Дэниел Смит - Below Zero

He had reached a dead end.

‘Why?’ Zak shivered violently and looked at the figure that had led him here, but instead of seeing the ancient explorer, with its face covered like a ghoul, he saw his sister.

May.

Now I know I’m going mad …

She wasn’t dressed as she had been when he last saw her. Instead, she was dressed how he best remembered her. Tight black jeans with knees so ripped it was a wonder they didn’t fall apart when she wriggled into them. A black T-shirt with The Walking Dead printed in bold white letters. A leather biker jacket with pin badges on the lapels. One of the pins was completely yellow, such a happy colour, with two black dots for eyes and a big smiley mouth. There was a splash of red blood on one side. She wore her favourite Dr. Martens boots, and a black beanie with a picture of a white hand holding a red heart-shaped hand grenade. Her hair was hanging loose from the edges of the beanie.

May had her arms crossed and was staring at her brother as if she couldn’t understand why the cold was bothering him so much. ‘Come on, you loser, what are you waiting for?’

Zak didn’t know if she was actually there, or if he was even hearing her voice for real. He had seen so many bizarre things over the past few hours, this was just another one to add to the long list.

‘What are you waiting for?’ May spoke ( thought? ) again, and a wide door slid open in the endless white wall beside her. When the door was open enough for a person to pass through, May lifted a hand and swept it towards the entrance and the darkness it had revealed. ‘Get inside, you freak. You’re the only one who can see this. The only one we can tell. You’re the only one who can know.’

Zak frowned and hesitated. It might be some kind of trap, but what did he have to lose? There was nowhere else for him to go.

So he stumbled forward, and followed May into the unknown.

Zak found himself in a rectangular room carved into the ice. White light shone from tiny bulbs fitted into the perfectly square corners, and an Arctic Cat snowmobile sat idle by the door. On the other side of the room a sloped corridor led deeper into the ice. There was no heat to warm his body, and Zak struggled to control his shivering as he followed his sister along the ice-corridor. A harsh draught moaned around him like the ghosts of the unhappy dead.

Zak made his way down and down, deeper and deeper into the ice until he came to a vast cavern with perfectly smooth walls of ice and a high, flat ceiling. The space was at least three times as big as the assembly hall at school, but instead of being stuffed with stacked chairs and smelling like school dinners, it was filled with horrors and stank like a slaughterhouse.

Bugs, like the ones that had smothered Mum, Dad and May, were everywhere. They crawled along the walls, they carpeted the floor, they clicked and rustled and fluttered as they scuttled over each other or took to the air. Littered among the insects covering the floor, there were parts taken from the dismantled plane and Magpie, and cobbled-together machines clattered with gears and glistened with grey cords of muscle, but all these were dwarfed by the giant monster towering over them.

Zak guessed it had been one of Mum and Dad’s Spiders, but it was hardly recognizable now. Instead of shining steel and alloy, the drone was encased in a hard outer shell similar to the kind covering the bugs. Grey translucent sinews twisted at its joints, and criss-crossed the creature’s underside. The monster was a demented mix of mechanical and biological. Metal pincers protruded from its face, coarse hairs growing around them. It was part-Spider, part-bug, all gross. Insects swarmed over it, disappearing beneath the shell, crawling over its fleshy parts, shedding their armour and melting into the monster, becoming part of it. They were giving it life. The smell rising from it was like wet soil and fresh meat.

On the other side of the cavern, opposite the corridor, May stood in a place where the world fell away into nothing. An immense and jagged rip ran from left to right like a monstrous mouth, its edges like dangerous teeth. A tear in the ice so wide it was impossible to see the other side.

The Chasm.

Zak crossed the huge room and went to his sister. He peered over the edge of The Chasm and stared into the endless depths of the Earth, thinking that if he toppled forwards and fell, he would be falling for ever. But the longer he stared into its eternity, the more he began to see.

There was something moving down there. Flickering fluorescent lights flitting backwards and forwards like fireflies in the darkness.

‘Let us show you.’ May spoke again, but Zak knew it wasn’t May, and when he looked at her, she faded and shimmered like an old memory. She was an illusion, put into his head by something he didn’t understand, but she was trying to tell him something. Whatever lay beneath the ice, it wanted Zak to understand.

Zak stared down into The Chasm once more, and saw the flickering lights lifting towards him like tiny lanterns in the night. The hum of insects grew louder as the swarm approached from below, and then they were rising up, surrounding him. And as they covered his body, Zak felt warm, and the familiar darkness of another vision came to him. But he no longer felt afraid, and this time he didn’t fight it. Instead, he let his mind go.

Zak surrendered himself to the vision.

As the vision slipped over him, Zak was surrounded by darkness so complete, so solid , that it was as if he was buried deep in fine black powder. Except, it felt like he was floating. Like his mind wasn’t in his body any more.

Weirdest. Feeling. Ever .

Zak wondered if he was dying.

No. This isn’t death. This is something else. This isn’t even real. This is all in my head. This is the vision – the thing they’ve been trying to show me.

Standing on the edge of The Chasm, with insects crawling over him, Zak’s mind joined with theirs, and he saw everything they wanted him to see. Their message came to him in a flash of images, racing through his thoughts.

He saw lights moving in the darkness below him, thousands of insects flickering and fluttering in the freezing, black depths. He saw a river of them flowing through the ice beneath his feet, swarming over each other, their legs intertwining, their wings struggling to open in the tight space. And the mind of every single insect was connected to the mind of every other insect, all of them acting together as if they were one.

I was right. A hive mind .

And now, in a way, he was part of that collective mind too. They could reach his thoughts in a way they couldn’t reach anybody else at Outpost Zero.

Because I’m different. My mind is different.

His illness weakened him; it made him vulnerable.

The insects showed him the river of seething bugs flowing away beneath the ice, flooding into a shimmering, glowing sea of them. A sea that pulsed with a fluorescent glow. The number of insects was impossible to grasp. More than thousands. More than millions. More than billions . All of their minds connected. All of them trying to free themselves from the ice directly below Outpost Zero.

BioMesa had discovered them, and now they had to protect themselves. They had to survive. They had to escape and find somewhere new – somewhere safe to hibernate.

And in the vision, Zak saw how their light was creating great heat, melting the ice that entombed them. The insects were almost ready to escape, but above them, Outpost Zero was perched on ice that was growing thinner and thinner.