The Spawning (21 page)

Gwen played hard at being a nympho and she did it, Coyle figured, to have the exact opposite reaction that you would think: to scare away men. It could be a hard life for an attractive woman at the stations, so she resolved this by coming on too strong and scaring men away. Oh, it got her into trouble from time to time and especially when the men were drunk and discovered she was just a tease, but, surprisingly, it worked more often than not. Simple child psychology.

And Horn?

Horn was not so easy to explain.

Other than the fact that he was a damn good mechanic, little could be said. He did not trust people. He was nihilistic by nature, cynical, angry. Coyle knew him about as good as anyone, had spent more than a few winters and summers with him. The thing about Horn you wanted to remember was that he fit in no box.

One summer at McMurdo, Horn openly confessed that he had lost his faith. So, since it was gone, he decided he needed to create his own religion. If some half-assed science fiction writer like L. Ron Hubbard could make up something as inherently ridiculous as Scientology, Horn claimed, then why couldn't he start his own religion, too? He figured that most religious people were religious because down deep they were atheists trying to overcompensate for their pessimistic world-views. So it only stood to reason that somebody with absolutely no faith should start a religion of his or her own.

Horn thought long and hard about it and came up with something called Utilitology.

In Utilitology, only inanimate office utilities such as typewriters, file cabinets, and fax machines could be worshipped. And this only within the cubicles of office parks. His motto was: WHEN ALL ELSE HAS FAILED—UTILITOLOGY. Of course, office parks and cubicles were difficult to come by in Antarctica, so he had to broaden the scope of his new religion. That's when he decided that Richard Byrd, the noted Antarctic explorer, was to be the patron saint of Utilitology and that somewhere beneath the vast wastes of the South Pole there was a relict population of Penguini, the Chosen Ones, who were brought about by Ernie Shackleton's men mating with Emperor Penguins.

That's how nuts Horn was.

Last year at Clime, Coyle and Horn had decided to write a novel together called
Asshole of the Civilized World: A Journal of Polar Sodomy.
It concerned a famous female American Indian Antarctic explorer called Pokatwatalot who was abducted by a violent band of inbred criminal penguins, viciously raped and forced into prostitution in polar brothels. After a series of unpleasant interludes amongst the smarmy penguin underworld, she was rescued by a dashing—and well-hung—NSF administrator named Hard Tack.

All of which, just goes to show what bored and bitter minds will resort to and just how far around the bend Horn's thinking was.

“That was a good supper you made last night, Nicky. I can always tell when you cook compared to Ida or The Beav.”

“Nicky is famous for his beef stroganoff,” Gwen said.

Coyle laughed. “That's right. And don't you forget it.”

Gwen pushed up against him. “Mama likes beef, Nicky, especially yours.” She winked at him. “Only yours.”

He gave her knee a squeeze and she grabbed his hand and moved it up to her thigh.

“Enough already,” Horn said. “Jesus Christ, this is serious business. Those people might be dead.”

“That's right,” Flagg said from the back. “Let's act like adults here, shall we?”

“You worry too much, Doc,” Gwen said.

“I think we all have a damn good reason to worry.”

Gwen shook her head. “It's not my way. Too much shit to worry about in life without worrying about things that haven't even come to pass.”

Coyle smiled. Gwen's practicality was priceless.

They had been traveling well over an hour by that point. It was about a ninety minute drive to NOAA Polaris. It was a dangerous jaunt. Something went wrong and so much for one mechanic, one UT, one doctor, and one cook . . . and part-time camp therapist. The four of them were bundled in their ECWs, but they'd unzipped their parkas because with the heater blasting it was a balmy 68 degrees in the cab. But all it took was a simple breakdown to turn a little drive into a fight for survival. It was thirty below outside and the wind was pushing it down to fifty. Exposed in that kind of weather, you wouldn't make it more than a few hours at best, even with a heated polar jumpsuit on.

“We should be getting close,” Flagg said.

In the Spryte's headlights, there was just an endless expanse of snow compacted by the ages, ancient blue ice showing through from time to time.

Horn picked up the radio mic, cleared his throat. “Polaris-One, Polaris-One, this is Spryte Two,” he said, using the call name/number of the Spryte. It was “Two” simply because there were two Sprytes at Clime, three Sno-Cats etc. “Polaris . . . do you copy? This is Spryte Two from Polar Clime en route to your destination. We have an ETA of ten minutes. Do you copy that?”

There was nothing but droning static over the speaker.

Horn sighed. “Polaris-One, this is Spryte Two. Do you copy? Repeat: Do you copy, Polaris?”

More static.

Nobody paid much attention.

Horn just shook his head. “Technology, the great white god itself has failed once again.”

“Oh, give it to me,” Gwen said, but she didn't touch the mic.

“Here,” Horn said, offering it to her.

“I never said I wanted the microphone.” She winked at Coyle. “I just said,
give it to me.”

Coyle laughed again. “Gwen, Gwen, Gwen. You really have to knock that shit off, girl. You carry on like that and you're gonna get all the wrong attention. You'll end up raped and stuffed in a snowdrift.”

“Promises, promises.” She snatched the mic from Horn. “Polaris-One? This is Spryte Two en route from Polar Clime. Do you read me? Do you read me?” She shook the mic. “We're on our way. We got some hot stuff on the menu. Left-over beef stroganoff or a blowjob, whichever you want first.”

Coyle took the mic from her. “Gwen, Jesus Christ. Hopper'll have a fit if he heard that.” He checked the radio. It seemed to be working. The GPS told him they were only minutes away. If it had been light out, they could have seen it. “Polaris-One? Polaris-One? Come on, boys, rise and shine. This is Spryte Two out of Polar Clime. Do you copy? Do you copy?”

More static. Dead air and nothing but dead air.

Nobody was surprised, of course. There had been dead air and nothing but dead air from NOAA Polaris in days. There had been a hope . . . albeit a small one . . . that maybe they were having some sort of transmission problems and that as the Spryte got within range, contact would be established.

No such luck.

Outside the cab, the bouncing lights of the Spryte showed them the flat white desolation of the polar plateau blown by surface drift and icy crystals, an occasional howling snow devil. Other than an occasional field of wind-sculpted sastrugi that looked like a rippling, frozen ocean, the landscape was an immense monotonous expanse of bleak nothingness.

“We should see it within five minutes,” Horn said.

Radio communications had a way of going toes up on the Ice . . . yet, Coyle was beginning to get a light fluttery feeling in his stomach. The sort of feeling you got in your guts as your bucket seat on the double Ferris wheel swung up and around the high arc and you had that awful sensation of weightlessness and relentless descent. Gwen had pressed up closer to him. In the dimness of the cab, her eyes looked very bright and wet.

She was no longer making jokes.

Humor, hope, and good cheer had no place out here.

The cabin altimeter said they were some 11,000 feet above sea level now which meant they were at the highest point of the Atlantis Dome and very close to Polaris Lab.

“There,” Gwen said. “There it is.”

Everyone studied what the headlights showed them: the gleaming ice; the flagged perimeters of remote pathways; the blowing snow and spinning ice crystals; the darkness as the beams slit it open, the slinking shadows that looked like they moved and pulled back of their own accord.

The wind was blowing harder now, gusting up to thirty knots and throwing snow at the Spryte with a vengeance. It rocked on its caterpillar treads as the conflicting gales tore at it, trying to peel it free of the ice. This was the result of the awesome katabatic winds which came rolling down from the highlands of the Transantarctics, gathering speed and density from downsloping gravitational forces and became a force to be reckoned with out on the plateau itself.

“There she blows,” Horn said under his breath.

He turned on the spotlights atop the cab and night turned to day . . . or nearly.

The ice road had ended, opening up into a wide clearing and there was NOAA Field Lab Polaris: a self-contained prefab polar habitat that looked like a long orange box. It had been brought out here during the summer by a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter in one piece and then bolted to the ice. Other than an attendant generator shed and a few modular plastic storage shacks, there was nothing else.

The habitat was dark.

“Looks pretty quiet out there,” Gwen said and there was something just under her words like a building panic.

Horn just sat there, his face unreadable as always. “Maybe they went for a walk.”

“What do you think, Nicky?”

He studied the snow-drifted habitat with a wary eye, feeling a sense of desolation that he did not like. “If they went for a walk,” he said, “I just hope it's not the same kind of walk everyone at Mount Hobb took that night.”

POLAR CLIME STATION

S
LIM WAS IN A box and there was no key.

He was trapped in the bowels of Antarctica and it really didn't matter if he was going crazy, because there was absolutely no way out. If he went raving they'd just shoot him with sedatives and restrain him until spring Winfly. That was it. He was here and April was back home in Illinois with Rachel and they both needed him and there was nothing he could do about it.

He felt useless.

He felt like a failure as a man. As a husband and a father.

He jumped up off his bed and kicked the wall. “FUCKING BULLSHIT, MAN! THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!”

He paced back and forth, thinking and trying not to think, his mind filled with horrors that were, that might be, that were yet to come. The world was losing its collective mind and his family was caught up in it and all he could do was wait and wait and wait. Take sleeping pills and have crazy dreams, fight off the goddamn headaches that came and went with unsettling regularity, and think about the shit that Locke had told him. Dead cities and aliens. Megaliths that were machines or networks. The human race being some kind of fucking crop the aliens had seeded and were now preparing to harvest.

Falling to his knees on the cold floor, he thought,
I don't believe in that shit. I don't care what kind of dreams I'm having or what kind April and Rachel are having . . . I don't believe in that shit!

And, dear God, if only he really didn't.

But he did.

The dreams, what was going on down here and back in the world . . . it was all part of something big. Something immense. Something so black and ugly and vile that it made him physically ill to contemplate its awful ramifications.

He climbed to his feet and kicked his little desk, scattered the papers that fell off and dropped on top of them, shredding them and balling them up. Drawings and half-ass attempts at poetry that had been written to explain what was in his mind, that evil influence he'd felt ever since he saw that thing under the tarp.

He hated all of it.

He kept tearing up the papers until he found his battered notebook. The one he wrote his song lyrics in. Because that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to write songs and do album cover design and body art. But those were pipedreams and he had a wife and a kid and, goddammit, he had to pay the bills. That's why he had come down to Antarctica in the first place.

Kneeling there, Slim wept as he paged through his notebook and saw all the lyrics he'd scribbled there back when the world was good and not some twisted nightmare. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he saw the lyrics of a song he'd written with Locke not two weeks ago. He tore that page out and tossed it. It was like something from another life when he actually knew how to have a good time. It seemed like ages ago. Like something he'd read in a book or saw on TV: plastic, synthetic, unreal.

Life was not like that anymore.

It was a dark matter now written by a dark hand on yellowed vellum that was crumbling away with the dominion of the ages. And knowing this, Slim put his face in his hands and cried. Cried tears of blood for his soul was forever wounded and gored, slit open and laid bare by the cruel knife of antiquity.

And a voice in his head that was stark and flat told him:
Even your gods and your religion and the very architecture of your civilization and society were but seeds planted by the Old Ones. Your race never truly had free will or choice, just a vague semblance of the same. You were puppets from the moment your ancestors crawled from the slime of cosmic generation. Every step plotted, every development foreseen. Biologically, mentally, and psychically . . . it was all directed and controlled to bring the race to where it stands now . . . on the very threshold of the ages, where its true nature and true purpose will be revealed.

It's all been a terrible lie.

You never really existed.

You were appendages of something ancient and dominating that has returned now to take possession of what was rightly theirs in the first place.

That voice was not his own, yet it was. The voice of the very race itself that was locked up in every man, woman, and child on the planet. It was incapable of lying. It saw the truth and reported it thusly.

Slim began to cry harder.