The Spawning (46 page)

“LISTEN TO ME! I'M AT THE EMPEROR ICE CAVE, BEARDMORE GLACIER! CALL SIGN: ECHO INDIA CHARLIE ZERO!” he shouted against the rising din from outside. “EVERYONE'S DEAD! GOD, EVERYONE'S DEAD . . . I'M THE LAST ONE . . . THE LAST ONE . . .
IT'S HAPPENING NOW . . . THOSE THINGS ARE RISING UP. .. RISING UP
–
”

The mic fell from his hand and he fell to his knees, panting and shaking, a shrilling squeal breaking loose inside his head and shattering his thoughts, making his eyes bulge and his face contort, drool run from his mouth in vile tangles.

Outside . . . dear God, outside . . .

A raging chaos of vibrations and hammerings, hissing static and metallic screeching. The lights were strobing, the temperature falling, everything flashing and flickering with rhythmic power surges. And cutting through it all, a resounding booming and a deranged choir of screaming voices wailing and wavering and echoing. Millions of voices screaming out in eerie susurrations of torment.

And somehow, above the noise, Warren could hear that strident piping rising and falling and breaking up into sharp trilling and squealing sounds. And the Beeman-thing. Because it was out there now, too, letting loose with a guttural primeval shriek that Warren knew was his own name being called by an inhuman, monstrous voice.

Closer now.

Much closer.

Warren was beyond fear, he was beyond anything. There was only hatred and acceptance and defeat cycling down into nothingness. Ignoring the blossoming pain in his head, he pulled himself up to the radio and gripped the mic in palsied fingers. “LISTEN TO ME! WHOEVER'S OUT THERE! PLEASE LISTEN TO ME!” he breathed into the mic. “THEY'RE COMING NOW! THEY'RE COMING FOR ME!
DON'T COME AFTER ME . . . WHATEVER YOU DO . . . DON'T COME AFTER ME. .. DEAR GOD, DON'T COME TO THIS PLACE
–
”

There was a sudden generation of crackling energy and the radio exploded with a shower of sparks, a gout of flames and smoke, a suffocating stink of melted plastic and fused circuitry.

Warren crawled across the floor on his hands and knees.

He did not dare look up at the window.

The Hypertat was in violent motion, filled with flickering blue light and smoke and heat and cold and a gagging intrusion of something that smelled like wet hides and spilled preservatives . . . acrid, overwhelming.

The door latch trembled.

Broke free.

The door was torn from its hinges and a freezing black shadow fell over Warren. Screaming, pressing his hands over his ears so he did not hear that profane musical piping sound, he looked up, seeing all the primal nightmares of his race standing there in that diabolical form before him. It was tall and conical, writhing vermiform appendages reaching out to him, a stench of hot gas and iced ammonium blowing off it and burning his nostrils. He could hear the low, hollow suspiring of its breath. Hear the rubbery creaking of its wings unfolding.

Five red eyes looked down upon him.

With intensity.

A burning, blistering intensity.

And in Warren's mind, a single and pitiful voice of defiance:
Fuck you . . . fuck you . . . fuck you goddamn fucking
–

Then his mind pulled into itself, liquefying and running like hot tallow.

And the eyes.

Those accursed alien eyes.

Like suns going supernova.

This was the only glimpse he was allowed of the thing as his own eyes filled with blood, rupturing from pinpoint hemorrhages, finally exploding from their sockets like moist and rotting grapes. His hair boiled with smoke and his face swelled-up into a livid bruise, his teeth dropping from his bleeding gums.

And inside his skull, his brain superheated into a steaming soup of gray matter gone black and red and molten . . . and splashed out his ears.

POLAR CLIME
MARCH 17

A
LL MORNING LONG AND well into the afternoon, the wind sounded like a lone wolf howling out some ancient song of mourning, its voice rising and falling but never fading away, just echoing off across the barren ice.

Time passed with a languid, unreal slowness.

It had been nearly two days since they killed the thing in T-Shack. Two long days. The atmosphere of Clime had steadily dissolved in that time, becoming blank and dim and fearsome. The shadows were thicker, the air pregnant with menace. And maybe some of that was some dire alien influence being directed at the station and its inhabitants, but a great deal of it was coming from within.

And that was more than enough.

A
BOUT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, Koch started screaming.

He came running from C-corridor into the Community Room, absolutely hysterical. Coyle and Locke pretty much had to tackle him and he fought with enraged fury, his head whipping from side to side, froth on his lips.

Gwen got a hypo from Medical and shot him up with Thorazine and that brought him down after a few minutes.

“What happened?” Coyle asked him, but being that he had just come from C-corridor he could pretty much imagine.

“Butler,” he said, his voice oddly thick and drawn-out. “She's . . . she's not human.”

Gwen went off at this point to look in on their guest.

If things worked out right, they would be rid of Butler in a few hours. Special Ed had gotten through to Colony and they were coming for her.

“What were you doing in there?” Locke asked him. “You know what happens . . . why did you go in there?”

He shook his head. “I had to see . . . see for myself.” Then he made a funny choking sound in his throat. “She's not human . . . just like they said . . . there's
something
inside her . . . something that can read your mind and make things move.” Koch just laid there, breathing, eyes swimming in and out of focus. “It . . . it knows . . . knows all about you . . . it knew about my mother.
It knew how she died! When she died! And . . . and . . . and . . .”

“Yes?”

Koch wiped sweat from his face and stared at the moisture on his palm like it was not just perspiration but maybe blood. “She told me . . .
told me that I would die down here . . .”

His face was in his hands and it was hard to say if the noise he was making was laughter or sobbing, maybe both. “Oh God . . . oh God . . . oh God . . . she's not human, man. She's a host for something. Something . . . something ancient, something evil. It knows the future, it knows the past.”

I
T STARTED WITH A rumbling and everyone in the dome heard it.

Wherever they were and whatever they were doing, they suddenly stopped.

Listened.

The phenomena was beginning again.

They all wanted to believe it was a storm gathering outside, making the dome shake as it did sometimes in the depth of winter, but this was different and they could all feel it right up their spines. No storm sounded like
this.
No storm ever exhaled a shrill screeching noise like metal tearing into metal that gradually rose in pitch until it was a shrieking, off-key almost musical piping that rode the howling winds and
became
the winds.

The dome was shaking.

The lights were flickering.

Some weird blue-white energy was arcing over the bulkheads.

A sudden and inexplicable rapping sound came from within the walls up and down the corridors. The floor was vibrating and the air filled with a scraping noise like forks drawn over blackboards.

Doors opened and slammed.

Ceiling tiles fell.

Computers crashed.

People screamed.

And that was how it started.

S
PECIAL ED WAS IN his office when it happened.

He was going through his reports, trying in vain to find a way to put some spin on all the things that had happened and failing miserably. He tapped a few keys on his laptop and the screen went black then came back on . . .

. . . something around him shifted, changed.

Feeling a rising anxiety fanning out in his chest, he looked around, licking his dry lips. Sensing that something was suddenly missing or that something else was intruding that did not belong, he set down his cup of coffee . . .

. . . the hair rose on the back of his neck.

The pages of his notebook began to flutter as if in a wind. Locked filing cabinets began to slide across the floor, turning in slow circles. The chair he sat on began to move, gliding across the floor as if it were being pulled.

This is it,
he thought in some dim back corner of his mind.
This is what we've all been waiting for and dreading. Here it comes.

Breathing deeply and trying to convince himself that he was not utterly mad, he watched as things vibrated on his desk, dancing about: pens and pencils, clipboards and coffee cups, rubber bands and pads of sticky notes. Paper clips were ejected from the mouth of a cup like lava from the cone of a volcano. They scattered in the air, spinning around as if caught in some insane magnetic vortex. Papers flew and drifted down like a fall of Autumn leaves.

Gathering himself, refusing to listen to the triphammer beat of his heart, he reached for his coffee cup and it skipped away from him, thudding against the desktop. A crack ran up the side and it shattered into fragments. He reached for a set of desk scissors and they flew away from his fingers with incredible velocity, sinking into the wall a good two inches.

A cold and sickly-smelling sweat breaking out on his face, he found that he could not get out of his chair. He had no feeling beneath the waist.

Paralyzed.

Immobile.

His legs were cold rubber.

As his chair slid across the floor, he absolutely lost it, began to scream: “IN HERE! SOMEBODY HELP ME! I'M TRAPPED!”

Inside his head, he could hear the wailing, piping voices of the ghosts that were invading the station. Like October winds blown through deserted churchyards and funneled down drainage pipes, they moaned and echoed while he shook with terror.

G
WEN STEPPED THROUGH THE door to Butler's room and right away saw Zoot crouched in the corner, her hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes wild with fear.

The dome was shaking. A picture of sunflowers on the wall one of the summer crew had left behind fell to the floor. Its glass face shattered . . . the tiny bits of broken glass blew over the floor like a down of drift.

Oh God, not again . . .

Butler was laying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Her plate of food was untouched. Her IV of fluids was half-drained. Her eyes were glossy black pits.

Gwen went over to Zoot, kneeled by her, pulling her to her. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“Eyes,” she said, her body rigid with terror.

“Eyes?”

“Red eyes. Five red eyes watching me.”

Gwen swallowed, feeling her sanity fraying now as it had been for some time.
Eyes.
A delusion? A hallucination? She had spent too much time around Butler now to believe that. For even in her own dreams she had seen red eyes staring out of pockets of shifting blackness at her.

“These eyes watch you?”

Zoot nodded. “Ever since I saw the ghost.”

“The ghost?”

“The ghost came out of Butler . . . it came out of her and it's been watching me. It won't let me leave. Everytime I go to the door, it knocks me back down.” Zoot was breathing very heavily. “Right now . . .”

“Yes?”

She looked over at the closet door. “It's in there. That's where it watches me from. From inside the closet.”

Gwen was going to tell her it was nothing, nothing at all, she just needed to get away from Butler, but as she reached out and touched Zoot to reassure her . . . something happened, something that floored her. Something that made her head spin and her teeth chatter and her belly come leapfrogging into her throat–”

“Gah,”
she said and it was a purely mindless animal grunt of violation.
“GAAAHHHHH
–

Like electricity.

Like grabbing a hot line, maybe a 220 sparking with juice.

Like laying your hands on it and feeling that energy come racing through you in a white-hot barrage, cooking your cells and making your brain flare-up with exploding fireworks . . .

Zoot.

Lynn Zutema.

She was from Iowa, unmarried, and had come to Antarctica because she wanted to get as far away from her family as possible. Her family were Seventh-Day Adventists and she'd been brought up under that restrictive yolk. When she turned eighteen, like a lot of kids who'd never enjoyed the freedoms most take for granted, she ran as fast and far away from the church as she could. The downside of that was that the Adventist elders had forbade her family from ever seeing or speaking to her again because she'd broke with their teachings.

I haven't seen or talked to my mom or dad in six years.

I don't think I ever will again.

My mom and dad are so brainwashed that they put the church before me.

Good riddance, I say.

Assholes.

. . . and then Gwen was back in her own head, knowing all the things that Zoot had never told her, all those messy private intimate details that rotted her soul black and made her hurt. Zoot never truly came out of her shell at Clime . . . so Gwen had climbed inside it with her.

“GWEN!” Zoot was shouting. “GWEN!”

Gwen blinked and shook and it was over.

Around her, the whole station was pulsating with some building charge of energy. She could feel it up and down her arms.

And from the closet, she heard something scratching.

Something that wanted to get out.

T
HE GHOSTS.

They were everywhere.

As the station shook and the fluorescents above flickered, Coyle saw them coming right out of the walls. He was crouched there with Locke, both of them looking down at Koch, Ida standing over them . . . and then it started.