by Tim Curran
“All right,” Sharkey said. “But for them to drift here . . . you have any idea how long that would take?”
“Again, time only means something to creatures like you and me with finite life spans and I think the Old Ones are nearly immortal. They’d have to be. Sure, they may die by accident or design, but not from old age. No, Doc, they drifted here like pollen on the wind.”
Hayes said he figured it was how they worked. Maybe drifting from one star system to the next, something that probably took millions of years. Then establishing themselves on worlds, hopping from planet to planet, seeding them with life.
Sharkey didn’t want to believe any of it, but slowly the logic of it took hold of her despite herself. “Yes . . . I suppose that’s how it must’ve been. It’s just incredible, is all.”
“Of course it is.”
“You heard what Lind said? That business about the helix and organic molecules, proteins . . . the conquest and the harvest . . . the perpetuation of the helix?”
“I heard.”
“And . . . “
“They created life here, they are the engineers of our DNA,” Hayes said. “They created it. Maybe out of themselves or from scratch, who knows? Jesus, this is outrageous. This is really going to throw the creationists firmly on their ass. So much for religion.”
“So much for everything.”
“I guess we’ve seen the face of God down here,” Hayes said. “And it’s an ugly one.”
Sharkey started laughing. Was having trouble stopping. “Gates . . . that’s what Gates was saying. That they might have seeded hundreds of worlds, directed evolution, that their ultimate agenda was harvesting those minds they had created . . . “
And this was the very thing Hayes was having trouble with. “But why? What do they want with them? What could it be?”
“To bring them into the hive, subjugate them . . . who knows?” Sharkey swallowed. “Down in the lake . . . those things down there . . . they’ve been waiting for us all this time. Waiting to harvest what we are. Fucking Christ, Jimmy . . . the patience of those monsters.”
What Hayes was trying to figure out is why they took total possession of Lind like they had. He’d been in the hut that day with Lind and those mummies had freaked him out, made him feel bad inside, but they hadn’t taken over his mind. Was it that Lind was just a sensitive of some sort? A natural receiver, a medium for lack of a better word?
And what about Meiner and St. Ours?
Those things had leeched their minds dry and destroyed their brains. And Hayes himself had been psychically attacked twice by the Old Ones . . . once in the hut alone and last night out on the tractor . . . why hadn’t they killed him, too? Why did he have the strength to fight? And Sharkey? She had had the dreams, too, as they all had. What in the hell were those things saving them for? What was the ultimate plan here?
“You feel up to that drive I was talking about?” he asked her.
“Vradaz?”
He nodded. “I don’t think we have much time left, Elaine. If we can learn something up there, maybe we might make it out of this yet.”
“Okay,” she said, but didn’t sound too hopeful. “Jimmy? Lind said ‘The Color Out of Space’. I’ve heard him say it before while he was heavily sedated. I thought it meant nothing . . . but I’m not so sure now. What is this Color Out of Space?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Old Ones themselves,” he speculated. “And maybe it’s something a lot worse.”
28
“Tell me again why I’m doing this,” Cutchen said.
“For the good of humanity,” Hayes told him. “What more reason do you need?”
Maybe Cutchen needed some reassurance here, some encouragement, but Hayes didn’t really have a lot to offer up in that department. Why were they going up to Vradaz Outpost, the abandoned Russian camp? Even he wasn’t sure, not really. But something bad, something truly terrible had happened there and he felt it was important that they find out what. Maybe they’d find nothing but a snowed-in empty camp, but Hayes was thinking there had to be evidence of what came down. If even some of what Nikolai Kolich said was true, then the outpost had undergone pretty much the same sort of shit that Kharkhov Station was currently undergoing.
Hayes could remember very well what Kolich had said.
Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that.
And didn’t that just sound familiar?
“Storm’s picking up pretty good out there,” Sharkey said.
Hayes worked the stick of the SnoCat, pressing in the clutch, and bringing it up to high gear as they came over a rise and moved across a barren ice plain. He figured they’d make Vradaz in thirty or forty minutes if the storm didn’t swallow them alive. They were plunging through Condition Two weather, sheets of wind-driven snow blasting the SnoCat and making it tremble. It was dark out, of course, and the only lights came from the ‘Cat itself. All you could see in the high beams was the white, uneven tundra broken occasionally by knobs of black rock and the swirling, blowing snow.
“You’re not going to get us lost are you?” Cutchen said.
“No, I don’t think so. I have a roll of kite twine on the back of the ‘Cat and I tied the other end to Targa House.” He glanced out his window at the huge rectangular mirror out there. “Shit . . . must have run out of string.”
“Ha, ha, you so funny,” Cutchen said.
“Relax. GPS knows the way and I took a bearing on Vradaz before we left. If we get lost, the beacon from Kharkhov will bring us back home.”
“If worse comes to worse,” Sharkey said, “we can gather up some wood and start a signal fire.”
“Boy, you guys are good. I’ll book you in Vegas when we get back . . . unless we don’t get back.” Cutchen thought about that a moment. “You think these Old Ones have much of a sense of humor, Hayes?”
“Yeah, I think they do. Look-it all the gags they’ve pulled on us. They’re some really silly bastards, you get to know ‘em.”
The SnoCat began to jump and lurch as it passed over a field of sastrugi, frozen ridges of snow and ice that looked like waves heading ashore at a beach. Except these never moved and they were tough as granite. But the SnoCat handled them just fine, jarring and bouncing, but handling it better on its twin sets of caterpillar tracks than an ordinary wheeled vehicle would have.
Hayes swung the ‘Cat around a glacial valley, the storm getting worse, beginning to howl and screech, filling its lungs full of frost and white death and letting it back out in a wild, whipping tempest. The cab of the ‘Cat was warm even without their ECW’s on, but outside? They wouldn’t have lasted long. Hayes had followed the ice road that Gates and his people had flagged for some thirty miles before the GPS told him it was time to trail blaze. It was dangerous work on an Antarctic night, but he had plotted a course on the contour map so he didn’t drive them into a fissure or crevice. It was lumpy and bumpy rolling over serrated ice ridges and steering around weathered black outcroppings of stone, but they were going to make it.
Hayes had already decided that.
He just wasn’t giving much thought to whether or not they’d make it back again.
One heartbreak at a time.
The wastelands to either side were dead white with canopies of ice that jutted like mountain peaks. You caught them out of the glare of the lights and out of the corner of your eye, they looked like monuments and gravestones sometimes. The landscape became very hilly as they approached the Dominion Range, full of sudden gullies and ice-pilings, horns of wind-blasted rock rising up like church spires. Rough, dangerous country. The Dominion Range was located along the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, where the massive Beardmore and Mill Glaciers came together. Had it been daylight, Hayes knew, they would have been able to see the rugged cones of the Transantarctic Mountains rising before them.
The SnoCat plodded along, plowing through wais
t-high drift and over ridges of ice. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept pushing from the high elevations, threatening to bury them at times.
“Hey! You see that!” Cutchen said, almost choking on his words.
Sharkey tensed next to him and Hayes tried to swallow. “What? What did you see?”
“I . . . well, I saw a shape . . . I thought I saw a shape,” Cutchen said. “Off to the right. It passed right by us . . . then I lost it in the snow.”
“Probably some rocks,” Sharkey pointed out.
“No, it was moving . . . I think it was moving away from us.” Cutchen let that hang a moment, then added, “I thought I saw eyes reflected.”
“Eyes?” Hayes said. “How many?”
Sharkey crossed her arms almost defiantly. “Stop it. Both of you.”
“Just a shape,” Cutchen said. “That’s all.”
Hayes was going to tell him he was crazy, that there was nothing moving out there but them, but the spit had dried up in his mouth. It felt like something was spinning a web at the base of his spine, a chill stealthily creeping up his back.
“It was probably nothing,” Cutchen said like he was trying to convince himself of the fact.
Ten minutes passed while Hayes hoped they’d see nothing else. He checked the GPS. “Okay, we should be right on top of Vradaz . . . gotta be right in this area somewhere.”
But it was dead winter in Antarctica, the perpetual night billowing and consuming like black satin. Hayes downshifted the ‘Cat and cranked up the headlights, put the spots on. Shafts of light cut across the glacial plane, making it no more than twenty or thirty feet before they reflected back the blizzard. It looked and sounded like a sandstorm out there.
They kept going, Hayes bringing the ‘Cat around in a loose circle, staying within the perimeters of the GPS field. Cutchen splayed the spots around. The snowfall died down a bit and they could see a huge ice barrier just beyond them that must have been seventy or eighty feet high.
“There,” Cutchen said. “There’s something over there.”
He was right.
A cluster of irregular shapes thrust from the snow, right at the foot of the barrier. Hayes could see what might have been roofs, an aerial, the rusted sheet metal of a wall blown clean of drift. Much of it was lost beneath an ice fall. The glaciers were pushing that barrier down from the mountains, a few feet a year. Sooner or later, Vradaz Outpost would be crushed beneath it.
Hayes pulled the SnoCat in closer, pushing through the night. Waves of snow like breakers at sea were spread across what must have been the compound at one time, gathering here at the foot of the ice barrier.
“A few more weeks and the camp would have been buried,” Cutchen said. “I think we should have waited.”
Hayes pulled the ‘Cat to a stop and killed the engine. Suddenly then, there was only that immense and eerie stillness, that ominous sense of desertion and lifelessness all abandoned camps seemed to have. The wind was blowing and that great ice barrier was cracking and popping.
They sat there in the cab, waiting, thinking.
Hayes didn’t know about the others, but the sight of Vradaz entombed in snow and ice made something in his belly stir like gravy. There was a tenseness to his limbs, a tightening of his ligaments and a quickness to his pulse. He found himself involuntarily reaching out for Sharkey’s hand just as she reached for his and for Cutchen’s. And there they sat, in that windy darkness, listening to the snow glance off the windshield and pepper the sides of the SnoCat. Nobody was moving. They were barely breathing.
Like standing outside a haunted house on a chill October night, Hayes found himself thinking. Listening to the leaves blow and the shutters creak and wondering if we have the balls to see this through.
“Okay, I’ve had enough,” Cutchen said. “Either we do this or turn around. I say we turn around. The brochure clearly said this place had a pool. I don’t see any pool.”
Hayes broke his grip with Sharkey’s gloved hands. “I suppose we can’t sit here like this being all girly.”
He opened his door and the cold blasted in.
And outside, the snow piled up and the wind screeched their names.
29
Well, it was no easy bit getting into the Vradaz Outpost.
It was a small camp, but the buildings — those that weren’t crushed beneath the ice barrier—were pretty much drifted from roof to ground. Hayes and his compatriots had to fight through snow that came up above their hips at times and then was blown clean five feet away. Hayes had brought lanterns, ice-axes, and shovels and they put them to good use. They chose a squat, central structure that appeared to be connected to the others and got to work. The sight of the place had filled them all with an unknown terror, but after thirty minutes spent shoveling and cutting their way through the heaped snow, that passed.
It was just a dead camp.
That was all it was and the exertion helped them see it. Their nerves were still sharpened, but Hayes figured that was only natural. Jesus, this was the South Pole at the dead of winter. Wind screaming and snow flying and the temperature hanging in at a steady fifty below. If their imaginations got a little worked up, it was to be expected.
When they found the door, it was sheathed in blue ice, buckled in its frame and Hayes had a mad desire to plow right through it with the SnoCat, but he didn’t want to take the chance of destroying anything in there. Anything that might remain. So they took their turns chopping through the ice by lantern-light, the snow whipping and creating jumping, distorted shadows around them.
And then the door was free. One good kick and it fell in.
“You first,” Cutchen said. “I’m the intellectual type . . . you’re the brave, stupid type.”
“Shit,” Hayes said, ducking in through the doorway and turning on his flashlight, something pulling up inside of him as he entered the abandoned structure. There was a smell of age and dust and wreckage.
The place was made of wood and prefab metal like most of the buildings at the South Pole. Concrete didn’t hold up too well with the abrasive wind and extreme temperature changes, it tended to flake away and crack wide open.
Looking around in there with his flashlight, Hayes was seeing debris everywhere like a cyclone went ripping through. The floor planking was ruptured, the roof sagging, great holes punched into the walls. Snow had drifted into the corners. He supposed the place was held mainly together by frost and ice. Seams of it necklaced the walls.
“Look,” Sharkey said. “Even the back of the door.”
“Jesus,” Cutchen said.
There were crude crosses etched into just about any available surface. Hex signs, really, to ward off evil. You could almost breathe in the madness that must have overtaken the place. Those scientists losing their minds when their science could not explain what appeared to be some sort of malefic haunting . . . in their desperation they had turned to the oldest of apotropaics: the cross.
But it had failed them.
Hayes, Sharkey, and Cutchen stood there maybe five minutes, sucking in the memory of evil and insanity that seemed to ooze from those bowed, ice-slicked walls.
“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” Cutchen finally said.
“Maybe one did.”
They were in some sort of entry, what Hayes’ mom had called a Mud Room back in Kansas. The sort of place you stowed your boots and coats and work clothes when you came in out of the fields. They passed through another doorway into a larger room. There were some old fuel oil barrels in there and a stove over in the corner. Everything else was in shambles . . . camp chairs overturned, video equipment shattered, papers spread in the dusting of snow. What looked like a desk had been reduced to kindling. A light fixture overhead was dangling by wires. The rungs of a red fireman’s ladder against the wall were hung with icicles.
Sharkey was examining some of the papers with her lantern.
“Make anything of it?” Hayes asked her.
She dropped them. “My Cy
rillic is a little rusty.”
They passed into another room in which the ceiling was caved in, stalactites of ice hung down and pooled on the floor. The walls were charred and bowed. There was a lot of electronic equipment in there, most of it destroyed and locked in flows of ice.
“Looks like they had a fire,” Cutchen said. “I wonder if it was an accident.”
They kept going, moving down a short corridor past some cramped sleeping quarters and then into another room which had been a laboratory once. There was still equipment in there . . . microscopes and racks of test tubes, antique computers and file cabinets whose drawers had been yanked open and left that way. The floor was a down of broken glass and instruments and papers. Hayes found a couple drills and an electric saw they must have used to slice up their ice core samples. There was a small ell off the room with a handle like a freezer on it. Inside were the core samples themselves, dated and tagged.
Sharkey almost went on her ass on a flow of ice on the floor. “Look at this,” she said, indicating a room just off the lab. The walls in there had great, blackened holes ripped into them through which you could see a maze of snow, ice, and lumber . . . the portion of the outpost crushed beneath the ice fall. There were a series of smaller holes drilled into the walls, too.
“Bullet holes,” Hayes said. “And those bigger ones . . . “
“Grenades?” Cutchen said, panning his light over them.
Sharkey was on her hands and knees studying some ancient stains on the walls, others spread over some folders caught in the ice flow. “This . . . well, this could be blood. It sure looks like it. I guess it could be ink or tomato sauce or something.”
Hayes felt something sink in him. Yeah, and maybe the center of the universe has creamy white filling, but I don’t think so. You were right the first time, Doc. That ain’t the blood of tomatoes, it’s the blood of people.
“Must’ve had themselves a showdown here,” Cutchen said. “Or a slaughter.”