Hive

It was meant as a joke, but humor was lost in this place and particularly with what they had seen and experienced thus far. Hayes tucked his flashlight into the pocket of his parka and kissed Sharkey hard. She responded, their tongues tasting each other and remembering each other and wanting this to last.

Finally Sharkey broke it off. “What’s this all about?”

“Just an urge.”

“An urge?”

“Yeah . . . I guess I needed to remind myself I was still human.”

She smiled. “We’ll discuss it later. What about Cutchy?”

“We better go get him -”

There was a sudden rending cry that they first took to be a scream. But it wasn’t a scream, it was just Cutchen yelling to them, angry and hysterical and just plain pissed-off.

They ran along behind the wall he’d disappeared around, sighting his light in the distance. They dodged around some towering rectangles and a broken dome, some piled debris. Cutchen was there, standing in a great open courtyard that must have been easily two hundred yards in circumference, flanked on all sides by the city itself which rose up above, overhanging and gradually coming together somewhere overhead. With his flashlight, Hayes could see a narrow passage up there maybe fifty feet across. But right before Cutchen, there was circular hole cut into the stone that was three times that big.

Cutchen held the lantern over the rim and the light was gradually swallowed up by dusty darkness.

“We didn’t come this way,” Hayes said. “I never saw this before.”

“Let’s backtrack,” Sharkey suggested. “Make for those lights.”

Hayes could see them back there. They backlit the honeycombed openings set in that terraced architectural monstrosity like ghost lights, made the city look even more eerie and haunted than it already was.

They turned and Hayes thought he heard something . . . that scratching sound again, but it was gone before anyone else picked up on it. He didn’t bother mentioning it.

Because right then, the lights from the generator dimmed and went out completely.

The blackness was absolute. Like being nailed shut in a casket.

“Oh, shit,” Sharkey said, bumping right into Hayes.

And then the ground beneath them began to shudder with a weird rhythmic vibration that they could feel coming right up through their boots. There was a deep and jarring reverberation that seemed to come from the bowels of the city itself as if some titanic alien machine had been switched on and was gearing up with pounding cycles and thrumming vibrations. Hayes had felt this before and always just before or during one of those hauntings . . . but this was bigger, this was huge and loud and violent. The vibrations almost knocked them off their feet. They had trouble standing or staying in one place. Flashlight beams were bobbing madly. The city was shaking like it was riding a seismic wave . . . parts of it falling and crashing, flaking away like dead skin.

Cutchen’s lantern light framed three white and desperate faces, three sets of staring, terror-filled eyes.

The city was in motion, thumping and rattling and cracking apart. Sharp crackling sounds and metallic grinding noises were echoing up out of the pit, getting louder and louder. The air seemed heavy and busy, whipped into a whirlwind by the intrusion of surging energy. Bits of rock and crystals of ice were pelting into Hayes and the others as they clung to one another. There was a low humming coming up out of the pit now, weird squealing noises and thumps, mad scratchings and the sound of radio static rising and falling in waves.

Cutchen screamed and broke away, dropping his lantern. His face in Hayes’ light was rigid and set, lips pulled back from bared and clenched teeth. Drool was hanging from his mouth. His eyes were wide and savage. He looked like he suddenly had gone insane. “Coming, coming, coming,” he cried over the volume of the city. “They’re coming, they’re all coming. . . the swarm is coming out of the sky . . . no hide there, no hide there... seek you out... they find you... they find your mind and they find your thoughts . . . they come . . . oh, the buzzing, the buzzing, the buzzing, the coming of the swarm ... the ancient hive... the swarm that fills the sky... “

He let out another scream, hands pressed to his ears. He was drooling and delusional and mad, running this way and then that, falling to his hands and knees and creeping like a mouse. Then rising up and hopping along, spinning around, arms swinging limp at his sides like an ape. He made growling sounds, then grunts and weird keening noises.