The Spawning (23 page)

“Goddammit, Biggs! How many times do we have to go over this?” Beeman wanted to know. “You don't send anything out without approval!
My
approval, you damn idiot!”

“Yes sir, Lieutenant-Commander Beeman, sir!” Biggs said, snapping to attention. “I told Dr. Dryden that . . . but, well, Chief, he just don't have any respect for your authority. Personally, sir, I think he thinks you're a flunky. And a really fucking stupid one at that.”

Warren wasn't playing video games now.

This was better.

Beeman was really something to see. Guy was like a kaleidoscope, going a dozen different shades of scarlet and purple. He had more colors in his face than a bag of Skittles. Cords snapped tight in his throat. Veins pulsed at his temples. His ears got so red they looked like they might start on fire. Biggs stepped back a bit because he thought the guy's bulging eyes were going to pop out of his head and hurt someone.

“YOU LISTEN TO ME, YOU SMART-ASSED, LAZY, INCOMPETENT SHIT!” Beeman shouted. “I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR CRAP! I'M IN CHARGE HERE AND YOU BETTER START TOEING THE FUCKING LINE OR SO HELP ME I'LL BREAK YOU! NOTHING GOES OUT WITHOUT MY SAY-SO, UNDERSTAND?”

“Yes sir! I understand just fine, sir!” Biggs said, giving him another limp-wristed salute. “But the problem here, big boss man, is that Dr. Dryden is in charge of this project and I do what
he
says! And Dryden told me quite specifically that he doesn't give a shit what you want, even less of one for what the fucking Navy wants! I have nothing but admiration and respect for you, sir, but I'm just following orders!
Sir!”

That was it. That broke it.

Beeman charged in before he could even hope of controlling himself. He charged in and shoved Biggs with everything he had, putting him right down on his ass.

And Biggs thought:
That's it, you stupid jarhead! Now you've done it! Now you've pissed all over your efficient little record! I'm down and I'll stay down because, oh boy, you hurt me!

“Oh! My fucking arm!” he whined, putting on the show. “I think you might have broken it, sir! I'll have to report this to the NSF. I'm pretty sure physical violence is in complete violation of NSF regulations.” He looked over at Warren who couldn't seem to remember how to close his mouth. “You saw it, didn't you, Warren? You witnessed the assault?”

“Yeah . . . I mean, I guess I did.”

Beeman looked ready to take it up another notch and break both Biggs's arms. But he controlled himself this time. “You do that. You report it. And while you're at it, you just remember that you're stuck with me until spring and I've got ways of making it one long, ugly winter for you.”

Biggs smiled at him. “I'll make a note of it, Big Chief. Yes sir, I will. I'm stuck with you until spring and you have ways of making it one long, ugly winter for me. Yes sir, threat duly noted and logged, El Kahuna.”

Beeman threw on his ECWs before his temper got the best of him and rapidly went out the door into the cold. When it was slammed shut, Biggs was still smiling.

“You just can't quit, can you?” Warren said.

“I won't quit until that motherfucker has a stroke. Fucking Navy. Fucking push-button jarheads.”

There was silence for a time as Biggs started thinking about the message he had sent and what it might mean. Something about it all made that anxiety in him rise like boiling milk. His palms were sweating and he almost felt sick to his stomach. That headache began to pound again in his skull.

“Wonder what they found down there,” Warren said. “700,000 years old. Hell could it be?”

“Doc said we'd see soon enough.”

Warren tried to smile but completely missed the mark. “Maybe that's what I'm afraid of.”

“I got something better to be afraid of,” Biggs said, his voice oddly hollow. “Dryden wants to thaw it out . . .”

NOAA FIELD CAMP POLARIS,
ATLANTIS ICE DOME

I
T LOOKED LIKE THE inside of the habitat had been painted red.

They all knew it was blood, of course, because it could not be anything else. It was splashed over the floor in an ice puddle, sprayed up the walls in frozen runnels and inkblots, and even hanging from the ceiling in cherry-red icicles.

When they came into the habitat, Coyle in the lead, they saw it right away in the beams of their flashlights: not just death, not just murder, but absolute barbaric
slaughter.

“Dear God, what happened here?” Flagg said.

The habitat was trashed. Desks flipped over, books scattered, papers flung about, dishes shattered. The airlock and outer door were wide open and snow had blown over the floor, drifting in the corners. Waters lines had burst in the cold, bleeding icicles from the ceiling.

Coyle kept looking around in disbelief. Lots of blood, but no bodies. What could that suggest?

“Horn?” he said. “You better go check that generator.”

“Right.” He didn't like the idea of going out there alone with what he was seeing, but he went.

While Flagg took video of the mess in the common room, Coyle and Gwen went down the corridor to check the other rooms.

“Look,” Gwen said, indicating a bloody smear on the wall.

It looked like something wet with blood had been dragged along the wall. The trail ended at a doorway where it became a handprint . . . only distorted, the palm print weirdly angled, the fingers splayed out seven and eight inches.

“What kind of hand made that?” Gwen asked, her breath frosting out in a rolling cloud.

Coyle swallowed. “Must've . . . must've been smeared or something.”

The dorm rooms were untouched. No blood, no nothing. The beds looked slept in. They scanned their lights around and found a frozen bottle of water, a few magazines cast aside. Nothing else.

Storage lockers were untouched.

The lab was a different story.

Going in there, Coyle's first sensory input was smell: a slightly acidic stench of fermentation that had no business being in the freezing air of the habitat. He breathed it in and it made something roll in his belly. Seconds later, he wasn't sure he'd smelled it at all.

Everything was wrecked. Equipment tossed to the floor, glassware reduced to fragments, notebooks torn in half, laptops shattered against the walls and lying in twisted heaps. Ice cores had been broken into pieces.

And slime.

There was slime everywhere . . . or something like slime.

Something gluey and clear like the mucilaginous secretions of a plant. It was pooled on the worktables, webbing instruments together, ribbons of it oozing over the edge and dripping down in long strands like snot. A glistening smear of it ran right up the wall and dripped from the ceiling. All of it frozen hard as granite. Coyle could barely chip it with his ice-axe. It was clear and hard like acrylic.

Coyle felt a singular dryness in his throat like he'd just inhaled a mouth full of coal dust. His lips were stuck together, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. His belly felt like it was filled with looping black worms.

He stood there, flashing his light around, hunchbacked shadows crawling over the walls.

“Nicky . . . I keep smelling something bad,” Gwen said, her eyes huge and dark and wet. “But it can't stink . . . not in this cold.”

“I smell it, too. There . . . then gone.”

He found himself transported back to 10
^th
grade Biology with Mr. Slapp. He could almost smell the chalk and hear pencils scratching on papers, see autumn leaves blown up against the tall mullioned windows as Mr. Slapp nervously paced back and forth in front of the blackboard, making bad jokes about his thinning hair and jingling the change in his pockets. And what did it, what really brought that absurd memory back to him, was the smell in the room of chemicals and preservatives. In Slapp's classroom, there had been a wooden cabinet built into the wall that ran the length of one side of the room. It was filled with jars and glass vessels of pickled things—snakes and toads, fetal pigs and marine life, even what had looked like a shriveled and hairless monkey's head floating in pale serum—that were white and puckered, pressed up to the glass, staring and clutching and coiling, but perfectly dead.

And smelling the sharp, sickly sweet odor in the air brought it all back to him.

This lab, of course, was not like a tenth grade biology classroom. Everything was white and sterile or gleaming stainless steel. Instruments and chemicals were locked in metal cabinets, tables crowded with the remains of digital binocular microscopes, laptops, chromatographs, and protein analyzers. A maze of electronic equipment on carts. The lab had been well equipped for geology, glaciology, and microbiology studies.

Coyle stepped around tables and workstations, bumped into charts on the walls.

Gwen was pressed up close to him, her arm looped around his own. “This is . . . this is spooky, Nicky. Blood everywhere. No bodies. Everything wrecked like somebody went insane. What could have happened?”

He shook his head. “I just don't know.”

“Mama thinks we should leave. Right now.”

Horn came through the door, puffing out clouds of white air that did not dissipate in the polar chill but slowly rose towards the ceiling. “Generator's been dead for days. Fuel cells are ruptured, lines slit . . . it was done on purpose, Nicky. Somebody wanted to cool this place off in a hurry.”

Sure, somebody,
he thought as he looked around, trying to make some sense of the madness.
Whoever did this slaughtered the NOAA team, wrecked the generator, then selectively smashed-up certain rooms.

Coyle squeezed his eyes shut, trying to find his center.

Flagg came down the corridor, holding his video camera in one hand. “It's all been documented for what good it will do us. I can't begin to . . . to understand something like this.”

“Let's go,” Coyle said, stepping past Horn and Flagg and taking off down the corridor as if he couldn't get out of the lab fast enough.

Flagg caught up with him. “We just can't leave this . . . like this.”

“We have to. The NSF will do their own investigation in the spring. We'll leave it for them. Our job is to look for survivors, not play detective.”

He led them back out into the cold and wind.

S
TANDING AT THE PERIMETER of a flagged pathway, Horn did not look too happy in the reflected glow of his flashlight. “Nicky, c'mon, what good is it going to do us to tromp around out there? We have a safety factor here, fuel-wise. I told you when we left we have about thirty minutes and then we've got to get out. We've already burned about twenty of those thirty minutes and I don't care for the idea of running out of gas out on the plateau.”

“Quit your bitching,” Gwen told him.

“Just a few minutes. Let's just do a quick canvas of the general area, see if we find anything,” Coyle told him. “If we don't, Hopper's going to be asking why we didn't.

“Exactly,” Flagg said. “We didn't come all this way to tuck our tails between our legs and run.”

Horn sighed. “Shit. Okay. But I'm telling you right now I got me a real bad feeling about this.”

“Noted,” Coyle said.

The wind was fierce and steel-edged, kicking up wild, twisting snow-devils that engulfed them in spinning ice and drift. Several times as they followed the black flags down the pathway they had to pause, hold onto one another, as solid sheets of drift enveloped them, powdering them white, leaving them clawing snow from their goggles and gaiters and balaclavas.

They stayed together, only a few feet apart, fierce gusts trying to knock them down or throw them right over the guide ropes. But they pushed on, leaning into the wind.

Coyle wasn't sure why he insisted on this, but he felt it was important. In the final analysis he could have really cared less what Hopper wanted or didn't want; something else was driving him. Something beyond mere morbid curiosity.

Gwen held her light up. The beam was filled with spinning snowflakes. “Something up there . . . something ahead,” she said through her balaclava.

Coyle saw it, ducking into a blast of drift and heading over there.

“Oh man,” Horn said.

All lights were on their discovery. It was a body dressed in ECWs, covered now in a membrane of ice and snow. But not so much that they could not see that it had no head.

“No blood,” Flagg said, kicking the snow around it. “This person wasn't killed here. Either they were blown here by the wind or–”

“Something dragged them here,” Horn finished for him.

Flagg documented it with his camera.

They moved on until they found a rope tethered to one of the flagpoles. It was tied very tightly and white with snow. It had been there for some time.

Putting his back to the wind, Coyle said, “There must be something out there. I'm going after it.”

“It's too dangerous to leave the pathway in a blow like this,” Flagg pointed out. “You could get lost in ten feet.”

“I'll follow the rope. Doc, you and Horn wait here.” He got no argument on that. “C'mon, Gwen.”

They ducked under the guide rope and followed the other rope off into the darkness. The weather was wild as it can only be out on the plateau where there is nothing to stop the wind. It screamed with demonic fury as they fought forward, holding mittened hands and not daring to let go of each other even for one second.

They didn't go far before they found something heaped with snow.

“It looks like a coffin,” Gwen said, not attempting to hide the unease in her voice.

And it did as Coyle brushed the snow off it: a long silver coffin made of aluminum. Inside, there was a lot of snow as if the lid had been opened to the elements for some time before blowing shut. They stood there staring down into its shadowy confines for a few moments. Then Coyle, on his knees on the hardpack, dug around in there, pushing aside snow and finding something clear and hard as ice.