Hive

There were crates of food and barrels of gasoline along the walls. One barrel was tipped over and ruptured as if somebody had opened it with an axe. A small room off to the left held a small Honda gasoline-powered generator that was now hopelessly ruined, covered in frozen melt-water. Huge stalactites hung from the ceiling and Hayes had to duck under them. Some reached right to the floor.

Sharkey was on her hands and knees, brushing snow away from what Cutchen had found.

Hayes helped her.

It took some time, but before they were done they had uncovered a roughly circular pit filled with frozen cadavers. It looked like a winter scene from Treblinka: skulls with yawning jaws and hollowed orbits, jutting femurs and ulnas, the barrel staves of ribcages. He figured there were probably twenty bodies in there, all tangled in a central heap of limbs and skull-faces and spirals of vertebrae that were fused together in a pool of ice. Some had the rags of clothes wrapped around them and others went to their maker naked. They weren’t exactly skeletons, but damn close. They all looked blackened and melted, knitted with sinew and wasted quilts of muscle.

And they’d all been shot.

Skulls had bullet holes in them. As did iliums and sternums and clavicles. Arm and leg bones were snapped. Jaws blasted away and pelvic wings shattered. No, this hadn’t been a careful cleansing here, this had been a wild murder spree carried out with submachine guns and automatic rifles. These bodies had taken an incredible volume of fire and at close range.

Hayes just stood there, breathlessly, staring down into that bone pit and almost sensing the terror and madness that had brought an atrocity like this into being. He stepped back and away, having trouble being clinical about it all like Sharkey. To him, it looked like those cadavers were trying to crawl out of the ice. All those staring faces and reaching, cremated hands. Like something from a waxworks or a spookshow, but certainly nothing real.

He ducked away beneath the ceiling of icicles and saw another irregular shape in the snow. For some reason, it caught his eye. Motes of dust and crystals of ice hung in the air. His breath frosted from his lips in great clouds. Using his boot, he scattered the snow away from that shape beneath. He was looking down at a shriveled, conical form maybe six or seven feet long that had been incinerated right down to a husk. Looking now like something that had been pulled from an alien crematory.

Hayes knew what it was, of course.

He recognized that shape and it filled his belly with fluttering wings. Another one of those things. Probably chopped from the ice and then burned when they realized what it was doing to them. Or maybe the security force had burned it. Not that it mattered.

“You better come over here,” he said to Sharkey, using a hush and quiet voice. The kind you used when you didn’t want to wake an infant . . . or something sleeping in a coffin.

“What now?” Cutchen said from above. “Can you guys hurry this up? I’m . . . I’m starting to lose it up here.”

Sharkey came over, saying, “Some of those bodies are wearing fatigues, Jimmy. Some of Kolich’s security people must have went in there, too.”

And Hayes didn’t doubt it.

... a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide... weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men... ghosts, bogies, I think... they spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls . . .

Yes, he could hear Nikolai Kolich saying it.

Except Kolich had left out the meat of the matter. These men at the outpost had drilled into a chasm, yes, but it hadn’t been just any chasm, but maybe a burial chamber of the Old Ones. And opening it had been like cutting the scab off some primordial, invidious wound. And the pus that leaked out was infectious and evil, a wasting pestilence in the form of alien memories and undead essences, a decayed intelligence that was still virulent after all those uncounted eons, a spiritual contamination that took their minds one by one by one. Making them something less than human, something ageless and undying, a cosmic horror.

“Another one,” Sharkey said. “Their tombs must be all over these mountains and rifts.”