Mutation

by Michael McBride

  “Let’s see you recover from that,” he said and kicked the head into the burning shaft.

  54

  BARNETT

  La Venta

  Barnett fired into the mouth of the ascending corridor as a dozen more creatures like Subject Z poured into the gallery. Streaking into the shadows between the statues, climbing the walls, hurtling straight at him.

  He hit the lead drone squarely between the eyes. Its feet went out from underneath it, but two others had already passed it before its body hit the ground. He could feel them trying to outflank him from the shadowed perimeter, leaving him with only one viable option.

  Retreat.

  Barnett hit the two converging upon him. Fired indiscriminately to either side. Ran and hurled himself toward the hole in the wall. Landed on his chest, spun while he was sliding, and went feet-first through the orifice.

  The broken glass in his pocket lanced into his thigh. He could already feel the infection moving through him in hot waves, tracing the patterns of his vessels in such a way that he felt the course of each and every one of them, from the smallest capillaries to the deep femoral artery.

  He scooted backward as fast as he could. Shot straight through the tunnel to drive them back. And yet they just kept coming.

  The moment he was clear, he jumped to his feet and ran across the spiral design on the floor, past the wire-wrapped post, into the opposite opening. He whirled and fired toward the tunnel from which he’d just emerged. Hit a drone in the forehead, right above the brow line of its deformed skull. Another crawled over its back and scurried out of the way before Barnett’s next shot struck the creature behind it.

  He threw himself into the hole and crawled for his life. He could already hear the footsteps striking the floor behind him, the nails clattering from the stone. Caught a glimpse of its alien face entering the tunnel as he twisted his torso up into the vertical chute and started up the stairs.

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  The vocalization nearly stopped him in his tracks. He glanced down the stairs, waited for it to poke its head up through the opening, and drilled it right through its elongated skull. Took off before the others could shove its body out of the way.

  A fiery pain radiated from his groin to his lower abdomen, nearly doubling him over. His waistband was already wet with blood, the legs of his pants sapped to his legs.

  The clatter of nails on the steps.

  He shot blindly behind him. Heard the bullets ricochet. Prayed it would hold them off for just a few more seconds. He burst into the transformation chamber, from which there was no other way out.

  This was where he would die.

  He pulled the box from the back of his pants, grabbed one of the M112 demolition blocks, and peeled the backing as he ran toward the tarnished silver ring in the floor. Stuck it right in the middle, stepped on it for good measure, and walked backward toward the far side of the room until he met with the rear wall.

  A faint current crackled from the copper conduits all around him.

  His chest felt heavy, as though his lungs were filling with fluid. He tasted blood in his mouth, felt it flooding throughout his abdomen, distending his stomach.

  “What are you waiting for?” he shouted.

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  A drone appeared in silhouette through the narrow opening. His rifle spat one final triple burst before the carbine whirred, announcing its empty magazine for all to hear. He let it fall from his grasp and clatter to the ground at his feet. He stared down at it, watched the blood dripping from his nose pattern its stock. When he looked back up, there were already four drones inside with him, moving stealthily around the room to flank him. They crouched, planted their hands on the floor, and tensed in anticipation of sprinting at him and ripping him to shreds.

  Subject Z emerged from the shadows and stepped into the chamber in halting, disjointed movements. He saw his reflection in the surface of its wide black eyes.

  Another much larger shape appeared behind the creature, its shape decidedly female. She’d been forced to remove the stag’s skull from her head to pass through the narrow tunnels. He almost would have preferred it to her true visage, which was no more human than Subject Z’s.

  “So what’s the plan?” Barnett said. “Trading in that ugly body for a better one?”

  The creature smiled, its teeth a nest of razors.

  “Even gods can evolve,” it said in a voice that filled the chamber, deep and resonant.

  “You’re still singing that same tired tune, huh? You think that gray husk is an improvement over human flesh?”

  “This form is weak.”

  “If hers is so much stronger, shouldn’t she be able to keep you from taking it?”

  “Not just weak here.” The creature gestured at its spindly body, then tapped its conical head. “Here.”

  It took a step forward into the room. Blue bolts of electricity rippled through the copper bands in the floor. The toroid crackled.

  Barnett bit his lip to keep from betraying his rising level of pain. It felt like his brain was expanding, causing the pressure inside his skull to multiply exponentially. He felt blood welling in his ears, wiped it from his upper lip with his sleeve.

  “And you’re just going to let him have your body, is that it? You, who fancy yourself a god, would willingly become a supplicant to this collection of microscopic germs?”

  The woman revealed her long fangs. Her cheeks stretched all the way back to her ears. He realized it was her attempt at a smile.

  “Inanna is supplicant to no one,” she said in a sexless voice, one Barnett felt reverberate in his chest. “She is the daughter of Anu and the bringer of his divine wrath.”

  “She’s about to become host to a soul-sucking parasite, and all so it can survive the release of this . . .”

  He removed his backpack, took out the silver canister, and held it up for her to see.

  Subject Z bared its teeth and lowered its body to the ground.

  The giant woman strode across the chamber, stepping over copper bands buzzing with current, and closed her hand around the canister. She crushed it in her palm like an aluminum can. He heard the glass vials shatter inside and realized his mistake. He remembered the debriefings of the survivors of the disaster at AREA 51 he’d conducted aboard the Aurora Borealis, recalled how they’d described Hollis Richards’s final confrontation with Subject Z. It had told him that all species served the gods in different capacities, that mankind’s purpose was to build, while the role of the organisms collectively responsible for transforming Dale Rubley into Subject Z was to do “what is required,” a purpose he now understood wasn’t to subsume the form of this Inanna, but rather to sacrifice itself to her so she could become something far greater.

  She tossed aside the canister, which bounced from the floor and struck the wall.

  The ground shook beneath their feet. Electricity sparked from the toroid.

  Not much longer now.

  Barnett started to laugh. He couldn’t help himself.

  Inanna gripped him by the throat and lifted him from his feet. He felt the vessels in his eyes rupture and for a moment saw only red, felt the heat of blood flowing down his cheeks like tears.

  “He infected himself,” she said. “We must hurry.”

  She dropped Barnett into a heap on the floor. He barely had the strength left to roll over onto his side so the blood would drain from his mouth. The cold stone felt good against his forehead. He clung to that sensation as his insides dissolved. The pain was beyond anything he’d ever imagined. He prayed for the release of death, but not yet.

  Not . . . quite . . . yet . . .

  The creatures surrounding him raced toward him with the clicking of nails.

  Clack-clack-clack.

  Inanna and Subject Z converged at the center of the room. Electricity shot from the silver ring. Steam filtered into the room through the cracks between stones.

  Barnett fought to keep his eyes
open, through the pain inflicted by both the hemorrhagic disease and the teeth of the drones, just long enough to see this through to the end.

  The current finally reached the threshold charge of the blasting cap.

  Inanna looked down at the demolition block and then at Barnett, who managed one final smile.

  She knelt and reached for the—

  A blinding light.

  Searing heat—

  55

  EVANS

  Giza, Egypt

  The tunnel terminated at a small square chamber. Evans recognized it as one of the previously unexplored structural voids discovered inside the Pyramid of Khufu on the muographic scan—an imaging technique that created three-dimensional volumetric renderings of solid structures using cosmic radiation that passed through matter in the same manner as X-rays were used to image the human body. A single doorway to his right granted access to a corridor that ascended toward the heart of the pyramid. The men carrying the body bag had already reached a point where the passage appeared to double back upon itself. They struggled to maneuver the stiff remains around the sharp turn, before vanishing from sight.

  If Evans was right about where this was leading, he had a pretty good idea what they’d find when they arrived.

  The ground quivered, forcing him to lean against the wall for balance. He stepped aside and allowed the blond woman to pass him.

  “The being the Nazis found . . . was it like the creature that killed your men in Mexico or like that guy back there?” Evans asked.

  The hulking beast with the mask of the feathered serpent followed them at a distance, as though wary of something none of the rest of them sensed.

  “Both,” she said. “The people living in Antarctica before the crustal displacement not only built that pyramid, they figured out how to use it.”

  Evans recalled his first impression of the gallery with the elaborate statuary and how it had been designed to be seen, a ceremonial space created to impress upon a large number of people the might of the gods. At the time, he hadn’t had a clue as to what this theoretical audience had been gathered to witness, but suddenly it all made sense.

  “They put one of these beings they believed to be a god inside and used the machine to mutate it, didn’t they?”

  “They used it to evolve him, much like our progenitors used him to evolve us.”

  “Then they obviously didn’t adhere to Nazi ideologies,” Jade said. “The basic tenet of their entire Aryan philosophy was that their blood was pure, superior to lesser forms of humanity.”

  “Not everyone shared the vision of my forebears. The commanding officer of the Antarctic expedition demanded that he be taken to Argentina with the intention of using him as collateral to broker a deal for their freedom and the absolution of the war crimes for which they were being hunted, like many prominent scientists had already done. My ancestors, however, were true believers in the cause, apostles of the Ahnenerbe, who trusted in the inherent superiority of our Aryan genes, but, more than that, dreamed of elevating them to superhuman levels. They escaped from the submarine on a lifeboat, spent the next two years working their way home, and set about not just rebuilding the Reich, but creating a new one. A stronger one.”

  “Using this being as foundation stock?” Evans said.

  “This was no mere being. We are talking about the god Utu. Enforcer of divine judgment. Brother of Enki and Enlil. Twin of Inanna. Son of Anu, lord of all creation, father of all mankind. An to the Sumerians. Ahura Mazda to the Zoroastrians. Quetzalcoatl to the Olmec. Zeus to the Greeks. Ra to the Egyptians. God to the Christians.”

  “You believe that corpse up there with the hawk mask is the body of God,” Jade said, incredulous.

  “We know it is.”

  They rounded the bend and struck off uphill toward exactly what Evans had expected to find. He could see the post wrapped in copper wires, the faint glow emanating from the copper spiral in the floor.

  “So then you believe you’re demigods.”

  “We are not their offspring; we are something far greater. The skulls of the children we passed on the walls are the result of attempted hybridization, human mules capable of little more than eating and sleeping. Even with their advanced scientific knowledge, the Ahnenerbe’s early attempts at selective breeding and in vitro fertilization failed to produce a single individual capable of higher orders of thought and functionality. My brothers and I were the first. We are their crowning achievement, marvels of genetic engineering, the product of splicing together the most advantageous genes from both species.”

  “They must have messed up somewhere along the way,” Anya said. “Have you looked in a mirror?”

  “We shall see how you fare when we release the virus. We have already demonstrated that our immune systems can fight off the virus. Will your species be able to say the same?”

  “So what do you intend to do?” Evans asked. “Use the pyramid on this Anu?”

  “We will use it to evolve him.” She paused at the entryway to the chamber and turned to look at him. “And ourselves right along with him.”

  “You want to become a monster like Subject Zeta?” Anya said.

  The blond woman spoke over her shoulder as she crossed the room toward the hole in the wall, through which the men ferrying the remains had already crawled.

  “No, we shall become gods, the fulfillment of our Aryan destiny.”

  “And then you’ll release the virus.”

  “We will have no further use for your kind.”

  She crawled through the hole, climbed up into the shaft, and ascended the stairs to the transformation chamber.

  Evans followed in mute silence. They were running out of time. He understood on a primal level that once they crossed this threshold, they would never come out again. They would be sacrificed and their blood used to resurrect this Anu, or perhaps they’d be deliberately infected with the virus and used to spread the disease. He couldn’t allow either to happen. If this was where the road ended for him, so be it, but the hell if he wasn’t taking these monsters with him.

  Lightning crackled from the toroid, shot straight through the floor and up the walls, converging at the center of the ceiling.

  “Das müssen wir jetzt tun,” Knight Mask said and crouched over the body of Anu. They’d removed it from the body bag and stripped it of its death mask and robes. “Ich weiss nicht, wie lange das noch dauern wird.”

  “Kneel,” the woman said.

  The men behind Anya, Evans, and Jade drove them to their knees beside the corpse.

  “Who will be first?” the woman asked.

  Evans looked first at Anya, then at Jade. He stared deeply into her eyes when he spoke.

  “I’ll do it. Just, please, let the others go.”

  “How very noble,” the woman said, “but this is not a negotiation.”

  A wet thuck.

  Jade’s eyes widened. Her lips parted. She made a gurgling sound and blood dribbled from her lower lip.

  Evans glanced down at her chest. Caught a fleeting glimpse of the tip of the blade protruding from between her breasts before the woman retracted it.

  “No,” he cried. “Please God, no.”

  Jade toppled forward onto the remains, the light already fading from her eyes as her blood washed over the desiccated flesh of the creature.

  Evans tried to roll her over with his shoulder, pressed his cheek against hers, searched for any sign—

  A sharp blow to the back of his head. His eyes crossed. Darkness gathered in his peripheral vision. He struggled to remain conscious. Fought through the pain and nausea to get to his feet. Brayed like a wounded animal and lunged at the woman.

  The men caught him by the arms and dragged him backward, against the wall. The butt of a rifle to the gut and he was again on his knees, gasping for breath he couldn’t seem to catch. They hurled Anya to the ground beside him, her face awash with tears.

  “Do not think you have been spared,” a man in a reflective ma
sk said. “Anu will be hungry when he awakens.”

  Faint wisps of steam erupted from between the stones. The air grew hotter by the second.

  “Beeile dich!” the woman shouted, her voice barely audible over the rumbling.

  She held out her open hand to the man in the knight mask, who placed the handle of the silver canister in her palm. It looked just like it did in the petroglyphs, far too plain for the awesome might it contained. She set it down in the center of the toroid, where the electromagnetic forces caused it to slowly start spinning, faster and faster with every revolution until it levitated from the floor. The lid popped open and the contents rose above the rim. A blur of vials, spinning as though in an invisible centrifuge.

  Evans slipped his bound wrists under his rear end, fed his legs through.

  “It is working!” the woman cried.

  She rejoined the others and the seven of them formed a circle around the room, halfway between the toroid and the walls. They cast aside their masks and revealed their true faces. The creature with the crocodilian face crouched in the doorway, watching the chest of the body on the floor rise and fall ever so slightly and the vessels plump beneath its skin.

  Evans made fists, pressed them together. Bit the tail end of the zip tie, tightened it until it cut into the flesh of his wrists. Raised his arms above his head. Brought them down against his hips as hard as he could, drawing his shoulder blades together, his elbows back and away.

  Unable to withstand the directional force, the tie snapped, and he jumped to his feet.

  The creature with the feathered serpent mask turned to face him, its eyes locking onto his. It recognized what he intended to do and attempted to cut him off.

  Evans grabbed Anya and shoved her toward the opening in the wall.

  “Get out of here!”

  The creature nearly struck at her as it raced past, losing its crocodilian mask in the process.

  Lightning bolts crackled and snapped, filling the room. The scalding steam turned everyone around him into flickering silhouettes. A blossom of pure energy bloomed from the toroid. Started to swirl. It assumed a helical form, like the beam that had erupted from the top of the pyramid in Antarctica, only this one wouldn’t merely serve to catalyze the transformation, it would disperse the virus into the air.