The Spawning (2 page)

Breathing in and out slowly to keep herself calm, Butler squatted down and examined them.

They were triangular, about eight inches long, splayed out at their widest point to maybe five or six inches. If she hadn't known better, she would have thought somebody had walked through here with swim flippers on. The marks were like that, but not exactly. And there were many of them crowded together which made her think maybe two people had been wearing them and walking abreast.

There's no pool around here,
she thought.
Whatever made them was caked with ice and snow. It came in from outside. The same thing that left that sharp stink . . .

She wasn't sure what to think or what unknown paths her mind was taking her down. She only knew that her visitor had been most unusual. But what could come out of the night and cold and smell like that and leave such weird prints?

She rushed down the corridor.

She knocked on doors, calling out the names of scientists and techies and contract personnel.

But there was no answer.

Just silence.

A silence that was big and overwhelming. One that made her want to crawl under a bed and hide.

Relax, just relax.

Yes, that was how you handled problems like this.

You didn't climb walls and scream and have nervous breakdowns, you simply took care of business. As frightened as you were, you simply erased the human factor and applied the scientific method. If some creature had come into camp, then you figured out what. If everyone was gone, then you found out where they'd gone
to.

Oh, and didn't that sound perfectly simple?

But it was not so simple with the compound lying around her, silent and waiting and somehow deadly. You could tell yourself by the light of day that a mausoleum was just a mausoleum, but try spending the night there.

She tried the door to Sandley's room first.

Sandley was a botanist and one of the other female residents. It was open. Clicking on the light, Butler looked around in there, maybe expecting to see something horrible like a hacked and bloody corpse, but seeing absolutely nothing.

The room was just empty.

The bedcovers were tossed aside as if Sandley had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a drink and never returned.

“Sandy,” Butler said under her breath. “Where are you? What happened here?”

Whoever had come for her—and by that point, Butler was sure that someone or some
thing
had—they had not messed up the papers on her desk or dropped ice. The floor was damp in spots, but that meant nothing. If the heat got cranked up enough, water started dripping everywhere in the dorm rooms.

She went over to the bed.

The blankets felt cold and . . . Jesus, there was more of that saliva threaded onto the pillow and dangling from the sheet like snot. And in the air, that same chemical odor. Old . . . but persistent.

Butler frantically checked the other rooms in the dorm. Van Erb. Johnson. Elder. Brighten. Lee. Huptmann. Callaway. O'Toole.

Empty.

Empty.

Empty.

Empty.

Even the ones of the contract workers who ran the place. All the rooms were empty. All the beds looked slept in. There was more of that slime . . . on the beds, on the walls, on the doorknobs.

The floors were damp.

But no people anywhere.

Butler raced to the end of the corridor and went into Gillian's room.

Gillian was the station manager. He ran the whole show and if anybody was on top of things, it would have been him.

His room was not quite like the others. The bed was slept in, yes, but everything was in disarray as if there'd been a struggle. The desk was tipped over. Files and papers scattered about. On the walls there were ragged scratches like knife blades had been dragged over them. On the floor, there was a rosary as if he'd been praying when it . . . whatever it was . . . had happened.

And whatever it had been, it had not taken him completely by surprise.

Not like the others.

Butler knew she had to formulate a plan.

The rest of the station had to be checked, even the lower levels. And when that was done, she would have to go outside and look in the garages and outbuildings, the warm-up shacks. Then she would get on the radio, send out a distress call on the emergency channel. Contact Rothera Station on Adelaide Island. Send her voice loud and clear so they would hear it everywhere, Pole Station and Vostok, Polar Clime and McMurdo . . . hear it all over the goddamn continent.

Yes, that's what she'd do.

Out in the corridor, breathing hard, she knew none of that would change one unpleasant little fact: she was alone. She was alone at Mount Hobb.

Trapped on the bottom of the world.

An easy hundred miles from the nearest occupied camp. And with the way the weather was kicking up outside, nobody would be able to get to her.

Just her.

And the wind.

The cold.

The emptiness.

And whatever had left those tracks and abducted everyone.

S
HE TRIED TO RELAX, tried to figure it out.

But all her mind kept coming back to was the very thing she did not want to think about: what was out in Shack #3. The relic that Huptmann and Dr. Elder had collected somewhere in the vicinity of the abandoned American installation, Kharkov Station. They kept it under lock and key out in Shack #3 and refused to say what it was.

But there were rumors.

With what had happened at Kharkov years back, there were plenty of rumors.

But you don't believe that nonsense. Those wild tales that came out of Kharkov. That down in the ice they found–

No, no. Huptmann and Elder were paleobiologists.

Surely what they had found was old, but it was certainly terrestrial.

She kept telling herself this.

Making herself believe.

S
HE WAS IN FULL-BLOWN panic mode now.

Her science and her reasoning brain had abandoned her. She was overcome and stomped down by the oldest of emotions: primal fear, superstitious terror.

She ran out of the dorms and into the common room where everyone ate and lounged.

She checked the Galley and the workshops.

The labs and storage rooms.

No one anywhere.

The funny thing was that every light was burning bright. The dorm rooms were the only ones with the lights off.

In the common room, she peered out the windows into the Antarctic twilight. It lasted about two hours that time of year before the sun came up again at one a.m. A storm was brewing out there. The wind was blowing, throwing sheets of snow around. The garages were even lit up. She could see the vehicles out there, Deltas and Sno-Cats and big plows with bubble tires.

She thought for a moment she saw a shape darting away into the purple shadows.

But no, it must have been her imagination.

There was no one left. No one at all.

Panicking, on the verge of complete hysteria, Butler stood there in the common room amongst the empty tables, trying to think, trying to come up with something that didn't involve the relic in Shack #3.

She couldn't seem to move.

She was almost afraid to.

Afraid what she might see or feel next.

Because right then, she was feeling things. Things that saw her that she could not see. A crawling sensation that there were eyes watching, watching.

She thought:
Get to the radio room, get out that distress.

Yes. Yes, that's what she was going to do.

But every direction she started in, everywhere she turned, she could feel something crowding in on her. Something almost palpable, something she could not see but only feel. It filled her brain with tangled shadows and made a cutting dread open up in her belly. Whatever it was, it was close enough to touch and close enough to touch
her.

That biting chemical odor wafted in her face, making her nostrils sting.

Something that felt like a twig brushed the back of her neck.

She cried out, whirling around, but there was nothing there.

She could hear a sort of hissing sound like a leaking radiator coming from the dorm corridor. She sensed movement all around her, heard distant scraping and scratching sounds.

Trembling, she went to her knees, breathing so hard now she was hyperventilating.
Oh please, oh God, just make it stop, make it all just stop, make it all go away.

There was a sudden sharp shrilling noise that rose up and died off.

Butler clambered to her feet and ran down towards the labs and radio room.

Three feet away, a door slammed.

Then another at the end of the corridor.

Something in the wall thudded.

Her eyes wide and her skin drawn tight over her bones, she saw another set of those wet flipper-like prints. They moved down the hallway and vanished at a solid wall as if whatever had left them had walked right
through
it.

She turned towards one of the doors that had slammed.

It led to the greenhouse.

She grasped the knob and threw it open. A blast of that chemical odor blew into her face and this time it smelled almost like bleach. It took her breath away and made her eyes water.

In the greenhouse, it was freezing.

Butler saw her breath.

All the plants—tomatoes and beans, carrots and parsnips and assorted other greens—were brown and wilted. She did not know where the cold air came from that killed everything, but her brain told her it could have come from only one possible source: the thing that had come into the station in the dead of night.

She stepped away from the door and saw a creeping shadow thrown against the wall in there and the door slammed shut in her face.

She let out a cry and something very cold passed behind her.

Stumbling, she ran back into the common room.

Right away she saw impossible, nebulous shapes pass by the windows.

She sank to her knees.

The lights flickered as a crackling sound like static electricity rose up.

They flickered again.

The hairs on the back of her neck were standing rigid, gooseflesh sweeping down her spine. The air was getting colder now and this was the first sign of invasion, she knew. That whatever had taken away the others was coming now for
her.
Coming with a chill and a stink and an eruption of energy.

A dark and freezing shadow fell over her.

She turned slowly to face whatever made it.

But there was nothing.

Nothing.

The lights went out.

The entire station was plunged into a murky half-light alive with half-glimpsed shapes and living sentient shadows that circled her and pressed in from all sides.

Down below, the generator cut out.

But the secondary did not kick in.

There was no sound but the wind howling outside.

The entire station shook.

Security lights had come on now and a warning alarm was ringing, telling her that the generator was dead.

Outside the windows, she could see shapes moving about, floating and dipping and pressing up against the glass. The illumination from one of the security lights outside captured a form and cast its shadow at her feet . . . an insane, abstract shadow, stout and conical with snaking, wavering appendages.

She screamed.

Because it was happening.

She did not know how it was she had slept through what had happened before, but she would not sleep through it this time. Now they were coming for her and she could not escape.

Things began to happen.

The temperature started dropping, but too fast for it to have anything to do with the failed generator. This was too rapid, too sudden, too abrupt. A pall of freezing air enveloped her. The floor beneath her began to vibrate and thrum. There were knockings in the walls, slithering sounds moving around her in the darkness. Awful fetid odors. A fluttering sound as of immense wings.

Her entire body was shaking.

She was numb with the cold and terror that settled into her, so infinite and so black.

Her temples were throbbing, sharp white bolts of pain exploding in her head, making her gasp. Making her teeth clench, her eyes roll back white in her head. Her mind was filled with crazy alien imagery and she knew it was not of her own creation, but something from outside, something that was pushing its way into her head. She saw–

—a flurry of black winged shapes taking flight like flies lighting from a corpse. A great swarm of them. They rose up against a series of towering monoliths, narrow and craggy and machinelike, obelisks and spires and honeycombed pylons that reached right into the boiling sky overhead, became the sky itself, slit open the underbelly of the heavens
–

She screamed with a horror that was profound.

The sight of that nameless architectural obscenity filled her with a mindless cosmic fear that reached out to her from the very pit of her being. It was a place she had seen in harrowing childhood nightmares she did not remember until now, a place she associated at the time as the castle of some evil witch. But now she knew, as all knew who looked upon that moldering pile of bones out of space and time, that it was the cradle of mankind and ultimately its tomb.

There was a pounding at the main door, a low hollow booming.

This cleared those awful stygian images and oriented her to a fresh slate of horror. One that was here and now and not half-remembered hereditary memory.

Whatever had come for her stood beyond that door now.

It stood out in that blowing white death, something born of shadows and nightmare antiquity.

The knocking came again.

And again.

Voices whispered in her head, shrill and shrieking.

A perverse musical piping that broke her mind like wheat before a scythe, scattering it into shorn grains. And she sat there, crying and shaking and delirious, just waiting for the thing that was coming for her.