Vector Borne

by Michael McBride

  There was a flash of eyeshine from the shadows near the ground, where a figure crouched momentarily before springing to its feet and hurtling across the courtyard.

  Brazelton shouted and gunfire echoed in the confines. Chips of tile and marble exploded from the tiered fountain in the center of the sanctum as the silver blur passed. Brazelton was still firing off round after round when it struck him. His war cry metamorphosed into a horrible scream as he hit the ground with the creature on his chest. It buried its face into his neck and Brazelton fell abruptly silent. An arc of blood patterned the adobe wall above his head.

  Everything was happening too quickly. The creature moved like lightning, a flash of liquid mercury and it was a dozen paces away from Brazelton’s crumpled body. Bradley uprooted his feet and turned to flee.

  There was a banging sound from the front door, as though something large were being repeatedly slammed against it.

  Angie’s screams reverberated from the walls. From the corner of his eye, he saw her dart out of the doorway to the sacristy and make a break for the front door.

  Bradley passed through the short corridor into the refectory and barreled into Barnes and Reaves in their hurry to see what was happening. He lost his balance and sent all three of them tumbling to the floor.

  Behind him, Angie’s screams grew even louder.

  “No!” Reaves shouted and tried to crawl out from beneath him.

  Bradley glanced back in time to see Angie lunge for the door, but the creature was faster. It closed the distance and launched itself at her with the speed and ferocity of a striking adder. Its body eclipsed hers as they slammed against the wooden construct. Her hair flared in a golden corona as the creature’s mouth latched onto the side of her throat. The expression on her face was the most awful thing Bradley had ever seen; a mixture of terror, agony, and the comprehension that her life was at an end.

  Blood spurted from her neck like the first bite from an overripe orange.

  And she screamed no more.

  Angie’s body slid down the bloodstained door as someone continued to beat against it from the other side. A solid impact split the wood and toppled her forward onto her face.

  The creature turned toward them. Its entire face shimmered with crimson, save for the twin reflective disks of its eyes. Slowly, it lowered to its haunches in a sinewy movement reminiscent of a serpent coiling, and bared a nest of hooked teeth that curled under in interlocking fashion. Some poked through its lips like piercings.

  “It’s magnificent,” Bradley whispered.

  It sprung toward them like a panther, leading with its outstretched arms, which it used to push off from the ground and propel itself into the air long enough to get its legs underneath it.

  The door burst inward behind it, sending broken chunks of wood flying in all directions.

  The silver blur crossed the courtyard so quickly that Bradley barely had time to throw his arms up in front of his face.

  He heard the resounding crack of gunfire and felt warmth on his hands and face before the weight of the creature slammed down on him. The crown of his head struck the wall. He cried out and threw himself away from the creature. He expected to feel talons slashing through his skin or those hideous teeth sinking into his neck.

  When he finally slid out from underneath it, his torso was sloppy with blood. The creature was facedown on top of Reaves and Barnes, who punched at it to get it off of them. Its long silver legs spasmed and its toenails carved at the planks with a screeching sound, but it made no effort to rise.

  Across the room, he saw Pike climbing through what was left of the front door, his unwavering pistol pointed directly at the body at Bradley’s feet. Pike didn’t even look down at Angie as he stepped over her body, or at Brazelton or Libby, whose corpses were on opposite sides of the fountain. He strode directly toward Bradley and stood over the creature.

  “Stand back.” Pike directed the barrel of his pistol at the back of the creature’s head. “We can’t afford to take any chances.”

  Sixty-Seven

  The final gunshot echoed from the face of the volcano, where a steady stream of lava and flames advanced downhill toward them.

  Courtney waited for another shot to come, but was rewarded with only silence. From where they knelt in a blind of shrubs and wild grasses, they could barely see the silhouetted huts and the mission though the smoke that clung to the treetops and drifted through the clearing.

  “What’s happening down there?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Bishop said. “I can’t see a thing.”

  The moment she heard the first screams, Courtney had stopped and turned toward the source, knowing full well where they had originated.

  “We have to keep moving,” Bishop had said, but she’d been frozen in place.

  If there was screaming, then undoubtedly her brother couldn’t be far away. She needed to see him with her own eyes, needed irrefutable proof as to whether or not it was really him. Even if they managed to escape the island, she couldn’t possibly spend the rest of her life wondering if it truly was him. And she wouldn’t be able to live with the thought that she had abandoned him when he had needed her the most. While Bishop had been less than thrilled about the prospect of giving up a single second of their head start, he had reluctantly agreed to seek a better vantage point from which to view the village from afar.

  They crawled forward into a blind of shrubs until they could see the roofs of the huts beside the campanile.

  She tried to decipher any sound over the rumbling ground and the pounding surf. Were those barely audible voices in the distance or just the roar of the fire consuming the island? A flicker of lightning, a mere gray discoloration through the ceiling of smoke, preceded a peal of thunder.

  What if they were all dead down there and whatever killed them was now silently stalking Bishop and her through the jungle? Or what if Pike and the others had survived and the monster they assumed to be her brother hadn’t?

  “I need to know,” she whispered.

  She could feel the weight of Bishop’s stare, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  “Courtney…”

  “If Tyler’s down there…If there’s any way I could have helped him and didn’t…”

  “Those people had guns. If they didn’t make it, what chance do we have?”

  “I know my brother. There’s no way he would ever hurt me. Regardless of the situation…or what he might have become.”

  “You’re willing to take that risk?”

  “What other choice do I have?”

  “You know he would have wanted you to be safe at all costs. He never would have allowed you to put yourself in danger. Even for him.”

  “But he would have done just that for me. What kind of person would I be if I weren’t willing to do the same?”

  “You’d be alive, Courtney.” He placed his hand on top of hers. “That’s the most important thing. I need you to stay alive. I’m not letting go of you this easily.”

  “What if they got him? What if he’s lying down there bleeding to death? What if there’s something I can do to help him?” She paused for a long moment before resuming in a voice so quiet even she could hardly hear it. “What if this is my only opportunity to say goodbye?”

  The rain continued to beat down on them, clearing the sludge of ash and tears from her cheeks. She wrung out her essentially useless mask in a puddle more mud than water and covered her face again.

  “Whoever survived down there will be coming for us soon anyway,” she whispered. “At least if we can get close enough to see, we’ll know what we’re up against.”

  “If we can see them, they can see us.”

  “Better to look death in the eye than to listen for his footsteps.”

  “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

  The corners of her lips curled upward into the ghost of a smile and she finally turned to look at him.

  “Okay,” he said. “W
e’re only getting close enough to figure out what happened. No closer. And as soon as we can tell what’s going on down there, we’re out of here. Do we have a deal?”

  It didn’t matter if she agreed out loud or not. He was only saying the words for his own benefit. Surely by now he knew that if her brother was down there, nothing on this planet would be able to keep her away.

  “What made you change your mind?” she whispered as they started down through the forest.

  “I don’t see where I ever had a choice.”

  Sixty-Eight

  “God…hurts…” Angie sputtered through a mouthful of blood. It flowed over her chin and down her neck, where it merged with the rest. The glistening wound in her throat revealed the tattered musculature, tendons, and trachea, despite Reaves’s best efforts to hold it closed. Blood sluiced out from between his fingers onto her drenched chest, which hitched with every futile breath. Her eyes were already glassy, a look Pike had seen hundreds of times before. She was a goner, and there was absolutely nothing any of them could do about it. The humane thing to do would be to end her suffering, but he knew damn well how the others would react if he suggested a bullet to the temple, so he didn’t waste his breath.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Reaves whispered over and over. He stroked the side of her face with his free hand, which only served to smear crimson across her cheek. She didn’t even blink her eyes when he grazed her lashes.

  Pike brushed past them and stepped through the remains of the front door. With a groan, he flopped Libby’s carcass off of his shoulder and onto the ground. Her wide eyes stared past him into the heavens. Brazelton’s body lay beside hers, his throat opened to such a degree that Pike had barely been able to keep the head attached when he carried it out here. Bradley handed him the blankets they had stripped from the priest’s bed and he wrapped each of them in turn, bundling them like so many pupae. The blood soaked through in Rorschach patterns. If a stray cinder were to ignite the decrepit mission, no one wanted the bodies to be incinerated inside. They only needed to be saved from the scavengers long enough to be retrieved and shipped back home for burial. Or at least that was Bradley’s plan. Pike had other plans for their permanent disposal, assuming the lava didn’t claim them first, which was starting to look like a distinct, and welcomed, possibility. It was his job to protect GeNext and make sure that no one ever learned what had happened on this island.

  He set aside the remaining sheet, knowing it would only be a matter of minutes before Dr. Whitted needed it. Once she was similarly prepared, they could cover all three with the plastic tarps they had found in the sacristy, where they were draped over the shelves of supposedly holy relics to shield them from the holes in the rotting roof.

  Pike turned at the sound of footsteps to see Reaves framed in the demolished door. His face was a deathly shade of pale. He somehow stared both beyond them and through them when he spoke.

  “She’s gone,” he said, then disappeared back inside.

  “Would you mind…?” Bradley asked.

  Pike walked through the door to collect her remains and nearly ran into Reaves as the anthropologist carried her body across the threshold. He laid her down almost lovingly on the ground beside the others and carefully bound her in the sheet.

  “She’s getting wet,” Reaves said. He tilted his face to the sky, but made no effort to block the rain. “I don’t want her to get wet.”

  Bradley clapped him softly on the back and glanced at Pike, who agreed to the unvoiced request with a nod. He went back inside, collected the tarps, and covered the three bodies. He weighted the edges down with stones. The raindrops tap-danced on the plastic.

  Now came the part he’d been waiting for. Since all of the human needs had been formally met, it was time to tend to the inhuman.

  He headed back into the building, gathered the last tarp, and crossed the courtyard toward the refectory. The body was sprawled exactly where he had left it. Spatters of blood and gray matter painted the floor around its head. The pool of blood from the exit wound in its forehead was already becoming sticky. The crater at the back of its head was framed by fragments of bone. Pike hoped the rain had cleansed him of the blowback, but with how tight the skin around the corners of his mouth felt, he wasn’t counting on it.

  It had proven itself a worthy adversary, but in the end, it was just another animal.

  He rolled the corpse onto its back and maneuvered it onto the spread tarp. Clenching the plastic in his fists, he dragged it toward the door. He knew it was already too late, but he wanted to minimize the amount of the creature’s blood he got on his skin. Lord only knew what kind of viruses and bacteria wriggled through it, none of which he particularly wanted to infect him.

  As he neared the front door, he heard Reaves softly crying.

  “Suck it up, for God’s sake,” he whispered. He dragged the body out into the rain and across the clearing toward the tree line, where Barnes continued to dig in the muddy ground at the base of a kapok tree with an old, rusted shovel. The site was exactly one hundred paces due south of the mission’s keystone at the southwest corner. Even if the entire village and the surrounding forest burned, they would still be able to find this spot.

  He heard sloshing footsteps behind him as Bradley and Reaves followed him across the clearing.

  Barnes had made less progress than Pike would have liked, but the hole was probably large enough to serve their purposes. He didn’t want to waste any more time here than they absolutely had to. The important thing was to get it buried in such a way that when they returned to the island they could find it and exhume it as quickly and easily as possible.

  “I still don’t understand why we don’t just torch the bastard.” Barnes cast aside the shovel and looked at anything other than the cargo on the tarp. “I’d be happy to do the honors.”

  Pike didn’t feel like expending the energy to reply. It didn’t matter what Barnes thought. After all, he wouldn’t be around after he fixed the radio with the parts they needed to gather from the Huxley. Like the others, his would just be another of the bodies decomposing in the silt at the bottom of the reef.

  But at least now that the creature was no longer a threat, he had the freedom to implement his plan on his own timeframe and as he saw fit, beginning with the interment of their ultimate prize.

  “Can I borrow your flashlight?” Bradley asked.

  Pike studied him for a long moment before removing the Maglite from his backpack and handing it to him.

  “Thank you.” Bradley knelt beside the creature’s corpse and directed the beam down at it. “I just wanted to…look at it…one last time.”

  “We’ll be coming back for it soon enough,” Pike said.

  Bradley offered a wistful smile.

  “One never knows.”

  He shined the light onto its face. The beam reflected dimly from behind the creature’s clouded eyes.

  Sixty-Nine

  Courtney closed her eyes and stifled a startled gasp. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her lips quivered. The entire world seemed to simultaneously drop out from beneath her and spin on a titling fulcrum. Bishop tensed beside her and squeezed her hand even tighter. She thought she had been prepared for what she would see, but nothing could have been further from the truth. When they had crept close enough to the mission to see Pike and Bradley in the clearing and the expressions on their faces, she had known the outcome of the firefight. She had felt it as a cold knot in her gut. If her brother really had become the monster, then his fate was decided. Whatever misguided hope she had held that she might be able to save him was now every bit as dead as he was.

  But there was still the possibility that the others were wrong, that Tyler hadn’t become what they thought he had. Of course, that undoubtedly meant that he hadn’t survived the sinking of the Mayr. If that were the case, she would still never be able to see him again, never be able to say all of the things she wished she had said while he was alive, but at least she still had
the opportunity to honor his memory by proving that he wasn’t responsible for all of the death, if only to herself. It was the least she could do for the man who had always been there to protect and encourage her, even when she didn’t believe in herself.

  She and Bishop were maybe five yards away, crouching inside a broad-leaved bush spotted with white blossoms. The sound of their approach had been muffled by the crunching noises of the computer technician she recognized from the Huxley digging what she now realized was a grave. They had dared encroach no closer for fear of discovery, and had watched in horror as Pike carried body after body out of the ruined mission door. When none of them had been moved to the single grave, she had recognized precisely whom it was for, and shifted so that she could clearly see it, if nothing else.

  And now that she’d seen the condition of the body, she wished she hadn’t.

  She forced herself to open her eyes. Bradley knelt to the corpse’s right, the beam of his flashlight reflecting from the grayish skin…no, scales…that covered every inch of the naked form. She recognized the texture and coloration, although now subdued by death, as that of the skin condition that had afflicted her brother the last time she had seen him. An exit wound bloomed from its forehead, a strange flower composed of white chips of bone, furled gray matter, and congealed blood. She couldn’t clearly see its eyes in their recesses. It slender nose tapered to a blunt point above teeth that protruded from its bulging mouth and even through its lips.

  Pike used a stick to prod what could have been another exit wound just below its left clavicle.

  “Through and through,” he said. “Son of a bitch should have been in some serious pain.”

  Courtney flinched at the comment and had to suppress the urge to storm out of hiding and punch him squarely in the jaw. Bishop must have sensed her thoughts. He again squeezed her hand, or perhaps tightened his grip to keep her from charging.

  “Look at its hands,” Reaves whispered barely loud enough for her to hear. He raised the left arm and fanned he blood-crusted fingers apart. The fingernails had grown into claws that more closely resembled those of a lizard than the talons of a bird, but she realized that wasn’t what he was referring to. A thin membrane stretched between the first knuckles of each finger. “They’re webbed.”