Hive

Gates’ team had set up an emergency ladder for people to climb down with. Using his light, Hayes saw that the drop was maybe twenty feet. But it was just as black as a mineshaft down there and the idea of descending made something seize up in his chest. But there was no real choice. He went down first and it was no easy bit in his ballooned-out bunny boots, like walking a tight rope in hip waders. He went down slowly, while Sharkey kept her flashlight beam on him. Tiny crystals of ice floated in it, clouds of his steaming breath.

Finally, he made it.

The floor was uneven, rocky, veined with frost and ice. Hayes played his light around and saw that he was in a passage that gradually sloped deeper into that frozen earth. “Okay,” he called out. “Next.”

Sharkey’s turn. She moved fairly quickly down the ladder. Cutchen followed, bitching the entire way that the last time he’d followed them down into a hole he’d had to squeeze out his long johns when they’d gotten back to the station. But, finally, he was down, too.

“Looks like the set from an old B-movie,” he said, holding his lantern high. “A natural cavern, I’d say. I don’t see any signs of chipping or toolwork on the walls.”

Hayes didn’t either. “Limestone,” he said, studying the striations, the layers pressing down upon one another.

“Sure, a natural limestone cavern. Probably hollowed out by ground water over millions of years,” Cutchen said.

Sharkey chortled. “Now who’s talking Geo one-oh-one?”

The passage was about eight or nine feet in height, maybe five in width. Hayes leading, they started down its sloping path. It would angle to the left, then to the right, had more twists and turns to it than a water snake. And they were going deeper into the mountain with each step. Ten minutes into it, Hayes began to notice that things were warming up. It still wasn’t time for a bikini wax and a thong, but it was certainly warmer. Cutchen noticed it, too, saying that it had to be due to a volcanic vent or geothermal action.

“Least we won’t freeze down here,” Sharkey said.

Cutchen nodded. “You know, I was wondering how Gates and the boys were handling this so well. Being down here hour after hour. If it wasn’t for the warmth they would have froze their balls off - “

Sharkey put a gloved finger to her lips. “Quiet.”

“What?”

“Shut the hell up,” she whispered.

Hayes was listening with her now, too.

He didn’t know what for and part of him honestly did not want to know, but he listened nonetheless. Then he heard an echo from somewhere below . . . just a quick, furtive scratching sound that disappeared so quickly he wasn’t sure he had heard it at all. Then he heard it again not five seconds later . . . like a stick being scratched along a subterranean wall.

And down there in that underworld, going to a place that was as storied and terrible in their imaginations as some vampire’s castle, it was probably the worse possible thing to be hearing. For a scratching implied motion and motion implied something alive . . .

Hayes was thinking: Could be a man, could be one of the team... and it could be something else entirely.

They stood there, looking at each other and at those limestone walls, an ice-mist tangling through their legs like groundfog. In the glow of Cutchen’s lantern, there was only their frosting breath, suspended ice crystals and drifting motes of dust. And shadows. Because down in that creeping murk, the lights were casting huge and distorted shadows.

Hayes took a few more steps, his belly feeling hollow and feathery. He played his light farther down into the stygian depths of that channel which, from where he was sitting, might as well have led right down to the lower regions of Hell itself.

He heard the sound again and started.

A distant scraping that seemed to be moving up the passage at them and then a few seconds later, sounded impossibly far-off. It would pause for a moment or two, then start up again . . . closer then farther, that same scratching, dragging sound. Hayes felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine. Something in his bowels tensed. He could hear his own breathing in his ears and it seemed impossibly loud. Then, suddenly, the scratching was much closer, so very close in fact that Hayes almost turned and ran. Because it seemed that whatever was making it would show itself at any moment, something spidery with scraping twigs for fingers.

Then it abruptly ceased.

“What in Christ was that?” Sharkey said behind him, edging closer to him now.