The Nightmarchers

by J. Lincoln Fenn

  The eyes blink.

  And when the lid of the jar is unscrewed, a new gecko drops into Samantha’s waiting hand. It climbs, serpentine, up her arm, jumps onto her head, flicks its tongue, then leaps offscreen. She looks inordinately pleased.

  Julia feels her blood thicken with dread. She’s seen enough to fill her nightmares for the rest of her life. She doesn’t want to know any more, she doesn’t want to think anymore, she doesn’t want to be a part of this. But it’s like that moment in front of Aunt Liddy’s basement door, the pull of what’s next, the forbidden place.

  She clicks the next one, VOLATILE ORGANIC COMPOUND FIRE THREAT.

  There’s a split screen on this video, the left side showing the churchwomen working in the garden, planting seeds with their bare hands, watering with cans afterward. Not a word or a look exchanged between them. The right side shows Isaac holding a gas canister, standing in a grove of trees near a beach, the ocean glimmering behind him. Red corpse flowers hanging from the tree branches. At the bottom of the video is a timer.

  Almost as soon as he douses one of the trunks with the gas, the women working in the garden stop, raise their heads. As he continues to spray the tree with gas, the women stand; all turn to face one direction. They remain there until he flicks on a cigarette lighter. Then they all break into a run, the shaky camera turning to capture them as they bolt for a shed that other women are emerging from, carrying empty buckets, racing toward the jungle.

  The video speeds up as more women grab buckets and follow their companions into the jungle, and Isaac stands still, waiting in the grove, the cigarette lighter in his hand, flame flickering. Then he runs out of the camera’s view—it looks comical speeded up, like a Charlie Chaplin film—and shortly after, the women enter the camera’s view, stumbling around in the grove, looking perplexed, confused, still not speaking. Eventually they drift off in ones and twos, and the video abruptly ends.

  Noah sits back down on the stool next to her, a bottle in his hand, Beluga Gold Line Russian vodka that’s already a quarter gone. Julia pulls the headphones out of her ears. Her hands are shaking. She didn’t know that they were.

  He offers her the bottle. She takes it, lifts it to her mouth, tips it up. Liquid fire runs down her throat, the burning so fierce it makes her eyes water and she has to stop, cough a few times.

  “Don’t be shy,” says Noah. “There are at least five cases of the stuff. I suspect that Dr. Alfred was a wee bit of an alcoholic.”

  She coughs a couple more times, wipes the back of her mouth with her hand. “What the hell, Noah? I mean . . . what the hell is that video about?”

  “Have you seen the last one?”

  She shakes her head. In the hallway, she can still hear the girl skipping rope. She’ll be bored soon.

  “You should watch it,” he says. “The phone is charging. It’ll take a few minutes before it will even power up. And I found this in your pack.”

  He drops the black tin box on the table. Abruptly, like an accusation.

  Julia had forgotten all about it. “I don’t know what’s inside. I found it at Irene’s camp. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Do you mind if I open this ‘probably nothing’ then?” He reaches out for a lone screwdriver on the table, not bothering to wait for her response.

  “No, go ahead,” Julia says anyway.

  He gives her a look.

  Julia grabs the headphones, slips them back over her ears for something to do while he fiddles with the lock.

  She clicks play.

  It must be later, maybe years later, because the lab looks much as it does right now—grimy, dusty, like years have passed. Isaac, alone, in front of the camera. He looks exhausted in the video, desperate. His standard white shirt is wrinkled, his hair disheveled, his face twisted with fury.

  “You knew this would happen. You knew it.” Each word a bitter pill. “Both of us . . . just lab rats. Expendable. She set herself on fire. Sam. Set herself on fire because we introduced your goddamn edited genome and the . . . It tried to impregnate her. She thought it would abort if she stressed her body. She was right—it fucking did. Always the better theoretician than me.”

  He leans in, his eyes ablaze. “So you know what I did? I made a deal, and they’re sending someone to come get us out of this goddamn hellhole. Because fuck you. Fuck you, and your investors, and your plan to introduce a Frankenstein mutant fungus so you can play eugenics and profit off the antidote, only sell it to whomever the hell you consider to be ‘good stock.’ I hope you speak Mandarin, asshole. Because the Chinese are going to suddenly be living a very, very long time.”

  Isaac reaches over, turns off the video, and Julia thinks it’s over, but then there’s a digital flicker, and it’s Samantha who’s in front of the camera, her face horribly burned, disfigured.

  “The funny thing is that if I stopped taking the pills, this,” she says calmly, pointing to her face, “would heal. Maybe it’s inevitable. Isaac gave me his pills, but even with that, I’ll run out after this tour group leaves. We got the go-ahead to take Greer’s—I guess blood isn’t thicker than water. Some other plan for her—Isaac might have known but he didn’t tell me and now . . .”

  She takes a deep breath. “I don’t know, really, if anyone will ever see this. But if you do—light it up. Burn it all to the ground, and never let anyone come back. Because its sentience has exploded exponentially. I honestly think it’s conducting its own experiments with the Reverend’s help—it wants to get off the island. It wants to propagate. I know, because when I was pregnant . . . I could hear its thoughts. That sounds . . . impossible. But the akua lele. That’s the thing it can’t live without. That’s the intelligence behind the scenes, controlling everything. I overheard one of the tourists say she saw it today. And it’s not happy with the way Alfred treated it. The anger, the sense of vindictiveness . . . I’ve never felt that kind of pure, violent hatred before.”

  There’s a sound off camera, like that of a box dropped on the floor.

  “I’m trashing all the data just in case some idiot finds this place. Then I’m going to blow up the greenhouse, let them do what they want to me after.”

  Tears well up in Samantha’s eyes. “The hardest thing is seeing Isaac not being Isaac. To watch some other . . . creature speaking through him. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

  She leans over, inadvertently offering the lens a close-up of her scarred neck. The flesh is peeling in places. Then the screen goes black, and the video stops.

  Julia can’t feel her hands as she pulls the headphones out of her ears. Her body is numb, spent.

  “Julia,” Noah whispers.

  She turns to him, sees that he’s gotten the black tin box open, has laid its contents out on the table. Pages, yellowed with time.

  Slowly Julia reaches over, picks one up, the edge obviously torn from where it was ripped from Irene’s journal. Because it’s Irene’s artistry at work, all right. She’d recognize those meticulous illustrations anywhere.

  A sketch of a girl, Agnes written in cursive under the portrait.

  It’s the very same girl skipping rope out in the hall, right now.

  He picks up the black remote for the television in front of her, puts a finger over his lips, and turns the volume all the way down. Hits play.

  A poor VHS of what must have been actual black-and-white film, the way it flickers. Agnes locked in the dog cage, a man with white hair, in a white lab coat, walks toward her, holding a surgical saw.

  That crooked nose, so much like her own.

  Dr. Alfred Greer.

  He turns toward the cage, and Agnes tries to press herself into its corner, as if there’s a way to escape, but there isn’t. And then a woman steps into view—shuffles, really. She slowly makes her way to the table in the lab—and even though the image is blurred, Julia recognizes her: a thinner, far less Amazonian version of Irene.

  One hand gone, cut off at the wrist. Sh
e wears a shabby old nightgown that droops off her shoulder, and when she gets to the table, she places her remaining hand on it. Alfred seems to say a few words to the sobbing Agnes, but Irene . . . Irene’s face is just numb, no expression. Alfred shrugs, turns his back to Agnes, and heads to the table. Grabs Irene’s forearm. Raises the saw dramatically.

  And here, for some inexplicable reason, sound kicks in. The room is filled with Agnes’s shrieks, and Alfred turns to her, one more time.

  If you don’t cooperate like a good little girl, I will take her from you piece by piece.

  Noah turns the monitor off. Hits eject.

  Written in black Sharpie on the spine: AKUA LELE: FERTILITY EXPERIMENT.

  “What did they do?” Julia whispers. “What have they done?”

  Noah reaches down under the table, pulls the GPS phone from the plug. It’s only at ten percent power, not that they’ll need it for long.

  “Should I . . . call it in?” Noah asks, his face ghost white.

  As if there’s a choice. It doesn’t really matter at this point. Julia knows she’ll never see Evie again. That her daughter will forever wonder what happened. Ethan has finally, incontrovertibly, won.

  “You have to call it in,” says Julia. “You have to tell them to light this whole fucking place up. Right now.”

  CHAPTER 24

  WHILE NOAH MAKES THE CALL, Julia leaves the lab for the tunnel, vodka bottle in hand, closing the hatch behind her so that Agnes can’t hear.

  Agnes has dropped the rope and switched to hopscotch. She’s scratched the court in the paint with a rock and is using a small package of crackers for a marker. She jumps to a square marked with the number three.

  Agnes turns to her. “Do you play?”

  “I used to, when I was little. But I think I’m too tired to play right now, Agnes.”

  Agnes nods. “Irene got tired too. She got so tired that she stopped moving altogether. It was sad. She used to read me books. Oh, I found one here.”

  Agnes drops her package of crackers and heads for the shelf, pulls something dusty from under a disintegrating binder, a book.

  Julia leans against the wall. It’s strange—she’d spent so much time thinking about ending her own life, and now that it truly is the end, she feels wistful, even for the insufferable days in the Los Angeles apartment—the hunger, the despair, the hopelessness. In hindsight, it all seems like the machinations of a child. One who was oblivious to how truly horrific her life could become.

  Agnes offers a shy smile, pads over to Julia, and wipes the grime from the cover. Holds it out to her. “I’m so happy you came. I was asleep, but I woke up because we knew you were coming. Have you ever been so sad, or so mad, that you just wanted to sleep and not wake up?”

  “Oh yes. Many times,” Julia says. No need to disabuse her of her happiness. No need to be cruel, and tell her it will all be over soon. She puts the bottle of vodka on the floor and takes the book. Its dust jacket is faded, yellowed, and torn. A cartoon girl on the cover, with neat braids and a pleated skirt. Boat, Goat, Moat. Hat, Bat, Mat. Learning Words by Rhyming.

  Something inside Julia tears a little. Her soul maybe.

  Agnes examines her face. “Your eyes look like hers. But your nose . . . it’s his nose. He was mean, that Alfred.”

  “I imagine he was.”

  “And his breath was stinky.” Agnes wrinkles her nose.

  How long do they have now? Minutes? Seconds?

  “Well, that’s all over now, isn’t it?” Julia hands the book back, and Agnes takes it, holds it to her chest.

  Noah opens the door then, and Agnes’s face clouds with an obvious jealousy. She grips the book more firmly. But then she sees the GPS phone in his hand.

  “Is that the map?” the girl asks eagerly. “Can I see the island the way a bird sees it?”

  Julia and Noah exchange a glance—what harm could there be? He hands it to Julia, and she presses the app for the GPS map. A digital image of the island appears.

  Agnes leans her face over the screen, sucks in her breath. “It’s shaped like a bean.” She tucks the book under her arm and takes the phone in wonder, walks off a few paces, utterly captivated.

  “Did you get through?” Julia says quietly.

  Noah nods, his face grim.

  “How long?”

  “Not long. Mind if I take a swig?”

  She nods, and he reaches down for the bottle, raises it up and takes a long one—she watches his Adam’s apple bob. Suddenly she doesn’t know what to do with her arms. She crosses them across her chest, uncrosses them, crosses them again. All the different ways she’d imagine she’d die, but this was certainly never one of them.

  Noah hands her the bottle, and she takes a couple of gulps. Wipes a tear away with the back of her hand, and utters a laugh that’s not a laugh.

  “Well,” she says. “Well.”

  Noah digs around in his pocket. “I found this, too, when I was searching for . . .” He pulls out a small aluminum package with a white pill encased in plastic. A black skull and crossbones on it. He turns the pack over: SODIUM CYANIDE: POISON. “Should be good, only a month old and they last about a year. You crush it between your teeth.”

  “Great,” says Julia. “Better than burning alive, I guess.”

  Noah cracks a wan smile. “We can wait until the first bomb hits and see how it goes. You should hang onto it for now.” He holds out the pack. “Maybe later we can flip for it.”

  He’s giving Julia the quickest way out. The gesture isn’t lost on her. “Thanks, Noah. I mean that.” She takes the package from him, slips it into her back pocket.

  “In the meantime,” he says, “we should crack open another case of the good stuff. No reason to be sober for what comes next.”

  “Look!” says Agnes. She drops the book and holds up the satellite phone, her face alight. She points to a small cove, not too far from where a red pin marks their location. “This is where the boat is. The woman’s boat.”

  Noah looks confused.

  “She’s talking about Beth,” Julia says.

  “She should have been long gone by now.”

  Agnes goes still, her head cocked to one side, as if she’s listening to music, a sound, that they can’t hear. “No . . . she’s not on the boat. She doesn’t move anymore.”

  Noah and Julia exchange a look. His is, Should we?

  Julia downs the last of the vodka, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Hell yeah.

  “Agnes . . . we need to get to the boat, and we need to hurry, as fast as we can. Can you lead us there?”

  A darkness clouds her face. “You said you would never leave.”

  “I said I would never leave you. You’re coming with us.”

  Noah’s face goes pale. Like, You can’t mean that.

  Julia doesn’t know what she means. All she knows is that she needs to get on the boat. The rest, she’ll work out later.

  And even Agnes looks uncertain. It must be hard for her to contemplate, leaving everyone and everything she’s ever known behind.

  “You have to come,” Julia says. “You won’t be safe here anymore.”

  Agnes nods, solemn and slightly mournful. Like she’s saying goodbye to more than just her home. “It must be time then.”

  They run. Through the hatch, out the tunnel, into the waiting jungle. It’s a different experience, knowing that a thousand eyes are watching, analyzing, thinking.

  Will it even let them leave?

  Nothing and no one tries to stop them, and Julia’s sure the nightmarchers would be hot on their trail, if it—if Kapu—wanted them to be.

  She believes Isaac. That it’s acting as one organism. Does it know it’s about to be annihilated? Or is this, their exodus, part of its plan?

  She’s slightly buzzed; she can feel the vodka at work, tripping through her veins, giving everything that’s already surreal an extra dreamlike quality. The air is so thick with moisture it may as well be rainin
g, the earth beneath her feet muddy, porous, like she might just slip into the bowels of the island with one misplaced step. She thinks of hell, and of Hades, and of the dark first nights when Evie was gone and the house felt like an empty tomb. They climb up a hill—is it just her imagination, or do the leaves, and vines, and branches seem to part before them?—and reach the top of the rise. The land drops away, revealing the cove, with slender, supine trees growing almost straight out of the rock face, bursting with corpse flowers. The sickly sweet scent of rotting flesh fills the air.

  And in the cove, a small yacht tied with a rope to a thin palm tree. Lights on in the cabin. Hope. Goddamn, she wishes she could shake it, hope. It’s exhausting.

  “Does anyone even know how to operate that thing?” Noah asks.

  “Kapu does,” Agnes says. Without another word, she starts to head down the rocky slope, jumping from boulder to boulder, agile as a goat.

  “Well, that makes no sense. I really wish I had another bottle of vodka,” Noah says.

  “Or two,” says Julia.

  Something shoots into the air at the far edge of the ocean’s dark horizon, a burst of red light. Too late, Julia thinks. We’re too late. But the light just arcs through the air, momentarily illuminating the sky, the massive carrier, before plummeting to the water and disappearing altogether.

  “A flare,” Noah says.

  “Why?”

  “To warn that it’s time to evacuate.”

  They both start to hurry down the slope—jagged rock beneath Julia’s feet; she has to use the trees and their branches to keep from falling. Sometimes she crushes a corpse flower in the process, releasing a stench that causes her stomach to roil. So much pollen in the air that her eyes cloud with it, making it even harder to see.

  “Come on!” shouts Agnes, perched on a lava boulder nearly twice her height.

  Julia trips over a thick root, but Noah catches her around her waist. She glances down—it’s not a root, it’s an arm. An arm that leads to Beth’s body—she’s suffered a massive head wound, her neck twisted awkwardly, like she’d tripped, fallen down the rocky slope. A computer hard drive is gripped in her left palm. Her skin is covered with a fine layer of white fungus; her eyes are open, staring blankly, blood trickling out of her mouth and staining her chin and teeth red. A single, delicate root has pierced her left eye, straight through the pupil.