Mutation

by Michael McBride

  Electricity licked at him, passed through him. It shot outward from the toroid and impaled the seven figures, lifting them from the ground. Anu floated between them, his body stiff and frail. His eyes opened and his lips peeled back from his long teeth.

  Evans ran past the blond woman, the current singing his skin, the alien organisms flooding his chest on the steam, bringing with them memories not his own.

  The creature bore down on him from the other side of the room.

  Evans threw himself into the vortex of energy as it rocketed toward the point of convergence overhead. Caught the canister against his chest. Forced the lid closed.

  The creature reached for him, but it was too late.

  The disrupted flow of energy expanded outward, setting the suspended bodies on fire. They screamed and thrashed. Arched backward with electricity snapping from their eyes and mouths.

  Evans hit the ground. Glanced back. Watched the ball of energy collapse in upon itself, sucking in all of the steam and the suspended bodies.

  Jade’s lifeless form slid past him. He caught her by the hand. Rolled on top of her. Wrapped her in his arms—

  56

  KELLY

  The Hangar

  The flashing emergency lights turned the night into a red-and-blue mockery of day. Helicopters streaked across the sky, securing the perimeter around the abandoned hangars. They’d already found the vehicle belonging to Maddox’s team off-base, but there had been no fingerprints or any other means of identifying the men, whose bodies were in the process of being collected at that very moment, or so she had heard over the walkie-talkies the men topside used to communicate with the investigative teams down below, none of whom had yet to find Roche. They’d seen what was hidden beneath the masks, however, so the remains were being sent to Friden at USAMRIID instead of the office of the medical examiner, whose men had already left with the bodies of her unsuspecting colleagues who’d been killed at their stations. They promised to send another unit for Tess when they finally recovered her remains. They all owed her a debt of gratitude, not just for sending the warning to Roche, but for solving the riddle of the crop circles, which had likely prevented the extinction of mankind.

  With the help of the field teams that still hadn’t checked in yet, of course.

  Kelly had already been informed about the explosions that had been detected by satellite in La Venta and Giza, which didn’t bode well for anyone who might have been within the archeological sites at the time. The information specialists were sorting through every available source of imaging at that very moment in hopes of finding her friends, but they didn’t sound overly optimistic. While the Middle Eastern team had fallen out of contact nearly a full day ago, Barnett had remained in close communication clear up until the moment that Maddox had seized the Hangar. She had to figure that if he were still alive, he would have found a way to contact them.

  “Make way,” one of the sentries guarding the entrance to the Hangar shouted.

  Kelly pushed past the officer who’d been debriefing her in the back of the ambulance, climbed down from the tailgate, and rushed toward the point where a pair of soldiers wheeled a gurney toward the waiting helicopter. She was nearly upon it when she realized that it wasn’t Roche and slowed to watch Maddox’s body blow past. His pale face was spattered with blood from the point-blank gunshot wounds that had destroyed his chest. The scars along the sides of his nose and cheeks looked like worms. His men followed on separate gurneys, their faces concealed inside pillowcases, to conceal the truth of their lineage from those unprepared to handle the truth. She watched the soldiers slide them through the side door of a cargo chopper.

  The rotors ramped up with a high-pitched whine and flattened the surrounding weeds. The helicopter lifted off and thundered low over the rooftops. She followed it with her eyes until it disappeared from sight.

  “I wasn’t expecting a parade or anything,” a voice said from behind her, “but I kind of thought some kind of celebration might be in order.”

  “Martin!” she sobbed and rushed to his side. Like the others, he was on a gurney, but one trailed by medical specialists. She climbed on top of him and kissed him all over his face. “I didn’t know if you were still—”

  “Shh,” he whispered and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “It’ll take more than any old god to kill me. Besides, I made a promise I fully intend to keep.”

  “Ma’am,” the medic said. “He’s in stable condition, but we still need to get him to a hospital.”

  Kelly climbed off the gurney, grabbed Roche’s hand, and ran alongside him as they wheeled him toward a second waiting chopper, this one with a red cross on its nose and another on its side door, which slid open as they neared. She stepped aside long enough for them to slide the gurney inside and started to climb in beside him—

  “Ma’am, we’ve arranged for you to be transported by ambulance—”

  “Try and stop me.”

  She forced her way on board, knelt beside Roche, and kissed his hand.

  The medic squeezed in beside his partner on the opposite side and signaled for the pilot to take off. The ground abruptly fell away from them. Kelly glanced back down at the smoldering ruins of what had essentially been her home for the past six months and silently hoped she never saw it again.

  The chopper banked to the north and offered a brief glimpse through the dissipating smoke of the Chesapeake Bay, its waves glimmering beneath the light of the full moon as the final sliver of Earth’s shadow passed into oblivion.

  EPILOGUE

  ONE WEEK LATER

  And starward drifts the stricken world,

  Lone in unalterable gloom

  Dead, with a universe for tomb,

  Dark, and to vaster darkness whirled.

  —GEORGE STERLING

  ANYA

  Giza, Egypt

  Anya sat on the steps beside the Sphinx and stared up at the Pyramid of Khufu. The pyramidion on top had been destroyed in the explosion, leaving the structure flat-topped and nine tiers too short. It had been crafted from a different color of stone, likely after a similar accident thousands of years ago. The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities had already located a quarry with stone that matched the old pyramidion and commissioned the masons to start cutting. Until they were finished, the desert surrounding the pyramid would remain cordoned off and the upper portion would be concealed beneath a framework of metal poles and tarps to discourage people from snapping pictures through the hole.

  That was the official story, anyway.

  The truth was that an entire team of specialists, financed by the DOD in cooperation with the Egyptian government, was crawling around inside like ants, and likely would be for the foreseeable future. They dressed in civilian attire and entered through the tunnel in the demolished pyramid to the northwest so as not to attract any unwanted attention. After all, they would have had a hard time explaining the logo with the twin inverted triangles on their caps and shoulders, and an even harder time trying to explain exactly which organization they represented, especially considering that no one had ever heard of Unit 51 and likely never would, despite its considerable increase in discretionary funding. As it turned out, stopping an extinction-level event was the kind of thing that opened a few eyes and checkbooks in Washington, although no amount of money or prestige was worth the price they’d paid.

  Not even close.

  For her part, Anya had spent the last two days at the Air Force Specialized Hospital in Cairo, receiving treatment for injuries that still hurt and probably always would. She wasn’t about to complain, though, as they would be a constant reminder that others had died so that she might live. A few broken bones, a couple dozen stitches, and a complete lack of hair and eyebrows were nothing compared to what it had cost her friends.

  Evans had managed to seal the container before being incinerated by the explosion. They found it a quarter-mile away, at the edge of the blast radius, amid a scattering of debris. That was all she knew about
it, though. The Secretary of Defense, Grady Clayborn, had personally conducted her debriefing, but she didn’t remember a word he’d said after delivering the news that she was the only survivor, crushing what little hope she’d been able to cling to during the hours slowly suffocating under the rubble, her subsequent handling by rescuers who could no more understand her then she could understand them, and the seemingly eternal convalescence. All she clearly remembered was resigning her position, signing about a million nondisclosure agreements, and waiting for Roche and Kelly to finally arrive.

  It had been at their insistence that she was out here now, as close to the pyramids as she was going to get ever again. This was her chance to say goodbye, to provide herself with a small amount of closure, knowing full well that not a single day would pass without recalling what she’d found here, what she’d lost, and how close her species had come to its ultimate demise. Worse, she’d looked upon the face of a being that might have been a god, maybe even her creator, and found him wanting.

  “You were right,” Roche said from behind her. She’d been so lost in thought she hadn’t heard him climb the stairs. “It was in the Black Forest, not far from the French border. I’ve made arrangements to have a plane fueled and waiting for us.”

  Anya nodded. She’d known it was only a matter of time before they located Enigma’s base of operations. When the blond woman had said the surviving members of the Ahnenerbe had returned to Germany not just to rebuild the Reich, but to pick up right where they left off, she’d meant it literally. She might as well have drawn them a map.

  “Evans and Jade would have wanted you to live your life,” Kelly whispered.

  They would have wanted to live theirs, too, Anya thought, but refrained from saying so out loud. She knew that the best way to honor their sacrifice was to make the most of every day she’d been given; she just hoped she had the strength to do so.

  “Come on,” Roche said. He offered his good hand and pulled her to her feet. He looked miserable with his other arm in a sling, but, like hers, his wounds would heal. “There’s just one more thing left to do.”

  Anya turned her back on the pyramids and took her first steps into a new life.

  ROCHE

  30 miles east of the French border,

  Black Forest, Germany

  Roche didn’t know the new director of Unit 51, let alone if he could be trusted. The only thing he did know was that he was no longer a part of it and wasn’t about to take the chance of anyone finding out about this final mission. The secrets contained inside the Ahnenerbe’s base of operations were priceless to certain factions, people who should be prevented from ever learning of their existence at all costs, so when it came to finding the staging grounds for the organization they’d nicknamed Enigma, he’d bypassed traditional information networks and reached out to some colleagues from his old life.

  While the kind of men who traveled the world documenting the crop-circle phenomenon couldn’t be counted upon to keep a secret any more then they could keep a crackpot theory to themselves, he could definitely count on no one believing them if they did betray his trust. Besides, even he hadn’t been sure that dispatching a group of single-prop airplanes over the nearly impenetrable Black Forest would yield any results, but Anya’s theory had been proved correct on the second day of sorties when they photographed what appeared to be an exact replica of Wewelsburg Castle at the base of a mountain practically unreachable by terrestrial vehicle.

  It had been designed to re-create the famed Renaissance castle built in 1609 and leased by Heinrich Himmler with the intention of converting it into a training facility for SS officers; however, it had quickly become the cult-center for the more esoteric pursuits of the Nazis—and who better to lead that charge than his pet project, the Ahnenerbe?

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Kelly whispered.

  Roche wrapped his arm around her and glanced back at Anya, who stared at the ramparts with an unreadable expression on her face.

  “We owe Barnett this much,” he said and led them across the narrow outer bridge, through the arched entryway, and into the triangular courtyard, where he’d stashed the tanks of gasoline he’d spent the last forty-eight hours ferrying out here by the truckload. “Besides, it’ll be a relief to know that no one will ever be able to reproduce the atrocities they conducted here.”

  He grabbed a tank in each hand and headed up the stairs into the castle, sloshing out gasoline as he went. The others each took a different wing of the triangular structure, with the intention of dousing everything in sight. He met up with Kelly at the point where the two main wings converged at a massive circular tower, inside of which was an elaborate chamber with ornate pillars and a marble design on the floor featuring the Schwartze Sonne, the Black Sun, an occult symbol with twelve lightning bolts striking from a central circle to an outer ring. They finished off their tanks, discarded them on the design, and returned to the courtyard for more.

  Together, they reentered the castle, climbed the staircase, and diverged once more. The toxic fumes were overwhelming, and yet they continued to splash the accelerant onto the floor, the walls, the furniture, everything they could find. Rooms passed in a blur as they walked from one floor to the next, returning to the courtyard as needed to replenish their supply of gasoline. The lower floors were reminiscent of a college dormitory, simple living quarters for anything but simple beings. The top floor, however, housed scientific suites stocked with computer systems and equipment of all kinds, clean rooms and isolation vaults, nurseries and cages, a veritable one-stop shop for a species hell-bent on its own eradication. The most disturbing discovery of all, though, was a room filled with candles that had burned to puddles, only to be replaced by others in a continual cycle of renewal that had apparently gone on for decades. The altar in the center was made from what at first looked like aspen branches, but upon closer examination turned out to be large bones, human, at least to some extent. Far larger than any man Roche had ever seen. They must have belonged to the being whose conical head rested upon them, his deformed face hidden behind the mask of a bull, a face that no doubt would have born a striking resemblance to the half-breeds who’d once lived here.

  As planned, they all met in the Crypt, or at least that was what it had been called at Wewelsburg. It was the ceremonial center of the castle, the black heart of the corrupted body, in the middle of which was a recessed pit surrounded by a granite ring. The red light of the setting sun passed through the angled windows of the domed ceiling in columns that spotlighted the inset Schwartze Sonne design. The blood spatters had long since dried, but there were more than enough of them to suggest that this room had seen its fair share of use.

  He closed his eyes and imagined the body of the creature with the mask of the feathered serpent, the god Enlil, lying supine in this very pit while the blood of a sacrifice spurted onto his vile remains. He wished they’d found some part of him within the blast zone, but, like the others, his physical form had surely been converted to ashes.

  Roche shook the last of the gasoline into the pit and looked at the others. While this was largely a ritual performed for their own benefit, it marked the formal end of one of the evilest eras in the history of their species and a new beginning for them personally.

  There were no words said, not that any would have sufficiently conveyed the gravity of the situation. They simply returned to the rutted dirt road leading into the trees, and, together, watched the castle burn.

  Elsewhere

  Enlil watched the men coming and going from the tunnel leading into the demolished pyramid from a distance, careful not to let them see him over the crest of the dune, although even if they had, they would have undoubtedly just wondered how a crocodile had found its way out into the desert, and then they would have thought nothing else of it. If there was one thing he had learned and his long life, it was patience, the kind of patience required for one to willingly allow himself to wither and die in order to be reborn again, to su
ffer the indignities of the flesh, to take a final breath, to feel the last beat of his heart.

  His time would come again, of that he was certain. And when it did, he would claim what was rightfully his and inflict suffering upon this world the likes of which it had never known. For his brother and sister. For his father. And, most important, for himself.

  He lowered his head and slithered across the sand to the tunnel he had painfully exhumed—while his scorched arms regrew and his blistered skin regenerated, while every nerve ending sang in electric agony and his vision slowly returned—at the base of a rock formation. It led beneath the ground to a temple where his devotees had gathered thousands of years ago to sing his praises and offer sacrifices in his name. He crawled through a crack in the wall, into the darkness and the dust, into a chamber that would, at least for now, serve as his tomb.

  The feathered serpent god closed his eyes and awaited death, all the while dreaming of the day mankind would awaken him once more and he could finally take his place in the sun.

  Keep reading for an excerpt of the first

  UNIT 51 novel . . .

  SUBHUMAN

  by MICHAEL MCBRIDE

  Bestselling author of Burial Ground

  THEY ARE NOT HUMAN.

  At a research station in Antarctica, five of the world’s top scientists have been brought together to solve one of the greatest mysteries in human history. Their subject, however, is anything but human . . .