The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  Here we go, Coyle thought.

  He followed Dayton around the side of the Hypertat and Reja and Barnes were standing there in their olive drab polar suits, weapons pointed up. The other men were rushing over.

  A body.

  The door to the Hypertat hung from one hinge, looked like it had been hit with incredible force.

  And just inside, sprawled on the floor, was the corpse.

  A man in ECWs, his body contorted and back arched as if from some horrible convulsion. But the worse thing was his face which was just grotesque: mouth seized open in a scream, hollow eye sockets filled with crystallized blood, tissue and blood and slime splashed down from those sockets in a grisly caul. All of it frozen into icicles that grew from his face to the floor like melted tallow.

  “Shit,” Horn said.

  Gwen looked away, but then looked back again. “What happened to him?” she said. “What could do that to him . . . blow his eyes out like that?”

  But nobody ventured a guess.

  “It’s Warren, I think,” Dayton said. “One of the contract guys. Must’ve sent out that Mayday and then . . . and then . . .”

  “Then what?” Gwen demanded.

  Coyle was staring at the corpse. The heater was running inside the Hypertat, but with the door wide open the body had iced-up. He was thankful for that, thankful that the subzero temperatures of Antarctica always reduced dead things to shriveled ice sculptures. He didn’t want to think what the body might have smelled like otherwise.

  “You check the other Hypertats?” Dayton said.

  “Empty. All of ‘em,” Barnes informed him.

  “Then we go downstairs.” He looked at his men, one after the other. “Norrys. I’m posting you up here.”

  “Alone, sir?”

  “Yes, alone, goddammit. If there’s trouble, it’ll be below not up here. Now we all have headsets and we keep in constant communication. Norrys . . . we don’t check in within thirty minutes, none of us, you evacuate and make for the chopper. Understood? You do not come after us.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  He pulled away, looking nervously around. The guy was scared and Coyle didn’t blame him a bit. Dayton and his boys were all SEALs, courtesy of the Navy, but all the training and all the experience in the world couldn’t prepare you for this kind of thing.

  Coyle was just glad it wasn’t him.

  He looked around, seeing the Hypertats and sheds, generating station and snowmobiles, pallets of yellow fuel drums stacked two high against the wall. So many places to hide. So many places for the imagination to create things that were not there.

  Dayton turned to the rest of them. “Shall we go below, people?”

  “Do we have a choice?” Horn said.

  Down they went.

  32

  EMPEROR TWO

  “WELL, SOMEBODY RAN THIS line,” Dayton said. “And that somebody might still be down here.”

  They were looking at a yellow electrical cord that ran into a crevice and was connected to the Polar Haven beyond. And what its purpose was, nobody even wanted to guess.

  The far wall of the glacier was set with many crevices, many of which had been taped off because they probably led to crevasses. There was even a huge circular tunnel that looked unpleasantly artificial, like the burrow of an immense worm. But only one had an electrical cord leading into it.

  “Must be where they were working,” Gwen said to the cold-pinched faces around her. “Maybe this is where they melted their specimen out.”

  And that’s the very thing everyone was afraid of, because that specimen of Dr. Dryden’s was missing. Nobody liked the idea of that.

  Down in the cavern, Dayton stationed McKerr at the Polar Haven and Barnes up at the top of the ice rise that sloped down and down until it flattened out and met the far wall of the glacier itself where all the crevices were. This is where Dayton took Coyle and the others, following the cord. For despite the mammoth size of the lower cavern, with the security lights strung out there was really nowhere else for anyone to hide. Nothing but the Haven, a tool shed, and the collapsed remains of what looked like a tent. Nothing but open ice that lifted and canted, forming mounds and ridges, scalloped hollows. And all of it had been checked.

  And while they were checking it out, dread growing in each and every one of them like a fetus coming to term, they found the electrical cord which led from the Polar Haven and down the slope and into one of the crevices.

  There was frozen blood at the triangular mouth.

  “All right,” Dayton said. “Reja, take point. Long, you’re the back door. Rest of you fall in-between.”

  And into the crevice they went.

  The blue ice walls were clear as glass, flashlight beams glaring off them in blinding arcs. It was like being in some crazy mirror maze of fissured ice that started and stopped, twisting and turning, the walls narrowing and then widening. The lights created crawling shadows, distorted reflections, and that ever-present aquamarine glow that turned faces green and the smears of blood on the walls black as ink.

  It was all claustrophobic, cramped, unsettling.

  Coyle found it easy to imagine what it would be like to lose your way and never get out again, nothing but those ice walls pressing in closer and closer. But judging from the cleat-marks on the floor, they were not lost.

  “There’s something over here,” Reja said, his light reflecting off the mouth of a fissure that led off from the main passage. “Like a room.”

  They followed him in there, their breath puffing out in white clouds that filled the flashlight beams like smoke. As they panned their lights around, they saw a dome-shaped room whose floor sloped into a central depression. Down there, forms were heaped and tangled. The forms of men long dead.

  “Check that out,” Horn said. “Bodies.”

  Their lights played off reaching fur-clad limbs and frosted faces frozen in what looked like agony or horror. Coyle counted six of them, but there might have been more beneath. As it was, they had been down there for decades, just a heap of mummified things with shrunken, skeletal bodies and faces blackened to leather that had split open in numerous places, revealing the gleaming bone beneath.

  “Look at how they’re dressed,” Coyle said. “Fur suits . . . finnesko boots. Jesus, they’ve been down here since the 1930’s . . . at least.”

  Gwen kept staring at them. “They must have died horribly.”

  “Let’s go,” Dayton said. “We’re not here as historians.”

  He moved off, but Coyle and Gwen and Horn just stood there.

  “There something on that guy’s back,” Gwen said.

  And that’s what they were all looking at . . . a weird fleshy clump on the exposed back of one of the cadavers, right between the shoulder blades. It looked like a spider or a crab. A big one.

  “Nicky,” Gwen said. “Mama’s not liking this.”

  Neither was he. For he was thinking a lot of things at that moment and none of them were good.

  “Come on, people,” Dayton said. “We gotta step on it here.”

  “But that thing . . .” Gwen started to say.

  “Doesn’t concern us,” Dayton told her.

  And Coyle knew right then and there that Dayton knew more than he was saying. More than he wanted to admit, for he was not surprised by any of it. Almost as if he expected something like that.

  “Doesn’t concern us at all,” he reiterated.

  Reja and Dayton led them further into the crevice, following that snaking electrical cord and Coyle began to feel the tension build and build in him. Because he knew, down deep, that what they had just seen was pretty harmless compared to what they were going to see. The menace was thick inside him, coiling and filling, running through his arteries and settling into his marrow.

  He was beginning to wonder if agreeing to any of this had not been a colossal mistake.

  Reja suddenly stopped at a turn in the crevice. “Listen,” he said.

  Yes . . . there it
was: a dripping. A dripping sound. And of all the sounds they could have heard down there, the sound of dripping water was the most startling of all. But as they waited there, they could also feel a suggestion of warmth and with it came a rancid, fermenting stink of moldering things and bacterial decay. Coyle had smelled something like it at NOAA Polaris that day.

  And here it was again . . . sharp, revolting, a moist fruiting odor.

  “Keep going,” Dayton said.

  Reja moved around the turn, his cleats ringing out on the ice, his Colt Carbine held in a defensive position. He was ready for anything. And as that stink grew stronger and the dripping louder, echoing and echoing, they all were. Because it was coming.

  Just ahead.

  They followed Reja, flashlight beams jiggling and bobbing, and found a depression in the ice where something had been removed, apparently. Nobody had to mention what that might be.

  Onward.

  The dripping was even louder now, echoing out like they were in the depths of some subterranean cave. Nobody said a word. Coyle, Gwen, and Horn were bunched together in the cold. Dayton was mumbling something under his breath, weapon raised. And in the back, Long had his flamethrower ready.

  Reja got there first, of course.

  He found the chamber and when it opened up before him, he stopped again. Stopped dead and they could feel the shock rolling off him in waves. “HALT! HALT OR I SHOOT!” he cried out.

  Carefully, the others inched forward . . .

  33

  UP ON THE RIDGE, Barnes thought: Why is this taking so fucking long?

  They should have been back, up out of the crevice, ten minutes ago. He stood there, shaking. In the distance, over near the Polar Haven, he could see McKerr stalking back and forth with his rifle. Goddamn idiot, like he was on guard duty and not down here, not down in this awful place, this breeding ground of nightmares.

  Barnes looked up.

  Up there, amongst the millions of jutting icicles, he was seeing something, something ghostly and gaseous that was flowing out like smoke, enveloping. Mist. It was mist. An ice fog was being born up there, coalescing, brewing, and now spreading out, coming down. It was incredible. And scary . . . because he thought for one manic moment that there were things in the mist. Shapes. Forms that drifted about with an ethereal sort of motion.

  Barnes blinked it away.

  But that ice fog was still there. Not only was it there, but it was expanding, blowing out now like steam from a cauldron. Up there, those rows of icicles upon icicles like the glistening teeth of dragon . . . they were gone now. Just gone.

  Barnes pulled off his goggles.

  Maybe they were steamed up, maybe–

  No, he was still seeing it.

  And he was cold.

  Not just chilly like he had been ever since they got out of that freezing wind outside, but numb. His hands were hurting with the cold and he couldn’t feel his legs. In his heated polar suit he shouldn’t have been that cold. He hadn’t been that cold five minutes ago.

  “McKerr! McKerr!” he called over the headset. “Something’s going on here . . . I’m fucking numb! Do you see that mist up there? Do you see it?”

  Over the speaker, McKerr just said, “Not seeing anything, man. It’s real nice over here. Goddamn tropical, just—”

  Barnes looked in his direction and McKerr was walking back and forth.

  He wasn’t even speaking.

  “—loving it I am. Yes sir.”

  Who in the fuck was he talking to?

  Barnes felt a stab of pain in his head.

  And then something worse, a crawling feeling like worms were squirming over his brain. He could feel them. Thousands of fat, wriggling worms gliding and inching and now . . . now burrowing. Yes, digging into the meat of his gray matter, tunneling deep into his mind with a hot, invasive motion, infesting.

  You’re imagining this shit! It’s not happening!

  But the pain was intense, building to some shrieking crescendo of white-hot agony. The worms were eating his brain, sucking on convolutions and folds of gray meat, draining it, filling themselves with bloody gobs of nervous tissue. And as they did so, they split into more worms and then split again, each one fattening and thickening, swelling into a huge slug-like form that kept eating and eating–

  Barnes hit the ice screaming.

  He stripped away his balaclava and neck gaiter, exposed his head to the cold. He pressed his hands to his skull, clutching it tightly with his fingers. And he could feel that grisly motion in there, that slinking and creeping, feel his skull inflating, the plates of his cranium being rudely forced apart by the swelling mass of worms in there. He could hear them, suckling and chewing with thrashing mouth parts, a moist and succulent devouring.

  My head, my head, my head! They’re tearing my head apart! They’re eating my mind, eating my mind, eating my fucking mind–

  As he dragged himself over the ice, screaming his lungs out, he caught sight of McKerr through bleary, tear-filled eyes. McKerr was just pacing back and forth, complete unaware of what was happening not fifty feet from him. Oblivious. Back and forth, back and forth, a toy soldier, nothing but a wind-up toy soldier. Except . . . except he was humming. Humming or singing with a weird fluting hollow sound like wind blown through a network of pipes.

  Barnes lost sight of him.

  Lost sight of everything as the pressure inside his skull increased and then increased again and tears of blood ran from his eyes and his body shook violently with convulsions that hammered him against the ice. And through the agony and insanity of his torment, he could hear a sound above him, circling in the ice fog, getting closer and closer . . . ssshhh-ssshhh-ssshhh . . . the sound of wings that were flapping frantically in fast-motion like those of a hovering hummingbird.

  Whatever owned those wings was coming for him.

  And knowing this, Barnes screamed yet again.

  34

  EMPEROR ONE

  “HEY!” NORRYS CRIED AS he circled around one of the Hypertats above.

  “Hey! Who is that?”

  He’d seen a hulking, retreating form over by the sheds. A manlike form, a hobbling shape, that vanished into shadow and then magically reappeared threading between the Hypertats.

  Norrys scanned back and forth with his MP5 submachine gun, a tactical flashlight bolted to it. The beam played over the Hypertats, exposing pockets of shadow, but revealing nothing else. He crept forward, starting each time the glacier cracked, his heart pounding and the cold making his eyes tear.

  “You identify yourself right now!” he cried out. “Or I shoot to kill! You hear me?”

  Silence.

  Then a quick patter of boots across the ice.

  Behind him.

  No, off to the left.

  No, over by the generator.

  Yes, whoever it was, they were over by the generator. Hiding there. Waiting. But they didn’t know who they were dealing with here. They didn’t know the kind of professional Norrys was or the body count he’d amassed as an eight-year veteran of Naval special forces. But they were going to find out. Oh, yes.

  “Captain Dayton . . . McKerr,” he said over his headset. “There’s somebody up here with me . . . Captain, you send somebody up?”

  Static. Nothing but static.

  Shit.

  Dayton had checked in not ten minutes ago. Now it was dead air.

  Norrys was sensing motion around him, but not sure where it was coming from. He tried again. “Listen to me . . . this is Norrys, topside . . . I’ve got movement up here . . . I don’t hear from you in the next twenty seconds, I’m assuming that this is an unfriendly . . . you copy that?”

  More dead air.

  Fuck.

  The generator made a sudden squealing sound and he wheeled around, ready to start capping. Shadows. Nothing more. The generator squealed again like its belts were full of ice. Then it choked, shook, and died. Right away, the lights flickered. Then they dimmed slowly and went out like a blown ca
ndle.

  Footsteps.

  Norrys swung his MP5 around, the light cutting the darkness. The Hypertats. The sheds. The ice. “Whoever’s there . . . identify yourself or I’m taking you out . . .”

  In the enveloping darkness there was gargling, moist laughter like somebody was laughing through a mouth of wet seaweed. It came and went.

  Norrys was sweating in his polar suit.

  Steam came off his head.

  Something was circling him in the dark and he could smell whatever it was. It carried a dirty, flyblown stink like rotting vegetation. There was movement to the left. To the right. A hissing just behind him. He pinwheeled with his MP5, letting off a three-round burst that drilled harmlessly into the ice.

  That cold, wet laughter.

  A slithering noise like rustling vines.

  He swung around and something hit the barrel of his MP5 in a fleshy blur and with incredible force. The gun was knocked from his hands and he heard it tumble across the ice.

  He kicked out where he thought something was.

  Then a hand slapped over his mouth, a hand that was damp and crawling. Norrys brought his elbow back and felt it sink into something soft.

  Then something pierced his throat like dozens of wasp stingers.

  35

  EMPEROR TWO

  OVER THE HEADSETS, MCKERR was crying out that the power went out.

  That he’d lost contact with Norrys.

  But nobody down in the crevice was paying him any mind. Not now. Not with what they were seeing in their glaring halogen lights . . . and what was seeing them. The nightmare that waited down there in the hollow in the ice. Reja had found a grotto and this was where the dripping came from. The electrical cord ended here, hooked up to a space heater that had been blasting hot air and making the grotto further melt out of the glacier. Water was dripping and pooling. Stalactites of ice that were crystal clear had grown from the roof to the floor and waiting there, in that womb of heat and wetness–

  A figure: grotesque, horribly distorted.