The mud squelched underneath him and issued a bubble that burst on the surface with the stench of rotten eggs. It was so strong it made his eyes water.
He crawled to Adrianne’s side and removed the branches he’d used to hide her.
“Time to move,” he whispered.
Her eyelids fluttered and parted just far enough to reveal the hint of her irises.
“I c-can’t…f-feel…my l-legs.”
Her teeth chattered when she spoke and her body tightened with muscular contractions beyond her control.
“Just hold on to me and don’t let go.”
She offered a weak smile and touched the side of his face with a hand that felt like ice. Her eyes opened just far enough that she could see him, but she didn’t appear to be able to focus on him.
“It’s h-happening so…f-fast now…I c-can f-feel it…everywhere…It…Oh, God…it h-hurts—”
“Save your strength. I’m getting you out of here.”
Brooks cradled her against his chest and struggled to stand. Her added weight threw off his balance and he fell sideways into the water. He bit his lip to keep from crying out against the strain and tried to rise again. His legs trembled and every muscle protested, but he managed to find his feet. The mud sucked his feet clear past his ankles. Every step was a seemingly superhuman feat that brought with it the boggy stench of sulfur and rot. He made as little noise as he could as he slogged through the water and still it sounded like a herd of bison fording a stream. He had no choice but to throw caution to the wind and trade stealth for speed.
As it was, he was burning through what little strength he’d regained at a staggering rate and Adrianne barely had enough to wrap one arm around his neck. Her other arm hung against his thigh and swung with every movement, toying with his already tenuous balance.
They crashed through the reeds and onto the mercifully dry ground. The river called to them through the trees ahead. He watched the canopy for any sign of movement. The way the breeze riffled the leaves, he probably wouldn’t have been able to recognize it regardless. Even if he were, there was nothing he could do about it. He was in no position to protect himself, let alone both of them. The only option was to head for the bridge as fast as he could and pray for a miracle.
And even if they crossed the Yarlung Tsangpo, they were far from in the clear. It wasn’t as though the bridge served as some sort of magical barrier the hunters couldn’t cross. For Brooks and his party to have been infected by the leeches, they had to have sucked the blood of this new species prior to sucking theirs, which meant they were more than a full day’s travel under ideal conditions from the farthest known extent of the predators’ range. And the trail through the Himalayas was still another day’s hike from there. That was a full two-days’ travel and he’d barely made it a hundred feet with Adrianne’s dead weight across his chest and his legs were on the verge of giving out.
The reality of the situation came crashing down on him. It was all he could do not to despair.
He looked at Adrianne’s pale face, rocking against his shoulder. The bruising around her eyes appeared to grow worse even as he watched. Her mouth hung open and blood dribbled down her chin. He didn’t need to see her teeth to know what was happening inside. And even if they did escape and he got her to a hospital, what then? They weren’t dealing with something as relatively innocuous as the common cold virus. This one was already making changes to her very genetic code at an alarming rate. There was no cure waiting or any known way to reverse the extent of the mutations. Their best hope was merely to stall the progression in the same way drugs were used to prevent HIV from turning into full-blown AIDS. And looking at her now, how could she hope to live like this for any length of time. She was in obvious pain and barely able to remain conscious for moments at a time. Were it not for the fact that he didn’t know to what extent she’d been exposed to the virus, it would almost be a mercy to spare her the continued suffering. But as the virus degraded inside the leeches, this could be the worst the infection might ever get and her body could potentially adapt. Or she could continue to endure a painful physical transformation that ended with her becoming like the others.
The lips he’d kissed so recently glistened with blood and he felt the heat radiating from her. He saw the way her chest shuddered with each breath and the limpness of her appendages. If he left her—just set her down in the grass and walked away—she would die, but there was still a chance he might live. And yet there was no way he was going to leave her behind. Either they both made it or neither of them did. It was as simple as that.
Brooks kissed her on the forehead and steeled his resolve.
He scoured the forest for any sign of a path that might lead to an option he had yet to consider and watched the mist-shrouded canyon to his right for anything that might serve as an alternate means of crossing the river, as the fallen trees had earlier. He had to stop and lean against a pine tree before his legs gave out. His shoulders were on fire and he was losing feeling in his hands. He took a deep breath and propelled himself forward.
Another hundred feet and his legs crumpled underneath him. He fell to his knees and shouldered a tree to keep from landing on top of Adrianne. He feared if he went all the way down, he wouldn’t be able to get back up again. Tears of frustration poured down his cheeks. He groaned as he fought back to his feet and staggered in the direction of the bridge.
He was beginning to feel a sense of inevitability. There was no way they were going to survive. Not at this rate and not with as loudly as they crashed through the branches and with the way the detritus crackled underfoot. It was only a matter of time before every animal in the forest knew they were here.
Brooks abruptly stopped and retraced that line of thought.
The corners of his lips curled upward and for the first time he felt something that might even have been hope.
He pressed on with a renewed sense of determination, the wheels in his mind turning as a plan slowly started to come together. It was a desperate gamble and one fraught with danger, but if it worked…
They crested a rise and found themselves on top of a granite formation, at the base of which the weak moonlight reflected from the stagnant floodwaters. The forest grew even denser as it approached the river. Mist moved silently through the upper canopy, obscuring the forest floor and all but the faintest hint of the trail. And downhill to his right he saw flickers of color.
Prayer flags.
He remembered how they’d been strung across the river. Somewhere in the mist beneath them was their only hope.
They’d finally reached the bridge.
Forty-four
Excerpt from the journal of
Hermann G. Wolff
Courtesy of Johann Brandt, Private Collection
Chicago, Illinois
(Translated from original handwritten German text)
March 1939
The censer fell from my hand and spilled cinders onto the ground, where they smoldered with an ethereal orange glow. The beasts stared at me through the smoke with those hideous eyes. They were human eyes. Of that I had no doubt. Not even then, before I knew for certain. These were the mythical people I had been sent to find, only they were anything but the Aryans we believed them to be. Maybe they had been, once upon a time, but now they were little more than animals. Mindless, soulless creatures that cared for nothing beyond the hunt, beyond the taste of blood in their mouths. I could no more share this discovery with my countrymen than I could anything else that had transpired in this godforsaken land. To allow the world to see the Germanic peoples as savages descended from filthy apes would be to destroy what little self-respect we had built since our catastrophic defeat in the Great War.
Or so I thought at the time. It wasn’t until later that I understood the truth, a truth I would share with no man for as long as I lived.
And so I stood there in the swirling smoke of the sandalwood and the damp leaves, waiting for my life to be ended. They watch
ed me for several minutes more before returning their attention to their meal. They ate with abandon, tearing meat from bone and entire appendages from the trunk. They snapped and snarled at each other and fought for scraps. And when the carcass had been rendered bone and gristle, they shoved handfuls of the bloody dirt into their mouths.
I did not see the first of them leave; I only noticed that there were fewer of them. Perhaps there had been as many as a dozen. By the time the majority of the skeleton had been carried away, there were only three left to fight over the remaining bones. One grabbed an armful of disarticulated ribs and scampered into the forest, leaving the last two with little more than a broken skull from which the brains had already been consumed and vertebrae hollowed of the marrow.
One had the tangled white fur of an unkempt Maltese, knotted with briars, mud, and feces. Even when it stood its shoulders remained hunched. It looked up at me from beneath its matted hair and I saw the age in its eyes. It bared its yellow teeth and then snatched the skull from the ground and hobbled into the underbrush.
The lone remaining specimen dropped to all fours and dug in the dirt for any morsel it might have missed. It was thinner by half than the others and its hair was much shorter. The growth was patchy, longer on its head and face, shorter on its arms and flanks. Were it a hound I might have thought it afflicted with mange. And then it looked up at me and snarled and I knew…I knew right then and there exactly what it was.
It must have detected the change in my expression or scent—or perhaps it was merely at the mercy of its hunger—for it stood and approached me, slowly at first. It raised its head and sniffed the air, savoring it like the bouquet of a fine wine. When it looked at me again, there was recognition in its eyes and an expression of confusion on its face. Somewhere in the mind of the beast it recognized me as I had recognized it.
In retrospect, I believe there was still a part of my old friend Kurt inside of it, for its muscles tensed and I was certain it would run, but it hung its head and slunk toward me, deliberately and with an air of submission. It sniffed again and again as it neared until its face pressed against first the robe, and then my bare skin. When its face reached mine there were tears in its eyes and I knew what needed to be done.
I drew the Luger from beneath my robe and pressed it against the beast’s heart. It closed its eyes and issued a hoarse growl, or what sometimes I find myself recalling as the sound of two words flowing together: kill me.
I know that must be a fiction of my mind’s creation to justify what I did next, for if I ever for a second think of the beast whose blood decorated the surrounding trees as my friend Eberhardt, then I am wracked with grief. Instead I have come to terms with the fact that Kurt’s soul departed his body when it changed, leaving nothing more than a base predator to inhabit what was left.
Without the yak, I could take no more than I could carry, so I was forced to prioritize as quickly as I could. The beasts might have been sated for the time being, but I had no doubt they would return again and this time no amount of incense or yak meat would save me. In that moment I experienced a measure of clarity I ascribed to the adrenaline flowing through my veins. I had seen with my own eyes what had become of Eberhardt. Something had caused that transformation and deep down I understood that I would spend every waking moment of the rest of my life trying to understand it. To that end, no amount of film or fur would help me, nor would any magnetic readings or maps. What I needed were the observations of a man more brilliant than I, a fellow naturalist of sorts whose journals I believed held the keys to proving the theories of revolutionaries like Charles Darwin. In these journals were the secrets to understanding man and God and the very future of our species, if indeed we were a single species. Perhaps the Aryans were not simply human, but rather something else entirely. Something more. Perhaps divinity was not a state of being, but a state of physicality. If men could grow fur and claws, then who was to say they could not grow the wings of an angel. The implications were staggering. There was no limit to the potential of Brandt’s pseudo-science, of all of his observations and drawings. This was the future, the dawn of a new age of knowledge, a renaissance of anatomy and spirituality that would lead us to the hand of our Maker.
Brandt’s precious case lay broken and emptied on the ground, his notebooks scattered. As I collected them I saw his bag of plaster and set to work without thinking. I had filmed him doing it enough times that it was second nature to me. I applied the plaster to the beast’s face, smearing it from one side to the other in such a way as to follow the contours and make the hair lay as its patterns of growth dictated. I covered its entire face from the crown of its head to its neck and from behind one ear to the other. And when it was nearly dry, I pried it from the creature’s face, loaded it into the trunk that had once belonged to Eberhardt himself, where I had already collected Brandt’s journals, and set out walking.
I crossed the bridge under the cover of darkness and was nearly upon the house where I had spent the last three weeks when it started to rain. I heard the grunting of the yak to the north and understood why they had chained it where they did. It not only served as an offering to protect the household, but to cover the retreat of the monks should the beasts, for whatever reason, prove insatiable.
I found the monk I had shot at the bend where he’d collapsed in the mud, bleeding from a wound in his leg. Another half-kilometer and he would have reached the farm, where they would have treated his wounds and sent word to his monastery. But fortune was on my side this day and destiny decreed that my quest would continue.
He lay facedown in the mud, his robe drenched, his legs far paler than I would have expected, even taking into account the blood loss. I rolled him over and aimed the pistol at his head.
His face was stark white and covered with mud, but I would have recognized it anywhere, especially when he opened his blue eyes and stared first at the Luger and then into my eyes. I fell to my knees beside him and rejoiced that my friend was still alive, but Johann didn’t share my enthusiasm. In fact, he looked at me as though I were the monster. He told me he understood what I intended to do, that he too had recognized the truth of what he’d seen in the valley. He said I cannot return to the Fatherland, that I must not share what I had learned here with anyone in a position of power within the Reich. He said they would misuse such wondrous knowledge for their own ends, that they would twist it and corrupt it into something dark and unholy.
He was right, I knew, and yet I had no intention of spending the rest of my life in this awful place as he suggested. I wanted no part of the monastic life or the teachings of any deity that demanded I give up all of my earthly possessions. I intended to learn everything I could not so I could be beholden to anyone’s god, but rather so I could look Him in the eyes as his equal, one who had unveiled all of his mysteries and deciphered all of his riddles.
And when Brandt told me he could not allow me to do so, I showed him that he had no way of stopping me. I pointed the gun into his face and pulled the trigger, but the hammer fell upon an empty chamber. So I hit him with it instead, again and again, until I heard the nervous lowing of the yak and realized I had run out of time.
I could not allow him to talk, though, at least not until I was comfortably back on my way to civilization. And despite all evidence to the contrary, I was not a murderer. The first death was an accident, the second self-defense, and the third an act of mercy.
Brandt’s calipers were in the trunk. I used them to pinch his tongue and draw it from his mouth. I rolled him onto his side, braced the pincers against his teeth, and raised my heel.
Seconds later I was on the move again, tracking the blood of my old friend on the path, his cry that preceded unconsciousness reverberating in my ears.
Forty-five
Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin
Motuo County
Tibet Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
October 17th
Today
&n
bsp; It was just under a quarter-mile away. Maybe a thousand feet. They’d come so far and were now so close…
From where he stood, clinging to the cover of the trees on the cliff, he watched the prayer flags alternately appear and disappear into the mist. To get there, they’d have to pick their way down the steep, rocky slope to his right, working their way closer to the river and the pitfall into its depths. From there it was a matter of wending through the dense foliage along the edge of the canyon to the mouth of the bridge. He followed the proposed route with his eyes, tracing the topography and working around the largest trees, the trunks of which he couldn’t even see through the lush—
A localized section of the canopy swayed. Maybe a hundred feet from the bridge.
The boughs gently stilled. A heartbeat later, the branches of the adjacent tree bowed dramatically before being overtaken by the fog.
They were down there, lurking near the bridge, just as he’d expected.
He watched the trees for several minutes longer, but only the fog moved through the canopy, obscuring it beneath a creeping white haze. There was no way of telling how many of them were down there. For all he knew, it could only be the one he had seen across the chasm after they crossed the fallen pines. Or the trees could literally be crawling with them. If he and Adrianne could survive the river, then surely they could, too. He had to plan on there being at least four and pray the element of surprise worked in his favor.
And that Adrianne would be able to make it across the bridge without him.
Brooks stepped back and merged with the shadows of the trees and whispered into Adrianne’s ear.
Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Page 28