Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  A clanging sound echoed through the garage, followed by a high-pitched whistle of wind. A cold breeze diffused into the room. The temperature dropped so rapidly that the goosebumps prickled along the backs of her arms and up her neck.

  “What was that?” Kelly asked.

  “What’s below us?” Roche asked.

  “Just solid rock as far as I know,” Anya said and looked at Friden.

  “Beats the hell out of me.”

  “If the collapse of the power plant destabilized the entire mountain—” Evans started.

  “Then this whole place could be about to come down,” Roche said.

  58

  ROCHE

  The ibuprofen barely took the edge off the pain. It felt like Roche had been stabbed repeatedly in the legs, which he supposed was exactly what had happened. The bandages were already saturated and he could feel the blood cooling as it trickled down his calves, but there was something wrong and he had to figure out what was going on before it was too late.

  He hobbled to the far side of the garage and found a metal hatch set into the floor. A tool reminiscent of a hooked crowbar hung from the wall above it. He stuck the bent end in the hole at one end and used it to raise the hatch, revealing a ladder leading down into the pitch-black depths.

  Cold air blew straight up into his face.

  “What’s down there?” he asked.

  “Once again,” Friden said. “No one consulted me on the blueprints, so I’m going to have to refer you to my previous answer of ‘How the hell should I know?’ ”

  “Very helpful.”

  “I live to serve.”

  Roche sat at the edge and dangled his legs above the ladder.

  “I’m going to need the flashlight.”

  “What you need to do is sit back down,” Jade said. “You’re in no condition to be on your feet.”

  “If this building falls down the mountain, I won’t be the only one who’s in no condition to be on his feet.”

  He took the flashlight from her and shined it down the shaft, which was easily as deep as the one they’d climbed from the pipe bridge.

  Every step brought with it a new level of pain. He could positively feel where the claws had passed through his tissue and muscles as though they were still there. His only option was to harness the pain and use it to sharpen his mental faculties. There were alarm bells going off in his head. The revelation that the chopper had been stationed within a two-hundred-mile radius was far too convenient and created more questions than it answered. Chief among them: Who was out there impersonating McMurdo Station?

  Roche had thought the sheer number of security cameras throughout the station was overkill, but he, of all people, should have recognized how precisely they’d been placed for surveillance of nearly every inch of the station. If someone had been monitoring their live feeds, they would have known exactly what was going on inside the station at all times and would have recognized that something was wrong when the cameras went dark. They could have activated whatever emergency protocol was in place and had an extraction team in the air within minutes, but instead they’d elected to let whatever was about to happen play out. He knew how paranoid that sounded, but the time frame and logistics worked. The biggest problem wasn’t that the pieces fit so much as the picture they formed when he put them together.

  There was nothing he could do about that now, though. The only thing that mattered was getting them all out of there alive.

  By the time he reached the bottom of the ladder, he was so cold his hands were shaking. He stepped down onto bare rock, knelt, and shined his light into a pair of narrow passageways, just like the ones on the opposite side of the garage. The cold air felt as though it were blowing at him from both directions at once. There was a grate over the tunnel to his left, which led back underneath the garage. He could see an industrial fan through the vent, its lopsided silver blades slowly turning at the behest of the frigid breeze. There was a faint hint of light at the end of the tunnel to his right. If he was correct, it led straight to the elevator shaft and served to help circulate—

  The vent lay facedown at the end of the tunnel.

  He shined his light at the ground. At the bloody palm prints smeared inside the aluminum ductwork.

  That was how the creature got into the station after climbing out of the elevator, which meant it would have known about the exterior access on the other end.

  Roche again spun and shined the light through the vent, toward the fan. It wasn’t just lopsided. One of the blades was bent outward, creating just enough room for something to squeeze—

  The beam reflected from a pair of eyes in the darkness behind the gap.

  “Oh, God.”

  Roche leaped to his feet and climbed the ladder as fast as he could.

  “It’s down here!” he shouted.

  He was halfway up when he saw the startled expressions on the faces of the others.

  Clack-clack-clack.

  “Close the hatch! Drag something heavy on top of it!”

  Clang.

  It hit the ladder behind him, the force from which sent vibrations through the metal.

  “Hurry!” Kelly screamed. “It’s right behind you!”

  Roche climbed toward the surface. The strain on his shoulders was ferocious, but he battled through it and climbed out onto the garage floor. Evans grabbed him by the jacket and dragged him away from the hole.

  Clang-clang-clang-clang.

  Jade nearly slammed the hatch down on his legs in her hurry to close it.

  “Come on!” she shouted at Friden and Anya, who dragged a tool cabinet across the garage. She threw herself onto the hatch. The creature struck the underside with enough force to lift it from the ground.

  Jade screamed and tried to use her body weight to keep it closed.

  Another blow from underneath and she rose several inches.

  Evans hurled himself onto the metal beside her.

  “Hurry up!” he shouted.

  Roche crawled to where Friden and Anya slid the cabinet across the concrete and helped them push it over the lip and onto the hatch beside Evans.

  Jarring impact from underneath rattled the tools in their drawers.

  “Do you guys hear that?” Kelly shouted.

  Another thud and the clamor of tools.

  And then Roche felt it more than heard it, a subtle, metered thrum passing through the ground, which could only mean one thing.

  Kelly ran to the door and threw it open.

  The wind raced past her, spreading snowflakes across the concrete.

  The thunder of chopper blades grew louder and louder until a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk came in low over the bright red arctic vehicles. Its rotor wash returned the accumulation from the ground to the air and blew it through the door.

  “Go!” Roche shouted.

  Kelly ran out into the blowing snow and waved her arms over her head. Friden pulled Anya to her feet and the two of them sprinted to catch up with her.

  The hatch rose again, toppling the cabinet onto its face and spilling wrenches all over the floor.

  Roche dragged himself up on top of it and shouted at Evans.

  “I don’t know how long I can hold this!”

  “Between the three of us—”

  “There’s nowhere for that chopper to land and it can’t fight that wind forever. You have to go. Now!”

  “You’d better be right behind us.”

  “Go!”

  Evans took Jade by the hand and pulled her to her feet.

  A collision from below lifted Roche from the ground.

  The lid slammed back down so hard it knocked him from on top of the cabinet.

  He pushed himself up from the ground and hobbled toward the open door, where Jade and Evans vanished into the swirling snow.

  The creature struck the hatch again and the cabinet slid to the side, disgorging half of its contents with a cascade of steel. Another thump and the lid swung open with the squeal of hinge
s.

  Roche limped out into the storm and shielded his face from the wind. The Black Hawk’s front wheels bounced from the roof of one of the vehicles as Evans climbed onto the tank-like tracks and boosted Jade toward where a man in black fatigues pulled her up through the open sliding door and into the helicopter.

  Evans glanced back at him. His eyes widened.

  Roche knew exactly what that meant.

  “Go!” he yelled and waved Evans onward, but even he couldn’t hear his voice over the roar of the blades.

  The soldier tugged Evans over the edge by the collar of his jacket.

  A gust of wind knocked the Black Hawk sideways before it again set a wheel down on the vehicle.

  The soldier turned away and for a moment Roche thought they were going to leave him. Another soldier attempted to hold Kelly back, but she fought through him and screamed at Roche.

  “Run!”

  When the first soldier turned around again, there was an assault rifle against his shoulder. He sighted down the long barrel through the scope.

  Straight at Roche.

  He dove for the tank-tracks and climbed up the side of the truck.

  A flash of discharge and a deafening report.

  Heat against his cheek.

  The projectile passed so close to his ear that it singed the cartilage.

  He dove through the open doorway and glanced back in time to see the creature slide through the snow on its back in a wash of blood.

  “Lift off!” the soldier shouted.

  The chopper bucked against the wind. Roche grabbed Evans’s leg while Kelly pulled him across the floor and away from the open door. He saw the creature clearly, sprawled—unmoving—on the ground, before the Black Hawk banked out over the canyon and the creature vanished into the blowing snow.

  59

  EVANS

  Wind-class icebreaker Aurora Borealis

  120 miles off the coast of

  Queen Maud Land, Antarctica

  The Aurora Borealis was a Wind-class icebreaker capable of carving through the sheet ice like a chainsaw through timber. In its previous incarnation it had been known as the USCGC Westwind and had launched under the Stars and Stripes in 1943. According to the official story, it had been decommissioned and scrapped more than thirty years ago, which, as Evans could attest, was about the furthest thing from the truth.

  He and the others had been whisked out across the sea to where the Aurora Borealis sat frozen in the ice, the Drygalski Mountains a memory behind them. The chopper had set down on a narrow landing pad, where a team of medics had been waiting to hustle them into a makeshift medical ward belowdecks.

  Everything that had happened since was a blur, from the cleaning, suturing, and rebandaging of their wounds to the blood tests, mouth swabs, and the monitoring of every vital function. He’d felt like a pincushion by the time he was pushed out of the partitioned exam room in a wheelchair and down the corridor to where the others were seated at a long table topped with steaming trays of bacon, sausage, and eggs. A man he’d never seen before poured them coffee from a carafe. He wore the same black fatigues as everyone else on the ship.

  Evans tried to read the situation by the expressions on the faces of the others, but they appeared every bit as confused as he was.

  “That will be all,” a deep voice said from behind him. “Thank you.”

  The medic who’d pushed Evans down the hallway and the man with the coffee exited without a word and closed the door behind them.

  A man in a custom-tailored suit wheeled Roche to the table and parked him beside Evans, who started to ask what was going on, but Roche silenced him with a look and a quick shake of his head.

  The man in the suit walked around to the head of the table and stood facing away from them, his hands clasped behind his back. Snowflakes tapped against the window in front of him, beyond which the seamless ice stretched from one horizon to the next. When he finally turned around, he offered them a halfhearted smile, took off his jacket, and draped it over the back of the chair.

  “Please,” he said, and gestured toward the untouched food on the table. “You must be starving.”

  “We just watched everyone in that station get killed in about the most horrific manner possible,” Jade said. “You’ll have to forgive us for not being the most gracious guests.”

  “We’re lucky to be alive,” Kelly said.

  “And while we appreciate everything you’ve done for us,” Evans said, “I think we’re all more than a little curious about what the hell we’re doing here.”

  “Where are my manners? Of course, of course.” He had a politician’s smile, blinding white and practiced. The kind that was meant to set people at ease, but tended to have the opposite effect. His dark hair was slicked back, and his eyes were so blue they seemed to stand apart from his face. His suit must have cost more than Evans made in a year. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is—”

  “Cameron Barnett,” Roche said. “You’re with the NSA.”

  “Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Roche, but I’m afraid your information is outdated. I was with the NSA. Now I represent our nation’s more, shall we say . . . esoteric . . . interests in a somewhat less official capacity.”

  “Did Richards know you were monitoring his security camera feeds?” Roche asked.

  Barnett smirked.

  “Who do you think funds this organization?”

  “And what organization is that?”

  “You mean Mr. Richards didn’t tell you?”

  “I’m starting to think there are a lot of things good old Hollis didn’t tell us,” Evans said.

  “The rest will come in time, but for now, all you really need know is that I represent an interagency task force established to investigate seemingly inexplicable phenomena with potential global ramifications.”

  “Try saying that five times fast.”

  “Which is why we use a code name.” Barnett sat down at the head of the table, leaned forward onto his elbows, and tented his fingers under his chin. “Welcome to Unit Fifty-one.”

  EPILOGUE

  Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

  —RICHARD DAWKINS

  Antarctic Research, Experimentation &

  Analysis Station 51

  September 23—24 hours later

  The men moved like ghosts through the deserted corridors, the lights mounted underneath the barrels of the M16 assault rifles seated against their shoulders slashing through the darkness. They wore full-body Level A Hazmat suits with opaque visors that concealed their faces. The yellow Tychem fabric was virtually impervious to every kind of chemical and biological contaminant, which seemed excessive to Barnett, but he didn’t want to take any chances, especially when it came to what they’d found in the station.

  The carnage had been even worse than the survivors had described. Fortunately, it wasn’t his job to collect and examine the bodies—what was left of them, anyway—but he wasn’t particularly enjoying his job at the moment, either. He’d just received word that his team had found the remains of his great-grandfather, Sergeant Jack Barnett, inside the pyramid. He’d been officially listed as Missing, Presumed Dead since he and his entire elite expeditionary squad vanished into the Antarctic hinterland so many years ago.

  Barnett’s grandfather, John, had been just a child at the time, but old enough to understand that as long as there wasn’t a body, there was still hope. He’d spent his entire life in the service of his country, if for no other reason than to gain access to classified information and launch his own investigation into his father’s disappearance. Barnett and his father, Robert, had followed in his footsteps, only their paths had taken them into intelligence, where they’d discovered secrets the world as a whole was unprepared to handle, secrets that led them to the doorstep of Hollis Richards a
nd the eventual union that had brought Barnett to this precise moment in time.

  Barnett dreaded the prospect of telling his grandfather that they’d found his missing father’s body, even more so because he had no choice but to lie to him and tell him it had been discovered in the frozen wreckage of the squad’s B-24D Liberator airplane. As he’d said a thousand times, there were truths that people simply didn’t need to know, for their own protection.

  Such was the case with everything that had happened inside this station. Richards’s staff of engineers and scientists had been selected for more than their considerable expertise; they’d been chosen because they’d left few people behind who would notice if they didn’t ever return. Their deaths would be officially reported, but there wouldn’t be any grieving families calling for a formal inquiry into the circumstances of their demise. They’d understood as much when they signed on, even if they hadn’t known exactly what awaited them in the remote Antarctic installation.

  Barnett regretted delaying the extraction of the survivors as long as he had. The wait had cost several men their lives, including Richards and Connor, but when Richards had contacted him using the pre-established McMurdo Protocol, which started an eight-hour countdown to extraction, they’d only just lost video from the security feed. It had been Barnett’s call to wait for the power to be restored, even if it meant the deaths of those who’d been inside the pyramid during its activation.

  Of course, not even he could have predicted the events that followed.

  His men advanced through the subterranean hallway and into Dr. Fleming’s lab at the end. He was suddenly grateful for the heavy SCBA tanks on his back, which flooded his hood with oxygen so he wouldn’t have to breathe what must have been an ungodly stench. The walls and floors were decorated with dried blood, especially inside the clean room, where Dr. Evans and Mr. Roche had reportedly killed Mr. Rayburn—who’d been officially reclassified as Subject B—with a drill, although his body was nowhere to be seen.