The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  And then he knew.

  An incubator. All three of them . . . Dryden, Stone, Kenneger . . . they had grown together like some kind of human fungi to provide warmth and food for the things coming to term within them. An incubator. A human incubator.

  Warren pulled himself away. “But it’s been allowed to freeze up,” he said under his breath. “Now why would that be?”

  “Fuck are you talking about?” Biggs wanted to know.

  But Warren could not explain, for even then the seeds of madness and horror were just taking root in his own soul and the greater purpose of it all was beginning to make itself known.

  He saw something glinting on the hand of one of the corpses.

  It drew his eye.

  A ring.

  Behind him, Beeman was wailing with a wild, screeching sound that sounded inhuman, like some insect calling out to the swarm.

  But that ring . . .

  Warren looked closer.

  An Annapolis ring. Only those who had graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland would have one. Dryden. Stone. Kenneger. Warren knew their histories. They were not military men.

  But Beeman was.

  Beeman.

  “C’mon, Warren!” Biggs cried out now. “We have to get out of here before it comes back! Before that thing returns!”

  And, Warren, slowly swiveling his head on his neck, breathed out a string of words: “I think we’re too late.”

  And Beeman moved.

  Or maybe it was Dryden. Or Stone. Or Kenneger.

  There was no way to know. It moved quickly, becoming what it was and being content with that . . . a hunched-over scarecrow-thing with a bulbous head and two huge yellow-pink eyes veined in red, eyes that hated with a feral intensity. Its face was red and raw, threaded with pink and pale seams of tissue . . . a pulpy and stringy mask that crawled like worms over what was beneath.

  Biggs screamed as he saw that immense puckered mouth open and display its fan of gray teeth like darning needles . . . a perfect circle of them.

  A splayed hand with webbing between the fingers and black, thorny claws lashed out and took his throat out in a spray of blood. His face came off like a flap of meat. And when he went down, the Beeman-thing took hold of him and buried its puckered, fanged mouth to his throat and began to feed with horrible, sucking sounds.

  Warren screamed and rushed it.

  It clawed out at him with hooked talons and fingers that were oddly scaly and mottled. Warren ducked away from it and it tossed Biggs’s bleeding corpse aside and came at him, hobbling over the ice, that puckering mouth pulling away from snake-like fangs, blood and blue-black ichor dripping.

  Warren dove at it.

  He dove and brought the ice-axe down on its head with everything he had and the blade sank into its skull to the hilt. There was no give like with bone, just a soft and mucid rottenness that the axe bisected easily. The Beeman-thing pulled back, wailing with a piercing, unearthly sound as it tried to pull the axe from the crown of its skull. Beneath its blood-stained ECWs, it was bulging and humped and undulant.

  And by then, Warren was running.

  But not before he saw.

  Saw dozens of jointed legs erupting from that gruesome face of pulp . . . coming out of the mouth and out of the eyes, wavering chitinous legs that clicked and scraped free . . . interlocked spidery bodies moving just beneath the flesh. For the Beeman-thing was more than just a cannibalistic monster, it was an incubator.

  Warren ran through the narrow winding crevice, the thing behind him giving chase with a resounding roar of absolute rage.

  11

  BY THE TIME HE made it back up to the Hypertat, Warren was shaking so badly he could barely open the door. And not just his hands, but his entire body. Rolling, spasmodic tremors ran through him like he was in the grip of a fever.

  But it was no fever.

  And it had very little to do with the cold.

  This was the aftermath of sheer adrenaline-pumping terror and gut-deep horror, shock and revulsion and nerves strained to the point of fraying. He fumbled madly with the door latch and finally got it open and fell through the door, landing face-first in his cumbersome ECWs. He clawed his way to his feet, slamming the door. Locking it. He yanked off his mittens, the thermal gloves beneath, and stumbled over to the window.

  Frosted.

  Goddamn frost-free window was all frosted-up.

  His teeth chattering, body quaking with tremors, fingers trembling, Warren went at the window like an animal, scraping the frost away with his numb fingertips. In the security lights he could see the other Hypertats lined up in a row like shoeboxes, the generator shack, storage sheds, the Skidoo snowmobiles hooked up to the electrical system to keep their block heaters warm.

  That was all he saw other than shadows.

  Clawing, reaching shadows.

  Some nearly-extinct voice of reason in the back of his mind told him he was over the edge, hallucinating, maybe flat-out crazy by this point . . . but the shadows out there . . . they were not right. They moved and shifted, tangled and slithered across the blue ice walls.

  He blinked it away, looking over at the mouth of the passage leading down to the cavern below.

  He could not see the thing which he knew must be coming after him even now. He saw nothing and somehow that was the worst thing he could imagine. Because it was there and any moment now he would see it—a twisted grotesque shadow with bleeding eyes—come clambering up from below.

  The snowmobiles.

  Some crazy sense of self-preservation that was still treading water told him to pack up his gear, grab some equipment, and take off on one of the Skidoos. But that was insane. Take off to where? The nearest station was Polar Clime and that was at least a hundred miles over the Beardmore and plateau beyond at dead winter. It was fifty below out there, wind chills kicking it down to like minus seventy. He’d freeze to death on an open snowmobile even if he knew how to navigate the glacier and find the station in that blackness and blowing snow, which he certainly did not.

  Face it, old man, you’re done in and you know damn well you’re done in. It ends here. In this ice cave. You’ll die here. Alone. You’ll never–

  What in the Jesus was that?

  He’d been reaching over to the radio, knowing that he had to get a Mayday out, when the noises started. Just like that night Biggs and he had heard them. A cycling cacophony of thuds and rumbling that seemed to be born far below but were getting closer with each rising beat. The lights in the Hypertat flickered. The screen on the laptop before him rolled black and stayed that way. Vibrations made the cave shake. Things trembled and fell, icicles dropped from the roof and smashed into fragments. The Hypertat was shaking, things rattling from shelves. The air was alive, supercharged with crackling static electricity, distant pinging and screeching noises that echoed and echoed.

  No time left, no time.

  Whatever was down there was much worse than just that thing that had murdered everyone, that fucking crawling incubator. Whoever it had been—Dryden or Stone or Kenneger or even Beeman himself—and whatever it now was, it paled next to what was waking up below.

  Warren grabbed the radio headset and managed to get it on his head with his badly shaking fingers. He picked up the mic, dropped it. Picked it up again and dropped it again.

  C’mon!

  In the back of his skull, a headache began to throb. His throat felt dry and his heart pounded relentlessly in his chest. He tried to speak into the mic, but his voice was raw and squeaking. Finally, he got it working and shouted into the mic: “MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! THIS IS ECHO INDIA CHARLIE ZERO! ECHO INDIA CHARLIE ZERO! EMPEROR ICE CAVE! BEARDMORE GLACIER! THIS IS A MAYDAY! REPEAT: THIS IS A MAYDAY! PLEASE RESPOND!”

  Nothing came back at him but droning static, some electronic background noise, a low murmuring which he thought was probably the polar emptiness of the glaciers and mountains themselves.

  “MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” he tried again, swe
at running down his face. “THIS IS A MAYDAY! IS ANYBODY FUCKING OUT THERE? CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME? TRANSMITTING MAYDAY TO MACOPS MCMURDO STATION!

  PLEASE RESPOND! SOMEBODY! ANYBODY!”

  The lights were flickering again, strobing as the power jumped in the lines. Through the window, he could see the security lights dimming and brightening. Shadows were moving everywhere now, spreading and pooling.

  “LISTEN TO ME! I’M AT THE EMPEROR ICE CAVE, BEARDMORE GLACIER! CALL SIGN: ECHO INDIA CHARLIE ZERO!” he shouted against the rising din from outside. “EVERYONE’S DEAD! GOD, EVERYONE’S DEAD . . . I’M THE LAST ONE . . . THE LAST ONE . . . IT’S HAPPENING NOW . . . THOSE THINGS ARE RISING UP. .. RISING UP–”

  The mic fell from his hand and he fell to his knees, panting and shaking, a shrilling squeal breaking loose inside his head and shattering his thoughts, making his eyes bulge and his face contort, drool run from his mouth in vile tangles.

  Outside . . . dear God, outside . . .

  A raging chaos of vibrations and hammerings, hissing static and metallic screeching. The lights were strobing, the temperature falling, everything flashing and flickering with rhythmic power surges. And cutting through it all, a resounding booming and a deranged choir of screaming voices wailing and wavering and echoing. Millions of voices screaming out in eerie susurrations of torment.

  And somehow, above the noise, Warren could hear that strident piping rising and falling and breaking up into sharp trilling and squealing sounds. And the Beeman-thing. Because it was out there now, too, letting loose with a guttural primeval shriek that Warren knew was his own name being called by an inhuman, monstrous voice.

  Closer now.

  Much closer.

  Warren was beyond fear, he was beyond anything. There was only hatred and acceptance and defeat cycling down into nothingness. Ignoring the blossoming pain in his head, he pulled himself up to the radio and gripped the mic in palsied fingers. “LISTEN TO ME! WHOEVER’S OUT THERE! PLEASE LISTEN TO ME!” he breathed into the mic. “THEY’RE COMING NOW! THEY’RE COMING FOR ME! DON’T COME AFTER ME . . . WHATEVER YOU DO . . . DON’T COME AFTER ME. .. DEAR GOD, DON’T COME TO THIS PLACE–”

  There was a sudden generation of crackling energy and the radio exploded with a shower of sparks, a gout of flames and smoke, a suffocating stink of melted plastic and fused circuitry.

  Warren crawled across the floor on his hands and knees.

  He did not dare look up at the window.

  The Hypertat was in violent motion, filled with flickering blue light and smoke and heat and cold and a gagging intrusion of something that smelled like wet hides and spilled preservatives . . . acrid, overwhelming.

  The door latch trembled.

  Broke free.

  The door was torn from its hinges and a freezing black shadow fell over Warren. Screaming, pressing his hands over his ears so he did not hear that profane musical piping sound, he looked up, seeing all the primal nightmares of his race standing there in that diabolical form before him. It was tall and conical, writhing vermiform appendages reaching out to him, a stench of hot gas and iced ammonium blowing off it and burning his nostrils. He could hear the low, hollow suspiring of its breath. Hear the rubbery creaking of its wings unfolding.

  Five red eyes looked down upon him.

  With intensity.

  A burning, blistering intensity.

  And in Warren’s mind, a single and pitiful voice of defiance: Fuck you . . . fuck you . . . fuck you goddamn fucking–

  Then his mind pulled into itself, liquefying and running like hot tallow.

  And the eyes.

  Those accursed alien eyes.

  Like suns going supernova.

  This was the only glimpse he was allowed of the thing as his own eyes filled with blood, rupturing from pinpoint hemorrhages, finally exploding from their sockets like moist and rotting grapes. His hair boiled with smoke and his face swelled-up into a livid bruise, his teeth dropping from his bleeding gums.

  And inside his skull, his brain superheated into a steaming soup of gray matter gone black and red and molten . . . and splashed out his ears.

  12

  POLAR CLIME

  MARCH 17

  ALL MORNING LONG AND well into the afternoon, the wind sounded like a lone wolf howling out some ancient song of mourning, its voice rising and falling but never fading away, just echoing off across the barren ice.

  Time passed with a languid, unreal slowness.

  It had been nearly two days since they killed the thing in T-Shack. Two long days. The atmosphere of Clime had steadily dissolved in that time, becoming blank and dim and fearsome. The shadows were thicker, the air pregnant with menace. And maybe some of that was some dire alien influence being directed at the station and its inhabitants, but a great deal of it was coming from within.

  And that was more than enough.

  13

  ABOUT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, Koch started screaming.

  He came running from C-corridor into the Community Room, absolutely hysterical. Coyle and Locke pretty much had to tackle him and he fought with enraged fury, his head whipping from side to side, froth on his lips.

  Gwen got a hypo from Medical and shot him up with Thorazine and that brought him down after a few minutes.

  “What happened?” Coyle asked him, but being that he had just come from C-corridor he could pretty much imagine.

  “Butler,” he said, his voice oddly thick and drawn-out. “She’s . . . she’s not human.”

  Gwen went off at this point to look in on their guest.

  If things worked out right, they would be rid of Butler in a few hours. Special Ed had gotten through to Colony and they were coming for her.

  “What were you doing in there?” Locke asked him. “You know what happens . . . why did you go in there?”

  He shook his head. “I had to see . . . see for myself.” Then he made a funny choking sound in his throat. “She’s not human . . . just like they said . . . there’s something inside her . . . something that can read your mind and make things move.” Koch just laid there, breathing, eyes swimming in and out of focus. “It . . . it knows . . . knows all about you . . . it knew about my mother. It knew how she died! When she died! And . . . and . . . and . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Koch wiped sweat from his face and stared at the moisture on his palm like it was not just perspiration but maybe blood. “She told me . . . told me that I would die down here . . .”

  His face was in his hands and it was hard to say if the noise he was making was laughter or sobbing, maybe both. “Oh God . . . oh God . . . oh God . . . she’s not human, man. She’s a host for something. Something . . . something ancient, something evil. It knows the future, it knows the past.”

  14

  IT STARTED WITH A rumbling and everyone in the dome heard it.

  Wherever they were and whatever they were doing, they suddenly stopped.

  Listened.

  The phenomena was beginning again.

  They all wanted to believe it was a storm gathering outside, making the dome shake as it did sometimes in the depth of winter, but this was different and they could all feel it right up their spines. No storm sounded like this. No storm ever exhaled a shrill screeching noise like metal tearing into metal that gradually rose in pitch until it was a shrieking, off-key almost musical piping that rode the howling winds and became the winds.

  The dome was shaking.

  The lights were flickering.

  Some weird blue-white energy was arcing over the bulkheads.

  A sudden and inexplicable rapping sound came from within the walls up and down the corridors. The floor was vibrating and the air filled with a scraping noise like forks drawn over blackboards.

  Doors opened and slammed.

  Ceiling tiles fell.

  Computers crashed.

  People screamed.

  And that was how it started.

  15

  SPECIAL ED WAS IN his office when it hap
pened.

  He was going through his reports, trying in vain to find a way to put some spin on all the things that had happened and failing miserably. He tapped a few keys on his laptop and the screen went black then came back on . . .

  . . . something around him shifted, changed.

  Feeling a rising anxiety fanning out in his chest, he looked around, licking his dry lips. Sensing that something was suddenly missing or that something else was intruding that did not belong, he set down his cup of coffee . . .

  . . . the hair rose on the back of his neck.

  The pages of his notebook began to flutter as if in a wind. Locked filing cabinets began to slide across the floor, turning in slow circles. The chair he sat on began to move, gliding across the floor as if it were being pulled.

  This is it, he thought in some dim back corner of his mind. This is what we’ve all been waiting for and dreading. Here it comes.

  Breathing deeply and trying to convince himself that he was not utterly mad, he watched as things vibrated on his desk, dancing about: pens and pencils, clipboards and coffee cups, rubber bands and pads of sticky notes. Paper clips were ejected from the mouth of a cup like lava from the cone of a volcano. They scattered in the air, spinning around as if caught in some insane magnetic vortex. Papers flew and drifted down like a fall of Autumn leaves.

  Gathering himself, refusing to listen to the triphammer beat of his heart, he reached for his coffee cup and it skipped away from him, thudding against the desktop. A crack ran up the side and it shattered into fragments. He reached for a set of desk scissors and they flew away from his fingers with incredible velocity, sinking into the wall a good two inches.

  A cold and sickly-smelling sweat breaking out on his face, he found that he could not get out of his chair. He had no feeling beneath the waist.