Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Read online

  The familiar mountain reared up over the treetops ahead, its entire face running with water. The clearing in front of it had become a lake. Its surface popped with raindrops and a small stream had formed where there had been only a shallow depression before.

  They sloshed through the shin-deep water toward the cave. The roar of the runoff splashing into the standing water made it impossible to hear anything else.

  Brooks ducked his head and shielded his flashlight when he passed through the waterfall.

  Their backpacks were in the mouth of the cave where they’d left them, although they were much wetter than he’d anticipated. He hoped the water-resistant fabric kept the clothes inside at least somewhat dry.

  He grabbed Adrianne’s pack and handed it to her, then tossed Warren’s to him. They were remarkably light without the cases of scientific gear they were leaving behind. He was reminded of something Brandt had said: You’d be surprised how heavy even an empty pack can be when hauling it over the highest mountain range in the world. He should have recognized it then. It wasn’t hyperbole; the only reason to carry an empty pack was if you were wearing everything that had been inside it and you’d left everything else behind.

  Julian shrugged on his pack and looked at Brooks with the face of a child. His hair hung over his eyes and his beard was stringy with water. In that moment, he looked positively terrified.

  “Are you all right?” Brooks asked.

  Julian nodded, but couldn’t maintain eye contact with him. He looked more than just scared. He looked sick.

  Brooks reached out and laid his palm against the grad student’s forehead.

  “You’re burning up.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Warren said. “If we keep moving, we ought to be able to make the bridge by early afternoon.”

  Brooks had no idea what time it was. With as dark as the storm clouds made the sky, the sun could have risen hours ago for all he knew.

  “What about Zhang’s supplies?” Adrianne asked.

  “Just take the whole pack and we’ll divvy them up along the way.”

  “We leave them,” Brooks said. “If he’s still alive, he’ll come looking for them and see that we’ve gone. He’ll know where to find us.”

  “He’s dead and you all know it!”

  “What if it were you, Warren? Would you want us to leave you with absolutely no means of survival?”

  “Of course, I would.”

  “You’re full of crap, Dr. Murray,” Adrianne said.

  “What use would they be to me if I were dead?”

  “I think maybe he’s right,” Julian said. “I’ve been climbing all my life and on every continent. One of the few benefits of having a trust fund instead of a father. And what I’ve seen is that no matter where you go, the birds don’t just stop chirping because of a little rain. This place is too quiet. Tell me you haven’t noticed the same thing. The only time the woods in Sonora weren’t near deafening with squawking was when there was a cougar on the prowl. And then not even the coyotes dared to make a sound.”

  No one spoke, for even now they could hear nothing over the rumble of the water falling mere feet away.

  “Regardless,” Brooks finally said, “we leave his supplies. Even if he doesn’t return to claim them, they’ll only slow us down.”

  He didn’t bother looking at Warren. This wasn’t a democracy. This was survival.

  “I’ll go out first. You wait here until I signal you that everything’s clear, then you come out fast and stay together. Got it?”

  He shouldered his pack, drew a deep breath, and slowly eased just far enough through the waterfall that he could see the muddy clearing. He could barely keep his eyes open with the water spattering from his head and shoulders. There was nothing in the flooded field or the muddy flats leading up to the tree line.

  His feet sank into the soft mud under the standing water as he stepped out from the waterfall and into the open. He shielded his eyes from the rain and turned in a full circle, watching for anything resembling movement, before focusing once again on the forest ahead, where deep shadows formed under the canopy.

  He reached back through the waterfall and gestured for the others to follow him. He’d barely begun to slog through the mire when he heard a loud splash behind him and whirled in time to catch Adrianne’s hand before she fell into the water. He pulled her toward him as Julian jumped through the waterfall and nearly bowled both of them over.

  Warren’s silhouette appeared on the other side through the curtain of water. He stood mere feet away, his shape distorted by the flowing water, then retreated and merged into the darkness.

  “Hurry up!” Brooks said.

  “He’s probably rummaging through Zhang’s pack,” Adrianne said.

  “Damn it, Warren!”

  There was movement on the other side, at the very edge of sight and low to the ground.

  “What the hell?” Julian said. “The water suddenly got warm.”

  Brooks looked down at the murky water around Julian’s legs. Tendrils of a darker fluid spread out from where the water splashed down into the lake. He shined his light into the water and watched the thicker fluid diffuse around their ankles before being whisked away by the current.

  “Go,” Brooks whispered. “Now!”

  He looked back up at the thin layer of flowing water that separated him from the cave, this time certain he could see frenetic movement near the mouth of the cave. How could anything have gotten past them while they were standing right there? Unless…

  “It was already in there!” Brooks shouted into Adrianne’s face. He jerked on her arm and sprinted in the opposite direction, water churning up in front of his knees.

  Behind him, he heard a roaring sound he was certain originated from something other than the runoff thundering down the face of the cliff.

  Part VII:

  Deluge

  Thirty-one

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 17th

  Today

  West.

  All Brooks could think was that they needed to go west.

  Somewhere ahead of them was their initial campsite and the path that would lead them through the forest and to the bridge over the Yarlung Tsangpo River. From there, the real trek began.

  If they made it that far.

  Crashing in the underbrush behind them. Or maybe uphill. The acoustics made it impossible to divine their location. Not that it mattered from which direction death came. His lungs burned and his legs ached and he felt as though he were dragging Adrianne behind him. He knew full well that when she went down, she was taking him with her. And through it all the sounds of their pursuit grew ever closer. It was only a matter of time before the gap closed completely.

  The ruckus of snapping branches melded with the rumble of water tearing down the hillside. He could no longer hear the sounds of their hunters and, worse, realized they were being chased toward a natural barrier they might not be able to cross. Even slowing down to try could prove their undoing.

  He couldn’t help but think about how Warren had been overcome before he could even cry out in alarm and slain without making a sound. It could have been any one of them. If whatever killed Warren was the same thing that got Zhang, then how had it managed to beat them back to the cave, unless it had known exactly where to go and had been on its way before they even followed the spent casings into the forest? That implied a level of intelligence Brooks refused to consider, for to even acknowledge the potential was to admit that there was no hope of them leaving Motuo alive.

  A tree stripped of leaves cartwheeled ahead of them through the forest. A great wave of brown water rose up in the distance and a chunk of the trail simply vanished. The shrubs growing from it toppled into the runoff.

  He glanced uphill. Floodwaters thundered down from the high country, eroding the gully before his
very eyes. Debris tumbled end over end with such speed that trees were pummeled and broken in half with resounding cracking sounds and showers of splinters.

  They weren’t going to make it.

  He looked back. Past Adrianne and Julian, whose fatigue showed on their faces, and toward the forest behind them. A dark shape eclipsed the path and bounded up into the trees uphill, maybe thirty feet back and heading for a crest of rock that rose above the point where the path intersected the impromptu river. He caught even more movement through the trees downhill as he turned back.

  “How well can you swim?” he shouted.

  “What?” Adrianne said.

  “How well can you swim?”

  “You’re out of your mind!”

  “If you have a better idea, now’s the time!”

  “We’ll drown!” Julian yelled.

  “All we have to do is survive the runoff.”

  “That’s all?”

  “The river will be running high and fast when we reach it. Keep your legs in front of you and brace for impact!”

  “The debris is moving at thirty miles an hour. Any of those trunks would hit us like a truck!”

  “Then don’t get hit!”

  Brooks peeked uphill to his right in time to see a silhouette dart behind the rock formation that channeled the water down through the uprooted forest.

  Stumps with serpentine roots bounded down the hillside, thrown before the rapids. Entire shrubs caught on trunks that could only stand against the assault for so much longer.

  To his left, the violent water flowed down the eroding gully toward a stone precipice from which it fired out over the distant treetops below. Another silhouette flashed from behind the trunk of one fig tree and vanished behind another.

  The roar was deafening. The water was running so high and fast it would sweep them under and propel them a quarter mile downhill before they were able to catch their first breath while plummeting down into the mist.

  It was at least a dozen feet wide, far wider than any of them could jump. A broken trunk screamed past, crashed downstream, and flipped out over the valley below. The sound of its impact, when it finally came, was like a head-on collision.

  This was suicide.

  Movement to his left. A white blur streaking through the forest, ascending the slope as it went. He caught a glimpse of long fur as it drew parallel with them.

  To his right, a hunched silhouette rose from the top of the rocks, crouched as though about to pounce.

  They were out of options. If they so much as slowed in an attempt to turn around, their pursuit would close from either side. Whatever they were, their movements were coordinated. It was a pack-hunting mentality reserved almost exclusively for higher order predators. One of them must have gone after Zhang, while the other lay in wait for them in the cave. As though they had done that very thing before.

  Ten feet and closing fast.

  A section of the path crumbled into the water before his very eyes.

  “It’s right behind me!” Julian shouted.

  Brooks couldn’t bring himself to look back. His heart raced and his eyes tried to keep up with the debris speeding past.

  Five feet.

  He looked uphill and prayed not to be impaled by a tree trunk.

  Two feet.

  A dark shape leapt from the top of the cliff in his peripheral vision as he focused on the stream.

  The ground gave way under his left foot before he could launch himself away from the bank. He saw brown water churning with vegetation and then he was immersed.

  His mouth filled with water even as he tried to close it. The shock of the sudden cold paralyzed him. Adrianne’s hand wrenched from his grasp. He struck the ground and his head filled with sparks. His feet flipped up over his head. Something grabbed his side. Tore through his shirt, the skin beneath. It was gone by the time he grabbed for it. He opened his eyes and saw only darkness. Something struck his shoulder. His back. He could no longer tell which way was up. His lungs rejected the fluid he’d inhaled, forcing him to open his mouth to cough.

  He inhaled the slightest amount of air with the water. For the most fleeting of moments he saw treetops and storm clouds. And then he was weightless.

  Falling.

  He saw the waiting river from which boulders stood like massive breakers, surrounded by the broken remains of shattered trunks boiling in the flume. Then the mist, and a body plummeting through it. Arms and legs limp.

  He struck the river with such force that he was certain he’d hit one of the boulders. The air, what little there was, exploded from his chest. He couldn’t even draw a mouthful of the vile water. The current dragged him under and bounced him along the bottom, repeatedly smacking his head against all manner of rocks and debris.

  In desperation he reached for what he thought was the surface and drove his hand down into the ground. His vision darkened as the pressure in his chest increased exponentially. When the seal broke, he was going to inhale his death.

  He flipped over and felt his heels strike the bottom. Used the momentary traction to propel himself upward toward water that grew incrementally brighter as he reached through tangles of roots and branches.

  He breached the surface with a gasp and a wave slammed right down on his face. He grabbed for anything he could reach and found himself once more submerged when the shrub he attempted to climb rolled over. Again, he fought to the surface and caught just enough air to survive the impact with a boulder, which sent him careening off to the side. He felt his eyes roll upward and realized in a moment of sheer panic that if he went under again he wouldn’t be coming back up.

  His right hand caught a snarl of branches. Before he could pull, his arm was nearly yanked from the socket. He faced upstream, the water battering his face, but he was no longer at its mercy. The branches bowed over the rocky bank. The trunk to which they were attached split right down the center with a loud snap.

  He grabbed on with his left hand and pulled himself toward the shore, all the while watching the trunk come apart and the roots rise from the crumbling ground.

  The moment his torso was out of the water, he gasped for air and ended up vomiting the horrible water onto the mud. He curled his fingers into the soft earth and dragged himself all the way out, where he lay on his side, staring through the overgrowth of shrubs into the dense forest.

  He remembered the others with a start and struggled to his hands and knees.

  The river raced past at a staggering speed, dragging with it whole trees and debris moving so fast he couldn’t identify it. He managed to get his feet under him and grabbed his side. His own warmth sluiced through his fingers and down his ribs.

  Nothing looked familiar and yet everything looked exactly the same. Several streams cascaded down the escarpment across the river from him, although none of them was nearly as large as the one that had carried him here, which could easily be miles away by now. As were whatever he had seen moving through the trees, those white blurs, but they wouldn’t remain that way for long.

  A flash of blue from ahead of him.

  Adrianne’s backpack.

  He sprinted headlong through the bushes lining the bank, barely keeping his eyes open as the branches slashed at his face. He burst from the trees and nearly leapt right back into the river. The bank had collapsed and in its stead was a collection of branches and trunks where the river bent. He leapt for the sturdiest looking section and grabbed for Adrianne’s backpack as it rushed past. His right hand caught a strap and he pulled for everything he was worth. His legs fell through the dam, but he maintained his leverage and dragged her up beside him.

  Her face was pale, her eyelids and lips blue. Her head lolled forward and water dribbled from her mouth.

  “No, no, no.”

  He pulled her toward the bank and started giving compressions. Her body bucked with his exertions, but didn’t respond. More and more water gushed from her mouth.

  Shouting.

  He looked up t
o see Julian on the other side, maybe a hundred feet upstream, staggering through the underbrush.

  Again with the compressions, hard and fast. He felt her sternum sink deeply into her breast, forcing spurts of water from her mouth. His fingers were too cold to feel for a pulse, even if he could afford to spare them.

  She retched and gagged. Turned her head and vomited all over him.

  He pulled her to him and smeared her wet hair from her face. Kissed her forehead over and over.

  She curled her fingers into the shirt on his back and started to cry.

  Thirty-two

  Johann Brandt Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

  Chicago, Illinois

  October 8th

  Nine Days Ago

  “You can ask me anything you want, but I can only tell you what I remember,” Brandt said. “And even then I often wonder how much is actual memory and how much is the product of an overactive imagination. Maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive. When you’re young, you’re convinced you will recall every event with complete clarity, only to find that it isn’t so much the database that corrodes as it is the hardware you use to retrieve it becoming increasingly antiquated. In my case, I often feel as though my memories are indexed in a card catalogue sorted by a blind librarian.”

  Brooks strolled down the main aisle, for the first time truly seeing the pictures on the walls and the faces of the men and woman for whom death had come shortly thereafter and served as the low-water mark in the history of a species that had only begun to fathom the depths of its capacity for evil. Until now, whether consciously or not, he had chosen not to look at them, as though to acknowledge them in his own mind would taint the majesty of the central display, but to look away from the suffering was every bit as monstrous as the initial infliction of cruelty. These were people whose lives had been inexorably altered and whose lips, if they could move, would tell tales too horrible to hear. And yet they were a part of the journey he prepared to take, and from their ashes a field of study to which he’d devoted much of his life had risen.