The Spawning (41 page)

“Horn,” Coyle said. “You get ready with your flamethrower.”

Frye and Horn spread out behind him. The smell came and vanished again. In that wind, that blackness, it could have been anywhere. On the other side of the dome and ten feet away lying in wait.

Behind the garage, he saw nothing.

Just some stacked skids of yellow barrels on the unbroken hardpack, a few pockets of shadow, drift blown up against the structure itself. Without any loose snow to leave prints in, the thing could have raced off into the darkness of the polar plateau for all he knew.

But he didn't think so.

He raced forward, the air so cold it made his lungs ache.

As he neared the far corner of the garage, his boot snagged on a shelf of ice and he went down in the drift. He came back up quick, brushing snow from his eyes. Horn and Frye jogged up behind him.

As he looked forward, he saw something. Not the beast itself, but the retreating shadow it threw in the pale moonlight as it slipped around the garage, out of sight. And that shadow . . . good God . . . nebulous and weird like two men joined at the waist, distorted and inhuman, things wiggling where their heads should have been like they wore crowns of wriggling snakes.

Frye yanked him to his feet.

Side by side, the three of them came around the corner of the garage and it was there waiting for them. It let out a screeching, primeval-sounding roar like a prehistoric monster and lunged at them. Coyle felt the wave of rancid heat it pushed before it, but all he really saw in that spit-second of shock as his boots slid on the ice and he again went down was a massive shadow bearing down on him.

Frye cried out.

Horn let out a shout and pulled the trigger of the flamethrower.

A blazing tongue of flame went right over Coyle's head in a gushing surge. In the darkness it was so bright it was nearly blinding. The mushroom cloud of fire hit the thing as it leaped forward, not directly, but glancing off its side and sending it spinning away. Most of the flaming jellied gasoline hit the sheet metal side of the garage and was scattered over the hardpack.

But the rest . . . stuck and burned.

The beast let out another roar and ran off with a see-sawing/ galloping sort of motion, shrieking out its agony. Even with its left side blazing, it moved quite fast, sizzling and loping, leaving a trail of churning smoke in its wake.

Then Coyle was on his feet and the others were running with him. There was no time to think, to plot, to let the unreal horror of what had just happened sink into them. They had to get that thing. They had to bring it down now or no one at Clime would be safe.

“It's making for T-Shack,” Frye said.

And it was. Still burning and smoking, casting a flickering orange light from the flames that still licked at it, it shambled at a good clip down the walkway that led from the garage to the tunnel that connected the dome and the Transmission Shack. It reached the tunnel and followed it towards the shack itself, pausing before the doorway into T-Shack that Coyle himself had used a few days before, scaring the shit out of Harvey in the process.

They went after it.

It left a trail of smoldering cinders on the walkway.

Something like cracked black plastic.

As it stood there, outside the door, Coyle got his first real good look at it. Just for a second, but that image would last him a lifetime. Its burning stink in his face, it looked bulbous and mounded like a spider walking upright, dozens of appendages waving with a slow, dreamlike sort of motion like ropy sea grasses caught in a tidal pull. Smoking fragments of it drifted off in the wind making it look as if it were flaking apart.

It roared in their direction and went through the door.

No, it did not
open
it, it went right
through
it like the door was something jury-rigged out of balsa wood. It lunged forward, its heaving mass knocking the door right off its hinges and somebody in there screamed bloody murder.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Coyle shouted as he gave chase.

Before Frye, Horn, and he had went after the thing, he'd told Special Ed to lock down all the doors and post people at all entrances. And apparently he had. And now the beast had found one of them.

Another scream pierced the night and Coyle cringed inside.

EMPEROR CAVE

B
IGGS WAS ALONE.

And although Warren was in his bunk snoring away, he had never felt so godawful alone in his life. For it was just the two of them now. They had shut off the power for the cavern and Polar Haven below. Nothing alive down there. Not anymore. Just the cold blue ice sleeping away eternity as it had for eons.

After Warren had returned from his little investigation below—when was that? Yesterday?—Biggs had gotten on the horn with MacOps and told them all he knew: Dryden and the others were missing. They could not account for their whereabouts. MacOps told them to sit tight. Not to go out on the Beardmore searching for them. Stay in the Hypertat. Keep the generator running.

But how long could you wait like that?

Doing nothing?

MacOps hadn't said,
just wait until spring, then we'll get you out . . .
but Biggs had a feeling that that's exactly what they were saying. You volunteered, baby. Now it's worse case scenario. Just button up the hatches and . . . wait.

Wait.

But how long could you wait?

Already he felt like he was living in a tin can. Warren and he never left each other's sight. They couldn't stand each other, but they stayed together. Even when they went to check on the generator, the other Hypertats that they kept running as back-ups, they went together. Bickering, mostly. But together.

Biggs spent a lot of time not thinking about what Dryden had chopped out of the ice down there and what had happened to the others, but there were other things he couldn't avoid thinking about: madness, cabin fever. For if he was stuck in this fucking Hypertat until spring with Warren, he'd go crazy. Simple as that.

And how much solitaire could you play?

How many books could you read?

How many movies could you watch?

How many TV dinners could you eat?

And, yes, how long before what got the others came for them? How long before they heard that piercing, freakish piping again? Because they would and he knew it.

Sitting at the radio, Biggs dropped his face into his hands and trembled.

And that's when he heard a noise: a scraping sound.

He sat up straight, rigid, eyes wide. There. The door. The door was locked, but the latch was moving back and forth as someone or some
thing
tried to open it from the other side.

“Warren!” he whispered as loud as he could.
“Warren! Wake the fuck up!”

Warren sat up on his bunk. “What?”

Biggs pointed. Warren saw it all right and seeing it, was fully awake. He jumped to his feet and snatched his ice-axe from the wall. He stepped over to the door. The latch continued to move back and forth.

“Open it,” he said.

“You're nuts.”

“Open it, goddammit.” He had the ice-axe in both fists like a baseball bat. “Do it, Biggs. Open that motherfucker.”

Biggs went over there, figuring this was just plain stupid but knowing there was no choice. If somebody needed help, they had to help them. And if it was something else . . . well, they had to go out sooner or later. Better to deal with it now.

He unlocked the door with shaking fingers.

The latch snapped from side to side and then door was pulled open.

Biggs jumped back, seeing something and not knowing what the hell it was. Something dark and menacing.

“Beeman!” Warren said. “Beeman!”

But Biggs wasn't so sure, not at first. Because it hadn't looked like Beeman at all for a second there. But something grinning with eyes like blood-rubies.

Beeman stepped into the Hypertat, going down on his knees. He was shaking, face pinched from the cold. He was wearing his ECWs . . . but still, it was freezing down in the cavern. He couldn't have survived. Not for days. No power down there. No nothing. And he couldn't have been outside where it was minus fifty.

“They're all dead,” Beeman breathed, gasping really. “Something got them. One by one, it got them.”

“What got them?” Warren said, completely on edge.

“I don't know. A thing.”

Biggs just shook his head. “A monster? Is that what you're saying?
A monster?”

Beeman looked at him, blinked his eyes. Said nothing more.

That look made something shrink inside of Biggs.

Oh, God, look at his face.

It was leathery and gray, seamed with white bands, a frostbitten mask. His lips were shriveled back from his teeth, which looked very yellow. And his eyes . . . they were shiny, glossy almost. Veined red. The cold could have been responsible. Maybe.

Warren was suspicious as hell, but he helped Beeman onto a bunk. Got him some hot coffee. Got some hot soup going. For a long time, nobody said a word. They let the poor man warm up, get his blood going again. Biggs and Warren stood side by side and just watched him. Warren was still holding the ice-axe. This was all wrong and both men knew it. But their desperation for another living soul canceled out their instincts.

After a time, Beeman said, “It got them. Some kind of thing. I saw it. It was hunched over Stone, chewing on him.”

“I was down there,” Warren said. “Where were you?”

“I was hiding in the crevice.”

“In the cold? Even after I turned off the lights and the power to the Polar Haven?”

“Yes, I hid.”

“Why didn't you come up?”

“I couldn't. It was waiting for me. I had to hide.”

“You found your way up in the darkness?”

“Yes.”

Biggs didn't know what to make of it. On one hand, he was scared inside, scared that they had just invited a monster into their midst. But on the other hand, Beeman looked like a man. And Beeman was Navy. Maybe he had the survival training and know how to survive down there. Biggs didn't know what to think, what to feel. He kept watching Beeman's hands as he gripped the coffee cup. So pale. Blue veins just beneath the skin.

They're not claws for chrissake, they're hands.

Sure. But his story . . . the way he told it . . . so flat, so indifferent, not a single note of drama or stress and terror. It wasn't right.

“Where are the bodies?”

“In one of the crevices. I saw them.”

Warren nodded slowly. “Okay. After you warm up, we're going down there. If there is some
thing
down there, then we better face it now before it comes after us.”

Beeman did not disagree. He just looked into his coffee cup.

Biggs didn't bother arguing either. Warren was right. Better now than later. As Beeman spoke in that lifeless, uninflected tone, Biggs just watched him, waiting for something, some monster to come leaping out of him.

But none did.

What was funny, though, was that Beeman did not touch his coffee or his soup . . . like there was something else he wanted.

POLAR CLIME

F
RYE AND HORN RIGHT behind him, Coyle came through the door, hopping over the wreckage, bringing his gun to bear. The first thing he saw was Danny Shin on the floor, his back up against a bank of transmitters, a fire-axe clutched to his bosom like a teddy bear. His mouth was wide open, his eyes staring, his face contorted like an old man having a coronary.

The second thing Coyle saw was what stood about four feet away from him.

A spider . . . it's a fucking giant spider.

But it wasn't a spider . . . not exactly, though its body plan was similar.

It was hard to say what it was . . . just a weird, repulsive, polymorphic thing that stood on eight or ten jointed, hairless, cream-colored legs like those of a crab. Fine spines grew from them like exposed wires. Its body was swollen, wrinkled and corrugated, the pale yellow of congealed fat.

But the most hideous, perfectly awful thing was that oblong, bulbous body which seemed to be composed of human faces . . . dozens of eyeless human faces crowding together in the gelatinous, oozing mass . . . all of them hairless and embryonic, composed of the transparent flesh of deep-sea shrimp that fanned out with purple veins. The faces pulsed like bubbles, opening and closing jellied lips as if gasping for air, networks of twitching cords sliding out of their mouths and then retreating with each breath.

If it reared up on a single set of legs it would have been taller than a man, but it did not . . . it waited there like a spider, twitching.

“Holy shit,” Horn said and that about covered it.

It made no aggressive moves.

Still smoking and sputtering on its left side, it filled the radio room with a nauseating stench, just waiting there as if unsure what to do. Ribbons of slime and snotty goo hung from its underside in streamers. They seemed to be moving independently of the beast itself.

It had no eyes as such, but Coyle was pretty sure it was seeing them.

Then the heads in the center sank into the mass to reveal a puckered black hole ringed by fleshy pink spines that might have been a mouth. Blood-red spikes inside gnashed together as if awaiting an offering of meat.

Coyle could hear the slopping sound of things dropping from it, the hollow sucking sounds of the mouths as those cords slid out and were pulled back in.

Gathering his nerve, he looked to Shin. “Danny,” he said in a very calm voice. “Danny, goddammit, look at me.”

The beast flinched at the sound of his voice. It made a juicy, slithering sound as its flesh moved and oozed, hundreds of cilia-like hairs trembling on its bulk.

“Danny . . . c'mon.”

Shin turned his head a few inches with a jerking motion. His mouth was pulled into a tight gray line. A trickle of drool hung from his lips.