The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  Something far less than human.

  A man or something like a man that shuffled with the side-to-side gait of a wounded animal and looked much like some colossal insect when he came at them, hissing and gibbering. His face was pallid, the skull beneath it exaggerated into a vulpine grin of hatred. His flesh was braided in muscle tissue. And everyone saw how misshapen he was . . . swollen and contorted, his back a huge cresting hump, his head almost laid flat against one sloping shoulder.

  Things were crawling under his skin.

  “That’s . . . I think that’s Paxton,” Dayton said.

  He looked out at them with lidless, glistening black eyes with slit pupils that were the purple-red of contusions. He made a snarling doglike sound.

  Then he leaped.

  He launched himself at them, bringing long and gnarled fingers to bear that were thorny like rose stems.

  Reja fired and missed as he was knocked to the side.

  Dayton fired a three-round burst, but Long, Horn, and Gwen were blocked by Dayton himself.

  Coyle pushed forward, but he never got off a shot.

  Dayton was slapped away, then those claws were coming at Coyle and he held the shotgun up in defense. Paxton lashed out at him, knocking the SPAS-12 from his hands. The claws at the end of those skeletal fingers were viciously sharp. They slit right through his parka and the down vest beneath. Had he been wearing less, they would have gutted him.

  Long was in action by then, of course.

  He swung his ice-axe and caught the Paxton-thing right in the face. He didn’t sink it in there, but caught it with a glancing blow that sheared open that crawling face and speared the left eyeball out of its socket with a spray of tissue and blood that was almost greenish, translucent.

  Paxton let out a keening wail, swinging around with an almost crablike, scuttling motion, tripping over the space heater that was heating up his little hidey hole.

  Reja fired, piercing Paxton with a spray of bullets. He made a shrieking sound and tried to escape.

  The others were circling around with their weapons.

  Paxton didn’t stand a chance and he knew it.

  The green juice running down his face, he looked at them with a flat hatred that was nearly indescribable. His clawed hands were hooked for combat, lips pulled away from the circle of yellow teeth beneath. They could all smell his breath coming out hot and maggoty . . . like he had been chewing on carrion.

  “Paxton,” Dayton said to him.

  That puckered mouth opened in a howling screech of rage and he jumped out at them and Coyle pulled the trigger. The 12-guage round caught him square in the chest and threw him up against the wall. Horn followed suit and nearly took his head off. Long and Reja perforated him with rounds. He slithered on the floor and right away began to burst open, a jelly-like green emulsion bubbling out of him, steaming and sputtering.

  Something was moving beneath his skin.

  Something alive.

  As they watched, Paxton split open like a slimy birth canal with a fleshy ripping sound.

  Gwen made a gagging noise.

  From that womb something ghostly white and fleshy emerged. It looked like a single human finger, the finger of a corpse. It wiggled in the air and hooked itself around the lip of the opening. Another digit pushed forth followed by another and another until there were no less than seven such appendages that reached out like white wormy fingers and flexed, pulling what they were connected to free.

  A hand, Coyle thought with budding madness. A fucking hand.

  But it was no hand.

  Just some white, oily parasite that dropped free. It looked like a segmented and hairless spider, a leggy thing with an elongated, teardrop-shaped body. It dragged a fleshy sac behind it like a deflated balloon...or a placenta. Tiny pink threads connected it to the birth canal, the remains of Paxton.

  Another crawled free.

  Then another.

  And another.

  Coyle, trying to keep his stomach down, was thinking of that spidery creature between the shoulder blades of the body in the pit.

  “Fuck is that?” Gwen was saying over and over again as she watched it breathe. “Fuck is that?”

  Coyle didn’t know and neither did Horn.

  As they all watched, speechless, more and more of the spiderlike parasites began to pull themselves free until there were easily two dozen of them, all of them still connected to the wombs by those pink threads like the static lines of parachutes. The parasites gathered there, more emerging all the time and spreading those long jointed legs with a hideous clicking sound. They climbed over the top of each other, glistening and sticky. They had no eyes, but several just crouched there, forelegs held out before them as if in indecision.

  Somebody screamed.

  The parasites began scuttling forward . . . in their direction.

  A leggy, creeping mass of them.

  And Coyle knew if one of those monsters touched him he would go totally insane. They were moving away from the pulsating carcass of Paxton with that scuttling noise and a constant tick-tick-tick of their legs.

  “Fuck this,” Long said and opened up with the flamethrower.

  There had to have been at least two dozen of the parasites out now like bony ticks and dozens still being born. But the gushing fire engulfed them, spreading and licking, the flames lighting up the grotto with a yellow and orange flickering. Fuming gouts of black smoke rose up against those shafts of clear ice. The spider-things twisted and flopped as they cooked.

  Everyone just stood there and watched them burn, the flames flickering and making the grotto glow.

  When they died down a few minutes later, there was nothing but blackened clumps and the burned-out, smoking husk of Paxton. Not pretty, but infinitely preferable to what they were looking at before the fire.

  Nobody moved.

  Nobody did anything.

  They just watched, fascinated and repulsed, but unable to turn away from what they were seeing through the haze of foul-smelling smoke.

  There was a ridge just beyond that split the grotto in two. Dayton scanned it with his light. “Let’s see what’s over there.”

  Hesitantly, the others followed.

  36

  IN THE PITCH BLACKNESS near the Polar Haven, McKerr was nearly out of his mind. He cast his light around on the barrel of his Colt, seeking out the movement and whispering motion he felt all around him.

  “Who’s there?” he cried. “Who the hell is it? Goddammit... you answer me!”

  Barnes wasn’t answering.

  Neither was Norrys above.

  And alone there, McKerr could feel the darkness closing in around him like a noose. Not just shadows and cold, but an almost organic menace that was inching its way in closer and closer. Above, he kept hearing something like the fluttering of wings, an occasional sharp trilling and a muted buzzing that came and went like a bumblebee trapped in a jar.

  He swung his light around.

  Wanting to shoot.

  Needing to shoot.

  Only his training and experience kept him from doing so, the fear that he might cut down one of his own team or one of the civilians from Clime.

  Then behind him, the sound of cleats crunching in the ice.

  He put his light and weapon in the direction of the sound.

  And he saw . . . at first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Just some hunched-over shape cut from shadow, something with reaching gnarled hands and shining eyes that were too huge, too luminous to belong to a man.

  Then the shape spoke: “Man, I think we’re all alone.”

  Norrys? Was that Norrys?

  The shape was looking more like a man now and McKerr relaxed slightly. It was just Norrys and it never had been anything else. McKerr breathed in and out, trying to cancel out the nightmares that danced through his head, that image burned into his imagination of some shadowy thing approaching him, a distorted and fanged thing with a face of creeping white tendrils. Something that was
certainly not Norrys.

  He opened his mouth to ask the man what he was doing down here, why he had abandoned his post topside, and Norrys smiled. “It was getting weird up there, man. I was hearing things . . . seeing things . . . then I couldn’t raise anybody on the radio.” He smiled again in the glow of the flashlight. “I guess I panicked.”

  McKerr could understand that. “I’m glad you’re here. There’s things going on. I can’t reach Barnes. Maybe we should go look for him.”

  “No, we better stay here. Follow orders. You know how Dayton gets.”

  McKerr nodded, glad he was no longer alone.

  The things you could imagine in a place like this, the things you could hear. He panned his light around and when he brought it back, Norrys was closer. His breath came out in rolling clouds of fog. For one second there, McKerr thought it smelled like rotting meat.

  Then it was gone.

  “We’re gonna be okay here,” Norrys said, his voice kind of low and phlegmy like he needed to clear his throat. “Just you and me.”

  “Sure.”

  It was about this time as McKerr waited, listening, tensing for what might come next, that he became aware of . . . heat. It was crazy, but he was sensing waves of heat pressing against him. A heat that was damp, fetid, and feverishly hot. It smelled one moment like rotting green vegetation and the next like warm vomit. Then it was gone.

  Imagination. Had to be.

  “Hope Dayton gets his ass back here already,” he said.

  “Me too,” Norrys said and he was closer than he had been.

  McKerr felt a sudden stab of unease in his belly. An unease at the proximity of Norrys. It seemed that every time he looked away, Norrys sidled in just a bit closer. It was the fear, surely. Fear like this could make the toughest men want to hold hands down here in this catacomb in the ancient ice.

  But that smell.

  Then the heat.

  Gone now . . . but so unnatural, so vile while it lasted.

  Norrys was breathing very harshly, like his lungs were congested. “Hey . . . you got a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke, dumbass,” McKerr said and then looked at him, had the weirdest hallucination that his face was . . . moving. “You know . . . you know I don’t smoke.”

  “I must’ve forgot.”

  He was closer now.

  “You okay, Norrys?”

  Norrys grinned. “Sure, I am. Just fine. You hear something out there?”

  McKerr played his light around. Yeah, he was hearing all kinds of things out there, but he couldn’t be sure what he was actually hearing and what was just in his head. It was getting so he didn’t trust either.

  He turned towards Norrys.

  Norrys’ grin was very large, very toothy. He face looked sallow in the light, almost yellow. And he was drooling. “We’re gonna be okay, buddy . . . just you and me . . .”

  He edged in closer . . .

  37

  WHEN THEY GOT OVER the ridge and started moving down the other side into a bowl-shaped pocket, they saw something waiting down below, curled up on the ice.

  A body.

  They went down to it, lights jiggling and throwing shadows around them.

  “God,” Gwen said as they got in closer, putting their lights on it.

  “Damn,” Horn said, his breath coming out in a rolling white cloud. “Is that . . . is that a man?”

  It looked like one . . . almost, but split wide open and everyone wondered if it was going to be another incubator like Paxton. But it wasn’t that at all.

  Realizing that it wasn’t going to jump out at them, that it was truly dead or incapable of motion at the very least, they ringed around it, put their lights on it and tried to figure exactly what they were looking at.

  Horn looked at Coyle and Coyle looked at Gwen, then they all turned to Dayton who as usual did not seem particularly shocked at anything. Unsettled maybe, but not shocked, not horrified as he should have been.

  “I wouldn’t get too close,” Long said.

  Dayton ignored him.

  He crouched down by the body. It was laying on its side, naked, something that had been a man but split from forehead to crotch. A corpse. Yet there was something very funny about it.

  Dayton prodded it with the barrel of his rifle.

  It was frozen to the ice.

  He stood up and gave it a nudge with his boot and it split open the rest of the way, the two halves falling apart.

  “Holy shit,” Horn said.

  There was nothing inside.

  Just a frozen shell that was empty like an injection mold used to thermoform a plastic action figure. Nothing else.

  “A casing,” Gwen said. “Nothing but a fucking casing . . . like whoever was in there shed their skin.”

  But that wasn’t exactly what Coyle was thinking. He was picturing something more along the lines of a chrysalis or a pupa. Like something that had come to term in the human shell, then cast it aside when it was ready.

  Dayton pushed the body with his boot so he could see its face . . . or half of it. There was no doubt it was Paxton. He rolled it over and there was the hollow casing of something like a spider between the shoulder blades. And then it all became clear or as clear as it would ever be: those spiderlike parasites attached to a healthy human, parasitized them, and then some sort of duplicate emerged. Something like a monstrous, living incubator. Something horribly pregnant.

  Coyle was about to fire about fifty questions at Dayton because the man obviously knew exactly what he was looking at . . . then there rose a sudden grinding of ice, a rumbling that shook the crevice and knocked nearly everyone down. It came again, the grotto shaking, shards of ice dropping from the ceiling.

  It was coming from a crevice in the glacier wall.

  “Pull back!” Dayton cried out. “Pull back!”

  Horn and Reja retreated into the crevice with Gwen right behind them, yanking Coyle with her. Long pulled back and Dayton went with him.

  Horn in the lead, they all ran as best as they could through that winding passage of blue ice, lights bobbing and cleats ringing out. Dayton kept shouting for them to move, move, and his voice had taken on a hysterical note.

  When Horn’s light picked out the opening of the crevice, Reja cried out, “What the hell was it? A fucking earthquake?”

  But as Coyle suspected it was something much worse than that.

  38

  THE FIRST THING GWEN saw when they got out of the crevice was Barnes.

  Her flashlight beam found him right away like it had known exactly where to look, what to reveal to her in that biting darkness to amplify her horror to the utmost. He was curled up on the ice, wrenched into a grotesque fetal position as if he had died in the midst of the most awful convulsions. His knees were drawn up to his chest, his hands hooked into frosted claws.

  And his face . . . dear God, his face . . .

  Horn sighed. “Just like the guy in the Hypertat.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Dayton said and there was almost a hint of emotional angst to his voice as if this was more than an inconvenience to him, but a personal loss. “They got to him . . . while we were down there . . . they got to him . . .”

  And yes they had.

  And nobody there needed to ask who they were.

  Barnes had died screaming, that much was obvious.

  And the horror and agony that had inspired that screaming had been so terrible that the scream itself had torn open his mouth as if it hadn’t been able to open wide enough naturally to convey the torment of what he had seen, what he had felt, and what he had known in those last unspeakable moments. His mouth was ripped open a couple inches in each corner and it gave him a grinning, macabre look like a laughing cemetery puppet. His face was purple and distended, a sculpture of frozen blood ejected from his mouth and nostrils, frozen tissue blown from his eye sockets. The ice around him was spattered with meat and sparkling red whorls.

  We’ll never get out of here alive, Gwen though
t.

  None of us.

  She was the last person in the world to throw in the towel, but there were limits to everything. Limits. And down here in this cyclopean netherworld of ice she felt that she had now reached hers. The point where all the guts and determination and optimism in the world simply curled-up in your belly and died. Because if the depraved nightmares of antiquity did not do them in, she figured, then the cold would.

  Because it was cold.

  Tropical compared to out in the Trough, but still dangerous. They all wore ECWs, boots, mittens and thermal gloves that were heated by battery packs, but there was a limit to that, too, she knew. Hypothermia would find them soon enough. They would begin to feel dopey, confused, then they would start making reckless decisions . . . and down here, that was as close to death as you could get.

  She stared at Barnes’s corpse, drinking in what it told her about her enemy and the power that enemy wielded.

  We’re all going to die like that with our brains boiling in our skulls, convulsing as our eyes melt and our faces twist into fright masks. Because that’s what these things do. They eat your mind right down to the bare and bleeding bone, dissolve it like flesh in an acid bath.

  She turned away and saw Coyle looking at her, his eyes fixed on her own, unblinking, unflinching, feeling what she felt and knowing what she knew. She could almost hear his voice in her head, telling her to keep it together, to hold on tight, because she was not alone and never had been.

  She smiled at him and her face was so cold she thought it would split open.

  He smiled back.

  Beneath their balaclavas, they could not see each other do so, but it was there and they knew it.

  Keep it together, Gwen, just a little bit longer.

  Okay, Nicky. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.

  39

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE lights?”

  Horn kept asking that question in the coveting, murky blackness, but nobody seemed to have an answer.

  As they moved away from the gory profusion that was Barnes, no one spoke. Dayton had been trying to reach everyone in his squad for some time and the fact that he hadn’t spoke volumes about what was happening to them down there. The lights had been shut off now. And one by one, they were being pulled off into the darkness to be tortured individually. That’s how it would work and was working.