Hayes stared off into the night through his goggles. His beard was already stiff and frozen. His breath and that of the others billowing out in great, frosty clouds that turned on the wind. Cold-pinched faces waited and wondered. A light snow was coming down now, just as fine and white as beach sand.

"Look!" somebody cried out. "You see that?"

Hayes didn't at first, but now he did.

And seeing it, he had to stop and blink, brush snow from his goggles because he couldn't really be seeing what he thought he was seeing. His heart caught in his chest, held painfully there for a moment like an animal caught in tar. This can't be good, a voice in his head was telling him. As far as developments go, this is next door to s.h.i.tty.

Somebody behind him gasped and somebody else swore under their breath.

What they were looking at was a lone form out there, running and stumbling before the Spryte, managing to keep just ahead of it, but barely. At first Hayes thought the Spryte was chasing the figure to catch up with it, but now it didn't look like that at all.

It looked like they were trying to run him over.

"Holy s.h.i.t," somebody said.

"Rutkowski? Go get me one of those rifles," Hayes snapped. "And make sure it's f.u.c.king loaded."

Then he was running, the wind propelling him forward and then doing its d.a.m.nedest to pitch him sideways. He pounded through drifts, slipping on his a.s.s only once. The others were coming, too, but staying behind him like they wanted him to see it first.

"Hey!" Hayes called out as he got in closer. "Hey! Duck behind that hut! Duck behind that f.u.c.king hut . . . it's almost on you!"

The figure drunkenly zigged and zagged, went face down in the snow and crab-crawled frantically forward like a kid in gym cla.s.s doing barrel crawls. But no kid ever had to plow through three- and four-foot drifts, keep his footing on pack-ice while the wind screamed into him at fifty and sixty miles an hour. And no kid ever had to do this in a bulky parka with the wind chill dipping down to seventy below zero.

Hayes was shouting at the lone man and at the driver of the Spryte, but it was doing him no good. With a sickening realization, he knew that the Spryte was going to overtake the man and was going to crush him beneath its treads. The figure got to his feet, moved off to the left and the Spryte compensated, its treads creaking as it came around. The Spryte was bearing down on him and Hayes was just too d.a.m.n far away to do anything. People were shouting out behind him and he made one last valiant dash, but he lost his footing and went down in a drift, coming back up with his face covered in snow. He frantically pawed it away.

The man fell.

But he saw Hayes.

He was shaking his head back and forth, shouting something, but Hayes couldn't hear what it was in the racket of the Spryte's engine. The lights of the Spryte were glaring and intense, snow swirling in their beams. Hayes could just make out a dim figure in the cab.

Where in the f.u.c.k was Rutkowski with that gun?

He heard Sharkey scream his name and then the Spryte rolled right over that lone figure in the snow, those jointed tracks crushing him with a popping, wet sound that was meaty, organic, and brutal. The Spryte lurched as it went over him, leaving nothing but a red and ripped heap in its wake.

And then it was coming at Hayes.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," he said under his breath, backing away now, preparing to break into a run.

But the Spryte stopped dead. Downshifted, started in reverse with a jerk as whoever was in that cab worked the stick roughly. There was no doubt what was happening: this crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d was going to roll right over the body again.

The Spryte backed up and did just that and suddenly Rutkowski was there with the rifle in his hands, just standing there, speechless.

"Shoot that motherf.u.c.ker!" Hayes told him.

But Rutkowski stood there, seeing that spreading red stain in the snow, smelling the blood and macerated flesh and he could not move.

Hayes took the rifle from his hands.

It was just a little bolt-action .22 survival rifle. He brought it up and popped a round through the cab. Worked the bolt and put another through there. He saw the bullet holes in the wide, sloping windshield. Saw the second bullet make the form in there throw its hands up and fall over.

The Spryte stopped.

Right on top of the body.

Hayes scrambled around the side of the cab and brought the rifle up, ready to finish the job and knowing that if anybody even so much as got in his way they were going to get a rifle-b.u.t.t upside the head.

But n.o.body did.

They came up, but stayed a good distance away. Cutchen was there with Sharkey. Koricki and Sodermark. Stotts, Biggs, and Rutkowski. A few of the scientists. n.o.body was saying a thing. The engine died on the Spryte and the door to the cab swung open and then shut again as the wind took it. Then it slammed open again and whoever was in there stepped out and onto the treads.

It was Holm.

The geologist from Gates' team. He just stood up on the treads like a politician preparing to make a speech. He wore a parka, but no hat. His white hair rustled in the wind. His face was the color of boiled bone.

"Holm?" Hayes said to him, wondering if he'd really hit him with the .22 or not. For he seemed perfectly healthy. "Holm? G.o.ddammit, Holm, what the f.u.c.k do you think you're doing?"

"Watch it, Jimmy," Rutkowski said. "There's something funny here."

Oh yeah, there definitely was.

Holm hopped off the treads, down into the snow and stepped forward even as Hayes stepped back. Holm was a skinny old guy in his sixties and Hayes could have broke him over his knee without working up a sweat . . . yet, at that moment it would have been hard to picture a more dangerous man than Holm. There was something cold and remorseless about him.

"Holm . . . " Hayes said.

Holm was looking at him and his eyes were filled with a chill blankness. There was nothing in them. Nothing human at any rate. He surveyed Hayes with a flat indifference, that pallid face punched with two black eyes that made something go liquid in Hayes' belly. You didn't want to spend too much time looking into those eyes. They were like windows looking through into some G.o.dless, dead-end of s.p.a.ce. You could see yourself there, suffocating in that deranged, airless void.

Hayes swallowed.

Those eyes drilled into him, sucking him dry.

There was power in those eyes, something immense and malignant and ancient. The way Hayes was feeling at that moment was how he felt looking into those gla.s.sy red orbs of the aliens in Hut #6. They got inside you, owned you, crushed your free will like a spider under a boot. At some primary level, they consumed and swallowed you. And you could feel all that you were sliding down into some black, soundless gullet.

Hayes made a squeaking sound in his throat, but that was it.

What he was feeling was awful . . . gut-deep and bone-cold and he was powerless to refuse it. It was like waking up in a coffin and hearing dirt thud against the lid . . . but having no voice with which to scream.

"Jimmy," Sharkey said. "Get away from him . . . get away from him right now."

Her voice was like a slap across the face. Hayes blinked and stumbled backward, almost fell as his feet skated out in opposite directions. But his mind came back and the world swam into view. And as it did, he was remembering the night they chatted with Gates on the Internet. He could still see those threatening words on the screen: you are in danger if I or others return watch us close very close something not right with holm I think they have his mind now This was how Hayes knew the ball had dropped.

He brought the gun up. "All right, Holm, no closer. Next one goes between your eyes. Where's Gates? Bryer? The others? What have you done with them?"

Holm c.o.c.ked his head slightly to one side like a puppy, but the effect was hardly cute . . . it was offensive and loathsome like feeling a spider unfurling its legs in your palm. It gave Hayes the same sense of atavistic revulsion. It actually made him take a step backward. His breath caught in his throat.

"Where's Gates?" he said again, noticing how weak and puny his voice seemed in the icy blackness of the night.

"Shoot him," Rutkowski said. "Put that f.u.c.king animal down. Look what he did . . . just look at what he did . . . "

But Hayes wasn't going to look.

He did not dare take his eyes away from Holm. Not for an instant. He was not looking at his eyes, but lower where the collar of his parka nestled against his chin. To look in those eyes was to see graveyards and misting hollows choked with bones. To look in those eyes was to feel the sweet poison of death pulling you down to sterile plains.

Holm stepped forward, paused, looked at Hayes with an arcane sort of amus.e.m.e.nt. The way you might look at a dog that had learned to sit up and beg or one of those cute monkeys that could turn the crank of an organ grinder. It was something like that. No fear or concern about Hayes and the rifle in his hands, but just a profound and boundless amus.e.m.e.nt at it all.

"Well somebody do something," another voice said. "Before I lose my f.u.c.king mind here."

The night was bunched around them, huge and black and freezing. The wind was still blowing and that powder of snow was still falling, blowing over those gathered there, dancing in the beams of the lights they held and the dimming beams of the Spryte. Holm was breathing very fast, the sound of it like somebody drawing air through crackling, dry hay. Each time he exhaled a cloud of frost gathered and dissipated.

Hayes could hear that wind moaning around the buildings, the sound of boots rocking uneasily on the hardpack snow.

Holm took another bold step forward, as if daring Hayes to put him down. He moved quickly with an almost fluidic motion, a vitality an old man had no right to possess. Hayes figured that, even though there was six feet separating them, Holm would have been on him before he even pulled the trigger. He was staring at Hayes and his eyes were wet and glistening, horribly dilated so that the iris and sclera of both eyes were swallowed by those fixed and expansive pupils. They were gla.s.sy and reflective.

Holm opened his mouth in something like a snarl, showing those even white teeth that were probably dentures. A sibilant hissing came from his throat, gaining volume and scratching up into a voice: "Gates? Gates is dead... we're all dead... "

Hayes almost shot him right then.

That voice was just too much. It was utterly inhuman, like the echo of subterranean water trying to form words. Holm smiled at what he had said and made a lunge at Hayes. He wasn't as quick as he seemed at first and Hayes sidestepped him and brought the rifle b.u.t.t down on his temple. Holm went to his knees immediately, but did not make a sound. Unless the howling wind was his voice, echoing off into the night, sweeping across that lonesome and ancient polar plain.

"All right," Hayes said. "Somebody get some rope or chain or something. We'll tie him up and bring him inside."

"Just kill him, Jimmy," Stotts said. "Do it, Jimmy . . . look at those eyes . . . nothing sane has eyes like that."

Rutkowski and Biggs came over, as did Sodermark and one of the scientists, a seismologist named Hinks, who spent most of his time out at remote tracking stations and was not privy to the majority of the madness at Kharkhov Station. Carefully then, Hayes handing off his rifle to Sharkey, they surrounded Holm.

"Get up," Rutkowski told him. "While you still f.u.c.king can."

Holm looked up at them with that same almost insipid blankness. His black eyes like those of a gra.s.shopper considering a stalk of gra.s.s. That's how they looked . . . unintelligent, completely vacant. At least at that moment. But Hayes knew those eyes and what they could do. One minute they were dead and empty, the next overflowing with all the knowledge of the cosmos.

Rutkowski and Hinks were looking p.i.s.sed-off.

Looked like what they had here was just some offensive drunk and they were going to pitch him out into the alley, maybe bang his head off a dumpster for good measure. They both reached down and yanked Holm to his feet. Hayes took hold of him, too, as did Biggs. They got him standing and then he started moving, fighting and writhing and twitching almost like he had no bones, was made of liquid rubber. He fought and struck out. He knocked Hinks aside and sent Rutkowski scrambling. Hayes darted in and gave him a quick shot to the jaw that snapped his head back and then something happened.

Hayes felt it coming . . . an energy, a building momentum like static electricity generating before lightning strikes. And then that thumping vibration started up, seeming to come from the ice below them. They could all feel it coming up through their boots and traveling along their bones in waves. It was the same sound Rutkowski had heard the night St. Ours died and the same sound Hayes, Cutchen, and Sharkey had heard at Vradaz . . . a rhythmic pulsating that rose up around them, getting louder and louder. Like the humming of some great machine. Then there was that crackling, electric sound that made the hairs stand up on the back of their necks. Thumpings and echoing knocks, a high and weird whistling sound.

Then Biggs and Stotts were suddenly knocked flat.

The window in the door of the Spryte's cab shattered as did the windshield. Hayes felt a rolling wave of heat pa.s.s right before him - so warm in fact that it melted the ice from his beard - and hit Rutkowski and Hinks, lifting them up and throwing them back five or six feet onto their a.s.ses.

Somebody screamed.

Somebody shouted.

And Holm stood there, his face almost luminous. The vibrating and crackling sounds grew louder and then there was a piercing, shrieking wail that made everyone cover their ears and grit their teeth. It broke up around them into a shrill piping. An almost musical piping like Hayes had heard the night in Hut #6 when the things had almost gotten his mind. It rose up all around them, strident and keening and Hayes saw forms out in the darkness . . . oblong shadows coming at them.

And then there was an explosion.

An echoing report and Sharkey was standing there with the .22 in her hands. All the noise suddenly stopped and there were no shadows mulling around them. There was nothing. Just those shocked faces and Holm standing there with a neat hole in his forehead about the size of a dime. Blood had spattered over his face from the impact and it looked like black ink in the semi-darkness. He tottered and fell over, striking his head on the treads of the Spryte.

People started getting out of there right away.

Hayes stood there, watching them leave. They all knew it was over with and they were rushing away.

"No, don't worry," Hayes called after them. "I'll drive the Spryte off this stiff . . . don't worry your heads none about it. Let me take care of it."

Then it was just him and Cutchen and Sharkey standing there, not saying a thing. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept drifting and the polar night wrapped around them like it would never let them go.

Finally, Sharkey dropped the rifle. "I . . . I guess I just killed a man," she said, seeming confused as to how she should feel about this.

But Cutchen just shook his head. "I don't know what it was you killed, Elaine. But it sure as h.e.l.l was not a man."

36.

Two hours later, they were all in the community room and La-Hune was holding court. For once, he didn't have to tell everyone to pipe down so he could be heard. n.o.body was talking. They were all looking at the floor, their hands, the tables before them. Anything but at each other and LaHune standing up there in front.

"For some time now," LaHune said, looking oddly uncomfortable up there, "Mr. Hayes has been warning me and most of you, I would imagine, that we are in danger here. That those . . . relics Dr. Gates and his team brought in are somehow hazardous to us. Mr. Hayes believes . . . as some of you do, no doubt . . . that those creatures are not entirely dead. That there is activity in them. A sort of psychic energy, if you will, that they emanate. Up until tonight, I was not ready to accept any of that. But now, after what happened out in the compound, I'm not so sure."

Hayes sat there with his arms folded, looking indignant. He wasn't sure what LaHune was up to, but he didn't care for it. The idea of having the man on his side suddenly was even worse than having him against him. He wasn't sure why, but it irked him.

"Now, Mr. Hayes has taken care of those creatures out in the hut . . . put them back to sleep so to speak . . . "

Somebody t.i.ttered at that.

" . . . but that's hardly the end of the problem. It's been five days now since we've heard from Dr. Gates' party. I don't care for it and neither do any of you. In fact, the only thing we've learned about them came in the form of that particularly ugly incident this evening."

Ugly? Hayes liked that. No, ugly didn't cut it. That business was a nightmare, a G.o.dd.a.m.n tragedy.

LaHune went on: "The bottom line is, people, we are very much alone out here. We can't look for help from the outside world until spring and spring is a long way off. We have to send a party up to Gates' camp to look for survivors. They may already be dead or worse. I don't know. But somebody has to go up there, so I'm - "

"I'll go," Hayes said. "I think Dr. Sharkey and Cutchen will come with me. Anyone else that wants to tag along, well, I'd welcome your help."

Hayes stood up and looked around.

n.o.body would meet his eyes.

It seemed that for a moment maybe Rutkowski and Hinks were considering it, but they lowered their heads one after the other.

"Didn't expect any of you would," Hayes said.

LaHune cleared his throat. "Now, I can't order you three to go up there."

"You don't have to," Sharkey said.