Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  “This is as far as I go,” he said. “No. Wait . . . it’s just a bend.”

  He turned to his left and entered another ascending passageway.

  “What’s your location?”

  “I would guess this branch runs parallel to the main ascending corridor, only about twenty feet deeper. Whatever’s ahead should fall in line with the iron column. Maybe where they store the capacitors.”

  Dreger looked down and Evans got a decent view of the nicks and scratches in the stone. The majority were linear in nature, like one would expect to see where a sarcophagus was dragged across the ground, only they were of uneven depth, which shot a big hole in the middle of his theory. The dust on the ground had an almost brownish tint.

  “Is that dirt?” Evans asked.

  Dreger ran his fingertips across the ground and held them in front of his face. He rubbed them together and scrutinized the discolorations.

  “I don’t think so. It’s some kind of powder.”

  “Rust?”

  “No. It practically disintegrates when you touch it.”

  Dreger continued higher until his beam limned the end of the tunnel and diffused into the darkness beyond the threshold.

  “Ugh,” he said. “It smells even worse up here.”

  Evans glanced up from the monitor and around the cafeteria, which had been converted into a command center large enough for dozens of computers and the workers monitoring every conceivable function and variable. The main screen Richards had used to deliver his introductory spiel featured the feed from a camera positioned in the uppermost chamber with the inset silver ring, where Dale Rubley, the chief engineer, directed the installation of lighting arrays and collected electromagnetic readings. Jade sat cross-legged on the pool table, swilling coffee as she continued to study the 3-D model of the temple on her laptop. Anya hovered over her, visibly making her uncomfortable.

  Evans covered the microphone on his headset.

  “Hey!” Jade looked impatiently in his direction. “I think you guys are going to want to see this.”

  Evans returned his attention to the screen as Dreger advanced into a square chamber roughly the size of a garage. His beam spotlighted the bluish-green column of oxidized copper wiring, casting its long shadow across the rear wall. He stopped and turned his head from left to right to visualize the reliefs carved into the stone. They were similar to those on the cliff, only partially concealed behind spatters of what almost looked like an ochre-based paint. The camera panned to the ceiling and the stars carved into the granite, just like the tomb in Akhetaten.

  “Jesus,” Evans whispered.

  “What is it?” Jade asked from behind him, but the images on the screen obviated his answer.

  The bodies strewn across the floor at the back of the chamber were skeletal and partially clothed in what looked like formerly white snowsuits darkened by the absorption of bodily dissolution and stuck to the ground by a crust of adipocere and amoeboid shapes of what he now recognized as dried blood.

  “They can’t be more than a hundred years old,” Anya said. “If that.”

  Dreger swept the camera across the broken and disarticulated remains, tatters of clothing, and blood so old it had evaporated to powder. A torn jacket still had a patch on the shoulder: three upside-down Vs, one on top of the other.

  “That’s a Marine insignia,” Dreger said.

  “American?” Anya asked.

  “They were alive when they entered that chamber,” Jade said.

  Evans looked back at her in time to see the color drain from her face.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “The spatter patterns on the walls are arterial, which means their hearts were still beating when they were attacked.”

  Dreger made a gagging sound and the camera abruptly turned toward the egress. His footsteps echoed from the speakers as he hurried back down the passage.

  “What in the name of God happened down there?” Evans said.

  33

  FRIDEN

  Friden struggled to open the door to his lab with his elbow while holding a cup of coffee in either hand and an open bag of Cheetos balanced on his iPad, the whole works perched precariously on his forearms. A ham sandwich hung from his mouth, dripping mayo down his chin. He’d barely entered the kitchen when he made the revelation that had been staring him right in the face this whole time and rushed back down to the sublevel, grabbing his lunch almost as an afterthought.

  He turned around and used his shoulder to flip the light switch. Stopped dead in his tracks. The sandwich fell from his mouth and knocked over his iPad, sending cheese puffs skittering in every direction. He stared at his workstation for several seconds while his mind tried to rationalize what he was seeing.

  “What in the name of all that’s holy . . . ?”

  Friden set his coffee on the nearest flat surface, flung the spillage from his hands, and wiped them on his lab coat. His desktop looked like someone had rummaged through it as though searching for state secrets. The light microscope was toppled on its side, the glass slide shattered. The computer monitor lay facedown on his stack of notes, the majority of which had fallen onto his chair and the floor, where they were soaked with the remainder of his overturned energy drink.

  He walked to the far side of his workstation and found a mess of printouts and utensils that had been stacked on the corner now littering the floor. Several of the books had fallen from his shelf, along with the framed picture of him with Carrie Fisher and one of the actual prop wands used during the filming of the second Harry Potter movie. He caught movement from his peripheral vision and glanced up at Speedy’s cage—

  “Are you coming or what?”

  He jumped at the sound of the voice behind him and turned to find Mariah standing in the doorway.

  “Do you get some sort of sick pleasure out of doing that, Mariah?”

  “The others are already in the cafeteria. They’re about to start.”

  “I know. I was just there.”

  “Don’t you want to watch?” She looked around his lab as though seeing it for the first time. “For Christ’s sake, Max. Could you possibly be a bigger slob?”

  “Funny,” he said.

  “Seriously. What the hell happened in here?”

  “Check it out. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  She picked her way through the mess and stood behind where he crouched in front of the cage.

  “Ugh. What is that?”

  What almost looked like a gooey spiderweb had been spun in the corner of the cage over the mouse’s nest.

  “I think that’s my archaea.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I couldn’t make this kind of thing up.”

  “There’s no way—”

  “I need gloves.”

  Friden toppled over in his hurry to stand and plucked a pair of examination gloves from the box in his top desk drawer.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Lift the lid, would you?”

  He snapped on his gloves and waited for her to do as he’d asked. The wire-mesh aquarium top came away with a crackling sound, tearing the fibrous strands.

  “You remember how that sound triggered the growth of the fimbriae?” he asked.

  “The one that ruptured the cellular membranes in the process?”

  “Right, but the transformation remained stable at 528 Hertz.”

  He pried back some of the strands, which stuck to his fingertips. Just like spiderwebs, they had almost no substance to them whatsoever. Speedy stirred in his nest, rustling the tattered tissues.

  “So what was the end result?”

  “Nothing really,” Friden said. “At least not until I exposed them to an electrical current.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “They formed a network that reminded me of the way axons connect to dendrites in the nervous system.”

  “So you electrocuted them?”

  “It made s
ense at the time. I wanted to see if they functioned in the same way and were able to conduct a current. The charge must have been too high. I killed a bunch of them, but stimulated a self-preservation reflex in others that triggered asexual reproduction in the form of budding. I guess they must have just kept on multiplying.”

  Speedy squeaked and burrowed deeper into his nest as Friden tried to unbury him.

  “I follow your logic, however flawed, but I still don’t understand why you would put it in with your mouse.”

  “I didn’t. I left it on a slide clipped to the light microscope. It got over here by itself.”

  “By itself.”

  “I know how it sounds.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “Whether or not you believe me doesn’t change the fact that it did.” He brushed cedar chips and nesting material from the mouse’s trembling back, revealing a patch of fur matted with blood. “Jesus. Poor little guy. What happened to—?”

  Speedy rose to his haunches so quickly that Friden felt the mouse’s hooked teeth inside the flesh of his fingertip before he even sensed what was coming. Rich red blood dripped from the hole in his glove.

  “Son of a . . . !”

  He jerked his hand from the cage and ripped off his glove. His entire index finger was covered in blood. He felt himself starting to swoon.

  “Just hold still,” Mariah said. She plucked a Kleenex from the box on his desk, wrapped it around his finger, and secured it with a strip of clear tape. “It might be touch-and-go for a while, but I think you’ll live.”

  “He’s never bitten me before.”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  Friden returned to the cage and used his opposite hand to expose Speedy, who’d buried himself beneath his nest once more.

  “You remember how Einstein defined insanity, don’t you?” she said.

  “I’ll be more careful this time.”

  Friden pulled back the layers of the nest until Speedy had nowhere else to go. The mouse curled into a ball on the glass bottom, which was thick with clotted cedar dust. There was so much blood on Speedy’s fur that it was initially difficult to find its source. He gently brushed aside the damp clumps until he found the wound at the base of the mouse’s skull, where tendril-like appendages almost appeared to have been sewn into its spine.

  Speedy turned and snapped at him, but Friden yanked his fingers out of range in the nick of time.

  “Oh my God,” Mariah said.

  Friden stared down at the mouse, which stood on its hind legs, its little hooked teeth and whiskers red with blood. They were about the only recognizable features left of his face. His black eyes bulged from his head to such an extent that it didn’t appear possible for the lids to close over them. His ears folded outward as a consequence of the swelling in his head, which almost looked like a misshapen bubble had formed beneath the fur. He screeched and rolled his head awkwardly back on his neck and started to twitch.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Mariah asked.

  “I don’t know. What should I do?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Who else would I be talking to?”

  “I don’t know anything about mice. It looks like it’s having a seizure.”

  Speedy fell to his side and contorted backward until the crown of his bulbous head nearly touched his spine. The mouse’s feet clawed uselessly at the glass. Its right eye bulged—

  Friden turned away.

  Crack.

  When he looked back, Speedy lay still, a pool of blood forming below his mouth.

  “He broke his own neck,” Mariah said.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Snap out of it, Max!” She took him squarely by the shoulders and turned him to face her. “What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing! I told you. It was the archaea from the lake.”

  She released him and he staggered away from the cage. Tripped over his desk chair. Landed on the floor.

  “That’s not the worst of it, though,” he said.

  “Wonderful. Please tell me you have more good news.”

  “Its genome,” he said. “I recognized a sequence of proteins I’d seen somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “The conehead’s extra chromosome.”

  “You’re kidding right?”

  “There are only so many nucleic acids. Sequences are bound to repeat. That’s the whole reason I came back to my lab instead of watching whatever’s going on down in the lake.”

  Mariah paced back and forth, gesticulating as she spoke.

  “The exposure to sound made them change form. Electricity caused them to multiply.”

  “What did you say they found in the pyramid?”

  Mariah froze and slowly turned to look at him.

  “The whole thing’s one big electrical generator.”

  “We can’t let them activate it,” Friden said.

  “That’s what they’re doing right now!”

  “We have to stop them.” Friden pushed himself up from the floor and stumbled toward the door. “Before it’s too late.”

  34

  RICHARDS

  If sound waves were the key to unlocking the pyramid, then it stood to reason that they would also be able to turn on the generator at its core. Richards was positively dying to find out what the ancient machine did.

  “Start at three hundred ninety-six hertz,” Rubley said.

  They’d rearranged the monitors so that everyone in the cafeteria could clearly see them from the tables, although most everyone stood or paced. The main screen showed an image of Rubley in his arc flash protective suit, which would shield him from both high voltage and heat. It seemed only fitting to Richards that Rubley looked like an astronaut in his full-body white suit and hood with the reflective face mask as he prepared to ramp up ancient technology potentially of alien origin. Richards had wanted to be inside the pyramid with the chief engineer, but Connor had reminded him of the reason he’d spent exorbitant amounts of money on experts and that he should let them do their jobs. It was his friend’s polite way of letting him know that he’d only get in the way.

  Each of the men wore a battery-powered headset inside the hood of his suit that allowed him to communicate directly with the other engineers inside the pyramid and Richards on the surface, where the audio channels had been routed to the monitors corresponding to their individual cameras.

  A high-pitched hum burst from the speakers, followed quickly by a crackling sound.

  The main screen filled with static, behind which there was a blue flash. The picture resolved just in time to show bolts of electricity shooting across the ground. Rubley hopped backward and stepped up onto a wooden stool with rubber-coated legs.

  “Did you see that?” Rubley shouted. “Magnificent!”

  The upper chamber looked completely different with the artificial light, which lent it the same clinical feel as the monitoring station they’d set up in the gallery with the statues, the view of which was on the leftmost screen. Two other engineers in matching arc flash suits recorded the surges in electromagnetic energy at several different points both inside and outside the pyramid. One of them spoke into the microphone inside his hood. Richards recognized the voice as belonging to Armand Scott, who supervised overnight operations. He was the taller of the two, the other being Paul Rayburn, an imposing physical specimen who had to be one of the nicest guys Richards had ever met.

  “We’re registering thirty-eight kilovolts at the toroid and thirty milliamps of current at the doorway.”

  “Toroid?” Richards asked.

  “The ring in the floor.”

  “Anywhere else?” Rubley asked.

  “Negligible readings at the other three layers of the door.”

  “They figured out how to use the sound waves to direct the electrical discharge from the toroid toward the desired wiring route, usi
ng it almost like a distributor. I don’t even know if I could do that.”

  Richards’s understanding of electrical systems was fairly rudimentary, but he had a good enough grasp to know that the donut-shaped top of the Tesla coil, the toroid, was releasing an absurd amount of energy in kilovolts that passed through the copper wiring in the floor and traveled some unknown distance through the stacked stones to deliver an electrical current to the mechanism that released the outermost of the four megaliths.

  “Magnitude?” Rubley asked.

  “Fifty hertz.”

  “This thing’s putting out the energy of an X-ray generator. Radiation readings?”

  “Four millisieverts.”

  “Magnetic flux density?”

  “Zero point five milliGauss.”

  “That’s the same as an overhead power line.”

  “The granite’s doing a phenomenal job of insulating it,” Rayburn said. “We’re not picking up any EMFs on the surface of the structure.”

  Richards looked around the cafeteria. All of the others had stopped what they were doing to watch. They all wore the same expression of wonder he felt on his own face. It reminded him of the classic footage of mission control in Houston during the moon landing.

  “Bump the frequency to six thirty-nine,” Rubley said.

  “On your mark.”

  Rubley glanced up at the camera, then down at the floor.

  “Now.”

  Another humming sound caused the image to vibrate. It quickly degenerated into static through which purplish-blue lightning bolts struck.

  “It’s starting to heat up down here,” Dreger said from the monitor on the right, which showed the cogs turning the magnet around the base of the copper-wrapped iron pillar. He thrust his face into the camera to demonstrate the beads on condensation on his mask.

  “I don’t like this,” Kelly said.

  “Negligible change in the subterranean water temperature,” Scott said.

  “I’m telling you, the temperature just jumped enough that I could feel it through my suit.”

  “We have to wait,” Jade said. “We can’t risk compromising the integrity of what could very well be a crime scene of some historical significance.”