The Spawning (24 page)

“Look,” he told Gwen, his light on it. “Slime. Like in the lab.”

He wanted to tell himself that maybe this had been some kind of case for scientific equipment, but deep inside he knew better. Whatever had laid waste to the camp had come in this container. Something vicious. Something unbelievably deadly. And something that oozed copious amounts of slime.

They followed the rope maybe another twenty feet in the storm and there it ended, frayed and red.

“What the hell's going on, Nicky?” Gwen said, almost frantic with the need for an explanation.

So he told her quickly what he thought. “I know it sounds crazy, but if you've got something better, I'm listening.”

The drift wind lightened for a moment and with their lights they could see things just ahead mounded in snow. They went over there, knowing they were taking big chances by straying away from the rope. What they found was a hand torn off at the wrist. It still had a wool mitten on it. And not ten feet away . . . another body.

“Oh God,” Gwen said.

It was nearly buried in snow. It was a man and he had been thoroughly gutted, leaving a hollow trough from throat to crotch that was half-filled with snow. One arm was extended upwards, hand reaching towards the sky, his face a gray, shriveled screaming mask of horror.

He had died violently and in agony.

Coyle took Gwen by the hand, found the rope and followed it back towards the flagged pathway. The wind was screaming and he kept imagining that he heard something like a female voice buried in it, shrill and cackling and absolutely deranged.

“About time,” Horn said when they showed.

“Anything?” Flagg asked as they started back along the pathway.

“Another body,” Coyle told him. “All fucking torn apart.”

He and Gwen led on, Horn and Flagg just behind them. The wind was at their backs now and it made the going easier as it pushed them along. But still the drift blew and whipped, blinding them and dumping snow over them.

They had sighted the lights of the idling Spryte when a gust that was practically cyclonic punched into them with incredible force, knocking Coyle to the ice and tossing Gwen right on top of him. Horn went sliding across the snowpack.

As Coyle hit the ice, he was seized by a manic, irrational terror because he was not so certain it
was
the wind. As it blasted into them it shrieked with a sound that was like some deafening unearthly squealing.

He pulled himself up and helped Gwen to her feet, shining his light in all directions. The storm raged, drift flying like buzzing hornets in his flashlight beam. He thought for one crazy, devastating moment that slid icicles into his stomach that he saw something . . . something large and distorted, hunched-over pulling off into the blizzarding darkness.

“Where's Flagg?” Gwen said, panic in her voice. “Where the hell is Flagg?”

Horn and Coyle looked around frantically.

He was nowhere to be scene.

Then Horn said, “Oh shit . . .”

Beyond the guide ropes there was a vibrant red spray in the snow that led off as far as their lights would reach and as they took that in, each one shivering with escalating dread, they heard a sound which was not the wind: a hysterical, agonized screaming in the distance.

Flagg.

It rose up and died away and then there was only the sibilant voice of the wind, droning on and on, an eerie and otherworldly soundtrack to the fear that each and everyone felt deep into their bones.

“Get to the Spryte!” Coyle said. “Now! Go! Go!”

Gwen looked at him, her eyes bright and hunted-looking through the slit of her balaclava. “But Flagg–”

“Fuck Flagg,” Horn said, leading the charge.

Running in bunny boots is an adventure and they found themselves tripping and falling as much as they were gaining ground. Coyle's heart was pounding, adrenaline kicking in and making his entire body tingle with exhilaration.

They made the Spryte and slammed the doors shut, locking them against what haunted the polar wastes.

“Get us out of here!” Coyle snapped.

But Horn did not have to be told. He threw the Spryte in gear, grabbed the brake bars and off they went. The heater was pumping out full blast but they still shivered. They didn't even want to think about what had just happened.

The Spryte's wipers were whipping back and forth, clearing snow, the headlights filled with agitated flakes. The drift wind was still throwing sheets at them and creating huge jumping shadows.

When he finally found his voice, Coyle got on the radio and called Clime, telling them they were en route to their position. And when Hopper asked if they'd found anything all Coyle would tell him was, “No survivors.” He hated even saying that, knowing that just about any station out there with a strong enough receiver could be listening in but Hopper demanded something.

“I'll fill you in upon return,” Coyle said into the mic.

And at that precise moment something hit the Spryte.

It hammered into it like a freight train, the impact making the vehicle rock on its tracks and knocking the mic from Coyle's hand. Horn, his face tight and corded in the dash lights, did not slow down. GPS was locked and he was not going to stop.

“That wasn't the wind,” Gwen said.

“No,” Coyle told her. “It wasn't.”

Something was out there, something strong enough to nearly stop a 3,000 pound vehicle dead in its tracks.

Nobody spoke.

They were all feeling it: the sense that they were far from safe, that whatever had devastated NOAA Polaris was still out there, hiding in the darkness and stalking them, using the storm as camouflage. They did not dare speculate as to what it might be.

Coyle just listened for it, knowing it was there.

He could feel its presence up his spine and in the gooseflesh that covered his arms and skin, creeping at the small of his belly. His mouth was so dry he could not swallow and so fixed were his eyes on what the headlights were revealing that he had to remember to blink.

Gwen's hand in his own was damp with sweat.

The snow blew around the Spryte like a heavy, claustrophobic sea fog, the wind roaring and whistling. The Spryte was not known for its stealth. It was a loud machine and you had to speak loudly to be heard in the cab. It was not unusual to return to camp after a trip in it with ringing ears.

But Coyle didn't hear the engine, the tracks cutting across the hardpack, he could only hear the wind, listening for the voice of the thing that was hunting them, knowing damn well it had not given up the chase.

And then–

Gwen tensed next to him, every muscle in her body seeming to draw upwards as she jerked at the sound the wind carried. It was a weird, almost feline screeching that echoed from the belly of the storm, chilling, piercing, unearthly. It rose up so loud it seemed that what made it was right next to the Spryte and then faded off into an obscene female cackling that sounded impossibly distant and then was lost altogether out across the ice fields.

Then something jumped in front of the Spryte.

They all saw it.

Just for a few seconds but enough so that they all gasped and pulled back in their seats, nearly cringing. It was some huge amorphous shape like liquid midnight, flowing and rippling and repulsively fleshy. The snow obscured it, then the headlights revealed it: a weird composite that looked like a reaching, corded mass of dead trees that had grown into one another in a mutiny of spiky limbs and then maybe four or five bodies strung together with a blue-black membranous skin that jutted with bony protrusions and trailing boneless limbs. They clearly saw three heads whose faces were like melting wax and running slime.

And a fourth rising above the others . . . a gnarled, convoluted thing with a face like a grinning Halloween pumpkin and phosphorescent yellow eyes, something like hair atop its head that was not hair but undulant growths like slow-moving deep-sea grasses that were hideously alive and coiling.

Then the Spryte—barreling forward at its top speed of 30 mph—slammed right into it and the thing could not get out of the way. The Spryte hit it and clear slime splashed up over the windshield and the cab rocked as the tracks rolled over it, grinding it into the drift with a moist, pulping sound that went up everyone's backbone. The thing let out a hollow, maniacal cry that was partly human but mostly the angry roaring of some primeval beast.

Something skittered over the windows like spiders or clutching tendrils.

And then they were free of it and its agonized voice faded into the storm.

Coyle looked back only once and in the rear lights he saw a squashed mass of flesh splashed over the snow, something rising from it like a hundred whipping vines.

Then it was lost from sight.

He sank back into his seat, Gwen doing the same.

For thirty minutes no one spoke. There was only the wind and the snow whispering at the windows and Horn muttering under his voice, “Gonna get us home . . . yes sir . . . gonna fucking get us home . . .”

The blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat... have an
origin outside the time and space we comprehend.

—H.P. Lovecraft

“T
HE LIGHTS WENT OFF all over camp, Nicky,” Special Ed was saying, shaking at the memory of it. “We can't account for it. Frye and Cryderman and Locke have been through every circuit in the place and nothing is damaged or fused. The lights just went out. The back-ups did not kick in. It was black as sin here and when the lights came back on . . . well, when they came back on, Slim was just gone.”

“Just gone,” Coyle said.

“Yes.”

Coyle stood there in his ECWs, water dripping from them. He was filled to bursting with too many rioting emotions and he simply could not get a handle on them. Though he was not a violent person, it all bubbled up inside him and he had a mad desire to punch the HR rep right in the mouth. But he didn't. And he didn't because it was not Special Ed's fault. It was nobody's fault.

“And you heard nothing and saw nothing unusual?”

“No, not a thing. The lights just went out.”

After what he'd seen at NOAA Polaris, Coyle was not in the mood to come back here and have more mysteries and weirdness shoved in his face. And neither were Horn or Gwen. But that's exactly what they got as soon as they pulled into camp. Gut was on them out in the Heavy Shop as they parked the Spryte. And after her there was a gauntlet of people—Ida and Danny Shin and The Beav. Even Cryderman who cared about nothing but Cryderman showed up. Harvey crawled out of T-Shack long enough to tell them that he thought the Masons were behind it. Most were concerned about Slim, but they also wanted to know what in the hell had happened at NOAA Polaris.

So he told them.

His first instinct was to not spread fear, but from his first telling to his last there was no way around it. He told the truth and people either were skeptical or alarmed.

Regardless, the crew at Polaris had been slaughtered and Flagg had joined them. And now Slim was gone.

“Jesus Christ, not Flagg, not Flagg,” Special Ed kept saying. “He's . . . you know his cousin is–”

“Married to a senator, yeah I know, Ed. But, see, that fucking thing that took him, it didn't much care.”

Coyle, Horn, and Gwen went through the entire story three times for Special Ed and Hopper. When they were done, Hopper looked very weary. So weary, he could not even talk rapid-fire. In fact, he did not seem to know what to do with himself. He sat down, stood up, paced his office, put his hands flat against the wall and breathed like he might hyperventilate. Nothing was “terrific” or “outstanding” today or even “an exceptional example of teamwork and prime productivity.”

“None of this makes any sense,” he finally said. “Nothing does this year.”

He just didn't understand.

“I . . . I just don't get it. I don't know what's going on. The whole world is coming apart . . . everything's just going to hell. What's it all mean, Nicky?”

“Go talk to Locke, he'll tell you,” Coyle said. “He'll tell you things you won't want to hear. All those things the NSF has been denying since Kharkov. Question is, Mr. Hopper: how bad do you want to know? How much sleep do you want to lose?”

Hopper didn't have much to say about that, so Coyle left him to the broken pieces of his ordered little world, watched him walk off in a daze. After Gwen and Horn went to their rooms, Coyle was still there with Ed, pelting Ed with questions about Slim.

Special Ed, of course, tried to down-play it in the finest HR tradition, but how could you down-play something like that? The lights went out for something like fifteen minutes. All of them. Not the power. The generators were still kicking out and everything was purring along just fine. Only the lights went out. Explain that. And then while you were at it, explain how Slim disappeared from his room when the door was locked from the
inside.
Of course, Special Ed was quick to down-play that, too. Nobody knew for sure that Slim was actually
in
there; he probably just locked his door and dropped out of sight somewhere else. And as to the shambles that room was in . . . who could really say?

I can, that's who,
Coyle thought, trying to swallow down his anger and frustration.
Things had been going to shit for Slim ever since he saw that thing under the tarp. Something goddamned spooky was going on with that kid and whatever it was, it arranged for the lights to go off so everyone else would be chasing their own shadows while he was snatched away.

“We've organized three searches and found nothing,” Special Ed admitted. “But I'm certainly hopeful that things will turn out well–”

“Shut up,” Coyle told him.

“Nicky, I'm just saying–”

“You're talking shit, Ed. I know it. You know it. I swear to God if you start reciting the NSF line on company liability and missing persons procedure, I'm going to slap you right across the face.”