every man signed.” He looked at me accusingly “You think we’d do this without telling them? God, who do you think I am? Josef Mengele?”
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to drag him and his whole team into a quiet room and work them over.
“What went wrong?” I said, keeping my voice even.
He was a long time answering. He and the other scientists exchanged looks, and Halverson studied the floor between his shoes.
“They were all screened,” Goldman said softly. “They knew the risks. But…gene therapy isn’t yet an exact science. Mapping the genome isn’t the same as truly indexing and annotating it.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What happened to them? Did they get sick?”
“Sick? No. No…they’re very healthy. It’s just that they…changed.”
“Use the word, dammit,” said Halverson in a fierce whisper. Apparently he wasn’t as fully on board with all this as the science staff.
“Some of the insect genes coded differently than we expected. Most of the changes were mild and mostly irrelevant. Some skin changes. Thickening of the dermis, some color changes, follicular alterations. We tried to correct the problems with more gene therapy, but…we couldn’t control the mutations.” Goldman sighed, and said: “They mutated.”
“Oh man,” said Bunny. “My daddy wanted me to stay in Force Recon. Worst that could happen there is I get shot.”
Top gave Goldman a hard look. “Why are they attacking your people? If they’re volunteers…”
Goldman shook his head, and nothing that I said could make him say it out loud. The rest of the science team looked ashamed and frightened. A few were openly weeping. None of them could look at us except Halverson. I saw the muscles at the corners of his jaw bunch and flex.
“Tell me,” I said. We were past the point of threats now.
Halverson wiped sweat from his eyes. “These…scientists…had a protocol for incidents involving extreme aberrations. The entire project was to be terminated, along with any potentially dangerous aberrant forms.”
“‘Aberrant forms’?” I echoed. “God. You idiots were going to terminate a dozen U.S. soldiers? Citizens?”
“No,” said Goldman. “They signed the papers! That officially made them property of the United States Army. And, besides…they were no longer soldiers.”
“You mean that they were no longer people?”
He didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
“You’re a real piece of work, Doc.”
“Look,” he snapped, “we’re at war! I did what I had to do to protect the best interests of the American people.”
Suddenly there was a low rumble that shuddered its way heavily through the walls. The cement floor beneath our feet buckled and cracked. Dust puffed down from the ceiling, pictures fell from the walls. The scientists screamed and started from their chairs, but there was nowhere to run. Top and Bunny yelled at them to shut up and they cowered back from the two big men with guns.
Halverson and I hurried to the door and peered out. There was a faint flickering red glow from down the hall. I could smell smoke. “Christ!” Halverson said. “I think that’s the generator room.”
There was a high whine from distressed engines and then the lights dimmed again and then went out. The staff room emergency lights kicked in after a few seconds, weak and yellow, giving each face a sallow and guilty cast.
“The generator can’t be out,” Goldman protested.
Halverson said nothing, but he looked stricken.
“What—?” Bunny asked.
The alarm took on a new tone as a pre-recorded voice shouted from all the speakers. It told us why everyone in the room was looking even more terrified than they had been only a minute ago.
“This facility has been compromised. Level One containment is in effect.”
The message looped and repeated. I turned to Goldman. “What does that mean?”
“It means that the generator is no longer feeding power to the airlocks or security systems. If the backup doesn’t come on, then the system will move to Level Two.”
“What happens then?”
“The whole place goes into lockdown,” said Halverson. “This is a biological research facility, Captain. If containment is in danger of total failure, then the whole system shuts down. The doors will seal permanently.”
“Did your test subjects know this?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Goldman. “Probably. I know the first subject, James Collins, knew it. He made a joke about it once. But…really, everyone knows, and it’s posted on signs all over the facility.”
I went to the door and opened it. Halverson joined me. “Looks like the backup generators are still on line. See—they are pulling the smoke out of the hall. The flames from the burning generator are dying down, too.”
“I take it the backup generators aren’t in the same room as the mains?”
“No, of course not. They’re at the other end of the complex.”
I pointed to the damaged access panel high on the wall. “That’s the air duct system?”
“Yes.”
“Does it go all the way into the chamber with the backup generators?”
He thought about it. “No. It terminates outside. The backups are on a totally separate system. Different venting, too. Smaller. No way they could use them to get into the chamber.”
“How secure is it?”
“If you didn’t have a key, then you’d need tools. Heavy pry bars and a lot of time. They were intended to protect against all forms of intrusion. The generator room is even hardened against an EMP.”
“That’s something.”
I pulled Halverson out into the hall for a moment. “Tell me about James Collins.”
Halverson paled. “He…he’s a good kid. Young, in his twenties. No family, no one at home. No sweetheart or anything like that. It was one of the conditions. The men couldn’t have families waiting at home. Better that way.”
“Better for whom?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.
“Collins was smart. He did a couple of tours with Force Recon. One in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. Took some shrapnel last time out. Lost a couple of fingers. It was while he was recovering at the evac hospital that he was approached about this project. He’s been here almost seventeen months.”
I stared at him. It was horrible. Some kid joins the Marines. Maybe he thinks he’s helping to save the world from terrorists, or maybe he thinks he’s saving his country. Or, maybe he’s just lonely. Someone with no one at home and nowhere to be, so he makes the Marine Corps into his family, and it’s a war so they’re happy as hell to have him. They throw him into one meat grinder and when he survives that they feed him into another. Then, when he’s battle-shocked and mutilated, they make him an offer. Maybe money, maybe promotion. Or maybe they play off his sense of duty. God and country. That kind of pitch. They bring him to this place, hide him down in the dark, and when he’s totally off the radar, they play God with him. If he lives, he’s the prize hog at the fair. Someone to trot out to appropriations committees. If he dies, who’s going to miss him?
But they never planned around a third option. What if they made him into a monster?
Hell, they wouldn’t think that way. They’re too limited, too conventional. They can make a monster, but to them it’s just science. Pure science, divorced from conscience, separated from ethical concerns because no one is watching. People like Goldman and his masters in the military always think they have everything under control.
I know firsthand that, too often, they don’t. I know because I’m the guy they send in to clean up their messes.
I don’t know who I hated more in that moment: Goldman, because he made a monster; or me, because I knew that I had to kill it.
In the air vents I could hear a faint scuttling sound. Like fingernails on paper. I stepped closer to the vent, straining to hear it in the gaps between the bleats of the warning bells. It was there. Faint, and growing fainter.
