William Meikle: Infestation

Banks clapped the man on the back.

“Try to follow the rest of us. I’ve told you and told you, look below you, not at the view on the way down. You’ll live longer. But at least you stayed out of the water. And you’re still in one piece, that’s the main thing, unlike these poor beasties.”

Nolan’s eyes were still wide as he looked around.

“What could do this, Cap? Polar bear?”

“Maybe,” Banks replied, “if there were three or four of them. Maybe. Or, if they were closer to the water, I’m thinking a pod of orca might do this much damage.”

But it didn’t look like any kind of predator feeding Banks had ever seen. The carcasses looked like they’d been stripped and butchered rather than torn apart; it might be bears, but they’d have to be the tidiest bears he’d ever come across.

He put the thought away; whatever the cause of the carnage, it wasn’t why they were here – he couldn’t see how it had anything to do with their mission. Hynd and Mac returned from opposite ends of the small rocky beach.

“Anything?” Banks asked.

Hynd shook his head.

“Whatever did it, it was around this bit of the shore. And they must have left in the water. There’s no tracks, no blood or spoor over to the south.”

“Same the other way,” Mac said and repeated his earlier observation. “What the fuck, Sarge?”

Hynd spoke dryly.

“I know one thing, Mac. It wasn’t the fucking Russians; there’s no empty vodka bottles.”

Banks saw that the men were spooked by the extent of the slaughter around them; standing amid bloody ruin never did anybody any good, whether it was animal parts or human ones. He had to get the squad moving, before they all got the heebie-jeebies.

“Focus, lads,” he said. “We’re here for a boat full of Russian spies. If you see a polar bear, you have my permission to blow its nuts off, but we need to move and we need to move now. Nolan, you ready, son?”

The Irishman gave Banks the thumbs up.

“Okay, move out. Mac, you’re still on point; Sarge, you watch our backs. If we dropped where we should have, there’s an Inuit settlement two miles to the north; that’s our first stop.”

In the short briefing he’d had back at base before leaving, the colonel had told Banks they’d intercepted a garbled message from a remote settlement off Baffin Island, telling of a Russian boat in trouble in the bay to the north of them.

“The diplomatic boys have been on the phone all morning; we’ve asked for first crack at it and, subject to a few deal sweeteners to keep the politicos happy, you’ve got permission to go in for a look.

“We’ve got no idea how many Ruskies there are on board, or what degree of armaments they might or might not have, so sneaking up on them is the order of the day.

“The Canuck Air Force will be your backup,” his superior said. “You’ve got twenty-four hours after the drop to get a report back here; if you don’t, they’ll send in the heavy mob.”

It wasn’t a particularly strange mission; Banks and the squad had worked similar jobs with tighter deadlines in worse conditions but the torn and bloody walrus remains had set a chill in his spine. His normally reliable hunch told him things might not be as straightforward as either the colonel had implied, or he had hoped.

The men were thinking much the same. They kept up a stream of low-voiced chat, all of it about the bloody mess they’d left behind them on the shore. Nolan, in particular, talked incessantly about the scene he’d landed in.

“I thought I’d crash landed, died, and gone to Hell,” he said after describing his landing for the fourth time in as many minutes. “It was like a fecking horror film.”

“Away and shite, ya big girl’s blouse,” McCally replied. “I’ve seen worse in Inverness on a Saturday night.”

“Aye,” Nolan replied deadpan. “Your mother always was a messy eater.”

Briggs, McCally, and Nolan’s laughter carried clear across the cold night, earning them an admonishment from the sarge.

“Keep it down, lads,” Hynd said from their backs. “If the cap’s right, we’ll be coming up on the settlement soon.”

That was enough to get quiet and they walked in silence for another half a mile. The terrain was easy going, hard-packed snow only occasionally punctuated with icy rocks they easily navigated and they made good time. Banks brought the others to a stop when Mac signaled from ten yards ahead of them; trouble ahead.

Banks left Nolan, McCally, and Briggs at the rear while he and Sergeant Hynd quickly moved up to Mac’s position and joined him, lying flat on a frozen rocky outcrop, oblivious to the cold as they took in the scene below them.

An Inuit settlement sat around a sheltered bay at the foot of the slope below them – or rather, what was left of it sat there. The community had been made up of twenty or so buildings along the shoreline; six of those buildings were now little more than torn and shattered timber frames and many of the others showed signs of attack. Multiple smears, black in the night vision glasses but again all too obviously blood, showed on the track running along between the buildings and the water’s edge. Two small fishing boats sat moored in the tiny harbor, one of which was listing badly, holed at the port side; the other was almost completely sunk, only the wheel house showing above the water. Out in the bay, several hundred yards offshore, a larger boat sat at anchor; it was too dark to see any identification and there were no lights on the vessel itself.

“Our Russian pals?” Hynd asked in a whisper.

“I guess so,” Banks replied.

He turned his glasses up to full zoom and tried to make out more detail of the vessel but it was too far off in the night. He turned his attention to the harbor and checked the whole length of the settlement. There were no signs of any bodies.

But there’s an awful lot of blood.

When Mac spoke, neither he, nor Hynd had an answer for him.

“What the fuck, Sarge?”

They took their time descending to the village, alert for any sound, any sign of attack, and taking care not to show themselves on the skyline. But no attack came. Nothing moved in the settlement below them save small wavelets lapping on the pebbled shore. The only sound was the crisp crunch of their feet on the snow and Mac’s muttered curses when he slipped and almost fell.

Banks kept his eyes on the settlement, but the closer they got, the more obvious it was the people here had suffered a catastrophic attack to match the one visited on the walruses they’d found earlier.

A well-worn narrow path of small stones and gravel took them from the top of the ridge in a slow-winding meander all the way down to the waterline at the southern end of the bay.

The house at this bottom end of town had suffered less damage than some of the others had but when they walked off the slope and onto the shore-side track, they saw the main door of the property was smashed inward. It was as if a small car had gone straight through it, knocking the door in and splintering the timbers of the frame and surrounding porch. Blood smears, three of them, each a yard wide in the room before merging in the doorway, led from the house out across the path and into the sea, only stopping at the water’s edge. A child’s boot sat there, bobbing half in, half out of the slush, which was stained pink for six inches all around.

Banks, not wanting to ask his men to look at anything he wouldn’t look at himself, stepped up onto the front porch of the house and approached the torn and shattered doorway.

“Hello?” he called out, then immediately felt stupid for doing so, as it was obvious there was no one home. The room was sprayed with blood, as if a mad artist had been at work with a pot of red paint, splashing it across walls, furniture, and carpets with abandonment. The power was out but Banks didn’t need extra lights, he could see enough in his goggles. There were indeed no bodies here, just the blood and the smears but that alone was enough to tell him that no one had survived. Two of the blood streaks originated at a large leather sofa facing the television; the floor there was darker still and the sofa had been torn to shreds in places, as if by knives, or talons. The third lot of blood, which looked narrower than the other two, led from an overturned cot in the corner.