The Spawning (33 page)

You could call it that all you wanted, of course, but morning was a conceptual term at best once winter began.

The wind had come in the night, at times little more than a mournful whisper and at others, the bellow of a typhoon, blowing snow in four- and five-foot drifts, packing it in a white, seamless barrier around the dome of Polar Clime, inundating outbuildings and Jamesways and turning little fish huts and warm-up shacks to sand dunes whose black flags flapped in the breeze.

Coyle was up early because when you were a cook that's just the way it was. When others relaxed, you worked. He rolled out of bed, listening to the perpetual hum of his humidifier. He stared at the tapestry of frost that lay over the walls, just thinking, thinking. Letting it all come back to him, all the bad stuff that had become a reality this year. And when it did, he was thankful for those first few groggy moments when he remembered none of it.

He stood up, feeling the chill coming through the walls. He looked out his icy square of window, rubbed the frost away with his sleeve. The compound was black and drifted, the security lights out there trembling in the wind.

As he made his way to the showers, he could hear the plows out there. Gut and Frye cleaning the night's mess as they did every morning. He could hear people starting to move around in their rooms, grumbling and swearing, ready for another day of living the dream. All seemed pretty ordinary.

But it wasn't.

And he could feel that from the top of his head to the balls of his feet. You worked in stations like Clime long enough, winter or summer, you got used to their particular feel. Summer stations had a crowded, hurried feel like a mall back home. Winters, they were more relaxed, plenty of space, a laid-back feel to it all. And that's how Clime had felt last winter and at the beginning of this season.

But now that had changed.

The atmosphere had been disrupted. And it had been disrupted ever since Mount Hobb lost its people and never had it regained its balance. Now it just felt disjointed, tense, out of sorts as if it did not know
how
to feel. Its muscles were not loose and relaxed, they were tight, expectant, ready for anything, like the station was an animal backed into a corner and ready to leap and draw blood at any moment.

Coyle could feel it in his belly and down his spine . . . that sense of nervous anticipation and barely-concealed dread. It was thick, heavy, almost suffocating.

When he stepped out of the shower and pulled his joggers on, Locke was waiting for him.

“Hey, Nicky,” he said, standing there in his Charlotte Hornets windsuit. He was breathing hard. He usually got up before everyone else and jogged the corridors of the dome before starting his day. “I hear we have a stowaway.”

“Yeah. She showed up in CosRay last night.”

“I hear there was some . . . phenomena happening around her.”

“Yeah, you could say that.” The gossip had already made the rounds, so there was no point in rehashing it.

“Funny, isn't it? She disappears for two months and shows up here.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you read that witchcraft book I sent you?”

“Yes. It didn't exactly reassure me.”

“It wasn't supposed to.”

Locke went on listing all the weird things that had happened starting with Mount Hobb and ending with the mysterious appearance of the woman thought to be Chelsea Butler. And then touching on the phenomena that was now being openly associated with her . . . telepathy, telekinesis. “She's been with
them,
Nicky. They've opened up something in her that they'll soon open up in the rest of us. I don't pretend to know how she ended up here or why, but I will tell you she's dangerous. Remember those people in the book? The ones who were called witches? Keziah Mason of the Arkham Devil-Cult comes to mind. She was not a witch really, yet she was. Something had been opened up in her. She was part of the hive. Butler is a witch, too, my friend. I went over there. She gives me the creeps . . . just staring and staring. She doesn't remember who she is. She might have been Chelsea Butler once, but now she's something else. Does this make sense to you?”

It did, of course. Because that book had pointed him in the same direction. No, those people weren't fairy-tale witches, yet that's exactly what they were. Something even worse.

“She's part of the hive now, Nicky. We're all in danger. That phenomena . . . it will get worse. She wasn't sent here for no reason.”

Coyle could not argue any of it because it was true. He knew it. Locke knew it. But even armed with this knowledge . . . what could they possibly do? Drag Butler out into the snow and burn her at the stake? Jesus, regardless of what had happened to her, she was still a human being.

Or was she?

“See, Nicky, all my life I've been seeing patterns and underlying causes to things other people consider either outlandish or simply coincidental. I've learned to believe that if anything seems too coincidental, it's no coincidence. That makes me a conspiracist. So be it. I gave that book to you to further illustrate my point that this stuff has been going on a long time and not just down here, though certainly it's more concentrated in Antarctica. I think others have seen the patterns to this and still others have mostly
refused
to see them. But you and I and everyone down here this year do not have the luxury of self-denial. No more than the people at Kharkov had. It's real, Nicky. It's happening. The epicenter is down here, but the shockwaves are spreading across the world. Are we together on this?”

Coyle had a manic desire to laugh, but he couldn't. “Yeah, we're together. Same page. Same chapter. Same book. And just so you know, I hate the plot.”

“So do I, Nicky, and mainly because I already know the ending.” Locke quieted a moment as Harvey came in with his duffel bag, the usual ugly and unhappy look on his face. He grumbled something in passing and Locke did not speak again until the shower was running. “The only question that remains right now, for you and I, is: what in the hell are we going to do about it?”

“I'm wondering that myself.”

Locke shrugged. “Think about it. People are talking crazy here . . . the crew is on its last nerve. If something isn't done, I think they'll take matters into their own hands. I think they'll go after Butler.” With that, he jogged off.

Coyle just stood there, feeling very weak and hopeless.

Yeah, what
were
they going to do about it?

Now Coyle understood a few things about hysteria and mob violence. Fear could make people do crazy, irrational, and violent things. It could kick up a crazy firestorm of superstition and intolerance. It seemed like an absolutely ridiculous concept that something as barbaric as witch-hysteria could be fanned into being at a modern Antarctic station . . . but he honestly believed that it
could
happen.

Because it was there.

In everyone.

That seed of bigotry and savagery looking for the dire nourishment that would give it full flower. Nobody at Clime was particularly violent or superstitious, but they were isolated and they were frightened and they were paranoid. The raw materials were certainly there. And when you took Butler and everything else and mixed them up in one big, foul-smelling stew then people would stop thinking rationally and start getting ideas. They would see her as the root of all evil and she would be the first scapegoat. And when that happened, when the fire was lit, the Old Ones would be inconsequential . . . for the crew would be their own worst enemies.

With that in mind, he wondered if the aliens had planned it that way as they had planned everything else. But, no, he didn't think so. Wanton, random purges would defeat their purpose. A farmer couldn't have his own livestock deciding which cow would live and which pig would die. No, if what Locke said was true and the world was about to be harvested, there would certainly be purges. But controlled, methodical purges designed to rid the hive of unruly, aberrant minds. For surely there would be some. Not a lot, but enough to cause trouble. Individuals who would essentially be freaks to the Old Ones: independent, free-thinking, those controls planted in their ancestors malfunctioning in them. People who would refuse the siren call of the hive and survive to fight. Dangerous elements that would have to be purged to maintain the fixed identity and global purity of the hive itself. Maybe he was one or Gwen or–

Dear God, enough.

Time to get to work.

I
N MEDICAL, BOTH GWEN and Zoot were shivering.

The temperature had not just dropped, it had plummeted. The air felt thicker, activated, like it was loaded with charged particles.

And it stank.

Stank with a foul sweetness of decay.

As Gwen sat there, holding Zoot's trembling hand, she was afraid. But more so, she was fascinated because she was seeing something that should have been physically impossible. She wished she had a camcorder right then. Because you could see something like this, but no one would ever believe you. At least, not back in the real world.

With the physical change coming over Butler, the phenomena began.

Things rattled on shelves. There were thumping sounds in the walls. That crackling noise again. Weird pipings and squeals. An odd thrumming vibration in the floor that Gwen could feel right through the balls of her feet. A wind rushed from absolutely nowhere and blew papers from Flagg's desk, only it wasn't cold like the air itself, but hot and gritty like a breath from a crematory oven.

On the bed, Butler sat up.

But she was no longer Butler, but a thing. A hag.

Her face was gray and horribly seamed, her mouth twisted into a malefic grin full of yellow overlapping teeth that were thin as nails. And her eyes, as they looked in Gwen's direction, were like the whites of eggs . . . slimy and colorless, completely lacking pupils. A trickle of inky fluid ran from the corner of her leathery lips. And as they watched, a series of black blood blisters rose up on her face like fleshy bubbles, popping one after the other.

“They will be named as of old,”
she said.
“All of them.”

Then she collapsed into a heap.

Gwen and Zoot held each other, chilled in ways they could not begin to fathom.

I
N THE GALLEY, IDA said, “The Beav's got her tit caught in the wringer, as my ma used to say. All bent out of shape. You know those chickens you had thawing, Nicky? Well, somebody helped themselves to three of them last night. You know The Beav, she counts everything, lives by her inventory. Somebody stole those chickens and she wants to know who. She was swearing a blue streak when she left here ten minutes ago to go crawl up Hopper's ass about it.”

Three chickens?

Three raw, uncooked chickens?

Now who in the hell would want three raw chickens? Coyle wondered. The only cooking facilities at Clime outside of a few microwave ovens and a few more Primus stoves in Emergency Supplies were right here in the Galley. Unless, of course, they weren't taken to be eaten. Maybe as a gag or something. But the way things were going these days, nobody was doing much pranking. They just weren't feeling mischievous or playful.

“I wonder who wanted my chickens,” he said out loud.

“Hell, who knows?” Ida said. “You know how these idiots are. Probably some kind of theme party coming up. Something to do with chickens or eggs or which came first. Remember last year, Nicky? The Fried Egg Gala? Probably something like that.”

And it could have been. It really could have been.

But as zany and out of hand as people got due to boredom at the stations, nobody wasted food. Outside of maybe a few cans of beans, the crews were real careful about that. Wasting food was like stealing from your own refrigerator. Last winter's Fried Egg Gala had been born because some fool at McMurdo had sent Clime two cases of rubber novelty fried eggs. Four-hundred of them. How those things had ended up in Antarctica was anyone's guess. But things like that happened in the spooky world of requisitions. One year at Pole Station, they'd gotten 1200 gross of pink party balloons and three dozen inflatable six-foot Godzilla figures. Another year at Palmer some joker had sent them twenty, five-foot rolls of clear plastic packing wrap and a hundred bottles of baby oil. The theme parties those years had been simply beyond description.

But raw chickens? Unless somebody was planning on Bacteria Night, it made no sense at all.

“I can't wait to hear what happened to ‘em,” Ida said.

Coyle couldn't either.

Because as much as he bounced the idea of stolen chickens around in his brain, it simply did not seem to fit. And that worried him. He couldn't honestly fit abducted poultry into the greater whole of the plentiful weirdness that was running rampant at Clime that year . . . yet, something told him that it must, in some way, be connected.

But the idea seemed ludicrous.

Maybe it was some asshole with an axe to grind against The Beav or maybe even him or the Galley staff in general and this was their way of getting back at them. Even that seemed farfetched, but given the petty bullshit of the camp system it was certainly possible.

A mere coincidence.

And as he tried to accept that, Locke's voice echoed in his head:
I've learned to believe that if anything seems too coincidental, it's no coincidence.

He left Ida to handle breakfast and headed towards Medical.

A
FTER LOCKE LEFT COYLE, he suited up and went out to the Power Station to relieve Stokes and what he found when he got there put him to his knees.

When he couldn't find Stokes in the generator room, he was not concerned. Maybe he'd gone off to the head. But when he still hadn't shown after thirty minutes, Locke went looking for him.

And when he found him he barely made it out of the supply room before his knees gave away and a hot spray of vomit broke from his lips. Crawling on all fours, still dry retching, he pulled himself up the walls, legs wobbly, and got on the intercom to T-Shack, told them to get somebody out to the Power Station right away.