There were maybe a dozen corpses in the murky pool, one of them partially ensnared by the cords of a parachute.
Byrne shouted and climbed to his feet. Looked straight up and turned in a circle. There was no sign of movement from the trees, no shadows scurrying over the edge of the pit.
Richards burst from the surface and splashed in Byrne’s direction.
“Go, go, go!”
He shoved Byrne ahead of him.
Warren emerged from the water and slogged toward where Byrne and Richards started up the ramp. Graves was right behind him.
“Jesus,” Warren said. “They were coming from everywhere!”
“They took down Anthony like he was nothing,” Graves said. “Just swarmed over him.”
Richards grabbed Byrne by the shoulder and turned him around.
“Can they swim?”
Byrne shrugged from the man’s grasp and tried to recall what had happened after the one he threw hit the water, but couldn’t remember anything beyond it landing on one of the corpses.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Primates don’t instinctively swim. Rivers generally serve as geographic barriers for zoonotic diseases. At least until they spread to man.”
“What the hell are they?” Graves asked.
Byrne had no answer. Primates like the chimpanzee – if that was even what these things were – were notoriously aggressive and thus a threat for spreading contagions, but he’d never heard of them attacked as a pack.
“It doesn’t matter what they are,” Richards said. “Right now we need to find a defensible position and call for retrieval.”
“No chopper’s going to be able to get to us through these trees,” Warren said.
“Then we’re going to have to get to town.”
Richards pushed past Byrne and jogged up the spiral ramp toward the jungle. The others hurried to catch up. The rain had made the ramp muddy and treacherous, slowing their pace to a maddening extent. The forest was little better. Any trail they might have left that morning was concealed by heavy branches bowing beneath the weight of the accumulated water. This time they made no effort at stealth. Richards took the lead and ran with his rifle at port arms, using it to clear his way. Graves brought up the rear. He jogged backward whenever the foliage granted enough space and then sprinted through the underbrush to catch back up with the rest of them.
Byrne’s legs ached and his chest burned. He was under no pretense about his relationship with these men. If he lagged, they would leave him behind without a second thought. So he pushed through the pain until he feared his body would simply give out, then pushed some more.
Richards suddenly stopped, crouched beside a broad tree trunk, and raised his rifle.
Byrne gratefully collapsed behind him and tried to catch his breath. He could see the slope leading downhill into Daru over Richards’s shoulder. The town somehow seemed even more deserted than they had left it. The darkness itself appeared to have taken up residence inside the buildings. A hazy mist rolled through the streets.
“Do you see anything?” Warren whispered.
Richards slowly swept his sightline across the main street one more time before answering.
“No.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
“We have to be sure. If they catch us out in the open we’re done.”
Graves crept up beside Richards. The two exchanged whispered words, then Graves flattened himself to the ground and squirmed into the tall grass.
“How did you know that tunnel was there?” Warren whispered.
“There was an anomaly on the magnetometric readout,” Byrne said, “a white shape suggesting extremely high ferromagnetic content and unaffected by the topography. It looked like it led toward the mine where we first landed and I didn’t remember seeing the same kind of trails they left after dragging the bodies so—”
“You figured they had to be connected for the bodies to have ended up in the other mine.”
“Diamond mines are full of iron ore, the erosion of which causes a chemical reaction that produces iron oxide, a ferromagnetic precipitate that accumulates on exposed surfaces.”
“Which served to outline the entire system on the map.”
“Maybe not the entire system, but definitely the part with water.”
Warren clapped him on the shoulder.
“That’s one I owe you,” he whispered, and crawled over beside Richards.
Byrne caught movement from his peripheral vision and looked past the others to see Graves step out from behind a ramshackle structure with a tarp roof. He held up his right fist and pumped it up and down to signal them to hurry up.
Richards and Warren broke from cover and sprinted out into the open. Byrne raced to catch up with them. The slope was slick and the grasses tangled around his ankles. He was halfway to the dirt road leading into town when Richards and Warren both stopped and looked uphill, to their right, toward the forest.
Byrne slid to a halt and followed their line of sight to where the trail they had followed mere hours ago vanished into the shadows.
The upper canopy came to life with simian screams.
* * *
9:42 pm GMT
Dark shapes burst from the trees and rained down upon the field. They hit the ground and without slowing charged downhill toward town. They used their arms for propulsion and swung their haunches behind them, utilizing a loping, almost sideways gait to crash through the tall grass at a staggering rate of speed.
“Run!” Graves shouted.
Byrne ran for everything he was worth, lifting his knees to free his ankles and desperately trying to keep up with the others, who pulled farther away from him with every stride.
What little head start they had on the creatures tearing through the weeds was rapidly diminishing. The grasses swayed and bowed to mark their passage, but only offered the occasional glimpse of a hunched silhouette or a streak of flowing fur.
Byrne tripped.
Hit the ground.
Pushed himself up and half-ran, half-limped toward the road, where Richards and Warren were already dashing after Graves toward the open storefront they’d used as their makeshift laboratory.
The screeching of primates grew louder by the second.
Byrne glanced one final time at the violently shaking weeds before he hit the main road and couldn’t see them anymore through buildings that didn’t look like they’d stand up to a strong wind, let alone any kind of assault.
“Hurry!” Graves shouted.
The others blew past him into the store and down the darkened aisles. Graves dragged the shutters across the opening and appeared ready to seal them, whether Byrne made it or not. The gap was barely wide enough to allow him to slide through when he reached it. He sidestepped Graves and slammed into a rack that crashed to the floor, sending him careening across the wooden planks with its contents.
Graves slammed the shutters closed and whirled to face Byrne.
“Help me!”
Byrne struggled to his feet and held the shutters while Graves rummaged for anything he could use to secure them. He found a length of chain behind the counter, wrapped it around the inner handle and a support post, and jammed a screwdriver through the links to hold it in place.
They headed away from the partition and toward the back of the store, where Richards stood on top of an overturned shelf, repeatedly slamming the legs of a metal chair up into the ceiling. The flimsy wood cracked and splintered. He cast the chair aside. Jumped up. Caught the edge. Jerked on it until a section of the ceiling collapsed and sent him toppling to the floor.
Warren climbed onto the shelf, kicked off the wall, and pulled himself through the hole into the darkness.
The screaming outside was deafening. The creatures hurled themselves against the shutters, over and over. Byrne couldn’t bring himself to turn around to make sure the chain was holding.
Graves climbed up behind Warren and reached back down for Byrne, who leaped past his outs
tretched hand and strained to scurry up into what looked like a small apartment. Graves tugged on the back of his suit and dragged him away from the orifice so Richards could climb through behind him.
“Secure all points of ingress!” Richards yelled.
The door at the back of the main room was serviced by a rickety flight of wooden stairs leading down to an alley filled with garbage. Warren overturned a table, flattened it to the door, and slid a threadbare couch against it. Richards ran to the bedroom, flipped the mattress over the broken window, and attempted to brace it with a dresser, a trunk, and anything else he could find. Byrne followed Graves down the steep, narrow staircase to the front door on the street level and helped rip up the floorboards to brace the door against the stairs.
Richards posted Graves at the top of the entryway and helped Warren wrench the washbasin from the wall and wedge it into the frame of the broken window in the kitchen. Byrne stared at the vaguely human-shaped bloodstain on the floor and the smears leading up the wall and to the barricaded window.
He stumbled backward, braced his back against the wall, and slid down to his rear end. He stared up at the ceiling. The wood was weathered and bowed and there were spots where he was certain he could see the night sky.
“We’re going to die in here,” he whispered.
Outside, the shrill cries ceased.
The silence was infinitely worse.
* * *
10:26 pm GMT
“I transmitted the emergency signal,” Richards whispered from the bedroom, where he watched the alley through a gap beside the mattress barely wide enough for the barrel of his rifle.
They hadn’t seen or heard the creatures in close to twenty minutes. The more time passed, the edgier they got.
“So what do we do now?” Byrne whispered.
“We wait.”
“How long?”
“You have to remember,” Graves whispered from the top of the staircase, where he watched the front door down the barrel of his rifle. “This mission’s off the books. We’re not officially even here.”
“What does that mean?” Byrne whispered.
“Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie and make you feel better?”
“The truth.”
“We’re on our own.”
“They’ll come,” Warren whispered. “They can’t afford for us to be found here by anyone else. There will be too many questions.”
“They’ll just firebomb the whole town and make it look like an accident.”
“Would you two shut up?” Richards whispered. “They’re not going to firebomb the town. They need what we have.” He looked pointedly at Byrne. “They need what he has.”
“I don’t have anything,” Byrne whispered. “There’s no outbreak. No virus.”
“But they don’t know that. For all they know we’ve collected the next Ebola virus or a potential biological weapon of mass destruction. Either one is worth its weight in gold to the powers that be.”
Warren peered down at the alley through the gap beside the dented metal tub.
“They won’t leave us here,” he whispered. “They’ll come for us.”
“And then they’ll turn this town into a crater you can see from space,” Graves whispered.
“That kind of thing doesn’t happen,” Byrne whispered. “There are protocols, especially when dealing with virulent organisms.”
“You just keep telling yourself that, Doc.” Graves chuckled. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd there have been more potential pandemics since the turn of the century than in the entire history of man before that?”
A creaking sound overhead.
Conversation ceased and all eyes looked to the ceiling.
“Something’s up there,” Byrne whispered.
“You think?”
“Shh!”
Motes of dust sparkled in the dim moonlight that passed through the roof. Byrne watched them billow on a current of air he couldn’t feel.
Another creaking sound. This time from closer to the bedroom.
Warren aimed his rifle at the ceiling and slowly approached, placing each foot silently on the wooden floor.
A shadow passed over a tiny hole and the column of motes disappeared.
“I have a shot,” Warren whispered.
“You could bring the whole roof down on our heads,” Richards whispered.
“One shot won’t compromise the structure.”
“We can’t take that risk. Hold your fire and wait for extraction.”
More creaking from directly above Graves, who slowly stood and aimed his rifle straight up.
A loud thump and a metallic clang. From below them.
Byrne scurried across the floor and looked down into the store. All was dark and still. No hint of movement.
“They’re testing our perimeter,” Richards whispered.
“They’re animals, for Christ’s sake,” Graves whispered. “They aren’t capable of—”
A shriek of scraping metal.
Warren ran back into the kitchen and threw his shoulder into the washbasin before it could slide from the sill. He shoved it back into place with a groan.
“Eyes open,” Richards whispered.
“They can’t get in here,” Graves whispered. “We have every ingress secured.”
“They took out the entire town,” Byrne whispered.
“While they were sleeping.”
“Shh!” Richards whispered.
A faint scratching sound. Overhead. Moving stealthily above the bedroom. Richards followed its progress with his eyes.
Clang.
Byrne looked down through the hole. Caught movement from his peripheral vision. Turned and saw a screwdriver roll across the floor. The chain through the handle on the shutters unraveled with a clanking sound and slithered to the bare wood.
“Help me!” he shouted, and frantically searched for anything he could drag over the hole.
“Use the table,” Graves said. He ran toward the barricaded rear door.
“Don’t abandon your post!” Richards shouted.
Graves dragged back the couch and pried the table from behind it.
Several shapes streaked past below Byrne. He heard the clatter of nails on metal and wood.
“Hurry!”
Graves inverted the table and slid it toward Byrne, who maneuvered it over the hole and climbed on top of it. Impact from beneath it nearly knocked him off. He grabbed one of the legs for balance.
Another blow. The table lifted from the floor and clapped back down.
Screaming erupted from all around them at once. The scratching sound on the roof turned to pounding, then to what almost sounded like thunder. Beams cracked and planks split.
Warren stepped away from the window, switched his AIR to full automatic, and fired up into the rafters. Dozens of bullet holes opened in the old wood, through which Byrne caught glimpses of long fur. Blood trickled through the gaps and bodies tumbled down the slope.
“The window!” Graves shouted.
The washbasin toppled inward at the same time there was a loud crash from the bottom of the front stairs.
Warren lunged for the washbasin as an avalanche of brownish-red fur filled the window. He yelled and fired into the mass of bodies, which drove him backward and to the floor. His shots went wild, hitting the wall on their way toward—
Byrne dove and tackled Graves. The bullets whipped past them and chewed up the bedroom wall, on the other side of which Richards retreated as he fired at the mattress, around which clawed appendages carved into the wood in an effort to squeeze past the barricade.
Graves pushed himself up from the ground and looked at Byrne as though seeing him for the first time. He gave a curt nod, rose to his feet, and bellowed as discharge spit from his barrel.
Warren screamed and struggled to squirm out from beneath the creatures that slashed at his isolation suit and pried at his hood. They snapped at his face shield and bit his forearms with teeth that lo
oked like those of a chimpanzee, only with long hooked canines. His rifle clattered to the ground. He used both hands in an attempt to keep them away from his—
One of the creatures tore through his hood and clamped onto his neck.
Warren’s cries abruptly ceased. His lips framed inaudible words. The vasculature beneath his skin darkened and spread like purple lightning bolts.
The table popped up. Hit the floor. Slid to the side.
Byrne glimpsed hunched shapes rising through the hole and dove for Warren’s IAR. Rolled onto his back. Shouted as he pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked in his grasp and spewed fiery steel through the bedroom wall on its way down toward the orifice. The bullets tore through the bodies climbing from the store and rushing toward him, lifting them from their feet and painting the walls crimson.
The couch scooted into the room. The back door fell inward and served as a ramp for the creatures scurrying in from the night.
Graves sprinted away from it, toward the front door. There were bodies around his legs before he was halfway there. He fell forward and tumbled down the stairs.
“Go!” Richards shouted.
He blew past Byrne through the path Graves had cleared toward the stairs. He leapt from the top step and crashed down onto the planks that still braced the lower half of the broken door. Primates screamed and slashed at him as he kicked down the remainder and dragged Graves out onto the street.
Byrne was airborne before they cleared the landing. He hit his head, then his shoulder. Clipped his foot on the rail. Came down on top of furry bodies and careened onto the sidewalk. Pointed Warren’s rifle back into the stairwell and pulled the trigger.
More creatures poured from inside the house, even as their brethren fell. They climbed over the bleeding bodies of their brethren and pounced onto the sidewalk. Even more scurried down the façade and rained from the roof.
Byrne continued to pull the trigger, even after the magazine was empty. He dug his heels into the dirt in an effort to distance himself from the monsters. Their cold blue eyes locked onto him as they bounded toward him, their fists striking the earth, their long fur streaming behind them, their cries echoing through the desolate street.
SNAFU: Unnatural Selection Page 32
