Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 17th

  Today

  The threat of being shot would only buy them so much time, and the boulder even less. They needed to be as far away as possible when the monks made their way out. Tibetan monks weren’t known for their pacifism and they outnumbered Brooks and Adrianne two-to-one. Brooks didn’t know how they fit into the puzzle that was Motuo, but the way Brooks saw it, the fact that they were responsible for hiding the bodies of the victims made them complicit in the killings.

  He couldn’t understand what the monk had to gain by lying to them about his identity, which made him question everything the man had attempted to communicate to them, yet there was no denying his staggering resemblance to the man in the old photographs. And how did they manage to travel through this hunting ground without being attacked by the predators?

  They slowed only long enough to grab the bistort Julian had initially shown him. Brooks pried it out by the roots and was already starting to run again when he remembered the grad student sifting through the detritus and what he had said.

  What you see here is actually two distinct species. Hepialus humuli—the ghost moth—spends the majority of the larval stage of its life cycle underground, feeding on the roots of plants like this bistort, where it inadvertently comes into contact with a fungus known as Ophiocordyceps sinensis. It either ingests a spore or inhales the mycelium, which allows the fungus to colonize the caterpillar’s body and turn it into one big reproductive vessel. This little sprout is actually the fruiting body of the fungus. Essentially one really ugly mushroom.

  He stopped abruptly and jerked Adrianne to a halt. He passed her the bistort, grabbed a handful of the loam, and shoved it into his pocket.

  People in Tibet and China have been eating them for their anti-aging and aphrodisiac effects for thousands of years. Only recently have we discovered that they increase the production of ATP in the body, dramatically improving stamina and physical endurance, and their cancer fighting properties are off the charts.

  That’s what his subconscious had been trying to make him remember. What was cancer if not the rapid and uncontrollable division of the body’s own cells where they had no business growing? That was precisely what was happening with the mutations already beginning to manifest inside of them. The spontaneous genesis of teeth was no different than the proliferation of a tumor. If they could slow—or even stop—their growth, then they could potentially buy themselves enough time to reach medical attention.

  If they managed to survive that long.

  Brooks lowered his shoulder and barreled through the branches. Once they reached the end of the trail, they would be forced to break cover and cross the open field. It was their point of greatest exposure. Once they crossed it to the northwest, Brooks was confident they could find the northern bend in the river and work their way back south to the bridge. It was just a matter of getting there.

  The monks were surely already out of the chute and knew exactly which direction they had gone. While the path was the obvious choice, it was also the route of least resistance and the fastest passage. They couldn’t risk allowing the forest to slow them down any more than they could take the chance of it dictating their course.

  Branches slashed his forearms and face. He tasted blood in his mouth and prayed the lacerations on his lips were the source. He burst from the forest before he saw the clearing and sprinted through the knee-high grasses. The sun was closer to the horizon than he’d expected and was already beginning to darken from gold to a brilliant bronze. In mere hours, it would sink behind the mountains and strand them in darkness.

  He glanced up and to his right and saw the silhouettes of four men on top of the precipice, their robes flagging on the breeze. None of them moved. They just watched as Brooks and Adrianne dashed across the field.

  Brooks fixed his eyes upon the opening of a narrow gully and ran straight for it. When he looked back again, the monks were gone.

  The bottom of the gully was filled with standing water and uprooted trees above which a cloud of mosquitoes hummed. The slope was slick with mud and they fell repeatedly, but eventually reached higher ground and the traction provided by the moldering detritus and the pine trees. The mosquitoes swarmed around them, but Brooks no longer had reason to fear them. The way he felt now left no doubt that he’d already been infected. His head throbbed and his mouth hurt, and every muscle in his body felt like it was on fire even as his skin grew colder and prickled with goosebumps.

  Looking back, there was only one point in time when they all could have been infected at the same time, and that was when they crossed through the leech zone. At the time he hadn’t given the slightest thought to the potential for transmission. In his mind, he equated leeches with the act of sucking blood and didn’t consider the fact that after doing so they metabolized the blood and became vectors to pass along the infection. They weren’t like bees, which could only sting once. They continued to aggressively feed throughout their lifecycles, passing along whatever blood-borne pathogens resided in their digestive tracts through their anticoagulatory enzymes. He’d been so fixated on traditional vectors like the mosquitoes that eagerly made pincushions out of him that he’d neglected to take the proper precautions against the more uncommon species, especially, in this case, one whose intestines produced endogenous exopeptidases—enzymes that broke down proteins one pair of amino acids at a time, essentially unzipping the DNA of the infection and passing it along in various stages of degradation, making its expression in the host not only variable, but unpredictable. It was like playing craps with each of their individual genomes.

  That was why their symptoms had all come on in different ways and at different times. None of them had received the exact same version of the virus that was now replicating itself unchecked inside all of their cells. The intact portion of the virus to which each of them had been exposed could have varied by any amount of an estimated five thousand base pairs, depending upon where the peptidases broke the chain of DNA. Considering it took only three base pairs to express something as dramatic as eye color, the physical expression from one individual to the next could be dramatically different.

  Adrianne fell, only this time she made no effort to rise.

  Brooks dropped to his knees beside her and rolled her onto her back. The left side of her face was brown with mud and she was barely able to keep her eyes open. He could positively feel the heat radiating from her.

  “Not much farther now,” he said. “You can make it.”

  The ghost of a smile formed on her lips.

  “Go on without me. I’m just…slowing you down.”

  “No chance of that.”

  She still clung to the bistort, the roots of which were only half consumed. He brushed off the dirt and held it to her lips, then fished around in his pocket until he found several of the larvae with the fungi growing from them.

  “Sorry about this,” he said, and slipped them into her mouth when she opened it to take a bite of the roots.

  The carcasses made crunching sounds between her teeth, but she didn’t protest.

  He took her by both hands, pulled her to her feet, and wrapped his arm around her back. She managed half a dozen steps before her legs gave out and she dragged both of them down.

  “Come on, Adrianne. You have to help me. You can do this.”

  He rolled onto his side, draped her arms around his neck, and struggled to all fours with her on his back. He grabbed her around the thighs and bellowed with the exertion of standing. Her grip around his neck was weak, forcing him to lean forward as he walked. The strain was phenomenal. He focused on anything and everything else to distract his mind, but the grim reality of the situation was that unless she regained enough strength to walk on her own, there was no way he was going to be able to get her to safety.

  Her grip grew weaker by the minute. Her head fell forward and re
sted on his shoulder. He could feel her fever, even through his clothing and over his own. She had to be well over 104 and still climbing. It was only a matter of time before brain damage started to occur.

  He needed to cool her down and fast.

  Brooks staggered on. She seemed to become heavier with each step he took. Balance grew increasingly untenable until he finally toppled forward onto the ground underneath her.

  “I need you to help me, Adrianne. I know you can hear me. I can’t do this without you.”

  He tried to stand again, but made it only as far as his knees before collapsing onto his side.

  Brooks crawled out from beneath her, stood, and dragged her by her wrists. He alternately glanced back over his shoulder to see where he was going and down at her face. Her eyes were closed, her eyelids dark with the early stages of bruising. Her skin was pale…so pale. Her mouth hung open and her head bobbed limply. There was blood on her lips and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing. The pulse in her wrists was so weak he could barely feel it.

  “Stay with me,” he said.

  Tears cut wet trails through the dirt on his face. He bared his teeth against the awful strain in his back and shoulders. His breath came in shivering bursts from his nose.

  Her wrists slipped from his grasp. He stumbled, caught his heels, and fell hard onto his back. His entire body cried out in pain when he attempted to stand. He had to settle for crawling back to where she lay, her hair tangled with pine needles and clotted with mud. Her eyelids had parted just enough to reveal bloodshot crescents of the sclera.

  “Hold on. Do you hear me? Just hold on.”

  He grabbed a fistful of her jacket and dragged her over the rocky rise. The sound of the distant river taunted him.

  They were so close now. Just a little farther…

  And yet he knew there was no way he could even get her as far as the bridge. As it was, he was so exhausted he feared he wouldn’t be able to make the trek on his own.

  The thought of dying here was more than he could bear. His survival instincts screamed for him to abandon her, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. At least not yet. Not until…

  Not until what? Until she died? Or worse…until she changed?

  There was standing water at the bottom of the steep hill and around the trunks of a thicket of birches. Their leaves were already yellowing from the saturation of their roots. The muddy water had to be significantly cooler than the ambient air, and would only get colder as the sun set. It was their only chance.

  He heard Julian’s voice in his head.

  Nature provides everything you need to survive in any given environment.

  Brooks dragged Adrianne down the rugged slope. They slid on gravel and mud alike and tumbled through thorn-bushes that tore their clothes and cut their skin. By the time they reached the bottom, Brooks’s palms and knees flowed freely with blood. He removed the pistol from beneath her waistband and inserted it under his own. With the last of his strength, he pulled Adrianne through the muddy weeds and into the water.

  The cold provided a physical shock and momentarily cleared the fever-induced fog that clouded his thoughts. Mosquitoes swarmed over the stagnant water, which produced a vile smell reminiscent of hardboiled eggs and flatus. He sank deeper into the mud as he worked his way through the maze of trunks until he reached a point where the water was more than a few inches deep. He turned and cradled Adrianne under her head and upper back and scooted until he found an isolated area from which he could barely see through the trees and even the crimson rays of the setting sun hardly reached them. He lowered the base of her skull into the cold water.

  Her eyes snapped open and she stared at his face. Her pupils were uneven and her nostrils were crusted with blood. When she spoke, her teeth shimmered with fresh blood.

  “It’s too…late…for me. You must…must go…”

  “Shh. Save your strength. We need to cool you off if we hope to break your fever.”

  Her lips parted as though she were about to speak, but her eyes closed and she let out a long sigh.

  Brooks searched through the mud until he found a large stone and used it to prop her head far enough out of the water. He emptied his pocket of the crisp worms and placed one against her lips, but she made no effort to chew it. He separated the rest from the detritus, tossed a couple into his mouth, and saved the remainder for Adrianne.

  He covered her body with leafy branches and found a dry patch on which to set the gun. He lowered himself into the water beside her. It couldn’t have been less than sixty degrees, but it felt like an ice bath. The clarity in his mind faded as the cold worked its way through his entire body.

  He managed to drag a branch with muddy leaves out of the muck and cover himself with it before his eyes closed of their own accord. He took Adrianne’s hand in his as the world ceased to exist.

  Forty-three

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 17th

  Today

  Brooks awakened wracked with violent shivers. His teeth chattered so hard it felt like he’d cracked them. The taste of blood in his mouth was overwhelming. He rolled to his side and dribbled a mouthful into the water.

  He spat again and focused on his surroundings. The dead leaves draped over his face made it hard to see. He removed the branch and let it sink into the mire.

  To his left, Adrianne’s shivering created tiny ripples that reflected the moonlight, which barely provided enough illumination for him to tell that the bruising around her eyes hadn’t gone away, but it hadn’t gotten worse either. Her irises moved restlessly beneath her lids. He cautiously touched her forehead and found it blessedly cool.

  Night had fallen, and with it the darkness he would have done anything to avoid. They were now at a distinct disadvantage. Not only could they hardly see and were totally unfamiliar with this part of the forest, but the lost time had surely allowed their pursuit to close whatever gap they had opened. The predators could be anywhere by now.

  And then there were the monks, who passed through the killing grounds with impunity. Brooks wished he knew how they accomplished such a feat. He didn’t buy into the notion that the tattoos provided some mystical source of protection any more than he believed the men were spared because of their devoutness. The problem was that he knew absolutely nothing about them. He had no idea where they came from or where they went, to which temple they belonged, or even which sect. All he knew was that wherever they went, the scent of sandalwood followed.

  Brooks sat up and listened. He heard the faraway grumble of the Yarlung Tsangpo and the whispering of the wind through the leaves. Regardless of whether or not there was anything else out there, they could only stay here for so much longer. They needed to take advantage of their diminished fevers before they spiked again, and already he could feel the resurgence of the heat and the pain that had been mercifully alleviated by the cold water.

  He tucked the pistol down the back of his pants, marked the spot where he left Adrianne, and crawled to the edge of the thicket, where he lay in the mud in the tall grass while he surveyed his surroundings.

  Nothing moved.

  Jackdaws and warblers shrieked in the distance and he heard the solitary hoot of a rhesus monkey from the other side of the river. The boughs of the trees swayed on a gust of wind, then stilled again. He risked climbing out into the open and stood up to better see.

  The river was maybe a quarter mile ahead through the trees. He could just barely make out the rocky precipice, beyond which a mist had settled into the canyon. The bridge had to be roughly a mile to the south, a distance that was simultaneously short and seemingly insurmountable. He listened for a full minute longer before crawling back into the water and quietly moving through the trees.

  Again, he thought of the monks and how they secured safe passage.

  If they were truly dealing with an evolved
version of Homo sapiens, a predatory offshoot resulting from speciation, then the best place to start was to catalogue the points of divergence. They had obviously followed the established natural progression when it came to their teeth, and yet the growth of hair over their entire bodies felt like a devolution of sorts, a step backward toward their remote forest ape ancestors. Their musculature was advanced, and yet they’d taken to the trees like primates. They had retained at least some amount of their higher mental faculties, while they appeared to hunt by instinct rather than by intelligence or cunning.

  Therein lay the key.

  How were they hunting them? Surely in the time he and Adrianne were unconscious in the water their tracks could easily have been discovered and followed, unless that wasn’t how they hunted. They’d lain in wait in the dense forest where the runoff had piled debris across the path and after the majority of the creatures fell into the river, the lone remaining individual had taken off in the direction of the bridge, or so Brooks had assumed.

  Maybe their vision had become sharper and they hunted from the trees to take advantage of their increased visual acuity. If so, then crashing through the dense canopy was almost counterintuitive. They would effectively be blinded by all of the leaves and branches. Besides, primates had evolved stereoscopic vision in order to escape predation, not so they could prey on other animals from above. And no sensory adaptation came without a price. Like blind men developed better hearing to compensate for their loss of sight, primates purchased superior sight at the expense of…

  “Their sense of smell,” Brooks whispered.

  Modern humans had roughly twice as many OR pseudogenes—the genetic basis for the sense of smell—than their closest primate relatives. If this trend continued and this new species not only regained functionality of the genes, but acquired even more, then it was a distinct possibility that their sense of smell could rival that of a bloodhound. Was it possible that the monks used the scent of sandalwood, which flourished all around them, to mask their scent from the predators, and if so, could he and Adrianne do the same?