Like an idiot, he didn’t bother to consider that they would be in danger. The reports of the Turned were still scattered at best, and the sightings and attacks were isolated and more prominent in remote locations in the western reaches of the state.
He wanted to give Laura an opportunity to get the things that meant the most to her. Things which would be lost had she not come. He didn’t know how bad things would eventually get, and if they would ever see their house again.
The smell of formalin pulls him from that dreadful day, and he finds himself looking into Lily’s glassy eyes. He takes a core sample of her iris, and cornea, and pushes the collected tissue into a small specimen container. It floats down, spiraling into the preservative, finally coming to rest on the bottom of the jar.
Just like dear little Lily here, he’ll bring the research subjects in, one at a time, and study them until he has an answer… the answers… whatever answers he may glean from his countless hours leaning over specimen containers, and agar plates, and microscopes. Even Rose will come in… eventually to be studied until there is nothing left to study, not even the smallest piece of connective tissue.
Neville!
The voice calls to him again. Louder. But this time he knows it for what it is. A phantom of the past, a torturous condemnation that would never let him forget the choice to leave the safety of the base, with his beautiful, frightened wife, and defenseless child. Only a fool, he knows now, would have done such a stupid thing. And he pays the price for his ignorance, every long, long day without the two little lights of his life.
A few boxes of odds and ends, a family photo album, and a some extra changes of clothing were all that they’d managed to save from the gnawing teeth of the rats.
Before he opened the door to the living room, to walk back outside to the jeep, and leave their home for the last time, both he and Laura took one final look around their dust-coated living room. Laura took the baby from her husband and held her close to her breast as she cried softly.
Laura said nothing as she turned and opened the door to walk, bravely, from their home. As the door opened, it did so onto the side of a blood-strewn jeep, and tattered remains of an olive-green military uniform.
It was too late for him to help Laura and the baby. She stepped onto the redwood porch before he could stop her, he tried to reach for her, for the baby, but it was a fruitless gesture.
That thing, that monstrous congealed heap of an unearthly creature, and the human pieces dangling from it, was on top of them before he could react.
Laura screamed, the child shrieked. Mercifully, it was over before they had realized the end had come. They had been snatched away from him and out of his life forever.
It hadn’t seen him. Too busy engorging itself on his wife and young daughter’s limp corpses. Neville Washington Shaw disappeared into the shadows of the house. He buried himself in the closet of the bedroom he had shared with Laura.
The rats clawed and ate at him for hours until the soldiers from Camp Able came and found him cowering there.
He shakes his head to clear the image from his mind, he knows it won’t stay away for long. He shakes the lingering fragments of the past away and wipes the tears from his clouded eyes with the sleeve of his lab coat.
Yes, these things will answer for the loss of his wife and his sweet baby girl. The Turned and the research subjects are one in the same, MONSTERS! Predators. That’s all, and nothing more.
He will keep going, keep cutting, keep digging. Deeper and deeper, until he has a remedy that will take them down once and for all, no matter what, no matter how long it takes. And, should he run out of subjects before he has all the answers, he’ll have the soldiers collect more, and repeat the process all over again.
But, for now, he still has too many questions, some questions to which he already knows the answers. But the most important answer still eludes and taunts him, like for instance, why are the affected children so different than affected adults?
Perhaps it’s because the physiology of the pediatric host is markedly different than that of the adult host population.
Of course, they reacted differently to the affliction. But why did they not undergo the physical transformations… mutations… that the adult victims had undergone?
He could only theorize; the pediatric bodies were a perfect, hospitable host, accepting whatever contamination they had met in the first place, during the initial event.
Dr. Valentine had said it was something that had fallen out of the object.
Perhaps the contamination is parasitic in nature and not an infection at all.
Yet no parasite has been confirmed in any of the subjects’ specimens to date. None of the samples came back positive for any parasitical infestation whatsoever.
He remains perplexed and frustrated, and anxious… impatient to a heightened degree. He has the feeling he’s chasing his tail, tugging at endless strings. Chasing squirrels, in fact.
Shaw turns his past research over and over in his brain, one bewildering stone at a time, looking for anything he might have missed. Replaying the tapes will take days.
He cuts Lily’s scalp with a number 10 scalpel. The incision is made from her right ear to her left ear, across the top of her head.
Her sticky blood drools onto the autopsy table and puddles like thick syrup. Lines of the hemoglobin stretch like honey from the cut. He has tested the blood tirelessly. Whatever causes the thick, sticky substance in the blood is still an unidentified, mystery component. Shaw is no hematologist.
He’s unfamiliar with the element which has merged with the hemoglobin causing, what appears to be purposeful coagulation of sorts; designed by intent and supporting the optimal hemostasis of the host’s body, and whatever the hell else is in it.
He peels Lily’s scalp gently forward. The feeling of it opening to reveal a potential clue, to an answer, to anyone of his questions is an exhilarating prospect.
Her small skull is partially exposed, and the fresh smell of raw human tissue reaches him. He pinches his surgical mask tighter to the bridge of his nose, leaving blood-stained prints on it. He pays the smell of it no mind and proceeds with the procedure as planned.
The temporalis muscle releases the scalp from the skull easily. Shaw peels it away by prodding the connecting tissues with his fingertips. A faint tearing sound accompanies the action; it satisfies his need to look inside the girl. He dissects the temporalis muscle with the scalpel and folds it forward until the flap lays across her nose, concealing her death-stare.
It’s time for the bone saw. The clunky instrument springs to life filling the room with a whine. He forgoes making the notch that will allow him to place the skull back together after he removes the brain from its hiding place. No crying parents are waiting for their dead child to come back, presentable as an unblemished lamb, after an autopsy.
The saw’s teeth dig in, excavating a narrow channel through the bone, circumferentially around the exposed rise skull. The smell of heated bone lifts into the air covering the smell of raw flesh. The grinding hum of the saw disrupts the silence of the procedure room, rebounding from the surface of the indifferent walls, tiled in colors of sky blue and dazzling white.
Splinters of bloody bone marrow sputter from the saw blade, rising into the air. A moist, red canopy of bio-sludge falling to rest in muddy clumps on his shoes.