Hive

“Oh, look,” Sharkey said, panning her light at the foot of some crumbled masonry.

It was Gates.

He was pressed into an alcove between shattered blocks of stone that had no doubt fallen from above. He was curled up in sort of a fetal position, knees to chin, his face white as new snow and contorted into a grimace of absolute horror. Blood had trickled from the rictus of his mouth. His eyes were spilled down his cheeks in gelatinous trails like squashed jellyfish.

It was horrible. Just like all the others.

But worse somehow, because you could almost feel the agonal convulsions that Gates had suffered before he died. There was no getting around the fact that he looked like he’d been literally scared to death. And that death had been a dark matter, mindless and perverse and ghastly. No man should have had to go like Gates did . . . alone and mad in that suffocating darkness, dying a crazy and hopeless death like a rat stuck in a drainpipe. Screaming as his eyes boiled to soup and splashed down his face. As his brain went to sauce and his soul was burnt to ash.

Gates had paid the final price for his curiosity.

But Hayes knew it was more than just scientific interest . . . Gates had been trying to unravel the mystery of the ages. He had been trying to put it all together so he could maybe save his own race. He was a hero. He was one of the greatest of great men.

Sharkey kneeled before him. She dug into his coat and found his field journal. “There’s a funny odor about him . . . not a death smell, something else. Sharp, acidic.”

Hayes had smelled it, too: a caustic, acrid stench like monkey urine.

The tenseness feeding between the three of them was electric and cutting. It lay in each of their bellies, a twisted knot of nausea.

“All right, all right, goddammit,” Hayes said, starting up into the city. “Let’s go see what did this, let’s go see what scared Gates to death.”

40

“No,” Cutchen said then, holding his lantern up. “Wait a minute now... what’s that over there?”

Hayes stepped down off some broken stones.

Sharkey was already over there, checking it out. Collapsible tables had been set out, half a dozen of them upon which were stone artifacts taken from the city, hammers and drills, cases of instruments, lanterns. There were piles of notebooks and a couple digital cameras. Microscopes. There was a crate full of rolled-up maps that turned out to be rubbings made from the walls inside . . . figures, glyphs, strange characters.

Cutchen grabbed a folding chair and sat down. There was a thermometer on the table. “It’s almost ten degrees in here. Balmy.”

Sharkey and Hayes looked around, found a flare pistol which she took and a twelve-gauge Remington pump that he took. They did not comment on these things. The men who had brought them down here had had their reasons and nobody dared question what those might have been.

Bottom line was, they felt better being armed.

“Look,” Hayes said. “A generator.”

It was. A Honda industrial job on a rolling cart. A spiderweb of power cords ran off of it, all of them leading up into the city itself. As Hayes followed them with his light he could see that there were cords hanging from the face of the city. There were several five-gallon cans of gasoline. He went to the generator. It had a 3800 watt capacity, so it could’ve lit up most of the entire city if you had enough light bulbs and judging from what he had seen, Gates and the boys certainly had enough of those.

“Will it work?” Sharkey asked.

“I think so.” Hayes checked the tank. It held ten gallons and was about half full. He took one of the cans and filled it up. Then he threw the circuit breaker and hit the electronic ignition. It roared to life immediately, finding a happy idle and sticking with it.

“Where’s the light?” Cutchen said.

“Just a minute. Let it warm up.” Hayes stood there, lighting a cigarette and waiting for the engine to push the coldness from itself. It didn’t take long. He turned the circuit breaker back on and suddenly, the cavern was bright.

“Damn,” Cutchen said. “That’s better.”