Hive

All those voices and shrill cries, misty race memory and screeching long-dead minds finally boiled down into a flux of gray, running mud. And a single voice spoke from the bottom of his mind: Isn’t revelation something, Jimmy? All these years people were wondering who they were and what they were and where they came from and what their destiny might be and you were one of them ... but now you know the truth and there’s no joy in knowing, is there? There’s only madness and horror. The collective consciousness of the human race is not ready for any of this. Men and women are still primarily savages, superstitious gourd-rattling, spell-casting yahoos . . . and the knowledge of this will utterly destroy them, won’t it? That all that we are and ever can be can be reduced to an equation, a test tube, chemicals and atoms worked by forbidding alien hands, an ambitious experiment in molecular biology. This will kill the race. This will crush our simple, pagan minds and leave nothing behind. All those years creationists and evolutionists have been battling it out and now, it turns, they’re both wrong and they’re both right... life can arise just about anywhere from a fixed set of variables and there is such a thing as the Creator. Only those variables were manipulated by cold and noxious minds and the Creator is something alien and grisly from some invidious, cosmic gutter out of space and out of time.

Kind of funny, ain’t it?

Life probably would have happened here without them, but men probably wouldn’t have. Not as we understand them. And what a serene and peaceful place this would have been. Eden. Only, Jimmy, you know who that slithering serpent was and what it brought to being: your race.

Hayes scrambled to his feet, started running, half out of his mind. He was whimpering and shaking and his heart was palpitating. His mind was strewn with cobwebs. He fled drunkenly from room to room, falling and getting up, tipping over skeletons and rawboned machinery and things that were both and neither. Finally vaulting over a table heaped with a pyramid of subhuman skulls and picking his way through those ancient remains like a rat through a bone pile.

And then there was the tunnel and he was climbing, breathing hard and crying out, feeling those dire and primal memories scratching their way up behind him. Then he fell out at Sharkey’s feet.

She went to him, holding him in her arms, tears in her eyes as she soothed him and calmed him and slowly, that contorted grimace left his face and his eyes stopped staring sightlessly.

“Christ, Jimmy,” Cutchen said. “What did you see down there? What in Christ did you see?”

So he told them.

42

Thirty minutes later, Hayes came to accept a very disturbing truth: they were lost. Oh, the generator was still running out there and the lights were still glowing, but regardless of what path they took, they couldn’t seem to get near them. There was a passage somewhere that would lead them back into the city proper and out of these primeval relics. Problem was, they couldn’t find it.

“You know what,” Cutchen said when Hayes admitted he was lost, “I’ve put up with a lot of shit. I’ve helped you two do things I should never have fucking gotten involved in. And now here we are . . . this is bullshit. You two do whatever in the fuck you want, but I’m getting out. I’m not waiting for you, Jimmy, to get us more lost. I’ve had it.”

If they had an argument to stay him, they couldn’t remember what is was.

They stood there stupidly with their flashlights as Cutchen stomped away, his lantern light bobbing and weaving, shining off ice crystals set into the masonry.

“We can’t let him go, Jimmy,” Sharkey said.

“No, just give him a minute or two. He’ll settle down. If not, I’ll cold-cock him and drag him behind us.”