The Thing (10 page)

Still the new dog remained frozen in place. The growling around it began to get louder. Several of the other dogs awoke and started to join in the pacing and grumbling. They instinctively began circling the stranger. Growls turned to angry, frustrated snarls. This newcomer was not reacting as a proper dog should. The lack of any kind of response was beginning to infuriate the other inhabitants of the kennel.

One barked at the husky, then a second. The circling became faster, the growling more frenzied. With one mind, three of the pacing animals stopped circling and turned to face the stranger. They jumped it simultaneously.

A fascinated and thoroughly absorbed Macready was running through the footage immediately preceding the violent explosion and subsequent shattering of the camera lens when the far-off clamor from the kennel reached him. Reluctantly he dragged himself away from the monitor, after shutting it down with the freeze-frame control, and stalked out of the pub.

It was silent in the deserted corridor as he made his way toward the sleeping rooms, silent save for the constant din the dogs were raising. He stopped outside one of the cubicles. The door was unlocked and he let himself in.

Clark lay beneath light blankets on his back, snoring. Macready hesitated, listening. If anything the dogs sounded more upset now than when he'd left the pub.

"Clark. Hey Clark."

There was no response. Macready moved close to the bed and reached down to nudge the handler's arm. Annoyed, Clark turned onto his side and pulled the blankets higher around his shoulders.

Macready reached over and pinched the handler's nostrils, cutting off his air. That made Clark sit up quickly. He blinked at the intruder, too groggy to be really mad.

"What's the idea, Mac? What's up?"

"Can't you hear?" Macready jabbed a finger toward the doorway. The cacophony from the kennel was clearly audible. "Dogtown's going nuts. I was up and it didn't bother me, but if you let those mutts wake everybody, the rest of the guys will make dog food out of you. Take care of it."

"Well, hell." Clark swung his legs out of the bed, bent over and rubbed his eyes as Macready disappeared into the corridor. Having discharged his responsibility, the pilot was anxious to get back to the videotape.

Clark fumbled for his pants. He liked his animals, but sometimes even the best sled teams could be a pain. High-strung creatures, the slightest argument was enough to set the whole bunch of them off. A fight over who was going to be lead dog, over a particular morsel of food, over anything except mating privileges (all the females were spayed) was enough to send them into mindless frenzy.

He didn't mind that and wasn't surprised when it happened. It was the nature of sled dogs. But did they have to prove it at five in the morning? He had to break it up of course, and not just because the noise might interrupt someone's beauty sleep. The dogs were valuable. Childs and Palmer and Macready took care of their machines. It was up to Clark to take care of his four-legged ones.

The heat in the corridor was automatically turned down during sleeping periods. His bed-warmed body protested at being dragged out so early. You could hear the wind whistling hungrily overhead.

Sleepy and annoyed, he turned a corridor corner that faced the kennel. The noise from within was louder now, much louder than he'd expected. He hurried toward the door. It sounded like tapes he'd heard of sled dogs attacking a bear.

Confused, he fumbled tiredly with the door, slipping the latch. "Now what's got into—"

Just as the door opened something hit him in the chest hard enough to send him staggering backward, his arms flailing for balance. He felt the same way he had one summer afternoon when Childs had accidentally blind-sided him during a game of touch iceball. The breath was knocked out of him as his diaphragm was compressed.

The two dogs who'd struck him got to their feet slowly and dragged themselves back into the kennel whimpering. From within there came a roaring straight from hell, a grotesque symphony of barks and snarls, growls and frantic whining.

And an unearthly screeching . . .

Macready was in the kitchen, having made a detour prior to returning to the pub and the waiting videotape. He had the big refrigerator open and was taking out a couple of beers to replenish the bar's stock when the far-off wailing reached him.

For an instant he stood there, frozen by the eerie sound, shocked into listening. Then he turned and sprinted out of the kitchen, forgetting to close the refrigerator door.

He used a beer can to smash the glass exterior of the fire alarm out in the hall, reached inside heedless of the broken glass still adhering to the box and pulled hard on the lever. Bells began to ring throughout the camp, startlingly loud in the silent, insulated corridors.

Macready and Norris followed the station manager and Clark toward the kennel. Macready carried a shotgun from the small armory while Garry hefted his Magnum. None of them were fully dressed. Clark carried a fire axe.

"I don't know what the hell's in there," he was telling them as they moved forward, "but it's weird and loud and pissed off, whatever it is. Sure as hell ain't no dog."

"What makes you so sure of that?" Garry asked him.

Clark's voice was solemn. "I've worked with animals most of my life, chief. No dog ever made a sound like that."

Far behind them, the hallway outside the sleeping cubicles was rapidly filling up with the rest of the outpost's personnel. Men stumbled half-naked into each other, into doors, hopping on one foot as they tried to shove the other hastily into pants' legs. Feet were jammed into shoes, heedless of possible damage to heels. The peaceful night had turned into a violent morning of confusion.

Childs was fighting with his belt buckle, which refused to tighten. He still wasn't fully awake. Bennings shouted at him from a nearby doorway.

"Mac wants
what?
" The camp's chief mechanic sought clarification.

"That's what he said. And he wants it
now
." Bennings whirled and vanished up the corridor before Childs could think to question him further.

Clark and his armed companions approached the kennel door. After the two dogs had come flying out at him the handler had reflexively thrown himself against the half-opened door and relocked it. Garry eyed him questioningly.

"I couldn't think of anything else to do," the handler told him. "And in any case, I didn't want to try anything by myself."

The two dogs who'd been locked out were barking hysterically as they clawed at the steel door in frantic attempts to get back into the fight. One of them was badly bloodied, and not from the collision with Clark.

The melee continued unabated inside, the noise giving the shivers to the men standing outside.

Garry reached for the handle, then hesitated. "How do you want to handle this? This is your department."

"I'm not sure it's anybody's department anymore," Clark replied. "You and Norris hang onto these two." He indicated the impatient dogs. "Macready and I will flank the opening. If nothing comes out, we'll go in."

Garry mulled it over briefly, then nodded agreement. He and Norris each grabbed a dog by the collar and wrestled them away from the door. Macready took up a position to the right of the doorway, readied the shotgun and looked tense. Where the hell was Childs?

Clark moved to the other side and put a hand on the latch. He looked over at the pilot. "Ready?" Mac thought of a sarcastic reply, bit it back and nodded affirmatively. The handler gave the other two a glance, saw that they were too busy trying to control the raging dogs to comment.

Clark took a deep breath and flipped open the latch. The heavy door swung outward. The noise inside the kennel was deafening. When nothing showed itself he nodded to Macready. The two men entered side by side.

The interior light had burnt out or been broken. It was coldly, unexpectedly dark. Macready cradled the shotgun and snapped on a flashlight, but before he could shine it around the chamber something hit him from behind and knocked him sprawling.

The moment the two men disappeared inside, the two dogs had broken free of Norris and Garry. Unused to handling anything as powerful as a sled dog, Norris had gone flat on his face. One of the dogs had raced up against Macready's legs and upended him.

"Mac, where are you!" Clark was shouting. If anything, the decibel level of the snarling and screeching and howling they'd stepped into had doubled.

"Here, dammit!" The pilot lay on the floor, groping for his flashlight. It had rolled from his grasp when he'd fallen but rested on the floor nearby, still glowing brightly thanks to the tough housing of aircraft aluminum.

Righting himself, Macready raised the end of the shotgun and hunted with the light. Clark quickly came up to stand next to him. Very little light entered from the dimly illuminated corridor outside. Macready moved the light around, trying to get his bearings in the unfamiliar chamber.

The far corner of the kennel was a seething mass of flashing teeth and ferocious snarls. The latter alternated with that high-pitched, bone-chilling screech. Something periodically threw dogs out of the pile with considerable force, but each time they were tossed aside they struggled back to their feet and rushed back in to rejoin the battle.

The light moved and illuminated something else. Something that wasn't a dog. Some thing. Or . . . was it a dog? It was impossible to tell because it seemed to have some of the aspects of a dog one moment and when the light revealed it the next, something entirely different. Its very shape seemed to alter as they watched.

Macready blinked. The weak light was playing nasty tricks on his eyes. He tried hard to focus on what was a dog one second and wasn't the next.

A voice sounded imperatively from behind him.

"What's going on, dammit!" Garry roared.

"There's something in here with the dogs! Some kind of animal." He lifted the shotgun and aimed it toward the pile in the corner. "I'm going to shoot."

"No, wait, you'll hit our animals!" Clark warned him. Macready hesitated.

"Do something else, then!"

Clark waded into the heaving tangle of fur and fangs and began grabbing at necks and bodies, tossing them aside. As soon as he'd cleared several away he started swinging the fire axe, chopping and hacking at the gurgling, hissing silhouette that the dogs were attacking.

From out of the darkness came a thick, bristly dark leg. It looked like something borrowed from a spider, or maybe a crab. It wrapped itself tightly around the axe and jerked spasmodically, sending Clark smashing into the wall. The handler somehow retained his grip on the weapon.

The rest of the station team was arriving in ones and twos. They tried to squeeze into the kennel entrance behind Garry for a look at the chaos inside.

Macready thought he could see the thing clearly now. He was damned if he was going to wait on Clark any longer. The shotgun went off several times, an ear-splitting thunder in the enclosed kennel. A furry missile, one of the still-fighting huskies, was flung at him and sent him stumbling to the floor. The flashlight rolled free again.

As soon as Macready went down Garry moved toward him, holding the Magnum with both hands and firing steadily in the direction of the screeching and moaning. A dog yelped, struck by a round. Macready was crawling past the station manager's ankles, trying to recover the flashlight.

"Clark! Where are you? Clark!" There was no reply from the dog handler. He'd hit the wall hard. In any case, it was difficult to hear anything in the kennel now, between the hissing, the frenzied barking of the dogs, and the regular eruption of Garry's pistol.

Childs came loping down a side corridor. He was towing a large tank on a two-wheeled dolly. Dual hoses ran from the top of the tank to a heavy industrial torch.

He halted outside the kennel and shouted to the men inside.

"What's happening in there?"

"Childs, is that you?" Macready's voice.

"Yeah, it's me, Mac. What the hell's going on?"

"You bring that torch? You get your ass in here with it!"

Childs didn't hesitate. He opened valves on the top of the tank, then switched on the gunlike device itself and rushed into the kennel trailing hoses behind him. The other men made a path for him.

It was still crowded inside and he bumped into Garry, throwing him off balance.

"Sorry, chief. Can't see clearly yet."

"Never mind me!" the station manager snapped at him, trying to reload in the near blackness.

"Childs!" Macready howled.

"I'm coming, dammit. Where are you?"

"Here!" Macready signaled with his flashlight, then directed the beam toward the reduced cluster of battling sled dogs. "It's over there in the corner. Torch it."

"What about the dogs?" the mechanic hesitated.

"Screw the dogs! Torch it!"

Childs touched a switch. Blue flame spurted from the tip of the device. He aimed it grimly toward the tangled mass and opened a valve wide.

Flame shot across the floor and struck the center of the mass. The dogs broke away immediately, a more elemental terror temporarily overwhelming their fear and anger at whatever they'd attacked. They scattered and broke instinctively for the open kennel door.