Macready took regular sightings his binoculars, the three men rotating driving shifts. Now something dark and irregular showed against the ice just ahead and slightly to their right.
He tapped Childs on the back, keeping his balance on the passenger seat. "Something over there!" he shouted over the roar of the engine. "Over there!" He pointed several times to indicate direction.
Childs nodded acknowledgment and angled the vehicle slightly to the right. Off to his left, Bennings swerved to match the new course.
Soon you could see it without binoculars. The two snowmobiles slowed as they approached.
It was surrounded by dog tracks. The prints were crowded and repetitive, signs of a short but intense struggle having disturbed the snow.
The dark lump was the half-eaten remains of a husky. Its hind legs and lower body had been picked clean. Torn hide flapped loosely in the wind. The top half of the body, from the sternum up, was missing.
Macready turned a slow circle, searching first with his eyes and then through the binoculars. There was no sign of the missing part of the dog or of its two companions.
"What is it?" Childs muttered, staring distastefully at the mangled husky.
Macready put the binoculars back in their case and walked out into the snow, following the line of still visible tracks. The line was narrower now.
"Maybe dinner," he muttered. The dim horizon showed nothing but faint light and a lowering sky.
"Dogs don't eat each other." Bennings kicked at the frozen body. "I'm no expert like Clark, but I know that much. A dog would rather starve than eat its own kind."
"I know," Macready said softly.
Childs had moved away from the body and was turning a slow half-circle. "Where's the other half?"
"Not around here," Macready told him. "I checked with the binocs. Probably took it along with them."
"For the next meal?" Childs spat into the snow.
"I'd think so. See, that's what Garry wasn't figuring on. One dog couldn't make it a thousand miles. One dog living off one or two others . . ." He let the obvious go unsaid. "Very convenient, having a steady food supply that travels with you on its own legs."
He went over to the snowmobile trailer, flipped up the lid and removed a two-gallon can of gasoline He unscrewed the cap, then glanced over at Bennings.
"They're still moving in a straight line. Where are these tracks headed?"
"Nowhere," the meteorologist insisted. "Just straight toward the ocean."
"That's something, anyway." The pilot silently poured the contents of the can over the remains. The men stepped clear. Macready pulled a crumpled piece of paper from a parka, pocket and lit it with his lighter, tossing it toward the remains. The bone and skin caught instantly and burned with a steady flame in the steady wind.
"Let's move."
Some of the initial enthusiasm was seeping away from his companions. They'd already traveled a long way from the warmth and comfort of the outpost. Now the gnawed remains of the sled dog had again reminded them of just how deadly an adversary they were pursuing.
"Maybe we ought to think this through again, Mac," Childs murmured half apologetically. He nodded toward the horizon. "They could be hours ahead of us."
Bennings surveyed the feeble sun. "Gonna get dark soon, too. Supposed to be fifty below tonight."
Macready, straddling the snowmobile towing the supply trailer, ignored them both. "Turn back if you want to. I'm going after them."
His companions exchanged an uncertain look, then started toward the machines.
"He's crazy for wanting to go on with this," Childs muttered unhappily.
"Yeah?" Bennings climbed onto the seat behind the mechanic. "Maybe not. Maybe we're the ones who are crazy for thinking of turning back."
"Ah, shut up." Childs gunned the engine.
Only a slight glow came from a sun the color of stale sherbet as the snowmobiles continued to follow the fading dog tracks. Quite unexpectedly, the trail changed direction. Macready slowed to a stop. Childs and Bennings pulled up along side him, their engines idling roughly.
"What's wrong, Mac?" the mechanic asked.
The pilot broke snow from his beard. The tracks had turned toward a ridge of low hills and snowcapped bluffs. It was very cold now.
"They turn off that way."
Childs rose in his seat and stared off in the indicated direction. "You think we can get in there?"
"As long as it doesn't get too steep," Macready told him. "You still with me?"
Childs looked back at Bennings. The meteorologist nodded. "Hell, it's too late to turn back tonight anyway. Might as well keep going 'til we stop for sleep. We can argue about what to do tomorrow morning."
"That's fair enough." Macready resumed his seat and veered his machine toward the rocks.
The terrain was more rugged than the pilot had supposed. High cliffs of solid ice rose from the little canyon they were exploring. Pressure ridging had been at work here in ancient times, as well as seismic forces. He felt like an ant crawling up a broken mirror.
They'd been using the snowmobile's headlamps since they'd entered the canyon. The sun hardly supplied enough light to see your own feet. But at least the dog tracks stood out starkly. The shielding cliffs had protected them from the blowing snow.
Bennings was uncomfortable in the maze. Out on the ice flats nothing could spring out at you, catch you by surprise. He wasn't in the mood for surprises. Not here.
What am I doing here, he thought? I should be back in camp, taking anemometer readings, watching the barometer, figuring fronts and lows and plotting percentage drops in temperature gradients against old figures in manuals.
Instead I'm freezing to death while we hunt a couple of dogs that maybe aren't dogs because their DNA has been altered by the invasion of something a hundred millennia old that got buried in the ice and dug up by a bunch of overeager unsuspecting Norwegians who—
He blinked. The snowmobiles were slowing down. He tried to see around Childs's bulk.
Dead ahead, caught in the light from the snowmobiles headlamps, was a single husky. Bennings didn't know whether to feel frightened or gratified.
The dog could have cared less. It sat in the middle of the little canyon, its back turned unconcernedly toward the approaching men, and munched contentedly on the upper half of the dog carcass they'd encountered out on the plain.
The lack of fear or any other recognizable reaction made Macready doubly cautious. He slowed his own vehicle and raised a hand. Childs and Bennings eased up alongside him.
He pointed at their quarry. It was barely twenty yards away and still gave no sign that it was aware of their presence. "What d'you make of that?"
"That's our runner, no question about that," Childs murmured. "It's finishing up its buddy, just like you said it would."
Macready carefully searched the canyon's rim, first the right side and then the left. Nothing could be seen among the crags. Nothing moved.
"Why the hell's it just sitting there?"
"Who gives a shit." Bennings was too cold for complex thinking. "Let's torch it and move on."
"I'm not sure . . ." Macready began.
Bennings interrupted him. "Don't go clever on me now, Mac. Either we finish this one now or I'm taking one of the mobiles, and heading home."
Childs was already unloading the torch and hooking it to the tank. Macready shrugged, arming himself with a thermite bomb. When Childs was ready they started up the sides of the canyon, each hugging the cliff wall. Bennings stood on guard at the snowmobiles in case the dog might try running past them at the last minute.
As Childs and Macready approached, the dog continued to ignore them, seemingly content merely to chew its food. The mechanic's eyes roved the landscape, trying to see into the darkness beyond the animal, into the area out of reach of the snowmobiles' headlights.
"Where's the other one, Mac? Where in hell's the other one?"
Macready shouted back toward the machines. "Th
ere's only the one of 'em here, Bennings! Keep a sharp eye out for the other one."
The meteorologist yelled his understanding, took out a flashlight and began playing its beam over the rocks off to his right.
Macready spoke to the dog while trying to look four ways at once. His voice was tense, coaxing. "Where's your buddy, boy? Huh? You can tell us. Dog's best friend, remember? Where'd your friend get to?"
Not only didn't the animal react, it continued to ignore their approach. Macready took out his own flashlight, uneasily playing it over crevices and possible hiding places in the cliff sides. Still nothing.
"Screw this. Childs, let that thing fly. Don't let up until he's ashes. We'll find the other one later."
Childs activated the nozzle. The tip of the torch sprang to life.
Bennings's attention was on the cliff face when something clutched at his ankles. He looked down and barely had time to scream as his body was yanked below the surface. The flashlight went flying. In seconds only his head and shoulders showed above the ice.
Childs and Macready whirled at the sound of the scream, and rushed back toward their companion. Only his head was visible now. Macready stumbled, snow stinging his face as he fell.
Something made a noise behind him, and it wasn't the wind. He'd never heard anything quite like that noise. It was a crackling, a snapping of something that wasn't wood or plastic. It was organic. He thought of fried pigskins being crumbled in a child's hand.
He rolled over. The dog was still facing away from him, but it was no longer eating. Its hair stuck straight up like the quills of a porcupine. As he stared it snarled, a throaty, undoglike sound. It turned to face him. Its skin was splitting, the mouth ripping open as something inside struggled to emerge, like a butterfly bursting from its cocoon.
Only there was nothing in the least attractive about the metamorphosis the husky was undergoing.
"Childs!"
The mechanic halted, his fingers tight on the torch, uncertain who to help first. Bennings was still in sight. In addition to his head he'd managed to get one arm out and was clawing frantically at the slick surface. Each time his shoulders started to emerge, something unseen would yank him back beneath the snow.
Childs took a step back toward Macready, his attention torn between his two companions. The dog continued to change. It had grown larger and darker. Suddenly it leaped, though no dog could possibly jump twenty feet in that clinging snow.
Childs reacted instinctively as the thing attacked the fallen Macready. He opened the flow to the torch. A stream of fire hit the dog-thing in mid-leap. The violence of the blast knocked it head over heels backward, a flaming ball of fur. And something else.
The animal was howling in pain, making a sound no dog ever made, a high-pitched screeching that reminded Macready of fingernails dragging down a blackboard.
He got to his knees and activated the thermite cannister. Aiming as carefully as he could in the confusion and dim light, he heaved it past the snowmobiles. The force of the throw sent him sprawling again.
The cannister landed a foot short of the twisting, flaming dog-thing and exploded. The smaller fire was suddenly enveloped in a blast of white flame.
Childs turned and started toward Bennings. The ice beneath the meteorologist was heaving violently. Macready scrambled to his feet and overtook the mechanic, grabbed him by his parka and tried to pull him back.
"What's the matter?" Childs tried to shake the smaller man off.
The pilot continued to pull at his friend, "Keep away! It'll get you too."
"Damn it!" Childs was half-moaning, half-crying. He repeated the curse over and over.
Suddenly Bennings's head finally vanished beneath the surface, his body jerked out of sight by something still unseen. The ice continued to ripple like boiling water. The activity moved around, coming toward the two men, then drifting away from them.
Part of the unfortunate meteorologist's body popped into view and just as quickly was sucked beneath the surface again. Macready and Childs watched for it to reappear, unable to aid their companion.
"What are we going to do?" the frustrated Childs cried. He was trying to trace the course of the subsurface heaving with the tip of the torch.
"How the fuck do I know."
Suddenly Bennings's head and shoulders exploded through the ice close to the snowmobiles. Something had him in an unbreakable grip, though in the distant glow from the headlamps they couldn't see what. To Childs it looked like the jaws of a dog, except that no dog that ever lived had a mouth that wide.
Bennings's heavy outer clothes began to split, stretched to their limits as the flesh beneath burst its natural boundaries. The clutching jaws writhed, turning the body toward their center. A snake always turns its prey in order to swallow it head first, Macready thought wildly. Bennings face vanished into that fluid, shifting mouth.
He turned and dashed for the snowmobile trailer, shouting back over his shoulder as he ran.
"Torch them!"
"But Bennings . . .!" Childs started to protest.
Macready wouldn't have recognized his own voice. "Can't you see that he's gone? Do it . . . while we've still got the chance to!"
Bennings . . . damn it, Bennings! Childs's teeth ground against one another. Bennings is dead, man. That thing is still alive. He activated the torch.
The powerful stream of fire struck the indistinguishable mass of which Bennings was now a part. The hulking clump of dark flesh burst into flame and ice began to melt around it. A wailing screech filled the night air.
Macready was working like a madman at the snowmobile trailer, frantically removing can after can of gasoline and tossing them onto the ice.
Something hard as steel thrust out of the ground. It had knobs and sharp projections and things like long, stiff hairs scattered across it. It just missed Macready and went right through the fiberglass body of the trailer.
Macready threw himself to one side. The leg yanked itself clear of the splintered fiberglass and flailed around in search of something to grab.
The pilot scrambled across the snow, uncapped a couple of cans and dumped their contents on that weaving, questing limb. Then be moved away and began pouring the rest onto the larger mass that Childs was melting out of the ice.
The cans went up like small bombs, further immolating the convulsive, twitching abomination beneath the snow. Behind them, the other dog-thing continued to burn. The continuous screeching and mewling echoed horribly off the walls of the little canyon, deafening the two frantic men.
Macready tossed the last can into the conflagration and clutched at Childs's arm. "That's enough, man."
The mechanic did not seem to hear him. Glassy-eyed, Childs continued to play the fire stream over the already seething mass. Part of Bennings's burning skeleton showed through the flames. If the other thing possessed a skeleton, Macready couldn't make it out. The inferno that filled the canyon was almost too bright to look at.
Macready finally had to step around in front of the mechanic and grab the torch with both hands. "Childs, that's enough! We got it."
The big man looked slowly down at him and blinked. "Yeah. Yeah, okay Mac." He shut off the flow to the torch. They stood there close together, their stunned faces awash with light from the dying flames. As the blaze began to subside, so did that damnable screeching. Soon it sounded far away, weak and unthreatening.
It gave out entirely in a few minutes. The two fires continued to burn. Macready and Childs waited until the last embers had turned dark. Then the pilot emptied a few more gallons of gas over the dark smudges staining the canyon floor and lit them. When they burnt themselves out there was nothing left to burn except ice and rock.
The snowmobile trailer was ruined. That thrusting leg that had come so close to impaling Macready had shattered not only the container but one of the supporting skis. Macready unlatched it and they transferred the remaining supplies to the storage box mounted over the snowmobile's rear seat.
Then they set off to retrace their path, speeding down the canyon back to the glacial plain and the frozen Antarctic night. It would have been more sensible to wait until morning. More sensible, yes, but neither man had any intention of spending a moment longer in that canyon, now occupied only by the ghosts of two gargoyles whose night-shrouded appearance would have put to shame any dozen visages haunting far distant Notre Dame.
Macready and Childs preferred to take the chance of freezing to death out on the clean ice . . .
Only the uppermost sliver of sun revealed itself the following day, signaling the beginning of the vernal equinox. And the beginning of six months of total darkness.
The men had gathered in the recreation room. Clark sat in a chair surrounded by his now suspicious co-workers. The dog handler looked frazzled and sounded defensive.
"I'm teIlin you," he said for at least the tenth time, "that I don't remember leaving the kennel unlatched."
Childs stood nearby. He was holding the well-used torch, having shortened its range in the event it had to be employed inside. He waved it meaningfully under Clark's nose.
"That's bullshit! You told us after those dogs split that you always check it."
"I always do." Clark chewed his lower lip and tried to so confident. He wasn't. That torch was too damn close. "They must have opened it after I closed up for the night."
"You left it open," Childs said accusingly, "so they could get out."
Clark kept his exasperation in check, along with the sarcastic reply that immediately came to mind. Sarcasm wouldn't be prudent just now, considering the expressions on the faces of the men encircling him. Childs's attitude was that he'd be glad to try out the industrial torch indoors, if Clark would just give him the slightest excuse.
"Would I even have told the rest of you that they had gone if I had anything to hide?" he argued fervently. "Would I have told you that I regularly check the latch after I'd deliberately left it open? Be reasonable!"
"That still doesn't explain why you didn't kennel that stray right away," Garry pointed out.
"I told you that I couldn't find—" He paused, angrily shoving the nozzle of the torch aside. "Keep that thing out of my face, will you?"
The Thing Page 13
