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  An alarm sounded and a red light flashed as unseen machinery hummed to life. Craig could feel the air around him start to blow by like a soft breeze and watched as the smoke was pulled into the various ventilation grills and expunged from the room. As the smoke retreated the figure that appeared from within the smoke seemed to materialize out of shadow and slowly gained clarity and detail with every passing second. The trio all trained their weapons on the figure until it came fully into view.

  It was a man, an incredibly tall and muscular man so pale he almost looked like he had the same blue-gray pallor normally only seen in corpses. His hair was long, dark and matted as it fell down from his scalp and covered the majority of his face. He was dirty and dark patches of what might have been dried blood covered the right side of his torso, but they didn't serve to cover the extensive pattern of scarred flesh. The scars appeared to cover nearly every inch of the man's exposed skin and were comprised of either jagged laceration scars, or the insect-like chitinous scars from poorly sutured surgical procedures.

  The man must also have been close to seven feet tall, and yet none of those distinguishing characteristics were what drew Craig's attention. The first thing was the man's eyes. They were red where they should have been white. It was as if his eyes had filled with blood from multiple burst capillaries that never receded. The second thing was the device he held in his left hand. The man held out his hand to Craig as if he wanted him to take a good look at it.

  Craig recognized it instantly and immediately shouted, "Hold fire! Hold Fire!!!"

  "What?!?" Wrigley growled.

  "Do not shoot," Craig said in as calm a voice as he could muster, "he's holding a detonator."

  Chapter 5

  "How can you tell?" Wrigley asked without lowering his rifle.

  "It's one I've used before, but it looks like it's been modified."

  "Modified how?"

  Craig looked down to the man's thumb to see the trigger had already been depressed within the housing of the detonator.

  "Best guess," Craig sighed and lowered his rifle, "it's been altered to a 'dead-man's switch.'"

  Bingham looked back to his tablet, "Download complete. We have what we came for boss. Any idea how we get through the wild man and back outside?"

  Craig looked to Wrigley and gestured at him as he said, "Lower your weapon."

  Wrigley didn't look happy but he did as he was told.

  Craig took a hesitant step forward as he locked his eyes on the giant in front of him.

  "Okay big guy. You got us at an impasse.

  What do we do now?"

  The man tilted his head to the side in a manner similar to the way a confused puppy would at the sound of Craig's words.

  Craig frowned, "Can you understand me?"

  The man's head righted itself and returned Craig's stare. Craig looked into the man's eerie eyes and recognized the look behind them. There was nothing more than a soul-chilling, vacant emptiness behind those red eyes that left only the most primal of consciousness keeping the man functioning. The man, whoever he was, had been mentally broken to such an extent that there was very little of what could pass as human cognition. Craig had seen it before on the vacant expressions of POW's who had been physically tortured beyond the point of sanity. Rape victims also carried such expressions with them, most of whom never fully recovered regardless of the time and the excellence of counseling. It was as if a person was stripped of all things that made them into who and what they were, until only the animal intelligence remained. Craig realized that trying to reason with this man was futile as he, most likely, couldn't comprehend what was being said to him.

  Craig looked around the lab. Someone had to be in control of this man and that someone was probably watching what was happening right now.

  "Enough of this!" Craig shouted to the area of paneled glass of the lab as Wrigley and Bingham looked at each other uneasily. "Talk to me!"

  A voice, mockingly casual came over a loudspeaker, "Mmmmm...yes?"

  Wrigley and Bingham raised their weapons, surprised by the voice, but Craig didn't flinch as he held his ground. "You clearly want something. What?"

  "I...want something from you?" the voice spoke with a chuckle. "If I remember correctly you are the one's trespassing on my location."

  "The whole assignment was a sham from the beginning. I'm thinking it was you who hired us in the first place and manipulated me and my team here for some reason. I want to know why."

  Silence came from the speakers.

  When Craig had waited long enough he shouted, "This isn't going to end well for anyone! We won't let you take us prisoner and if you have your," Craig pointed to the man holding the detonator, "thing, let go of that trigger, then it's likely the explosion will rupture the chamber. I figure the room is pressurized, so the breach of the air seals will take out the entire area. He'll destroy your entire lab in the explosion!"

  Craig let that bit of obvious logic simmer for a brief moment before he again shouted, "So tell me what you want!"

  "I'm impressed, you know. You're very smart for a soldier; however, there is something of which you are mistaken."

  A cold and nervous sweat beaded on Craig's brow at those words.

  "And what might that be?"

  Whoever was talking through the speaker must have moved in closer to the microphone he had been speaking into as his voice turned into a near hiss that was amplified by the volume of the speakers.

  "That the detonator is hooked up to…explosives."

  Craig frowned in confusion, and then realization hit him squarely in the face as his legs threatened to buckle under his weight. The vents in the walls, the seals on the doors, the lab buried underground, the fact that entire space was an airtight containment unit meant that there could only be one use for such a structure.

  Craig's eyes shot wide as he screamed, "WAIT!!!"

  The naked feral man in front of him blinked as if he had been surprised by something he just heard and released the trigger on the detonator. The air vents responded to the signal and automatically closed with the sound of metal scraping on metal while an ear popping sensation burst into Craig’s ears as the room sealed. Wrigley and Bingham instinctively ran up the stairs for the door. Craig followed but had known that the moment the immense chamber had been pressurized there was no hope of them opening it.

  Then the room went silent and all of the fluorescent lights shut off and red emergency floodlights snapped on as a siren began to blare over unseen loudspeakers. Despite the noise, the sound of a couple of the air vents reopening could just be heard followed by a slight hissing noise as dark wisps, not unlike smoke, flowed out of the vents and into the chamber.

  Craig tried to hold his breath but the smell of whatever was flowing into the space permeated the receptors in his nostrils and a cloyingly sweet smell registered within his brain. Craig blew some of the air he had stored in his lungs out through his nose in an attempt to rid himself of the smell but it instead grew stronger. A moment later he felt the room spin and his head lolled to one side giving him a clear view of Wrigley who was convulsively retching out what looked like black slime while Bingham grabbed his head with both hands and was screaming as that same black slime oozed from his eyes, ears nose and mouth.

  Craig tried to make sense of what he was seeing when he realized he had let out the breath he had been holding. Panic shot through him and momentarily cleared his fogged mind, but not enough to stop him from taking in a breath. The pain shot into him like a thousand red-hot knives that seared him as they penetrated deeper and deeper into his lungs. He tried to blow out the breath of painful air, but instead gurgled on liquid and, as he tried to push out whatever was in his throat, the black slime that had escaped from his companions exploded from his mouth as well. Craig couldn't hear himself choking but his tongue could still taste the substance as it passed up and out of his throat. It wasn't black slime at all, it had just looked that way under the red floodlights. It was blood.r />
  Craig lost all sense of balance next and fell down the stairs to the floor of the lab. His body was so racked with pain that any additional fractures the fall might cause were lost in his background of pain. As he lay there and his vision started to blur with blood that was filling his eyes, he could see the feral man just standing there, watching the scene with that same confused puppy-dog head-tilt that he had worn earlier.

  A puddle began to spread across the floor where he lay as all the pain he felt suddenly disappeared. Craig had the strangest sense that he was literally sinking into the concrete beneath him as his mind went blank.

  Chapter 6

  The creature crouched down, looking at the body in front of him as its flesh melted away, leaving only bones. There was no cognitive process at work as to what was happening, nor why the invaders suddenly fell to the ground screaming as their bodies literally melted before his eyes.

  The wordless language of instinct from deep inside his core told him that he shouldn't touch the remains, but there was still the curious need to investigate what was happening that made him shuffle closer. He was aware that he used to understand a large variety of things, but he couldn't put his thoughts together with enough clarity to make sense of what was happening.

  He looked to the floor again. The threat that had been lying there was little more than a puddle of ichor, clothes and bones now. He knelt just outside the perimeter of the pool that used to be the man's body and peered at his reflection on the surface of the puddle of blood. The face that looked back was a stranger to him, but he wasn't frightened, instead he studied the unknown face and the strange eyes that stared back. Desperately he tried to put the pieces of his shattered thoughts back together, but was interrupted as the sound of the air vents again shifting position hummed in his ears. Unseen motors whirred to life and he could feel the air in the room rushing all around him. He stood and a thrumming in his ears distracted him from the fact that he had suddenly found it difficult to draw in a breath. The need to escape surged through him but his limbs grew weak and the urgency in his chest kept him from launching into action. Instead he simply staggered back to the center of the room, to his special spot, and sat down. He fought to catch his breath for a few more moments, but the vents had effectively sucked all the air from the room and, an instant later, he fell to the floor unconscious.

  An audible ticking sound came from the speakers as another gas filtered into the room for a few seconds before a countdown initiated.

  "Final decontamination procedure initiating in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... ignition sequence activated"

  There was one last slight clicking sound before the entire room exploded into flame as a tiny spark ignited the natural gas that had filled the room. The fire spread everywhere, covering the equipment, floors, walls, ceiling and every nook and cranny of the chamber. The fire was so brilliant that the blood and body fluids on the floor bubbled, but it was short lived as the lack of oxygen in the room limited the burn and snuffed out the fire almost as quickly as it had ignited. The fire, having consumed the remaining oxygen in the room created a natural vacuum and any tinder that there may have been remaining in the room was extinguished as well.

  It was only then that the siren stopped wailing and the red floodlights shut down as the fluorescent lights flickered back on. Men appeared at the glass viewing windows on the other side of the pressurized doors, wearing Level 5 Haz-Mat suits while a third hissing sound initiated from within the chamber.

  A mechanical voice reported after an announcing chime sounded, "Trace contaminant level: 0%. Air quality restored. Disengaging auto locking sequences."

  The wheels on the vaulted doors began to spin as the men in their Haz-Mat suits worked to disengage the seals on the doors that now slid open with a slight whooshing sound. The men poured into the room carrying mops and large plastic bins, followed by other men who rolled carts holding several individual gallon jugs of liquid chemicals inside the room.

  Without a word each man began to mop up, or otherwise decontaminate the lab space with the exception of two who moved to the unconscious man lying at the center of the room. Mysteriously, the huge man appeared to have been spared from the fire, which should not have been possible under the circumstances, although his skin had been slightly scorched in places and smoke rose from his hair. One of the suited individuals knelt down and rolled the giant from his side to his back, then removed a stethoscope and began to listen to various locations on the man's torso. The second individual pulled out a hypodermic needle that was already filled with a clear substance.

  The individual with the stethoscope nodded and lifted his head up and said, "He's alive. Let's get him back to his holding cell."

  "Is he sedated?" an authoritative voice called over the loudspeakers.

  The second man with the hypodermic had just removed the now empty needle from the man's neck.

  "Just finished, sir."

  "Good," the voice over the loudspeaker replied, "I’d hate to find you and the rest of the medical staff in pieces because you had forgotten."

  "No problem sir." The medical tech arose and walked to one of the carts as he disengaged the needle from the chamber of the hypodermic and placed both items in a red plastic biomedical waste container sitting on the cart.

  Once the floors were mopped clean and sterilized with bleach, including the stairwells and any other surface that the remains of the assault team might have come in contact with, four more individuals in Haz-Mat suits rolled a gurney into the lab. They peered down at the fallen enormous, and still unconscious form that was lying at their feet, as a number of additional techs abandoned their cleaning tools and surrounded the body. Together the techs knelt and, on the audible count of three, strained to lift the heavy man up and onto the gurney.

  The unconscious man's body thudded onto the metal gurney like a slab of meat, his skull clanging loudly on a side bar, before being summarily abandoned by the techs that had lifted him so that the men who had wheeled the gurney into the room could now remove him to another area to further complete the decontamination process on him.

  One man near the head of the gurney remained in the lab and looked to an electronic tablet as the giant was wheeled out and away. He tapped the screen a couple of times before setting the device down on a nearby countertop. The tech reached back behind his head and disengaged the hood of the Haz-Mat suit, pulled the polymer fabric off his head and took in a deep breath of the lab's refrigerated air that blew generously into the chamber.

  Dr. Phineas Whelan let out the breath and turned to the three others standing around the gurney and frowned.

  "As I am not currently melting into a pool of meat soup, I feel it is safe to assume that you can remove your hazardous material suits without apprehension."

  The three people still in their Haz-Mat suits looked momentarily at each other, as if they were wondering which of them were going to be the first to trust Dr. Whelan's words. Then, hesitantly, each individual began to slowly disconnect his or her headgear and breathe in the "fresh" air of the lab space.

  Dr. Whelan had stepped from the remainder of his Haz-Mat suit as a tech wheeled a cart over and lifted the suit from the floor placing it in a plastic garbage bag for later disposal. The tech waited patiently while the other three people stepped from their suits and Dr. Whelan began talking.

  "Gentlemen, and lady, may I assume that the results of the weapon speak for themselves?"

  No one replied, but Dr. Whelan hadn't truly been expecting any verbal confirmation before he continued, "What you just witnessed is the end result of the biological weapon research that my team and I were commissioned two years ago to assemble. Unfortunately, the parties who originally commissioned the research and development have apparently decided to renege on their original offer, and that is what brings us together here and now."

  One of the people who stepped from his Haz-Mat suits was a well-dressed, middle-aged man with dark features. Speaking in a thick Balkan accent he as
ked "What exactly was it that killed those men?"

  Dr. Whelan, clearly aggravated by the interruption, scowled at the man who did his best to maintain his composure under the glare.

  "The gas is a vaporized propellant of genetically altered Filoviridae organisms. These are combined with a compound specifically designed to accelerate the organism’s ability to invade and replicate themselves within the host's respiratory and renal tissues, thereby causing near instantaneous liquefaction of those organs and killing the host. As you have seen, the effects also have the added benefit of causing particularly gruesome fatalities that bring a certain...shall we say...psychological component to the table as well."

  The man with the Balkan accent rubbed his throat uncomfortably, but the other two people from the Haz-Mat suits stepped forward. One was a middle-aged woman who looked more intrigued than ill at ease over the prospect laid before her.

  "I thought that all previous attempts to weaponize those particular viruses was proven to be ineffectual by both the United States and Russia. How is it that you succeeded where the world's superpowers have failed?"

  Dr. Whelan smiled at the woman and seemed intrigued by her mild challenge.

  "In the simplest terms possible, the Filoviridae do not replicate themselves through cellular division. Instead they invade a host and utilize the amino acid chains of the host's cells to create copies of themselves. The host cell is destroyed in the process and a new viral organism is created. Now, due to the anaerobic nature of the Filoviridae, their transmission could not be relied upon to be distributed via an aerosol emitter... unless we add an additional amino acid to the chain. This additional amino acid serves no purpose other than to protect the Filoviridae from breakdown within an aerobic environment and thus allows for the aerosol distribution."