Hive

When he was done telling her his story, he said simply, “I saw them, Doc . . . Elaine, I saw them. They’re down there and they have been for millions of years, breeding and living and waiting in that warm darkness. Waiting for us . . . I know they’ve been waiting for us. It doesn’t make sense or maybe it does, but I know it’s true. Jesus, I know it’s true.”

“I wish I really thought you made all this up,” was all she could say.

“Me, too. But we all saw that city, those things down there. Christ.” He paused, trying to catch his breath just like he’d been trying to catch it ever since he’d seen them. Trying to catch his breath and trying to plane his world flat before it went too far askew and pitched him on his ass. “It’s all on tape, though. Wait until LaHune gets his hands on this . . . we’ll have a blackout like never before. I bet he won’t even let anyone see it.”

Sharkey fed him whiskey and soft words, gave him a shoulder to lean on. It was enough. It had to be enough. They were in her room, sitting on the bed and maybe it was the best possible place to be and maybe it was the worse. For what came next was the result of chemistry. Later, they could not say who started it. Just that it happened. That they fell into each other and lost themselves in the warmth and necessity of the act. The foreplay had been the telling of Hayes’ story, no sweet nothings, but a great and voluminous blackness that had to be covered, had to be shut away somewhere and so it was. Like dread or mourning, the impact of what they knew to be true and what they guessed to be true threw them into each other’s arms and the connection was made whole, potential energy gone kinetic, and the power was real. Foreplay abandoned, there was the act, there was motion and breathing and moaning and hot skin, limbs entwined and heat shared and maybe hearts touched and filled. All that Hayes could remember later was that he had never felt so strong or so weak. When he was inside Elaine Sharkey and she was wrapped around him, her eyes glowing like azure flames, he had never felt so completely alive and so utterly pure.

There was an excitement, he knew, in bedding another man’s wife. The illicit thrill, the taboo. But it was far beyond that. The hunger had been growing for weeks and it was only a matter of time before the beast showed its teeth and filled its belly. And then, afterwards, the afterglow, a secret and a memory they shared and held deep inside themselves in a special place other hands could not touch or hope to sully. It was theirs and theirs alone and this was enough. This was all and everything and it was not spoken of. They could no more frame it with words than they could hold one another’s souls in the palms of their hands. And that was the beauty of it, the thrill and joy and the magic.

And later, wrapped in each other’s arms and touching and never wanting to let go, there were soft voices in the darkness.

“What . . . what are we going to do, Elaine?”

“I don’t know, Jimmy, I just don’t know.”

And he didn’t either, so he laid there, feeling her, and loving the tactile sensation of her flesh, smelling that perfume coming off her which didn’t come out of any bottle, but was just her inner beauty announcing itself as sweet honey, jasmine, and musk.

There were no answers, there was only the two of them in the darkness, feeling and being felt. Listening to the wind scraping across the compound and the blood rushing at their temples. What they had at that moment was the memory of their seduction and it was secret.

23

So LaHune had been feeding them a straight ration of shit for too long now, expecting them to chew and swallow, maybe ask for seconds, fill their bellies and smile and shove back empty plates, my compliments to the fucking cook. But day by day that was getting harder and you could see it behind their eyes and just under their smiles, like there was something pissed-off and randy waiting to show itself and when it did, my dearly beloved, cover your heads and hold onto your privates, this is going to be ugly and fierce and loud.

Sure, LaHune, Christian saint that he was, had given them back their Internet and SAT TV and maybe everyone should have been happier than a penis on a Playboy shoot . . . but it wasn’t that simple. The TV, the radio, the Internet . . . when you were locked down and nailed shut for five months in the coffin of Antarctica, got so you needed these things. Like clean air to breath. And when someone shoved a pillow over your face and cut off your wind, you didn’t exactly thank ‘em when they pulled it off, let you breathe. What you did was kick them in the nuts so hard their little gonads rang off the inside of their skulls like ball bearings in a pinball game. Didn’t matter how many sweet nothings about the Official Secrets Act they hummed in your ear, you kicked ‘em hard and sure so maybe next time they’d keep that in mind.