The Extinction Code Read online

  ‘There’s not a road in sight out here,’ Lopez said. ‘If we can’t take off again, we’ll be stuck out here for days.’

  ‘We need to be quick,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Once it heats up in the jungle the air won’t have enough density to get airborne again. I hope they’re ready for us down there.’

  A dense swathe of cloud drifted by below them, and then Ethan glimpsed the river winding like a silvery serpent beneath the jungle canopy toward a deep chasm between two terrific mountain ranges cloaked in thick tropical forest.

  ‘Down there,’ he said and pointed ahead.

  As they closed in on what looked like a fairly open stretch of water they glimpsed a sudden burst of what looked like blood spilling into the air. Ethan recognized the red stain for what it was, a smoke grenade marking the landing zone for him, something he’d seen many times in his service years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Ethan glanced at the terrain around them. He knew that the rising temperatures would send the air over the jungle up while the cold air from the mountain tops would plunge down, creating lethal vortexes of turbulent air close to the base of the mountains. But he knew that he also had to turn into the wind to land, which would be blowing in from the distant shore. He angled the Icon to pass to the south of the smoke marker, and his eye traced an imaginary line through the sky he would follow to descend and land on the river.

  ‘You’re overshooting,’ Lopez said as she leaned over to look at the smoke marker a thousand feet below them.

  ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘I feel so reassured.’

  Ethan banked the Icon over and felt the wings tremble and the fuselage gyrate as it hit the violent downdrafts sweeping across the mountain slopes toward the valley below. The engine strained as he allowed the aircraft to descend, turning slowly as the jungle loomed toward them until he lined up with the river and the turbulence died down.

  ‘Remind me not to do this again,’ Lopez said as she gripped her seat, her jaw clenched as they descended.

  Ethan did not reply as he focused on the green surface of the river, which kinked left and right maybe a half mile ahead. The red smoke was drifting toward him in a listless cloud, revealing not much in the way of lift–generating headwind as the water began to race past them just a few feet away, tree limbs reaching out for the little aircraft as it skimmed the surface of the river at almost fifty knots.

  Ethan pulled back on the throttle and eased the nose a little higher, and then the Icon’s hull thumped gently down onto the water and the aircraft slowed dramatically under the extra drag until it settled on the surface, drifting slowly downstream with the current. He heard Lopez’s sigh of relief as he kicked in the rudder and guided the Icon around in a gentle turn, adding power to cruise upstream to the landing zone.

  On the bank stood two figures, both of them encased in Level Four Hazmat suits, their faces visible behind the transparent face plates, even their hands shoved into thick white gloves. Each carried another identical suit in their arms as Ethan guided the Icon into the bank and let her nose bump up onto a narrow shore. He killed the engine as one of the Hazmats grabbed the aircraft’s nose with his free hand to prevent the Icon from slipping back into the river.

  Ethan opened the canopy and Lopez tossed the two suits a line. They understood immediately and by the time Ethan and Lopez had disembarked the aircraft was secured to a nearby tree by the line.

  ‘Put these on, right now,’ one of the Hazmats ordered. ‘We don’t know how far this thing has spread.’

  ‘It’s airborne?’ Lopez asked as she hauled on the Hazmat suit.

  ‘We’re not sure, but we know how infectious it is. One touch folks, and you’re history.’

  Ethan felt his blood run cold as he hurriedly pulled on the Hazmat suit. ‘One touch?’

  ‘I’m doctor Michael Arando,’ came the reply, ‘and yes, one touch. I’m damned lucky to be alive myself. It’s this way.’

  Ethan said nothing more as he pulled on his headgear and mutually checked Lopez’s suit for any gaps or tears before they moved to follow Arando into the forest.

  If the climate had been hot before they had reached the shore, it was as nothing compared to the intense humidity of the jungle as they clambered through its interior in the heavy, uncomfortable suits. Ethan felt as though he was walking inside an oven, his lungs feeling hot as he stumbled and struggled through the dense undergrowth, conscious of any sharp objects that might tear his protective suit.

  ‘How long have you been up here?’ Lopez asked Arando, coping somewhat better with the conditions.

  ‘Five years, studying lemurs,’ Arando replied. ‘I was working out here when I discovered the site. I didn’t know for sure what I was looking at, other than it was highly dangerous. That’s when I called for the quarantine zone to be put into place, in an attempt to prevent the contamination from spreading.’

  ‘How long do you think the disease, or whatever it is, has been at work?’

  ‘No more than a few days,’ Arando replied, ‘which is what’s so terrifying. I checked on the lemur population here a week ago and there were no problems at all. I came back for the following weeks’ check–up and they were all dead.’

  ‘All dead?’ Lopez echoed. ‘How many is all?’

  ‘About a hundred fifty,’ Arando replied, and Ethan noted the suppressed grief in the naturalist’s tone. ‘Just gone, overnight. And that’s not all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘You’ll have to see that to believe it,’ Arando replied.

  Ethan followed the scientist along what looked like an animal trail that ran through the densely packed trees. Listless rays of sunlight that had managed to break through the overcast penetrated weakly through the canopy far above, but the forest floor itself was a gloomy and uninviting place. Heavy creepers clung to the thick trunks, foliage blocking every path between them except for the narrow trail Arando was now following.

  He slowed, and Ethan waited as the scientist raised his hand to halt them and then pointed at something lying in the bushes. Ethan saw what looked like a delicate bird, it’s once colorful plumage smeared with a mess of ugly white foam.

  ‘It’s fungal,’ Arando said, ‘and it’s spreading fast. This path was clear of infection yesterday.’

  ‘The birds,’ Lopez guessed. ‘If they’re susceptible to this disease they’ll spread it faster than anything else.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Arando replied, ‘which is why we’re so lucky the outbreak is occurring here on Madagascar and not on the African mainland. But it’s only a matter of time before a migratory species picks up the infection and reaches other shores, if it hasn’t happened already.’

  Ethan frowned again at the tiny corpse.

  ‘But this is the same infection as the one hitting bats in the USA, isn’t it? White nose syndrome?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Arando said in reply as he pushed on through the foliage, ‘this is far worse than that.’

  ‘Why?’ Lopez asked.

  Arando didn’t answer, pushing on through the dense undergrowth until he reached what looked like a clearing ahead, the forest appearing brighter as the sunlight was able to reach the earth. Ethan would be glad to get out of the dense forest and…

  He slowed as Arando moved to stand next to the edge of the clearing. For a moment, Ethan’s mind could not quite understand what he was seeing, for the forest seemed to be cloaked in snow. He heard Lopez gasp, and as they moved to stand next to Arando so they got their first glimpse of the terror that had struck the forest.

  Everything before them was coated in a thick, white fungal growth so dense it concealed the details of everything hidden within, as though the jungle were indeed beneath a few inches of snow. Ethan could see trees, ferns, creepers and vines all likewise coated in the bizarre foam and the forest floor was littered with the smooth, white, indistinct forms of dead animals, their corpses entombed in the thick fluid that stretched for hundreds of yards in a near perfect
circle amid the dense greenery of the surrounding jungles.

  The only markings visible on the white blanket were patches of forest growth that had fallen since to litter the forest floor, dead leaves and vines, all decaying and slowly being consumed by the white mess oozing from within them.

  ‘What the hell?’ Ethan uttered.

  Arando spoke slowly, as though also still in shock at what he was witnessing.

  ‘All I’ve managed to ascertain so far is that this fungus affects something that is in all of us, and by all of us I mean all living things on this planet. The disease can penetrate skin, thus devouring the victim from within. It attacks at the cellular level, and is the first and only time I’ve ever encountered a disease which affects all flora and fauna alike. Even insects are not immune. This, thing, kills anything and everything it touches and it’s spreading fast.’

  Ethan crouched down, and with one gloved hand he touched the edge of the white film coating the forest floor. It came away in gloopy strings, sticking to his gloves easily.

  And then he saw it was moving.

  Ethan stood bolt upright and took a pace back from the edge of the white film, a sudden and deeply primal horror filling him as he took a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘That’s exactly what I did when I first realized it,’ Arando said as he noted Ethan’s reaction. ‘It’s alive.’

  ***

  XXIV

  Lopez backed away from the white goo, a look of disgust on her face. ‘That’s like something from a fifties horror movie.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it’s like,’ Arando agreed. ‘This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and my only conclusion is that it cannot have come from this island. It exists at ambient temperature, and although it could have lain dormant for millions of years I don’t know of any major event that could have brought this thing out of hibernation and to have manifested itself so fast.’

  Ethan looked at Lopez, who appeared transfixed by the horrific scene. ‘This is what must have been going on when Channing disappeared from Montana. Maybe he thought that he’d found evidence of an outbreak like this before, maybe as far back in time as the dinosaurs?’

  Lopez nodded, her gaze vacant as the stared at the horrific sight before them.

  ‘Channing sends the reporter away, isolating himself. Then what? He excavates the bones himself and flees with them?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Ethan said. ‘Too much work for one man to complete in one day. Somebody else might have got there first, taken Channing with them. They might then have figured out what scared him so much and…’

  ‘Started work on it,’ Lopez finished his sentence. ‘What if they figured out what happened and started developing a weapon from it? It could have escaped.’

  Arando looked from one of them to the other in confusion. ‘What the hell are you two talking about?’

  Ethan turned to the scientist. ‘A few years back a specialist in Tyrannosaurus remains named Aubrey Channing disappeared after finding a fossil in Montana, to which he was directed by another younger scientist who wanted nothing to do with what he’d found. That younger scientist now works in a remote facility charged with preserving bio–specimens in case of an extinction level event.’

  Arando looked at the thick gloop covering the forest. ‘You think that he figured the dinosaurs succumbed to this same infectious disease? It’s not possible. We would have found evidence of this in their fossils long ago, the cellular destruction would leave markers in the bone that would be obvious, just like any other infection.’

  Ethan’s train of thought slammed to a halt. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Damned sure,’ Arando replied. ‘You don’t get an outbreak like this, big enough to remove eighty per cent of all living things from our planet, and not have any evidence of it ever having been here. Besides, the dinosaurs are now agreed to have been forced into extinction by an asteroid strike in the Yucatan Peninsula – all of the available evidence points to it.’

  ‘Then what the hell was Channing so afraid of?’ Lopez asked Ethan.

  Ethan stared at the glutinous mess before them that was consuming the jungle alive, creeping ever outward with the remorseless, unstoppable patience of a glacier swallowing entire continents, and then he thought about what had happened to the dinosaurs so many millions of years ago.

  ‘Schofield said that the dinosaurs were already in decline before the asteroid hit,’ he said, ‘or so Channing had told him.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Lopez agreed. ‘But they weren’t taken out by this infection, right?’

  ‘No,’ Ethan replied, having to assume that a specialist like Arando knew far more about the science of extinction than he did. ‘But what if they were suffering from it, and the asteroid was what brought it to an end?’

  Lopez seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘An impact with the strength of a billion Hiroshima bombs would lay waste to most things, maybe even this,’ she agreed.

  Ethan turned to Arando. ‘Does fire kill this stuff?’

  ‘Sure,’ Arando agreed, ‘fire kills all living cells if directly exposed to it, but it would take a hell of a blaze as this stuff smothers everything. Flames need a constant supply of oxygen to burn.’

  Ethan thought for a moment.

  ‘The global damage after the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs spread around the globe, right? There were forest fires, lava flows and then a nuclear winter that lasted for a decade and wiped out pretty much all of the flora and fauna on the planet.’

  ‘It was a devastating blow to life,’ Arando agreed, ‘and the lava from the Deccan Traps covered most of what we now call Asia. Very little life survived on the surface or in the oceans, which were poisoned by the chemicals falling out of the sky.’

  Ethan turned to Lopez.

  ‘If this fungus feeds on living cells, it would have a tough time surviving the wake of an impact like that,’ he said. ‘That asteroid might also have been responsible for bringing to an end an extinction level event, rather than just creating one.’

  Arando shook his head, uncertain. ‘Many species did survive,’ he pointed out, ‘and even thrived in the wake of the impact. They would have been surrounded by debris and carcasses, highly exposed to any surviving examples of the infection. No, it couldn’t have happened like that, but…’

  ‘But what?’ Lopez pressed.

  ‘But it could have brought the disease down with it,’ he replied.

  Ethan thought again, about what he knew about panspermia and tardigrades and the knowledge that some forms of life could remain locked up inside comets and asteroids for millions, perhaps billions of years, just waiting for that perfect moment to burst into life on a new world and replicate.

  ‘If it did, then it could have infected some species that survived the impact,’ Ethan speculated, ‘which then died out before the infection took hold due to the devastation around them in the wake of the impact.’

  Arando nodded.

  ‘It couldn’t spread far and eventually vanished again, until your man Channing discovered those bones in Montana. If he recognized the fossil to have been infected by something, perhaps something that might have survived the fossilization process, it might have been enough to scare him into quarantining himself.’

  ‘And that act might have cost him his life,’ Ethan went on.

  ‘Somebody extracts the infection from the fossilized bones,’ Lopez figured, ‘re–animates it or whatever, and then starts testing it out.’

  Ethan looked at the mess before them and suddenly he knew that what he was looking at was not a natural act, the evolution of some new and lethal weapon of disease. This was something ancient, primal, captured by men and released on the island to wreak its havoc on species that had no natural defense against it.

  ‘Somebody put this here,’ he said finally.

  ‘You’re saying that somebody killed this forest on purpose?’ Arando said in horror. ‘Why?’

  ‘To test it,’ Ethan guessed. ‘And now
they won’t want it to spread too far and get out of control.’

  ‘It’s too late for that!’ Arando wailed in horror. ‘It’s out, they can’t stop this now!’

  Ethan was about to reply when he heard a distant sound, like a horn echoing in from the mountain peaks. The echoing, indistinct sound grew stronger with each passing moment, and with a near–clairvoyant certainty Ethan knew that this part of the forest was about to become an inferno.

  ‘Move, now!’ he yelled. ‘Get back to the river!’

  Ethan bolted from the scene and crashed through the undergrowth, Lopez following right behind him and Arando bringing up the rear and calling out to Ethan.

  ‘What the hell is going on?!’

  ‘Your site is about to disappear for good!’ Ethan yelled as they ran, stumbling in the heavy suits across fallen trees and dense foliage. ‘Keep moving!’

  Ethan heard the noise more clearly now above the sound of his own laboured breathing inside the oven–like mask, a distinctive whine of a jet engine that rocketed through the valleys nearby. He couldn’t see anything in the sky above them through the mask and the dense canopy, but he knew the jet was coming around toward them by the sound of its engine.

  ‘They must have followed us!’ Lopez gasped as she ran behind Ethan toward the river. ‘They’ll see the smoke from the landing zone!’

  Ethan did not reply as he ran, focusing on moving as fast as he could though the dense undergrowth. The sound of the jet engine became much louder, howling toward the site from what sounded like directly ahead as Ethan burst from the treeline onto a shore of wet, dark sand and looked up to see a small jet fighter soar overhead, a faint trail of smoke from its engines as it vanished over their heads. Ethan tore off his mask and ripped off the suit as he cried out.

  ‘Get down!’

  Ethan shouted the warning as he hurled himself into the water, Lopez crashing in alongside him as Arando turned and looked back into the forest.

  The blast thundered as though a storm had broken directly overhead, a shockwave of pressured air radiating outward at supersonic speed, crashing through the forest and flattening trees in its path. The blast hit Arando with the force of a freight train, the Hazmat suit disintegrating as the explosion tore his body apart to hurl what remained far out across the river in a hail of debris that crashed into the water around Ethan.