The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  It knows me, somehow it knows me, Coyle found himself thinking as some braying chant—equal parts wicked and withering—echoed through his mind on oil-gloss raven’s wings. It recognizes who I am and where I came from. It knows that it is the progenitor, the godhead sea of life, the keeper of the double-helix.

  A thousand disjointed images flew through his head and at such speed he could not grasp even a single one or hope to form a chain of logic from the impressions the Shoggoth gave him. His brain was a fall of black ash and superannuated dust, the ghosts of the eons filling his skull–

  The Shoggoth.

  That from which all earthly life and the life of a million other worlds had been engineered. But was it wise? He could sense an intelligence there, cold and distant, but an intelligence all the same, one degenerated by the chill rain of millions upon millions of years. And with it . . . something else. Remorse. Self-loathing. A dire hatred of what it was and what it was made to be by its masters, the Old Ones, and an absolute feral loathing for all the life that sprang from its biogenetic loins.

  Rising from the warm, dead seas of the Precambrian, it had survived Achaean and Proterozoic time, watched as the Paleozoic became the Mesozoic and finally the Cenozoic, witnessing extinctions and comets, ice ages and the shifting of poles and the rising of mountains and seas turned to deserts. Its kind waited it all out, sleeping away down here in their frozen tombs in black cellars of dead cities while men rose from apelike ancestors and skittered across hillsides like white ants, self-important, brimming with conceit over their mastery of nature and their rising rudimentary intellect, never knowing, never guessing in their supreme arrogance that they had been engineered, created to fulfill a purpose and that purpose was to be harvested, wheat to the scythe as the Old Ones had engineered, modified, and harvested so many life forms.

  It was part of the cycle and men were no more important than livestock or germs on a slide.

  An organic technology.

  Nothing more. Human society, culture, religion—all of it was synthetic, plastic, generated from original archetypes bred into the species to have the very effect they indeed had. Intelligence was developed, genetics modified, brains engineered.

  Now came the time of the reaping.

  And the Shoggoth recognized it, knowing that it would outlive this little controlled experiment on Earth as it had on a thousand worlds. It was the helix and it was eternal and men were only dust to be scattered by the wind, just another page in its book of days.

  But for it all, as it looked upon Coyle with a barely flickering consciousness, it felt sorrow.

  Coyle came out of it knowing he had been in some weird psychic uplink with the creature and that it would have gone on for some time because the Shoggoth had the time. An hour, a day, a month or a year or ten of them were all the same to it.

  But what broke the connection was the call of its masters.

  A keening and shrill, insect-like cry which was the sound of the huntsman’s horn that drove the hounds: the beast reacted. It closed that eye and shut Coyle away from it.

  He noticed something else right away: that the accretion of those tumor-like bubbles or fleshy nodes were timing their expansions with the dominant keening of those piping voices. And, yes, dear God, there were tiny oval openings at their apexes like . . . mouths. Each time he heard those piercing cries, the bubbles expanded and those openings puckered wide.

  The Shoggoth made a gurgling sound like a rumbling belly, waves of flaccid motion rolling through it. More tentacles rose up, these blood-red and slicked with slime, puckering mouths where their suckers should have been.

  Each mouth made a low, mucid mewling sound that almost sounded like the squealing of infants.

  Coyle bit down on a mittened fist out of horror, disgust, and . . . and pity.

  The Old Ones were tormenting it.

  It could not refuse.

  It let out a blaring and harsh cry somewhere between a caw and a squeal that was shrill and cutting. And no one there could doubt that it was a cry of something like torment.

  The Shoggoth moved.

  It became a writhing tower of flesh, a fetal embryonic horror of budding limbs and licking segmented tongues, whipping trunk-like tentacles barbed with spines and snaking gut-ropes like corkscrewing larva. It did not just crawl up the slope, it glided. It came on with a hundred pustulant eyes watering with bile and jutting shrieking mouths like suckering pink-ringed blow holes peeling back to reveal narrow teeth like fishbones and surgical needles.

  Long didn’t wait, he torched it.

  It rose up, tentacles lashing and flesh bulging and throbbing. Its cry of rage became one of low, bubbling pain. It came through the curtain of flame with a horrid rolling motion, filled with unearthly wrath and Long doused it again as more tentacles looped free like worms from carrion.

  And by then, everyone was shooting.

  It was part anger, part repulsion, and part hysteria. Fingers found triggers and kept jerking, needing to vanquish the thing, needing to eliminate something so invidiously offensive to the human mind.

  Bullets and buckshot punched into that squealing mass of flames, cutting holes through it, spraying tissue and fluids in every direction. Steam and smoke blew off it. Pools of sizzling ichor spilled over the ice. And Long squirted more fire onto it, wetting it down.

  And the thing screamed. With volume.

  But it did not die.

  It surged forward, casting aside burning sheets of tissue, and was up the rise before anyone could even move or think of it.

  It took Long.

  It took him by the head in one of those puckered, toothed mouths that darted forward on a flabby neck. That mouth went rigid and blubbery lips engulfed him right up to the shoulders. Then there was a gurgling sound and gray fetid slime splashed over his entire body in a snotty, milky web. He thrashed as the Shoggoth mashed his head to pulp with a sickening popping sound, licking up skullmeat like sauce . . . then a liquescent, serous sucking sound began and Long’s body went rigid and his ECWs collapsed as he was literally vacuumed dry.

  The beast spit him out, just bones in a parka and polar suit, washed down with glistening bloodwine that steamed in the cold.

  By then they were all running.

  A nightmarish retreat through that stygian netherworld, skating and slipping over the lake of ice as the beast pursued them, screeching and whining, its mass shuddering with agonal convulsions that no doubt had something to do with the constant, directed stridulous piping noises of the Old Ones.

  But it was injured.

  Reja turned to fight. Dayton screamed at him to retreat, to follow orders, but Reja had just watched his friend die and he had now parted company with command. “GET TO THE TUNNEL!” he shouted. “I’M GONNA BURN THIS MOTHERFUCKER!”

  Injured or not, the Shoggoth vaulted at him and Reja emptied a steam of fire at it that covered it in flame. Then it rose up and took him, a living burning pelt, drowning him in slime and undulant viscera and teeth like knives. The beast absorbed him, making him part of its massive girth . . . but in the end it collapsed to the ice, spinning in a sickly, weakened circle as it blazed and sizzled under the rising flames, snapping and popping and letting forth plumes of oily black smoke that stank like cremated hides.

  But before it died, it let out one last rasping cry, a death-song, that was high and cutting.

  And the very worst thing is that from within the distant city, that cry was answered.

  47

  IT TOOK THEM AN easy thirty minutes to climb back up the tunnel and they never slowed or wavered, for from below they could hear the raging, roaring shriek of what had answered the dying Shoggoth’s call.

  When they made it out, Gwen and Horn were still there waiting, but there was no time for explanations.

  Staying together, they marched back towards the passage that would lead them to the grotto above, Emperor One. That rumbling, grinding sound was getting louder and louder as whatever was down in that circu
lar ice tunnel began to rise, the cavern shaking with its approach.

  They made it to the Polar Haven and beyond when all around them, dipping and buzzing, rising and falling, were the Old Ones, hiding no more. They were droning and circling, piping with a reverberating wall of noise. They had come now and they had come in numbers as they had in the old, forgotten times. Everyone there could feel the primeval horror of their race gripping them, the fear these things inspired, the low booming headaches that psychic contact with the members of the hive always brought.

  Horn made to fire up into their masses, but Dayton stayed him. “No. Leave ‘em. If they were after us, they would’ve done something by now. We have to get out of here.”

  As they moved towards the passage, Coyle kept his light on them, amazed at how many there were, grimly fascinated at how they hovered and propelled themselves about. In the jumping lights, it was like a dark summer pond had brought all of its mosquito larvae to term at the same moment, an unceasing, busy, buzzing multitude of winged adults filling the sky.

  You’re not going to stop us, Coyle thought at them and knew perfectly well that they heard him, understood his petty defiance all too well. You can’t stop us from getting out of here. We won’t let you. But he knew how ridiculous, how childish such thoughts were put up against the immensity of the hive. If the Old Ones wanted to, they would stop them. But, somehow, that’s not what this was about. That’s not what this was about at all.

  But if not . . . then what?

  Coyle, though, felt he knew.

  “They’re summoning something up out of that tunnel and we better get out of here before it shows.”

  “What?” Gwen said. “What’s down there?”

  “A Shoggoth,” Coyle said and would say no more.

  And no sooner had those words left his mouth and registered with the others than there was a huge, resounding eruption of motion as whatever it was entered the cavern with a moist and squeaking noise and a bestial roaring that shook icicles free from above.

  “MOVE!” Dayton said. “GODDAMMIT, MOVE!”

  It was no easy bit pushing themselves over the ice in their cumbersome boots and Stabilicers with what they’d already been through, with the cold that tapped their strength, the thrumming psychic energy of the hive itself that seemed to eat at their reserves on some essential level. But they did. They moved and fought and then Dayton’s light picked out the passage.

  Coyle turned back once, spearing the blackened cavern with his light.

  What he saw in that brief instant sent him rushing headlong into the passage.

  Another Shoggoth . . . but about five times the size of the one they’d burnt.

  It came out of the tunnel like an opaque eruption of convulsive whale blubber rising from a red ocean with a spray of stinking charnel slime and dull phosphorescence. A titanic black shape that rolled right over the Polar Haven with a sluicing, oily motion. He caught only a glimpse of it, but what he saw was enough: an immense wave of gray jelly with dozens of shining yellow-golden eyes, jointed limbs emerging from the mass and reaching out.

  “Hurry!” he said to the others. “Jesus Christ, hurry!”

  48

  EMPEROR ONE

  WHEN THEY REACHED THE grotto above, moving away from that gargantuan noise of slithering and clicking and squirming that was coming after them, they saw Norrys step out from behind one of the Hypertats. He was smiling. But his eyes were dead as slate.

  “Hey, it’s about time,” he said. “Been waiting for you.”

  “I’ll bet you have,” Dayton said and shot him point blank in the chest.

  Norrys wheeled around, emitted a sharp little cry that was more rage than pain and dropped to one knee. Then Dayton sprayed him with slugs and he hit the ice, flailing and screaming, blood spurting out of him that was incredibly bright and red.

  He thumped around for a moment or two.

  Went still with a final spasmodic jerking of his legs.

  And for maybe ten seconds nobody said a thing. There was only the rumbling vibrations of that thing forcing itself up the passage and the cracking of the glacier, clouds of exhaled breath rolling into the flashlight beams.

  And then two pale legs came out of the collar of Norrys’s polar suit, followed by a third and a fourth. And then a parasite, this one an adult apparently, came creeping out, its segmented body glistening with slime, its legs pulling it away from the corpse. It was connected by two strings of red tissue that pulled taut and snapped like rubber bands. Fighting against the cold, it clicked over the ice and then Horn pulled his ice-axe off his belt and swung at it. The pick speared the creature right between two of its bony plates.

  Horn lifted it up into the air, firmly impaled by the axe.

  White blood dribbled from it and sizzled on the ice. Blood that was alien in nature, completely bleached of hemoglobin. The parasite’s legs bicycled madly in the air with a sickening clicking noise.

  “Ugly motherfucker, all right,” Horn said and tossed it and the axe away.

  Yes, it was ugly, Coyle got to thinking. And ugly in more than just its skeletal, leggy appearance. What it was designed for was equally as ugly.

  Parasites.

  The Old Ones must have used them for mind control, something like that. Because Norrys, despite his eyes, had seemed perfectly normal to them. If it hadn’t been for seeing that thing below trying to pass itself off as Norrys and the others, they would have accepted him as one of their own and taken him back with them.

  And then what?

  Would he have become an incubator, too?

  But there was no time for idle speculation.

  “That thing’s coming fast,” Horn said to Dayton. “We’ll never make it back to the chopper in time.”

  “It’s on its way in,” Dayton said, listening through his headset.

  Coyle was with them as they panned their lights down into the passage. The thing coming after them wasn’t visible yet, but definitely on its way. It was rushing up at them out of the frozen darkness below and he could feel it down there, surging and rising, coming on with a cremating stink of carrion and rotten fermentation, a slithering and unspeakable horror his mind could not wrap itself around.

  “We need to stall it,” Dayton said.

  “The fuel barrels,” Horn said. “Battle of the Bulge.”

  “What?” Gwen said.

  But Coyle got it. The Battle of the Bulge. In the movie, the allies roll flaming fuel barrels down at Nazi tanks and sink them in a sea of fire. And that’s exactly what they were going to do. Gwen just didn’t understand the reference. There were just some things in life, like war movies, that were particularly a male province. Women just didn’t understand the attraction of cinematic warfare. Or most didn’t. And Coyle did not think he was sexist in thinking that.

  Everyone ran over to the pallets with the yellow fuel drums on them. They tipped the barrels onto the ice and rolled them over to the passage. Using ice-axes, they popped the seals on barrel after barrel and then rolled them down the ice runway to what was coming on. Six barrels and then a seventh, fuel splashing and spraying.

  “That’ll have to do,” Dayton said.

  Everyone got their balaclavas on, hoods zipped up tight, and went over to the opening of the Emperor cave itself. Then Dayton tossed a phosphorus grenade down there that went up with mushrooming flames.

  Coyle wasn’t there to see it.

  But he did see Dayton running towards them, the flash of blinding light from deeper in the grotto. And everyone heard the barrels go up with a thundering noise. And what came after it: the roar of the beast that shook the glacier.

  Then Horn was leading them out into the blackness of Desolation Trough.

  The wind screamed and whipped, ice fog and drift blowing in every direction. Not looking back, the survivors descended the guyline into the raging hell of the Trough, the howl of the wind blocking out the noise of what was behind them.

  49

  IN THE REAR COMPAR
TMENT of the Icewolf, Coyle sat next to Gwen, both of them strapped into their webseats and hanging on tight . . . to their harnesses and to each other, as the chopper began to life free of the ice.

  We made it, he wanted to say to her over the headset in his helmet, but didn’t dare. He was too afraid that he would jinx them at this, the most critical juncture of their escape. For at any moment, that primal horror could come at them out of the darkness and crush the chopper like a tin can, sucking out the warm jelly within.

  Stop it, just fucking stop it already–

  The chopper shook.

  Began to rise.

  Ten feet off the ground, the rotors whipping and thudding against the storm, it shuddered, tipped back to earth, bounced off the ice and rose up again, this time holding its own against the wind.

  Coyle could feel the bite of the massive turbines that lifted them up into the tempest and held them there, man’s technology facing off against nature’s wrath. The chopper lifted up and up and he could feel that sucking sensation in his belly, the sensation of sudden ascent that you got from a rising elevator. Then the chopper banked to the right and swung around in a wide circle. Rising, still rising, up and up and up for maybe five minutes, and then coming down again and not by accident.

  What the fuck?

  Dayton was up in the cockpit and over the headset, Coyle heard him say, “Find that fucker and fix it.”

  Then one of the pilots: “Target acquisition . . . whatever you got down there, it’s sending out one hell of a heat signature.”

  “Arm those Hellfires,” Dayton said.

  And that’s when he realized they were going after it.

  The Shoggoth.

  Or sealing up the Emperor at the very least.

  Gwen’s hand tightened around his own.

  The chopper continued to descend, zipping down like a hunting wasp in search of prey.

  “Oh, God,” Coyle said under his breath.

  When he’d boarded the Icewolf in the compound of Polar Clime, he’d seen the wings thrusting out from either side, the stacked pods of rockets beneath them. He’d asked Reja what they were for and Reja had winked at him, said, Hellfire missiles. They’re for whatever we find. And that’s what was going on now. The pilot was arming the missiles and they were about to let them fly, fly at whatever they had locked onto.