This Green Hell

TWENTY-FOUR

The sun had fallen behind the tall trees hours ago; as it dipped now towards the horizon, the shadows merged into twilight. Barrels of slow-burning vegetation had been spaced around the edges of the clearing and the heavy humid air kept the smoke low to the ground, giving the campsite a Gothic feel.

Alex felt something approaching. Small sounds carried infinitesimal vibrations that could be felt deep in the inner ear, light carried colours and wavelengths not seen by normal human vision; even the skin contained remnants of Pacinian corpuscles that could detect the slightest movement — all these were like superior senses within Alex’s system. And now they kicked into action: he felt the shift in atmosphere like a bow wave preceding a ship. He tried to reach out with his senses and form some kind of image, but it refused to take shape in his mind. Must be still too far out, he thought.

Then his head snapped around and he frowned in disbelief. Amazing — so quiet. A man stood silently at the edge of the clearing, as if waiting for a sign, or an invitation. He was wearing priest’s vestments.

Aimee appeared beside Alex and unnecessarily nudged his arm to get his attention. He nodded towards the man. ‘I take it that’s your priest?’

‘Yeah, Father Alonso González — he gives me the creeps.’

She folded her arms and stared at the man from under lowered brows. Alex smiled; he could tell the priest would get no invitation from her. Something about him made Alex extremely uneasy too. He was no taller than Alex, and not physically imposing, but Alex’s unique vision detected a cold radiation emanating from him that would have better suited a corpse.

He pressed the stud in his ear and spoke softly. ‘HAWCs, we got company. Give me a perimeter.’

In a few seconds, Mak and Franks appeared just at the edge of the jungle, one on either side of the priest, guns cradled in their arms, barrels loosely pointed at González. Sam took up a position a few steps behind Alex; he could feel his second-incommand’s eyes boring into the newcomer.

Alex looked around; he sensed other presences now, close by, but he couldn’t distinguish them yet, or identify their positions. He winced slightly — despite their indistinct physical presence, they screamed for attention inside his head.

The remaining drill workers were gathering close to the priest. They stood still, not speaking, just watching him as if waiting for some signal. Tomás came up behind Aimee and stood just behind her right shoulder. He was bumped out of the way by Captain Garmadia, who took up position between her and Alex.

The priest fixed his eyes on Alex and glided forwards. He stopped about five feet away, but didn’t speak. It was if he was waiting for them to make the first move. It was Garmadia who obliged.

‘I am not aware of you having authorisation to be in this area, padre. Where are you from, and on whose instruction were you sent to Paraguay?’

The priest’s eyes flicked to Garmadia for an instant, then he turned his head to the HAWCs on either side of him, took in Sam, then switched his gaze back to Alex. His mouth lowered slightly behind his beard. ‘You are a North American, señor?’

Alex ignored the question. ‘You must be Father González. Where are our men, Father? We’d like to speak to them.’

The priest’s mouth had remained open and the deep voice spilled out again. ‘Many men decided to return home. The others are safe with me.’

‘We will be the judges of that, padre.’ Captain Garmadia stepped in front of Alex, possibly feeling insulted that the priest had chosen to address the HAWC. ‘I am Captain Fernando Garmadia of the Paraguayan military forces. I am in charge of this district. I insist on seeing our men immediately.’

The priest replied to the Paraguayan soldier, but kept his eyes on Alex. ‘Do you fear the God? That one day He will rise up?’

Garmadia frowned. ‘Perdón?’

‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,’ the priest said, his stance as still as stone.

‘Hebrews 10:31,’ Sam said, coming up beside Aimee, his eyes fixed on the black-clad priest. ‘God is not the author of confusion, but of peace — Isaiah 4:25.’

The priest’s left eye bulged slightly and swivelled towards Sam. Then he seemed to relax and held out his hand to Alex. ‘Isaiah has words of the greatest beauty. I am sorry, I have been too long without educated company. Please allow me to formally introduce myself.’

As Alex held out his own hand, Sam said to the priest, ‘That was actually Corinthians 14:33. I thought you might have known that.’

Two things happened: the priest seized Alex’s hand, and Aimee screamed.

An explosion went off in Alex’s mind, then blackness, darker than night, engulfed him. An alien roar tore through his head, and he saw screaming human beings trapped in a blood-red web as a hellish nightmare of sharp teeth slowly descended upon them.

He heard a thousand voices, shouting in triumph now, not fear. One day He will rise up! The words came from all around him, and from deep, deep below the earth. A thousand voices, a million, that were separate and then one, as if a single mind shared a billion mouths. It was his dream playing over again.

From a dark cave, miles below ground, he heard his name — Alex, Alex … It had to be Aimee — she was calling to him from the surface. He floated upwards, happy that he could fly through the ice and stone. She was calling him and he sped towards her.

He opened his eyes. His head was resting on a soft pillow, but it still hurt like hell. There was dried blood caking his nose.

Aimee was bathing his forehead. She leaned in close to his face. ‘Alex, are you okay? You blacked out when the priest grabbed your hand, and blood started gushing from your nose. You scared the hell out of me … uhh, all of us.’

He grabbed her hand and sat up quickly. ‘Where is he?’

Sam pushed forward from where he stood at the rear of the crowded cabin. Alex could see Maria and Michael Vargis behind the lieutenant’s large frame.

‘Gone,’ Sam reported. ‘It was weird — he grabbed your hand and you looked like you’d been poleaxed. You fell, and there was blood everywhere. I was watching the priest until you fell, then when I looked up again, he just wasn’t there — can’t have been more than a second or two. No one can move that quickly — not even you. I sent Mak and Franks out, but after an hour they gave up without finding a trace.’

Alex swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up quickly; he swayed for a second. ‘I’m okay.’ He looked at Aimee’s expression and gave her a smile. ‘Really. I must be dehydrated, that’s all.’

He looked around the room, but his eyes weren’t focused on its interior; he was seeing much further than its four walls. ‘He’s gone now,’ he said softly, then, ‘Sam, with me.’

He was out of the cabin before anyone could say another word.

Sam was one of the few below the rank of general who was aware of Alex’s abilities. He had been on missions where he had seen his commanding officer do things that no other human being was capable of. He knew Alex had a second sense that opened to him a world that was inaccessible to other people. He also knew that Alex Hunter didn’t black out because he was dehydrated.

‘What did you see, boss?’ He had to take long strides to keep up as Alex moved quickly.

‘I don’t know, Sam. As soon as I touched the guy’s hand, everything turned upside down. The images I got were bizarre, openly hostile and definitely not priestly.’

Alex stopped when they reached the centre of the camp. It was completely dark and the perimeter lights were struggling with the limited power supply. In addition, the burning braziers now only gave off a dull red glow, looking like portholes to the bowels of hell.

‘I want a watch tonight,’ Alex ordered. ‘You and I first, then Franks and Mak can relieve us in six hours. Keep everyone inside the perimeter. At first light, we’ll pay a visit to the padre at home. I’ve got a bad feeling about all the men that went with him.’

Sam nodded. ‘You got it, boss. Hey, take it easy.’

He recognised the look in Alex’s eyes — it wouldn’t take much of a push before the furies were let loose, and then … Alex Hunter was capable of a lot of good, but when the rage took hold, then sometimes good wasn’t the priority.

‘Yes, Maria, no, Maria, of course I verified the results, Maria, and no, I didn’t make a mistake.’ Michael mimicked his mother’s voice as he checked the results of the thermal-shock process. ‘Hey, don’t like the cold, do you?’

The Hades bacteria had been rendered dormant at the low temperature. Michael also noticed that the cells in a state of dormancy had developed a protein coat, but had quickly germinated and reactivated when the temperature was increased. At 2000 degrees, as if a switch had been flipped, the same results manifested — black, inanimate, useless dust.

‘Skata! No fucking difference. Got any other great ideas, Maria?’

Michael stood with his hands on his hips, staring into the isolation cube as its walls swirled with colour while it cooled. He sniffed — Maria had been right; he could smell something too. He removed his glove and placed his fingers on the glass, pulling them away almost instantly — it was still too hot to touch safely. But he was sure he’d felt a slight roughness on the normally smooth surface.

He bent down to look closer, but could see nothing. He searched in one of the equipment boxes they had brought with them, removed a small but powerful magnifying glass and held it up to the box, moving it in and out to adjust the focus until he could see the surface of the box clearly. Fine, almost invisible cracks ran throughout the depth of its panes.

Michael stood up and looked towards the ceiling. ‘So much for withstanding temperatures to 3000 degrees.’ He rolled one hand into a fist and punched his forehead. ‘She’ll murder me!’

He bent to examine the box again, then frowned, and turned back to the equipment pack. He took out a glass slide and swab, replaced his gloves, then wiped the swab down the side of the glass cube. He transferred the sample to the slide, squeezed a drop of sterile water onto it, and placed it under a manual microscope. He twirled the focus dial several revolutions until he had his desired clarity. Hmm, that’s not good. The solution showed traces of the Hades Bug dust — somehow its incinerated fragments had extruded through the thick glass of the isolation cube.

Michael sat back, thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Well, I’m out of ideas.’ He exhaled and stood up slowly. Much as he hated it, he needed to ask Maria what to do next, and inform her of the failing isolation cube.

He stretched his back and turned to the door, pushing the hood of his suit back to expose his perspiration-slicked hair. He pulled off his gloves and, with one hand, opened the door. With the other, he wiped his brow, transferring a small black smudge from his finger to his forehead.

If he had looked one last time through the microscope, he would have seen something that might have worried him more than a broken piece of equipment. On the glass slide, among the floating fragments, sub-microscopic buds were beginning to appear on some of the biological splinters. Gradually, the buds opened and extended cytoplasmic stalks; a moment later, cell division restarted.

Maria listened to her son with an impassive face as he told her about the bacteria’s development of a protein seed coating at lower temperatures. She knew that their options had been limited to start with; and were now probably exhausted. Without any form of realistic, natural or derived immunological defence, the human race had no hope of winning a microscopic physiological war with the Hades Bug. And losing to this particular microorganism meant a very unpleasant death. For the first time in her life as a scientist, Maria considered euthanasia as an option.

Michael broke her concentration. ‘What now? Should I try to chemically attenuate? We didn’t bring many compounds. I’m still thinking the radiation option would—’

‘No!’ Maria yelled, and Michael recoiled as though slapped.

She immediately regretted using the sharp tone, and exhaled wearily. She wished she could tell him. The radioactive material she had brought wasn’t the simple shortwave Röntgen radiation used for X-rays. Instead, it was the infinitely more powerful lithium-deuterium particles required for an elastic collision — a million times too much energy for simple bacterial attenuation.

She softened her voice. ‘No, Michael, for now we document our results and concentrate on other, less elegant defensive mechanisms. We can still consider gross amputation for extremity contamination, and, out of the body, surely it must be vulnerable. Let’s look at what kills it — sodium hypochlorite should at least explode the cell walls.’

She reached over and rubbed her son’s arm, smiling into his face. She was often brusque with him, but in her heart she knew he was the only good thing to come out of her marriage. One day she’d tell him that. He frowned, probably not understanding the reason for the sudden show of maternal affection.

‘You’ve done a good job,’ she went on. ‘But I think its rapid transmission is a good thing — as long as we can totally isolate the infected men, then we can let the disease run its course; let it burn itself out.’

She knew that probably wasn’t true anymore — the genie was out of the bottle. Unlike South Africa, there would be no simple sealing of a hole in the ground here. This wound had ruptured and cauterisation would not be enough; total excision of the necrotic flesh was needed. There was no way of knowing for how long the Hades Bug could go dormant; it could remain in that state for weeks, years … centuries? They still knew next to nothing about it.

She felt she was being pushed towards a precipice. A paragraph from Protocol 9 leapt into her mind: In the event of possible border or boundary extrusion, initiate total CZS. Comprehensive Zone Sterilisation meant leaving behind no hosts, no vectors, no transmission — and no survivors.

She looked at Michael, her only child. There must be another way, she thought.