"This is impossible," Stacy said. "You can't just engineer something like this out of the blue. There would have to be a hundred steps between the fungus and this result, all of which would be major medical breakthroughs. There is something you're not telling us."
Waters turned on her, and his watery eyes seemed particularly crazed.
"Make no mistake, Dr. Stacy, there is a lot I am not telling you. You will know only what you need to know to help further my research. I appreciate your intelligence, but you are a two-legged lab rat to me." He pointed to the glass. "I am taking medicine to an entirely new level. Me. I have done the work here. These results are my doing."
Monroe spoke what came across as an afterthought, "This is about saving the planet. None of us are as important as that goal. Tell us what we need to know, or, um, you'll be going in there next."
It seemed to Major Gant that Monroe might pull the big strings but Waters controlled the labs and research. This meant that if Waters planned to use them in an experiment, any confessions to Monroe would be a waste of breath.
Inside the cell, Costa grappled with the walking corpse, holding its wrists and swinging it against the wall.
"Die, you fuck … just die!" And he slammed its head repeatedly.
Gant realized that the man hoped to find the weak spot in the skull. His only chance of defeating the creature was to expose that core and crush it, probably with a stomp or repeated blows against the hard wall.
But Costa had grown tired while the zombie seemed unfazed by the beating it suffered.
"Let him out," Stacy pleaded. "Please."
What happened next happened fast.
The thing inside Miss Clemons nipped Costa's nose. Not much, just a little. Just enough to cause him to instinctively smack her face away … releasing her left arm in the process. That left arm came around and raked across his cheek, splitting open the skin and sending a sprinkle of blood splashing onto the two-way mirror.
He reached for the wound and tried to back off, but she dove in with her teeth again, latching on to his chin and chewing off a patch of flesh.
Stacy gasped and sobbed. Gant squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
Both of the unit's arms came around and dug into Costa's shoulders. He tried to fight them off but the thing's jaws kept working and the nails dug deep. It barely noticed as he rammed a knee into its gut. Its head shook but did not retreat when Costa blasted it with an elbow strike.
The endgame came when the agent lost his balance, falling to the ground with the parasite-infected body on top, clawing and biting.
"He put up a good fight," Waters remarked coldly. "This was, of course, an optimal situation. The unit's central core was invisible, deep inside the throat of the cadaver, and the body itself was perfect for hosting, in that it was intact and recently deceased."
"You are a sick man," Stacy said as she averted her tear-soaked eyes and her face scrunched into an expression of revulsion. "To stand here and watch … you're not human."
"You must detach yourself." Waters's response sounded very familiar to Thom Gant.
Stacy turned to Monroe and walked over to him. Gant saw that Monroe had also averted his eyes.
"What about you?" she asked and wiped her cheek on the black sleeve of her BDUs. "This is your solution to population control? You're going to allow innocent people — children even — to be attacked and murdered like this? To be torn apart?"
"No, I hate it," Monroe responded. "But this is the best weapon we have to win this war. It meets every need. It is perfect for the task. Yes, messy, and horrible, but it fits the need."
Waters — his eyes still staring at the carnage inside the test chamber — spoke his thoughts aloud as if no one else existed in the room at that moment: "I must admit, sometimes I do get caught up in the emotion of it all. Yes, to realize that we are dealing with a new organism that holds so much promise."
"That makes me wonder who gave it to you," Gant said.
Waters answered fast, "This is mine. All mine. I took the translations and grew it … nurtured it … into what you see here."
"Translations?"
Monroe halted any response to Gant's question by telling Stacy, "Why don't you talk to your soldier friend about weapons and the messes they make. How many children were killed by American smart bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan? How many times did our heroes get the bad guy but also kill families? In war, things are messy. And in this case, I don't have any other choice. This is the smartest of all weapons, gift-wrapped perfectly for our needs."
"So many other, more conventional means of biological and viral warfare and you choose this?" Gant asked.
Monroe responded, "None as perfect as this, and this has the added benefit of not being on anyone's radar screen. The response will be shock and terror, and that means there will be no response. Stockpiles of vaccines and medicines will be of no use because this will be something no one has ever seen before. On top of that, cultural and religious considerations will make this a difficult infection to stop even when the means might be available."
Gant remarked, "I see that. Terror is as much a part of this weapon as the parasite itself. That makes you a sadistic son of a bitch."
"This is an opportunity," Monroe defended, but the tone in his voice confirmed Gant's suspicion that the men in this laboratory were not the originators of the organism. It sounded very much like Monroe viewed the parasite as a serendipitous gift, not the result of research and hard work. "For every negative you can point out, we have found a dozen positives that will ensure it will do the job we require effectively and fast. There will be pain, yes, I regret that. But this organism will perform exactly as needed."
"A real monster," Waters mumbled as a tear born from his condition rolled along his dark cheek. "The biggest monster of the them all."
"And you hold its leash," Stacy spat. "What happens now?"
Waters looked to her, then back into the room and tapped the glass.
"Just wait and see."
Monroe and Waters wandered to a corner of the room and whispered. Gant heard snippets of their conversation, phrases like "increasing rate of response" and "unforeseen adaptations" and — most curious of all—"beyond what we expected from the initial equations."
However, Gant felt fatigue setting in, to the extent that he slid to the floor and sat with his back against the wall. His knee hurt like crazy and he felt a pang of pain from his shoulder, both leftover reminders of his painful experience in the bowels of Red Rock back in Pennsylvania. Gant wondered what kind of scars this mission would leave him with, assuming he actually survived.
Stacy slid down alongside Gant. He noticed that she tried very hard to hide her tears. It dawned on him that these were not tears of fear, despite how afraid she — and he — were. Instead, these were tears of empathy and anger at having watched a man die in a brutal laboratory experiment.
Thom sometimes wished he could feel that type of sadness for the victims he came across in his line of work. Yes, watching Costa die had elicited anger. That was a much different response than sadness.
At the same time he wondered how long it would take — if they did survive — for Annabelle Stacy to grow the same shell he wore. She would need it for this line of work, but would lose much in the process.
"I can't understand why they are doing this," she said quietly as the guards looked on. "They can't be this stupid. Creating animated corpses as a means of population control? What do they expect is going to happen?"
"This is not exactly the first idea I would think someone would come up with," Gant answered. "I believe there is something more at work here."
"What? You think these guys are lying about all of this?"