Hellstrom's Hive

Janvert was reaching for the radio microphone, hardly believing he had that token of civilization within his grasp, when a voice boomed at him from high over his right shoulder.

“Janvert!”

He jerked back, slamming the door to shut off the car’s dome light, dodged to the front of the car and crouched there, pointing his weapon up into the darkness.

“Janvert, I know you can hear me.”

The voice came from up in the trees, but it was too dark to show any detail to Janvert. He held himself locked in indecision. What a fool he’d been to leave the car’s dome light on!

“I am speaking to you through a remote system, Janvert,” the voice said. “There is an electronic device in a tree near you. It will pick up your answer and transmit it to me. You must answer me now.”

A loudspeaker!

Still, Janvert crouched in silence. It was a trick. They wanted him to speak just to locate him.

“We have someone here who wants to speak to you,” the voice said. “Listen carefully, Janvert.”

At first, Janvert failed to recognize the new voice issuing from the speaker. There was such a throat-strained quality in the words, as though each required superhuman effort. It was a woman, though, and then she said, “Eddie! It’s Clovis. Please answer me!”

Clovis was the only one who called him Eddie. The others all used that hated Shorty. He stared up through the darkness. Clovis?

“Eddie,” she said, “if you don’t come back, they’re going to take me down to a—a place where—where they—cut off your legs and the rest—” She was sobbing now. “Your legs and the rest of your body at the waist and—oh, God! Eddie, I’m so frightened. Eddie! Please answer me! Please come back!”

Janvert recalled that room of stumped bodies, the multicolored tubes, the hideously accentuated sexuality. Abruptly, he experienced a flashing memory: the severed head on the tunnel floor, the gore, his own feet trampling through red fruit, his body spattered with . . .

He doubled over, vomited.

Clovis’s voice went on and on, pleading with him.

“Eddie, please, can you hear me? Please! Don’t let them do that to me. Oh, God! Why doesn’t he answer?”

I can’t answer her, Janvert thought.

But he had to respond. He had to do something. The air was full of the nauseating smell of his own vomit and his chest ached, but his head felt cleared. He straightened, supporting himself with a hand on the car’s hood.

“Hellstrom!” he called.

“Right here.” It was the first voice Janvert had heard.

“How can I trust you?” Janvert asked. He started working his way back to the car’s door. He had to get to that radio.

“We will harm neither you nor Miss Carr if you return,” Hellstrom said. “We do not lie about such things, Mr. Janvert. You will be placed under necessary restraints, but neither of you will be harmed. We will permit the two of you to associate and have any relationship you wish, but if you do not return to us immediately, we will carry out our threat. We will do so with the deepest regret, but we will do it. Our own attitudes toward a procreative stump are much different from yours, Mr. Janvert. Believe me.”

“I believe you,” Janvert said. He was at the car’s door now, hesitating. If he opened the door and grabbed for the microphone, what would they do up there? They must have searchers out here by now. They had that speaker in the tree. They had some way of knowing what he was doing. He had to take precautions, then. He lifted the captured weapon, intending to spray the area around him randomly before opening the door. He didn’t allow himself to think about Clovis. But that room . . . His finger on the firing stud refused to move. That room with the stubs of bodies! Again, he felt nausea clutching him.

Clovis could still be heard over the speaker. She was crying somewhere in the background, sobbing and calling his name. “Eddie—Eddie—Eddie—please help me. Make it stop—”

Janvert closed his eyes. What can I do?

As the thought pulsed in his mind, he felt a tingling on his back and right side, heard a distant humming that followed him all the way down to the dusty ground beside the car, but he no longer heard it by the time he was stretched in the dust.