Hive (15 page)

Hayes laughed and walked straight past him, wanting badly to curl up in a dark corner somewhere. “You got that right, Doc, because I
am
scared. And I think you are, too. We all are and we have a real fucking good reason to be.”

S
ure, Elaine Sharkey was iron. All hard edges and cutting corners sharp enough to slit your throat, you got too close, but when she was with Hayes? Maybe melted butter, something soft and warm and liquid and they both knew it and it was getting to the point that they didn't bother pretending otherwise. Maybe to the other men her eyes were blazing and cold, blue diamonds in a deep-freeze and her scowling mouth was hard and bitter. But to Hayes it was anything but that. It was a mouth to desire and want and feel. Yes, there was a connection between them and it was electric and real and that was the secret they coveted. Which was no secret at all.

When he was done telling her his story, he said simply, “I saw them, Doc . . .
Elaine,
I saw them. They're down there and they have been for millions of years, breeding and living and waiting in that warm darkness. Waiting for us . . . I know they've been waiting for us. It doesn't make sense or maybe it does, but I know it's true. Jesus, I know it's true.”

“I wish I really thought you made all this up,” was all she could say.

“Me, too. But we all saw that city, those things down there. Christ.” He paused, trying to catch his breath just like he'd been trying to catch it ever since he'd seen
them.
Trying to catch his breath and trying to plane his world flat before it went too far askew and pitched him on his ass. “It's all on tape, though. Wait until LaHune gets his hands on this . . . we'll have a blackout like never before. I bet he won't even let anyone see it.”

Sharkey fed him whiskey and soft words, gave him a shoulder to lean on. It was enough. It had to be enough. They were in her room, sitting on the bed and maybe it was the best possible place to be and maybe it was the worse. For what came next was the result of chemistry. Later, they could not say who started it. Just that it happened. That they fell into each other and lost themselves in the warmth and necessity of the act. The foreplay had been the telling of Hayes' story, no sweet nothings, but a great and voluminous blackness that had to be covered, had to be shut away somewhere and so it was. Like dread or mourning, the impact of what they knew to be true and what they guessed to be true threw them into each other's arms and the connection was made whole, potential energy gone kinetic, and the power was real. Foreplay abandoned, there was the act, there was motion and breathing and moaning and hot skin, limbs entwined and heat shared and maybe hearts touched and filled. All that Hayes could remember later was that he had never felt so strong or so weak. When he was inside Elaine Sharkey and she was wrapped around him, her eyes glowing like azure flames, he had never felt so completely alive and so utterly pure.

There was an excitement, he knew, in bedding another man's wife. The illicit thrill, the taboo. But it was far beyond that. The hunger had been growing for weeks and it was only a matter of time before the beast showed its teeth and filled its belly. And then, afterwards, the afterglow, a secret and a memory they shared and held deep inside themselves in a special place other hands could not touch or hope to sully. It was theirs and theirs alone and this was enough. This was all and everything and it was not spoken of. They could no more frame it with words than they could hold one another's souls in the palms of their hands. And that was the beauty of it, the thrill and joy and the magic.

And later, wrapped in each other's arms and touching and never wanting to let go, there were soft voices in the darkness.

“What . . . what are we going to do, Elaine?”

“I don't know, Jimmy, I just don't know.”

And he didn't either, so he laid there, feeling her, and loving the tactile sensation of her flesh, smelling that perfume coming off her which didn't come out of any bottle, but was just her inner beauty announcing itself as sweet honey, jasmine, and musk.

There were no answers, there was only the two of them in the darkness, feeling and being felt. Listening to the wind scraping across the compound and the blood rushing at their temples. What they had at that moment was the memory of their seduction and it was secret.

S
o LaHune had been feeding them a straight ration of shit for too long now, expecting them to chew and swallow, maybe ask for seconds, fill their bellies and smile and shove back empty plates, my compliments to the fucking cook. But day by day that was getting harder and you could see it behind their eyes and just under their smiles, like there was something pissed-off and randy waiting to show itself and when it did, my dearly beloved, cover your heads and hold onto your privates, this is going to be ugly and fierce and
loud.

Sure, LaHune, Christian saint that he was, had given them back their Internet and SAT TV and maybe everyone should have been happier than a penis on a Playboy shoot . . . but it wasn't that simple. The TV, the radio, the Internet . . . when you were locked down and nailed shut for five months in the coffin of Antarctica, got so you needed these things. Like clean air to breath. And when someone shoved a pillow over your face and cut off your wind, you didn't exactly thank ‘em when they pulled it off, let you breathe. What you did was kick them in the nuts so hard their little gonads rang off the inside of their skulls like ball bearings in a pinball game. Didn't matter how many sweet nothings about the Official Secrets Act they hummed in your ear, you kicked ‘em hard and sure so maybe next time they'd keep that in mind.

At least, that's how the Glory Boys — Rutkowski, St. Ours, and a few others — were seeing this little scenario.

“We can sit here and hold each other's dicks while we piss,” St. Ours told them. “Or we can zip our flies shut and do something. We can show that fucking monkey-skull LaHune which side his bread is buttered on.”

Maybe it was the loss of Meiner and too much whiskey and maybe it was just plain poor sense combined with isolation and confinement and that frustration they'd been gathering up like wool, but it made sense. St. Ours talked and the others listened with an almost religious rapture and plans were laid and not a one of them questioned any of it. Like a swift-rushing river they let it flow and carry them along, never once thinking of damming it.

At the far north end of Targa House, at the end of the corridor that split off the community room, you could find the radio room and supply lockers. You kept going, just around the bend, you'd find an Emergency Supplies Room that held extra radio parts, survival gear, freeze-dried food, ECWs, just about anything you'd need if the going got tough. You'd also find a weapon's locker there.

And if you wanted to get into it, then it was only a matter of kicking through LaHune's door across the hallway. Maybe going in there with three, four tough boys with liquor in their bellies and taking the keys.

LaHune never really saw them come in.

He was sleeping and about the time his eyes started to flicker open and register a vague shape standing over him, a fist had already collided with his temple. There was about enough time to cry out and then another fist caught him just above the eye and the lights went out. LaHune fell into blackness and his last sensory input was of pain and the stink of cheap whiskey, body odor, and machine oil . . . a very working man kind of smell.

“Tie that fucking puke up,” St. Ours said, toying with a flap of skin at his knuckle that he'd torn on LaHune's head.

Rutkowski and the others — a couple maintenance jocks named Biggs and Stotts—just stood there like toys waiting to be wound, maybe considering for the first time that they were involving themselves in some real deep shit here. The sort of shit you could and would drown in when the whiskey left your brain.

“With what?” Rutkowski said.

“Cut up some of those bed sheets,” St. Ours said. “Tie and gag him, then we'll get some guns and kerosene and have ourselves a wienie roast with Gates' pets out in the hut.”

And maybe the others weren't crazy about the idea of hurting LaHune or being an accomplice to an assault, but they liked the idea of torching the mummies. Yeah, they liked that just fine. Using pocket knives, Stotts and Biggs trussed LaHune up and that poor boy was out cold as a salmon steak in a freezer. When they were done, they were sweaty and maybe even a little confused.

“C'mon,” St. Ours told them.

In LaHune's desk, they found keys for every lock at the station, but all they wanted were the keys to the Emergency Supplies Room and the gun locker in there. When they had them, they went across the corridor and let themselves in. The room was about the size of a two-car garage. Crates and boxes, medical supplies and laboratory equipment marked fragile, drums of fuel, just about everything else. Because down there at the South Pole during winter, if you didn't have it and you needed it, you had to make it.

In the gun locker they found flare guns, .22 caliber survival rifles. They were hoping for some bigger hardware, but they figured the rifles would be enough. They found the shells easily enough and loaded the guns. Then they stood in a tight little circle, holding up those guns and liking the feel of them . . . their weight and solidity, the way weapons always made a man feel somehow more like a man. A hunter. A warrior. They stood there looking at each other, seeing the lights in each other's eyes, but not knowing what it was, only that it was strong and necessary and good.

It was all up to St. Ours now.

They would do what he said.

“All right,” he told them. “We're going to get ourselves some kerosene in the Equipment Garage . . . maybe gas or even diesel fuel, then we're going over to Hut Six and you know what we're going to do then. Anyone gets in our way . . . “

They seemed eager a moment before, but now something in them was weakening and wavering and St. Ours didn't care for it. “What? What the hell is it?” he put to them.

Rutkowski opened his mouth to say something, but the words didn't want to come. He'd been feeling something the past few minutes, but he wasn't really sure what it was. Only that it was in his head.

Biggs was rubbing his temples. “Damnedest thing . . . got me a headache, I'm thinking.”

“A headache? So take a fucking aspirin already. Jesus.” But St. Ours was looking at the other two and seeing it on them as well. Something was afoot. “Well? Are we going to do this or sit around pissing about our heads?”

Stotts, tall and angular and lantern-jawed like some stock New Englander, kept licking his lips. “It's in the back of my head . . . I can feel it back there.”

“Oh, for chrissake.”

Rutkowski shook his head, too. There was something there and it wasn't to be denied. The more he tried to ignore it, the more it raged, the more pain it brought with it. Maybe this wasn't a migraine coming on him, but it lived next door.

“Fuck is with you people?” St. Ours wanted to know.

But they couldn't really say because they were having trouble stringing words together and the pain was uniform and disorienting. Like something had woken up in their heads. Woken and stretched and started clawing up things. Rifles were lowered and then dropped and eyes went from being confused to being dark and shifting like simmering oil. Those eyes stared and rarely blinked and there was something very strange about it all.

St. Ours had been thinking maybe these boys had been affected by a leaky gas furnace or something because headaches were sure as hell not catchy. But what he was seeing in their eyes and beginning to feel along the nape of his neck was not gas, it was . . . it was a sense of
visitation.
Something was in that room with them, something unseen and nameless and malefic was filling the empty spaces between them, making everything and everyone just go bad to their cores.

Rutkowski kept trying to talk, but his mouth wouldn't seem to open and his head was filled with a thick, black down and he couldn't seem to think around it. His belly was filled with spiders and he could feel them in there, crawling up his spine and along his nerve ganglia making him want to fold-up or scream and -

“Fuck's with you people?” St. Ours was saying, flat-out scared now. What was in their heads wasn't in his, but he had enough other bad stuff going on to make up for it.

About then, they all became aware of the most peculiar vibration that seemed to be traveling through the floor beneath their feet and up into their bones, making their teeth ache. It was subtle at first, but growing, rising up now like some generator amping into life, that rhythmic thrumming passing through all of them and making them tremble and shake. And, Jesus, it was getting louder all the time like having your ear up against the metal casing of a hydraulic pump.

St. Ours tried to say something, but that thrumming drowned out his voice and the others were completely in thrall to it now, lost in a fog, their bodies moving now in cadence with that awful vibration. Noises began echoing around them . . . pinging sounds, whispering sounds, metallic sounds echoing down long pipes and brief squeals that almost sounded like human screams inverted or played in reverse.

And then there was a crackling like static electricity, a discharge of energy that made the hairs stand up on their arms and St. Ours wanted to cry out, but he couldn't. He still had the .22 in his hands and he wanted to open up on something, drill something, anything to make it stop before his head flew apart. Maybe the others didn't see what he saw then . . . and it was hard to say because they looked empty and dumb like window dummies . . . but it made him want to run.

Except, he didn't think he could.

The far outside wall of the room was getting fuzzy. It was made of bare concrete blocks, except now it looked like it was made of smoke. Something almost diaphanous and insubstantial. It was fluttering and glowing now as if it were backlit by some enormous burst of energy and you could see the mortaring between the blocks standing out lividly.