The Spawning (45 page)

It could have happened that way, Warren figured. Countless men, dogs, and pony teams had fallen into crevasses in the old days. But he didn't think that happened here. They were all on their backs, frozen together, except one that was lying face down. Using his ice-axe, Warren scraped the ice away from the man's back. His Burberry suit had been peeled away. His back was bare, blackened and fissured, and there was something between his shoulder blades rising from the desiccated flesh.

Biggs was on his knees now at the rim of the pit, shining his light down. Crystals of ice danced in the beam. “Looks . . . looks like a spider.”

“Can't be,” Warren said.

But it did look like a spider.

One of those hideous side-to-side scuttling crab spiders they had in the desert or jungle. Except this one was lodged in the corpse's back, mounded like it was trying to pull itself free. It was just as blackened and seamed as the man himself, splitting open from the cold and dryness, but Warren could see its segmented, hairless body where it broke free of the skin, the jointed legs which were the thickness of pencils. The way it was connected, not like it was a separate entity, but like–

It was riding him. Riding him like some kind of leggy parasite.

Right then, as Warren climbed from the pit, not wanting to be down there any longer with the frozen dead and that spidery thing, he realized that Dryden and the others must have found the pit, too. But somehow, someway, a sheet of ice had formed over the entrance to hide the opening.

And he didn't believe that was accidental.

Biggs's eyes looked like they wanted to come right out of his head. “What the hell was that?” he wanted to know. “Why was it growing from him like that?”

But Warren didn't know and part of him was grateful for that.

Maybe fifteen minutes later, after navigating one blind turn after the other, they found the cavity in the ice where Dryden had chopped out the creature. And just beyond that, a little grotto in the ice and in it, the bodies.

“Holy shit,” Biggs said.

Dryden, Stone, Kenneger . . . God, jumbled together and slaughtered, faces peeled down to skulls and bellies split open, entrails snaking over the ice like frozen worms. And everywhere, pooled and sprayed, blood freeze-dried into red ice that sparkled in the lights.

Biggs turned away from them. “Okay, now we've seen ‘em. Beeman's right. Now let's get the fuck out of here.”

Warren thought that was sound advice . . . but like the bodies in the pit, these demanded that he examine them closer. Because if he wanted answers or intimations of the same, he would find them amongst the grisly remains before him.

“Please, Warren,” Biggs said.

“Just a minute. I have to see something.”

Beeman who had barely spoken a word in the past hour began to get a little skittish. “Biggs is right,” he said. “We should get out of here before that thing comes back.”

“Yeah,” Biggs said. “Come on.”

Beeman just stood there, his face unreadable beyond the fur fringe of his zipped-up parka hood. Biggs was scared. Scared like Warren had never seen him scared before. And Warren knew it was this place, at least part of it was. The noxious atmosphere of this tomb in the ice.

But he had to see.

He had to know even as fingers of fear spread through his belly and into his chest, he had to see. To understand.

For the bodies were all
wrong
somehow.

Good God! Get the fuck out of here! Get out!

But he couldn't.

Up close, wreathed in frozen blood, the bodies had been savagely mauled. Their ECWs had been torn free, the flesh beneath bitten, chewed, gnawed. Teeth marks in raw red meat were evident, claw-marks, scrapes, gouges and furrows. Like something with immense claws and huge teeth had been at them. Warren could clearly see the bite mark in one throat where something had bitten out a mouthful of flesh.

Yes, the feeding was evident.

But the bodies themselves . . . then he knew.

They weren't just jumbled together. No. They were
pressed
together, melted together like they had grown that way. Even with his ice-axe, he could not pry them apart . . . quilts of flesh grew into quilts of flesh, muscles were linked with other muscles, bones growing right through other bones. Not three men, but one single entity like some protoplasmic thing that had been splitting. Dryden, Stone, Kenneger, they had been fused into a single gory, fleshy whole, a webbing of tissue.

You don't need to know more than that. You don't need to.

Beeman was beginning to make a throaty wailing sound like an Indian warrior singing his death-song. In the close confines of the ice grotto, his voice echoed out with a ghostly, eerie sound.

“Goddammit, Warren!” Biggs said. “We have to get out of here! Beeman's fucking losing it!”

But Warren was fixated with what he was seeing.

Grown together.

And their bodies, not just fused, but
channeled.
Some of the wounds he had thought were punctures were not punctures at all, but holes that had been tunneled through flesh. Something had been burrowing into them. With his ice-axe, he pulled something free of one of these holes and it dropped to the ice . . . a curled up, spidery thing with legs folded under it. Yes, just like the thing on the back of that mummy in the pit, only a juvenile form. Dead. Warren, a dry giggling building in his throat, began tearing at the burrows and more of those little horrors fell free, leggy and perverse.

And then he knew.

An incubator. All three of them . . . Dryden, Stone, Kenneger . . . they had grown together like some kind of human fungi to provide warmth and food for the things coming to term within them. An incubator. A human incubator.

Warren pulled himself away. “But it's been allowed to freeze up,” he said under his breath. “Now why would that be?”

“Fuck are you talking about?” Biggs wanted to know.

But Warren could not explain, for even then the seeds of madness and horror were just taking root in his own soul and the greater purpose of it all was beginning to make itself known.

He saw something glinting on the hand of one of the corpses.

It drew his eye.

A ring.

Behind him, Beeman was wailing with a wild, screeching sound that sounded inhuman, like some insect calling out to the swarm.

But that ring . . .

Warren looked closer.

An Annapolis ring. Only those who had graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland would have one. Dryden. Stone. Kenneger. Warren knew their histories. They were not military men.

But Beeman was.

Beeman.

“C'mon, Warren!” Biggs cried out now. “We have to get out of here before it comes back! Before that thing returns!”

And, Warren, slowly swiveling his head on his neck, breathed out a string of words: “I think we're too late.”

And Beeman moved.

Or maybe it was Dryden. Or Stone. Or Kenneger.

There was no way to know. It moved quickly, becoming what it was and being content with that . . . a hunched-over scarecrow-thing with a bulbous head and two huge yellow-pink eyes veined in red, eyes that hated with a feral intensity. Its face was red and raw, threaded with pink and pale seams of tissue . . . a pulpy and stringy mask that crawled like worms over what was beneath.

Biggs screamed as he saw that immense puckered mouth open and display its fan of gray teeth like darning needles . . . a perfect circle of them.

A splayed hand with webbing between the fingers and black, thorny claws lashed out and took his throat out in a spray of blood. His face came off like a flap of meat. And when he went down, the Beeman-thing took hold of him and buried its puckered, fanged mouth to his throat and began to feed with horrible, sucking sounds.

Warren screamed and rushed it.

It clawed out at him with hooked talons and fingers that were oddly scaly and mottled. Warren ducked away from it and it tossed Biggs's bleeding corpse aside and came at him, hobbling over the ice, that puckering mouth pulling away from snake-like fangs, blood and blue-black ichor dripping.

Warren dove at it.

He dove and brought the ice-axe down on its head with everything he had and the blade sank into its skull to the hilt. There was no give like with bone, just a soft and mucid rottenness that the axe bisected easily. The Beeman-thing pulled back, wailing with a piercing, unearthly sound as it tried to pull the axe from the crown of its skull. Beneath its blood-stained ECWs, it was bulging and humped and undulant.

And by then, Warren was running.

But not before he saw.

Saw dozens of jointed legs erupting from that gruesome face of pulp . . . coming out of the mouth and out of the eyes, wavering chitinous legs that clicked and scraped free . . . interlocked spidery bodies moving just beneath the flesh. For the Beeman-thing was more than just a cannibalistic monster, it was an incubator.

Warren ran through the narrow winding crevice, the thing behind him giving chase with a resounding roar of absolute rage.

B
Y THE TIME HE made it back up to the Hypertat, Warren was shaking so badly he could barely open the door. And not just his hands, but his entire body. Rolling, spasmodic tremors ran through him like he was in the grip of a fever.

But it was no fever.

And it had very little to do with the cold.

This was the aftermath of sheer adrenaline-pumping terror and gut-deep horror, shock and revulsion and nerves strained to the point of fraying. He fumbled madly with the door latch and finally got it open and fell through the door, landing face-first in his cumbersome ECWs. He clawed his way to his feet, slamming the door. Locking it. He yanked off his mittens, the thermal gloves beneath, and stumbled over to the window.

Frosted.

Goddamn frost-free window was all frosted-up.

His teeth chattering, body quaking with tremors, fingers trembling, Warren went at the window like an animal, scraping the frost away with his numb fingertips. In the security lights he could see the other Hypertats lined up in a row like shoeboxes, the generator shack, storage sheds, the Skidoo snowmobiles hooked up to the electrical system to keep their block heaters warm.

That was all he saw other than shadows.

Clawing, reaching shadows.

Some nearly-extinct voice of reason in the back of his mind told him he was over the edge, hallucinating, maybe flat-out crazy by this point . . . but the shadows out there . . . they were not right. They moved and shifted, tangled and slithered across the blue ice walls.

He blinked it away, looking over at the mouth of the passage leading down to the cavern below.

He could not see the thing which he knew must be coming after him even now. He saw nothing and somehow that was the worst thing he could imagine. Because it was there and any moment now he would see it—a twisted grotesque shadow with bleeding eyes—come clambering up from below.

The snowmobiles.

Some crazy sense of self-preservation that was still treading water told him to pack up his gear, grab some equipment, and take off on one of the Skidoos. But that was insane. Take off to
where?
The nearest station was Polar Clime and that was at least a hundred miles over the Beardmore and plateau beyond at dead winter. It was fifty below out there, wind chills kicking it down to like minus seventy. He'd freeze to death on an open snowmobile even if he knew how to navigate the glacier and find the station in that blackness and blowing snow, which he certainly did not.

Face it, old man, you're done in and you know damn well you're done in. It ends here. In this ice cave. You'll die here. Alone. You'll never–

What in the Jesus was that?

He'd been reaching over to the radio, knowing that he had to get a Mayday out, when the noises started. Just like that night Biggs and he had heard them. A cycling cacophony of thuds and rumbling that seemed to be born far below but were getting closer with each rising beat. The lights in the Hypertat flickered. The screen on the laptop before him rolled black and stayed that way. Vibrations made the cave shake. Things trembled and fell, icicles dropped from the roof and smashed into fragments. The Hypertat was shaking, things rattling from shelves. The air was alive, supercharged with crackling static electricity, distant pinging and screeching noises that echoed and echoed.

No time left, no time.

Whatever was down there was much worse than just that thing that had murdered everyone, that fucking crawling incubator. Whoever it had been—Dryden or Stone or Kenneger or even Beeman himself—and whatever it now was, it paled next to what was waking up below.

Warren grabbed the radio headset and managed to get it on his head with his badly shaking fingers. He picked up the mic, dropped it. Picked it up again and dropped it again.

C'mon!

In the back of his skull, a headache began to throb. His throat felt dry and his heart pounded relentlessly in his chest. He tried to speak into the mic, but his voice was raw and squeaking. Finally, he got it working and shouted into the mic: “MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! THIS IS ECHO INDIA CHARLIE ZERO! ECHO INDIA CHARLIE ZERO! EMPEROR ICE CAVE! BEARDMORE GLACIER! THIS IS A MAYDAY! REPEAT: THIS IS A MAYDAY! PLEASE RESPOND!”

Nothing came back at him but droning static, some electronic background noise, a low murmuring which he thought was probably the polar emptiness of the glaciers and mountains themselves.

“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” he tried again, sweat running down his face. “THIS IS A MAYDAY! IS ANYBODY FUCKING OUT THERE? CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME? TRANSMITTING MAYDAY TO MACOPS MCMURDO STATION!

PLEASE RESPOND! SOMEBODY! ANYBODY!”

The lights were flickering again, strobing as the power jumped in the lines. Through the window, he could see the security lights dimming and brightening. Shadows were moving everywhere now, spreading and pooling.