Tim Curran
HIVE
This is for Elaine Lamkin
PART ONE
OUT OF THE ICE
“…there was one part of the ancient land… which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil.”
1
Antarctica was a graveyard, of course.
A subzero cemetery of high frozen monoliths and leaning tombstones of exposed, ancient rock. A burial ground of sunless wastes and biting cold, snow plains and ragged mountains. Gale-force blizzards sucked the warmth from a man and tucked him down deep in frozen tombs and covered his tracks with shrieking windstorms of ice crystals that blew just as fine and white as crematory ash. Like the snow and the cold and the enveloping darkness of winter, the winds were a constant. Night after night, they screamed and wailed with the voices of lost souls. A communal death-rattle of all those interred in mass graves of coveting blue ice and sculpted into leering, frosted death angels.
Antarctica was dead and had been for millions of years.
A wasteland, some said, where God had buried those things he no longer wished to look upon. Nightmares and abominations of flesh and spirit. And if that were true, then whatever was entombed beneath the permafrost, locked-down cold and sightless in that eternal deep-freeze, was never meant to be exhumed.
2
Nothing stays buried forever at the Pole.
It was one of those sayings they tossed around down there. Sometimes you weren’t sure what it meant and other times you weren’t sure you wanted to. But it was true, nonetheless: nothing stays buried forever at the South Pole. The glaciers are in constant motion, grinding and tearing at the primordial bedrock far below, and what they don’t dig up, sooner or later the blizzard winds will blow clean like bones in the desert. So if Antarctica was a graveyard then, it was one in a process of perpetual resurrection, vomiting out those awful bits of its past it could no longer hold down in its belly.
This is how Hayes saw it on his darker days at Kharkhov Station when his poetic turn of mind began devouring itself one bite at a time. But he knew it to be true. He just tried not to think about it, was all.
“I can see ’em now,” Lind said, his face pressed up to the frosted glass of Targa House, the place where all the personnel of the station ate, slept, and lived. “It’s Gates, all right, coming in with the SnoCat. Must be bringing those mummies in from the high ridges.”
Hayes set down his cup of coffee, scratched his beard, and went up to the window. What he saw out there was winter at the South Geomagnetic Pole… sheets of snow whipping and swirling and engulfing. The steeple of the drilling tower, the dome of the meteorology station, the power Quonset, half dozen other structures limned by electric lights and shrouded beneath blankets of white.
Kharkhov Station sat near-center of East Antarctica on the Polar Plateau, some 3500 meters above sea level in what had once been the Soviet sector of the continent. A desolate, godless place that was completely cut off from the world from March until October when spring finally returned. During the long, dark winter, only a small crew of contractors and technicians remained, the others got out before the planes stopped coming and winter set its teeth into that ancient continent.
A burial ground.
That’s what it was.
The wind howled and the huts shook and day by day that immense bleak nothingness chewed a hole through your soul and blew through your numbed mind like an October gust through a deserted house. It was the third week of winter and you knew the sun would not rise and break that womb of blackness for another three months. Three long, bitter months that would eat at your belly and your brain, freezing something up inside you that wouldn’t thaw until you saw civilization again in the spring. And until then, you waited and you listened and you were never really sure what for.
A graveyard indeed, Hayes thought.
The visibility returned for a few fleeting moments and he could see the lights of the SnoCat bobbing through the dimness. Yeah, it was Gates, all right. Gates and his cargo of goodies that had the entire station on edge. He had radioed in three days before from the tent camp about what he had found up there, what he was cutting from the ice.
And now just about everyone was beside themselves with excitement, just waiting for Gates’ return like he was Jesus or Santa Claus.
But it was infectious.
Hayes had been seeing it for days now, that look of raw exhilaration and wonder on those usually dour, bored faces. The faces of children who were on the verge of some great discovery… wonder, awe, and something just beneath it akin to superstitious terror. Because it didn’t take too much to get the imagination rolling in that awful place and particularly when Gates promised he’d be rolling in with mummies from a pre-human civilization.
Jesus, the very idea was overwhelming.
“He’s bringing the ’Cat over to Six,” Lind said, fists clenched at his sides, something in his throat bobbing up and down. “Shit, Hayes, we’re gonna be in the history books over this one. I was talking to Cutchen and Cutchen was saying that, come spring when they pull our asses out of here, we’re all going to be famous, you know? Famous for discovering those mummies… he said this discovery will shake the world to its knees.”
Hayes could just imagine Cutchen saying something like that. Cutchen’s only pastimes seemed to be sarcasm and toying with lesser minds.
“Cutchen’s full of shit,” Hayes said.
“I thought you two were friends?”
“We are. That’s why I know he’s full of shit.”
“Sure, but he’s right about us being famous.”
“Christ, Lind… listen to yourself. Gates is going to be famous. He’s the man who found all that stuff up there. And maybe a couple of the other eggheads like Holm and Bryer who helped him… but you? Or me? Hell no, we’re just contractors, were support personnel.”
But Lind just shook his head. “No, what they found up there… we’re part of it.”
“Jesus Christ, Lind, you’re a plumber. When the Discovery Channel or National Geographic start making their documentaries, they’re not going to want to know how you bravely handled the Station’s shit or heat-taped two-hundred feet of piss-pipe. They’ll be talking to the scientists, the techs, even that NSF hard-on LaHune. But not us. They’ll tell you to keep the water running and me to run a couple extra two-twenty lines for all their equipment.”
Of course, it was all lost on Lind.
He was so excited by it all he could barely contain himself. He was like a little kid waiting for trick-or-treating to start, tense and shaking, having a hell of a time just keeping his feet on the floor and not jumping for joy. And it was pretty funny to see, Hayes had to admit that. You took a guy like Lind — barely 5’5, just as round as a medicine ball and not much lighter, bad teeth, scraggly beard — and watched him hopping around like he was waiting for the candy store to open, it was absolutely priceless.
Damn, where was the camcorder when you needed it?
If Gates’ mummies had been female, they would’ve wanted to keep their legs crossed in Lind’s presence because he was that excited and that in love. Course, those mummies weren’t male or female from what Gates said over the set. In fact, he was having a hell of a time deciding whether they were animal or vegetable.
Lind said, “They’re unloading the sled now… must be bringing those mummies into the hut.” He shook his head. “And here I thought this winter was going to be a waste of time. How old he say those mummies were?”