by Greig Beck
* * * *
Francisco could hear his own breathing — a rasping combination of exhaustion and nerves. Louder than usual, it was true, but he still shouldn’t have been able to hear it above the sounds of the jungle. Where are all the forest creatures? Have we frightened them into silence?
Alfraedo called a halt just over two hours into the search. The trail they followed was faint, but the scatterings of machinery parts and sections of broken foliage were a useful guide. Francisco could not shake the unpleasant suspicion that it was almost too easy to track the men. Alfraedo reached out his hand to a broad leaf at head height - it came away sticky with blood. He pulled free one of his revolvers and held it up beside his face as he whispered over his shoulder, ’Silencio.’ He hunched down and carefully moved forward.
Francisco noticed the men had bunched up — no one wanted to be too far away from the main group. Even he found himself walking so close behind the large and reassuring frame of Alfraedo that he accidentally kicked the man’s heels several times. The foliage they pushed through was wet; even in the dark, Francisco could see glistening blood and gore. It was everywhere: on their clothes, their skin; it dripped down on them and squelched beneath their feet. It was clear to Francisco that someone was very badly hurt, or dead.
Francisco knew he was breathing harder and faster, and Alfraedo half turned to him to slowly bring the muzzle of his gun to his lips, before waving them on. Francisco’s mouth immediately dried, but he gulped anyway.
The moon broke from the clouds and lit a clearing just behind a thin veil of tangled vines and ferns. A figure sat naked and alone in the centre of the silvery open space. The powerful frame seemed misshapen, and was hunched over what looked like a large, skinned monkey. The creature held the object to its face, jaws working, burrowing.
Alfraedo made a guttural sound and parted the curtain of green. He took a single step forward, straightened his back and trained his light on the figure. It seemed oblivious to the shaking beam and continued to gorge itself on the carcass in its hands.
A floating sensation filled Francisco’s head, as if it was disconnected from the rest of him. He realised his knees were shaking and his heart pounding. He too moved forward, just one small step, barely aware of the movement.
The other men entered the clearing, forming a line either side of Alfraedo, their lanterns illuminating the space with a yellow glow.
‘Hey, señor ...’Alfraedo’s usually strong voice sounded small and frightened, and ended with a little quiver. He swallowed and tried again. ‘Excuse me, señor.’
This time the naked figure looked up. Francisco gasped as he recognised the face: the priest.
The man’s long colourless face, the stark eyes, could have been a carnival mask floating in the torch beams. Blood and viscera coated his arms to the elbows and also his beard, as if he had pushed his entire head into the corpse he held. As Francisco’s gaze fell on the carcass in the priest’s hands, he recognised it as that of a human being.
Bile rose in his throat as he recalled the desecration of flesh that had once been the American soldiers. So this is our jaguar, he thought as he opened his eyes once more on the terrible scene. Santa Madre de Dios, he whispered and crossed himself with a shaking hand.
The lifted lanterns also served to illuminate the forest behind the bloody figure. Several carcasses dangled from branches, their ankles bound and throats crushed. The faces of some were bloated and darkened by settling blood, indicating they had been hung upside down while they still lived. With others, it was impossible to tell, as the skin had been ripped from their bodies and flung into higher branches to hang there like drying garments after washing day.
‘We have been waiting for you.’ The voice seemed to well up from deep within the man, as though his vocal cords had receded into his core. He smiled, showing row upon row of needle-like teeth, still coated with flesh and gristle from the feast he had been enjoying. He turned his head to look at the bodies hung behind him and smiled again. ‘Yes, we took them all ... we needed them.’
He turned back and his eyes bored into Francisco. ‘As we need you. As we need all of you.’
Francisco could smell the acrid tang of sour sweat and urine among the men he stood with. This is what fear smells like, he thought, as two of the men holding lanterns fled back into the jungle. He would have liked to run as well, but his legs refused to do anything more than shake.
There was a roar like thunder that shook the trees around them and made Francisco cringe and cover his ears in pain and terror. The priest vanished, and Francisco felt a breeze pass by him. He assumed González had entered the jungle in pursuit of the men.
Without the priest’s physical presence, the spell was broken and Francisco felt his legs return to him. Just as he was contemplating his own escape, the priest reappeared, both men clasped in his hands. One hung by the ankle, moaning, his leg clearly broken, a shard of bone extruding through the flesh. The other was held by the throat, the priest’s hand compressing flesh and bone to about a quarter of its normal size. The man’s head wobbled as if held to the torso by skin alone.
González dropped the men onto the pile of human debris at his feet. ‘I am sated now,’ he said. ‘They will be for later.’ He looked at the hanging bodies again. ‘All are needed; all will join with us by being consumed.’
Alfraedo lifted his gun and fired five shots. Despite the close range, he only managed three hits; the bullets making a damp thwacking sound as they struck the priest’s chest. González made no move to dodge them; it was as if he welcomed them, Francisco thought; as though he wanted to test his body against them — and found himself to be superior.
González opened his mouth and roared again. It was an inhuman sound that conjured images of hell and cold and darkness, and made Francisco’s bowels loosen in terror. In a blur, the priest was in front of Alfraedo, his hand around the large man’s throat. He lifted him in one hand, and Francisco heard squeaking noises come from the mining manager’s nose and mouth.
Francisco was weeping with dread now. He retched, bile spilling onto his silver goatee. The men with him had fallen to their knees; they looked as though they were praying to the priest, even though he was now something very different. González brought Alfraedo’s face close to his own and smiled, his needle-sharp teeth glistening red in the moonlight. He dug his taloned fingers into the meat of Alfraedo’s neck and ripped away a large flap of skin from the front of his throat. Arterial blood spurted over the priest’s face and shoulders. He opened his mouth, wider than seemed humanly possible, and the red fountain sprayed into its black cavity. Even before the body was drained, González opened his hand and let Alfraedo flop to the ground, his legs and arms still twitching as though being touched by an electrical current.
Francisco was running — he didn’t know how — his legs must have just taken over. He hadn’t even thought of reaching for his gun; it remained in its holster, forgotten. He had dropped his flashlight — he couldn’t remember when or where — all logic had been washed away by a tidal wave of fear, revulsion and panic. He had made it through the first barrier of ferns when he was knocked from his feet by a blow so powerful he heard the sickening crunch of the large bone in his thigh breaking before he felt it. Then the pain came and it was excruciating; mercifully, he passed out.
Consciousness returned too soon. His ankles were bound together and he was being dragged along the ground, tied to other bodies in some ghastly procession of cadavers and weakly struggling men. He didn’t bother fighting; like a small animal in the jaws of a predator, he knew he was without hope. He knew his fate: he and the others were little more than sacks of food to be consumed at leisure by something that was no priest, was no man at all really. Indeed, it was something probably older and infinitely more powerful than any mortal. Perhaps demons do exist after all, he thought in his near delirium.
The moon glowed above as they broke into another clearing. In the silvery light, Francisco could make o
ut an enormous banyan tree and a stone building enfolded in its heavy embrace. As he and the other men were dragged up the steps and into the darkness, he smelled the charnel-house odour from inside. His body convulsed in one last desperate act of resistance and he began to yell and struggle.
The procession stopped and the priest looked back at him briefly, gave his needle-sharp smile and licked his lips. Then the movement started again, the column of writhing flesh dragged into the stone building.
Francisco wailed as they entered the pitch darkness. There would be no rescue, no merciful angels coming to save him because he had spent his life aiding his fellow humans. No, he would come to his end in a foul-smelling dungeon at the hands of an evil that was too horrible to contemplate.
Francisco finally remembered the gun still at his hip. He pulled it free and placed the barrel in his mouth. As he felt himself being tipped into a dark, acrid cavity in the floor, his last thought was that he was being pulled down into the very depths of hell.
He pulled the trigger.
* * * *
THIRTEEN
A
imee sat in her cabin staring at the mobile phone and computer on her desk. Both were useless as communication devices now that the uplink to the satellite had been destroyed.
Things were unravelling quickly and she wished Francisco and Alfraedo would return. She almost hoped they hadn’t managed to find the saboteurs; there was enough tension in the camp without having to look after prisoners as well.
She switched off the lantern in her cabin and peered through the thin curtains out to the clearing. A few shapes moved about, some ambling, some darting. In the dark, the jungle itself seemed closer, thicker, more menacing and malevolent. She shuddered and dropped the curtain.
She undressed, dragged a damp T-shirt over her head and lay down on the rumpled bed. Things will be better in the morning. They always look better in the morning, she thought. She closed her eyes. A bead of perspiration tickled her temple as it ran from her forehead, her feet itched, and the still air felt like warm syrup as she dragged it into her lungs. She put one arm behind her head and immediately smelled her own sour body odour. Nice, she thought as she exhaled noisily through compressed lips.
Dawn wasn’t far away, but sleep wouldn’t come. There was something nagging at her, whispering to her in the dark, just out of focus, refusing to become clear to her fatigued mind. Aimee groaned as she pulled herself up and swung her legs over the side of her bed. She rubbed her face, and sat in silence for a few minutes holding her head. She grabbed her canteen from the table top and sipped loudly — the water tasted like plastic. She wished she had a metal container — they always made the water seem cooler. But you couldn’t use metal in the jungle; it rusted, everything rusted. The germ of a thought bloomed in her tired mind.
She stood up and felt in the darkness for her computer. She hesitated a moment at the thought of using up its remaining battery power, then shrugged and switched it on, going immediately to her results for the bacterial DNA match. She had found close approximations to a number of microbial forms with many genus similarities, but her strange bug was stubbornly eluding that final step towards identification.
The effect the microbe had on living tissue was extraordinary and frightening. She had never heard of that level of biocorrosion in anything other than... Corrosion... Her fingers leapt across the keyboard as she pursued the thought. She dived into old research papers and mining notes — and found it. Her eyes flew over the notes as she read furiously. Just last decade, there had been a serious pipe failure on the North Slope of Alaska. It transpired that microscopic organisms were eating through the toughened pipes, leading to leakage and finally total failure. Could it be... ?
She skimmed down the pages looking for clues. She knew that the microorganisms she had been looking for, responsible for converting carbon to natural gas, were anaerobes — they did their job without oxygen or light, which was how they could function so deep below the earth. The biochemistry of their metabolisms was extraordinary and, by their very nature, they were carbon hungry. In simple terms, they ate carbons — that was how they instigated methanogenesis.
Aimee sat back for a second, before switching her screen images to the sample data from the infected men. Holy shit. She sat back again, placing both hands on her slick forehead. Of course, of course, of course. The bacteria ate carbon, all carbon. It was just doing what it existed to do — and had turned out to be very good at it. Carbon was the fourth-most abundant element in the universe and was present in all known life forms — including the human body, where it was the second-most abundant element after oxygen.
‘Oh God, no.’ Aimee pushed her hair back wearily. ’It’s fucking eating us.’
Clavicula occultus — her ‘hidden key’ to the world’s energy problem — wasn’t just converting prehistoric carbon into oil as she’d assumed; it was also consuming the carbon it found in the human body and literally converting it to something else. Maybe even something that may become petroleum in a few hundred thousand years.
Aimee looked up at the ceiling and the golden halo of light thrown by the lantern. She felt heavy, drained of all energy. The depth of the oil and gas chamber meant the microbes had been imprisoned, locked away from the upper world of light and air. The mile-thick barrier had been the human race’s first line of defence. Perhaps, while we’ve been looking for them, they’ve just been patiently waiting for us.
She crushed her eyes shut for a moment, then said softly, ‘What have Het loose upon the world?’
She needed to speak to someone but the phone on her desk was useless. Shit! Anger welled up inside her, then dissipated to leave a small knot of fear and frustration deep in her belly. She thought of Alex Hunter - he had once been her antidote to fear or loneliness. She needed him right now — his advice, and his strength.
Once again, her last days with him came back to her. She was the one who’d decided it would be best for both of them if he gave up being in the Special Forces; settled down, became more normal. At first she’d asked him, then, towards the end, she had demanded it, and had taken his refusal as him choosing the HAWCs over her. She hadn’t even had the courage to say her final farewell in person. She could still remember every detail: the floral notepaper, the blue ink, the words: You’ve made your choice, and it’s a bad one. I think it’s best if I don’t see you again . . . Goodbye forever, Alex.
She looked back up to the halo of light and spoke softly. ‘I wish I’d never said that.’
* * * *
‘I can’t reach Aimee.’
Jack Hammerson took the call from Alfred Beadman just after four in the morning. The normally urbane and relaxed chairman of GBR was in a state of high agitation. Hammerson rubbed his face with his free hand, feeling the stubble on his chin, and let the man speak on, allowing himself time to ease into full wakefulness.
‘Now there’s a quarantine order. The Paraguayan government has issued a no-go directive over that whole area of the jungle and they won’t say why. Something’s wrong, Jack, Aimee needs help. Is Captain Hunter down there yet?’ Beadman was breathing like a marathon runner.
‘Yes, Alfred, we know about the Q-order.’ Hammerson kept his voice calm, hoping to influence the older man. ‘Surprised us a bit, and did slow us up by a day or so, but we’ve made secondary plans and expect to be there by first light tomorrow. Now, when did she go offline?’
‘I don’t know exactly. She was supposed to call me about 10 pm. When I didn’t hear from her, I tried her phone, then her voice over internet link, then email, then even the site manager’s number — nothing’s getting through. Seems their satellite link is broken; and then when I called the government official in charge of mining and energy, he told me about the quarantine order. Would the quarantine order necessitate a blackout? Why? Jack, do you think you can use one of your satellites to check on her? I know you can zoom right in these days.’
Hammerson sighed. Why did people think he had s
ome sort of satellite joystick in his top drawer that he could use to swing around a multi-billion-dollar piece of orbiting telemetry at a moment’s notice? Still, he couldn’t get angry with Beadman for trying all avenues. He knew that Aimee was like a daughter to him.
‘Alfred, satellites are almost useless for vision down there — too much green for us to see anything clearly. But I know where the HAWCs are, and I think you know what Alex is like — he’ll find her, no matter where she is. He and his team are less than a day from making contact. We all just have to be patient. I’ll call you as soon as I get any further information. Now get some sleep. Good night, Alfred.’
Hammerson heard the chairman splutter a bit more, but hung up anyway. There wasn’t anything further he could share with him. He looked at the clock: 4:14 am. He’d give it a few hours then get another field update. Wouldn’t hurt to have Alex and the team punch it up another level.
