The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  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 something 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.

  4

  POLAR CLIME

  FRYE 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.

  The creature trembled, raising two legs off the floor like a wolf spider preparing to strike.

  Coyle did not take his eyes off the beast. “Danny, on the count of three, I want you to crawl away towards us as fast as you possibly can. Can you do that?”

  Shin nodded, but he was shaking so badly it was hard to tell.

  Coyle opened his mouth to count
. . . then he felt something seem to almost expand in the back of his head, a black vortex of whispering voices that blotted out all else and made him feel giddy.

  (come onto me)

  (touch me)

  (drown in me)

  He looked at the creature–

  Looked and saw a massive hump swelling like rising bread dough where the mouth had been. With a gelatinous sound and an eruption of clear fluid, the hump burst open and two tiny human arms came out, then three and four and five, a dozen and maybe two dozen that were a moist bubblegum pink reaching out to him, getting closer and closer until he could feel the sickening heat as their fingers waved in his face–

  “Nicky!” Frye cried out.

  He blinked and it was gone . . . it was just the spider-thing again, all those faces.

  He breathed in and out. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  Shin looked once at the beast and then at Coyle and jumped, tossing the axe and actually making it maybe three feet before the most appalling thing happened. The beast made a gurgling sound and something like a gelid, smooth tentacle slid from its body with amazing speed. The tip was barbed like a blow dart. As Shin dove away, that barbed tip impaled him right between the shoulder blades. About four inches of tentacle slid in with it, making a sound like a tongue slipping into an especially juicy peach.

  Coyle screamed out something, but that was about it.

  Shin lived long enough to make a grunting, surprised sound and a squeaking girlish cry and that was about it. Then his body blew up like an over-inflated balloon as if he’d just been filled with helium. He expanded in a split second with a stretching, elastic sort of sound. His windpants tore open as did his polar fleece shirt, the buttons of which were expelled like bullets.

  It happened just that quick.

  He lived for about two seconds like a bulging, rolling balloon animal that was about to burst, his skin strained and lividly purple from exploded blood vessels. Then he died and the tentacle retracted with a hissing sound like escaping gas.

  Coyle drilled three bullets into the beast and was not even aware that he had done so. The sound of the chamber explosions slapped him out of his shocked fugue. The rounds passed right through the thing, exit wounds spraying clots of tissue and pink fluid. The beast roared and spun in a crazy half-circle, a perfect spout of green, watery blood coming from one of the bullet holes and striking the wall and steaming.

  It could have had them.

  Right then and right there, the beast could have had them. It was only ten feet away. But it did not charge. It wailed with an almost womanish sounding scream and turned away from them. The doorway leading into the rear living quarters was open, but, again, the beast didn’t bother with doors. It whipped around in circle, spinning like a top, spraying tissue and green blood in every which direction. It hit the wall and went right through it like a buzzsaw, leaving a few wriggling strands of itself on the chasm it created. In the other room, they heard things crashing and falling.

  Coyle went in there and it looked like the beast was having a temper tantrum. It was no longer a spider-thing but a pulsating black pod, still spinning, dozens of squirming blue tentacles coiling and twining like nesting snakes. They were five and six feet in length, lashing at anything in sight.

  The widescreen TV was smashed to the floor.

  A table full of magazines and empty beer cans was flipped over.

  A rack of DVDs was flunk across the room.

  And then it just sank amongst the wreckage, looking like it was giving up, melting into a black greasy blob and making a weird mewling sound.

  But it wasn’t giving up . . . it was changing, moving, reconfiguring itself.

  It inflated itself into a huge entity, something with two cylindrical heads and three mouths, five or six glaring red eyes if not more. It was blue and rubbery and tentacled with a dozen whipping, muscular ropes set with hooks like the claws of a cat.

  Coyle fired.

  He emptied the 9mm into the thing and it jumped up and back, hit the wall, came down howling like a dozen wolves, then mewing like a Siamese. Tentacles whipped and clutched, taloned feet scratched over the floor. And then it stopped right there, hesitating. Pissing green blood from half a dozen wounds, the skull of the head on the right laid open, it trembled with absolute rage, just shaking and shuddering, fixing the men in the room with those red, oval alien eyes.

  It hated.

  There was no doubt about that. It hated with an absolute raw malevolence that was not even remotely of this Earth, but something born in black cosmic gulfs. Men could not hate the way the beast hated with complete loathing. It was beyond a simple emotional state, but almost biological in its dire rhythms.

  It glared at them, leered, and seethed. It was not something pretending to be a man.

  It was a monster.

  An animal designed with an almost supernatural survivability, a vitality that was unthinkable. Right then, it seemed to be weighing out its options. They had it and it knew it. It sat there, clawed and quivering, tentacles slithering, eyes hating and mouths hanging open. Coyle did not believe for one moment that it had given up. He could not imagine such a thing throwing in the towel and admitting defeat without its maws red with human blood, without having crunched human bones and yanked out steaming entrails from cleaved bellies.

  “Burn that motherfucker,” Frye said, simply tired of it all.

  As Horn pulled the trigger on his flamethrower, the beast hissed with those mouths and a forest of clawed tentacles came up in a defensive posture.

  It shifted into a mammoth black hood like an oil spill.

  Then a stream of flame hit it, knocking it back and over. It came right back up and was drenched in burning fluid. It jumped and rolled and shrieked and Horn hosed it down. By that time, the entire far end of the room was engulfed in flame. The men backed away into the radio room as the beast fought against the burning jellied gasoline, smoke rolling off it, its burning stench just sickening to smell. Its last act was to sculpt itself into a great flaming ball with dozens of squirming ropes . . . then it cracked open and the black oily shell it had encased itself in fell away, shattering on the floor like candy glass.

  From that black capsule a bright red jelly gushed free, becoming a towering ooze that clung to the ceiling by tendrils, sliding and undulating, its bright red glistening mass rolling with waves.

  It let out a perfectly human scream that sounded like a woman being flayed . . . then collapsed beneath the flames, melting away and dying.

  The men just stood there, letting it burn.

  Frye dropped his ice-axe to the floor with a clang and everyone jumped. Fumbling a cigarette into his mouth with shaking fingers, he said “What the fuck was that?”

  But nobody even attempted a guess.

  5

  EMPEROR CAVE

  WHEN THEY GOT DOWN to the cavern, the first thing Warren noticed was that the tent was collapsed. The yellow tent Dryden had been thawing out his creature in. He walked over to it, Biggs and Beeman behind him.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “The thing is gone.”

  Biggs was breathing hard. “No, it’s not gone,” he said. “It’s still here. Only it’s not frozen anymore.”

  Not a neurotic reaction to the impossible, merely a statement of fact. It was gone. And if everyone was dead as Beeman said and Warren himself suspected . . . then, well, it must have left under its own power. The idea of that should have shocked them, but it didn’t.

  Not now.

  Warren had turned the power back on and the cavern was brightly-lit, the heater in the Polar Haven chugging away again. In the curious refracted blue light of the enclosing ice, he looked around, maybe expecting to see that alien horror walking around.

  But there was nothing. Just the silence. The shifting of the ice.

  “Is that what your monster is?” Biggs said then to Beeman. “That thing from the ice?”

  Beeman shook his head. “No, not that. Something else.�
�� He paused, looking across the cavern. “It looks like a man, I think. But it’s not a man.”

  “You’re way behind on your urban legends, Biggs. Way I hear it, those aliens don’t eat flesh, they eat minds,” Warren said.

  Biggs grunted. “Well, if that’s the case, that sonofabitch is gonna go hungry if he goes after Beeman.”

  Beeman said nothing and maybe that was the most disturbing part.

  The three of them stood there a moment and said nothing. Bundled up in their bright red ECWs, parka hoods pulled tight, mittened hands gripping ice-axes and flashlights, they looked like they had just ascended Mount Everest and not descended into some labyrinthine ice cave. The only thing missing was the sense of joy or exhilaration. They stood there in silence, breathing out white clouds of vapor, the cold rendering their faces blank and unreadable. The only thing alive about them were their eyes and they were intense, hunted.

  Warren motioned them forward and they followed him up the sloping ridge, their Stabilicer cleats making a crunching noise as they dug in for purchase. When they reached the top, they could see the numerous crevices slit into the wall of the glacier. And that huge round tunnel that hadn’t been there before.

  “Hell you make of that?” Biggs wanted to know.

  “It’s artificial,” Warren said.

  “You think?”

  They both looked at Beeman, maybe hoping he would have some input on this, but he said nothing. Everything about him had changed. He was cool and noncommittal, his speech clipped and his manner lifeless.

  They went down.

  Standing at the periphery of the tunnel, there could be no doubt it was artificial. It was too symmetrical, too smooth, too channeled-looking. There was no way to know how it had been formed, because there was not so much as a scratch or gouge in the lustrous walls that would have hinted at a steel bit or hot water drill at work. Polished, is what Warren thought. Cut so cleanly, so perfectly, it looked like a tunnel of clear blue glass.

  “Melted?” Biggs said.

  “It’s anybody’s guess,” Warren said.

  They put their flashlights beams into it and there was nothing really to see. Just that glossy tunnel dropping away deeper and deeper into the glacier until their lights would no longer penetrate the darkness. Warren mentally calculated that what they could see of it went down several dozen feet.