Hive

And, just maybe, it was more than that even.

The winds were cyclonic and whipping, making the SnoCat shake and feel like it was going to be vacuumed right up into that Arctic maelstrom or maybe be entombed beneath a mountain of drifting now. But these were physical things . . . palpable things you could feel and know, things with limitations despite their intensity.

But there were other things on the storm.

Things funneling and raging in that vortex that you could only feel in your soul, things like pain and insanity and fear. Maybe wraiths and ghosts and all those demented minds lost in storms and whirlwinds, creeping things from beyond death or nameless evils that had never been born . . . the gathered malignancies and earthbound toxins of that which was human and that which was not, writhing shadows blown from pole to pole since antiquity. Yes, all of that and more, the collected horrors of the race and the sheared veil of the grave, coming together at once, breathing in frost and exhaling blight, a deranged elemental sentience that howled and screeched and cackled in the shrill and broken voices of a million, a million-million lost and tormented souls . . .

Hayes was feeling them out there on that moaning storm-wind, enclosing the SnoCat in a frozen winding sheet. Death. Unseen, unspeakable, and unstoppable, filling its lungs with a savage whiteness and his head with a scratching black madness. He kept his eyes fixed on the windshield, what the headlights could show him: snow and wind and night, everything all wrapped and twined together, coming at them and drowning them in darkness. He kept blinking his eyes, telling himself he wasn’t seeing death out there. Wasn’t seeing spinning cloven skulls and the blowing, rent shrouds of deathless cadavers flapping like high masts. Boiling storms of sightless eyes and ragged cornhusk figures flitting about. Couldn’t hear them calling his name or scraping at the windows with white skeletal fingers.

It was imagination.

It was stress and terror and fatigue.

Too many things.

He could feel Sharkey next to him, her leg against his own and both separated by inches of fleece and wool and vinyl. He wondered if she saw what he was seeing and if she did . . . why didn’t she scream? Why didn’t they both scream? What held them together and why were those seams sewn so tightly, so strongly that not even this could tear them?

My God, but Hayes felt alone.

Maybe there were people in the cab with him and maybe he had only willed them to be there so he didn’t go stark, screaming insane. That viscid, living blackness was pressing down upon the SnoCat, inhuming it beneath layers of frozen graveyard soil. And he could feel it happening. Could sense the weight and pressure, the eternal suffocation of that oblong box. His throat was scratchy. The air thin and dusty. His breath was being sucked away and his brain was dissolving into a firmament of rot. Nothing but worms and time and clotted soil. Oh, dear God, he could really feel it now, that claustrophobic sense of entombment, of burial, of moist darkness. He could really hear the sounds of rats pawing at his box and the scratching requiem of a tuneless violin, time filtering out into dusty eternity. And his own voice, frantic and terrified: Who did you think you were to flex your muscle against this land? To raise your fist in defiance against those who created you and everything else? The dark lords of organic profusion? What worming disobedience made you think for one shivering instant you could fight against those minds that already own you and have owned your kind since you first crawled from the protoplasmic slime?

Oh, dear Christ, what had he been thinking? What had he -

“Are you all right?” Sharkey suddenly asked him.

And the answer to that was something he did not know.

He’d been thinking about what the Old Ones had buried at the core of humanity. He’d been talking about the weather with Cutchen and then . . . and then he wasn’t sure. Hallucinations. Fears. Insecurities. Everything coming at him at once. But none of it had been real. None of it.

He swallowed. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Really fine?” she said.

“Hell no,” he said honestly.

“We’re close,” Cutchen suddenly said. His voice was calm, yet full of the apprehension a doctor might use when he told you your belly was full of cancer. “According to the GPS, we’re practically there.”

But Hayes knew that without looking. He could feel it in his balls, his guts, along the back of his spine. It was an ancient sensory network and in the worst of times, it was rarely wrong.