Read The Spawning for Free Online

he’d never actually seen a true accident. Nothing that couldn’t be mopped up or swept into the dustbin. He’d seen violence, but that always involved one or two people. But worse things had happened down there on a large scale and more than once.
    Back in 1979, a New Zealand flight loaded with over 200 tourists had crashed right into Mount Erebus. The aircraft broke up on impact, scattering bodies and flaming remains all over the mountainside and down into crevasses. Recovery teams came in from McMurdo and Scott Base and it was a real ugly mess. During the following weeks, charred corpses and limbs and torsos and decapitated heads were gathered up and zipped into plastic bags. Skua gulls—notorious scavengers that haunt the garbage heaps of the stations and eat anything from potato peelings to seal placentas and baby penguins—showed up in numbers for their share of the goodies, pecking through the plastic bags and feasting on what was inside. Something which drove members of the recovery teams into a blind rage.
    Coyle had known a guy named Jerry Sherrily who had worked McMurdo back then and been part of the clean-up crew. It had been a nasty business. Remains were stored in the food freezers until they could be flown out. Sherrily said he would never forget the sound of the Skuas eating out of those bags or the sight of one flying over his head with a human hand in its beak. It was high summer at the time and as the bodies came in, they were stacked alongside the strip at Willy Field. The sun glaring down on them made them heat up and the bags kept breaking open as they were off-loaded from choppers, splashing rancid body fluids and gouts of tissue in the faces of the workers.
    Coyle had seen some of the films of all that and he was remembering them now. Remembering every grisly detail and wondering just what in the hell he was getting himself into here.
    First Mount Hobb losing its crew and now a chopper crash.
    If these were omens for the coming winter, then they were not good ones.

6
    T HE CRASH SITE.
    They saw the smoke from it long before they got in visual range.
    Out on the polar plateau, if it was clear and cold, you could see for miles. But on a day like today with the sun barely making a showing and the snow blowing down from the mountains and that gloomy haze reflected up off the ice itself, visibility was down to twenty yards at best. It made it hard to tell which was the sky and which was the earth itself. It became one. Something that was only multiplied by the dimness of the dying early winter sunlight.
    Horn piloted the Sno-Cat down the flagged ice road, the headlights jumping as they passed over humps and dips. The ice road was safe, but beyond its perimeters there were great jagged crevasse fields blown by ice-mist and glacial wind, meandering rows of scalloped sastrugi that looked like five-foot breakers heading ashore that had frozen in place. Back in the old days, Coyle knew, you had to rope your sledge to five or six men and drag it over obstacles like that, something that was accomplished only by straining brute strength and willpower. Even dog teams had a hell of a time.
    â€œThere . . . that’s smoke out there,” Special Ed said, jabbing his finger at the windshield. “See that?”
    They all did, of course. Out in that unbroken glaring whiteness where even the shadows were pale gray, the black plumes of smoke boiling in the sky were in stark contrast. Frye’s Sno-Cat was already at the scene when Horn downshifted and rolled them to a stop. He brought it around so the headlights were on the wreck like the other ‘Cat. He left it running.
    They strapped their Stabilicers on—extra soles with steel cleats on them that you strapped to your boots so you didn’t slip and slide all over the place—and jumped out.
    The crashed helicopter was a Huey.
    It looked like some fluorescent orange wasp that had fallen to earth, been stepped on, and kicked to