“You’re completely mad, Hayes.”
“Oh, but let me share one more thing with you. We gave old Nikolai a jingle at Vostok and you know what? He denies ever telling us any of that business. His puppet masters have yanked his strings and now he’s dancing to their tune same way you’re dancing to yours.” Hayes stood up. “But that’s okay, LaHune, I’m just shit-tired of arguing with you. What happened to the Russians will happen to us. Those minds will eat us alive. But you just sit there on your shiny white ass and do nothing. That’s fine. Your mind already belongs to some ass-fucking suits back in Washington. But as for me? I’m going to fight this tooth and nail and if you want to get in my way, I’ll fucking step on you. And that, sonny, is a promise.”
With that, Hayes offered him a courtly bow and left LaHune’s office.
34
The next two days passed with a measured, languid slowness . . . drawn out, elastic, and mordantly unreal. A claustrophobic, evil shadow had fallen over the station, breeding a tension and a fear that was barely concealed like a moldering skull seen through a funeral veil. It was an almost palpable thing, a suffocating sense of malevolence and you could feel it wherever you went . . . bunching in the shadows, scratching at the frosted windows, oozing from the ice like contaminated bile. You could tell yourself it was imagination and nerves and isolation, but you never believed it, because it was everywhere, hanging over the camp in a frightful pall, patient and waiting and acutely sentient. It was behind you and to either side, giggling and chattering its teeth and reaching out for your throat with cold, white fingers. And like your soul, you could not put a finger on it, but it was there, alive and breathing and namelessly destructive. It was in your blood and bones like a disease germ and just beneath your thoughts like a dire memory. And whatever it was, it was something born to darkness like worms in a grave.
The personnel at Kharkhov did not speak of it.
Like a cluster of little old ladies at a church luncheon who refused to discuss disquieting things like cancer or the boy next door who came back from the war in a body bag, it was a taboo subject, one their minds burdened under, but one that never got past their lips.
Such things did not make for polite company.
They stirred up bad odors and opened dank cellars that were best left bolted and chained. So the scientists carried on with their research and experiments. The contract personnel kept things humming. People gathered in the community room for lunch and dinner and talked sports and current events and went out of their way not to look one another in the eye because it was better that way. And the subject of Gates and the ruined city, the mummies and those down in Lake Vordog, were never brought up.
A psychologist would have called it avoidance and he or she would have been right. When you did not openly discuss things, they seemed all the less real . . . even if said things did make your skin crawl. But you ingested them, tucked them away into the scarred and secret landscape of your subconscious where you ultimately knew they would boil and fester and one day fill you with a seething poison. Like being touched in a private place by a child molester, you purged it and pretended such things could not have happened.
But later? Well, yes, later it would show its teeth, but that was later.
And this is how it was at Kharkhov Station.
This was how the population kept their sanity . . . by sheer deception and willpower born of self-preservation and desperation. But it was there, of course, that gnawing and pervasive sense of violation. The feeling that maybe your mind and your thoughts were not entirely your own and maybe never had been. But such ideas were venomous and infective, so the small colony refused them and went about being industrious and ignorant even while that ancient web was spun around them thickly. What they were feeling and how they were dealing with those feelings was exactly how they were supposed to deal with them. Exactly how the architects of their minds had intended it so very long ago.
Hayes, of course, was not among them.
He freely admitted the danger to any and all who would listen. But therein lie the twist: they refused to listen. They nodded when he spoke to them, but not a word of what he said got past their ears. He had put a stop to it by bulldozing down the wall of Hut #6. If there ever was a danger — and they were not certain of this — then it was over now. Back to reality. But Hayes didn’t believe them because he was feeling what they were feeling and was seeing that barely-disguised terror in their eyes.
“You see that’s what kills me,” he said to Sharkey on the evening of that second day while they lay in the warm darkness of her bed. “That’s what really fucking tears me a new asshole, Doc. These people know they’re screwed, but they won’t admit to it now. Not a one of them.”
“It’s herd instinct, Jimmy. That’s all it is. They cope by losing themselves in the mundane politics of day to day living. They submerge themselves into the body of the herd and pretend that there is no tiger hiding in the shadows,” Sharkey told him. “This is how they stay alive, how they stay sane. It’s human nature. If something is so immense and terrible that it threatens to peel your mind bare, you exorcise it and pretend everything is hunky-dory.”
“I suppose,” he said.
“No, really. How do you think people survived those concentration camps? Do you think they dwelled on their imminent deaths or what that smoke coming out of the chimneys was from? The fact that they could be going to the showers next? Of course not. If they had, not a single sane mind would have come out of that horror. But a surprising amount did.”
“There’s a parallel there, Doc, and a good one, but I’m just too pissed-off at them to see it. I hate complacency. I hate people sitting around and pretending the world isn’t falling apart around them. That’s what’s wrong with us Americans as a whole . . . we’ve gotten too goddamn selfish and too goddamn good at putting our blinders on. Millions are being slaughtered in Rwanda? We just accidentally bombed a schoolhouse in Iraq . . . oh, that’s just terrible, isn’t it? Well, not my affair. Praise the Lord and pass the gravy, mom.”
Sharkey said, “I never realized you were a political activist at heart.”
He relaxed a bit, chuckled. “I do get on my soapbox now and again.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the darkness. “My old man was a dire-hard conservative republican. Anything the government told him, he believed. He thought they were incapable of lying. The sort of guy politicians thrive on. Salt of the earth, but mindless. I had a teacher in high school . . . a real 1960s radical who was big on confrontation with those in power . . . I think a lot of him rubbed off on me. Because he didn’t just sit there and take it. He demanded that our government be held responsible for anything it fucked up or lied about. I agreed then and I agree now. My old man and me had some real rows over our conflicting viewpoints. But to this day, I feel exactly the same. I do not trust people with money and power and I despise the little guy who looks the other way while these fat cats fuck up the world as they always have.”
“And you’re seeing a microcosm of that here, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, definitely. I have to ask myself if those people deserve saving . . . are they worth it?”
“And?”
“And I’m not honestly sure. Complacency deserves what its gets.”
Sharkey didn’t say anything for a time.
Neither of them did.
Hayes wasn’t sure what she was thinking. Maybe it was something good and maybe it was something bad. Regardless, she just didn’t say. The silence between them was heavy, but not uncomfortable. It seemed perfectly fine, perfectly acceptable, and that’s how Hayes knew this wasn’t what you might call a winter-camp fling. It was something more. Something with weight and volume and substance and he was almost glad that things were too crazy, too spooky for him to sit and think about the absolute truth of their relationship. Because, he figured, it might just have scared the shit out of him and sent him running into a hole like a rabbit with a hawk descending.