Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  More lights blinked into being on the console.

  He heard faint clicking noises, stealthily approaching.

  The hell if he was sticking around to find out what was making them.

  “They’re dead!” he shouted into the transceiver. He whirled and bolted toward the stairs. “There’s no one manning the helm! We’re headed straight for—!”

  Something struck him from behind and sent him careening into the air over the stairwell. He hit the steel steps on his chest with the weight on his back. Both the transceiver and his pistol clattered away from him. He tried to brace himself, to slow his momentum, but his legs flipped up over his head. Cartwheeling, he felt something sharp tearing through his clothes and into his skin even as the repeated impact with the stairs snapped ribs and dislocated his shoulder. He struck the deck below with such force that it knocked the wind out of him. A scream came out as little more than a gasp.

  He looked up from the floor, spattered with droplets and arcs of glistening crimson, to see several faces peek out through the gaps of their stateroom doors. His fate was reflected in the widening terror in their eyes.

  The weight scrabbled and clawed on top of him.

  Pressure on his neck.

  Cold pain.

  The sensation of fingers moving under his skin, between the muscles.

  A rush of warmth.

  His hands slipped in his own blood and his face struck the floor.

  He was peripherally aware of the screams.

  And then of nothing at all.

  Forty-Four

  “Just look at that proliferation rate,” Angie said. “It’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”

  Reaves watched in awe as the odd-shaped organisms multiplied before his very eyes. They were being cultured on a gelatinous agar upon which Angie had dripped human blood. Every time one of the unclassified thermophiles came into contact with a lymphocyte, it appeared to pierce it, then emerge on the other side, only there were now two of them every time it did. Half of its virus load was left behind in the cell to colonize it, lending it an almost blurry appearance where once the edges of the sphere had been relatively smooth.

  “Now watch this.” She removed the culture and exposed it to a stream of concentrated oxygen for a full thirty seconds. When she replaced it under the microscope, all movement had ceased. The altered surface of the white blood cells resumed their normal spherical shape. In a matter of seconds, the cellular membranes ruptured. Their contents oozed out like filling the from a donut. “They can’t survive without an environment rich in hydrogen sulfide. The only problem is that neither can the cells they’ve already infected. The epithelial tissues I’ve experimented with are even more sensitive.”

  “So there’s no way of reversing the process?”

  “Given enough time, we might be able to find some way. Maybe a slower exchange of hydrogen sulfide for oxygen wouldn’t trigger such dramatic effects, or perhaps—”

  Voices rose in the corridor outside the lab. More shouting joined the fevered chorus.

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” Reaves asked.

  They both slowly stood from their stools and walked toward the door. It sounded like pure bedlam on the other side.

  Yelling.

  The rumble of running footsteps.

  Angie pressed the button to disengage the lock and the door slid back into the wall.

  The shouts became a roar. Men sprinted past the threshold, barreling through the hallway, bellowing in a tumult of voices. Reaves isolated Bradley’s from the din.

  “Abandon ship!”

  The moment he saw Bradley’s white head of hair, he lunged out into the corridor, grabbed him by the upper arm, and whirled him around.

  “What’s going on?” Reaves shouted.

  “It’s on the ship.” Bradley’s eyes were wide with panic. Spittle flew from his lips when he spoke. “I saw it. Up there. I saw it go into the pilothouse through the roof. And the men in there. The men. They—”

  “Saw what? Slow down and—”

  “There’s no time! We have to get—”

  Screams erupted from somewhere above them, horrible screams, men and women alike, filled with such pain and raw anguish they chilled his blood.

  The overhead lights flickered once, then again. A heartbeat later they died with thud that shook the floor. Crimson lights bloomed from their glass and wire casings on the walls.

  A klaxon blared.

  Shadowed people thundered down the stairway and met with those already in the hallway in a collision that sent bodies to the floor amid tangles of limbs and frantic cries.

  “What’s happening?” Angie screamed.

  The floor bucked beneath them. They stumbled and grabbed each other to maintain their balance.

  “We have to abandon ship!” Tears streamed down Bradley’s cheeks. “We don’t have time to debate this!”

  Bradley grabbed Reaves and hauled him into the chaos. He barely had a chance to grab Angie’s hand before they were swept into the stampede. His thoughts were jumbled. Nothing made sense. It was as though they had stepped out of the cold and rational world of the lab and into a nightmare.

  The screams on the higher decks intensified over the thunder of footsteps.

  They were being channeled back toward the stern, past the doorways of various laboratories where terrified faces peered out before being shoved aside by men and women seeking sanctuary. He pictured the isolation barrier in the lab he and Angie had just abandoned and the fates of those on the Mayr who hadn’t sealed themselves behind it.

  How had everything fallen apart so quickly?

  The deck lurched again and threw them toward the port side wall. Angie’s hand was torn from his. He heard her scream and strike the threshold as he was tossed into the converted engineering room. He slid into a forest of chair legs and tried to pull himself back to his feet before the ship canted again. The entire room was scarlet, save for the computer monitor on the table he used to right himself. It must have been plugged into one of the outlets serviced by the emergency generator. On the screen, the security tape from the Mayr continued to play. No. It wasn’t from the Mayr. The picture was too clear. There was no static. The time stamp in the bottom right corner rolled past with today’s date. The screen was divided into four quadrants. The upper left showed a still-life of the wheelhouse. Lights blinked on the console, over which a man was draped, unmoving. Another body was crumpled in a heap under the bank of windows. Lightning flashed. The upper right picture displayed the third level hallway, now abandoned, except for the two figures sprawled prone on the floor in a wide pool of black. The bottom two quadrants featured men and women fighting through each other to get to the stairwells. In the bottom left corner image, he caught a brief glimpse of a shadow at the periphery, right before a man in a button-down shirt and chinos was hauled from the melee.

  Christ. Bradley was right. How in the world had it gotten aboard the ship?

  The frightening truth hit him.

  It was only two decks above him, a mere twenty vertical feet.

  Something grabbed his arm and he screamed. He spun around to find Angie tugging at his elbow, urging him toward the hallway.

  The floor tilted and hurled them both through the doorway.

  “Come on!” she screamed.

  They merged into the crowd and were funneled past the submersible hanger and through the door into the sheeting rain. People slipped and fell on the slick deck. They grabbed onto those around them in an effort to pull themselves back to their feet, only to drag the others down with them.

  “Over here!” Bradley shouted.

  He was near the starboard rail, leaning over a white canister that looked like an industrial-size propane tank. When he broke the seal and threw back the upper half, the life raft inside of it leapt into the air and began to self-inflate. It dropped over the gunwale and splashed into the ocean. Beyond him, Reaves saw the island rapidly drawing nearer. A wide bay opened before t
hem like a great mouth preparing to swallow them whole.

  Lightning flared and he saw two of the round orange boats already riding the rough waves. Neither had more than two silhouettes in them. The shadows struggled to distance themselves from the Huxley. Since they were launching at less than full capacity, there wouldn’t be nearly enough space for those still trying to abandon the research vessel.

  He and Angie were barely halfway to the life raft when someone shoved Bradley aside to clamber over the rail. Bradley hit the gunwale and dropped like a stone. By the time Reaves reached his side, a small group had already cut the tether that moored the craft to the ship and were drifting away toward the others.

  Reaves knelt beside Bradley, who looked up at him through distant, unfocused eyes. A gash across his forehead dripped blood through his brows.

  “Get up!” Reaves shouted. He wrapped his arms around Bradley’s chest and lifted him up, but he wouldn’t be able to bear his weight for long.

  “Hurry!” Angie yelled.

  The screaming from the boat grew louder as more and more people herded out onto the stern. Reaves looked through the jostling bodies for any sign of what to do. He couldn’t see any more of the life raft canisters and battling against the flow toward where the creature worked its way in their direction in order to reach the rafts on the bow wasn’t an option. To his right, several people were already leaping down into the sea from under the A-frame winch.

  He glanced again toward the island, which a moment earlier had appeared to be rushing toward them, but now seemed so far away.

  Maybe if they could swim just far enough to reach one of the nearly empty life rafts…

  More screams behind him. He turned to see a shimmer of silver and twin reflections from a pair of eyes, and then a man was jerked back through the open doorway even as he ran.

  They were out of time.

  “Go!” Reaves shoved Angie toward the rear of the ship. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  He saw the terror in her eyes. She said something, but her words were drowned out by the awful cries.

  “We’re going to have to swim for it,” he said directly into Bradley’s ear. “I can’t do it for both of us.”

  “My fault,” was Bradley’s only reply.

  When they reached the edge, Reaves stared down into the violent waves fifteen feet down in the vessel’s wake. The moment they hit the water, they were going to be pulled under and swept away from each other.

  He suddenly thought of the souls on the Mayr whose corpses they had yet to find. They were somewhere on the ocean floor, weren’t they? They had attempted this exact same flight and never reached the shore. Was he now preparing to join the ranks of bloated, waterlogged remains now buried in the reef, feeding the scavengers?

  “Swim as hard as you can!” he shouted.

  With one final glance back over her shoulder, Angie leapt out into the air. She vanished as soon as she hit the waves.

  Reaves looked into Bradley’s eyes.

  “I’ll see you on the other side,” his old friend said.

  “Not if I see you first,” Reaves said through a weak attempt at a smile.

  He drew a deep breath and stepped off the precipice and into the swirling wind that preceded the impact and the bitter cold.

  Forty-Five

  Ambitle Island

  There was no way Pike was going to make it in time. He had underestimated the distance to the nearest navigable harbor and the going had become increasingly treacherous despite his complete disregard for his safety as he hurtled through the forest. His cheeks and hands were lacerated from the branches that seemed to bar his every move and he had given up on the thermal vision goggles that were constantly swatted against his forehead. Running little more than blind, he had forsaken looking for the tracks of the survivors and barreled ahead along the route of least resistance. He was barely conscious of the sounds of his men crashing through the underbrush behind him. The wicked displays of lightning in the clouds overhead made the ground leap and the tree trunks buck with a disorienting strobe effect. His lungs had long since passed the point of burning and his legs had crossed over from aching to a form of numbness. The topography routed him higher, into jungle that housed only mist and shadows. The metronomic thumping of the breakers to his left was his only means of geographical navigation. Occasional gaps in the canopy afforded spotted glimpses of the ocean. By the time he recognized them and the lack of lights from any visible vessels that may have been sailing past, they were behind him.

  The trees abruptly fell away to either side. Pike barely had time to stop before charging right off a limestone cliff and plummeting down into the treetops thirty yards below him. From here he could see the calmer waters of a deep bay and the first stretches of open sand since the one upon which they had initially beached. The land rose steeply from it on three sides to where the impenetrable fog claimed it. If he were one of the people who managed to reach the island in the work boat, that was exactly where he would go. And if he were piloting the Huxley, that was the kind of harbor he would seek.

  As if to prove his point, he saw lights through the trees downhill to his left, moving northeastward at a decent click directly toward the relatively sheltered cove.

  “There she is,” Brazelton managed to gasp as he struggled to catch his breath.

  Pike raised the transceiver and shouted into the microphone.

  “Ambitle to Huxley. Acknowledge, Huxley.” He released the transmit button and listened to the reply of dead air. “Damn it, Huxley! Acknowledge!”

  He quickly scanned through the channels, trying repeatedly to hail the vessel, which cleared the trees and headed straight for the beach.

  “Something’s wrong,” Walker said.

  “Huxley! This is Ambitle to Huxley! Acknowledge for Christ’s sake!”

  “They’re coming in too fast.”

  “Take this.” Pike thrust the transceiver against Walker’s chest. “Keep trying to raise them.”

  He raised his pistol and aimed at the research vessel. It was too far away to hit, but that wasn’t his intention. He wanted them to see the flash of muzzle flare, to hear the clap of the report. Anything to get their attention and persuade them to turn around. He fired off six rounds in rapid succession. With his ears still ringing, he watched for any sign of reaction from the Huxley.

  It continued to steam into the bay at an angle.

  Pike bellowed up into the sky and fired another half dozen shots.

  Behind him, Walker cursed and yelled into the transceiver.

  “Why aren’t they responding?” Brazelton asked. “It can’t just be because of the electrical interference. We’re in direct line-of-sight.”

  “They aren’t slowing down,” Walker said.

  “I can see that!” Pike snapped. He knew damn well that something was wrong on the ship and he was helpless to do anything about it.

  He kicked a rock over the precipice as lightning seared the sky.

  There was no more time to waste.

  “We have to get down there before it’s too late,” Pike said, but he understood on a primal level that it already was.

  He sprinted to his right, where the rock ledge abutted the sheer slope and leapt down into the runoff. The mud was slick enough to carry him downhill in a controlled slide, past exposed roots that reached for him like tentacles and around piles of debris that clogged the thin stream.

  The screaming sound of shearing metal echoed up from below him.

  The Huxley’s lights flickered through the branches. Its engine roared. The bow tipped downward and the stern rose high up on the water.

  “No, no, no!” he shouted.

  She was tearing herself apart on the reef.

  The lights flickered once more and then extinguished, leaving the black silhouette of the vessel careening toward the shore, sinking lower and lower toward the waterline.

  The sound of ripping metal metamorphosed into the dull wrenching sound of the hull being
completely disemboweled. There was a whump as the air was forced from the hold by a massive rush of seawater flooding in and the resultant change in pressure.

  She was sinking quickly now and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it.

  Pike heard the screams in the distance, a choir of torment at the gates of hell.

  Through the interlaced branches, he watched the sea rise up over the gunwales and onto the main deck. Metal buckled. Windows shattered. A skin of oil spread out across the waves, reflecting the lightning with rainbow colors.

  He’d never stood a chance.

  A shout of pure anguish exploded past his lips.

  It wasn’t until he saw the life rafts and the people struggling to swim in the dark waters that he realized it could only get worse.

  Forty-Six

  Bradley barely clung to consciousness. His head throbbed and his vision wavered. He felt disconnected from his appendages, which grew colder and more sluggish with each passing second. The only warmth was from the blood trickling down his forehead and into his eyes, which drifted in and out of focus. He wanted nothing more than to close them, if only to ease the sting of the saltwater…

  “Wake up!” Reaves shouted. He slapped Bradley on the cheek, splashing water into his face in the process. Bradley sputtered and coughed, and raised his chin up out of the water again.

  He was disoriented. Everything that had happened blended into an oddly shifting, disorganized mess of images in his mind. The screams still resonated in his ears. He saw the rail rushing toward his face. He remembered the chaos on the boat as blurs of people fighting past him and through him, standing on the deck with the rain pelting him, held upright by Reaves. He recalled stepping from the stern into a world defined by a cold blackness and then fists hauling him up onto the vicious waves by his shirt and dragging him into a lesser darkness. There was barely enough illumination coming through around the waves to see the faces of Reaves and Dr. Whitted, both of whom clung to the straps overhead, just as he did. The black rubber ring around them was perhaps eight feet in diameter. Orange fabric was stretched over it and lashed to the inflatable ring. They were underneath one of the life rafts, in the small pocket of air between its body and the ocean. He vaguely recalled Reaves paddling both of them toward the craft in hopes of hauling them aboard. The men already on it had shouted for them to let go before they capsized the raft and beaten them back down into the water with their fists. Rather than give up, Reaves had dived underwater and brought him up into this insignificant gap where at least they could hang on to the boat and breathe without being bludgeoned by the men who had not only refused to save them, but had been eager to consign them to their deaths.