Chapter 4
Wednesday, April 11
Lisha watched the wind and rain lash the window pane and tried to concentrate. The rocking of the converted oil rig wasn’t helping her get any work done. The early April gale was only a Category Two on the Saffir-Simpson scale, or so the crew said. To her, born and raised in New York’s Bronx, it was damn near the end of the world!
“Just a little storm, Dr. Breda,” a lilting female voice laughed from the corner of the lab. Lisha glanced over to where Assa, her young, redheaded lab assistant, worked away on the spectrograph, one ear sporting a compact Bluetooth set that no doubt pumped non-stop techno music.
“Little storm to you maybe,” Lisha grumbled and popped another anti-nausea pill before turning back to her computer. “Crazy Scottish bitch.”
“Crazy Irish bitch!” Assa reminded her. Of course, Lisha knew where she was from; it was part of their banter. “The sequencer finished its run.”
“Thanks,” she replied and checked the computer. Once she’d returned from New Mexico, she’d turned over the samples of the unusual fox to another team and had gone back to work on The Project. The first results from the fox’s bio-genetic workups had just come onto her large plasma display, and they made her lean in closer. “What the hell?” she mumbled as she looked at the genetic sequencing.
“Problem, Boss?”
“The protein sequences are all messed up.” Assa was there in a moment, looking over her shoulder. The small girl pushed her mop of red hair back over one shoulder as she read the data and nodded. “Polluted is all I can think.”
“Look at this,” Assa said and pointed over Lisha’s shoulder, “and this.”
“I know; it’s very unusual.” Lisha sighed and leaned back, scratching her chin unconsciously. It would take days to order another sample prepared and run. And budget constraints were already tight enough on The Project. After the exposé last month, a lot of their Euro funding had dried up. A new super race, indeed. Idiots. She was about to order the sample when her phone rang. Assa went back to her work, and Lisha picked up the receiver. As her luck (or lack thereof) would have it, it was one of the directors calling from San Diego.
An hour later, she hung up, her ear sore from holding the handset while he complained about her leaving the site and how far behind schedule they were.
“There is no such thing as a schedule for what we are doing,” she tried to remind the annoyed idealist, who proceeded to soldier on with his complaints, regardless of what she said. In the end, Lisha sat and endured the verbal assault assuring the director they would continue to make progress as quickly as possible. She also tossed in that the trip to New Mexico would garner some positive press from the university department she’d visited. She didn’t think he was convinced, but he was eventually placated, and she was allowed to get back to work.
It was two hours past dinner when one of the scientists came in and asked her what she wanted to do with the fox samples. “Do you have the samples I saw earlier? Sorry, I forget your name?”
“Grant Porter,” he said with a shrug. “Here are those samples. I was going to toss them in the burner before cutting out for the day.”
“Can I see them?” She followed him back to the prep area of the lab, and he removed three glass slides from a container marked with red tape and the word “contaminated.” She put on a pair of nitrile gloves and examined them. The microscopically-thin slice of animal flesh was visible. Worse…it was green. “You using a new dye?”
Grant glanced at the supply shelf then shook his head. “Nope, same stuff for years.”
“Then why is the sample green?”
The man opened his mouth to comment, then shut it and cocked his head, “You know, I really don’t know!” He picked up one of the other two samples; it had a similar ghastly green hue. “All I can guess is there was some sort of a reaction to the reagents.”
“But why not those samples?” Lisha asked and gestured to another rack of slides on a nearby counter. They all had the normal bluish tint.
“I’ll run some tests and see what I can figure out.”
Lisha nodded and returned to her work. Grant picked up one of the green sample slides and eyed it suspiciously. He reached for another sample without looking and suddenly jerked back his hand with a hiss. He’d caught the corner of the slide and wasn’t wearing his nitrile gloves outside of the lab. “Damn it,” he said, squeezing a drop of blood from the nick. He grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer off the shelf and spread a liberal amount of it on the wound, ignoring the flash of burning pain from the alcohol-based goo. Wiping it clean on a paper towel, he tossed it in the flash burner and headed back to his lab, the incident forgotten.
* * *
Lisha didn’t know why she got up in the middle of the night. She’d worked 14 hours in the lab crunching genome numbers and running simulations. The last thing she needed was to be up at three a.m., staring at her dimly-lit compartment roof, wondering why she was awake.
“Might as well go to the bathroom,” she mumbled to the darkness. A minute later, she had her robe wrapped around her and was stumbling out into the corridor, trying to remember if the head was to the left or the right.
A muffled cry rang out from her left. Lisha rubbed her eyes and looked that way. “What the hell?” She heard another cry, but this one was quieter and followed by a thump, like someone had punched the wall. Was someone having late sex with a coworker? The married quarters were one deck down, but it wasn’t unheard of for the younger staff to “hook up” as they called it. Such fraternization was against the official policy, but it happened nonetheless. She remembered the bathroom was the other way.
Lisha turned toward the bathroom just as a door opened in the direction of the sound. She glanced over her shoulder. The hallway was dimly lit as the rig went to power-saving mode each night at eleven o’clock. The figure that stood there seemed familiar. She tried to remember his name.
“Up late?” she asked. He seemed to sway slightly, his eyes glowing as they locked onto her. “You okay, Grant?” She finally recalled his name.
“Gnaaaah,” came the guttural reply. The man took a halting step, and Lisha was horrified. It was Grant Porter all right, only he wasn’t the same man. Bright red blood covered the front of his T-shirt and his lips were pulled back in a rictus of animalistic rage. She had no doubt she was the target of that rage.
“Oh God,” she cried out, and the man began to shamble toward her. Lisha ran and instantly tripped over her robe, sprawling painfully on the floor. The door to her right opened, and one of the German scientists stepped out.
“Dr. Breda?” he asked, rubbing his eyes, “are you okay?” Grant Porter launched himself at the man with a primal scream that made Lisha cover her ears and moan.
“Gott im himmel!” the man screamed as Grant bore him to the ground with his weight. “Was machst du, ahhrgh!” His complaint was cut off as teeth tore into his throat, fountaining blood in a crimson arc along the walls, almost to the ceiling.
“Noooo,” Lisha moaned, “this isn’t happening!”
Grant stood up unsteadily, leaving his victim on the floor. The hapless man lay on his back, hands grasping at his ravaged throat, gurgling as blood spurted between his fingers in ever slower pulses, his thrashing slowing. Lisha crawled backward on her hands and feet like a crab and began to scream. All along the hall, doors opened. The technician chewed a bloody mouthful of flesh and swallowed as he surveyed the stunned faces. With a snap of his jaws and a snarl, he attacked.
* * * * *