Amazonia (26 page)

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Authors: James Rollins

Tags: #Sci-Fi Thriller

BOOK: Amazonia
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Even Marshall had retired to their room with Jessie hours ago. He had an early morning conference call with the CDC, two Cabinet heads, and the director of the CIA. He had eloquently described the meeting as "a preemptive strike before the political shitstorm hits the fan." Such were the ways of government. Rather than attacking the problem aggressively, everyone was still pointing fingers and running for cover. Marshall's goal tomorrow was to shake things up. A decisive plan of action was needed. So far, the fifteen outbreak zones were being managed fifteen different ways. It was chaos.
Sighing, Lauren stared at the reams of papers and printouts spread atop her table. Her team was still struggling with one simple question.
What was causing the disease?
Testing and research were ongoing in labs across the country--from the CDC in Atlanta all the way to the Salk facility in San Diego. But the Instar Institute had become scientific ground zero for the disease.
Lauren pushed away a report from a Dr. Shelby on utilizing monkey kidney cells as a culture medium. He had failed.
Negative response
. Up to this point, the contagious agent continued to thwart all means of identification: aerobic and anaerobic cultures, fungal assays, electron microscopy, dot hybridization, polymerase chain reaction. As of today, no progress had been made. Each study ended with similar tags:
negative response, zero growth, indeterminate analysis
. All fancy ways of saying failure.
Her beeper, resting beside her now-cold cup of coffee, began to buzz and dance across the Formica countertop. She snatched it before it fell off the table.
"Who the heck is paging me at this hour?" she mumbled, glancing at the beeper's screen. The Caller ID feature listed the number as
Large Scale Biological Labs
. She didn't know the facility, but the area code placed it
somewhere in northern California. The call was probably just some technician requesting their fax number or submission protocol. Still...
Lauren stood, pocketed her beeper, and headed over to the phone on the wall. As she picked up the receiver, she heard a door open behind her. Over her shoulder, she was surprised to see Jessie standing in her pajamas, rubbing at her eyes blearily.
"Grandma..."
Lauren replaced the receiver and crossed to the child. "Honey, what are you doing up? You should be in bed."
"I couldn't find you."
She knelt before the girl. "What's wrong? Did you have another scary dream?" The first few nights here, Jessie had awoken with nightmares, triggered by the quarantine and the strange environment. But the child had seemed to adjust rapidly, making friends with several of the other kids.
"My tummy hurts," she said, her eyes sheening with threatening tears.
"Oh, honey, that's what you get for eating ice cream so late." Lauren reached out and pulled the girl into a hug. "Why don't I get you a glass of water, and we'll get you tucked back into--"
Lauren's voice died as she realized how warm the child was. She reached a palm to Jessie's forehead. "Oh, God," she mumbled under her breath.
The child was burning up.

2:31 A.M.
AMAZON JUNGLE

Louis stood by his tent as Jacques strode up from theriver. His lieutenant carried something wrapped in a sodden
blanket under his arms. Whatever it was, it appeared no larger than a watermelon.

"Doctor," the Maroon tribesman said stiffly.
"Jacques, what did you discover?" He had sent the man and two others to investigate the explosion that had occurred just after midnight. The noise had woken his own camp mere minutes after they had settled in for the night. Earlier, at sunset, Louis had learned of the discovery of the Indian
shabano
and the fate of the villagers. Then hours later the explosion...
What was going on over there?
"Sir, the village has been incinerated...as has much of the surrounding forest. We could not get too close due to the remaining fires. Maybe by morning."
"And the other team?"
Jacques glanced to his toes. "Gone, sir. I dropped Malachim and Toady ashore to scout after them."
Louis clenched a fist and cursed his overconfidence. After the successful abduction of one of their soldiers, he had grown complacent with his prey. But now this! One of his team's trackers must have been spotted. Now that the fox had been alerted to the hounds, Louis's mission was far more complicated. "Gather the other men. If the Rangers are running from us, we don't want them to get too far away."
"Yes, sir. But, Doctor, I'm not sure the others are fleeing from us."
"What makes you think that?"
"As we paddled up to the fire zone, we saw a body float out from a side stream."
"A body?" Louis feared it was his mole, dispatched and sent downriver as a message.
Jacques unrolled the sodden blanket in his arms and dropped its content to the leafed floor of the jungle. It was a human head. "We found it floating near the remains."
Frowning, Louis knelt and examined the head, what little there was of it. The face had been all but chewed away, but from the shaved scalp, it was clearly one of the Rangers.
"The body was the same," Jacques said, "gnawed to the bone."
Louis glanced up. "What happened to him?"
"Piranhas, I'd say, from the bite wounds."
"Are you sure?"
"Pretty damn sure." Jacques fingered the scarred half of his nose, reminding Louis that, as a boy, his lieutenant had had intimate experience with the voracious river predators.
"Did they feed on him after he was dead?"
Jacques shrugged. "If he wasn't, I pity the poor bastard."
Louis climbed to his feet. He stared out toward the river. "What the hell is happening out there?"
Ten
Escape

AUGUST 14, 3:12 A.M.
AMAZON JUNGLE

Atop the island knoll, Nate stood with the other civilians, ringed by the Ranger team, which was now down to eight members.
One for each of the civilians
, Nate thought,
like personal bodyguards
.

"How about using another of your napalm bombs to clear a path through the buggers?" Frank asked, standing near Captain Waxman. "Roll it down the slope, then duck for cover."
"We'd all be dead. If the heat blast didn't fry us, then we'd be pinned down between a burning forest and the poisonous bastards."
Frank sighed, staring out into the dark forests. "How about your grenades? We could lob them in series, creating a swath through them."
Waxman frowned. "It'd be risky to deploy them so close to us, and no guarantee that it would kill enough of the bastards among all these tree trunks. I say we hold the hill, try to last until daybreak."
Frank crossed his arms, little pleased with this plan.
Around the knoll, occasional fiery blasts from the
flamethrowers ignited the night as Corporal Okamoto and Private Carrera maintained sentry posts on either slope. Though it had been half an hour since sighting one of them, the beasts were still out there. The surrounding forests had gone deathly quiet, no monkey calls, no bird-song. Even the insects seemed to have died down to a whispery buzz and whine. But beyond the reach of their flashlights, the leaves still rustled as unseen lurkers crept through the underbrush.
Night scopes focused on the surrounding waters revealed creatures still hopping into and out of the stream. Nathan's earlier assessment seemed to be accurate. The creatures, gill-breathers, needed to return to the waters occasionally to revive themselves.
Nearby, Manny knelt in the leaf-strewn dirt, working by flashlight. Kelly and Kouwe stood behind his shoulder. Earlier, Manny had risked his life to dash into the forest's fringe to collect one of the beasts stunned by a blast of flame. Though partially charbroiled, it was a decent specimen. The creature was about a foot long from the tip of its tail to its razor-toothed mouth. Large black eyes protruded, giving it a nearly 360-degree view of its surroundings. Strong articulated limbs ended in webbed and suckered toes almost as long as the body itself.
As the others watched, Manny was performing a rapid dissection. The Brazilian biologist worked deftly with a scalpel and forceps from Kelly's med kit.
"This thing is amazing," Manny finally mumbled.
Nate joined Kelly and Kouwe as the biologist explained.
"It's clearly some form of chimera. An amalgam of more than one species."
"How so?" Kelly asked.
Manny shifted aside and pointed with his thumb forceps. "Nathan was right. Though its skin is not scaled like a fish, it definitely has the breathing system of an
aquatic species. Gills, no lungs. But its legs--notice the banding on the skin--are definitely amphibious. The striping pattern is very characteristic of
Phobobates trivittatus,
the striped poison-dart frog, the largest and most toxic member of the frog family."
"So you're saying it's some mutated form of this species?" Nate asked.
"I thought so at first. It looks almost like a tadpole whose growth was arrested at the stage where gills were still present and only its hind legs had formed. But as I dissected further, I became less convinced. First, and most obvious, is that its size is way out of proportion. This thing must weigh close to five pounds. Monstrously gigantic for even the largest species of dart frog."
Manny rolled the dissected creature over and pointed to its eyes and teeth. "Additionally, its skull structure is all misshapen. Rather than flattened horizontally like a frog's, the cranium is flattened vertically, more like a fish's. In fact, the skull conformation, jaw, and teeth are almost identical in size and shape to a common Amazonian river predator--
Serrasalmus rhombeus
." Manny glanced up from his handiwork. "The black piranha."
Kelly leaned away. "That's impossible."
"If this thing weren't right in front of me, I'd agree." Manny sat back. "I've worked with Amazonian species all my life, and I've seen nothing like it. A true chimera. A single creature that shares the biological features of both frog and fish."
Nate eyed the creature. "How could that be?"
Manny shook his head. "I don't know. But how does a man regenerate a limb? I think the presence of such a chimera suggests we're on the right trail. Something is out there, something your father's expedition discovered, something with a distinct mutating ability."
Nate stared at the dissected ruins.
What the hell was out there?
A call arose from Private Carrera. Her sentry post faced the northern slope of the knoll. "They're on the move again!"
Nate straightened. The rustling from her side of the forest had grown louder. It sounded as if the entire jungle were stirring.
Carrera flamed the lower slope. Her fiery jets pushed back the darkness. Reflected in the fire were hundreds of tiny eyes, covering both the forest floor and the trees. One of the creatures sprang from its perch on the limb of a palm tree and bounded into the fire zone. There was a short chatter of automatic rifle fire, and the creature was shredded to a bloody mush.
"Everybody back!" Carrera called. "They're coming!"
From the trees and underbrush, small bodies started to leap and bound toward them, oblivious to the fire and bullets. The creatures were determined to overrun them with their sheer numbers.
Nate flashed back on the Indian massacre site. It was happening all over again. He swung his shotgun from his shoulder, aimed, and blasted a creature in midair as it leaped from a branch over Carrera's head. Gobbets of flesh rained down.
As a group, they were forced to vacate the knoll's summit and retreat down the southern face. Gunfire and flames lit the night. Flashlights danced, making every shadow shift and jerk.
Leading the charge down the southern slope, Corporal Okamoto swathed jets of fire before them. "It still looks clear this way!" he called out.
Nate risked a peek his way. Distantly through the forest, he could make out the other fork of the stream below as it swept around the southern flank of the hill.
"Why aren't any of the creatures on this side of the hill?" Anna asked, her face flushed.
Zane answered, his eyes wide as he kept glancing behind
him. "They probably rallied all their numbers on the far side for this final assault."
Nate stared toward the stream below. It was wide, smooth, and quiet, but he knew better. He remembered the large capybara rodent flushed from the forest and racing along the river, where it was set upon by the predators. "They're herding us," he mumbled.
"What?" Kelly asked.
"They want us close to the water. The pack is driving us to the river."
Manny heard him. "I think Nate's right. Despite their ability to move on land for short distances, they're basically aquatic. They'd want their meal as close to water as possible before taking it down."
Kelly looked behind her to the line of Rangers flaming and firing along their back trail. "What choice do we have?"
Down the slope, Okamoto slowed as they neared the river, clearly suspicious of the water, too. The corporal turned to Captain Waxman behind him. "Sir, I'll try to cross first. Like last time."
Waxman nodded. "Careful, corporal."
Okamoto headed for the stream.
"No!" Nate called. "I'm sure it's a trap."
Okamoto glanced to him, then to his captain, who waved him forward again.

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