Hive

He stood there in the wind, watching the Spryte coming on. The others were circled behind him in a loose knot. It took a lot to get people out on a night like that, but something like this, well, it drew them like metal filings to a magnet.

“Sodermark tried to raise ‘em on the radio, but they’re not responding,” Sharkey said as she joined the group out there.

Hayes stared off into the night through his goggles. His beard was already stiff and frozen. His breath and that of the others billowing out in great, frosty clouds that turned on the wind. Cold-pinched faces waited and wondered. A light snow was coming down now, just as fine and white as beach sand.

“Look!” somebody cried out. “You see that?”

Hayes didn’t at first, but now he did.

And seeing it, he had to stop and blink, brush snow from his goggles because he couldn’t really be seeing what he thought he was seeing. His heart caught in his chest, held painfully there for a moment like an animal caught in tar. This can’t be good, a voice in his head was telling him. As far as developments go, this is next door to shitty.

Somebody behind him gasped and somebody else swore under their breath.

What they were looking at was a lone form out there, running and stumbling before the Spryte, managing to keep just ahead of it, but barely. At first Hayes thought the Spryte was chasing the figure to catch up with it, but now it didn’t look like that at all.

It looked like they were trying to run him over.

“Holy shit,” somebody said.

“Rutkowski? Go get me one of those rifles,” Hayes snapped. “And make sure it’s fucking loaded.”

Then he was running, the wind propelling him forward and then doing its damnedest to pitch him sideways. He pounded through drifts, slipping on his ass only once. The others were coming, too, but staying behind him like they wanted him to see it first.

“Hey!” Hayes called out as he got in closer. “Hey! Duck behind that hut! Duck behind that fucking hut . . . it’s almost on you!”

The figure drunkenly zigged and zagged, went face down in the snow and crab-crawled frantically forward like a kid in gym class doing barrel crawls. But no kid ever had to plow through three- and four-foot drifts, keep his footing on pack-ice while the wind screamed into him at fifty and sixty miles an hour. And no kid ever had to do this in a bulky parka with the wind chill dipping down to seventy below zero.

Hayes was shouting at the lone man and at the driver of the Spryte, but it was doing him no good. With a sickening realization, he knew that the Spryte was going to overtake the man and was going to crush him beneath its treads. The figure got to his feet, moved off to the left and the Spryte compensated, its treads creaking as it came around. The Spryte was bearing down on him and Hayes was just too damn far away to do anything. People were shouting out behind him and he made one last valiant dash, but he lost his footing and went down in a drift, coming back up with his face covered in snow. He frantically pawed it away.

The man fell.

But he saw Hayes.

He was shaking his head back and forth, shouting something, but Hayes couldn’t hear what it was in the racket of the Spryte’s engine. The lights of the Spryte were glaring and intense, snow swirling in their beams. Hayes could just make out a dim figure in the cab.

Where in the fuck was Rutkowski with that gun?

He heard Sharkey scream his name and then the Spryte rolled right over that lone figure in the snow, those jointed tracks crushing him with a popping, wet sound that was meaty, organic, and brutal. The Spryte lurched as it went over him, leaving nothing but a red and ripped heap in its wake.

And then it was coming at Hayes.

“Oh, shit,” he said under his breath, backing away now, preparing to break into a run.

But the Spryte stopped dead. Downshifted, started in reverse with a jerk as whoever was in that cab worked the stick roughly. There was no doubt what was happening: this crazy bastard was going to roll right over the body again.

The Spryte backed up and did just that and suddenly Rutkowski was there with the rifle in his hands, just standing there, speechless.

“Shoot that motherfucker!” Hayes told him.

But Rutkowski stood there, seeing that spreading red stain in the snow, smelling the blood and macerated flesh and he could not move.

Hayes took the rifle from his hands.

It was just a little bolt-action .22 survival rifle. He brought it up and popped a round through the cab. Worked the bolt and put another through there. He saw the bullet holes in the wide, sloping windshield. Saw the second bullet make the form in there throw its hands up and fall over.

The Spryte stopped.

Right on top of the body.

Hayes scrambled around the side of the cab and brought the rifle up, ready to finish the job and knowing that if anybody even so much as got in his way they were going to get a rifle-butt upside the head.

But nobody did.