What Hayes was trying to figure out is why they took total possession of Lind like they had. He’d been in the hut that day with Lind and those mummies had freaked him out, made him feel bad inside, but they hadn’t taken over his mind. Was it that Lind was just a sensitive of some sort? A natural receiver, a medium for lack of a better word?
And what about Meiner and St. Ours?
Those things had leeched their minds dry and destroyed their brains. And Hayes himself had been psychically attacked twice by the Old Ones . . . once in the hut alone and last night out on the tractor . . . why hadn’t they killed him, too? Why did he have the strength to fight? And Sharkey? She had had the dreams, too, as they all had. What in the hell were those things saving them for? What was the ultimate plan here?
“You feel up to that drive I was talking about?” he asked her.
“Vradaz?”
He nodded. “I don’t think we have much time left, Elaine. If we can learn something up there, maybe we might make it out of this yet.”
“Okay,” she said, but didn’t sound too hopeful. “Jimmy? Lind said ‘The Color Out of Space’. I’ve heard him say it before while he was heavily sedated. I thought it meant nothing . . . but I’m not so sure now. What is this Color Out of Space?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Old Ones themselves,” he speculated. “And maybe it’s something a lot worse.”
28
“Tell me again why I’m doing this,” Cutchen said.
“For the good of humanity,” Hayes told him. “What more reason do you need?”
Maybe Cutchen needed some reassurance here, some encouragement, but Hayes didn’t really have a lot to offer up in that department. Why were they going up to Vradaz Outpost, the abandoned Russian camp? Even he wasn’t sure, not really. But something bad, something truly terrible had happened there and he felt it was important that they find out what. Maybe they’d find nothing but a snowed-in empty camp, but Hayes was thinking there had to be evidence of what came down. If even some of what Nikolai Kolich said was true, then the outpost had undergone pretty much the same sort of shit that Kharkhov Station was currently undergoing.
Hayes could remember very well what Kolich had said.
Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that.
And didn’t that just sound familiar?
“Storm’s picking up pretty good out there,” Sharkey said.
Hayes worked the stick of the SnoCat, pressing in the clutch, and bringing it up to high gear as they came over a rise and moved across a barren ice plain. He figured they’d make Vradaz in thirty or forty minutes if the storm didn’t swallow them alive. They were plunging through Condition Two weather, sheets of wind-driven snow blasting the SnoCat and making it tremble. It was dark out, of course, and the only lights came from the ‘Cat itself. All you could see in the high beams was the white, uneven tundra broken occasionally by knobs of black rock and the swirling, blowing snow.
“You’re not going to get us lost are you?” Cutchen said.
“No, I don’t think so. I have a roll of kite twine on the back of the ‘Cat and I tied the other end to Targa House.” He glanced out his window at the huge rectangular mirror out there. “Shit . . . must have run out of string.”
“Ha, ha, you so funny,” Cutchen said.
“Relax. GPS knows the way and I took a bearing on Vradaz before we left. If we get lost, the beacon from Kharkhov will bring us back home.”
“If worse comes to worse,” Sharkey said, “we can gather up some wood and start a signal fire.”
“Boy, you guys are good. I’ll book you in Vegas when we get back . . . unless we don’t get back.” Cutchen thought about that a moment. “You think these Old Ones have much of a sense of humor, Hayes?”
“Yeah, I think they do. Look-it all the gags they’ve pulled on us. They’re some really silly bastards, you get to know ‘em.”
The SnoCat began to jump and lurch as it passed over a field of sastrugi, frozen ridges of snow and ice that looked like waves heading ashore at a beach. Except these never moved and they were tough as granite. But the SnoCat handled them just fine, jarring and bouncing, but handling it better on its twin sets of caterpillar tracks than an ordinary wheeled vehicle would have.
Hayes swung the ‘Cat around a glacial valley, the storm getting worse, beginning to howl and screech, filling its lungs full of frost and white death and letting it back out in a wild, whipping tempest. The cab of the ‘Cat was warm even without their ECW’s on, but outside? They wouldn’t have lasted long. Hayes had followed the ice road that Gates and his people had flagged for some thirty miles before the GPS told him it was time to trail blaze. It was dangerous work on an Antarctic night, but he had plotted a course on the contour map so he didn’t drive them into a fissure or crevice. It was lumpy and bumpy rolling over serrated ice ridges and steering around weathered black outcroppings of stone, but they were going to make it.
Hayes had already decided that.
He just wasn’t giving much thought to whether or not they’d make it back again.
One heartbreak at a time.
The wastelands to either side were dead white with canopies of ice that jutted like mountain peaks. You caught them out of the glare of the lights and out of the corner of your eye, they looked like monuments and gravestones sometimes. The landscape became very hilly as they approached the Dominion Range, full of sudden gullies and ice-pilings, horns of wind-blasted rock rising up like church spires. Rough, dangerous country. The Dominion Range was located along the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, where the massive Beardmore and Mill Glaciers came together. Had it been daylight, Hayes knew, they would have been able to see the rugged cones of the Transantarctic Mountains rising before them.
The SnoCat plodded along, plowing through waist-high drift and over ridges of ice. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept pushing from the high elevations, threatening to bury them at times.
“Hey! You see that!” Cutchen said, almost choking on his words.
Sharkey tensed next to him and Hayes tried to swallow. “What? What did you see?”
“I . . . well, I saw a shape . . . I thought I saw a shape,” Cutchen said. “Off to the right. It passed right by us . . . then I lost it in the snow.”
“Probably some rocks,” Sharkey pointed out.
“No, it was moving . . . I think it was moving away from us.” Cutchen let that hang a moment, then added, “I thought I saw eyes reflected.”
“Eyes?” Hayes said. “How many?”
Sharkey crossed her arms almost defiantly. “Stop it. Both of you.”
“Just a shape,” Cutchen said. “That’s all.”
Hayes was going to tell him he was crazy, that there was nothing moving out there but them, but the spit had dried up in his mouth. It felt like something was spinning a web at the base of his spine, a chill stealthily creeping up his back.
“It was probably nothing,” Cutchen said like he was trying to convince himself of the fact.
Ten minutes passed while Hayes hoped they’d see nothing else. He checked the GPS. “Okay, we should be right on top of Vradaz . . . gotta be right in this area somewhere.”
But it was dead winter in Antarctica, the perpetual night billowing and consuming like black satin. Hayes downshifted the ‘Cat and cranked up the headlights, put the spots on. Shafts of light cut across the glacial plane, making it no more than twenty or thirty feet before they reflected back the blizzard. It looked and sounded like a sandstorm out there.