The Thing (18 page)

The meteorologist yelled his understanding, took out a flashlight and began playing its beam over the rocks off to his right.

Macready spoke to the dog while trying to look four ways at once. His voice was tense, coaxing. "Where's your buddy, boy? Huh? You can tell us. Dog's best friend, remember? Where'd your friend get to?"

Not only didn't the animal react, it continued to ignore their approach. Macready took out his own flashlight, uneasily playing it over crevices and possible hiding places in the cliff sides. Still nothing.

"Screw this. Childs, let that thing fly. Don't let up until he's ashes. We'll find the other one later."

Childs activated the nozzle. The tip of the torch sprang to life.

Bennings's attention was on the cliff face when something clutched at his ankles. He looked down and barely had time to scream as his body was yanked below the surface. The flashlight went flying. In seconds only his head and shoulders showed above the ice.

Childs and Macready whirled at the sound of the scream, and rushed back toward their companion. Only his head was visible now. Macready stumbled, snow stinging his face as he fell.

Something made a noise behind him, and it wasn't the wind. He'd never heard anything quite like that noise. It was a crackling, a snapping of something that wasn't wood or plastic. It was organic. He thought of fried pigskins being crumbled in a child's hand.

He rolled over. The dog was still facing away from him, but it was no longer eating. Its hair stuck straight up like the quills of a porcupine. As he stared it snarled, a throaty, undoglike sound. It turned to face him. Its skin was splitting, the mouth ripping open as something inside struggled to emerge, like a butterfly bursting from its cocoon.

Only there was nothing in the least attractive about the metamorphosis the husky was undergoing.

"Childs!"

The mechanic halted, his fingers tight on the torch, uncertain who to help first. Bennings was still in sight. In addition to his head he'd managed to get one arm out and was clawing frantically at the slick surface. Each time his shoulders started to emerge, something unseen would yank him back beneath the snow.

Childs took a step back toward Macready, his attention torn between his two companions. The dog continued to change. It had grown larger and darker. Suddenly it leaped, though no dog could possibly jump twenty feet in that clinging snow.

Childs reacted instinctively as the thing attacked the fallen Macready. He opened the flow to the torch. A stream of fire hit the dog-thing in mid-leap. The violence of the blast knocked it head over heels backward, a flaming ball of fur. And something else.

The animal was howling in pain, making a sound no dog ever made, a high-pitched screeching that reminded Macready of fingernails dragging down a blackboard.

He got to his knees and activated the thermite cannister. Aiming as carefully as he could in the confusion and dim light, he heaved it past the snowmobiles. The force of the throw sent him sprawling again.

The cannister landed a foot short of the twisting, flaming dog-thing and exploded. The smaller fire was suddenly enveloped in a blast of white flame.

Childs turned and started toward Bennings. The ice beneath the meteorologist was heaving violently. Macready scrambled to his feet and overtook the mechanic, grabbed him by his parka and tried to pull him back.

"What's the matter?" Childs tried to shake the smaller man off.

The pilot continued to pull at his friend, "Keep away! It'll get you too."

"Damn it!" Childs was half-moaning, half-crying. He repeated the curse over and over.

Suddenly Bennings's head finally vanished beneath the surface, his body jerked out of sight by something still unseen. The ice continued to ripple like boiling water. The activity moved around, coming toward the two men, then drifting away from them.

Part of the unfortunate meteorologist's body popped into view and just as quickly was sucked beneath the surface again. Macready and Childs watched for it to reappear, unable to aid their companion.

"What are we going to
do?
" the frustrated Childs cried. He was trying to trace the course of the subsurface heaving with the tip of the torch.

"How the fuck do I know."

Suddenly Bennings's head and shoulders exploded through the ice close to the snowmobiles. Something had him in an unbreakable grip, though in the distant glow from the headlamps they couldn't see what. To Childs it looked like the jaws of a dog, except that no dog that ever lived had a mouth that wide.

Bennings's heavy outer clothes began to split, stretched to their limits as the flesh beneath burst its natural boundaries. The clutching jaws writhed, turning the body toward their center. A snake always turns its prey in order to swallow it head first, Macready thought wildly. Bennings face vanished into that fluid, shifting mouth.

He turned and dashed for the snowmobile trailer, shouting back over his shoulder as he ran.

"Torch them!"

"But Bennings . . .!" Childs started to protest.

Macready wouldn't have recognized his own voice. "Can't you see that he's gone? Do it . . . while we've still got the chance to!"

Bennings . . . damn it, Bennings! Childs's teeth ground against one another. Bennings is dead, man. That thing is still alive. He activated the torch.

The powerful stream of fire struck the indistinguishable mass of which Bennings was now a part. The hulking clump of dark flesh burst into flame and ice began to melt around it. A wailing screech filled the night air.

Macready was working like a madman at the snowmobile trailer, frantically removing can after can of gasoline and tossing them onto the ice.

Something hard as steel thrust out of the ground. It had knobs and sharp projections and things like long, stiff hairs scattered across it. It just missed Macready and went right through the fiberglass body of the trailer.

Macready threw himself to one side. The leg yanked itself clear of the splintered fiberglass and flailed around in search of something to grab.

The pilot scrambled across the snow, uncapped a couple of cans and dumped their contents on that weaving, questing limb. Then be moved away and began pouring the rest onto the larger mass that Childs was melting out of the ice.

The cans went up like small bombs, further immolating the convulsive, twitching abomination beneath the snow. Behind them, the other dog-thing continued to burn. The continuous screeching and mewling echoed horribly off the walls of the little canyon, deafening the two frantic men.

Macready tossed the last can into the conflagration and clutched at Childs's arm. "That's enough, man."

The mechanic did not seem to hear him. Glassy-eyed, Childs continued to play the fire stream over the already seething mass. Part of Bennings's burning skeleton showed through the flames. If the other thing possessed a skeleton, Macready couldn't make it out. The inferno that filled the canyon was almost too bright to look at.

Macready finally had to step around in front of the mechanic and grab the torch with both hands. "Childs, that's enough! We got it."

The big man looked slowly down at him and blinked. "Yeah. Yeah, okay Mac." He shut off the flow to the torch. They stood there close together, their stunned faces awash with light from the dying flames. As the blaze began to subside, so did that damnable screeching. Soon it sounded far away, weak and unthreatening.

It gave out entirely in a few minutes. The two fires continued to burn. Macready and Childs waited until the last embers had turned dark. Then the pilot emptied a few more gallons of gas over the dark smudges staining the canyon floor and lit them. When they burnt themselves out there was nothing left to burn except ice and rock.

The snowmobile trailer was ruined. That thrusting leg that had come so close to impaling Macready had shattered not only the container but one of the supporting skis. Macready unlatched it and they transferred the remaining supplies to the storage box mounted over the snowmobile's rear seat.

Then they set off to retrace their path, speeding down the canyon back to the glacial plain and the frozen Antarctic night. It would have been more sensible to wait until morning. More sensible, yes, but neither man had any intention of spending a moment longer in that canyon, now occupied only by the ghosts of two gargoyles whose night-shrouded appearance would have put to shame any dozen visages haunting far distant Notre Dame.

Macready and Childs preferred to take the chance of freezing to death out on the clean ice . . .

Only the uppermost sliver of sun revealed itself the following day, signaling the beginning of the vernal equinox. And the beginning of six months of total darkness.

The men had gathered in the recreation room. Clark sat in a chair surrounded by his now suspicious co-workers. The dog handler looked frazzled and sounded defensive.

"I'm teIlin you," he said for at least the tenth time, "that I don't remember leaving the kennel unlatched."

Childs stood nearby. He was holding the well-used torch, having shortened its range in the event it had to be employed inside. He waved it meaningfully under Clark's nose.

"That's bullshit! You told us after those dogs split that you
always
check it."

"I always do." Clark chewed his lower lip and tried to so confident. He wasn't. That torch was too damn close. "They must have opened it after I closed up for the night."

"You left it open," Childs said accusingly, "so they could get out."

Clark kept his exasperation in check, along with the sarcastic reply that immediately came to mind. Sarcasm wouldn't be prudent just now, considering the expressions on the faces of the men encircling him. Childs's attitude was that he'd be glad to try out the industrial torch indoors, if Clark would just give him the slightest excuse.

"Would I even have told the rest of you that they had gone if I had anything to hide?" he argued fervently. "Would I have told you that I regularly check the latch after I'd deliberately left it open? Be reasonable!"

"That still doesn't explain why you didn't kennel that stray right away," Garry pointed out.

"I told you that I couldn't find—" He paused, angrily shoving the nozzle of the torch aside. "Keep that thing out of my face, will you?"

Childs reached out with one hand, grabbed the handler by the collar, and lifted him out of the chair. The mechanic was right on the edge, had been ever since they'd returned to camp. He was still thinking of Bennings and wondering if they'd managed to kill him while he was still Bennings.

"Don't you be telling me—"

Nauls stepped between them and spoke sharply to the mechanic.

"Lighten your load, sucker. You ain't the judge and executioner around here."

Childs reluctantly let go of the dog handler. Clark slumped back in his chair, keeping a wary eye on the mechanic as he spoke to Nauls.

"Thanks," he said gratefully.

Childs turned his frustration and anger on the peacemaker. "Who you trying to protect, mutherfucker? I'm trying to tell you that this son of a bitch could be one of
them
. You want one of those things that could be anybody messing around in your kitchen, man?"

Garry separated them. No one noticed Macready out in the hallway, watching the confrontation. He'd been outside, rummaging around in the trash dump. He had a bundle tucked under one arm.

"Now hold on, dammit," the station manager told the two combatants. He struggled to keep his voice level. "We're getting nowhere acting like this. Fighting and arguing isn't going to prove anything. If this bit of Blair's theory about this thing taking over cellular structures all the way up to the brain is correct, then that dog could have gotten to anybody. It had enough time. A whole night."

"And if it got to Clark, or anyone else," put in Copper quietly from his seat near the big card table, "then Clark, or anyone else, could have gotten to somebody else."

That's about right, Macready decided. A few eyes turned to him as he stepped into the room. But the attention was still on the speculating doctor.

Copper cleared his throat. "What I'm saying is that, theoretically, any of us could now be whatever the hell this thing was. It learns fast. Too damn fast. It can be subtle when it has to, can bide its time. Like those two changed dogs did."

Norris shook his head, rubbing his chest and grimacing at the slight but persistent pain there.

"It's too much to absorb all at once, Doc. I can buy the business about the dogs. I saw that. But taking over several of us and keeping it a secret from the rest? Hell, we all know each other. If some alien whatsis had gained control of Clark—" the handler stiffened at the sound of his name—"or Childs, or me, or anyone else, wouldn't it give itself away somehow? Wouldn't it make a mistake, do something obviously wrong that the rest of us would pick up on?"

Copper smiled humorlessly. "If it can become enough of a dog to fool another dog, with its acute canine senses, then why
not
a man? This thing arrived here in an extraterrestrial vehicle. It's not an animal. It's highly intelligent as well as extremely adaptable. All it needs to survive is an organic host to take control of. Why not a man instead of a dog?"