Hive

Hayes kicked it with his boot to prove to himself that it was dead. A piece of its leathery, burnt hide fell off like tree bark. It was hollow inside, that alien machinery boiled to ash. Even its ghost was dead now. Or what Hayes would have called a ghost, because nothing else seemed to fit. That diabolic power, the vestiges of those remorseless minds that seemed to cling on after death like a negative charge in a dry cell battery . . . just waiting to come into contact with living mental energies they could twist and subvert.

“You wanna guess what happened here?” Sharkey said.

“Oh, you know as well as I do. They dug up some of these ugly pricks and those minds woke up, became active. The Russians started having bad dreams and seeing ghosts and hearing things . . . and by the time they realized what was happening, they weren’t even men anymore. Just . . . vessels for dead, alien minds that maybe wanted to fulfill some perverse plan set into motion millions of years ago.” He put a cigarette in his lips and lit. “Then the people at Vostok got worried, so they sent in soldiers. Some of the soldiers got contaminated by those minds . . . but not enough. Those that weren’t, killed everyone except those three Kolich mentioned, those drooling and insane things that had once been men. The soldiers burned the rest and the Old Ones, too.”

“That’s why they abandoned this camp, Jimmy. To stop the spread of the infection.”

Cutchen said, “C’mon already, I . . . “ He paused like his throat had seized up. “I’m hearing things up here, people. Sounds. I don’t know . . . like things moving, sliding . . . “

Hayes walked over to the ladder.

He heard a thump up there, followed by another. Then a scraping sound like nails dragged over ice. Then there was silence. Cutchen came barreling down the ladder, missing the last three rungs and landing on his ass.

He looked up at Hayes with wild, unblinking eyes. His face was white as kidskin. “There’s . . . there’s something up there, something moving in the other room.”

They were all tensed and waiting, just as still as the ice around them.

A floorboard overhead creaked. There was a weird and low vibration followed by a crackling sound. A pounding like a fist at the door above. A sliding, whispering noise. They were all crouched down low with Cutchen now, holding onto one another. A shrill, echoing peal sounded out above.

“What the hell is it?” Cutchen said.

“Shut up,” Hayes whispered. “For the love of God, be quiet . . . “

They waited there, hearing sounds . . . thumpings and knockings, scratching noises and that unearthly crackling. Hayes held onto them, never having felt this absolutely vulnerable in his life. His thoughts had gone liquid in his head. His soul felt like some whirlpool sucking down into fathomless blackness. He felt something catch in his throat, a cry or a scream, and Sharkey made a muted whimpering sound.

No, they hadn’t seen anything, but they had heard things.

The things that probably drove the Russians insane. And they were feeling something, too . . . something electric and rising and palpable.

Those vibrations started again, making the entire building tremble. The walls above sounded like hammers were beating into them. There were other sounds above . . . like whispering, distorted voices and hollow pipings, a buzzing noise. And then -

Then Sharkey gasped and a huge, amorphous shadow passed over the trap door as if some grotesque figure had passed before the lantern, making a sound like forks scraped over blackboards and then fading away.

They stayed together like that maybe five or ten minutes, then Hayes went up the ladder, expecting to see something that would leech his mind dry. But there was nothing, nothing at all. The others came up and not a one of them remarked on those weird spade-like prints in the snow.

The wind was whipping and the snow coming at them in sheets as they found the SnoCat and Hayes started it up. He brought it around and bulldozed through a few drifts. Cutchen was staring into his rearview mirror, seeing things darting in and out of the blizzard that he would not comment on.

“Just drive,” he said when Hayes asked him. “For the love of Christ, get us out of here . . . “

30

So in the days following the successful probe of Lake Vordog, Professor Gundry found himself wishing that he had stayed at CalTech working on his glaciological models. Wishing he had never come down to Antarctica and opened Pandora’s Box, got a good look at what was inside. For though it made absolutely no scientific sense, he now knew there were things a man was better off not seeing, not knowing. Things that could get down inside a man, unlocking old doors and rattling primal skeletons from moldering closets, making him feel things and remember things that could poison him to his marrow.

Gundry was no longer the man Hayes had gotten to know, however briefly.