“How?” asked Stone.
“We need a killshot,” said Jon.
“That won’t work on that thing,” said Stone.
“Not a normal killshot,” said Jon. “A CRISPR scrambler. Destroy it at a cellular level.”
Jon raced after it, hearing calamity ahead. His mind went to his team, to Mel. He heard more gunshots. More guards had arrived. At least they could distract it, but in the end, they were only more food.
Their lab was a mess, with upturned tables. Several members of the team lay nearby. Jon looked for Mel. He spotted her hiding under a lab table near her workstation. He ran to her.
“What is that?” asked Mel. “Is that the chimp?”
“Not anymore,” said Jon. Stone followed behind him. “We need a serum. A scrambler. It needs to cut apart the creature’s DNA. It’s the only thing that can take it down.”
Mel nodded and went to her workstation. “It will take a few minutes.” More gunshots rang out and then stopped. The alarm rang then, and the room was bathed in red.
EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT
EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT
EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT
The familiar voice rang out.
“I don’t think some locked doors are going to stop that thing,” said Stone.
Jon left Stone with Mel and went to the outer door of their lab. The creature had left chaos in its wake. Half digested bodies were strewn everywhere, blood and gore piled around them. The thing had gone from body to body, absorbing what it could, before moving onto the next.
Louder gunshots rang out now. Shotguns. Jon followed the trail of blood. He should have turned around, but he needed to see. Just like he needed to watch the experiment. He had to bear the burden of his creation.
He crept through the hallways of the labs, a path of destruction laid out in front of him. Bodies were strewn about, the glass walls of the various labs broken, shattered. A few researchers ran past him as he followed the creature.
And then he saw it. Saw what it had become.
It was massive now, ten feet tall, and six or seven feet across. But its size had finally hurt it, as it moved slower, the incredible mutative growth making it more and more immobile.
It was nearly invincible though, proven by the shotgun blasts it absorbed. An entire squad of guards had surrounded it, all protected in riot gear and pump action shotguns. They unloaded blast after blast directly into it, and blood and bone flew off the creature in sprays behind it, covering the area with gore.
But it didn’t slow down, lumbering after each guard, and now not attacking, but enveloping them as a whole.
It swallowed one, the guard suffocating in the creature’s mass. He screamed, screamed for help, until flesh filled his lungs. The other guards unloaded on it, but it did nothing. It came after the next, and the others ran. Ran toward him.
Oh shit.
The creature turned and moved after them, and it saw Jon now, its face a mass of flesh and cartilage, two eyes still peering out, the only original thing remaining. It saw Jon, and it lumbered toward him. Flesh and bone and muscle sprung from it as it ran, regenerating what was lost and more, and he sprinted back to his lab. He hoped they had the shot; they needed it now.
Jon turned and ran, but he heard it behind him, smashing its way through glass partitions and doors, upending tables and equipment. Some of it got absorbed in its mass of flesh, bits of metal and glass poking out. He looked back to see it, closer now, still moving, faster than him, even with its size.
Jon sprinted as hard as he could, wishing he had spent more time on the treadmill. He saw his lab, and he hoped they had the shot ready.
It gained on him, and he could hear the shuffling of the flesh as it chased him, bone and muscle scraping against the ground. They had made this thing; they had to kill it, before it destroyed everything down here.
He ran for the outer doors of his lab, and Stone and Mel waited there. Stone held the tranquilizer rifle to his shoulder.
“Shoot it!” yelled Jon, sprinting past them. Stone pulled the trigger, and Jon turned to see the dart shoot out and land in the middle of the mass of the great creature. It screamed, its body an amplifier, and Jon heard nothing but it. It still charged, only thirty feet away. It would be on them in an instant, and it would absorb them, and they would become a part of its great mass. It was an ending they deserved. They had created this thing and becoming a part of it was justice.
It lumbered, but then the scrambler took a hold of it from within, and it slowed, the great scrabbling legs stumbled, pieces of flesh sloughing off from it as its cellular walls collapsed. The distended bone and muscle softened, and then melted, cell by cell, and the creature then fell, as its legs disintegrated beneath it. It slid toward them, still screaming in pain.
The creature’s flesh liquefied in front of them, and its great size diminished, slowly turning into a puddle on the floor, pieces of body armor and lab equipment mixed among it. Jon thought he could spot pieces of the original chimp in there somewhere, but he wasn’t sure. It had absorbed over a dozen people along the way, and their flesh was there too, converted into regenerative cells. The smell hit him then, and Jon retched, unable to stop himself.
He threw up to the side, the impossible stink of bile and blood overpowering his senses. It was a new smell, a smell of wrongness. He wiped his mouth.
The creature was mostly gone now, turned into a puddle of mixed regenerative flesh. It squelched and bubbled, as it was broken down into its most basic elements.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Stone. He fell to his knees. Mel and Jon only stared at what remained of the thing.
A team of guards approached cautiously, two dozen of them, armed with shotguns and riot shields, the only equipment they had to deal with resistance.
“It’s dead,” said Jon, to the guard leading them. “It’s dead.”
23
Shaw scrubbed through footage of the creature. Back and forth, back and forth. The footage cut to different security cameras, as the creature was born, attacked guards, grew, rampaged, and finally died.
He watched it, over and over again, while Jon sat and waited. Jon didn’t watch, not now. He had already seen it, and it replayed in his mind endlessly, the creature absorbing the guards.
It had taken hours to clean the lab. Dozens were dead, including half his team, killed in the immediate rampage. Multiple clean-up crews appeared within minutes, bagging up bodies. Jon didn’t know where they had come from, or where they took the bodies. He didn’t ask, not expecting an answer either way. Doctors saw to them, to him, Stone, Mel, the rest of the survivors. The three of them were fine, aside from some bumps and bruises. Most of the survivors hadn’t been touched at all. One had survived with broken ribs after being thrown to the side, but all who had been touched by the creature had died, eviscerated or absorbed.
They collected the massive pile of flesh, people in white hazmat suits collecting it in vials, in bags, in bottles. But none was disposed of. Jon didn’t know what kind of scientific value it had, if any at all. The CRISPR scrambler had most likely destroyed any evidence of what happened inside the creature after their test, and they still had the serum on file. They could make another, make a thousand of them.
Jon didn’t know what to expect from Shaw. He wanted results, but this thing had killed dozens of his workers, and damaged part of his facility. It was monstrous, disastrous. He had exiled Armitage for setting off a small firebomb that ultimately hurt no one and damaged nothing.
So Jon had stepped into Shaw’s office the next day expecting the worst. He had hugged Tommy extra hard that morning before leaving, just in case. He wanted something else he could do, some fallback plan, but there was nothing. His ultimate arbiter stood in front of him, examining camera footage, repeatedly.