by Tim Curran
They were all shining their lights around, looking, searching, seeking out what they could feel moving all around them now. Coyle put his light above and saw nothing but a condensing ice fog that steamed and billowed and swirled.
The Old Ones were up there, he knew.
They were not showing themselves, but they were most assuredly there.
“Fucking things,” Reja said. “I’d just like to get a shot at one of them.”
But Horn shook his head. “It’s not their way. They like to play games and their favorite is hide-and-seek.”
“All right,” Dayton said. “Keep your minds focused. We’re not done here yet. Those fucking things can only defeat us if we defeat ourselves first.”
Words of wisdom, Coyle thought.
Dayton’s voice had barely died away when there came a cacophonous and shrill piping that almost sounded angry. It came from everywhere, nowhere, from the depths of the ice cave and from the depths of everyone’s minds, the thin and reedy piping of a syrinx echoing out and out.
Coyle felt a booming like a gong in his head at the sound of it.
Dayton led them on and their lights picked out the Polar Haven.
No one was there, of course.
“Blood,” Long said. “Blood.”
There was a smear of it on the ice and it led away as their lights followed its trail. There was a splash of it on the Polar Haven, a frozen puddle of it at their feet, then a gruesome smeared pathway leading away as if McKerr had been murdered, then his gutted carcass dragged away deeper into the cavern.
Dayton started following the trail.
As did Reja and Long. All of them had their weapons at the ready.
“This is a fucking waste of time,” Horn said. “That much blood . . . he’s dead. Let’s just make for the chopper. We can’t do anymore here.”
“We have to try,” Coyle told him.
“That’s bullshit.”
And Reja, who was amazingly calm and quiet in the face of peril, suddenly moved very quick and put the barrel of his Colt Carbine right in Horn’s face. And the look in his eyes told everyone there that he would pull the trigger and had no doubt done such things before. “Listen to me, you sonofabitch. We’re not leaving anybody behind unless they’re a corpse. McKerr was one of us and we’re either going to find his fucking body or we’re not leaving. That’s how it works. That’s how we play the game: we don’t leave anyone behind. And if that was you, Horn, I wouldn’t stop until I found you. Nothing could make me. So just shut the fuck up and let’s get this done.”
With that he stomped away, following the blood trail.
Nobody said a word about it after that. If anything, Reja’s words had galvanized them. Even Horn seemed more intent now and that was really something for that cynical boy.
They moved on—Coyle, Dayton, and Reja out front; Gwen, Horn, and Long bringing up the back. Their lights played over the frozen crust, revealing horns and serrated crests of blue-green ice, occasional pressure cracks that fanned out in crazy spider-webbed patterns. And more blood, of course. That was constant. It might disappear for five or ten feet, but it always showed up again.
Coyle was so tense by this point, he thought he might shatter. Because he knew that at any moment they were going to see something. Something that’ll take one of us or all of us.
As they came up a rippled mound of ice, he heard a sound which stopped him and made Gwen walk right into him. They all stopped, jumbled together. He didn’t have to alert anybody to what he heard because they were all hearing it by then: a crunching and slurping noise that sounded very much like a lion gnawing on a carcass out on the veldt.
The blood trail.
Now the sound of feeding.
Dayton charged up the mound and on the other side, lying in a perfect pool of darkness down in a little glacial hollow was a body. It had to be McKerr for it was dressed in an olive-drab polar suit of the sort Dayton’s men were wearing. At least, it was dressed in the ragged remains of one . . . because the body had been horribly mangled, looked like a pack of very hungry dogs had set upon it. It was torn and twisted, green polar suit and flesh and blood and jutting red bones all tangled up into a loose-limbed mass. Bits of tissue and globs of blood were sprayed out in every which direction. It had to be McKerr, but you wouldn’t have known it because his face had been gnawed right off the leering skull beneath.
Long, who had seen his share of corpses, stumbled back, overwhelmed by it. Gwen turned away, too, but Horn just kept staring at the mess with his light on it, his lips moving like he wanted to say something.
Dayton charged ahead, hearing the thing that had done this, its low and gurgling breathing. Coyle went with him, Reja at his heels. And when they saw it, waiting there on the ice, somebody gasped and somebody moaned.
But all lights were on it.
Here’s what Coyle saw: a hunched-over troll-like thing with a face like a grotesque fleshy moon, pale and pitted and wormy, seamed with red and gray. A face that crawled over what was beneath. It had huge yellow eyes lacking pupils that were threaded with pink veins that pulsed. Its mouth was an unbroken circle of gray, needle-like teeth. Gore dripped free and splatted to the ice.
It must have heard them coming and tried to sneak away with a mouthful of meat.
“That’s . . . that’s Beeman,” Long said.
Dayton had his MP5 on the thing. “Not anymore it’s not,” he said.
The malformed horror before him began to change, its face melting like plastic, oozing and bubbling and reshaping itself into other faces . . . Barnes, then Norrys, then McKerr, then a whole series of faces that he only recognized from photographs: Stone and Kenneger, Dryden and Paxton and Reese.
Reja charged forward, just beside himself. “Norrys! You motherfucker! You killed McKerr! You dirty sonofabitch–”
He got right in the field of fire and nobody could shoot. And maybe that had been the thing’s plan all along . . . to use its hypnotic screen or whatever it was to confuse and confound those there, draw one in to shield itself. Reja could not be blamed. He saw Norrys, a stinking and murdering version, but Norrys all the same. He brought his rifle butt down on the thing and by then, whatever it really was, it had hold of him, crushing him in its grip.
His rifle went skidding across the ice.
Coyle went after the thing, he smashed its face with his SPAS-12 and smashed it again and the thing tossed aside Reja, throwing him right into Long and Horn. They all went down in a heap, flashlight beams darting around in the darkness. Dayton was trying to a shoot without hitting anyone. Gwen wanted to do the same.
Dayton charged in and a thorny, scabrous hand clasped his face and sent him flying back into Gwen.
Panic ripped open inside Coyle because he knew the thing had him. It was unbelievably strong. He punched and kicked it, but it did no good. He almost got away, but it moved with a dazzling speed and something slugged into him, his arms going numb right up to the shoulders. He wasn’t even aware that the shotgun fell from his hands. He wasn’t aware of much at all.
Nothing but flying backward as the thing threw him.
And the sound of his own cry.
40
IN HIS HEAD, COYLE thought he heard Gwen cry out: Nicky! Look out! Look out! You’re going over!
Her voice was there.
In those few seconds he flew backward, he distinctly heard it cry out in his head. He heard the terror and anxiety in it . . . then he was going back and back, expecting to strike the ice wall and be knocked senseless. But there was no wall. Just a few streamers of yellow tape that Dryden’s team had strung across the mouth of a crevice. He felt his body hit them, stretch them, and then they broke. But they did manage to slow his momentum.
He was flung to the left, struck the fissured wall of the crevice, and then went down on his belly, swinging around in a wild slippery circle on the glossy ice, spinning and finally coming to rest on the lip of the crevasse.
His legs from knees on down w
ere hanging out in empty air.
He reached out frantically, trying to dig his mittens into the ice, trying to find something, anything, to hold onto. And as he did so, he slid down another inch. His heart hammering, he could feel the great depths beneath him reaching up for him. Any moment now, he knew, gravity was going to pull him down.
And he would drop for a mile before he hit bottom.
Alone in the encompassing blackness, he waited for it.
41
NOBODY WENT AFTER COYLE.
They couldn’t.
The beast was among them and it wanted blood.
It came right at Gwen in the dappled illumination of fumbled flashlights. It made a high screeching sound and scuttled over the ice on all fours like a crab. She pulled herself back, wondering where in the hell her gun was, and the thing came on with a stench of spoiled meat.
“Watch it!” somebody yelled. “Watch it!”
The thing looked up with those yellow, blood-seamed eyes and hissed, its shriveled lips pulling back from sheathed jaws and Dayton fired. He put a volley of three rounds into the thing that knocked it back as if it had been slapped.
Then it came right back again, trying to work itself as close to her as possible so the others could not fire upon it. Gwen kicked out at it as it reached for her. Dayton hit it with a glancing shot that barely slowed it down.
Steaming, hot, and repulsive, it prepared to leap.
Horn, God bless his innate recklessness, didn’t give a shit who he hit as long as he took out the thing amongst them. He brought his assault shotgun to bear, bringing it around by the pistol-grip and took quick aim. On automatic mode, the SPAS-12 can pump out four rounds per second. He jerked the trigger and got off one that went high and wild and then another that caught the beast in the shoulder and vaporized said shoulder, knocking the thing backwards and down with a grinding squeal of agony.
It tried to rise up again.
But they were ready.
Long didn’t bother with his flamethrower because the thing was just too close to the others, but Dayton and Horn and Reja had their weapons trained on it, bracketed lights full in the creature’s face. In that moment before they opened up, it stared at them with those glistening yellow eyes and a rank steam poured from its mouth.
Then everyone opened up.
The beast never had a chance. Dayton peppered it with his MP5, Reja drilled it with his Colt Carbine, and Horn pumped two 12-gauge rounds into it that nearly tore it in half. It finally went down in a writhing, boiling mass of undulating flesh and thrashing limbs. But it wasn’t dead. It rose up from the pool of its own running anatomy, blood and slime and flesh hanging like confetti. It opened its puckered, bleeding mouth and screamed at them with a shrieking, glottal cry that was nearly deafening.
Gwen had found her Beretta by then and she put a round right into its skull. It went through the left eye and sprayed filth out the back of its head.
And that’s when they all saw what it really was.
What it had always been.
An incubator like the others.
A viscid and squamous horror that needed flesh and blood to feed the things that nested inside of it. The barrage of slugs that had blasted into it had torn open the ECWs it wore, the ones that had no doubt belonged to the original host body it had invaded. They were shredded, ripped, smoking from contact burns. Now they could see its throat, part of its chest, one misshapen arm of braided muscle. Its corded flesh was not flesh as such, but the bodies of the parasites that lived off it, their segmented, wriggling bodies that were housed in its tissue. It was crawling with those leggy, spidery parasites that had been born out of the creature down in the crevice.
Its entire body was creeping with them.
It was like some living cocoon giving forth grotesque pupae.
Some were large with spreading jointed legs like spider crabs and others small and twitching like tarantulas. As everyone watched in horror, legs and segmented bodies were disengaging themselves from the thing. Appendages like pencils burst from its throat, its face, its chest, dozens and dozens of them like wiggling pale fingers. An especially large parasite unfolded itself out of the mouth, a fan of legs reaching out like a pallid hand emerging from the thing’s throat. More and more all the time. Several of them rose from the matted hair atop its bulbous head.
Horn couldn’t take it anymore.
He opened up with his SPAS-12 and blew the crawling thing into fragments. It literally broke open with a moist, cracking sound. And from the burst smoking husk, the parasites came like an army of bony, embryonic spiders .
Then Long squeezed the trigger on his flamethrower and engulfed the nest in a curtain of fire and what was beneath sizzled and smoked and snapped. The parasites popped open like ticks in the heat, pop-pop-pop, one after the other and the sound of that was absolutely hideous. A few scuttlers made it away and Horn stomped one with his boot, its chitinous exoskeleton cracking open with a hiss of white goo.
The others wouldn’t make it far in the cold.
Gwen, who was absolutely beside herself with revulsion and fear by this point, was shaking so badly she could barely keep on her feet. She turned away from the stinking, burning mass and then her eyes widened. “Nicky,” she said. “Nicky . . .”
42
COYLE WAS HANGING ON now out of luck and sheer strength.
He did not dare move.
He did not dare even breathe.
It wouldn’t take much and he knew it. The crevice was black and grainy and he could not see a thing, only the flickering light from above that painted the mouth with bands of yellow and orange light.
The amazing thing was that he was no longer aware of the cold. It was there, all right, but with every muscle in his body straining, his blood juiced with adrenaline, he was warm. Very warm. Hot sweat was running down his face, steaming in the frigid air. It was stinging his eyes and trickling down his spine. All he could feel besides his tensing, aching muscles, was the abyssal depths below him. And that made his belly flop over upon itself again and again as he imagined what the impact would be like far below.
Then flashlights were in his face and he could see the crevice angling up to the mouth above. It wasn’t very far away at all . . . maybe twenty feet at most, not even. If he could just move enough to dig his cleats in.
“Nicky!” Gwen’s voice. “Nicky! Hang on!”
And at that moment, some self-sacrificing part of him wanted to call out to her like some hero in an old movie. No, don’t risk it! Don’t come after me! Just leave me down here and save yourselves! But his mouth refused to frame those words. It, like the rest of him, wanted to live. He did not want to die this way, plummeting hundreds and hundreds of feet into an icy grave.
He could hear them discussing it above and then Dayton simply took charge as he was prone to. What they did was form a human chain with Dayton at the mouth of the crevice, Reja next, then Horn, then Long, and finally Gwen. They dug their Stabilicer cleats in, locked hands, and slowly, inch by inch, they moved closer and closer to him.
Coyle felt himself slide out another inch.
He called up reserves of strength he never knew he had, pressing himself down into the ice, trying to meld himself to it.
Gwen was only a few feet away now.
She had taken her balaclava off and her cold-pinched face was beautiful. Simply beautiful. Her eyes were huge and dark and he could see how much she cared for him. It made his heart squeeze in his chest.
“Hold still, Nicky,” she said.
As her reaching hand got closer and closer, he heard a sudden and intrusive noise up in the cavern: a high and evil buzzing like thousands of bees were fanning their wings. It was a very darkly harmonious sound, but one filled with malefic intent that made the ice around him vibrate and tremble. The Old Ones were gathering in masses now, winging out of the darkness of the Beardmore or flying up from some bottomless crevasse and clustering out there like rooks.
Gwen’s hand.<
br />
Inches away.
A crackling sound rose up, that electronic pinging and humming as if some eldritch machine buried in the ice was starting up, sending out oscillating waves of power. He felt a sickness roll in his belly, a hot-sweet nausea at the sound and feel of it. If those things attacked now, came to drain their minds now–
He lifted a hand to clutch Gwen’s.
And the crevice shook, rippled with seismic energy that shook the glacier, made Dayton’s chain of bodies tense. Everyone cried out. More than a few were cussing. But they did not falter, did not hesitate in what they were doing.
Coyle gasped. He started to slide and it felt like the bottom of his belly had opened up, because he knew he was going down this time.
Then Gwen snatched his wrist and held it in a grip of iron.
“Got him!” she called out.
“Okay.” Dayton’s voice. “On the count of three we move together! One . . . two . . . three . . .”
“Mama’s got you, Nicky,” Gwen said, straining. “She won’t let go . . .”
They moved together as Dayton had instructed. Left leg up a few inches, then right, then left and then right. Coyle could feel the irresistible strength flowing through that chain of arms and helping hands, that strength and willingness to sacrifice which he knew was purely human and had nothing to do with aliens or their engineering. This was real. This was vital. This was the human condition in all its unstoppable glory.
Coyle was dragged up ten inches, then a foot, and then he arched up his knee and dug his cleats into the lip of the crevasse and pushed and then he was part of it, part of that caterpillar of human muscle and human determination. He moved farther and farther from the crevasse. Dayton was out of the crevice now. Then Reja and Horn. They gave one last powerful jerk and he was up himself.
His ass thumped firmly in the crevice mouth, cleats dug in.
