Hive (23 page)

Sharkey got out of her chair and walked around behind Hayes. She stroked his hair and then kissed him on the cheek. “Why don't you go accidentally knock Hut Six down . . . that's a start. That might shut them down or at least set them back.”

Hayes stood up and took her into his arms. And maybe he didn't really take her, because she seemed to fall right in place like a cog. He kissed her and she kissed him back and that kiss was in no hurry, it held on, pressed them together and only ended when it was on the verge of bigger things.

“I think I'll go do just that. Have a little accident with the ‘dozer. A big fucking oops,” he said, his insides filled with a warmth that quickly sought lower regions. “And then we'll see. We'll just see. You know, lady, I got me this crazy idea of us walking out of here together.”

“Me, too,” she said.

Hayes turned away and started down the corridor.

“Be careful, Jimmy,” she said, not sure if he heard her or not.

“Nor is it to be thought...that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substances walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

A
few hours after Hayes went out on his mission, Cutchen appeared at the door to the infirmary. “Knock, knock,” he said.

“It's open,” Sharkey said. She was staring into the screen of her laptop, glasses balanced on the end of her nose. “If you want drugs, the answer is no.”

But Cutchen didn't want that.

He had an almost rakish smile on his face. And his eyes had that typical I-know-something-you-don't-know gleam in them. “How's things? Anything going on I should know about?”

Sharkey still hadn't looked up from her laptop. “Go ahead, Cutchy. I know you want to. You look like a little boy trying to sneak a snake into the schoolhouse. Spill it.”

“It concerns our Mr. Hayes.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, about an hour ago I was coming back from the dome and I saw the craziest damn thing. I saw the camp bulldozer suddenly roar into life, come plowing through the compound and smash through the wall of Hut Six. Now isn't that astounding?”

Sharkey was still reading off her screen. “Yup. Crazy things happen. Hard to see out there.”

“You know what I saw then? Oh, this is even better. I saw Hayes hop out of the ‘dozer and elbow his way through a group of people at Targa House, ignoring their questions as to what the hell he thought he was doing. Those people kept asking and he kept ignoring them and they were all smiling, some were even clapping.”

“Really?” Sharkey was looking up now, smiling herself. “Sounds like Hayes did a pretty careless thing . . . but it certainly perked up morale, didn't it?”

“I would say so. Jesus, everyone's been wandering around here like a bunch of goddamn zombies. All of them afraid of their own shadows . . . and now this. Yeah, they needed it. It was a real big boost, kicked them out of their shells. Maybe even gave them the sort of hope they've been lacking.” Cutchen laughed. “It certainly gave me a charge. Hayes is like our very own rebel leader now, our own Pancho Villa, our Robin Hood. But you already knew about this, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“And did you put him up to it?”

Sharkey shrugged. “I suggested it. Our Mr. Hayes is a very impulsive fellow, you know.”

“Oh, I know. Everyone seems to look to him now, like he's in charge and not LaHune. I would tend to agree. Hayes is now our spiritual leader.” Cutchen sat down across from her. “LaHune didn't care for any of it, of course.”

Cutchen explained that LaHune came storming into the community room, demanding to know what Hayes thought he was doing and Hayes told him that he was preserving Gates' specimens before they rotted away completely. That he'd taken down that wall purely out of scientific concern for the mummies.

“LaHune, of course, started threatening Hayes with all sorts of repercussions.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Hayes then told him to go promptly fuck himself.” Cutchen laughed about this. “As you might expect there was more applause.”

“I imagine so.”

Cutchen sat there for a time watching Sharkey who seemed to be pretty enrapt with what was on her laptop. “Tell you the truth, Elaine, I didn't just come here to tell you about that, though.”

“No?”

“Nope. For some time now, both you and Hayes have been pulling me into this scenario of yours and I'll be the first to admit, I'm not seeing the big picture in this conspiracy. I know what I've been dreaming about and what I've been feeling and the things I've seen here . . . and at Vradaz. But you two have yet to feed me more than scraps. So let's have it. Tell me everything.”

“Funny you should be asking these things, because I think I'm in a position, finally, where I can tell you. What I've been studying here on my laptop are Dr. Gates' files. I hacked into his system because I had a pretty good feeling that everything he hadn't told us that day in the community room was locked up on his computer and I was right.” Using her mouse, she scrolled through a few pages. “You see, not only was all of it there, but more. Gates has been sending written reports from his laptop up at the excavation to his desktop here. The last one was dated two days ago . . . “

“You're a sneaky devil, Madam.”

“Yes, I am.”

“And? What did you find?”

“Where do I begin?” She sat back in her chair. “What we saw at that Russian camp, Cutchy . . . how would you classify that business?”

He shrugged. “Ghosts, I guess. Memories locked up in those dead husks like Hayes said. Sensitive minds come into contact with them . . . or maybe any minds at all . . . and out pop these memories: noises and apparitions and that sort of business. I never believed in any of that bull before, but I don't have much of a choice now.”

“You'd call them ghosts?”

“Yes.” He leaned forward. “Unless you have a better term . . . maybe one that would help me sleep better at night.”

Sharkey shook her head. “I don't. ‘Ghosts' will have to do. Because, essentially, that's what they are. Gates wrote in some detail about psychic manifestations occurring in proximity to the Old Ones. People have been seeing spooks down here a long time, having bad dreams and weird experiences . . . and I guess you can figure out why.
Reflections,
are what Gates calls these phenomena, projections from those dead husks, from minds that never truly died in the way we understand death . . . just waited. Maybe not conscious really or sentient, but dreaming. And what we're picking up are the ethereal projections of those dead minds . . . intellects, a mass-consciousness that was so very powerful in life that even death couldn't crush it. Not completely. Gates isn't certain about a lot of that . . . just that those minds are active in a way, not really alive but functioning pretty much on auto like a radio station, broadcasting and broadcasting. Our minds come into contact with them and we pick up those signals, then the trouble starts.”

Cutchen nodded. “I'll buy that. Makes sense. And maybe as they unthaw, those minds become stronger. Maybe that's what got to Meiner and St. Ours.”

“They may have been more sensitive to it than others. Same way I think Hayes is. Gates had another theory on that. He thought that maybe those dead minds were being energized not only by us, but amplified by that huge and overpowering central consciousness down in the lake. That the living ones might be acting as sort of a generator.”

“He's guessing, though.”

“Of course he's guessing. There's no way to know.” Sharkey scrolled through a few pages on the screen. “Did Hayes tell you about his experiences? Out in the hut and on the tractor?”

“Yeah. Those minds almost did to him what they did to Meiner and St. Ours,” Cutchen said.

“Did he tell you about his telepathic link with Lind after the events in the hut?” She could see that he hadn't, so she filled him in on it. “Lind was seeing things millions of years old. A city here at the Pole before the glaciers swallowed the continent. And just before he died, well . . . “

“Possessed.” Cutchen said the word so she didn't have to. “That's what everyone's saying. That Lind was possessed by those things.”

“Yes, at least what we could call diabolical possession. He manifested all the signs you hear about in those cases . . . telepathy and telekinesis, that sort of thing. He described to us the original colonization of this world and we were able to smell and feel what he was smelling and feeling. The thick poisonous atmosphere of another world, the heat there, then the freezing cold of deep space.”

“Did Gates confirm that they are alien? I mean we've all been tossing the word around, but — “

“Yes, he was certain. You see, he unlocked the code of their writings, their glyphs and bas-reliefs. That ancient city he found, it was scrawled with writings which were essentially a written history of who the Old Ones were, where they came from, what they planned to do . . . and had done.”

“He unlocked all that? In just a month or so?”

Sharkey nodded. “Yes, because he found something akin to the Rosetta Stone, except this one was a key to their language and symbols. He called it the Dyer Stone after Professor Dyer of the Pabodie Expedition. A soapstone about the size of a tabletop . . . with it, he was able to translate those writings.”

“And . . . and what did he find out?”

“There are carvings in those ruins, Cutchy. Ancient maps of our solar system and other systems as well. Dozens and dozens of them. Firm evidence, Gates said, of interplanetary and interstellar travel and this probably before our planet was even cool. Dyer mentioned certain ancient books and legends that hinted at Pluto as the Old Ones' first outpost in this star system, but according to the maps Gates found, they came here from either Uranus or Neptune . . . but before that, who can say?”

“Uranus? Neptune?” Cutchen shook his head. “Those are dead worlds, Elaine.”

“Sure, now they are . . . but what about 500 million years ago? A billion? Maybe that's why they came here, because they knew their world . . . Uranus or Neptune . . . was doomed. And maybe they just came seeking our warm oceans. Gates thinks that they are originally marine organisms, but given their durability, they can adapt themselves to just about any environment. Gates thinks that myths and legends concerning winged demons and flying monsters might be race memories of them, impressions from the dawn of our race that survived in the form of folktale and legend. Regardless, they've been here since the beginning.
Our
beginning and the beginning of all life on this world.”

“I was hoping you weren't going to go there,” Cutchen said.

“I have to. Because that's what this is all about: life. The creation of it, the continuation of it, the modification of it. When Lind was . . . well,
possessed,
he started ranting on about the
helix.
There was no doubt he was talking about DNA . . . the plan of all life on this planet. He was uplinked with those dead minds and telling us about the helix, that they were the farmers of the helix. That they created the helix and seeded it, world to world to world.”

“That's kind of what Hayes was saying,” Cutchen said, looking beaten and cramped from the weight of it all. “That they started life here, they started it and they would harvest it.”

“Yes. It almost sounded like to the Old Ones, the helix was God. Which, I suppose, fits in with what certain evolutionary biologists have been saying. That life, all life, is merely a host, a vessel to ensure the propagation and continuation of the genetic material.”

“That's pleasant.”

Sharkey nodded. “Remember what Gates told us that day? Lake, the biologist in the Pabodie Expedition, had found fossilized prints in Precambrian rock that had to be at least a billion years old. The prints of the Old Ones. Probably from one of the earliest of their earth colonies. Some time later, Gates wrote, there would have been a mass migration that went on for millions of years. Their original outposts were doomed and unsuitable, so they came here. They came to earth en masse to colonize and found our planet to be dead, so they engineered a highly ambitious blueprint to bring forth not only life on this world, but
intelligent
life.”

“But that's insane,” Cutchen said. “I'm sorry, but it is. That the human race is the end result of something they started into motion a billion years ago. That's crazy.”

“Is it? Think about it. These things have been seeding life on dozens and dozens of planets probably since before our sun was born. And they've been doing it with a very specific agenda: to bring forth intelligence. Intelligent minds that they could master, that they could modify and subvert. And since none existed here, they created them. God knows how many colonies they've created. Maybe hundreds if not thousands spread across space, outposts on countless alien worlds. Out in our own solar system there are probably ruins of ancient cities much like the ones Gates found. And probably on the planets orbiting a hundred stars, if not a thousand.” She stopped, maybe to catch her own mental breath or to let Cutchen catch his. “It's fantastic, heady stuff, I know. That city Gates found . . . it was probably on a plain or in a valley originally that became a mountain millions upon millions of years later. Gates said that, according to ancient legend, there were other cities . . . in Asia, the Australian desert, a certain sunken continent in the Pacific. Maybe our tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu are, again, just ancestral memories of these places . . . “