Immortal

54

A brutally cold wind swept in off the peninsula, chased by the feeble light of the midnight sun just below the horizon as FBI Special Agent Pete Devereux led three men across the tundra. The small town of Brevig Mission with its spindly church shrank behind them in the strange blue shadows cast across the snow fields. Devereux was following an Inuit guide who was almost entirely concealed by thick coats and a fur-lined hood.

Devereux’s voice seemed weak as it was snapped away by the wind.

‘You sure they were out here?’ he asked, shouting to be heard.

The Inuit nodded, gesturing ahead of them.

‘They were here. Two men. They did not ask the elders to dig here, and refused to talk to us.’

Devereux looked out across the frozen wastes to where magnificent mountains crouched against the cold vista. He was about to say there was nothing to see when he spotted a series of geometric shapes huddled in a small knot amidst rippling clumps of hardy grass. A different kind of chill enveloped him as he realized what they were.

Gravestones.

The Inuit led the FBI team to the edge of the stones, and pointed to a spot on the ground some ten feet away.

‘This is where the man was working. He had tents and a vehicle. He stayed for a few days, and then he must have died here because another man came and took the tents away.’

Devereux looked at the ground. Half hidden by snow and ice he could just see where tent posts had been driven into the permafrost. Trampled, muddled snow and ice betrayed the presence of men in the last few days. His eye traced the ghostly outline of the tent, and he realized it had surrounded a single grave. Treading carefully, Devereux stepped across the snow and looked down at the grave. He lifted one foot and placed it on the earth in front of the gravestone, and instantly felt it give slightly beneath him.

Devereux turned to his companions.

‘Unpack the shovels.’

The Inuit tracker looked at him, his tiny eyes squinting against the bitter wind and little specks of ice encrusting his eyelashes.

‘This is not proper,’ he said. ‘You disrespect our people by digging here.’

Devereux shook his head as one of the agents began handing out shovels.

‘It’s not our choice,’ he said. ‘Your people have already been disrespected, we’re just trying to put it right. We’ve been ordered to do this for public safety. Whatever the people here were doing, it may not have been safe.’

The Inuit frowned.

‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’

Devereux stared at the Inuit as the agents behind him began driving their shovels into the icy earth. He was about to join them when, over the shoulder of the Inuit, he saw the town of Brevig Mission in the distance. The church spire of the Lutheran Memorial Church caught his attention. With a sudden jolt of memory, he recalled seeing an entire graveyard behind the church as they’d passed by.

Devereux whirled around to look at the gravestones behind him. His eyes flicked across them one by one, and the dates leapt out at him. 1918. 1918. 1918. 1918. 1918. They stretched away until they were too far to be read.

Beside him, another FBI agent drove his shovel into the snow. Devereux grabbed his arm and held it fast. The agent looked at him quizzically.

‘C’mon, Pete, let’s get this over with. It’s goddamn freezing out here.’

Devereux turned to the Inuit guide.

‘These people, they all died at the same time?’

The Inuit nodded. ‘They all got sick.’

‘How many?’ Devereux asked.

‘Half of the town died. It killed them very quickly, just a few days.’

Devereux turned to the agents behind him.

‘Get the bio-suits out and have this area cordoned off right away.’

As the agents hurried to carry out his orders, Devereux turned to the Inuit.

‘What killed these people?’ he asked.

‘The great sickness,’ he replied. ‘You call it the Spanish Flu.’

Devereux stood rooted to the spot as the man’s words echoed through his skull, provoking memories of long forgotten stories learned at high school and from television documentaries. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been an extremely severe influenza pandemic that spread across the entire globe during the aftermath of World War One. Most victims had been healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affected juveniles or the elderly. Lasting three years, the pandemic killed between fifty and one hundred million people, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. At least five hundred million people had been infected. Although little was known about the geographical origin of the disease, it had been concluded that it killed via what was known as a cytokine storm, a massively excessive response of the human body’s immune system. The influenza’s modus operandi explained its severe nature and the age of its victims. The strong immune systems of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children, middle-aged and elderly adults resulted in fewer deaths.

‘It killed half of the town?’ he asked the Inuit.

‘More than that. This town was known as Teller Mission at the time. It lost eighty-five percent of its population in less than a week.’

Devereux turned and watched as his agents, now dressed in bio-suits, began digging down into the hard soil, making far greater progress than could be expected through permafrost; evidently the soil had already been turned over recently.

‘You think the man died here because he dug up the body?’ the Inuit asked.

Devereux nodded but did not reply as he slipped on his own bio-hazard suit. Another, more insidious suspicion had already crept into his mind as he watched his men digging deeper and deeper into the frozen soil until suddenly one of the shovels hit something. Devereux waved the Inuit back from the grave.

‘Stay upwind of us,’ he said, acutely aware of the possibility of airborne infection.

Devereux approached the grave, coming to stand on the edge. He looked down into the depths of the freezing earth and felt a primal fear creeping through his veins. The muddied corpse of a woman who had clearly been dead for at least a century stared up at him, gruesomely preserved by the rock-hard permafrost in which she had been interred. Devereux’s men backed nervously away from the body, covering their noses and coughing as a pungent waft of putrefaction spilled onto the cold air.

‘Looks normal enough to me,’ one of the agents said, ‘for somebody who’s been dead a hundred years.’

Devereux nodded thoughtfully, and was about to turn away when a sudden thought occurred to him.

‘A hundred years,’ he echoed. ‘If she’s been here that long, then why is she stinking like she died yesterday?’

A silence enveloped the men for a moment, and then Devereux grabbed a shovel and stepped back to the edge of the grave. He plunged the shovel down into the earth alongside the body of the woman, and then hauled back on the handle, prizing her rigid body free of the earth and tipping it up against the side of the grave before driving the shovel into the earth behind her to pin her in place.

‘Give me another shovel here!’ he said urgently.

An agent passed him a shovel, and Devereux scraped away at the loose soil beneath where the woman’s corpse had lain. As the soil fell away, the stench became overpowering and a patch of flesh appeared. Devereux scraped furiously until half of another body was revealed encased in soil.

The face of a man stared back up at him. One eye was open, the eyeball rolled up and the white exposed. Soil smudged his face and filled his slackly hanging mouth, and through the dirt Devereux could see blood staining his shirt. What bothered him more was that the man was wearing a modern fleece, thick boots and a digital watch on his left wrist.

‘Er, boss,’ said one of the agents beside Devereux, ‘that ain’t no 1918 corpse.’

Devereux nodded, his voice a ghostly whisper above the buffeting winds.

‘That’s not what bothers me,’ he replied. ‘What I want to know is: what the hell were they doing with that original, infected corpse?’

Beside them, the Inuit pointed toward the distant airstrip and made a sweeping gesture with his hands up into the sky.

‘The other man who came here, he fly away with bits of the body.’

Devereux pulled a photograph from his pocket, one sent to him by the DIA, and showed it to the Inuit. The native nodded vigorously and pointed at the image. Devereux pulled out a satellite phone from his jacket and punched in a number as he wondered what kind of unimaginable shit-storm was going to go down at the Pentagon when they found out that Colonel Donald Wolfe had apparently turned into an international terrorist.