“A little.” But the thought of eating didn’t interest Reese. “But it can wait.”
“Are you sure? It might improve your attitude.”
Reese huffed. “I’ll have you know this attitude is a survival response to years of teaching high school.”
Harrington chuckled and shook his head. They crossed to the other side of the parking deck to a trailer.
“The techs were able to recover some old footage from the surveillance cameras.” Harrington opened the door. Inside, conservative chairs with enough padding to suggest they wouldn’t leave bruises on someone’s ass and a table with several laptops and a lot of wiring.
Phillips sat in one of the seats with a look of expectation on her face.
“I’m guessing you’re not very surprised to see me.”
She gestured to the chair beside her. Reese sat. Harrington leaned against a cabinet behind him and folded his arms.
“I need you to look at something and tell me what’s going on.” Phillips angled the laptop toward Reese. “Hit the enter key to start and stop it. The arrow keys to fast forward or rewind.”
A view of level four showed on the screen with personnel frozen mid-movement. Reese hit the enter key. There was no sound to accompany the men and women working in the lab. Some smiled, some laughed. They exchanged charts and looked over each other’s shoulder at whatever data showed on a computer screen.
“Go ahead and fast forward it to 0100.”
Reese did. As the counter ticked off the last couple minutes before he hit stop, people began to stagger around as if confused before they dropped to the floor in rapid succession.
He hit play, and the recording resumed its normal speed. A few of the people moved their arms and legs before falling still. Reese’s stomach sank.
“Is there something I’m—”
“Just watch.”
A blur flickered over the screen, and the bodies shredded, peeling apart in what was an otherwise empty room except for the haze of black. Crimson smeared across the tile and castoff dotted the walls. Massive footprints, five long toes, stamped the ground under a black phantom presence.
Reese squinted. There shouldn’t have been an indication they were there. Warping in the picture at most but never any kind of form.
“Dr. Dante?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Why aren’t they showing up on the recording.”
“Remember when I told you there are different Phases?”
She nodded.
“When the Anubis is in Phase two, at that point it goes from being biological to whatever makes up the ichor and the subject acquires the inhuman form, the subject will be invisible to most recording devices.”
Phillips gave him a questioning look.
“The closest thing we could come up with to explain the phenomenon is a similarity to quantum interference, which is the concept that elementary particles can not only be in the same place at the same time, but they can cross, causing them to act like waves. But we’re dealing with mass that isn’t made of matter. It’s something we can’t see, yet we do see it. It doesn’t emit energy but affects space-time, which means they should have a gravitational field—”
“Dr. Dante.” She nodded at the computer.
“Right, the video.”
Reese hit the enter key again. A half minute in, the entire picture warped, bits of wall scattered, swiped free by nothing, the ceiling buckled, metal ripped, glass cleaved from the walls dividing the labs, falling to the ground and shattering into tiny fragments. In less than five seconds on the counter, three human bodies flickered into reality they lay broken among the shredded corpses.
Exactly what Reese expected to see when capturing an Anubis in Phase two. A stark contrast to the first part of the recording.
A haze manifested, darkening the closer it moved toward the camera before almost solidifying into a human shape as the Anubis shifted from Phase two to one and the figure moved out of view. But they had come from the direction of the foyer leading to level five.