Mutation

by Michael McBride

  “And the third?”

  “I was just about to start on it. Now that I know what I’m doing, it shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Perfect. Let me know the moment you decipher it.” He offered a wink and a crooked smile. “If anyone can do it, Dr. Clarke, it’s you.”

  Tess blushed and headed back to her office. All modesty aside, his sentiments reinforced her innermost feelings. This riddle seemed to have been custom-tailored to her skill set. If anyone in the world was equipped to solve this mystery, it was her.

  20

  KELLY

  U.S. Army Medical Research

  Institute of Infectious Diseases,

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  It was a three-hour drive from Joint Base Langley-Eustis to Fort Detrick; the Black Hawk made it in under thirty minutes. Dr. Max Friden had been waiting in the front alcove when they landed and charged through the rotor wash to meet them, his lab coat snapping behind him on the hurricane-force wind. He looked just like Kelly remembered, with his round glasses and narrow face, but considerably healthier thanks to the exposure to natural sunlight he’d been denied in Antarctica.

  Roche climbed out first and hopped to the tarmac. He ducked his head and jogged toward Friden, who had to shout to be heard over the whine of the engine as it ramped down.

  “It’s about time you got here. You absolutely will not believe—” He abruptly turned to look at Kelly as she rushed to catch up with them. “Hello. And just who is this divine—?”

  “Stow it, Friden,” Roche said. “You remember Dr. Nolan.”

  “Kelly?” he said. “My goodness, you’ve changed. And for the better, I might add. That silver hair really brings out the color of your eyes.”

  She rolled them for his benefit.

  “Nice to know some things never change, Max.”

  “Are you through?” Roche asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Friden said and snapped his fingers. “I totally forgot you guys were a thing.”

  As if sensing their discomfort with the subject, he looked at each of them in turn. “Does this mean you’re not a thing?” He cocked his head and offered a boyish grin. “If you’re not too busy, maybe afterward we could—?”

  “You called us here,” Kelly said. “Remember?”

  “Right. We’ll circle back to that topic later.”

  Friden led them up the walkway, through the entrance, and into a five-story atrium that reminded Kelly more of a hospital than a military installation. Everything was shiny and modern: from the polished tile floor to the vaulted ceiling, and all of the windows and sound-dampening panels in between. There was even a coffee kiosk surrounded by chairs that appeared as though a person could melt right into them.

  “Don’t let the looks of this place deceive you,” Friden said. He guided them straight across the vast space toward a bank of stainless-steel elevators. “The scientists in these labs are working with some of the nastiest stuff you can imagine. I’m talking biological agents like anthrax and ricin, hemorrhagic viruses like Ebola and Marburg, staphyloccalenterotoxin B—I just love saying that one—plague, botulism. You name it, it’s somewhere within these walls. Plus a few more sensitive projects, which is why you’re here.”

  “Isn’t all of that supposed to be housed at the CDC in Atlanta?” Roche asked.

  They stopped in front of a bank of stainless-steel elevators, one of which was ready and waiting. Its door opened the moment Friden pushed the button, and they all stepped inside. He pressed his badge to the digital reader, which unlocked the access panel and buttons numbered one through five. An additional panel slid back and revealed a retinal scanner. He removed his glasses, leaned closer, and stared into the red light. The elevator doors automatically closed.

  “That’s the public health side of the coin. Those guys handle all of the touchy-feely outreach kind of stuff.”

  “Like trying to prevent and control our exposure to diseases?” Kelly said.

  “Exactly,” Friden said, oblivious to her sarcasm. “It’s our job here to develop active countermeasures and figure out the most efficient ways of killing these bastards.”

  “Or weaponizing them,” Roche said.

  Kelly turned to face the doors as the elevator commenced its descent to an unlabeled sublevel. Roche’s eyes met hers in the reflection on the stainless-steel panel. They both knew that if someone here was working with the alien bacterium that was responsible for the creation of Subject Z, they had a whole lot more to worry about than whatever virus had been contained in the Iraqi tomb, assuming that was even why they were here in the first place. The military applications of harnessing a hive-mind organism with such murderous potential were unlimited, as were the ways any kind of experimentation could go wrong.

  “That’s not my bag.”

  “Then what is your bag?”

  “I get to work with the kind of cool things no one else can wrap their heads around. That whole mess at AREA 51 might have been the worst thing to ever happen to me personally, but definitely not professionally. Thanks to that alien organism, people figured that I knew all kinds of things that I didn’t. It was like I woke up one day to find the government shoving security clearances in my face and begging me to work with stuff that would literally blow your mind. Why do you think you guys still send your samples to me?”

  “I didn’t know that we did,” Roche said.

  “Aren’t you some sort of bigwig over there now?”

  “I’m learning there’s a lot Barnett hasn’t told anyone.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  The elevator dinged, and the doors opened upon a subterranean level that had to be more than fifty feet down, based on the duration of the ride. Everything down here looked a whole lot more intimidating. Gone were fancy chairs, picture windows, and modern décor. The walls were bare and utilitarian, the lighting cold and lifeless, and the dispersal nozzles blossoming from the ceiling the kind designed to expel highly pressurized, flammable accelerants that could be used to “sterilize” the corridor with a massive fireball should so much as a single viral particle escape the sealed labs.

  At the end of the short corridor was a small reception area of sorts with a table and chairs, a coffee maker, refrigerator, and microwave. There were two doors on either side. Restrooms, a utility closet, and storage, or so it appeared. The lone door at the back of the room was different from all of the others. It was made of stainless steel and looked like a cross between a bank vault and the hatch on a submarine, only with a reinforced window at eye level. The lighted sign above it displayed the word CLEAR in red letters.

  Friden walked straight toward it, opened it with a hiss of escaping air, and gestured for them to precede him into the pressurized room. Isolation suits hung from specially designed racks on the walls. Coiled tubing dangled from the ceiling beside each of them.

  “All of the labs down here are biosafety level four, which means we have to wear positive-pressure protective suits. As soon as you put it on, hook it to the tubing. That’ll fill it with oxygen and create a pressure barrier, so even if the integrity of the suit is compromised, air will be forced out instead of being sucked in.”

  Kelly was familiar with suits like these. The engineering team had worn them inside the submerged pyramid in Antarctica, for all the good it had done them. She elected not to share that observation with the others as she slipped into the smallest suit she could find, sealed it across her chest, and attached the air nozzle, which caused the plastic shield covering her face and upper chest to momentarily fog up. She glanced at Roche, who looked just about as nervous as she felt.

  “Ready?” Friden asked.

  Neither Kelly nor Roche could find the voice to respond.

  “Oh, come on,” the microbiologist said. “It’s not that bad. Just don’t fart in there or the smell will seep into your clothes and you’ll be walking around with it for the rest of the day.”

  He unhooked himself from his hose and headed for the inner door.
The sign posted on it read:

  DO NOT ENTER

  WITHOUT

  VENTILATED SUIT

  NO GLASSWARE

  BEYOND THIS POINT

  When he opened it, the door behind them automatically locked with a loud thunk.

  The next chamber was barely large enough to accommodate all three of them at once. Friden again hooked his suit to the coiled tubing hanging from the ceiling and the others followed suit. Kelly noticed the grate in the floor and the nozzles overhead a heartbeat before chemicals poured down on them.

  Friden raised his arms over his head and turned in circles to make sure that every inch of his suit was sterilized, then watched to make sure Kelly and Roche did the same. The lock on the inner door disengaged when the flow ceased. The hallway on the other side had bare white walls and blue doors with inset windows, through which Kelly saw clean rooms with hooded workstations, massive glove boxes containing Lord only knew what, and equipment ranging from test tubes and petri dishes to microscopes and centrifuges, plus countless devices so foreign to her that she couldn’t even speculate as to their designated functions.

  He opened the fourth door on the right, instructed them to attach the hoses hanging beside them, and led them into a lab that was the complete opposite of the one he’d shared with Speedy, the mouse he’d brought with him to Antarctica. Everything was spotless, from the work surface underneath the window running the width of the rear wall to the hooded stations to either side. There were computer monitors mounted to the walls and what almost looked like an arcade console with twin joysticks. The window offered a glimpse of the adjoining sealed room, where she saw a glove box filled with various instrumentation, only the attached gloves hadn’t been designed for human hands, but rather the robotic armatures connected to the ceiling.

  Friden assumed the stool closest to the joysticks and directed their attention to the monitor above the window. Kelly leaned closer so she could better see what almost looked like a honeycomb made from the tattered sails of a ghost ship.

  “What are we looking at?” she asked.

  “Those are desiccated adipocytes. Dried-up fat cells, if you will. They’re some of the largest cells in the human body, which helps to illustrate what I’m about to show you.” He toggled the joysticks and a whining sound emanated from the adjacent chamber. The armatures on the other side of the window advanced into the glove box, toward what she assumed to be the microscopic array responsible for the image on the screen. “As I’m sure even you know, adipocytes form a cushioning layer underneath the skin to both protect the underlying tissue and store energy reserves. When a body dies, these cells essentially liquefy and the greasy fat drains out. That’s one of the most important factors in the process of mummification.”

  Kelly suddenly understood where the sample had come from. She glanced at Roche, whose expression remained guarded, but she knew him well enough to see through it. He recognized the source, too.

  “The sample is from the body in Mosul,” she said.

  “Um, yeah,” Friden said. “It would have been nice if you guys could have offered a little more information than that. Might even have saved me several months—”

  “What did you find?” Roche asked.

  “Check this out.” He looked back at Kelly, winked, and manipulated the joysticks. “Prepare to be amazed.”

  The image on the screen simultaneously darkened and blurred. When the details resolved, the honeycomb was already well into the process of regeneration. The empty cells refilled and plumped up. The formerly ragged edges became smooth. Within a matter of seconds, it appeared to be a completely different sample.

  “What did you do?” Roche asked.

  “That, my friend, was a single drop of hemoglobin. Those fat cells not only absorbed it, but incorporated it into their biomass. I tried the same experiment with tissue samples collected elsewhere in the body. Skin, nerve, viscera. The same thing happened to each and every one of them.”

  “That’s impossible,” Kelly said, but she knew that wasn’t the case at all.

  She’d seen the footage of Subject Z slitting a man’s throat and bleeding him onto the remains in the stone sarcophagus, remains it had subsequently stolen and taken with it to the South American mainland, where those remains now left the footprints of a human being close to seven feet tall.

  BOOK II

  Hard light bathed them—a whole nation of eyeless men, Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed.

  —C. S. LEWIS

  21

  BARNETT

  8 miles northwest of Chontalpa

  “Fan out,” Barnett said. “They can’t have gotten very far.”

  The landing of their Cessna had dispelled a good amount of the deep black smoke, but the flames still lapping at the ruptured fuel tanker and the carcass of the wingless Chieftain just kept churning out more. The sun permeated the roiling clouds as little more than a vague aura, hardly brighter than the crackling flames. He could barely see more than a dozen feet ahead of him and his men were already well outside of visual range, although he could hear them through the comlink in his ear.

  “There’s another one over here,” Morgan whispered. “Looks like he was cut in half by the wing of the plane. His body’s still warm, though. And his blood has barely begun to coagulate. We can’t be more than an hour behind them. If that.”

  “Then we can’t afford to waste any more time here,” Barnett said.

  Their course had taken them roughly fifteen degrees west of north this entire time. It stood to reason that unless Subject Z had overshot its destination, it would likely continue in that direction. They needed to know what was out here.

  He removed the satellite phone from his pack and called the dedicated line at the Hangar. Maddox answered on the first ring, his voice made hollow by the acoustics of the command center.

  “We’re on the ground, but they’re already gone,” Barnett said. He caught a glimpse of a body through the smoke, crumpled on the ground. Crouched and felt the heat of the dead man’s neck, if not his pulse. Retracted his hand bloody and wiped it on his pants. “We’re right behind them now; we can’t afford to give up any ground by running off in the wrong direction. I need to know what all is out here in this godforsaken jungle.”

  “Give me a few minutes,” Maddox said. “I’m out of men to assign.”

  “Where’s Roche?”

  “He took a chopper to USAMRIID”—he pronounced it you-SAM-rid—“to meet with Dr. Friden.”

  “Friden?” Barnett’s heart rate accelerated. He’d been waiting for the microbiologist to make a breakthrough for months now. “Did he say what he found?”

  “Negative. He declined to divulge any details over the phone and insisted on sharing whatever he’d discovered in person.”

  “When Roche checks in, tell him I want a status update.”

  The dead man’s face was covered with a paste of blood and cocaine the consistency of mud. There were vertical lacerations on his forehead, the skin parted and puckered where claws had gripped it hard enough to score the underlying frontal bone. His neck had been ripped open by teeth. No doubt about it. Subject Z’s teeth were sharklike in their configuration and resembled needles, though. The edges of this wound demonstrated dramatically different dentition, more gripping and tearing than cutting and slicing, closer to what one would expect from a wolf or a coyote. Or a human being.

  “Dr. Clarke figured out that the second location is in Giza,” Maddox said. “And if we’re right about the importance of the lunar eclipse, we have just about twenty-four hours to get someone there.”

  “Dispatch a unit—”

  “Unless you want me to dispatch our command team, we’re out of bodies.”

  “Damn it.” Barnett stood and headed toward the wreckage of the Chieftain, inside the cargo hold of which was a burning tower of bundled cocaine that had to be worth millions of dollars. At least someone out there was having a worse day than he was. “Get ahold of Dr. Evans and
make sure he’s on the next flight to Sphinx International. And contact Clayborn at the DoD. Tell him to ready a tactical unit. I’ve got a hunch we’re going to need it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve got clear tracks over here,” Sheppard said through the comlink. “Leading into the jungle to the north.”

  “Transfer me to Dr. Nolan,” Barnett said. “I need her to evaluate our location in relation to variations in the magnetic fields. If Zeta’s using them for navigation, then we should be able to find a way to head it off.”

  “She left with Roche,” Maddox said.

  Barnett bared his teeth in frustration and narrowly resisted the urge to spike the sat phone on the turf.

  “Here’s what I need you to do: comb through those satellite feeds, determine every possible destination within a day’s walk, and get drones over those locations as quickly as possible.”

  “I anticipated your order,” Maddox said. “We’re in the process of executing as we speak.”

  “Excellent. Let me know the second you find anything. Now transfer me to Dr. Clarke.”

  “Dr. Clarke?”

  “You said she deciphered the second location. I need her to decipher the third. Right now. And surely she can access Dr. Nolan’s system and forward a map of the magnetic variances in this area.”

  “Good luck, director,” Maddox said and with a click, he was gone.

  “More dead to the east,” Brinkley said. “They had snipers set up in the trees. For all the good it did them. Looks like they were fed through a wood chipper. The savagery gets worse with each encounter.”

  Barnett had noticed the same thing. It appeared as though UNSUB X somehow grew stronger with every confrontation, but he chose not to share that observation with the others.

  He left the wreckage behind and entered the dense rainforest. The smoke seemed to be trapped beneath the canopy, unable to filter through the branches. He barely saw the trunk of a massive kapok tree in time to keep from walking into it and had to duck underneath a headhunting bough. Something warm grazed his cheek, leaving behind a sensation of dampness. He turned around and saw first a hand, its curled fingers dripping with blood, and then the rest of the body, hanging upside down from the upper reaches.