Mutation

Book 0: Unit 51 Novel

by Michael McBride

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

IT LIVES.



In a research hangar in Virginia, a Unit 51 team studies an ancient but long-dormant virus that can transform human physiology—and turn it into something else . . .



IT MUTATES.



In the Amazon rain forest, a newly evolving life form known as Subject Z acquires the ability to think conceptually, build elaborate traps, create new carriers—and spawn a new race . . .



IT SPREADS.



In Mexico and Turkey, the men and women of Unit 51 race to uncover a global link between the mutations: a connection as ancient as the oldest tombs on earth—and as alien and unknowable as the universe itself. But time is running out. The infected are growing in number. And the nightmare is going viral.

Release date: September 29, 2020

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 381

Sample

The events of the last year had changed Martin Roche, or maybe they’d simply served to return him to the path he’d been meant to travel. Either way, he didn’t like it. He’d left the intelligence community and the national security apparatus because he’d lost faith in what he was doing and grown resentful of being made to spy on his own people, and yet here he was now, standing before a wall of monitors upon which played satellite, drone, and surveillance footage from all around the world.

He’d been trained to see the patterns that no one else could see and detect threats hidden in the chaos by the elite cryptanalysis unit of the U.S. Marines, from whose pocket he’d been picked by the NSA, who’d honed those skills to a razor’s edge. Had he believed there was anyone better equipped to handle this job, he would have gladly declined Barnett’s offer and walked away with a clear conscience. He’d seen glimpses of the fate that awaited them all if Unit 51 failed to prevent it, though, and couldn’t abandon those he loved to it, even if it meant throwing away the life he had made for himself in England, the countless hours of research he’d invested into deciphering the mysterious crop circles, and the burgeoning relationship with the woman who occupied his every waking thought.

Roche cleared his mind. He couldn’t afford to be distracted or he might miss something crucial.

“Transfer monitor six to the main screen,” he said.

Three digital information specialists were seated at the terminals in the front of the room. Each of them was responsible for acquiring and screening the incoming footage from various locations around the globe. In a perfect world, there would have been a single technologist assigned to each source, but after losing nearly twenty percent of their total ranks to the feathered serpents beneath the Antarctic ice cap, their numbers dwindled by the day. They were running on a skeleton crew, and until they secured anything resembling an actual victory, they weren’t going to be able to lure quality applicants away from any of the other branches. Assuming they even still had funding by then. As it was, Clayborn claimed it was becoming increasingly difficult to appropriate any kind of budget for his discretionary projects at the DOD, which was his not-so-subtle way of saying that either they showed some positive results or they were on their own.

Roche couldn’t allow that to happen. Not with Subject Z—and Lord only knew what else—out there on the loose.

An aerial image appeared on the central monitor. A jagged range of sharp, icy peaks rose from a seamless field of white. It was all that remained of the ice cap above the subterranean lake and Forward Operating Base Atlantis, from which only a handful of them had managed to escape with their lives. With the feathered serpents able to breed unchecked and with nothing to stop them from reaching the surface, a decision had been made to drop a bunker buster with a thermobaric warhead straight down the elevator shaft to collapse the entire ice dome. In theory, the detonation had sucked all of the air out of the caverns and used it to generate a high-temperature explosion that incinerated everything inside before dropping two vertical miles of ice onto the ashes, but if he had learned one thing during the past year, it was that nature always found a way to persevere.

“Give me a thermal overlay,” Roche said.

The specialist toggled some keys and the image became pixelated. There were no heat signatures whatsoever.

“It’s been six months,” the specialist said. Lucas O’Reilly was his name. Or maybe just Reilly. That Roche didn’t know the man’s name spoke volumes about the situation and his state of mind. “If anything survived the blast, we’d have found it by now.”

“We’re dealing with an extant species of dinosaur capable of surviving for tens of thousands of years in a state of cryobiosis. You’ll have to indulge my paranoia.”

“Why don’t you get out of here for a while?” a voice said from behind him.

Roche turned to find Special Agent Marc Maddox standing behind him with his hands clasped behind his back. He had brilliant blue eyes and wore his blond hair buzzed; his broad jaw was cleanly shaved. He wore the scars along the sides of his nose and from the corners of his mouth to his ears with pride. He’d earned them in Afghanistan, undoubtedly in a manner he’d rather not recount. The plastic surgeons had done such a miraculous job that what could have been a disfiguring injury merely added character to his face. With Barnett and Morgan in the field, he was in charge of operations, while Roche served as team lead for the scientific branch. They shared responsibility for tracking Subject Z and its traveling companion—officially classified as Unknown Subject, or UNSUB X—who continued to elude their pursuit.

“I was just about to check the drone footage from Colombia,” Roche said.

“Do you really think it’s possible that Subject Zeta and UNSUB X made it that far north?”

“We can’t afford to assume they didn’t.”

“You and I both know that they could easily hide in the Amazon rainforest and we’d never find so much as a trace of them.”

“If hiding is their goal,” Roche said.

“What else could they possibly want? The moment they stick their heads out of that jungle we’ll be right there to rain fire down upon them.”

“They wouldn’t have risked leaving Antarctica if they didn’t have a destination. All signs support a steady northward advance.”

“We’ve beaten this horse to death,” Maddox said. “Have we heard from our men on the ground?”

“Both teams checked in right on schedule.”

“And with the same reports, I’m sure.”

“The northern unit will reach the coordinates first,” Roche said. “Special Agent Staley estimated sometime around sunrise. Barnett said his team acquired a boat and shouldn’t be more than four or five hours behind.”

“You know as well as I do what they’ll find when they get there.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Unfortunately, at this point, that’s what it’s going to take.”

“We will find them,” Roche said.

“But not if we spread ourselves too thin. You should get some sleep. You look like you just crawled out of your own grave.”

“That was the style I was aiming for.”

“Go on, Martin. You’re no good to anyone like this. We need you on top of your game if we’re going to find them.”

“It’s a matter of when, not if.”

Roche glanced back at the wall of monitors, nodded to himself, and clapped Maddox on the shoulder on his way out. The satellites would still be there when he returned, and there would be even more footage to evaluate. They would find Subject Z, whether tomorrow or ten years from now, and he would personally make sure that when they did, they obliterated it, right down to the molecular level.

He caught his reflection from the mirrored glass of the Arcade, as the drone room was known, and saw what Maddox meant. His hair was shaggy, his face unshaved, and his clothes were too loose. He’d let himself go and still hadn’t accomplished a blasted thing, save for driving away the only person who truly mattered to him, but he couldn’t bring himself to take a step back and let someone else do the job. He simply couldn’t afford to trust anyone. As recent events in Mexico had clearly demonstrated, a shadow organization they’d taken to calling Enigma, because of how little they knew about it, seemed to always be a step ahead of them, which could mean only one thing: it had somehow managed to infiltrate Unit 51.

The office Dr. Kelly Nolan shared with Dr. Tess Clarke was near the end of the hallway. He stopped outside the open door and looked inside. Kelly had exchanged the red and green streaks in her hair for a completely new color, which appeared silver in some light and purple in others. Barnett had arranged for her to finish her doctorate at Oregon State via a remote-learning platform. After developing a system that predicted seismic activity and modifying the design from the ancient machine they’d discovered under the onion field in Wiltshire to produce a limitless amount of energy from flowing water, it hadn’t taken a whole lot of convincing. She’d only just returned from defending her doctoral thesis and visiting her mother, who had begun displaying symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. She’d asked Roche to go with her, but he hadn’t even been able to do that for her.

She obviously hadn’t arrived very long ago, as she was still wearing her jacket and hadn’t even opened the bag of croissants on her desk, and yet she was already working at the digital touchscreen monitor mounted to the wall behind her desk. On the screen was a program of her own design that featured all of the tectonic plates with various overlays, from vague continental maps to precise images from Google Earth, which allowed her to evaluate seismic and volcanic activity, as well as the fluctuating magnetic fields they generated, in real time.

After the MRI revealed that Subject A had accelerated growth to the same parts of its brain that a homing pigeon used for magnetoreception, she’d set about isolating every single variation in magnetic field strength from the southern tip of Argentina all the way north to the Arctic Circle in hopes of determining every route Subject Z could take and every conceivable destination along the way. The problem was that there were simply too many possibilities. If the creature was as sensitive to subtle magnetic variances as a homing pigeon, it could utilize fields as small as fifty microteslas, which wasn’t a whole lot stronger than the field generated by standard overhead power lines.

Her left hand fretted at her side. It was an unconscious tic that made her look like she was playing an air guitar. She was incredibly self-conscious about it, yet most of the time didn’t even realize she was doing it. Roche wanted to go in there and take her hand in his, to reassure her that everything was going to be all right, but he was no longer sure that their relationship was such that he could. Nor did he believe that everything was going to be all right ever again.

She paused what she was doing and cocked her head.

Roche ducked out of the doorway before she caught him looking and headed toward the end of the corridor, where he’d taken to sleeping in the conference room outside of Barnett’s office while the director was in the field. Roche couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the world above the underground bunker, which had been built as an emergency relocation center for the National Military Establishment—the precursor agency to the Department of Defense—in case of a nuclear attack, let alone the inside of the apartment he’d rented. He wasn’t even sure if his key would still work in the lock. He’d sacrificed everything for the greater good and what did he have to show for it?

“Martin?”

Roche turned at the sound of Kelly’s voice. She stood outside her office with an expression of concern he could read from twenty feet away. He offered a half-smile and a wave, ducked into the conference room, and curled up on the couch.

Several seconds passed before he heard her footsteps retreat into her office and the door close behind her.

They were closing the net; he could feel it.

Special Agent Shane Staley and his team slogged through the flooded jungle, negotiating the snaking roots of the mangroves, keeping to the cover of the rubber trees, and pushing through curtains of strangler figs. The soft mud sucked at his feet and released them with the vile stench of flatus. The shrieking of parrots and chittering of monkeys masked the sounds of their advance, at least until the racket suddenly ceased.

He held up his fist to halt his men, who were concealed so well that he could barely discern their silhouettes from the shadows and the whites of their eyes from their camouflage face paint. He stared up into the canopy. Everything was silent and still. No breeze ruffled the leaves and no birds jostled the branches. Even the sun, it seemed, was barely able to penetrate the upper reaches with more than the most ambitious columns of light. Only the mosquitoes whined around his head, their efforts intensified and frenzied as though somehow sensing their window of opportunity was closing.

Something brushed past his calf beneath the brown water. He turned around in time to see the furry body of a dead simian breach the surface before submerging once more and continuing its migration on the weak current.

Staley felt the weight of his men’s stares upon him. They sensed it, too. The rainforest didn’t fall silent without a good reason. It took something truly ferocious to quiet an environment accustomed to going about its business while jaguars hunted from the trees, crocodiles lurked in the shallows, and venomous snakes slithered invisibly through the detritus. He feared that they’d finally found exactly what they’d been dispatched to find, only suddenly he wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing. After all, he’d seen what their quarry was capable of doing.

He slowed his breathing and lowered his fist. No matter how vicious Subject Z might be, a bullet through the brainpan would put it down like any other animal, for that was how he had chosen to think of it. Calling it what it truly was only served to grant it a psychological advantage. When he had the animal in his sights, he would not hesitate. It was time to take this monster off the board, once and for all.

He seated the butt of his SCAR 17 assault rifle against his shoulder and started slowly toward the Rio Solimões. His men followed his lead, as he knew they would, with only the slightest hesitation.

The upper section of the Amazon River announced its presence with a thrum he could feel through the earth.

The brain trust back at the Hangar had discovered a method, however unscientific, of tracking their prey by satellite. While the satellites couldn’t technically see the creature, or even the faintest hint of its thermal signature, through the impenetrable canopy, they could detect concentrations of carrion birds in the upper reaches and wheeling above the treetops. They were also able to extrapolate a line connecting documented signs of its passage with real-time imagery to plot the theoretical course of the creature’s northward migration.

Staley and his team, who’d barely been given time to exchange names, let alone train together, had been airlifted to a point nearly twenty miles north of their current position with instructions to follow the winding course of the Amazon until they encountered Barnett’s team. Or the creature. Whichever came first.

The rumble of the mighty river intensified from a subtle physical sensation to an audible one. The current against his legs grew stronger by the second, forcing him to work his way toward shallower water and the spotted stretches of dry ground from which dense thickets of ceibas grew. He crawled into the weeds and caught his first glimpse of the distant river—

A shrill scream erupted from somewhere ahead of him.

His men sought cover in his peripheral vision. The barrels of their rifles carved through the shadows as they attempted to get a bead on the source of the noise, which had sounded almost human—

Another cry echoed through the rainforest, pitiful and resigned.

Staley removed his global comlink from his backpack, but as expected, there was no signal. The satellite was generally only in range for a handful of hours every day, and even then they were often forced to find an unobstructed view of the sky.

They were on their own.

He caught the attention of Special Agent Todd Simmons and signaled for him to circle around to the right. A heartbeat later, the former marine was gone, leaving little more than shivering leaves in his wake. SA Ed Darling recognized what Staley planned to do and was on the move the moment their eyes locked through the underbrush. A glance confirmed that SA Don Koish was already falling back into containment position behind him. They would drive their prey ahead of them and flush it out into the open on the riverbank, closing in from three sides as they approached, forcing it to either stand its ground or attempt to get past them. Koish would serve as the last line of defense. If it somehow eluded the three of them, it was up to him to put it down.

Staley moved stealthily through the maze of buttress roots and vines, never once taking his eyes from the jungle in front of him, despite the damp palm leaves and fern fronds that grazed his face.

It was too quiet. Even his soft breathing and the faint slurping sounds of his carefully placed footsteps in the mud threatened to betray him.

He scanned the canopy for any sign of movement, but the jungle might as well have been dead. Save for the infernal mosquitoes. He focused on anything other than the sensation of the wretched insects crawling on his skin and the instinctive desire to slap them.

Crack.

Staley froze.

The sound had come from maybe twenty feet ahead of him, somewhere on the other side of a stand of rubber trees, between the trunks of which he watched the brown river racing past.

He lowered himself to all fours and crawled as close as he dared before flattening his body against the ground to minimize his profile. Although he couldn’t see them, the subtle crunching of dead leaves and twigs announced the arrival of Darling and Simmons to either side of him.

Staley used his elbows to drag himself through the mud and studied the bank of the river down the sightline of his bullpup rifle. He saw some sort of animal. Four of them. Golden-brown fur, positively crawling with flies. Capybaras. Judging by the horrific smell and the bones protruding from beneath their pelts, they were already in advanced stages of decomposition, a state rarely seen in an environment like this with the preponderance of predators and scavengers, which never let a single morsel go to waste.

He suddenly recognized the implications.

The creature had used the carrion birds to lure them here.

Another cracking sound, barely audible over the rumble of the river.

It was a trap.

A shadow passed through the gaps between the leaves.

Staley swallowed hard. Concentrated on regulating his breathing. He was only going to get one shot at this. And if he missed . . .

He suppressed the thought and squirmed closer in maddeningly small increments. A gentle breeze ruffled the branches and he caught a glimpse of movement. A dark shape. Little more than a shifting of the shadows. It passed through a pinprick column of light, revealing a hint of pale gray skin. And then it was gone.

Crack.

Another few feet and he could clearly see the muddy bank, bristling with wild grasses and ferns. The branches of the trees on both sides of the river grew so densely over the water that they shunted the sky.

Crack.

Staley looked to his right, through the proliferation of leaves and vines, and saw it clearly for the first time. The creature crouched at the edge of the forest with its hunched back to him, balanced on its toes, its elongated skull seemingly too large for its spindly form. It leaned forward and braced itself on its slender, sinewy arms. If ever there had been anything remotely human about it, it was long gone.

The creature stiffened. Raised its conical head. Cocked it first one way, then the other.

It knew they were there.

Staley sighted down the base of its skull. A triple burst from this distance and its cranium would simply vanish in a red cloud.

The creature rounded on him, revealing a face out of his nightmares. Its eyes were bulbous and round, a shade of black so dark they appeared fathomless, and stood apart from mutated features glistening with blood. Broad cheekbones tapered to a narrow chin. Its mouth formed a hideous expression reminiscent of a smile, only the teeth resembled needles and were arranged in uneven rows.

Spread out upon the bloodied leaves and grass below it were the carcasses of dozens of dead monkeys and vultures, their necks broken at obscene angles, their twitching appendages clawing and scratching uselessly at the ground. A black howler monkey with its mane torn away from a hideous gash on its throat looked up into the trees, its lips writhing as though trying to produce vocalizations that wouldn’t come. It turned toward Staley and its spine realigned with a sickening crack. A rush of blood washed the whitish film from its eyes. It opened its mouth and issued an awful scream.

Subject Z spoke in a deep, resonant voice that seemed to echo from all around it at once.

“Have you come . . . to die?”

Staley shouted and pulled the trigger.

The creature moved in a blur and vanished into the foliage. Bullets pounded the bodies of the animals he was certain were dead, even as they struggled to rise from the ground.

Simmons yelled and fired a fusillade that shredded the vegetation. His war cry metamorphosed into a scream that abruptly ceased as his blood-spattered helmet rolled out from beneath the ferns.

“Fall back!” Staley shouted.

He turned and sprinted into the rainforest. Branches slashed at his face and chest, making it impossible to see. His foot snagged on a root and he went down hard. Pushed himself up from the slick mud, only to fall again.

Gunfire crackled from somewhere ahead of him, but when he looked up, it wasn’t one of his fellow soldiers he saw.

A pair of long, thin legs protruded from the muck, their skin pallid and psoriatic, almost like the scales of a dead trout. The thighs and hips were corded with muscle. He followed the sculpted abdomen over a pair of bare breasts to the head of a stag. The deer’s eyes had been removed, leaving ragged holes through which reptilian eyes with slit pupils stared.

A crashing sound from the underbrush beyond the figure. Koish screamed. His rifle clattered to the ground.

The woman looming over Staley had to be nearly seven feet tall. She reached up with her massive hands, curled her long fingers around the antlers, and lifted the mask from her head.

Staley’s cries echoed through the jungle until, once more, only silence remained.

The Hangar

The tomb in Mosul had been immediately sealed and the unknown biological agent determined to be “dangerous and exotic,” a classification which meant that no one was taking any chances with it. Anya and Evans, along with every soldier who’d been within a quarter-mile of the scorched school, had been quarantined for seventy-two hours and subjected to a battery of painful and invasive tests, all of which had come back negative. During what Evans liked to call their forced vacation, the necropolis had been converted into a Biohazard Safety Level 4 containment facility and a hard-military cordon enforced at a one-mile radius. They’d been granted permission to return with the appropriate positive-pressure isolation suits, but only long enough to document the site.

In addition to photographing the underground cave from every conceivable angle, they’d used a FARO laser scanner to generate a perfect 3-D representation of each of the caverns, right down to the cobwebs hanging from the ceilings and the petroglyphs chiseled into the stone walls. They’d then sent the data files to one of Unit 51’s computer gurus, who’d spent the last six months converting their work into a virtual reality program that would supposedly allow them to peruse the tombs at their leisure.

Fortunately, they’d been allowed to collect various biological and bone-core samples that had survived the sterilization process, which gave them something to work on in the meantime. Had they known that the entire necropolis would be subsequently “sanitized,” which was apparently the terminology used for obliterated from the face of the planet, they would have been more aggressive in their initial investigation. She understood they couldn’t risk an extremist faction like Al-Qaeda or a hostile state like Iran gaining access to any kind of virulent biological agent, although she couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t all part of an elaborate cover-up to make sure that no one found out about the nature of the bodies entombed within.

The Teleportation Room, as it was known, had been constructed on the second sublevel of the Hangar specifically for VR viewing. There were four individual units, each of which featured a circular railing and a treadmill-like floor that moved in any direction to allow the viewer to explore the virtual environment without worrying about harming his or her corporeal form. The headset functioned in tandem with a rotating camera that detected the viewer’s movements, making it possible to incorporate physical investigative techniques like crouching and leaning over objects. Everything about it was intimidating to Anya, like voluntarily plugging herself into the Matrix, until the goggles were on and she was magically transported into the Iraqi caverns.

Anya found herself in the antechamber. She could look down and see the bones protruding from the dirt below her where her feet should have been. The petroglyphs on the walls were even clearer than they had been in person, thanks to the various filters and digital enhancements the designer had applied. To say he’d done an amazing job was an understatement.

She exited the antechamber and passed through the room where the mutated remains lay contorted on the ground. The lab had been able to isolate a portion of the virus’s DNA from bone cores, but the samples had been too degraded by the ravages of time to generate a complete genome. Based on what they could tell, however, the protein sequences were similar to those of hemorrhagic fevers like the Ebola and Marburg viruses. They’d been reluctant to commit beyond that, though. Of course, considering they’d finally discovered something capable of bringing down creatures like Subject Z, she had no doubt they were currently in a frenzy trying to revive and weaponize it.

Anya wanted no part of that. The mere thought of cooking up such nasty pathogens in a lab scared her on a primal level. There were undoubtedly countless similarly horrific primitive organisms frozen in the permafrost, just waiting to be thawed, though, so it was probably only a matter of humanity choosing the method of his demise. Her job was to determine the origin of the corpse entombed in the second chamber. Unlike those in the first, with their elongated craniums, bodily deformations, and clawed appendages, it was humanoid in form, if not dimension.

According to computer models, the man was a quarter-inch shy of seven feet tall. Based on the density of his bone samples, she estimated that his skeleton weighed nearly 150 pounds by itself. Assuming average human muscular proportions, his weight, while he was alive, had to have been at least 300 pounds. She wished she’d been able to run his mummified corpse through a CT scanner to provide a more in-depth analysis, but she was simply going to have to make do.

She felt oddly self-conscious turning sideways to squeeze through the crevice in the virtual wall and stepping over the creature’s carcass. The remains tied to the plinth were so real she couldn’t resist the urge to reach out and touch them, although her arm passed invisibly in front of her and her fingers grazed the safety rail. She leaned over the body and attempted to scrutinize it in the same manner as she would have in the field.

The man’s joints demonstrated advanced cartilaginous wear with deterioration of the bones where they rubbed against each other, despite estimates placing him at somewhere between thirty and forty years old at the time of his death, although any predictive models were based upon Homo sapiens sapiens, which this man, as evidenced by the sequenced portions of his genome, was clearly not. At least not entirely.

Anya spoke into a handheld audio recorder as she walked around the plinth. She hoped that articulation might somehow lead to the epiphany that had eluded her so far.

“The process of mummification has occurred by natural means. There are no incisions in the vicinity of the abdomen to suggest evisceration or surgical excision of any of the organs.” She crouched beside where the subject’s wrists and ankles had been bound to the floor by ropes. “The bindings have eroded through the flesh. Subsequent scoring on the bones themselves implies that the injuries were premortem.”

“He was entombed while he was still alive?”

Anya shrieked and ripped off her goggles. Jade stood in the adjacent unit with the visor on and her arms stretched out in front of her. Anya had been so immersed in the virtual world that she hadn’t heard the other woman enter.

“For the love of God, Jade. You nearly scared me to death.”

She lowered her headset again and was transported right back to the tomb on the other side of the globe.

“Where are you looking?” Jade asked.

“On the right side of the plinth, where the wrist and ankle are bound.”

“Good eye.” It was strange to think that they were both crouching in the same place without being able to see each other. “Although I would be inclined to classify the injuries as perimortem based on the lack of callus formation.”

Anya swelled with pride. Jade was their resident forensic expert and not one to casually offer a compliment, backhanded though it might have been.

“What brings you down here, Jade?”

“I was thinking about the contractures. They’re caused by an at. . .