Part 18 (1/2)

She stood up with Cutchen and Hayes. The three of them scanned those dour, frightened faces in the room.

”I guess that's it then,” Hayes said. ”We leave in an hour. Any of you happen to grow a pair of b.a.l.l.s by then, meet us out at the SnoCat.”

The three of them left and the gathering broke up. Broke up quietly. n.o.body had a thing to say. They plodded back to the dark corners of their lives and looked for a convenient pile of sand to stick their heads into.

37.

Two or three times on the way up to the tent camp, Hayes found himself wondering what in the h.e.l.l LaHune was up to. His sudden about-face was worrisome. Troubling. There was no sense of satisfaction attached to it; none whatsoever. No, thank G.o.d you're with us now, Mister LaHune, things is going to be better now, yessum. For LaHune, as far as Hayes was concerned, was a man with an agenda and Hayes had to wonder just how this abrupt turn of face might possibly serve the administrator and his masters.

There had to be something there.

And maybe had he been more awake, not so worn and squeezed dry, he might have seen it. But as things stood, he was having trouble thinking about little else but the storm and the darkness and the incredible danger they were all in.

They had not been able to honestly identify who the body that Holm ran over belonged to. There was no ID on the corpse and its physical state was appalling. Like 150 pounds of b.l.o.o.d.y meat poured into a parka and thermal wind pants. But they had answered one little question. They'd been wondering what the scenario of all that was. They found it hard to believe their John Doe had made it all the way from Gates' encampment to Kharkhov on foot and in a Condition One blizzard yet. But about two miles from the station they'd found a Ski-Doo snowmobile abandoned on the ice road. Their John Doe had escaped on the sled and Holm had come after him on the Spryte.

And what would have happened, Hayes wondered, if Holm had gotten him out on the road? What then?

He kept picturing Holm returning and doing the most awful things once they'd invited him amongst them. Because, of course, they would have. Like a disease germ he would have circulated freely and then - ”What are we going to do,” Cutchen said then, ”if we find no one at the camp? Or worse, what if they're all dead or . . . possessed like Holm? What then?”

”We'll do whatever feels right,” Sharkey said.

”Regardless of what that might be,” Hayes added.

And that was it in a nutsh.e.l.l, wasn't it? Regardless of what that might be. Because honestly he had no idea what they were going into, only that the idea of it gave him about the same sense of apprehension as sticking his hands into a nest of rattlesnakes sidled up in a desert crevice. The idea of getting bit wasn't what bothered him, it was the idea of the venom itself. And the sort of venom he might get stuck with in those blasphemous ruins was the sort that could erase who and what he was and birth something invidious and primal implanted in his genes a hundred-thousand millennia before.

You don't know that, you really don't.

Yet, he did.

Maybe whatever it was had hid itself in the primal depths of the human psyche, but it was there, all right. Waiting. Biding its time. A ghost, a memory, a revenant hiding in the dank and dripping crypt of the human condition like a pestilence waiting to overtake and infect. A cursed tomb waiting to be violated, waiting to loose some eldritch horror upon the world. An in-bred plague that festered in the wormy charnel depths of the subconscious, waiting to be woken, activated by the discordant piping of alien minds.

Dear Christ, there could be nothing as horrible as this.

Nothing.

He did not and could not know the ultimate aim of awakening the sleeping dragon the Old Ones had planted in the minds of men . . . but it would be colossal, it would be immense, it would be the end of history as they knew it and the beginning of something else entirely. The continuation of that primordial seeding, the vast outer extremity of that tree, the ultimate objective.

The final fruit.

It made Hayes weak just to think of it, whatever it might be.

So he did not think about it. Not much, anyway.

He kept an eye on what the blazing lights of the SnoCat showed him. Which was just snow and whiteness, ragged ridges of black rock. The terrain was rough and hilly as they plied the foothills of the Dominion Range, moving up frozen slopes and down through rivers of drift, bouncing madly over crests of volcanic rock. Moving ever higher and higher along the ice road.

”Jesus,” Cutchen said as the SnoCat shook like a wet tabby, ”this is worse than I thought. We have no business out here . . . those winds are sweeping down from the mountains and picking up everything in their path, peeling this f.u.c.king continent right down to the bare rock.”

”We'll make it,” Hayes said. ”Unless the GPS goes to h.e.l.l.”

”You can't trust anything in a blow like this.”

The storm.

Hayes could see it out there in that haunted blackness, the headlights clotted with snow thick as a fall of flower petals, thick as dust blowing through the decayed corridors of a ghost town. It was more than just a Condition One storm with near-zero visibility and winds approaching a hundred miles an hour and snow falling by the bails, pushed into frozen crests and waves. No, this was bigger than that. This was every storm that had ever sc.r.a.ped across the Geomagnetic graveyard of that white, dead continent. Pacific typhoons and Atlantic hurricanes, Midwestern tornadoes and oceanic white squalls, tempests and blizzards and violent gales . . . all of them converging here, bled dry of their force and suction and devastation, reborn at the South Pole in a screaming glacial white-out that was sculpting the rugged landscape in canopies of frost, leeching warmth, driving blood to freon, and pus.h.i.+ng anything alive down into a polar tomb, a necropolis of black, cracking ice.

And, just maybe, it was more than that even.

The winds were cyclonic and whipping, making the SnoCat shake and feel like it was going to be vacuumed right up into that Arctic maelstrom or maybe be entombed beneath a mountain of drifting now. But these were physical things . . . palpable things you could feel and know, things with limitations despite their intensity.

But there were other things on the storm.

Things funneling and raging in that vortex that you could only feel in your soul, things like pain and insanity and fear. Maybe wraiths and ghosts and all those demented minds lost in storms and whirlwinds, creeping things from beyond death or nameless evils that had never been born . . . the gathered malignancies and earthbound toxins of that which was human and that which was not, writhing shadows blown from pole to pole since antiquity. Yes, all of that and more, the collected horrors of the race and the sheared veil of the grave, coming together at once, breathing in frost and exhaling blight, a deranged elemental sentience that howled and screeched and cackled in the shrill and broken voices of a million, a million-million lost and tormented souls . . .

Hayes was feeling them out there on that moaning storm-wind, enclosing the SnoCat in a frozen winding sheet. Death. Unseen, unspeakable, and unstoppable, filling its lungs with a savage whiteness and his head with a scratching black madness. He kept his eyes fixed on the winds.h.i.+eld, what the headlights could show him: snow and wind and night, everything all wrapped and twined together, coming at them and drowning them in darkness. He kept blinking his eyes, telling himself he wasn't seeing death out there. Wasn't seeing spinning cloven skulls and the blowing, rent shrouds of deathless cadavers flapping like high masts. Boiling storms of sightless eyes and ragged cornhusk figures flitting about. Couldn't hear them calling his name or sc.r.a.ping at the windows with white skeletal fingers.

It was imagination.

It was stress and terror and fatigue.

Too many things.

He could feel Sharkey next to him, her leg against his own and both separated by inches of fleece and wool and vinyl. He wondered if she saw what he was seeing and if she did . . . why didn't she scream? Why didn't they both scream? What held them together and why were those seams sewn so tightly, so strongly that not even this could tear them?

My G.o.d, but Hayes felt alone.

Maybe there were people in the cab with him and maybe he had only willed them to be there so he didn't go stark, screaming insane. That viscid, living blackness was pressing down upon the SnoCat, inhuming it beneath layers of frozen graveyard soil. And he could feel it happening. Could sense the weight and pressure, the eternal suffocation of that oblong box. His throat was scratchy. The air thin and dusty. His breath was being sucked away and his brain was dissolving into a firmament of rot. Nothing but worms and time and clotted soil. Oh, dear G.o.d, he could really feel it now, that claustrophobic sense of entombment, of burial, of moist darkness. He could really hear the sounds of rats pawing at his box and the scratching requiem of a tuneless violin, time filtering out into dusty eternity. And his own voice, frantic and terrified: Who did you think you were to flex your muscle against this land? To raise your fist in defiance against those who created you and everything else? The dark lords of organic profusion? What worming disobedience made you think for one s.h.i.+vering instant you could fight against those minds that already own you and have owned your kind since you first crawled from the protoplasmic slime?

Oh, dear Christ, what had he been thinking? What had he - ”Are you all right?” Sharkey suddenly asked him.

And the answer to that was something he did not know.

He'd been thinking about what the Old Ones had buried at the core of humanity. He'd been talking about the weather with Cutchen and then . . . and then he wasn't sure. Hallucinations. Fears. Insecurities. Everything coming at him at once. But none of it had been real. None of it.

He swallowed. ”Yeah, I'm fine.”

”Really fine?” she said.

”h.e.l.l no,” he said honestly.

”We're close,” Cutchen suddenly said. His voice was calm, yet full of the apprehension a doctor might use when he told you your belly was full of cancer. ”According to the GPS, we're practically there.”

But Hayes knew that without looking. He could feel it in his b.a.l.l.s, his guts, along the back of his spine. It was an ancient sensory network and in the worst of times, it was rarely wrong.

Hayes slowed the SnoCat, downs.h.i.+fted, said, ”Yippy-f.u.c.king-skippy.”