Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  “We would have seen smoke from a fire.”

  “It’s been raining for nearly a week. Every piece of wood on this island must be saturated.”

  Pike shook his head, stood, and walked further inland. Walker called out for anyone within earshot. After a few minutes of hiking up the slope, a rugged crest of basalt pillars rose to his right like columns supporting the jungle, which cascaded down its face in flowering vines. Blue and white orchids bloomed from the moss that bearded the crevices. The workboat was partially concealed at its base under an umbrella formed by a stand of batai trees. The SART beacon, an orange canister that resembled a slender garbage disposal unit, was still attached to the frame. The housing of the outboard motor was cracked, the small screw bent. There were no personal effects, and other than the riot of footprints in the mud, there was no sign that anyone had been here recently.

  Except for the smeared, bloody handprints on the rails.

  Sixteen

  “They must have headed for higher ground,” Walker said.

  Pike nodded and turned a complete circle. It made sense that whoever had survived would have instinctively sought the highest point nearby from which to gather their bearings in hopes of signaling for help. Of course, staying near the beach closest to the wreckage, knowing that it was only a matter of time before someone came looking for the Mayr, was probably more logical in the minds of civilians, unless they feared another tsunami. Or something else.

  He crouched and inspected the footprints. Those closest to the small vessel were well preserved as the combination of the canopy and the pillared cliff saved them from the deluge. There were a good number of distinct sets of prints, which degenerated to vague sloppy impressions filled with standing water farther away from the enclave. Without a doubt, they were headed deeper inland and away from the eastern shore.

  “They were in a hurry,” Pike said, thinking aloud. “They didn’t congregate here for very long to evaluate their situation, but instead struck off quickly and with little apparent indecision.”

  “You have to figure that wave could have washed nearly this high onto the island. If they feared a repeat performance, the last thing they would have wanted was to be caught down here on foot.”

  Pike pictured the eight men and women dragging their heavy craft through the mud, clothes thoroughly drenched, frozen to the bone, shivering, hearts pounding and hands trembling from their harrowing ordeal on the violent sea. The adrenaline would have been rapidly fleeing them, their core body temperatures steadily dropping. With the realization of relative safety and the understanding that the Mayr and all of their friends aboard it were now at the bottom of the ocean, shock would have descended upon them fairly rapidly.

  He tried to put himself in their position. What would he have done? He would have ensured the preservation of the small vessel, just as they had. He would have recognized the need to conserve body heat once they were no longer moving and attempted to build a fire, which would have served the secondary purpose of functioning as a smoke signal. The ground here would have been protected well enough to shield a bonfire were they able to find enough dry kindling, but how would they have started it? He climbed into the boat and saw the empty brackets where the emergency kit had been mounted. The white plastic case itself lay overturned in the weeds against the face of the cliff in a mess of its contents. Pike performed a quick inventory of what remained. Missing were the First Aid kit, the waterproof matches, both of the hazard flares and the flare gun, and the emergency transceiver.

  “Start scanning through the frequencies,” Pike said. “Let’s see if anyone’s trying to broadcast a call for help.”

  “We would have picked it up on the tug when we neared the island.”

  Pike shot him a glance.

  “Yes, sir.” Walker stepped away from the boat and Pike heard the crackle of static.

  In their shoes, he would have used the matches to start a fire on this very spot. A small stack of branches and crumbled leaves attested to the fact that they had at least started to do just that.

  And then they had simply left without lighting it.

  He walked back out into the sheeting rain. A gust of wind screamed through the wavering trees. The trail through the mud was now little more than an uneven trench that would be washed away altogether soon enough.

  Pike was thankful he still wore the wetsuit, without which he would be beyond miserable like the poor souls whose path he now followed up the slope with Walker at his heels. The static provided a droning undertone to the clap of the rain and the sucking sounds of their footsteps.

  After fifteen minutes of slipping and sliding uphill, using rocks and weeds to balance themselves, they reached a flat crest of land where the trees thinned. The elements had scoured the ground and erased the tracks. To the east, the Pacific stretched through the mist to the infinite horizon. The jungle grew denser to the north as it climbed up into the clouds that clung to the dormant caldera. To the west, the rolling hills would eventually give way to the kilometers of open sea that separated Ambitle from New Ireland and the chaos that had become of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. A faint crimson glow stained the clouds, behind which the sun had begun to set.

  “There’s nothing on any of the bands.” With a click, Walker silenced the buzz. “It’s always possible their battery could be dead or they could have broken it or accidentally immersed it.”

  Or they could have grown wings and flown away, Pike refrained from adding. The hairs along his arms and neck rose uncomfortably beneath the skintight neoprene. It may have been years since he had last used his instincts in the field, but they had returned to him like a long lost friend.

  Something was definitely not right here.

  A dot appeared far off on the ocean to the east. With a wink of reflected lightning on the pilothouse windows, the Huxley announced her arrival.

  “It’s about time,” Walker said. “We should be on the tug when she reaches the harbor. With a few more men and the proper equipment, we’ll be able to form a proper search party.”

  The wind paused to draw another breath. In its absence, Pike smelled a familiar scent that both validated and churned his gut.

  “Not just yet.”

  The wind blew into his face with a howl, chasing away the aroma, but he knew what he had smelled.

  He struck off up the steep hillside toward the silent volcano. The trees clung to the harsh grade by sheer will alone, their exposed roots like the tentacles of great cephalopods. Using the trunks to haul himself higher, he reached a slanted obsidian outcropping that formed an overhang not quite large enough to qualify as a cave. Sprawled in its shallow mouth was exactly what Pike had expected to find.

  Seventeen

  Feni Islands

  South Pacific Ocean

  52 km East of New Ireland Island, Papua New Guinea

  November 30th

  5:42 p.m. PGT

  Courtney awakened with a scream. She scrabbled backward, out from beneath the smothering weight on her body. She toppled from the bed and landed hard on her side. Her gaze darted around her unfamiliar surroundings in twitching movements as she screamed again and again until her parched throat felt as though it had been torn to ribbons. A man she had never seen threw himself to the floor beside her and gripped her shoulders. She planted her palms against his chest and shoved him with all of the strength she could muster. He landed on the wooden planks, flat on his back, a startled expression on his face. She took in his wetsuit, his damp brown hair and days’ worth of stubble, his wide hazel eyes. He rose to his haunches. Courtney kicked at the slick deck until her back met with cold metal and she couldn’t propel herself any farther away. In a panic, she searched the room with her eyes for anything she could use to hold the man at bay. All she saw were windows haphazardly boarded over with waterlogged plywood or spider-webbed with cracks, coils of frayed rope, a laptop computer on an iron drum, a bed to her left mounded with ratty blankets. A row of gaffes hung on the wall beside
the lone entrance to the room, through which she could see only rain and the rolling brown sea. In order to reach them, she would have to fight through the man who now crawled warily toward her, open palms held up so she could clearly see them. His hands became those of the shadowed form on the other side of the isolation shield. She screamed and kicked at them.

  It was only then, when her pale legs flailed in front of her, that she realized she was naked.

  “Calm down,” the man said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Her heels connected with his hands and forearms and narrowly missed his face, which served to back him out of reach.

  She gauged the distance to the gaffes. If she managed to land a solid kick to his face, she just might be able to—

  A cold hand closed around her wrist, startling her to silence. Slowly, a man eased himself down from the bed and to the ground beside her.

  “Shh.” He folded his strong arms around her. She thrashed against him to no avail. “It’s all right, Courtney. Everything’s going to be okay now.”

  Her adrenaline spent, she collapsed into the man’s arms. She buried her face in his bare chest and started to cry.

  “We’re safe now, Courtney.” He stroked her auburn hair and whispered so close to her ear that she could feel his breath. “We made it.”

  She pulled away and looked up through tear-blurred eyes at John Bishop. His blonde hair was plastered back by blood from a laceration along his hairline. His face was so pallid that his blue eyes appeared recessed into bruises. He took her face in his hands and wiped away her tears with his thumbs.

  “We survived,” he whispered, and again drew her to him.

  He dragged a blanket down from the bed and wrapped it around both of them. Her whole body shuddered as she sobbed. She pulled herself against him so tightly that her fingernails gouged into his back, but he only held her tighter.

  The man in the wetsuit rose to his feet and cautiously eased closer to them. He just stood there, staring down at them as though uncertain how to proceed.

  “Thank you,” Bishop said.

  The man nodded.

  “Anytime.”

  With the realization of safety, the memories flooded back to Courtney, transporting her back aboard the Mayr in vivid detail.

  She awakens to the sound of thunder and the wailing wind. She’s too disoriented by her sudden arousal to make sense of her thoughts, a convolution of dream and reality. She struggles to open her eyes. Exhaustion had claimed her right there at her station under the hood in the lab. She must have just rested her head on her arms for just a second…

  Courtney blinks away the sleep and raises her head. She peels a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth and wipes away the drool. The entire room is bathed in a scarlet glare, which only adds to the sense of displacement. She sits up and glances over her shoulder. All of the overhead fluorescents are off. The illumination is provided by the red light over the main door and another on the opposite side of the room near the batch reactor. The hum of machinery is subdued. It takes her a moment to realize that all of the non-essential equipment in the room has powered down. There is only the gurgle of fluid from her aquarium, the purr of the overhead fans, the continuous culture module, and the batch reactor, beyond which the contamination shield has been lifted and the recently sterilized steel walls reflect the red glow. Something must have happened to the main power for the backup generators to have kicked in.

  Thunder rumbles overhead and the wind continues to shriek.

  Even in her half-slumbering state, she recognizes there’s something incongruous about the scene around her. The walls of the lab are reinforced by stainless steel and sound-damping insulation. She can’t ever remember hearing a storm from inside the lab before.

  Courtney stands and stomps the feeling back into her left foot. She yawns and stretches and gives her station a once-over to make sure she hasn’t knocked over any of the test tubes of heme she’d isolated from the tube worm before heading toward the door. She looks at her watch. Almost midnight. She can’t have been asleep for more than an hour. A good jolt of caffeine ought to clear her head. Maybe a sandwich if they still have the sliced turkey out. She’ll swing by the mess, drop in on Ty, and come back to finish up before calling it a night. Her brother had been bedridden for the better part of the last two days following the incident with the ruptured seal, which had resulted in his confinement with his assistant Devin behind the biohazard shield for more than two hours and a lengthy and painful period of decontamination. The ship’s doctor, a retired naval physician named Dr. Walter Partridge, had been treating him for what appeared to be a dermatological reaction to the agents in the chemical shower and the burn to the left side of his face. His skin had first dried and cracked, and then begun to flake away, almost like in the aftermath of a sunburn. He’d spiked a high fever, had some pretty intense abdominal bloating and cramping, and bleeding from his nose and gums. During the rare occasions he’d been awake when she visited, however, he had remained in good spirits. She felt the pangs of guilt for how infrequent her visits had been due to her work, but he had assured her that he would be fine soon enough and was raring to rejoin her in the lab. Besides, Dr. Partridge seemed like he had things well in hand. The old doctor—who took these floating assignments twice a year to keep in touch with his nautical roots and to maintain his sanity with a wife he was quick to joke could peel the paint from the walls with the merest glance—had been incensed with both the manufacturers of the chemicals and the HazMat team for their obviously callous disregard of the safety protocols, which should never have led to such adverse reactions. If he had anything to say in the matter, Ty would be back on his feet in no time.

  She’s peripherally aware that the rumbling sound has diminished and no longer originates from directly above her, but rather from somewhere near the port side. The wind sounds as though it’s blowing unimpeded through the main corridor.

  She presses the button to disengage the lock and the door slides back into the wall.

  The world erupts in chaos.

  Courtney cried out and clutched Bishop tighter. She shunted the memory before she was forced to relive another second of the horror.

  Thumping sounds came from the stern and the boat rocked with transferred weight. She heard voices over the thrum of the rain. Three men appeared in the doorway.

  “Dr. Martin. Mr. Bishop,” one of the men said. He nodded to the man in the wetsuit. “I can’t tell you how thrilled we all are that you survived. My name is James Van Horn. Let’s get you aboard the Huxley so a doctor can have a good look at you.”

  He strode into the room and offered his hand to Courtney. The mention of the doctor suddenly reminded her of her brother.

  “Where’s Ty?” Courtney whispered.

  “That’s what we’d like to find out. We’re all dying to learn exactly what happened here.”

  Courtney leapt up from the floor, shoved past the men, and ran out onto the deck. The rain pelted her naked body.

  “Where’s my brother?” she screamed across the raging sea.

  Eighteen

  Ambitle Island

  Pike inspected the corpse and the rock ledge surrounding it from several feet away for fear of ruining any footprints. The body lay spread-eagle on a mat of gravel and decomposing leaves. He estimated the man was in his mid-twenties, although it was impossible to be certain with the way his facial architecture was distorted by fractures and the swelling from the absorbed seawater. Both of his legs were crooked from multiple fractures of his femora and tibiae, his ebon feet bare.

  The wind screamed across the stone face, stirring the flies that crawled all over his skin and inside the gaping wound in his abdomen.

  “This isn’t one of the men from the lifeboat,” Pike said.

  “How can you be sure?” Walker’s words were mumbled thanks to the hand he held over his mouth and nose.

  “The edges of the lacerations to his gut. The level of decomposition makes it h
arder to tell, but you can see there’s no bruising where the skin was torn. There’s no blood either.”

  “There’s no way the tsunami could have washed him all the way up here.”

  “Right. See those scuff marks on the ground over there? Someone dragged his body.”

  “You’re suggesting some kind of animal hauled him up that steep hill and dragged him under this overhang so it could eat in peace out of the rain?”

  Pike found a long stick and used it to brush aside the leaves that had accumulated on the remains, then peeled back the upper lip of the severed muscles and the layer of greasy fat. A vile stench billowed out on the wings of the disturbed flies. In the mess of rotting viscera, he made out the shapes of the liver and kidneys, the horn of the stomach cradling the pancreas, the thick black arteries and vena cava, and the musculature of the lumbar spine. Only the bowels had been removed. He let the flap close and turned a slow circle. No coils of intestine had been cast aside into the shrubs. Any animal that would have had the urge to consume a drowned man it had found washed up in the forest wouldn’t have contented itself with the bowels alone. There should have been chunks ripped from the flesh, straps of muscle peeled away from the bones, and the prized internal organs sloppily consumed.

  And it would have left tracks.

  The bodies floating in the hold of the Mayr were nearly identical.

  He could only remember one other time when he’d encountered corpses in this condition.

  Pike brought the transceiver to his lips.

  “Brazelton.”

  Static answered.

  “Brazelton!”

  Pike studied Walker, whose hand fell to the hilt of his knife as he stared down at the corpse, an expression of grim comprehension on his face.

  “Brazelton!”

  “I’m here. I’m here.” His heavy breathing echoed under the stone lip. “The Huxley arrived. I…just helping them get…two survivors onto…Zodiac.”