by Edward Lee
“Who the hell cares? It’s fucked up!”
It just bothered her. She held the light on the head. “And look at that there, look at the forehead.”
“I’d rather not. Let’s just go.”
The creature’s brow seemed ever-so-slightly angled. Upward.
Like it was trying to grow horns, she thought.
««—»»
No more surprises met up with them during their journey through the pipeline. It took them another fifteen minutes to make it the rest of the way. A steel ladder awaited them, ascending up into a manhole.
“He’ll be waiting for us,” she whispered. “He’s probably got his shotgun aimed at the top of that manhole right this second. Any suggestions on how we do this?”
“There’s only one way I can think of,” Adam said, “and as far as I’m concerned, the sooner we’re out of this damned sewer, the better,” and then he simply charged up the ladder, shouting at the top of his lungs and firing his pistol.
More concussion pounded Clare’s ears as she looked up and watched Adam climb over the rim of the manhole. Gotta hand it to him, she thought. He’s got balls.
“Come on up,” he said. “The room’s clear.”
Clare emerged into a small room with nothing in it, but just beyond the door, she saw a long, brightly lit hallway.
“This is B-Wing,” she said.
“Never been back here before,” Adam added, peeking out.
“I think we’re about to find out why Winster and Dellin keep this section off limits to everyone.”
Clare was about to step out into the hall, but Adam held her back. “What do we do about Winster’s kid?”
“Find him and kill him,” Clare said as bluntly as possible.
“Shit, and all this time I never knew Winster even had a kid.”
“By now I’m sure that Harry has to keep his hidden.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only way to keep him out of prison or a psycho ward.” Clare subconsciously checked to make sure she had sufficient ammunition. “But he’s already killed Mrs. Grable and her husband, and he shot you and tried to kill me. I think that gives us the perfect right to blow his brains out. That’s something I’ve been wanting to do for over a year.”
“What exactly did Winster’s kid—” Adam began, but then thought better of finishing the question.
“Thanks,” Clare said.
They checked and cleared each room in the corridor, each either an office, a lab, or an exam room. Suddenly Stuart Winster and his shotgun wasn’t anywhere to be found. Maybe he left the building, found his father and headed for the hills, she considered, but she doubted that and she sorely hoped not. Those two had wrecked her life—she wouldn’t rest until she had her final confrontation with them.
And it was just like Colonel Winster—Harry—to toy with her like this: having Dellin recruit her for this job, hand-picking guards from the Foster Care system—hence, no families to come looking for them after they “disappeared.” She knew he had the same thing in store for her.
“Aw, fuck,” Adam said when they walked into the next room. Walls of glass tanks made it clear: this was a specimen room of some kind, and Adam had been peering into one of the tanks, when he’d made his remark.
“What’s that, a big aquarium?”
Clare looked in too.
“Aw, fuck,” she said.
The tank stretched half the length of the room. Bubbles roiled up from filters on either side, and its top was bolted down.
The tank contained things that resembled eels but these eels were yards long, and where their pectoral fins should be were growths that looked more like—
Hands, Clare realized. Tiny hands…
The eels frenzied when they saw Adam and Clare looking in. Long jaws filled with wolf-like teeth tried to gnaw through the glass; Clare and Adam both stepped back out of reflex.
Then Clare took note of the heads. Like the rat-thing they’d seen in the sewer, these ferocious eels seemed to all possess similar protrusions above the eyes…
All the other tanks contained more and more mutations: snakes, insects, fish, an array of amphibians, shrews the size of guinea pigs, mosquitoes the size of bats, caterpillars the size of billy clubs, all fanged, all uniquely mutated, and all bearing the odd angular point-like protrusions over the brows.
“What the hell do you think this is?” Adam asked. He was across the room, having opened a closet. Inside stood a container, about the same dimensions of a ten-gallon drum, but lined and topped with bolts. Small indicator lights glowed from some kind of a switch panel. On one side was a port-hole like window lit up from the inside, and when Clare looked in she saw a rack of strange narrow test tubes. A printed-out label on the rack read:
11 JUNE 95
MASTER SAMPLE
GRID #: S27-0078
Some kind of genetic specimen sample? Clare guessed.
“Guess it’s one of them big freezer things,” Adam offered without much fluency.
“Cryolization,” Clare said.
“Unless there’s a bottle of Bud in that thing, let’s get out of here,” he suggested, rubbing his gut. “The things in all them tanks’re making me sick.”
Clare commiserated. They left the specimen room. Clare opened the next door, walked in—
“We’ve been waiting for you, Clare. Please, come in!”
Smiling at her from the other side of the room, wearing a clean white lab coat, was Colonel Harold T. Winster, and standing next to him was his overalled son, Stuart.
“Huh-huh-huh-hi, Clare!” Stuart stuttered, waving at her with his two-fingered hand.
Stuart wasn’t holding the shotgun.
Not a whole lot went through Clare’s mind when she raised her pistol and drew a bead on Stuart’s warped face.
— | — | —
Chapter Fifteen
(I)
Could it be that easy?
Her pistol was cocked, her finger on the trigger.
I’m going to kill them both, aren’t I? she asked herself, and it looked like the answer was Yes.
Self-defense and justifiable homicide would probably stand up in court—if she perjured herself a little. But the real law-enforcement officer in her knew that it was technically murder.
What I really should do is cuff them and take them in, let the authorities work it out.
But then it could all wind up as another white-wash.
A second later, though, it didn’t matter.
Harold Winster’s DeLoreanesque visage remained where he stood, smiling into her gunsight.
Then—
click
Adam cocked his own gun and put it to her temple.
“Don’t make me empty that pretty head of yours, honeybunch.”
Clare was appalled. “You lying, back-stabbing ASSHOLE!”
Adam took her pistol and stuffed it in his belt. “It was kind of a pain in the ass fingering Dellin, but the look on your face just now? It was worth it. I guess women’s intuition is all the same, huh? It sucks.”
He spun her around and slammed her against the wall to cover her better.
“Good work, Adam,” Winster said.
But it was Winster’s son who giddily approached her, the warped face beaming at the sight of her. At once, his foul breath was in her face, his hands—one normal and one two-fingered—were on her. “Uh-uh-uh-I’m gonna bite her, okay, Daddy? Just once please, Daddy?”
“If you do,” Clare began and was about to grab his throat.
Adam’s gun was at her temple again. “If he does, you’ll just get bit, sweetcakes, and I’d really like to see that.”
“Uh-uh-uh-I like ta bite girls, ’specially Clare.”
Clare’s eyes squeezed shut: Stuart’s drooly tongue was licking her face, crooked teeth on her cheek, about to bite down.
“Son, son, none of that now,” Winster commanded. “You’ll have your fun in due time, with Clare and our other pretty new fr
iend.” Stuart backed off, and Clare breathed a sigh of relief.
But she knew the relief would not last long.
Behind Winster were several curtained-off cubicles, like in a hospital room. “Come, come,” he bid, waving her forward. “You must see the entirety of my operation.”
Adam nudged her forward with the gun in her kidney. Winster drew back one curtain—
—and Clare wilted.
It was Joyce who lay on the exam table within, strapped to it. She lay either unconscious or dead.
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” Winster said. “She’s still quite among the living, and quite vital to us. She’s been well-conditioned for our needs—as have you.”
Clare didn’t know what he meant, didn’t want to know.
“We’re ready to actually begin in earnest now. Oh, yes, the initial trials were subject to many flaws, but we expected as much. We just fooled around, you might say—with subjects such as this, to perfect the proper dosages according to body-weight, blood-counts, etcetera.”
He whipped back another curtain. A severely thin naked woman with stringy dark hair lay on a metal table. The table had wheels on its top, and some sort of track system. “The locals weren’t much of a crop to pick from, I’m afraid,” Winster was regretting. “Bad nutrition and the ravages of drug- and alcohol-abuse reduced their fertility. But they served their purposes well nonetheless.”
Winster nodded to his deranged son, who pushed on the girl’s thigh, whereupon her body slid slowly over the table’s wheels. The girl rolled into a large round opening just behind the table, but as she rolled, Clare saw her fingers moving slightly, her head lolling back and forth.
Still alive, Clare thought.
Stuart closed a large windowed hatch over the chute. Instantly an orange-glow could be seen in the window, and the girl began to thrash madly inside, mewling.
“Good God,” Clare muttered.
“It’s the very latest in organic waste-disposal, Clare,” Winster went on in his coy tone. “An industrial dry-heat desiccator. Did you know that it takes six to twelve hours to cremate a body conventionally? And then there’s all that smoke that goes along with the process. We can’t have sooty smoke stacks visible on a federal habitat reserve. This process requires only thirty minutes to fully desiccate a human being, distilling all moisture, every molecule of water. A grinder reduces what’s left to a small, manageable pile of granular desiccant, much like sand.” He raised a finger, enthused with his awful explanations. “Lately we’ve taken to disposing of it in the local waterways—just to see what happens. And there have been some impressive results.”
“We’ve seen those results, Winster,” Clare spoke up. “It’s mutating everything in the lake.”
“Indeed.”
“And it’s scarin’ the crap out of me,” Adam confessed. “You should’ve seen the fuckin’ rat that was down in the pipe tonight.”
Now Winster was nodding. “Yes, we’ll have to tone down to a more controlled setting from here on.”
“And I just saw some of your ‘specimens’ in that room with all the glass tanks,” Adam added. “I had no idea you were getting results like that already.”
“Marvelous, isn’t it?”
“Not when I gotta walk around in the same woods with all that shit!” the ranger complained. “This place is turning into a freak-show, Harry. Sooner or later people from the outside are gonna get wind of what’s going on here.”
“No, no, Adam, you really must leave that to us.”
“How the hell,” Clare began, “can desiccated remains of a human being create the things I’ve already seen around here?”
“A perceptive question,” Winster replied, “and the answer is this: We’ve desiccated more than just human beings here.”
Clare stared at him.
Winster was enjoying this, walking about the room in his lab coat like a medical professor before a classroom full of students. “Unlike cremation, which oxidizes the material, desiccation leaves certain cellular attributes in the waste intact. Gene markers, for one. And we’re talking about an absolutely unique gene marker.”
The recollection clicked in her head: what she’d seen in the other room, the cryolizer.
“The master sample,” she deduced.
Winster pointed, impressed. “Excellent, yes! The master sample. See, Clare, that sample is what this entire clinic really exists for. And it contains properties previously unknown to genetic science. Certain links of the master sample’s chromosomal chain were spliced into the reproductive genes of a subject, anything we wanted—a rodent, an amphibian, any manner of insect—”
“Or a human,” Clare blurted.
“Ultimately, yes,” Winster said with pride. “But that was the easiest part. Achieving reproductive success was the hard part. And we did it.”
Winster pulled back yet another curtain, unveiling a typical hospital bed, but there was nothing else typical about it at all. A nude woman lay on it, wrists and chest lashed to the rail, ankles bound to gynecological stirrups. Grotesquely pregnant, the woman’s swollen belly shuddered. Her head turned to one side, eyes open and looking blankly at Clare, tongue hanging out.
Grace Fletcher, Clare knew at once.
Winster pointed to several large white nozzled devices that hung off hinged arms over Joyce’s bed, the device that Clare now recognized as the missing IRMT machine. Then he patted Grace Fletcher on the head. “I lobotomize them all first, of course—it’s the humane thing to do. It makes them more manageable. In fact, I’ll be lobotomizing your friend Joyce in a few moments, and I’m delighted that you’ll be here to watch.”
Clare’s knees were wobbling.
Now Winster was patting Grace Fletcher’s gravid belly. “Everything we’re doing out here revolves around one process, a process called transfection.”
Clare remembered the word; Dellin had explained it when they were at the bar. Gene-splicing on a molecular scale, splicing selective parts of genes into another cell, then the targeted cell takes on new properties.
“Grace, here, has done quite well for us, and so did Donna for a time,” Winster went on. “The transfection worked marvelously with them. Donna birthed two near-perfect fetuses, and Grace birthed three.”
Clare could only hope that she had misunderstood him. “You mean you—”
“We transfected a reproductive gene marker from the master sample into their eggs, fertilized them in vitro, then replanted them into their wombs. It’s a terribly simple process these days. Since we’re still in a preliminary stage here, we used Stuart’s sperm for the fertilization.”
“And they gave birth to—”
“Let’s call them ‘genetic prototypes,’ shall we?”
“Where are they!” Clare yelled.
Winster’s hand bid the desiccator, whose window was now filled with illumined steam. “We destroyed them, of course. As I just said, we’re only in preliminary stages at this point. A full compliment of incubators won’t be installed until next month. But by then, we’ll be ready—for Stage Two.”
“You put babies into that thing!” Clare screamed.
Winster cast back the darkest grin. “Believe me, Clare. These things weren’t babies.”
This was madness. She had to get out, but how could she do that with Adam’s gun to her back? I’ve got to make a move, got to try SOMETHING…
“And you can believe this too, Clare: there are some compartmentalizations in the Defense Department that are very happy with my results so far, and will do anything to accommodate me, anything to protect me. All they care about are results.”
Clare had no doubt about that. What good was justice when the authorities were as evil as the perpetrators?
Winster turned around to check Grace’s vital signs, and during that moment, Adam brought the gun to her neck and grabbed her hand. “They’re gonna use you for that, honeybunch,” he whispered. “But before they do, I’m damn well gonna get a piece of you first, and it ain�
�t gonna be no sloppy seconds after that freak kid of his, either.” Then he rubbed her hand firmly against his crotch. Creases of revulsion webbed her face when she realized what she was feeling: what must’ve been a dozen metal piercings in his genitals.
Clare thought she would throw up.
Adam let go of her hand when Winster returned his attentions.
“Grace and Donna didn’t go missing until just a few months ago,” Clare challenged him. “They couldn’t possibly have given birth to anything in that short time.”
Winster seemed pleased by the question. “Under normal reproductive conditions, no, they couldn’t. But here’s where our success shines, Clare. We weren’t just transfecting genetic components of the master sample into the host egg, we were also transfecting a growth marker at the same time, and for that we have only one man to thank, your love-interest, Dellin.”
Now Clare smirked at his name. “Where is Dellin, by the way? I would think the evil prick would be here gloating right along with you.”
Winster walked across the room, ran a finger through Clare’s hair. “You’ll be relieved to know that Dellin was kept ignorant of our real purpose here. He’s a molecular-targeting scientist, and a brilliant one. It was his skills that enabled us to identify the particular genetic marker that causes stromatic cancer to spread so fast. It’s the fastest-growing carcinoma that exists.” He held up a finger. “If we could only be able to take that genetic property out of the cancer and transfect it into a human reproductive gene—that was our Holy Grail. And Dellin got it for us, without ever knowing what we were really doing. His techniques in the front of the building solved our most paramount problems here in the back.”
The relief, however useless, swept through her. By now it was obvious to her: Adam had planted the videotape in Dellin’s cottage, knowing full well that that’s where she’d go after finding her phone out of order. He was innocent all along. But—
“Where is he?” she demanded. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
