Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  The shadow vanished momentarily in the white cloud before reappearing on top of the console and hurtling toward Rivers. The shape struck the Second Mate, who fired several more bursts up into the ceiling, causing the entire screen to go white.

  “I’m sorry.” The fervor had drained from Bradley’s voice. “I didn’t mean to push as hard as I obviously did. It just felt like we were onto something there for a moment. You have my apologies. You have to understand that I was an honest-to-God physician before I ever became…this.” He gestured to his fancy, rumpled suit. Or perhaps toward the aging man inside of it.

  Courtney nodded.

  On the screen, the white cloud settled like falling snow.

  “There was one other thing…” Courtney said. She paused as she too joined the others in what seemed to be an interminable wait for the cloud from the fire extinguisher to clear. Bishop realized he was holding his breath. He couldn’t see any sign of movement through the mist. “His gums had started to bleed.”

  Bradley turned quickly to face her. Whatever he had planned to say was forgotten, as on the screen it was now painfully apparent what had happened to Second Mate Ellis Rivers.

  “Christ almighty,” Bishop whispered.

  Arcs of black fluid crisscrossed the windows before which Rivers had just been standing. Even in grayscale, he could see tiny streams of blood rolling downward from the long spatters. The console was smeared where Rivers’s body had been dragged over it. The warning lights were blinking like crazy now. The horizon yawed dramatically through the blood-streaked glass, thrown into stark relief by a strobe of lightning. Another bloody trail marred the white floor, leading to the doorway and the stairs beyond.

  Thirty

  Dr. Brendan Reaves leaned over Dr. Angela Whitted’s shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bacteria on the scanning electron microscope’s monitor beside her. They were in the Biology/Analytical Clean Lab on the Huxley, where the batch reactor had been relocated following its retrieval from the Mayr’s carcass. The loss of power on the Mayr had killed the systems that regulated the heat, pressure, and agitation. All of the microorganisms that had been transferred into it from the bioreactor had died shortly thereafter and aggregated into a microbial sludge on the bottom. From that sludge, the microbiologist had extracted several representative samples that were now stained and matted on a series of microscope slides she was finally ready to analyze. Angie worked on retainer for GeNext as part of Reaves’s discreet team of scientists dedicated to cracking the riddle of the mutated skeletons they’d discovered through the years. By day, she was Deputy Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, a division of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and co-chaired the Presidential Council on Emerging Infectious Diseases. While her pedigree lent to formality and aloofness, Angie was one of the most down-to-earth women Reaves had ever met. Her enthusiasm and love for her job were contagious. They had even shared a few passion-filled nights back in the subterranean labs of the GeNext complex that he was certain not only challenged his flexibility, but the laws of gravity as well.

  Angie crinkled her freckled nose like she always did when she squinted her aquamarine eyes into the eyepiece lenses of the microscope. She slowly licked her lips and tucked her blonde bangs behind her ears.

  “Looks like a lineup of the usual suspects.” She drew her eyes from the lenses and gestured toward the microbes on the screen. “This bacterium here that looks like a turnip with a bunch of hairy roots is Thermococcaleshydrothermalis. These things that look kind of like fluke worms are ectothiorhodospira. Those over there that resemble halved pomegranates with worms coming out of them are Methanococcusvalcanius. See those that look like lily pads with a bunch of tadpoles under them? That’s Methanococcusjannaschii. And that circular prokaryote with all of the long flagellates is our good friendThermococcus litoralis.”

  “That’s what you’d expect to find in a hydrothermal vent?”

  “In the South Pacific anyway. The types of bacteria vary by location. Most of these are endemic to this area, but you could expect to find ectothirhodospira and various species of archaea in pretty much any geothermal vent as far north as the Solfataric Fields in Iceland.”

  “You have every microscopic organism memorized, don’t you?”

  “Not every single one of them.” She winked at him and his stomach tingled. “Look at it this way. Until recently, we didn’t even know these things existed. And we’re still finding new ones all the time. No one really knows what all they’re capable of. They could prove to be the greatest boon to mankind the world has ever known, or they could end up producing pathogens capable of destroying all life on earth. There’s no way of knowing until we discover and identify them, and then crack them open to see what they can do.

  “Take this little bugger here, Thermococcuslitoralis. It produces an enzyme called DNA polymerase that serves as a catalyst for DNA replication. It’s able to not only copy existing strands and synthesize new ones, it can also repair damaged DNA. And this is an organism that by all means should never have come into physical contact with man based upon its natural habitat, and here it is capable of manipulating our genetic code.”

  “Makes you wonder why we haven’t found a way to weaponize it yet.”

  “Who says we haven’t tried.” She winked again. His mind flashed back to a cluster of four small moles at the base of her spine that reminded him of an arrow. As if she could read his mind, her elbow nuzzled his lap. “Wait…a…second…What do we have here?” She zoomed in until she focused on a single bacterium that looked almost like an acorn with dozens of wispy antennae. Inside its bulk were several spiked balls that could have passed for microscopic sea urchins. Reaves at least knew enough to recognize them as viruses. “Well, hello there, handsome.”

  “What are we looking at here?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. This one’s new to me. All of a sudden, things just got interesting.” She smiled and pressed her eyes back against the microscope. “Oh, how I love a good challenge.”

  “Tell me what you see.” Reaves’s heart was beating hard and fast and his hands trembled with excitement. “Is it possible that this—?”

  “You’ll know as soon as I do. Now scoot. Scoot. I have about a million tests to run. And I need to dice up those viruses and map their proteins…”

  Her words trailed into an unintelligible mumble. He’d seen her this way plenty of times. She’d gone into that special place in her head where she simply ceased to exist as a physical entity. She was now a being of pure thought, to whom the rest of the world, including him, no longer existed.

  “Tell me this is our culprit and I’ll get down on one knee—”

  “Sounds kinky,” she said. “Now go bother someone who isn’t trying to unlock the secrets of the universe.”

  Reaves smirked and left her to her business. As he was crossing the corridor and preparing to enter the main laboratory, a thought struck him from out of the blue. Until that moment, it had been an abstraction. If they really had found the microorganism responsible for the mutations in Chaco Man, then they needed to seriously consider the fact that someone aboard the Mayr could truly have been altered. Sure, they were fairly confident working under that assumption, but the reality of the situation was something different entirely. All of the evidence—from the disemboweled corpses on both the ship and the island to the footprints Pike had photographed—pointed to that fact. However, in his excitement, he hadn’t stopped to think about the implications. The gnawed bones in the cave under Casa Rinconada and piled at the foot of the altar beneath the sivalinga. The gutted corpses scattered around the village in Zambia. The nearly identical bodies stashed down in the hold of the Mayr. If a living and breathing Chaco Man had butchered the entire crew and somehow managed to follow those who escaped onto the island, it could be out there at this very moment. Until now, he had never considered the possibility of being forced to confront it in the flesh. What woul
d they do when they came face-to-face with something capable of tearing them apart with its bare hands without a second thought?

  It struck him exactly how poorly prepared there were. They had the advantage of knowledge and firepower, but how much good would either do against an entity that had managed to survive in one incarnation or another through the eons with the kind of predatory instincts that caused it to immediately begin killing everyone around it?

  A shiver rippled up his spine. For the first time, he questioned what they were doing, his whole life’s work. If Chaco Man had indeed been spawned by bacteria exhumed from deep under the Kilinailau Trench, then his creation was directly their fault. His fault. He had arranged for the collection of thermophilic organisms from the active vents under the auspices of bioengineering research. He had put these men’s and women’s lives at risk. He was responsible for their deaths. And who knew how many more to come.

  It took him some time to compose himself before he typed in the code and entered the main laboratory.

  Dr. Henri Renault, a trust fund child who had attended medical school with Bradley at Cambridge so many years ago, and whose initial infusion of capital into GeNext entitled him to a minority share of the company, sat at a laptop with a wet computer tower still rife with algae dripping saltwater onto the floor beside him. His position, and Bradley’s lone indiscretion with a man he considered a friend, had allowed Renault to insinuate himself into their inner circle of scientists as their resident physician. After all of this time, it was something of a relief to finally be able to put his only useful skill to work. Renault glanced up from reading Dr. Partridge’s electronic medical files, which had been transferred by the technical staff on the Huxley to his personal laptop. His bushy brows looked like charcoal flames burning over brown eyes magnified by glasses that could have been cut from storm windows. He had raked his hair into odd parts with his fingers and his mouth was set into a perpetual O of surprise.

  “What does the chart say?” Reaves asked. While medical management wasn’t his forte, he’d learned enough over the course of the last dozen years via his anemia research and the massive Chaco Man undertaking to at least have a yeoman’s grasp of it.

  “Let us just say that Dr. Partridge’s notes are spartan, to be kind,” Renault said in a thick French accent. “This is a physician whom modern medicine passed by long ago. His patients were fortunate he did not have access to leeches or attempt to ‘candle’ them.”

  “All judgment aside, have you found anything useful?”

  Reaves had tired of the pompous windbag years ago. His ego was like a yapping terrier sitting on his shoulder.

  “Let me walk you through it.” Renault rose from his chair and paced behind the deck with his hands clasped behind his back. Reaves rolled his eyes. “The patient, a thirty-four year-old Caucasian male, presents with a second-degree burn on his left cheek, shortness of breath, and a cough. A topical anesthetic, lidocaine and prilocaine cream, is used to treat the pain from the burn, while the remaining symptoms are addressed with an albuterol bronchodilator.”

  “A nebulizer.”

  “Correct.” Renault waggled his fingers behind his lower back. “Four hours status-post initial examination, the patient returns to the infirmary, complaining of pruritus and accompanying erythema.” Could the pretentious blowhard not just say an itchy rash, for crying out loud? “The physician addresses this with a topical antihistamine, and during the course of which determines the patient to be febrile.”

  “He had a fever.”

  “Would you like an actual medical case history or would you prefer I rap it in the vernacular to which you’re obviously more accustomed?” He sighed. “Americans…”

  “I know all of this so far. Shortly thereafter, the rash becomes a silver plaque of flaking skin Partridge diagnoses as a systemic form of psoriasis, which spreads all over his body.”

  “You have to understand that psoriasis is a largely heredity inflammatory immunoresponse. One does not simply acquire it.”

  “Regardless, he has it. From there, the migraines begin: acute frontal headaches with hypersensitivity to light. The fever becomes harder to manage. The psoriasis covers nearly every inch of his body.”

  “Dr. Partridge, in his infinite professionalism, described the patient in his chart as looking like a sockeye salmon. Twenty-four hours post-exposure, the patient is admitted for observation, during the course of which hourly updates are entered into his chart.”

  “Only a single patient is in the infirmary at this point, correct? Dr. Tyler Martin? Is there any further mention of his graduate assistant, Devin Wallace?”

  “There were no additions to Mr. Wallace’s chart following his initial treatment. Dr. Partridge recommended short-term follow-up, but apparently neither man had the inclination to see it through.”

  “Is there anything in there that’s even remotely helpful?” Reaves was exhausted from the cock-of-the-walk routine. There was still so much he had to do. In addition to coordinating the research in the lab, tracking the progress of Pike’s team on the island, and his overwhelming desire to watch the security recordings in hopes of catching the merest glimpse of what he knew would be there somewhere, he needed to rush this old blowhard through his recitation so he could begin to examine the corpses that had been brought over from Ambitle and would soon enough be stinking up the submersible hanger. “Check that. Let me streamline this process. I’ll ask a question, and you answer as directly as possible.”

  It was Renault’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “Bloodwork?”

  “Elevated RBCs and WBCs.”

  “Platelets?”

  “Normal.”

  “Anything else abnormal in the blood?”

  “No.”

  “Toxicology?”

  “Negative.”

  “Serology?”

  “Not performed.”

  “CSF?”

  “I doubt the good doctor even considered a puncture.”

  “Physical observation?”

  “Yellowing and accelerated growth of the finger- and toenails.Scleralicterus, yellowing of the whites of the eyes.”

  “Jaundice?”

  “The liver was enlarged upon palpation. No function tests or enzyme assays were performed.”

  “Assessment?”

  “Dr. Partridge’s conclusion was that he was unable to properly manage the patient’s deteriorating condition and planned to call for air retrieval the following morning, November 28th.”

  “But something happened and the ship sank first.”

  “Would you care for my personal impressions of this case?”

  Oh, for the love of God.

  Reaves made a show of checking his watch, then glanced at the door.

  “The variety and progression of symptomatology is what concerns me. In regard to the classical model of escalation, this disease shares a good number of traits with an immunodeficiency disease like AIDS. In my professional opinion, this is the work of a retrovirus.”

  Reaves’s thoughts shifted back to the bacterium on the slide filled with spiny viruses.

  His theory about the relationship between the geothermal events and exposure had been correct. The earth had thrust a pathogen that had been patiently waiting under the crust to the surface, one that had been biding its time until it could perform its sole biological imperative.

  And there was something he’d never considered: Was it possible that this virus was contagious?

  They needed answers, and they needed them right now. There were men on the island, presumably tracking not only the survivors, but one of the infected, as well. And there was the matter of the second man, Devin Wallace, whom everyone had apparently lost track of after his initial treatment following his exposure to the contents of the bioreactor.

  What the hell had happened to him?

  Thirty-One

  Ambitle Island

  Pike had known exactly what Montgomery’s radio silence meant. He had cal
led the Huxley and had them triangulate the GPS beacon in Montgomery’s transceiver. While the signal could only be pinpointed to within a square half-kilometer on this remote island, which was of precious little geographical use to him, the satellite had been able to confirm that the beacon was static. In more than forty minutes now, the transceiver hadn’t moved at all. He didn’t need to discuss the implications with Brazelton and Walker. Neither of them was by any means stupid, which was why they didn’t suggest that they turn around to investigate. Montgomery and Pearson weren’t the kind of men to be lying in the mud, wounded, waiting for the cavalry to arrive and rescue them.

  At least now Pike knew they had roughly a two kilometer lead on the hunter, although that fact was only slightly comforting considering that the twin trails they had picked up on the far side of the spring continued to head due northwest without any sign of doubling back upon themselves. If whatever had followed the survivors had re-crossed the island and was now behind them, then he had no doubt that there were only corpses ahead of them on this path.

  They traversed the steep topography through trees that eclipsed even the storm, around the bases of sheer limestone escarpments, and through flooded gullies, their water levels deceptive, their banks beyond treacherous. Far downhill, he could hear the repeated crashing sound of waves breaking against the rocky shoreline. There were no white sprawls of sandy beaches, only sharp stone teeth waiting to crush a boat’s hull, groves so dense they grew right down into the ocean, and cliffs to shame those of Acapulco. This was by far the least hospitable stretch of coast he’d encountered north of Antarctica. Maybe this side of the island provided safety from the tsunamis, but it offered precious little hope of rescue. In their shoes, with death nipping at his heels, he never would have considered the option of heading back east, which left either slowing their pace and attempting to scale the steepening, heavily forested slope up to the caldera, or continuing to skirt the western shore in a northward progression until they reached anything that resembled a beach or the Tolai village on the northwestern-most point of the island. He wondered if they had suspected what he already knew. Their pursuit would eventually overtake them. It wasn’t a matter of if, only of when and where.