Chapter Text
September 4, 2005
The sole survivor of the incident at the Miskatonic-UMaine expedition arrived at the outpost that evening. According to Nathan’s bunkmate, who’d been waiting up for the survivor’s arrival since he’d broadcast for help on the radio, the man had shown up on a snowmobile, towing behind him a metal storage locker, which he’d convinced the station’s mechanics to haul inside the laboratory before anyone else could intervene.
The locker was on the floor, sweating ice. The lab was in an uproar. Nathan had heard the argument down the hallway and changed directions from his path to his room, lured away from the prospect of sleep by his senior biologist’s raised voice.
“Get it out of here,” she was saying. “Get it out right now.”
The survivor from the Miskatonic base held his palms out flat, appeasing her. “There’s no risk of contamination—”
Dr. Biswas was furious. In the year Nathan had spent subject to her clipped professionalism, even lately when the sun was scarce and everyone at the station had come unglued, he had never seen her outright angry.
“I want it outside,” she said, her voice cracking on the last word.
Nathan huddled in the doorframe. Warwick, the station manager, was inside the room halfway between the survivor and Dr. Biswas, his hands on his hips and posture tense. The mechanics were half-stooped with hands groping for the ropes they’d rigged around the locker, stalled uncertainly without a clear order.
In the standoff between Dr. Biswas and the newcomer, neither seemed to have the upper ground. Warwick was clearly confused. Everyone looked tired and on edge.
When the Miskatonic survivor said he’d be arriving with a sample of the life form that had attacked his base and murdered all his colleagues, Nathan had expected a sliver of tissue or bundle of cells in a tube, not a slab of the stuff so large it took up most of the lab’s limited floor space in its metal box. No wonder Dr. Biswas was up in arms. The scientist liked her space pristine and organized to her wishes; it was why Nathan and his projects had been relegated months ago to one of the shacks outside across the walkways, forcing him to traverse the wind and cold every day he wanted to do his job.
Bitterness for Biswas gave him the confidence to shuffle further into the lab and raise his voice.
“We could put the sample in my shed,” Nathan said. “There are heaters, and I’ve got tables and some equipment.”
The newcomer looked at him for the first time. He wasn’t at all what Nathan had expected from a rattled survivor, but then again this was the same man who had insisted on hitching a heavy storage box full of some dead organism to a snowmobile as he fled the site of a massacre. There was a little wildness to him, in the windswept tips of his hair and rugged lines of his face. But his expression was calm, and under unshaven cheeks, he was friendly-looking, distinguished in his middle age, strikingly handsome.
He crossed the room and extended a hand to Nathan. “Dan Cain.”
No one had ever given a shit about introducing themselves to Nathan, especially not with such a determined, meaningful handshake. “Nate Sanderson,” he said, and winced. The nickname was in his past; he went by Nathan professionally, and around here, everyone used surnames. Cain’s easy attitude had made Nathan helpless to mimic him.
“Are you the doctor here?” Cain was totally sincere, disarming in his directness. “The GP?”
Heat flushed up Nathan’s cheeks. Dr. Biswas sniffed.
“No,” she said. “He’s my assistant.”
If Cain was irritated by being forced to change his expectations, he didn’t show it. He squared himself up in front of Nathan as if no one else in the room mattered, although his attention darted briefly toward his box.
Nathan knew the look of a distracted scientist. It was a familiar burden. Cain wanted equipment, privacy, the guarantee of the preservation of his material, none of which he was going to get from Biswas.
“I need a few things to work on the sample,” said Cain. “Some chemicals, tools for dissection…”
“Listen, Cain,” said Warwick. There was a warning in his voice. “What you need is to see the doctor and rest up so we can talk. Grab a drink, grab some food, hell, take a sedative. You’ve been traveling for hours—”
“I’ll be fine.” A glitter in his dark eyes, a determination. “Let me get this sample secured, and then I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
The mechanics huffed as they dragged the locker out of the lab like dogs with an overburdened sled. Whoever wasn’t asleep had made a gauntlet down the hallway, lining the walls, gawking at the newcomer.
It was odd to see someone new at the outpost. Dazzling, even. Nathan’s ten colleagues had grown nervy as the dark Antarctic winter dragged on, as sick on each other as the cook’s meal rotations, and more fights were cropping up over things that wouldn’t have bothered anyone in brighter times. Misplaced items were by default stolen; misunderstandings blew up into arguments that took days to untangle. Cliques had formed of allies of friends. Nathan had opted to stay out of it all, locked in his shed.
In the hallway around Cain, all Nathan saw was dogs hungry to pick the flesh off a bone.
The young telecommunications officer, Lee, was the first to step away from the wall, moving forward to shove himself into Cain’s path. “Man, you’re something else,” he said. “You’ve got balls, driving all the way through the storm like that.”
Lee had fielded Cain’s mayday call from the other base. God knows what Cain had sounded like on that call after watching everyone slaughtered round him, and what perverse rubbernecking Lee was doing now to intimidate Cain into his confidence. Bored at his job when the weather worsened and communications cut out, Lee had been hunting the station for drama, stirring tensions and shaking loose everyone’s secrets, even the ones they hadn’t wanted to share.
Nathan had become a source of entertainment for Lee a month ago, back when he hadn’t known better not to trust anyone who pretended to care about his personal life. Embarrassment ignited with a spark of defensiveness made Nathan feel protective for Cain.
“Leave him alone,” said Nathan. “He just got out of hell.”
Lee raised his brows, amused. It had been an unnecessary act of loyalty that did more damage to Nathan’s image than it helped Cain. There wasn’t a single line of discontent on Cain’s face. He was just as unruffled as he’d been arguing with Biswas.
“Hey,” Cain said, all charm. “I recognize that voice. Lee, was it? Thanks for bailing me out of there.”
Lee beamed. “You bet. Welcome to the outpost. You need anything, you come find me.”
He returned to his pack, his friends the dog handler, the cook, and the helicopter pilot. Bold-faced of Lee to try and recruit Cain in front of the station chief. At least he hadn’t got a handshake.
It was bitterly cold outside. Nathan huddled into his parka and kept his mouth shut, not wanting the saliva to freeze. Outside in the darkness, light shone in the window of Nathan’s shed across the compound. Strings of flags marked wooden walkways between the buildings, flapping in each gust as snow blew over the path. Wind shields protected the lone helicopter and the bulldozer. They had been idle for a while, swaddled up in a tarp against the oncoming storm.
Cain’s base, the site of the massacre, had been a well-outfitted joint research venture, not the dinky outcrop of steel makeshifts and scattered meteorological equipment that made up good-old NSF Outpost #32. Nathan wondered if Cain pitied their digs, or in light of the danger he’d fled, if he cared at all.
The mechanics grunted as they lifted the locker up the step into the shed. Nathan felt a sudden plunge of shame for the mess on the tables and shelves, the haphazardness of his experiments. No one bothered to come out here. Nathan had a method to his own madness, but of course Cain wasn’t taking Nathan’s measure by the state of his lab; he was focused entirely on the metal box, on interposing himself to guide it toward a space Nathan cleared hastily of equipment crates.
The station manager came inside and slammed the door against the wind, making the already tiny shed feel claustrophobic with puffy parka-clad bodies. “Alright,” said Warwick. “You can come with me now, Cain.”
From his position in the room, Nathan was the only one who’d be able to see Cain’s tight expression, the desperate way his eyes flicked to the box. It was the first time his mask had slipped.
“I’ll take care of that, Dr. Cain,” Nathan said. “I’ll stay here. I’ll watch it for you.”
Cain’s brief concern vanished, and he smiled. Nathan’s body flushed with an old, traitorous happiness, a latent poison he’d hoped had frozen solid in his veins over the last year in this wasteland.
“Thanks, Nate,” said Cain. “But please don’t open it.”
Nathan nodded. A specimen, Cain had called it over the radio. The man was a consummate scientist. Whatever beast he’d fought had killed twenty people. A monster, is what he’d meant.
Nathan’s desire to get ready for bed had evaporated; he would spend however long with this precious cargo for company, if it meant the newcomer with the god-like calm would look at him with that reverence of appreciation again. The door opened and the wind howled. The others filed out, and Nathan was left alone.
Cain didn’t return for another hour, and by then Nathan was exhausted. The buzz of the stranger’s arrival had caught up to him at last. But briefing with station leadership hadn’t shaken Cain at all, and rather than dismissing Nathan from his post or asking for a walk back to the main compound, Cain smiled at him as he came inside.
He hung up his parka, then settled back into Nathan’s desk chair, his legs spread wide and his big hands braced on his knees.
“So,” said Cain. “Where are you from, Nate?”
He must have been ten years Nathan’s senior and twice as fit. There were muscles in his neck and arms that were the inherence of that class of men who once tormented Nathan for being a lean stick.
“Seattle,” said Nathan.
“You study at UW? I’ve got friends who teach there.”
“I did,” Nathan hedged, hoping not to get into particulars about the doctoral program professors they had in common. He couldn’t bear to know if he’d been the brunt of some anecdote swapped to Cain over dinner and drinks.
Perhaps Cain had a sixth sense for shyer men’s awkwardness, because he dropped the line of inquiry as he looked around the shed. “Looks like you’re studying ice samples.”
No way in hell did he actually want to hear about that. He was only being polite; he was in the business of forensics, some kind of preeminent medical investigator flown in on the ill-fated research team’s dime, and the small talk about microbes between them could only stretch so far.
Nathan moved himself like a barrier between his work and Cain’s line of sight, absentmindedly clearing space in the middle of the desk. “Sorry you couldn’t work in the actual lab.”
“Dr. Biswas might come around.”
“Maybe.”
“She’s hard to please, huh?”
Nathan’s skin prickled. He knew he shouldn’t take it personally. Cain didn’t know his history, the whole pathetic slog of it—the middle Sanderson boy, the worst student, the loner, always competing for scraps.
Something in Nathan’s expression might have given him away, because Cain’s smile twisted into empathy, a compelling blend of interest and apology. He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees, bringing himself a breath away from Nathan where he huddled against the worktable.
“Don’t forget, you’re worth your professional chops, too. Anyone who takes a post out here is a hero in my book.” He levered himself to his feet, sighing. “Well, I’ve got to call it a night soon. Do you mind if I stay here a minute to inspect my sample, make sure I didn’t destroy it on my ride over?”
Alone, he meant. Curious as he was, Nathan wouldn’t push to get involved. He liked Cain on instinct; he felt bad for him, and moreover, he felt stirred to do him one better than Lee, who had been so arrogant to promise him help he couldn’t give. Nathan was Cain’s peer, a fellow scientist. As much as it made him flush to recall Cain’s praise, he was worth his chops. And he had offered the shed, so it wasn’t his business now how Cain came and went to it.
So, when Cain lingered, studying him patiently, Nathan took the hint and left him there, in vigil over his locker.
Morning came. This time of year, there was no sun at dawn, no sun at all.
Shivering in the hall, adjusting to the reduced heat in the corridors at the tail end of the sleeping period, Nathan found the rec room had been set up for a presentation, like when they’d been briefed their first week of work. After breakfast, everyone piled inside and took seats like kids in a classroom. An overhead projector had been dusted off and was humming along, casting a blank square of light on the side of Cain’s face and sharp blade of his nose.
He was standing at the front of the room in low discussion with Warwick, coffee mug in hand, neatly groomed. Nathan had entertained a weird thought last night that Cain might have slept in the shed with his locker, but he looked too fresh and rested. His face was shaved and the flyaways in his hair from his mad dash across the tundra last night had been combed back, revealing strands of silver.
“Damn,” said Padden, the pilot. “The tragic survivor is buff.”
Nathan jumped and whirled to face her, heart racing. But she was only talking to her friend, the cook.
After a moment, Cain stepped forward and raised his voice.
“Hey, everyone,” he said. “Figured you all know who I am by now, but I’ll give myself a quick introduction before we get into the details. My name is Dr. Daniel Cain. I’m an independent forensic specialist. Last week, my partner and I arrived at the Miskatonic-UMaine Expedition to investigate a tragic accident. A party of ten had traveled east of the main station to perform some localized boring on the sandstone there. On August 29th, they were violently attacked at their base by a large creature. Yesterday, the morning after my team returned from our investigation, the creature attacked the rest of the crew at the main base.”
He tucked his hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit. The breast was emblazoned with an embroidered crest and a patch that read D. CAIN. The last man alive.
“Your chief thought it was a good idea to get you all caught up on what happened so we can be best prepared,” Cain said, nodding at Warwick. “We’re dealing with the unknown here, so I can’t say for sure if you’ll be targeted next, but I don’t want to take any chances. Expert help is on the way. But for now, we’re on our own with whatever’s out there. This thing is dangerous. Or, it might be two entirely different things... Let me show you something.”
He had the natural, animated authority of every good professor that Nathan had admired in college. Everyone was hooked, watching quietly, as Cain licked his fingers to separate a photo slide from a stack in his hands and arrange it on the projector.
“Thanks to Lee for letting me use the thermal copier for these slides,” Cain said. “Handy.”
Lee grinned. “Anytime, Dr. C.”
A little smile remained on Cain’s face as he fiddled the knob to adjust the height of the overhead lens. The image came into focus, a black scene illuminated by floodlights. In shadow were the stark lines of wires and drills, the contraptions of Miskatonic’s research program, huge machines designed to bore for fossils. Stuff only the geophysicist in the room might appreciate. Not that even he would be looking too closely at those right now.
In the foreground of the picture, there were nine bodies laid out in a row.
“This picture was taken by the first rescuers to arrive at the sub-base. See this damage to the corpses?” Cain’s finger entered the projection, tapped the dark shapes of bodies and what looked like bundles at their sides. “The creature came through the camp, gathered each victim, and removed their head.”
Those were heads, not bundles of belongings. A stiffness settled over the room. It was so quiet suddenly that Nathan could hear someone’s shoe scud the floor as they shifted in their seat. Someone else whistled through their teeth. The projector growled in the silence.
Of course, Nathan should have anticipated the nature of this briefing. Cain was a forensic investigator, and this was about the scenes of tragedy, murder, mutilations. Nathan darted a glance around the room, wondering how his peers would react. On the radio call, Cain had said the massacre was carried out by some kind of monstrous life form. A beast that apparently decapitated its prey.
“Now,” said Cain, almost cheerful, obliviously professional despite the ripples he’d caused in the room, “we need to compare this with the attack on the base that happened a few days later.”
Nathan held his breath, bracing himself for close-ups of headless corpses. But the picture Cain placed on the projector was a classic expedition group shot, the exact type of photo that had been instrumental in luring Nathan into the Antarctic in the first place. A dozen-odd people, and none of them his kin, no smart, golden brothers and their perfect families jostling for attention from the stoic Sanderson patriarchy. Just a few people with their own business to take care of, a place Nathan could work and be left alone.
“This is the chief administrator, Alvarez,” said Cain, indicating a man on the middle-left. “Here’s the lead biologist, Stroble. The geophysicists and the graduate students I didn’t have a chance to meet properly—this group right here—and the meteorologists.”
There was no reason Nathan could discern for this recounting of the dead, but Warwick didn’t look inclined to hurry Cain along. Maybe he just needed a moment of remembrance.
“Here’s the mechanics,” Cain went on. “And…”
As Cain hovered a finger over a man in the middle of the lineup, there was an infinitesimal pause. The figure was a small guy with glasses, standing with his hands behind his back and his chin raised. Between his position in the center of the group and his expression, he oozed self-important pride.
Nathan had an uncharitable thought that Cain’s hesitation was related to a memory of helpless violence. The little guy was obviously someone important, but he impressed Nathan as a kindred spirit, a weedy academic brought on to test samples and not someone who knew his way around a weapon to protect himself.
“My partner,” said Cain, curling his index finger back into a fist. “Dr. Herbert West. He arrived a couple days before me, and everyone wanted a picture. Well, this was the crew at the main base of the Miskatonic-UMaine Expedition before. This was them after.”
He swapped the photo on the projector. An image assaulted Nathan. Something incomprehensible came to him in spots and pieces as his brain tried to shelter him from the full effect.
It wasn’t enough. He squeezed his eyes shut. His face rippled and there was a roar in his ears, the howl of his body rejecting the revulsion. Someone gasped at the same time Padden swore, “Holy fuck.” A chair scraped back and then someone else was up out of the room, stumbling down the hallway; a dry heaving sound came from the other side of the door, and bile spurted up in Nathan’s mouth in sympathy.
“This is what remained of the specimen at the time I was able to set it on fire and cause enough damage to force it into retreat,” Cain said evenly. “What you see here is a composite after it absorbed its victims. I believe it was in the process of digestion, or some sort of mass cellular transformation, to reshape its form using human DNA.”
“Dr. Cain,” said Warwick, choked.
“You see how it differs from the attack on the sub-base, mainly—”
“Alright.” Warwick cupped a palm over the head of the projector, blocking the image. There was a whirr as he flipped the switch and it shut down. “Alright.”
No one moved. What the station manager had just done was unprofessional cowardice, interrupting his own briefing like a frightened parent switching off an inappropriate television show before the kids, but Nathan could have hugged the man for it. Not that he wanted to touch another human being again.
The Miskatonic-UMaine crew, the ones at the main camp who hadn’t been beheaded, had been fused together.
In the few seconds he had permitted himself to look, he had seen their naked bodies melted, squeezed and pulled like taffy into a fleshy lava flow, mouths elongated into wide open screams with the teeth scattered and stretched out into crooked zipper pulls. The composite shape looked like a pellet regurgitated from an animal, as though they had been ingested together and heaved up from an infernal belly.
They were covered in a web of what looked like roots. Some of them still had hair and pieces of clothing squeezed between their forms. There had been an arm stuck out of the mass, groping. Fire had boiled the skin into a sausage char. That must have been Cain with a flamethrower, spraying the mass.
Fear cold as ice slipped into Nathan’s gut. There was no trace of revulsion on Cain’s face, no hint of horror. If anything, he seemed a little bemused.
“Sorry, everyone,” he said. “I guess I’m desensitized. I’ve been a field medic, an investigator on some nasty scenes, an emergency room doctor… I forget there are surprises left to anyone. That thing wasn’t the worst I’ve seen come out of the ER.”
His joke fell flat. No one was fooled; there was no human tragedy alive to compare with what they’d just been forced to comprehend.
Whoever had bolted outside slunk back in. Nathan darted a glance over his shoulder to see it was Lee, who had just experienced more trauma in this room than he’d ever managed to coax out of his co-workers. He was staring glass-eyed at Cain and seemed totally betrayed, looking terrified that he’d slap another nasty slide on the projector.
Lee’s suffering was all the motivation Nathan needed to compose himself. Nathan lifted his chin and looked at Cain, willing him to look back, to be caught in this moment of scientific stolidness and evaluated above his peers.
But Cain was too busy for Nathan. He offered an apologetic smile to the room at large as he walked forward and spread his hands.
“As I was saying, it's made of unusual cells,” he said. “I’m going to do my best to study its nature based on a sample I’ve brought with me. Dr. Biswas, if you’d be willing to help—”
“Dr. Cain,” she said, with heat. It was like they’d picked right back up on their argument from last night. “We’re a small facility, not an alien research center. We have no capability to study a thing like that. I won’t risk a particle of that monstrosity in my lab for no good reason.”
Cain’s face was a plaster mask. No emotion showed through, even though he had every right to be frustrated. “Then, if I could request some materials—”
“We’ll discuss it,” said the station manager. “In the meantime, we’re reinforcing security. The important thing is not to panic. Keep your wits about you, keep an eye out. We’ll get through this until help arrives.”
The rest of the crew shuffled out, muttering to each other. Cain stacked his horrible photo slides on the table behind him, neatened the edges, and tucked them inside the breast of his jumpsuit. Warwick was talking to him in a voice too indistinct to make out. Cain stood a head over the chief and had his face inclined to listen to him, his dark eyes focused.
Nathan should have left the room, but by then it was too late. Cain had looked over and caught him staring.
But he didn’t seem interested in making Nathan feel embarrassed. For his dawdling in the room, his final desperation to stand out, Nathan had at last received the acknowledgement he’d wanted: Cain’s warm, but conspiratorial, smile.