Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  It was now or never.

  The creature tensed to attack.

  Evans pulled the trigger.

  It suddenly turned around.

  Evans caught a flash of reflected light from its eyes as he grabbed the back of its head with one hand and drove the drill bit into the side of its throat with the other.

  Retracted it.

  Drove it in again.

  The second stab hit the carotid and sprayed him across his chest, up his shoulder, and spattered the cabinets behind him.

  The creature hit him squarely in the gut, hard enough to drop him to his knees. The drill tore sideways through its neck. Evans found himself face-to-face with the creature, their eyes mere inches apart. Within them he saw unfathomable darkness and sentience of such malevolence that it chilled him to his core.

  The creature smiled at the recognition. Blood burbled past its lips and dribbled down its chin.

  Roche dove onto it from behind and pinned it to the ground.

  Evans drew back his legs and watched the creature thrash in an effort to scurry out from beneath Roche while its blood continued to pulse from its neck.

  Roche struggled to hold it down until its movements slowed and its muscles went slack. It clawed at the floor with its left hand. The expression on its face softened. The fire left its eyes.

  Roche rolled off of the creature and onto his rear end.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  Evans nudged the body with his foot.

  It didn’t even try to move.

  “It’s over,” he said and buried his head in his hands.

  51

  ANYA

  Anya had never felt such overwhelming relief in her life. She’d thought for sure that this was where she would die. They hadn’t even found a way out of the cavern when they smelled butane and heard the commotion inside the clean room. The shouting had abruptly ceased and she’d feared Evans and Roche were gone. She’d been so excited when they emerged from the clean room that she ran to them and hugged them both.

  That was when she saw it, lying facedown on the floor in a pool of blood. The flashlight had been left shining across the floor in such a way that it spotlighted a face that only vaguely resembled that of Paul Rayburn. For all intents and purposes, he had become something alien, and whether or not that transformation was complete would forever remain a mystery.

  She hadn’t known him well, but he’d been nice to her when she first arrived and had helped her set up a camera to record her work in the clean room. He’d even been so curious that he’d assisted her with taking core samples from the bones and preparing slides for analysis. He hadn’t deserved what happened to him any more than he deserved what they were about to do to him. She understood Jade’s rationale, but it felt like a posthumous insult inflicted upon a man who’d already endured too much.

  The others had lifted him onto the stainless-steel table and rolled him onto his chest so that Jade could examine his spinal cord. She’d retracted the skin from his neck and severed the nuchal ligament to expose the spinous processes. The organisms formed a brownish aggregate that looked almost like a muscle, only with fibrous appendages that entered through the foramen between vertebral bodies, where they fused with the spinal nerves. Amber-colored spinal fluid leaked from punctures in the thecal sac where the filamentous strands passed through and merged with the spinal cord.

  “It went straight for the central nervous system,” Jade said. “Look at the way it integrated with the nerve fibers.”

  “So it’s using the host’s nerve tracts to conduct its own electrical commands,” Evans said.

  “That’s my working theory.”

  “Which seems reasonable, but we’re missing the key component.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “The source of those commands,” Anya answered for him. “Where’s its brain?”

  Jade stepped back and held up her gloved hands. She looked from Anya to Evans before settling upon Roche, who sat across the room, perched on a tall stool, silently surveying the scene.

  “Hand me that cranial saw, would you?” Jade said.

  “We should wait,” Anya said. “Our focus needs to be on getting out of here, not—”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  Anya had to look away. Of course she did, but after everything they’d just been through, all she wanted to do now was curl up in a nice warm bed and sleep until the world made sense again.

  “And those retractors, too,” Jade said. “I’m going to need someone to provide manual traction on the scalp.”

  “I can’t watch this,” Anya said, and left before she changed her mind.

  She heard the buzz of a saw behind her and hurried into the hall, where she followed the sound of voices into Friden’s lab. He had both of the Bunsen burners under his hood set on low, which provided a faint bluish glow. Kelly leaned over one, rubbing her hands together for warmth.

  “I’m telling you,” Friden said. “We’re missing something.”

  He paced a trail through the cluttered room, chewing on the corner of his lip.

  “Missing what?” Anya asked.

  “Think about it. There were four men down there in the pyramid, but only one of them was actually inside the chamber when they activated it. Now we know Dreger’s body is down there at the bottom of the elevator shaft, and we’ve seen what happened to Scott and Rayburn, but what about Rubley?”

  “You heard them on the radio. It didn’t sound like any of them thought he was going to make it.”

  “So what then? His body became some kind of infected vessel that spread the organism to the others?”

  “Sounds viable to me.”

  “Then where’s Rubley’s body? I mean, if it was nothing more than a vector, then surely it would have still been in the elevator when it reached the surface. Roche would have seen it.”

  “He said he didn’t get a good look at the bodies. Maybe Rubley’s was one of them.”

  “He said he saw two bodies, and we had two men attack us. Are you saying that’s just coincidence?”

  “What are you suggesting? That his body was dumped out of the elevator before it got to the top?”

  “Maybe he climbed out on his own,” Kelly said.

  The firelight cast the shadows of her tapping fingers onto the wall of the hood. They were the first words she’d spoken since Anya entered the room and sounded like they’d come from far away, as though Kelly were somehow vanishing inside herself.

  Friden kicked an empty can of Red Bull. It hit the wall with a clang and skittered into the corner.

  Anya put her hand on Kelly’s shoulder.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  Kelly cut sideways through the flame with her fingers.

  “Not until I’m thousands of miles away from this horrible place.”

  “We just have to wait a little longer, until they’re able to get a helicopter up here from McMurdo.”

  “That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

  “You don’t believe them?”

  “After everything I’ve seen today, I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  Anya gave her a squeeze and walked around Friden’s desk toward his chair, which looked plush enough to swallow her whole. She had no doubt that she could fall asleep in a matter of—

  She stepped on something that made a metallic scraping sound and nearly rolled her ankle. It was the lid from the poor mouse’s cage, which sat on the shelf to her right. There was a mess of cedar chips and bedding material, but she didn’t see Speedy.

  “What did you do with him?” she asked.

  “With who?” Friden said.

  “With Speedy. Who else?”

  “Nothing. He’s still in there.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course, he is. Where else would he be?”

  Friden nudged her aside and looked down into the cage.

  “This isn’t funny.” He ran his finge
rs through the substrate, the dust from which adhered to the sticky glass above the nest in the corner. “He was here. I’m telling you, he was right here.”

  “I suppose he must have climbed out on his own, too,” Kelly said.

  Anya stifled a chill.

  “Jesus,” she whispered, and ran back toward her lab and the clean room, where the others had made an oval-shaped incision in the creature’s cranium and removed the center like a lid to expose the brain.

  “Speedy’s gone!” she said.

  “What do you mean, gone?” Roche asked. He hopped down from his stool and looked her squarely in the eyes.

  “Friden’s mouse. The one he watched die. It’s gone.”

  “Then it must not have been as dead as he thought,” Jade said.

  “Speaking of gone,” Evans said. “Has anyone seen Richards?”

  52

  RICHARDS

  Richards had lost all sense of direction and had no idea where he was. Nor did he really care, because if he was right about where he was going, he likely wouldn’t be coming back anyway, and he was at peace with that decision. He felt the pull of destiny, as though every decision he had made in his entire life had brought him to this singular moment in time, a moment he’d known would come to pass since he was a child. Even now, he didn’t question that all-pervasive vision as he shined the flashlight through the narrow crevice in an attempt to follow the mouse, which he believed to be his own spirit animal in a way, for it had come to him and him alone.

  He’d been standing outside the door to the clean room, staring at the dead body of yet another man he’d failed to protect, when he heard a scratching sound from somewhere in the darkness to his right. Dr. Liang had been so lost in thought that he didn’t think she even realized she’d handed him her light, which he’d directed toward the cavern wall, eliciting a squeak and a flurry of motion across the ground.

  He had felt as though he were moving through a dream as he approached the spot where he’d seen the movement and the dark stain on the bare rock. It was smeared, as though painted by a brush that was barely damp, and yet there was no mistaking what it was.

  The intermittent trail led straight back to the open door of the clean room, through which light and the subdued sound of voices spilled into the cavern. He’d detected more motion from the corner of his eye and followed it deeper into the cavern, where he’d seen it again, only this time more clearly. The mouse had been hunched on the ground, licking the blood from its little front paws. It caught him looking and rose to its hind legs. A flash of reflected light from its eyes and it was gone.

  Richards was by no means an expert on mice, but he knew with complete certainty that Dr. Friden’s was the only mouse on the entire continent. There’d been more paperwork involved with bringing the microbiologist’s pet than there had been for Dr. Friden and all of his equipment. And he certainly didn’t need to be a genius to know that whatever that mouse might have been, it most assuredly wasn’t dead, despite Dr. Friden’s opinions on the matter. Of course, Mr. Roche had said the same thing about the men he’d seen in the elevator, and there was no way that either Mr. Scott or Mr. Rayburn could have been described as such, which meant that either two of the most intelligent men in their respective fields lacked the necessary observational skills to qualify states as intrinsically disparate as life and death, or somehow the subjects had been both dead then and alive now, a revelation that opened all sorts of possibilities when considered alongside the theory that Dr. Friden’s archaea could conduct impulses through a network resembling brain matter.

  There were several openings in the far back corner of the cavern, opposite where Jade and the others had run blindly into an earthen cul-de-sac. The trail of blood led to the wall, over the lip of a ledge, and into a dark tunnel, from the depths of which he heard the faint scratching of claws. He climbed inside and crawled maybe a dozen feet before the ceiling rose enough for him to stand. His light revealed walls etched with the same kind of petroglyphs as those inside the submerged temple. He recognized men and anthropomorphic creatures, animals and beings with conical skulls. What initially looked like stylized suns shined down upon them, although based on the shape and sheer quantity that filled the sky above the pyramids and figures, he realized they weren’t suns at all, but rather flying vessels that proved he’d been right all along.

  The tunnel narrowed to the point that he feared he might get stuck, before opening into another domed cavern. The temperature dropped a good twenty degrees as he advanced. He felt the movement of freezing air coming from the mouth of another tunnel to his left, inside of which his light shimmered from walls coated with ice.

  The mouse stood on its hind legs in the center of the chamber, where several more trails of blood converged. One entered from Richards’s right, where at the farthest reaches of his beam he could see a silver duct with a hole punched through its side, which must have served as a conduit between the station and the exhaust vents. His team had run the ducts through as many of the natural recesses as they could, and only drilled when absolutely necessary so as not to compromise the structural integrity of the mountain, which, he now understood, had allowed what lurked ahead of him unlimited access to the entire station.

  Speedy dropped to all fours and darted into the orifice directly across from Richards, who focused on the passage so as not to have to contemplate the fact that the blood on the ground was damp enough to ice over.

  The moment he entered the tunnel, he knew. He positively knew. The smell was so vile that he had to bury his mouth and nose into the crook of his elbow. The designs on the walls passed in his peripheral vision, but he didn’t dare turn to examine them for fear of taking his eyes off the flashlight beam, at the far end of which the mouse alternately appeared from and then disappeared back into the darkness.

  His footsteps echoed uncomfortably in the confines. The cold faded behind him. A distant sound, like an amalgam of a click and a cough, reverberated from ahead of him.

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  Richards froze.

  Millions of years of inherited instincts cried out for him to turn and run, but the only voice he heard in his head was his father’s when he told his old man what he’d seen in the sky above their farm. The cruel laughter had metamorphosed into the verbal abuse that had always heralded the physical pain to come. It was that voice that had motivated him to succeed in everything he did, if only out of spite, and that voice that gave him the strength to press on.

  He lightened his tread and advanced slowly, cautiously. He heard that same husky, almost growling sound, but this time he didn’t let it faze him.

  The stench intensified until it made his eyes water. You couldn’t grow up in rural Kansas without going to a slaughterhouse, which was exactly what this cavern smelled like.

  Speedy stood on his hind legs in the mouth of the tunnel, beyond which was a larger space of indeterminate size.

  Richards’s heavy breathing and footsteps echoed from inside of it, where the awful smell became less an olfactory phenomenon than a physical one.

  The mouse waited until he was nearly right on top of it before turning tail and scampering into the depths.

  Richards’s heart beat so hard and fast he feared he might have a heart attack right then and there, so close to realizing his lifelong dream.

  He forced himself onward. Damn the consequences. If after all these years his body chose the moment of his greatest triumph to betray him, so be it. He wasn’t leaving without seeing what he’d traveled so far and invested so much to find.

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  The sound echoed from everywhere at once, making its origin impossible to divine.

  He advanced into the darkness, shining his light from one side of the cavern to the other. The walls and ground glistened with blood, which made the tread of his boots sticky. Flowstone columns divided the chamber. He weaved through them, only peripherally aware of the designs carved into them, most of which were obscured by
the accumulation of centuries of accreted minerals.

  Movement ahead.

  Richards shined his light through the maze of pillars, but couldn’t see anything beyond open space and darkness.

  Uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uh.

  The noise came from directly ahead of him.

  Richards took a deep breath. Blew it out slowly. Focused his resolve.

  He strode out into the open and shined the flashlight onto his destiny.

  53

  KELLY

  Their voices echoed throughout the passages.

  “Richards!”

  “Hollis!”

  Kelly had spent a considerable amount of time in her youth spelunking in caves a lot like this one along the Oregon coast. She’d grown up in the same town where the movie Goonies was set and filmed and often drew pirate maps that would lead her to caves where she searched for the treasure of One-Eyed Willie. It was a secret she never shared with anyone as she knew how pathetic it made her sound, but it was vastly preferable to sitting at home alone or being forced to play with other kids, all of whom thought she was weird. There was even one kid who convinced her entire fifth grade class that her hand twitched because she was possessed by the devil. It was because of people like him that she prayed she would find treasure enough to move her mother and her far away from that place.

  It was on one such adventure that she spotted a sea lion down by the shore. It dragged itself by one flipper across the sand and rocks and vanished into a crevice at the base of the cliff upon which she stood. By the time she picked her way through the forest and down the escarpment, the tide had risen up the beach and nearly to a cave she never would have seen had she not watched the animal drag itself inside.

  She knew better than to even attempt to enter a coastal cave when the tide was coming in. There was no way of knowing how high the water would rise until you were drowning in it. And yet that day she had thrown caution to the wind, splashed through the tide pools, and dropped to her hands and knees. To this day, she still remembered with perfect clarity cocking her head and trying to see up a slope of talus into the shadows at the top. It had been so dark in there, and yet she’d kept crawling, a part of her clinging to the hope that the animal had been sent by some greater power to lead her to the treasure that would solve all of her problems, unlike the electrotherapy the doctors claimed would do just that.