Subhuman

by Michael McBride

That was why she’d volunteered three months of her time to the U.N. International Criminal Court’s investigation of Boko Haram. The militant faction considered itself the de facto Western branch of the Islamic State, but in terms of violence and bloodshed it knew no peer. Despite the formal declaration of a state of emergency and the creation of several new infantry divisions, the number of extremists continued to grow, fueled by the prospect of marauding the countryside in hordes straight out of the Middle Ages. A trail of scorched earth followed them from one village to the next as they expanded their territory. To date, they’d murdered more than 25,000 people and displaced millions in the process of securing 50,000 square miles of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad. They needed to be stopped and forced to stand for their crimes against humanity before their numbers swelled to the point that they no longer could be.

  Jade skidded down the dirt mound and into the pit, where the remains of bloated men, women, and children lay, discarded and seething with black flies. She removed her camera and digital voice recorder from her bag and began the laborious process of documenting the nature of the wounds and the various causes of death. Those near the bottom had been butchered in the most horrific ways, while those nearer the top had been shot point-blank in the back of the head. Whether the executioners had already sated their taste for killing or had simply needed to expedite the process was a matter of speculation.

  While her skills as a forensic anthropologist were overkill at this juncture, they were crucial in establishing a case for genocide. They needed the kind of incontrovertible proof that only someone intimately familiar with the subtle skeletal distinctions between not only races, but the various ethnicities and geographic variances within those races could provide. If they could prove that Boko Haram was targeting a specific ethnicity or religion, then a formal tribunal could be assembled, without which there could be no direct intervention, at least not without the majority of nations on board, and that wasn’t about to happen as long as military action would be perceived as a war against Islam in this climate of political correctness.

  The problem was that until the civilized world acknowledged that it was at war with extremism, the forces aligning against it would continue to rally the disenfranchised to their cause.

  Sometimes it seemed to Jade as though she inhabited two different worlds. Back home she taught osteology and genetic mutation within the safe environs of the University of Colorado Medical School. It was often staggering to think that while we were all the same on the inside, it was the almost trivial variations in genetic expression that divided humanity, and man’s very nature that pitted him against those he identified as different when there was otherwise such beauty in the world.

  She stared down at the outstretched arm of a woman who’d died while trying to reach a baby in a bloodstained diaper. Her fingers rested inches from those of the infant.

  Jade knelt and brought their hands together. It seemed like the very least she could do.

  She was about to stand again when she noticed the body beneath theirs. Flies crawled all over its grayish skin and misshapen skull. She rolled the body sideways so she could see its face and features that weren’t entirely human.

  4

  ROCHE

  Wiltshire County, England

  “You’re certain it wasn’t vandals,” Martin Roche said.

  “I was in that field yesterday afternoon,” Abe Grafton said. The farmer spoke with a thick British accent and had the look of a man who’d spent a lifetime in the sun. “I’m telling you, it wasn’t there. And there’s no way any number of people could have made it in so little time. Least of all without me hearing them.”

  Roche plugged the Smart Geiger into his cell phone as they tramped through the waist-deep barley toward the distant row of beech trees, above which the sun, having dispelled the morning fog, commenced its ascent in earnest.

  “What’s that for?” Grafton asked.

  “This app measures radiation exposure in micro-sieverts per hour.”

  “You’re saying my fields are radioactive?”

  The readings rose with every step until they reached a point where it looked like a shadow had fallen upon the wavering crops, at least from this elevation. Roche held up the screen so the farmer could see it.

  “Bloody hell,” Grafton said. “This is just wonderful. What will it do to my sheep?”

  “Do your sheep graze in your crops?”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “Then you probably don’t need to worry about them.”

  They stepped from the sea of green tassels into a clearly demarcated flattened section. Roche unplugged the mini Geiger counter, took several photographs, and then crouched in the barley. None of the long stems were broken. It was as though they’d simply collapsed to the ground in a radial pattern. The nodes, which reminded him of knuckles along the stalk, were all artificially elongated, a curious anomaly he’d been able to independently reproduce using boiling water, microwaves, and electricity. Considering the nearest power lines were little more than toothpicks against the horizon and the closest cell tower was twice that far away, he could safely rule out spontaneous induction, although that wouldn’t have explained the design of the crop circle or the tiny dead gall flies perfectly preserved on the grains as though flash-frozen.

  “What are you looking for?”

  Roche broke off one of the tassels and handed it to the farmer, who plucked off one of the dead flies and inspected it before crumbling it between his fingers.

  “The devil can do something like that?”

  Roche attached the 150x magnification lens to the camera on his phone, grabbed a handful of dirt, and appraised it on the view screen.

  “What kind of fertilizer do you use?”

  Grafton puffed out his chest.

  “This is an organic farm, sir. The only fertilizer comes from my sheep.”

  Roche held up the screen so the farmer could see the microscopic, pearl-like spheres mixed in with the soil.

  “These little balls are silicon dioxide, commonly found in industrial fertilizers and cosmetics.”

  “I assure you, neither are in use here. You saw the wife, didn’t you?”

  His laughter boomed across the plains.

  Roche cast aside the dirt, brushed off his palm on his thigh, and put the magnifying lens back into his field kit. With each passing year, researchers like him discovered more and more seemingly inexplicable anomalies in these crop circles. While the prevailing theory was that most were elaborate hoaxes, there were similarities between them that simply defied logical explanation. How were the crops flattened without breaking a single stem? What caused the spike in radiation and the malformed nodes, some of which appeared as though they’d been popped from the inside? What could have killed the flies in such a manner and why was there such a high concentration of silica?

  More important, what did these crop circles mean?

  A growing faction believed they were created by extraterrestrial life in an attempt to communicate with us. After all, how could such precise patterns, formed from sacred geometry and higher orders of mathematics, be created in the middle of nowhere? Some even claimed to have seen plasma spheres hover over the fields and patterns form beneath them like magic.

  Roche didn’t believe in magic any more than he believed in aliens, but the fact remained that there was simply too much that he couldn’t explain.

  “Do you mind if I collect samples of grain from both inside and outside the circle?” Roche asked.

  “What good can that possibly do?”

  “I can compare their rates of germination against known standards and see if there are any variations in growth patterns.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “As a general rule, seeds collected inside the pattern exhibit stunted growth.”

  “But not always?”

  “If the crop circle is formed right before harvest, when the grain is fully matured, the seeds actually grow faster.”
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br />   “Figure out what causes that and we can sell it. We’ll be millionaires.”

  “I don’t think that’s the best idea.”

  “Why the hell not? I need to recoup the loss of this harvest somehow.”

  “Look around you. Don’t you notice anything unusual?”

  “More unusual than the radioactive pattern in my bloody barley?”

  “There aren’t any birds. All of this grain. All of these dead flies. And there’s not a single bird in the sky.”

  “What are you, some kind of scientist?”

  “Something like that,” Roche said, although nothing could be further from the truth.

  He wasn’t one of these New Age freaks who traveled hundreds of miles to lay in the design and commune with the universe or experience the surge in mystical energy, or whatever it was they did. He was an educated man, a skeptical man, but one who couldn’t walk away from a mystery of this magnitude without cracking the code. As a cryptanalyst first for the Marine Cryptologic Support Battalion and later the National Security Agency, he’d been trained to see patterns where there were none, to identify signals within intelligence that could mean the difference between life and death for operatives in the field.

  His grandfather had emigrated from French Basque country as a child and served as a U.S. Marine in World War II. Francois de la Roche had utilized his ability to speak the obscure Basque language as a code talker, translating official communications in a way the Germans couldn’t understand. While he and his team were ultimately replaced by the legendary Navajo Code Talkers, whose language was built upon complex grammar that wasn’t mutually intelligible to any known language, the way he described his service and his subsequent years in intelligence had stirred Roche’s imagination. Cipher machines and the bombe used to break the encryptions. Wiretaps and listening devices. Informants and double agents. His whole life he’d wanted nothing more than to be an operative in this game of cloak-and-dagger like his pépère, who had made himself sound like a cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones.

  The reality, of course, was something else entirely.

  Linguists like his grandfather were sent to the front lines. Several of the men he’d known at Fort Meade had died in Afghanistan, where it was impossible to tell the difference between innocents and suicide bombers until they pushed the detonators on their explosive vests. Roche had served from thousands of miles away in a dark room where written communications whipped past on a computer screen so fast that he barely had a chance to glance at them in search of hidden messages and patterns. He’d been good at it, though. Whether as a consequence of his training or some innate gift, he’d helped locate and eliminate terror cells all over the globe and prevent attacks that would have made 9/11 a historical footnote. He’d been so good, in fact, that the NSA had snatched him from the Marines and set him up at a fancy station making ten times as much money and granted him a high-enough security clearance that he probably could have figured out the identity of the second shooter on the grassy knoll, if he’d had the time.

  His sole task had been to evaluate cell phone calls plucked from the ether. Not just those flagged because of certain trigger words, but communications of all kinds. After all, terrorists were ingrained into society like ticks on a deer’s back. They lived invisible lives and recruited nationals who weren’t hindered by Arabic accents or the color of their skin. He’d believed in the importance of his job clear up until the moment that realization struck him like a lightning bolt from the sky.

  He was spying on his own people.

  Not only was he violating the constitutional rights he had sworn to uphold, he was doing the exact same thing as the imaginary Communist spies he’d spent his childhood thwarting with secret codes and plastic guns. He’d become Boris Badenov, only rather than wearing a black trench coat and fedora and skulking through the shadows, he sat in a dark room drinking Starbucks and pissing on the very notion of freedom.

  So it was that six months later—after jumping through flaming hoops and signing countless documents that ensured that if he so much as thought about breaking his oath of confidentiality he’d be executed for treason—he was no longer employed by the federal government and traveling the world in search of his place in life when he encountered his first crop circle in a field in Nebraska. He’d been driving west to see the Rockies when a hand-painted sign on the side of the highway caught his eye. The farmer had charged him twenty dollars and told him to follow a simpleton in overalls into the cornfield, where the design had supposedly appeared overnight a week prior.

  From the ground, it had looked like a poorly conceived corn maze. The leaves of the standing stalks were strangely withered and, after driving hundreds of miles with starlings and crows lining every fence and telephone wire, he became suddenly conscious of the fact that he hadn’t seen a single bird since climbing out of his car.

  From that day forward, he’d dedicated his skills to deciphering the riddle that had plagued some of the brightest scientific minds dating back to the seventeenth century. The problem was that if there was a pattern to their formation, it eluded him. The only one he could find was in geographic dispersion. There was a stretch in southwest England where not only did the crop circles appear more than anywhere else in the world, but they did so in a pattern that mirrored the flow of a large subterranean aquifer, as confirmed by overlaying a map of known crop circles on top of a hydro-geological map of England, which was why he’d moved to Trowbridge and set up a makeshift laboratory in his garage.

  This was now the third crop circle he’d investigated in as many months.

  Roche opened an app on his own design on his phone that used a sophisticated geolocation algorithm to create a map from his movements. He walked the perimeter, following each and every curve and contour. When he was done, he stopped in the center of the crop circle, where the matted barley formed a clockwise pattern as though swirled by a tornado, and studied the image of a pentagon with circles of equal diameter at each of its five points.

  “Have you ever seen this symbol before?” Roche asked.

  Grafton shook his head.

  Neither had Roche, but he was certain that the key to unlocking the secret was out here somewhere, whether celestial or terrestrial in origin, and it was only a matter of time before he found it.

  5

  KELLY

  Seaside, Oregon

  The Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk thundered low over the spruce forests and grassy bluffs of Tillamook Head until the steep cliffs abruptly gave way to the Pacific, where they veered to the north and followed the coastline. Kelly Nolan was harnessed in the back, twirling a shock of green-dyed hair around her index finger. She looked from the open laptop on her thighs to the window, where the vast ocean vanished into the night, and then back again.

  2:03 a.m.

  Never in her life had she been so nervous, and not just because she’d hadn’t been on a helicopter before, let alone one traveling at what had to be nearly 200 miles an hour. If it turned out she was wrong . . .

  She couldn’t afford to think about that now. Her greater concern was what was about to happen if she was right.

  “The evacuation’s proceeding on schedule,” the pilot said through the noise-canceling headphones, which made the thupp-thupp-thupp of the rotors sound like the heartbeat of some great mechanical being. Everything had happened so quickly that she couldn’t remember his name, or even if he and his copilot had introduced themselves.

  “Excellent,” Dr. Davis Walters said from the seat beside her, his voice somewhat garbled by the microphone touching his lower lip. “We have confirmation from all five assembly areas?”

  “Yes, sir. We should be passing over Assembly Area Five any second now.”

  The fingers on Kelly’s left hand tapped a restless rhythm on the pad of her thumb, faster and faster, as though soloing on an air guitar. It was an unconscious tic she’d developed as a small child, and one she couldn’t turn off without an absurd amount of concent
ration. Her multicolored fingernails moved in a blur, so fast that even she couldn’t figure out if there was a pattern to the tapping.

  2:04 a.m.

  A collection of lights materialized below them, where the plateau had become a parking lot for evacuees gathered in the hope that this was just another drill. The town sprawled across the shoreline below them, a sandy oasis among the rugged escarpments. The red and blue lights of emergency vehicles flashed through the streets while search-and-rescue choppers swept their spotlights across the vacant beach and desolate boardwalk. A seemingly endless parade of brake lights led inland toward higher ground, where the lights of the other four assembly areas stood in stark contrast to the dark forest.

  “There are going to be a lot of pissed-off people if you’re wrong about this,” the copilot said.

  “Even more if we’re right,” Kelly said.

  She focused on her laptop, which displayed the incoming data from the oceanic hydrophone array and the search coil magnetometer she’d installed at the USGS’s seismic monitoring station in Corvallis. The SCM was a fairly simplistic sensor that monitored fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. These subtle oscillations manifested as sounds of such low frequency that the human ear couldn’t hear them, but they were often used to detect impending avalanches or the formation of tornadoes nearly half an hour before they hit. Her theory was that the same technology could be applied to predict earthquakes.

  The Earth’s magnetic field was formed by a combination of minerals turning around a solid iron core, which generated an electrical current, and the spin of the planet on its axis, known as the Coriolis force. Together they created an enormous electromagnetic field from one pole to the other that produced constant background noise at 7.83 Hertz, below the range of hearing, in much the same way that the flow of electricity through power lines made them buzz.

  Her entire graduate thesis was built upon the premise that a localized variation in that sound suggested geological upheaval corresponding with the movement of tectonic plates against one another, which added to the strength of the magnetic field as their edges compressed like springs, storing inordinate amounts of energy just waiting to be released. She’d even been granted access to the moored, autonomous infrasonic hydrophone arrays that the students at the Hatfield Marine Science Center used to listen to the whales. The idea was that not only would the hydrophone capture the sound of the subauditory variance in the magnetic field, it would allow her to run it through an amplifier and a subwoofer to create a physical expression of that sound in a shallow liquid medium—a process called Cymatics, which she likened to the scene in Jurassic Park when ripples formed in the cup of water on the SUV’s dashboard as the Tyrannosaurus rex approached—a literal waveform that could be used to predict not only an impending quake, but its severity.