Hive

by Tim Curran

  Hayes sucked in a breath and went in there slowly, heavily, like he was dragging a ball and chain behind him. Before he saw the blood, he could smell it: sharp and metallic. It got right down into his guts. He scoped out the situation pretty quickly because the infirmary just wasn’t that big. Lind was sitting in the corner between two cabinets of drugs and instruments, kind of wedged in there like maybe he was stuck. His back was up against the wall and his knees were drawn up to his chin. There was a lot of blood . . . it was scarfed over his shirt and there was a smeared trail of it running across the tiles to his present position. His left arm looked like he’d stuck it in a barrel of red ink.

  And, yeah, he had a knife in his hand. A scalpel.

  Sharkey was standing next to an examination table, her usually capable and confident face looking pinched and rubbery like she’d been out in the cold. Her blue eyes were wide and helpless.

  “Lind,” she said in a very soft voice. “Hayes is here. I want you to talk to him.”

  Lind jerked like maybe he’d been asleep. He held the bloody scalpel out in warning towards Sharkey, droplets of blood dripping from his wrist. “I’m not talking to anyone . . . you’re all infected and I goddamn well know it. I know what’s going on here . . . I know what those things want, I know how they got to you.”

  Hayes clenched his teeth, unclenched them, willed himself to go loose, to relax. It was not easy. Jesus, Lind looked like shit. And it wasn’t just the blood either. He looked like maybe he’d dropped twenty pounds, his once round face seemed to be sagging under his scraggly beard. Just hanging like the jowls of a hound, slack and sallow. His eyes were bulging from their sockets, discolored and shot through with tiny red veins. They gleamed like wet chrome.

  Hayes squatted about four feet away from him. “Lind? Look at me. It’s me, it’s Jimmy. Your old bunkmate . . . just look at me, tell me about it. Tell me how they get to you.”

  Lind jerked again, seemed to be doing so anytime somebody mentioned his name like he was hooked up to a battery. “Jimmy . . . oh, shit, Jimmy . . . they . . . them out in that fucking hut, you know what they do? You know what they want? They come in your dreams, Jimmy. Those mummies . . . the Old Ones . . . hee, hee . . . they come in your dreams, Jimmy, and they start sucking your mind dry because that’s all they want: our minds.”

  “Lind, listen to me,” Hayes said. “Those ugly pricks have been dead millions of years - “

  “They’re not dead, Jimmy! Maybe they can’t move their bodies no more, but their minds, Jimmy, their minds are not fucking dead! You know they’re not . . . they’ve been waiting down here in the ice for us, waiting for us all these millions of years to come and set them free! They knew we would because that’s how they planned it!” Lind was breathing real hard, gasping for breath or maybe gasping for something he just couldn’t find. “Jimmy . . . oh Jesus, Jimmy, I know you think I’m fucking crazy, you all think I’m fucking crazy, but you better listen to me before it’s too late.”

  Hayes held his hands out. “Lind, you’re going to bleed to death. Let the Doc patch you up and then we’ll talk.”

  “No.” Flat, immovable. “We talk now.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Lind was trying to catch his breath. “They been frozen in the ice, Jimmy, but their minds never died. They just waited . . . waited for us to come. Those minds . . . oh, Jimmy, those awful fucking minds are so cold and evil and patient . . . they’ve been dreaming about us, waiting until we came for them. And when we did . . . when that limpdick Gates went down in that cave . . . those minds started waking up, reaching out to our own . . . that’s why everyone’s having nightmares . . . the Old Ones . . . those minds of theirs are invading ours, getting into our heads one inch at a time and by spring, by spring there won’t be any men left down here, but things that look like men with poisoned alien minds . . . “

  Lind started laughing then, but it was not good laughter. This was stark and black and cutting, a screech of despair and madness echoing from his skull.

  “Have . . . have they come in your dreams, too, Lind?” Hayes asked him, feeling Sharkey’s eyes burning into him, knowing she did not like him encouraging this delusion. But, fuck it, that’s how it had to be handled and he knew it.

  “Dreams,” Lind sobbed, “oh, all the dreams. Out in the hut, you remember out in the hut, Jimmy? It touched my mind then and it hasn’t let go since. Tonight . . . “

  “Yes?”

  There were tears rolling down Lind’s face now. “Tonight I woke up . . . I woke up, Jimmy, and I could feel the cold, oh, the terrible blowing cold . . . and it was there, one of them things . . . it was standing there at the end of my cot, thinking about me... all those terrible red eyes looking at me and ice dropping off it in clots . . . “

  Hayes felt gooseflesh run down his arms and up his spine, thinking that he would have went for the knife, too. But it was just a dream, had to be just a dream.

  Lind looked like he wanted to say something else, but his eyes slid shut and he slumped over. Hayes moved quick and pulled the scalpel from his fingers, all that blood, but there was no fight left in Lind. With Sharkey’s help they got him on the table and she started swabbing out his slit wrist.

  “It’s deep, but he pretty much missed the artery,” she said, cleaning the blood from his wrist and injecting some antibiotics right into it.

  Hayes watched as she stitched him close, saying she was going to have to get an IV going, get some whole blood and plasma into him.

  “Then you better dope him up, Doc,” Hayes said, “and strap his ass down. Because he might have failed this time, but he’s going to try again and we both know it.”

  Then Hayes went out into the corridor, out to the wolves skulking around there, waiting for him to toss them scraps of bloody meat.

  “He dead?” St. Ours said.

  “No, he’ll be all right.”

  “He say . . . he say why he did it? Why he slit his wrists?” Meiner wanted, had to know.

  They were all looking at Hayes now. Even Cutchen was. They were all thinking things, maybe things they’d imagined and maybe things they’d dreamed. You could see it on their faces . . . unspoken fears, stuff they didn’t even dare admit to themselves.

  “Tell us,” Rutkowski said. “Tell us what made him do it.”

  Hayes grinned like a skull. He was sick of this place, sick of these people and their ghoulish curiosity. “Oh, come on, boys, you know damn well what made him do it . . . the nightmares. The things in his head . . . same things that are going to make you all do it, sooner or later.”

  11

  Hayes could remember having to do things that scared him.

  Could remember how he felt before and how he felt afterwards. He remembered having to call his mother up when he was sixteen from the police station, tell her he’d been busted for selling pot, she had to come and get him. He remembered getting in a car accident when he was nineteen, walking away without a scratch while his best friend, Toby Young, who’d been driving, died in the emergency room. When Toby’s parents got there, asking how Toby was, he’d had to tell them, see that look in their eyes — disbelief, shock, then something like anger because he was alive and their son was dead. And, yes, he remembered when his old man was laying in that hospital bed eaten up with the cancer and his sister was out of her head with religious hysteria. He remembered having to tell the doctor to shut the old man off.

  All these things had scared him, had stripped away his innocence and made something rot inside him. These were things you had to do, things which you could not walk away from unchanged, but you did them because it was expected of you. It was the right thing and it had to be done.

  But none of them, none of those things, as terrible and necessary as they’d been, had gotten inside him like when he’d gone to Hut #6 to look at those mummies, to prove to himself that they were dead and nothing but dead. The temperature had dipped to a bitter seventy below and the wind was shrieking at sixty miles an hour,
flinging snow and pulverized ice crystals across the compound. Antarctica at dead-winter: black and unforgiving, that wind wailing around you like wraiths. Hayes went alone.

  He did not ask for the key from LaHune. He took a set of boltcutters, bundled into his ECW — Extreme Cold Weather — gear and started off across the compound, following the guylines through that blasting, sub-zero tempest, knowing that if he let go of the guiding rope and got off the walkway, he’d probably never find his way back. That they’d find him curled up out there come spring, a white and stiffened thing frozen up like meat in a deepfreeze.

  The snow was piling up into drifts and he pounded through it with his white bunny boots, gripping the guyline with a wool-mittened hand that was already going numb.

  You’re crazy to be doing this, he told himself and, hallelujah, wasn’t that the goddamned truth? For, Christ, it wasn’t as if he really believed what Lind had said. But there was something there . . . a grain of sanity, an underlying nugget of truth . . . in what the man had been raving about. Something behind his eyes that was incapable of lying. And Hayes was going to see what that was.

  The snow crunched beneath his boots and the wind tried to strip him right out of his Gore-Tex parka. His goggles kept fogging over, but he kept going until he made Hut #6. Outside the door, he just stood there, swaying in the wind like some heavily-swaddled child just learning the fine art of balance.

  Just fucking do it.

  And he knew he had to, for something both ancient and inexplicable had woken deep in the very pit of his being and it was screaming danger! in his head. There was danger here and that half-forgotten sixth sense in him was painfully aware of the fact. And if Hayes didn’t get on with it already, that voice was going to make him turn and run.

  LaHune or Gates or both had locked the hut with a chain and a Masterlock and the bolt cutter took care of that pretty damn quick. And, holy oh God, it was time for the show.

  The wind almost pulled the door out of his hand and his arm out of socket to boot. After a time, he got it closed and went inside, feeling the heat of the hut melting the ice out of his beard. It was only about fifty degrees in there, but that was positively tropical for East Antarctica in the cruel depths of winter.

  In that stark and haunted moment before he turned on the lights, he could’ve almost sworn there was movement in the hut . . . stealthy, secretive.

  Then the light was on and he was alone with the dead.

  He saw the mummies right away, trying to shake the feeling that they were seeing him, too.

  Crazy thinking.

  They were stretched out on the tables like shanks of thawing beef.

  The shack shook in the wind and Hayes shook with it.

  Two of the specimens were gradually defrosting, water dripping from them into collection buckets. For the most part, they were still ice-sheathed and obscured, unless you wanted to get in real close and peer through that clear blue, acrylic-looking ice and see them up close and personal. But that wasn’t necessary anyway, for the other mummy was completely unthawed.

  Unthawed to the point where it was really starting to smell. Gates had thrown a canvas tarp over it and Hayes knew he had to pull that tarp back, had to pull it back and look at the thing in all its hideous splendor. And the very act took all the guts he had or would ever have. For this was one of those godawful defining moments in life that scared the shit right out of you and made you want to fold-up and hide your head.

  And that’s exactly how Hayes was feeling . . . terrified, alone, completely vulnerable, his internals filled with a spreading helix of white ice.

  He took off his mittens, let his fingers warm, but they refused. He took hold of the tarp, something clenching inside him, and yanked it free . . . and it slid off almost of its own volition. He backed up, uttering a slight gasp.

  The mummy was unthawed.

  It was still ugly as ugly got and maybe even a little bit worse, because now it had a hacked and slit appearance from Gates and his boys taking their samples and cutting into it with knives and saws.

  And the smell . . . terrible, not just rotting fish now, but low tides and decaying seaweed, black mud and something like rotten cabbage. A weird, gassy odor.

  Fucking thing is going bad, Hayes was thinking, like spoiled pork... why would Gates want that? Why would he let the find of the ages just rot?

  But there were no answers for that. Maybe the thing turned faster than he anticipated.

  Regardless, that wasn’t why Hayes had come.

  He got in close as he dared to the monstrosity, certain that it was going to move despite that smell. It looked much the same as it had the other day, despite the various incisions: like some bloated, fleshy eggplant. Its shell was a leaden, shiny gray, looked tough like the hide of a crab. Chitinous. Its wings — if that’s what they were and not modified fins — were folded-up against its sides like umbrellas, some sticky fluid like tree sap had oozed from them in puddles and runnels, collected on the table. Those branching tentacles at the center of its body now looked like nothing but tree roots, tangled up and vestigal. And those thick, muscular tentacles at its base had blackened, hung limp like dead snakes.

  Yes, it was dead, it was surely dead.

  Yet . . .

  Yet the tapering arms of that bizarre starfish-shaped head were erect like an unclenched, reaching hand. Those globular eyes at each tip wide and blazing a neon red, filled with an impossible, unearthly vitality. They were shiny with tiny black pupils, the gray lids shriveled back, something like pink tears running down the stalks.

  Hayes had to remember to breathe.

  He could see where one eye had been cut away, the black chasm left in its place. He was trying desperately to be rational, to be lucid and realistic, but it was not easy because once you looked at those eyes it was very difficult to look away. They were not human eyes and there was nothing you might even abstractly call a face, still . . . Hayes was looking at those eyes and thinking they were filled with an absolute, almost stupid hatred, a loathing that made him feel weak inside.

  Turn away, don’t look at it.

  But he was looking and inside it felt like he’d popped a hole, everything draining out of him. He had to turn away. Like a vampire, you couldn’t stare into its eyes or you were done. But he kept looking, feeling and emoting and sensing and it was there, all right, something in the back of his head. He couldn’t put a name to it at first . . . just that it was something invasive, something alien that did not belong in his mind. But it had taken root and was spreading out like fingers, a high and sibilant buzzing, a droning whine like that of a cicada. Growing louder and louder until he was having trouble thinking, remembering anything, remembering who and what he was. There was just that buzzing filling his head and it was coming from the thing, it was being directed into him and he knew it.

  Hayes wasn’t even aware of how he was shaking or the piss that ran down his leg or the tears that filled his eyes and splashed down his face in warm creeks. There was only the buzzing, stealing him away and . . . and showing him things.

  Yes, the Old Ones.

  Not three like there were in the hut or even ten or twenty, but hundreds, thousands of them. A buzzing, trilling swarm of them filling the sky and descending like locusts come to strip a field. They were darting in and out of low places and hollows and over sharp-peaked roofs, rising up into that luminous sky . . . only, yes, it was not in the sky, but underwater. Thousands of them, a hive of the Old Ones, swimming through and above some geometrically impossible sunken city in a crystalline green sea with those immense membranous wings spread out so they could glide. He saw their bodies bloat up obscenely as they sucked in water and deflate as they expelled it like squids . . . moving so quickly, so efficiently. There had to be a million of them now, more showing themselves all the time, swimming and leaping and rising and falling -

  Hayes went on his ass.

  Teetered and fell and it was probably the only thing that indeed saved him, kept hi
s mind from going to sludge. He hit the floor, fell back and cracked his head against a table and that buzzing was gone. Not completely, there was still a suggestion of it there, but its grip had been broken.

  And he came to himself and realized that it had taken hold of him, that thing, and nobody would ever make him believe different. He could hear Lind’s voice in his head saying, Can’t you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind . . . wanting to make you something but what you are?

  Hayes scrambled to his feet, smelling the thing and hating it and knowing it somehow from some past time and the revulsion he felt was learned and instinctual, something carried by the race from a very distant and ancient time. What he did next was what any savage would have done when a monster, a beast was threatening the tribe, invading it, trying to subvert and steal away all that it was: he looked for a weapon.

  Panting and half-out of his mind, he stumbled through Gates’ makeshift laboratory, past the two thawing horrors and amongst tables of instruments and chemicals. He wanted fire. His simplified brain told him the thing had to be burned, so he sought fire, but there was nothing. Acid, maybe. But he was no chemist, he wouldn’t know acid if he saw it.

  And in those precious seconds that he stumbled drunkenly through the hut, he could feel that buzzing in his head rising up again and he looked over his shoulder at the Old One, certain now it would be rising up, those bulging red eyes seeking him out with a flat hatred and those branching tentacles reaching out for him -

  But no.

  It lay there, dreaming meat.

  But its mind was alive and he knew that now, could feel it worrying at his will, and that was insane because there was an incision just beneath that starfish-shaped head and he knew without a doubt that Gates had removed its brain. That even now it was sunk in one of those jars around him, a fleshy and alien thing like a pickled monstrosity in a sideshow.