Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,31

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