Hive (36 page)

“Do you think it's possible?”

“Sure, Doc, just not probable. For all we know, that crazy fuck is dogging us, staying behind us all the time or ahead of us, just out of sight. We could play tag like this for weeks.”

Sharkey brushed a strand of red hair from her forehead. “Is he here, Jimmy? Can you feel him?”

Hayes stood there, leaning up against the Cat dozer and pulling from his cigarette. He thought over her question and when he answered it was not his mind talking, but his heart. “Yeah, he's here. I can feel that bastard out there . . . “

The fuel depo.

If there was any place on the station you could hide, it was here. It was basically a reinforced sheet metal tunnel with tanks of fuel to each side, predominately diesel which ran most of the vehicles and the generators which fired the boilers and kept the lights lit and the systems working and the people warm and fed and the wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round. Even though it was lit by a string of lights, it was shadowy and dank, stinking of oil and diesel fuel.

Carefully then, the Remington pump in his hands, Hayes led the way down the steel catwalk that ran the length of the building. Their footsteps echoed off the steel drums and their hearts pounded, that ominous feeling of expectancy was almost physically sickening. It would have been so easy to hide behind one of the giant drums, springing out and taking them by surprise. But they walked the entire length, peered behind every drum and there was nothing. They walked back towards the doorway.

Hayes suddenly froze.

“What?”
Sharkey whispered, sounding like a petrified little girl.

“Well,” Hayes said in a blatantly loud voice. “He ain't here.” Then he dragged her over near the doorway. “I know where he is. He's down under our feet. He's hiding in the conduit that runs from here to the garage.”

Sharkey did not argue with him.

She could see that almost electric look of certainty in his eyes and knew it was fed not by a hunch, but by a deeper knowledge that was inescapably right. If Hayes said he was down there, then LaHune was down there, all right. Hiding like a rat snake in a rabbit hole. And somebody was going to have to flush him out.

He racked the pump on the Remington and put it in Sharkey's hands. “Run over to the garage. Just behind the dozer there's an access panel, a grating set into the floor. He'll try and come up through it when I flush him out. When he comes up . . . blast him. You've got three rounds in there.”

“And you?”

Hayes took her ice-axe. He stepped outside with her. “Go, Elaine. Run over there. I won't go down until I see that you made it.”

She shook her head, sighed, then ran off into the night, her bunny boots crunching through the crust of snow. The garage was about a hundred feet away. He saw her pause near the back door to it, standing under the light and waving. He waved back.

As quiet as could be, Hayes tip-toed back in . . . if you could realistically tip-toe in those big, cumbersome boots. But he did it quietly. As quietly as he could. By the time he got to the grating, his heart was hammering so hard his fingertips were throbbing. He crouched near the grating.

Elaine should be in place now, let's do the dirty deed and get this done with.

There was no way to be quiet lifting off the metal grating, so he didn't bother. He flipped it off there, letting it clang onto the catwalk. He made a big show of it, talking out loud like he was carrying on a conversation with someone so that LaHune would think he wasn't coming down alone.

Then he dropped down into the conduit.

It was like an escape tunnel from some old war movie, except it was cut through the ice and squared-off perfectly. You could stand upright in there if you were an elf or a pixie, but other than that you had to stoop. Hayes tucked his flashlight into his parka and popped an emergency flare. It threw just as much light if not more and unlike a flashlight, somebody came at you, you could always jam the burning end into their face.

Okay.

Hayes started creeping his way down the length of the conduit.

Fuel lines ran overhead and to either side. The flare was hissing and the smoke was gagging, but bright. Great, slinking shadows mocked his movements. He could hear the flare hissing and just about everything else . . . ice cracking, water dripping as the flare heated the ice overhead, his bones growing, his eyes watering. Yeah, he could hear just about everything, but what might be lurking just ahead of him. His gloved hand was gripping the ice-axe so tightly, he thought he might snap the metal shaft.

C'mon, you asshole, show yourself, daddy wants to cut your fucking head open.

But LaHune did not show himself and Hayes was already half way down the conduit. He was starting to get nervous. Real nervous that LaHune had led him on a merry chase, trapping him down here, getting him out of the way so he could get Sharkey. Yet . . . he still had that feeling itching at the back of his brain that LaHune was down here. Somewhere.

And then, two thirds of the way down, it came to him in a flash.

Was down here, you idiot. Past tense. Now he's up in the garage and -

He heard the grating clang open and somebody scramble up and out. Then he heard the shotgun go off. Just once. Sharkey screamed and there rose an instantaneous shrill piping of feral rage and pain. There was a crash and somebody cried out. Hayes started moving as fast as he could, just seconds behind LaHune . . . or the thing he now was. The conduit began to tremble as that deep, thrumming vibration started, rattling down chunks of ice on Hayes.

And then there was the grating.

It was shut, but he hit it like a rocket, swinging it up and open and the first thing he saw as he rolled across the snowy floor was blood. It was splattered everywhere in translucent whorls that looked purple under those sodium lights. Hayes thought madly that it looked like somebody had been shaking a sprinkler can of red ink around in there.

Then he saw Elaine.

She was spread-eagled near the Spryte, face down. The shotgun was a few feet from her and you could smell the smoke and cordite from the blast. Hayes started going to her, but then felt motion behind him and then off to the side.

LaHune.

He hopped off one of the truck hoods and landed very gracefully as if he were held aloft by invisible wings. He kept his knees bent and his hands open like claws against his breast. He was imitating the Old Ones, because he was them now. Anything human in him had been squeezed out now. He was just a sponge that was saturated with their minds and powered by the psychic energies of those dead men in Targa House.

He looked hideous.

Being the avatar, the disease cell, of the aliens had not only warped him psychologically, but physically. His head looked unnaturally huge, great patches of hair missing from it. His balding cranium was bulging from what was inside, set with a blue tracery of veins that seemed to throb and wiggle . . . as if there were fat indigo worms just beneath his skin. His face was convoluted and terribly wrinkled, mummified, hollow-cheeked, gray as corpse-flesh. His lips had withered back and his gums were jutting and mottled, the teeth pushed out like fangs.

Hayes brought up the ice-axe, his guts tangled in knots.

LaHune just stood there, his eyes just as red as spilled blood. He glared at Hayes with an almost insane hatred, a blind and consuming wrath. And that was all bad enough. Bad enough to make Hayes take one stumbling step backwards, but what was worse was that Sharkey had not missed.

She had hit LaHune with the twelve-gauge.

It was a glancing shot that had blasted away most of the side of his head, ear included. The flesh around that grisly crater was blackened and burnt from contact burns and inside that jagged chasm of shattered skull, you could see LaHune's brain . . . how it was swollen and fleshy pink, the convolutions rising like bread dough, arteries as thick and loathsome as red pond leeches clutching the gray matter like fingers.

He could not be alive.

And maybe he wasn't. But the parasites living in his head most certainly were.

“Stay back, LaHune,” Hayes said, inching his way over to that shotgun.

The administrator was possessed . . . biologically and spiritually. He was not a man any longer. He was like some living monolith, a flesh and blood tombstone erected to the dark memory of those noxious things. They were in him like maggots in rancid meat and no physiology could withstand such an invasion without mutating, becoming a horror itself.

“Just stay back, LaHune, or I swear to God I'll split your fucking head open and piss on what runs out.”

But could he? Could he really swing the ice-axe at that hulking alien malignance? Yes, he knew he could. Same as he could step on a juicy spider bloated on blood. Yet, the idea of that ice-axe sinking into that brain and it popping like a water blister or a fleshy balloon and spraying him with filth, it was almost more than he could bear to take.

LaHune came forward in a perverse hopping motion.

He cocked that bulbous head to the side and pink intercranial fluid ran from his gaping wound. His lips were distended and puckered like he wanted a goodnight kiss. The skin there was wrinkled like that of an eighty year-old woman. He made a hollow whistling sound that steadily rose up to that keening, lunatic piping that was loud and piercing and beyond the volume of human lungs to produce.

Hayes felt those blazing red eyes spear into him, but he was already in motion. Be the time LaHune's possessed mind knocked him flat the ice-axe was already in motion. It caught him right between the eyes, the blade splitting his face open lengthwise. Something like blood came squirting out, but this was bluish-green like the juice of a crushed grasshopper and muddy.

Still, LaHune did not die.

He let out a wailing, tormented squealing and fell back and at that very moment the windshields of every vehicle in the garage shattered. A great wind swept through there, knocking Hayes down and then rolling him away. Then LaHune was coming at him, those eyes filled with arcing electricity . . . bleeding red tears and filled with an unearthly fury.

Hayes knew he was done.

This was how cheaters died, this is how revolutionaries were executed by those violating, demented alien minds. Already they were entering his head and crushing his will and sending white-hot jolts of pain through his nerve endings.

But in their arrogance, they forgot Sharkey.

And they didn't remember her until she sat up with the shotgun in her hands. LaHune's huge, grotesque head pivoted on his neck, those eyes smoldered crimson, and those fissured lips came together in a shrill, piping scream of intense malevolence.

Then the shotgun went off, splashing that lewd face from the bone beneath and tossing LaHune up against the dozer. The last round of buckshot nearly tore him in half. And then Hayes was on that writhing, repulsive thing, swinging the ice-axe down on it again and again, sectioning it like a worm. Those vibrations rose up, followed by the crackling of energy, but it was pathetic and weak and soon faded. Yet, he kept bringing the axe down, feeling those invidious minds still trying to worm into his own. The LaHune-thing crawled and inched and slithered, pissing that blue-green mud. It howled and twisted with boneless gyrations.

Hayes jumped up into the Cat dozer and it roared to life.

The LaHune-thing screeching and bleeding and hissing and steaming, the dozer rolled over it, those caterpillar tracks grinding up what was left like bad meat. When it stopped moving, Hayes scraped up what was left with the dozer's blade and pushed it out the door.

And that's when those minds really died.

For they vented themselves with a final cacophonous tornado wind that shattered the windows in the garage and blew all the doors off.

But that was it.

The infection had been stopped.

Hayes stumbled out of the cab and Sharkey was there waiting for him. Leaning against each other, they walked back through the blowing polar night to Targa House.

T
he coming days were busy ones as were the coming weeks.

There were things that had to be done and there was no one but them to do it, so they screwed up their courage and clenched their teeth and got their peckers out of their pants, and did what had to be done.

Hayes bulldozed down the drill tower and reduced all that multi-million dollar equipment to twisted metal and shattered plastic and wiring that the wind and ice claimed immediately. He took down Hut #6 completely and then pushed the frozen mummies into an ice trench. Then he dumped about two-hundred gallons of diesel fuel in there and had a little wienie roast. The Old Ones were reduced to burned out husks. To finish the job, Hayes pushed a two ton slab of concrete in after them which crushed their remains to cinders. Then he pushed snow over the hole and within a day or two, the winter had done its job and you could not see where the grave was.

Sharkey was no less busy.

She wrote out a detailed report of all they had seen and all they had witnessed. Hayes and she spent long nights debating about what they should tell the NSF and what they shouldn't tell them. They decided on a severely truncated version of events. In the report, they would say that LaHune had sent them up to Gates' encampment after he had not been heard from for days. That was essentially true. They would leave out their journey below, saying that the camp was already destroyed when they got there. And that when they returned from the camp, everyone in the station was dead. Again, essentially true. This was the sort of story that would cause the NSF some sleepless nights, but in the long run, they could live with it.

Then came the dirty work.

They photographed the bodies in the community room for evidence and then carried them out into the snow, dragging them off one by one with a snowmobile to one of the storage sheds.

After that, they sent their report and the NSF began besieging them with emails and radio calls. They got more of the same from bigwigs at McMurdo and the Amundsen-Scott Station. But there was nothing to be done. An investigation would begin in the spring.