The Spawning (49 page)

Coyle's eyes were watering as his lungs gasped for air.

Special Ed and Ida hit the floor. Harvey and The Beav followed like dominoes, as if they were miners that had just inhaled poison gas. They hit the floor, gagging and whimpering. Koch let out a high, hysterical scream and dropped down to his knees. His fingers were blistered and smoldering. The stink of cremated flesh was unbearable. He'd been brandishing an ice-axe that suddenly glowed red hot in his hands . . . it hit the floor and melted into a bubbling pool of metal.

You could feel the energy in the air cycling up, thrumming and crackling, as blue eddies of juice ran up and down Butler's body with a stink of fused electrical wiring.

“Somebody do something!” Gut cried out, trying to get to her feet, and something invisible hit her right in the midsection with such force she folded-up, the breath knocked from her.

She's going to kill us all,
Coyle thought while he still could think.
She's going to turn up the volume all the way this time and level the fucking station . . .

Both Frye and Horn collapsed.

The energy coming off Butler was wild, but undirected. It went in every direction in waves of force and heat and vibration. Several people were knocked around. Locke was thrown into Special Ed. The lights flickered overhead and a pipe burst, spraying water that froze almost instantly in the sub-zero gale coming from Butler. A cyclone started in Gwen's room and everything in there that wasn't tied down— clothing and blankets, water bottles and papers and trash from the can—came spinning out the door and spilled into the corridor like the room had just thrown up. The door slammed with such force that it was nearly split in two. The paint on the walls steamed and superheated, curdling and bubbling. Nails were ejected from studs and the plasterboard fanned out with huge, gaping cracks.

There was nothing anyone could do.

Frye and Horn were blown into the Community Room, tumbling like kids down a park hill, knocking aside Eicke like a nine pin, and that's when the corridor became a wind tunnel of roaring, vacuuming noise that hit with the force of a hurricane. The cacophony was deafening. Everything was flying and spinning in a tornado of screeching wind.

Coyle hunkered down the best he could, squinting his eyes against the blow. The lights were strobing on and off, the air a tempest of dust and ice crystals, nails and flakes of paint, papers and chips of wood. The corridor was not just flying apart, but flaking away, eroding.

He saw Locke get sucked into the storm and get thrown thirty feet down the corridor. Special Ed and Ida followed in his wake. The Beav was lifted five feet into the air and bounced off the walls. Coyle himself was blown down the hallway, striking Gwen, then both of them rolled right into Zoot.

They ended up in a merry little heap.

The three of them were twined together, knotted up and compressed into one another like a jumble of pilots who had been smashed together by too many G's. Just a living hodgepodge of legs and arms and bodies. And Coyle had never, ever thought for one moment in his life that he would find it unpleasant to be married to two attractive women in such a way, but it
was
unpleasant. Unpleasant because that force was still on them and he could not move. And unpleasant because he figured he was about to die and the worst part of that was he would have to hear Gwen and Zoot dying with him. And that was more than he could take.

The station was coming apart.

The ceiling was falling around them, the walls rupturing. Things were falling and flying, cutting them and bruising them and banging into them and all the while they were sandblasted with debris and dirt, papers and plaster dust and fine scathing paint chips.

And through that violent rushing storm of deafening noise and flying clutter, he could hear those rhythmic pulsating noises that rattled the entire station and threatened to bring it down around them. And buried in it, those shrill piping cries which were the shrieking voices of the Old Ones and a manic buzzing which must have been their wings, the sound of the swarm itself.

Butler hovered harmlessly in the storm like a moth before a lit window.

But she was no longer Butler or anything like Butler: she was a wraith, a corpse-hag, a rawboned mummy that had clawed its way from a sandy tomb. Tiny lines like cracks in fine porcelain had fanned over her face, connecting into a maze of wrinkles and ruts and deep-hewn seams. Strips of flesh blew around like loose bandages. Her black lips split open, shearing away from her mouth to expose pitted gums. A series of tiny blood blisters erupted over her body and swelled to the size of hen's eggs, each bursting with a spray of black bile.

Her voice pierced the wall of noise, a scraping of dry metal:
“Named! Thee have all been named since before thy birth! Before the birth of thy race! Old, old, old beyond time! God will not be the one that calls of thee! For thee is thrice named by the devils of old! Gather in their name and give unto them that which is theirs . . . and theirs alone! Gather, children, gather for ye harvest! Flesh and blood and soul and spirit! Taken aloft, shall ye be, into the hollow places and the dark spaces in-between!”

And Coyle knew he had been named as they all had been named.

Named by those who had brought forth life and substance upon the barren face of primordial Earth. Something in him raged against the idea, but something much older accepted it and he lowered his head and waited to be harvested, lain low by an intellect that was omnipotent and ancient and unspeakably malignant.

He looked in Butler's direction and saw her left eye expand like a helium balloon, shattering the orbit around it, distending until it was the size of a softball. Then it exploded with a spray of tissue, the right eye following suit. And what was left were blackened, empty sockets from which tendrils of blood floated like red lucid wires, held in stasis by the airless pocket cycling around her. But deep back in those sockets, there was a cold scarlet glow . . . and he knew it, recognized it. It was the red river of communal sacrifice and he felt the draw of its bitter shadowy waters where he would drown and twist as the light in him, the drive and purity and soul, was leeched from his skull and he was extinguished.

Then . . . the goons from Colony showed.

Coyle, like the others, was pretty much out of it by then. The roaring wind and storm of debris and cycling energy had not dissipated in the least. In fact, it was still rising and expanding like the storm waters of the alien hive itself which would soon drown the world.

The lights overhead did not go out.

They simply dimmed as they were drained dry of electricity and vanquished, exploding in showers of sparks and glass. Flashlight beams cut through the howling murk. Dayton had arrived with three troopers to pick up Butler and all of them were knocked instantly on their asses. His men went down firing their MP5 machine guns from the hip, bullets ripping into the walls and ricocheting wildly. Dayton himself struggled against the tempest, shouting out orders that were never heard.

The Butler-thing drifted towards him, an absolute mummy now, eroding and flaking into a great whirlwind of debris that swarmed over her skeleton like a hive of angry bees.
“Die!”
said her broken, wavering voice that seemed to come from distant, echoing leagues.
“All die! Give up that which is asked! A burnt offering
–
”

How he did it, even he did not know. But as she bore down on him and flattened him with a barrage of cold energy, the 9mm Beretta Model 92 in his gloved hands went off and three bullets drilled into her skull, blowing it into fragments.

The wall nearest her was blown out, vaporized into a billowing steam and a great final wind tore down the corridor . . . and then it ended. There was nothing but debris and ruins and scattered bodies. The icy cold vanished and there was the sound of dripping water.

And the moaning of voices in the dusty darkness.

W
HEN THEY PULLED THEMSELVES from the wreckage, they were banged-up, bruised, sore, and more than a little in shock. But they were all alive. Dayton's men helped them into the Community Room and slowly everyone came to their senses.

C-corridor was literally gutted.

The walls were collapsed, the sheet metal behind them mangled and twisted. The ceilings were ripped open, broken pipes and wiring hanging down like fractured bones and severed arteries. The good thing was, the integrity of the dome structure itself was undamaged. The bitter cold and wind had not gotten in.

After Dayton had inspected everyone for damage, he ordered his men to pick through the debris and gather up what they could find of Butler. Her bones, blackened and pitted and entirely fleshless, were scattered the length of the corridor. They put what they found in a vinyl body bag. Some of the bones were still smoldering.

Finally, Dayton pulled Coyle aside, said, “These are, for all intents and purposes, your people now, Coyle. Watch them. Guard them. Things are going to start happening now. Things worse than you've seen so far. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?”

Coyle swallowed. “Yes.”

“The world as we understand it will now begin to dissolve and you have to be ready. What was laid down and planned out long ago will begin in earnest. Are you ready for that?”

“I guess I don't have a choice.”

“No, you don't. None of us do.”

They stood there, looking at each other, and maybe even understanding each other. Finally, Coyle said, “Butler showed up here two months after she disappeared at Mount Hobb. Why? Did she come from Colony? Was she sent here on purpose?”

Dayton sighed. “Listen to me, Coyle. When I met you out at that crash site you didn't like me. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“You thought I was some gung-ho, flag-waving asshole. Maybe I am. But what your boys saw in the wreckage . . . that
carcass
was dangerous. I had to contain it immediately. It caused the crash, it killed the pilot. I had to get your asses out of there pronto so you didn't all suffer the same fate.” Dayton shook his head. “I've always followed orders. I never questioned those orders . . . but lately . . . well, things have changed. To answer your question, there are two groups at Colony actively opposing one another—one faction that is partially responsible for many things going on down here and many things that have happened in the past and another faction that actively opposes the first in any way they can. By any means. Do you understand?”

Coyle did. He was trying to tell him many things without actually saying them. “And your loyalties have shifted? You throw in with that second faction?”

“Yes. Absolutely. We're attempting some damage control but it might be too damn late. It was this second faction that sent us out to contain the crash site . . . the first faction
wanted
your crew to retrieve the carcass and if you had, it would have been Kharkov all over again. Those same people were responsible for Butler showing up here and for another
entity
you took care of, I understand.”

“That thing . . . it killed several people. It wiped out NOAA Polaris.”

“It's doing what it was designed to do—thin any opposing force and spread fear and paranoia.”

“What the hell was that thing?”

“We call it a
Creeper,
the beakers at Colony call them
Proto-Spawn.
They were engineered by the aliens from a much older life form, the oldest life form on the planet save the aliens themselves.”

“Shoggoth?” Coyle asked.

Dayton ignored that. “Now . . . I told you some things I shouldn't have. I want your trust and I want your help. Tomorrow we're going up to the Emperor Cave. Nobody's heard from them in days. Somebody's got to go up there. That somebody is me. We're going to sort out the menace up there. You think you can spare yourself and a couple more of your crew to come along?”

Coyle's first reaction was to decline because his people had already been through so much, yet he was starting to like Dayton. And the idea of striking back against the alien dominance was very satisfying.

“All right,” he finally said. “How we getting up there? It's quite a pull.”

“Chopper. A specially-rigged Icewolf that can handle the conditions down here. Ten-hundred hours we pick you up.”

“We'll be ready.”

“It's gonna be rugged,” Dayton warned him. “Pick the right people. You want to see what the Creeper was developed from? Tomorrow you'll get a chance.”

Dayton and his men left then, making for the Sno-Cat outside that had brought them. For a long time, Coyle stood around wondering if he had just made a terrible mistake.

What was laid down and planned out long ago will begin in earnest. Are you ready for that?

He figured he was ready.

As ready as anyone could be for the end of the world.

But before any of that came down, they had to put the station back in order and that was priority one. And the amazing thing was, everyone chipped in. No cliques. No bullshit. That was all done now. Butler had broken that all up and now they were working together. It took a few hours to set things as right as they were going to be that night.

Nobody questioned what had to be done even when Hansen's remains were swept up.

EMPEROR CAVE,
BEARDMORE GLACIER
MARCH 18

D
ESOLATION TROUGH WAS LIKE the Grand Canyon drowned in ice.

From above, during the summer when there was light to see by, it looked as if the Beardmore had cracked open like an eggshell right to its glacial core. But in the winter, in the darkness and cold, it looked more like a vault, a great jagged burial pit that had no bottom.

And down there, in that polar void, was a howling devastation beyond imagination. The frozen winds of the Queen Alexandra Range were funneled downward by the conical peaks of Mount Wild where they rushed through the Trough, turned back upon themselves by the titanic barrier of the Cerberus Icefalls which was like a cork in a bottle. This created a frightful vortex of blowing drift, enshrouding ice fog, and a howling subzero wind that roared and rumbled, cutting right through anything living like frozen knifeblades.