Hive. Part 1

Hive.

Tim Curran.

This is for Elaine Lamkin.

PART ONE.

OUT OF THE ICE.

"... there was one part of the ancient land... which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil."

- H.P. Lovecraft.

1.

Antarctica was a graveyard, of course.

A subzero cemetery of high frozen monoliths and leaning tombstones of exposed, ancient rock. A burial ground of sunless wastes and biting cold, snow plains and ragged mountains. Gale-force blizzards sucked the warmth from a man and tucked him down deep in frozen tombs and covered his tracks with shrieking windstorms of ice crystals that blew just as fine and white as crematory ash. Like the snow and the cold and the enveloping darkness of winter, the winds were a constant. Night after night, they screamed and wailed with the voices of lost souls. A communal death-rattle of all those interred in ma.s.s graves of coveting blue ice and sculpted into leering, frosted death angels.

Antarctica was dead and had been for millions of years.

A wasteland, some said, where G.o.d had buried those things he no longer wished to look upon. Nightmares and abominations of flesh and spirit. And if that were true, then whatever was entombed beneath the permafrost, locked-down cold and sightless in that eternal deep-freeze, was never meant to be exhumed.

2.

Nothing stays buried forever at the Pole.

It was one of those sayings they tossed around down there. Sometimes you weren't sure what it meant and other times you weren't sure you wanted to. But it was true, nonetheless: nothing stays buried forever at the South Pole. The glaciers are in constant motion, grinding and tearing at the primordial bedrock far below, and what they don't dig up, sooner or later the blizzard winds will blow clean like bones in the desert. So if Antarctica was a graveyard then, it was one in a process of perpetual resurrection, vomiting out those awful bits of its past it could no longer hold down in its belly.

This is how Hayes saw it on his darker days at Kharkhov Station when his poetic turn of mind began devouring itself one bite at a time. But he knew it to be true. He just tried not to think about it, was all.

"I can see 'em now," Lind said, his face pressed up to the frosted gla.s.s of Targa House, the place where all the personnel of the station ate, slept, and lived. "It's Gates, all right, coming in with the SnoCat. Must be bringing those mummies in from the high ridges."

Hayes set down his cup of coffee, scratched his beard, and went up to the window. What he saw out there was winter at the South Geomagnetic Pole . . . sheets of snow whipping and swirling and engulfing. The steeple of the drilling tower, the dome of the meteorology station, the power Quonset, half dozen other structures limned by electric lights and shrouded beneath blankets of white.

Kharkhov Station sat near-center of East Antarctica on the Polar Plateau, some 3500 meters above sea level in what had once been the Soviet sector of the continent. A desolate, G.o.dless place that was completely cut off from the world from March until October when spring finally returned. During the long, dark winter, only a small crew of contractors and technicians remained, the others got out before the planes stopped coming and winter set its teeth into that ancient continent.

A burial ground.

That's what it was.

The wind howled and the huts shook and day by day that immense bleak nothingness chewed a hole through your soul and blew through your numbed mind like an October gust through a deserted house. It was the third week of winter and you knew the sun would not rise and break that womb of blackness for another three months. Three long, bitter months that would eat at your belly and your brain, freezing something up inside you that wouldn't thaw until you saw civilization again in the spring. And until then, you waited and you listened and you were never really sure what for.

A graveyard indeed, Hayes thought.

The visibility returned for a few fleeting moments and he could see the lights of the SnoCat bobbing through the dimness. Yeah, it was Gates, all right. Gates and his cargo of goodies that had the entire station on edge. He had radioed in three days before from the tent camp about what he had found up there, what he was cutting from the ice.

And now just about everyone was beside themselves with excitement, just waiting for Gates' return like he was Jesus or Santa Claus.

But it was infectious.

Hayes had been seeing it for days now, that look of raw exhilaration and wonder on those usually dour, bored faces. The faces of children who were on the verge of some great discovery . . . wonder, awe, and something just beneath it akin to superst.i.tious terror. Because it didn't take too much to get the imagination rolling in that awful place and particularly when Gates promised he'd be rolling in with mummies from a pre-human civilization.

Jesus, the very idea was overwhelming.

"He's bringing the 'Cat over to Six," Lind said, fists clenched at his sides, something in his throat bobbing up and down. "s.h.i.+t, Hayes, we're gonna be in the history books over this one. I was talking to Cutchen and Cutchen was saying that, come spring when they pull our a.s.ses out of here, we're all going to be famous, you know? Famous for discovering those mummies . . . he said this discovery will shake the world to its knees."

Hayes could just imagine Cutchen saying something like that. Cutchen's only pastimes seemed to be sarcasm and toying with lesser minds.

"Cutchen's full of s.h.i.+t," Hayes said.

"I thought you two were friends?"

"We are. That's why I know he's full of s.h.i.+t."

"Sure, but he's right about us being famous."

"Christ, Lind . . . listen to yourself. Gates is going to be famous. He's the man who found all that stuff up there. And maybe a couple of the other eggheads like Holm and Bryer who helped him . . . but you? Or me? h.e.l.l no, we're just contractors, were support personnel."

But Lind just shook his head. "No, what they found up there . . . we're part of it."

"Jesus Christ, Lind, you're a plumber. When the Discovery Channel or National Geographic start making their doc.u.mentaries, they're not going to want to know how you bravely handled the Station's s.h.i.+t or heat-taped two-hundred feet of p.i.s.s-pipe. They'll be talking to the scientists, the techs, even that NSF hard-on LaHune. But not us. They'll tell you to keep the water running and me to run a couple extra two-twenty lines for all their equipment."

Of course, it was all lost on Lind.

He was so excited by it all he could barely contain himself. He was like a little kid waiting for trick-or-treating to start, tense and shaking, having a h.e.l.l of a time just keeping his feet on the floor and not jumping for joy. And it was pretty funny to see, Hayes had to admit that. You took a guy like Lind - barely 5'5, just as round as a medicine ball and not much lighter, bad teeth, scraggly beard - and watched him hopping around like he was waiting for the candy store to open, it was absolutely priceless.

d.a.m.n, where was the camcorder when you needed it?

If Gates' mummies had been female, they would've wanted to keep their legs crossed in Lind's presence because he was that excited and that in love. Course, those mummies weren't male or female from what Gates said over the set. In fact, he was having a h.e.l.l of a time deciding whether they were animal or vegetable.

Lind said, "They're unloading the sled now . . . must be bringing those mummies into the hut." He shook his head. "And here I thought this winter was going to be a waste of time. How old he say those mummies were?"

"He's guessing two- to three-hundred million years. Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth."

Lind clucked his tongue. "Imagine that. I didn't even know there were mummies back then."

Hayes just looked at him, shook his head. It was a good thing Lind was some kind of plumber, because when you came down to it, he wasn't much smarter that most dingleb.a.l.l.s hanging off a camel's a.s.s. A real natural with pipes and venting, but anything else? Forget it.

As Hayes watched, Lind began pulling on his fleece jacket and thermal pants, parka, boots, and wool mittens. "Well aren't you coming, Hayes?"

But Hayes just shook his head. Already he could see people spilling out of shacks and buildings, some of them still pulling on their ECW's even though the wind was shrieking and it was pus.h.i.+ng seventy below out there.

"I'll wait until the groupies thin," he told Lind.

But Lind was already going out the door, the frigid breath of Antarctica blowing in until the heaters swallowed it.

Hayes sat down, lit a cigarette and sipped coffee, staring at the game of solitaire on his laptop. Yeah, it was going to be a long G.o.dd.a.m.n winter. The thought of that set on him wrong for reasons even he wasn't sure of, made him feel like he was bleeding inside.

Outside the compound, the wind rose up, showing its teeth.

3.

You had to love Lind, Hayes thought later as he got a look at the mummies over in Hut #6. He was really something, positively good to the last drop. Hayes was standing there with him and two other contractors that knew about as much about evolutionary biology as they did about menstrual cramps . . . and Lind? Oh, he was just going on and on while Gates and Bryer and Holm took notes and photographs, made measurements and sc.r.a.ped ice from one of the mummies.

"Yeah, that's one ugly, p.r.i.c.k, Professor," Lind was saying, hovering around them, taking up their light while they continually, and politely, told him to step back. "d.a.m.n, look at that thing . . . enough to give you the cold sweats. I bet I have nightmares until spring just looking at it. But, you know, more I look at it, more I'm thinking that what you got there is one of those animals without a spine, you know, an un-vertebrate like a starfish or a jellyfish. Something like that."

"You mean invertebrate," Bryer, the paleoclimatologist corrected him.

"Isn't that what I said?"

Bryer chuckled, as did a few of the others.

Outside, the wind pelted the walls with snow just as fine as blown sand. And inside, the air was greasy, warm, close. A funny, acrid stink beginning to make itself known as the thing continued to melt.

"We really made a find here, eh, Professor?" Lind said to Gates.

He looked up over his spectacles, a pencil hanging from his lips. "Yes, we certainly did. The find of the ages, Lind. What we have here is entirely new to science. I'm guessing its neither animal nor plant, but a sort of chimera."

"Yeah, that's what I was thinking," Lind said. "Boy, this is gonna make us famous."

Hayes laughed low in his throat. "Sure, I can already see your picture on the cover of Newsweek and Scientific American. There's a picture of Professor Gates, too, but it's kind of small, stuck down in the corner."

There were a few laughs over that.

Lind scowled. "You don't have to be a smarta.s.s, Hayes. Jesus Christ."

But Hayes figured he did. Here these guys were trying to figure out what this was all about while Lind circled them on his unicycle, pumping his red horn and shaking a rubber chicken at them.

So, yes, he had to be a smarta.s.s.

Same way Lind had to talk . . . even about things he knew nothing of. These were traits they both practiced month by dark month during the long, grim South Pole winters. But in the hut . . . with that defrosting mummy laid out like something spilled from a freakshow jar . . . well, maybe they were doing it because they had to do something. Had to say something. Make some noise, anything to disrupt the malign sound of that nightmare melting, dripping and dripping like blood from a slit throat. Hayes couldn't stand it . . . it made his scalp feel like it wanted to crawl off the back of his head.

And he kept thinking: What the h.e.l.l's with you? It's a G.o.dd.a.m.n fossil, it can't do nothing but wait.

Wait. Yeah, maybe that wasn't what he'd meant to think, but had thought it all the same. And the more you stared at that G.o.dd.a.m.n thing, more you started thinking it wasn't a fossil at all, just something ancient . . . waiting.

Christ, of all crazy things to be thinking.

The wind shook the hut and that was enough for the other two onlookers - a couple contractors named Rutkowski and St. Ours. They went out the door like something was biting their a.s.ses. And maybe something was.

"I'm starting to get the feeling that our friends here don't like what you've found," Holm said, running a hand through his white hair. "I think it's giving them the creeps."

Gates laughed thinly. "Is our pet here bothering you, Hayes?"

"h.e.l.l, no, I like it, big ugly sonofab.i.t.c.h," he said. "Got all I can do not to hug it and get it alone somewhere."

They all started laughing at that. But it didn't last long. Not very long at all. Like laughter in a mortuary, good cheer just did not belong in this place. Not now. Not with what was berthed in there.

Hayes did not envy Gates and his people.

Sure, they were scientists. Gates was a paleobiologist and Holm was a geologist, but the very idea of touching that monstrosity in the melting ice, well, it made something in his stomach roll over and then roll over again. He was trying desperately to catalog what it was he was feeling, but it was just beyond him. All he could say for sure is that that creature made his guts roll up like a dirty carpet, made something inside him run both hot and cold. Whatever that thing was, it revolted him on some unknown inner level and he just couldn't get a handle on it.

It was dead.

That's what Gates said, but looking at it, Christ and the saints, you really had to wonder. For the blue ice was getting very clear now and it was like looking through thick gla.s.s. It distorted things, but nowhere near enough for Hayes' liking.

The mummy was big. Probably an easy seven feet from end to end, shaped like some great fleshy barrel that tapered at each end and was set with high vertical ridges that ran up and down its length. Its skin was an oily gunmetal gray like that of a shark, set with tiny fissures and minute scars. Midline, there was a pair of appendages that branched out like tree limbs and then branched out again into fine tapering tendrils. At the bottom of the torso, there were five muscular tentacles, each an easy four feet in length. They looked oddly like the trunks of elephants . . . though not wrinkled, but smooth and firm and powerful. They ended in flat triangular spades that might have been called feet on another world.

And the ice kept melting and the water kept dripping and that weird rotten fish-stink began to come off the thing.

"What's that there?" Lind said. "That . . . that a head?"

"Yes," Gates said. "It would seem to meet the criteria."

Maybe for a biologist, but not for Hayes or Lind. They stood around like mourners, just wanting to throw dirt over it. At the top of the thing's torso was a flabby, blunt neck that almost looked like a wrinkled-up scarf or foreskin. On top of it was something like a great five-pointed starfish, dirty yellow in color. The radial arms of the star were made of tapering, saggy tubes and at the end of each, a bulbous red eye.

Hayes thought that it looked like the creature had been frozen very quickly, flash-frozen like one of those mammoths up in Siberia you read about. Because it looked . . . well, almost startled like it had been caught by surprise. At least that's what he had been thinking, but the more the ice melted and the more of that head and those five leering red eyes he saw, the more he was thinking it looked p.i.s.sed-off, arrogant, superior, something. And whatever that look was, it sure as h.e.l.l was not friendly.

You wouldn't want to meet this fellah on a good day, Hayes thought, let alone with that evil look about it.

And thinking that, he just couldn't imagine how something like it could have walked. For it was debased and degenerate, the sort of thing made to crawl, not walk upright like a man. But according to what Gates told Bryer, it stood and walked, all right.