“There’s something up there,” Richards said.
Warren followed Richards’s line of sight with his own rifle.
“Hurry up, Doc,” Anthony said.
The skin on the dead man’s chest was intact, but the distention masked any abnormal swelling of the lymph glands that would betray an acute immune response. Regardless, Byrne palpated both axillae, then the man’s neck—
Putrid water gushed from what had initially looked like a goiter, but was merely a flap of skin. The water had entered through a wound beside the man’s trachea, just like the one on the bull back in the clearing.
“I don’t see…” Warren said. “Wait. There. What in the name of God…?”
Byrne shoved the dead man aside and nearly fell into the deeper water in his hurry to grab another corpse. The woman wore a tattered nightgown that clung to her bloated form. He scraped her wet hair from her neck to reveal a similar wound. The man who floated up to the surface from beneath her rolled to his side and exposed a tear in the skin from his collarbone to his earlobe.
“Move out,” Richards said. “Now, goddammit!”
Someone jerked on the back of Byrne’s suit and he toppled to his rear end with a splash. He kicked at the water as he scooted away from the remains. His back struck the rock wall and still he splashed in a vain attempt to distance himself from the carnage. The way the water distended the flesh… if there were any violation of the integrity of the skin, the water would have leaked out. The only place it had done so was the neck, which meant the wound was not only the means of exsanguination, it was also the point of envenomation.
Anthony grabbed him by the front of his suit and hauled him to his feet. The soldier’s eyes locked onto his.
“Snap out of it, Doc. We’ve got to go.”
Richards and Graves were already two tiers up and climbing fast. Warren reached down from the next level and helped Byrne pull himself up.
Byrne felt himself climbing, but seemed detached from his physical form. His mind reeled at the implications of what he’d discovered. The truth had been staring him right in the face the entire time.
They didn’t follow the winding route, but rather scaled the crumbling path from one level to the next, using whatever outcroppings they could find.
The light of the setting sun bled into darkness. The other men became silhouettes and the branches high above blended into the night sky.
A faint beeping sound.
Richards abruptly stopped climbing and shed his backpack. He knelt and removed the case containing his tablet from inside.
“What did you see up there?” Byrne asked.
In response, Warren thrust his rifle into Byrne’s chest and inclined his chin upward.
Byrne raised the IAR to his shoulder and pressed his cheek to the stock. The view through the scope was disorienting at first, but as his eye adjusted he was able to distinguish the thick, leafy boughs from the shadows. There was something else up there, something he couldn’t quite—
“Christ,” he whispered.
There were bodies in the trees. Human bodies. Way up in the treetops. Suspended by their feet, their arms dangling beneath them, swaying on the breeze.
Warren snatched his rifle back.
“How did they get all the way up there?” Byrne whispered.
“A better question would be what the hell is capable of getting them up there?” Graves said.
“Would you guys shut up?” Anthony said. “I think I hear something.”
Byrne dialed down his respirator and held his breath in an effort to better hear. A reddish light bloomed from his left. He turned to see Richards trying to shield the glow from his tablet. On the screen was a satellite image, only the contrast was all wrong. Everything was dark purple and blue, with the exception of a ring at the center of the screen composed of red and orange dots that constricted as he watched.
Byrne realized with a start that he was looking at thermal imaging from the GEOS 2 satellite, which must have finally been overhead.
“We’re surrounded,” Richards whispered. He looked up at Byrne, who was thankful he couldn’t see the man’s face through the reflection of the heat signatures on his face shield.
A high-pitched sound from the distance.
Byrne looked up toward the forest above and this time clearly heard a sound that made his blood run cold.
The screeching of monkeys.
The screaming of primates reached a deafening crescendo, then abruptly ceased. The resulting silence was somehow even worse.
Richards had dropped the tablet in favor of his rifle and all four men quietly fanned out to better cover the entire circumference of the diamond mine.
Byrne’s pulse rushed in his ears as he scrutinized the dark forest floor, now a mere fifteen feet above them. The red and orange ring on the tablet at his feet continued to shrink in almost imperceptible increments. If whatever was up there had been able to lay waste to an entire town, what chance did the five of them have?
“What the hell us up there?” Anthony whispered.
“Shut up or we’ll find out!” Graves whispered. “There’s still a chance—”
“They know we’re here,” Richards whispered.
Byrne knelt and picked up the tablet with trembling hands. The image was dark and he was unable to clearly gauge the scale, but if each conglomeration of colored pixels corresponded to an individual organism, they were more than surrounded, they were easily outnumbered thirty-to-one. Their own shapes in the very middle appeared small and isolated as the ring continued to constrict—
The image went black.
“Full night vision,” Richards whispered.
Byrne tapped the screen, but nothing happened. The satellite must have traveled out of range once more.
He looked up toward the forest. He couldn’t see a blasted thing. The branches overhanging the pit were indistinct shapes composed of varying degrees of shadow. The upper reaches continued to sway.
“Set your weapons for three-round bursts,” Richards whispered. “When they come, they’re coming all at once. We can’t afford to burn through our magazines too fast.”
A loud cracking sound overhead, followed by crashing through the trees.
Byrne glanced up in time to see a human body cartwheel from the lower canopy and streak past him. It hit the water with a splash that echoed away into the night.
He recalled the bodies in the first diamond mine, the one into which they’d parachuted. At the time, their only intel had been the satellite images of the streets of Daru. They’d been expecting to find corpses everywhere. The bodies in the water hadn’t seemed out of place, but in retrospect, there hadn’t been any clearly identifiable trails like they’d followed to get here, and yet the bodies had been in roughly the same condition as the ones in the pit below him must have been sixteen hours ago.
“Keep your eyes open, boys,” Graves whispered.
Byrne swiped the screen and opened another map, one entirely composed of black and white. The magnetometer map wasn’t nearly as detailed as either the thermal or aerial images. The trees provided little more than texture, as their mineral content was vastly inferior to the strata from which they grew. The topography was revealed in a gray scale that varied with ferromagnetic content. Biological matter and rocks with low iron content appeared dark gray, while dense stone rich in mineral content was almost white. The black circle in the center corresponded to the diamond mine, the outer edges of which had been stripped to the bare dirt. The center was much brighter, as the bottom of the pit had yet to be mined. And leading away from it to the east was what almost looked like a faint white snake.