Free Hive by Tim Curran

dream of a city . . . except it ain’t like no city you’ve ever seen before. Towers and pyramids and shafts, honeycombs that lead through stone, don’t come out anywhere but into themselves. I dream I’m flying above the city, moving fast, and there are others flying with me and they all look like those ugly pricks out in the hut. We . . . we fly and then we dip down, down into those holes and hollow places, then . . . then I wake up. I don’t want to remember what happens down in those holes.”
    â€œI dream about holes sometimes, too,” Meiner admitted. “Like tunnels going up and down and left and right . . . lost in those tunnels and hearing a buzzing like wasps, only that buzzing is like words I understand. I’m scared shitless, in the dream. I know those voices want something from me.”
    He stopped there. By God, it was enough. He wasn’t going any farther with it, he wasn’t going to pick at the scabs of his nightmares until all that black blood started flowing again. He wasn’t going to tell them about the rest of it. The tunnels and high stone rooms, all those things standing around while Meiner and dozens of others laid on tables. The things . . . oh Jesus . . . those things would be inside their heads and touching them, sticking things into them and cutting into them with blades of light, making things happen to them . . . and the pain, all the pain . . . needles going into him and knives cutting and tubes stuck in his head and oh dear sweet Jesus the agony, the agony while those trilling voices kept talking and talking, hands that were not hands but things like tree branches or twigs taking him apart and putting him back together again . . .
    Rutkowski looked gray and old suddenly. “I don’t like it, I just don’t like it. Those dreams . . . they’re so
familiar,
you know? Like I’ve seen it all before, lived through all that shit years ago. Don’t make no sense.”
    And it didn’t. Not on the surface. But they’d all felt it, that sense of familiarity, that déjà vu they couldn’t get out from under. It haunted them. Just like the first time they’d seen the mummies — they had all known implicitly that they had seen them before, very long ago, and the fear those things inspired was inbred and ancient, a wisp of memory from a misty, forgotten past.
    â€œYeah, I remember those things. Somehow, I do,” St. Ours said. “Fuck me, but Gates sure opened up a Pandora’s box here.”
    And, God, how true was that.
    Meiner knew it was true, just like he knew he was afraid to close his eyes even for an instant. Because when he did the dreams came and the things swam up out of the darkness, those buzzing voices in his head, filling him, breaking him down. And sometimes, yes, sometimes even when he was awake, when he’d come out of the nightmares at three a.m. sweating and shaking, feeling the pain of what they had done to him or someone like him, he would still be hearing those voices. High and trilling and insectile, outside, carried by the winds, calling him out into the storm and sometimes out to the hut where they were waiting for him.
    But he wasn’t about to admit any of that.

13
    O f course, Hayes didn’t sleep.
    He didn’t do much of anything after his return from Hut #6 except drink a lot of coffee laced with whiskey and take a few hot showers, trying to shake that awful feeling of violation, the sense that his mind had been invaded and subverted by something diabolic and dirty. But it was all in vain, for that feeling of invasion persisted. That his most private and intimate place, his mind, had been defiled. He nodded off for maybe thirty minutes just before dawn —what passed for dawn in a place where the sun never rose, that was —and came awake from the mother of all nightmares in which shapeless things had their fingers in his skull, rooting around and touching