Mutation

by Michael McBride

  The UNIT 51 Novels

  by MICHAEL MCBRIDE

  SUBHUMAN

  FORSAKEN

  MUTATION

  MUTATION

  - A UNIT 51 NOVEL -

  MICHAEL MCBRIDE

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK I - MODERN DAY

  1 - ROCHE

  2 - STALEY

  3 - ANYA

  4 - TESS

  5 - BARNETT

  6 - KELLY

  7 - ARELLANO

  8 - ROCHE

  9 - EVANS

  10 - BARNETT

  11 - TESS

  12 - JADE

  13 - KELLY

  14 - BARNETT

  15 - ANYA

  16 - ROCHE

  17 - TRUJILLO

  18 - EVANS

  19 - TESS

  20 - KELLY

  BOOK II

  21 - BARNETT

  22 - JADE

  23 - ROCHE

  24 - ANYA

  25 - TESS

  26 - EVANS

  27 - KELLY

  28 - BARNETT

  29 - JADE

  30 - TESS

  31 - ROCHE

  32 - ANYA

  33 - BARNETT

  34 - TESS

  35 - KELLY

  36 - EVANS

  37 - BARNETT

  38 - TESS

  39 - JADE

  40 - ROCHE

  BOOK III

  41 - BARNETT

  42 - ANYA

  43 - TESS

  44 - KELLY

  45 - BARNETT

  46 - EVANS

  47 - ROCHE

  48 - BARNETT

  49 - JADE

  50 - KELLY

  51 - BARNETT

  52 - ANYA

  53 - ROCHE

  54 - BARNETT

  55 - EVANS

  56 - KELLY

  EPILOGUE - ONE WEEK LATER

  Teaser chapter

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 Michael McBride

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4601-0

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4602-7 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4602-3p (e-book)

  CROP CIRCLES WILTSHIRE COUNTY, ENGLAND JULY, 1990

  MAPS:

  MESOPOTAMIA

  MESOAMERICA

  ANTARCTICA

  PROLOGUE

  But Life, being Life, can never die at all.

  —FREDERICK TENNYSON

  EVANS

  Mosul, Iraq

  The skeletal remains of Old Town intermittently appeared from the black smoke churning against the horizon. The ground trembled from the distant airstrikes, and the air crackled with automatic gunfire. U.S. Army Sergeant Luke Carmichael led the procession on foot through the ruins of the once-great city. The roads were filled with the rubble of the collapsed buildings, making them impassible by vehicle. Dr. Cade Evans followed closely behind him in his borrowed desert camouflage fatigues. A crust of dust had already formed on his lips and around his nostrils, and his skin felt like sandpaper. He’d never been to Mosul and couldn’t picture how it must have looked before first the Islamic State and then al-Qaeda seized control.

  A pall of concrete dust hung over the entire city. Power lines had fallen, their wires snaking lifelessly through streets where the charred husks of abandoned vehicles rusted. The façades of the few buildings that remained standing offered glimpses into the lives once lived inside them. There were no people on the streets, nor any sign that there ever would be again.

  “How much farther?” Dr. Anya Fleming asked from behind him. She’d refused to don a burqa and instead wore her auburn hair tucked up underneath her helmet and fatigues that were way too large for her slender form. Her eyes stood out from her dirty face like emeralds stomped into the sand.

  “It’s just up ahead,” Corporal Brian Lewis said. He brought up the rear so silently that Evans had almost forgotten he was there.

  Carmichael moved through the haze like a specter. Evans followed him over a mound of rubble from which rusted lengths of rebar stood. Forty-eight hours ago, he’d seen a single picture of what awaited them ahead, and it had been all he could think about since.

  A fighter jet screamed across the skyline a heartbeat before the ground shuddered and rubble rained down all around them. The shadow of a drone passed over him, but it was gone by the time he looked up.

  The sergeant guided them through the framework of a building burned to the bare girders and into an alley clogged with debris.

  “This used to be a school,” Carmichael said of the demolished structure before them. It now looked more like a parking garage, with bare concrete floors and walls. Only the blackened metal frames of chairs and desks hinted at its former purpose. “There were children inside when they torched it.”

  Evans’s boots left tread marks in the carpet of soot and ash. The rusted sprinkler pipes were still bolted to the ceiling, for all the good they’d done. Charcoaled wall studs framed corridors that funneled them deeper into the dark structure. Their military escorts switched on the LED lights mounted to the barrels of their M4 carbines and swept them through the vacant building. Carmichael offered Evans his mini Maglite and waited for him to turn it on before advancing.

  The foundation was cracked in some places and entirely absent in others. They ducked in and out of what had once been classrooms to avoid pits that had to be a good fifteen feet deep. The sergeant stopped at the fractured edge of one maybe six feet across and shined his light down upon a ladder descending into the earth.

  “You’re on your own from here,” Lewis said. “They don’t pay me enough to go back down there.”

  “We’ll stand guard up here,” Carmichael said. “If either of us so much as senses anyone coming, we’re out of here. All of us. You hear me?”

  Evans stared at him for several seconds before nodding and starting down the ladder. Anya followed. The echoes of their footfalls on the aluminum rungs preceded them into the depths. The cool air was a welcome change and chilled the layer of sweat under his fatigues. The dirt floor at the bottom was hard and smelled of a bygone age.

  He shined his light up the ladder until Anya reached the bottom and stepped down. There was an arched orifice behind him, near the ground. Not the traditional ornate Islamic pointed arch, but rather one chiseled from the bedrock itself. He crouched and peered inside. When he looked back at Anya, he couldn’t hid
e his excitement.

  “That good?” she asked.

  “You have no idea.”

  Evans rolled onto his stomach and slid his legs through the opening. He pushed himself backward until he could duck his head under the arch before letting go and dropping into the ancient tomb.

  There were only so many places in the arid Middle East suitable for habitation. As such, countless civilizations had risen from and fallen on the very same land, with new societies growing from the carcasses of their predecessors. Discoveries like this weren’t uncommon, especially along the Tigris River and in what was known as the Cradle of Civilization, although finding intact human remains was an anomaly of the highest order. Entire peoples had come and gone without leaving any posthumous evidence, at least not that the eternal desert was willing to give up.

  This part of Northern Iraq had been ruled through the millennia by the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians. While this necropolis could have been used by any one or even all of them, the primitive stone arch likely dated to ancient Sumer and a culture that thrived thousands of years ago. The petroglyphs carved into the walls appeared to reflect the Assyrian style, which reminded Evans of primitive Egyptian hieroglyphics, although it was hard to tell for sure through the eons’ worth of dust that had accumulated on them. And upon the bones scattered across the floor amid the fallen boulders that had once sealed the entrance of the necropolis.

  A single opening branched from the rear of the antechamber. The passageway was ten feet long and led them into the room where the picture had been taken. There were skeletons in varying stages of articulation all around them. Sprawled across the ground. Slouched against walls adorned with elaborate carvings. All plastered with dust and ravaged by age, despite which he could clearly see the shapes of their elongated craniums and deformed facial architecture.

  “Classic abandonment context,” Anya said. “They were sealed in here and left to decompose where they fell.”

  She drew her shirt over her mouth and nose, crouched, and brushed the dust from the most complete set of remains she could find.

  A narrow opening led to another chamber. Evans took in everything around him as he walked toward it. There were no stars carved into the ceiling as he’d seen at every other similar burial site. No gouges in the stone where the creatures had attempted to claw their way out. It was almost as though they’d acquiesced to their ultimate fate without raging against it, which was totally out of character for this alien species.

  There was another body wedged in the passageway. He estimated that brought the total so far to nine, although there was no way of telling how many of them were primary and how many were drones. He could only imagine the horror the people who’d lived here must have felt with so many of these monsters out there at once. They must have existed in a constant state of terror.

  The adjoining chamber was considerably smaller and strung with cobwebs as thick as ropes, which nearly concealed the stone plinth in the center. And the hominin remains resting upon it.

  Evans parted the webs, which made crackling sounds as they fell away. For there to have been spiders in here, there had to have been a means by which they entered. Some sort of crevice or hole that reached the surface. And any orifice, no matter how small, meant an influx of fresh air, and yet the creatures had been unable to exploit it to escape. There was obviously something he was missing.

  “Cade?”

  Anya’s voice echoed from the chamber behind him. He couldn’t find the words to respond as he stared down at the body on the plinth.

  The dead man had to be close to seven feet tall. His skin was so desiccated and shrunken to his underlying skeleton that Evans could see all of the places where his bones had been broken. The tibias and femurs. The radii and humeri. The pelvic girdle and ribs. Whoever he was, he’d been beaten so savagely that he wouldn’t have been able to so much as crawl, and yet still he was bound by frayed ropes that had eroded through his parchment-like skin.

  “There’s something wrong here,” Anya said.

  Evans swept the cobwebs away from the man’s face and revealed an eagle mask, painstakingly constructed with real feathers and the hooked beak of a giant raptor.

  Anya tugged on the back of his jacket.

  “We have to get out of here right now.”

  He turned to face her and saw the fear in her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She took him by the hand and pulled him back through the crevice and into the outer chamber.

  “The bodies,” she said. “Look at the way they’re contorted. At the way their spines are bent backward.”

  Evans glanced at them as they hurried past. She was right. They were all twisted, with their knees bent and their upper extremities curled to their chests.

  She hit the ladder ahead of him and scampered toward the surface.

  “We need to seal the entrance!” she shouted.

  Carmichael shined his light down on her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Hurry!”

  Anya crawled from the hole and ran toward where an intact section of scorched paneling remained attached to the studs. She jerked on it until the nails pried loose and jumped back. It crashed to the floor at her feet.

  Evans emerged from the hole and looked at the two soldiers, who could only shrug in response.

  “Talk to me, Anya,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t you see?” She positively trembled as she dragged the heavy sheet of wood across the room. “That posture is a result of contractures. I should have recognized it from the start. Every muscle in their bodies constricted. At once. Before they died.”

  “Okay. I’ll bite. So what causes something like that to happen?”

  He helped her slide the makeshift barricade over the pit. They dropped it with a booming sound that reverberated beneath their feet. She was so pale when she finally met his stare that the freckles on her nose and cheekbones stood out like constellations, even through the dirt.

  “Disease.”

  BARNETT

  Pali-Aike National Park, Megallanes Region, Chile

  The landscape was like that of an entirely different planet. Rugged lava fields gave way to sparse grasslands lorded over by towers of metamorphic rock. Green and orange lichen grew from jagged formations reminiscent of coral reefs. It had to be one of the most desolate regions on the planet, and yet still their prey eluded them.

  Cameron Barnett, Director of Unit 51, crunched over the sharp, uneven ground. There were no trees or man-made structures, nothing at all to obscure his view of the horizon in any direction. If the creature was out there, he would have been able to see it.

  He bellowed in frustration and listened to his voice echo across the plains.

  There were only so many places it could have gone. The airplane upon which it had hitched a ride from McMurdo Station in Antarctica had crashed near Rio Grande, Argentina, seventy miles to the south of their current location. He and his team had arrived within fourteen hours of the incident, the aftermath of which they’d watched on a live news broadcast. The pilot and copilot had been killed before the Basler BT-67 hit the ground. They’d found the cockpit spattered with blood and the seatbelts severed by the same implements that had been used on the men themselves, whose bodies had been thrown through the shattered windshield. There had only been two passengers, researchers returning to the States, and it was anyone’s guess as to whether or not they’d still been alive when the rows of seats slammed forward upon impact and compacted against the rear wall of the cockpit.

  Barnett didn’t need to wait around for the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation. He already knew what had happened. He’d seen the damage to the door separating the cabin from the cargo hold. The passengers had never known it was back there and had surely been taken by surprise when the door suddenly opened and death came for them.

  The few surviving footprints in the surrounding forest had led to t
he northwest before being lost to the bare stone and windswept snow. Remote tracking by satellite and drone had turned up nothing. It was as though the subject codenamed Zeta—after the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet and in reference to the alien species unofficially classified as Zeta Reticulans, but more commonly known as Grays—had simply vanished. There was only snow and ice to the south. To the east, the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. And to the west, little more than a maze of frozen islands. North was the only direction the creature realistically could have gone as it led to the South American mainland, where if it could reach the deep Andes or the dense Amazon rainforest, it could potentially hide from them forever.

  They couldn’t let it get that far.

  “Should be just over the next rise,” Special Agent Rand Morgan said from behind him.

  Barnett looked toward where a craggy formation serrated the skyline and nodded.

  His men hung back from him. Not that he blamed them. He was in a vile mood and took it out on everyone within range. Or perhaps they simply wanted to have someone physically between them and Subject Z if they stumbled upon it.

  Their black fatigues blended into the volcanic landscape, save for the red insignias on their shoulders, which featured the superimposed inverted triangles of Unit 51, the clandestine organization responsible for the investigation of arcane and inexplicable discoveries and events that potentially threatened national security. The unit was cofinanced by the estate of the late Hollis Richards—a venture capitalist who’d become obsessed with the alien phenomena that had ultimately cost him his life—and the Department of Defense. It was personally overseen by Grady Clayborn, the Secretary of Defense, who answered only to the President of the United States, a man who was growing increasingly distraught at their inability to find the creature responsible for slaughtering more than fifty men and women in Antarctica.