The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  The clan, the scores and scores of them, hesitated. They were reluctant to leave the safety of the red oasis for the dry and forbidding cliffs that would one day be Santorini and the islands of Ionian Greece. The majority wanted to stay, hoping that their instincts were wrong, and that their home would remain safe.

  More than sixteen hundred miles away in the west, where the sky continued to darken, the Gibraltar Dam was falling. At first, the breach was small, but the incomparably violent rapids chewed through the bedrock with such force that in only an hour they were conveying broken bits of Spain and Morocco eastward toward the marshlands south of Crete, and toward the sea of the Canal-builders. Glutted with debris and filling the sky with dust, black water spread across gleaming white salt flats. In the early stages, the flood spread out so widely and so quickly that it was in places only inches deep, even as it spread from horizon to horizon. It fanned out across hundreds of miles and was still advancing eastward on the day the cephalopod Canal-builders tried to flee, while the tribe of She Who Leads wavered between hesitation and a clear decision on evacuation up to the peaks of Santorini.

  On that day, the earth’s albedo changed. The Mediterranean canyon drank so greedily of the Atlantic that the change would have been immediately apparent from the surface of the moon without the aid of binoculars. Even from Mars, with unaided eyes, the tiny, bluish-white crescent of Earth could be seen darkening in the middle, ever so slightly.

  For another day, hesitancy dominated the descendants of Seed’s clan. And then for another day. And another. Though they had gathered up the healing weeds and were ready to depart, even a dust-filled sky that turned the full moon as red as blood left them reluctant to leave.

  Even after the rising waters began to turn distant Crete into an island and continued advancing toward the Santorini oasis, there was hesitation. As a strange new shoreline approached like an incoming tide that seemed determined never to stop rising, it became horribly apparent that the canal-building monsters had been the first to experience the coming desolation, and were not nearly so reluctant in responding to it.

  “Look, now,” She Who Leads communicated, and they looked, and they saw.

  First one of the cephalopods, then another and another, came waddling like giant salamander snails out of the new sea and onto red-slicked rocks. During the same millennia of exile in which the bonobos’ wiry hair evolved into water-retaining fur, and in which teeth became shorter while spears and blades grew more ornate, the snake-headed Canal-builders likewise continued to change. The adults, and not just the pups, could now emerge onto the land.

  They had to come out of the water, as near as She Who Leads could tell. It was clear that the cephalopods must also have felt the quake, and that they were fleeing north to this place in a murderous panic. Behind them, the roiling waters told it so. One of the medicine-keepers was pulled from the rocks by the attackers, and he managed to break free moments later only to die from massive organ failure.

  The last adult cephalopod to emerge and charge toward the red rocks surfaced with huge bites taken out of one side. Some other denizen of the southern marshlands was chasing them. They were clearly afraid of it, and She Who Leads knew immediately that she should fear it as well.

  The bonobo descendants, despite a sense of wonder and curiosity that grew with each generation, had no desire to find out what was happening to the cephalopods, or why.

  “Run!” She Who Leads commanded, pointing north.

  No one had to say it again.

  The bonobos ran for the north hills.

  And as the Mediterranean filled, life on earth would never be quite so simple again.

  Chapter 14

  Immortal Sins

  Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough. He cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

  —from a George Orwell fable

  Beware the beast man, for he is the devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours.

  —from Rod Serling’s screenplay of a Boulle fable

  July 3, 1948

  MacCready Base Camp #3, Santorini

  After quickly reexamining the copper disk, Mac and Jacques decided that they had not made fools of themselves in their initial assessment of its likely origin and purpose. Indeed, the object’s recent manufacture as a weapon was a clear reminder that, on this island, the unexpected was always ready to strike from ambush.

  Nesbitt was the only one who still believed this assessment was no better than a joke; but she had other matters on her mind. The 2:00 a.m. attack was pushing her along an altogether different path forward, into the unknown.

  The Plum Islander and McQueen had been shot at with more than weaponized clamshells and copper. As she and the private were ushered indoors to have their wounds examined, and as the rest of Nesbitt’s crew took watch outside, it became apparent that both of them were singled out for copious squirts of ink—which had targeted them with all the precision of an Olympian’s spears.

  When Nesbitt stripped off McQueen’s shirt, there was so much ink and blood slicking his skin that it was initially difficult for her to identify the wounds. He held strong through a hurried cleaning and stitching. Then McQueen and the Catalina’s pilot helped Nesbitt to locate, sponge off, and stitch her own wounds. The scientist’s field dressing was almost finished when she noticed that the young private’s face was beginning to pale.

  “How are you feeling?” Nesbitt asked.

  “I’m not really sure. I’ll let you know in a few minutes.”

  Despite being able to put up a good front, beads of sweat were breaking out across McQueen’s forehead, and his lower lip was beginning to tremble. Nesbitt needed only those few minutes to be crystal clear on the question of how he felt.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” he confessed miserably. The sickness embraced him with frightening rapidity, then progressed. Nothing from the medical kit could bring down his fever and as morning twilight approached, it began to look as if the only hope of finding enough cool water to lower McQueen’s temperature was to carry him down to the nearest beach and immerse his whole body.

  That won’t do, Nesbitt thought. Even without the possibility of lurking cephalopods, McQueen’s wounds were swelling and festering too quickly for a cold-water bath to provide any real aid. The part of the equation that raised her suspicions, and forced her thinking in a new direction, was the fact that she—one of the only two people cut and sprayed by the Kraken—was not sick at all. What, she asked herself, is the most obvious difference between his blood and mine?

  The microscope began to provide answers. A small sample from McQueen’s wounded skin was a microbial horror show, rioting with infection. Ink from one of his towels was no less revealing.

  “As I was guessing, the ink itself is a bacterial soup,” Nesbitt announced. “Every spoonful must contain dozens of spherical, rod-shaped and spirochete species—all the easier to infect you with, if their carriers break your skin before spraying you.”

  “These animals—they knew exactly what they were doing,” said Cousteau, waving a hand back and forth between the ink-sprayed Nesbitt and McQueen.

  The young private was still straining to maintain a strong and stoic front for Nesbitt, but he flickered in and out of semiconsciousness.

  “They’re tool makers,” Mac said, and Nesbitt finally nodded an acknowledgment of this.

  “Suddenly,” she said, “that little joke I thought you and Jacques were making doesn’t seem quite so funny anymore.”

  All eyes were on the Plum Island scientist as she produced a blade and cut deep into her thumb, then squeezed blood out between her thumb and forefinger and drizzled it onto one of McQueen’s wounds.

  “Open the
rest of the dressing,” she commanded, preparing to drip more blood. “I want to get this into his wounds ASAP.”

  Nesbitt’s crew was incredulous, but her pilot obeyed. This will help you for a while, she said to herself, as if simultaneously uttering it to the dying man. I don’t know for how long—but it should help.

  “I have a rough idea why you’re doing this,” Mac said. “But I’d like to hear it direct from you.”

  “You read my report, right?” She neither asked about nor referred to the blood results, because that was need-to-know status, and not even the pilot who flew her here needed to know.

  Mac nodded.

  “I’m sure you understood it.”

  “Yes,” he answered. And he therefore expressed only a certain level of surprise and curiosity but not shock as McQueen’s fever and swelling halted an hour past sunrise, and subsided by lunchtime.

  After a light supper, the private claimed to be feeling well enough to stand watch.

  “Of course, you would say that,” Nesbitt replied. “But it’s not necessary. A dry wind has come in and everything seems quiet now.”

  “Yes. Until next time,” McQueen predicted.

  “Until next time,” she quietly echoed.

  July 4, 1948

  Base Camp # 3, Santorini

  The night had passed without any unwanted company. Though he slept well and was recovering from the infection, McQueen looked haggard and grim. Meanwhile, he and everyone else looked at Nora Nesbitt in puzzlement over what she had done for him.

  And what was that? Cousteau had wondered. Driving back an infection by infecting him with something she knew to be in her own blood?

  Late in the morning, Cousteau paid the innkeeper generously in two ounces of Nesbitt’s gold sovereigns, to complete a shopping list, and to remain silent enough to hopefully keep Dmitri and his friends away. He also offered a bonus for the town elders to buy their silence. While the groceries were coming in, Mac, Yanni, and the two fossil hunters set off in search of a new overlook upon the lagoon and Nea Kameni. Only a short walk beyond the side door, a dry streambed pointed the way up. Carved out through three dozen centuries of soft rains, the trail was a slash in the earth, deep enough for them to reach higher ground without being easily seen. Cousteau had watched Mac walk away with one of Nesbitt’s walkie-talkies. So far, so good, he told himself in the current American vernacular.

  Up there, and in accordance with Nesbitt’s and Cousteau’s instructions, Mac’s away team was checking back with Base Camp #3 every ten minutes.

  After Nesbitt changed McQueen’s dressings and returned to prowling the hallways and adjacent rooms with her walkie-talkie, seeking out better reception, the private turned to Cousteau and confided, “I guess I shouldn’t be alive, huh?”

  “I do not know,” the Frenchman replied. “But it does appear that this is your lucky day.”

  “Yeah, but for how long? A killer squid grabs a guy right off the Catalina, and then—”

  “I think they’re more closely related to octopuses.”

  “And they squirt poison at you, and they throw weapons at you.” McQueen was clearly working heroically, and successfully, at maintaining calmness in his voice—avoiding a repeat of his embarrassing display after the first Catalina attack. “I mean,” he continued, “how does this happen? It’s like this island is becoming a monster movie for real. Where the hell are we?”

  “Where we have never, ever been,” Cousteau replied.

  “All things considered, sir, I’d almost rather be on Devil’s Island. Almost.”

  “No,” the Frenchman said sternly, taking the mere mention of the place as a slur against his country. “No,” he said again, “you would never—even almost—want to be there.”

  The overlook gave only a partial view across the lagoon. To ascend nearer the inner rim of the crater would risk being seen by too many farmers, and sooner or later one of them was bound to invite the attention of the Russians.

  The views in every direction were at least partly blocked by tall hills, including the limestone peak of Mesa Vouno. Long before the Gibraltar Dam was born, wave after wave of tectonic spasms had uplifted the rock layers with such force that once-horizontal fossil beds were tipped completely on their side.

  “How old are those rocks?” Mac said, pointing.

  “We’ve spent some time studying them,” said Alan. “Back to dinosaur times, we think—and maybe beyond. You’ll find the ruins of a Roman amphitheater at the top, and fossil oysters all around it.”

  “But they’ve been off the menu for a while,” Boulle said. He grinned excitedly. “If the rocks could talk—and in a way, every one of them actually does have a story to tell—well, just imagine. Think about where your friend’s Catalina is parked. If you look down from the height of Fira and picture the donkey trail winding a thousand feet down to the plane—then, at around the time the pyramids were being built, and only a small part of the way down, you have to imagine those donkeys embedded in the solid rock of a volcanic cone rising high above Santorini. Five or six million years earlier, this very spot was a forest of olive trees that supported giant shrews and dog-sized elephants—which were probably hunted by the tribe of our tool-making bonobos. And seventy million years before then, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs patrolled the same seafloor that became Mesa Vouno.”

  “You think dinosaurs ever roamed here?” Yanni asked. “These islands?”

  “Probably—almost certainly,” Alan answered. “And that’s looking back across only what? Maybe the upper one or two percent of earth’s history?”

  “Yeah, well,” Mac said. “Against that picture I hope we have time on our side. I wouldn’t really want to think we could end up even more extinct than the dinosaurs one day.”

  “More extinct?” asked Alan.

  Yanni nodded. “Our friend Colbert, at the museum, says they’re not all gone. He looks at the fossilized hips and legs of one group and guess what? Birds. He even calls all those theropod footprints in Joisey sandstone birdie feet.”

  “And we think he’s on to something,” said Mac. “It may be that one branch of the dinosaurs really is still all around us, literally in the branches.”

  “Yeah, isn’t that a hoot?” Yanni said. “And I mean that literally. I don’t think real dinosaurs ever hissed and roared like the ones in King Kong. The forests of their time must have sounded a lot like the birds right here, this morning. A big one chasing dinner might have screeched like an eagle closing in on a rabbit. I wouldn’t be surprised if the real Tyrannosaurus rex got up in the morning and crowed at the sunrise, like a rooster.”

  Alan smiled at the image, then said, “I’d like to know where these shell-slinging Kraken came from. Can anyone here toss up a good theory?”

  “Maybe,” Mac said. “But I’m not sure we’re allowed to talk about it quite yet.”

  “Anything to do with Nesbitt’s—?” There was no time to speak the whole question. Nesbitt herself broke in from the Akrotiri base camp in great excitement.

  “Mac! What’s your twenty? Bogey coming in. Over.”

  “I’m about a hundred and fifty yards above you and to your northwest. What bogey? Over.”

  “Two, Mac. Two bogeys. Coming in fast. Look to your southeast!” Nesbitt seemed so alarmed that she forgot her training to close with “Over.” At this point, they both did.

  The first bogey came roaring into view—a huge turboprop with no national markings. Two peculiar structures protruded near the cockpit, like overgrown feelers on the head of a beetle.

  “It has closed panels, ventral,” Nesbitt called. “You see them?”

  “Roger that. Looks like bomb-bay doors and they’re closed.”

  “Copy that. Closed.”

  “And here comes the second one!”

  Bogey number two barreled in lower than the first, then disappeared behind a hill. It, too, had bomb-bay doors. “Doors closed,” Mac radioed. “Looks like it may be recon. Over.”

  “Copy
that, Mac. Think it’s Russians?”

  “Difficult to imagine who else.” He listened as the planes circled twice outside the lagoon, then faded away into the distance. They reappeared nearly twenty miles south, out near the horizon. Turning again northward, the pair overflew Akrotiri and the dry valley, one of them passing so low overhead that had it been moving any slower, Mac could have counted its rivets.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered. “Shit.”

  This time, the bomb-bay doors were open.

  July 4, 1948

  11:02 a.m., Santorini Time; 4:02 a.m., Eastern Standard Time

  Washington, D.C.

  At first the president believed another bomb had been delivered to the mailroom, and that this time it had gone off.

  But it was only the floor jumping—again.

  One side of the Oval Office had just dropped a half inch, while the other side bulged upward, to the same degree. The jolt sent three rats scurrying from their latest hiding place. The recent layering-on of new plaster, new paint, and new carpeting was simply not going to work. The White House was collapsing from the inside out, under a relentless assault by the microbes of wood decay, by termites, and by vermin.

  Seems an apt analogy for much of America and the world these days, Truman thought, as he turned his attention to the windows, and to the world beyond.

  Each new crisis, and each hopeful attempt to fix it, seemed simply to unlock the door on one or two new crises.

  A grandson would recall for friends, many years later, that the president never spoke at home about the dawn of the atomic age or the mutually assured paranoia of Cold War politics. But in a personal memo following war’s end, he had already declared that what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never be allowed to happen again. Yet in the name of “defense by the ultimate deterrent,” newsreels continually broadcast—to impress both the public and the Russians—what atomic bomb tests in the Pacific had done to the volcanic atoll called Bikini. The latest radiation readings were so horrific that Truman had begun calling the place “Nothing-at-all Atoll.” Twenty more tests were planned.