Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  2:05 a.m.

  “Still no alerts from the NOAA,” the pilot said. “Tell me you have access to data we don’t.”

  “Hydrophones off the coast have picked up a substantial increase in noise in the infrasonic range over the last six days,” Kelly said.

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “If I’m right—”

  “If?” the copilot interrupted.

  “—we’re looking at a seismic event that could wipe this entire coastline off the map. Are you willing to take the chance that I’m wrong?”

  At first, the SCM readings had been chaotic and seemingly incoherent. She’d despaired that her entire thesis was a failure and she’d wasted years of her life and tens of thousands of dollars, at least until she realized that any tectonic activity along the Cascadia fault line—the subduction zone running from Northern California to Vancouver—would create a proportional disturbance in the surrounding ocean, which, when digitally subtracted, left her with data that could be plotted as a perfect sine wave of increasing frequency and intensity. Initially, the spikes in activity were erratic and interspersed with periods of relative calm, but since 8:53 P.M. the readings had assumed an element of steady escalation, inside of which she detected a pattern she couldn’t quite explain, one that when isolated appeared to form what could loosely be considered a countdown.

  2:06 a.m.

  She glanced nervously at Dr. Walters. She’d never seen him so pale. He alternately tore his fingers through his hair and checked his cell phone, which was logged into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Tsunami Warning Center. As her graduate adviser, it was his neck on the proverbial chopping block.

  “Any reports of flooding anywhere along the coast?” he asked.

  “Nothing that’s been reported to the Coast Guard,” the pilot said.

  Kelly caught Dr. Walters looking at her from the corner of his eye and wondered if even he was beginning to doubt her. She’d spent two panicked hours trying to convince anyone who would listen to evacuate a stretch of the Oregon coast from Manzanita to Astoria corresponding to the increased activity in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. She’d been in tears when she finally called Walters, who for the last five years had been predicting a massive and long overdue earthquake off the shore of the Pacific Northwest. Even he had been difficult to convince, and had only been persuaded by the threat of having to live with the deaths of thousands on his conscience if he didn’t act. It didn’t hurt that he was obviously into her. She felt guilty about taking advantage of his feelings, but as one of the designers of the Tsunami Early Warning System, he’d been able to set the gears in motion with a single text. Evacuations had commenced within a matter of minutes, and the USCG Jayhawk had been dispatched to ferry them to the Seaside command center at the Hilltop Assembly Area.

  “How long until we’re on the ground?” Walters asked.

  “Just a few more minutes,” the pilot said.

  2:07 a.m.

  “We’re too late,” Kelly said. She closed her eyes and slowly exhaled in an effort to calm her nerves. She opened them again just in time to watch the magnetometer readings flatline. “The countdown’s complete.”

  Kelly stared at Dr. Walters, whose expression ran the gamut from apprehension to sheer terror at the thought of having thrown away his career alongside millions of dollars of emergency funds.

  She had to look away.

  2:08 a.m.

  The magnetometer readings spiked by a full 3 mi-croteslas, and the background noise on the hydrophones jumped 20 hertz. The ground below them appeared to shiver.

  An alarm sounded from Walters’s phone. He read the warning into his microphone so they all could hear.

  “Preliminary quake information . . . Location: off the coast of Oregon . . . Depth: 7 miles . . . Estimated magnitude: 7.8 . . . Christ.” Another beeping sound. “The early warning buoys just alarmed.”

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” the copilot said.

  Kelly leaned against the window so she could look straight down at the row of hotels lining the boardwalk. The wheels of the chopper nearly skimmed their roofs as they banked around the town toward the command center. The beach grew longer and longer before her very eyes as the Pacific receded.

  She heard a grumbling sound outside, followed by the shrill cry of what sounded like an air-raid siren. One of the hotels fell straight down to the ground beneath them. The helicopter lurched violently, as though caught in a downdraft.

  The night grew suddenly silent and so still that the chopper seemed to float effortlessly.

  Kelly knew exactly what that meant.

  “Get us above it!” she shouted.

  The Jayhawk banked sharply and streaked inland, climbing as it went.

  Kelly pressed her cheek against the window and looked back. A tsunami rose from the black horizon, thrust upward by the seismic event. It seemed to pause for the briefest of moments before bearing down upon the coastline at nearly 500 miles an hour. Moonlight shimmered from the seamless crescent of water as it raced into the shallows and rose in a churning wall of destruction that swallowed the beach, hammered the line of hotels, and washed over the business district, sending cars and debris tumbling into the surrounding neighborhoods, where entire houses vanished beneath the sea. The massive tidal wave tore through the foothills and broke against the cliffs, throwing so much water into the air that it nearly submerged the airborne chopper.

  She stared down upon the devastation in mute horror.

  Walters placed his trembling hand on her shoulder.

  “You did good. Imagine how many people could have died tonight.”

  Kelly looked away from where she could see little more than rooftops protruding from water roiling with the detritus of ruined lives. All she could think about were those who hadn’t made it to safety because she hadn’t recognized the pattern in time.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes and watched the readings on her laptop continue to spike with the aftershocks, although with diminishing intensity until, finally, they returned to normal.

  6

  ANYA

  Johann Brandt Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Chicago, Illinois

  The main public exhibit hall was filled with shatterproof glass cases positioned beneath recessed lights that made them appear to glow. Each contained skeletal remains and artifacts related to the various stages of human evolution. The exhibit had closed hours ago with the rest of the Johann Brandt Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Only a handful of researchers remained cloistered in their labs, lost in their work and oblivious to the time. Security guards prowled the dark hallways of the 220,000-square-foot complex, which was spread out over four floors, including a subterranean level primarily used for storage and curation. One of them had been nice enough to keep Anya Fleming company for as long as he could, before leaving her alone in front of a long display case in what they jokingly called “Headhunter’s Hall.”

  She scrutinized her reflection in the glass. If she tilted her head just right, she could superimpose her green eyes and freckles over the hollow sockets and cheekbones of the two-thousand-year-old skull inside. Its cranium, however, was a different story. It was disproportionately large and elongated, which was why the guys in the genetics lab called it a conehead, after the old Saturday Night Live sketch with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. To Anya, though, it looked more like a Xenomorph from the Alien films.

  She’d exhumed this specimen herself, from beneath the red clay soil in the steppes of the Southern Ural Mountains at a site called Arkaim, colloquially known as Russia’s Stonehenge, which was built in the seventeenth century BCE, at the height of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture. It consisted of two concentric rings of dwellings surrounded by fortifications nearly twenty feet tall and a moat another six feet deep. A single entryway served as a bottleneck to repel invading forces, although no one knew precisely which enemies were aligned against them or why they abandoned the fortress. It wasn’t until recen
tly that anyone even knew it was there. Had surveyors not recognized its significance, it would have vanished beneath the floodwaters used to create a reservoir.

  While the settlement was found burned to the ground and nearly indistinguishable from the plains around it, archeologists were still able to piece together its functionality as a celestial observatory, similar to those from the same time period in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and throughout Central and South America, contemporary sites where—whether coincidentally or not—dozens of other coneheads like the one Anya had been staring at had been unearthed.

  The prevailing school of thought was that their misshapen heads were a consequence of artificial cranial deformation, a process by which the growth of an infant’s pliable skull was altered by binding it between two pieces of wood or wrapping it tightly in a cloth. While many primitive cultures like the Huns and the Alans were known to employ such methods as recently as the third century BCE, the practice largely died out shortly thereafter. Their craniums were easily distinguished by an indentation that almost looked like a headband across the frontal bone and along the parietal sutures, with associated forward protrusion of the mastoid processes and a bulbous occipital bone.

  The skulls in the case before her now were different, though. They were elongated more in the vertical axis than the horizontal and had been exhumed from burials near known ancient observatories. The majority were collected from a cave in Paracas, Peru, near the enigmatic Nazca Lines, yet they shared several striking physical characteristics with the others, some of which had been collected on the other side of the globe. Traditional deformation merely changed the shape of the cranium. These were a full 25 percent larger and 60 percent heavier. No amount of squishing or flattening could add mass or change the volume of the brainpan. More important, analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, which was inherited through the maternal line, demonstrated mutations distinct from all other species of primates, including modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. And this one—the one she’d personally disinterred—could potentially help them understand the nature of these mutated sequences and determine their function.

  Previous remains had been discovered in caves and other regions where the climate wreaked havoc on their DNA, degrading samples to the point that sequencing had been unable to produce a complete genome. Her skull, on the other hand, had been so perfectly preserved in the dense mud that the entire skeleton remained articulated. At this very moment, a sample from this cranium was down the hall in the genetics lab, its genome being sequenced by some of the most accomplished geneticists in the world, the same team that had sequenced Denisovan DNA from a single finger bone.

  The process was taking forever, though. The results should have come back a full eight hours ago, although no one had been willing to commit to a formal timetable. She was just a postdoctoral fellow, which, in this esteemed company, was the equivalent of being an undrafted rookie playing on an all-star team. Those on staff at the Brandt Institute were the very brightest minds in their respective fields, the kind of brilliant researchers who could secure tenured positions at any university in the world just by picking up the phone. They’d been lured here not because their mere presence would secure funding for the institution, but rather because the institution secured that money for them. Third-party funding ensured they could write blank checks from inexhaustible accounts in order to perform any research they wanted, anywhere in the world, without anyone looking over their shoulders.

  That had really just been the icing on the cake for Anya. There weren’t many institutions willing to concede the possibility that these coneheads, which were essentially the equivalent of roadside curiosities in the scientific community, could actually be a discrete lineage of extinct hominin, a terminal branch on mankind’s family tree. There were simply too many similarities between individual remains discovered on completely different continents that defied coincidence.

  More than 500 candidates had applied for the posting she’d secured with a single interview. Even better, she’d been given an office of her own and keys to pretty much every laboratory in the entire state-of-the-art facility. She’d immediately become the envy of every other fellow, and even a few department heads. Not bad for a four-eyed girl from Scranton, whose first archeological dig was in a sandbox that produced what the other kids convinced her was a piece of chocolate.

  She probably should have just gone home to wait, but she knew someone would call from the lab the moment she walked through the door. What in the world was taking so long? The institute’s new DNA analyzer could sequence the entire human genome in twenty-six hours and it had been—she glanced at her watch—nearly thirty-five hours. It was already nine o’clock, and the building was a graveyard. Maybe the lab had decided to call it a day and no one had bothered to tell her. If that were the case, she was going to storm into the department head’s office first thing in the morning and scream—

  “Dr. Fleming?”

  Anya flinched at the sound of the voice. She hadn’t heard anyone enter the cavernous room.

  “Yes?”

  She turned to face a man she’d never seen before. Granted, there were nearly 400 staff and another 80 doctoral candidates at any given time, but she would have remembered this man. He wore a custom-tailored suit and a practiced smile that didn’t reach his eyes, which surreptitiously surveyed the exhibit hall. His bearing was upright and regal in a way she attributed to either wealth or military service, almost like a Secret Service agent, although this man appeared more accustomed to the limelight than blending into the woodwork.

  He strode toward her and proffered his hand. He was handsome in a rugged way, although he was both too old and too angular for her. Too many sharp edges: from his buzz-cut hair to the line of his jaw to the shoulders of his jacket.

  “My name is Will Connor. It’s my distinct pleasure to finally meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too. You’ll have to pardon me, but I’m kind of preoccupied right now—”

  “Waiting for the results from the genetics lab.” His smile morphed into an amused smirk. “Don’t look so surprised. That’s the whole reason I’m here. And I do apologize for making you wait so long.”

  “The results are in?”

  “Do try to keep up, won’t you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let me start over. I represent the interests of the corporation that funds your research. In fact, you could say my employer was integral in securing your services here.”

  “My research is funded by the institute—”

  “Which, in turn, is funded by the generous donations of benefactors like my employer, who’s just dying to meet you.”

  “What about the results?”

  “Don’t worry. They’ve already been sent to your faculty email so you can evaluate them on the plane.”

  “What plane?”

  7

  RICHARDS

  Antarctic Research, Experimentation &

  Analysis Station 51

  Queen Maud Land, Antarctica

  “The suspense is killing me. Can’t I just get a quick peek?”

  Hollis Richards had been in the middle of dinner when Friden interrupted and hustled him down into the sublevel of the research station, where the laboratories had been installed inside a natural formation.

  “Just give me a few more seconds.”

  Richards paced Friden’s lab while the microbiologist diddled with the scanning electron microscope. He stopped in front of the glass cage at the back of the room and tapped on the glass.

  “Don’t do that,” Friden said. “Speedy hates it when people do that.”

  The mouse stuck its whiskered nose out of its bedding and sniffed at the air before burying itself once more, apparently less perturbed than its owner. Richards didn’t understand why Friden was so attached to the kind of rodent Richards had killed by the thousands on his farm as a kid, but it was important to him that his staff felt comfortable in their new surroundings. />
  He’d learned a lot about people as a venture capitalist. It required more than an almost prescient ability to see the merits of an idea and the confidence to invest an absurd amount of money. To be successful you had to believe in the men and women behind the vision and have faith in their ability to achieve it.

  Sure, he’d swung for the fences and missed more often than not, but all it took was connecting with the right pitch one time, and he’d knocked at least a dozen out of the park in the last twenty years alone, from household names like Google and Amazon to pioneers in the fields of biotherapeutics and organic agricultural solutions. If there was one thing he’d learned from his father, it was that you could never lose when you gambled with someone else’s money, and the way his old man saw it, that was exactly what you had if you didn’t have the dirt under your nails to show for it, which was why it had seemed like the greatest possible posthumous insult to sell the family homestead to a corporate farm and roll the dice on a single bet. Richards was almost disappointed when he didn’t lose everything on a company called Quantum Link, a dedicated online gaming service that subsequently diversified and changed its name to America Online.