Kathy Reichs: Code

“Whatever.” Ben began packing our gear. “Let’s go find the others. Hi must’ve given up by now.”

I secured hooks to poles, then scanned the ledge for trash. It’d been nice fishing alone with Ben. The two of us didn’t spend much one-on-one time together, and he often went mute when Hi and Shelton were around. Probably because those two never let anyone get a word in edgewise.

Ben was already sixteen, the oldest of the Virals. He even had a driver’s license. That should’ve made him our leader, but he preferred letting me make the decisions. Which was surprising, since I was fourteen and youngest, the only girl, and still learning about our home city of Charleston. But Ben usually let me have my way.

And he’s a cutie, I had to admit, even though I only thought of him as a brother. Ben fascinated me, but he could be maddening, too. It was often impossible to read what was going on behind that intense gaze. I sometimes felt I understood him the least of my packmates.

After securing our tackle, we descended to the forest below. I’d barely touched boot to soil when a gray blur rocketed from the foliage.

“Coop, heel!” I wasn’t anxious for a full-bodied lunge to my midsection. Mindful of his new training, the wolfdog checked his sprint and scampered to sit at my side.

“Good boy.” Ear scratch. “Where’s your family?”

Crackling leaves answered the question. I turned to see Whisper crouching by a large cedar at my back. The gray wolf regarded me quietly, then stepped aside for her mate, a German shepherd I’d named Polo. Beyond them, Coop’s brother, Buster, alternated between chomping and shaking a stick.

“Release,” I said.

Coop bounded back into the bushes, trailed by his fellow canines. “Hanging around a wolf pack is nuts.” Ben wiped his sweaty brow with a forearm, despite the mild temperature. “Whether it includes your mutt’s mother or not.”

“Don’t be such a baby,” I teased. “They’re practically lapdogs.”

“Lapdogs won’t rip your face off. Or eat you.”

“Hey, we’re a wolf pack, too, remember?” I located the deer run we’d followed to Tern Point and started into the forest. “Why should we be scared of another one?”

Ben didn’t answer. He still wasn’t comfortable with the truth. Not like me.

Here’s the deal. Last spring, my friends and I got zapped by a nasty supervirus. Me. Hiram. Shelton. Ben. And my wolfdog, Coop, of course.

The culprit was a designer pathogen created by Dr. Marcus Karsten, my father’s former boss at the Loggerhead Island Research Institute. In a reckless attempt to strike it rich, Karsten combined DNA from two different types of parvovirus, accidentally creating a brand-new strain. A doozy.

Unfortunately for us, this vicious little germ was contagious to humans. We were infected while rescuing Coop, who’d been abducted by Karsten for use as a test subject.

First came the sickness. Headaches. Fevers. Blackouts. You name it.

The changes followed. We began to evolve. Or devolve.

Even now, I find it hard to describe. My mind twists and bends, sounding out new depths in my subconscious. My senses blast into hyperdrive, becoming more acute than humanly possible.

And sometimes I lose control, succumbing to primal instincts. Foreign impulses. Animal urges to hunt, or feed, or fight. It’s the same with the others. Mostly.

The illness eventually passed, but not the changes. Our bodies had been transformed. The tiny viral invader had rewritten our genetic code, inserting canine DNA into human double helixes.

Shifting us. Hiding the wolf inside our cellular blueprint.

Welding us together as a pack.

Now we’re Viral. To the core.

Scary thing is, we don’t know if the sickness is truly finished. Or if the alterations are permanent. Could the effects grow more intense? Will they fade over time? No idea. With Karsten gone, so was our only link to the virus.

That’s not to say we’ve given up. We don’t have the answers, but we intend to find them. How? Still working on that.

Ben and I continued along the trail to a small clearing.

Beep! Beep!

Ben threw me a knowing glance. My eyes rolled in response. Obviously, Hi was still at it.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Entering the meadow, I heard agitated voices.

“How much longer?” Shelton Devers pushed black-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “This stopped being interesting before it started.”

Shelton is short and skinny, with dark chocolate skin and features common on the streets of Kyoto. Black father. Asian mother. You get the picture.

Shelton stood in the clearing’s center, arms crossed, boredom etched on his face. He wore a yellow Pac-Man retro hoodie and oversized basketball shorts, which hung from his scrawny frame like clothes on a hanger.

“Why all the Haterade?” answered Hiram Stolowitski. “We found buried treasure once before, right?”

“A perfect reason to quit,” Shelton said. “We’ve filled our lifetime quota.”

“Not yet.” Hi returned his attention to the device in his hands. “The geocache is supposed to be right here . Somewhere. I just have to find it.”

“So far, all you’ve found are bottle caps, some pliers, and a Diet Coke.”

“I re-jiggered the settings to ignore trash metal. No more false alarms.”

“No more anything. It just beeps.”

Hi wore a jarring arrangement: red Adidas headband, blue Hawaiian shirt, and white board shorts. In his hands was a Fisher Labs F2 metal detector, fresh from the package as of that morning. He’d been combing the clearing for thirty minutes, insisting something was buried there.

Chubby-faced and red-cheeked, Hi looked like he’d been running sprints rather than carefully walking a grid. No question he could be annoying at times, but we all respected his scientific curiosity. Hi loved experiments and gadgets, figuring things out. Usually I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

That day, not everyone was feeling as charitable.

“This is stupid.” More a computer guy, Shelton preferred hacking websites to tramping through the woods. “Check the GPS again. We could be in the wrong place. And who’d bury something out here, anyway? It’s private property.”

Loggerhead Island is a private veterinary research preserve, complete with troops of free-ranging rhesus monkeys. The habitat is almost wholly undisturbed, with no permanent buildings outside the main LIRI complex.

We visited often. Loggerhead was one of the few places we could be totally alone.

“The geocaching website listed these coordinates,” Hi repeated stubbornly. “This is the first cache ever posted for Loggerhead, and I intend to find it.”

“When’d you adopt this wonderful new hobby?” Ben asked.

“When I ordered the detector. So last month, I guess. Now stop bugging me and let me finish scoping the clearing. The cache is within a hundred-foot radius.”

Lazy Sunday. With no other plans, we’d selected our default option—messing around on Loggerhead. Our safe haven. We’d taken Sewee , as usual, then hiked over to explore the woods bordering Tern Point, a conical stone peak on the island’s southeastern corner. Hi had insisted.

“Explain this again,” I asked, not sure I fully understood the concept.

“I’m searching for a geocache.” Hi, with infinite patience. “It’s a game. Someone buries or hides a box with an object inside, then posts the coordinates online.”

Shelton, skeptical. “How do you know a box is buried here?”

Hi continued at his deliberate pace, slowly sweeping the detector back and forth in front of him. “Because my iPhone says we’re on the exact coordinates, and the clue told me to ‘be sure to scratch the surface.’”