TWELVE

Anh Dung—Vietnam

SARA GAGGED AS she exited the tall grass and entered the village proper. The odor of decaying human flesh had been filtered by grass, but here in the open, the stench overpowered the senses—hypersensitive or not. Sara covered her nose with her arm, working hard not to retch.

Bishop scrunched his nose in revolt, but said nothing and kept his weapon at the ready. King held his breath, removed his backpack, and dug inside. He removed three surgical masks and passed them out. After putting on his own, he said, “They’re not perfect, but they’ll help.”

With the smell partly blocked, they turned their attention to the village. Fifteen huts standing upon two-foot stilts lined the small dirt path that wound down the middle of the small village. They were simple, yet effective. The stilts protected from the monsoon floods. The thatch roofs, made from tightly coiled reeds, kept the rains at bay. And the wooden plank walls held each structure firmly together while providing some protection from the elements. But they weren’t designed to survive an attack. Sara could picture what the village must have looked like, but now it was in shambles.

Walls had been torn apart. Roofs had crumbled or burned. The village looked like a howitzer had used it for target practice. But the structural damage to the village paled in comparison to the devastation wrought upon its occupants. Bodies were strewn throughout the village. Hanging out of doorways. Twisted over rocks. Lying in mud. Most of the dead had gaping wounds, exposing marbled flesh, glints of white bone, and skin torn like weak fabric. They’d been slaughtered. And not one body was seen outside the village. Whatever force had struck the village came so fast that not one villager had a chance to run.

“Brugada didn’t do this,” Sara said.

“I’d say so,” King said as he approached a woman’s headless body crumpled against a hut. Her head was in her lap, stained brown with blood. A swarm of flies dispersed at his approach, forming a wary, buzzing cloud above. He knelt down next to the woman. Her eyes were white and moving. Maggots. He looked at her neck. The skin, muscles, and veins were stretched and jagged. Her head had been torn off, not cut. King shot up, M4 at the ready.

With Bishop keeping watch in all directions, King went about quickly inspecting bodies. Some had been pummeled to death. Heads and chests bore indentations the size of his fist. Others had been torn apart, limbs removed, jaws snapped wide open, heads crushed. After inspecting the sixth victim he headed for the path. Footprints of all sizes had been pressed into the damp earth. King knelt and ran his hand through his hair, which was messier than usual thanks to the humidity.

Sara stood next to him, unsettled by the carnage. “What happened here?”

“Doesn’t make sense,” King said, his voice nearly a whisper.

Sara realized he was spooked.

King pointed to the last body he’d inspected. She looked at it. A young woman, perhaps still in her teens, lay gutted. Her organs displayed next to her in the short grass. Her face a petrified mask of horror. Sara looked away quickly. She’d only seen a flash of the carnage, but it was more than enough.

“You need to see it for yourself,” King said. “Look again. At her chest.”

Sara brought her eyes back up and looked at the girl, avoiding the trail of intestines hanging from the cavity below her ribs. On her chest were four lacerations stretching from shoulder to ribs. She’d been mauled by something. Some kind of animal.

“And her head, at the temple,” King instructed.

Sara looked. Two thick puncture wounds had been gouged in the side of her head where something large had bitten down.

“A tiger?” she said. Vietnam had as few as two hundred tigers left. The species was on the brink of extinction. But she couldn’t think of any other possibility.

“Tigers are man-eaters, but not like this.”

Sara’s thoughts drifted to the Noah’s Ark theory of the Anna-mites; to the large mammals still being discovered in the Asian wilderness and the external pressures placed on the region during the Vietnam War. “Maybe the tigers in the Annamites are different? Hyperevolved.”

He waited for the explanation.

“When species are as isolated as they are here, they tend to evolve differently. In places like Australia, where evolution took its own path over millions of years, we see a totally unique group of mammal species.”

“Galapagos Islands. Darwin. I’m with you.”

“But in certain situations—when food is short, or even overly abundant—we see rapid evolution. We’ve been able to artificially boost the speed of evolution by three hundred percent in the lab, but in the wild, in extreme cases, the change can take place over a single generation. If food is abundant we find a process called plasticity. The evolving species eats more food, matures more quickly, and reproduces at earlier and earlier ages, creating a perfect recipe for evolution to occur quickly between generations.”

“Like rabbits.”

“Exactly. When food is plentiful, rabbit populations explode.”

“Rabbits didn’t do this.”

“Not plasticity . . . Hyperevolution caused by food shortage or extreme competition tends to happen most frequently when humanity encroaches on a habitat. These kinds of changes are taking place all over the world at a slightly increased evolutionary pace. As the human race hunts Kodiak bears, their size continues to decrease, making them faster and harder to find. Squirrels, raccoons, and hawks have adapted to living in cities. There are more than five thousand coyotes living in Los Angeles. They’ve become more cunning. Faster. Smaller.”

“Seems like you could just as easily end up with a superpredator. Fear and running away may let you live to fight another day, but eventually you do need to fight to survive.”

Sara looked at him. “It’s possible.”

“Even so, this makes no sense.” King shook his head. “Tigers kill to eat. They’d have no reason to kill an entire village. Even a hyperevolved tiger.”

“Sometimes evolution is more of a psychological change, making a population more fearful or secretive. But it can also lead to extreme territoriality and violent behavior. A tiger forced into a new territory by a more dominant specimen might see the human population as competition and—”

“Do this.”

“In theory. But hyperevolution requires an actual change in the genetic code, which certainly takes more time—even hyperevolution caused in accelerated breeding scenarios. We’re assuming that tigers don’t already have this instinct built in. It’s not inconceivable that tigers have latent abilities and instincts that could be triggered in certain situations.”

“That’s possible?”

Sara gave a slight nod, trying to stay focused on her thoughts rather than the gore surrounding her. “Genetic assimilation. Basically, the genetics of a creature, whether it be tiger, human, or shark, remain unchanged despite phenotypic changes—appearance—or behavior. The genetic code remains intact, but the expression of that code is affected by the environment.”

“Like playing the same song through different sets of speakers.”

“Exactly. All the music is there, but some speakers have more bass than others, so a vocal track might get drowned out. Let’s say there’s an island populated by ground-dwelling squirrels typically preyed upon by birds. They stay close to the ground, seeking shelter in brush and subterranean dens. But introduce a land predator and the squirrels are suddenly climbing trees. The instinct and ability to climb trees have always been there, but weren’t triggered until the introduction of a predator. The predator is basically a barrier to the continuing success and survival of the squirrel. Same as an ice age or food shortage might be. The genetic assimilation is a hard-wired method of overcoming evolutionary barriers without having to evolve over several generations, which often takes too long to be useful. It’s much faster than evolution and requires only a few generations to perfect the change . . . sometimes no generations.”

“Like flipping a switch.”

“Yes.”

“Can the switch be flipped off?”

She shrugged. “It’s all theory. No way to know for sure.”

“So this could be an average, run-of-the-mill tiger reacting to a unique situation the way any other tiger would.”

“It’s possible.”

“Except . . .” He pointed up and down the path. “There isn’t a single cat print.”

Sara knelt, looking at the footprints. Then one stood out among the others. “What about that one?”

The single print looked human, but too wide and too deep. While overweight people with wide feet weren’t unheard of, it didn’t make sense in this part of the world. “Have you ever se—”

Debris from inside one of the huts spilled out. Clay pots and clumps of reed thatching tumbled down the hut’s ramp to the ground. King and Bishop stood between Sara and the hut and took aim, ready to reduce the already ailing structure to toothpicks. An old woman stumbled down the ramp and fell to the earth as gravity proved too much for her brittle bones and aging muscles.

They rushed to her and found her mumbling incoherently through her white, dehydrated lips. Her hair was straight and completely gray. Not a hint of youth remained. Her wrinkled face, etched with years, softened at seeing them. She saw their guns and sighed.

Sara frowned upon seeing the old woman. She was someone’s grandmother . . . perhaps great-grandmother. Had she seen them all die? Her daughters? Her sons? Were their bodies lying around the village? Sara remembered what it was like attending her grandmother’s funeral, seeing the open casket. Death seemed so well preserved then, like an illusion of life. Her grandmother looked more alive in death than this woman did alive.

Sara’s heart went out to her. She shared some water from her canteen. The woman gagged and the liquid dribbled from her mouth. She was too exhausted to drink.

“Nguoi Rung,” the woman said. “Nguoi Rung. Nguoi Rung.”

King could see she was fading fast. “She’s not going to make it.”

A battle raged in Sara. She wanted to save the woman. And she might even be able to. She had everything she needed to start an IV liquid drip in her pack . . . but there was still a chance the woman would die before Sara had a chance to draw her blood. And that was a risk she couldn’t take. Sara opened her backpack and removed her medical kit. She popped open the green case and riffled through the supplies. She took out the IV kit and set it aside. Her hands shook as she removed the syringe from its sterile packaging and attached the needle.

The old woman stopped repeating the words when she saw Sara turn to her, needle in hand. Her face twisted into a mask of concern, as though she were asking, “Are you no better?”

Sara fought the tears growing in her eyes. Her emotions would undo her if she let them. “Hold her down,” she said to the two Delta operators, who looked just as confused as the dying old woman.

“Hey . . . ,” King said, obviously perplexed.

“I don’t want to do this. I really don’t. But look around you. Everyone in this village is dead or gone. And look at the bodies. They’re all women! The men are buried out there, in the field. If they all died from Brugada, and the women didn’t, then her blood is the last chance we have. Getting her healthy enough to survive this might take days. We don’t have days.” Tears broke free and ran down her cheeks.

King and Bishop laid down their weapons and held the woman tight. King propped the woman up so that her head was against his chest. He wrapped his left arm under and around the woman’s arm and squeezed. With his right hand he gently rubbed her head. “It’s okay,” he whispered. Though he knew she had no idea what he was saying, he felt sure she’d understand the gesture.

Sara pushed the woman’s dirty sleeve up away from her forearm. The veins were easy to see against her malnourished skin as they filled with blood from King’s tight grasp. She struggled only a moment and then became resigned to her fate.

“I’m sorry,” Sara said as she worked the needle into the woman’s vein. Sara sniffled as the woman’s very life-force seemed to drain away with the blood filling the syringe.

Fifteen seconds later, the syringe was full. Sara removed the needle from the woman’s arm and capped it. The future of mankind now depended on a syringe full of an old woman’s blood. Sara instinctually picked up a cloth to put against the puncture wound created by the needle, but the sludgelike blood left in the woman’s body lacked the force to exit the wound. Her slowing heart was trying to pump mud.

“Nguoi Rung,” the woman said once again. Then her eyes closed and she was gone. Dead as the rest of the women left rotting in the village. But unlike the other women, her body remained unbroken and her death, while not of her choosing, was for a far more noble cause.

“There’s nothing left for us here,” Sara said. “We can set up camp somewhere else. Somewhere safe. And I can analyze her blood.”

“And if you don’t find what you’re looking for?” King asked.

“We’re going to be here for a while. If someone else survived this mess, we’ll need to find them.”

ROOK AND SOMI had placed the remaining four motion sensors along the most likely routes into the village. Rook paused at the top of the slope, searching for any movement in the jungle below.

“See anything, Gung Ho?” Somi asked.

“Not a thing.” Rook looked back at her. “You’re in intelligence, right?”

Somi nodded. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that someone should have known the LZ was hot.” He stood and headed toward the village. “More than that, I’m wondering how they knew we were coming at all.”

“Coincidence?”

Rook shook his head. “You think we should chalk it up to dumb luck?”

Somi clapped him on the shoulder. “Sometimes that’s exactly what intelligence is.”

He smiled as they crossed through the field, watching for the little orange flags Bishop had placed in the grass marking the clear path.

“Seems like your opinion of the intelligence community isn’t that great,” Rook said.

“You could say that.”

“How’d you get into it?”

“My father.”

“Seems kind of old-world.”

“This is the old world.”

“Right . . . But you must have a choice now?”

Somi’s momentary frown wasn’t lost on Rook. “Not everything is a choice. Not when it comes to family. Or honor.”

The field cleared and they entered the village. The stench of thirty rotting corpses filled his nose, but not even that could foul his mood. He saw King, Bishop, and Sara standing over a body. “Man, now I know why they named this place Anh Dung. It smells like shit.”

Sara whirled on him like a tornado. “What did you just say? Look around you! Do you have any idea what—”

Rook didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. A wave of nausea took his breath away. He felt his eyes roll back and sensed gravity pulling on his body. Then nothing.

Rook was dead.