Subhuman
Unit
51 #1
by
Michael McBride
Genre:
Horror, Thriller, Supernatural, Aliens
THEY
ARE NOT HUMAN.
At a research station in Antarctica, five of
the world’s top scientists have been brought together to solve one
of the greatest mysteries in human history. Their subject, however,
is anything but human . . .
THEY
ARE NOT NATURAL.
Deep beneath the ice, the submerged ruins of
a lost civilization hold the key to the strange mutations that each
scientist has encountered across the globe: A misshapen skull in
Russia. The grotesque carvings of a lost race in Peru. The mummified
remains of a humanoid monstrosity in Egypt . . .
THEY
ARE NOT FRIENDLY.
When a series of sound waves trigger the
ancient organisms, a new kind of evolution begins. Latching onto a
human host—crossbreeding with human DNA—a long-extinct life form
is reborn. Its kind has not walked the earth for thousands of years.
Its instincts are fiercer, more savage, than any predator alive. And
its prey are the scientists who unleashed it, the humans who spawned
it, and the tender living flesh on which it feeds . . .
Praise
for Michael McBride
“A
fast-paced and frightening ride. Highly recommended for fans of
creature horror and the thrillers of Michael Crichton.”—The
Horror Review on PREDATORY
INSTINCT
“McBride
writes with the perfect mixture of suspense and horror that
keeps
the reader on edge.” —Examiner
Amazon
* Apple
* B&N
*Kobo
1: RICHARDS
Queen Maud Land,
Antarctica
Modern day: January 13—8 months ago
The wind howled and assaulted the
command trailer with snow that sounded more like sleet against the steel
siding. What little Hollis Richards could see through the frost fractals on the
window roiled with flakes that shifted direction with each violent gust. The
Cessna ski plane that brought him here from McMurdo Station was somewhere out
there beyond the veritable armada of red Kress transport vehicles and Delta
heavy haulers, each of them the size of a Winnebago with wheels as tall as a
full-grown man. The single-prop plane had barely reached the camp before being
overtaken by the storm, which the pilot had tried to use as an excuse not to
fly. At least until Richards made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. There was no
way that he was going to wait so much as a single minute longer.
It had taken four days, operating
around the clock, for the hot-water drill to bore through two miles of solid
ice to reach a lake roughly the size of the Puget Sound, which had been sealed
off from the outside world for an estimated quarter of a million years. They
only had another twelve hours before the hole closed on them again, so they
didn’t have a second to waste. They needed to evaluate all of the water samples
and sediment cores before they lost the ability to replenish them. It wasn’t
the cost that made the logistics of the operation so prohibitive. The problem
was transporting tens of thousands of gallons of purified water across an entire
continent during what passed for summer in Antarctica. They couldn’t just fire
antifreeze into the ice cap and risk contaminating the entire site, like the
Russians did with Lake Vostok.
Richards pulled up a chair beside
Dr. Max Friden, who worked his magic on the scanning electron microscope and
made a blurry image appear on the monitor between them. The microbiologist
tweaked the focus until the magnified sample of the sediment became clear. The
contrast appeared in shades of gray and at first reminded Richards of the
surface of the moon.
“Tell me you see something,”
Richards said. His voice positively trembled with excitement.
“If there’s anything here, I’ll
find it.”
The microscope crept slowly
across the slide.
“Well, well, well. What do we
have here?” Friden said.
Richards leaned closer to the monitor, but
nothing jumped out at him.
“Right there.” Friden tapped the
screen with his index finger. “Give me a second. Let me see if I can . . . zoom
. . . in . . .” The image momentarily blurred before resolving once more.
“There.”
Richards leaned onto his elbows
and stared at what looked like a gob of spit stuck to the bark of a birch tree.
“Pretty freaking amazing, right?”
Friden said.
“What is it?”
“That, my friend, is the execution
of the bonus clause in my contract.” The microbiologist leaned back and laced
his fingers behind his head. “What you’re looking at is a bacterium. A living,
breathing microscopic creature. Well, it really isn’t, either. We killed it
when we prepared the slide and it’s a
single- celled organism, so it can’t really breathe, but you get the gist.”
“What kind?”
“No one knows exactly how many
species of bacteria there are, but our best estimate suggests a minimum of
36,000 . . .”
Richards smiled patiently. He
might have been the spitting image of his father, from his piercing blue eyes
to his thick white hair and goatee, but fortunately that was all he’d inherited
from his old man. He could thank his mother—God rest her soul—for his
temperament.
Friden pushed his glasses higher
on his slender nose. The thick lenses magnified his brown eyes.
“I don’t know,” the
microbiologist said. “I haven’t seen anything quite like it before.”
Richards beamed and clapped him
on the shoulder.
“That’s exactly what I wanted to
hear. Now find me something I can work with.”
Richards’s handheld transceiver
crackled. He snatched it from the edge of the desk and already had one arm in
his jacket when he spoke into it.
“Talk to me.”
“We have eyes,” the man on the
other end of the connection said.
Richards’s heart leapt into his
throat, rendering him momentarily speechless.
“Don’t go any farther until I get
there.”
He popped the seal on the door
and clattered down the steps into the accumulation. The raging wind battered
him sideways. He pulled up his fur-fringed hood, lowered his head, and
staggered blindly toward the adjacent big red trailer, which didn’t appear from
the blowing snow until it was within arm’s reach. The door opened as he
ascended the icy stairs.
“You’ve got to see this,” Will
Connor said, and practically dragged him into the cabin. The former Navy SEAL
was more than his personal assistant. He was his right-hand man, his bodyguard,
and, most important, the only person in the world he trusted implicitly. The
truth was he was also the closest thing Richards had to a friend.
The entire trailer was filled with
monitors and electronic components fed by an external gas generator, which made
the floor vibrate and provided a constant background thrum. The interior
smelled of stale coffee, body odor, and an earthy dampness that brought to mind
memories of the root cellar at his childhood home in Kansas, even the most
fleeting memories of which required swift and forceful repression.
Connor pulled back a chair at the
console for Richards, who sat beside a man he’d met only briefly two years ago,
when his team of geologists first identified the topographical features
suggesting the presence of a large body of water beneath the polar ice cap and
he’d only just opened negotiations with the government of Norway for the land
lease. Ron Dreger was the lead driller for the team from Advanced Mining
Solutions, the company responsible for the feats of engineering that had
brought Richards to the bottom of the
Earth and the brink of realizing his lifelong dream.
The monitor above him featured a
circular image of a white tube that darkened to blue at the very end.
“What you’re looking at is the view
from the fiber-optic camera two miles beneath our feet,” Dreger said. He
toggled some keys on his laptop, using only three fingers as he was missing the
tips of his ring and pinkie fingers, and the camera advanced toward the bottom.
The shaft was already considerably narrower than when the hot-water drill broke
through, accelerated by a surprise flume of water that fired upward as a result
of the sudden change in pressure, which had inhaled fluid from the surrounding
network of subsurface rivers and lakes they were only now discovering.
The lead driller turned to face
Richards with an enormous grin on his heavily bearded face, like a Viking
preparing to pillage.
“Are you ready?”
Richards stared at the monitor
and released a long, slow exhalation.
“I’ve been waiting for this my
whole life.”
The camera passed through the
orifice and into a vast cavernous space, the ring of lights around the lens
creating little more than a halo of illumination. The water had receded,
leaving behind icicles hanging like stalactites from the vaulted ice dome.
There was no way of estimating size or
depth. There was only up, down, and the unfathomable darkness in
between.
“Should I keep going?” Dreger
asked.
Richards nodded, and the camera
slowly approached the surface of the lake, which remained in a liquid state due
to a combination of geothermal heat rising from beneath the mantle, insulation
from the polar extremes by two vertical miles of ice, and the pressure formed
by the marriage of the two. The image became fluid. When the aperture
rectified, it revealed cloudy brown-ish water through which whitish blebs and
air bubbles shivered toward the surface. A greenish shape took form from the
depths, gaining focus as the camera neared. The rocky bed was covered with a
layer of slimy sediment, from which tendrils of sludge wavered. It looked like
the surface of some distant planet, which was exactly what Richards hoped it
was.
There were countless theories
regarding the origin of life on earth, but the one that truly resonated with
him was called lithopanspermia and
involved the seeding of the planet by microbes hitchhiking through space on
comets and asteroids, whether having survived on debris ejected from a
collapsing planet or by the deliberate usage of a meteorite to plant life on a
suitable world by some higher intelligence. Fossilized bacteria of
extraterrestrial origin were found on a meteorite recovered from this very
continent less than twenty years ago, but it wasn’t until living samples were
collected from Lake Vostok that Richards realized what he needed to do.
Ever since that fateful night
sixty years ago, when he’d run into the wheat fields to escape the sound of his
father raining blows upon his sobbing mother, he’d known mankind wasn’t alone
in the universe. He remembered every detail with complete clarity, for it was
that single moment in time that altered the course of his life. He recalled
staring up into the sky and begging for God to answer his prayers, to take his
mother and him from that horrible place. Only rather than a vision of the
Almighty, he saw a triangle formed by three pinpricks of light hovering
overhead. He’d initially thought they were part of a constellation he hadn’t
seen before until they sped off without a sound and vanished against the
distant horizon.
He’d been looking for them ever
since.
“What’s that over there?” Connor
asked.
“Where?” Dreger said.
Connor leaned over Richards’s
shoulder and tapped the left side of the screen. The driller typed commands
into his laptop, and the camera turned in that direction.
“A little higher.”
The change in angle was
disorienting at first, at least until Richards saw what had caught Connor’s
eye.
“What in the name of God is
that?”
Michael
McBride was born in Colorado and still resides in the shadow of
the Rocky Mountains. He hates the snow, but loves the Avalanche.
He works with medical radiation, yet somehow managed to
produce five children, none of whom, miraculously, have tails, third
eyes, or other random mutations. He writes fiction that
runs the gamut from thriller (Remains) to horror to science fiction
(Vector Borne, Snowblind) . . . and loves every minute of it. He is a
two-time winner of the DarkFuse Readers' Choice Award.
Follow
the tour HERE
for exclusive excerpts, guest posts and a giveaway!
1 comments:
Sounds Awesome.
Post a Comment