Hive

Looking around in there with his flashlight, Hayes was seeing debris everywhere like a cyclone went ripping through. The floor planking was ruptured, the roof sagging, great holes punched into the walls. Snow had drifted into the corners. He supposed the place was held mainly together by frost and ice. Seams of it necklaced the walls.

“Look,” Sharkey said. “Even the back of the door.”

“Jesus,” Cutchen said.

There were crude crosses etched into just about any available surface. Hex signs, really, to ward off evil. You could almost breathe in the madness that must have overtaken the place. Those scientists losing their minds when their science could not explain what appeared to be some sort of malefic haunting . . . in their desperation they had turned to the oldest of apotropaics: the cross.

But it had failed them.

Hayes, Sharkey, and Cutchen stood there maybe five minutes, sucking in the memory of evil and insanity that seemed to ooze from those bowed, ice-slicked walls.

“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” Cutchen finally said.

“Maybe one did.”

They were in some sort of entry, what Hayes’ mom had called a Mud Room back in Kansas. The sort of place you stowed your boots and coats and work clothes when you came in out of the fields. They passed through another doorway into a larger room. There were some old fuel oil barrels in there and a stove over in the corner. Everything else was in shambles . . . camp chairs overturned, video equipment shattered, papers spread in the dusting of snow. What looked like a desk had been reduced to kindling. A light fixture overhead was dangling by wires. The rungs of a red fireman’s ladder against the wall were hung with icicles.

Sharkey was examining some of the papers with her lantern.

“Make anything of it?” Hayes asked her.

She dropped them. “My Cyrillic is a little rusty.”

They passed into another room in which the ceiling was caved in, stalactites of ice hung down and pooled on the floor. The walls were charred and bowed. There was a lot of electronic equipment in there, most of it destroyed and locked in flows of ice.

“Looks like they had a fire,” Cutchen said. “I wonder if it was an accident.”

They kept going, moving down a short corridor past some cramped sleeping quarters and then into another room which had been a laboratory once. There was still equipment in there . . . microscopes and racks of test tubes, antique computers and file cabinets whose drawers had been yanked open and left that way. The floor was a down of broken glass and instruments and papers. Hayes found a couple drills and an electric saw they must have used to slice up their ice core samples. There was a small ell off the room with a handle like a freezer on it. Inside were the core samples themselves, dated and tagged.

Sharkey almost went on her ass on a flow of ice on the floor. “Look at this,” she said, indicating a room just off the lab. The walls in there had great, blackened holes ripped into them through which you could see a maze of snow, ice, and lumber . . . the portion of the outpost crushed beneath the ice fall. There were a series of smaller holes drilled into the walls, too.

“Bullet holes,” Hayes said. “And those bigger ones . . . “

“Grenades?” Cutchen said, panning his light over them.

Sharkey was on her hands and knees studying some ancient stains on the walls, others spread over some folders caught in the ice flow. “This . . . well, this could be blood. It sure looks like it. I guess it could be ink or tomato sauce or something.”

Hayes felt something sink in him. Yeah, and maybe the center of the universe has creamy white filling, but I don’t think so. You were right the first time, Doc. That ain’t the blood of tomatoes, it’s the blood of people.

“Must’ve had themselves a showdown here,” Cutchen said. “Or a slaughter.”

Hayes was wondering how much truth there was in what Kolich had told them. There was more to this mess than just men going mad and seeing ghosts and what not. You could almost feel the agony and suffering in the air. Those holes . . . there was no doubt about them. Somebody had opened up with an automatic weapon in here.

What had Kolich said?

A security force went up there, came back with the three and said the others were all dead.

Or been killed.

Hayes was picturing some security force, maybe something more along the lines of a hit squad coming in here and killing everyone. Saving those three others for interrogation or study. Whatever had happened it had been violent and harsh and ugly. The outpost had been under Soviet jurisdiction at the time. The Soviets knew how to handle little problems like hauntings and alien minds trying to take over their men.

“So what does it tell us?” Sharkey said.

Cutchen shook his head. “Nothing we want to know about.”