Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  “As you know,” Van Horn said, “three divers were sent down into the wreckage to divine the reason for her sinking and to salvage everything of importance. Their first pass was exploratory in nature, to help us gather topical information before searching for specific equipment and proprietary research.”

  Bishop’s heart thudded in his chest. The images were startling. He felt himself holding his breath as though he were slowly suffocating all over again.

  “Mr. Barnes, please enlarge the number one feed.”

  With a keystroke, the image from the top left filled the screen.

  “What do you see, Mr. Bishop?”

  “That’s the stairwell leading from the main deck to the hold.” He watched as the diver swam sideways and then upward into the corridor leading to the engine room. The ship had settled on its starboard side as he only vaguely recalled. A human shape materialized in the light and floated toward the camera. He recognized the pale, bloated face immediately. “Kim. Stanley, I think. She was one of the graduate research assistants.”

  Bishop realized that Van Horn was no longer watching the monitor. The man’s eyes watched him instead, gauging his reactions.

  “What do you remember about the hours preceding your time in the isolation chamber? Why did you and Dr. Martin seal yourselves in there?”

  On the screen, the footage wound through a maze of pipes that cast long shadows through the murky water. In his mind, images flashed like bolts of lightning tearing the night sky. Waking from a deep sleep in his cabin to the sound of waves slamming against the hull and screams from the hallway. Stumbling into the corridor where bodies collided and raced past him toward the clogged stairwell. A spatter of blood on the wall. A black puddle on the floor from which sloppy smears and footprints originated. The crimson glare of the emergency lights. The ship rocking violently beneath him. Funneling into the crowd and down to the main deck where the screams intensified and he saw a man’s body crumpled against the wall—

  The same man’s corpse floated into view on the monitor, pointing through the screen at Bishop from beyond the grave. Behind him, more bodies floated in cold storage, their limbs entangled.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. How had the body ended up all the way down there? He tried to look away, but couldn’t tear his eyes from the corpses on the screen as the camera panned across their features one at a time.

  “Talk to me, Bishop,” Van Horn said. “We need to find out what happened here. Why were all of these people down in the hold when the ship was foundering? What made you and Dr. Martin decide to seal yourselves in the lab?” His voice rose with each question until it was nearly a shout. “What did you see?”

  Bishop clenched his fists to stave off hyperventilation. He focused on his breathing, while on the screen the diver swam back through the engine room, down the stairwell, and into the main corridor. The doors to the labs passed at the edges of the light’s aura, the stainless steel bowed, pitted, and deeply scratched.

  “Tell me what you saw!”

  The diver swam through the thin gap between the door and the frame leading into the clean lab. Two other divers hovered with their backs to him. Their headlamps diffused through the silt-blanketed biohazard shield. Closer and closer the camera came until he could see into the chamber. Two shapes were heaped in the corner in the standing water. With the way the video jerked, it was impossible to tell if either of them was alive.

  “I’m running out of patience, Bishop. I need to know—”

  Bishop leapt from the chair and staggered backward from the monitor. In his head, he was there again, his memories disjointed, flickering like a reel-to-reel projecting random frames. The shield dropping in front of his face, silencing the horrible cries. Courtney clasping his hand under the red glare. Smears of blood on the barrier, smudged handprints and arterial arches. A silhouette pacing on the other side, turning toward them, the emergency lights reflecting from its—

  “Eyes,” Bishop whispered. “I remember its eyes.”

  Twenty-Two

  Ambitle Island

  They picked up the trail under a section of canopy so thick it was impervious even to the rain about half a kilometer west-northwest from where they had split up on the rise. Clearly demarcated footprints led ever westward, not at a leisurely pace, but at a full-out sprint as evidenced by the spacing between them. There were four distinct sets: three adult males and a fourth, much smaller man, or, more likely, a woman. The spongy loam was frequently disturbed where one of them had fallen and hurriedly scrabbled back to his feet. Between the closely packed trunks, their snaking roots, and the vines that dangled from nearly every bough overhead, progress was slower than he would have liked. Pike could only imagine what could have scared the survivors badly enough that they had even attempted to navigate this forest at such a breakneck speed, blindly barreling through the shrubs and the thickets, branches tearing at their clothes and exposed skin, unable to see more than a few feet ahead of them at any given time.

  Montgomery had radioed in twenty minutes ago with news that he and Pearson had found a similar path heading northward, confirming that the landing party had indeed split up. Their tracks had been spaced more evenly, their path less erratic. It was steeper going with portions of the eroded slope held together by the roots of the trees that clung perilously to the soil at sharp angles and the sheer stone escarpments that forced a more circuitous route.

  Pike envisioned the circumstances that would have caused the group to divide in such a manner. Considering the speed with which they’d broken camp before it was even established, he couldn’t fathom that there had been much debate. Perhaps it was possible they had willingly separated in order to increase their chances of finding rescue; however, he felt it more likely that something else, some external factor, had necessitated their sudden, chaotic flight.

  And he had a pretty good idea what had done so.

  Pike realized he was approaching the search from the wrong perspective. He needed to think less like the prey and more like the predator. If he were stalking a group of people, how would he do it? He would secure the high ground and run them like a herd of cattle until all of their energy was spent and they would provide the least resistance. He would hide his presence in the shadows and stay just far enough behind them that they could feel him there without being able to do anything about it, then wait until the right moment arrived to attack. Once he adapted his thinking, it didn’t take long to find what he was looking for.

  “I need more light.”

  Pike knelt on the soft mat of moss and decomposing leaves ten yards uphill from the trail, his night vision goggles pulled up onto his forehead like a unicorn’s horn. He shined his flashlight onto the impression in the detritus, which bore the distinct, though poorly defined, shape of a human footprint. Walker directed his beam onto the print while Pike carefully extracted the vegetative matter to expose the black mud underneath.

  “It looks like about a size twelve,” Breazelton said. He held his own foot up beside the imprint. “Maybe thirteen.”

  “And it’s bare,” Walker said. “The edges aren’t smooth, and there’s no tread. The mud’s more compressed where he bears his weight.” He gestured to the print as he spoke. “This sideways L-shape here is where the ball of the foot was planted. No heel contact. You can see the gouges from the toes in front of it. Whoever left it was obviously running.”

  Pike traced his fingertip along the ridges left by the toes. They were teardrop-shaped rather than rounded. He glanced at Brazelton, who nodded that he had noticed the same thing. They had definitely seen tracks like this before.

  There were two more footprints spaced approximately a meter apart before they lost the trail to the wilderness. Pike was about to suggest they fan out to follow both trails when his transceiver crackled.

  “We found them,” Pearson said.

  Pike deciphered the nature of the discovery from the tone of Pearson’s voice.

  “Where are you?”

/>   “Maybe half a kilometer…north from where we separated.”

  “What’s their condition?”

  “If it’s confirmation…a theory you’re looking for…consider it confirmed.”

  “Stay right there. Don’t touch anything until I get there.”

  “Kind of hard not to,” Pearson said.

  “Keep following this trail,” Pike said to Brazelton. He sheathed his transceiver. “Report in every fifteen minutes.”

  “There’s one of them on this island,” Walker said. “Those things we’ve been collecting for GeNext. That’s what we’re really hunting, isn’t it?”

  “If you encounter anything out of the ordinary, call me first,” Pike said. “Do not attempt to engage this thing without waiting for backup. If confrontation is unavoidable, I expect you to do everything in your power to take it down alive.”

  Thunder rumbled across the sea from the west. Soft at first, it grew into a mechanical whooping sound as it approached.

  “Don’t screw this up,” Pike said.

  He whirled and sprinted back through the jungle as the pulsating sound of rotors swept overhead, shaking the canopy with hurricane force.

  Twenty-Three

  R/V Aldous Huxley

  Courtney dreamed the dreams of the dead.

  She was a child of seven or eight, wearing dirty shorts and a T-shirt decorated with the mud she’d wiped onto her chest from her hands, her red hair a wind-knotted mess, covered with freckles from head to toe. Her brother climbed over the rocky Jersey coast ahead of her, glancing occasionally back over his shoulder to make sure she wasn’t about to fall. A frigid wind blew in across the Atlantic, driving the waves against the breakers with the sound of repeated freeway collisions and throwing foamy spray high above them to alight like rain on their backs. She struggled to keep up, knowing full well that Ty would always outpace her. When she eventually slid down the embankment, she found her brother crouching over a tide pool.

  “They’re stuck in here until the tide comes in to wash them away again,” he said.

  Courtney stared down into the water, where minnows darted restlessly, crabs fiddled in the sand, and snails mowed the green slime. At the very bottom, a creature with pale tendrils played host to a tiny, red-spotted yellowfin grouper that clung to the sanctuary it provided. It was an anemone, she was certain. She would have told Ty that she recognized it, if only she were able to make the word come out right. Anen…Amem…Amenome… But it wasn’t like any anemone they had encountered in their explorations. This one was an almost translucent white with only five unevenly spaced tendrils that were tattered and falling apart where the scavengers had gnawed them. Weren’t they supposed to be able to sting anything that bit them?

  As she stared at it, the details became clear. The tentacles were fingers, the cup where the mouth should have been, a palm. The stalk she assumed moored it to the rocks was instead a wrist that a crab used to crawl up to steal a morsel with its pincers.

  Waves crashed harder and harder against the shore, a ceaseless thunder that made her want to clap her hands over her ears, but they wouldn’t respond. She could only look down at the tide pool as her vision drifted in and out of focus until it settled upon the reflection on the water.

  “Sometimes they’re trapped in there for days at a time, until the animals on the land notice them and make a meal of them,” Ty’s reflection said. His skin took on the shimmering silver cast of a fish’s scales and twin scarlet circles flashed in his corneas.

  She awakened with the sound of waves still crashing inside her head. No, the pounding was too rhythmic, like a heart beating way too fast. It seemed to hover somewhere over her head.

  “Feeling any better?” a man she didn’t immediately recognize asked. He stood beside her bed, changing out the IV bag that tethered the tall metal pole to the point of discomfort on her right arm by a long tube.

  She tried to speak, but only produced the clicking sound of her dry tongue peeling from the roof of her mouth. With the realization that she was in the shipboard infirmary, the memories flooded back, overwhelming her and rolling down her cheeks as tears. She remembered waiting to die in the isolation chamber while the ship was battered and driven to the bottom of the sea. Bishop holding her until the darkness without became the darkness within as her heartbeat slowed to the pace of the drops of seawater dripping into her tomb. The image of her brother’s visage on the tide pool returned, only now as that of an adult, his face swollen and distorted, beneath the water instead of above it. A flash of red from his eyes and she was again inside her lab.

  Screams assail her from the corridor. She hears what sounds like an air raid siren. Men and women formed of shadows by the scarlet glare streak past as they run aft. Her mind’s unable to rationalize the bedlam.

  She stands in the doorway, immobile as though in a dream, until someone veers in her direction and grabs her by the hand.

  “What’s happening?” she cries.

  “I don’t know!” a voice she recognizes as Bishop’s shouts.

  He pulls her into the hallway.

  The floor heaves violently beneath her feet, throwing them both to the ground. Bodies topple onto them. Feet stampede past their heads. She reflexively throws her arms up in front of her face to ward them off and takes a heel to the gut. Bishop tugs on her hand and drags her to her feet. The tide has turned and those that had been running toward the stern now charge directly at them.

  The ship lurches again, hurling them against the wall. The Mayr’s turned her broad side into the waves. No longer cutting through them, she’s at their mercy.

  A rush of freezing water races down the corridor, rising over their ankles and threatening to sweep them off their feet.

  The boat cants in the opposite direction. It’s all she can do to stay upright amid the screaming figures streaming past.

  Bishop pulls her again, this time back into the lab. Equipment falls from the worktables and shatters on the floor. Her elbow knocks a microscope from the counter. She trips over a stool, but manages to catch herself without dragging both of them down. They retreat from the doorway as the floor rocks and seawater floods across the threshold.

  The klaxon continues to blare.

  “What’s going on?” she screams.

  Bishop tightens his grip on her hand in response.

  They retreat to the forward portion of the lab, away from the lone entrance.

  The screams in the hallway reach a crescendo.

  A rack of beakers plummets to the ground on the other side of the table with the machine gun-prattle of shattering glass. The real-time PCR machine wobbles and clatters against the mass spectrometer with a shriek and a crash.

  Something hard presses into her back. She reaches behind her and feels stainless steel, smooth and rounded. It vibrates against her touch. Tubing coils around her wrist.

  The batch reactor.

  Metal groans as the ship heaves again. They stumble to the right. Courtney reaches out to brace herself. A round button gives way under her palm. Another klaxon joins the chorus.

  “No!” Bishop shouts.

  The Plexiglas isolation shield shoots down from the ceiling and embeds itself in the floor with enough force to drop her to her knees.

  “Raise it!” Bishop yells.

  He pounds his fists against the cordon. The floor tips on a steep incline.

  “I can’t! The mechanism to retract it is on the other side!”

  A wave breaks against the hull like a torpedo, launching them from their feet. Her head strikes something hard and she tastes metal in her mouth. The entire world spins. She’s vaguely aware of Bishop on top of her, blood pouring over his closed eyelids from a laceration across his hairline, and someone shouting over the tumult.

  “Let us in! Please, God! You have to let us in!”

  “Where’s Bishop?” she whispered.

  “He ought to be back shortly,” Dr. Kiley said. “You should really rest in the meantime. Your pulse ox is s
till only—”

  “No.”

  Courtney threw back the covers and attempted to lunge out of bed, but instead collapsed to the floor. The IV tube ripped out of her arm. A mixture of blood and saline ran down her forearm to drip from her fingertips. She struggled to her feet, and, swaying, staggered toward the door.

  She had to find Bishop.

  A swell of nausea washed over her and she had to lean against the door jamb to quell her dizziness.

  “Please, Dr. Martin.” Dr. Kiley stepped in front of her and took her gently by the shoulders. “You aren’t in any kind of shape to—”

  Courtney brushed him aside and crossed the exam room toward the door to the corridor.

  The memory consumed her. In her mind, she was rising from the standing water inside the isolation chamber, unsteady from the blow to the head. Double-vision changed to single and then back again. The ship rocked wildly. She braced herself against the biohazard shield and peered out into the lab. Bishop grunted behind her in an effort to stand, but only ended up splashing back into the water. The crimson glare had bled onto the Plexiglas in smudges and arcs, from which glistening rivulets trickled. And through them, she watched the silhouette pace like a caged tiger. When its face turned toward her, twin circles reflected the emergency lights from its eyes.

  Twenty-Four

  Ambitle Island

  Pike sprinted through the jungle. He pushed his body beyond its limits. He’d passed the point of exhaustion long ago and now functioned on pure adrenaline. His cheeks bled from the lacerations inflicted by the branches in his way. His palms and knees were skinned from repeatedly tripping and scrambling up the slick rock formations, but he was too focused on the task at hand to feel any of it.