Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  Pike could only stare in confusion.

  “Are you guys seeing this?” he whispered for the benefit of those watching the feed.

  There had to be at least thirty of them down here, hidden away in a dank corner of the engine room. Why had all of their corpses congregated here? There was no way they would have been hauled back here by scavengers, nor were the currents such that they could have all floated to this one point. They must have already been down here when the ship foundered, but why? The logic was contrary to established human behavior patterns. If the crew had seen their fate coming in that towering wall of water, the last thing they would have done was herd into most secluded corner of the lowest level from which there was no means of escape. None of them would have strayed far from the lifeboats, and the captain would have ensured they were all well versed with the evacuation procedures. The fact that Captain Ryan Cartwright hadn’t sent out an SOS spoke volumes about how swiftly death had descended upon the Mayr. Thus far, Pike’s exploration had generated more questions than answers. He only hoped that they’d have the explanation they needed when it came time to face the world, the mourning relatives of these poor souls, and the inevitable lawsuits.

  Pike panned his camera slowly across the carnage for documentation’s sake. He imagined the team on the other research vessel steaming across the ocean clustered around their monitors, watching in abject horror as he spotlighted every face like waxen moons against the pitch black. No longer did he pay conscious attention to them, but instead let the camera be his eyes while he emotionally distanced himself.

  “Pike,” Brazelton’s voice, marred by static, crackled into his ear. “We’re just off the main corridor. There’s something…There’s something you need to see down here.”

  “You already cleared the upper decks?” He spoke into his microphone as he swam away from the remains and kicked back toward the stairwell, following his column of light through the haze.

  “The Oh-Four deck’s gone. The wheelhouse. The chart room. Torn right off and scattered across the reef. All of the officers’ and the chief scientists’ staterooms on the Oh-Three are empty.”

  “Same for the Oh-Two,” Walker said. “The cabins are vacant, as are the mess and the lounge. There was one body in the hospital suite. Old guy. Doctor if you believe the stitching on the lab coat. The fish had already started in on him.” He paused. “So where are the rest of them? They can’t have all washed over the deck and we would have seen their rafts on the shore if they’d made it that far.”

  “They’re down here,” Pike said. He ducked his head under the threshold and kicked back down the staircase. An ugly scorpion fish covered with venomous spikes brushed against his arm.

  “Not all of them,” Brazelton whispered.

  Pike recognized the reluctance to elaborate in the man’s voice. Their communications were monitored on the same feed as the images. Apparently this was something that needed to be seen.

  He flippered his way forward toward where a faint glow emanated from the darkened doorway above him. Below him, the signs on the wall beside the dented and buckled stainless steel doors passed. Divers Locker, Electronics Shop, Main Lab. He glanced up to orient himself. The signs read: Hydro Lab, Electronics/Computer Lab, Climate Control Chamber. He passed below the open orifice marked “Biology/Analytical Clean Lab.” The door was warped and jammed partially open. There were deep scratches in the metal. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed to flatten his chest and squirm through with the tank on his back.

  Long worktables were bolted to the now-vertical floor to his left, the machines and glassware that had once rested upon them shattered on the wall in front of him that now served as the floor. Above him, the port wall, now the ceiling, was covered with racks and shelves emptied of their contents. An enormous aquarium was still bolted in place, the water inside as black as tar.

  He followed the source of the amber glow across the room, over jumbled mounds of unrecognizable equipment, computer towers, stainless steel and shards of glass to where Brazelton and Walker floated. Both men faced away from him, palms pressed flat against what appeared to be an algae- and sediment-covered wall. Their lights formed coronae around their heads like twin eclipsed suns. The wall must have been made from some opaque material, for their beams diffused ahead of them.

  One of the divers turned toward him and Pike heard Brazelton’s voice in his ear.

  “Check this out.”

  Brazelton swiped his palm across the wall and produced a cloud of dust. Pike focused his light upon an orange design he recognized immediately. The biohazard symbol. He thought back to the Mayr’s schematics, which he had studied on the flight to New Guinea. This lab had an isolation shield that dropped from the ceiling to seal off the rear quarter of the room where the hooded stations and the batch reactor were installed. He swam closer and smeared away more of the sludge until he could see through the Plexiglas barrier.

  Even in the darkness barely lightened by his headlamp, he could tell the ocean hadn’t flooded the other side. A massive stainless steel vat glistened in the center of the chamber, jutting forth from what had once been the floor like a tumor. A spider-webbed glass emergency chemical shower filled the corner overhead, a long pull-cord dangling over its open top.

  “Down there,” Walker said. “In the corner.”

  “What—?” Pike started, but then he saw them. Little more than silhouettes against the back wall, nearly buried under broken gear and sparkling slivers of glass.

  He leaned closer, struggling to discern the details. Water dripped from above onto the accumulation on the floor, which looked to be about a foot deep. He deciphered the human shapes: the bulbs of the slumped heads, the ridges of the shoulders.

  Pike’s breath caught in his throat. For a second, he thought he’d seen—there it was again. Hardly visible. Slow. Rhythmic.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Brazelton whispered. “They’re still alive in there.”

  Ten

  Consciousness returned by degree with a red aura that burned through her eyelids. She tried to open them, but the effort was just too great. Her heavy body was unresponsive, her torso frozen, her extremities leaden. The fog that shrouded her mind made it impossible to generate a single coherent thought. Each breath was a burden her chest seemed increasingly willing to forsake, each autonomic exertion a feat of superhuman resilience with the weight on her body that felt as though it were compressing her, attempting to merge her with the cold steel beneath her she could no more feel than the frigid water pooling around her. Droplets pattered the accumulation in a dysrhythmic timpani in counterpoint to the throbbing in her temples. The darkness inside of her beckoned. No longer was her life defined by sleeping and waking cycles, but by the myriad shades of gray that separated them, where she was neither aware nor oblivious, floating in the space between heartbeats, which grew wider with each labored breath.

  The crimson glare prodded her eyes like needles, gouging channels through which it could flow into her brain like blood, bringing with it a pain that began as an ache before blossoming into agony beyond anything she had ever experienced. Every vessel in her body pumped ground glass, every attempted thought the slash of a razor blade through gray matter. Her frozen fingers and toes felt as though the skin were being flayed from the bones. She opened her mouth to scream, but was unable to draw enough air to produce more than a choking sound. She wanted to cry, desired nothing more than to slip back into the realm of numbness from which the light had summoned her, where there had been no self and time had been both fleeting and eternal, the here and now a figment of an imagination not her own.

  Her eyelids parted with the sensation of tearing lashes to reveal an unfocused crescent of blinding light that seared her retinas. The glare was no longer a scarlet hue, but rather a brilliant amber that she drew into herself through the vacuum of her stare. Her eyelids slid closed again. Too late. The damage was done. When they opened again, the forgotten panic
awakened inside of her.

  Dr. Courtney Martin’s eyes snapped wide and she screamed, a shrill sound coated with barbs that tore at her parched throat. Comprehension struck her like a tire iron to the skull. Her chest heaved. Her body trembled. She tried to move her arms and failed, tried to push herself up from the floor and out of the water to no avail. Imprisoned within her unresponsive flesh, clarity of thought momentarily returned.

  She was going to die.

  Courtney screamed again, dotting the inside of the oxygen mask strapped over her mouth and nose with the last of her precious moisture. The attached tubing connected her to the port on the wall. The flow of air had ceased long ago when the heart of the ship had stilled. She had felt the thrum of the engine fade through the floor, watched as the blue sparks raining from the broken electrical conduits overhead petered like the last flakes of falling snow, the red emergency lights dimming until the darkness without became the darkness within. Cowering in this chamber as the wall became the floor and the rending sound of steel, a discordant choir of the damned burning in the fires of hell, signaled the advance of the flood that raced into her lab and hit the isolation barrier with the sound of thunder. She remembered watching the silt aggregate on the Plexiglas until she could no longer see the destruction, trying in vain to wipe it away from her side of the barricade while she screamed in futility. Each miniature grain of sand, each microscopic alga that adhered to the opposite surface was a nail driven into her coffin. Her salvation had become her tomb. How long had she been trapped in the blackness, waiting for her oxygen to run out, watching the droplets of seawater dripping through the seams in the hull and wondering which fate would claim her first? At what point had the gasping for air given way to unconsciousness? When had her body shut down to preserve only her most vital functions?

  The light became many, all of which now moved, their glow diffusing around her, limning the equipment, casting long shadows that shivered on the wall behind her, highlighting the shape of the man crumpled against the wall beside her. She had only the vaguest recollection of his presence.

  Starfish—no, they were hands—smeared back and forth across the isolation shield. They cleared wider and wider swatches through which she could see blurry silhouettes in the sparkling clouds caused by their disturbance. The shifting glare focused to the distinct circles of flashlight beams.

  There was someone out there.

  Courtney screamed with the last of her energy, and again retreated into the insensate darkness.

  Eleven

  “There’s no time to wait!” Pike snapped into the satellite phone. “How much oxygen can that chamber possibly hold? They’ve already been trapped in there for more than forty-eight hours. They were barely breathing for Christ’s sake! By the time you get here, they’ll be long since dead!”

  He rummaged around on the deck until he found what he was looking for. They were ill-prepared for this contingency. Worst case scenario, they had expected to find any survivors beached on one of the islands in the life rafts. None of them had foreseen the possibility they could have used the isolation cordon to stay alive.

  Pike was only peripherally aware of the voice on the other end of the line. They’d already wasted too much time arguing, time they didn’t have. If they wanted to learn what had happened to the ship, then they needed these people alive. Besides, he was in charge, and whatever the consequences, they were his to bear.

  “We don’t know if it’s even possible to retract the shield. For all we know, its track is so warped we couldn’t make it rise if we did somehow find a way to power the mechanism to raise it. And by then we’d just be extracting corpses!”

  The boat lurched beneath him and he grabbed the gunwale. An enormous wave followed, hitting the tug like a truck and throwing spray across the deck. Miniquakes continued to rip apart the Kilinailau Trench, sending monstrous waves outward in all directions. There was no time for this argument. With the instability of the ocean floor, the Mayr could shift, the hull buckle, and those sealed inside could end up drowned before they reached them.

  “We’re going in,” Pike said over the objections from the other end. “Wish us luck.”

  He disconnected the call and hurled the phone through the doorway into the cabin, where already several inches of water covered the floor. Donning his helmet once more, he cradled the acetylene torch to his chest under his left arm, and plunged down into the ocean. The waves had stirred the silt into a shifting cloud through which he could barely see the wreckage. He kicked downward toward the bowed A-frame winch at the stern of the Mayr and followed the warped track of the submersible launch toward the open doorway beside the hanger. A light bloomed from the corridor as Walker emerged and took the torch from him. They flippered deeper into the unstable vessel, the groaning of metal all around them.

  “What did the engineer say?” Walker asked through the com-link inside his helmet.

  “Does it matter?”

  Walker chuckled in response.

  They swam upward into the lab and back toward where Brazelton waited. He’d cleared all of the sludge from the Plexiglas barrier so they could clearly see inside. Their lights made the refractions of water on the wall inside the chamber waver. The bodies were still slouched in the corner where Pike had last seen them.

  “They haven’t moved since you left,” Brazelton said. “I can’t even tell if they’re breathing anymore.”

  “Then we don’t have time to screw around.”

  The torch flared to life to his left, a ferocious blue-white that blinded him for several seconds. Walker braced his feet and leaned toward the shield as high and as far away from those inside as he could get, poised to set to work. He glanced back at Pike for final approval.

  Pike understood the man’s hesitation. If there were any kind of flammable gas inside, the torch would ignite it and they’d be blown to pieces. It was a calculated risk. Surely any combustible gas would have killed the people in there long ago, and the oxygen mounts on the wall couldn’t flow once the tanks were dry. The greater concern was that they had dropped the shield because of the release of some biological contaminant Walker now prepared to release into the water.

  “We’re going to have to move fast,” Pike said. “Once that water starts to rush in there, it’s going to flood in a matter of seconds.”

  Walker nodded and brought the flame to the isolation barrier. The glare grew even brighter. The plastic melted and turned an orange-red. Molten gobs dripped to the ground before turning ashen and issuing bubbling tendrils of steam. Water fired through the rough cut with such velocity that it struck the inner wall on the opposite side of the chamber like a stream of bullets that visibly warped the steel and immediately started to pool on the floor.

  “Hurry up,” Pike whispered. “Hurry up!”

  He watched the water level rise on the other side as Walker burned a circle wide enough for them to squeeze through. The shadows inside were already submerged to their waists and Walker wasn’t even halfway done.

  “Hurry up!”

  “I’m going as fast as I can!”

  “This was a bad idea…” Brazelton said.

  Pike turned on the flow of air through the ancillary octopus regulator attached to his scuba tank and watched the bubbles rise from the mouthpiece. His legs tensed in anticipation of the first solid kick. He glanced at Brazelton to make sure he was ready. When the time came to move, there could be no hesitation.

  Multiple streams of water now fired into the chamber, boring into the steel across the room with the pressure of the entire ocean behind them, filling the room with spray. Pike could barely see the people through the mist and the droplets on the interior of the Plexiglas. Their heads were barely above the rising water. Any second it would eclipse their mouths.

  “Hurry up!”

  The torch continued its glowing orange arc upward toward where Walker had started, but it was moving too slowly. They had killed the survivors as surely as if they’d sat back and watche
d them suffocate while they waited for help to arrive.

  “There go their heads,” Brazelton said. “They aren’t even making an effort to raise them out of the water.”

  “There’s still time,” Pike said.

  “All it takes is one breath and their lungs will fill—”

  “I said there’s still time!”

  With a resounding crack, the circle of thick Plexiglas snapped away from the barrier and struck the interior wall with enough force to bury itself in the metal.

  Pike launched himself forward toward the hole, propelled by the awesome current, which sucked him through and spit him out along the vicious flume. He hit the wall and was driven to the floor. The chamber was completely full by the time he gathered his bearings and righted himself. His headlamp played across the nearest figure, a woman, her hair twisting around her head in the swirling current. He swam toward her as fast as he could. He forced the rescue regulator into her mouth, pried her from the debris, and pulled her to his chest.

  If she’d already aspirated enough seawater, no amount of oxygen would save her on the long journey back to the surface.

  He flippered past Brazelton, who struggled to lift a man from the floor, toward the opening and felt hands grab his shoulders and pull him through. His rapid breathing echoed inside his helmet as he raced across the room and down into the main corridor, urging himself faster. He tried to feel for the woman’s heartbeat against her ribs, but the neoprene gloves made it impossible. He willed her to live through sheer force of thought.