The Spawning (40 page)

“What did?” Frye said, returning from shutting down the alarm.

“A monster or something.”

Frye pushed past Zoot. “A monster? What the fuck you mean, a monster?”

“He's gonna need stitches,” Special Ed said to Coyle. “He's lost a lot of blood.”

“I'll take care of it,” Gwen said. “But I need to get into Medical.”

Coyle kneeled down by Locke. Gwen was still wrapping his arm. “What happened, Locke? What was in there?”

He blinked his eyes rapidly for a moment or two, swallowed a couple times. Then his eyes focused and he looked up. “Heard him scream . . . that fucking alarm, Nicky . . . then I went in there.” He began trembling now, shaking his head back and forth. “Something was in there . . .
something had Cryderman.
It was eating him . . . I think it was eating him. I . . . it growled or something and swatted me . . . I don't know what it was . . . it . . . it had
claws . . .”

Coyle could figure out the rest. “You're going to be all right, man,” he said.

Locke managed a dopey/confused smile, grimacing as Gwen shot antibiotics into him.

Horn arrived and he brought the heavy artillery with him. Strapped to his back with a harness were what looked like a couple scuba-sized acetylene tanks in a welded frame. A high-pressure PVC hose came off them and fed into a metal bracket in his hands which was set with handgrips and a trigger, a nasty-looking spout at the end. A propane torch was attached to the frame at his back. Copper hosing came from it, was clamped to the hand-bracket or gun assembly. The tubing terminated about two inches in front of the spout, a flame flickering there.

“Fucking Buck Rogers,” Frye said.

“What is that supposed to be?” Shin asked.

Horn just grinned. “Flamethrower. Homemade. Got me three more of ‘em out in the Heavy Shop.”

“You're gonna blow us all up.”

“Nope,” Horn said.

Coyle got it. Dangerous as hell, probably, but he figured it would work. One squeeze of the trigger on the gun assembly and flammable liquid would rush from the tank and out of the spout at high pressure where it would make contact with the propane flame . . .
whoosh!
A hand-held incendiary weapon.

Horn gave a brief description of his engineering prowess to the others, finished by saying, “Best part, people, is the fuel. Jellied gasoline. It hits something and it keeps burning. Just try and put it out.”

Coyle was smiling, too. Jellied gasoline was homemade napalm. You mixed gasoline with Styrofoam, very finely-ground in this case so it wouldn't clog the hose, and the Styrofoam absorbed the gas, liquefied into a jelly-like emulsion that was extremely flammable and would stick to anything it hit, burning and burning.

“Flamethrower,” Shin said with some distaste. “That's ridiculous.”

Horn grinned again, his eyes sparkling with mischief. With the flamethrower, his ECWs, heavy beard and flag bandanna wrapped around his head, he looked like some kind of polar terrorist. “I'll show you how ridiculous it is, dipshit.”

“Put that thing away,” Special Ed said.

Coyle said, “Horn . . .”

Too late.

Horn turned, thinking no one was behind him, and squeezed the trigger. A gout of flame gushed from the spout and became a rolling fireball that almost hit Harvey. Fire extinguisher in hand, he hit the floor and the fire rolled harmlessly over him. It traveled for maybe thirty feet and struck the far wall, where it clung and burned with greasy black smoke.

“Goddamn it!” Special Ed cried out. “Put that damn thing away!”

The Beav and several others began spraying the blaze down with fire extinguishers, but the stuff did not want to go out. They stomped it and hosed it down, gradually bringing it under control.

“Jee-ZUZ-Christ!” Frye said. “Now ain't that something?”

Harvey pulled himself off the floor, beet-red in the face, gesticulating wildly. “You almost killed me! You almost goddamn killed me!”

Horn laughed. “Yeah, and some loss that would be.”

People were either astounded or incensed at the weapon and told Horn so, but not for long . . . for there came a weird, high-pitched howling from Medical. It sounded like the squealing yelps of a dozen dogs slowed down and then sped up, vanishing in a shrill eerie wailing.

“Holy shit,” Shin said.

“Nicky,” Ed said, swallowing. “Hopper's in there . . .”

“Come on,” Coyle told Horn, taking his gun out. “Rest of you stay back.”

A few inched forward, but most had no problem remaining behind. Zoot and Danny Shin were the only ones that were intrigued by what was in that room down the corridor. Intrigued, but scared. Frye held out his hands, forcing them both back.

“You heard the man!” he said. “Stay back!”

Horn behind him, Gut at the rear with her axe, Coyle led the way down the corridor with Hopper's 9mm Colt. The gun felt almost slippery in his sweaty hand. A trickle of perspiration tickled its way down his spine.

The door to Medical was at the very end of the corridor. It was open just a crack like every door in every scary movie he'd ever seen. One of those doors you didn't dare open.

If you were watching this,
he told himself,
you'd be telling yourself to leave it alone.

But Coyle didn't have a choice.

When he got closer to it, he saw that Locke's blood was on it. A smeared handprint. More blood was on the wall next to it like he had been stumbling about drunkenly after the creature attacked him. And he probably had been.

Coyle held up his hand to the others so they would stop.

He listened.

It sounded very quiet in there, but he did not believe for a moment that whatever had gotten Cryderman had left. It had not come out the door and he had not heard the window break.

That meant it was still in there.

Waiting. Playing cat-and-mouse.

Unless it went through a heating duct, because it knows how to do that.

Coyle moved closer to the door, listening to the beat of his own heart. His limbs felt heavy, thick.

“You hear it?” Gut said.

He ignored her. There was a thumping sound in there, a bumping. Now a muted sliding. He saw a blur of shadow through the crack. He knew then that whatever was in there was waiting just behind the door.

The lights in there went out.

“Shit,” he said. Then to Gut: “Get us some flashlights.”

He was about five feet from the door and at any moment, whatever was in there—he was picturing some hulking, freakish shape in his mind—would come bounding out and sink its yellow claws into him. Whatever it was, it was smart. It knew enough to turn off the lights so that it could get the jump on them in the darkness. Something which definitely tipped the odds in its favor.

Gut brought him a flashlight.

As she handed it to him, her hand was shaking so badly that she nearly dropped it. She quickly retreated behind Horn and his artillery. Gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, Coyle again moved towards the door. The thing was there. He knew it. He could hear it breathing with a slopping, moist sound.

It moved with a squashing noise.

And right then, a vile stench rose up like somebody had just cracked open a rotting egg. The stink wafted from behind the door, utterly rancid and filthy, like sulfurous fumes coming off a cesspool.

“Damn,” Horn said.

Coyle tried to ignore the oily yellow stink, but it burned his eyes, his nostrils. Three feet from the door, something again bumped behind it. The door trembled . . . then slowly began to open without so much as a telltale creaking.

Coyle motioned the others back.

The door whispered open a foot, that stink becoming unbearable. Then it violently slammed shut and he jumped an easy foot backward, almost landing on Horn.

Breathing very fast, he said: “I think . . . I think it's toying with us.”

There was another thud behind the door and then something rammed into it. Something else, which Coyle did not think was a hand at this juncture, grasped the door knob and rattled it.

He pulled the trigger.

Maybe it was simple reflexive action, but he jerked it and put two rounds right through the door. On the other side, there was a high and wavering sort of scream that sounded almost too human. Something hit the door and with such force that the panel split right down the middle. Whatever was on the other side was not only pissed off, but very strong.

He heard it moving around in there now with that same squashing sound like it was treading over rotting grapes three inches deep. Something fell, something else shattered. And there was a deafening, undulating roar that made him take two stumbling steps backward.

Glass breaking.

“The window,” Horn said. “It's going through the fucking window!”

Coyle ran to the door, threw it open without letting himself even think of what might come jumping out at him. He sensed rather than saw movement, and quickly fired three rounds. Whatever it was, it let out a manic, animal baying. He fumbled for the light switch and saw something big moving through the infirmary door. He rushed in there past Hopper's gutted, swinging body. There was glass on the floor from shattered cabinets, empty bags of blood and plasma, and lots of that slime.

It was going out the window.

He didn't even shoot. He just saw it and stopped dead.

The window was small, maybe three-feet by three-feet and what was forcing itself out of it was much larger. It was wet and glistening and obscenely fleshy. Coyle did not know what it was, but it looked almost like some swollen juicy fetus trailing the ballooning, ruptured remains of a placenta behind it. It
bulged
as it pushed its way through, a dozen whipping umbilical cords rustling at the window frame, and then it was gone, crunching through the hardpack outside the dome.

“Motherfucker,” Horn said in a dry voice.

Coyle swallowed, forced himself to breathe. “Let's go get that sonofabitch.”

T
HE WIND THREW SNOW and a scrim of tiny ice particles in Coyle's face as he came around the dome, passing near the shattered window of Medical. Already, from the inside, they were busy boarding it up. He could hear the whine of cordless drills, muffled voices.

Standing there in his bulky ECWs, flashlight in one mittened hand and gun in the other, he felt the cold trying to suck his warmth away. It was edging down towards fifty below and it felt like it. His pants were stiff, his parka making cracking sounds when he moved his arms.

“Come on,” he told Horn, his breath coming out in great freezing clouds.

“Let's get it,” Frye said, raising an ice-axe in one hand.

The three of them moved forward. Coyle scanned the whiteness at his feet. The wind blew and the snow raged in the beam of his light. Frost glistened on the hardpack.

But not just snow.

Frozen slime.

Lots of it. A trail of it led across the new drift. Not just the clear slime that he knew so well, but a pinkish material that might have been blood. Frozen drops of it. There was some greenish stuff, too, and he couldn't even begin to guess what that might be. There were prints in the fresh snow, many of them like maybe two people had been walking and dragging a third.

“Funny sort of thing this must be,” Frye said.

Coyle kept moving.

He felt like some surreal big-game hunter following a blood trail.

The wind moaned around him, whipping snow around. Even with his balaclava on his face was stiff from the cold, his beard full of ice. Overhead, the sky was clear and glacial, stars shimmering and auroras flickering over the distant mountaintops.

He followed the trail and noticed that the prints were now more uniform and it looked like the thing had been walking on three feet . . . maybe not feet exactly, but something more along the lines of pegs or thorns. Each print had three such indentations like spikes. Even in the freezing air, Coyle was catching occasional whiffs of a gassy, revolting smell that came and went.

It was damnably dark out there.

The flashlights and far-flung security lights did little to change that. A world of frost and shadows and bitter cold.

“That thing ain't gonna last long out in this,” Frye said, panning his light around.

Horn grunted. “It's been doing all right so far.”

Coyle saw a shadow dart away over near the garage and he didn't doubt its reality when he heard a sudden fragmented, alien wailing that sounded much like several mouths had made it. The very tone of it was unearthly and it went right up his spine.

“Come on,” he said.

They raced after the cry.

In their cumbersome cold weather gear and big, air-filled boots, it wasn't exactly a graceful run, but they gained ground, huffing and puffing. They pounded forward over the hardpack, plowing through drifts, clenching their teeth against the cold. Flashlights bobbed in their hands, casting wild, cavorting shadows . . . any of which could have been something more than a shadow. The wind blew dead-on at them, gathering up sheets of drift and throwing it in their faces.

The trail led to the garage, past the doors, and around the side.

For whatever reason, the creature did not seem interested in getting in there. And Coyle knew that wasn't because it was too stupid to figure out doorknobs, but because it had something else in mind. And he wondered just what. The thing was probably nowhere near as intelligent as the race that had no doubt manufactured it, but it was certainly crafty. It had been hiding out at Clime for several days now. And it was only by accident that it was discovered at all.

Sure,
he thought,
it probably has a rudimentary intelligence, but don't give it too much credit. Right now, it's an animal. It's cold, injured, and it will fight to survive.

As they came around the far side of the garage, the wind brought the odor of the thing.