The Spawning (36 page)

“When I was in McMurdo,” Biggs said, “I was drinking with these people over at the Erebus Club. One of them was this woman, some fucking lesbo. She was an artist and had been invited down by the NSF for the summer. She was going on and on about the natural beauty and how you could find yourself down here, commune with Mother Earth and become aware of your humanity, your spirituality as you lived amongst the penguin colonies. Artsy-fartsy eco-fantasy bullshit. And I told her as much. She said I didn't understand. But I told her that I understood only too well. That I hated to be the fly in her pie, but Antarctica was not a poem and it wasn't a painting and it wasn't a church. It was dark and cold and bitter and ate human lives by the handful. It was raw nature and raw nature was simply ugly and brutal. There was nothing beautiful about it. You didn't commune with it, you fought it. You kept it down or it would take your life.”

“What'd she say to that?”

“She said it would change me. I would not come out of here the same and she was right. Because I won't come out of here the same and neither will you. We'll either be fucking crazy or they'll take us out in body bags.”

A week ago, Biggs knew, Warren would have told him he was cynical and pessimistic and a general asshole . . . but he didn't say that now. Because he knew he was right. This place was a graveyard and you could pretend otherwise all you wanted, but it was still a fucking graveyard.

Warren rubbed his tired eyes. “I don't know what the hell to do.”

“About what?”

“About what's happening here.”

“Nothing you can do but ride it out,” Biggs told him. “It's like herpes: you just have to live with it.” Then he saw how desperate Warren was and he almost felt sorry for him. But just for a moment. Then he felt angry at the man's naiveté. “I told you not to go down there. I told you not to go look at that monster. So if your head is all messed-up, don't blame me.”

Warren kept rubbing his eyes. “We have to do something, Biggs. We haven't heard from Dryden or the others in like twelve hours.”

“Try sixteen,” Biggs said, checking his watch.

“I don't suppose you wanna go down there and check on ‘em?”

“Nope. But I'll put it on my To-Do list right after eating snails, fire-walking, and a gender reassignment.”

“Somebody's gotta go.”

“Why not you?”

Warren pursed his lips, the blood drained from his face. “I can't . . . I just can't go back down there.”

“That's sensible.”

“Jesus Christ, Biggs. We're late checking in with MacOps as it is.”

“So call ‘em.”

“And tell them what exactly? That things are okay up here, but we don't know about below? You don't think they might want us to go check? You don't think they might ask us to go ascertain if those guys are even alive down there?”

Biggs didn't know and he didn't care. He only knew one thing for sure: he wasn't going down into that tomb and that was that. “You think they're dead down there?”

“I don't know. I've been calling and calling them.”

“Maybe they're just away from the radio. You know how beakers are.”

But that didn't hold water and he knew it. At Emperor, you had to sign out and take an emergency radio with you when you went outside the Hypertats or to the Polar Haven below. SOP. The radios fit in your pocket. There was no reason not to take one.

Biggs opened his mouth, probably to say something smart-assed . . . then closed it just as quick. He was suddenly seized by that expectant, crawling feeling in his belly as he had been just before Dryden called him up from the Polar Haven and told him to send that message to McMurdo, that they'd found something.

It was there again. Just like that.

A building apprehension, a creeping dread, something rising from the pit of his belly and making his skin feel tight, his scalp tingle. Weird. Electrical. Like the polarity of the air around him had just changed and he was changing with it.

The lights flickered.

Flickered again.

No, it was not unusual. Sometimes there was a momentary surge in the line from the generator. It happened sometimes.

They flickered again.

Then not just flickered, but strobed, flashing on and off.

“What the hell?” Warren said, his voice dry like there was no spit in his mouth.

A rumbling sound rose up.

It seemed to be coming from the ice beneath them. There was a crackling of static that was unpleasantly sharp, unpleasantly near. It was followed by a shrill metallic screeching, high pinging noises. And then vibrations that rolled through the Hypertat in a rhythmic booming like the beat of heart.

Louder.

Louder.

The entire Hypertat was shaking.

The lights were strobing madly.

Warren cried out and Biggs just clung to his chair as it vibrated across the floor and a squeal of static came from the radio. The lights were flickering madly and he thought he glimpsed swaying twisted, inhuman figures cavorting around him. And then, from outside, a wild and shrieking cacophony of strident piping that was so loud they had to cover their ears. And then–

Nothing.

Beeman was sitting up in his bunk, mouth opening and closing in fishlike gulps.

Warren looked scared white.

And Biggs was not in much better shape.
Like somebody threw a switch,
he thought.
On and then off.
God, his skin felt cool to the touch. It was still creeping from his balls to his throat.

“What the hell was that?” Warren finally asked.

Biggs didn't have an answer. He was too busy staring at the window, expecting to see something looking in at them. Something huge and malefic with the face of an insect.

“The cavern,” Beeman said and his voice had an eerie, lonesome sound to it. “Down in the cavern. That thing . . . it's awake now. It's awake and it knows where we are.”

POLAR CLIME
MARCH 15

IT WAS A LONG day.

Quiet, but eerie and expectant.

The crew came and went, tense and helpless, not speaking, just looking angry and frightened and increasingly paranoid as they were burdened under terrible stress and psychological pressure.

Harvey Smith stayed in his room. He came out for meals, but took his tray back with him because he no longer trusted anyone. He was not sure who was still human. He wrote endless letters to his mother, describing the state of the station.

Coyle and Gwen, Frye and Locke and Zoot spent a lot of time discussing what was going on in the world and, more importantly to them, what was going on at Clime. They knew that somewhere there was a creature with a savage appetite for human flesh. It was out in the darkness or hiding amongst them, but it was there. And eventually, it was going to show itself.

Gwen admitted to them that a voice—an ancient, crumbling voice—called to her in the night and it was no dream. Something had been out in the compound, calling her name.

Not that any of it surprised Zoot. She was having the dreams constantly. And hearing the voices. They got worse, she found, if she spent time with Butler.

Danny Shin, as scared as the others, sought out Locke and the two of them had many long conversations. “It's happening,” Locke told him. “It really is. And down here, we're sitting right on top of the epicenter.”

Shin tried arguing that no one had actually seen a living Old One. Not at Clime. And Locke said, “No . . . not yet. But it's coming. And when we do, look out.”

As it turned out, the first person to see one of the creatures and survive was Shin himself. Coming back from the Power Station and Locke, he came bolting into the Community Room, ranting and raving to all present. He claimed something was up on top of the dome, watching him. He wouldn't say what until Frye threatened to beat it out of him. Then, calming slowly, he said it was one of the things that Locke had told him about. It had great wings and staring red eyes. And it made a shrill, piping sound as if it were trying to communicate with him.

Frye and Coyle went out with flashlights for a look, but saw nothing.

Nothing on top of the dome, that was. But outside, in the fresh drift, there were strange triangular prints in the snow. Many of them clustered beneath the windows . . . as if whatever had made them, had been standing there, looking in.

Coyle had been expecting these prints, but actually
seeing
them was almost too much for him. Standing there on the hardpack, Frye next to him, the wind blowing in his face and a few fingers of drift blowing past his boots, he couldn't seem to catch his breath.

Here was the smoking gun.

Frye said, “That our creature, Nicky?”

But Coyle shook his head. “No, not the creature . . . whatever left these was its master.”

Hopper's mental condition was deteriorating by the day. He made the mistake of looking in on Butler in the dead of night.

Though she was unconscious, the phenomena began . . . rapping in the walls, vibrations and distant piping noises. Shaking and sweating, just shot through with horror, he watched as steam issued from her pores. Not steam exactly, but a swirling, boiling mist that gathered above her in fine threads of ectoplasm, forming itself into an inhuman shape with outstretched wings and coiling limbs and bright red eyes set atop fleshy stalks . . .

Hopper screamed and threw himself into the corridor which was empty and thick with shadows. He looked back once and that misty shape was coming out of Medical, re-forming in the corridor. Then dissipating, dissolving until there was only those red eyes following him, five red eyes set with tiny black pupils that watched and watched.

As he ran, they drifted along behind him.

And when he found his own office and slammed the door shut, locking it, the lights went out and then there was just him and those disembodied red eyes floating and peering into him. Making him know things and remember things.

Somewhere during the process, he went out cold.

Horn was not remotely surprised by anything that happened or would happen; he always expected the worst. When he wasn't fine-tuning the vehicles in the garage or Heavy Shop, he was devising weapons. A long time video game addict who'd fought his share of alien horrors on the screen, he planned on being ready. He'd told Coyle that he could easily fashion flamethrowers and electric prods that would fry alien ass. And he wasn't kidding.

The two remaining members of the FEMC crew—Koch and Hansen—had fashioned themselves machetes on the lathe and, like Horn, were ready to fight. It was not a good idea to sneak up behind them. It might cost you a limb.

Ida was hearing a lot of the same stuff as the others and she was not immune to the positively morose atmosphere of the station, but she refused to believe. She refused to even discuss it. She hid out in her room and drank.

The Beav, maybe having once been part of the counterculture herself, accepted it. She, too, stayed in her room when she could, listening to The Doors and Sly and the Family Stone, thinking it might all blow over.

Eicke holed himself up in Atmospherics with canned food and would not come out. Cryderman was on his own out in T-Shack. Hopper still didn't want Harvey anywhere near the radio, so Cryderman manned it alone. He even hooked up an alarm that would sound when something came in. Although, sometimes he was so drunk he didn't hear it.

Gut did not want to believe in Locke's stories, but slowly, like Shin, she came around. And when she did, being the sort of person she was, she wanted to take action. She didn't honestly believe some of the things being said, but that there was a monster among them—or one bloodthirsty psychopath—she did not doubt. And in her mind, Butler was the cause of it. She was some kind of witch and she needed to be sorted out . . . one way or another.

Special Ed found Hopper in his room, cowering in the corner. He clasped his hands together, wringing them, interlocking his fingers, the knuckles popping white with the exertion of it all. He was very near to a nervous breakdown.

“They've been following me around and they won't let me go,” he said, bunching his hands into fists and pounding them on the floor. “Ever since I went to see Butler . . . that
monster
. . . ever since, they follow me. They won't let me alone.
They'll never leave me alone.
They watch and watch and watch. They look at me from the walls and peer from under my bed. I feel them looking through my closet door. Oh . . . oh, God, this sounds mad, I know it sounds mad . . . but they even follow me in my sleep. I see them looking at me, always looking at me.”

“Who watches you?” Special Ed asked him.

“Ghosts,” Hopper said. “Ghosts.”

Frye stopped by Coyle's room just before supper and said, “Funny how it is now. How you can link all these things together. Things that are happening now. Things that happened at Kharkov. Things that happened years ago. There has always been a pattern, but we were too dumb to see it.”

“Or we didn't want to see it.”

Frye stared off into space. “Ever been to the Dry Valleys?”

“Flew over ‘em,” Coyle said. “Years back.”

The Dry Valleys region was inland from Ross Island in the Transantarctics. It was free from snow and ice all year long because the land there was rising faster than the glaciers could impede. The Valleys were like some weird sunken world that sat below the level of the polar plateau surrounded on all sides by ice and snow. A series of valleys of exposed rock and sand that were notorious for the howling dry winds that buffeted them and blew them clean of drift. Geologists went there to study the rocks and microbiologists to study the microbes. It was one of those rare places in Antarctica where you could actually see the landmass instead of just pieces of it jutting up from the ice cap.

“It's a strange place in my book,” Frye told him. “I was there my second year down here, rigging camp for a bunch of beakers from Yale. You got those sandy valleys, walls and towers of stone rising in-between. The rocks are purple and white and red . . . real pretty, I guess, if you can get used to the desolation and that wind moaning all night long. You don't expect a place like that down here. Looks like you're not in Antarctica anymore, but crawling around on Mars or one of them alien places. Weird. There's big shelves of rock called ventifacts that have been eroded by the wind. They rise up hundreds of feet, some of ‘em, and look like . . . I don't know . . . faces and figures. Gives you the creeps in late summer when the shadows play over ‘em. Rivers of ice-melt run through there and there's sand dunes that rise up thirty, forty feet like in the Sahara, only bigger. A wild place.