The Spawning (8 page)

“And where did you go?” Relling said.

Butler was shaking despite the injection, just trembling and sweating, eyes huge and fixed, filled with cloying shadows. Her hands bunched in and out of fists. But she could remember, she could see that place, that void of darkness in which glowing geometrical shapes crawled and were alive, viscidly alive.

“That place . . . we flew into that place . . . into that dark place . . .”

“What did you see?”

“The city . . . I saw the city!
It floats, black and endless!
Towers and pillars and pyramids made of black crystal . . . full of holes . . . holes . . . so many holes . . .”

“What was in the city?”

“Them . . . those things like at Hobb . . . the Kharkov things! Flying and hopping . . . up into the sky and down into the holes below! I was with them! I was
part
of them! We were the hive! We were the hive! The eyes! The eyes!”

Relling gripped her arm. “Tell me about the eyes.”

Butler was moaning now, tears running down her cheeks. “The eyes . . . the million eyes!
The million million eyes!”

(the teeming numbers . . . hopping and creeping and filling the spaces)

“What do the eyes do? What do they do?”

“No! No! Nooooo! Not the eyes that burn and see!”

“Tell me!”

“NO! I CANNOT SAY! I WILL NOT TALK OF THE EYES–”

The table Butler was strapped to began to vibrate and there was a sudden sharp, chemical odor in the air which had dropped thirty degrees in the span of seconds. Noises began to echo . . . slitherings and scratchings, pipings and squeals. The plasterboard wall shook and a great crack ran through it. The lights overhead flickered, went off.

“THE EYES! THE MILLION EYES OF THEM!”

(the hive)

(THE HIVE)

(THE WITCH-SWARM)

And then as Relling watched with a clinical eye, shapes began to bleed from the walls, spreading their wings, their eyes lit a malefic electric red. They filled the room in ghost trains. Then faded.

Butler was unconscious.

Relling went back to her office, wiping a dew of sweat from her brow. She thumbed the intercom. “Has the package been delivered to Polaris yet?”

“It's not ready. Tomorrow for sure.”

Relling sighed. “All right. But no later, no later.”

Sitting behind her desk, she listened to the wind moaning through the compound.

POLAR CLIME STATION,
FEBRUARY 23
^rd

O
FFICIALLY AT CLIME, NICKY Coyle was a DA, a Dining Attendant, but he was no common DA and nobody thought of him as such. DAs loaded dishwashers and emptied garbage, made pitchers of Kool-Aid and pots of coffee, cleaned up the dining area and scrubbed pots.

Coyle was no DA; he was a chef.

Just ask anyone at Clime, and particularly when they were hungry.

During his twelve-year tenure in Antarctica, he'd done just about everything. He'd worked Waste and Supply, been a heavy equipment operator and a mechanic. He'd been a meteorologist's assistant. A medic. Worked the power plant and radio room. But he'd always liked cooking best. It was in his blood. When you were a chef and a good one, you were always golden at any far-flung outpost. Having tasty meals and desserts available made the desolation go down that much easier for the crews, most of which were punchy and homesick by mid-winter or midsummer for that matter. It was hard work sometimes, but if you loved it there was nothing like it. When everyone else was relaxing and enjoying themselves, you were working. But that was okay.

That winter at Clime, there were three people working the Galley: Coyle, Ida LaRue, and the ill-named Bonnie Beaver, who everyone simply called “The Beav.” The Beav was the Galley Supervisor. It was a job Coyle could have had if he wanted, but he didn't. When you were a supervisor—and every section had one, even when there was only one person in that particular section—you were responsible for everything. In the Galley, that meant every carton of liquid eggs and every slab of frozen dough and every packet of salt had to be accounted for.

It paid better, but it was bullshit.

So Coyle did the cooking and The Beav did the supervising and Ida pretty much sat on her ass until The Beav jumped her shit and made her set tables or load the dishwasher or do any of the other countless menial tasks that Ida was assigned as a lower-rung DA.

Ida was okay.

She was in her late fifties and looked seventy, something she owed to Wild Turkey and a disastrous series of marriages that she would gladly tell you about in detail. Pity was Ida's thing.

The Beav wasn't much younger.

She was an old hippie that liked to talk about seeing Jimi at Monterey and The Who at Woodstock, love-ins and crash-pads and the groovy days of dropping acid on Haight-Ashbury and seeing Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane in small clubs that barely held thirty people.

When he was cooking, Coyle liked the quiet, to be alone with his thoughts. Ida wanted country music and The Beav preferred the Mothers of Invention or Moby Grape, maybe a little Grass Roots or some Zombies.

After the whole crash site business, Coyle decided he would wash it all from his mind by getting drunk or cooking.

He chose the latter.

As the wind blew and the dome rocked, he was layering lasagna noodles in industrial-sized stainless steel pans while his sauce simmered on the stove. Coyle never used hamburger. Only Italian sausage. And always fresh ricotta, not cottage cheese like his mother. That woman had been some kind of cook, but raising seven kids on a cop's salary she'd learned all about short-cuts and stretching dollars.

“You hear that wind?” Ida said, paging through a copy of
Soap Opera Digest
that was two years out of date. “Sounds like it's gonna come right through them walls after us. That goddamn wind.”

Coyle just nodded. “You feel like lending a hand here, Ida, you let me know.”

“The mind's willing, but the body's another matter, Nicky. My back is paining me something awful today.” She flipped through a few pages. “I shouldn't even be down here, but I needed the money. I should be home, way my back is. Ever since my second husband, Winky O'Dell, threw me down those stairs fifteen years ago, my back has been shit.”

Coyle kept layering noodles and sauce and meat. “Why'd he throw you down the stairs, Ida?”

“He was drunk . . . or I was. I can't remember. He was Irish, though, and you know what kind of tempers those guys have.” She found an article that interested her, kept clicking her tongue. “Listen to this, Nicky. Says here that they might bring back Billy Clyde Tuggle on
All my Children
. . . you believe that? That dirty sonofabitch. You remember him? He was a pimp over in Center City and Estelle and Donna worked for him. That was a long time ago. He came back that other time and threw his pregnant daughter down the stairs. Oh, I hated him. He was supposed to have drowned in that river. But they never stay dead on the stories. Next thing you know, they'll be bringing back Ray Gardener. Now there was some piece of work.”

Coyle shut her out.

When she wasn't talking about her ex-husbands, she was jabbering on about her “stories” and the intertwined lives of soap opera characters. Coyle had never watched a soap opera in his life, but two weeks now with Ida and he felt like he knew all about Center City and Port Charles.

“Hey, Nicky,” a voice said.

It was Harvey Smith, their radio operator that winter. Harvey was okay, just paranoid. Something Coyle figured would deepen as the winter drew on. He spent most of his time at the Transmission Shack, but when he wasn't monitoring communications he was whipping up conspiracies. Because everyone was against him and he knew it.

Coyle walked out of the Galley. “Hey, Harv.”

Harvey was a short, chubby, balding man with an ugly disposition that made him an instant target. “They're at it again,” he said.

“At what?”

Harvey peered around to see if
they
were listening. “You know. I got back to my room and they'd been in there again. They moved all my stuff around. Bastards even went through the drawers of my desk and put mother's picture in the frame upside down. Now do I deserve that? I don't cause no trouble. I don't even talk to these people. Why do they go after me?”

“I don't know, Harv.”

“I know why and so do you. They're
Masons.
They're all Freemasons. All of ‘em. All part of that little cult with their secret meetings and robes and chanting. Masons. I hate Masons. They know I know about it.”

“They can't all be Masons, Harv.”

“Hopper is. People named Hopper always are. God, all winter I'm going to have to deal with this.”

Coyle took him aside. “Here's what you need to do, Harv. Write it all down. Make lists of who you think the Masons are and what your proof is. But don't tell anyone. Just write it all down and make copies so they can't destroy all your evidence. Write all the things down they do to you.”

Harvey brightened. “Yeah . . . yeah! That's a good idea.”

“I think so.”

“But be careful, Nicky. They know you and me aren't with ‘em. They might get dangerous.”

“I'll watch my back.”

Harvey dropped him a wink now that they were in it together. He took off at a fast clip and Coyle sighed. Here he was yet again as the camp priest and therapist.

The Galley and dining area were traditionally the hub of any station in Antarctica. Central processing and dispatch for rumors and gossip, all the tiny infractions and abuses and gripes that came from all corners every single day. It was all aired in the Galley. Ida thrived on it. The Beav despised it. And Coyle was forced to tolerate it.

As he cooked, Hopper stopped by as he always did. “Mmm! Smells great, Nicky! Way to go!”

Thankfully, he kept right on going, seeming to move in every direction at once before deciding on the most direct route to wherever it was he needed to go. That was good. As Coyle sprinkled cheese over his pans of lasagna, he knew he just wasn't up to the station manager. He found Hopper fatiguing on the best of days, let alone today. He was one of those hyperactive, energetic individuals that seemed to come at you like a full-force gale, wearing you down incrementally like wind eroding a hillside until you were stripped bare, a skeleton and little else.

Coyle made ready to slide his lasagna pans in the oven, but before he did that he took his fist and smacked the edge of the stainless steel counter to discharge the static electricity so he didn't get zapped. The air was so incredibly dry in Antarctica that static electricity built up continually. After you got zapped a few times, you learned to discharge it before grabbing a counter or a doorknob, just about anything.

“Hey, Nicky.”

Sighing, shoving his pans in the oven, Coyle turned and Gwen Curie was standing there. Gwen was a tall and curvy brunette with an impressive bosom over which was stretched a sweatshirt that read: I WISH THESE WERE BRAIN CELLS.

“Hey, Gwen.”

“What're you making me for supper?” she asked. “I've got savage appetites, you know.”

“Lasagna.”

“Italian sausage?” she asked, her big dark eyes practically smoldering.

“Yup.”

She licked her lips and tossed her hair back. “Mama likes sausage. Especially when it's yours, Nicky.” She winked. “Mama liked it a lot last night.”

“Sssh,” he said, smiling. “People will talk.”

Gwen dipped a finger into the sauce and sucked it clean. “Mmm. You going to the Callisto Party? Should be a real roar. We're all getting together and drinking Yager Bombs first. Doc said we can dress his CPR dolls up like aliens long as we don't break them and he gets them back.”

“I'll be there.”

“Mama wants you at her side.”

“Tell mama it's a date.”

Gwen smiled and winked. “See ya,” she said and went on her way, swinging her hips in an exaggerated manner. So exaggerated that Frye once said that if you shoved a broom up her ass she could sweep the floors at the same time.

Theme parties.

They kept the herds sane during the winter, gave them something to look forward to and something to plan for.

Most of them—excuses for excessive drinking, really—could be as harmless as Greaser Night where everyone dressed like they'd just jumped out of the 1950's or Hippie Night—The Beav was already pushing for that—or Punk Rock night. Or they could get quite a bit edgier and downright offbeat such as Casualty Night or Alien Abduction Night or Disenfranchised Youth Night. By the end of winter, when petty disagreements had boiled over into major resentments, you might have very negative theme parties like Hostility Night or Anger Management Night. By that point, most people stopped going and those that did were openly bitter and looking for a good fight or a reason simply to lash out. The HR people like Special Ed frowned on the latter, but rarely tried to stop them unless serious bloodshed was in the offing.

The Callisto Party was something special.

NASA, who was underwriting a lot of research at the stations, had decided to give the NSF's Antarctic personnel a prime opportunity: the chance to be the first to peek through the window of interplanetary space at another world. To see what it looked like at the very same moment the scientists and technicians at NASA and Houston and the JPL would be seeing it. Not a delayed and censored feed like the sort that would be given to CNN and the other global news networks. But a
live
feed. Or as live of a feed as can be hoped for from a world nearly 400 million miles from Earth.

The Cassini 3 unmanned spacecraft had left Earth some fourteen months previous for a rendezvous with the planet Jupiter. Its purpose was to drop probes onto the Jovian moons Europa and Io, Ganymede and Callisto, all of which were suspected of having warm oceans beneath their icy crust. And tomorrow, the first of those probes would descend and transmit live images back to Earth.