Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  “Wait up!” Ty called from behind her. He tried to jog, but with the weight of his dented bioreactor, it was more of a shamble.

  The main deck of the Research Vessel Ernst Mayr housed the majority of the scientific suites. There were machine and electronics shops, and a divers locker nearest the hanger, a two-story garage with a sled on rails to slide the Corellian back and forth from its launch. Moving toward the bow, there were fully equipped laboratories of all kinds: hydrologic, computer, a massive general lab, and a biology/analytical clean lab. GeNext had spared no expense in equipping what amounted to the most advanced mobile research platform ever put to sea.

  There were four functional decks above them. The 01 Deck housed the mess and galley, the emergency generator room, lounge, library, and the scientific personnel quarters, while the remainder of the crew boarded on the 02 Deck with the hospital suite. The Master Quarters on the smaller 03 Deck were reserved for the Captain, his officers, and the chief scientists. Above that on the 04 Deck were the radio/chart room, the surface control station, and the pilothouse, from the top which the communications tower reached another twenty-five feet into the sky.

  Ty caught up to her and threw his arm around her shoulder. He smelled of brine and sweat, a scent that reminded her of his pigsty of a bedroom as a teenager in Wildwood, New Jersey. She imagined she was pretty ripe herself.

  “It’s crazy back there,” he said. “Pretty much the entire crew’s in the hanger preparing to disassemble the Corellian. They’re going to have to strip her and basically rebuild her from scratch. Did you see how badly beat up she was?”

  Courtney shook her head. She had climbed out the hatch and refused to look at the battered vessel even as it was hauled out of the ocean by a massive A-frame crane and taxied into the hanger. She knew how close they had come to dying without the visual confirmation.

  Both of them landing the assignment on the Mayr had been a real coup. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and they had needed to sell themselves as the very best in their fields to beat out dozens of applicants from the many GeNext-funded research labs filled with the most brilliant and ambitious scientists in the world. It was the first time that she had ever stood on level ground with her brother. Ty was the golden child, for whom everything had always come so easily. All of her life, she had dwelled in his shadow. All of her teachers had expected better from her than she could deliver based on their experiences with her brother. How many times had she seen that same expression on their faces, the one that begged the question, “Are you sure you’re related to Tyler Martin?” Even her parents, in their loving yet condescending way, had always treated her as though she needed an extra boost to succeed, while expecting less of her in the process. She couldn’t blame any of them, though. Ty was a genius and had never been anything other than wonderful to her, or anyone else for that matter.

  It wasn’t until her college years at Rutgers that she had stepped into a spotlight of her own. Not only had she graduated at the top of her class from one of the most prestigious marine biology programs in the nation, but she had been able to forge an identity of her own, entirely independent of his. Now, here she was on a commission so many of her colleagues would have given an arm for, preparing to isolate the hemoglobin from a deep sea worm few even knew existed in hopes of revolutionizing the health care industry, and her brother couldn’t have been happier for her. She could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. Ty had never felt the same need to compete with her. He had always believed in her, and had been there every step of the way to protect her from the big bad world, even when she didn’t need it. There was no one else on earth she would rather have working at her side right now. Even if he was in desperate need of a shower.

  “What do you say to a late dinner tonight once we’re done in the lab?” she asked.

  “Sounds good to me. I can’t imagine it’ll take me more than a couple of hours to transfer samples to the main batch reactor and the continuous culture module.”

  They reached the door labeled “Biology/ Clean Lab.” Ty pressed his thumb to the scanner on the security panel, then lifted it away from the pink digital representation of his print. The lock disengaged with a click and the stainless steel door slid back into the recessed wall. Once they passed through, it closed again behind them with little more than a whisper.

  The lights were bright enough to shame the sun. It always took Courtney several moments for her eyes to adjust. There were several hooded microarray work stations where isolates were heated, centrifuged, and incubated in the center of the room on an island surrounded by stools. Beside them were various matching off-white machines attached to computer keypads and monitors: a dual absorbance detector, a separation module, an auto sampler, a refraction index detector, a continuous culture module, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, and a real time PCR machine. There were buttons, wires, tubes, and blinking lights everywhere.

  Their lab assistants were already there, warming up the equipment and running through the transfer protocols. Both were graduate students paying their dues and hoping to weasel their names into print when the time came to publish. Both of them glanced up from their tasks, then resumed them with renewed vigor.

  Ty branched to the right and made his way to the far right corner of the laboratory while Courtney headed toward the back of the room. A one thousand gallon aquarium made from the same glass as the portholes of the submersible waited for her. The heated seawater inside was pressurized to one hundred and fifty atmospheres and flooded with hydrogen sulfide gas that funneled up through a salvaged section of the collapsed hydrothermal vent Godzilla, complete with empty tubes from the worms that had abandoned it.

  “We heard what happened down there,” her assistant said. Kim Stanley was a graduate student at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography working on her PhD in Marine Biology. With her diminutive size and stunning traditional Asian features, she looked like a geisha in baggy overalls. “I’m so glad that you’re all right.”

  “There was never any doubt.” Courtney forced a smile and latched her collection canister onto the airlock built into the side of the tank. The seal disengaged with a hiss. Water from the aquarium raced into a chamber that surrounded the inner housing where the worm rested. Once the pressure and temperature equalized, she would open the inner gasket and allow the worm to wriggle out into its new home. “I don’t think Bishop even broke a sweat.”

  “We could feel the quake all the way up here. It was like the ocean just dropped out from under the ship.”

  “It wasn’t that bad down there.” Courtney didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She was still shaken up. It was all she could do to steady her hands. “Can you monitor the gauges and flood the bin when everything’s stabilized?”

  She turned away without waiting for a response. While she had time to kill, she might as well see if there was something she could do to help Ty. He crouched at the far end of the room next to an industrial-size batch reactor that reminded her of a beer vat. Hoses snaked from the side of the unit to wall-mounted nozzles that issued steady streams of compressed gasses. Devin Wallace, a Microbiology and Virology doctoral candidate from the University of Pennsylvania, monitored the power, enthalpy, heat transfer coefficient, and wall temperature gauges on a touchscreen display. His shaggy brown hair kept falling over his glasses, which triggered his annoying habit of jutting forth his lower jaw so he could blow his bangs aside. He wore a thin, patchy beard in an effort to look older than his twenty-four years. His six and a half feet of little more than skin and bones had earned him the nickname Lurch.

  Ty glanced up and winked as she neared. He was kneeling beside the portable bioreactor, coupling the transfer tubing. He stood and wiped his palms on his pants.

  “Shall we do this?” he asked through a smirk.

  “Ready when you are,” Devin said. He tapped the screen with a long, bony finger. “Initiating sequence.”

  With a whirring sound, the batch reactor began to inhale t
he contents of the bioreactor. Courtney felt the vibrations through her feet. She was ten steps away when she heard a loud crack and something metallic pinged off into the corner of the lab. Pressurized steam fired from the bioreactor’s ruptured seal directly at Ty’s head. He shouted and threw himself to the ground, where he rolled onto his side and pawed at his face.

  The smell of rotten eggs filled the air, signaling the release of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas.

  “Ty!” Courtney screamed, and broke into a sprint.

  Devin was faster. He slapped the emergency button on the wall. A Plexiglas barrier shot down from the ceiling and embedded itself in the floor, effectively sealing off that entire portion of the lab. The ceiling vents kicked on and a klaxon blared.

  “Ty!” Courtney threw herself against the barrier over and over. “Ty!”

  She was helpless but to watch as the steam intensified and filled the cordoned chamber like a sauna. Devin’s silhouette ran to Ty’s side, hauled him to his feet, and dragged him in the direction of the emergency shower stall. For a long moment, she could see nothing through the roiling haze and condensation, and could only pace and scream in futility. When the overhead fans finally sucked the steam through the hoods, she saw both men squeezed together in the clear glass emergency shower stall, fully clothed, soaked to the bone. Both of them held oxygen masks over their mouths and noses, connecting them to the wall by long tubes. Ty offered a wave of assurance, but she could clearly see the pain in his eyes as he walked toward her. When he reached her, he raised his hand and pressed his palm to the Plexiglas.

  Courtney matched the gesture. Her hand looked like a child’s against his. The entire left half of his face was lobster-red, but she didn’t see any sign of blisters or lesions. He struggled to keep his left eye open. It was shot through with irritated vessels and issued a constant dribble of tears.

  She sobbed with relief and reached helplessly toward his cheek.

  The Hazmat crew stampeded into the room, still shrugging into their gear. Hands seized her shoulders and dragged her away from Ty. She strained to free herself, all the while watching Ty’s pained expression fade into the distance until she was shoved into the hallway and the steel lab door whooshed closed in her face.

  Seven

  Makambu Village

  Great Rift Valley

  East African Rift System

  28 km Southwest of Lake Tanganyika

  Zambia

  June 24th

  5:10 p.m. CAT

  Five Months Ago

  The Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter crested the jagged western edge of the valley and swooped down toward the distinct demarcation where the forest gave way to the eternal savannah that stretched as far as the eye could see. Roland Pike scrutinized the topography as they thundered low across the plains. Tall red plateaus lorded over fields of wild grasses interspersed with clusters of Borassus palms, the occasional baobab behemoth, and prickly mopane shrubs. A sulfurous scent rose from the hot springs off to his right, a series of oblong ponds set into a landscape of barren earth, skeletal trees, and swirling steam. Orange and gold colonies of photosynthetic bacterial growth ringed the shallows of the acidic bodies of water, which turned a deep amethyst-blue toward the center where the hydrothermal vents expelled scalding water from the mantle. Two men clad entirely in white Hazmat gear appeared as specters through the mist, silver collection canisters at their feet. They shielded their eyes against the blazing African sun and watched the chopper pass before resuming their tasks. A tan Jeep glinted against the scorched ground.

  Pike adjusted the flow of air through the respirator tank attached to the back of his own isolation suit. He was already wet with sweat underneath the high-density polyethylene fiber fabric. Even with the wind rushing in through the open side doors, he felt as though he were being baked alive.

  A plume of black smoke funneled into the sky from a ring of trees on the horizon, replacing the smell of rotten eggs with the charnel stench of burning flesh.

  The Huey descended, raising a riot of dust in its wake.

  Pike recognized the village from the pictures that had been forwarded to his laptop while he was in transit. A wall of lashed straw had been erected around a circular area roughly an eighth of a mile in diameter, in the middle of which were a good dozen circular huts made of mud packed over a framework of branches with conical thatch roofs. Palms and agave trees with their broad, leathery leaves grew from gray dirt packed by countless generations of bare feet. A weather-beaten Jeep and a panel truck that appeared to have been assembled from World War II scrap were parked in the shade of a single baobab tree. Several more men in Hazmat suits stepped out of the pall of smoke that clung to the village and headed toward where the chopper landed in a wash of flattened grasses and stirred dust.

  With a nod to the pilot, Pike grabbed his leather overnight bag and an oversize stainless steel briefcase and hopped down onto the Zambian soil. He was barely out from beneath the rotors when the helicopter took to the air again. Its mechanical heartbeat echoed into infinity as it vanished into the eastern sky.

  The two men rushed to greet him and led him to the village.

  “Give me the details,” Pike said. He passed through the entrance and surveyed the scene through steel-gray eyes. Rivulets of sweat trickled down his rugged, leathered face from under his blonde hair. Although the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth betrayed his fifty years, he was better conditioned than most men half his age. “We’re wasting time we don’t have.”

  “Twenty-six dead over the course of three days,” Avery Brazelton, an Army-trained biochemist, said. “Primarily women, children, and their elderly. There are six survivors. We’ve been systematically evaluating the remains and taking blood and tissue samples. We’re also collecting bacterial growth from the hot springs in order to prepare cultures, as you requested.”

  “Show me the bodies.”

  Brazelton and the other man, whom Pike recognized as James Van Horn, a geneticist they had lured away from the Navy, guided him toward the rear of the village. Over the last five years, GeNext had slowly assembled an inner circle of the most brilliant scientific minds to solve the riddle of what they had nicknamed Chaco Man. That brain trust was further divided into two teams, one that convened at irregular intervals at the corporate headquarters as a kind of think tank, and another that worked full-time under Pike’s direction. His unit was officially on the books as private security, but that was only a small component of its duties. Pike’s men were hand-selected for their experience in the field, preferably under the kind of supervision that only the military could provide. His were men of discretion, who would not betray the secrets of their discoveries and who, most importantly, would follow his orders without question, under any circumstances. These men were chosen for more than their mental acuity. One never knew what kind of trouble one might encounter thousands of miles from civilization.

  The smoke thickened as they passed between dwellings with threadbare blankets draped over their open doorways. Rotting agave fruit dotted the ground. The dirt was spattered with dried blood in long arcs and wide blotches, and scarred by the trails left by the corpses that had been dragged to where Pike could now see the flicker of flames consuming what at first looked like a mass of stacked wood. Charred skeletal remains burned black, arms curled to their chests, jaws opened in soundless screams, piled one on top of the other. Two of his men labored over a heap of bodies beside it, photographing and cataloguing the various wounds before tossing the carcasses onto the pyre.

  Pike crouched beside one of the cadavers, a woman of no more than thirty. She wore the tatters of a sunflower-yellow dress, presumably donated by one of the wandering missions. The fabric was crisp with blood darker even than her ebon skin. There were scrapes and abrasions on her face, arms, and legs. A deep laceration bisected her left thigh. Her entire backside was distended by putrefaction. And where her abdomen had once been was a gaping maw of crusted blood and severed vessels. Pike noted the expose
d lumbar vertebrae and posterior ribs.

  “They were all like this,” Brazelton said. “Some had more dramatic defensive wounds, but all of them were similarly eviscerated.”

  “Looks like some kind of animal had its way with her.” Pike used a slender stick to peel the edges of the macerated flesh away from her lower anterior ribs. “These are definitely teeth marks.”

  “We ran off a pack of wild dogs when we arrived, but not all of the teeth imprints are definitively canine.”

  “Where were the bodies?”

  “Just lying there on the ground. We documented where we found each and every one of them.”

  “No attempt had been made to bury them?”

  “Apparently not. The survivors weren’t even in the village when we got here. We assume they saw the smoke and followed it here from wherever they were hiding. Just materialized out of the savannah. We have a translator with them now.”

  Pike studied the other corpses. There were raggedly torn throats, compound fractures of all kinds, and parallel gashes that appeared to have been inflicted by claws. All of them were sunken in the midsection where they had been absolved of their intestines.

  “Have they said anything useful?”

  “So far, we haven’t been able to get a whole lot out of them beyond the same talk of demons.”

  Pike rose and walked away from the fire to where he could see several natives clad in ill-fitting polo shirts and dirty jeans gathered near a hut to the north with one of his men in soot-stained protective gear. Upon closer inspection, he saw that the mud walls of the dwellings were cracked and had crumbled in sections.