Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  If his body gave out first, they would both fall down onto the jagged bones. His weight crashing down on top of her from this height would undoubtedly break her neck. The image grew even more real as the pain in his shoulders caused him to bite through his lip and fill his mouth with blood. He was nearly resigned to that fate when his right forearm rounded over the ledge and he was able to raise his elbow onto level ground. His entire body shook when he pulled himself up into a cavern with a ceiling so low he could barely crawl out on all fours.

  He turned around and reached for Adrianne, who clasped his wrist with the last of her strength. Her palm was slick with blood. Were it not for his grasp on her wrist, she would have fallen. As it was, he barely lifted her high enough to wrap his other arm around her torso and awkwardly drag her up beside him.

  She gingerly plucked the flashlight from between his teeth and shined it into the waiting darkness. The light lent little more than the impression of space. As she crawled toward the larger cavern, leaving smears of blood on ground already thick with it, the ceiling rose and they were eventually able to stand on legs that hardly seemed able.

  The floor was carpeted with a layer of blood that had long ago dried and curled up like the silt in an evaporated lakebed. It turned to powder underfoot as they advanced. Whatever lived in here must have just shoved the bloody remains across the floor and down into the chute to dispose of them. And whatever had done so was likely the source of the long white hairs all over the ground amid the desiccated reeds and vegetation. It reminded Brooks of a bird’s nest, or perhaps more like the warren of a mammal, although one that hadn’t been used in quite some time. It smelled of age and fecal dust, with the faint scent of ammonia. He recognized it as the smell of a tomb even before Adrianne shined the light onto the bodies arranged supine on the ground, side-by-side, their arms crossed over their sunken chests. The silk robes that had once covered their bodies had rotted to black tatters and now revealed more than they concealed.

  Here was the species Brandt had cast, although these individuals had been dead for a long, long time.

  Their skin had pulled tightly to their bones and become the texture of leather. Their lips were drawn back from bared teeth reminiscent of those of a chimpanzee, only sharper. Their foreheads were more steeply sloped, but the remainder of their facial architecture was surprisingly human. Their hair grew to widow’s peaks just above the bridges of their noses and followed the contours their cheekbones beneath their eyes. Their beards were wiry and long and more closely resembled the hair on their heads than the whiskers of an ordinary man. Even their necks, shoulders, and the remainder of the skin showing through the silk was covered with a layer of white hair every bit as thick, lending them the overall appearance of albino orangutans crossed with human beings.

  Adrianne knelt beside the nearest one and reached tentatively toward its face. She stopped, steadied her nerves, and brushed its cheek with the backs of her fingers. Her long nails combed through its beard. She looked up at Brooks with tears in her eyes. There were simply no words for the emotions they both felt. It was like awakening inside of a dream rather than from one. This was the moment they’d spent their entire lives working toward, all the while content in the knowledge that it would never arrive.

  “Is this what Dr. Brandt cast?” she finally asked.

  “No,” Brooks whispered. “All of these are too gaunt. The face he cast was much more…alive.”

  “That was seventy years ago.”

  “And these have all been dead for at least twice that long. Probably longer.”

  “So this is just a tomb.”

  “That’s my guess. Only more like a crypt. I would wager this is some sort of familial unit or clan and generations of them were all laid to rest together.”

  “You think they’re capable of breeding?”

  Brooks could only shake his head. He hadn’t considered that the mutations, if that was indeed the source of the physical changes, could be passed through the germ line in addition to manifesting from viral insertion into the DNA. That was a terrifying line of thought, for if these creatures could breed and found a way to cross the barrier of the Himalayas, then humanity’s days at the top of the food chain were numbered.

  Adrianne raised the light to the walls. Hundreds of tiny nooks had been carved into the stone and filled with trinkets, all of them concealed under a layer of dust. The majority were Śartra, Buddhist relics of all shapes and sizes. There were bowls filled with pearls and beads, items of jewelry, miniature statues of the Buddha in various poses, and every type of stupa. What little space remained was etched with the same stylized script as they had seen in the room below. The grave goods in this one cavern alone had to be worth several million dollars.

  The notion that religious relics like these were in some way important to these dead creatures was beyond comprehension. Perhaps like the modern remains hidden in the cliffs, someone else had entombed them here and left the Śartra as an offering of sorts. Or maybe these…things had collected the artifacts like birds gather foil and string for their nests. The idea that these creatures were capable of comprehending religious dogma on any level implied more than mere intelligence; it implied the kind of imaginative thinking and reasoning that would make them more terrifying than any predator the world had ever seen.

  Adrianne turned in a circle until the light settled upon twin columns of empty recesses, staggered to form a primitive staircase, like those prominent in the ruins of the Pueblo II Era tribes of the American Southwest. She shined it upward and illuminated another fissure, this one even narrower than the last, but fortunately the toe-trail continued upward into the darkness.

  Brooks stepped in front of her before she could mount the ladder. He was the better climber and could use the rope to belay her up once more if she reached her physical limits. Besides, he had the ice axes, which were probably the best weapons they had in such close quarters. And he had a feeling that before the day was through, he was going to have to use them.

  He climbed as fast as he dared. Adrianne had affixed the flashlight under the right sleeve of her jacket so that it shined upward. He passed several slender fissures to either side, but their ultimate goal was to climb out of the darkness, not find themselves further lost in it. The smell that wafted from each was the same as the one from below. Perhaps this series of caverns had once served as a home to these creatures; now it was one enormous tomb that didn’t smell as if it had been disturbed in many years. The extant species obviously dwelled somewhere else.

  The tunnel terminated abruptly at the top. Like the other burials, this one had been sealed from the outside by a large stone.

  Brooks braced himself and shoved against it.

  The rock didn’t budge.

  He pushed again.

  And again and again.

  There was no give at all. He thought about how long the bodies had been down there and how much dust had accumulated on the artifacts. It was a distinct possibility that this boulder hadn’t been moved in decades.

  Panic set in.

  He bucked his shoulders against the stone and shoved with his legs until the pressure broke one of the footholds and he started to fall.

  Thirty-eight

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 17th

  Today

  Brooks caught himself on the next handhold and immediately looked down at Adrianne. Her hair and shoulders were covered with rocky debris, but at least the broken rock hadn’t knocked her off the wall. He took a deep breath and forced himself to approach this rationally.

  The blasted boulder was either extraordinarily heavy or wedged in there tightly. He used the pick of his ice ax to scrape around the edges. Gravel and dirt rained down on Adrianne below him before clattering to the ground seconds later. As he chiseled, more and more light shined down onto him and muddy water dribbled thro
ugh the seams. He reholstered his pick, braced himself again, and pushed upward with all his might. The stone made a cracking sound, then abruptly slid away from the earth that had held it so tight. Gray light and rain flooded the darkness. He saw the branches of pines overhead as he continued to shove the rock out of the way. When the gap was large enough to accommodate his shoulders, he pulled himself out on shaking arms and crawled onto a mat of flattened grasses and dead needles.

  A gust of wind howled past him, assaulting him with raindrops and tossing the branches of the trees before once more resuming the steady drizzle. His heart thudded in his ears as he quickly surveyed his surroundings. They were on the top of the cliff and exposed to the elements from which they’d largely been shielded in the canyon below. Maybe twenty feet to the west was the edge of the cliff and a surprised group of vultures. Some took to flight from the dead trees, while others huffed and hopped away into the underbrush. The forest limited his view in every direction, save for the high, mist-shrouded peaks that towered over the upper canopy, which bowed to the will of the wind. If there was anything else out here, he couldn’t see it.

  “Come on,” he said, and reached down to help Adrianne out of the hole.

  She collapsed onto the ground and struggled to rise to her feet. He took her by the hand and pulled her toward the forest to the north, keeping the river within sight to his left. They still needed to cross it if they were to have any hope of reaching the bridge.

  “We’re looking at two distinct population models.” Adrianne spoke just loudly enough that he could hear her over the river. “The one entombed down there appears to be a terminal branch, one steeped in an entirely different culture and dynamic. How old would you say the bodies were?”

  “The most recent couldn’t have been interred much less than a century ago.”

  “Like maybe seventy or eighty years?”

  Brooks saw where she was going with that line of thought.

  “You think we’re dealing with a population evolved from the first wave of Europeans to explore this region?”

  “The timing would be right. It would also coincide with the bodies in the coffins and fit with a marked and dramatic shift in population models, living arrangements, and funereal practices.”

  “You’re suggesting a Caucasian lineage usurped the habitat from one arisen from native Tibetans?”

  “Does that not fit with the entire colonial mindset of the early twentieth century?”

  Brooks shouldered aside pine branches and birch saplings, keeping one eye on the cliff to his left, the other on the thick forest. With as loud as the river was, they wouldn’t hear anything approaching until it was too late. They needed to find a place to cross the gorge—and soon—or there was no way they’d be able to reach the bridge before nightfall.

  “That would at least explain the artifacts entombed with the bodies, but it still doesn’t tell us what we need to know about the extant population.”

  “Of course it does. Think about it. We’re dealing with a more loosely bound clan potentially evolved from soldiers from the British Indian Army and the Nazis. When you factor that into the equation, it gives their instincts and actions a measure of predictability.”

  “You’re assuming their human instincts somehow translate to their mutated state.”

  “Instincts are ingrained in your hindbrain. They’re the result of millions of years of evolution, of ancestors surviving any number of threats and environmental factors. Even if the cerebrum is destroyed, the body retains the knowledge of how to keep itself alive in much the same way birds inherently know to fly south for the winter. It’s not a conscious decision, but rather one that’s been passed down through successive generations, which, if they learned one thing, it’s how to survive.”

  Brooks parted a stand of saplings and stopped dead in his tracks. The thicket ahead of him looked like a tornado had torn through it. The tall pines were uprooted and smashed and snarled into a mess of broken and tangled wood where the floodwaters had washed down from the high country, bringing with them enormous boulders from the granite escarpment to the east. It wasn’t the devastation ahead of him that had caught his attention, though.

  He glanced back at Adrianne, then headed for the cliff. The water had hit the trees with the force of a runaway train, throwing fifty- to eighty-foot-tall pines ahead of it as though they were mere blades of grass. Several had been swept over the edge and now rested across the chasm, tangled with shrubbery and vegetation.

  They couldn’t have asked for better luck.

  Adrianne’s hand tightened on his when she realized what he intended to do.

  The Yunnan pine was a transitional species that filled the elevation gap between the smaller and broader chir pines and the sturdier Himalayan pines. It grew much taller than either of its cousins and had much longer needles. Unfortunately, it also had a much thinner trunk.

  Brooks cautiously approached the precipice on the slick rocks and mud. He released Adrianne’s hand for balance and gingerly placed his right foot on the trunk, near where its severed roots projected upward, taller even than he was. The wood was waterlogged and gave slightly under his weight.

  His heartbeat thumped in his temples.

  Several trees had fallen on top of one another, their lower branches tangled and stripped to the bare wood. The upper reaches were a seemingly impenetrable bushy snarl of needles that completely hid the tapering trunks underneath them and the opposite edge beyond. Through the gaps between the trunks he could barely see the brown water rushing past through the mist and spume.

  He took hold of one of the roots and eased both feet up onto the trunk. Even at its widest point, it couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches in diameter. The thought of balancing along its tapering length caused his hands to shake.

  “We can find another place to cross,” Adrianne said. “Surely there’s—”

  “There’s no time. We can do this. We’ll just go across one at a time so it can handle our weight. I’ll go first. I can belay you across if it falls.”

  “But what if it falls while you’re on it?”

  He opened his mouth to say something reassuring, but the words never came out. He caught motion from the corner of his eye and whirled uphill toward the forest. A clump of branches maybe thirty feet from the ground swayed harder than the rest of those around it. He watched for several seconds before returning his attention to Adrianne.

  “We’re out of time.”

  Brooks stepped away from the roots and out over the nothingness. The deceptive wind battered him from his left. He thrust out both arms for balance, slowly lowered himself to his hands and knees, and crawled toward the opposite edge. Below him, the river roared and debris raced past like cars on a freeway. He forced himself to look up and concentrate on the far side. The tree bowed beneath his weight, subtly at first, but visibly as he neared the middle and started picking his way around the branches, transferring his weight from one trunk to the next and back again. Another few feet and he would crawl into the dense canopy, where the going would be slow and dangerous, and worse, he wouldn’t be able to see much of anything through the heavily-needled boughs. He looked back over his shoulder in time to see Adrianne step up onto the trunk. He was about to shout for her to get back down when he saw the expression on her face. Behind her, the pine trees shook as though blown by a tempest, raining needles and pinecones onto the ground. Shadows launched from one tree to the next as the crashing sounds reached his ears even over the river.

  “Run!” he shouted, and crawled back toward her as fast as he could.

  Adrianne pushed off from the roots and managed several long strides before her right foot glanced from the bark and vanished out of sight. She slammed down onto the trunk with a resounding crack.

  The tree shuddered and noticeably dropped beneath him. He dove for her as she toppled to the side and grabbed her hand.

  Behind her, branches exploded from the trees and white blurs streaked toward the g
round from the upper reaches.

  “Come on!” he shouted, and pulled her up onto the log behind him.

  He stood and hopped from one trunk to the next as he worked his way into the smothering foliage. He released Adrianne’s hand and prayed she stayed on his heels. They were barely halfway across when the trunks shuddered and started to shake.

  They weren’t going to make it.

  Brooks grabbed the branches and used them to propel himself forward. He lunged from one trunk to another, conscious of certain death rushing past beneath him and the narrowing of the trunks even as the branches grew closer together. The tree bounced underneath him and clumps of bark broke off where the wet wood splintered and cracked beneath their weight.

  A roar behind him and a loud snapping sound.

  One of the narrower trees to his right wrenched away from the others and plummeted into the mist.

  He could see the forest on the opposite side through the branches and realized that it didn’t matter if they reached them. Their pursuit would overtake them long before they reached the cover of the forest, if they even made it across the makeshift bridge, which bucked underneath him, making it nearly impossible to know where it would be when he stepped down. He tried not to think about how many of them must have been behind him to cause the trunks to shake so violently.

  The moment he saw solid ground he drew his ice ax. Two more strides and he could make the jump. He lowered his shoulder against the branches, came down on his right foot, and lunged with his left. The instant it landed on a section of trunk narrower than it, he dove for the rock ledge. He landed hard on his shoulder and popped right back up, ax in hand.

  He swung it at the largest tree even as Adrianne struggled toward him, her eyes wide, a scream he couldn’t hear on her lips.

  White blurs streaked through the branches, barely ten feet behind her.

  He swung the ax again and again. Wood chips and bark flew. A crack formed and widened, then collapsed in upon itself with a sharp thack.