Hive

The night was bunched around them, huge and black and freezing. The wind was still blowing and that powder of snow was still falling, blowing over those gathered there, dancing in the beams of the lights they held and the dimming beams of the Spryte. Holm was breathing very fast, the sound of it like somebody drawing air through crackling, dry hay. Each time he exhaled a cloud of frost gathered and dissipated.

Hayes could hear that wind moaning around the buildings, the sound of boots rocking uneasily on the hardpack snow.

Holm took another bold step forward, as if daring Hayes to put him down. He moved quickly with an almost fluidic motion, a vitality an old man had no right to possess. Hayes figured that, even though there was six feet separating them, Holm would have been on him before he even pulled the trigger. He was staring at Hayes and his eyes were wet and glistening, horribly dilated so that the iris and sclera of both eyes were swallowed by those fixed and expansive pupils. They were glassy and reflective.

Holm opened his mouth in something like a snarl, showing those even white teeth that were probably dentures. A sibilant hissing came from his throat, gaining volume and scratching up into a voice: “Gates? Gates is dead... we’re all dead... “

Hayes almost shot him right then.

That voice was just too much. It was utterly inhuman, like the echo of subterranean water trying to form words. Holm smiled at what he had said and made a lunge at Hayes. He wasn’t as quick as he seemed at first and Hayes sidestepped him and brought the rifle butt down on his temple. Holm went to his knees immediately, but did not make a sound. Unless the howling wind was his voice, echoing off into the night, sweeping across that lonesome and ancient polar plain.

“All right,” Hayes said. “Somebody get some rope or chain or something. We’ll tie him up and bring him inside.”

“Just kill him, Jimmy,” Stotts said. “Do it, Jimmy . . . look at those eyes . . . nothing sane has eyes like that.”

Rutkowski and Biggs came over, as did Sodermark and one of the scientists, a seismologist named Hinks, who spent most of his time out at remote tracking stations and was not privy to the majority of the madness at Kharkhov Station. Carefully then, Hayes handing off his rifle to Sharkey, they surrounded Holm.

“Get up,” Rutkowski told him. “While you still fucking can.”

Holm looked up at them with that same almost insipid blankness. His black eyes like those of a grasshopper considering a stalk of grass. That’s how they looked . . . unintelligent, completely vacant. At least at that moment. But Hayes knew those eyes and what they could do. One minute they were dead and empty, the next overflowing with all the knowledge of the cosmos.

Rutkowski and Hinks were looking pissed-off.

Looked like what they had here was just some offensive drunk and they were going to pitch him out into the alley, maybe bang his head off a dumpster for good measure. They both reached down and yanked Holm to his feet. Hayes took hold of him, too, as did Biggs. They got him standing and then he started moving, fighting and writhing and twitching almost like he had no bones, was made of liquid rubber. He fought and struck out. He knocked Hinks aside and sent Rutkowski scrambling. Hayes darted in and gave him a quick shot to the jaw that snapped his head back and then something happened.

Hayes felt it coming . . . an energy, a building momentum like static electricity generating before lightning strikes. And then that thumping vibration started up, seeming to come from the ice below them. They could all feel it coming up through their boots and traveling along their bones in waves. It was the same sound Rutkowski had heard the night St. Ours died and the same sound Hayes, Cutchen, and Sharkey had heard at Vradaz . . . a rhythmic pulsating that rose up around them, getting louder and louder. Like the humming of some great machine. Then there was that crackling, electric sound that made the hairs stand up on the back of their necks. Thumpings and echoing knocks, a high and weird whistling sound.

Then Biggs and Stotts were suddenly knocked flat.

The window in the door of the Spryte’s cab shattered as did the windshield. Hayes felt a rolling wave of heat pass right before him — so warm in fact that it melted the ice from his beard — and hit Rutkowski and Hinks, lifting them up and throwing them back five or six feet onto their asses.

Somebody screamed.

Somebody shouted.

And Holm stood there, his face almost luminous. The vibrating and crackling sounds grew louder and then there was a piercing, shrieking wail that made everyone cover their ears and grit their teeth. It broke up around them into a shrill piping. An almost musical piping like Hayes had heard the night in Hut #6 when the things had almost gotten his mind. It rose up all around them, strident and keening and Hayes saw forms out in the darkness . . . oblong shadows coming at them.