Altar of Eden

by James Rollins

  He didn’t know what that might be, but he knew one thing for sure.

  He was on the wrong side of that fence.

  Chapter 50

  Duncan leaned his fists on the curved desk of the monitoring station.

  The security nest had been built into a bunker in the hillside. It offered immediate access both to the villa and to the subterranean lab. Behind him, bulletproof windows offered a sweeping view of the cove and the foundering fishing charter as it limped within a pall of smoke into their waters. It was not his most immediate concern. The gun battery atop the villa kept the boat under a tight watch.

  Instead, his attention remained fixed to the dark screen.

  He listened to the static in his earpiece, straining for any sign of his scouting party. The horrific screams over the radio still echoed in his ears. He couldn’t tell how many throats issued those cries.

  Were any of his men still alive?

  “Play the tape again,” Duncan said.

  The technician seated at the desk manipulated a toggle, and the dark screen fuzzed with a blur of brightness—then stopped on a crisp image of a freshwater spring bubbling out of the side of a forested hill-side. Camera 4A had been positioned near the island’s sole watering hole. It was one of twelve cameras posted at key positions, areas that offered the best vantage for observing the test subjects’ daily routine.

  Duncan’s team had managed to install the new unit. The image wobbled as the camera was quickly positioned and secured. He caught a glimpse of an arm waved in front of the camera, testing its function.

  Then the hand jerked back, and one of his men sprinted past the camera. His rifle was on his shoulder, his cheek pressed tightly to the stock. Though there was no sound transmitted over the camera feed, the gun rattled and smoked as it was fired. Then the man disappeared out of view.

  A moment later, the image cracked and went black.

  Duncan straightened, taking in a sharp, deep breath. It was more than his men’s fate that worried him. He stared across the remaining eleven cameras. They displayed various views of the island: a crude latrine, a rocky ledge, a shallow cave, and three cameras alone focused on the main village habitat. It all looked peaceful, except there was not a single sign of any of the inhabitants. Their conspicuous absence left only one conclusion.

  “They know about the video cameras,” he mumbled.

  All of them.

  His mind worried on that implication.

  So then why only take out one camera?

  The answer was simple enough. The bastards had set a trap intended to lure men to the site. But why? To exact revenge? He didn’t think so. The act was too calculated, too purposeful. He pictured again the rattle of the assault rifle. Another possibility asserted itself and grew more certain as he considered it. The broken camera was not meant to lure men—but weapons.

  Duncan shifted to a computer monitor. It displayed a map of the island. Tiny red dots moved in real time across the screen. They represented the tracking tags of the fourteen ape-men and the twenty-three other specimens. But none of those tags had come near the spring at the time of the attack. As he stared at the screen he noted several of the tags remained fixed in place, some in the village huts, two in the cave, the rest in the jungle.

  Duncan reached out and counted the number of immobile tags.

  . . . twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

  The same number as the ape-men. That couldn’t be a coincidence. There could be only one other explanation.

  “They’ve removed their tags,” he said aloud.

  “Sir!” The technician jolted and pointed to the live feed from one of the cameras. “You’d better see this.”

  Duncan joined him at the monitor. The screen displayed a view of a jungle clearing. As he stared he saw nothing at first. Then a shift of shadows at the edge of the glade drew his eye. Shapes crept through the forest.

  Two, maybe three.

  He squinted.

  Were they the missing inhabitants?

  Then one of the shadows slipped into a dappling of sunlight. The figure wore trousers, a camouflage jacket, and carried an assault rifle. At first he thought it might be one of his men, still alive. But the gear was wrong. Duncan knew all of the men who had crossed the bridge into that hellish place. This wasn’t one of them. Someone else was over there.

  He weighed the possibilities. Ever since the trouble in Haiti, raiders had been growing bolder in the region. Could that be who they were?

  On the monitor, the mysterious party disappeared into the jungle.

  “What do you want done?” the technician asked.

  Duncan turned to the computer monitor. The chaotic motion of the red blips had stopped. As he stared they began to move again, all of them—converging toward the trespassers like a tightening noose.

  His lips thinned with grim satisfaction. The fools had picked the wrong island to land on.

  “Sir?”

  “Keep monitoring,” Duncan said. “This problem should take care of itself in a few moments.”

  But it didn’t address another worry. How the hell did a raiding party get onto that other island in the first place? Duncan swung to the arc of windows overlooking the sea. The smoking boat continued to limp into their cove.

  That had to be the answer.

  He’d heard of birds that would fake a broken wing to lure a cat away from a nest. The same was going on here. The distressed ship had been used to draw their attention, to get them to drop their guard.

  Anger stoked to a burn deep in his chest.

  Time to grind that bird under a heel.

  “Call up the gunner in the bunker,” Duncan ordered, still staring down at the cove. “Tell him to open fire on that boat.”

  Chapter 51

  Jack sensed them before he saw them.

  He lifted a fist to stop his teammates. Over the course of the trek, he’d grown attuned to the forest: the hushed whisper of a sea breeze through pine needles, the briny scent of loam and salt, the pattern of shadow and sunlight. Then suddenly a change. A quiet crackling rose from the woods all around, like a smoldering fire sweeping down on them. Off the wind, his nose picked up a distinctly musky smell. A flock of small swallows burst through the branches to the left.

  Something was out there and closing in.

  Jack lowered to a wary crouch and swung up his Remington. He preferred to hunt with a shotgun in woodland conditions. In such tight quarters, the scattering punch of a shotgun served better than the precision of a rifle.

  Mack and Bruce took up positions to either side. They kept their backs toward each other, weapons pointed out.

  Jack searched the shadows. The rustling went immediately quiet, as if a switch had been thrown. He waited. It would be easy to attribute the noises to an overactive imagination, except that overripe odor remained on the breeze.

  A prickling spread down the back of Jack’s neck. He felt eyes upon them—many eyes, studying him as intensely as he watched the forest. As he strained all his senses, his headache flared and his vision tunneled. For a moment a strange static filled his skull, as if his body were a radio tuner straining for a signal.

  Then a cracking of branches exploded to the right. For some reason he knew to glance up. A shadow passed overhead and fell heavily down toward Jack and his men. They had to scatter out of the way. It struck the ground in the center of their group.

  Blood splattered in all directions.

  Jack stared, disgusted and stunned.

  A headless corpse lay on the ground. The arms had been ripped off at the sockets, leaving only a torso and legs. Blood continued to ooze from the wounds.

  What the hell . . .

  He noted the black khaki camouflage uniform. It was the same gear as the assault team that had attacked ACRES. He turned his attention back toward the shadowy forest. The woods remained dead quiet, so silent he could hear the waves washing the beach off in the distance. The static in his head dulled to a low hum—but as he strained with e
very sense on fire, the buzz slowly grew in volume.

  “Here they come,” Jack whispered to his men.

  LORNA CONTINUED TO carry the female child in her arms while Sesame Street played on the dayroom’s television.

  “So you think last night’s attack was an attempt to reach the young ones here?” Bennett asked.

  Lorna shrugged. “Why else would they attack this island? You said they have plenty of food, water, and shelter. So why swim over during the night and ambush a guard on the beach?”

  “You may be right,” Malik said. “But that doesn’t explain the hyper-aggression displayed before we relocated the adults to the other island. This can’t be all about the young ones.”

  Both men turned to her. They focused a bit too intensely, as if expecting a solution from her, some insight into their problem. She knew if she failed to impress them, failed to prove her usefulness, her days on the island would come to a swift end.

  “These bouts of aggression,” she started. “You said that the attacks came without provocation.”

  Malik nodded. “That’s right. Last year an adult specimen was calmly completing an IQ test when suddenly he whipped around and mauled the technician monitoring the test. The specimen was, of course, killed in order to weed out the troublemakers.”

  “And nothing provoked that attack?”

  “Not that we could judge.”

  “What about procedures done elsewhere in your labs? Specifically, painful tests?”

  Malik rubbed his chin in thought. “We do examinations all the time. I still don’t understand your point.”

  She again pictured the strange flocking behavior she had witnessed earlier. “You said these specimens share a hive mentality? That thoughts are spread across their magnetic network. So why not pain, too? In other words, what one feels they all might feel. If that’s the case, if you provoke one specimen, an entirely different one might lash out in a reflexive reaction.”

  Bennett stared at Malik. “Had you considered that possibility?”

  “No, but it’s an intriguing angle.” The researcher’s eyes narrowed with contemplation, but he looked unconvinced. “I’ll have to review the records.”

  Lorna pressed. “You have to stop thinking of them as individuals. There is only one intelligence out there, spread fractally among the group. They are a single psyche stretched across multiple minds. And for years, you’ve been abusing that psyche, torturing it on multiple fronts.”

  She stared at Malik, waiting for him to object to her assessment of his cruelty. His silence spoke volumes.

  She continued. “Under such prolonged and sustained abuse, is it any surprise you began to see psychotic breaks? But you’ve been tackling this the wrong way. Trying to weed out this problem by culling only the violent ones. These breaks aren’t arising from individuals in the group, they’re coming from the whole, from the hive mind that you’ve abused to the point of psychosis.”

  Bennett and Malik shared a worried look.

  “So you’re suggesting the entire hive mind out there might be psychotic,” Malik said, his voice cracking with disappointment. “Driven insane.”

  “Maybe even worse.”

  “What do you mean worse?” Bennett asked.

  “If what Dr. Malik described is true about their IQs, the entity you’ve created out there isn’t just insane—but brilliantly insane. Beyond our comprehension, beyond rehabilitation. Pure rage and madness coupled with cunning and guile.” She shook her head. “You’ve created a monster.”

  JACK STARED DOWN the length of his shotgun at the woods. His skull felt as if it were on fire. The corpse behind him reeked of blood and bowel. Why had they tossed it at Jack’s group? As a threat, a distraction? Then why didn’t they just attack?

  As he studied the forest he sensed them on all sides. Jack and his men were surrounded, trapped. He again considered the corpse, his mind working fast.

  Why throw it here?

  Then he suddenly knew. He glanced over to the body, remembering the rattle of automatic fire. It sounded like it had come from more than one gun. Whatever was out there had dispatched the trained soldiers as easily as swatting flies. If they wanted to take out Jack’s team, they could do so just as easily. But instead they threw the body here.

  And he knew why.

  As a message.

  Jack called to Mack and Bruce. “Lower your weapons.”

  To demonstrate, he dropped his shotgun from his shoulder, held it at arm’s length, and crouched to set it on the ground.

  “Are you nuts, sir?” Mack asked.

  “Do it. If you want to live.”

  Mack grumbled under his breath but obeyed.

  Jack knew the corpse was tossed here as a warning. To show that their lives were forfeit if they didn’t surrender. He also sensed that whatever shared this island knew Jack’s team was different from the commandos.

  As the weapons were dropped, shadows shifted, and a shape slipped into view. Much closer than Jack had suspected. Only a couple of meters. Others stirred out there, too. Some larger, some smaller.

  “Jack . . . ?” Mack hissed at him.

  “Stand down,” he warned.

  Mack complied, but he was not happy about it.

  The shape moved closer. At first Jack thought it was a large chimpanzee or a small gorilla, but as it stepped into the sunlight it walked upright like a man. No shambling or knuckle dragging. It cocked its head as it came forward. Jack noted an ear was missing, leaving a long jagged scar down one side. This was no surgical wound, but one lost in combat.

  As it stepped closer yet again its flattened nostrils flared as it took in Jack’s scent. Naked, the creature was covered in fur—and blood. Though smaller by a couple of feet, its body was heavy-boned and layered with muscles. Jack suspected the creature could rip him apart with its bare hands.

  But for the moment there was an uneasy truce.

  Large shining eyes stared at him.

  Jack noted the intelligence there. But there was no warmth, no welcome. Those eyes remained as cold as a winter star.

  Jack’s blood settled into the pit of his stomach as another realization struck him. He remembered Lorna’s description of genetic throwbacks. He knew what faced him was not any animal—but was once a man.

  Another of the creatures, his face knotted in a snarl of threat, appeared behind the first. He carried a lightweight assault rifle, likely confiscated from the dead body behind Jack.

  To the left, a black-furred tiger shoved into view. Lips rippled back to reveal fangs as long as daggers.

  All their gazes fixed on Jack.

  The combined focus set his head to aching, his skull bones to vibrating. He had to resist pressing his palms against his ears.

  The first creature came forward until he stood directly in front of Jack. He leaned closer and sniffed at his clothes. Hands reached up and gripped Jack’s shirt. Fingers dug in, and the arms jerked wide, ripping open his shirt. Buttons went flying. With Jack’s chest and belly bared, he felt exposed and vulnerable. The bandages that Lorna had dressed over his wounds stood out starkly against his naked skin.

  Hands reached again and tore those away, too, taking with it some hair and a bit of scabbing. Jack winced but made no move to shove the other away. Fresh blood dribbled down his stomach.

  To the left, Mack swore under his breath, his hands still in the air.

  On the right, Bruce remained in a fixed crouch. A pack of small wolves faced his teammates. Jack saw Bruce’s eyes dart toward the weapon on the ground.

  “Don’t,” Jack warned between clenched teeth.

  Bruce obeyed, but his gaze remained fixed on the rifle, ready to leap at the first provocation. Jack couldn’t let that happen.

  The man-beast before Jack cocked his head and leaned close, sniffing at the trails of blood down his chest, taking in long deep breaths. His small head then tilted back, eyes slightly closed, as if tipping that scent deep inside him. Over the creature’s head, Jack noted t
he others doing the same. Even the cat’s eyes slipped to half-mast, as if taking in his scent.

  For a moment a rich smell of blood filled his own nostrils, almost overpowering in its intensity. Then it was gone.

  The examiner’s face rose before him. Hands gripped his shoulders and dragged him down until Jack was nose to nose with the beastly form. Jack smelled its fetid body, noted each eyelash, heard the rasp of its breath. Fingers remained clamped on his shoulders. He felt the raw muscular power in that grip.

  But it was the eyes that held Jack’s full attention.

  Pupils dilated as Jack stared. It was like peering down into a dark well. He sensed that the abyss had no bottom—but it was far from empty. Something strange stared back out at him.

  The static in his head ratcheted up to a volume that threatened to crack his skull. It felt like his brain was trying to squeeze out his ears. As he rode a wave of agony his sight suddenly narrowed until he seemed to be hanging over that bottomless abyss.

  He was trapped there for a breath—then the beast shoved him away, and Jack stumbled back into a tree. The pressure in his skull receded to a dull throb.

  The creature turned and headed away. The other beasts swung like one body and vanished back into the forest.

  Jack remained standing, trembling.

  What the hell just happened?

  The beast who had confronted him glanced back before disappearing. Cold eyes stared at him, then down to the shotgun at his feet. The message was clear.

  Mack stumbled over to Jack. “What now, boss?”

  He crouched and retrieved his weapon. “We go with them.”

  “What?” Bruce asked, aghast. “They’ll tear us to pieces.”

  Jack knew his teammate’s warning was not without merit. For the moment he had passed some test of fire here. What that test was he didn’t know—and passing it scared him as much as it relieved him.

  But he was also under no delusion. This was no warm welcome. They simply shared a common enemy. Nothing more. He remembered the coldness in that attention and knew that the uneasy truce would last only as long as this war.