Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  He thought of the men and women shoving each other, trampling their own ranks in their rush to abandon ship. He remembered the pitiful howls of the injured on the floor as they were stampeded without a single soul stopping to help them to their feet. His head still pounded from being shoved out of the way so that the men who would later try to drown them could have a life raft that should have held ten all to themselves. He thought of the creature on the boat, a random aberration of evolution, the same demon that had caused the end of so many once flourishing societies, and wondered if its genesis had been less an accident than the will of a God whose children had lost their way.

  The men shifted overhead, nearly shoving them back underwater. Over the rumble of the storm and the clapping of waves against the small craft, Bradley could still hear the screams and cries for help, only now they sounded much more distant, haunting.

  He tried not to look at the others for fear he would see the blame he felt reflected back at him.

  There was a sudden shift in the current beside him, as though something large swam just past his legs, not quite close enough to touch. He knew full well that the South Pacific was home to some of the largest and most aggressive sharks in the entire would, and all of the bodies flailing around in the water, bleeding like he was now, must have been calling them from far and wide.

  The raft suddenly dipped. This time, he was driven beneath the waves.

  He struggled back to the surface, spitting seawater and gasping for air.

  Above him, the boat rocked dramatically. The taut polyurethane-coated fabric bucked up and down as the men moved quickly from one side to the other and back again. He heard first their startled shouts, then their screams. Something tore through the fabric, opening a seam to the sky. Then again. And again. The slashes were barely wide enough to see bursts of frenetic activity. Shadowed forms darting past so quickly that they could have been specters, momentarily frozen in time by a strobe of lightning.

  One scream abruptly ceased, while the other seemed to linger, painfully, infinitely.

  “What the hell—?”

  “Shh!” Reaves hissed. He clapped his hand over Bradley’s mouth.

  The ragged tears allowed just enough light to pass through for Bradley to see Reaves’s wide eyes looking up through the slits. Dark fluid poured over the edges. Whitted held out her palm and placed it in the stream. She immediately flung the fluid from her hand and wiped it on her blouse. The expression of terror on her face confirmed his suspicions.

  Blood.

  The remaining cries waned, then stopped altogether.

  The fabric bowed above them, one section at a time, as though under first one foot, then the other.

  There was a loud splash to his left, and he felt the same change in the current he had mere moments prior.

  They all held their breath as the blood continued to trickle down into the ocean between them.

  He looked from Reaves to Whitted and then through the ripped bottom of the liferaft at the flickering storm clouds.

  The silence overhead was painful. He kept waiting for some sign of movement, a dip in the fabric, a rocking of the boat, but nothing happened.

  When he could bear it no more, he reached up, grabbed hold of the nearest slit, and pulled himself up just far enough to clearly see through it. The rapidly cooling blood ran down his forearms and dripped onto his face. His already narrowed field of vision canted with the craft. At first he saw only the rim of the inflatable tube and the straps wrapped around it. When they hit the next chop, a body flopped into view. He saw a limp arm and a face covered with so much blood that he hardly recognized it as belonging to one of the men that had battered him back into the sea.

  Bradley dropped back down so quickly that he lost his grip and Reaves had to help fish him back out of the water before he was swept away.

  “Dead,” he sputtered.

  “It’s in the water with us,” Whitted said. Her voice rose an octave when she spoke. “It climbed up onto the raft right above us and killed them both, didn’t it? Mere inches away from us!”

  “Shh,” Reaves whispered. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves if it doesn’t already know we’re here.”

  Bradley attuned his hearing to even the faintest sound as they communicated silently with their eyes. He listened to the screams of his fellow survivors fighting for their lives against the violent sea, and realized how few voices actually remained.

  In his mind, he pictured a silver-skinned creature only part man knifing through the water like a Great White, grabbing the helpless swimmers and dragging them underwater where it could tear them apart.

  Forty-Seven

  Pike lost sight of the beach as he charged through the forest, but he could still hear the screams. They guided him through the dense groves and over rock formations and channels of runoff. The grumble of the ship’s engines had faded to a cough and then to nothing at all. The sound of shearing metal had been swallowed by the waves. The klaxons had been smothered underwater. No longer could he see any manmade lights through the canopy, only the random electrical discharge from the storm clouds and the occasional blue sparks from the ship as it took on water. But the screams…the screams grew louder and more terrified by the second.

  He had to trust that his men were following him. The slope was too treacherous to glance away from his footing, and even if they did fall behind, their ears would lead them to the beach. Assuming all of the screams hadn’t been silenced by then.

  He should have diagnosed the trap sooner. It was his job, for Christ’s sake. But he had underestimated his adversary, the most critical of all mistakes. And the cost of his failure would be the lives of all those aboard the Huxley and their only means of escaping the island. With the research vessel torn to ribbons and sinking into the black depths, they had effectively been cut off from the outside world. Their radio and satellite communications networks were ruined. Their weapons cache was now submerged under hundreds of feet of seawater. Their only functional boats were the inflatable Zodiacs and the life rafts that would essentially leave them at the mercy of the storm and the unpredictable waves.

  There was still the outside chance that they would be able to find a functional radio in the village that they could use to hail the mainland, but his adversary had already proven its cunning. If it was smart enough to lure an entire vessel to its demise, then surely it had considered every possible contingency, especially one so easily remedied.

  For the first time in his life, he felt the stirrings of despair. He bared his teeth and stuffed them down. Now was not the time to allow fear to take root, not while he still had blood pumping through his veins and a Beretta in his fist.

  The cove had been out of sight for maybe fifteen minutes as he plunged through the dark jungle. He had to be getting close to the beach by now. The screams were minion, and so awful they pierced his very soul. He recognized the difference between terror and pain. He had heard both so many times passing the lips of the wounded and the dying. These were the heartbreaking cries of people desperately entreating the ear of a deaf God, channeling their life forces into their voices knowing that their physical vessels were already lost to them.

  They were the screams of a slaughter.

  He burst from the jungle and found himself upon the top of a limestone crag, where he again came under siege by the rain and the ferocious wind that propelled it into his face. Ten yards below him was the beach he had seen from above. The waves dragged wreckage onto the shore, bringing with them the lifeless bodies already partially covered with sand and seaweed. Rafts still bobbed a hundred yards from the shore, while those who braved the ocean without them flailed toward the shallows.

  There wasn’t a single living soul on the beach. He had expected to find something inhuman attacking the survivors the moment they crawled from the sea, but instead encountered only sand so choppy and rutted by the rain that it was impossible to tell if there were footprints of any kind.

  The
stern of the Huxley was still visible far out where it was lodged on the reef, the tall A-frame a dramatic arch through which the cresting waves spilled onto the deck. Her back was broken. The entire bow and everything forward of the partially collapsed submersible hanger was now underwater. Only the very crown of the wheelhouse with a single misshapen satellite dish breached the surface.

  And between there and where he stood, dozens of people fought for their lives against the sea.

  He scrambled down a series of staggered rock ledges until he dropped into the wet sand and sprinted toward the shoreline. Amid the mess of sheared metal and debris, there were at least a half-dozen unmoving bodies. When he reached the nearest, he paused to survey the area around him down the sightline of his pistol. Behind him, there was no sign of movement in the jungle, only the branches that swayed on the monsoon winds. Regardless, it took all of his strength to turn his back on the forest with a mere twenty yards of sand separating him from it. Across the sea, the life rafts drifted inexorably toward him on the roiling waves, while flailing arms alternately appeared on the distant crests before vanishing into the troughs. Their cries and pleas for help were already diminishing. He knelt over the corpse and rolled it onto its back. A man’s face stared up at him, his mouth and eyes packed with sand, his skin coated with it. His uniform was that of a crew member, although his nametag was undoubtedly somewhere on the ocean floor. Pike didn’t recognize the man, but the gash across his neck left no doubt as to his cause of death. The horizontal gash was so deep that Pike could clearly see the exposed musculature and severed trachea, from which saltwater trickled to fill the wound.

  He hadn’t seen anyone on the beach. However the man’s throat had been ripped open, it had happened somewhere out there before his remains reached the shore.

  Pike leapt up, scanned his surroundings again, and ran to the next body.

  Brazelton and Walker scurried down the escarpment from the south and approached his position, weapons covering the tree line.

  At least now there was someone to watch his back while he inspected a woman who lay supine in the surf. Her clothes were ripped, revealing a belly and chest transected by deep scratches that showed no indication of healing. Her neck was intact, but there was standing water behind her parted lips. He felt for a pulse at the side of her cold throat.

  Nothing.

  The voices from the sea grew steadily louder. A glance confirmed they were maybe fifty yards out. As he watched, one struggling shadow rose up a wave, then quickly disappeared beneath it, arms raised over its head, grasping only empty air. Pike scrutinized that same point for several long seconds, but the swimmer never reappeared.

  “We have to get them to shore,” Walker said. He shed his backpack, dropped it to the sand, and waded out until he the water reached his waist. He held his pistol high in one hand.

  “Where is it?” Brazelton asked. He kept his back to Pike while he swept his Beretta back and forth across the trees. “It has to be around here somewhere.”

  Pike had been wondering the exact same thing. There was something wrong with this scenario. He hurried to the next corpse, and the one after that. Both of them had been cut deeply across their stomachs, chests, necks, and faces. One’s wounds appeared to have been capable of causing a fatal amount of blood loss, while the other’s looked fairly superficial. For them to have reached the beach first, they had to have either been in the water well before the others or physically dragged ashore. Yet there were no distinct footprints, at least not that he could tell. And how had the pilot driven the Huxley into the reef with all of the navigational systems at his disposal. There should have been warning lights and alarms going off everywhere.

  His blood ran cold.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “It was already on the ship.”

  He leapt to his feet and stood at the edge of the sea, which threw brine up over his ankles and tried to drag him out to his death. How had he not seen it? All along, he had thought that after killing Montgomery and Pearson, the creature was cutting across the island overland to spring its trap when the men from the vessel attempted to land, but it had simply doubled back to the eastern bay and somehow boarded the Huxley. Just as it had done on the Mayr, it must have dispatched the captain, leaving the ship helpless as it sped into the harbor and struck the reef. The people out there in the ocean…they weren’t merely fleeing the sinking boat, but whatever had been on it as well, which meant that—

  “It’s out there in the water,” he shouted.

  “What?” Brazelton said. He eased back until his shoulder brushed Pike’s.

  “That goddamned thing is out there with them!”

  The corpses that had washed to shore…they’d been attacked while trying to swim to the island.

  A pair of life rafts rode the waves toward them, a mere thirty yards out. The paddling arms of a dozen swimmers slapped at the water just beyond the breakers. All of them dark silhouettes. He couldn’t decipher a single detail, even with the blinding flashes of lightning. No faces, no eyes. Nothing.

  For all he knew, any one of them could be the creature.

  Forty-Eight

  They had heard the commotion from perhaps a kilometer away. Distance was impossible to gauge in the dense jungle through which they blindly forged their way, through bushes nearly as tall as they were and around trunks so poorly spaced it was like trying to shoulder through a crowd on a busy city street. Bishop had recognized the noises, for he had heard them all far too recently. The forlorn wail of an emergency klaxon. The muffled screams. The shriek of shearing metal. And the resounding thud of the sinking vessel suddenly taking on water. By the time they managed to get close enough to see the bay, it was already too late.

  From where they had climbed ashore after fleeing the ship that now lay in ruins, he had chosen a slowly ascending route that would still lead them to the north, but into the steeper hills where they could maintain the high ground and have a better chance of spotting their pursuit, which would undoubtedly favor the lowlands where the forest was slightly thinner and the passage easier. If they identified trouble before it found them, they could easily disappear into the seemingly impregnable interior of the volcanic island where no one could ever find them.

  Now they stood at a crossroads.

  Far below them, through the sparse gaps in the canopy, they watched a sliver of beach and the nightmare out on the ocean. The mist drifted past, concealing and then revealing the horror. The Huxley’s stern stood from the reef at an angle, while the ocean around it bubbled and boiled as the fore section of the vessel settled into the silt. Life rafts that looked like Cheerios from this height rolled toward the shore while specks that could only be swimmers dotted the whitecaps. He may not have been able to clearly see them well enough for a head count, but it was obvious that he was looking at a fraction of those that had been aboard.

  “How could this have happened?” Courtney whispered.

  Bishop shook his head. He hadn’t the slightest clue. All he knew was that with all of the computer navigation equipment on the bridge, there should have been no way they could have bottomed out the vessel on the reef. The only scenario he could imagine was if there had been no one on the bridge to see the console come to life with warning lights or to react to the blare of the emergency klaxon. He thought of the Mayr and stifled a shiver.

  “We should help them,” Courtney said. She crouched beside him behind a broad-leaved shrub covered with what looked like string beans.

  “There’s nothing we can do for them now.”

  “We can’t just let them die.”

  “By the time we’re able to reach the beach, their fates will have already been decided.”

  “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.”

  “Tell me you haven’t forgotten what happened to us on that very ship. We were prisoners, Courtney.”

  “What do you propose then? That we just sit here and watch them drown?”

  “No.” The wind rose with a howl, e
clipsing the screams for a blessed moment. “We need to take advantage of this opportunity to get ahead of them so we can reach the village first. It’s our only chance.”

  “But what kind of people would that make us?”

  “The living kind,” Bishop said.

  Courtney shook her head. Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes before she wiped them away. Bishop’s heart went out to her, but nothing could change his mind. His only priority right now was keeping them both alive. Besides, these were the same men who would have undoubtedly killed them to protect their secret. The fewer of them left the better.

  He took Courtney by the hand and pulled her out from behind the bush. They needed to make every second count. It was only a matter of time before those on the beach regrouped and came to the same realization that he and Courtney already had. Their only chance of calling for rescue meant gambling that there was a functional communications system in the village. The Huxley’s emergency beacon would eventually summon help, but as Bishop could attest, with the aftermath of the destructive tsunami, days could pass in the interim. He and Courtney needed to take matters into their own hands.