Chapter 63 - Lab Rat (Patreon)

She landed in the net Napoleon had made.

The strands stretched under her weight, and the catch felt elastic and soft. The drop from the ninth floor down to the twelfth felt like almost nothing, and no fear had moved through her on the way down.

She lay there for a second with the pack against her chest, breathing. Then she heard them.

Tilting her head, she looked through the hole. The shaft kept going past the edge of the webbing, showing the broken edges of the floors below her and the path of destruction the drill had carved all the way down through the building.

So much destruction. He’s actually willing to tear down his whole research facility just to grab me? That is insane.

That’s where the fear hit. Past the edge of the webbing, the shaft kept going, with smoke and fire glowing in patches on the lower floors, and twisted metal hanging out of the walls. From somewhere down there, the sounds came up.

Long and low. They held a pitch that didn’t sit right in her ears, something between a moan and a call, and they came one after another from different directions, as if more than one thing was making them.

“Tera. Those sounds. Are those Kanryx?”

They have a more human tone. I don’t think they’re Kanryx, Operator. But we don’t have time to analyze it. We need to move.

A second call answered the first, longer, and this one sounded even more human.

“That second one. It’s more human.”

It is. I’d want to break it down properly, but we don’t have time. Move.

“You’re right.”

She rolled to her side and pushed up on the webbing, careful with her boots, and stepped off onto the broken concrete of the twelfth floor. What was left of the stairs on her right was busted up, but there was a stretch of solid floor between her and the emergency exit, and the door was right there in front of her.

“Napoleon. Cut the net down. We can’t let them figure out which floor we stopped on.”

Napoleon ran up the wall and across the rim of the hole, snipping each point where the webbing was attached. The net collapsed in on itself and dropped through the hole. She watched it fall, the strands folding over each other on the way down, until the fire on the lower floors caught them and they burned off.

She looked at her left forearm. The mark had moved. Eighty-five percent. Stepping sideways out of the line of sight of the hole, she pressed her back to the wall.

“Tera. What happens when this hits a hundred? The formula activates and I get the new ability, and that’s it, or does something else go down?”

Operator, I have no idea. We’re on uncharted ground here, and right now you’re the lab rat. You’re the proof of what does or doesn’t happen.

“Thanks for being honest. Not exactly leaving me with high hopes.”

I’d never lie to you.

Breathing out, she adjusted the pack tight against her back, drew the revolver, and held it low.

The emergency door was right in front of her, and the control panel beside it was dark with no power, the screen dead. She set her shoulder against the door and pushed. Heavy, but it gave.

Okay. So far, easy.

On the other side, the corridor was painted red.

Emergency lights along the ceiling were flashing in a broken rhythm, black, red, black, red, then a longer red and a longer black. The whole hallway pulsed out of sync, and whatever circuit was driving those strips was on its last legs.

Ahead of her it ran long.

Napoleon jumped to her right shoulder, balanced there a second, then reached down with his front legs and detached two of his own eyes from his body. He fixed one to each of her shoulders with small dabs of webbing. Now she had her own headlights, one on each side, throwing two clean beams forward down the hall.

“Thanks, Napoleon.”

He dropped back to the floor and ran a few feet ahead, his remaining eyes flicking left and right, and the light got stronger as he moved.

The corridor was a mess. Nobody had cleaned it in days, maybe longer. Chairs were knocked over and lying across the floor, with trash everywhere, paper cups and papers scattered around, a torn lab coat hanging off a cart, and a surgical glove on the floor with dried blood on the fingers. Stains spread across the floor in different colors, red and green, and some black.

Burned plastic and blood hung in the air.

“Looks like somebody tried to survive in here,” she said aloud. “And didn’t make it, or maybe whatever was in here wasn’t even a person.”

Yes, because being this positive is going to help you get out of all this easily, Operator. Things have actually gone well so far. Don’t jinx us with comments like that.

“Sorry.”

Thank God I’ve got Tera. If I were here talking to myself, I’d lose it.

On her left, there were six doors. Every one of them had the control panel smashed in from the outside, the card slots crushed with bent metal jammed into them.

Somebody made sure those doors don’t open for anyone out here. Like us.

“Or somebody asked to be locked in so nobody could pull them out.”

Oh. Another positive comment. I’m trying to develop emotional patterns, Operator, and comments like that make me wonder why I’m bothering.

“Okay. Sorry.”

Revolver low, she kept moving.

“Tera. I want to check what’s behind each door.”

You can’t go in.

“I don’t need to go in. Just the windows. We need to know what we’re walking past.”

Agreed.

She leaned towards the first reinforced window. Dark inside, and she couldn’t make anything out. The second door was the same, silence, nothing moving through the glass. The third was the same.

It was at the fourth door where the lights inside weren’t all the way out. Emergency strips were going in there too, blinking on the same broken pattern as the corridor, the only door so far that had anything still running.

She put her face close to the glass and couldn’t hear anything through the door, but she saw it.

It looked like a slug, pale and long, the body sliding across the floor of the room and leaving a wet trail behind it. No arms, no legs, just the body.

But it had eyes. Human eyes. Set into the front of it, looking out. The eyes found hers through the window. The thing froze.

Then it started moving again, faster, dragging itself toward the door, and the eyes stayed locked on her the whole time. They didn’t blink. They moved with the body, but they never left her. And the way it pulled itself across the floor looked like alarm. Like it was screaming at her with no mouth to use it. Trying to tell her something, or trying to warn her, she couldn’t tell which.

It pressed itself against the inside of the door, and the eyes stared up at her, wide. She stepped back from the glass.

“Tera. What the hell were they experimenting with down here?”

Remember what happened with your mini-clone. The changes she went through. That could be one of the experiments. One of the results of a formula that went bad. This is why you should be grateful you have the mini and can run the tests on her.

“You sure I’m grateful, Tera? After what I lived through with her, I’m not exactly thrilled about running more of those.”

The eyes were still watching her through the glass.

Operator. Your mark. Check it.

She looked at her left forearm. The bar had no numbers, but she could read it by the spread. It had climbed close to ninety-eight percent.

“Almost there.”

Up ahead at the far end of the corridor, another door waited, marked emergency exit, a second stairwell.

Thank God. The other exit. That can get us further down.

That’s when she started hearing the gunfire.

Controlled bursts came from beyond the second stairwell, followed by voices shouting, and she couldn’t make out the words, just that people were screaming.

And under the gunfire, something else. A rhythm. Voices moving together.

Is someone praying? Who prays while they’re shooting?

The doors along the corridor she had just walked past, the silent ones, moved. Things inside them roared. The metal banged from the inside, one door, then another, then another, the sound moving down the line.

Okay, they’re getting close. Hide? Nowhere to hide. Fight? The only option is to fight, but fight what? Shit. Why does nothing in this place ever get to be easy?

She backed up fast against the opposite wall, near the door she had come in through, and pressed herself into the corner where the broken emergency lights flickered the worst, using the unlit stretches to keep herself out of sight.

“Napoleon. Your eyes. Take them off me and shut them down. Now.”

Napoleon pulled the two eyes off her shoulders and turned them off. The corridor went back to red and black.

Gunfire got louder, closer, and the door at the far end of the corridor slammed open.

A blonde girl walked through first. Eight to ten years old. She wasn’t crying. Nobody was holding her hand. She was just walking backwards, watching whatever was behind her.

After her, a woman stepped through, thirties or maybe early forties. She wore a cloth skirt stitched together roughly, low heels, and hair pulled back badly. She had a notebook in her hand, the cover stained dark with dried blood, and she grabbed the girl’s hand.

Then a tall man came through. Blonde too, also looked thirties. Dirty, torn lab coat; an ID card hanging from his neck. He took a position next to the woman and the girl.

After them, two more came through, both armed. A thin man in his twenties with brown hair, and a woman next to him with brown hair too, both in tactical uniforms. Not the regular facility security she had seen days ago with the parasites on their necks, but a different uniform from some other branch.

The woman with the rifle shouted at the others.

“Stay back. We need to block this damn door. We have to block it.”

“With what?” the male guard said. “There’s nothing here to block it with. Think about what’s coming up those stairs with those maniacs. It’s going to break through that door without a problem.”

Behind them, praying kept coming up the stairwell, the rhythm of it climbing, voices stacked on top of voices.

“Lessa,” the male guard said. “Get away from the door. Aim at whatever comes through it.”

“The bullets aren’t doing anything to them!” she shouted back. “Let’s run for the other exit; it’s right there!”

The Operator looked down at Napoleon.

“Do nothing. Don’t attack anyone until I tell you to.”

Napoleon nodded his head and held position.

They haven’t seen me yet. That’s good. If they knew there’s nothing waiting for them on the other side of that door, they wouldn’t be this calm.

Before the group could start moving toward the other exit, the door at the far end of the corridor exploded. Something punched it. The door flew off its frame and hit the wall across the corridor.

The thing that came through after had to break the concrete around the doorframe because it didn’t fit. The wall around the opening cracked and crumbled as the body forced itself in.

Almost seven feet tall. Shoulders so wide it had to angle sideways to clear what was left of the frame. The muscle wasn’t in human proportion. The arms were so long they hung down past the knees, the knuckles almost dragging on the floor.

But the face was untouched, the face of a regular man, calm, almost peaceful-looking, the face you’d pass on the street and not look at twice. Except for the eyes, wide open and not blinking, not once.

Is that a person?

He stepped through, and a smile spread across his face.

Behind him, six people in white coats started filing into the corridor one by one. Each coat had a symbol drawn in red on the right side, a spiral with an eye at the center. None of them carried weapons.

Are they praying?

They were chanting in a language she didn’t understand; the words flowed together in a rhythm.

Behind those six, three soldiers came through. Same tactical uniform as the men Napoleon had killed earlier. They looked like they were there to guard the people in the white coats, but with the giant at the front, it wasn’t clear what they had to guard against.

On the other end of the corridor, Lessa and her partner kept their rifles up, but she could see their weapons shaking. The scientists pulled in tighter around the girl, and the woman wrapped her arms around her.

One of the men in white coats, who had been chanting, stepped forward past the giant, walking slowly with his hands held loosely at his sides.

“Lower your weapons,” he said, his voice coming out warm and calm, as if he was greeting them at a Sunday service. “If you fire at us, you’ll be the first ones to die, and we don’t want you to die.”

Neither of the two guards answered.

“We know you’re afraid. I understand that fear, all of it. But I want you to understand something. To receive the evolution is to receive love from the Father. Especially the child.”

He crouched down low and spoke past the guards to the little girl.

“Sweetheart. You grew up here. You know nothing else. Things in this place are getting worse, and we want to speed things along before they get any worse than that.”

“Don’t talk to her,” the male scientist shouted at the fanatic. “Get away from her. Now.”

Lessa kept the rifle up, finger on the trigger.

“Let’s stop the games and just end this. Use your heads; the bullets do nothing to him. This is the perfection of the mutation, the best thing we’ve made, and we want to give it to you. Now please put the weapons down. It’s pointless.”

His face shifted, not all the way, just enough for the warmth to pull back, and he turned to the giant.

“Don’t kill them. Knock them out.”

The giant took one step forward, and the floor shook under his weight. A second step, and the dust came down from the ceiling.

Lessa and her partner opened fire.

Controlled bursts, the rifles steady against their shoulders. The bullets hit the giant across the chest and shoulders and flattened on impact; the rounds dropping straight down and rolling on the floor at his feet. They kept firing as the giant kept walking. Lessa switched her aim to the face. The bullets hit and flattened off his cheek, his forehead, and the bridge of his nose, and none of it did anything to him. The smile stayed in place.

The scientists threw themselves over the little girl. The woman pressed the girl down against the floor and covered the girl's body with her own. The man went over both of them.

The Operator pressed harder into her corner.

“Tera,” she whispered. “What do we do?”

There’s no way out behind us. The only way out is through. Operator, if we want to get out of here, we’re going to have to fight.

Then it hit her.

It started with her shirt. The fabric against her skin felt like sandpaper, every fiber against her arms and her shoulders, and her back, scraping at her skin. Her pants did the same against her thighs, and even the strap of the pack against her shoulder turned into a band of scraping that wouldn’t let up.

A small sound escaped her, not loud, a noise of discomfort she couldn’t hold back. The corridor went still.

Every head turned toward the shadowed corner where the emergency lights were flickering on and off, where she was pressed against the wall.

The man in white smiled, the corners of his mouth pulling up slowly, and a thin line of sweat ran down the side of his face from his hairline. His chest rose and fell faster under the white coat, his eyes locked on her, and the smile grew wider.

“Another servant for our father. What a blessing. Lord, thank you.”

She didn’t say anything. She looked down at her forearm and the mark was full. One hundred percent.

“Tera. One hundred percent.”

Yes. I know.

And that was when the first transformation began.