“What the—”
He turned away and rubbed his eyes, telling himself to get a grip. But when he looked again, he saw exactly the same thing: a ten-by-ten room with walls that appeared to be crawling. He was wondering if it was another optical illusion when he realized it wasn’t the walls that were crawling. It was what was on them.
The entire cell was filled floor to ceiling with wasps. They crawled over every surface except, for some reason, the glass right in front of St. Luke and Korigan. But while they swarmed over every other inch of the cell, they especially seemed to favor the far right corner where a giant lump of insects were climbing into and over what looked like a rounded hive. On closer inspection, though, Korigan realized he was wrong again. The thing in the corner wasn’t a hive at all. It was a person. A man.
And he was moving.
After that, it was a hard fight not to be sick. Korigan had seen a lot of horrors in his life, but he’d always had a special hatred for insects. The only thing that kept him from sprinting back to the elevator was the fact that St. Luke was still standing beside him, watching him intently like he was waiting for Korigan to crack. But while it had never been for such high stakes, Korigan had played this game before, and he knew better than to show any sign of weakness. In the end, the only trace of his inner panic was a slight waver in his voice as he calmly asked his host, “What is that?”
“An experiment in the limits of human endurance,” St. Luke replied proudly, tapping the glass behind the bars. “Mankind is capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. But the only way to know how much more is to push. That’s what I do here, Korigan. I push limits.” He lifted his eyebrows with a smile that sent shivers down Korigan’s spine. “Would you like to see the rest?”
Korigan would have been happy if he never saw anything like this again in his life. These were Dr. Mengele–level atrocities, and even Korigan had his limits. But he hadn’t reached them yet.
“Tell me, Commander, how far are you willing to go?”
“As far as I have to.”
He wasn’t sure what game St. Luke was playing: if he was actually proud of the things in the cages, or if this whole zoo tour was just another test. Either way, Korigan was determined not to lose, so he buried his fear and nodded to his host, matching him grin to feral grin.
“What else you got?”
This answer seemed to delight St. Luke more than anything else Korigan had said. His host was practically bouncing as he started down the hall, showing off cage after cage of horrors. In one, a pair of twin teenage girls were methodically slaughtering and dismantling a goat, arranging the pieces in a disturbing mosaic across the bloody floor of their enclosure. In another, a seemingly normal young man sat crouched with his hands over his face, hiding from the walls of his cell, which was entirely covered in broken mirrors. Yet another held an old man who was naked save for a cloth around his waist and a chain around his neck where he’d been tied like a dog to a post in the cell’s center. In his hands, he held a pot of something black and viscous that he was using like finger paint to write enormous, complex messages on the wall in a myriad of languages. Having studied several, Korigan recognized Greek, English, and Coptic. Before they passed out of view, he also spotted his own name scrawled amid the rest, which had to be the creepiest thing he’d seen all night. Or, at least, it was until they reached the double doors at the hall’s end.
Up until this point, the path through the zoo had resembled a prison hallway. Once St. Luke pushed open the doors, though, Korigan could see that the room on the other side was much larger, a modern-looking underground lab complete with bright white walls and techs in full-body hazmat-style lab suits hovering around banks of computers. The sudden switch was enough to make Korigan jump, but while they were clearly at the more modern end of St. Luke’s experiments, even this space was obviously no ordinary lab.
Half of the equipment—the computers, centrifuges, lab tables, chemical hoods, sample fridges, and so on—looked like it could have come from any hospital. But the rest of it, the strange objects interspersed between the normal ones, defied explanation. No two were the same. Some were tiny, some giant, some were made of metal, others of stacked brownish-white tiles that looked disturbingly like bones. But while Korigan didn’t understand any of it, he recognized the rusty, reddish-brown stain that covered their moving parts.
Blood was everywhere, actually. Even the normal lab equipment was splashed with it, the white and steel surfaces splattered, old and new drips overlapping like the room had been repeatedly sprayed with blood and then haphazardly wiped down, but never actually cleaned. The smell certainly lingered. The rusty, musky scent of dried blood was so thick in the air down here, even Korigan found it hard to breathe. But unnerving as an underground lab soaked in blood and filled with strange artifacts was, the stained equipment was nothing compared to the six-foot-tall black cube sitting at the room’s center.
From a distance, it looked like it was made of matte black glass. As he got closer, though, Korigan saw that the cube didn’t actually have walls at all. It was just… dark. A box of deep shadows cast by nothing, and that didn’t make sense at all. You couldn’t just have a cube of dark. And yet, there it was, standing in front of him like an ink stain in the air. It had no physical borders, no walls, just a clear, invisible line that the light from the banks of fluorescents overhead simply could not—or would not—penetrate.
Given the other, more obvious, horrors they’d passed by to reach this place, a box of dark should have been the least of Korigan’s worries. But hard as he’d learned to be, Victor Korigan was above all a practical man. He valued money and steel and leverage, things he could touch and hold and wield. Things that had purpose. He had walked over corpses and felt nothing, because corpses he understood. But the sheer physical impossibility of that thick, inky darkness, that shadow from nothing, scared him more than all the blood in the room combined.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
The whisper made him jump, and he whirled around to see St. Luke standing right beside him. “It’s awful,” he said, the words tumbling from his lips.
He regretted the admission of weakness at once, but surprisingly St. Luke’s smile grew bigger. “It is, isn’t? That’s what makes it so compelling to me.”
“What is it?”
St. Luke’s smile turned sly. “I can’t tell you all our secrets,” he said, walking over to a metal lab table where the masked techs had laid out a grid of shoebox-sized white specimen containers marked with blood-red biohazard symbols. “For now, let’s just say that that black box is the alpha and omega of my operation here, and the reason for this.”
He removed the lid from the closest box and reached inside, pulling out a two-inch-long glass vial filled with a sickly green, viscous liquid that glowed like emerald fire under the lab’s bright lights. “You know what this is, of course?”
Korigan had never seen the green slime before, but he wasn’t stupid. “That’s the drug,” he said, turning all the way around so he wouldn’t have to look at the terrifying box of darkness anymore. “The one that’s been making junkies go crazy.”
“It does a lot more than that,” St. Luke said, putting the vial back in its box. “But this was just our first attempt, and as you saw from today’s experiments, far too strong. But we learn from our mistakes, and I think you’ll find the next version is far more up your alley.”