He remembered how cold her cheeks had been, how her chest hadn’t risen as he watched, how her breath didn’t even ripple the pool of blood under her mouth, and yet still he’d clung to the hope that she might have survived. And now…
Brandt’s shadow fell upon him and he turned to find the monk staring at him with an expression he couldn’t read. He lowered his gaze to the chorten, touched it gently with his fingertips, and traced the Tibetan script he assumed was some sort of prayer.
Brandt’s shadow receded.
The heavy wooden door of the building opened behind him with a squeal.
Brooks felt a swell of anger. At the monks for not helping them escape Motuo, for not saving Adrianne as they had him, for interring her in an unmarked chorten half a world away from her home. But mostly he was mad at himself for failing to protect her. She’d trusted him and he’d let her down. He knew he’d spend the rest of his life dealing with the guilt and the dreams of what might have been.
A shadow fell over him again. This time he didn’t look back, at least not until he recognized the voice of the woman standing behind him.
“I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to wake up.”
Fifty
Dbang-po Monastery
Himalayan Mountains
Tibet Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
October 29th
Twelve Days Later
“You’re sure you have to go?” Adrianne said.
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
Brooks wore a collection of clothes the monks had gathered for him and a pair of sandals. In his pack were boots, a coat, and a hat made from the fur of what looked like a species of husky. He wasn’t about to complain, though. The river had claimed his backpack and the supplies Adrianne had scattered on the bank in an effort to mislead what the monks called yeh-teh—or “bear from the rocky place” in Sherpa—about which he still had much to learn.
He held Adrianne and kissed her softly. He still couldn’t touch her without recalling how she’d felt when he thought she was dead and he would never be able to shake the image of the blood pooled beneath her mouth. Her gums were scarred from where the burgeoning teeth had been excised from the cancellous bone, but they became less noticeable with each passing day. The teeth themselves had reminded Brooks of sprouted chia seeds. It was hard to believe such tiny growths were responsible for so much pain and bleeding. His own had been even smaller and now resided at the bottom of a small vase. Their fingernails were still thick and ridged near the edges, but Brandt assured them they would grow out and it would be as though nothing had ever happened. The remainder of the physical changes, while internal where no one would see them, would never go away. At least not for a very long time.
“Promise me you’ll be careful.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. I have Sdom to get me through the Himalayas.”
“That’s precisely what worries me.”
Brooks stared into her eyes and sighed.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He smiled and kissed her again. “Don’t change while I’m gone.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
He opened the door and looked back one last time before stepping out into the sunlight. Brandt—or Tsering as he was now known—and two other monks, Kunchen and Tenzin, stood in the courtyard in their red robes, waiting to see him off. Over the past few days Brooks had gained a tremendous amount of respect for the devotees of the Zhed Stag monastery and all of the personal sacrifices they had made. They were the wardens of Motuo, the keepers of the secrets they would ensure never left the valley. Not to mention the fact that they were all brilliant in their own ways.
The Dzogchen Dgon-pa—the large central dwelling around which all of the other buildings had been constructed—was a repository of knowledge pertaining to every aspect of human evolution. The research these monks had assembled was nothing short of miraculous. The first time Brooks entered he felt like a Neanderthal being led through Times Square. There were simply things that had previously been beyond his limited ability to comprehend. He couldn’t wait to truly delve into the mysteries when he returned.
Brooks stopped several feet from the monks and bowed in deference. They grinned at the clumsy gesture, or perhaps at his absurd outfit.
“Where’s Spider?” he asked. “Chang khang Sdom?”
Brandt rolled his eyes and Brooks knew.
He looked straight up the sheer face of the escarpment in time to see Sdom come bounding down the granite, bouncing from the rock as he belayed himself on the rope. He unclipped his harness and looked Brooks up and down.
“Not a word, Julian.”
“Come on, prof. Cut me some slack. This is too good to pass up.”
They had found Julian a full three days after his attack. He’d managed to climb, bleeding and on the verge of death, into a recess high on the cliff, where he treated his own wounds with the stinging nettle and subsisted on the roots he’d collected until he marshaled enough strength to brave the remainder of the climb. The monk named Tenzin had seen him from a distance and lowered a rope to him. They’d called him “spider” ever since and spoke of him in a tone of reverence. It was a unique situation for Julian, and one he did his best to milk for everything it was worth.
“Better get it out of your system now. We have a long journey ahead of us.”
Brooks tuned out the flurry of insults about his wardrobe. He was just happy that Julian had survived, even if his arms and legs were now as hairy as those of a tarantula.
Brandt pulled him aside and gave him a searching look.
“You have my word,” Brooks said. “We will return.”
Brandt gave a solemn nod. It was hard to believe this man who didn’t look a day over fifty was nearly twice that old. It was one of the many benefits of the mutation, or, more precisely, one of the byproducts of it. And one Brooks looked forward to studying in greater detail.
“We’re burning daylight,” Julian said. “The hell if I’m going to spend another night out in the open.”
“Promise me you’ll take good care of her,” Brooks said.
Again, Brandt nodded. Adrianne was more than just his guest; she was his insurance that Brooks and Julian would come back. While the monk and former SS scientist was hesitant to take the risk of letting them return to the outside world with a somewhat functional understanding of the secrets he’d sworn to keep, he not-so-secretly reveled in the thought of twisting the knife in the back of the man who’d usurped his identity and sent countless expeditions to their deaths in his name.
Brooks didn’t give the notion of returning to his old life a second thought. Every second of it had been devoted to discovering the answers that were contained inside of the building in front of him, where chromosomes were mapped right down to the locus level and matched to the physical traits they controlled, where the functions and emotions of the human brain were isolated with pinpoint precision, and where the genomes of man and his many antecessors were plotted side by side with their differing genetic sequences and the corresponding viral sources. And he’d only just scratched the surface of the knowledge they’d accumulated not with the aid of computers and databases, but with the tools unique to them, and them alone, as he was only now beginning to understand.
He couldn’t wait to get back to work, but there was something important he had to do first.
Brooks and Julian left the monks behind. They navigated the passages through the mountain and crossed the bridges between buildings until they reached the narrow trail carved into the rock, which led up to the pasture where the yaks grazed. From there the hike would be long and perilous. He hadn’t even been at Zhed Stag for two weeks and already he was content to stay here and never return to what he’d once thought of as the real world. He now thought of it in the same way as he’d once viewed a colony of ants, busying themselves with the mere act of staying busy, unaware of the
world that existed around them.
Or inside of them.
He stopped halfway up the chiseled staircase and looked back down. The monastery was barely visible among the trees growing from the hillside. There was so much he wanted to learn. Lifetimes’ worth. Fortunately, he now had all the time in the world to learn it.
Epilogue
Northwestern Memorial Hospital
Chicago, Illinois
November 8th
Twenty-two Days Later
The man beneath the covers was so frail he was nearly invisible beneath them. He looked far worse than when last Brooks saw him. His eyelashes glistened with salve and his lids were thin and purple with ruptured veins. The nasogastric tube through which they fed him was taped to his upper lip so it wouldn’t slide out of his nostril. The ventilator tube that snaked down his throat made his chest rise and fall with a monotonous click…whir…click…whir.
Brooks sat in the chair beside him, staring at the old man who had nearly sent them all to their deaths. He thought about Warren and how he was now interred in a coffin where no one would ever find him, and about Zhang, whose final moments had been filled with a level of pain to which no man should have to be subjected. And not because this diminished man wanted to understand the truth about the men who evolved into the predatory yeh-teh as he had claimed, but rather those who evolved separately from them, those who had discovered the secrets of longevity.
My boy, if there is one thing I understand, it is the nature of mortality. I may not be afflicted with some fatal disease, but I assure you, I am dying. It is simply the fulfillment of my biological destiny, and my time will come sooner than later.
All of this because one old man was afraid of dying. And rightfully so considering how many he had personally sent to premature graves in Dachau and the forests of Motuo.
He had dispatched Brooks and his team into the Tibetan wilds knowing full well they’d contract the virus. In fact, he’d been counting on it. Surely one of them would be infected by the complete version of the virus and not one corrupted by the digestive system of the leeches. He didn’t care if they all suffered the violent transformation caused by the incomplete virus or if they were slaughtered by those who already had. Brooks’s expedition had been his last-ditch effort to bring back one of them with the right combination of viral proteins, before he succumbed to his own inevitable fate.
Only he hadn’t understood the nature of the mutations. They weren’t directly responsible for slowing the aging process, but rather for increasing the mental faculties of those who figured out how to do so for themselves. And it was one of many secrets they would one day in the distant future take to their graves with them. Secrets a man named Hermann Wolff had committed countless atrocities in an effort to learn, as the pictures hanging on the walls in his private exhibition hall attested.
“Can you hear me in there?” Brooks asked.
Click…whir…
The man he’d once known as Johann Brandt made no reply. His irises twitched underneath his eyelids, whether in response to his voice or of their own accord Brooks couldn’t be sure.
“I know who you are. Who you really are. Not that it matters now.”
Click…whir…
The spherical lumps beneath his eyelids twitched again.
“I met the real Johann Brandt. Nice enough guy. Not much of a talker, though. But I guess you probably already knew that.”
Click…whir…
“No one will ever question your contributions to the field of evolutionary anthropology, only the means by which you amassed your knowledge. And, rest assured, they will find out.”
Click…whir…
Wolff’s eyes darted frantically beneath his lids.
“But for all that knowledge, you forgot the most important aspect of evolution…the element of unpredictability. Only in retrospect can evolution be viewed as a straight line. Think of all of the branches that ultimately resulted in extinction, despite their physical adaptations. Only man would be so arrogant as to think he could control his own evolution, or worse, believe himself to be the finished product of it. For as little as you regard Paranthropus and the supposed devolution of its teeth, it survived for a million years while Homo sapiens have only been around half that long.”
Click…whir…
“And despite all of the knowledge you accumulated, you drew the wrong conclusion. The defining characteristic of our evolution isn’t our teeth…”
Brooks concentrated on projecting the words as the monks had taught him.
It’s our minds.
Wolff’s eyelids snapped open and he stared at Brooks from the corner of his bloodshot eyes.
Our brains have more than tripled in size since we descended from the trees. It just took a viral key to unlock their potential.
Brooks rose and walked toward the door. He heard the rhythmic click…whir… of the ventilator behind him and looked back into the old man’s terrified eyes one last time.
I’ll leave you to think about that while you die.
About the Author
Michael McBride is the bestselling author of Ancient Enemy, Bloodletting, Burial Ground, Innocents Lost, Sunblind, The Coyote, and Vector Borne. His novella Snowblind won the 2012 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award and received honorable mention in The Best Horror of the Year. He lives in Avalanche Territory with his wife and kids.
To explore the author’s other works, please visit www.michaelmcbride.net.
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