Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  He could tell Roche was thinking the exact same thing. He leaned against the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, observing the others with almost clinical detachment. The man was an enigma. Evans’s first impression had been that something wasn’t quite right about him, or maybe he was just a prick, but the way he’d run toward danger instead of away from it betrayed a chink in his armor-like façade. Underneath was a man seemingly at odds with what one would expect from someone who chased flying saucers, a man with whom he now shared an unspoken bond formed by the mystery surrounding the disappearance and deaths of the engineers.

  The kid with the colored streaks in her hair was never far from Roche’s side, a fact for which Evans was more than a little grateful. Had Kelly not come back for them and opened that door when she did, he and Roche would have been launched out over the canyon.

  Jade was up in everybody’s business, as she always seemed to be arguing for no other reason than she could. She demanded to know what Richards was doing about their situation, shy of dialing through the bandwidths and pleading into the static, which placed her at odds with Connor, who didn’t take kindly to any sort of assault on his employer. The truth was Richards was taking the catastrophe the hardest. He looked like it was all he could do to battle through the onset of physical shock.

  “I got it!” Allen Graves said. He pumped his fist and swung in a circle in his chair.

  The computer specialist couldn’t have been more than twenty years old and looked like Shaggy, had Scooby-doo’s best friend decided to dye his hair purple. He had a bar code tattooed on the back of his neck and reminded Evans of the kind of guy who hung out in the plush chairs at a hipster coffee shop talking about the screenplay he was going to write.

  The monitors around him lit up and immediately divided into quadrants, each of which featured the view from a different security camera. While Evans had noticed cameras around the station, he never would have guessed there were so many.

  “I diverted power from the emergency lighting in the garage—why you would need it when you can simply open the doors is beyond me—to the security system, which means I can access the stored data from the last twenty-four hours. Minus the last hour or whatever that the system was offline.”

  “Is there a camera in the elevator?” Roche asked.

  “He wants to know if there’s a camera in the elevator. Are you kidding? You can hardly take a dump around here without an audience.”

  Evans hopped down from the table and positioned himself so that he could see all of the monitors clearly.

  “Bring it up,” he said.

  “You know a ‘please’ would go a long way—”

  “Mr. Roche said there were two bodies in the elevator,” Richards interrupted. “That means two men are still missing and could be in desperate need of our help.”

  Graves stared at him for a long moment, then turned and without another word brought up the elevator camera and isolated it on the center monitor. The screen filled with seamless blackness marred by the occasional ripple of static. Horizontal bands wriggled up and down as he rewound the feed, searching for the most recent image. The time stamp in the corner scrolled back past an hour, then ninety minutes. An image of the control console appeared, and beyond it, the bare metal floor and the open grate.

  “There has to be more,” Evans said. “Let it run.”

  Several seconds passed uneventfully until there was a flash of light and the feed abruptly terminated.

  “Whatever happened down there knocked out the camera,” Graves said. “What did you guys do, set off an EMP?”

  “That’s exactly what we did,” Kelly said.

  Graves glanced at her.

  “I like your hair.”

  “I’d like you to do your job,” Roche said.

  Evans smirked.

  “Are there any other cameras down there?” Jade asked.

  “Yeah, but they’re going to show the exact same thing. Well, not the exact same thing. What I mean is that none of them will show you anything beyond the ninety-three-minute mark.”

  “Anything with a view of the lake?” Evans asked.

  “We’ve got a camera on the pier.”

  “Show me.”

  Graves flipped through the cameras until he found the one he wanted and blew it up on the monitor in front of him.

  “I’ll run it back another thirty seconds or so.”

  From the vantage point of the camera, Evans could see straight down the dock to where the submersible was moored. Everything appeared in shades of blue. The lake stretched out beyond it into the distance, where he could barely make out the tip of the pyramid breaking the surface.

  “The cameras down there are infrared, so you won’t get the color scale of the terrestrial cameras, but I talked the boss here into springing for the thermal models that increase the contrast based on temperature gradients. See how the water looks almost black? That’s because it’s so freaking cold. A person would show up in shades of orange and—”

  A golden light erupted from the water a heartbeat before the camera went dark.

  “Whoa,” Graves said.

  “Back it up,” Jade said.

  “Can you pause the footage right before it goes dark?” Evans asked.

  Graves scrolled back through the recording and played it one frame at a time.

  “This thing records at thirty frames per second,” Graves said, “which means that each of these images represents roughly thirty-three milliseconds.”

  The outline of the pyramid took form beneath the water first, as though it were limned with an ethereal purple light. It brightened from orange to red to a golden hue that intensified as it neared the point until it shot straight up into the air, not as a solid beam, but as twin spirals that formed a helix. The image went black a frame later.

  Evans’s pulse rushed in his ears.

  “What in the name of God was that?” he said.

  “No wonder everything’s fried,” Graves said. “A discharge of that magnitude? We’re lucky anything up here still works at all.”

  “The men were inside it when that happened,” Jade said. “What did it do to them?”

  “I can’t tell you what it did to them,” Friden said from the doorway. “But I think I figured out what it was supposed to do.”

  39

  ANYA

  “You’re out of your mind,” Connor said.

  “Look,” Friden said. “I’m only telling you what I can prove. Any inference is your own.”

  “You’re telling me that the pyramid was designed to mutate people.”

  “I’m telling you that I witnessed the application of sound and electricity to cause physical changes in an unclassified species of archaea of potentially extraterrestrial origin.”

  “Which is a far cry from a human being.”

  “Let him speak,” Richards said. He looked like he’d aged a decade in the last few hours, diminishing him before their very eyes.

  “Thank you,” Friden said.

  “Tell us again about the mouse,” Roche said.

  “There’s nothing more to say. The mutated archaea somehow got into Speedy’s cage, penetrated his skin, and messed with his nervous system, which caused him to nearly fold in half.”

  Jade looked up from Friden’s iPad.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “See? She gets it. I’m apparently not the only one here with half a brain.”

  “You’re giving yourself too much credit,” Kelly said.

  “That hurt.”

  “May I?” Anya asked.

  Jade handed her the iPad. Anya immediately recognized the genome that had been sequenced from the remains she’d unearthed in Arkaim, right down to the extra chromosome. Four of the chromosomes were highlighted, including the fifth, eighth, and eleventh, which, as she already knew, featured sections that had been inverted, if not how. For the sequences to have been flipped, there had to have been some form of direct damage
to the DNA that could have been caused by anything from radiation to the lytic action of an enzyme, some process by which the helix was severed and reassembled backward, completely altering the physical expression of the gene.

  It was the extra twenty-fourth chromosome—the one she had taken to calling the Delta Gene after the mathematical symbol for change—that most intrigued her, not just because of what it represented, but because of its similarity to the genome plotted beside it, labeled Unclassified Archaea ssp. They were nearly identical. The implications were mindboggling.

  “It incorporated its DNA into that of the host,” she said.

  “And in the process altered three other chromosomes in ways we can’t even speculate.”

  Anya thought about Headhunter’s Hall back at the Brandt Institute in Chicago. Nearly all of the specimens had been found near ancient sites in the vicinity of pyramids, ziggurats, and other sites sacred to once-prospering civilizations. The notion that primitive people like the Egyptians, Inca, and Sumerians had such an intimate understanding of technology and physiology was as hard to swallow as the idea that they could have accidentally built a machine capable of triggering a form of spontaneous evolution. But if they hadn’t built them, then who had?

  Roche stepped forward and glanced at the iPad as he spoke.

  “Let’s take this at face value and assume that everything is as you claim.”

  “Which it is,” Friden said.

  “What would the exposure to the combination of sound and electricity have done to the men inside?”

  “Theoretically? Nothing. Outside of electrocution, anyway.”

  “What he means to say,” Jade said, “is that without this species of bacteria—”

  “Archaea.”

  “Fine. Without this species of archaea to serve as a catalyst, nothing could have happened to them beyond the charge we witnessed pass through Rubley.”

  “What about the steam?” Anya asked.

  “Of course,” Friden said. “Archaea are able to survive temperature extremes that would kill other life-forms. If they could thrive in that lake, I have no doubt they could survive its sudden heating and vaporization.”

  “So these microbes were inside the pyramid—in the air with them—when these conditions aligned,” Jade said.

  “None of this changes the fact that our men are dead,” Connor said.

  “Missing,” Richards said.

  “You didn’t see that hole,” Roche said. “It almost looked like someone tore a hole through the cage. And there was so much blood . . .”

  “Even if they did—for whatever asinine reason—punch a hole through the elevator,” Connor said, “there’s only one way to go from there, and that’s down. No one can survive a fall like that.”

  “What about the rigging?”

  “You ever try to grab a steel bar when you’re flying past it at ten miles an hour? It would practically tear your arm off. Besides, what are we actually considering here? That these microscopic bugs could cause some sort of physical transformation?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” Friden said.

  “And it ended up killing that stupid mouse of yours. What makes you think the same thing wouldn’t happen to our guys? There’s the cause of all your blood, Mr. NSA.”

  Anya glanced at Roche in time to see a flicker of anger in his eyes.

  “There’s one way to know for sure,” Graves said. From the tone of his voice, Anya knew exactly what he meant.

  “Can you get video from the bottom of the shaft, Mr. Graves?” Richards asked.

  “I can try. If you’re positive that’s what you want.”

  “The safety of these men is my responsibility. The burden of that failure is mine to bear.”

  Graves licked his lips, then turned to face the monitors. One of the cameras pointed directly down at the elevator platform from where it was mounted to the cage above and to the side of the opening. A crack ran diagonally across the image, distorting it almost like a poorly aligned fold in a magazine. Chunks of ice the size of boulders had fallen down the shaft and completely sealed it off, bending and tearing the metal frame in the process. The platform itself was cracked and littered with rocks and debris.

  “I don’t see anything,” Connor said. “Can you zoom in?”

  “I can’t zoom, but I can magnify the image. That will ruin the resolution, though.”

  “Please try, Mr. Graves,” Richards said.

  Anya’s heart broke for the old man, who reminded her of her grandfather in a way.

  Graves magnified the central portion of the picture, giving it a pixilated appearance. The cracks in the concrete and the edges of the boulders became indistinct, but the blood that leaked out from beneath them was still just enough warmer than the platform to show up as a lighter shade of blue. As was the mangled hand jutting from a crevice between stones, its ring and pinkie fingers shorter than the others.

  A moan from behind her.

  Anya turned and saw the anguish on Mariah’s face before she collapsed in the doorway, sobbing, and buried her face in her hands.

  “Mariah . . .” Richards rose and made his way to her side. He knelt and placed his hand on her back. “I can’t tell you how sorry I—”

  She looked up at him through wild, tear-soaked eyes.

  “Sorry? You’re sorry? How long do you think it takes to fall two miles, especially when the whole way down you know you’re going to die?”

  “Mariah, please . . .”

  He reached for her, but she slapped his hand away.

  “He told you to wait. We all told you! But you didn’t listen, did you? You went right ahead with it anyway. You were so hell-bent on proving aliens built this horrible machine that you never bothered to consider what they designed it to do. Didn’t you spare a thought for what would happen to the men who were inside the pyramid when they turned it on? Well, I’ll tell you what happened. Four men are dead. My Ron is dead. And it’s all your fault. So tell me, huh? Was it worth it?”

  Mariah propelled herself to her feet and was out the door before Richards could even try to stop her.

  Anya looked away. She couldn’t bear to see the pain on his face. Granted, she’d never understood his obsession and considered his correlation of aliens and coneheads to be a product of his imagination, but there was a part of her that had been rooting for him to be right. His belief was innocent, almost childlike in a way. He was an old man who only wanted to prove that we weren’t alone in the universe, and yet four men with whom he’d lived in close quarters and shared every aspect of his life for nearly a year had paid the ultimate price.

  A voice materialized from beneath the static coming from the radio.

  Richards dove for it and pressed the button on the microphone.

  “This is Antarctic Research Station Fifty-one. Do you copy?”

  “Antarctic Research . . . Fifty-one . . . This . . . Barnett. . . state . . . nature . . . your emergency.”

  The voice was barely audible and cut in and out.

  “We’ve had an accident, McMurdo. Four men are missing and presumed dead. Do you copy?”

  “. . . repeat . . . Station Fifty-one . . .”

  “We’ve had an accident, McMurdo!” Richards shouted into the microphone. “Can you hear me? McMurdo?”

  Anya caught movement from the corner of her eye.

  She looked at the top left quadrant of the monitor on the right, but there was no sign of what she might have seen. She recognized the laundry room, the back wall of which was dominated by the standby generator.

  “. . . breaking up . . . I repeat . . . nature . . . emergency. . .”

  “I pray you can hear me, McMurdo. This is Antarctic Research Station Fifty-one. We’ve had an accident!”

  There it was again. This time she saw it. The picture was small and the source of the movement indistinct, but it almost looked like a shadow passed across the floor. There was a design on the generator. A long black arc, like an inverted Nike swoosh.
She was certain it hadn’t been there a few seconds ago.

  “Hey.” She pointed at the monitor as a silhouette streaked across the screen in a blur. “Did you guys see—?”

  The power died with a resounding thud.

  The monitors went black and the emergency lights died.

  “McMurdo?” Richards shouted. “McMurdo? Do you copy?”

  His voice echoed throughout the dark station.

  BOOK III

  Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

  —CARL SAGAN

  40

  MARIAH

  September 22

  It had to be easily twenty below, but Mariah didn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything. She’d passed into a strange realm of numbness, where her thoughts were sluggish and her body seemed incapable of responding to even the simplest of commands.

  Mariah had only known Ron Dreger for a few months, but they’d clicked immediately. Never in her life would she have thought she would fall for the kind of guy who had oil permanently trapped in his fingerprints and always smelled of grease, and yet here she was, wishing she’d made more of what little time they’d been given. They’d never even gotten around to talking about the future. Honestly, they’d been so comfortable with each other that they’d never even felt the need to discuss the present.

  She pulled up her hood and wrapped her arms around her chest. The snow blew straight into her face, forcing her to duck her head into the wind as she walked away from the garage.

  She’d said some horrible things to Richards, who she knew would have cut off his own arm to save Dreger, but there was no taking them back now. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered anymore.

  Visibility couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet, which was more than enough to see what remained of the elevator shaft. The wreckage of the building in the valley below was lost to the storm. It barely seemed possible that this ragged cliff had ever been stable enough to support a building that large. The glacier had calved away from the edge, leaving behind bent and broken rails that bent away from the exposed shaft, which they’d sunk straight down the sheer face of the mountain in hopes that it would provide an added element of stability, for all the good it had done.