The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Nesbitt maintained her silence, believing she was taking in more information from Dmitri than he would ever get out of her.

  He seemed happy to comply. “I’ll tell you what you are, Nora Nesbitt. You’re my highest-value prisoner. You’re someone we can even use as—what you call a bargaining chip, if such an exchange should ever become necessary.”

  The Russians had separated Nesbitt from the rest of her crew. The building seemed remarkably quiet, for all that had happened. She had seen Alan and McQueen ushered into one room and locked in, the two Frenchmen in another. She did not know what happened to the rest of the men. If they were captured or killed, they went down without shouts.

  Nesbitt listened with great intensity but could detect no sounds of interrogation in the other rooms.

  At Dmitri’s signal, part of his crew brought in three tightly wrapped body bags, already air-pump shrunk-and-sealed, and weighted for disposal at sea. The men laid the black bags on the far end of the room with uncanny gentleness.

  “Comrades,” Dmitri addressed his men, then motioned them toward the door with a slight nod. The commandos walked out and left him alone again with Nesbitt.

  “I learned during the war that good friends help you to hide,” her captor said. “I learned after the war that true friends help you to hide bodies.”

  “Am I supposed to find that funny?”

  “Not at all,” the Russian replied, and knelt down beside the bags, as if in prayer. “I’m afraid we will be at war soon. But do you really believe either of us ever had any real choice in this outcome?”

  Nesbit decided to withhold a reply.

  Dmitri made a sign of the cross over the bodies, then stood and returned Nesbitt’s cold silence with an even more obstinate countenance and posture—like a man frozen in time. “Don’t you know,” he said at last, “that whatever happens to you or to any of our people during the next few days—or even the next few minutes—has already been written?”

  “What?” Nesbitt said, breaking her silence. “You’re trying to tell me about God?”

  “No. I am talking about Heisenberg, Einstein, even Newton and Darwin.” He undid the safety on his weapon. “I really did not want any of this to be happening.”

  “But here you are, making it happen anyway.”

  “I do not believe you are capable of understanding, Nesbitt. If all the actions of the universe, this world, and our lives in it were set in motion before we and the oceans were born, then there is no free will. If, instead, everything that happens around us and to us, is random—including the mix of the genes you were born with that have determined how your brain will behave—then where is free will? If everything that happens is simultaneously set in predetermined motion and only appears random, there is still no free will.”

  “So, kill yourself,” said Nesbitt.

  “Not likely. So, let us pray.”

  In the clear, hot atmosphere of a Santorini afternoon, there was no denying that getting anywhere near Base Camp #3 was a nonstarter. Mac and Yanni halted more than a hundred yards out, then backed away as stealthily as their considerable skills permitted. A two-handgun invasion would have been quick suicide against no fewer than twenty well-armed, highly trained Russian commandos.

  The pair traveled north, keeping close to the cliff edge and pausing to study the lagoon whenever they could, from hiding places in crevices, or among thick stands of fig trees. There was new activity near Nea Kameni and the red plumes. Little flickers of Kraken light were just barely perceptible, but there were enough of them to give the impression of undersea thunderclouds on the move. Most of the activity seemed to surround the place where the Russian launch was exploded by a mine.

  Mac looked west across the lagoon and saw that one of the ships—presumably the one that had launched the Base Camp #3 raiding party—was still holding position near the white island. Its stern faced the center of the lagoon, as if ready for a quick retreat. In the north, the second ship also continued holding position.

  Nothing had changed since the first time he looked—at least, if one was willing to ignore certain details. Foreboding and guilt began to weigh down on Mac. He could not be sure that Alan and the others still lived.

  “And so it happens again,” Mac said. “I get distracted and someone pays. Always someone pays.”

  “I need you to stop that shit. Right now.”

  He tried to keep his focus on the lights in the water, and on the two ships, but some stubborn part of his subconscious continued torturing itself, and reaching out to him, with the names of the lost, and his part in their loss.

  “I’m sorry, Yanni,” he said with resignation. “Can’t not remember who, and how. None of us is really anything else, but what we remember.”

  “Shut up, you ninny. You wanna remember when someone died? Go. Beat yourself up with the last minute of his life—forever. You want to remember his laughter, his warmth, the good years? Then you’re in the right spot: how you remember. We ain’t what we remember. We’re how we remember. Got me?”

  Mac nodded, grudgingly.

  The ship in the north spared him the necessity of giving an actual reply. Two sheets of flame burst out from its cannons, and seconds later their thunder filled the sky. By then two shells had already detonated among the red plumes.

  When the clouds of smoke and wet mist began to pull apart and drift off, more than a half-dozen Kraken could be seen stunned or dying at the water’s surface, their bodies turning pallid white.

  The heavy cruiser that up until then had been holding position near the white island was suddenly moving full speed astern, toward the center of the lagoon. The northern ship remained on post, apparently providing cover.

  “Nooo . . .” Yanni said.

  Mac studied the expression on her face and could see that there was no way any words from him could help. In a shared state of sensory overload, hours seemed to pass—but they were only minutes, crowded with new and rapidly changing events.

  There came to them the sounds of firing from the new, thousands-of-rounds-per-minute guns. The rounds discharged so fast from the full-astern, Nea Kameni–bound ship that every bang blended undetectably into a continual metallic buzz. The bright tracer rounds were so numerous that they reminded Mac of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers death rays. The “rays” went out in short bursts, aimed mostly at those Kraken already dead or dying on the surface . . . mostly. It was difficult to know what was actually happening. The ship’s A-frame had either broken away from the stern or been pulled away by some unseen defender of the lagoon.

  As the firing ceased and the vessel came to a halt among the white cephalopods—their number having increased and the majority of them now sinking in shreds—lines were being drawn from the bottom, as if by fishermen.

  “Cousteau’s red velvet,” Mac said softly. “They’ve got their samples.”

  Near Therasia in the north, a sudden geyser of white water erupted, suggesting another attack with a vintage mine. But it soon became all too clear that the other Russian ship, the Kursk, had fired its cannon again. It moved quickly and deliberately toward something flopping erratically on the surface, shifting from red, to white, to red again. They must have seen it and fired about a hundred yards away—a concussion shot, meant to stun, Mac guessed. Whaling lines were fired into the animal, and the vessel edged nearer, with nets.

  Just offshore of Nea Kameni, the red plume sampling ship—no other description seemed closer to the truth—hit the gas pedal and began churning her screws full ahead toward the lagoon’s westernmost exit. Before she overcame inertia and started to pick up speed, two of her guns were firing again. A half-dozen men on the stern had managed to hook on to, and were hauling aboard, severed tentacles and shreds of writhing Kraken flesh.

  “You know, Mac,” Yanni said. “It’s not the Kraken who give me the Willies.”

  “I know,” Mac said, having broken away for at least a little while from the traps of his past.

  Yanni continued: �
��Humans really scare me.”

  1175 b.c.

  The Lost Worlds of Homer

  5.33 Million Years after the Mediterranean Flood

  The name “Kraken” was given late in history. Until officially classified as a cephalopod of unknown origin in the 1735 edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, the creature was more often called Scylla, a name that went back before the Trojan War.

  There was a story, based mostly on myth blended with reality, in which Odysseus, during his long and tragic journey home from Troy, had been told about a sea monster with multiple long necks, each with teeth that could strip flesh from bone: “In any vessel,” the sorceress Circe had warned, “with every single head of hers, she—Scylla—snatches and carries off a man from the dark-prowed ship.”

  In addition to being an eater of men, the creature was also said to be a skilled shape-shifter.

  “But to my crew I said nothing about the awful monster Scylla,” said Odysseus, according to Homer. He gave no warning at all, as they sailed past the rock cliffs where the mythical beast dwelled. “For I knew the men would not continue rowing, but would huddle together in the hold.”

  Odysseus climbed onto the prow of his ship, wearing metal armor and carrying two spears, for he sensed that the monster was lurking, either in the water or on the cliffs nearby. Though he strained his eyes, looking the sea and the gloomy rock face over and over, he recorded that it was impossible to clearly distinguish the beast—until it struck, and snatched men from his crew.

  “Thus did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock,” Odysseus lamented. “And she munched them up while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all of my voyages.”

  Chapter 17

  Future Primitive

  You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

  —Eleanor Roosevelt

  July 6, 1948

  11:40 p.m.

  Santorini

  Alan Tse-lin had survived disorientingly deadly situations before and by now should have become accustomed to and quickly adaptable to chaos, but tonight required far too much effort, and it was taking far too long for him to clear the wool from his mind.

  The young polymath became aware that he was lying on his back in a ravine, against something hard and wet. He knew that he’d been ink-sprayed with a bacterial cocktail so potent it would have made Nesbitt’s Plum Islanders gasp—whether in horror, or with visions of opportunity, he decided, was impossible to know.

  What he could say, with reasonable certainty, was that the rapid onset of “ink fever” had broken while he lay unconscious in the ditch. When Alan first came stumbling into the shallow ravine, his back had apparently pitched up against a fallen tree. That accounted for the “something hard.” The storm that passed over the island and created the conditions for his escape from the Russians accounted for most of the wetness. Alan had only the seed of an idea about what had rallied his immune system against the infectious ink and saved his life. That he could try to account for later. But at the moment he was much more concerned about avoiding either Russian or cephalopod pursuers, while running through every possibility he could imagine for how to track down Mac and Yanni.

  A part of his mind that fought valiantly to stay on the safer side of the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, clarity and fever dreams, focused Alan on the importance of hunkering down alongside the tree fall. There, despite an increasingly commanding urge to drop off into sleep, he forced himself to maximum alertness.

  Even while he remained silent and perfectly still, cuts and fever-swollen muscles competed for his attention. But at least there were no broken bones or bullet wounds, and all of his major organs were still inside.

  The past three or four hours seemed fragmentary: flashes of vivid memory between long gaps of nothingness while staggering in the dark. As with most military prisoners, escape had been priority one—to be attempted whenever opportunity knocked, for even one sought-after fugitive stretched and thinned the enemy’s resources. This night, opportunity had arrived as a thunderstorm. And the Kraken came with it. Two Russians guarding the perimeter were confused and evidently baited into a trap by a display of lights so well orchestrated that if one could discern the position of any of the cephalopods, it was impossible to determine the motion of the others. Alan saw two Russians go down with what Mac would have called rapid-onset “organ failure.” He escaped with slash wounds and inking—unable now to recall exactly how he escaped.

  Alan did not know what happened to the other prisoners.

  Overhead, the stars came out. The moon did not come up at all. It did not matter. These days, even with a throbber of a headache that was trying for a new record on his pain scale, Alan possessed what he had proudly come to call “owl eyes.”

  He was still lying next to the deadfall, bit by bit regaining his strength and wondering how to track a professional tracker like Yanni if she did not want to be found, when he heard a sudden rattling from a nearby tree. Turning his head very slowly toward the source of the noise, he saw the beast, not more than fifteen feet away.

  Two slit-like eyes, luminous in reflected starlight, stared back. A tentacle projected itself toward him from between the leaves, and then two more of them. Together they sounded like a nest of rattlesnakes, except for rattling a little more slowly than snakes—all three outstretched tentacles in synchrony, with a hypnotic rhythm. This individual was smaller than the ones Alan had seen before. It could be no larger, he supposed, than an old lapdog. Its flesh glistened under the stars. Gravity and air seemed not to burden the monster, as if being away from both rain and seawater raised no obstacles against this pint-sized version of the Kraken scuttling up a highland ravine and climbing into a tree.

  Interpreting the rattling sound as next of kin to a “back-off” warning from a cornered snake, he back-crawled slowly and quietly away from the creature, expecting at any moment to be slashed and re-inked, or worse, by its hidden companions.

  If two night raids have taught us anything, Alan reminded himself, it’s that the Kraken, like us, tend to travel in groups.

  When he had increased the distance between himself and the monster in the tree to thirty feet, he propped himself up onto his elbows, then into a sitting position, trying to make his body appear as small and nonthreatening as possible.

  Even the greater distance and the slowing tempo of the rattling did not make the creature seem any less formidable—especially as, apparently in direct response to Alan’s retreat, it descended from the leaves to the base of the tree trunk and seemed ready to close the distance.

  They travel in groups, the scientist repeated to himself, as a rattling from about sixty or seventy feet behind made him abandon the prior caution of slow movements and brought him struggling quickly to his feet. A few steps up the side of the ravine proved that he could run and climb despite the swelling and stiffness, though he doubted it was possible—while surrounded—to outpace two or three determined Kraken.

  “Alan,” Yanni called softly, from behind the newer source of rattlesnake sounds, “stay where you are if you don’t want to piss it off.”

  “Thank God. Are you two okay?”

  “Shhhh,” Mac said. “Let Yanni handle this.”

  “Whatever you do,” Yanni added, “don’t run.”

  “Right. Absolutely, don’t run. Absolutely, no pissing it off.”

  Yanni was working several metal objects in her hands—clicking and scraping them together with a speed that could have given a snake’s rattle a run for its money.

  This historically unprecedented commotion went on for nearly twenty minutes—and then for twenty minutes more, with Yanni adjusting mode and tempo to keep up. As the acting Ameri
can ambassador of Homo sapiens, she let the cephalopod lead the duet.

  Finally, well after midnight, the clicking of the animal’s barbs reached a high, buzzing pitch with which Yanni could no longer keep pace. Alan was expecting it to let loose with a bioluminescent light show that might be visible for miles around but the night visitor apparently knew better than to attract too much attention. Instead, at the height of what could only be described as a fit of hyperactivity, the creature scurried up the tree and leaped so swiftly out of the ravine that it seemed to Alan as if he were watching a ghostly whirlwind.

  “Gone,” Yanni said.

  “Good,” Alan replied. “I’m guessing that it finally needed to get out of here and rehydrate somewhere?” His legs felt weak and Mac was suddenly at his side, steadying him.

  “Where are Cousteau and the others?” Mac asked.

  Alan explained the Kraken raid, his escape, and why he held out hope for the others, based upon his observations that one of the monsters had already held off from killing him on sight, and another had just allowed all three of them to live. Of course, at Base Camp #3, they did not have Yanni, he thought, with a shudder.

  When he was finished with his story, Alan asked Yanni, “So, now you hold actual jam sessions with those things, huh? You want to explain that for me?”

  Yanni returned silence to her friend and looked away.

  “Mac?”

  “Oh, what an amazingly long and strange answer this would be.”

  July 7, 1948

  1:20 a.m.

  Base Camp #3, Santorini

  It was plain to Cousteau that when the one they called Uri regained consciousness, he quickly regretted it.

  “You’re doing very well,” Cousteau lied. “You’ll be up walking in a day or two. You have nothing to worry about.”

  He signaled Boulle to administer another shot from their captors’ supply of morphine, and knew it would not work for very long. He hinted to Nesbitt that she might be able to help (as she had helped Private McQueen, he left unsaid), but her response was cold indifference. It was clear to him that if she could get away with it, she’d gladly have helped the Russian more quickly into an unmarked grave.