The Spawning

by Tim Curran

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.

  18

  IN 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.

  19

  AFTER 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.

  20

  COYLE WAS THERE WITH Frye and Special Ed, Hopper and Horn and Gwen, Hansen and Koch from the FEMC crew. And Locke, of course. He was sitting in the booth in the generator room, pale as drift, just trying to hold it together as Zoot and Danny Shin did everything they could to calm him.

  Coyle left the generator room, thinking, what’s the point of being calm? Now is the time for panic. Now is the time to really lose it.

  He went back and looked at the body, drawn by some magnetism he really didn’t understand. He was glad that he had not eaten.

  The stink in the corridor was unbelievable . . . a sharp but fast-fading smell of vomit that couldn’t hold a candle to that other, overwhelming stink of raw meat, bowels, and blood.

  It made bile rise up the back of his throat.

  It made his eyes actually water.

  It filled him with a greasy, slow-shifting nausea that he had to swallow back down.

  There was another smell, too . . . just a ghost of it . . . but enough to set his skin to crawling: an over-ripened, fruiting smell like tomatoes rotting to moist, dark pulp.

  Inside the supply room, Stokes . . . or what was left of him . . . lay in a twisted, loose-limbed heap, covered with blood. It pooled around him and was splashed on the walls. His face was ruined, bleeding and skinless, gouged so deeply it looked like someone had taken a garden trowel to it . . . one whose tines had been razor-sharp. He only had one eye and it was glazed and staring, liquid with manic horror, nearly popped from the socket. He had been eviscerated, what was inside dangling in fleshy loops from the fluorescent light fixture overhead or macerated and tossed into the corners.

  Much of it was missing.

  Much of it like the corpse itself, bore an amazing profusion of punctures that could have been from some weapon or even claws and teeth of a highly fantastic nature.

  It was all bad, it was horrible.

  But what really grounded it for Coyle was that, almost as an afterthought, Stokes’s heart had been ripped from his chest—and with great force, judging by ribs snapped like cornstalks—and shoved into his mouth.

  Danny Shin came into the room, examining things with a cold, clinical detachment that made Coyle think he’d missed his calling in forensic pathology.

  There was a clear, gelatinous liquid hanging from a shelf. He was prodding it with a pencil. “This didn’t come from a human body,” he said. “It looks like snot.”

  There was more of it smeared on the door frame, oozing over the floor, and dripping from the ceiling.

  “Some kind of slime,” he said.

  Out in the corridor, nobody was saying much.

  Hopper was pacing back and forth, his face aged thirty years in the past two weeks, a maze of straining cords and intersecting deep-cut lines. One eye was wide, the other drawn into a narrow. He did not look good. In fact, he looked very much like a man who was hysterically tap-dancing at the edge of sanity, just waiting for the plunge into darkness.

  Special Ed was mortified . . . but was that because of Stokes or Hopper? Because if Hopper folded up, it was all on his shoulders.

  Frye came over and towed Coyle down the corridor. “I’ve seen a few bodies in my time, Nicky . . . but this . . . Jesus. Whatever got that poor bastard went after him like an animal, just tearing and biting and slaughtering . . . but no animal ever born hangs intestines from light fixtures and shoves fucking hearts in mouths.”

  Coyle nodded. “I think . . . I think what was done in there was done for a reason . . . to have the very effect on us it is having.”

&nb
sp; “To sicken us? Kick our legs out? Make us feel helpless as whipped dogs?”

  “You got it,” Coyle told him. “Whatever did this did it to achieve a certain psychological effect. You see that slime in there? That’s the same kind of stuff we saw at the Polaris camp. Something was brought there to create panic and horror. And I think the same thing was brought here.”

  21

  WITHIN THE HOUR, THE crew lost their collective mind.

  Things had been bad enough before, but with the murder of Stokes, the disappearance of Cassie Malone, Flagg, and Slim, not to mention the weird and frightening phenomena of Chelsea Butler, the fear on them was a palpable thing. It ran from their pores like poison. It fouled the air with a sour, sharp odor of fevers running unchecked.

  When news broke of the murder, everyone made the connection very quickly after what they’d heard about NOAA Polaris: Stokes was killed by something that was apparently evil and cunning that left a lot of slime behind it.

  A monster.

  There was a monster on the loose.

  Hopper didn’t wait for the mob to find him and lynch him, he headed it off at the pass: he got on the intercom telling everyone to form up for search parties. If there was something hiding among them, they would find it. At first, people refused because they sure as hell weren’t tromping around out in the snow and dark with only flashlights . . . but then, they all surprisingly acquiesced.

  The searching went on for the better part of two hours.

  When it was over, there were a lot of unhappy people standing around. But no one was bickering. They were just waiting for the next act and it wasn’t long in coming.

  Harvey was in T-Shack and, being Harvey, first thing he did was get on the horn to McMurdo and tell anyone that would listen that now they had another murder, a monster on the loose, and a missing woman from Mount Hobb who was not exactly “human” anymore, as he put it.

  In essence, Clime was poised at the edge of the brink and an uprising by the crew was only days away now.

  He was out of line and everyone knew it.

  You didn’t get on that radio about something like that without the station manager’s approval. When Hopper found out, he actually ran out to T-Shack and gave Harvey the mother of all ass-chewings. Cryderman was there when it happened and he “accidentally” turned on the intercom and broadcast the whole thing throughout the station.

  Cryderman, of course, couldn’t stand Harvey and the others barely tolerated him, so his purpose was to make public the humiliation of their resident Freemason-fearing conspiracist. But if that was his purpose, the broadcast achieved something of a higher order: the crew realized that while Hopper was not firing on all cylinders anymore and he’d hung up his good guy station-cheerleader shoes, he was certainly not fucking around. He planned on stepping on anyone that got out of line and stepping on them goddamned hard.

  After that, even Gut kept her mouth shut.

  For awhile.

  You see, they’d all forgotten one little thing about Hopper: maybe he presented a comical figure to them, but he was ex-Navy. He’d been a Chief Petty Officer at one time and the ability to screw, chew, and barbecue unruly ass came with the territory. Oh, he’d been very convincing in his Mr. Good Guy routine. He’d been calm and patient and supportive. He’d been brotherly, fatherly, even motherly. The supreme let’s-go-get-’em-team sort of station manager cum track coach and president of the Optimists Club. But now that the chips were down and the fat was in the fire and his gears began to slip one cog at a time along with his patience, he reverted to the stock he’d originally been cut from.

  Forget sympathy and understanding and support groups, he was on the edge and he planned on busting balls left and right.

  So when the new, surly Hopper showed his grim face, people toed the line and did what they were told.

  There was still arguing and bickering, but it was amongst the crew itself. Nobody said boo when Hopper stormed by like a tornado looking for a good silo to knock down and a Kansas farmhouse to kick up into the air, Dorothy and all.

  Shin went back to Geolab and Coring and played with his ice cores; Locke found plenty to do out at the Power Station; The Beav had inventory to take and Gut had snow to push around; Zoot and Gwen kept an eye on Chelsea Butler. Cryderman took over in T-Shack because Hopper had temporarily relieved Harvey of that position with no pay. Special Ed brooded. Ida made some frozen pizzas for dinner. Coyle helped Hansen and Koch and Frye haul Stokes’s remains out to an unused Jamesway near the runway. Everyone else just stayed out of the way.

  And Hopper?

  He was on a roll. He cut the station’s satellite internet and got on the intercom and calmly told everyone that there would be no more personal traffic on the radio until further notice. In not so many words, he informed them that not so much as a bean fart was going over the airwaves without his signature on someone’s bare ass. And he meant it.

  When that was done, he told Cryderman to get lost. Then he called the NSF and received his own formal ass-chewing.

  And when he was done, it was Special Ed’s turn.

  Maybe Hopper’s about-face couldn’t have happened at a better time.

  The crew needed a leader with strength, confidence, and authority. It was the only glue holding them together.

  All in all, it was one ugly day at Polar Clime. The atmosphere was strictly summer carnival and anything went. By nine that night, the station was quiet, tense, subdued but panicky.

  People were staying in their rooms for the most part and that wasn’t because of Hopper and his brand new groove, but because each and every one of them could feel something building. Something about to explode. And they were all afraid to be caught out in the open when that happened.

  22

  LONG AFTER THE SEARCH parties had all broken up, Frye found Coyle and brought him down to the lower level of the dome. “Found something you might want to see,” Frye said. “I found ‘em during the search, but I didn’t want to say anything to anybody.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see.”

  On the lower level there was a lot of storage, the electrical substation, and emergency generator room. The latter enclosed in a huge metal cage about the size of a garage. When Frye was searching, he had gone in there. He wasn’t supposed to have a key, but he did.

  Classic Frye.

  When he wasn’t on the Ice—and that was generally only the summers because he didn’t like all the people—he ran a locksmithing business in Pell City, Alabama. Every winter season, he took it upon himself to pick every lock in the station.

  He brought Coyle into the cage so he could see what he found behind the generator itself: chicken bones. Wings, legs, breasts . . . you name it. As well as the crushed and gnawed husks of carcasses all scattered about amongst the exhaust piping and incoming fuel lines. They were spread everywhere, slivers of bone and fragments of the same, all polished white and clean, not a scrap of meat to be found or a drop of blood.

  Nothing.

  They looked like they’d been licked clean.

  Even the marrow was missing from them.

  “Lot of effing bones, Nicky,” Frye said, leaning there against the wall of the generator, chewing his lower lip behind that shaggy steel-gray beard. “I’m thinking you’re looking at more than one chicken here.”

  Coyle was on his hands and knees prodding the remains with his flashlight like some half-assed TV detective trying to glean a clue. The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of the Purloined Chickens, he thought without much humor. The bones disturbed him deeply.

  “Last night, three chickens were swiped from the Galley,” he told Frye. “I had a bunch thawing for dinner. Somebody just slipped in there last night and took ‘em.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, Ida said the Midrats were untouched.”

  “Midrats” were Midnight Rations. One of those terms like Galley that was left over from the days when the Navy ran the stations. During the su
mmer, a fully-stocked Midrats was kept along with a cook to oversee it, to keep the night crews fed and happy. But during the winter, when hardly anyone but the radio operator or a few insomniacs like the scientists or Power Station techies were up and about, Midrats consisted of cold cuts and cheese, crackers and fruit stored in Tupperware containers. It was there if you wanted it. Mostly, no one touched it.

  Frye just shook his head. “So somebody stole three raw chickens? Took ‘em down here and ate the sumbitches?”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “Raw chickens?”

  “Apparently.”

  Coyle squatted there, thinking, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The bones were in such a state that he did not believe for a moment that a human being had done this.

  It was the work of an animal.

  But there were no animals at Clime. NSF regulations: no pets of any sort. And despite what the movies led people to believe, nobody had used huskies or dog teams in Antarctica since the 1960’s. Snowmobiles and other assorted vehicles made dogs obsolete. Now and again, in the summer, you might get some guys with a dog team trying to break a record or relive the “good old days” but that was rare. It was expensive to transport and keep animals on the Ice. Back in the good old days they had shot seals to feed the dogs, but nobody much cared for that idea these days.

  So . . . no dogs.

  Then what?

  “Here’s what lays on me wrong, Nicky,” Frye said. “Look at the cage here. Reinforced steel mesh. Take a cutting torch to get through it. But the cage is intact. That means whoever left these scraps came in through the door. Only Hopper and Locke have keys. Those are the regulations. I got one because I like to pick locks and make keys. Unless you got a stray key floating around or another nosy SOB like me, this just don’t wash. Because there’s only one other way in here.”

  And Coyle was examining that other way right now.

  At the back of the generator, set into the wall, there was a grille that connected with the ductwork that acted as a heat vent. Generators threw off a lot of heat. The grille swung open on a hinge. The duct leading off from it was square, about two feet wide by one foot high. You could have come through there, maybe, entered through the grille on the dome roof and shimmied your way down . . . if you were about the size of a three-year old child, that was.