Mutation

by Michael McBride

  Arellano spun and sprinted from the building. He knocked over a stack of bricks and tripped over them. Landed squarely on his chest. Pushed himself up from the stoop.

  A man looked back at him from the shrubs to his left. His face was awash with blood from the parallel lacerations that divided it into sections of retracted skin and bare bone. Another man’s legs protruded from the bonfire, where his Kalashnikov smoldered.

  This time, Arellano couldn’t contain his scream.

  He scrambled back to his truck. Climbed in. Gunned the engine. Punched the stick into gear and stomped the gas to the floor.

  The truck lurched ahead. Hit the ramp at an angle. Nearly toppled to its side before righting itself against the wall of trees on the opposite side of the riverbed, hitting them hard enough to knock a corpse from the underbrush. The rear tires bounced over it and his cargo slammed against the wall.

  The tires caught on the loose stones and the rear doors slammed closed. The bumper careened from the bank and he entered the straightaway going way too fast, but he didn’t care.

  Behind him, the crates and sacks shifted and rocked and bounced from the floor and walls. And he heard scratching, which he tuned out as the branches scraping the sides of his truck while he prayed that the people who slaughtered everyone in the camp didn’t come for him.

  8

  ROCHE

  The Hangar

  The virtual reality was hugely disorienting at first. Roche had been unprepared for the extent to which his mind bought into the digital world. It felt like he was actually inside the tomb in Iraq as Anya and Evans had originally found it, and yet simultaneously apart from it. When he looked down, he saw only dirt, rubble, and debris where his legs should have been, and nearly stumbled in real life trying to walk across what looked like an uneven floor. He had to resign himself to keeping his eyes straight ahead to prevent his primitive hindbrain from focusing on the details it couldn’t rationalize. After a few minutes, though, he started to get the hang of it. The trick, he realized, lay in embracing the illusion.

  There were a few spots around the room where the data was either missing or corrupted, leading to areas where there were simply black holes, but the remainder of the necropolis was nearly flawless. He found himself physically brushing away cobwebs that weren’t there and ducking underneath overhangs where his head would have bumped against the stone roof in real life. It was almost impossible to believe that he could examine every detail in three dimensions and yet couldn’t touch or hold it. He understood what the technology’s detractors meant when they said people would enter these virtual worlds and never return. There would be whole generations that would willingly go down these rabbit holes and find realms far better than the one in which they lived, entire realities from which they had no desire to ever leave.

  That wasn’t why he’d come down to the VR lab, though. Nor was it just idle curiosity. The fact that the ancient tattoo matched a crop circle formed thousands of years later couldn’t be a coincidence. If Jade was right about the tattoo being left as a warning to whoever had the misfortune of finding the sealed tomb, then it had to be more than just a map. There had to be some deeper meaning, and if anyone could find it, it was him.

  Truth be told, he needed something other than tracking Subject Z to occupy his mind before he lost it.

  He’d seen all of the pictures taken during the initial documentation, but there had been a sterility to them that vanished inside the virtual realm. The body was just how it had appeared on Tess’s monitor, only seeing it in true-to-life dimensions reminded him of how tall the man actually was and how much pain he must have endured before his passing. Roche wished they could have removed the eagle mask so he could have seen the man’s face, but he supposed that if he had found a corpse potentially riddled with disease, he probably wouldn’t have been in any hurry to mess with it, either.

  It served as a good starting point from which to begin his virtual exploration. While he didn’t know much about ancient peoples specifically, he understood them well enough to know that the petroglyphs they carved into the walls of their tombs weren’t just for decoration. They told stories in some way germane to the subject entombed with them. These were incredibly illustrative, although not so much in what they showed, but in what they didn’t. The few designs on the sandstone walls were unevenly spaced and appeared rushed, as though whoever carved them had been in a big hurry to either get the tomb ready for its occupant, or to get the hell out of there. Judging by the bodies of the creatures with the elongated craniums, he figured it was most likely the former. He couldn’t imagine anyone with big enough cojones to do his work with those hideous corpses lying at his feet, which meant the designs had been rushed to get the tomb ready for its occupant, or perhaps they’d even been carved while the tall man was tied up and dying on the plinth. Either way, the creatures had to have come later, which suggested they’d somehow been lured inside.

  “Taking a break from the real world?”

  Roche jumped at the sound of the voice and ripped off his headset. Maddox stood in the adjacent ring, his arms extended as he walked on the rolling pad.

  “They should really make this thing like a video game so that if a new player enters, he appears inside the game,” Roche said. “I didn’t even hear you open the door.”

  “Dr. Nolan said she thought you might have come down here. I figured I’d let you know that the director and his team are aboard the chopper and heading north as we speak.”

  Barnett had sent them digital pictures of the dead monkeys and vultures lying in the bottom of their boat. Until that moment, Roche had never considered the prospect of Subject Z deliberately infecting animals with the microscopic alien organisms that not only formed its physical and mental being, but triggered the same transformation in other individuals, which allowed it to control them through some sort of hive-mind relationship. More frightening than the thought of being attacked by ferocious beasts beholden to its will was the idea that any single one of them, even something as benign as a field mouse could serve as a reservoir for the organisms. Even if they were lucky enough to kill Subject Z, it could always bide its time until the world forgot about it before respawning when they least expected it.

  “How far north?” Roche asked.

  “Panama,” Maddox said.

  “If they can stop it before it crosses the Darién Gap—”

  “Assuming that’s its goal.”

  “—then we can at least somewhat contain it.”

  “On a continent covered with tens of thousands of square miles of undeveloped and unexplored wilderness.”

  “I didn’t say it was a perfect plan,” Roche said.

  “Have you notified the Panamanian authorities?”

  “We made an attempt.”

  “And?”

  “They were surprisingly unreceptive to the suggestion that there was an alien being rampaging through the jungle in their general direction.”

  “Did you tell them about the monkeys?”

  Maddox raised his headset and gave Roche a look that let him know how he thought any sane person would respond to such a statement.

  “Point taken,” Roche said, “but we should at least dispatch another team—”

  “With what men?”

  “Tell Clayborn—”

  “The Secretary of Defense doesn’t appreciate being told anything. He’s of the mind that this is our mess, so we should clean it up.”

  “Until we have a veritable army of monsters pouring across the Mexican border into Arizona.”

  “Those were pretty much his exact words.”

  Roche pressed the vein throbbing in his temple, which occasionally helped stave off the migraine he could positively feel building.

  “Then I’m afraid that’s exactly what he’s going to get.”

  He pulled down his visor and welcomed the escape, essentially proving right all of the technology’s detractors. He hated bureaucracy, but not nearly as much as the men
who aspired to serve it. If this was Unit 51’s mess, then he’d be damned if they weren’t going to clean it up, which appeared to be the same thing the ancient Assyrians had done. Nine creatures like Subject Z didn’t drop dead of their own accord.

  The figures on the walls were either meant to represent the dead man on the plinth, or the mask had been fitted over his face so that he resembled the designs. In each depiction, he stood sideways with one foot in front of the other and one arm raised and extended. In the other hand he held some sort of canister by the handle. A tassel cascaded over his shoulder and wings grew from his back. In some depictions he had two wings, in others four, like a butterfly. He raised what looked like a pinecone in one hand and wore a bracelet reminiscent of a watch on the other. There were bearded men in some and griffons in others. Symbols with the wings and tail feathers of a bird. The only thing that remained unchanged from one picture to the next was the container he carried.

  Roche scrutinized each depiction as he walked past, clearing his mind of conscious thought to allow his subconscious to interpret the meaning that had thus far eluded him. It wasn’t what he saw on the walls that caught his attention, but rather what he detected on the floor from the corner of his eye.

  He weaved through the contorted remains of the creatures and into the antechamber, where the upper crescent of the arched doorway granted a glimpse of what little data was captured in the adjacent sinkhole, at the bottom of the ladder. He knelt and felt as though he sank into the floor. He should have recognized it right away. The bones scattered throughout the chamber and nearly buried beneath the dust and dirt were different than all of the rest, but it wasn’t until he found a recognizable piece of a decidedly normal skull that he realized that all of the bones belonged to an average human like himself, only one who’d been literally torn to pieces.

  9

  EVANS

  35,000 feet above the

  Atlantic Ocean

  The Cessna Citation X had been fueled and waiting upon their arrival and they’d been in the air less than an hour after Evans’s discovery that the central circle of the tattoo corresponded to an archeological site known as Göbekli Tepe, which predated the dawn of the Assyrian Empire by more than 7,500 years. While only a relatively recent discovery, the Stone Age site in the anlıurfa Province of southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, had been carbon-dated to the tenth millennium BCE, a time when the region had been lush and known as the Fertile Crescent. The former Cradle of Civilization was now a vast desert wasteland where proxy wars fought in the name of oil threatened to erase the very history of mankind’s genesis. That Jade’s theoretical warning led to the site of the world’s first temple wasn’t surprising, especially considering it had been deliberately buried thousands of years ago in the hope that it would never be found.

  They needed to figure out exactly what they were walking into, which was why the three of them slaved over the touchscreen monitors affixed to the armatures beside their seats instead of catching a little shut-eye or watching the pitch-black Atlantic roll restlessly past beneath them.

  “No matter how long I stare at it,” Anya said, “I can’t figure out why the map would lead us to this place. It’s a historical anomaly. I mean, it was built seven thousand years before the Pyramids of Giza and during the hunter-gatherer phase of our evolution. These guys were supposed to be painting on cave walls, not building”—she gestured at her screen in exasperation—“this.”

  Evans knew exactly what she meant. Göbekli Tepe was twice as old as Stonehenge, and yet the craftsmanship was on a completely different level, one that reminded him of the Mayans, who didn’t appear until eight thousand years later. Massive T-shaped pillars up to two stories tall and ten tons each had been quarried from the bedrock, arranged in circles, and fitted together with walls of stacked stones. The primitive structures weren’t arranged like a traditional village, but rather built one at a time and used for roughly a hundred years before each was completely buried and another built on top of it. Archeologists had used remote sensing devices to detect more than twenty structures buried underneath the man-made plateau that lorded over the flatlands, but they had yet to excavate beyond the five nearest the surface. All of them were essentially the same, with the exception of one subtle, yet striking difference.

  At the center of each circular unit were two towering megaliths, taller even than the surrounding walls. Each was positioned parallel to its partner, fitted into a slotted stone support, and carved to resemble a giant man. They wore loincloths and belts and cradled their bellies with their hands. The tops of the T-shaped slabs represented their shoulders, while their heads were conspicuously absent. Animals had been carved in high relief on the sides of their bodies, predatory beasts theorized to be the protectors of these symbolic deities, but it wasn’t the different animals that made the parallel pillars unique, but rather the minuscule difference in their alignment from one temple to the next.

  Researchers believed they’d been designed almost like primitive picture windows to track a single star across the night sky, one that traveled low against the horizon and, thanks to the wobbling, top-like precession of Earth on its axis, only remained in the same place for a century before necessitating the construction of a new temple and twin megaliths with a slightly different orientation to monitor its progress. That star was Deneb, also known as Alpha Cigni, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus, the swan with outstretched wings and a hazy body formed of distant nebulae. It was the head of the Northern Cross, one vertex of the Summer Triangle asterism, and the object to which mankind’s first temple had been devoted, although archeologists could only speculate as to the reason why, which was of precious little help to them now.

  “So what’s your theory?” Jade asked.

  “It obviously functions as a celestial observatory,” Evans said, “but if there’s a significance to their choice of stars, I can’t see it. For all I know it’s as simple as it was the brightest star in the night sky at the time. Then again, it’s always possible they weren’t tracking a star at all and we’re simply trying to force a pattern where none exists.”

  “You don’t believe that any more than you believe the map on the dead guy’s chest leading to it was a coincidence,” Anya said.

  “And if the tattoo indeed serves as a warning,” Jade said, “then it stands to reason that the warning pertains to the disease that killed the creatures inside the tomb.”

  “Unless it has more to do with the creatures themselves than their deaths,” Evans said.

  “A distinct possibility; however, the physical remains would be a far more effective warning than a tattoo. Whoever ultimately discovered the tomb would essentially have to climb over their bodies to reach the tattooed man bound to the altar.”

  “Tell me about it,” Anya said.

  “No domestic refuse or hominin remains have been discovered at Göbekli Tepe,” Evans said. “That suggests no one actually lived there, and that the complex was exclusively used for either worship or ritual.”

  “Which again flies in the face of conventional wisdom because our ancestors at the time were nomadic and didn’t put down roots until the advent of agriculture five centuries later.”

  “So where did they live?” Jade asked.

  “One can only guess,” Evans said. “They built the temple complex long before any permanent dwellings. The only bones anyone has found so far belong to animals.”

  “Sacrifices?” Anya said.

  “More likely food, based on the specific bones and the corresponding cuts of meat.”

  “So people showed up at this temple to eat and stare at a star through pillars shaped like giant headless men?” Jade said.

  Evans had to admit it sounded ridiculous when she phrased it like that, but the simple truth of the statement was undeniable. There had to be something more to it than that, which brought him back to the carvings on the megaliths.

  “It’s possible there’s a clue hidden among the p
etroglyphs,” he said. “I haven’t had very much time to study them, but the only thing that strikes me as odd so far is the selection of animals. The majority of the carvings feature boars, snakes, vultures, and other native species like scorpions and foxes, but others depict species like geese and armadillos that aren’t indigenous to the area.”

  “How would they know about them if they weren’t local?” Anya asked.

  “That’s the point,” Jade said. “What about the time frame itself? We know that crustal displacement fifteen thousand years ago was responsible for shifting Antarctica to the South Pole and causing it to freeze. That’s not very far from the theoretical era we’re dealing with here.”

  “You’re right. In fact, 10,000 BCE coincides with the end of the Younger Dryas cold event, which was a mini ice age about three thousand years after the last glacial maximum.”

  “That would explain why they’ve located so many subterranean structures they’ve yet to be able to excavate,” Evans said. “The underground cities at Derinkuyu and Kaymakli in Central Turkey date to roughly the same time and are theorized to have been carved to house entire populations during the Younger Dryas. There are actually more than two hundred Stone Age sites in the country with at least two sublevels.”

  “So you think what we’re looking for is buried underneath two thousand years’ worth of buildings essentially built one on top of the other?” Jade said.

  “I suppose it’s possible, but I’m inclined to think not based on the fact that the map was tattooed during the time of the Assyrians, more than five thousand years after its abandonment.”

  “Then what’s there that we’re flying halfway around the world to find?”

  Evans switched to an aerial view of the site on his screen. There was nothing but open desert surrounding the man-made mountain of buried temples. If no one had lived there, then they must have traveled a considerable distance to reach their site of worship, the oldest in the history of the world. It would have been a sacred site, one the people of the time had apparently considered of greater value than their own homes to have invested so much time and effort into building the structures and then burying them. The temple would have served as the house of the first known gods, whose likenesses towered over each of the structures, cold and sightless. Whatever was housed there would have been of the utmost importance, even more important to them than their own lives.