Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  Reaves heard commotion in the hallway, but by the time he ducked his head out of the lab, there was no one in sight. He walked down the corridor and entered the makeshift command center to find Bradley alone in the room, staring at the monitor with his fingers steepled beneath his chin.

  “What was all the ruckus?”

  Bradley waved off his question and continued to be mesmerized by the screen in front of him. It was paused on an image with a thick bar of static frozen in the center, above which Reaves saw a stairwell that looked identical to the one he had just passed on his way in. He eased into the room and was nearly at Bradley’s side when he saw what held his longtime employer and friend enrapt. There were bodies mounded in the threshold like sandbags heaped along the banks of a flooding river. They were mostly obscured by the crackling black bands, but just on the other side, a pair of eyes glowed gray with reflected light, twin circles of eyeshine. The black silhouette to which they belonged was outlined with the same gray.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Reaves said. “We were right.”

  Bradley nodded, but said nothing.

  Reaves took the seat beside him and stared at the vaguely human shape on the screen for a long moment before finally turning to engage Bradley. He forgot what he was going to say when he saw the tears glistening on Bradley’s cheeks and the pained expression on his face.

  “How long have we waited for this moment?” Bradley asked. “How many years have we been searching? How much time and effort have we expended to bring us to this very moment?”

  Reaves waited silently. Bradley was obviously building up to something.

  “Did you ever think this would happen? I mean really happen?” He broke his stare from the screen and turned to face Reaves. “I don’t know if I actually ever did. All of these years of imagining what it would be like, and now we’re actually going to have the opportunity to study a living example of Chaco Man.”

  “We don’t have him yet.”

  “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “You have to remember that somewhere inside of that mutated body is a living, breathing human being. It’s not like the remains back in The Crypt. This is someone’s child, someone’s—”

  “Brother,” Bradley said.

  “You’re sure?”

  Bradley nodded and looked back at the screen.

  “Do you think she knows?” Reaves asked.

  “I don’t think so. At least not yet.”

  “Eventually, she will. And then what?”

  Bradley smiled wistfully.

  “What’s the value of the information we could learn from studying him? We’re looking at the next step in the evolution of humanity. We’re apes confronted with Neanderthal Man.”

  Reaves leaned forward and tapped the screen where the corpses were piled.

  “This isn’t the future. This is an aberration. We’re not dealing with the progression of mankind, but rather something set upon the earth to prey upon it. This is the spontaneous emergence of a predator as deadly as any that has ever stalked the earth. And on this monitor is proof-positive why we should never coexist.” He bumped his chair against Bradley’s and gave a single chuckle. “Do you remember how this whole quest of ours started? You should have seen the look on your face when you saw the bodies for the first time. I thought you were going to piss that fancy suit of yours.”

  “I nearly did.” Bradley snorted a laugh and shook his head. “I’ll never forget that moment. It changed the course of my life. It gave me purpose.”

  “And what was that purpose?”

  “I wanted to understand them. I wanted to know how such fantastic mutations could arise. I wanted to study every facet of their existence. Why had they been entombed under the ruins? Why had they been buried with live animals? Why were there human bones all around them? Were they the reason for the evidence of cannibalism? And most importantly, I needed to know how they came into being.”

  “And that’s the revelation we’re on the brink of right now.” He rested his hand on Bradley’s shoulder. “Possessing Chaco Man has never been our goal. We will be the first to study him, and we’ll be the first to understand him, even if we end up having to share him with the world.”

  “I’m more worried we’ll be forced to destroy him. Just like so many other times in the past.”

  “Brendan,” a voice interrupted from behind them. He turned to find Angie leaning around the doorway. Her face was positively aglow with excitement. “You have to see this.”

  Reaves met Bradley’s stare, and together they leapt from their chairs and hustled out into the hallway. Angie was already a good five paces ahead of them, her hips swishing like a speed walker’s.

  “That microorganism you saw? The one with the viruses inside of it?” she said without looking back. “It’s an unclassified species of thermophile similar to thermococcuslitoralis. At least physically, anyway. I’ve barely begun to examine it, but I’ve already been able to isolate one of the viruses. You have to see this thing to believe it.”

  Angie ducked into the main lab and both men followed. She sat in front of the scanning electron microscope and gestured toward the screen.

  “This is at 26,400x magnification.” The virus looked like a fuzzy sac containing twin budding willow branches, each of which were long and filamentous.

  “It’s dead,” Reaves said.

  She spun in her chair to face them, her eyes wild.

  “It’s a retrovirus.”

  When neither immediately said anything, her face flushed with frustration.

  “Don’t you get it? This is a super-aggressive form of virus. I haven’t had the opportunity to break down its protein structure yet, but I can tell you right now that this is one scary bug.”“A retrovirus,” Bradley said. “Like AIDS?”

  “Exactly. Think of it as a little dictator that infects the body and imposes its will over every cell. It copies its proteins directly into the host’s DNA and forces the body to make changes more conducive to its proliferation. Consider the human immunodeficiency virus. Through the process of reverse transcription, it inserts a copy of its RNA into the host’s DNA, so that every time a cell divides and replicates, it reproduces the virus’ genetic code as a part of its own. In the case of HIV, it depletes the number of T cells in the body, which weakens the immune system and essentially creates its own ideal environment that allows for the development of full-blown AIDS.

  “Based on the symptoms the doctor on the Mayr documented—the sudden onset and rapid advancement of inflammatory skin plaques, and the accelerated growth of the nails—I think we’re dealing with a virus that attacks the cells with the most rapid reproduction rate. The subsequent immune reaction caused the patient to spike a fever. I can only speculate from there, but here’s my theory. The initial infection serves as a form of distraction. While the lymphocytes are waging a losing battle against the psoriatic condition, the virus attacks the remainder of the body. It triggers rapid proliferation of ordinarily slow-dividing cells like the bones of the maxilla, which causes those sharp protuberances that mimic teeth, and the tissues of the retina, to cause the development of a low light-enhancing film similar to the tapetumlucidum in nocturnal animals. It’ll take years of playing with this little devil before I can conclusively demonstrate this, though.”

  She looked at each of them in turn, a mischievous smile on her face.

  “Want to see the coolest part?”

  She leaned across her desk to the microarray workstation where several test tubes filled with cloudy fluid were balanced in the warmer. She used a micropipette to draw a sample from one of them.

  “This is a concentrated solution of aqueous hydrogen sulfide and saline,” she said, waving the tip under her crinkled nose. “Just like you’d find in one of the hydrothermal vents where the bacterium was collected.”

  It smelled like she passed gas.

  “You won’t believe this.” She lowered the pipette to the stained slide they now viewed. A tiny
drop shivered from the tip before snapping free. It spread across the monitor, making the entire virus buck to the left. She had to track it down and center over it once more. “Check it out.”

  “Hold the slide still,” Reaves said.

  “I’m not touching it.”

  “I can’t get a good look at it with you moving it around like that.”

  “Like I said, I’m not doing it.”

  The hairy filaments on the screen flipped back and forth in twitching movements, the clear, bud-like balls along their lengths colliding.

  Angie raised her hands palm-up to show that she wasn’t manipulating what they were witnessing.

  “It’s alive,” Bradley said.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Angie said. “It’s as though they can exist for extended periods of time in a dormant state that imitates death. It’s chemosynthetic. Apparently, it requires a high level of hydrogen sulfide to survive.”

  “Even inside a host?”

  “Especially inside of a host.It’s natural environment is rife with hydrogen sulfide.”

  “Is there enough naturally occurring in the atmosphere to sustain it?” Reaves asked.

  “It wouldn’t have been dead on the slide when you walked in if there were.”

  “Then how in the world does it survive?”

  Angie smiled. A devious expression Reaves had seen before, although in a dramatically different context, crossed her face. Again, his stomach fluttered.

  “I have a theory about that…”

  She made them wait her out.

  “What does hydrogen sulfide smell like?” she finally asked.

  “Like a great big fart,” Reaves said.

  She waved her hands as though trying to coax the obvious answer out of them.

  “And where do ‘great big farts’ come from?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Bradley whispered.

  Thirty-Four

  James Van Horn opened the door to the submersible hanger, which now served as a temporary morgue until the bodies were properly studied and transferred to more permanent accommodations in cold storage belowdecks. There was no way to perform formal autopsies on corpses that eventually had to be returned to the families of the deceased. His footsteps echoed in the large garage as he walked to the center of the bay. The control room up the flight of stairs to the left was dark, the submersible Trident to his right in dry dock. Ahead, the garage door to the launch on the stern was closed. Twenty feet overhead, the stadium lights mounted to the exposed girders shined down on the smooth floor, spotlighting the lumpy tarps and the five cadavers they covered. The two divers who had dropped what they were doing on the ocean floor to collect them from the island stood as far away from the remains as possible, their backs against the wall beside the door through which he’d entered. Neither spoke as they stared around the room at anything other than the source of the putrid stench.

  Several crabs made clacking sounds as they scuttled across the ground. Van Horn swept aside the nearest with his boot and approached the remains.

  “What kind of condition are they in?” he asked. He watched small lumps move under the amassed tarps like the heels of a baby through an expectant mother’s belly. It was going to be a long time before he ordered crab legs again.

  “You think either of us looked at them?” one of the men said. “We just hauled them to the Zodiak and dragged them in here like you told us to. No one said anything about having to look at them.”

  Van Horn couldn’t blame them. He didn’t relish the prospect much himself. After days rotting in the elements and with the obvious attention from the scavengers, he could only imagine their condition.

  “You’re dismissed,” he said.

  With a shared sigh of relief, both men ducked out the doorway and into the corridor. The door closed behind them with a loud thud that reverberated through the hollow chamber.

  The transceiver clipped to his belt squawked.

  “What…you doing?” Pike’s voice snapped through the fuzz.

  “Just making sure we retrieved all of the stiffs before turning them over to scientific.” He stood before the tarps, wishing he had some sort of mask to pull over his mouth and nose. All smells were particulate. The thought of rotten flesh dripping from his nostrils onto his tongue and down the back of his throat was enough to churn his gut. “Believe me, it’s not a task I anticipate enjoying. At all.”

  “No. What…ship doing on…west side of the island?”

  “Bradley’s orders. If there’s the possibility that the survivors reached the shore, he figures that’s where we should be.” He chuckled. “It was either that or start raising the dead from the Mayr, and I’m in no hurry to have any more stinking corpses on board.”

  “Turn around,” Pike said. “Right now, for the love…” His words dissolved into the static. “Just…around.”

  “The electrical interference is getting worse. I can barely understand what you’re trying to say.” He slipped on the pair of nitrile examination gloves he had pilfered from one of the labs on his way to the hanger and lifted the corner of one of the tarps. Another crab snapped at his fingers before dancing away. “Nasty little critters.”

  “…exactly what it wants…herding you…already…Montgomery and Pearson...response…”

  “I’m not following. Your transmission’s cutting in and out.”

  Van Horn drew a deep breath, steadied his resolve, and threw back the first tarp. Three men lay supine on a solar blanket, their remains crawling with the blasted crabs. One of the men was scorched black, the other two gutted, staring blankly up at him through filmy eyes. Insect larvae burrowed through their wounds and under their skin.

  “Ugh.” Van Horn groaned and turned away to choke down his gorge. He had known what to expect, but still hadn’t been prepared. The next bundle only held two corpses, he knew, fortunately only one of which had been disemboweled. It was a miserable day indeed when that was the reason to consider himself lucky. He walked around to the other side and prepared to raise the tarp. Now that some of the bodies were exposed, the smell had intensified tenfold. The last thing he wanted to do was add to it.

  “…hear me, damn it! I…don’t…I repeat, don’t…”

  “You’re breaking up on me. All I caught was ‘don’t’.”

  “…within a mile of the island…keep…distance…If it…someone like…Montgomery…”

  “What about a mile from the island? Can you see something from where you are?”

  Van Horn crouched, grabbed the corner of the tarp, and, in one quick motion, threw it back. It fluttered like a magician’s cape and crumpled to the ground.

  “Don’t moor the ship…mile of the island!” Pike shouted. “Do…copy? It’s…trap. The goddamned thing…luring the Huxley…”

  The two recently exposed bodies rested on the floor beside the others. The one nearest to him had been savaged, its belly opened to cradle standing water and decomposing viscera.

  “Repeat, Pike. It sounded like you said something about a trap.”

  The body next to it was still clothed and intact. Its entire body appeared bloated and swollen, its abdomen massively distended.

  Its chest rose ever so slightly.

  “What the hell?”

  “Do not…that ship within a mile…”

  He looked from the man’s chest to his bruised neck, beside which he caught a flash of silver as something slid out from under the corpse—

  A pair of eyes snapped open. The bright halogens overhead reflected as twin golden circles. It shoved the drowned man’s body off of it and sprung to its feet. Scaled lips peeled back from a mouth filled with multiple rows of sharp teeth in a horrible mockery of a smile.

  Van Horn screamed and flung himself backward, but the creature was already upon him. He reached for his gun and came away with only his transceiver. It clattered from his hand and slid away from his fingers.

  “Just listen…me…Horn. Do not…that damn ship within a mother-lo
ving mile…”

  Another scream passed from his lacerated trachea as a gurgle of fluid.

  A puddle of dark blood spread beneath him, seeping away from him to where the transceiver rested, pooling against its side.

  “…copy, Van Horn? I said, do…copy?”

  Pike’s words drifted away into the hanger over the soft slapping of wet, bare feet and the sound of tearing flesh.

  Thirty-Five

  Ambitle Island

  Pike roared in frustration and hurled the transceiver against the trunk of a kapok. Broken plastic and fractured electrical components cascaded into the underbrush.

  Lightning crackled across the sky in a ceaseless display.

  “Give me your transceiver,” he said to Walker.

  “So you can break it, too?”

  “Just give me your goddamned transceiver!” Pike shouted, his voice echoing through the valley.

  “All right, all right,” Walker said. “Keep it together, man.”

  Pike’s stare bored holes into Walker, who turned away to look upon the sea, where the Huxley sailed out of sight through the canopy to their right.

  “Ambitle to Huxley,” Pike said into the transceiver. “Come in, Huxley.”

  The only reply was the crackle of static.

  “There’s too much electrical interference,” Brazelton said. “We’re just going to have to wait it out. Besides, I doubt there’s anywhere on this island equipped to dock a vessel the size of the Huxley. They won’t have any other choice but to moor far off the coast.” He turned to address Walker’s back. “You said the western shore is shallow, right?”

  “I said there are shallow-water hydrothermal vents. The shelf drops slowly, but Tutum Bay is still several hundred feet deep within shouting distance of the coast.”

  “The ship’s draft is too deep to even attempt it. They’d tear the hull out on the reef.”

  “But they’ll still dispatch a landing party,” Pike said.

  “Not if we get there first,” Brazelton said. “Right?”