Hellstrom's Hive (5 page)

Brood instructions for selected workers.
We use the language of the Outside, but with our own meanings. It is important that the key distinctions not be confused. The practices of concealment demand this. Because we are virtually defenseless against the best forces of the Outside, our major defense remains in their never learning that we live among them, patterning ourselves after Hive creatures.

 

As the afternoon above Hellstrom's valley wore on, Depeaux began reflecting on the briefing sessions with Merrivale. It was a matter of emphasis, but he began to wonder just how many agents had been
wasted
on this project. Merrivale was a very queer duck—that damned affected British accent and all. There had been times when he gave off the distinct impression that he admired Hellstrom. It was Merrivale's pattern to admire only success, but it was an admiration always tinged with fear. The closer to Merrivale the success occurred, the greater his fear.

The isolated valley continued to bake in the hot autumn sun. Depeaux grew somnolent and there were moments when his eyelids drooped.

He forced himself to concentrate on the farm buildings. If the last reports were to be believed, Hellstrom himself was somewhere down there in one of those buildings. Nothing showed itself to confirm this assumption, however.

Why would Merrivale admire Hellstrom?

An abrupt slamming sound shocked Depeaux into full awareness. He saw movement at the far-left corner of the barn-studio. A wheeled cart came into view. It was an odd vehicle, reminiscent of an old-fashioned railway baggage cart, the hand-pulled kind used in stations. It had high slat sides and big spoked wheels. A high-pitched voice called out a command from somewhere behind the building, but Depeaux could not make out the words. It had sounded like “work a load.” That made no sense, though.

A young woman strode from behind the barn to the front of the cart and, at first, Depeaux thought she was nude. The binoculars revealed skin-colored briefs, but she wore no bra, no blouse. Her feet were tucked into sandals.

The powerful glasses put Depeaux right up next to the young woman as she lowered a steering bar that had been caught upright at the front of the cart. She had firm breasts with dark nipples. He was so intent on watching her that he almost missed the approach of another young woman clad the same way, noticing her only when a strange third hand entered his field of vision. The young women were enough alike to be sisters, but they didn't fit the descriptions he had of the women who served as officers of Hellstrom's corporation. Their hair was light gold.

The young women took the steering bar and, pulling on it, trundled the cart toward the north gate. They moved with a bouncing urgency Depeaux found inconsistent with the long wait that box had enjoyed outside the gate. He saw no other reason for the cart. They were going to get the box. What was in that damned thing? And why were they almost nude? He recalled
how the two deliverymen had strained in moving the box, wondered if the two women were expected to get that heavy object onto their cart. Surely, others would come out and help.

With increasing amazement, he watched the women open the gate, wheel the cart into position, drop its end, and tip the box into the cart's bed. They lifted the heavy box with a muscular ease that astonished him, displaying a far easier time with it than had the men who delivered it. Briskly, they closed the end of the cart and trotted back toward the barn with the same sense of urgency they'd shown on the outward trip. In far less time than he'd expected, they were at the barn and out of sight behind it. Again, there came that abrupt slamming sound. A door?

Depeaux estimated the whole incident had taken no more than five minutes. Astonishing! They were amazons! Yet, they'd appeared at first to be no more than well-developed, nubile young females. Was Hellstrom's farm a hideout for health nuts, a kind of inland muscle beach? The nudity argued for some such answer as that. Depeaux didn't like that answer, though. Everything about the women had been too casually businesslike. They weren't muscle fanatics. They'd just been two workers going about a job and it had been a job they knew well enough not to need excess words or motions in executing it. Why women for that kind of work?

It was another goddamned default message!

Depeaux glanced at his watch: less than an hour to sunset. The valley and farm had settled back into its disturbing surface tranquillity. The place had been rendered even more empty by the brief spurt of human energy from the young women.

What the hell was in that box?

The low sun washed across the ridgetop to his left, shadowing the valley's depths now, but light reflected from golden grass and leaves on the opposite hillside kept the shadows lucent. Depeaux knew he was in good cover under the dark bushes, but valley and countryside once more had taken on that sense of
ominous quiet. He took a deep breath and reaffirmed his decision to wait for night before leaving. This place had all of the atmosphere of a trap. He squirmed backward, deeper into shadows, peered left at the open countryside he would have to cross. The long, low light bathed the field in a golden glow touched with orange. The light cast a definite shadow along the path of crushed grass that marked his trail.

I was a fool to come up that way, he thought.

And perversely: What was Porter's mistake?

A sense of desperate immobility overcame him. The unexpected muscularity of those seminude young women, the persistent irritating hum from the barn-studio, the unspoken warnings in Merrivale's briefings and the reports, that internalized vacuum of a valley set against the distant movement of cattle far outside it (why so far?)—everything told him to wait for darkness. He lay for almost an hour, watching, stewing in his own premonitions.

The light dimmed. Low in the west, the sky took on a purple streaming against incandescent orange. The slopes of the valley drifted into a dusky almost blackness where it was difficult to determine if he actually saw details or was remembering them. No lights showed from the farmhouse or the barn. Visibility dropped to only a few feet, but when he crept out from under the bushes there were stars and a far aura of light on the northern horizon. That would be Fosterville, he knew. Still no lights from the farm.

Another default message.

Depeaux felt around him to make sure he was free of the bushes, got to his feet. There was a tension ache in his back. He groped in his knapsack, took out the sandwich in a rattling of paper, unwrapped it, and ate it while he regained his sense of direction. Fosterville's glow was a good landmark. The sandwich restored him and he took a long swallow of water and secured his pack.

The sense of danger remained.

The illogic of it dominated his consciousness, but he had learned to trust that sense. It was a message contained in everything he had studied about this place—all he had heard and all he had seen—a message, as well, of things not seen and not heard. The combined default message said
danger
.

Get the hell out of here, he told himself.

He twisted his watchband to bring the luminous dial of its companion compass into view, sighted along it, and set off across the field. As he moved out of the trees, his vision improved and he gained a sense of the long, sloping expanse of dried grass through which he had crept earlier.

The ground was uneven under the grass and he stumbled often. He kicked up dust unavoidably and several times he stopped to repress a sneeze. His passage through the grass seemed to him abnormally loud in the night silence, but there was a faint breeze and, when he stopped, he could hear it soughing in the trees ahead of him. There was a similarity between the two sounds that he tried to improve upon by slowing his pace. He had accumulated more grass burrs and they rasped his skin. Slow movement irritated him, too. He found himself unconsciously picking up speed. Something inside him said
hurry
.

The luminous dial of his compass and the glowing sky oriented him well, though. He found he could see the occasional trees in the field and avoided them easily. The dark line of thicker trees through which he had come stood out plainly. There would be the game trail to follow through there. He expected to encounter the trail long before his feet actually felt the hard, grassless surface. He crouched then to feel the surface with his hands, tracing the almost worn-down hoof-marks in the dirt. No deer had passed this way in a long while. Those were very old marks; he had noted this earlier, but now it compounded the total message of this place.

Depeaux started to straighten and strike out along the trail when he became aware of a distant swishing in the field behind him. He tipped his head to listen. The swishing sounded neither like someone walking through the grass nor like the wind. It had no definite position—just somewhere back there. Starlight showed nothing but distant shadows which could be trees, the configuration of the land. The sound was growing louder and he felt menace in it. There was something more akin to a susurrant humming in it now than to swishing. He straightened, turned away from the sound, and began trotting along the trail. He found he could make out the track if he peered down at a sharp angle.

Soon, he was at the line of thicker trees, the witch-spread of madroñas, and the heavier spacing of pines. The trees reduced the faint assistance of the starlight, and he was forced to slow his pace to a walk. Several times he lost the trail and had to grope for it with his feet. He longed to take out the small flashlight in his pack, but that odd sound had grown even louder behind him. It was a definite hissing-humming now. What made that sound? The noise of countless hoopskirts dragging through grass would not be as mechanical. The image of hoopskirts amused him for a moment, though, until he thought of the seminude young amazons at the farm. Somehow, they were not amusing, even when clad in his imaginary hoopskirts.

He had hidden the bicycle in bushes where the game trail crossed a narrow dirt road. That road led around a low hill and down a long slope to the country road where he had parked the van. The bicycle had a handlebar light and he promised himself he would use that light and ride like hell.

Was that sound behind him louder? What the hell could make such a sound? Was it something natural? Birds, perhaps? The susurrant intrusion now reached out into the grass on both sides of him, as though he were being drawn into the wings of an advancing army. Depeaux had the auditory impression of
many creatures moving in a wide fan to enclose him. He tried to increase his speed, but it was too dark; he kept running into trees.

What
was
that sound?

His body was wet with perspiration, fear tight in his chest.

Again, he tried to quicken his pace, tripped and fell full length. The susurrant pursuit stopped. Depeaux lay quietly waiting for a moment, probing with his ears. Nothing. What the hell! The absence of sound was as frightening as its presence had been. Slowly, he got to his feet and, immediately, the noise started again. It was on both sides and behind him. Terrified now, Depeaux stumbled forward, tripping, lurching, crashing through trees, on the trail sometimes and sometimes off it.

Where was that goddamned road where he'd hidden the bike?

The horns of enclosing noise were ahead of him now, on both sides and ahead. Depeaux, panting, stumbling, groped for the flashlight in his pack, found it. Why hadn't he brought a gun? An automatic even? Something small, like the one Tymiena carried. Damn! What was that noise? He wondered if he dared turn on the flashlight and sweep its beam around him. He couldn't bring even a little gun! No! His bird-watcher cover ruled against it! He was panting and gasping now. His legs ached.

The road was under his feet before he realized it. He stumbled to a halt, tried to get his bearings in the dark. Had he left the trail just back there? He didn't believe he could be far from the bushes where he'd hidden the damned bike. It had to be nearby. Did he dare use the flashlight? The hissing-hum enclosed him now. The bike had to be just to his right. It had to be. He groped toward blacker shadows among shadows, stumbled over a bush, and landed in the frame of the bicycle.

Cursing under his breath, Depeaux got to his feet, pulled the bicycle upright, and leaned against it. He could see the road better now: a separation of lightness in the dark, and he thought
suddenly how good it would be just to get on the bicycle and coast back to the van and Tymiena. But the hissing-hums had grown louder, closing in on him! The hell with them! He yanked the flashlight from the pack, depressed the switch. A beam of light stabbed out into the trees. It revealed three young women clad as the amazons at the farm had been, tight briefs and sandals, but their eyes and noses were hidden behind glossy dark shields the shape of diving masks. Each of them carried a long wand with a whiplike twinned end. The wands made him think of some odd antenna system, but their doubled ends were pointed directly at him and there was no mistaking the menace.

From Nils Hellstrom's diary.
Sometimes, I realize my name isn't important. It could be any other grouping of sounds and I'd still be me. Names are
not
important. This is a good thought. It is precisely as my brood mother and my first teachers said. The name I use represents an accident. It is not the name that might have been given to me had I been born into an Outsider family with all of their usual self-centered individualism. Their consciousness is not my consciousness; their timeline is not my timeline. We of the Hive will do away with names someday. My brood mother's words convey a deep sense of reassurance in this. Our perfect society cannot allow permanent individual names. They are labels, at best, are names. They are useful only in a transient way. Perhaps we will carry different labels at different stages in our lives. Or numbers. Somehow, numbers feel more in keeping with the intent my brood mother expressed so well.

 

It was 2:40
A.M
. and for almost ten minutes now Clovis had been watching Eddie pace back and forth in the tiny living room of her apartment. The telephone had awakened them from deep sleep and Eddie had answered it. He had come openly to her apartment. The Agency didn't mind that. It expected certain
sexual antics from its people and appreciated it when this activity was kept intramural. Nothing deep and demanding in this sex; just good, energetic bodily enjoyment.

All Eddie had said after hanging up was, “That was DT. Merrivale told him to call. They've lost contact with Carlos and Tymiena.”

“Oh, my God!”

She'd gotten out of bed then, draped a robe about her body. Eddie had gone directly into the living room.

“I should've answered the phone,” she said now, hoping this would break him out of his deep reverie.

“Why? DT was looking for me.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“How did he know you were here?”

“He tried my place and nobody answered.”

“Eddie, I don't like that.”

“Shit!”

“Eddie, what's the rest of it? What'd DT say?”

He stopped in front of her and stared down at her feet which she had pulled partly under her body when flopping into a chair. “He says we've gotta play brother and sister again. Nick Myerlie is going to be our daddy and we're going on a nice vacation way out in Oregon!”