The Nightmarchers

by J. Lincoln Fenn

  But I will.

  And she does.

  And just like that, he’s gone.

  CHAPTER 22

  A LONG TUNNEL WITH STALE air, the same red paint on the concrete floor, the lights intermittent, with some of the bulbs burned out, others removed entirely. In fact, the lights look an awful lot like the ones in the Reverend’s greenhouse, now that she thinks about it. Maybe he knows about this place. It shouldn’t surprise her, but it does.

  The girl hums to herself, her bare feet slap-slapping against the concrete floor, leaving muddy prints. There are other prints too, made by boots, one set large, one set small, heading down the tunnel, then another set of just the small prints, heading back out. They look recent, still wet. Julia grips her machete tighter.

  Fine roots have broken through the concrete walls in places—they reach down to the floor, spanning the width to the other side. The tunnel feels endless. Julia wonders how far it goes, and how well it holds up. There are cracks in the ceiling too, with more roots hanging down, sometimes brushing against the top of her head.

  Finally she sees a doorway ahead, and sound echoes out, artificial, unintelligible, tinny voices that stop, start, stop, and then a sound like a tape being played backward followed by a pause until the tinny voices start up again. But just who is in there?

  The girl turns, smiles. Such perfect teeth for someone who’s never seen a dentist. “I told you I know where everything is.”

  Julia forces a return smile. “You did.”

  There’s just the faintest rush of air from above as they enter a corridor, rusting metal shelves on the left—Julia looks up to see a broken vent, more curling roots hanging through the vertical slots, and then her gaze falls on a metal sign on the right wall, obscured by a thick layer of dirt. ARN NG IO A ARD.

  She wipes her wet hand over it, smearing the dirt in the process, revealing the missing words underneath.

  WARNING BIOHAZARD

  At the end of the corridor is a thick metal door, the kind you might see in a submarine, with a circular hatch.

  “Make it die,” says a gravelly male voice. “You can do it, you did it before—”

  It cuts off, then there’s the sound of a video being rewound again, behind her now. She turns, half expecting to see something there, but no, the sound must be coming through the air vent.

  But the girl isn’t concerned in the slightest, doesn’t show any interest in the sign, or the disembodied voice coming through the vent, or the shelves laden with dusty equipment—beakers and deteriorating cardboard boxes, an old rusting typewriter, the remains of books and binders with slumped spines.

  The girl spots a frayed rope curled on the bottom shelf, and this does interest her. She eagerly grabs it, runs her hands down the length of the rope, just about double her height.

  “I haven’t played jump rope in forever,” she announces. “Can we play when we’re done?”

  Julia lets a hand fall on the girl’s head. If the island isn’t in flames by then. “Sure, we can play.”

  At this the girl breaks out in an eager grin, and she grabs Julia by the hand, pulls her forward to the hatch. The muddy footprints end there. “Well, come on then. Hurry up, hurry up.”

  It takes both of them to turn the wheel, which groans in protest. When Julia opens the door, the man’s captured voice is so loud, it’s almost deafening.

  “Don’t make me hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”

  Julia tightens her grip on her machete, and steps through the hatch.

  The room is a small dome that’s in much better shape than the tunnel, and sitting in front of an array of cracked screens, hunched over on a stool, is Noah.

  He must hear her come in, or sense her, since the volume on the monitor is turned up so loud—“Very good, that’s much, much better”—because he turns, and when he sees her his face lights up with a genuine grin.

  Julia feels a rush of relief—he’s alive, he’s not a nightmarcher, she’s not alone in this anymore—which is quickly followed by the uneasy question: how?

  He powers off the sound, jumps to his feet. “Julia! Oh Jesus H. Christ, I thought—”

  “You were—”

  “I know. I’d imagined what it’d be like, but it was . . . unimaginable.” He looks off to the left, at the floor, something remote and untouchable in his eyes. “I was with you, in the cabin; then somehow I was wrestling with Beth in the jungle. And in between . . . I was a child again, playing with my brother. I didn’t want to come back. I really didn’t.”

  The brother he lost to ALS.

  “But I have the pills. I made her give them to me. She said hers were stolen.”

  “And on a scale of one to ten, how trustworthy would you say she is?”

  Well, that’s not a hard question to answer. “Zero.”

  “Self-preservation seems to be high on her list.”

  Beth was such a poor and traitorous companion, with her own plan within a plan. Julia feels everything that’s happened to her since the last time she saw him well up, and tears threaten.

  He rushes toward her, catches her by the shoulders. “Jesus, you look like utter shit.”

  She starts to laugh, and he does too.

  “I found a stash of booze. You want to get hammered? I was going to, but it seemed sad to get wasted alone.”

  There’s a swelling bruise around his left eye.

  “Oh, you like that? Our friend Beth. I expect she’s on her goddamn boat by now. She said you were going to meet up with us here, that the plan was to call off the big dogs, and we’d escape together. Then when I did call off the big dogs, she whacked me with something very large and very hard. When I came to, I saw she’d done this to the router.” He points to a lump of smashed metal. “So we’re incommunicado, unfortunately.”

  “I have this, if we can plug it in,” says Julia. She drops her sodden pack to the floor, pulls out the GPS phone.

  “Oh dear God, I think I love you,” says Noah.

  Just then, the girl steps shyly into the room, dragging the jump rope behind her. His face blanches.

  “This is . . .” Julia starts to say, but realizes she still doesn’t know her name.

  The girl reaches out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  Why does Noah seem so strange all of a sudden? He reaches out his hand, tentatively clasps hers. “Yeah. Nice to meet you too.” Although his tone is off, distant.

  “Why is your face so furry?” asks the girl.

  “Is it now?” Noah says, running a hand through his beard. “Maybe I’m part bear.”

  “That’s silly, nobody’s part bear—that only happens in fairy tales,” the girl says. She turns to Julia. “I’m going to go play in the tunnel with my jump rope.”

  “All right,” says Julia. “Don’t go too far.” The words are out before she even realizes they’re a reflex from her mothering days. This girl, she has no doubt, could handle herself in any situation.

  “Okaaayyy,” says the girl. She gives a half twirl on the floor and then skips off, humming some kind of song that sounds familiar, but isn’t.

  Noah seems stricken.

  “What?” Julia says.

  He turns to her, all seriousness. “There’s something I have to show you. You might just want that drink afterward.”

  He leads her to a control panel that could have been in any of the ’50s-era sci-fi movies Julia’s ever seen, painted an industrial greenish gray with bright red knobs, small cracked monitors with convex screens, cobwebs. Beyond the control panel is a room that can be seen through a wall of darkened glass, with a hospital bed, a dog cage, and assorted rusting surgical instruments.

  Julia gets an ominous feeling in the pit of her stomach. There is history here, and it feels very, very dark.

  “I was wondering what the hell this all was,” says Noah. “Come, take a look at this.”

  Julia reaches out her hand, idly twists one of the dead knobs with her fingers. Nothing. She gla
nces at the door. She can hear the girl skipping rope, the even slap-slap as her feet jump and land on the cold concrete.

  Noah silently beckons Julia over to a makeshift table—a dusty old door propped up with cement cinder blocks, a couple of old hospital stools parked underneath. He pulls them both out, offers her a seat. On top of the table are laptops—several—from different eras and in different conditions. Two televisions with VHS players: one off with a tape sticking out like a tongue, the other powered on, the screen frozen on a tilted shot of the lab.

  He settles on one of the stools. “Most of these computers are junk—I found hard drives in the trash can, smashed to hell. But see that?”

  He points to an area on the table that seems cleaner than the rest. Yes, in fact it looks like someone took a sponge to it; there are curved streaks. Julia sits down on the other stool.

  “So then I did some digging around the rest of this crap. Figured if someone was working here, they’d hide their gear. Wouldn’t just leave it out in the open. I then found this in a cardboard box full of crackers.”

  He cracks open a shiny laptop, the newest one in the lot. “Christ, I wish there were some salvageable crackers, but their expiration date was 1962.”

  The screen blinks on, and Julia sucks in her breath. “But no internet?”

  “We might be able to jack in through your satellite phone. I’d expect it can be used as a hot spot.”

  There are photos lying facedown on the keyboard.

  “Obviously they wanted to protect these too,” Noah says.

  She picks them up, turns them over. Isaac. Isaac. But a more carefree version of Isaac, standing in front of a Ferris wheel at what looks like a county fair, a big foam cheese hat on his head, his arm wrapped around the redhead, who is sucking beer through a straw from a trucker cap.

  Samantha, written at the bottom. A couple.

  Two more photos, one of their wedding, with both of them cutting a cake shaped like a double helix, and then a selfie in a greenhouse Julia instantly recognizes, her great-aunt’s.

  Now look at the state of them. Her great-aunt is like some kind of black hole—all who come close to her periphery are drawn in, crushed into nothingness.

  She turns her attention instead to the keyboard. Presses the power button. There’s a whir and a hum as it wakes up. Her fingers itch to type—finally, civilization.

  “So what happened?” she asks. “Isaac seems pretty into the whole church thing.”

  “A cover, at least that’s the impression I get from what I’ve seen. Although I suspect they were running low on antidote. There’s a pretty desperate plea for more drugs—Greer Enterprises had been smuggling it in through the luggage, but then it looks like they stopped for some reason.”

  The redhead checking her luggage. The pills stolen from her room.

  Noah leans over, touches the trackpad with his finger, double-clicks a folder on the desktop. PROJECT MARCHER. “Probably better not to discuss in front of . . . present company. I’m going to look around for an outlet. I’m supposed to check in with the carrier hourly now, and I don’t know how long I was unconscious for.”

  Present company? The girl. He must mean the girl. She’s still in the hallway, jumping rope, and Julia catches bits from her song.

  “Ladybug, ladybug, turn around, ladybug, ladybug, touch the ground. . . .”

  An old jump-rope song, one Julia remembers singing herself when she was young.

  Noah reaches over into the pile of old gear, pulls out a pair of headphones, and gives her a serious look. “Wear these. And where’s the plug? I can get the phone charging.”

  “In the front zipper of the pack.” Julia takes the headphones and slips them on over her ears.

  Then he gets up, leaves her with the laptop.

  When he does, she sees why he gave her the headphones—most of the files in the folder are videos. She plugs the headphones into the laptop; then she hits play on the first one, the oldest, from two years ago.

  INVESTOR OVERVIEW.

  CHAPTER 23

  ISAAC STANDS IN FRONT OF the lens, adjusts the camera so that both he and Samantha are in view. The lab is in better shape, like someone attempted to put away or hide the junk; the surfaces are wiped down and look serviceable. They’re both wearing white lab coats, purple latex gloves, but there’s something hokey about it, like they’re actors getting ready for the director to call out Action!

  “I think we can dumb this down enough for the investors,” Isaac says into the lens. “We’ll load up the packet with enough science that they’ll never read it.”

  “Neuropeptide genes!” says Samantha with a mischievous grin. Her voice is raspier than Julia had imagined. “Schistosome parasites of the phylum Platyhelminthes! Should I get a beaker? Think this would look better with a beaker?”

  “Babe, chill.” Apparently satisfied with the angle, he draws one of the rusty stools over, the wheels squeaking loudly in protest. He’s in the foreground, she’s in the background. “Maybe a test tube. You could hold it up and gaze at it intently.”

  It’s like Isaac is a completely different person. One she would like better.

  “Okay, but I’m front and center on the next video. You know how investors love the women-in-STEM angle.”

  Isaac sighs. “Fine. I’m going to count to five, then it’s all seriousness, okay? I don’t want to be stuck doing this all day.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Samantha grumbles.

  Isaac takes a moment to compose his face, then counts down, “Five, four, three, two, one.”

  He pauses, giving enough time for a clean edit later. Not his first time out, apparently. Then he says, “To better understand why the corpse flower can’t survive off the island, we decided to dig in here at the site of the former Greer Enterprises lab and embed ourselves in the local village to isolate what, exactly, is required to stabilize our platform.”

  The former Greer Enterprises lab?

  “It took some time to convince Reverend Palmer of our sincerity”—Isaac presses his hands together in prayer—“but the lure of redeeming two sinners and bringing some new blood into the congregation proved to be an irresistible temptation. Plus our miraculous immunity seemed like a sign from God. We played that up a bit—I talked about angelic visions that required Sam and me to meditate deep in the jungle, said that we were given permission to cross the wall, which bought us the time we needed. And what we’ve discovered—well, I think what we have is beyond a purely medicinal application, as Dr. Alfred Greer suspected but was never able to confirm, due to the limits of technology during his time. But I think you’ll see that, with some experimentation, we could have something that would be of interest to governments, militaries, and corporations the world over.”

  He looks particularly smug as he says this—he reminds her of all the insufferable twenty-something millionaires Ethan would hang out with, so assured that their great fortune was destined.

  “Now, is this a spider?” He reaches down for something out of the shot, comes back holding a plastic box with a very large spider inside. Maybe a tarantula—it’s as big as his hand.

  “The answer is, yes and no. It’s a spider, but with no will of its own, not anymore. Its central nervous system and brain have been, so to speak, hacked by a lowly fungi. Now, if the spider had only been limited to a one- to two-week exposure, it would have seen the positive health effects that human visitors experience. As you know, exposure to the spores boosts the immune system by increasing the production of T cells, and it also ‘switches off’ the p21 gene so that tissue can regenerate. I can see you counting your billions already. Except . . . attempts to grow the fungi off the island have failed; attempts at creating a synthetic version have failed; every single scientific angle has been analyzed and duplicated exactly. No dice. But what if this isn’t a fungus in the usual sense of a fungus? What if the reason that it won’t thrive off the island is because . . . it’s only part of the organism? What if the fungus and the cor
pse flower aren’t separate species in the way we usually think? What if the complex VOCs the flower emits are a message not from one species to another, but rather from one cell to another? What if all the species on the island are so symbiotic that they essentially act as one collective, sentient being?”

  An exasperated-looking Samantha puts the test tube she’d been examining down on the table. “Jesus, Isaac. Really? Sentience? You want to drag us into plant sentience?”

  “Do you want to continue our funding?”

  “I do. But I don’t want to be beholden to a wacky theory—”

  “It’s not wacky. It’s a leap, but we’ve got clear evidence that the fungus is acting like a neural network for the ecosystem here, that plants are exhibiting the capacity to learn, that trees on one side of the island are releasing VOC signals when trees on the other side of the island are threatened; hell, even the insects, the animals aren’t acting as individual organisms. They sacrifice—”

  “So it’s thinking? Our names are attached to this report. We’ll never be able to get work anywhere else—”

  “And if the stock goes public, we won’t need to,” says Isaac. He stands up, heads toward the camera. “Now we’re going to have to shoot this again because—”

  The video ends.

  Julia clicks on the next one—REGENERATION FIVE DAYS. There’s a gecko in a glass jar; the glass jar is shaken violently, and the gecko drops its tail. The gecko is removed, the tail removed, dirt placed in the jar, then the tail, then a sprout that looks like one from the greenhouse. Next it’s liberally doused with white spores. Then the video speeds up, shows the corpse flower growing, its roots entwining themselves around the tail, the fungus growing up and along the sides of the jar, like veins. Eventually a slight bulb forms at the nub of the gecko’s tail, which eventually lengthens, sprouts embryonic-looking arms, legs, a head, the dark beginnings of organs visible under the translucent skin. The embryonic limbs grow into fully formed limbs, the skin thickens, and the features of the head become defined: the slit of the mouth, the large orb-shaped eyes.