Mutation

by Michael McBride

  Their deaths weighed heavily upon Barnett’s conscience. He wasn’t sleeping and looked as though he’d aged a decade in the last week alone. Silver had crept into his dark hair at the temples and flecked his stubble. The lines on his forehead and around his ice-blue eyes were even more pronounced. There was a part of him that resented being burdened with this kind of responsibility, but there was no one else capable of bearing it. He hesitated to even consider the implications of failure. There were some things that the world at large could never know about, and it fell upon him to make sure they were able to sleep at night without ever learning of the horrors that lurked in the darkness.

  Golden tufts of grass grew from soil as hard as stone. The blades were crisp and frosted and crackled underfoot. They formed a pattern like stepping-stones clear up to the point where the black escarpment jutted from the hillside.

  Morgan caught up with him as they climbed over the sharp formation, from the top of which they could see nearly to the end of the world in every direction. There was no movement, no sign of life, least of all from the guanacos lying downhill in the weeds. The long fur of the orange and white camelids, which reminded him of a cross between a llama and an antelope, ruffled on the frigid breeze.

  Barnett’s team back at the Hangar, Unit 51’s base of operations in Hampton, Virginia, had detected the dead animals by satellite and forwarded the coordinates to them in the field. He’d known the correlation between the dead animals and Subject Z had been a stretch, but they’d simply had no other leads.

  They picked their way down the steep slope, through prickly groundcover that left burs in their laces. The two special agents bringing up the rear—Troy Brinkley and Saul Sheppard—drew their automatic rifles and pulled the charging handles. Of course, had Subject Z still been around, they would have already been in the same position as the guanacos, whose long necks had been opened with such savagery that it was a miracle their heads were still attached. They’d been cut from pubis to sternum and their abdominal contents disgorged onto the flattened weeds. Their carcasses were frozen to the ground, and a layer of frost had already formed on their distended skin. The dirt had soaked up as much blood as it could hold and cradled dark puddles layered with ice. Their eyes were sunken and their noses gray and dry. At a guess, they’d been dead for somewhere between two and three days, which meant that Barnett and his men were rapidly losing ground.

  “I’ve got something over here,” Morgan said.

  He knelt beside a carcass downhill from the others.

  Barnett crouched beside him and followed his stare to the ground, where the mud had frozen and preserved a track he would have recognized anywhere. It was just the ball of a foot and the teardrop-shaped impressions of clawed toes, almost like the track of a bear, only rather than forming an arch, the digits tapered from medial to lateral. There was no mistaking Subject Z’s footprint.

  “There’s another one over here,” Sheppard said.

  Barnett hurried to where the agent was already taking pictures of the track. It was a partial at best, but clear enough that he could see that it belonged to someone other than the creature, someone startlingly human.

  “Zeta’s not alone,” Barnett said.

  He stood and turned in a circle, hoping to see any indication as to where their quarry might have gone. The idea that someone was traveling with Subject Z through this wasteland made him uneasy, but not nearly as much as the prospect that the print belonged to someone who’d been dead for thousands of years.

  JADE

  U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Fort Detrick, Maryland

  “Let’s start with a T1 sagittal,” Dr. Jade Liang said. “I want a good look at what we’re dealing with here.”

  From where she sat at the control console in the MRI suite, she could see the technologist’s monitors to her left and the circular gantry housing the 3.0-Tesla magnet straight ahead through the soundproof window. The brain of Subject A—or Alpha, the codename given to the drone that had once been Hollis Richards—had been extracted and stabilized using a phosphate-buffered formalin fixating agent, chemopreserved with osmium tetroxide and epoxy resin monomers, and housed in a clear plastic casing shaped like the head inside of which it once resided. The MRI technologists had attached a series of electrodes designed to stimulate different areas of the midbrain, cerebellum, and cerebrum to determine the functionality of the various sections, assuming they remained viable this long after death.

  U.S. Army Radiology Specialist Victor Dupuis used the scout images of the brain in three planes to program the system to virtually slice it, like a loaf of bread, from left to right in five-millimeter cuts. The mere fact that he was in the room with her meant that his security clearance was high enough that she could count on him not to tell anyone about what he saw. Jade had to wonder what all he’d dealt with through the course of his work that he had earned the trust of an agency that didn’t trust anyone. He hadn’t batted an eye when she arrived with the clear plastic head on ice. Neither had his partner, Jill Ervin, who positioned the phantom head in the domed electromagnetic coil and waited inside the room by the transcranial direct current stimulator she would use to deliver the electric shocks.

  The MRI machine issued a throbbing techno beat as the changing magnetic fields caused the brain tissues to release characteristic signals that were then captured and translated into grayscale images—in this case, cross-sections of the elongated brain in profile. It looked like a football made of convoluted folds of putty, inside of which were structures completely different from those found in a normal human brain.

  The brain stem, which regulated autonomic functions like heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing, was somewhat similar in appearance. The baseball-like cerebellum, responsible for motor functions and coordination, was wider and longer and cradled the brain almost like spread wings. The cerebrum had grown to fit the mutated skull, although it retained the same relative amounts of white and gray matter. She could tell right away that the pituitary gland and hypothalamus were easily twice their normal size, which made the corpus callosum look less like an inverted Nike swoosh and more like a tilted horseshoe.

  “Look at the size of those temporal lobes,” Dupuis said.

  “Can you get me some T2 axials through them?” Jade asked.

  “I can do anything you want.”

  He winked at her and set to work.

  The increased dimensions of the pituitary gland and hypothalamus didn’t surprise her. They produced the growth hormones that were responsible for the obvious deformations she’d noticed upon physical evaluation and subsequent autopsy. While the lab seemed to be taking its sweet time with the results of the blood and tissue assays, she was confident they’d show elevated levels of human growth hormone, HGH, and the insulin-like growth factor produced in the liver, IGF-1, which was capable of stimulating proliferation in a wide variety of tissues, most notably the osteoblasts and chondrocytes responsible for bone development.

  Even with the lab results, she feared they wouldn’t be able to determine the mechanism by which the skull elongated, the orbital sockets widened, and the jaws re-formed to accommodate the sharklike configuration of sharp teeth. These weren’t random mutations, but rather specialized physical adaptations that followed blueprints coded into the RNA of the microscopic alien organism, which, like a retrovirus, replicated inside of an infected species and inserted its genetic code into the host’s DNA.

  “Check out the amygdala,” Dupuis said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “That would definitely explain the aggression,” Jade said. “And the increased size of the hippocampus and temporal lobes supports our theory about its long-term memory storage, if not its genetic memory.”

  “You mean like the way a monarch butterfly knows the exact route to take during its migration without ever having flown it before?”

  “Essentially.”

  “In a human?”

  “Trust me,” Jade said.
“There’s nothing human about this thing.”

  Of course, that was a lie. She’d been with Subject A when it died in the field. In its final moments, it had spoken in the voice of Hollis Richards, who had warned her that it was up to her to stop the end of the world. There was a part of her that wanted to believe that conversation had never happened, that her mind and ears had conspired against her, and not just because the prospect of Hollis being trapped inside his own mind while the organisms used his body to commit horrible atrocities made her sick to her stomach. The idea of somehow being responsible for the fate of the entire world terrified her, especially considering she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was supposed to do or where to begin.

  “Can we move on to the functional imaging?” she asked.

  “Give me a second.”

  Functional MRI, or fMRI, was a relatively new neuroimaging technique used to measure brain activity in response to various forms of stimuli, thus showing which parts of the brain were responsible for each function, like the temporal lobes and their increased activity in response to trying to recall childhood memories or the occipital lobe and its ability to distinguish visual phenomena. While a clinically dead brain wouldn’t demonstrate actual functioning, electrically stimulating the corresponding parts of the brain allowed them to visualize the neural pathways that were already there. She needed to figure out how the parasitic organisms interacted with the host brain if they were going to find a way to prevent them from doing so.

  “That’s odd,” Dupuis said.

  Jade leaned closer to his monitor. He tapped the sagittal image, near where a blob of color had formed. It was gold in the center and faded to a deep red near the edges, and covered the thalamus, hippocampus, and vestibular nuclei.“Which electrode did you stimulate?” Jade asked.

  “That’s just it. We didn’t stimulate any of them.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That area of the brain is responding to the static magnetic field itself.”

  Dr. Kelly Nolan, Jade’s colleague who had solved the mystery of how Subject A had been able to travel from Antarctica to Mexico, believed it had done so using some sort of internal sensors that allowed it to detect the elevated magnetic fields aligned along the borders of tectonic plates. Not only did this prove her hypothesis, it potentially gave them the means by which to track Subject Z, assuming Barnett and his team hadn’t already found it.

  “Do you want to try to stimulate that area first?” he asked.

  “Seems like a good place to start.”

  Dupuis brought up the visual representations of the electrodes surrounding the ghost image of the elongated brain on the monitor and programmed the system to acquire the images. He leaned forward, pressed the button to activate the speaker inside the exam room, and spoke into the microphone.

  “Ready to get this show on the road?”

  Jill turned toward the window and gave him the thumbs up. She wore powder-blue surgical scrubs and her blond hair in a ponytail.

  “Target electrodes nine and eighteen,” he said. “Let’s start at one-point-five milliamps and seventy megahertz.”

  She set the system as requested and looked back at him expectantly.

  “On my mark,” Dupuis said.

  He started the scan on his console and the machine on the other side of the wall started to thump. He held up three fingers so she could see them. Two. One.

  Jill triggered the electrical stimulation and the brain on the monitor lit up. The golden aura raced outward from the central focus and struck like lightning bolts throughout the brain.

  “What’s happening?” Jade asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  A flash of light from inside the MRI tube. Jill shielded her eyes.

  Dupuis attempted to terminate the scan.

  “Make it stop!” Jade shouted.

  “I’m trying!”

  Arcs of electricity snapped and crackled from the plastic head inside the gantry. Jill rushed to the control unit and attempted to manually drive the table out of the magnet. The entire head glowed bluish-purple before suddenly shattering. Plastic shards and brain matter struck the window right in front of Jade, who flinched and pushed her chair backward from the console.

  The thumping slowed, and the image on the monitor faded from gold to deep red to gray.

  “What in the name of God was that?” Jade asked.

  “Was there metal inside there?”

  “No.”

  “There had to be.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “Well, something caused an electrical arc.”

  Jill stood with her back to them, her hands pressed to her face. Dark fluid spattered to the ground at her feet, but it wasn’t until she turned around and Jade saw her face that she understood that it was blood pouring through Jill’s fingers. The plastic shards had shredded her skin, exposing bone and embedding themselves in the soft tissue. She screamed and fell to her knees.

  “Oh, my God,” Jade said. She lunged to her feet, ran out of the control room, and into the hallway. The door to the exam room was closed and magnetically sealed. She jerked on the handle to no avail. “Open the door!”

  An alarm klaxon blared and emergency lights flashed. Dupuis remotely drove the table out of the gantry.

  “I can’t!” he shouted. “It automatically locks if the sensors detect a biological contaminant!”

  Jade ran back into the control room and watched helplessly through the window.

  Jill tried to push herself up from the floor, but only succeeded in smearing bloody palm prints on the white tile.

  There was a drumroll of footsteps from the hallway as the emergency response team raced toward them.

  Jade pressed the button and leaned over the microphone.

  “Try to remain calm.” Her voice echoed from inside the exam room. “Help is on the way.”

  Jill looked up, her wide eyes like beacons set into the mask of blood. She struggled to her feet, staggered to the window, and leaned against it. Her molars were visible through a hole in her cheek. Her eyes sought Jade’s and held them.

  It wasn’t fear Jade saw inside them, but rather something that raised the goosebumps on the backs of her arms.

  An almost placid smile formed on Jill’s face. Jade couldn’t hear her when she spoke, but she was able to read the words on her lips.

  Hello again . . . Dr. Liang.

  “No . . .” Jade whispered. She stumbled backward and nearly toppled over her chair. “Please . . .”

  The footsteps converged outside of the exam room. She heard barked commands. Dupuis rushed to join the rescue efforts.

  Jill cocked her head first one way, and then the other, like a vulture. Jade could almost hear the deep, resonant voice of Subject Z inside her head when the woman spoke.

  We are . . . free . . . thanks to you. Jill’s pupils widened until they nearly eclipsed the irises. The vessels in her sclera ruptured and flooded the whites. You will . . . live . . . this day.

  A pair of men in biohazard suits hurried past the doorway. Pressurized air hissed as they inflated the containment chamber outside the exam room.

  Jill planted both palms against the glass, pressed her bloody forehead between them, and smiled.

  But you will . . . die . . . with the rest . . . of your species.

  She abruptly turned away from the window and walked across the room to where the shattered casing containing what little remained of Subject A’s brain rested on the patient table. Shards protruded from the base of the broken cranium.

  “Don’t . . .” Jade whispered.

  Jill looked back at her, smiled, and slammed her chest down onto the jagged plastic.

  Jade turned away as the woman’s blood overflowed the table and flooded onto the floor.

  BOOK I

  MODERN DAY

  From each sad remnant of decay, some forms of life arise so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

 
—CHARLES MACKAY

  1

  ROCHE

  The Hangar, Unit 51 base of operations,

  Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Hampton, Virginia

  The events of the last year had changed Martin Roche, or maybe they’d simply served to return him to the path he’d been meant to travel. Either way, he didn’t like it. He’d left the intelligence community and the national security apparatus because he’d lost faith in what he was doing and grown resentful of being made to spy on his own people, and yet here he was now, standing before a wall of monitors upon which played satellite, drone, and surveillance footage from all around the world.

  He’d been trained to see the patterns that no one else could see and detect threats hidden in the chaos by the elite cryptanalysis unit of the U.S. Marines, from whose pocket he’d been picked by the NSA, who’d honed those skills to a razor’s edge. Had he believed there was anyone better equipped to handle this job, he would have gladly declined Barnett’s offer and walked away with a clear conscience. He’d seen glimpses of the fate that awaited them all if Unit 51 failed to prevent it, though, and couldn’t abandon those he loved to it, even if it meant throwing away the life he had made for himself in England, the countless hours of research he’d invested into deciphering the mysterious crop circles, and the burgeoning relationship with the woman who occupied his every waking thought.

  Roche cleared his mind. He couldn’t afford to be distracted or he might miss something crucial.

  “Transfer monitor six to the main screen,” he said.

  Three digital information specialists were seated at the terminals in the front of the room. Each of them was responsible for acquiring and screening the incoming footage from various locations around the globe. In a perfect world, there would have been a single technologist assigned to each source, but after losing nearly twenty percent of their total ranks to the feathered serpents beneath the Antarctic ice cap, their numbers dwindled by the day. They were running on a skeleton crew, and until they secured anything resembling an actual victory, they weren’t going to be able to lure quality applicants away from any of the other branches. Assuming they even still had funding by then. As it was, Clayborn claimed it was becoming increasingly difficult to appropriate any kind of budget for his discretionary projects at the DOD, which was his not-so-subtle way of saying that either they showed some positive results or they were on their own.