Lightning flickered overhead. The subsequent thunder was indistinguishable from the rumbling sounds of the island.
Bradley lowered the flashlight from the hand back down to the head. A puzzled expression crinkled his face. He turned the face away from him and shined the beam at the side of its neck, just below the base of its jaw. He reached out, withdrew his hand, and then tentatively touched it with his trembling fingers. When he stroked the skin from back to front, fringes peeled apart like the pages of a book. He glanced up at Reaves and then at Pike before looking back down. Carefully, he parted two of the folds and stuck his thumb and index finger inside the creature’s neck. When he pulled them out, they pinched pinkish-gray flaps of tissue with edges like a dulled circular saw blade.
As a marine biologist, Courtney immediately recognized what they were.
Gills.
A cloud of smoke passed between them, momentarily obscuring her view.
“We need to get moving,” Bishop whispered directly into her ear, “while they’re still distracted.”
She knew he was right, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave. Not yet. Not until she was certain one way or the other. The problem was that there was still so little of his former humanity left that she couldn’t discern a single specific characteristic. She couldn’t see the birthmark on his left shoulder of the scar on his chest for the scales. She couldn’t see his eyes or his smile or any of the facial expressions she probably knew better than her own. She couldn’t hear his voice or see the way he walked. If this really was her brother, then there was absolutely nothing left of him in that lifeless vessel with the crater in its forehead. All she had to go on was her gut reaction, and whether rational or not, it was insistent.
Courtney wiped away her tears and crawled quietly out of the bushes behind Bishop. They stayed low to the ground as they wended a circuitous route up the hillside, clinging to the deepest cover they could find. All the while, she rehearsed the images in her mind. The scaled skin. The clawed and webbed hands like a frog’s. The gills. The teeth. The long legs with the severe toenails. Her instinctive reaction gave way to certainty. She didn’t know how she knew for sure. She just did.
She waited until they crested the first ridge to finally put voice to the words.
“That wasn’t my brother.”
Seventy
Reaves watched Pike wrap the body in the tarp and pack the dirt back over the impromptu grave. Pike kicked the detritus back into place and covered it with a mat of branches. Reaves wondered why he even bothered, considering the whole island was going to burn. He prayed none of them would return to this accursed spot to exhume the remains. Nothing good could ever come from the knowledge contained within its genetic code. The world was not now, nor would it ever be, ready for its secrets to be revealed. Within this one specimen was enough ammunition to drive humanity to extinction a hundred times over, enough to remake mankind not in God’s image, but in myriad ways unbounded even by the wildest imagination.
Mere feet under the ground lay temptation greater even than Eve tasted. This corpse was the new forbidden fruit, one metaphorical bite from which would insure not a mere fall from grace, but an abrupt evolutionary end.
This was God’s wrath, His ultimate failsafe.
This was the ticking bomb at the Earth’s core.
This was how the slate would be cleaned.
Reaves shivered, wrapped his arms around his chest, and watched the rain puddle on the gravesite. He couldn’t bear to turn around and see the filthy tarp covering Angie’s body. Her final breath still rattled in his ears on a continuous loop over which even the sound of the volcano spewing their demise was a blessing. The rain absolved him of her blood, which had covered the entirety of the left side of his face and his shirt. He cursed himself for how casual they had kept their relationship. There had always been a tomorrow for two people so invested in their careers, that mythical day when their stars would align and they would be together. Now there were no more tomorrows. Not for them. The thing that had brought them together had irrevocably torn them apart. He had invited her into their inner circle, and, as such, he was responsible for her death. For all of their deaths. And if anyone ever came back to claim this body, he would be responsible for the extinction of his species.
You’re being melodramatic, he could hear Bradley saying, which was why he couldn’t share his feelings with his longtime friend. Bradley would never understand the evolutionary ramifications should man begin to experiment with things like this, with which he was never meant to coexist. All along that had been Bradley’s intent, and for the longest time it had been his, as well. Finding this creature—or, to be brutally honest, creating this creature—had been their shared obsession. And now what did they have to show for it? More than a hundred dead and a former human being whose life had been usurped by the bacterium that would be the destroyer of mankind.
He pictured the hollow eyes and the mouth full of hooked teeth like those of a shark.
If mankind had been made in God’s image, then whose visage was this?
He feared nothing more than finding out in the eternity of damnation ahead.
“Time to get moving,” Pike said. “I want the radio fixed and running before nightfall. We’re getting off this rock.”
“The sooner the better,” Barnes said. “I don’t want to stick around long enough to find out how far that lava’s going to flow.”
“At least we don’t have to worry about what’s sneaking up behind us anymore,” Bradley said through the mask he had commandeered from Brazelton’s supplies. Reaves wasn’t jealous in the slightest. He had appropriated something of his own.
“That doesn’t mean this is going to be a leisurely stroll,” Pike said. “We can’t afford to waste any time.”
Pike whirled and struck off to the south at a rapid click without bothering to glance back to make sure that the rest of them were coming.
Reaves stood his ground. He turned around to see the rain-beaded tarp by the front door of the mission. One of the corners had peeled free and flapped on the breeze. He could see Angie’s slender lower legs and feet.
“We’re not just leaving them…like this…are we?” he asked.
“You can stay and keep them company, if you want,” Pike called back. There was an almost mocking tone in his voice. “Although I imagine you’ll have to carry the conversation.”
Reaves felt sick to his stomach. This was the road he had chosen, the one he had sacrificed his career, his entire world, to travel. How had he not seen that this had always been his ultimate destination?
In his mind, he saw Angie smiling at him, giving him that devilish wink of hers.
This was his mess to clean up, and he intended to do just that.
He started forward slowly, one step at a time, then jogged to catch up with the others, but he had to slow his pace when the object he’d tucked under his waistband nearly bounced out. He readjusted the Beretta he had found by Brazelton’s body and made sure that his shirt concealed it.
No one could ever return to this island to claim the knowledge that body contained.
Pandora’s Box had to remain closed.
Regardless of the cost.
Seventy-One
Bishop was silent for a long moment as he contemplated his words carefully. If there was a right thing to say, it eluded him. Courtney’s suffering was written all over her face, and while he wanted nothing more than to make her feel better, he feared the emotional ramifications of fueling a potential fantasy. If she were to find out that the body the men at the mission had been in such a hurry to bury was her brother’s, it would crush her, yet at the same time, hope was worth its weight in gold. In order to elude the men who undoubtedly were already coming after them, they needed to stay sharp. Both of them. He wouldn’t be able to pull off what he had in mind alone.
“How can you be sure?” he finally asked.
The tower of ash expanded overhead to the point that it nearly rea
ched the far horizon to the west, where the Pacific met the sky. The lightning display no longer even penetrated the roiling cloud, and the raindrops fell dark and heavy. Ash had finally begun to descend from the heavens like snowflakes, decorating the leaves overhead and carpeting swatches of the ground, which they avoided to prevent leaving pristine footprints. Smoke wafted around them like a fog rolling out to sea, where the waves pounding against the breakers and the sheer limestone escarpments alternately appeared and disappeared. From uphill to his left, the flames heralding the advance of the lava were an orangish smear through the smothering smoke. He had already been forced to shed his shirt and tear it into straps in order to provide fresh fabric to cover their mouths. The ash in the air could accumulate in their lungs and asphyxiate them in no time flat.
“You don’t believe me,” she whispered barely loud enough to be heard over the grumble of the eruption.
“Of course I believe you. I just want to know…. Was it something you saw? A physical trait? Something you recognized? Some small detail? Anything?”
“There was just something that wasn’t quite…right. I can’t put my finger on it, exactly, but I know beyond any shadow of doubt that what we just saw was not my brother.”
Bishop nodded and helped her across a thin stream. His feet were killing him, but he wasn’t about to stick them in the water, which had been heated uphill to the point that steam rose from it.
They needed to pick up their pace if they wanted to keep from losing their head start. Once they reached the Huxley, he figured they would need at least half an hour to execute his plan, and that was the best case scenario. If they reached the ship and found that everything wasn’t set up like he hoped, then they were in big trouble.
“If that wasn’t your brother, then who could it possibly be?” Bishop asked.
They walked in silence for several minutes before Courtney finally spoke.
“You don’t have any siblings, do you?”
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand. There’s a bond…I don’t know how to describe it. When you see someone nearly every day of your life…When you watch them grow and change in subtle ways, you come to see them as a combination of who they were, who they are, and who’ll they’ll become at the same time. It’s not a psychic connection or anything metaphysical like that. It’s more like…” She paused as a flock of startled parrots shot through the canopy above them and continued out over the ocean. “It’s like there’s a person inside the body that only you can see, a person that’s been revealed to you in ways that make it so that you can recognize them despite their outward appearance, not because of it.”
Bishop debated whether or not he should even attempt to vocalize his thoughts. He decided the question was crucial to determining her state of mind. If he wasn’t going to be able to count on her, he needed to know now.
“Then you know what that means?”
“That Tyler’s probably dead?” She stated it so bluntly that it surprised him. “Yeah. I understand the implications. But you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not willing to give up on him just yet. We managed to survive. Who’s to say he didn’t?”
Bishop smiled. That was precisely what he needed to hear.
“Once we get off this island and find help, I promise we’ll come back and tear every inch of this jungle and the reef apart until we find him.”
“We?”
“You aren’t planning on ditching me just yet, are you?”
She squeezed his hand.
“You’re that confident you’re going to be able to get us out of here?”
“Not a doubt in my mind.” He hoped he sounded more convincing than he felt.
“You’re a rotten liar.”
“I prefer to call it optimism.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
He offered a crooked smile.
“How far do you think you can swim?”
Seventy-Two
Pike had picked up the trail before they were even out of sight of the village. For as discreet as Bishop and Martin were being, they might as well have been leaving behind bread crumbs. The broken branches, the trampled shrubs, the bare footprints in the ash. They had doubled back toward the mission instead of fleeing while they had the chance. Had they taken off when Pike was distracted by the creature and the pending siege, they could have been miles ahead by now. So why had they taken the risk to come back?
Martin.
She needed to see with her own eyes if the creature was truly her brother. He hoped she liked what she saw, because her curiosity was about to get her killed. The fact that their tracks had yet to be covered by the settling ash and the bushes they’d stomped still hadn’t sprung back into place meant that they couldn’t be more than half an hour ahead of them on the path.
And it was obvious where they were headed.
There was something they needed aboard the Huxley. Otherwise they would have fled in any number of directions. If they had been the ones who disabled the radio in the village, as he had begun to seriously doubt, then were they planning on destroying any components that could possibly be used to fix it? No, they hadn’t broken the radio. The creature must have crippled it to prevent someone in the village from calling for help before the slaughter commenced. At the sound of the first screams, surely someone would have gone straight for their sole means of signaling the outside world. Bishop and Martin had gone to the village for the exact same reason that his group had. They wanted to get off this island. They knew that even if they survived the creature, there was no way they would be allowed to tell the world about what they had seen. Making a run for the Huxley was a desperate ploy. What did they hope to accomplish?
Surely they didn’t think they could round up the necessary electronics, sneak back past them, and fix the radio without getting caught. And destroying the components was a fool’s proposition. They had to know that if Pike’s party wasn’t able to leave the island, he would spend every waking moment hunting them down like dogs. The satellite tower had been ripped from the roof of the wheelhouse. There was no power, no functional computers. The EPIRB beacon was only designed to broadcast an emergency distress signal, not any kind of outgoing message. Diving for the weapons cache would be a waste of time. The magnetic lock would have shorted in the locked position, and even were they able to open it, whatever was inside would be all but useless after prolonged immersion in the brine. With the way the waves were rolling in, there was no way they would be able to paddle the massive life rafts past the breakers by themselves, not without some form out outboard motor, and he couldn’t think of any craft on the research vessel equipped with—
Pike laughed out loud.
“Well, what do you know,” he said.
This changed everything.
How had he not seen it right from the start?
He amended his plan on the fly. Not only were they getting off this rock, they were doing so tonight. By this time tomorrow, they’d return with a new ship to collect their prize and erase any sign that they’d ever been on the island. He couldn’t have asked for things to work out any better.
Pike glanced back over his shoulder at the others. They’d fallen so far behind that he could barely see them through the maze of vegetation. They trudged with their heads down, dead on their feet. He debated simply leaving them, or perhaps putting each of them down right now, but the time wasn’t right. Not yet. He still needed their help.
And while he would like to get Bradley safely back to the mainland in order to cash in on all of his hard work and capitalize on the leverage he suddenly had on his employer, he realized that he now held all of the cards.
If he was the only one to survive this ordeal, then he would have sole possession of the corpse and the secrets it contained. He could write his own ticket. How much would any of GeNext’s competitors be willing to pay for the knowledge they could glean from one of its legs? A foot? A single toe? How much would someone like Amgen be willing to pay f
or its brain? He could auction off the parts to the highest bidders and make more money than any human being had ever amassed, not just the paltry bonus Bradley would pay him for saving his pathetic life.
He smiled.
If none of the others survived, no one would ever know.
“Hurry up back there!” he called.
He had a long journey ahead of him.
But first, they all had a date with destiny.
Seventy-Three
Courtney barely had the strength to keep going. Her feet were badly cut and she had passed the point of exhaustion long ago. And now she had to fight against her failing body with sheer will alone, the will to persevere, the will to survive. Wherever Ty was now, she knew that was what he would have wanted, what he would have expected from her. While it was a relief that he hadn’t become what everyone believed he had, she understood that his remains might never be recovered, that she would never learn what had happened to him. With that realization came a marrow-deep sorrow that threatened to rob her of her fading resolve.
In her mind, she saw the scaled, gray carcass spread out on the tarp beside the shallow grave. The structure of the facial bones was all wrong, even with the mutations. And the legs were too long. The corpse was too tall to be her brother’s.
She had suspected where Bishop was leading her the entire time, but it wasn’t until the sound of the waves thundering against the cliffs softened to the roar of the ocean raging against the beach that she knew for sure. Through the trees, she saw the whitecaps rolling into the bay and sweeping all the way up across the sand and into the forest. The smoke hung above the water like a fog, so dense she could hardly see the life rafts floating fifty yards from shore as though trying to battle their way past the breakers, which were now little more than crests of rock that disappeared beneath every tall wave. She pondered the prospect of trying to paddle one of the inflatable orange crafts out to sea, but with the way the sea roiled, they would never escape the bay. And even if they did, where could they possibly go? They’d be adrift in the midst of a storm on the furious Pacific and possibly swept away from Papua New Guinea rather than toward it. By the time anyone happened to come across them, they could be long dead from exposure or dehydration or any number of things. She felt suddenly deflated. All of the hardship, everything they had endured, had been for naught.
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