“Sergeant?” he spoke into it. “Sergeant Gonzalez?”

“Go ahead, Fluke.”

“The door-it looks like somebody’s kicked it open. The lock’s broken.”

“Are you sure, Private?”

“Yes, sir. Not only that-it appears to have been kicked open from the inside.”

“We’re on our way.”

“Roger, out.”

Fluke stepped closer now, moving slowly, the beam of his light licking over the linoleum flooring, up the damaged door, into the thin black wedge of the room beyond.

“Can we go now?” Davis asked. “Please?”

“Just a minute.” The chill he’d noticed-it came from here. He could feel it seeping out the crack, as if the room itself was exhaling.

He kicked the door gently open. It moved awkwardly, groaning on sprung hinges. He felt along the inside wall, found the light switch, snapped it on.

The overhead fluorescent flickered into life, lending a feeble illumination to the space beyond. It was a large, spartan-looking metal cube, containing ganged power conduits bolted to metal housings leading in from the powerhouse outside, with step-down transformers to attenuate the voltage entering the base. The room thrummed with current; Fluke could feel it almost tingle his skin. He looked around, frowning. There it was: the source of the chill air.

“What the hell?” he muttered.

On the far wall was an access panel. It was about four feet square and set just above the floor; it was used to reach the repair and maintenance crawl space for the length of conduit between the room itself and the base’s external shell. Normally, this was kept securely closed. But now it yawned open, the panel sagging loosely on twisted pins. Arctic air from outside was pouring in.

“My ears,” Davis said. “They hurt.”

Fluke walked quickly across the room and knelt before the damaged panel. Grasping its edge, he tried to push it closed, but it was folded back on itself and refused to budge. He tried again, heaving with all his strength. No luck. He stopped to warm his fingers and catch his breath. As he did so, his gaze fell on the crawl space that lay beyond the frame of the access panel.

It was a dark hole perhaps ten feet deep. At the far end, the exterior panel had also been torn away and Fluke could see outside: the outline of an equipment shed, ribbons of snow swirling like dust devils in the banshee wind. Staring, he realized that his ears hurt, too. But it wasn’t a pain he’d felt before-it was a strange, deep ringing, almost felt more than heard, accompanied by an unpleasant sensation of pressure, as if his inner ears were swelling within his skull…

And then-as he crouched, staring-the swirls of snow at the far end of the maintenance crawl space were abruptly blotted out.

He peered down the tunnel in confusion, wondering if the exterior panel had just been shut from the outside. But then the darkness shifted-and he realized what had suddenly blocked his view was a large shape, moving stealthily toward him down the crawl space.

He fell backward onto the floor with a neigh of terror. He pulled his sidearm from his holster but his fingers were suddenly fat and stupid and it clattered to the floor. He tried to marshal his wits, to rise to his feet and run, but he was paralyzed with shock and disbelief. The thing was closer now, filling the wide crawl space with its bulk, and as he stared Fluke felt the pain in his head swell until it was almost unbearable. There was a sudden flood of warmth around his thighs as his bladder let go.

And then it was in the room. Davis screamed-a sharp, piercing sound-and the thing turned toward her. Fluke just stared. There was absolutely nothing in his understanding or experience, no nightmare, no fever dream, no creation either of the Almighty or the Prince of Darkness that could account for what was now with them in the room.

Davis screamed again, wildly, a dreadful, larynx-shredding scream, and then instantly the thing was on her. The scream escalated in pitch and volume, then changed to a desperate, bubbling gargle. Fluke felt himself lashed with a warm, viscous spray. Quite abruptly, he realized he could move. He staggered to his feet and wheeled desperately toward the door, weapon forgotten. Distantly, as if from very far away, he thought he heard shouts; a cry of warning. But then it was on him and suddenly there was nothing at all left in his universe except pain.

34

The front windows of the Sno-Cat 1643RE were vast-they took up the entire face of the cab-and from his vantage point in the driver’s seat Marshall had a panoramic view of the storm. Although the heavy glass and metal shielded him from the worst of the fury, he was all too conscious of how the big vehicle swayed under the fierce gusts and of the ice pellets that hammered incessantly against the roof and sides. The wind cried and moaned constantly, as if frustrated in its desire to peel back the steel and get at him.

Marshall took his eyes off the swirling whitescape long enough to glance at his watch. He had been driving now for almost forty minutes. Once he’d cleared the immediate area of the camp and its labyrinth of lava fissures, he had made good time. The permafrost was quite level, and he’d managed a steady thirty miles an hour: he didn’t know the maximum safe operating speed and was playing it safe. He’d lied to Logan about his expertise-he’d never driven a Sno-Cat in his life-but the vehicle had proven mercifully easy to handle, its controls similar to a truck or tractor, with extra switches for the plow, winch, rotating beacon, and transmission-pan heater. The hardest thing to adjust to had been the four independently sprung steel tracks, hydraulically steered by the front and rear axles, which-combined with the cab’s alarming amount of glass-gave him a lurching, almost vertiginous sense of being perched far too high off the ground.

The Cat’s half-dozen halogen headlights lanced ahead, barely penetrating the murk. Marshall peered along their beams into the raging storm, then glanced over at the GPS mounted onto the control panel. He knew the Tunit camp was situated near a frozen lake; Gonzalez had mentioned as much. There was only one such lake in the GPS unit’s database within a thirty-mile radius to the north, but it was sizable. That made fuel his biggest concern. The Cat had half a tank. That meant twenty-five gallons to reach the lake, find the village, and get back to the base. And Marshall had no idea how much fuel the enormous machine used.

He drove on, wipers flailing at the whirlwind of snow and the needles of ice peppering the window. He shook his head blearily, trying to clear it, wishing he’d brought a thermos of coffee. Was it really only thirty-six hours since he’d discovered the creature was missing?

Again, Marshall found himself wondering why exactly was he making a trip that could well prove a wild-goose chase at best-and ruinous at worst. If he broke down out here in the Zone, lost power, he’d never be found in time.

The Tunits have the answer. Some scientist had written those words, fifty years ago. The man had felt them important enough to commit to paper, to encrypt, to conceal within his quarters. And now, today, someone had been savagely killed. And another assaulted in the most bizarre way. Almost forty people were in grave danger. If there was even the merest chance the Tunits knew something-an old myth, some oral tradition, anecdotal evidence, anything that could shed a little light on what was afflicting the base-it was worth the risk.

And there was another, more personal reason. No matter where he’d gone or what he’d done over the past seven days, it seemed to Marshall he’d never quite been alone. There was a presence, always there, always watching: two yellow eyes, big as fists, with pupils like bottomless black pools. Since he’d first seen them looking back at him through the ice, those eyes had haunted him. The paleoecologist in him wanted-needed-to understand this creature better. Even if Faraday was right, even if it was somehow still alive and behind the recent atrocities, Marshall felt a yearning to decipher its mysteries. And he would travel a lot farther than thirty miles in a blinding snowstorm to accomplish that.