The Spawning (53 page)

We'll never get out of here alive,
Gwen thought.

None of us.

She was the last person in the world to throw in the towel, but there were limits to everything.
Limits.
And down here in this cyclopean netherworld of ice she felt that she had now reached hers. The point where all the guts and determination and optimism in the world simply curled-up in your belly and died. Because if the depraved nightmares of antiquity did not do them in, she figured, then the cold would.

Because it was cold.

Tropical compared to out in the Trough, but still dangerous. They all wore ECWs, boots, mittens and thermal gloves that were heated by battery packs, but there was a limit to that, too, she knew. Hypothermia would find them soon enough. They would begin to feel dopey, confused, then they would start making reckless decisions . . . and down here, that was as close to death as you could get.

She stared at Barnes's corpse, drinking in what it told her about her enemy and the power that enemy wielded.

We're all going to die like that with our brains boiling in our skulls, convulsing as our eyes melt and our faces twist into fright masks. Because that's what these things do. They eat your mind right down to the bare and bleeding bone, dissolve it like flesh in an acid bath.

She turned away and saw Coyle looking at her, his eyes fixed on her own, unblinking, unflinching, feeling what she felt and knowing what she knew. She could almost hear his voice in her head, telling her to keep it together, to hold on tight, because she was not alone and never had been.

She smiled at him and her face was so cold she thought it would split open.

He smiled back.

Beneath their balaclavas, they could not see each other do so, but it was there and they knew it.

Keep it together, Gwen, just a little bit longer.

Okay, Nicky. I'll do it. I'll do it.

“W
HAT HAPPENED TO THE lights?”

Horn kept asking that question in the coveting, murky blackness, but nobody seemed to have an answer.

As they moved away from the gory profusion that was Barnes, no one spoke. Dayton had been trying to reach everyone in his squad for some time and the fact that he hadn't spoke volumes about what was happening to them down there. The lights had been shut off now. And one by one, they were being pulled off into the darkness to be tortured individually. That's how it would work and was working.

They were all shining their lights around, looking, searching, seeking out what they could feel moving all around them now. Coyle put his light above and saw nothing but a condensing ice fog that steamed and billowed and swirled.

The Old Ones were up there, he knew.

They were not showing themselves, but they were most assuredly there.

“Fucking things,” Reja said. “I'd just like to get a shot at one of them.”

But Horn shook his head. “It's not their way. They like to play games and their favorite is hide-and-seek.”

“All right,” Dayton said. “Keep your minds focused. We're not done here yet. Those fucking things can only defeat us if we defeat ourselves first.”

Words of wisdom, Coyle thought.

Dayton's voice had barely died away when there came a cacophonous and shrill piping that almost sounded angry. It came from everywhere, nowhere, from the depths of the ice cave and from the depths of everyone's minds, the thin and reedy piping of a syrinx echoing out and out.

Coyle felt a booming like a gong in his head at the sound of it.

Dayton led them on and their lights picked out the Polar Haven.

No one was there, of course.

“Blood,” Long said. “Blood.”

There was a smear of it on the ice and it led away as their lights followed its trail. There was a splash of it on the Polar Haven, a frozen puddle of it at their feet, then a gruesome smeared pathway leading away as if McKerr had been murdered, then his gutted carcass dragged away deeper into the cavern.

Dayton started following the trail.

As did Reja and Long. All of them had their weapons at the ready.

“This is a fucking waste of time,” Horn said. “That much blood . . . he's dead. Let's just make for the chopper. We can't do anymore here.”

“We have to try,” Coyle told him.

“That's bullshit.”

And Reja, who was amazingly calm and quiet in the face of peril, suddenly moved very quick and put the barrel of his Colt Carbine right in Horn's face. And the look in his eyes told everyone there that he would pull the trigger and had no doubt done such things before. “Listen to me, you sonofabitch. We're not leaving anybody behind unless they're a corpse. McKerr was one of us and we're either going to find his fucking body or we're not leaving. That's how it works. That's how we play the game: we don't leave
anyone
behind. And if that was you, Horn, I wouldn't stop until I found you. Nothing could make me. So just shut the fuck up and let's get this done.”

With that he stomped away, following the blood trail.

Nobody said a word about it after that. If anything, Reja's words had galvanized them. Even Horn seemed more intent now and that was really something for that cynical boy.

They moved on—Coyle, Dayton, and Reja out front; Gwen, Horn, and Long bringing up the back. Their lights played over the frozen crust, revealing horns and serrated crests of blue-green ice, occasional pressure cracks that fanned out in crazy spider-webbed patterns. And more blood, of course. That was constant. It might disappear for five or ten feet, but it always showed up again.

Coyle was so tense by this point, he thought he might shatter. Because he knew that at any moment they were going to see something.
Something that'll take one of us or all of us.

As they came up a rippled mound of ice, he heard a sound which stopped him and made Gwen walk right into him. They all stopped, jumbled together. He didn't have to alert anybody to what he heard because they were all hearing it by then: a crunching and slurping noise that sounded very much like a lion gnawing on a carcass out on the veldt.

The blood trail.

Now the sound of feeding.

Dayton charged up the mound and on the other side, lying in a perfect pool of darkness down in a little glacial hollow was a body. It had to be McKerr for it was dressed in an olive-drab polar suit of the sort Dayton's men were wearing. At least, it was dressed in the ragged remains of one . . . because the body had been horribly mangled, looked like a pack of very hungry dogs had set upon it. It was torn and twisted, green polar suit and flesh and blood and jutting red bones all tangled up into a loose-limbed mass. Bits of tissue and globs of blood were sprayed out in every which direction. It had to be McKerr, but you wouldn't have known it because his face had been gnawed right off the leering skull beneath.

Long, who had seen his share of corpses, stumbled back, overwhelmed by it. Gwen turned away, too, but Horn just kept staring at the mess with his light on it, his lips moving like he wanted to say something.

Dayton charged ahead, hearing the thing that had done this, its low and gurgling breathing. Coyle went with him, Reja at his heels. And when they saw it, waiting there on the ice, somebody gasped and somebody moaned.

But all lights were on it.

Here's what Coyle saw: a hunched-over troll-like thing with a face like a grotesque fleshy moon, pale and pitted and wormy, seamed with red and gray. A face that crawled over what was beneath. It had huge yellow eyes lacking pupils that were threaded with pink veins that pulsed. Its mouth was an unbroken circle of gray, needle-like teeth. Gore dripped free and splatted to the ice.

It must have heard them coming and tried to sneak away with a mouthful of meat.

“That's . . . that's Beeman,” Long said.

Dayton had his MP5 on the thing. “Not anymore it's not,” he said.

The malformed horror before him began to change, its face melting like plastic, oozing and bubbling and reshaping itself into other faces . . . Barnes, then Norrys, then McKerr, then a whole series of faces that he only recognized from photographs: Stone and Kenneger, Dryden and Paxton and Reese.

Reja charged forward, just beside himself. “Norrys! You motherfucker! You killed McKerr! You dirty sonofabitch–”

He got right in the field of fire and nobody could shoot. And maybe that had been the thing's plan all along . . . to use its hypnotic screen or whatever it was to confuse and confound those there, draw one in to shield itself. Reja could not be blamed. He saw Norrys, a stinking and murdering version, but Norrys all the same. He brought his rifle butt down on the thing and by then, whatever it really was, it had hold of him, crushing him in its grip.

His rifle went skidding across the ice.

Coyle went after the thing, he smashed its face with his SPAS-12 and smashed it again and the thing tossed aside Reja, throwing him right into Long and Horn. They all went down in a heap, flashlight beams darting around in the darkness. Dayton was trying to a shoot without hitting anyone. Gwen wanted to do the same.

Dayton charged in and a thorny, scabrous hand clasped his face and sent him flying back into Gwen.

Panic ripped open inside Coyle because he knew the thing had him. It was unbelievably strong. He punched and kicked it, but it did no good. He almost got away, but it moved with a dazzling speed and something slugged into him, his arms going numb right up to the shoulders. He wasn't even aware that the shotgun fell from his hands. He wasn't aware of much at all.

Nothing but flying backward as the thing threw him.

And the sound of his own cry.

I
N HIS HEAD, COYLE thought he heard Gwen cry out:
Nicky! Look out! Look out! You're going over!

Her voice was there.

In those few seconds he flew backward, he distinctly heard it cry out in his head. He heard the terror and anxiety in it . . . then he was going back and back, expecting to strike the ice wall and be knocked senseless. But there was no wall. Just a few streamers of yellow tape that Dryden's team had strung across the mouth of a crevice. He felt his body hit them, stretch them, and then they broke. But they did manage to slow his momentum.

He was flung to the left, struck the fissured wall of the crevice, and then went down on his belly, swinging around in a wild slippery circle on the glossy ice, spinning and finally coming to rest on the lip of the crevasse.

His legs from knees on down were hanging out in empty air.

He reached out frantically, trying to dig his mittens into the ice, trying to find something, anything, to hold onto. And as he did so, he slid down another inch. His heart hammering, he could feel the great depths beneath him reaching up for him. Any moment now, he knew, gravity was going to pull him down.

And he would drop for a mile before he hit bottom.

Alone in the encompassing blackness, he waited for it.

N
OBODY WENT AFTER COYLE.

They couldn't.

The beast was among them and it wanted blood.

It came right at Gwen in the dappled illumination of fumbled flashlights. It made a high screeching sound and scuttled over the ice on all fours like a crab. She pulled herself back, wondering where in the hell her gun was, and the thing came on with a stench of spoiled meat.

“Watch it!” somebody yelled. “Watch it!”

The thing looked up with those yellow, blood-seamed eyes and hissed, its shriveled lips pulling back from sheathed jaws and Dayton fired. He put a volley of three rounds into the thing that knocked it back as if it had been slapped.

Then it came right back again, trying to work itself as close to her as possible so the others could not fire upon it. Gwen kicked out at it as it reached for her. Dayton hit it with a glancing shot that barely slowed it down.

Steaming, hot, and repulsive, it prepared to leap.

Horn, God bless his innate recklessness, didn't give a shit who he hit as long as he took out the thing amongst them. He brought his assault shotgun to bear, bringing it around by the pistol-grip and took quick aim. On automatic mode, the SPAS-12 can pump out four rounds per second. He jerked the trigger and got off one that went high and wild and then another that caught the beast in the shoulder and vaporized said shoulder, knocking the thing backwards and down with a grinding squeal of agony.

It tried to rise up again.

But they were ready.

Long didn't bother with his flamethrower because the thing was just too close to the others, but Dayton and Horn and Reja had their weapons trained on it, bracketed lights full in the creature's face. In that moment before they opened up, it stared at them with those glistening yellow eyes and a rank steam poured from its mouth.

Then everyone opened up.

The beast never had a chance. Dayton peppered it with his MP5, Reja drilled it with his Colt Carbine, and Horn pumped two 12-gauge rounds into it that nearly tore it in half. It finally went down in a writhing, boiling mass of undulating flesh and thrashing limbs. But it wasn't dead. It rose up from the pool of its own running anatomy, blood and slime and flesh hanging like confetti. It opened its puckered, bleeding mouth and screamed at them with a shrieking, glottal cry that was nearly deafening.

Gwen had found her Beretta by then and she put a round right into its skull. It went through the left eye and sprayed filth out the back of its head.

And that's when they all saw what it really was.

What it had always been.

An incubator like the others.

A viscid and squamous horror that needed flesh and blood to feed the things that nested inside of it. The barrage of slugs that had blasted into it had torn open the ECWs it wore, the ones that had no doubt belonged to the original host body it had invaded. They were shredded, ripped, smoking from contact burns. Now they could see its throat, part of its chest, one misshapen arm of braided muscle. Its corded flesh was not flesh as such, but the bodies of the parasites that lived off it, their segmented, wriggling bodies that were housed in its tissue. It was crawling with those leggy, spidery parasites that had been born out of the creature down in the crevice.