by Tim Curran
They chopper came down into the Trough at such a velocity, Coyle thought he might pass right out cold. His belly was flipping around and bile was coming up the back of his throat. He didn’t know if it was from fear of crashing or from descent or both. But Gwen was feeling it, too, gripping his hand so tightly he thought she might smash it.
“Ready, locked and loaded,” one of the pilots said.
Oh, shit.
In the enclosed confines of the Icewolf, Coyle did not see what burst free of the mouth of Emperor Cave. And that was probably a good thing. There are certain things it is better not to see, to only know in your heart as shapeless nightmares.
The creature was so large it actually widened the mouth of the cave as it emerged in an eruption of ice and force, a noxious outpouring of fleshjelly that reconfigured itself, mutating and shifting and oozing as it broke free. It rolled out into the howling blackness on massive, stubby, trunk-like tentacles set with brilliant red orbs, leaving a trail of steaming slime in its wake. Its body was mottled with orange, green, and gray striations . . . bloated, fungous, and chambered like a nautilus, sheaths of jagged and rubbery bones fanning out and connected by a membranous tissue. It had jointed insect-like limbs ending in thrashing triple-pronged hooks and three heads that jutted from the quivering mass horizontally, heads set with dozens of glaring greenish-gold eyes, each with a mouth whose jaws were like the webbed fingers of a hand opening up, revealing interlocking rows of spiraling teeth and a dozen licking black tongues.
And it was with these mouths that it cried out with a shrill, bellowing wail that sounded like an air raid siren ripping through the darkness, slitting it right open and making it bleed. That cry cycled out and out and it was this that Coyle heard, made him pull into himself, right before the missiles took flight.
By then, the Icewolf was already pulling up out of the Trough, climbing hard to avoid the Cerberus Icefall in the distance.
But that’s how the Hellfire missiles worked.
No need for line-of-sight firing.
Once they were locked onto their targets, they would find them regardless of which direction they were fired from. Laser-guided, they would find said targets and nothing, not even the Old Ones, could stop them.
The Shoggoth rose up, roaring and screeching and filling the storm with its primordial anger . . . and the Hellfire missiles came screeching down at it, armed with high-explosive and incendiary warheads.
Impact.
The beast went up like the Fourth of July, the HE rounds obliterating it with rolling, thunderous concussions of pure force, and the incendiaries finished the job by turning all that fleshy debris and raining tissue into a firestorm that made the icescape glow with flickering light.
The Shoggoth was gone.
Ice was blasted, melted, then frozen up again just as quickly.
And the Icewolf climbed and climbed, the wind trying to throw it against the walls of the Trough. There were a few scary moments when the pilots fought hard to reign her in. But, finally, the controls responded and the chopper veered over the jutting plates of the Cerberus Icefall and lifted free of Desolation Trough, screaming across the escarpments of the Beardmore Glacier and disappearing into the polar blackness.
50
POLAR CLIME
AFTER THE CHOPPER DROPPED them off and Coyle stepped into the dome, exhausted, aching, but his mind weirdly exhilarated, he expected to feel a sense of calm, of security.
But that’s not what he felt at all.
He felt tension.
That invidious atmosphere was still there, still feeding off itself. In some ways, it had not lessened at all since Butler was killed . . . or destroyed.
There was something, something.
He had the strangest feeling he was being watched. It had been like that for weeks at Clime now, the sense that eyes were on you all the time. But this was different. This was not subtle and unknown, but immediate and visible.
That negative energy had been drained for a time from the death of Butler, but now it was gaining strength and he could feel it.
It was getting stronger.
“You’re feeling it, too, aren’t you?” Gwen said to him.
“Yes.”
She held his hand. “It’s . . . it’s almost like it’s hard to breathe. The rest of ‘em don’t feel it because they’ve been here the whole time . . . but we can.” She pursed her lips, swallowed. “It’s . . . it’s awful.”
And it was. Absolutely. Like the atmosphere of Clime was spiritually rancid, noxious. Gwen was right. The air did feel heavy. It was almost repellent with dread and blackness and a burgeoning insanity.
Coyle could feel the energy rising. It was like standing next to a generating station as it cycled up. His skin was crawling. He felt like he was shaking inside. Even his molars were aching. Maybe it was just the after-effect of what they’d seen at Emperor, but he was beginning to think it was much more localized than that.
He swept Gwen into his arms, kissing her first with his mouth and then his tongue.
“Mama kind of likes that.”
“You saved my life today,” he said.
“It’s what I do.”
He tried to feel good about things. They had struck against the Old Ones and had a victory of sorts, even though it cost quite a few lives. There should have been some sense of triumph but there was not. When Butler was here, things had been bad. That weird, eldritch energy had been rising by the day and now it was again.
But how to explain that?
It wasn’t his imagination: Gwen felt it, too.
Butler was more than a member of the hive, he thought then. She—like them all—became an avatar for it, a conduit. Part of it.
With that in mind there was only one possible explanation: there was another conduit here.
“But there can’t be,” Gwen said. “We’d know it.”
“If it was at Clime . . . what if it’s not? What if all the time it’s been somewhere else? An energy source, a battery, that Butler drew off of and is still running? Still running, still active, still dangerous to us all?”
She looked at him with warm, wet eyes. “But where?”
51
ICEBOX TWO
TEN MINUTES LATER THEY were in a Sno-Cat, heading out across the plateau in the darkness. The wind whipped drift in fine sheets that glanced off the cab like powdered glass. The headlights were filled with spiraling white. The plateau was flat like a sheet of paper, only a few fields of sastrugi to be seen. Out here, there were no crevasses, no nothing. Just the blackness and the endless frozen crust of the plateau itself. Since there were no radio beacons to home onto or any flagged ice road to follow, they navigated by GPS. It took them about twenty minutes.
Finally, Frye said, “There it is. Hope this ain’t a wild goose chase, Nicky.”
Icebox Two appeared as a mound that rose like bread dough from the frozen whiteness. A few timbers jutted from it, part of a corrugated roof, but nothing else. In the headlights of the Cat, blown by drift, it was shadowy and unreal as it rose up before them. Like a giant igloo or the wicked witch’s cottage in Hansel and Grethel, only this time made from spun sugar of the purest white. Frye brought the Sno-Cat to a halt and left it running. In that kind of cold, you didn’t dare turn off an engine. Not out on the desolation of the polar plateau.
As Coyle stepped out into the freezing air, he knew he had tracked down the source: he could feel it right up his spine.
He led the way to the mound anxiously, but also apprehensively. He’d gotten real good at listening to that inner voice of his and it was practically screaming in his head at that moment. He knew what he was looking for as he circled the mound of ice and snow.
“Look,” he said, standing there in the darkness and bitter cold. He was panning his light around and the evidence was unmistakable.
“Footprints for sure,” Frye said. “Somebody’s been out here.”
“And quite a bit, I’d say,” Gwen put in.
“I’ll go first,” Coyle said. “You two follow after a minute. I don’t want us bunching up in there if something happens.”
“Be careful,” Frye said. “Might not be much holding it together.”
With his flashlight in one mittened hand and the SPAS-12 in the other, Coyle entered the tunnel. There was enough room for one man on his belly to squirm along like a snake, but not much more. The walls brushed his shoulders and the ceiling scraped against the top of his hood. Little clumps of snow fell all around him. The tunnel snaked so that it was almost always angling away; there was no way to see what was around the next turn. The flashlight beam made it glow yellow and weird.
Then it opened and Coyle saw a room.
He shined his light around before dropping down in there. The floor was buckled, icicles draped from the heaving ceiling. A bubbling seam of ice had burst through one wall and spread into a pool. There were a few old metal desks, a bookshelf covered in ice, the gray walls covered in frost an inch thick.
Carefully, he slid out of his hole and dropped onto the floor. He didn’t have his Stabilicers on and it was slippery. He could hear Frye coming down the tunnel now, grunting.
But other that, it was quiet in there.
The air was unpleasantly heavy and blank with silence. Ice crystals spun like dust motes in the flashlight beam. Grim shadows hung in the corners. Just an icy crypt that should have felt pretty neutral, but felt anything but. Because there was something here, something hiding and waiting, and it was a hostile thing.
Coyle could feel it.
Frye pushed through the opening, swearing, and dropped down. About thirty seconds later Gwen showed up. Coyle was grateful to have them. The atmosphere down there was beginning to feel toxic.
Frye played his light around, a sack of flares and jellied gasoline bombs—courtesy of Horn—tied to his belt. “This is the old comm room by the looks of it,” he said.
Besides the desks, there were file cabinets and meteorological charts rolled up like posters and stuck in cubbies in the walls. Not much else besides a calendar from 1978 on the wall.
Gwen walked around, breathing in the leaden air, studying the warped floors and chasing away nests of shadow. “It looks almost sterile in here.”
“It’s been abandoned a long time,” Frye said.
“Yes . . . but no beer bottles? No cigarette butts? No nothing? Seems to me that somebody from Clime out on a kick would have dug in here before this. Out of curiosity if nothing else. You know how people are.”
She was right, Coyle knew.
Places like this are magnets for people. In the crowded stations in the summer, people look for places like this to come and be alone with their ice wives or ice husbands. Maybe bring a Primus stove, a bottle of wine, a sleeping bag, have a little fun. But what they were seeing was a stark emptiness like a museum display. Like something preserved behind glass.
“Do you know why this station was abandoned?” she asked him.
“No. Not really.”
“I just wonder,” she said.
So do I, he thought. I wonder if there was a real good reason not to leave men out here in the summer and winter. If maybe something happened. Maybe they started losing it, maybe they saw things and heard things and felt things. Maybe what was under the ice started to call their names . . .
He didn’t doubt any of it, because right then he was feeling something. Something alive inside him that was threatening to eat his guts right out.
“C’mon,” he finally said.
They went through a half-opened doorway at the far side of the room that was frozen in place. There was a shadowy corridor ahead of them that was piled with old barrels and cardboard boxes. The floor was duckboard, frost-heaved, and badly worn. The gloom was thick and hungry, cut only by their lights. Their footsteps echoed out and made it sound like they were being followed. Doorways leading into empty rooms were like the sprung lids of coffins.
“Stay together, kids,” Frye said, though it did not need saying. “Easy to get lost down here.”
They found the old bunkhouse with its rows of gray metal cots stripped of mattress pads, curled photos of girls in bikinis still tacked to the walls . . . many of which had Farrah Fawcett-styled tresses. They found the galley with its tables and chairs, the pantry still holding canned goods. There were cups and plates set out, a coffee pot and a loaf of frozen bread. In the radio room, a game of solitaire was still laid out, the cards frosted to the table. All in all, it had an eerie feeling to it, a station filled with lingering memories and ghosts. Like exploring the Mary Celeste after she had been emptied.
But there was no mystery to Icebox Two that they knew of. Back in the seventies and before, things had just been abandoned on the Ice. These days everything from sewage to scrap to garbage was shipped out so as not to disturb the environment, not so back then.
Yet, even knowing that, Coyle could not get past the feeling that this place had been abandoned. And in a hurry.
Many of the rooms were collapsed beneath shrouds of ice and snow. The corridor leading to the generator room was caved-in. The floors creaked and the walls cracked as they explored and everyone was very aware of how dangerous this was, how the old trusses might buckle at any moment and bury them alive in a womb of ice and debris.
Then they came down a small hallway with bulging walls and a ceiling that hung down like a full belly. Ice was hanging in stalactites everywhere. It led to a heavy wooden door that was not froze shut, but locked. Locked from the other side.
“Look out,” Frye said as an old iron pipe on the ceiling swung down, nearly braining Coyle. It ran the length of the room disappearing into the wall. The rusted bracket that held it was hanging by one badly worn screw.
“Turn off your lights,” Coyle whispered to them.
“What?” Gwen said.
“Turn ‘em off.”
They did and then they all saw what he saw. For coming beneath the doorway was a faint, flickering illumination. And there was nothing down in that darkened catacomb which could account for that.
“All right then,” Coyle whispered. “Let’s invite ourselves in.”
But they never had to for someone came out to meet them.
In fact, their host came right through the door without opening it. And seconds before it happened, they all began to feel it as an intensifying static charge in the air.
What they saw was Cassie Malone . . . or what had once been Cassie.
She came drifting out, a luminous sugar-bone white ghost from a shadowbox, a high-voltage galvanic ghoul membrane-fleshed in crackling cellophane with an electrified crystal skeleton beneath trying to burn its way out.
Gwen let out a cry at the sight of her, stumbling backward.
“Don’t let her touch you,” Frye said. “She’s like Slim now.”
She drifted forward, a conductive, voltaic puppet caught between life and death, blue-white static charges forking out from her and crawling over the ceiling. She reached out to them with glowing fingers like live fuses that smoked and popped, eyes gibbous moons of pure atomic fission.
Coyle fired a round into her and there was a flash of light as the steel pellets made contact with her supercharged electrical field.
Her mouth was a shriveled black wormhole and she called out to them with a shrieking discordant voice that was part maniacal laughter, part noisemaker, part hissing steam oven.
What she was saying they did not know because the air around her or the field she created did not seem to conduct sound as they understood it.
The closer she came, the colder the room got and the colder they got. It was som
e sort of endothermic, heat-sucking, reaction: she was drawing energy from them to give herself form and motion.
It was Frye who saved them.
He jumped up grabbed the hanging pipe on the ceiling and brought it down into her, grounding her as he had done with Slim.
The effect was instantaneous.
Cassie made a screeching/whining sound like a drill bit through metal and there was a blinding flash of light and a resounding explosion that put them all on their asses . . . arcing whirlwinds whipped through the room, ice flew and frost filled the air along with burning bits of what had once been Cassie Malone.
“It burned,” Frye said, looking at his hands where he had grabbed the pipe. “It burned.”
Gwen checked him over but he seemed no worse for wear.
“Look over there,” he said, shining his light around and picking out something wedged in the corner that they had missed.
It was a body, curled and blackened.
It was an absolute horror. Just a shrunken, leathery thing that looked like it was made of pine bark. Not a man, really, but a mummy pulled from a tomb . . . dry and corded, limbs contorted. Just awful.
“It’s Harv,” Coyle said. “He must have dug his way in.”
Frye nodded. “Sure, she called him out here. And she would have called each and every one of us out here sooner or later.”
“I’ve heard the voices, too,” Gwen said.
“But she was just a conduit, not the battery itself,” Coyle told them, knowing he was getting close now.
The locked plank door that Cassie had come through. That was where he had to go. He went over there and . . . right away, something happened.
Icebox Two began to shake.
Noises broke open all around them . . . whisperings and pinging noises, a metallic screeching that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. The floor was vibrating like dozens, hundreds of hammers were banging on it from below. Squealing sounds came from the walls and it sounded like screaming human voices, hollow and drawn-out and impossibly shrill, were echoing up the corridors.