by Nate Granzow
Clayton breathed in audibly through his nose and clamped his jaw. "I thought we talked about that, man."
"Yeah, well I think everyone should know why I wouldn't trust you to take out my garbage, let alone check your instinct for shoving a knife in my back."
A human shout echoed from behind them, interrupting the tension.
"That sounded like Henri," Olivia said, sniffing back her tears, revitalized at the thought that her mentor was still alive. Two figures approached quickly out of the darkness. Henri and Austin, drenched in sweat and winded, came into view.
Henri panted, "Great to see you all again, but...well—"
"They're right bloody behind us!" Austin cried, ushering them onward.
"Wait, where's Christian?" Olivia asked, suddenly realizing her assistant had disappeared.
"Hopefully far, far ahead of us," Austin mumbled, sliding his revolver from its holster as the chuckles of the hekura rose above the sound of splattering swill at their feet.
Clayton, his powerful legs pushing through the mire at a faster pace than his companions, stopped 50 yards ahead, motioning for them to step into a small offshoot from the tunnel. The room was little more than a windowless concrete box the size of a prison cell, separated from the passageway only by a sliding steel grate.
"You folks had better hurry up," Clayton urged, unfurling his weapon, holding it at the low ready as the beasts neared, their galloping pace marked by the staccato splash of rapidly moving feet striking still water. When the last of the crew had made it inside, Clayton, Jeremy, and Austin worked together to force the rusty grate closed behind them. The three men grunted and adjusted their hold, muscles straining against the rusty bars. Jeremy stared at his friend angrily, but said nothing. He'd confront him later about keeping his cancer a secret. Or maybe he'd wait to see how long it took Austin to tell him of his own volition. He felt betrayed, and suddenly very alone even among the others.
With the cries of the hekura growing in volume, the three men pushed with the last of their strength.
"Get it closed," Henri cried, jumping in place anxiously. Finally, the gate broke free, dropping into place with a resounding clank. A white body immediately swung from the tunnel and slammed into the steel frame. Olivia let out a short, surprised cry and jumped, bumping into Austin's back.
As the others raised their weapons, Henri shouted, "Wait. Everybody just wait. It can’t reach us through the grate." He jostled to the front of the crowd. Stopping well outside the animal’s reach, the researcher began scrutinizing the creature as if it had been taxidermied and put on display inside a museum. The beast stood mostly still, its broad chest—skin stretched taught around its ribcage like a white rubber glove—heaving in and out, a rapid pulse visible in the prominent veins running along its neck and arms as it glared at the Frenchman, eyes aglow in the darkness.
"Incredible. Absolutely incredible. It bears so many physiological similarities to a human, yet it's clearly anatomically distinct. Note the elongated clavicle and the enlarged thoracic cage…why, it appears as though it has an extra set of rib bones—I count 26."
"Yeah, fascinating, Doctor. Can I put a bullet in its brainpan yet?" Austin asked politely, his finger wrapped about the Webley’s trigger, knuckles white as he gripped the weapon and pointed it at the mighty animal before them.
As if the creature had understood the Brit's violent request, it growled, leapt from the grate, and rushed into the depths of the tunnel system, followed by a blurred trail of the other fast-moving hekura.
"Serendipity?" Austin asked.
Olivia whispered, "I don't think so."
The recognizable scuttling of microscopic legs echoed along the tunnel.
"Great. We're now trapped between a million hungry bugs and some freakish carnivorous people-monkeys," Clayton said, gripping his rifle and stepping toward the ported gate. "I think now would be an excellent time to start crying like helpless schoolgirls."
"Mr. Clayton, do you have any flares left?" Henri asked.
The big man shook his head.
"Well we can't just stay here and wait for them," Olivia cried. "They'll pour through the gaps in the bars and consume us in seconds!"
Working to lift the hatch open again, Austin groaned, as the steel didn't budge. "We may not have a choice."
THIRTY-ONE
The footfalls of the approaching ants grew until the waves of bodies began to flood past, a small number trickling into the offshoot where the research team hid.
They began stomping at the creatures with the heels of their boots. Clumsily joining in the squashing, Henri suddenly let out an abbreviated cry and disappeared. Stepping toward where the Frenchman had stood a moment before, Olivia reached for her mentor.
"Henri, what happened?"
Her feet left solid ground. The sensation of helplessly falling swept through her chest as her body plunged through a jagged crack in the concrete floor. Her breath exploded from her lungs as she tumbled down a precipitous cavern wall, dirt coating her sweat-lined clothes. After rolling 50 feet at a sharp, downward pitch, Olivia landed heavily at the bottom. Reeling from the fall, she attempted to raise herself only to be flattened by a following Austin.
"Budge up," he groaned, spurring her on with a slap on the backside as he scrambled to avoid being crushed beneath Clayton's hulking form.
Reaching the bottom, the mercenary slid to a stop, stood, rolled his shoulders, and shivered. "God damn, I can still feel the little bastards crawling on me."
Jeremy, bringing up the rear, gained more momentum than his companions, his stocky form bouncing and skidding to a stop 10 feet beyond the group. Austin jogged over to help him up, but was pushed away angrily.
"I'm fine."
"Hey, easy mate. Just trying to help."
Glaring at the pilot, Jeremy swept the dust from his shoulders and replied, "I don't need your help."
"What the hell? What happened to all that about watching one another's back?"
"Yeah, well that was before I learned you were keeping such a big fucking secret from me," he whispered angrily as he poked a finger against the pilot's chest. "Olivia told me about your diagnosis. I can't believe you'd tell her before you'd tell me."
The Englishman cursed and looked away. "Bollocks. Look, she figured it out on her own; I didn't tell her. But you're right; I should have told you before. It's just, well, how the hell do you bring that up casually? 'Hey mate, cracking good beer at this place; you catch the game the other night? Oh, and by the by, I'm dying of cancer.'"
"It didn't have to be like that."
"I didn't want you to feel sorry for me, Jeremy. Something about spending my final days with things as normal as they could be," Austin said, his voice softening."That's no excuse. I've stood by you through some crazy shit, man, and you owed me at least the honest truth," Jeremy said, ducking under the Cobray's sling and standing.
"I'm sorry, hermano," Austin whispered, looking at the ground.
"Don't call me that," Jeremy said, stepping away.
The Brit gave a frustrated sigh, hands resting on his hips, then turned and stared at Olivia as he chewed his bottom lip angrily. He didn't know how it'd come up, but he wished she'd kept the news about his cancer diagnosis to herself. There was no telling how the news, once disseminated through the group, would affect their perception of him. A man like Clayton—with no loyalties to the group and the solitary objective of survival—might view him as expendable. If he didn't already.
"Where are we?" Henri asked, swaying in place and massaging his temple. A fresh bruise had begun to form along his withdrawn hairline. Olivia plucked a dirt clod from his shirt collar.
"I could care less where we are so long as it doesn't have creepy-ass albino freaks trying to cube me up and pass me around like group fondue," Clayton mused, switching off his tactical light and looking around.
"Wherever we are, it's beautiful," Olivia said as she took in the space. The subterranean cavern spanned half a mile befor
e trailing into a narrow passage, carved deep into the limestone bedrock beneath the jungle floor. Thick stalagmites stretched toward the arciform ceiling, the pervasive darkness punctuated by a single, narrow column of early morning sunlight streaming down from the cave's apogee and illuminating the calm waters of a central lake. Curiously out of place in the glittering natural beauty stood a steel pipe, a foot in diameter, creeping from the lake's edge and shooting upwards through the rock.
Into the Hygeia complex.
Olivia turned to face the group.
"Did anyone else notice something peculiar about the hekura?"
"You mean besides the fact that they're some kind of flesh-hungry ape? Is that not peculiar enough for you?" Clayton asked as he adjusted the fit of the drop-leg holster wrapped around his thigh.
Ignoring him, she continued. "They clearly hunt in a pack—not unlike hyenas or wolves. But you notice there doesn't seem to be any variation in age between the individuals? Where are the immature adults? The young? These aren't strictly males or females of the species hunting us, either. You may have noted the differences in build and genitalia. But that means the hekura are either incapable of producing offspring, or have some kind of social hierarchy where the weakest stay behind with the young. It's curious."
"Curious? Man, you guys have a weird sense of fascination. I've seen some funky shit in my days, and I'll admit, looked at some depraved stuff with a morbid sense of curiosity, but it's always been dead and beyond harming anyone. You guys should prioritize better: Kill these hekura things first, and then feel free to study them to your heart's content," Clayton replied.
"You know, it's precisely that kind of attitude that has led to the extinction of millions of species throughout history," Henri reprimanded. Clayton dismissively waved a hand at the elder researcher.
Olivia continued. "What I'm getting at is, whatever caused the researchers to change may also have rendered them sterile, or rewired their instincts so they no longer seek to reproduce."
"That's reassuring," Jeremy said. "At least we don't have to worry about them raping us to death, then, eh?"
"That wasn't my point," Olivia said flatly. She paused, conflicted about what she was about to say. "I mean that, if that's the case, then there can't be more hekura than there were original researchers at the outpost. Fifty or so at the most. But with attrition caused by starvation or disease taking its toll on the population over the past four years, we may only be looking at contending with a dozen or more individuals. Perhaps we could make a stand against them."
Henri looked at his mentee, shocked at her conflicting suggestion to his own.
"I'm all about going toe to toe with an enemy on a normal day," Clayton said, shaking his head. "But even if you were right about their numbers, these things are some fierce, tricky motherfuckers."
"Look at these," Austin said, ignoring the discussion and waving the researchers over to one of the larger stalagmites. "Etchings. Glyphs of some sort. Carved in the rock."
Running her fingers over the symbols, Olivia turned to Jeremy and Austin and asked, "Do either of you speak any Yanomami?"
"About enough to ask for a banana. But Olivia, the Yanomami have no written language. It can't be text," Austin said, his eyes following the etchings up the stone column until they disappeared into the darkness.
"Look over here," Henri called out, gesturing toward another stone edifice. "These are pictographs," he said, his face inches from the stone and his mouth agape. "Mr. Clayton, you have young eyes. Come and tell me what this looks like to you."
Strolling over reluctantly, the mercenary said, "Some dude, looks like a native with a spear or a blowgun, running away from a tornado."
"Snake," Jeremy corrected. "It looks like a snake. Probably an anaconda. The locals have all sorts of legends about big snakes. They're terrified of them. Once you've seen one up close, it's easy to understand why."
"Seems pretty cut and dried. Tribesman running from a snake," Clayton said with a shrug.
"What does this mean?" Olivia asked, tracing her finger along a deep vertical groove that stopped above the depiction of the snake. "Or the deep 'V' surrounding the entire scene?"
"The beam of light and the cavern walls. That's got to be it," Jeremy said, his enthusiasm building. The team's intrigue felt tangible—the images offering a much-needed distraction from the grimness of their situation, even if the symbols turned out to be meaningless.
Austin wandered away from the group, nearing another pillar. "Hello," he said under his breath as he touched his hand to another pictograph. "And what are you on about?"
This one depicted several tribesmen—led by a feathered man, likely a village shaman—standing above a scene exactly like the one on the opposite pillar. Only, here, those tribesmen had driven one of their own into the cavern below—the figure plummeting, traveling along the beam of sunlight toward the coiled snake below. Ignoring the pace of the rest of the group, Austin jogged to the last stalagmite in the cluster and looked for the next depiction. Being farther away from the light made the detail of the etchings difficult to make out, but there was no mistaking what it meant to convey. Another scene, a progression of the other two, showed the fallen tribesman, not eaten by the anaconda, but emerging from the water. This carving was deeper, more vivid than the rest; the artist had spent extra time etching it into the stone. The tribesman had changed since his fall. The muscular figure—now twice the size of the tribesmen above it—hunched over, its mouth agape and filled with jagged teeth.
Austin took a sharp breath.
The tribesman had been transformed.
He had become hekura.
THIRTY-TWO
"The tribes who inhabited this area must have viewed the cavern as holy or cursed. Perhaps used only to throw prisoners of war or disgraced members of the tribe into the pool," Henri said as he wiped his glasses clean. One of the lenses had a fresh spider-web fracture in it from the researcher's fall into the cavern.
Olivia nodded and continued, "Famine or disease may have killed the tribe off years later, and the cavern ended up forgotten. But the area the natives had cleared to demarcate it—picture a palisade wall built around the opening to ensure the hekura remained trapped—must have stayed relatively clear of trees over the centuries following." Her fingers kneaded the top button on her shirt as she looked thoughtfully from column to column.
"Hygeia goes looking for a site to build this research outpost. They find the clearing and begin construction," Austin added, shaking his head subtly.
Olivia pointed to the water pipe rising from the lake. "And pipe down looking for a natural reservoir of water. Later, after the outpost had been constructed, someone gets sloppy, removes a clogged filter and forgets to replace it. The researchers start drinking straight from the lake—water tainted with some kind of parasitic microbe. A luminescent parasite would explain the glowing capybara bones, the hekuras' eyes, the ants, and the pictograph of the tribesmen transforming after being thrown into the water."
"A parasite capable of instigating genetic mutation," Henri muttered. "That's not unheard of. But the sheer scale of the hekura's transformation is of an unprecedented magnitude."
Olivia nodded enthusiastically. "Work with me here: Let's just say a parasitic microorganism—age-old, primordial—inhabits the calm water of this cavern for thousands of years. But no environment, even one hidden like this, is perfectly isolated. So the parasite needs to develop a defense mechanism. A means of ensuring its survival. So it adapts in such a way that, if consumed, it alters the DNA of the host animal—the ants and the researchers, in this case—causing growth abnormalities and increasing violent behavior in order to defend the territory in which the parasite thrives."
"Even though the hekura aren't contained here in the cavern—they're free to roam the jungle—there's something keeping them relatively close to this outpost." Henri agreed. "We weren't attacked until we got within a mile of this cavern."
"The parasites
use neuromediators to control the behavior of the hekura, adjusting the concentrations of norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin in the brain, and so altering the hekuras' motion activity, aggression and social behavior. Only, unlike most parasites that weaken the host until it eventually dies, this parasite seems to have bolstered the host's strength. The researchers were lost almost five years ago; if they've been infected all that time, I think it's safe to say the parasite actually enjoys a mutualistic or symbiotic relationship with its host." Olivia chewed her lip, looking toward the water. Suddenly, she exclaimed, "We need a sample."
Moving in the direction of the water's edge, Olivia felt a firm hand on her shoulder.
"And what are you going to collect it with? Your hands?" Austin asked.
"I've got a sandwich bag," Henri interrupted, withdrawing the crumpled plastic from his pocket and emptying it of crumbs.
"Very scientific."
"Desperate times. And I had dozens of specimen jars in a bag you wouldn't let me bring," the old man retorted.
"A bag like the one you dropped at first sign of trouble?" Austin shot back. "And why do you need a sample at all? You believe the water is tainted with a DNA-altering parasite and your first thought is to get closer to it?" He stared long into Olivia's eyes, pleading. She smiled at him meaningfully.
"If we can get a sample, we can find out how it reacts to antibiotics. We could save those people, Austin."
"Those things are no longer people, all right?" he argued. "They're rabid animals. Nothing more. And they will kill us if they find us. Our first and only objective is to get out of this jungle alive. I care bugger-all about the welfare of the hekura."
"We'll be careful. I promise," she said as she turned to leave.
Realizing he couldn't stop her, Austin shouted, "Wait, Olivia." She stopped and turned.
"You know how to use this? He slid the Webley from its holster and held it out to her by its barrel. Olivia smiled. It was an oddly sweet gesture. "Just don't drop it. I'd rather not have to go swimming to retrieve it."
