Hive

by Tim Curran

  Yet, its mind was alive and vibrant. The idea of that made hysterical laughter bubble up the back of Hayes’ throat and then he saw the axe hanging by the fire extinguisher and then his hands were on it, gripping it with a primitive glee. He raced back at the thing, knocking a table of fossils over in his flight. He was going to chop that motherfucker up, hack it to bits.

  And he meant to.

  He stood over the thing, axe raised and then the buzzing rose up, felt like a fist taking hold of his brain and squeezing until the agony was white-hot and he cried out.

  The axe fell from his fingers and he went down to his knees.

  Fight or flight.

  He crab-crawled to the door, fumbling it open and falling out into the screaming polar night. He got the door shut, those frozen winds slapping him none too gently back into reality. He found his mittens, put them on and pulled himself along the guylines back to Targa House, the door of Hut #6 wide open, hammering back and forth in the wind.

  He looked over his shoulder only once, thinking he saw some lurid alien shape moving through the blowing snow at him . . .

  12

  The next morning, before they started their day, the boys were hanging out in the community room, chewing scrambled eggs and bacon, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes, doing a lot of talking.

  “I’ll tell you guys something,” Rutkowski said. “LaHune is some kind of fucking nut about all this. No communication, no email . . . I mean, what the hell? What’s all this James Bond shit about? Because of those dead things that might be aliens? Jesus H. Christ, so what? What if they are? He can’t lock us down here like prisoners. It ain’t right and somebody’s gotta do something about it.”

  St. Ours lit another cigarette from the butt of his first, flagrantly ignoring the NO SMOKING sign on the wall and getting hard looks from some of the scientists who were trying to eat. “Yeah, something’s gotta be done. And it’s up to us to do it. You know those fucking eggheads won’t lift a finger. You lock them in a closet with a microscope and they’d be just fine and dandy with it. Now, way I’m seeing this, LaHune has slipped a cog and he’s about six inches from being as crazy as Lind. He’s supposed to be in charge? Well, if we were at sea and the captain was crazy . . . “

  “Mutiny?” Rutkowski said. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  If Rutkowski did, he wasn’t admitting it.

  Meiner sat there watching them, thinking things. He knew these two. He’d wintered over with them half a dozen times. Rutkowski was full of hot air, liked to talk, but was essentially harmless. St. Ours, however, was a hardcase. He liked to talk, too, but he was a big boy and he wasn’t above using his hands on someone that pissed him off or got in his way. When he drank, he liked to fight and right now there was whiskey on his breath.

  “We can’t just go doing shit like that,” Meiner said, though part of him liked the idea. “Come spring they’ll throw us in the clink.”

  “Hell we can’t,” St. Ours said. “Let me do it. I’d like to take that little cockmite LaHune outside and pound the snot out of him.”

  Meiner didn’t even bother commenting on that. The visual of a couple guys out in that sub-zero blackness in their ECW’s swinging was hilarious.

  “Just simmer down now,” Rutkowski said. “LaHune is a pushbutton boy, all company. Push button A, he shits. Push button B, he locks us down. He’s just doing what hard-ons like him always do. The mummies is why. He’s towing the NSF line and it’s because of those fucking mummies.”

  “That’s Gates’ fault,” St. Ours said.

  “Sure, it is. But you can’t blame him, finding something like that. Like a kid first discovering his pecker, he can’t help but take it out and pull on it. Besides, Gates is not a bad sort. You can talk to the guy. Shit, you can even talk pussy with him. He’s all right. Not like some of these other monkeyfucks — “ Rutkowski shot a glance over at a few scientists at a nearby table, some of the wonder boys who were drilling down to Lake Vordog “ — he’s okay. See, boys, the problem here is those mummies. If they were gone, LaHune might be willing to pull an inch or two of that steel rod out of his ass and let us join the freaking world again.”

  “You plan on stealing ‘em?” St. Ours said.

  “Well, maybe losing them might be a better word for it. Regardless, it’s something for us to think about.”

  “It couldn’t happen soon enough for me,” Meiner said, his hand shaking as he brought his coffee cup to his lips.

  “You . . . you still having those nightmares?”

  Meiner nodded weakly. “Every night . . . crazy shit. Even when I do manage to fall asleep, I wake up with the cold sweats.”

  “Those things out there,” St. Ours said, looking a little green around the gills, maybe even blue. “I’m not too big of a man to admit that they’re getting to me, too. No, don’t you fucking look at me like that, Rutkowski. You’re having the dreams, too. We’re all having the dreams. Even those eggheads are.”

  “What . . . what are your dreams about?” Meiner wanted to know.

  Rutkowski shifted in his seat, licked his lips. “I can’t remember, but their good ones . . . something about colors or shapes, things moving that shouldn’t move.”

  “I remember some of mine,” St. Ours said. He pulled off his cigarette, let the smoke drift out through his nostrils and past those wide, blank eyes. “A city . . . I dream of a city . . . except it ain’t like no city you’ve ever seen before. Towers and pyramids and shafts, honeycombs that lead through stone, don’t come out anywhere but into themselves. I dream I’m flying above the city, moving fast, and there are others flying with me and they all look like those ugly pricks out in the hut. We . . . we fly and then we dip down, down into those holes and hollow places, then . . . then I wake up. I don’t want to remember what happens down in those holes.”

  “I dream about holes sometimes, too,” Meiner admitted. “Like tunnels going up and down and left and right . . . lost in those tunnels and hearing a buzzing like wasps, only that buzzing is like words I understand. I’m scared shitless, in the dream. I know those voices want something from me.”

  He stopped there. By God, it was enough. He wasn’t going any farther with it, he wasn’t going to pick at the scabs of his nightmares until all that black blood started flowing again. He wasn’t going to tell them about the rest of it. The tunnels and high stone rooms, all those things standing around while Meiner and dozens of others laid on tables. The things . . . oh Jesus . . . those things would be inside their heads and touching them, sticking things into them and cutting into them with blades of light, making things happen to them . . . and the pain, all the pain . . . needles going into him and knives cutting and tubes stuck in his head and oh dear sweet Jesus the agony, the agony while those trilling voices kept talking and talking, hands that were not hands but things like tree branches or twigs taking him apart and putting him back together again . . .

  Rutkowski looked gray and old suddenly. “I don’t like it, I just don’t like it. Those dreams . . . they’re so familiar, you know? Like I’ve seen it all before, lived through all that shit years ago. Don’t make no sense.”

  And it didn’t. Not on the surface. But they’d all felt it, that sense of familiarity, that déjà vu they couldn’t get out from under. It haunted them. Just like the first time they’d seen the mummies — they had all known implicitly that they had seen them before, very long ago, and the fear those things inspired was inbred and ancient, a wisp of memory from a misty, forgotten past.

  “Yeah, I remember those things. Somehow, I do,” St. Ours said. “Fuck me, but Gates sure opened up a Pandora’s box here.”

  And, God, how true was that.

  Meiner knew it was true, just like he knew he was afraid to close his eyes even for an instant. Because when he did the dreams came and the things swam up out of the darkness, those buzzing voices in his head, filling him, breaking him down. And sometimes, yes, sometimes even
when he was awake, when he’d come out of the nightmares at three a.m. sweating and shaking, feeling the pain of what they had done to him or someone like him, he would still be hearing those voices. High and trilling and insectile, outside, carried by the winds, calling him out into the storm and sometimes out to the hut where they were waiting for him.

  But he wasn’t about to admit any of that.

  13

  Of course, Hayes didn’t sleep.

  He didn’t do much of anything after his return from Hut #6 except drink a lot of coffee laced with whiskey and take a few hot showers, trying to shake that awful feeling of violation, the sense that his mind had been invaded and subverted by something diabolic and dirty. But it was all in vain, for that feeling of invasion persisted. That his most private and intimate place, his mind, had been defiled. He nodded off for maybe thirty minutes just before dawn —what passed for dawn in a place where the sun never rose, that was —and came awake from the mother of all nightmares in which shapeless things had their fingers in his skull, rooting around and touching things, making him think and feel things that were not part of him but part of something else. Something alien.

  No, none of it made any real sense.

  But what had happened in Hut #6 didn’t make any either. It had happened, he was certain it had happened. But what proof was there? Minute by minute it was fading in his head like a bad dream, becoming indistinct and surreal . . . like something viewed through yellowed cellophane.

  Hayes knew he had to put it into some kind of perspective, though, had to beat it into submission and stomp it flat. Because if he couldn’t do that, if he couldn’t bronze his balls and inflate his chest . . . well then, he would start raving like Lind, his mind going to a warm fruiting pulp.

  Hut #6, Hut #6, Hut #6.

  Jesus, he was starting to think of it as some taboo place, a shunned place like a haunted house filled with evil sprits that oozed from the shattered walls or the cobwebby tomb of some executed witch that had eaten children and called up the dead, was looking for a good reason to rise herself. But that’s how he saw it: a bad place. Not a place that was necessarily physically dangerous, but psychologically toxic and spiritually rotten.

  Twice since returning from Hut #6, he had marched over to the infirmary, stood outside Doc Sharkey’s room, wanting to pound on the door, scratch his way through it, throw himself at her feet and scream out the horrors he had suffered. But each time he got there, the strength, the volition to do anything more than listen to his own feeble, crushed voice shrieking in his head was gone.

  He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about Sharkey . . . a married woman, Christ in Heaven . . . but he knew, deep down he knew, that he could have gone to her, any time of day or night and she would have helped him, she would have been there for him. Because the bond between them was there, it was real, it was strong, it was strung tight and sure like cable. Yet, for all that, he just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t see him dumping this rotting, smelly mess at her feet.

  She would want you to.

  But Hayes still couldn’t do it, just couldn’t open up his flank like that. Not yet. That feeling of violation — go ahead and say the word, bucko, rape, because that’s how it made you feel, like you’d been viciously raped — was too real yet and he couldn’t put it into perspective. He would need time.

  His second trip to the infirmary, he just stood outside Sharkey’s door with a breathless, silent sobbing knotted in his throat. Before the sobbing became the real thing, he went into the infirmary itself and beyond to the room where there were a few cots set up for sick people.

  Lind was on one of them.

  He had been restrained now, pumped full of God-knows-what to keep him calm and quiet, Thorazine or something like that. Hayes stood in the doorway looking at the form of his old roommate lying there, looking wasted and old and fragile like if he fell off the cot he might break into pieces. Hayes could see him fine in the nightlight like some little old man shot through with cancer, his life wheezing out of him in rattling breaths.

  It was a hell of a thing, wasn’t it? To see him like that?

  Hayes felt a lump of something insoluble in his throat that he couldn’t seem to swallow down. Fucking Lind. Dumb sonofabitch, but harmless and funny and even sweet in his own way.

  Lind, Jesus, poor Lind.

  Lind whose vocabulary was severely challenged and thought gonorrhea was one of those boats they used in the canals of Venice and bullocks were a woman’s breasts. Claimed he had a maiden aunt named Chlamydia and that his sister married a guy named Harry Greenslit. He used to make Hayes laugh all the time, talking about his shrewish wife and how she rode his ass so hard when he was home he couldn’t wait to get back to fucking Antarctica to cool it off. He equated his wife’s tirades and foul mouth with being sodomized, as in, Jesus, Hayes, she banged me for three days straight, soon as I walk in the door, she bends me over and pounds the stuffing out of me. My asshole’s so fucking loose by the time I get back here, I gotta shove a lemon up there to get it to pucker back up.

  Lind. Christ.

  Hayes walked into the room, over near Lind’s cot and right away Lind started to thrash in his sleep. He began to twitch, his eyelids fluttering. Hayes stepped back in the doorway, a weird thrumming sensation at his temples, and Lind settled back down. What the hell was that about? Hayes walked back over there and the thrumming started again with drumming waves and Lind started jerking again like he could sense Hayes’ presence and maybe he could and maybe it was even more than just that.

  A voice in Hayes’ head was saying: It isn’t your mere presence he’s reacting to, you silly bastard, it’s what you’re carrying. That thing in the hut, that pissing Old One, it touched you, it got inside you, it stained something in you that’ll never wash completely clean. That’s what Lind’s reacting to ... he can smell it on you same as he can smell it on himself. Violation.

  You bear Their touch.

  It was crazy, but it made sense. Like they had planted some seed in his head just as they had done with Lind, woke something up inside them that had been sleeping a long time. Something mystic, something ancient, something unspeakable.

  But what? What was it?

  For as Hayes neared Lind again, he started twitching and moaning, trembling as if he had come into contact with some sort of energy. Hayes backed away again, all the spit in his mouth dried up, a tension headache starting behind his eyes . . . except it wasn’t that, it was something else completely. For he could -

  He was seeing inside of Lind’s head.

  It was crazyass bullshit, but, yes, he was seeing what Lind dreamed. It could be nothing else. He was connecting with him, their minds touching, sharing thoughts and brainwaves. The thrumming had gone away now and there was just those grainy, distorted pictures like a broadcast coming in on an old black and white Sylvannia tube set. Hayes felt dizzy, disoriented, those images rushing through his brain and making him want to pass cold out. But he saw, he saw . . .

  He saw... a landscape... valleys and low snow-covered hills, hollows in which great beasts wandered listlessly, gnawing at squat vegetation. The beasts were shaggy things like bison or maybe rhinoceros, but with huge archaic horns. It was tundra mostly, the snowline creeping in from all sides, the world turning to winter. There was an immense lake in the distance or maybe it was part of the sea. It was flanked by mounds about which was built some rolling, immense city that looked to be quarried from stone. The image was wavering, fading, but Hayes could still see those towers and weird skeletal spires, arched domes and scalloped discs . . . an impossible city heaped and clustered and crowded, tangled up in itself like the bones of some gigantic beast . . .

  Then it was gone.

  Hayes backed away into the infirmary, wide-eyed and shocked. He had not imagined any of it, he had not hallucinated any of it. He sat at Sharkey’s desk, trying to catch his breath, wiping the sweat from his face. He was thinking things then, thinking terrible, impossible things that he believe
d nonetheless. That landscape . . . it was Antarctica as seen maybe in the late Miocene before the glaciers had covered it. When that immense, alien city found first by Pabodie and then later by Gates was not up in the mountains but set atop low mounds that would someday be mountains.

  Gates had said the ice sheet was roughly forty-million years old.

  Hayes went through all the normal channels trying to make sense of it, but there was no getting around what he had seen or how he had seen it. Lind was maybe like some sort of receiver picking up broadcasts from the dead and dreaming brains of the Old Ones, images of life in Antarctica forty-million years gone. And Hayes had been able to see what he was seeing.

  Telepathy.

  Parlor tricks. Psychic bullshit.

  But he had it now, at least some rudimentary form.

  The Old Ones had touched his mind and given him this. No, no, he couldn’t believe that. Maybe it had been in him all along and they just, well, woke it up, brought it to the fore from wherever it had been dreaming away the millennia. Hayes was thinking that maybe all men had it inside them, they’d just forgotten how to use it and now and then somebody would be born with the faculty fully activated and be labeled as a freak . . . or quietly go mad.

  It was too much.

  LaHune had to hear this shit.

  14

  LaHune was looking pretty much like he’d bitten into something sour as Hayes told him what had happened out in Hut #6. You could see that he did not want to be hearing shit like this. Whether he believed in any of it or not was immaterial, the idea of those dead minds still being somehow active and animate was really beyond the scope of things as he saw them. What could you do with information like that? You surely couldn’t crunch it on your laptop or scribble it on your clipboard or slip it in a folder and file it away. This was buggy stuff, now wasn’t it? This kind of thing surely upset the old applecart, threw a wrench into the machine, and put the monkeyshit in the mayo.