Suddenly, everything became clear.
“Profound retrograde amnesia,” he said.
“What?”
She was panting and out of breath. He slowed and looped her arm over his shoulders so he could ease her burden.
“It’s a condition generally attributed to severe head trauma; however, there’ve been a ton of documented cases caused by viral sources like encephalitis and even herpes simplex, the common cold sore. They not only cause memory impairment, but extreme agitation and dramatic changes in personality.”
“The virus attacks the central nervous system.”
“Specifically the thalamus and the hippocampal formations of the temporal lobes in the brain.”
“Meaning it affects the cerebrum while leaving the brainstem intact. But they still have some residual language comprehension, so Broca’s area and the frontal lobe must not be affected to the same degree. They’re capable of emotion and complex problem solving without the restraints of conscience. They’re running on instinct and emotion, and that’s the surest recipe for violence and aggression.”
“That violence is generally indiscriminate, though. These things attacked as a pack. Their movements were coordinated. That’s more suggestive of, at worst, localized brain damage. And if you think about infections like encephalitis and herpes, it’s the acute swelling of the brain itself that poses the greatest threat. It’s possible the chronic inflammatory nature of this viral infection is responsible for increased and sustained pressure on the lateral parts of the brain, if not for shunting blood flow entirely to the areas in question.”
“So if we can effectively combat the swelling—”
“We can theoretically prevent the localized brain damage.”
“But for how long?”
Brooks knew the answer to her question was of significant personal consequence, but without any pharmaceutical-grade anti-inflammatories, they were counting on finding a large quantity of roots that might not even work. The prospect was depressing, and yet he couldn’t allow her to give up hope.
“As long as it takes.”
He squeezed her hand and guided her through a maze of longan and durian trees, which opened onto a clearing that afforded him a better view of their surroundings. The river was a clearly delineated line through the treetops of the valley below them and to the south. The hills grew steeper and more heavily forested to the west, forming a transition zone of sorts between the river and the mountains. The main path ran somewhere through there, although from here he couldn’t quite tell where. The trees to the northwest blocked his view of the plateau where they had camped and the broad meadow at the base of the cliff honeycombed with tombs. Maybe another half-mile to the north and then back to the west and they could approach the escarpment from the forest above it, instead of walking out into the open field.
It seemed like a logical course of action, but to get there they would have to pick their way through the woods where Zhang had been taken.
The drizzle waned and the humidity skyrocketed. The clouds thinned enough that he could see the sun already sinking toward the rugged western horizon. No matter how hard he wished, he couldn’t slow its descent. They needed to cross that bridge while they could still see well enough to do so. They wouldn’t be able to survive another night in this awful place, nor would they be able to indefinitely stall the progression of the virus.
They walked in a silence marred only by the crunching of their footsteps on the wet detritus. Already Adrianne’s hand was starting to feel warmer. They had to find more of the bistort root. Brooks tried to remember anything else Julian had showed him that could prove helpful. He wished he’d been paying closer attention.
The dull headache that had been with him most of the day had blossomed into a throbbing migraine. He’d always been prone to headaches when he didn’t get enough sleep, though, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had anything even remotely resembling a decent night’s rest. Maybe Pai Village, which had been what, five days ago? That was too long for anyone to go without allowing his body to recuperate. It was no wonder every muscle and joint in his body ached. And with the way the storms came and went, bringing with them warring pressure fronts, it would be abnormal if his sinuses didn’t hurt. There was no point in analyzing every little ache and pain, even if he did have the subtle metallic taste of blood in his mouth.
He spat on the ground and was relieved to see little more than the faintest pink hue.
The hills sloped sharply away from them to the west, forcing them to climb higher if they intended to follow the topography and utilize the diminishing cover. Massive rock formations reared up from the trees, which grew sparser as they walked. They had a much better view of the valley below them, where they could now clearly see the grasslands and the sheer cliffs that enclosed them, among them the one housing the cave where Warren had been killed. The waterfall no longer flowed and the pond had shrunk to a quarter of its former size, leaving behind a ring of muddy weeds and debris. While he still couldn’t see the escarpment where they’d left their equipment inside the tombs, he had a good enough feel for where they were to find his way there.
Maybe he hadn’t fully formulated a plan for what they would do once they reached it, but at least he knew where they could find more bistort when they…
In his mind he saw Julian, kneeling in front of the pink-flowered plant. Something about the image set off alarm bells and derailed his line of thought, yet, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why. He remembered the grad student sifting through the dead leaves and weeds around its roots, then looking up at him with a huge grin on his face.
Nature provides everything you need to survive in any given environment. You just have to know where to look for it.
Brooks nearly had it when Adrianne gasped and tugged on his hand.
He stopped and followed her line of sight to the northwest, toward where he could now see the crest of the hill on top of the escarpment where he had first climbed out of the tombs.
“You still have that gun?” he asked.
“There’s only one bullet.”
“If we have to use it, we’re dead already.”
He struck off through the trees as quietly as possible toward where two wooden caskets now rested beside the hole in the earth.
Part IX:
Speciation
Forty -one
Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin
Motuo County
Tibet Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
October 17th
Today
They approached the ledge from the east. Cautiously. Quietly. The scent of sandalwood wafted from the orifice, but they could neither see nor hear anything transpiring below. Brooks raised his ax as he neared the coffins. They were the same as all of the others: hand-carved from a single trunk. Coils of rope were heaped on the ground beside them, presumably the means by which they would be lowered over the ledge, through the vegetative screen, and into the tombs.
Adrianne covered him with the pistol, although they’d agreed that she would only fire as a last resort. They needed to hold on to that lone bullet for as long as they could.
There were partial footprints in the mud with smooth, rounded edges. They could have been left by any kind of shoe or sandal. The flattened weeds and bare granite gave no indication of how the caskets had come to be here or who had brought them. Only the incense suggested that anyone was still here.
Brooks watched the mouth of the chute as he quietly slid back the lid of the nearest coffin. He glanced down and then quickly at Adrianne, who surveyed the tree line uphill along the barrel of the gun before joining him. He held up a hand to stop her, but she brushed it aside and stared down at the remains.
Warren wasn’t immediately recognizable. The left side of his face was crushed and the right was a mask of blood. His skin was pale and waxy and bloated with absorbed water. Flies crawled all over him, as though oblivious to the intrusi
on on their meal. His arms had been crossed almost peacefully over his chest. His clothes were still wet and muddy and his gut distended with the gasses of early decomposition. It was hard to believe that mere hours ago this had been the same living, breathing entity with whom they had spent every moment of the last week. And now he was dead.
Brooks felt a surge of anger and helplessness.
He closed the lid with tears in his eyes and opened the other coffin.
Zhang had fared no better. His jaw was broken and jutted to the side, where his cheek had been torn back to his ear. The ends of broken ribs protruded from the front of his sweater, which was black with blood. His arms were similarly crossed over his chest, although the left had been placed over the right to hide the stubs where two of his fingers appeared to have been bitten off. His abdomen—
Brooks turned away. He could think of no worse way to die. Whoever gathered his remains had at least managed to stuff most of him back inside.
A clattering sound from the hole.
Adrianne silently closed the lid while Brooks walked toward the hole. He wanted nothing more than to drive the pick straight through the skull of whoever was down there. Two men lay dead in the coffins that would be used to hide their remains where they would theoretically never be found. And whoever was down there was responsible for keeping the secrets of this horrible place.
The clattering grew louder.
Brooks waved Adrianne back. She ducked behind Zhang’s coffin and peered around the side. He crouched between the hole and the edge of the cliff. If he was right and the sounds were the result of someone ascending the ladder, then whoever it was would have his back to him when he climbed out.
He adjusted his sweaty grip on the handle of the ice ax. Tensed the muscles in his legs in anticipation of lunging.
The crown of a bald head appeared, followed by a slender neck, and shoulders draped with the sashes of a red robe.
Brooks sprung and wrapped his left arm around the man’s neck. He jerked him backward and partially out of the hole, and pressed the tip of the pick against his throat, right under the curve of his jaw.
The man made a gagging sound and grabbed Brooks’s left arm.
“How many more of you are there?” Brooks whispered.
The man didn’t respond.
Brooks pressed harder on the pick and felt the warmth of blood trickle onto his arm. He asked again, but still the man said nothing, so he forced the tip even deeper, caught the edge of the man’s jaw, and used it to turn his face.
The man made more gagging sounds, but didn’t say a word. The skin on his head and neck were nearly black with sak yant tattoos, the kind tapped into the skin using a sharpened bamboo stick. He recognized the Ongk Phra, or Buddha’s Body, meant to provide insight and guidance; the Sii Yord, or Four Spires, designed for protection; the Ha Thaew, or Five Rows, which promised good luck; the Paed Tidt, or Eight Points, which granted protection in the eight directions of the universe; and the Yord Mongkut, or Spired Crown, which promised good fortune in combat. Read together, they told the tale of a long-suffering monk whose battles with both the inner and the outer worlds were equally real. They also spoke of a man whose spiritual beliefs were of greater consequence than any amount of pain he could experience in the flesh.
“How many others are down there?” Brooks whispered directly into the monk’s ear.
When no answer came, he wrenched the man all the way out of the hole, pinned him on his back, and pressed his forearm against the man’s throat with all of his weight. The man’s pale skin immediately started to redden, highlighting the perfectly symmetrical Suea, the twin tiger tattoos facing each other from opposite sides of his face. Their tails framed his eyes like question marks and their serpentine bodies curled around his nose. His lips fit perfectly between their ferocious jaws and slashing claws. It was a tattoo meant to demonstrate power and authority, but it wasn’t nearly as striking as the blue of his eyes or the birthmark on his right temple. The same blue eyes and birthmark he recognized from the pictures of Brandt’s expedition they had found inside the cave.
Brooks could only stare at the face hidden beneath the tigers. The monk had shaved his head so recently that not even the stubble showed. His skin was taut and leathered by the sun. There were crow’s feet beside his eyes, but few other wrinkles or signs of aging. Even his eyes themselves held the intangible quality of youth.
He imagined Brandt wasting away in his wheelchair, his flesh clinging to his bones like melting taffy. There was no way this could be the same man from the photographs. Birthmarks themselves were hereditary, but Brooks had never known one to appear in the exact same place in subsequent generations. This man couldn’t have been more than fifty-some years old, if that. He barely looked older than the man in the old black and white pictures.
“Jesus,” Adrianne whispered from behind him.
Brooks looked back to see her pointing the pistol over his shoulder and at the monk’s face. She wore the same expression of surprise he must have been wearing.
He stared again at the man. His robe marked him as a monk of the Mahayana or Tibetan tradition, who wore red as a symbol of their compassion and kindness toward all other beings. Even with the tattoos altering his face, he would have sworn this was the same man.
Brooks knew enough German to bumble his way through simple conversations. He pointed at the hole and looked the monk right in the eyes when he spoke.
“Wieviel?”
The man’s face showed a flash of recognition, but he said nothing. Brooks raised the ax into striking position. A droplet of blood fell from the tip of the pick, landed on one of the tigers, and dribbled into the well of his ear.
The monk’s eyes widened and he held up three fingers.
“Drei?” Brooks said.
He felt the monk try to nod against his forearm and lessened the pressure just enough for him to accomplish the gesture. Brooks’s head was spinning. Here was a man who was physically identical to a scientist that never returned from an expedition nearly three-quarters of a century ago and who spoke the same language, and yet this man appeared barely older than he was and nowhere near as frail as Brandt.
“Ask him if he was part of the König Expedition,” Adrianne said.
The monk glanced at her from the corner of his eye.
“You understand what she said, don’t you?”
The man looked back at Brooks, but communicated nothing with his eyes.
“He recognized the name,” Adrianne said.
“We found König’s body in the tombs,” Brooks said, and pointed down into the hole beside them.
The monk couldn’t hide the comprehension in his eyes.
Brooks struggled to recall anything and everything he had learned in German, rudimentary though his knowledge was.
“Was ist…deine…Name?”
The man’s brow wrinkled and he looked almost confused.
Brooks removed his arm from the monk’s neck, but kept the ax raised in striking position. The monk rubbed his throat and the blood slowly drained from his face.
“Mein Name ist Jordan.”
The man tapped his lips and made a gesture like sound coming out. He opened his mouth and Brooks saw the nub where his tongue had been cut out.
“You have no tongue…no Zunge?”
The man nodded cautiously.
“So you can’t speak…nicht sprechen?”
Again, the monk nodded and held up his hands. He glanced at the ax, then at Brooks, and then back at the ax.
Brooks lowered the ax without breaking eye contact.
“Was ist deine Name?”
The man looked at him without blinking.
Brooks had recognized both Brandt and König in the pictures, but he couldn’t be certain about the others, especially considering the names had been written out of order.
“Eberhardt?” he said.
The man shook his head. There was an element of sadness in his eyes.
“Metzge
r?”
Again, he shook his head.
“Wolff?”
Another shake.
“Well, it can’t be König or Brandt.”
The monk nodded. A wistful smile formed on his lips.
A clattering sound arose from the hole.
Brooks realized they’d been too loud, but he couldn’t give up. Not yet. Not while they were so close to finally getting some answers.
“König?”
Adrianne aimed the gun at the hole as a face appeared. It bore the same Suea tattoo.
“It can’t be Brandt.”
The man glanced at the other tattooed monk and held up a hand. The second man stopped where he was, but never took his eyes off Adrianne’s gun.
More clattering sounds from below them as feet struck the rungs of the ladders.
“You’re not Brandt,” Brooks said. “I know Johann Brandt. You aren’t his son and you certainly aren’t him. You look nothing like him.”
“I don’t like this,” Adrianne said. “He’s stalling.”
She was right and Brooks knew it. The monk was lying to them in hopes of buying time, but for what?
“Down the hole,” Brooks said. “Zu gehen…unter.”
He grabbed the monk by the sash and pushed him toward the earthen orifice. The second monk scrambled down and out of the way. The man who was trying to mislead them into thinking his name was Brandt extended his arms and caught the lip before he fell. Brooks shoved him in the midsection with his foot and the man dropped out of sight.
“Don’t let them out of there,” Brooks said.
Adrianne stepped forward and aimed the gun down into the darkness while Brooks lunged for the boulder. He shoved it over the hole, grabbed Adrianne’s hand, and dragged her toward the trail.
Forty-two
Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin
Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Page 26
