Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  His plan was simple. They contact help and set up a rendezvous on the far side of the island. Once they were safely off this godforsaken rock, he’d send back assistance for the others. Beyond that, all he cared about was that they weren’t killed first.

  He envisioned the island in his head and tried to plot a course in his mind. The Tolai Village was on the north end of Tutum Bay, which, if he was correct, should be approximately six kilometers from where they were now. If they forged ahead as quickly as they could through the remainder of the night and the better part of the day, they should reach it by sometime in the early afternoon. Maybe they would even get lucky and hail a passing freighter that could get them off of this infernal island by sundown.

  The plan hinged upon them finding the village well ahead of the others while traversing the steeper and more perilous terrain to hide their tracks, in little more than their tattered clothing and bare feet.

  “Come on,” he whispered. He tugged her by the hand toward the invisible path that meandered deeper into the jungle. Only the cries from the beach followed them, but eventually they were drowned out by the rain on the canopy.

  Forty-Nine

  Pike fought through the hip-deep waves to help Walker pull the first life raft to shore. A man in uniform and a woman in a pantsuit cringed away from them like drenched, beaten dogs. Their wide eyes and pallor told the tale of what they had endured. Once they’d dragged the inflatable craft onto the sand, they headed back out without a backward glance. Two more swimmers reached the beach and now crawled toward where Brazelton still covered the tree line, bringing the grand total to five, including the man who lay on his side, vomiting seawater. Five of the dozens of bodies they had seen paddling away from the sinking ship. While they landed the second life raft, in which a solitary able seaman huddled against the storm, the final swimmer, a young woman Pike recognized as the seismologist they had hired at the last second, finally crawled to shore, sobbing as she collapsed face-first into the sand. The lone remaining liferaft drifted slowly toward them.

  “Start a fire,” Pike shouted to one of the stunned men from the first craft. “We need to warm these people up in a hurry.”

  He and Walker sloshed back into the ocean toward the last vessel. Including the three of them who had been on Ambitle prior to the Huxley’s foundering, that brought the grand total of survivors to ten, plus however many were on the raft that was almost within reach. Ten of sixty-two souls. The rest had been lost to the sea and whatever hunted it. Their ship was a part of the reef, their communications fried by the water. At least the EPIRB distress beacon would have been activated the moment the waves flooded the main deck. Someone would be able to find them, eventually, when there were finally enough spare hands in tsunami-ravaged Oceania to break away from the mainland to search for them. In the meantime, he needed to keep these people alive long enough to welcome a rescue party. After witnessing what had happened to the survivors from the Mayr, he knew that would be no small feat.

  Once the raft was close enough to grab, he and Walker both started pulling it landward. At first, Pike couldn’t see anyone over the tall rubber ring and feared it might have been launched empty, but then he smelled it…the faintly metallic scent of freshly butchered meat. He pulled himself up to get a better look and saw the carcasses sprawled on the slashed fabric. Two men had been cut to ribbons, their clothes so bloody it was hard to tell their uniforms apart from their lacerated skin. They’d been attacked with such ferocity that they were unrecognizable. Every inch of exposed skin was sliced as though they’d been dragged behind a car over a road paved with broken bottles.

  “God damn,” Walker said.

  “Out of the water,” Pike said.

  “What in the name of God did this to—?”

  “Get out of the water! Now!”

  Pike was about to shove away and splash toward the shallows when something brushed his leg. He yelled and kicked at it, connecting with something soft and forgiving. It grabbed him around the thigh. He pointed his pistol at the water and tightened his finger on the trigger—

  A face breached the surface in front of him with a gasp and he nearly put a bullet right between Bradley’s eyes. His employer sputtered and threw his arms around him.

  “Thank God,” Bradley said, over and over.

  Pike extricated himself from the embrace and shoved the older man toward where the others congregated on the beach. He turned back in time to see Reaves and Whitted pop up from beneath the life craft.

  “What happened out there?” Pike asked Reaves as he dragged the man quickly away from the orange raft.

  “It was in the ocean with us…It-it…just climbed up onto the raft and slaughtered them…with us right underneath…the whole time…listening to them scream…the blood—”

  “On the Huxley,” Pike snapped.”What happened aboard the Huxley?”

  “It got onto the boat. Somehow. There was no warning. I just heard Bradley shouting. And the next thing I know, the halls were packed…people trying to abandon ship. I saw…on the monitor…in the pilothouse…the captain…We just…like the others…just jumped overboard and tried…tried…”

  “See if you can help start a fire,” Pike said. Between the man’s incoherence and the chattering of his teeth, Pike could barely follow what Reaves was trying to say, but he got a clear enough picture. As he had surmised, the same thing that had happened on the Mayr had transpired on the Huxley, and right now that creature was out there at this very moment. Somewhere. And if it didn’t fear attacking a large vessel filled with more than sixty able-bodied men and women, then it would have no qualms about coming after their disorganized lot on this isolated beach.

  “Hurry up with that fire!” he shouted.

  More than the heat, right now they needed the light. The beach was too open, indefensible. Their hunter had already demonstrated that it had no aversion to water, and the forest to the west was so dense that if it approached from that direction, it would be upon them before they even knew it was coming. They had three pistols and three Tasers between them, a pathetic arsenal against something so obviously capable, and not nearly enough to guard against an assault that could come from any of the three hundred and sixty degrees. The majority of them were half-drowned and settling into shock. A part of him thought the rest be damned; he was saving himself. But like a herd of gazelles, keeping the stragglers around was the best defense against predation. At least then the strong among them would have some warning.

  With a flash of pinkish light, a flare burned into being. Two silhouetted men raided the emergency kit from one of the life rafts in the glow. Another brilliant glare joined the first. Despite the storm’s wrath, the chemical fire stained the night fuchsia, casting a weak pall of light over their small section of the beach. A pathetic pile of damp wood smoldered over one of the flares between two of the crafts, producing more black smoke than flame.

  Pike grabbed the mewling seismologist and yanked her to her feet.

  “Get up and find some dry wood,” he shouted into her face, then turned to the others. “All of you. Gather as many dry logs as you can find. We need more light!”

  If only the infernal rain would cease. There was no point in trying to start a fire under the protective canopy. They needed to be able to create a perimeter, without which they’d never see that thing coming from the concealing jungle. The way Pike saw it, they had to make it until dawn. After the sun rose, assuming it more than diffused into the omnipresent cloud cover, they could strike off for the village to the north. As it stood now, a dozen civilians stumbling blindly through the black forest behind them would be like leading lambs to the slaughter.

  He turned away from the flare and lowered his goggles over his eyes once more. Across the ocean, all was deep blue and black, save for the distant golden smoke billowing from the Huxley’s stern. No color beckoned from the horseshoe-shaped beach in the distance, nor from the forest rising up the steep slopes away from it.

  The de
luge diminished, if only by degree.

  Other than the sound of movement and voices behind him, he heard only the growl of the breakers and the whispering waves washing up onto the sand.

  He again raised his goggles when the aura of the growing fire behind him skewed his vision.

  The hunter was out there somewhere. He could sense its stealthy advance from all around him at once.

  It was close now.

  Watching them.

  “Get that fire going! We need some goddamned light!”

  He felt its eyes upon him.

  It was coming.

  And it was coming soon.

  Fifty

  Ambitle Island

  Reaves had to keep moving. If he sat down for even a moment, he knew the shock would claim him. His legs grew increasingly numb and warmth coursed through his veins despite the fact that he couldn’t seem to stop shivering. He tasted blood in his mouth from his nipped tongue and had to suppress the image of the fluid pouring down on them through the torn fabric of the life raft. This was all his fault. He was the one who insisted they try to collect the thermophiles from the hydrothermal vents. What had he expected to happen? There could be no success without everything playing out exactly as it had, but he had never imagined…this. It had all been abstract, a theoretical, almost mythical quest, and now how many lives had been lost because of his lack of foresight?

  He dropped an armful of damp kindling and lianas onto the fire, which miraculously stayed alight even as the rain tried to quench it. When he turned back toward the forest for the return trip, he froze in his tracks. The trees seemed somehow malevolent. The darkness beneath them, now crawling with smoke, was ominous. He couldn’t go back in there, despite the two men who guarded them from the tree line with automatic pistols.

  Not only was this all his fault, but he was a coward who couldn’t bring himself to face his own creation.

  He wished he had never found the cavern beneath the kiva in Chaco Canyon, that this was somehow a dream from which he would awaken to find himself ten years younger and again an idealistic anthropologist with his entire future ahead of him.

  For the hundredth time, he glanced at his bare wrist where his watch had been. He had no idea when or where he had lost it. Not that it mattered. Like all the rest, he now just waited for the sun to rise and prayed for it to hurry. The sooner they set off for the village, which in their minds had become some mystical Shangri La filled with radios that were powerful enough to tug on God’s ear, the sooner they would be on a boat headed far away from here. He just couldn’t bring himself to think about what would happen back in the real world when they returned and had to somehow answer for the deaths of more than a hundred men and women who had sailed under the GeNext corporate flag on an errand primarily of his design.

  But before he could fathom the future, he had to reckon with the present manifestation of his past, of his species’ collective past.

  Brazelton and Walker never diverted their attention from the jungle. The fire at their backs made their shadows flag on the sand, stretching them to the wall of batai and rosewood trees, from which a trio of silhouetted forms emerged, burdened by stacks of wood. None of them made eye contact as they passed him, as though they feared they would see their ultimate fates mirrored in his stare. Frightened though he was, the idea of the fire dying for his inaction was every bit as mortifying as again venturing into the darkness.

  Lightning crackled across the sky. The thunder followed, only the gap between them had lengthened noticeably. Whether or not it was only wishful thinking, he was convinced the rain was slowing.

  When he finally summoned the courage to move, Angie fell in beside him. As much as he wanted to hold her, the last thing he needed right now was to be reminded of his feelings for her while knowing that he had nearly been responsible for her death, and still might be before the night was through.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said so softly that only he could hear her. She clammed up as they walked between the sentries until they reached the edge of the jungle. “What do we know about this thing?”

  Reaves began sifting through the detritus, feeling for dry patches under the wet leaves and moss. Angie knelt beside him and continued. Both of them looked up from their task every few seconds to make sure there was nothing sneaking up on them from the darkness.

  “It needs a constant supply of hydrogen sulfide to fuel the bacteria inside of it, without which we’ve demonstrated they will die, correct?” She waited for him to nod before plowing on. “I don’t think human bowels produce enough of the gas to tide them over for very long, at least not in the requisite concentrations. So what does that mean? That somewhere nearby there has to be a sustainable source of the gas, something capable of continuous production, something like the hydrothermal vent the bacteria originally came from. Maybe a hot spring or something along those lines. That’s where it has to have set up some kind of home base.”

  “So what are you suggesting? After it consumes the gas from the intestines of those it kills, it returns to some sort of geothermal formation to wait for the opportunity to hunt again?”

  “Think about the historical precedent that originally led us to study the hydrothermal vents in the first place. Each of the previous instances revolved around a massive seismic upheaval capable of generating significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide. The eruption of the volcanoes in Arizona and Japan, and the lava fields in Vietnam and on Rapa Nui, would have filled the air with it. And even the hot springs in Zambia would have produced copious amounts under the right conditions. For this thing to have survived here as long as it has, there has to be some naturally occurring source that it returns to in order to refuel, for lack of a better term, the organisms responsible for its transformation. Otherwise, it would surely be dead by now.”

  “Not when there are so many of us on the island producing the gas for it.”

  “But there’s more. What did you notice about it in all of the security footage?”

  “There was never really a clear shot of it. The whole time, it barely ever entered the camera’s range.”

  “But when it did, what did you see?”

  “Hardly more than a blurry shadow.”

  “Come on, Brendan.”

  “Its eyes, Angie. I saw its eyes.”

  “Exactly.Because of the eyeshine. So what does that tell us?”

  “That its night vision is a hell of a lot better than ours.” A shiver rippled up his spine. Suddenly he realized that by the time he saw the creature approaching—if he even did at all—it would already be too late for both of them. They had to get out of the jungle this very second. He crawled away from her and started grabbing as much wood as he could find, regardless of whether it was dry or not.

  “Right,” Angie said from behind him. “Its night vision. Bright light, especially sunlight, would overstimulate its retinas and effectively render it blind.”

  He finally saw where she was going with this line of thought.

  “So you think that before sunrise it will need to return to whatever geothermal formation sustains it?”

  “Maybe not before sunrise, per se. The jungle is so thick that it blocks out the majority of the sun’s light. But shortly thereafter, for sure.”

  “Then all we need to do is make it to the coming day.”

  “And get off of this island by nightfall.”

  “You’re brilliant.”

  “I could still be wrong. In which case, it will relentlessly hunt us down until we’re all dead and then eventually die itself.”

  After a momentary surge of hope, that sobering thought made his stomach clench. Even if she was right, there still wasn’t even a hint of down on the horizon, but hurrying back to that big, bright bonfire sounded good right about now.

  The back of his hand brushed what felt like a log protruding from under a rain-beaded shrub. One more good-sized piece and he could call it quits and get out of the darkness. He transferred the bundle of sticks a
wkwardly to his left arm and grabbed the log. The bark had an odd, almost leathery texture, and something tangled around it. He traced its length toward—

  “Jesus,” he gasped and threw himself backward. The wood clattered beside him as he scrambled away.

  It wasn’t a log. Not with laces and rubber tread. It was a boot. Attached to a leg. Hairs. A pant cuff.

  Angie looked over his shoulder and screamed.

  He grabbed her by the hand and sprinted toward the wan glow of the flames through the branches.

  Fifty-One

  Pike whirled at the sound of the first scream. Until that very moment, he had expected the assault to come from the sea. There was no way in hell that thing could have flanked them, not with the way he’d been carefully monitoring the waves as they pounded the desolate shore. He sprinted away from the waterline toward where the fire now burned several feet high in the lee of the two life rafts. A dozen shadowed bodies huddled together as though hiding in the suffocating black smoke, which made it impossible to see the tree line from his vantage point. As if it were contagious, the screaming spread to the group around the flames. He shoved through them and saw Brazelton and Walker silhouetted against the wall of trees, the wet leaves of which reflected the golden light. His men’s shadows snapped across the sand like windblown sheets on a clothesline.

  Two figures burst from the foliage and Pike nearly squeezed off a round before he recognized Reaves and Whitted at the last second. The woman continued to scream as Reaves led her between Brazelton and Walker, who scanned the jungle down the sightlines of their pistols.

  Pike grabbed Reaves by the arm, nearly cleaving him from his feet.

  “What did you see?”

  “It’s in the jungle! We found a body, and it…it…” Reaves tried to jerk his arm from Pike’s grasp to no avail. “Let me go, for Christ’s sake! It’s right behind us!”