SNAFU: Unnatural Selection

by Christopher Golden

  The diamond mine appeared to have been abandoned for decades. The spiral walkway that wound around its circumference was narrow and crumbling and often vanished behind cascades of roots and vines.

  “Give me some more light,” Richards said.

  Graves clicked on the underbarrel beam on his rifle and shined it down into the pit. It spotlighted the surface of the water and penetrated its murky depths.

  “Jesus,” Warren whispered.

  Byrne stepped backward so quickly that he tripped over his own feet. He hit the ground with a shout that echoed throughout the still forest.

  * * *

  5:26 pm GMT

  The golden aura darkened to a rustic orange then to a deep crimson as the sun descended toward the Atlantic Ocean. Their route into the pit was even more hazardous than it had looked from above. The earth had fractured as it eroded and buckled beneath them with every step, forcing them to walk with their backs pressed against the uneven walls, as far from the edges as they could get. Chunks of dirt and rock broke loose and hit the water with echoing splashes and the occasional sickening thuck.

  Byrne dialed up his respirator and tried not to think about how horrible the stench must have been. The bodies nearest the surface didn’t appear to float so much as rest upon the ones beneath. The vile water was soupy with gobs of flesh. There was no telling how deep the pit was, but the prospect of there being several hundred men, women, and children in its depths made his stomach clench. What kind of monsters would cast them into the pit so unceremoniously when setting fire to the village to incinerate the remains would have been far more respectful, not to mention sanitary? If the carcasses hadn’t been roiling with disease before, they certainly were now.

  He wasn’t a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, but the manner of disposal seemed almost sacrilegious. These people had been thrown away like garbage, cast aside with no more thought than one might spare for a fast food wrapper. If Boko Haram was indeed responsible, then mankind was lost. Any religion – no matter the inaccuracy of the interpretation – that could spawn a faction capable of such callous disregard for the sanctity of life was a virus that needed to be eradicated before it damned the entire species to a mindless, predatory existence.

  There were entire sections where the trail had entirely eroded away. The others were better trained at picking their way down the exposed rock using the vegetation as leverage than he was, but the prospect of falling into that horrible pit strengthened his grip every bit as much as his resolve. He would have been content to examine the remains through the scope of a rifle, and probably would have if the bodies had been in better condition. Water was notoriously unkind to human remains, which absorbed fluid to the point of becoming unrecognizable gelatinous blobs. After this long, he didn’t hold out much hope that he’d be able to determine the mechanism by which these people had been envenomated, let alone be able to collect anything resembling a useful sample of blood or tissue. He was in way over his head and everyone knew it, but he was also their only hope of figuring this out quickly enough to prevent this kind of carnage from happening to any number of unsuspecting towns, whether here or around the world. For all they knew, even now a man could be walking into Times Square with the means of wiping out Midtown.

  A haze of mosquitos hung over the water, through which black flies twirled lazily. They alighted on the parts of the corpses that broke the surface and formed a living, seething second skin.

  Byrne descended the ramp into ankle-deep water beside Richards, who shielded his eyes from the setting sun as he stared high up into the distant canopy with an indecipherable expression on his face. Warren paced nervously while Anthony and Graves kept their rifles trained on the forest floor fifty feet up. Byrne realized that down here they were at a serious tactical disadvantage and hurriedly knelt beside the nearest body before he lost his nerve.

  The man’s black skin had faded to a whitish-gray and split when Byrne attempted to use a stick to draw the remains closer, forcing him to resort to using his hands. He took the man by the forearm and cringed when his fingers sunk into the waterlogged flesh.

  “I don’t like this,” Warren said.

  “You and me both,” Anthony said. “Hurry it up, would you?”

  “You’re more than welcome to help,” Byrne said as he dragged the dead man from the deeper water onto the ledge.

  Richards unslung his rifle and seated it against his shoulder. He leaned against the earthen wall and used the scope to look straight up into the rapidly darkening canopy, hundreds of feet overhead.

  Byrne carefully rolled the man onto his back. His eyes remained open, but a film clouded his irises, making them appear to have rolled all the way back into his head. His features were swollen and misshapen, his neck engorged and goitrous. He was naked, save for his underwear, which had taken on the greenish-brown color of the water.

  “There’s something up there,” Richards said.

  Warren followed Richards’s line of sight with his own rifle.

  “Hurry up, Doc,” Anthony said.

  The skin on the dead man’s chest was intact, but the distention masked any abnormal swelling of the lymph glands that would betray an acute immune response. Regardless, Byrne palpated both axillae, then the man’s neck—

  Putrid water gushed from what had initially looked like a goiter, but was merely a flap of skin. The water had entered through a wound beside the man’s trachea, just like the one on the bull back in the clearing.

  “I don’t see…” Warren said. “Wait. There. What in the name of God…?”

  Byrne shoved the dead man aside and nearly fell into the deeper water in his hurry to grab another corpse. The woman wore a tattered nightgown that clung to her bloated form. He scraped her wet hair from her neck to reveal a similar wound. The man who floated up to the surface from beneath her rolled to his side and exposed a tear in the skin from his collarbone to his earlobe.

  “Move out,” Richards said. “Now, goddammit!”

  Someone jerked on the back of Byrne’s suit and he toppled to his rear end with a splash. He kicked at the water as he scooted away from the remains. His back struck the rock wall and still he splashed in a vain attempt to distance himself from the carnage. The way the water distended the flesh… if there were any violation of the integrity of the skin, the water would have leaked out. The only place it had done so was the neck, which meant the wound was not only the means of exsanguination, it was also the point of envenomation.

  Anthony grabbed him by the front of his suit and hauled him to his feet. The soldier’s eyes locked onto his.

  “Snap out of it, Doc. We’ve got to go.”

  Richards and Graves were already two tiers up and climbing fast. Warren reached down from the next level and helped Byrne pull himself up.

  Byrne felt himself climbing, but seemed detached from his physical form. His mind reeled at the implications of what he’d discovered. The truth had been staring him right in the face the entire time.

  They didn’t follow the winding route, but rather scaled the crumbling path from one level to the next, using whatever outcroppings they could find.

  The light of the setting sun bled into darkness. The other men became silhouettes and the branches high above blended into the night sky.

  A faint beeping sound.

  Richards abruptly stopped climbing and shed his backpack. He knelt and removed the case containing his tablet from inside.

  “What did you see up there?” Byrne asked.

  In response, Warren thrust his rifle into Byrne’s chest and inclined his chin upward.

  Byrne raised the IAR to his shoulder and pressed his cheek to the stock. The view through the scope was disorienting at first, but as his eye adjusted he was able to distinguish the thick, leafy boughs from the shadows. There was something else up there, something he couldn’t quite—

  “Christ,” he whispered.

  There were bodies in the trees. Human bodies. Way up in the
treetops. Suspended by their feet, their arms dangling beneath them, swaying on the breeze.

  Warren snatched his rifle back.

  “How did they get all the way up there?” Byrne whispered.

  “A better question would be what the hell is capable of getting them up there?” Graves said.

  “Would you guys shut up?” Anthony said. “I think I hear something.”

  Byrne dialed down his respirator and held his breath in an effort to better hear. A reddish light bloomed from his left. He turned to see Richards trying to shield the glow from his tablet. On the screen was a satellite image, only the contrast was all wrong. Everything was dark purple and blue, with the exception of a ring at the center of the screen composed of red and orange dots that constricted as he watched.

  Byrne realized with a start that he was looking at thermal imaging from the GEOS 2 satellite, which must have finally been overhead.

  “We’re surrounded,” Richards whispered. He looked up at Byrne, who was thankful he couldn’t see the man’s face through the reflection of the heat signatures on his face shield.

  A high-pitched sound from the distance.

  Byrne looked up toward the forest above and this time clearly heard a sound that made his blood run cold.

  The screeching of monkeys.

  * * *

  7:56 pm GMT

  The screaming of primates reached a deafening crescendo, then abruptly ceased. The resulting silence was somehow even worse.

  Richards had dropped the tablet in favor of his rifle and all four men quietly fanned out to better cover the entire circumference of the diamond mine.

  Byrne’s pulse rushed in his ears as he scrutinized the dark forest floor, now a mere fifteen feet above them. The red and orange ring on the tablet at his feet continued to shrink in almost imperceptible increments. If whatever was up there had been able to lay waste to an entire town, what chance did the five of them have?

  “What the hell us up there?” Anthony whispered.

  “Shut up or we’ll find out!” Graves whispered. “There’s still a chance—”

  “They know we’re here,” Richards whispered.

  Byrne knelt and picked up the tablet with trembling hands. The image was dark and he was unable to clearly gauge the scale, but if each conglomeration of colored pixels corresponded to an individual organism, they were more than surrounded, they were easily outnumbered thirty-to-one. Their own shapes in the very middle appeared small and isolated as the ring continued to constrict—

  The image went black.

  “Full night vision,” Richards whispered.

  Byrne tapped the screen, but nothing happened. The satellite must have traveled out of range once more.

  He looked up toward the forest. He couldn’t see a blasted thing. The branches overhanging the pit were indistinct shapes composed of varying degrees of shadow. The upper reaches continued to sway.

  “Set your weapons for three-round bursts,” Richards whispered. “When they come, they’re coming all at once. We can’t afford to burn through our magazines too fast.”

  A loud cracking sound overhead, followed by crashing through the trees.

  Byrne glanced up in time to see a human body cartwheel from the lower canopy and streak past him. It hit the water with a splash that echoed away into the night.

  He recalled the bodies in the first diamond mine, the one into which they’d parachuted. At the time, their only intel had been the satellite images of the streets of Daru. They’d been expecting to find corpses everywhere. The bodies in the water hadn’t seemed out of place, but in retrospect, there hadn’t been any clearly identifiable trails like they’d followed to get here, and yet the bodies had been in roughly the same condition as the ones in the pit below him must have been sixteen hours ago.

  “Keep your eyes open, boys,” Graves whispered.

  Byrne swiped the screen and opened another map, one entirely composed of black and white. The magnetometer map wasn’t nearly as detailed as either the thermal or aerial images. The trees provided little more than texture, as their mineral content was vastly inferior to the strata from which they grew. The topography was revealed in a gray scale that varied with ferromagnetic content. Biological matter and rocks with low iron content appeared dark gray, while dense stone rich in mineral content was almost white. The black circle in the center corresponded to the diamond mine, the outer edges of which had been stripped to the bare dirt. The center was much brighter, as the bottom of the pit had yet to be mined. And leading away from it to the east was what almost looked like a faint white snake.

  Byrne glanced down at the water, then back at the magnetometer readout.

  It made total sense.

  A crackling sound above him.

  The branches along the edge of the pit shook. Byrne caught a blur of motion directly overhead. Leaves and blossoms fell from the trees like snow.

  “I found a way out—” Byrne started, but Richards shushed him.

  Byrne switched on his night vision apparatus and lowered it over his eyes. He could see the shapes in the bushes and the trees, but none of them clearly enough to tell what they were. They were obviously well adapted to hunting under the cover of darkness.

  The crackling sounds faded and a preternatural silence once more descended upon them.

  Byrne scooted to the edge and stared down into the water. There were bodies upon bodies beneath the living skein of insects.

  “Listen to me,” Byrne whispered. “There’s a way out—”

  A shrill cry shattered the stillness. Others joined it as the night came to life. Shadows burst from the undergrowth and exploded from the branches. They hit the ground and poured over the edge of the pit in a tidal wave of animalian ferocity.

  Warren shouted and gunfire erupted all around Byrne. The report near his ear was deafening and made everything sound tinny and hollow, as though he were trapped inside an air duct. Discharge flared from barrels. Byrne caught glimpses of bared teeth as muscular forms scurried down the dirt walls and leaped from the spiral ramp. Long brownish-red fur flowed from their bodies like flames.

  A spatter of blood struck his face shield a heartbeat before a simian shape plummeted past him toward the water. It hit one of the corpses and drove it under.

  Anthony screamed from Byrne’s right. The soldier toppled backward as he fired, his bullets chewing up the earthen wall. Slender arms slashed at his head and chest while jaws snapped at his throat. His isolation suit tore. He struggled and stumbled. Dropped his rifle. Lost his footing. Fell a half-dozen feet to the walkway below him. Before he could get back to his feet, they were upon him. His horrible cries echoed over the ruckus.

  Something heavy struck Byrne between his shoulders. Drove him to his knees. He felt claws in his back. Scratching against his hood. He reached behind him, grabbed a handful of fur, and flung the beast over the edge. What almost looked like an orangutan crossed with a chimpanzee streaked toward the bottom of the pit.

  Byrne climbed to his feet and grabbed Richards, who bellowed as he fired into the masses of creatures streaming from the jungle.

  “There’s only one way out of here!” Byrne shouted.

  If Richards had heard him over the shrieking and gunfire, he didn’t acknowledge him.

  “Listen to me, goddammit! Either we get out of here now or we’re all dead!”

  “We’re all dead regardless!”

  “Not if you follow me!”

  Byrne turned toward the water, took two running strides, and jumped out over the nothingness.

  * * *

  8:15 pm GMT

  Byrne’s stomach fluttered and he heard himself shout.

  He hit the water feet first. Felt something squish beneath his heels. And then he was immersed in the cool fluid.

  He flailed and struggled through the tangle of arms and legs. His exertions caused the flesh of the bodies trapped beneath the surface to dissociate from the bones. Even with the night vision goggles, he could barely
see a thing as he fought his way down through the corpses, crawling between and over and around them. He worked his way deeper and deeper until there became more space between the remains and he was able to see the rocky bottom.

  Water trickled into his isolation suit from the punctures in the back, but fortunately his respirator was still patent and the seal around his hood remained intact.

  He envisioned the magnetic signal on the map that had reminded him of a snake, how it had appeared to branch from the eastern side of the mine and turned—

  There!

  The hole was nearly concealed by the corpse wedged into it. The woman’s hair wavered like seaweed. Her rear end had entered the tunnel first, folding her forehead to her knees. Chunks of flesh and detritus sluiced past her on the subtle current. He grabbed her leg and pulled, but merely felt the bones in her knee dislocate.

  Something brushed his side.

  Byrne whirled to see Richards pass to his right and grip the woman by the shoulder. Together they leveraged her from the hole and sent her drifting back to join the others.

  Byrne didn’t waste any time. He slithered through the orifice and into a chute so narrow he had to use his hands to pull himself deeper into the earth.

  The ground beneath him slowly metamorphosed from coarse rock to stone that had been smoothed by time and running water. The walls withdrew enough for him to swim and he took full advantage. He banged his elbows and knees, hit his head and jammed his fingers. Squeezed past rotting remains and did everything in his power to restrain the growing panic inside of him.

  What if he was wrong? What if they were swimming into a dead end, or worse? The air supply in his respirator wouldn’t last forever, nor would his suit hold up to another attack.

  The tunnel constricted once more. The walls were sharp with broken rocks, the ground littered with fragments that threatened to cut through his gloves. Diamonds glimmered from the rubble. He got a grip on the walls and propelled himself from the end of the tunnel into a larger pool. The moment he felt the ceiling lift, he pushed himself to his hands and knees and raised his head out of the water.