Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  Pike released his grip and continued toward the forest in a two-handed shooter’s stance.

  “Any sign of movement?”

  “No,” Walker said, “but I can’t see a blasted thing.”

  “Fall back and cover the civilians. I want to know exactly what Reaves saw if you have to beat it out of him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Walker said, and backed toward the fire without taking his eyes from the trees.

  Pike was tired of being hunted. It was time to go on the offensive.

  “We’re going in there, aren’t we?” Brazelton said.

  “Unless you have a better idea. We could always just sit around and wait for it to pick us off one by one.”

  “Today’s as good a day to die as any.”

  Pike smiled and donned his thermal vision goggles. Together they advanced to the edge of the forest. The flickering firelight made the liana-coiled trunks of the trees dance. Wet branches brushed his thighs and chest and grabbed at his face. He didn’t so much as blink as he forced his way through the leaves and vines until the fire was but a memory behind him. Silently, he placed one foot, and then the next, all the while swiveling his narrowed vision from side to side, his finger pressed into the sweet spot on the trigger, prepared for the orangish glow of body heat to materialize at any second when the attack commenced. Twenty paces in, he saw the first deep blue spatter on the ground through a cluster of saplings.

  Thunder grumbled overhead as the rain continued to clap on the canopy. The occasional stream drained through the upper reaches and pattered the sloppy ground.

  He crept straight through the vegetation toward the source of the color. The body was already rapidly cooling from its vaguely purple core outward to its blue extremities. The side of the man’s neck looked like it had been gnawed by a pack of wolves. Spatters and droplets of blood glowed blue on the leaves and detritus. Based on the coloration and the rate of cooling, he’d been dead for roughly thirty minutes, which was before he had initially even reached the beach.

  “Shit,” Pike whispered. He’d been outmaneuvered again. By the time he turned around, it was already too late.

  Gunfire erupted amid a chaos of screams behind him.

  “Go!” Pike shouted and barreled past Brazelton. He had to shove his goggles out of the way before the firelight blinded him.

  Pike counted three shots in rapid succession before all he could hear were the cries and shouts over the echo of the final report. He bellowed in rage as he burst from the jungle onto the beach. A man nearly knocked him down in his hurry to flee the site where their fire was now scattered. Embers billowed in an expulsion of ash as a man flopped around on the dwindling blaze. People were running everywhere with no apparent direction.

  “How did it get behind us?” Brazelton shouted.

  “It was never in the forest! The whole thing was a ruse!”

  In the waning firelight, it was impossible to tell who was who amid the panic. Pike aligned his pistol with first one panicked face and then another. The body that smothered the flames twitched and then stilled, leaving the unrecognizable man’s clothes smoldering, his charred flesh beginning to cook. He counted two more bodies sprawled on the sand. Someone trampled the nearest in his hurry to sprint for cover behind one of the life rafts. Beside the black neoprene-clad body lay Walker’s weapon. Pike ran over and spared a quick glance at the man before again returning his attention to the bedlam. The back of Walker’s neck had been savagely attacked. Skin and muscle alike had been ripped away from the exposed knobs of his cervical column. The gaping wound was filled with blood and rainwater. He had never seen his assailant coming.

  “Where is it?” Brazelton yelled.

  “Everyone! Calm down!”

  The other body closer to the surf belonged to a young crew member Pike had helped out of one of the life rafts. A section of his trachea had been torn away. Based on the lacerations surrounding the wound, it appeared as though it had been inflicted by a large clawed hand.

  He spun in a circle, but only saw the dark shapes running through the night.

  The screams tapered as more and more of the survivors reached hiding places beside or beneath the twin orange crafts.

  Pike raised his pistol to the sky and fired into the air. The thunder-clap of the report silenced the cries.

  “Can anyone see it?” he bellowed.

  The only response was whimpering out of his direct line of sight.

  “It’s not on the beach,” Brazelton said.

  Pike stormed around to the far side of the nearest life raft, grabbed one of the cowering men, and hauled him to his feet.

  “What happened?” Pike shouted into his face.

  The man blubbered something unintelligible. Pike shoved him back down.

  “Over here!” Brazelton called.

  Pike ran to where his comrade stood near the shoreline, staring at the crashing waves.

  “What?” Pike snapped.

  “You tell me,” Brazelton said, and turned away without explanation. “Everyone come out from where you’re hiding! We need to do a quick headcount!”

  It only took a moment for Pike to figure out what Brazleton had noticed. When he did, he roared his frustration across the sea.

  The corpses no longer littered the shallows.

  They were gone.

  Fifty-Two

  Courtney felt sick to her stomach. With all of those people swimming in the open ocean, trying desperately to reach the shore, she and Bishop had simply walked away. A part of her knew that Bishop was right. By the time they reached the distant beach, they wouldn’t have been able to affect the outcome. Life and death would have already been decided. The only thing they would have accomplished was delivering themselves into the hands of the enemy. But that justification didn’t make it easier to live with the decision. Still, she continued to listen for the cries for help that had long ago faded and watch the sky for flares. The fact that she neither saw nor heard a thing only compounded her guilt.

  Every tree was identical to the last, every grove a twin to the one before. The world became a seamless tangle of vegetation interwoven by vines that attempted to ensnare her like the invisible strands of a spider’s web. Her bare feet were nearly numb from the cold mud that squished between her toes. What little strength she held in reserve was failing with her resolve. Even if they did manage to find Ty, what then? If he was infected as the others suspected and truly had been responsible for the deaths of those aboard the Mayr…

  She envisioned the eyes on the other side of the biohazard shield. The hunger. The relentlessness. She wrapped her arms around her torso to combat a violent shiver.

  They ran the serious risk of freezing to death unless the rain stopped and the sun heated them up in a hurry.

  She crinkled her nose at the smell of rotten eggs. Her first thought was again of her brother as the ruptured seal of the bioreactor fired scalding steam into his face. As the stink intensified, the forest thinned. No longer were the trees one indistinct conglomeration of trunks and branches and vines. There was enough room to clearly pick their way between them. Despite the increased exposure to the elements and the standing water, the ground grew firmer. The faster pace helped to warm her, if only by degree.

  Steam swirled through the forest ahead of them. The trees fell away, and the few that dared grow near the source of the sulfurous stench were stripped of all leaves and bark. Their gray, skeletal forms stood sentry around a hydrothermal spring that hid behind the steam. The rain had tapered during their time under the canopy, but she could still hear it pattering on the standing water and felt the merciless cold tapping on her head and shoulders.

  Bishop walked in front of her through the mist like an apparition. He held out a hand to signal her to stop and ducked behind the hollowed carcass of a dead tree. She knelt behind him and whispered into his ear.

  “Why are we stopping?”

  He turned around, pressed his index finger to his lips, and then pointed up into t
he steam. There were two human silhouettes, mere shadows appearing and then disappearing into the billowing whiteness as though suspended in midair.

  “Stay here,” Bishop whispered. “Don’t follow me until I signal that everything’s clear. And if anything happens to me, you run.” He squeezed her hand for emphasis and looked her in the eyes. “Understand?”

  Courtney nodded. She watched as he crawled out from behind the trunk and scampered quietly behind another dead tree. He ducked his head out and then quickly back, then again more slowly. In a crouch, he darted into the steam and out of sight.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  Lightning crackled through the clouds overhead. Was it her imagination, or were the storm heads paling in anticipation of dawn’s arrival?

  Bishop materialized from the steam, still moving at a crouch. Whatever sound he might have made was swallowed by the distant grumble of thunder.

  “We’re going to have to go around to the west,” he said.

  “What did you see?”

  “We can’t get past through there—”

  “What did you see?” she interrupted.

  “Courtney—”

  “Damn it, Bishop. Tell me what you saw!”

  He took her by the hand and eased her to standing.

  “Trust me. You don’t want to—”

  Courtney broke free and ran into the mist. She focused on the bodies suspended above her as she approached. An unvoiced prayer filled her head as the shadows drew contrast.

  Please, Lord. Don’t let it be Ty.

  The detritus gave way to bare limestone, flat and slick with algal proliferation and condensation. She had to slow down to keep from slipping and cracking her head open, and paid more attention to her footing than the bodies hanging above and in front of her, from which a droning buzz emanated. Bright yellow and orange rings encircled a small body of water that reminded her of the Grand Prismatic Spring she had seen on a visit to Yellowstone as a child. The topaz-blue water sizzled and popped with rainwater as steam swirled across the surface and rose to where two men had been hung from the dead trees by vines lashed around their necks and chests. They’d been stripped and gutted, their gaping abdominal cavities alive with swarming flies. All of the muscle had been peeled from their buttocks, thighs, and calves, leaving the exposed bones to blacken and the tendons to peel away from their points of insertion. She feared that if she looked closer she would see teeth marks lining what little flesh remained. The skin on their faces was mottled black and more of the insufferable insects lay siege to their eyes and buzzed into their nostrils and open mouths. One man’s scalp was stubbled with gray, the other’s thick with curly black hair. While she couldn’t distinguish their facial features, she was able to identify them as two of the seamen she had seen on the deck of the Mayr prior to the Corellian’s launch. They must have been on deck already to have reached the work boat and eventually the island when no one else had.

  She felt terrible for the swell of relief that surged through her that neither was her brother’s corpse.

  There was still a chance that his was among those lost to the sea, sinking into the silt even as the crabs and fish gnawed them to bones, but deep down, she could sense that he was still alive. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but she was certain that her brother was out there somewhere at this very moment, possibly in desperate need of her help. She wondered if he experienced the same kind of connection to her. Was he hunting her even as she searched for him?

  An icy finger traced her spine and she had to look away from the remains. Whoever said there was beauty in death had been wrong. All that was left of these men were eviscerated carcasses that would continue to rot until either their flesh decomposed or the vines snapped and dropped them into the—

  “Come on,” Bishop whispered. He tried to gently guide her away from the spring. “We need to keep moving.”

  “Wait.”

  Something shimmered where the blazing orange bacterial ring met with the limestone.

  Courtney knelt at the pool’s edge, careful to stay clear of the torrid water. She looked around until she found a stick and used its slender end to scrape out a sample of the snot-like thermophilic sludge. At first she had thought the silver hue at the waterline was a mere reflection, but now, as she studied the sloppy gob on the stick, the source of the shiny coloration was obvious. She held it out for Bishop to see. Smooth silver flecks dotted the fluorescent orange slime. She tilted them to reflect the light.

  “What are they?” he asked.

  Courtney closed her eyes and pictured Ty, drifting in and out of consciousness on the examination table in the hospital suite while what the doctor called “inflammatory plaques” colonized his skin, but what they had really looked like were—

  “Scales,” Courtney whispered, and dropped the stick into the spring.

  Fifty-Three

  When the dust settled, four of them were dead, and another two were missing, leaving seven of them standing on the beach around a pile of blackened sticks and charcoal. Shock had settled over the group like a wet blanket. Bradley recognized how fortunate they were, but that was of little solace. The grim truth with which they all needed to come to grips was that it was only a matter of time before they were all dead. None of them had so much as sensed the attack coming. Even now, looking back, it had all happened so quickly that Bradley couldn’t think of any way they could have stopped it. One moment he was staring up into the sky, thanking his maker for allowing them to survive the sinking and begging for forgiveness for his role in the deaths of so many, and the next, he had been surrounded by gunfire and screaming. He remembered turning around in time to watch Walker fire his pistol into the sand while a sinuous form composed of what looked like quicksilver clung to his back, tearing at his neck as though trying to rip his whole head off from behind. Golden circles of eyeshine had flashed in his direction, snapping him out of his momentary paralysis. He recalled diving to the ground behind a life raft and burrowing into the sand so he could wriggle underneath it. After that, all he could remember was being alone in the darkness, assaulted by the horrible cries of pain and terror, until the craft was lifted off of him and he crawled trembling back out onto a beach dotted with fresh corpses.

  When Pike had pulled him aside and demanded to know what he had seen, all he could say was that it had happened so fast that he honestly couldn’t be sure. No, he hadn’t seen where the creature had appeared from or where it had gone. No, he hadn’t gotten a good look at it, other than the fact that it moved as though made of fluid. No, he hadn’t noticed how the other men had been killed or what happened to the remains that had washed ashore. None of them had. It was as though the creature had simply materialized out of thin air between them and then disappeared every bit as suddenly. All Reaves had seen was a man hurled into the fire, choking and coughing up a flume of blood. One of the others had heard a man cry out in agony behind her, but hadn’t been able to find the courage to turn around. Between the eight of them, they couldn’t piece together a single useful account. Whatever demon they had unleashed was as incorporeal as the wind.

  Pike held the blinding pink flare at the center of their circle. There would be no new fire, for as little good as it had done them. Pike’s unilateral decision was to head out, and to do so quickly before the creature decided to come back and finish them off.

  Bradley stared from one expressionless face to the next. Reaves held Angie in his arms as she shuddered against his chest. In his old friend’s blank stare, he saw the same guilt that must have been radiating from his with the intensity of the sun. Libby Parsons, the seismologist, shivered beside them, arms drawn to her breast, looking out from beneath the tangled clumps of her bangs at something apparently only she could see. Brazelton stood beside her, his eyes flicking nervously across the beach, his finger white on the trigger of his pistol. Barnes stayed close to him, or, more accurately, to the man with the weapon. The Taser he had commandeered shook in his fist, forcing him
to constantly readjust his sweaty grip.

  “We need to move out,” Pike said. His eyes roamed from them to the beach as he turned in slow circles. “This thing has been dictating the situation from the start and we’ve played right into its hands. It wanted us here so it could do exactly what it just did. It’s time to see if we can assert a measure of control, or at least see if we can throw a wrench into its plans.”

  “So you want to strike out into the jungle where it could be hiding anywhere?” Libby snapped. “You think that doesn’t fit into its plans? And what happens when the rescuers arrive and we aren’t here? They aren’t going to know to hike inland to try to find what’s left of us!” Her voice grew shrill with hysterics. “Does it really matter anyway? Wherever we go, it will find us! And what then? You saw how quickly it snuck up on us. None of us really even saw it. Staying here is our best chance. We can rebuild the fire and signal—”

  “You want to stay here?” Pike’s expression was unreadable. “Fine. Stay here. We’ll tell them where to find your body when we get off this island. And as far as your imminent rescue theory? Think about this…The Mayr’s emergency beacon began broadcasting more than four days ago now. In that time, how many people have come looking for it? We’re stranded in the middle of nowhere while all available aid workers are on the mainland sifting through countless tons of debris to disinter tens of thousands of waterlogged corpses. This close to the epicenter of the quake that produced the tsunami in the first place? They’ve already written us off. It’ll be several more days before they even think about broadening their search from the major population centers to canvass the sea for what they already assume are sunken vessels.”

  “I don’t want to die,” she sobbed.

  Barnes squeezed her elbow in a sad gesture of support.

  “Then do exactly what I tell you to do and there’s a chance you’ll live through this.”

  “A chance?” Bradley nearly laughed. “What chance do any of us have?”