Terminal Freeze

by Lincoln Child

  “If you’re so eager to find them,” Wolff said, “why not just use the radio?”

  “Can’t do that,” Conti replied. “That sergeant doesn’t believe in my work. None of them do. They’d probably give us false directions, just to throw us off. Or confiscate the camera. We can’t take the chance.”

  He led the way down the hallway. Most of the doors they passed were closed; the ones that were open gave onto shadow-haunted spaces full of unidentifiable gear. They descended a staircase, turned a corner.

  “That’s it, right?” Conti said. “That door on the left?”

  Wolff nodded.

  Ekberg followed the two into a small waiting room. She had never been in this section of the base and, despite her unease, looked around curiously at the dusty medical supplies and ancient, fading labels of the bottles stored behind glass fronts. Conti had already walked into the next room, and when she heard his sharp intake of breath she knew he had found something. Peering in after him, she saw two sheeted bodies lying on an examination table. One was abnormally short, as if made up of parts rather than an intact corpse. The plastic coverings were so thickly smeared with blood and fluids that the remains were utterly obscured. Ekberg quickly looked away.

  “Kari,” Conti said.

  She was so overcome with horror that she did not reply.

  “Kari,” he repeated. “Turn on the sound pack.”

  It was all she could do to switch on the mixer, plug in the microphone cable. Conti hovered over the bodies, the glare from his camera raking them pitilessly. “They’re here,” he said into his lavalier mic, his voice fraught with the gravity of the moment. “The newest victims. One was a simple soldier, doing his part in the service of our country, who gave his life trying to protect others. The other was one of our own, Ashleigh Davis, who was also doing a service—a service in its way no less vital. She came to this godforsaken place in order to solve a great mystery. She was an intrepid journalist who never shirked danger, never hesitated to put her life on the line for others, whether for enlightenment or entertainment. The thing that killed them is still out there—as is the party of soldiers bent on its destruction.”

  He fell silent, but his camera lingered over the sheeted bodies, passing back and forth, zooming in, panning out.

  “They’ll never let you show that on the air,” Wolff said.

  “I’m thinking of the DVD to follow,” Conti said. “The director’s cut.” He lowered the camera. “This was a lucky break.”

  “A lucky break?” Ekberg asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Finding them here. I was afraid they’d be in cold storage already.”

  Wasn’t so lucky for them, Ekberg thought. She began to object but held her tongue. It wouldn’t do any good.

  They returned to the corridor and continued, their footsteps echoing hollowly on the floor. Now and then Conti called a halt and stood motionless, listening intently. There was an expression on his face she’d never seen before: a strangely furtive eagerness. His eyes shone with it. She glanced uneasily at Wolff. In the reflected light of the camera, his face was set in a dubious frown.

  Another intersection, another endless hall. Conti stopped once again. “Look,” he said, pointing the camera down the hall like an oversized flashlight. “Isn’t that blood on the floor?”

  Ekberg followed the beam of light. He was right: maybe twenty yards ahead, sprays of what could only be blood covered the floor of the hallway. They seemed to have come from an open doorway marked P-H STAGING ROOM. A confusing welter of bloody footprints led in and out of the room and down the far end of the corridor. Ekberg felt a spike of anxiety.

  Conti trotted ahead, fitting the camera’s viewfinder to his eye. Ekberg watched as he pointed the lens at the blood, panning left to right in a long, lingering take. Then he stepped up to the door—bloodying his own shoes in the process—and began shooting the interior of the room. He motioned for Ekberg to run the sound again.

  “This is where the outrage occurred,” he intoned. “This is where the unspeakable finality of death overtook them. Death at the hands of what can only be described as a monster—a monster whose secrets we are now committed to uncovering…and putting to an end.”

  He gestured for Ekberg to kill the sound. Lowering the camera, he pointed excitedly at the ground before him. “Look. Those tracks—there are three sets at least! That’s got to be Gonzalez and his men.” He paused, scrutinizing the floor more carefully. “My God. Is this the monster’s spoor?” He raised the camera again, panned ahead of them along the corridor.

  As Ekberg came forward, she avoided looking into the room where Ashleigh and the soldier named Fluke had died, focusing instead on the bloody splotch Conti was staring at. It couldn’t be the tread of a creature—it couldn’t. It was too big; its shape was too unnatural. Something about it disturbed her violently and she looked away.

  “Beautiful,” Conti murmured as he filmed. “Just beautiful. The only thing better would be if—” Remembering himself, he fell silent. He lowered the camera and shot a hooded gaze in the direction of Wolff and Ekberg.

  The faint lighting in the hallway dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. Then it went out completely. And Ekberg found herself in utter darkness. She heard a surprised hiss from Wolff. A few seconds later, the light came back on, somewhat fainter than before.

  Conti heaved the camera back onto his shoulder. “Ready?”

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Wolff said.

  “What are you talking about? We know where they went now. This is precisely what we came for—we have to hurry.” And he trotted forward. After a moment, Wolff followed. Ekberg swung in behind, hugely reluctant.

  The corridor ended at an intersection, where the bloody tracks clearly went right. They passed several doors and a stairwell leading down to C Level before the tracks petered out. They stopped at the point where the last faint fleck of blood was visible on the floor.

  “Well?” Wolff asked.

  Conti pointed ahead. “The hallway dead ends in that room, there.” And again he fitted his eye to the camera and moved forward.

  Ekberg remained motionless, watching the director as he proceeded toward a double door stenciled RADAR SUPPORT. The doors were open and—surprisingly—a few lights were on within. As she watched, Conti stepped through. He looked first right, then left. And then he froze. For a long moment he remained motionless. At last he turned on the camera, filmed for perhaps fifteen seconds. Then he glanced out into the corridor.

  “Kari?” he said in a strange, thick voice. “Could you come here a moment?”

  She walked down the corridor, stepped through the doorway. Directly before her was a huge metal rack full of ancient, dusty equipment. When she looked at Conti inquiringly, he simply nodded over her shoulder. She turned, looking in the indicated direction. At first she saw nothing. But then she looked down, in the corner, where the floor met the adjoining walls. A head lay there, upturned, staring at her with an expression that almost seemed accusatory. She staggered backward, reeling under a double blow of shock and horror. A part of her registered that this had been Creel, the foreman of the roustabout team they’d hired from Anchorage. The head had been torn rudely from its shoulders, and arterial blood sprayed in a wide corona around it. A few feet away, two booted feet peeped out almost impishly from behind the edge of the metal rack.

  She groaned, stepping backward quickly. As she did, she bumped roughly into something. Turning, she looked directly into the wide lens of Conti’s camera. He had been filming her. She could see the reflection of her face in the glass—a small face, pale, vulnerable, frightened.

  “Stop it!” she heard herself cry. “Goddamn you, stop it, stop it, stop it!”

  45

  “I’ve finished my analysis of the blood from the vault shards,” Faraday said quietly.

  Marshall glanced over at him. The biologist was staring up from his position at the fixed-angle centrifuge. He had spent the last seve
ral minutes moving from the stereozoom microscope to the centrifuge and back again, and the eyepieces of the microscope had left marks that made him look like a raccoon.

  “And?” Marshall prompted.

  “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.”

  Sully sighed impatiently. Gonzalez hadn’t reported in, and he was taking the wait badly. “Specifics would help, Wright.”

  Faraday replaced his glasses and blinked at Sully. “It concerns the white blood cells. Mostly.”

  Sully waved his hand, as if to say, we’re waiting.

  “You know white blood cells are all about infections, inflammation, and the rest. The neutrophils, lymphocytes, basophils, etcetera—they’re tasked with defense, with wound healing. Well, this organism has a hyper-developed white blood cell line. It’s like a healing machine on steroids. There’s an incredibly high concentration of monocytes. And they’re not at all typical—they’re huge. They’re clearly capable of transforming into macrophages and dumping a ton of cytokines and other chemicals into the bloodstream, promoting almost instant healing.”

  When nobody replied, Faraday continued. “There’s something else. The tests indicate a chemical compound in the blood and cell tissue very similar to arylcyclohexylamine.”

  “Come again?” said Marshall.

  “It’s the causative agent in PCP. And it’s present in the creature’s blood in a remarkably high concentration—more than one hundred nanograms per milliliter. I believe it’s an NMDA receptor antagonist, acting as both a stimulator and an anesthetic. What I can’t understand is how the creature could produce such a chemical—I’ve never seen anything like it before in nature, certainly not in these concentrations. Assuming it’s not exogenous, perhaps the anterior pituitary gland is releasing it into the bloodstream as a response to stress. Anyway, such a flood of exotic chemicals in the bloodstream would account for its apparent imperviousness to bullets and other injury. It simply doesn’t feel the wounds, and—”

  “This is all very interesting,” Sully interrupted. “But it doesn’t get us any closer to the real goal: finding the damn thing’s Achilles’ heel.”

  “He’s right,” Logan said. “The most important thing is learning how to stop it.”

  “Maybe it’s been stopped already,” Marshall said. He glanced around the life-sciences lab with eyes made bleary by the long trek through the snowstorm. “Maybe it’s dead. Electricity worked last time.”

  “Last time, the beast they were dealing with was much smaller,” Sully replied. “We don’t even know if it was the same species.”

  “It was the same,” Usuguk said. “Kurrshuq is kurrshuq. The difference is size, power, capacity for evil.”

  Marshall glanced over at the Tunit, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lab. He had taken several fetishlike items from his medicine bundle and arrayed them on the ground before him. Picking up each in turn, he spoke to it in a low, singsong tone, full of pleading and urgency. Then he carefully replaced it on the ground, gave it a loving half turn, and picked up the next.

  “What are you doing?” Marshall asked.

  “Performing a ceremony,” was the response.

  “I gathered that. What kind?”

  “This has become a place of unrest. Of evil. I am asking my guardian spirits for help.”

  “Why don’t you ask them to send down a couple of bazookas while you’re at it?” said Sully. “M20s, preferably.”

  There was a noise in the corridor outside. The speed with which everyone save Usuguk turned toward it drove home to Marshall just how much tension was in the air. The knob turned and the door pushed open. Sergeant Gonzalez and a private—the one named Phillips—stood outside. They came in slowly and closed the door behind them.

  “Well?” demanded Sully.

  Gonzalez walked stiff-legged into the center of the room. He un-houldered his M16 and let it drop to the floor. Phillips simply stood where he was, ashen-faced.

  “Is it dead?” asked Marshall.

  Gonzalez shook his head wearily.

  “And the trap?” asked Logan. “The electricity?”

  “The electricity made it mad,” replied Gonzalez.

  “Why don’t you tell us what happened?” Marshall asked quietly.

  The sergeant’s gaze drifted toward the floor. For nearly a minute he said nothing. Then at last he fetched a deep breath.

  “We set it up just like you said. Standing water on the floor, atop a metal plate. A curtain of bare wires hanging down from the ceiling, attached to a high-voltage source. In a corridor the beast would have to traverse if it wanted to reach the rest of the base.”

  “And?” Marshall prompted.

  “It flanked us somehow. Came up from the rear. I don’t know how it got around our position, but it did. We managed to fall back. It approached, hit the wires. Took the full electrical load.” He shook his head at the memory.

  “What kind of current?” asked Logan.

  “Six thousand volts.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Faraday. “You must have mis-wired it somehow. Nothing could take that kind of charge and survive.”

  “I didn’t mis-wire it. It went off like a goddamned explosion.”

  “And the creature?” asked Marshall.

  “Charred its pelt here and there. That’s about it.”

  A brief silence ensued.

  “How did you get back?” Sully asked.

  “Marcelin was inside the substation, controlling the current. He began to scream. The creature went for him. We managed to run past while…” Gonzalez didn’t bother finishing the sentence.

  Another, longer silence settled over the room. Marshall glanced around again at the deflated faces. Not until now—when faced with failure—did he realize just how much he’d been relying on Gonzalez and his team to succeed. He had put so much faith in the Tunit’s story, on electricity being the way to combat the creature, that this setback seemed almost unbearable. And yet there was something in what Gonzalez had just said that sounded a familiar ring. He searched his memory for a connection.

  And then, quite suddenly, he realized what it was.

  “Just a moment,” he said aloud.

  The others turned toward him.

  “Maybe it wasn’t the electricity that made it mad.”

  “What are you suggesting?” asked Logan.

  “This creature is a complete mystery to us, right? It’s a freak of nature, a genetic aberration. Its blood is completely abnormal. Conventional weaponry doesn’t seem to have much effect on it. So why should we presume to understand its motivations—or its emotions—or anything else about it?”

  “What’s your point?” asked Sully.

  “My point is this. All along we’ve been assuming this creature is only interested in murdering us all. What if it didn’t start out that way? Remember what Toussaint said? That it plays with you. Maybe that’s actually what it was doing: playing.”

  “Usuguk said the same thing,” added Logan. “About the other one. It played like a fox cub plays with a vole.”

  “Playing?” repeated Sully. “Was the thing playing when it first killed that production assistant, Peters?”

  “Maybe it didn’t know what it was doing. Or didn’t care. That can be part of playing, too—a cat doesn’t have any feelings for the pain of a mouse. The point is, maybe the creature wasn’t deliberately trying to kill. Not at first. When Peters’s body was placed in the infirmary, it came and took it back—like it would a plaything. And look at Toussaint—he was hung up like a toy. And there’s something else. It has killed, it has torn to pieces—but it hasn’t eaten any of its victims. Not a one.”

  “Something we did angered it,” said Logan.

  Marshall nodded. “And I think I know what it was. What did everyone who’s been killed so far have in common? They all screamed.”

  “Kind of a normal reaction when you’re faced with a blood-thirsty monster,” said Sully.

  “Marcelin screamed,�
�� Marshall went on. “Didn’t Sergeant Gonzalez here imply that’s why the creature went after it instead of him?”

  “And Ashleigh Davis,” Logan added. “The soldiers heard her scream, as well.”

  “Creel screamed, too,” Gonzalez said. “It went right over me to get at him.”

  Marshall turned toward Usuguk. “And you said that the first beast, the smaller one, didn’t become angry until it was played tapes of animals in distress. Rabbits screaming. But Toussaint didn’t scream. We heard him on the camera’s audio track. He just murmured under his breath: no, no, no.”

  “This is nothing but arrant speculation,” said Sully.

  “It’s not speculation when every action conforms to a pattern,” replied Logan.

  “For all we know, the screams simply caught its attention,” Sully went on.

  “Clearly all its senses are exquisitely acute,” said Marshall. “It wouldn’t need sound to catch its attention.”

  The room went silent. All eyes, Marshall saw, were on him. Even Usuguk had put down his totem and was regarding him intently.

  “I think sound is painful to this creature, perhaps exquisitely so,” Marshall said. “Specifically, sounds of a certain frequency and amplitude—such as a scream. Look at its ears, how closely they resemble a bat’s. Sound might have a completely different effect on it than it has on us. I think the creature perceives a scream as a threat, an act of aggression…and acts accordingly.”

  “And after it’s been screamed at enough,” Logan added, “it assumes we are hostile—and grows angry.”

  Marshall nodded. “Instead of killing us as a side effect of play, it begins to kill in earnest. For self-protection.”

  “This is too much,” said Sully. “What do you suggest—that we kill it with sound?”

  “I suggest that we look into the possibility, yes,” Marshall said. “At least, hurt it enough to drive it away.”

  “Even if we could, just how would we do that?” Sully went on. “This is a radar installation. Radar uses electromagnetic waves, not sound waves.”