The Spawning (42 page)

The creature trembled, raising two legs off the floor like a wolf spider preparing to strike.

Coyle did not take his eyes off the beast. “Danny, on the count of three, I want you to crawl away towards us as fast as you possibly can. Can you do that?”

Shin nodded, but he was shaking so badly it was hard to tell.

Coyle opened his mouth to count . . . then he felt something seem to almost
expand
in the back of his head, a black vortex of whispering voices that blotted out all else and made him feel giddy.

(come onto me)

(touch me)

(drown in me)

He looked at the creature–

Looked
and saw a massive hump swelling like rising bread dough where the mouth had been. With a gelatinous sound and an eruption of clear fluid, the hump burst open and two tiny human arms came out, then three and four and five, a dozen and maybe two dozen that were a moist bubblegum pink reaching out to him, getting closer and closer until he could feel the sickening heat as their fingers waved in his face–

“Nicky!” Frye cried out.

He blinked and it was gone . . . it was just the spider-thing again, all those faces.

He breathed in and out. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

Shin looked once at the beast and then at Coyle and jumped, tossing the axe and actually making it maybe three feet before the most appalling thing happened. The beast made a gurgling sound and something like a gelid, smooth tentacle slid from its body with amazing speed. The tip was barbed like a blow dart. As Shin dove away, that barbed tip impaled him right between the shoulder blades. About four inches of tentacle slid in with it, making a sound like a tongue slipping into an especially juicy peach.

Coyle screamed out something, but that was about it.

Shin lived long enough to make a grunting, surprised sound and a squeaking girlish cry and that was about it. Then his body blew up like an over-inflated balloon as if he'd just been filled with helium. He expanded in a split second with a stretching, elastic sort of sound. His windpants tore open as did his polar fleece shirt, the buttons of which were expelled like bullets.

It happened just that quick.

He lived for about two seconds like a bulging, rolling balloon animal that was about to burst, his skin strained and lividly purple from exploded blood vessels. Then he died and the tentacle retracted with a hissing sound like escaping gas.

Coyle drilled three bullets into the beast and was not even aware that he had done so. The sound of the chamber explosions slapped him out of his shocked fugue. The rounds passed right through the thing, exit wounds spraying clots of tissue and pink fluid. The beast roared and spun in a crazy half-circle, a perfect spout of green, watery blood coming from one of the bullet holes and striking the wall and steaming.

It could have had them.

Right then and right there, the beast could have had them. It was only ten feet away. But it did not charge. It wailed with an almost womanish sounding scream and turned away from them. The doorway leading into the rear living quarters was open, but, again, the beast didn't bother with doors. It whipped around in circle, spinning like a top, spraying tissue and green blood in every which direction. It hit the wall and went right through it like a buzzsaw, leaving a few wriggling strands of itself on the chasm it created. In the other room, they heard things crashing and falling.

Coyle went in there and it looked like the beast was having a temper tantrum. It was no longer a spider-thing but a pulsating black pod, still spinning, dozens of squirming blue tentacles coiling and twining like nesting snakes. They were five and six feet in length, lashing at anything in sight.

The widescreen TV was smashed to the floor.

A table full of magazines and empty beer cans was flipped over.

A rack of DVDs was flunk across the room.

And then it just sank amongst the wreckage, looking like it was giving up, melting into a black greasy blob and making a weird mewling sound.

But it wasn't giving up . . . it was changing, moving, reconfiguring itself.

It inflated itself into a huge entity, something with two cylindrical heads and three mouths, five or six glaring red eyes if not more. It was blue and rubbery and tentacled with a dozen whipping, muscular ropes set with hooks like the claws of a cat.

Coyle fired.

He emptied the 9mm into the thing and it jumped up and back, hit the wall, came down howling like a dozen wolves, then mewing like a Siamese. Tentacles whipped and clutched, taloned feet scratched over the floor. And then it stopped right there, hesitating. Pissing green blood from half a dozen wounds, the skull of the head on the right laid open, it trembled with absolute rage, just shaking and shuddering, fixing the men in the room with those red, oval alien eyes.

It hated.

There was no doubt about that. It hated with an absolute raw malevolence that was not even remotely of this Earth, but something born in black cosmic gulfs. Men could not hate the way the beast hated with complete loathing. It was beyond a simple emotional state, but almost biological in its dire rhythms.

It glared at them, leered, and seethed. It was not something pretending to be a man.

It was a monster.

An animal designed with an almost supernatural survivability, a vitality that was unthinkable. Right then, it seemed to be weighing out its options. They had it and it knew it. It sat there, clawed and quivering, tentacles slithering, eyes hating and mouths hanging open. Coyle did not believe for one moment that it had given up. He could not imagine such a thing throwing in the towel and admitting defeat without its maws red with human blood, without having crunched human bones and yanked out steaming entrails from cleaved bellies.

“Burn that motherfucker,” Frye said, simply tired of it all.

As Horn pulled the trigger on his flamethrower, the beast hissed with those mouths and a forest of clawed tentacles came up in a defensive posture.

It shifted into a mammoth black hood like an oil spill.

Then a stream of flame hit it, knocking it back and over. It came right back up and was drenched in burning fluid. It jumped and rolled and shrieked and Horn hosed it down. By that time, the entire far end of the room was engulfed in flame. The men backed away into the radio room as the beast fought against the burning jellied gasoline, smoke rolling off it, its burning stench just sickening to smell. Its last act was to sculpt itself into a great flaming ball with dozens of squirming ropes . . . then it cracked open and the black oily shell it had encased itself in fell away, shattering on the floor like candy glass.

From that black capsule a bright red jelly gushed free, becoming a towering ooze that clung to the ceiling by tendrils, sliding and undulating, its bright red glistening mass rolling with waves.

It let out a perfectly human scream that sounded like a woman being flayed . . . then collapsed beneath the flames, melting away and dying.

The men just stood there, letting it burn.

Frye dropped his ice-axe to the floor with a clang and everyone jumped. Fumbling a cigarette into his mouth with shaking fingers, he said “What the fuck was that?”

But nobody even attempted a guess.

EMPEROR CAVE

W
HEN THEY GOT DOWN to the cavern, the first thing Warren noticed was that the tent was collapsed. The yellow tent Dryden had been thawing out his creature in. He walked over to it, Biggs and Beeman behind him.

“It's gone,” he said. “The thing is gone.”

Biggs was breathing hard. “No, it's not gone,” he said. “It's still here. Only it's not frozen anymore.”

Not a neurotic reaction to the impossible, merely a statement of fact. It
was
gone. And if everyone was dead as Beeman said and Warren himself suspected . . . then, well, it must have left under its own power. The idea of that should have shocked them, but it didn't.

Not now.

Warren had turned the power back on and the cavern was brightly-lit, the heater in the Polar Haven chugging away again. In the curious refracted blue light of the enclosing ice, he looked around, maybe expecting to see that alien horror walking around.

But there was nothing. Just the silence. The shifting of the ice.

“Is that what your monster is?” Biggs said then to Beeman. “That thing from the ice?”

Beeman shook his head. “No, not that. Something else.” He paused, looking across the cavern. “It looks like a man, I think. But it's not a man.”

“You're way behind on your urban legends, Biggs. Way I hear it, those aliens don't eat flesh, they eat minds,” Warren said.

Biggs grunted. “Well, if that's the case, that sonofabitch is gonna go hungry if he goes after Beeman.”

Beeman said nothing and maybe that was the most disturbing part.

The three of them stood there a moment and said nothing. Bundled up in their bright red ECWs, parka hoods pulled tight, mittened hands gripping ice-axes and flashlights, they looked like they had just ascended Mount Everest and not descended into some labyrinthine ice cave. The only thing missing was the sense of joy or exhilaration. They stood there in silence, breathing out white clouds of vapor, the cold rendering their faces blank and unreadable. The only thing alive about them were their eyes and they were intense, hunted.

Warren motioned them forward and they followed him up the sloping ridge, their Stabilicer cleats making a crunching noise as they dug in for purchase. When they reached the top, they could see the numerous crevices slit into the wall of the glacier. And that huge round tunnel that hadn't been there before.

“Hell you make of that?” Biggs wanted to know.

“It's artificial,” Warren said.

“You think?”

They both looked at Beeman, maybe hoping he would have some input on this, but he said nothing. Everything about him had changed. He was cool and noncommittal, his speech clipped and his manner lifeless.

They went down.

Standing at the periphery of the tunnel, there could be no doubt it was artificial. It was too symmetrical, too smooth, too channeled-looking. There was no way to know how it had been formed, because there was not so much as a scratch or gouge in the lustrous walls that would have hinted at a steel bit or hot water drill at work. Polished, is what Warren thought. Cut so cleanly, so perfectly, it looked like a tunnel of clear blue glass.

“Melted?” Biggs said.

“It's anybody's guess,” Warren said.

They put their flashlights beams into it and there was nothing really to see. Just that glossy tunnel dropping away deeper and deeper into the glacier until their lights would no longer penetrate the darkness. Warren mentally calculated that what they could see of it went down several dozen feet.

“It must lead somewhere,” Biggs said. “I'd like to know where and why.”

Warren just shook his head. “You wanna go down, be my guest.”

And the totally insane part was that, for a moment there, it looked like Biggs was actually considering it.
Biggs.
Nihilistic, cynical, selfish, fuck-you-and-yours Biggs. A man with no curiosity that did not directly involve saving his own skin. It was amazing. But there were many amazing things today, not the least of which was actually getting Biggs to come down here at all. And now that he had, he did not seem as frightened as he should've been. In some twisted way, he almost seemed to be enjoying himself.

He worked himself closer to the tunnel mouth.

“Careful,” Warren said.

Beeman made a funny moaning sound in his throat and Biggs smiled at him, winked at him, as if it was all part of some big joke now and only they were in on the punchline. “HEY!” Biggs called down the shaft. “ANYBODY DOWN THERE? ANYBODY HOOOOOME? WE'RE UP HERE WAITING! WHY DON'T YOU COME AND SAY HEY!”

“Knock it off,” Warren said.

“HELLOOOOOO DOWN THERE!”

Warren couldn't take it anymore.

He grabbed him and yanked him away from the opening, almost threw him on his ass. But the sound of his voice echoing down there in those subterranean depths . . . it was just too much. It made something rip open inside him. The echo of that voice bouncing around, going deeper and deeper and sounding low and guttural the further it went . . . God, he thought he'd rather slit his own wrists than have to hear it again.

“Take it easy, man,” Biggs said.

“Just knock it off,” Warren warned him. “This isn't a fucking game.”

But how could he make him realize what that echo had done to him? How he did not want something down there to
hear
them up here. Because he was certain there was something down there, something loathsome and awful that was listening to them. In the back of his head, he could almost hear the fleshy thudding of its heart.

He let go of Biggs and at that moment, a rumbling, inexplicable sound came rolling up the tunnel. It sounded almost like the grumbling of an empty belly.

Warren backed away, pressing a mitten to his mouth so he did not cry out. He kept backing away until a little dip in the ice almost put him on his ass. His stomach was roiling and he thought for a moment there he might vomit.

Breathing hard, he said, “Beeman . . . show us that crevice. Show us those goddamn bodies.”

Beeman did not hesitate.

He lumbered off past one crevice mouth and then another that had been taped off with yellow film by Dryden and probably led to a crevasse. He brought them over to the crevice that Dryden had found the creature in. The very one Warren had been down before and saw . . . saw something pulling away from him.

He put his flashlight beam in there.

Crystals of blood were still iced on the blue irregular walls, appearing a shocking scarlet that looked nearly black when you pulled the light away. Warren knew they had to go in there just like he knew they wouldn't all be coming back out again.