The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  Horn gave a brief description of his engineering prowess to the others, finished by saying, “Best part, people, is the fuel. Jellied gasoline. It hits something and it keeps burning. Just try and put it out.”

  Coyle was smiling, too. Jellied gasoline was homemade napalm. You mixed gasoline with Styrofoam, very finely-ground in this case so it wouldn’t clog the hose, and the Styrofoam absorbed the gas, liquefied into a jelly-like emulsion that was extremely flammable and would stick to anything it hit, burning and burning.

  “Flamethrower,” Shin said with some distaste. “That’s ridiculous.”

  Horn grinned again, his eyes sparkling with mischief. With the flamethrower, his ECWs, heavy beard and flag bandanna wrapped around his head, he looked like some kind of polar terrorist. “I’ll show you how ridiculous it is, dipshit.”

  “Put that thing away,” Special Ed said.

  Coyle said, “Horn . . .”

  Too late.

  Horn turned, thinking no one was behind him, and squeezed the trigger. A gout of flame gushed from the spout and became a rolling fireball that almost hit Harvey. Fire extinguisher in hand, he hit the floor and the fire rolled harmlessly over him. It traveled for maybe thirty feet and struck the far wall, where it clung and burned with greasy black smoke.

  “Goddamn it!” Special Ed cried out. “Put that damn thing away!”

  The Beav and several others began spraying the blaze down with fire extinguishers, but the stuff did not want to go out. They stomped it and hosed it down, gradually bringing it under control.

  “Jee-ZUZ-Christ!” Frye said. “Now ain’t that something?”

  Harvey pulled himself off the floor, beet-red in the face, gesticulating wildly. “You almost killed me! You almost goddamn killed me!”

  Horn laughed. “Yeah, and some loss that would be.”

  People were either astounded or incensed at the weapon and told Horn so, but not for long . . . for there came a weird, high-pitched howling from Medical. It sounded like the squealing yelps of a dozen dogs slowed down and then sped up, vanishing in a shrill eerie wailing.

  “Holy shit,” Shin said.

  “Nicky,” Ed said, swallowing. “Hopper’s in there . . .”

  “Come on,” Coyle told Horn, taking his gun out. “Rest of you stay back.”

  A few inched forward, but most had no problem remaining behind. Zoot and Danny Shin were the only ones that were intrigued by what was in that room down the corridor. Intrigued, but scared. Frye held out his hands, forcing them both back.

  “You heard the man!” he said. “Stay back!”

  Horn behind him, Gut at the rear with her axe, Coyle led the way down the corridor with Hopper’s 9mm Colt. The gun felt almost slippery in his sweaty hand. A trickle of perspiration tickled its way down his spine.

  The door to Medical was at the very end of the corridor. It was open just a crack like every door in every scary movie he’d ever seen. One of those doors you didn’t dare open.

  If you were watching this, he told himself, you’d be telling yourself to leave it alone.

  But Coyle didn’t have a choice.

  When he got closer to it, he saw that Locke’s blood was on it. A smeared handprint. More blood was on the wall next to it like he had been stumbling about drunkenly after the creature attacked him. And he probably had been.

  Coyle held up his hand to the others so they would stop.

  He listened.

  It sounded very quiet in there, but he did not believe for a moment that whatever had gotten Cryderman had left. It had not come out the door and he had not heard the window break.

  That meant it was still in there.

  Waiting. Playing cat-and-mouse.

  Unless it went through a heating duct, because it knows how to do that.

  Coyle moved closer to the door, listening to the beat of his own heart. His limbs felt heavy, thick.

  “You hear it?” Gut said.

  He ignored her. There was a thumping sound in there, a bumping. Now a muted sliding. He saw a blur of shadow through the crack. He knew then that whatever was in there was waiting just behind the door.

  The lights in there went out.

  “Shit,” he said. Then to Gut: “Get us some flashlights.”

  He was about five feet from the door and at any moment, whatever was in there—he was picturing some hulking, freakish shape in his mind—would come bounding out and sink its yellow claws into him. Whatever it was, it was smart. It knew enough to turn off the lights so that it could get the jump on them in the darkness. Something which definitely tipped the odds in its favor.

  Gut brought him a flashlight.

  As she handed it to him, her hand was shaking so badly that she nearly dropped it. She quickly retreated behind Horn and his artillery. Gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, Coyle again moved towards the door. The thing was there. He knew it. He could hear it breathing with a slopping, moist sound.

  It moved with a squashing noise.

  And right then, a vile stench rose up like somebody had just cracked open a rotting egg. The stink wafted from behind the door, utterly rancid and filthy, like sulfurous fumes coming off a cesspool.

  “Damn,” Horn said.

  Coyle tried to ignore the oily yellow stink, but it burned his eyes, his nostrils. Three feet from the door, something again bumped behind it. The door trembled . . . then slowly began to open without so much as a telltale creaking.

  Coyle motioned the others back.

  The door whispered open a foot, that stink becoming unbearable. Then it violently slammed shut and he jumped an easy foot backward, almost landing on Horn.

  Breathing very fast, he said: “I think . . . I think it’s toying with us.”

  There was another thud behind the door and then something rammed into it. Something else, which Coyle did not think was a hand at this juncture, grasped the door knob and rattled it.

  He pulled the trigger.

  Maybe it was simple reflexive action, but he jerked it and put two rounds right through the door. On the other side, there was a high and wavering sort of scream that sounded almost too human. Something hit the door and with such force that the panel split right down the middle. Whatever was on the other side was not only pissed off, but very strong.

  He heard it moving around in there now with that same squashing sound like it was treading over rotting grapes three inches deep. Something fell, something else shattered. And there was a deafening, undulating roar that made him take two stumbling steps backward.

  Glass breaking.

  “The window,” Horn said. “It’s going through the fucking window!”

  Coyle ran to the door, threw it open without letting himself even think of what might come jumping out at him. He sensed rather than saw movement, and quickly fired three rounds. Whatever it was, it let out a manic, animal baying. He fumbled for the light switch and saw something big moving through the infirmary door. He rushed in there past Hopper’s gutted, swinging body. There was glass on the floor from shattered cabinets, empty bags of blood and plasma, and lots of that slime.

  It was going out the window.

  He didn’t even shoot. He just saw it and stopped dead.

  The window was small, maybe three-feet by three-feet and what was forcing itself out of it was much larger. It was wet and glistening and obscenely fleshy. Coyle did not know what it was, but it looked almost like some swollen juicy fetus trailing the ballooning, ruptured remains of a placenta behind it. It bulged as it pushed its way through, a dozen whipping umbilical cords rustling at the window frame, and then it was gone, crunching through the hardpack outside the dome.

  “Motherfucker,” Horn said in a dry voice.

  Coyle swallowed, forced himself to breathe. “Let’s go get that sonofabitch.”

  2

  THE WIND THREW SNOW and a scrim of tiny ice particles in Coyle’s face as he came around the dome, passing near the shattered window of Medical. Already, from the inside, they were bu
sy boarding it up. He could hear the whine of cordless drills, muffled voices.

  Standing there in his bulky ECWs, flashlight in one mittened hand and gun in the other, he felt the cold trying to suck his warmth away. It was edging down towards fifty below and it felt like it. His pants were stiff, his parka making cracking sounds when he moved his arms.

  “Come on,” he told Horn, his breath coming out in great freezing clouds.

  “Let’s get it,” Frye said, raising an ice-axe in one hand.

  The three of them moved forward. Coyle scanned the whiteness at his feet. The wind blew and the snow raged in the beam of his light. Frost glistened on the hardpack.

  But not just snow.

  Frozen slime.

  Lots of it. A trail of it led across the new drift. Not just the clear slime that he knew so well, but a pinkish material that might have been blood. Frozen drops of it. There was some greenish stuff, too, and he couldn’t even begin to guess what that might be. There were prints in the fresh snow, many of them like maybe two people had been walking and dragging a third.

  “Funny sort of thing this must be,” Frye said.

  Coyle kept moving.

  He felt like some surreal big-game hunter following a blood trail.

  The wind moaned around him, whipping snow around. Even with his balaclava on his face was stiff from the cold, his beard full of ice. Overhead, the sky was clear and glacial, stars shimmering and auroras flickering over the distant mountaintops.

  He followed the trail and noticed that the prints were now more uniform and it looked like the thing had been walking on three feet . . . maybe not feet exactly, but something more along the lines of pegs or thorns. Each print had three such indentations like spikes. Even in the freezing air, Coyle was catching occasional whiffs of a gassy, revolting smell that came and went.

  It was damnably dark out there.

  The flashlights and far-flung security lights did little to change that. A world of frost and shadows and bitter cold.

  “That thing ain’t gonna last long out in this,” Frye said, panning his light around.

  Horn grunted. “It’s been doing all right so far.”

  Coyle saw a shadow dart away over near the garage and he didn’t doubt its reality when he heard a sudden fragmented, alien wailing that sounded much like several mouths had made it. The very tone of it was unearthly and it went right up his spine.

  “Come on,” he said.

  They raced after the cry.

  In their cumbersome cold weather gear and big, air-filled boots, it wasn’t exactly a graceful run, but they gained ground, huffing and puffing. They pounded forward over the hardpack, plowing through drifts, clenching their teeth against the cold. Flashlights bobbed in their hands, casting wild, cavorting shadows . . . any of which could have been something more than a shadow. The wind blew dead-on at them, gathering up sheets of drift and throwing it in their faces.

  The trail led to the garage, past the doors, and around the side.

  For whatever reason, the creature did not seem interested in getting in there. And Coyle knew that wasn’t because it was too stupid to figure out doorknobs, but because it had something else in mind. And he wondered just what. The thing was probably nowhere near as intelligent as the race that had no doubt manufactured it, but it was certainly crafty. It had been hiding out at Clime for several days now. And it was only by accident that it was discovered at all.

  Sure, he thought, it probably has a rudimentary intelligence, but don’t give it too much credit. Right now, it’s an animal. It’s cold, injured, and it will fight to survive.

  As they came around the far side of the garage, the wind brought the odor of the thing.

  “Horn,” Coyle said. “You get ready with your flamethrower.”

  Frye and Horn spread out behind him. The smell came and vanished again. In that wind, that blackness, it could have been anywhere. On the other side of the dome and ten feet away lying in wait.

  Behind the garage, he saw nothing.

  Just some stacked skids of yellow barrels on the unbroken hardpack, a few pockets of shadow, drift blown up against the structure itself. Without any loose snow to leave prints in, the thing could have raced off into the darkness of the polar plateau for all he knew.

  But he didn’t think so.

  He raced forward, the air so cold it made his lungs ache.

  As he neared the far corner of the garage, his boot snagged on a shelf of ice and he went down in the drift. He came back up quick, brushing snow from his eyes. Horn and Frye jogged up behind him.

  As he looked forward, he saw something. Not the beast itself, but the retreating shadow it threw in the pale moonlight as it slipped around the garage, out of sight. And that shadow . . . good God . . . nebulous and weird like two men joined at the waist, distorted and inhuman, things wiggling where their heads should have been like they wore crowns of wriggling snakes.

  Frye yanked him to his feet.

  Side by side, the three of them came around the corner of the garage and it was there waiting for them. It let out a screeching, primeval-sounding roar like a prehistoric monster and lunged at them. Coyle felt the wave of rancid heat it pushed before it, but all he really saw in that spit-second of shock as his boots slid on the ice and he again went down was a massive shadow bearing down on him.

  Frye cried out.

  Horn let out a shout and pulled the trigger of the flamethrower.

  A blazing tongue of flame went right over Coyle’s head in a gushing surge. In the darkness it was so bright it was nearly blinding. The mushroom cloud of fire hit the thing as it leaped forward, not directly, but glancing off its side and sending it spinning away. Most of the flaming jellied gasoline hit the sheet metal side of the garage and was scattered over the hardpack.

  But the rest . . . stuck and burned.

  The beast let out another roar and ran off with a see-sawing/ galloping sort of motion, shrieking out its agony. Even with its left side blazing, it moved quite fast, sizzling and loping, leaving a trail of churning smoke in its wake.

  Then Coyle was on his feet and the others were running with him. There was no time to think, to plot, to let the unreal horror of what had just happened sink into them. They had to get that thing. They had to bring it down now or no one at Clime would be safe.

  “It’s making for T-Shack,” Frye said.

  And it was. Still burning and smoking, casting a flickering orange light from the flames that still licked at it, it shambled at a good clip down the walkway that led from the garage to the tunnel that connected the dome and the Transmission Shack. It reached the tunnel and followed it towards the shack itself, pausing before the doorway into T-Shack that Coyle himself had used a few days before, scaring the shit out of Harvey in the process.

  They went after it.

  It left a trail of smoldering cinders on the walkway.

  Something like cracked black plastic.

  As it stood there, outside the door, Coyle got his first real good look at it. Just for a second, but that image would last him a lifetime. Its burning stink in his face, it looked bulbous and mounded like a spider walking upright, dozens of appendages waving with a slow, dreamlike sort of motion like ropy sea grasses caught in a tidal pull. Smoking fragments of it drifted off in the wind making it look as if it were flaking apart.

  It roared in their direction and went through the door.

  No, it did not open it, it went right through it like the door was something jury-rigged out of balsa wood. It lunged forward, its heaving mass knocking the door right off its hinges and somebody in there screamed bloody murder.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Coyle shouted as he gave chase.

  Before Frye, Horn, and he had went after the thing, he’d told Special Ed to lock down all the doors and post people at all entrances. And apparently he had. And now the beast had found one of them.

  Another scream pierced the night and Coyle cringed inside.

  3

  EM
PEROR CAVE

  BIGGS WAS ALONE.

  And although Warren was in his bunk snoring away, he had never felt so godawful alone in his life. For it was just the two of them now. They had shut off the power for the cavern and Polar Haven below. Nothing alive down there. Not anymore. Just the cold blue ice sleeping away eternity as it had for eons.

  After Warren had returned from his little investigation below—when was that? Yesterday?—Biggs had gotten on the horn with MacOps and told them all he knew: Dryden and the others were missing. They could not account for their whereabouts. MacOps told them to sit tight. Not to go out on the Beardmore searching for them. Stay in the Hypertat. Keep the generator running.

  But how long could you wait like that?

  Doing nothing?

  MacOps hadn’t said, just wait until spring, then we’ll get you out . . . but Biggs had a feeling that that’s exactly what they were saying. You volunteered, baby. Now it’s worse case scenario. Just button up the hatches and . . . wait.

  Wait.

  But how long could you wait?

  Already he felt like he was living in a tin can. Warren and he never left each other’s sight. They couldn’t stand each other, but they stayed together. Even when they went to check on the generator, the other Hypertats that they kept running as back-ups, they went together. Bickering, mostly. But together.

  Biggs spent a lot of time not thinking about what Dryden had chopped out of the ice down there and what had happened to the others, but there were other things he couldn’t avoid thinking about: madness, cabin fever. For if he was stuck in this fucking Hypertat until spring with Warren, he’d go crazy. Simple as that.

  And how much solitaire could you play?

  How many books could you read?

  How many movies could you watch?

  How many TV dinners could you eat?

  And, yes, how long before what got the others came for them? How long before they heard that piercing, freakish piping again? Because they would and he knew it.