SNAFU: Unnatural Selection

VENOM Michael McBride

The thunder of helicopter blades summons him from the insensate darkness. The rotor wash hurls dirt against the Plexiglas shield covering his face. He opens his eyes. With the light comes the pain, forcing him to close them again. He has to warn them, though. Before it’s too late. For them. For all of them.

He screams and opens his eyes. The visor is cracked and spotted with blood. He can barely see the vague black shape of the Sikorsky MH-60G Pave Hawk settling through the cloud of dust. It takes all of his remaining strength to push himself to his hands and knees.

The camouflage Tyvek fabric of his isolation suit is torn and stained black with dried blood, whether his or someone else’s, he can’t recall. He attempts to wipe the blood from his shield, but only manages to smear the dust. The congealed droplets are on the inside.

The impelled dirt strikes his bare skin like needles. He tastes dust, inhales it into lungs that feel like paper sacks full of broken glass. Coughs it out with a fresh spatter of dark blood. Again he screams, and through sheer force of will struggles to his feet.

The wind shoves him backward. The dirt whipped up from the rutted road makes it impossible to see clearly. Dark shapes litter the ground around him, human silhouettes barely glimpsed through the dust. The fabric of their tattered suits flags from their inert forms. The ground surrounding them is spattered black.

“Don’t…”

The word is barbed and rips past his lips, although even he can’t hear it. He tastes blood in his mouth, feels it dribble down his chin and neck.

His only thought is for the men in the helicopter. It’s too late for him and the others. Their fates were sealed the moment they stepped from the plane. These men still had a chance, though.

The landing gear hits the ground and the rotor slows with a high-pitched whine. The cloud of dust expands outward, buffets the ramshackle buildings to either side, further scouring what little paint remains to the bare, gray wood.

He waves his arms over his head in an attempt to get their attention. Loses his balance. Collapses to the ground before he even realizes he’s falling.

“Don’t… get…”

He rolls onto his back and stares through the brown haze into the blazing sun. He wants nothing more than to feel its warm caress on his face as he once more descends into darkness. He thinks of the men in the chopper, of their faceless wives and children half a world away, and struggles to stand.

The ferocious wind has waned. He can see the indistinct outlines of the pilot and copilot through the dust settling upon the Pave Hawk’s windshield. He waves his arm over his head. Prays they’ll see him in time.

He hears the thunk of the lock on the helicopter’s sliding door disengage.

“Don’t get out!” he shouts.

His voice reverberates in the quiet that falls upon the still town. He looks from one side of the street to the other. Glass glimmers from the rusted tin awnings beneath the broken second-story windows, through which he detects the faintest shifting of shadows.

It’s already too late.

“This video footage was sent to Doctors Without Borders by a Ugandan physician named Samuel Odongo,” Dr Maryann Reilly said. The inverted image of the computer monitor reflected from her glasses. As the Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, she was one of the most powerful people within the hierarchy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a role belied by the fact that she looked like a cross between an owl and a stork in a pantsuit. “It was routed through the State Department and the CDC on its way to us.”

“Where was it recorded?” Dr Alex Byrne asked. He was the chief pathologist of the Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch and in charge of outbreak investigations and surveillance. The primary role of the IDPB was determining the cause and process of pathogenesis – the origin and development of a new disease – by utilizing gross and microscopic examination, immunohistochemistry, and molecular evaluation. His responsibility was critical and time-sensitive. They needed to understand everything they possibly could about a potential outbreak if they hoped to have any chance of containing it.

“Sierra Leone. Six days ago.”

His mind raced as he watched the shaky footage. The quality was poor and suggested it was recorded on a cell phone. The voiceover was provided by a deep male voice and spoken in a language he neither recognized nor understood. Monkeys screeched in the background from the dense canopy of tropical trees surrounding a clearing, in the middle of which were several brown lumps with long fur.

The camera approached and zoomed in on one of the carcasses. Flies crawled on its face, into its nose, over its unblinking eyes. Its tongue protruded from its snout and its lips were drawn back from its bared canines. A mane of golden-brown fur grew from its forehead to its haunches.

“Papio papio,” the voice said, this time with a formal British accent. “The Guinea baboon.”

The camera moved from one animal to the next. They were all in the same condition. Based upon the level of desiccation, Byrne estimated they’d been dead for somewhere between 72 and 96 hours, although with the humidity in Western Africa, it could have been longer. The dead animals appeared skeletal, their fur brittle and their skin clinging to their bones.

“As you can clearly see, these primates appear malnourished and exhibit an advanced state of dehydration.” Odongo nudged the animal with his foot to demonstrate its underside. Its left flank peeled from the grass with a crackling sound. “There is no appreciable hypostasis, no postmortem pooling of blood in the tissues, as one would expect to find in any deceased mammal.”

“Are we working under the assumption that we’re dealing with a potentially mutated form of cholera?” Byrne asked. “That level of dehydration could easily have been caused by acute diarrhea.”

“Keep watching,” Reilly said. The expression on her face remained neutral, although she nervously clicked the nail of her middle finger with her thumb.

The monitor issued a burst of static as the doctor knelt beside the baboon. He rolled it onto its back with his gloved hand. Its legs were stiff and remained flexed at the joints.

“There is visible evidence of rigor mortis, proving conclusively that this animal has been deceased for less than twenty-four hours.”

“That can’t be right,” Byrne said. “Not unless it was exsanguinated prior to its death.”

“Shh.”

The camera wobbled. Something made a clattering sound. The hand appeared again, only this time holding a scalpel, which the doctor used to hack off fistfuls of the baboon’s mane until he cleared a patch of grayish-black skin on its throat. Its trachea and musculature protruded from its taut, brittle flesh. He cut a straight incision beside the animal’s windpipe and two more perpendicular to it, one at either end, and retracted the flaps. No blood welled to the surface, nor was there more than the faintest hint on the silver connective tissue.

“Is the animal’s skin intact?” Byrne asked. “What about the mucus membranes?”

The aperture of the camera zoomed in and out to focus on the incision.

“Those are questions I can’t answer.”

Odongo turned the scalpel over and used the blunt end to pry the carotid artery from behind the sternoclydomastoid muscle. It was shriveled and tortuous. He pinched it between his fingers, inverted the scalpel, and cut straight down its length to reveal the hollow lumen.

“There is no blood.” He let the animal roll back onto its side and slashed its belly open in a display of frustration. “Not one drop.”

“It’s a hemorrhagic virus,” Byrne said.

“We can’t afford to jump to any conclusions. The last thing we need is panic like we had with Ebola.”

Odongo turned the camera on himself. His dark skin was beaded with sweat and his eyes were so bloodshot it appeared as though he hadn’t slept in days. The screeching of the monkeys grew fevered. He glanced back at the trees, then into the lens once more. It shook so badly in his hands that he became a blur. He said something in the other language and another man took the camera from him, steadying the image.

“It is our concern that if this disease is viral, as I suspect, it could cross the barrier between species and trigger a spillover event.”

Reilly stopped the recording, closed the file, and launched another containing six thumbnail images. She clicked the first and it expanded to fill the whole screen.

“These satellite images were taken just over twenty-four hours ago.”

The first showed a town surrounded by tropical forest. The buildings and roads were too small to demonstrate any kind of detail and must have been included to establish scale. The subsequent images each zoomed in a little more until an area defined as one hundred square meters was visualized. The buildings were slightly grainy and their edges indistinct, but there was no mistaking the shapes of the bodies lying in the streets.

Byrne leaned closer to the screen. His pulse thrummed in his ears. He looked back at Reilly. Her expression confirmed his suspicions.

“When do I leave?”

There were more bodies than he could count. For as many of them as there were in the streets, he could only imagine how many lay dead inside their homes or in the various other buildings. The individual remains became so pixilated when he zoomed in on them that all detail was lost. There appeared to be some unquantifiable amount of blood on the ground surrounding them, but it was simply impossible to tell for certain.

Byrne couldn’t afford to make any assumptions about their collective cause of death. He needed to consider every conceivable scenario, especially in an area surrounded by so much violence and political upheaval. He was far better prepared to handle a viral outbreak than an assault by a militant jihadist faction like Boko Haram.

The buildings were in such a state that disrepair could easily be mistaken for the residua of a violent siege. There were holes in the rusted tin roofs and entire sections of structures had collapsed in upon themselves. What appeared to be a market was concealed beneath rows of cloth and wooden awnings, the aisles between which were completely empty.

Byrne leaned back and tapped his teeth with the end of his pen. There was something about that observation…

The streets in which the majority of the corpses lay were main streets. Others were residential, as evidenced by the animal pens behind the main dwellings. The concentration of human remains was the key to the revelation. Whatever fate befell the population had come at night, when people were in their homes or the town center. While that didn’t necessarily preclude viral involvement, it did support the alternate narrative that an attack had come under the cover of darkness.

Byrne rubbed his eyes and looked out the window. The sun set over the Atlantic, imbuing it with a crimson glow that sparkled upon the waves.

There was something he was missing. He could feel it.

He closed his eyes and imagined Dr Odongo entering the clearing with the baboon carcasses. They’d been dead for less than twenty-four hours, yet looked as though they’d been deceased for much longer than that. Something about it bothered him, beyond the obvious. Something that was staring him right in the face.

He pictured the flies crawling all over their faces, into orifices they’d been unable to explore while their meals had been alive.

And then it hit him.

The carcasses were intact. The baboons had been dead for nearly a full day and not a single scavenger beyond the flies had made any attempt to consume their remains. There were no wild dogs fighting over the bodies or jackals laughing at a distance. There hadn’t even been evidence of vultures. The trees had been filled with screeching monkeys, not carrion birds, which would have pecked out the moist orbital globes first, then the bloated bellies and tender tongues.

Byrne opened his eyes and again scrutinized the images on his laptop.

The resolution wasn’t sharp enough to tell if there was any evidence the human corpses had been scavenged, but it was good enough to see there were no carrion birds perched on the rooftops or the telephone wires. There were no dogs roaming the streets. The only sign of life was a small herd of cattle clustered to one side of a fenced pasture. They were thin and had long fur, and were packed so closely together that it was impossible to tell one from the next, which begged the question: why were they alive while all of the men were dead? Had other species of livestock survived inside their pens? More importantly, why had the baboons died while whatever species of monkey shrieked from the trees survived?

Viruses could be finicky when it came to interspecies transmission, but he couldn’t think of a single one that drew a distinction between species as closely related as primates.

Again, he found every piece of evidence contradicting the next. Had an attacking force used a chemical weapon? That would explain the lack of scavengers, if not the survival of the bovines. Surely an agent like that would leave traces behind, which he supposed he’d find out soon enough.

Byrne scrutinized the forest encircling the Sierra Leonean town and realized just how easily the entire place could have been surrounded without anyone knowing. Heck, it could still have been surrounded when the picture was taken, for all he could see through the trees.

He again looked at the cattle. They were at the edge of the field farthest from the jungle, their hind quarters crammed into a corner, their heads aligned to form an imposing wall of long, curved horns. They all faced uphill toward the dense canopy from which Byrne could almost hear the screaming of monkeys.

Byrne had never experienced free fall, nor had he ever had any desire to do so. Until they fastened him into his harness, a part of him had genuinely believed they were just screwing with him and they’d end up landing on some gravel airstrip in the middle of nowhere, not hurtling through the darkness with the wind peeling his cheeks back to his ears. It was all he could do to keep from screaming and embarrassing himself in front of men who already made no secret about how little they thought of him. He was unlike them in every way, although if the man to whom he was harnessed didn’t pull the cord on the blasted chute soon, no one would be able to tell them apart after they hit the ground.

A dense canopy of kroma, ceiba, and red ironwood trees rushed toward them. He caught a glimpse of Daru in the distance before it vanished behind rugged foothills. The man attached to his back, Captain Trevor Richards of the 13^th Marine Expeditionary Unit, pinned Byrne’s arms to his sides and nosed them both downward. The wind screamed in their ears as they accelerated straight toward a seamless mass of two hundred-foot-tall trees.

It hit Byrne with a start that they were going to crash through the canopy, whether they slowed down or not.

The individual leaves drew contrast from the mass of foliage. Even at the very top, the branches were as thick as Byrne’s arms. He envisioned what would happen if they struck one at what had to be a hundred miles an hour—

A sharp tug knocked the wind out of him. Yanked him upward. The parachute expanded with a popping sound. His feet swung down beneath him. He drew his knees to his chest a heartbeat before they slammed through the upper canopy.

A blur of brown and green. Boughs struck his feet and rump. Sent him careening.

“Straighten your legs, dammit!” Richards yelled into his ear.

Byrne did as he was instructed. A branch raked across his visor and nearly tore the Tyvek hood of his camouflaged isolation suit.

A sudden jolt.

The harness yanked his groin into his gut. His breath returned with a gasp.

They spun on the parachute cords. The trees whipped past in a blur. He looked down and saw his feet swirling over a snarl of branches and, beneath them, a seamless stretch of darkness. Leaves and twigs rained soundlessly down toward it.

“Hang on,” Richards said.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice—”

The marine disengaged the parachute release. They were falling before Byrne could finish his thought.

Branches snapped and bark burst from the boughs. They passed through the lower canopy and into a ring of trunks.

The calculations defied him. A hundred and fifty feet. More than four hundred pounds between them, accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared. The force of the impact with the ground would be—

Another sharp tug and a pop as the reserve chute deployed.

They careened into the darkness, spinning in wild circles.

They weren’t slowing down fast enough. They’d hit the ground like sacks of flour thrown from the roof of an apartment complex.

Byrne caught glimpses of the ground to either side; shadowed shrubs and mats of detritus, rising far too fast, while beneath him, there was still only darkness.

They passed through the ground without encountering resistance. The ragged edges of the earth rose rapidly above them, along with the forest floor. The walls around them were rounded and bare. Walkways had been carved into the dirt in a spiral pattern that led all the way down to the bottom of the pit, which materialized beneath their feet mere seconds before Richards pulled the toggles and they swung upward.

They splashed down into two feet of water, slid through the soft mud, and stumbled forward to dissipate their momentum.

Richards released the lock on Byrne’s harness and shoved him out of the way so he could collapse the chute. The other Marines burst from the canopy and streaked into the pit with a surprising amount of grace. They alighted like fowl and bundled up their parachutes with practiced ease.

“What is this place?” Byrne asked.

“An illegal diamond mine,” Richards said. “This whole country is riddled with them.”

Byrne couldn’t see a thing. The only light was provided by the dim reflection upon the stagnant water of what precious little moonlight passed through the dense canopy hundreds of feet above him. There were stacks of sieves and mounds of sifted earth, but no indication anyone was there, or had been for several days.

“Saddle up, boys,” Richards said. “We’ve got a hike ahead of us.”

Byrne waded toward the uneven ramp that would lead them to the surface. The water was warm and its surface was alive with mosquitoes and black flies. His foot snagged on something and he fell into the water. He cursed and smeared the mud from his visor. He felt a lump on top of his tactical helmet and remembered the night vision goggles mounted to it.

The others slogged past him without offering to help him up. They already wore their goggles, which looked like cameras with tapering telescopic lenses that barely fit inside their hoods.

Byrne stood and manipulated the goggles through the fabric. It took some doing, but he eventually aligned them with his eyes.

The world transformed into a disorienting spectrum of green and gray, through which the others moved like wraiths. He struck off after them before they could leave him behind, only this time with more caution. He looked down into the water and stopped dead in his tracks.

The object that had tripped him floated to the surface. It was a body, its skin distended by absorbed fluids and decomposition. It slowly settled back into the muck.

Byrne turned in a circle. The entire pool was full of corpses.

“I’m so glad I can’t smell anything with this suit on,” he whispered.

He picked his way through the remains and climbed out of the water. He had to jog to catch up with the others.

The soldiers ahead of him moved stealthily through the jungle: ducking under vines, passing through curtains of epiphyte and orchid roots, and skirting clusters of shrubs easily as tall as they were. Byrne frequently lost sight of them, only to watch them materialize from some unexpected point in the brush. He tried his best to minimize the ruckus of his passage, for all the good it did him. At least the others wouldn’t be able to lose him.

Byrne’s introduction to them had been brief and he’d been so preoccupied he’d glossed over them. He’d spent the entire plane ride from Atlanta to Morón Air Base in Spain poring over satellite imagery. The preliminary aerial surveillance wasn’t as cut-and-dried as he’d initially believed.

Daru was a small settlement twenty miles southeast of the diamond-mining town of Tongo. It had a population of 6,000, the majority of whom were of the Mende ethnic group. It also housed barracks for the Sierra Leonean army, which made it a target of moderate strategic value, especially to an extremist faction like Boko Haram.

The militant Islamic jihadist group had swept across Cameroon, Chad, and Niger like a fiery plague, slaughtering and burning everyone and everything in its path. After pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, it became the de facto western army of ISIS, poised to roll eastward across Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, where the two forces would converge with the entirety of Northern Africa and the Middle East under their direct control, providing the ideal staging grounds to launch a massive assault upon Europe.

The simple fact was the correlation between the dead monkeys and the bodies in the streets of Daru was speculative at best. True, the timeframe lent more credibility to Byrne’s hypothesis than mere coincidence, but even he could see how similar the satellite images looked to those of the towns hundreds of miles to the east left smoldering in Boko Haram’s wake. He’d compared them for any overt dissimilarities, anything he could use to rule out a militaristic siege, but couldn’t find anything incontrovertible. By the time he’d set aside the images, he was beginning to think maybe he’d been dispatched into a warzone rather than ground zero of a viral outbreak, which was why he regretted not making more of an effort to connect with the soldiers stealing through the shadows ahead of him.

He’d assumed they were part of the cargo plane’s crew clear up until the point they were twenty thousand feet above Sierra Leone and briefing him so fast he could barely keep up with what they were saying.

Theirs was a mission of reconnaissance, to establish the nature and severity of the threat. If they determined that they were dealing with a potential spillover event, then they were to create a firm perimeter and contain the situation until a team of CDC and UN scientists assembling in Nuremburg could be deployed. If they were instead faced with hostile opposition, they were to gather as much intel as they could while doing everything in their power to keep themselves alive.

Captain Trevor Richards remained in the lead and only occasionally dropped back far enough for Byrne to see him. The digital camouflage of his isolation suit made him nearly invisible and indistinguishable from the other men, were it not for the way he moved. He was sinewy and lithe, fluid in his movements, unlike First Lieutenant Chad Graves, whose broad shoulders and loping gait made him appear to move like a silverback through the brush. Private First Class Ryan Anthony remained closest to Byrne and served as his personal protector, quite obviously against his will. When his assignment had been handed down, the kid had looked like he was going to throw a tantrum. To his credit, he’d steeled his broad jaw, thrown out his chest, and saluted his commanding officer before turning his gray eyes upon Byrne and offering a curt nod. Corporal Elias Warren brought up the rear. He was easily a half-foot shorter than the rest of them and built more like a wide receiver than a linebacker, but he had an economy of movement that somehow lent him an air of danger, as though he were the personification of a trap perpetually prepared to spring.

In the grand scheme of things, Byrne supposed it didn’t matter in the slightest whether they liked or respected him as long as they did their jobs and kept him alive. Of course, when it came right down to it, that was undoubtedly how they must have viewed him, too.

The forest thinned, if only by degree. By the time he recognized the clearing through the trees, they were already upon it.

Richards lay on his stomach in the overgrowth beneath a cieba tree, scanning the clearing through the scope of his M27 IAR.

Anthony appeared as if by magic beside Byrne and pulled him to his knees.

Graves crouched beside them, staring down the slope of tall, wavering grasses toward where a town squatted in the darkness. The buildings were mere silhouettes, nearly indistinguishable from the night.

“Jesus,” Richards whispered.

Warren slid into the bushes beside Richards and sighted down his rifle.

“Someone must have come back for them,” he whispered. “Either that or our intel’s flawed.”

“What do you see?” Byrne asked.

“The bodies,” Richards whispered. “They’re gone.”

They walked in a diamond formation down the main road into Daru. The rising sun cast their shadows ahead of them. Anthony and Warren had scouted ahead and determined there wasn’t a single living organism within the settlement, which didn’t make any of them feel the slightest bit better about the situation. Richards took point and swept his rifle from one side of the deserted street to the other. Anthony and Warren stayed to either side of Byrne, covering the open doorways and windows of the two-story shacks, while Graves brought up the rear.

It reminded Byrne of the ghost towns of the American West, only rather than an air of mystery, an almost palpable shroud of suffering was draped over it.

Richards stopped and waved him forward. There was a dried spatter of blood on the dirt beside scuffmarks where it looked like a body had been dragged from the road.

“Do what you need to do,” Richards said. He removed his backpack, unzipped the main pouch, and extricated the case containing Byrne’s equipment, which he dropped unceremoniously to the ground. “And do it fast.”

Byrne knelt and opened his case. Inside were all of the tools he needed for the collection and testing of blood in the field. Ideally, samples would be taken directly from the source, but he had the skill to make this work. The blood was clotted and congealed with the dirt which, fortunately, was packed and hadn’t allowed the blood to soak very deep. He chiseled off the uppermost layer and scooped it into a plastic baggie.

“I need somewhere to set up.”

Richards locked eyes with Anthony and jerked his head toward the nearest storefront.

Anthony nodded and approached it in a shooter’s stance with his rifle seated against his shoulder. The front doors were little more than shutters that folded back to open the entire width of a shop, above which a hand-painted sign that read simply: 190 Kissy St. He broke the padlock with the butt of his rifle, fished it from the latch, and tossed it aside. Graves covered Anthony while the soldier cautiously drew the shutters open. Graves vanished into the darkness for nearly a full minute before emerging with his barrel lowered.

“All clear.”

Byrne glanced back to find Richards staring at him.

“What are you waiting for?”

Byrne closed the sample inside the case and headed toward the store. There were three rows of metal shelves, all stuffed to overflowing with a seemingly random assortment of goods. Vegetables rotted in wicker baskets beside open sacks of grain. Warm bottles of Coca-Cola were packed next to unlabeled bottles filled with liquids of various colors that looked homemade.

Anthony used his arm to clear some space, sending the wares crashing to the floor.

Byrne set his case on the shelf and carefully unloaded his supplies. The first thing he needed to do was separate the blood from the dirt by spinning it down in a centrifuge with an anticoagulant so he could run it through a gamut of tests and assays. He’d done this so many times he could do it in his sleep. His hands performed tasks he’d learned by rote while his mind tried to rationalize his situation.

He’d expected to find the bodies rotting in the streets. He couldn’t think of a single explanation for how such a large number could vanish in less than twenty-four hours. There were obvious marks indicating they’d been dragged away, but to where and for what reason? Scavengers picked at the remains where they lay. Predators moved their meals to a place where they could be consumed uninterrupted, but only did so with fresh kills, certainly not corpses potentially festering with disease.

The portable centrifuge whirred to a stop. He separated the blood from the heavier organic material and transferred it into several smaller wells. He drew up the blood from the first well and ran it through a First Antigen Rapid Test to evaluate for hemorrhagic diseases like Ebola while he set up the ELISA assay and the PCR machine. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay measured the concentration of antibodies and evaluated for a wide variety of viral, bacterial, protozoan, and helminthic infections from Dengue fever and leprosy to malaria and Chagas disease. The polymerase chain reaction would allow him to isolate and identify any viral DNA from the human genome by running it alongside one of his control samples.

“What’s taking so long?” Richards asked.

“These tests take time,” Byrne said.

“Time’s a luxury we can’t afford, Doc,” Anthony said.

Byrne tuned them out. He loaded the genomic, viral, and plasmid templates into the wells in the Palm PCR instrument beside the blood sample and set it aside to work its magic. He placed the final blood sample onto a Polystyrene plate coated with an antibody solution, added an enzyme-conjugated antibody, and finally the substrate that would trigger the reaction and produce a measurable signal. He slid it to one side and used a pipette to transfer the PCR samples to the gel electrophoresis machine, which conducted an electrical charge across an agar medium to separate the prepared DNA segments by size, isolating the viral segment from the human and control samples.

He breathed an audible sigh of relief when the First Antigen Rapid Test came back negative.

“We can rule out hemorrhagic fever,” Byrne said.

“So we can take off these infernal suits?” Warren said. He stood with his back to them, sighting the opposite side of the street through his scope.

“Not yet. There are still hundreds of diseases we need to cross off our list, any one of which could kill us in any number of painful and horrific ways.”

Byrne removed the gelatinous medium from the electrophoresis machine and shined a black light onto it.

Anthony must have read the expression of surprise on his face.

“What is it?”

“There’s no virus.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. There’s no virus.”

“Could it have separated from the blood or could the sample have been contaminated?” Richards asked.

“You don’t understand. A virus works by inserting its DNA directly into the host’s genetic code. That’s its sole biological imperative. It infects the individual cells and uses the host’s RNA to replicate its own DNA. In essence, its genes are incorporated into those of the organism it infects, like adding more teeth to a zipper. The human genome contains the residue of countless historical viruses we’ve been passing down for eons. This blood perfectly matches that of the control sample.”

“Then what the hell killed all of these people?” Richards asked from directly behind him.

Byrne attached the ELISA plate reader to his laptop and launched the software. The application generated a curve that plotted fluorescence against the concentration of interferons, which were signaling proteins released by cells in response to the presence of viruses, bacteria, and parasites. The comparison to the saved control sample excluded Interferon Type I and III reactions, which were produced in response to an aggressive virus. The elevated levels of Interferon Type II indicated an acute immune response, despite the complete absence of any identifiable pathogen. The presence of immunoglobin G and E antibodies further muddied the waters. They were only produced by the immune system in response to specific infections.

And then it hit him.

“That can’t be right,” Byrne said.

“Talk to me,” Richards said.

“The levels of immunoglobins G and E are off the charts.”

“What does that mean?”

“IgG attaches to pathogens designated for elimination and IgE binds to allergens that produce histamine and cause inflammation. The two in conjunction indicate a very specific immune response, one designed to combat the presence of a toxin capable of triggering a violent allergic reaction.”

“In English, Doctor.”

“The human immune system releases these antibodies in response to the presence of biological toxins, like those found in a bee sting or a snake bite, only in nowhere near these concentrations.”

“You’re suggesting—”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m telling you that I know without a doubt what killed these people.”

“And what’s that?”

“Venom.”

The building across the street featured a native clothing store and, above it, a two-room apartment, the rear window of which offered an unobstructed view of the grassy slope leading uphill through the pastures to the edge of the forest. From this vantage point, they could clearly see the trampled paths where the bodies had been dragged from the streets. They converged into a single trail that led beneath the dense canopy. In the far distance to the west, Byrne could see the broken fence where the long-horned cattle from the satellite image had once been contained.

The occupants of the apartment had been overcome while they slept. The bed linens lay crumpled to one side and the sheets were spattered with blood, although the combined volume couldn’t have been more than three or four ounces, even taking into account the spatters on the walls and the smears leading across the floor, down the wooden stairs, and through the doors and windows. Whoever claimed their remains had been careful not to leave any traces of their presence. It was as though the attack had come in two phases. The initial siege had been fast and surgical in its precision: the victims had been injected with venom and left to succumb to the eventual paralysis. The second had come some time later, when the bodies could be collected without offering the slightest resistance. That was their working theory, anyway. Unspoken between them was the fact that if their theory was correct, there was the chance the victims could still be alive.

“We should call it in,” Byrne said.

“And say what?” Richards said. “All we have is a single blood test from an unknown victim who, for all we know, could have been stung by a bee before their death.”

“So what do you propose then?”

“We search the remainder of the town. Whoever did this must have left some trace behind. You continue running your tests. If that fails, I can think of one sure way to conclusively determine what we’re up against.”

Byrne stared at the point where the path vanished into the darkness beneath the branches. He recalled his observation that the entire town could have been surrounded without anyone knowing it and had to stifle a shiver.

“What’s over there?” Warren asked from where he knelt by the adjacent window, studying the forest through the scope of his rifle.

“The satellite imagery shows a seamless stretch of forest,” Graves said.

“What about thermal or magnetometric imagery?”

“We didn’t anticipate needing them. We’ll have to wait for the satellite to pass over again.”

“And when’s that?”

“Just under twelve hours from now,” Graves said.

“You’re kidding, right? We should be able to task any satellite and have it here within ninety minutes,” Warren said.

“If you want the same aerial photographs we already have, sure. If you want to see anything below the canopy, we have to coordinate with NASA to get the GEOS 2 satellite overhead. It’s in geosynchronous orbit, so it can only be programmed to pass overhead once every twenty-four hours.”

“By then it could be too late. We need to know what’s out there right now!”

“Then we have no choice but to take matters into our own hands,” Richards said. “Doc, I need to know every possible method of venom dispersal.”

“I’m certainly no authority—”

“An educated guess will suffice.”

“I would imagine the primary method of delivery would have to be subdermal. Our skin acts as a barrier, hence the reason bees have stingers and snakes have fangs.”

“No possible means of aerial envenomation?”

“I’ve never heard of it, but that’s not to say it can’t be done. To the best of my knowledge, no one’s attempted the weaponization of venom, outside of its use on darts and arrows by various indigenous tribes.”

“So if we’re wearing our isolation suits, we should be safe,” Anthony said.

“As long as they remain intact,” Byrne said. “Keep in mind, though, they aren’t designed to stand up to any kind of trauma or sharp penetration.”

“I got news for you, Doc,” Graves said. “Anyone gets that close to us will have a bullet through his brain before he can even think about attacking.”

“This town had a population of nearly two thousand. As far as we know, not one of them escaped their collective fate. We should just report in and wait for backup to arrive.”

“And by doing so we could be consigning our reinforcements to their deaths,” Richards said. “We need to determine the nature of the threat before we do anything else.”

Byrne looked toward the forest, where presumably the entire town had been dragged. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was out there.

They agreed to perform a cursory search of the town in hopes of finding any clues before heading blindly into the wilderness. Every house was in the same condition. These people had never known what hit them. The attack had come through the broken windows and doors while they were sleeping and their bodies had been removed through the same egresses. There were no bullet holes or spent casings, no discolorations on the walls or ceilings to suggest aerial dispersion, or any other indication of the means by which these people had been overcome. All that remained of them were smears and patterns of blood to mark where they’d fallen and the direction of their posthumous passage.

Whatever livestock they’d held was gone as well. The stables and pens were vacant, the straw desiccated and dusty. There were no fresh tracks or any other sign animals had even been housed there recently, with the exception of sporadic mounds of fecal material, which Byrne theorized belonged to animals other than those once contained in the pens.

The spoor was black and runny, a trait caused by a high concentration of blood. The fact the same feces was scattered throughout the town suggested it came from one species, and not one that had been domesticated or housed in the pens or pastures. Richards suggested it belonged to a species of scavenger that had fed upon the victims while they were either incapacitated or dead, which made a certain amount of sense. Byrne was no expert on feces, nor did he have any desire to be, but he couldn’t dismiss the observation that much of the spoor appeared to be older than forty-eight hours, especially that found near the fringes of town by the majority of the empty livestock pens.

The establishments in what passed for the commercial district were different. There was nothing peaceful about the way the patrons of the ramshackle bars and restaurants had gone. The walls and ceilings were spattered with blood. Tables lay overturned amid shattered bottles and plates. Dried blood flaked from the wooden floor like lichen and formed a brick-red path onto the dirt road where the victims had either crawled or been dragged out into the street. The dirt remained disturbed where many had fallen and struggled to drag themselves in the opposite direction from which their remains were ultimately taken.

Byrne performed the ELISA assay on another half-dozen blood samples he’d collected from various points around town while the others explored the military barracks. It appeared as though the majority of the forces had been dispatched before the siege. Bunks remained perfectly made and footlockers were half-empty. There were no boots or fatigues to be found in most of the buildings, which reminded Byrne more of mobile homes stuffed full of cots than actual quarters. The inner walls of the guard shack were riddled with bullet holes and covered with blood, as was the westernmost barracks, inside of which it looked much like all of the other dwellings.

Graves was able to determine that the forces had been dispatched three weeks ago to Koindu, a town forty miles to the northeast on a finger of land thrust straight into Guinea on one side and Liberia on the other, presumably as a deterrent to the advances of Boko Haram. Richards speculated the jihadists must have gained knowledge of the maneuver and swept southwest along the banks of the Moa River, which flowed directly behind the outpost.

The assays had provided no new information, but had confirmed the presence of IgG and IgH antibodies in comparable amounts. It was only while waiting for the others to complete their search of the barracks that Byrne decided to isolate the blood from the spoor near the front gates, where Anthony remained as his personal guard, and run it through a separate ELISA assay. The results solidified a theory that had yet to fully form in his mind.

“Interesting,” Byrne whispered.

“What?” Anthony said. He peeked back over his shoulder before returning his attention to the gate blocking the lone road into the outpost.

“This blood sample. From the stool. It has elevated levels of eosinophils and acetylcholine receptor antibodies.”

“So what?”

“Acetylcholine receptors purvey chemical signals from the nerves to the muscles. Eosinophils are the white blood cells responsible for combating allergic responses, especially in relation to the respiratory system.”

“What are you getting at?”

“The nervous system in the first thing affected by envenomation, followed in short measure by the respiratory system. Think of a cobra. After it bites its prey, its venom goes straight into the bloodstream and to the nerves, where it blocks the signals from the brain to the muscles, causing paralysis. Immune responses work much more slowly. The body produces increased amounts of white blood cells in response to the elevated levels of histamine caused by the venom. Eosinophils, specifically, help combat inflammation of the lungs, which is the ultimate denouement of a snakebite. First the prey can’t move, then it can’t breathe. That might be an oversimplification, but you get the gist.”

“We already knew we were dealing with a type of venom. That doesn’t change anything.”

“But it tells us a lot about the animals that produced the spoor.”

“Great.”

“Don’t you see? They’re ophiophagic. The elevated levels of eosinophils and acetylcholine receptor antibodies aren’t present in the blood of the victims, but they’re in high concentration after passing through the bodies of the scavengers. They’re not sensitive to the venom because they already have the antibodies to combat it. Like a mongoose or an opossum—”

“A honey badger.”

“Exactly.”

“But none of those are large enough to prey upon people, no matter how incapacitated they are.”

Byrne stood and paced the front deck of the empty barracks. Richards and Warren emerged from behind a stand of trees on the far side of the field, while Graves appeared from the direction of the river.

Anthony was right. He couldn’t think of a single ophiophagic species that preyed upon man, nor could he think of one that scavenged. Ophiophagy was a specific adaptation that evolved based on the prevalence of venomous sources of food. So what did that imply?

“We’ve stalled long enough,” Richards said.

Byrne understood what he meant. The time had come to follow the trail into the jungle, where any number of potential dangers could be lurking behind any tree trunk or waiting in the trees with weapons trained down on them. They’d be sacrificing every advantage the open space afforded.

“Tell me you learned something we can use,” Warren said. He nodded toward Byrne’s case.

Byrne shook his head and glanced at Anthony. He was reluctant to share what he’d found until he was able to make sense of the results. They didn’t make sense, at least not in this context. Either the species responsible for the spoor was a scavenger that had seemingly overnight evolved the ability to manufacture antibodies in the levels required for the ingestion of high quantities of venom, or the production of antibodies was the adaptation of a predatory species that had somehow developed the ability to produce venom.

The rain fell in rivulets through the canopy, hitting the muddy ground with a sound like a rushing river. Byrne skirted the sucking puddles and battled through the wet shrubs. Guinea fowl called from the brush and scampered away when they neared. Macaws squawked and swifts darted through the treetops. Byrne watched for the monkeys he’d heard on Dr Odongo’s recording, but didn’t see a single species that didn’t have wings or scales.

The trail they’d been following since leaving Daru was still evident, although by now it had become a narrow stream, obscuring whatever footprints might have survived the parade of bodies being dragged over them.

That was the detail that most bothered Byrne. There were any number of ways to relocate a large quantity of remains – loading them onto a truck, airlifting them by chopper, or even pulling multiple victims on a makeshift travois. Dragging individual carcasses across such a large distance and over terrain this brutal seemed like the least practical option. There had to be a method to this madness, otherwise heaping the remains on top of each other for mass incineration would have been the fastest and most efficient means of elimination. The only reason to go to this much trouble was if whoever was responsible intended to keep the bodies, for whatever ghastly reason. If the attack on Daru was just a test of whatever mode of venom dispersion they employed, then the last thing Byrne’s detail could afford was to let the enemy perfect its weapon. Chemical agents were bad enough; a biological weapon that left no residue, could easily pass through airport screening, and was capable of completely incapacitating an entire town in a matter of hours without allowing more than token resistance from trained soldiers would be catastrophic in the wrong hands.

If only Byrne had access to even one of the victims. Maybe then he’d at least be able to determine the means of envenomation. An airborne mode of delivery would almost certainly be fatal as there wouldn’t be time for the victim to generate an immune response. The sudden and acute respiratory inflammation would cause more bleeding than they’d seen in town and would manifest as a mist from coughing or pools when the diaphragmatic reflex waned and anoxia caused the loss of consciousness. It seemed the least likely path to weaponization, but how else could so many people be overcome in such a short amount of time? It wasn’t even possible to overwhelm a population so large without an invading force numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands.

Indigenous tribes in the Amazon had been using poison-dipped darts and arrows for millennia, but even they didn’t have the skill required to hunt thousands of people without leaving so much as a single dart behind. There had to be some other form of mass dispersal, and the fact he couldn’t think of it scared him more than anything else. What kind of nightmare were they walking—

Impact from the side.

Byrne hit the ground. Hard. The weight of his assailant nearly knocked the wind out of him. Before he could cry out, he was seized by his shoulders and rolled onto his back.

Graves thrust his face shield against Byrne’s and mouthed the word Quiet.

Byrne nodded.

Graves widened his eyes as though seeking confirmation.

Byrne mouthed the word Okay and Graves climbed off of him. By the time he rolled over, Graves had vanished into the shrubs. Byrne could barely see Warren off to his right. The soldier lay prone in the mud, his shoulders and rear end breaching the surface of the brown water, the barrel of his rifle propped on the branch of a thorny shrub with green-spotted fruit. The angle of his sightline was obscured from Byrne’s vantage point. He crawled around the wide buttress roots of a ceiba tree to get a better view.

At first, all he could see were the same trees as everywhere else. It was only then that he realized he could no longer hear the pheasants scurrying invisibly through the brush or the trumpeting of hornbills from the upper reaches. The only sound was the pattering of rain on the leathery branches and dribbling onto the saturated detritus. And beneath it, a faint buzzing sound he’d been so lost in thought he might not have ever heard.

The flies were fat and black and only occasionally appeared through the screen of leaves and flowering shrubs. There was a small clearing where a tree had fallen and created a light gap. Graves materialized from the forest and crept forward with his rifle seated against his shoulder. The rain made clapping sounds on his isolation suit. A cloud of flies erupted from in front of the soldier. He waved them away, lowered his barrel, and stared at the ground. When he looked back at the others, the expression on his face was unreadable.

Richards rose from the bushes mere feet to Byrne’s right. He’d been so well hidden Byrne hadn’t even sensed he was there. Warren pushed himself from the mud and preceded the captain into the clearing. Anthony appeared beside Byrne as he followed.

Byrne pushed through branches so heavily thorned he feared they might pierce his suit, and stepped around Warren to get a better look at what lay on the ground before him. The flies tapped against his face shield as he stared down at the dead animal. Its skin was like parchment and taut against its prominent bones. The level of desiccation made it appear almost mummified, as though it had been dead for weeks and left to rot beneath the blazing sun, not in an expanding puddle of rainwater than had to be a good foot deep. Byrne knew better, though. He’d seen this long-horned bull on a satellite image taken a mere thirty-six hours ago.

Richards argued the bull could have come from a different herd. Byrne had been unable to prove otherwise, but couldn’t shake the feeling this was one of the cattle that had escaped from the pen at the edge of town. Further inspection had revealed both of its hind legs were dislocated at the fetlock and hock joints, which made them appear oddly strait and elongated, as though they’d been pulled with extreme force. One of its horns was broken; the fracture line was fresh with no sign of callus formation. The rain had washed away any indication of the mechanism of its death or how it had come to be in the clearing.

Raising its head by the broken horn revealed a large, bloodless wound on its neck. The muscles and tendons stood out like wires. It looked like a scavenger had bitten into its neck, and then thought better of it. Again, Byrne wished he had the human bodies for comparison. Or maybe a sample of blood to run through the ELISA assay, without which it would be impossible to prove the bull hadn’t been attacked by a wild animal weeks ago and left to decompose in the clearing, despite the fact that whatever killed it had made no attempt to consume it.

Graves proposed it had mangled its own legs by stepping in the burrows of some ground-dwelling animals – it happened all the time on his parents’ ranch back home, he said – and it had ended up using its formidable horns to defend itself from predation while it wasted away. The scavenging must have only commenced when the rain started and the bull bled the last if its lifeblood into the puddle that formed around it.

The others agreed it was a plausible scenario. Byrne, however, continued to mull it over as they advanced deeper into the jungle. The rain slowed, but the ground had already drunk its fill and supported muddy puddles that often concealed the trail. Progress was slow and treacherous. It felt as though they’d traveled ten miles from Daru, but according to Richards’s GPS they were barely over three. A fresh batch of aerial reconnaissance from an ordinary military-grade satellite showed the town just as they’d left it, only wetter. The streets were bare and there was no sign of life anywhere. The surrounding forest remained impervious to the camera and they still had several hours before the GEOS 2 was overhead, neither of which did them the slightest bit of good.

Byrne knew it was still too soon to share his burgeoning theory, especially considering how ridiculous it sounded inside of his head. It started with the inference he’d drawn from the stool sample. Whatever animal left its spoor must have attempted to scavenge the victims while they were still alive for there to be such a high concentration of blood in its feces. It would take a brazen animal to even attempt something like that. Vultures were known for such acts, but the fecal material was definitively mammalian, which considerably narrowed the field. And considering there were no known ophophagic scavengers, it meant they had to be dealing with an opportunistic predator, one roughly the size of a dog, judging by the size of its spoor. And if a species that large had somehow evolved the capacity not for the consumption of venomous species, but rather for its production…

Byrne shook his head to clear his thoughts. That line of thought was patently absurd. There had to be another, more logical solution; he just needed to come at it from a different angle. He was exhausted and hadn’t slept in several days. Things would undoubtedly make more sense after a good night’s sleep, although he wasn’t overly optimistic that would happen anytime soon.

The canopy remained silent, save for the dripping of condensation working its way inexorably to the ground, which did nothing to suppress the sounds of their passage. Despite their attempted stealth, Byrne could pinpoint the locations of the others around him, if only by the whispering of leaves grazing their isolation suits or the faint slurping of boots being drawn from the mud. Byrne was getting better at concealing the sounds of his passage, but he had a long way to go to catch up with the others, who maintained a diamond formation around him.

The intonation of the dripping changed. As did the faint whistling noise of the wind through the trees.

Byrne slowed and surveyed his surroundings. The branches overhead nearly blocked out the sunlight, only a fraction of which reached the ground in palpable columns of light. It diffused into the upper reaches ahead of him, dramatically lighting boughs that appeared noticeably less dense and shivered on a breeze he couldn’t feel through the oppressive humidity.

He resumed walking, alternately glancing from the trail to the treetops. The others passed through the bushes like specters. Their pace slowed. They obviously recognized the same thing he had. There was a change in the air. The goosebumps rose on his shoulders and neck. He felt the faint movement of air, but there was something else, something he couldn’t quite define. He watched the branches overhead. There was no sign of life. No motion. No sound. Even the metronomic dripping seemed to have ceased. And yet still it felt as though something was up there. Watching him. Tracking his every movement.

Byrne looked back down and pushed through a wall of saplings taller than he was.

Richards stood in front of him, silhouetted against the golden aura that passed through the canopy. The others appeared to either side of him and stopped when they reached the edge of a sheer cliff.

The whistling of the wind almost sounded like it came from beneath them.

Byrne approached the ledge and looked down into an enormous pit like the one into which they’d parachuted, only this one was so deep the light barely reached the bottom, where it shimmered on the surface of a murky brown pool.

The trail they’d been following since Daru terminated at their feet.

The diamond mine appeared to have been abandoned for decades. The spiral walkway that wound around its circumference was narrow and crumbling and often vanished behind cascades of roots and vines.

“Give me some more light,” Richards said.

Graves clicked on the underbarrel beam on his rifle and shined it down into the pit. It spotlighted the surface of the water and penetrated its murky depths.

“Jesus,” Warren whispered.

Byrne stepped backward so quickly that he tripped over his own feet. He hit the ground with a shout that echoed throughout the still forest.

The golden aura darkened to a rustic orange then to a deep crimson as the sun descended toward the Atlantic Ocean. Their route into the pit was even more hazardous than it had looked from above. The earth had fractured as it eroded and buckled beneath them with every step, forcing them to walk with their backs pressed against the uneven walls, as far from the edges as they could get. Chunks of dirt and rock broke loose and hit the water with echoing splashes and the occasional sickening thuck.

Byrne dialed up his respirator and tried not to think about how horrible the stench must have been. The bodies nearest the surface didn’t appear to float so much as rest upon the ones beneath. The vile water was soupy with gobs of flesh. There was no telling how deep the pit was, but the prospect of there being several hundred men, women, and children in its depths made his stomach clench. What kind of monsters would cast them into the pit so unceremoniously when setting fire to the village to incinerate the remains would have been far more respectful, not to mention sanitary? If the carcasses hadn’t been roiling with disease before, they certainly were now.

He wasn’t a religious man by any stretch of the imagination, but the manner of disposal seemed almost sacrilegious. These people had been thrown away like garbage, cast aside with no more thought than one might spare for a fast food wrapper. If Boko Haram was indeed responsible, then mankind was lost. Any religion – no matter the inaccuracy of the interpretation – that could spawn a faction capable of such callous disregard for the sanctity of life was a virus that needed to be eradicated before it damned the entire species to a mindless, predatory existence.

There were entire sections where the trail had entirely eroded away. The others were better trained at picking their way down the exposed rock using the vegetation as leverage than he was, but the prospect of falling into that horrible pit strengthened his grip every bit as much as his resolve. He would have been content to examine the remains through the scope of a rifle, and probably would have if the bodies had been in better condition. Water was notoriously unkind to human remains, which absorbed fluid to the point of becoming unrecognizable gelatinous blobs. After this long, he didn’t hold out much hope that he’d be able to determine the mechanism by which these people had been envenomated, let alone be able to collect anything resembling a useful sample of blood or tissue. He was in way over his head and everyone knew it, but he was also their only hope of figuring this out quickly enough to prevent this kind of carnage from happening to any number of unsuspecting towns, whether here or around the world. For all they knew, even now a man could be walking into Times Square with the means of wiping out Midtown.

A haze of mosquitos hung over the water, through which black flies twirled lazily. They alighted on the parts of the corpses that broke the surface and formed a living, seething second skin.

Byrne descended the ramp into ankle-deep water beside Richards, who shielded his eyes from the setting sun as he stared high up into the distant canopy with an indecipherable expression on his face. Warren paced nervously while Anthony and Graves kept their rifles trained on the forest floor fifty feet up. Byrne realized that down here they were at a serious tactical disadvantage and hurriedly knelt beside the nearest body before he lost his nerve.

The man’s black skin had faded to a whitish-gray and split when Byrne attempted to use a stick to draw the remains closer, forcing him to resort to using his hands. He took the man by the forearm and cringed when his fingers sunk into the waterlogged flesh.

“I don’t like this,” Warren said.

“You and me both,” Anthony said. “Hurry it up, would you?”

“You’re more than welcome to help,” Byrne said as he dragged the dead man from the deeper water onto the ledge.

Richards unslung his rifle and seated it against his shoulder. He leaned against the earthen wall and used the scope to look straight up into the rapidly darkening canopy, hundreds of feet overhead.

Byrne carefully rolled the man onto his back. His eyes remained open, but a film clouded his irises, making them appear to have rolled all the way back into his head. His features were swollen and misshapen, his neck engorged and goitrous. He was naked, save for his underwear, which had taken on the greenish-brown color of the water.

“There’s something up there,” Richards said.

Warren followed Richards’s line of sight with his own rifle.

“Hurry up, Doc,” Anthony said.

The skin on the dead man’s chest was intact, but the distention masked any abnormal swelling of the lymph glands that would betray an acute immune response. Regardless, Byrne palpated both axillae, then the man’s neck—

Putrid water gushed from what had initially looked like a goiter, but was merely a flap of skin. The water had entered through a wound beside the man’s trachea, just like the one on the bull back in the clearing.

“I don’t see…” Warren said. “Wait. There. What in the name of God…?”

Byrne shoved the dead man aside and nearly fell into the deeper water in his hurry to grab another corpse. The woman wore a tattered nightgown that clung to her bloated form. He scraped her wet hair from her neck to reveal a similar wound. The man who floated up to the surface from beneath her rolled to his side and exposed a tear in the skin from his collarbone to his earlobe.

“Move out,” Richards said. “Now, goddammit!”

Someone jerked on the back of Byrne’s suit and he toppled to his rear end with a splash. He kicked at the water as he scooted away from the remains. His back struck the rock wall and still he splashed in a vain attempt to distance himself from the carnage. The way the water distended the flesh… if there were any violation of the integrity of the skin, the water would have leaked out. The only place it had done so was the neck, which meant the wound was not only the means of exsanguination, it was also the point of envenomation.

Anthony grabbed him by the front of his suit and hauled him to his feet. The soldier’s eyes locked onto his.

“Snap out of it, Doc. We’ve got to go.”

Richards and Graves were already two tiers up and climbing fast. Warren reached down from the next level and helped Byrne pull himself up.

Byrne felt himself climbing, but seemed detached from his physical form. His mind reeled at the implications of what he’d discovered. The truth had been staring him right in the face the entire time.

They didn’t follow the winding route, but rather scaled the crumbling path from one level to the next, using whatever outcroppings they could find.

The light of the setting sun bled into darkness. The other men became silhouettes and the branches high above blended into the night sky.

A faint beeping sound.

Richards abruptly stopped climbing and shed his backpack. He knelt and removed the case containing his tablet from inside.

“What did you see up there?” Byrne asked.

In response, Warren thrust his rifle into Byrne’s chest and inclined his chin upward.

Byrne raised the IAR to his shoulder and pressed his cheek to the stock. The view through the scope was disorienting at first, but as his eye adjusted he was able to distinguish the thick, leafy boughs from the shadows. There was something else up there, something he couldn’t quite—

“Christ,” he whispered.

There were bodies in the trees. Human bodies. Way up in the treetops. Suspended by their feet, their arms dangling beneath them, swaying on the breeze.

Warren snatched his rifle back.

“How did they get all the way up there?” Byrne whispered.

“A better question would be what the hell is capable of getting them up there?” Graves said.

“Would you guys shut up?” Anthony said. “I think I hear something.”

Byrne dialed down his respirator and held his breath in an effort to better hear. A reddish light bloomed from his left. He turned to see Richards trying to shield the glow from his tablet. On the screen was a satellite image, only the contrast was all wrong. Everything was dark purple and blue, with the exception of a ring at the center of the screen composed of red and orange dots that constricted as he watched.

Byrne realized with a start that he was looking at thermal imaging from the GEOS 2 satellite, which must have finally been overhead.

“We’re surrounded,” Richards whispered. He looked up at Byrne, who was thankful he couldn’t see the man’s face through the reflection of the heat signatures on his face shield.

A high-pitched sound from the distance.

Byrne looked up toward the forest above and this time clearly heard a sound that made his blood run cold.

The screeching of monkeys.

The screaming of primates reached a deafening crescendo, then abruptly ceased. The resulting silence was somehow even worse.

Richards had dropped the tablet in favor of his rifle and all four men quietly fanned out to better cover the entire circumference of the diamond mine.

Byrne’s pulse rushed in his ears as he scrutinized the dark forest floor, now a mere fifteen feet above them. The red and orange ring on the tablet at his feet continued to shrink in almost imperceptible increments. If whatever was up there had been able to lay waste to an entire town, what chance did the five of them have?

“What the hell us up there?” Anthony whispered.

“Shut up or we’ll find out!” Graves whispered. “There’s still a chance—”

“They know we’re here,” Richards whispered.

Byrne knelt and picked up the tablet with trembling hands. The image was dark and he was unable to clearly gauge the scale, but if each conglomeration of colored pixels corresponded to an individual organism, they were more than surrounded, they were easily outnumbered thirty-to-one. Their own shapes in the very middle appeared small and isolated as the ring continued to constrict—

The image went black.

“Full night vision,” Richards whispered.

Byrne tapped the screen, but nothing happened. The satellite must have traveled out of range once more.

He looked up toward the forest. He couldn’t see a blasted thing. The branches overhanging the pit were indistinct shapes composed of varying degrees of shadow. The upper reaches continued to sway.

“Set your weapons for three-round bursts,” Richards whispered. “When they come, they’re coming all at once. We can’t afford to burn through our magazines too fast.”

A loud cracking sound overhead, followed by crashing through the trees.

Byrne glanced up in time to see a human body cartwheel from the lower canopy and streak past him. It hit the water with a splash that echoed away into the night.

He recalled the bodies in the first diamond mine, the one into which they’d parachuted. At the time, their only intel had been the satellite images of the streets of Daru. They’d been expecting to find corpses everywhere. The bodies in the water hadn’t seemed out of place, but in retrospect, there hadn’t been any clearly identifiable trails like they’d followed to get here, and yet the bodies had been in roughly the same condition as the ones in the pit below him must have been sixteen hours ago.

“Keep your eyes open, boys,” Graves whispered.

Byrne swiped the screen and opened another map, one entirely composed of black and white. The magnetometer map wasn’t nearly as detailed as either the thermal or aerial images. The trees provided little more than texture, as their mineral content was vastly inferior to the strata from which they grew. The topography was revealed in a gray scale that varied with ferromagnetic content. Biological matter and rocks with low iron content appeared dark gray, while dense stone rich in mineral content was almost white. The black circle in the center corresponded to the diamond mine, the outer edges of which had been stripped to the bare dirt. The center was much brighter, as the bottom of the pit had yet to be mined. And leading away from it to the east was what almost looked like a faint white snake.

Byrne glanced down at the water, then back at the magnetometer readout.

It made total sense.

A crackling sound above him.

The branches along the edge of the pit shook. Byrne caught a blur of motion directly overhead. Leaves and blossoms fell from the trees like snow.

“I found a way out—” Byrne started, but Richards shushed him.

Byrne switched on his night vision apparatus and lowered it over his eyes. He could see the shapes in the bushes and the trees, but none of them clearly enough to tell what they were. They were obviously well adapted to hunting under the cover of darkness.

The crackling sounds faded and a preternatural silence once more descended upon them.

Byrne scooted to the edge and stared down into the water. There were bodies upon bodies beneath the living skein of insects.

“Listen to me,” Byrne whispered. “There’s a way out—”

A shrill cry shattered the stillness. Others joined it as the night came to life. Shadows burst from the undergrowth and exploded from the branches. They hit the ground and poured over the edge of the pit in a tidal wave of animalian ferocity.

Warren shouted and gunfire erupted all around Byrne. The report near his ear was deafening and made everything sound tinny and hollow, as though he were trapped inside an air duct. Discharge flared from barrels. Byrne caught glimpses of bared teeth as muscular forms scurried down the dirt walls and leaped from the spiral ramp. Long brownish-red fur flowed from their bodies like flames.

A spatter of blood struck his face shield a heartbeat before a simian shape plummeted past him toward the water. It hit one of the corpses and drove it under.

Anthony screamed from Byrne’s right. The soldier toppled backward as he fired, his bullets chewing up the earthen wall. Slender arms slashed at his head and chest while jaws snapped at his throat. His isolation suit tore. He struggled and stumbled. Dropped his rifle. Lost his footing. Fell a half-dozen feet to the walkway below him. Before he could get back to his feet, they were upon him. His horrible cries echoed over the ruckus.

Something heavy struck Byrne between his shoulders. Drove him to his knees. He felt claws in his back. Scratching against his hood. He reached behind him, grabbed a handful of fur, and flung the beast over the edge. What almost looked like an orangutan crossed with a chimpanzee streaked toward the bottom of the pit.

Byrne climbed to his feet and grabbed Richards, who bellowed as he fired into the masses of creatures streaming from the jungle.

“There’s only one way out of here!” Byrne shouted.

If Richards had heard him over the shrieking and gunfire, he didn’t acknowledge him.

“Listen to me, goddammit! Either we get out of here now or we’re all dead!”

“We’re all dead regardless!”

“Not if you follow me!”

Byrne turned toward the water, took two running strides, and jumped out over the nothingness.

Byrne’s stomach fluttered and he heard himself shout.

He hit the water feet first. Felt something squish beneath his heels. And then he was immersed in the cool fluid.

He flailed and struggled through the tangle of arms and legs. His exertions caused the flesh of the bodies trapped beneath the surface to dissociate from the bones. Even with the night vision goggles, he could barely see a thing as he fought his way down through the corpses, crawling between and over and around them. He worked his way deeper and deeper until there became more space between the remains and he was able to see the rocky bottom.

Water trickled into his isolation suit from the punctures in the back, but fortunately his respirator was still patent and the seal around his hood remained intact.

He envisioned the magnetic signal on the map that had reminded him of a snake, how it had appeared to branch from the eastern side of the mine and turned—

There!

The hole was nearly concealed by the corpse wedged into it. The woman’s hair wavered like seaweed. Her rear end had entered the tunnel first, folding her forehead to her knees. Chunks of flesh and detritus sluiced past her on the subtle current. He grabbed her leg and pulled, but merely felt the bones in her knee dislocate.

Something brushed his side.

Byrne whirled to see Richards pass to his right and grip the woman by the shoulder. Together they leveraged her from the hole and sent her drifting back to join the others.

Byrne didn’t waste any time. He slithered through the orifice and into a chute so narrow he had to use his hands to pull himself deeper into the earth.

The ground beneath him slowly metamorphosed from coarse rock to stone that had been smoothed by time and running water. The walls withdrew enough for him to swim and he took full advantage. He banged his elbows and knees, hit his head and jammed his fingers. Squeezed past rotting remains and did everything in his power to restrain the growing panic inside of him.

What if he was wrong? What if they were swimming into a dead end, or worse? The air supply in his respirator wouldn’t last forever, nor would his suit hold up to another attack.

The tunnel constricted once more. The walls were sharp with broken rocks, the ground littered with fragments that threatened to cut through his gloves. Diamonds glimmered from the rubble. He got a grip on the walls and propelled himself from the end of the tunnel into a larger pool. The moment he felt the ceiling lift, he pushed himself to his hands and knees and raised his head out of the water.

There were maybe a dozen corpses in the murky pool, one of them partially ensnared by the cords of a parachute.

Byrne shouted and climbed to his feet. Looked straight up and turned in a circle. There was no sign of movement from the trees, no shadows scurrying over the edge of the pit.

Richards burst from the surface and splashed in Byrne’s direction.

“Go, go, go!”

He shoved Byrne ahead of him.

Warren emerged from the water and slogged toward where Byrne and Richards started up the ramp. Graves was right behind him.

“Jesus,” Warren said. “They were coming from everywhere!”

“They took down Anthony like he was nothing,” Graves said. “Just swarmed over him.”

Richards grabbed Byrne by the shoulder and turned him around.

“Can they swim?”

Byrne shrugged from the man’s grasp and tried to recall what had happened after the one he threw hit the water, but couldn’t remember anything beyond it landing on one of the corpses.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Primates don’t instinctively swim. Rivers generally serve as geographic barriers for zoonotic diseases. At least until they spread to man.”

“What the hell are they?” Graves asked.

Byrne had no answer. Primates like the chimpanzee – if that was even what these things were – were notoriously aggressive and thus a threat for spreading contagions, but he’d never heard of them attacked as a pack.

“It doesn’t matter what they are,” Richards said. “Right now we need to find a defensible position and call for retrieval.”

“No chopper’s going to be able to get to us through these trees,” Warren said.

“Then we’re going to have to get to town.”

Richards pushed past Byrne and jogged up the spiral ramp toward the jungle. The others hurried to catch up. The rain had made the ramp muddy and treacherous, slowing their pace to a maddening extent. The forest was little better. Any trail they might have left that morning was concealed by heavy branches bowing beneath the weight of the accumulated water. This time they made no effort at stealth. Richards took the lead and ran with his rifle at port arms, using it to clear his way. Graves brought up the rear. He jogged backward whenever the foliage granted enough space and then sprinted through the underbrush to catch back up with the rest of them.

Byrne’s legs ached and his chest burned. He was under no pretense about his relationship with these men. If he lagged, they would leave him behind without a second thought. So he pushed through the pain until he feared his body would simply give out, then pushed some more.

Richards suddenly stopped, crouched beside a broad tree trunk, and raised his rifle.

Byrne gratefully collapsed behind him and tried to catch his breath. He could see the slope leading downhill into Daru over Richards’s shoulder. The town somehow seemed even more deserted than they had left it. The darkness itself appeared to have taken up residence inside the buildings. A hazy mist rolled through the streets.

“Do you see anything?” Warren whispered.

Richards slowly swept his sightline across the main street one more time before answering.

“No.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

“We have to be sure. If they catch us out in the open we’re done.”

Graves crept up beside Richards. The two exchanged whispered words, then Graves flattened himself to the ground and squirmed into the tall grass.

“How did you know that tunnel was there?” Warren whispered.

“There was an anomaly on the magnetometric readout,” Byrne said, “a white shape suggesting extremely high ferromagnetic content and unaffected by the topography. It looked like it led toward the mine where we first landed and I didn’t remember seeing the same kind of trails they left after dragging the bodies so—”

“You figured they had to be connected for the bodies to have ended up in the other mine.”

“Diamond mines are full of iron ore, the erosion of which causes a chemical reaction that produces iron oxide, a ferromagnetic precipitate that accumulates on exposed surfaces.”

“Which served to outline the entire system on the map.”

“Maybe not the entire system, but definitely the part with water.”

Warren clapped him on the shoulder.

“That’s one I owe you,” he whispered, and crawled over beside Richards.

Byrne caught movement from his peripheral vision and looked past the others to see Graves step out from behind a ramshackle structure with a tarp roof. He held up his right fist and pumped it up and down to signal them to hurry up.

Richards and Warren broke from cover and sprinted out into the open. Byrne raced to catch up with them. The slope was slick and the grasses tangled around his ankles. He was halfway to the dirt road leading into town when Richards and Warren both stopped and looked uphill, to their right, toward the forest.

Byrne slid to a halt and followed their line of sight to where the trail they had followed mere hours ago vanished into the shadows.

The upper canopy came to life with simian screams.

Dark shapes burst from the trees and rained down upon the field. They hit the ground and without slowing charged downhill toward town. They used their arms for propulsion and swung their haunches behind them, utilizing a loping, almost sideways gait to crash through the tall grass at a staggering rate of speed.

“Run!” Graves shouted.

Byrne ran for everything he was worth, lifting his knees to free his ankles and desperately trying to keep up with the others, who pulled farther away from him with every stride.

What little head start they had on the creatures tearing through the weeds was rapidly diminishing. The grasses swayed and bowed to mark their passage, but only offered the occasional glimpse of a hunched silhouette or a streak of flowing fur.

Byrne tripped.

Hit the ground.

Pushed himself up and half-ran, half-limped toward the road, where Richards and Warren were already dashing after Graves toward the open storefront they’d used as their makeshift laboratory.

The screeching of primates grew louder by the second.

Byrne glanced one final time at the violently shaking weeds before he hit the main road and couldn’t see them anymore through buildings that didn’t look like they’d stand up to a strong wind, let alone any kind of assault.

“Hurry!” Graves shouted.

The others blew past him into the store and down the darkened aisles. Graves dragged the shutters across the opening and appeared ready to seal them, whether Byrne made it or not. The gap was barely wide enough to allow him to slide through when he reached it. He sidestepped Graves and slammed into a rack that crashed to the floor, sending him careening across the wooden planks with its contents.

Graves slammed the shutters closed and whirled to face Byrne.

“Help me!”

Byrne struggled to his feet and held the shutters while Graves rummaged for anything he could use to secure them. He found a length of chain behind the counter, wrapped it around the inner handle and a support post, and jammed a screwdriver through the links to hold it in place.

They headed away from the partition and toward the back of the store, where Richards stood on top of an overturned shelf, repeatedly slamming the legs of a metal chair up into the ceiling. The flimsy wood cracked and splintered. He cast the chair aside. Jumped up. Caught the edge. Jerked on it until a section of the ceiling collapsed and sent him toppling to the floor.

Warren climbed onto the shelf, kicked off the wall, and pulled himself through the hole into the darkness.

The screaming outside was deafening. The creatures hurled themselves against the shutters, over and over. Byrne couldn’t bring himself to turn around to make sure the chain was holding.

Graves climbed up behind Warren and reached back down for Byrne, who leaped past his outstretched hand and strained to scurry up into what looked like a small apartment. Graves tugged on the back of his suit and dragged him away from the orifice so Richards could climb through behind him.

“Secure all points of ingress!” Richards yelled.

The door at the back of the main room was serviced by a rickety flight of wooden stairs leading down to an alley filled with garbage. Warren overturned a table, flattened it to the door, and slid a threadbare couch against it. Richards ran to the bedroom, flipped the mattress over the broken window, and attempted to brace it with a dresser, a trunk, and anything else he could find. Byrne followed Graves down the steep, narrow staircase to the front door on the street level and helped rip up the floorboards to brace the door against the stairs.

Richards posted Graves at the top of the entryway and helped Warren wrench the washbasin from the wall and wedge it into the frame of the broken window in the kitchen. Byrne stared at the vaguely human-shaped bloodstain on the floor and the smears leading up the wall and to the barricaded window.

He stumbled backward, braced his back against the wall, and slid down to his rear end. He stared up at the ceiling. The wood was weathered and bowed and there were spots where he was certain he could see the night sky.

“We’re going to die in here,” he whispered.

Outside, the shrill cries ceased.

The silence was infinitely worse.

“I transmitted the emergency signal,” Richards whispered from the bedroom, where he watched the alley through a gap beside the mattress barely wide enough for the barrel of his rifle.

They hadn’t seen or heard the creatures in close to twenty minutes. The more time passed, the edgier they got.

“So what do we do now?” Byrne whispered.

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“You have to remember,” Graves whispered from the top of the staircase, where he watched the front door down the barrel of his rifle. “This mission’s off the books. We’re not officially even here.”

“What does that mean?” Byrne whispered.

“Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie and make you feel better?”

“The truth.”

“We’re on our own.”

“They’ll come,” Warren whispered. “They can’t afford for us to be found here by anyone else. There will be too many questions.”

“They’ll just firebomb the whole town and make it look like an accident.”

“Would you two shut up?” Richards whispered. “They’re not going to firebomb the town. They need what we have.” He looked pointedly at Byrne. “They need what he has.”

“I don’t have anything,” Byrne whispered. “There’s no outbreak. No virus.”

“But they don’t know that. For all they know we’ve collected the next Ebola virus or a potential biological weapon of mass destruction. Either one is worth its weight in gold to the powers that be.”

Warren peered down at the alley through the gap beside the dented metal tub.

“They won’t leave us here,” he whispered. “They’ll come for us.”

“And then they’ll turn this town into a crater you can see from space,” Graves whispered.

“That kind of thing doesn’t happen,” Byrne whispered. “There are protocols, especially when dealing with virulent organisms.”

“You just keep telling yourself that, Doc.” Graves chuckled. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd there have been more potential pandemics since the turn of the century than in the entire history of man before that?”

A creaking sound overhead.

Conversation ceased and all eyes looked to the ceiling.

“Something’s up there,” Byrne whispered.

“You think?”

“Shh!”

Motes of dust sparkled in the dim moonlight that passed through the roof. Byrne watched them billow on a current of air he couldn’t feel.

Another creaking sound. This time from closer to the bedroom.

Warren aimed his rifle at the ceiling and slowly approached, placing each foot silently on the wooden floor.

A shadow passed over a tiny hole and the column of motes disappeared.

“I have a shot,” Warren whispered.

“You could bring the whole roof down on our heads,” Richards whispered.

“One shot won’t compromise the structure.”

“We can’t take that risk. Hold your fire and wait for extraction.”

More creaking from directly above Graves, who slowly stood and aimed his rifle straight up.

A loud thump and a metallic clang. From below them.

Byrne scurried across the floor and looked down into the store. All was dark and still. No hint of movement.

“They’re testing our perimeter,” Richards whispered.

“They’re animals, for Christ’s sake,” Graves whispered. “They aren’t capable of—”

A shriek of scraping metal.

Warren ran back into the kitchen and threw his shoulder into the washbasin before it could slide from the sill. He shoved it back into place with a groan.

“Eyes open,” Richards whispered.

“They can’t get in here,” Graves whispered. “We have every ingress secured.”

“They took out the entire town,” Byrne whispered.

“While they were sleeping.”

“Shh!” Richards whispered.

A faint scratching sound. Overhead. Moving stealthily above the bedroom. Richards followed its progress with his eyes.

Clang.

Byrne looked down through the hole. Caught movement from his peripheral vision. Turned and saw a screwdriver roll across the floor. The chain through the handle on the shutters unraveled with a clanking sound and slithered to the bare wood.

“Help me!” he shouted, and frantically searched for anything he could drag over the hole.

“Use the table,” Graves said. He ran toward the barricaded rear door.

“Don’t abandon your post!” Richards shouted.

Graves dragged back the couch and pried the table from behind it.

Several shapes streaked past below Byrne. He heard the clatter of nails on metal and wood.

“Hurry!”

Graves inverted the table and slid it toward Byrne, who maneuvered it over the hole and climbed on top of it. Impact from beneath it nearly knocked him off. He grabbed one of the legs for balance.

Another blow. The table lifted from the floor and clapped back down.

Screaming erupted from all around them at once. The scratching sound on the roof turned to pounding, then to what almost sounded like thunder. Beams cracked and planks split.

Warren stepped away from the window, switched his AIR to full automatic, and fired up into the rafters. Dozens of bullet holes opened in the old wood, through which Byrne caught glimpses of long fur. Blood trickled through the gaps and bodies tumbled down the slope.

“The window!” Graves shouted.

The washbasin toppled inward at the same time there was a loud crash from the bottom of the front stairs.

Warren lunged for the washbasin as an avalanche of brownish-red fur filled the window. He yelled and fired into the mass of bodies, which drove him backward and to the floor. His shots went wild, hitting the wall on their way toward—

Byrne dove and tackled Graves. The bullets whipped past them and chewed up the bedroom wall, on the other side of which Richards retreated as he fired at the mattress, around which clawed appendages carved into the wood in an effort to squeeze past the barricade.

Graves pushed himself up from the ground and looked at Byrne as though seeing him for the first time. He gave a curt nod, rose to his feet, and bellowed as discharge spit from his barrel.

Warren screamed and struggled to squirm out from beneath the creatures that slashed at his isolation suit and pried at his hood. They snapped at his face shield and bit his forearms with teeth that looked like those of a chimpanzee, only with long hooked canines. His rifle clattered to the ground. He used both hands in an attempt to keep them away from his—

One of the creatures tore through his hood and clamped onto his neck.

Warren’s cries abruptly ceased. His lips framed inaudible words. The vasculature beneath his skin darkened and spread like purple lightning bolts.

The table popped up. Hit the floor. Slid to the side.

Byrne glimpsed hunched shapes rising through the hole and dove for Warren’s IAR. Rolled onto his back. Shouted as he pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked in his grasp and spewed fiery steel through the bedroom wall on its way down toward the orifice. The bullets tore through the bodies climbing from the store and rushing toward him, lifting them from their feet and painting the walls crimson.

The couch scooted into the room. The back door fell inward and served as a ramp for the creatures scurrying in from the night.

Graves sprinted away from it, toward the front door. There were bodies around his legs before he was halfway there. He fell forward and tumbled down the stairs.

“Go!” Richards shouted.

He blew past Byrne through the path Graves had cleared toward the stairs. He leapt from the top step and crashed down onto the planks that still braced the lower half of the broken door. Primates screamed and slashed at him as he kicked down the remainder and dragged Graves out onto the street.

Byrne was airborne before they cleared the landing. He hit his head, then his shoulder. Clipped his foot on the rail. Came down on top of furry bodies and careened onto the sidewalk. Pointed Warren’s rifle back into the stairwell and pulled the trigger.

More creatures poured from inside the house, even as their brethren fell. They climbed over the bleeding bodies of their brethren and pounced onto the sidewalk. Even more scurried down the façade and rained from the roof.

Byrne continued to pull the trigger, even after the magazine was empty. He dug his heels into the dirt in an effort to distance himself from the monsters. Their cold blue eyes locked onto him as they bounded toward him, their fists striking the earth, their long fur streaming behind them, their cries echoing through the desolate street.

Richards grabbed him by the back of his suit and dragged him away from their advance. Graves stepped between them and the creatures and started shooting even as they swarmed over him and buried him beneath their numbers.

Byrne rolled to all fours. Shoved Richards ahead of him.

“Run!”

“Marines don’t know the meaning of the word,” Richards said, and opened fire.

Byrne didn’t even have time to turn around.

Impact from behind.

His face was driven into the dirt. He rolled over. Tried to shield his face with his forearms.

The gunfire ceased.

Byrne’s screams rose above those of the primates before they were silenced by a stabbing pain in the side of his neck and the sudden descent of darkness.

The agony was beyond anything Byrne had ever experienced. Fire flowed through his veins. The venom pulsed within him, branching out from the deeper vessels, through his flesh, and out to his skin, where every nerve ending was a live wire. Even the sensation of his clothing against him was more than he could bear.

He could feel himself winding down. His thoughts became increasingly sluggish and disconnected. He was only peripherally aware of the creatures around him. Their attack had been a blitzkrieg, and had ended as quickly as it started. The screaming faded to grunting, then to sniffing and shuffling sounds, and finally to silence as the primates vanished into the shadows, leaving their prey to suffer in peace as the venom worked its paralytic magic.

Byrne clawed at the gravel in a futile attempt to drag himself from the street. He sputtered and coughed, freckling his face shield with blood. His eyes focused in and out on the blood of their own accord. He caught one final glimpse of Richards to his right before the muscles in his neck failed him and his head struck the ground.

If they were still here when the creatures returned, they would be dragged into the forest and hung from the trees with all of the others, to serve as sustenance for whatever the hell they actually were. With as many chemicals as they pumped into the ground in these diamond mines and at the rate the indigenous viruses mutated, there was no way of knowing what kinds of monsters were breeding in the darkness beneath the dense canopy.

He screamed, and yet no sound formed. The dirt scraped against the Plexiglas. His fingers curled into the earth one final time, but dragged him no farther.

With his last conscious thought, Byrne prayed for death.

Byrne felt like he was drowning in a fathomless black sea. The waves of unconsciousness pulled him under and only occasionally did he breach the surface and experience moments of what could only loosely be considered consciousness. His appendages were warm and unresponsive, yet he could feel his pulse throbbing through every vessel with exquisite clarity. He tasted blood, felt damp warmth on his neck and chest.

He had no idea how long he opened his eyes, only that he experienced a surprising sense of disorientation every time he did, as though he’d been awakened from a dream that was somehow more real than the plane his body inhabited. The pain returned in subtle increments. Tears crawled down his cheeks, but he couldn’t summon the physical release of a scream.

The simian handprint in the dirt served to remind him of the siege and the incremental brightening of the sky of the passage of time. Try as he might, he could no more see the others than he could raise his head to look for them. There was still no sign of the primates, but they were right there waiting for him with their ferocious teeth bared when the waves of unconsciousness pulled him under again…

Fire in his toes roused him. The sunlight was blinding, but it tethered him to consciousness. How long had he been out? A meek whimper passed his lips. The almost blissful warmth was gone, replaced by an electric sensation akin to a razor stropping his nerve tracts. With the pain came fleeting moments of lucidity, when he understood completely that he was paralyzed and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He was a prisoner inside his own flesh. The prospect of being suspended high in the trees, completely aware of his situation and helpless to do anything about it…

The suffering the townspeople must have experienced was beyond the limits of his imagination. They’d been drained of their blood, like a spider drained a fly, their necks tapped in the same fashion as a maple tree being harvested for its sap.

That was why the bull’s legs had been disarticulated. Either its weight had caused the joints to dislocate while it was being dragged or when they attempted to hang it from the trees. Byrne wondered how many others they might have seen had they looked up into the canopy through the scopes of their rifles.

A clattering sound from somewhere above him and to his right. The buckling sound of a heavy object landing on a tin roof to his left.

The creatures were coming back now that he and the marines were helpless. Now there was nothing they could do to stop it. The creatures could now maintain a steady state of envenomation without the threat of them fighting back, keeping them paralyzed but alive until they were drained of every last drop of blood.

The clamor of nails on rooftops. Snuffling and grunting.

Byrne pictured himself being dragged into the jungle and strung up by his heels while he was slowly bled to death. Worse, he envisioned doing so while he was conscious of everything around him. Feeling every pain. Staring blankly into the trees while those monsters climbed all over him. He couldn’t think of a worse way to die.

He eyes closed his eyes and once more welcomed the darkness, from the depths of which he heard the distant rumble of thunder and the clatter of nails on the buildings and the tin awnings.

The thunder transforms into the recognizable thupping sound of helicopter blades. Byrne opens his eyes. The crippling pain returns, and with it the realization the chopper has frightened off the creatures. He closes his eyes and struggles not to sink back into darkness. He has no idea where the monsters are now, only that they can’t have gone very far. His sole overriding imperative is to warn the men who’ve come to rescue them.

He opens his eyes and struggles to his feet as the Sikorsky MH-60G Pave Hawk descends through the dust. Fights through the lingering paralysis and the rotor wash. Shields his eyes from the dirt whipped up from the road. He passes Graves and Richards, but can barely see their silhouettes through the dust, let alone any signs of life.

“Don’t…”

Byrne gurgles blood and watches the chopper settle to the road. The rotors slow and the cloud of dust billows outward. He waves his arms over his head to get their attention before it’s too late, but loses his balance. Hits the ground.

“Don’t…get…”

He rolls onto his back and stares into the sun. Their rescuers have no idea the nightmare that awaits them if they get out of their chopper. Byrne can’t let that happen. He somehow finds the strength to stand again. Waves his arms over his head.

The latch on the sliding door of the Pave Hawk disengages with a thunk.

“Don’t get out!”

His voice echoes away into oblivion. He looks from one side of the street to the other.

The creatures.

The last thing he heard before losing consciousness was the sound of them scurrying up the wooden buildings and climbing over the awnings. They hadn’t had time to run for the cover of the forest. There’d barely been enough time to hide.

The Pave Hawk’s side door slides open.

“No!” Byrne shouts.

Men in camouflaged isolation gear jump to the ground, their rifles at the ready. Their face shields reflect the sun as they run toward him. They don’t know what hits them.

The simian screams explode from all around them at once. The men turn helplessly in circles as the primates leap from the open windows and burst from the shadowed doorways. They streak across the street and converge upon the soldiers, who barely manage to fire their weapons before they’re buried under a flurry of slashing claws and snapping teeth.

The rotor whines back to life, but it’s too late for the pilot. The blades turn impotently as the creatures bound through the open door and converge upon the cockpit. A blur of brownish-red fur through the windshield, then a spatter of blood. The landing gear rises and drops back to the ground. The tail swings around, tearing through the front half of a building and filling the air with wooden shrapnel.

Byrne falls to his knees. He can hear the screams of his would-be saviors even over the roar of the rotors.

They will all share the same horrible fate. Once the men from the chopper are subdued, the creatures will return their attention to Byrne and there will be absolutely nothing he can do to stop it. He lacks the energy to run, not that he’d make it very far, and he no longer has the will to fight.

He slumps forward and sobs in frustration. Blood trickles down his chin, dribbles onto the Plexiglas.

One by one, the screams of the men are silenced.

Byrne glances back at Graves. The first lieutenant’s feet scrape the ground in an effort to stand, but he hardly has the strength to raise his head. If only he’d been right and the chopper had obliterated the entire town. At least then their deaths would have been swift and merciful.

The helicopter blades kick up dirt as the chopper continues to bounce and judder and swing slowly in circles. Through the side window Byrne sees the pilot crumpled against the console and the creatures climbing over each other in their hurry to get out the open door.

He looks at Richards, who has dragged himself closer. The captain’s mask is cracked and he’s covered with blood, but the expression of resolve on his face is unmistakable. He reaches for his rifle, which remains well out of his reach.

Byrne picks up the IAR. Richards’s eyes lock onto his, then direct them toward the chopper.

The creatures rise from the fallen soldiers and turn as one toward Byrne.

Richards nods solemnly.

Byrne understands.

He raises the rifle to his shoulder. Sights down the Pave Hawk as the tail spins around again.

A blur of brown as the creatures bound toward him, their long fur flagging on the tempestuous gale.

Byrne pulls the trigger. Watches the bullets punch through the helicopter from the rear propeller toward the back door, puncturing the gas tank and tearing through electrical components.

A flash of light turns the creatures to silhouettes.

Their fur becomes flames as they’re thrown like rag dolls ahead of the explosion.

A wall of heat tosses Byrne backward.

He hits the ground near Richards. Skids across the gravel. Meets the captain’s stare one final time.

Richards nods to Byrne, then closes his eyes.

Byrne screams as the flames engulf him.