SNAFU: Unnatural Selection

by Christopher Golden

  The ferocious wind has waned. He can see the indistinct outlines of the pilot and copilot through the dust settling upon the Pave Hawk’s windshield. He waves his arm over his head. Prays they’ll see him in time.

  He hears the thunk of the lock on the helicopter’s sliding door disengage.

  “Don’t get out!” he shouts.

  His voice reverberates in the quiet that falls upon the still town. He looks from one side of the street to the other. Glass glimmers from the rusted tin awnings beneath the broken second-story windows, through which he detects the faintest shifting of shadows.

  It’s already too late.

  * * *

  OCTOBER 18th

  45 HOURS AGO

  National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID)

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

  7:27 am EST

  12:27 pm GMT

  “This video footage was sent to Doctors Without Borders by a Ugandan physician named Samuel Odongo,” Dr Maryann Reilly said. The inverted image of the computer monitor reflected from her glasses. As the Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, she was one of the most powerful people within the hierarchy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a role belied by the fact that she looked like a cross between an owl and a stork in a pantsuit. “It was routed through the State Department and the CDC on its way to us.”

  “Where was it recorded?” Dr Alex Byrne asked. He was the chief pathologist of the Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch and in charge of outbreak investigations and surveillance. The primary role of the IDPB was determining the cause and process of pathogenesis – the origin and development of a new disease – by utilizing gross and microscopic examination, immunohistochemistry, and molecular evaluation. His responsibility was critical and time-sensitive. They needed to understand everything they possibly could about a potential outbreak if they hoped to have any chance of containing it.

  “Sierra Leone. Six days ago.”

  His mind raced as he watched the shaky footage. The quality was poor and suggested it was recorded on a cell phone. The voiceover was provided by a deep male voice and spoken in a language he neither recognized nor understood. Monkeys screeched in the background from the dense canopy of tropical trees surrounding a clearing, in the middle of which were several brown lumps with long fur.

  The camera approached and zoomed in on one of the carcasses. Flies crawled on its face, into its nose, over its unblinking eyes. Its tongue protruded from its snout and its lips were drawn back from its bared canines. A mane of golden-brown fur grew from its forehead to its haunches.

  “Papio papio,” the voice said, this time with a formal British accent. “The Guinea baboon.”

  The camera moved from one animal to the next. They were all in the same condition. Based upon the level of desiccation, Byrne estimated they’d been dead for somewhere between 72 and 96 hours, although with the humidity in Western Africa, it could have been longer. The dead animals appeared skeletal, their fur brittle and their skin clinging to their bones.

  “As you can clearly see, these primates appear malnourished and exhibit an advanced state of dehydration.” Odongo nudged the animal with his foot to demonstrate its underside. Its left flank peeled from the grass with a crackling sound. “There is no appreciable hypostasis, no postmortem pooling of blood in the tissues, as one would expect to find in any deceased mammal.”

  “Are we working under the assumption that we’re dealing with a potentially mutated form of cholera?” Byrne asked. “That level of dehydration could easily have been caused by acute diarrhea.”

  “Keep watching,” Reilly said. The expression on her face remained neutral, although she nervously clicked the nail of her middle finger with her thumb.

  The monitor issued a burst of static as the doctor knelt beside the baboon. He rolled it onto its back with his gloved hand. Its legs were stiff and remained flexed at the joints.

  “There is visible evidence of rigor mortis, proving conclusively that this animal has been deceased for less than twenty-four hours.”

  “That can’t be right,” Byrne said. “Not unless it was exsanguinated prior to its death.”

  “Shh.”

  The camera wobbled. Something made a clattering sound. The hand appeared again, only this time holding a scalpel, which the doctor used to hack off fistfuls of the baboon’s mane until he cleared a patch of grayish-black skin on its throat. Its trachea and musculature protruded from its taut, brittle flesh. He cut a straight incision beside the animal’s windpipe and two more perpendicular to it, one at either end, and retracted the flaps. No blood welled to the surface, nor was there more than the faintest hint on the silver connective tissue.

  “Is the animal’s skin intact?” Byrne asked. “What about the mucus membranes?”

  The aperture of the camera zoomed in and out to focus on the incision.

  “Those are questions I can’t answer.”

  Odongo turned the scalpel over and used the blunt end to pry the carotid artery from behind the sternoclydomastoid muscle. It was shriveled and tortuous. He pinched it between his fingers, inverted the scalpel, and cut straight down its length to reveal the hollow lumen.

  “There is no blood.” He let the animal roll back onto its side and slashed its belly open in a display of frustration. “Not one drop.”

  “It’s a hemorrhagic virus,” Byrne said.

  “We can’t afford to jump to any conclusions. The last thing we need is panic like we had with Ebola.”

  Odongo turned the camera on himself. His dark skin was beaded with sweat and his eyes were so bloodshot it appeared as though he hadn’t slept in days. The screeching of the monkeys grew fevered. He glanced back at the trees, then into the lens once more. It shook so badly in his hands that he became a blur. He said something in the other language and another man took the camera from him, steadying the image.

  “It is our concern that if this disease is viral, as I suspect, it could cross the barrier between species and trigger a spillover event.”

  Reilly stopped the recording, closed the file, and launched another containing six thumbnail images. She clicked the first and it expanded to fill the whole screen.

  “These satellite images were taken just over twenty-four hours ago.”

  The first showed a town surrounded by tropical forest. The buildings and roads were too small to demonstrate any kind of detail and must have been included to establish scale. The subsequent images each zoomed in a little more until an area defined as one hundred square meters was visualized. The buildings were slightly grainy and their edges indistinct, but there was no mistaking the shapes of the bodies lying in the streets.

  Byrne leaned closer to the screen. His pulse thrummed in his ears. He looked back at Reilly. Her expression confirmed his suspicions.

  “When do I leave?”

  * * *

  OCTOBER 19th

  16 HOURS AGO

  80 Miles West of Spain, 35,000 Feet Above the Atlantic Ocean, USA

  12:53 pm EST

  5:53 pm GMT

  There were more bodies than he could count. For as many of them as there were in the streets, he could only imagine how many lay dead inside their homes or in the various other buildings. The individual remains became so pixilated when he zoomed in on them that all detail was lost. There appeared to be some unquantifiable amount of blood on the ground surrounding them, but it was simply impossible to tell for certain.

  Byrne couldn’t afford to make any assumptions about their collective cause of death. He needed to consider every conceivable scenario, especially in an area surrounded by so much violence and political upheaval. He was far better prepared to handle a viral outbreak than an assault by a militant jihadist faction like Boko Haram.

  The buildings were in such a state that disrepair could easily be mistaken for the residua of a violent siege. There were holes in the rusted tin
roofs and entire sections of structures had collapsed in upon themselves. What appeared to be a market was concealed beneath rows of cloth and wooden awnings, the aisles between which were completely empty.

  Byrne leaned back and tapped his teeth with the end of his pen. There was something about that observation…

  The streets in which the majority of the corpses lay were main streets. Others were residential, as evidenced by the animal pens behind the main dwellings. The concentration of human remains was the key to the revelation. Whatever fate befell the population had come at night, when people were in their homes or the town center. While that didn’t necessarily preclude viral involvement, it did support the alternate narrative that an attack had come under the cover of darkness.

  Byrne rubbed his eyes and looked out the window. The sun set over the Atlantic, imbuing it with a crimson glow that sparkled upon the waves.

  There was something he was missing. He could feel it.

  He closed his eyes and imagined Dr Odongo entering the clearing with the baboon carcasses. They’d been dead for less than twenty-four hours, yet looked as though they’d been deceased for much longer than that. Something about it bothered him, beyond the obvious. Something that was staring him right in the face.

  He pictured the flies crawling all over their faces, into orifices they’d been unable to explore while their meals had been alive.

  And then it hit him.

  The carcasses were intact. The baboons had been dead for nearly a full day and not a single scavenger beyond the flies had made any attempt to consume their remains. There were no wild dogs fighting over the bodies or jackals laughing at a distance. There hadn’t even been evidence of vultures. The trees had been filled with screeching monkeys, not carrion birds, which would have pecked out the moist orbital globes first, then the bloated bellies and tender tongues.

  Byrne opened his eyes and again scrutinized the images on his laptop.

  The resolution wasn’t sharp enough to tell if there was any evidence the human corpses had been scavenged, but it was good enough to see there were no carrion birds perched on the rooftops or the telephone wires. There were no dogs roaming the streets. The only sign of life was a small herd of cattle clustered to one side of a fenced pasture. They were thin and had long fur, and were packed so closely together that it was impossible to tell one from the next, which begged the question: why were they alive while all of the men were dead? Had other species of livestock survived inside their pens? More importantly, why had the baboons died while whatever species of monkey shrieked from the trees survived?

  Viruses could be finicky when it came to interspecies transmission, but he couldn’t think of a single one that drew a distinction between species as closely related as primates.

  Again, he found every piece of evidence contradicting the next. Had an attacking force used a chemical weapon? That would explain the lack of scavengers, if not the survival of the bovines. Surely an agent like that would leave traces behind, which he supposed he’d find out soon enough.

  Byrne scrutinized the forest encircling the Sierra Leonean town and realized just how easily the entire place could have been surrounded without anyone knowing. Heck, it could still have been surrounded when the picture was taken, for all he could see through the trees.

  He again looked at the cattle. They were at the edge of the field farthest from the jungle, their hind quarters crammed into a corner, their heads aligned to form an imposing wall of long, curved horns. They all faced uphill toward the dense canopy from which Byrne could almost hear the screaming of monkeys.

  * * *

  2.9 Miles East-Northeast of Daru

  Kailahun District, Eastern Province, Sierra Leone

  October 19th

  3:27 am GMT

  Byrne had never experienced free fall, nor had he ever had any desire to do so. Until they fastened him into his harness, a part of him had genuinely believed they were just screwing with him and they’d end up landing on some gravel airstrip in the middle of nowhere, not hurtling through the darkness with the wind peeling his cheeks back to his ears. It was all he could do to keep from screaming and embarrassing himself in front of men who already made no secret about how little they thought of him. He was unlike them in every way, although if the man to whom he was harnessed didn’t pull the cord on the blasted chute soon, no one would be able to tell them apart after they hit the ground.

  A dense canopy of kroma, ceiba, and red ironwood trees rushed toward them. He caught a glimpse of Daru in the distance before it vanished behind rugged foothills. The man attached to his back, Captain Trevor Richards of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, pinned Byrne’s arms to his sides and nosed them both downward. The wind screamed in their ears as they accelerated straight toward a seamless mass of two hundred-foot-tall trees.

  It hit Byrne with a start that they were going to crash through the canopy, whether they slowed down or not.

  The individual leaves drew contrast from the mass of foliage. Even at the very top, the branches were as thick as Byrne’s arms. He envisioned what would happen if they struck one at what had to be a hundred miles an hour—

  A sharp tug knocked the wind out of him. Yanked him upward. The parachute expanded with a popping sound. His feet swung down beneath him. He drew his knees to his chest a heartbeat before they slammed through the upper canopy.

  A blur of brown and green. Boughs struck his feet and rump. Sent him careening.

  “Straighten your legs, dammit!” Richards yelled into his ear.

  Byrne did as he was instructed. A branch raked across his visor and nearly tore the Tyvek hood of his camouflaged isolation suit.

  A sudden jolt.

  The harness yanked his groin into his gut. His breath returned with a gasp.

  They spun on the parachute cords. The trees whipped past in a blur. He looked down and saw his feet swirling over a snarl of branches and, beneath them, a seamless stretch of darkness. Leaves and twigs rained soundlessly down toward it.

  “Hang on,” Richards said.

  “I don’t have a whole lot of choice—”

  The marine disengaged the parachute release. They were falling before Byrne could finish his thought.

  Branches snapped and bark burst from the boughs. They passed through the lower canopy and into a ring of trunks.

  The calculations defied him. A hundred and fifty feet. More than four hundred pounds between them, accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared. The force of the impact with the ground would be—

  Another sharp tug and a pop as the reserve chute deployed.

  They careened into the darkness, spinning in wild circles.

  They weren’t slowing down fast enough. They’d hit the ground like sacks of flour thrown from the roof of an apartment complex.

  Byrne caught glimpses of the ground to either side; shadowed shrubs and mats of detritus, rising far too fast, while beneath him, there was still only darkness.

  They passed through the ground without encountering resistance. The ragged edges of the earth rose rapidly above them, along with the forest floor. The walls around them were rounded and bare. Walkways had been carved into the dirt in a spiral pattern that led all the way down to the bottom of the pit, which materialized beneath their feet mere seconds before Richards pulled the toggles and they swung upward.

  They splashed down into two feet of water, slid through the soft mud, and stumbled forward to dissipate their momentum.

  Richards released the lock on Byrne’s harness and shoved him out of the way so he could collapse the chute. The other Marines burst from the canopy and streaked into the pit with a surprising amount of grace. They alighted like fowl and bundled up their parachutes with practiced ease.

  “What is this place?” Byrne asked.

  “An illegal diamond mine,” Richards said. “This whole country is riddled with them.”

  Byrne couldn’t see a thing. The only light was provided by the dim reflection upon the stagnant wate
r of what precious little moonlight passed through the dense canopy hundreds of feet above him. There were stacks of sieves and mounds of sifted earth, but no indication anyone was there, or had been for several days.

  “Saddle up, boys,” Richards said. “We’ve got a hike ahead of us.”

  Byrne waded toward the uneven ramp that would lead them to the surface. The water was warm and its surface was alive with mosquitoes and black flies. His foot snagged on something and he fell into the water. He cursed and smeared the mud from his visor. He felt a lump on top of his tactical helmet and remembered the night vision goggles mounted to it.

  The others slogged past him without offering to help him up. They already wore their goggles, which looked like cameras with tapering telescopic lenses that barely fit inside their hoods.

  Byrne stood and manipulated the goggles through the fabric. It took some doing, but he eventually aligned them with his eyes.

  The world transformed into a disorienting spectrum of green and gray, through which the others moved like wraiths. He struck off after them before they could leave him behind, only this time with more caution. He looked down into the water and stopped dead in his tracks.

  The object that had tripped him floated to the surface. It was a body, its skin distended by absorbed fluids and decomposition. It slowly settled back into the muck.

  Byrne turned in a circle. The entire pool was full of corpses.

  “I’m so glad I can’t smell anything with this suit on,” he whispered.

  He picked his way through the remains and climbed out of the water. He had to jog to catch up with the others.

  * * *

  Daru, Kailahun District, Eastern Province, Sierra Leone

  6:03 am GMT