The doorways blew past and before he knew it, they’d cleared the stern and were hurtling toward the lighter water and the surface.
They breached the waves and paddled toward the boat. Walker and Brazelton surfaced a moment later, the limp man supported between them. Walker transferred the man’s weight to Brazelton, pulled himself up onto the tug, and reached back down for the woman. Together, he and Pike hauled her up onto the deck. Pike tore off his helmet and hurled it aside. Behind him, he heard them heave the other survivor onto the boat.
“Get them some blankets!” He fell upon the woman, pulled the regulator from her mouth, and lowered his ear to her lips. “Now!”
No exhalations tickled the fine hairs or made the slightest sound. He could see standing water behind her parted teeth.
“Damn it!” he shouted.
Pike started CPR with the compressions to pump the water out of her chest. Fluid burbled from her mouth and spilled onto the planks, but still she made no attempt to gasp for air. He tugged off his right glove with his teeth and felt for a carotid pulse. Her skin was tinged blue and ice-cold to the touch. His own fingers were frozen and wrinkled, yet, whether real or imagined, he thought he felt a weak, thready pulse.
Brazelton threw himself to the deck beside them and ripped off the woman’s drenched clothes. White patches of frostbite stood out against her blue-marbled skin. He covered her in dry blankets from the cabin.
Pike continued thrusting against her breast as the wind and rain assaulted them in gusts. The entire ship bucked under them on the choppy waves.
He leaned over her head and peeled apart her eyelids. The pupils constricted ever so subtly.
“She’s still alive!” Pike said, pumping with renewed vigor.
A geyser of fluid shot from her mouth and spattered back down onto her face. She choked and sputtered. Pike rolled her into the rescue position to allow the fluid to drain.
She made no effort to move, or even open her eyes, but her chest swelled visibly with each inspiration.
With a retching sound, the man Walker had been resuscitating vomited a puddle of seawater behind him.
After watching her breathe for a long moment, Pike carefully lifted the woman from the deck and carried her out of the storm and into the cabin.
Twelve
Redmond, Washington
7:56 p.m. PST Local Time (January 29th)
1:56 p.m. PGT (January 30th)
This was a catastrophe beyond anything Bradley had dealt with in all of his years at the helm of GeNext. He was responsible for sending forty-some people to their deaths. Good men and women who had only been doing their jobs. He felt a bone-deep sorrow as he watched the nightmare images from the South Pacific flash past on the plasma screen mounted to his office wall. Buildings demolished to such a degree that it was impossible to tell what they had once been. The wreckage of ships perched on the remains of structures that had once stood ten stories tall. Bodies draped with stained sheets lining the streets while more and more were pulled out of the rubble. Children wearing masks of glistening blood carried in the arms of rescue workers while they screamed for the parents they would never find. Across the bottom of the screen scrolled the number for the International Red Cross and another number to which to text donations. Fading celebrities were already using the disaster to gain face-time. Every channel showed the same apocalyptic visions of suffering as he flipped through them, faster and faster, until he finally hurled the remote across the room and stood from his desk.
He loosened his collar and used his tie to wipe the sweat from his brow. This office that he had spent so many years perfectly appointing, to be his home away from home, was suddenly suffocating him. The sheepskins on the walls and the leather furnishings became nothing more than the hides of dead animals, the journals and tomes in the bookcases filled with useless words that were obsolete by the time they were published. His desk, purchased from the estate of Harry S. Truman and upon which the famous “The Buck Stops Here” sign had rested, reminded him that the man who had once sat there was now dead, as were the hundreds of thousands of Japanese whose lives had become expendable in the mind of the former president who quite possibly made that decision while sitting at this very desk. All of the crystal, brass, and gold awards and plaques, all of the priceless paintings and framed photographs of him with heads of state, all of the polished marble and electronic gadgets were the trappings of a vain man, come to haunt the young idealist who had set out to save the world from itself and had instead become imprisoned in a Brioni suit, a slave to the fortune and responsibility that sapped his very soul.
His office started to spin around him. He needed to get out of here. Right now. Clear his head. And there was one place that no matter the stress and the chaos always brought the world back into focus.
He staggered out of his suite and down the corridor, signaled the elevator, and prepared to descend to the lowest level. The three subbasements were reserved exclusively for research and development. The lone elevator at the rear of the complex that accessed them wouldn’t descend without proper clearance, as enforced by the retinal scanner built into the control panel. None of them was open to the public and only the cream of the scientific crop would ever set foot on the two uppermost. As for the deepest level, only a select few men and women were even aware of its existence, several of whom were down here now in their own private labs, while the rest were crossing the Pacific aboard the R/V Aldous Huxley or already at the site of the Mayr’s sinking.
Bradley stepped out of the elevator and into the central hallway. He passed the entrances to the various laboratories and clean rooms, each of them sealed by a pressurized stainless steel airlock. His destination was at the end of the corridor, where it abruptly terminated at a door that reflected his approach. He caught a glimpse of the same disheveled suit he had worn the day before, the heavy bags beneath his blue eyes, and a mussed head of hair gone prematurely white. He leaned toward the black screen and opened his eye wide for the laser to scan his retina. With a hiss, the door slid into the wall and he stepped into what his elite team of researchers had affectionately nicknamed The Crypt.
Eight Plexiglas cases stood to either side of the main aisle, spaced every ten feet. Each unit was roughly three feet deep, six feet tall, and sized to accommodate its occupant, with a stainless steel base that housed the humidity and temperature controls that maintained the precise atmospheric conditions required to arrest further decomposition. Inside of each were corpses in various states of decay. Some were nearly intact and mummified, while others were mere collections of bones. He had spent the last twelve years collecting them following the discovery of the first pair in Chaco Canyon, and a fortune hiring the most brilliant and discreet group of scientists in the world to scour the globe for more examples and to break the code of their impossible existence. There was still so much they didn’t understand, but he was certain they were close now.
He could remember the details of the acquisition of each one of them with perfect clarity, even without the aid of the enlarged photographs that hung on the walls behind them, which documented where the body had been found and the surrounding area. The two cases at the front of the room housed the very first: the gaunt, desiccated forms of little more than crisp skin stretched over knots of bone that his flashlight had shown him on that fateful day, the same day the first shock of white had appeared in his bangs. Even after all this time, they made his stomach flutter every time he walked into the room. Beside the picture of the ruins of Casa Rinconada and the carcass-riddled cave hung x-rays and CT scans, magnified images of bone matrices and tissue samples, and all sorts of lab printouts from radiocarbon dating to RFLP genomic profiles.
The second case on the right contained the skull they had found beneath the Bhadresvara linga. It had cost a pretty penny to secret it out of Vietnam, along with a generous sampling of the bones that had been scattered on the ground around it. They were scored with teeth marks a forensic odontologist had conf
irmed matched those of the skull.
Across the aisle were the skeletal remains of the woman they had fished out of the subterranean pool in Guatemala, whose bones were almost blindingly white in contrast to the others after thirteen hundred years in the cold water.
In the case beside her rested the cadaver they had removed from a cliff-side tomb on Rapa Nui fourteen months ago, where it had been walled behind several tons of basalt. The ebon stone walls had been scarred with gouges from fingertips and still rimed with brown flakes of dried blood like lichen. He had been entombed alive. His dehydrated corpse had been slumped in the back, his calves and thighs stripped nearly to the bone. The prevailing theory in the lab was that he had attempted to sustain himself on his own flesh after being sealed in there more than two thousand years ago. The pictures that covered the wall behind it were of a serene white beach with just the crown of one of the famous statues’ heads against the backdrop of a sheer cliff of volcanic rock, a dark hole in the mounded stones, and the crumpled form with its skeletal legs stretched out before it.
Their most recent arrival prior to the events in Africa, a diminutive man exhumed near Beppu, Japan at the foot of Mt. Tsurumi in 2008, was reassembled in the third case to the right. He had been dismembered, his parts packed in sulfurous precipitates and wrapped in bamboo leaves, and buried near the natural hot spring known as Blood Pond. The location was memorialized in pictures filled with steam and boiling crimson water, lush fields of emerald grasses that crawled up the steep volcanic cone, and the bundled remains on the fertile soil at the bottom of a deep pit. Carbon dating of the remains and the trace amounts of ash in the hole placed his interment at somewhere between eleven and twelve hundred years ago.
The final two cases housed the charred remains from Zambia, which had been burned so badly that despite their best efforts, the bones continued to crumble. Had they arrived just forty-eight hours sooner, they would possibly have still been alive, or at least there would have been enough flesh remaining to unlock Pandora’s Box. Since there had been nothing left but charcoal, the DNA samples had been corrupted and whatever mutagenic agent had caused the violent transformation had been lost. The bacterial samples from the hot springs had demonstrated nothing out of the ordinary. They had blown the one shot they had been given thanks to the natives, whom he could hardly blame for saving their own skins. It was regrettable that Pike’s team hadn’t been able to track down any of the survivors. Perhaps their testimony might have at least helped narrow the possible sources of exposure. As it stood now, the historical precedent suggested that such an event would never happen again in their lifetimes.
Bradley sighed.
Here they had eight individuals from the furthest reaches of the globe and from different points in time, all of which coincided with major geothermal and sociological upheavals. The eruption of the Sunset Cone in Arizona in 1150 C.E. and the mass migration of the Anasazi that immediately followed. The surge in activity in the Haut Dong Nai volcanic fields in the fourteenth century and the subsequent abandonment of My Son by the Champa. The eruption of the Guatemalan volcano Fuego mere miles from Bilbao, in the early eighth century, when the Maya abruptly vanished from the face of the earth. The birth of the Hiva-Hiva lava flow on Easter Island and the sharp decline in the native Polynesian population nearly two millennia ago. The eruption of Mt. Tsurumi in 867 C.E. and the flight of a group of Buddhist monks from their ruined temple. In all instances, they left behind archaeological evidence of cannibalism. But those weren’t the only threads that bound them together. All of the corpses shared several remarkable physical attributes. If GeNext could have isolated the origin of these truly amazing genetic traits, Bradley was convinced they could have unraveled the very mystery of life itself.
They had been so close…
Thirteen
Bradley heard footsteps behind him and turned around to find Brendan Reaves staring at him.
“I thought that might be you,” the anthropologist said. While his stubbled cheeks were now flecked with gray and his formerly smooth skin had become the texture of a saddle, the fire in his eyes was that of the much younger man who had summoned him to Chaco Canyon so many years ago. “How are you holding up?”
“About as well as one might expect.”
Reaves offered a sympathetic smile and a gentle squeeze on the shoulder.
Bradley wasn’t surprised to find Reaves down here so late. Their shared obsession had given Reaves the unprecedented opportunity to broaden the spectrum of his research in hopes of isolating the catalyst for the next step in the evolution of mankind and the possible link back to his origins in the primordial ooze. Reaves had been the one who intuited the connection between the bodies and taken the leap of logic that had led them to all of the others. He had combined two of the more controversial theories of evolution to generate a hypothesis of his own.
The fundamental principle was that an organism must either adapt to its environment or perish. At the heart of this notion was the belief that a single cataclysmic event could trigger radical and rapid physical changes within a species, contrary to the slow-motion premise of natural selection.
The second, and most critical factor, had been only recently put forth. A meteorite that scientists speculated had originated on Mars was pried from the Antarctic tundra, but more than just a chunk of iron and minerals had made the journey through space. Fossilized evidence confirmed the presence of microorganisms nearly identical to a type of extremophilic bacteria called Archaea, a discovery that supported the idea that life could indeed exist on even the most inhospitable planets. These bacteria, which could survive atmospheres lacking oxygen and temperature extremes that would either freeze or cook all other known life forms, provided the basis for the idea that life hadn’t begun in an idyllic garden in Mesopotamia, but rather deep within the molten core of the Earth. Eons of geologic activity had forced these bacteria to the surface where they had helped to convert a hydrogen atmosphere to oxygen as a byproduct of their chemosynthetic processes, theoretically giving birth to terrestrial life.
Reaves had combined two factors that adhered to a single, if circumstantial, theory. With the verifiable cataclysmic events of the sudden eruption of the Sunset Cone in Arizona and the increased volcanic activity on the Indochina Peninsula, the environment had suddenly placed increased pressure on its inhabitants while simultaneously forcing organisms that had never been meant to dwell aboveground to the surface. There was no incontrovertible proof of any kind, however. None of the remains showed any sort of bacterial infestation, nor had more than two individuals been changed dramatically by the geothermal events, but the theory had held together well enough for them to recognize the significance of the Ah Puch statues and the Mayan cenote. From that point on, they hadn’t sat back like vultures waiting for news of a potentially intriguing dig. They had actively instigated excavations in regions where geologic disaster and the collapse or rapid relocation of a culture had occurred at the same time, which had led them to Easter Island and the Inland Sea of Japan. And Reaves had coordinated both of those digs, in addition to a dozen others on every continent at the exact same time.
It had been at Reaves’s insistence that they started to track modern geothermal activity. After all, if such cases had appeared sporadically throughout recorded history, who was to say that the same thing couldn’t happen right now. And once that lone refugee from Makambu Village had stumbled into Mpulungu carrying his dying wife and rambling about demons, Reaves had plucked the report from the wire and his team had been in the air to bolster the research forces already on the ground.
And still they had been too late.
Bradley had cured diseases and enhanced the lives of his entire generation, conquered the business world, made billions of dollars, and yet the only mystery that had ever really mattered to him personally would be the one to haunt him from beyond the grave.
“There’s something you need to see,” Reaves said.
Bradley noticed a cur
ious spark in the man’s eyes. He was about to say that he was in no mood, but he would have been saying it to Reaves’s back.
He followed Reaves down the hallway and into the anthropologist’s office. Maps highlighted with circles, notes, and various-colored pushpins covered the walls between shelves overflowing with books about nearly every conceivable culture. Scraps of paper curled from the bindings where Reaves had marked countless passages. File cabinets stood in the rear corners, drawers open, manila folders askew. The chairs were heaped with open tomes, files, and stacks of paper. Amid the bedlam were trappings of Reaves’s former life: potsherds, arrowheads, and carved bones in Lucite cubes; framed photographs of various excavations and newspaper clippings; Southwestern sand art designs and ephemera of all sorts.
Reaves stepped behind a desk heaped with leaning stacks of research materials that appeared on the brink of toppling to the floor and gestured to the lone chair. Bradley eased through the clutter and sat in the proffered seat. The screen of the laptop in front of him was framed with sticky-notes, the scrawl illegible. Reaves leaned over his shoulder and tapped the mouse pad. The screensaver faded to reveal a rectangular video display and the control bar beneath it.
“The recording you’re about to watch was forwarded about twenty minutes ago from the wreckage of the Mayr via the Huxley.”
A fist clenched in Bradley’s gut. He winced at the sudden discomfort.
“Tell me there are survivors.”
“See for yourself.”
Reaves clicked the “Play” button and the footage began to roll.
It took Bradley a moment to rationalize what he was seeing. A blinding glare burned in the upper left corner of the screen, throwing the rest of the image into shadow. He was barely able to discern a man’s silhouette at the heart of the fiery glow of a blowtorch, which he appeared to be using to cut through a wall. No, not a wall. He recognized the biohazard warning symbol on what he suddenly realized was the isolation shield in the clean lab. The view panned downward and to the right. Two human shapes sat slumped in the corner while the water flooded up to their chests.
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