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 damn 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 fuck 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, shit,” 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 bastard 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 motherfucker!” 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-butt upside the head.
But nobody 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. Nobody 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? Goddammit, Holm, what the fuck 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 godless, dead-end of space. 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 glassy 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 cocked 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 fucking 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 amusement. 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 amusement at it all.
“Well somebody do something,” another voice said. “Before I lose my fucking 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.