“You make it sound like they change shape.” One of the men started to laugh, but it withered. “You got to be fucking kidding me.”
“You saw the prints.”
The man swallowed. “Yeah, but how the hell is that even possible?”
“I told you we did things we shouldn’t have. Things no one had the right to do.” Reese turned away. If they were repulsed by what he’d done—and they should have been—he didn’t want to see it.
The remains of the glass doors to the side lab on Reese’s left hung from their hinges. Nothing much about level four had changed except the large pieces of equipment in what used to be the MRI room.
He walked over.
Jones stopped him. “You want to go somewhere, ask.”
“The walls are transparent. There isn’t anywhere for anyone to hide. And like I said before, if they wanted to kill us, we’d already be dead.” He pulled away.
Large banks of metal cabinets had replaced the specimen coolers. They covered the entire back wall.
“Dr. Dante, what are you looking at?”
“They’re cryo-units.” They’d stored a number of tissue samples in a smaller storage system when the project began. He took a step, and his foot slid, jerking him off balance. Reese’s hip caught the edge of an island counter. Test tubes toppled over and rolled off the side. They shattered, and the shards scattered until they hit the oily pink fluid coating the floor.
Strings of it dripped at a steady pace from the bottom of the units.
“Dr. Dante?” Harrington said.
“I’m here.” He got his feet under him and shuffled closer to the cabinets. He gripped the handle with his Tyvek gloved hand and pulled.
A small puff of steam rolled from the widening gap followed by another bucket worth of goo. Familiar cylindrical units lined the shelves.
Pinkish fluid welled at the tops and rolled down the sides. Pressed against the thin windows on the sides of the cylinders, curled fetuses in various stages of development.
Reese stared. No. Impossible. Even Echols wasn’t that stupid.
Someone said his name, but they were too far away.
The early testing involved live animals that rejected the ichor and expelled fluid similar to what ran from the cryo-unit. They often saved the bodies for study to try to find out why.
But they’d never used live human subjects, let alone…this. Fuck. What the hell had happened here?
A heavy weight landed on Reese’s shoulder, and he jerked, almost losing his balance again. Jones had his rifle over his shoulder. For a moment his face was lost behind the light reflecting across the hood mask.
“You okay?”
Reese shook his head. “Colonel?”
“Yes?”
“I need access to the main computers. Can the tech guys get them running?”
“Why?”
“Those are human fetuses in there. They’re drowning in rejection plasma. That only happens when ichor is rejected from live cells.”
“Those were alive?”
“Yeah, they had to be.”
“How is that possible?”