Hive (3 page)

Nerves.

Jesus, that's all it was. Too much weird shit happening lately, his imagination had been cranked. And when you lost control of your imagination during the long Antarctic winter, you could be in real trouble.

Hayes settled back in, deciding to lay off the microwave lasagna before bedtime. Because that was probably the real culprit.

Couldn't be anything else.

B
y the next afternoon, everyone in camp had heard about Lind's little episode.

At a research station like Kharkhov, there were no secrets. Stories — whether real, imagined, or grossly exaggerated — made the rounds like clap at a convention. Everything was passed around, re-told, re-invented, blown out of proportion until it bore little resemblance to the incident that had inspired it.

In the mess hall, trying to eat his grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup in peace, they were all over Hayes like birds on roadkill, all pecking away to see if there was any good red meat left on the carcass.

“Heard Lind tried to slit his wrists,” Meiner, one of the heavy equipment operators was saying, smelling like diesel fuel and hydraulic grease and not doing much for Hayes' appetite. “Sumbitch just went crazy, they're saying, crazier than a red-headed shitbug. Just lost it staring down at that mummy in the ice.”

Hayes sighed, set his sandwich down. “He -”

“It's true enough,” St. Ours said. “I was there with him for awhile. He was getting a funny look in his eyes the whole time, just staring at the ugly bastard in the ice, that monster just thawing out and that face swimming up clear . . . and it weren't no sort of face I'd want to see again.”

Rutkowski jumped in at that point, started saying how Lind had gotten a funny gleam in his eyes like a man ready to jump off a bridge. That none of it surprised him because there was something funny about Lind and something even funnier about those dead things Gates had dragged back from the camp in the foothills.

They talked on and on non-stop.

Didn't let Hayes get a word in edgewise about any of it. Other than Gates, Holm, and Bryer, he'd been the only one to see Lind's breakdown, if that's what it had been. Both Rutkowski and St. Ours had left the hut maybe fifteen minutes before. Not that the lack of firsthand experience in the matter was slowing them down any.

Meiner was saying how he'd been at the Palmer Station on Anvers Island one lean winter and that three people had committed suicide one week, slit their wrists to a man, one after the other. It was spooky shit, he said. Got so people at Palmer thought there was some sort of insanity bug making the rounds. But that was the Antarctic winter, sometimes people just couldn't take the isolation, the desolation, it got under their skins like scabies. And when that happened, when something slipped a cog upstairs, then that left a person wide open to bad “influences.”

“Don't surprise me, not one cunt-hair,” St. Ours confessed to them. “We had this man and wife team at McMurdo one winter, funny ducks they were, geologists, studying rocks and corings, always looking for something but real vague as to what it was when you put a question to ‘em. Anyway, they were up on Mount Erebus for maybe a week, doing some digging. They come down, come back, and they got this funny look in their eyes . . . kind of a shellshocked look, you know?”

Rutkowski nodded. “Seen it plenty of times.”

“Sure enough,” St. Ours said. “Sure enough. Only this time it was worse, savvy? They had all these rocks they found up there, but real flat with weird carvings on ‘em like hieroglyphics or some of that Egyptian gobbledegook. They was acting damn freaky, hoarding those rocks, getting really scary about ‘em. So one day, I was over at their shack and I says to ‘em, I ast ‘em what in Christ were those rocks about? They said they were artifacts from some ancient civilization, wouldn't let me touch ‘em. Said once you touched ‘em, your mind went one drop at a time and something else filled it. What? I ast ‘em. But they wouldn't say, just grinning and staring like a couple pitch-and-throw carnie dolls. Two days later, yessir, two days later, hand in hand they wandered off into a blizzard, left a note that they was following the ‘old voices from under the mountain.' Jesus Christ. But that just goes to show you the kind of horseshitty things that happen down here.”

“I believe it,” Meiner said.

Hayes pushed his plate away, wondering why they had to choose him as their totem pole to dance around. “Listen, you guys, I was there when Lind dropped his deck. None of
you
were, only me. He didn't try to slit his wrists or anything like that, he just had a bad time of it is all.”

They listened intently, nodded, then Rutkowski got that conspiratorial look in his eyes and said, “Slit both his wrists, that's what they're saying. Probably would've made a go of his throat if there were time.”

“I don't like it,” St. Ours said.

“Listen - “ Hayes attempted, but they shut him off like a leaky tap.

“I don't like the idea of three more months up here with a crazy man,” Rutkowski said. “They better lock his ass up. That's all I gotta say on the matter.”

Meiner said, “It ain't that crazy shit you got to worry about, it's what Gates brought back here. Jesus and Mary, go out there and look at that one he's defrosting . . . it'll make you want to piss down your leg. Looks like some kind of crazy gray cucumber with these yellow worms growing out of the top of its head and big, staring red eyes at the end of each one . . . nothing that looks like that thing can be up to any good. Believe you me.”

Gradually, as the shit got deeper and it got difficult to find leg room or draw a breath with the stink, they moved off and Lind was pretty much forgotten. Now it was just the mummies and how word had it they weren't even from this planet. Ghost stories and campfire tales and those three big, seasoned men trying to out-do one another, scaring the shit out of each other in the process.

Hayes ignored it all and sipped his soup, listened to the wind trying to strip Targa House off the frozen tundra as it did day after day, reaching and clawing and howling like something hungry come down out of the mountains to the west.

“Join you?” a voice said.

Hayes looked up and it was Doc Sharkey, the station's physician, a short pretty redhead with bright blue eyes. She was the only woman in camp and all the men were saying how she was too heavy for their liking, but by spring they'd all be trying to get into her pants.

Thing was, she wasn't heavy, not in Hayes' worldview. She was wide in the hips, nicely rounded in that way he'd always found blatantly sexual. No, the men kept their distance (at least for the time being) because she intimidated them. It wasn't anything she actually said or did, but her face more than anything. Those upturned Nordic eyes of hers gave her a cold, detached look that was enhanced by her mouth which had a sort of cruel lilt to it.

Hayes liked her right away when he met her and the reason for that was downright silly and he didn't even like to admit it to himself: she reminded him of Carla Jean Rasper from the third grade, his first serious crush. Same hair, same eyes, same mouth. When he'd first caught sight of Sharkey, he'd been instantly transported back to grade school, speechless and stupid just like he'd been around Carla Jean.
Good Morning, little schoolgirl
. . .

“Earth to Jimmy Hayes . . . what's your frequency?”

“Huh? Oh yeah, Doc, sit down. Please do,” Hayes said.

What's your frequency?
He liked that. Hadn't that nut who attacked Dan Rather on his way to CBS that time said something like that? Sure.
What's your frequency, Kenneth?
REM had done a song by the same name.

Sharkey sat down and Hayes found himself staring into her eyes a little too long. He wasn't married, but she was. Her husband was an anthropologist on a grant somewhere in Borneo studying monkey semen or something like that.

“How goes it?” Sharkey asked, pouring some dressing on her salad.

Hayes laughed without meaning to do so. “Well, I been thinking that they better take a chance and send a plane down here before all these people go completely mad.”

She smiled. “We won't see a plane until September at the earliest and mid-October wouldn't surprise me. Sorry, Jimmy, what we got is what we got and we'll have to live with it.”

“They're talking some pretty crazy shit, Doc,” Hayes told her. “And not just the contractors either, if what I'm hearing is correct.”

The building shook and the lights dimmed momentarily.

Sharkey sighed. “No, it's not just the contractors, it's the scientists, too. I think this is going to be a long winter. Should make for an interesting psychological profile by spring.”

“Sure, I don't doubt it a bit. Maybe Gates ought to ship his mummies back up to those caves.”

“That won't happen,” she laughed.

“I'm serious, Doc. Those goddamn things are like catalysts. These people are already acting goddamn loony and I hate to see what another month will bring.”

“I've spent three winters at the Pole, Jimmy, and most of them are just lonely and quiet and boring. But I don't think we'll see that this year. What Gates found has everyone worked up. I'm hoping it'll die down in a week or so, but I have to wonder. Even I have to wonder.”

“Why's that?”

She looked at him, her eyes sparkling. “You saw those mummies, Jimmy, and you can't deny that there's something . . .
peculiar
about them. Don't look at me like that, you felt it same as I did. They have to be the most alien-looking creatures I've ever seen, but I don't know if that's what's eating people around here. I'm only going to say, from a very safe medical pedestal, that those . . .
remains
seem to be having a very unusual psychological impact on whoever looks at them.”

Hayes didn't doubt that a bit. He'd felt it right away when he'd been in Hut #6 with Lind and the others. He hadn't been able to put a finger on what it was about the thing and still really couldn't, other than to say that there was something extremely
unsettling
about it. Something that got inside you, dug in deep like a burrowing worm looking for a hot, moist place to lay its eggs.

And what had Lind said?

Can't you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind...?

Hayes swallowed, something caught in his throat. “There's something . . .
bad
about those things, Doc. We're all feeling it. Maybe not Gates and those other eggheads, but the rest of us are feeling it just fine, thank you. I don't know what to make of it.”

“Lind seemed to think it was trying to steal his mind or something?”

Hayes nodded. “That's what he said. It was getting inside his head, unlocking things. You want to take a stab at that?”

She shook her head. “I'm not a therapist, Jimmy. I've given you my learned G.P. speculation, that's all I can do.”

“How about off the record?”

She set her fork down. “Off the record? Off the record you couldn't pay me a million dollars to spend the night alone out there with that horror.”

T
hat evening after dinner, Gates finally left the side of his lover out in Hut #6, and joined the others in the community room at Targa House. At what seemed a prearranged moment — the entire winter crew in attendance, some 20 scientists and contractors — he stood up and tapped a spoon against his water glass. It drew everyone's attention right away, because to a man, they'd been waiting for it.

Waiting patiently.

Now, it was rare to find everyone in the community room. Usually some of the contractors would be out at the power station or working on the vehicles and snowmobiles, maybe down in the shafts checking lines. And the scientists were usually out at the drilling tower or in one of their improvised labs or at their laptops, tapping away.

But not tonight.

Everyone was there, gathered around just waiting for Gates to say something because he hadn't exactly been a social butterfly since he came down from the tent camp. So everyone was in attendance like spooks hanging around the War Room wondering if the president was going to bomb some country.

Hayes was sitting with Doc Sharkey and Cutchen, the meteorologist, playing poker. Rutkowski and most of the other contractors were at the table opposite playing cribbage . . . now and again, one of them would look over at Elaine Sharkey, nod their heads as if to say, yup, she's a woman, all right, knew it first time I saw her.

“I think Dr. Gates would like to say a word or two,” LaHune said. He was sitting alone at a table in the corner looking . . . efficient. Sitting there in his fancy
L.L. Bean
sweater and windpants, straight and tall like he had an iron bar shoved up his ass and he wanted to keep it there.

“Ah, the plot thickens,” Cutchen said.

Gates smiled to everyone. His eyes were bloodshot with brown half-moons under them. He'd been busy and hadn't been sleeping much. “Hello, everyone,” he said. “Tomorrow afternoon I'm going back up to the excavation, but before I do that, I'd like to touch base and tell you what all this is about and what it might mean.”

Everyone was watching him now.

“I'm not going to waste a lot of your time talking about the mummies themselves as we've only just completed a preliminary dissection of one of the intact specimens and it'll take time to correlate and interpret all the data Dr. Holm, Dr. Bryer, and myself have compiled. But I don't think I'd be going out on
too
shaky of a limb by saying what we've found out there will certainly revolutionize the field of biology. The creature . . . creatures . . . are of a completely new variety, composed of characteristics of both plant and animal and a few that fit neither pantheon. Let me just say that, in regards to its basal anatomy, it seems to fit nowhere in the fossil record. I'm guessing what we've uncovered up here will keep comparative anatomists and physiologists alike busy for decades to come.