“Holy cow.” The boy stared back, unblinking.
Hammerson noticed the blanket over the dog’s shoulders looked weirdly lumped as if there were real shoulder joints there, and it was broad, and not the usual narrow, slim slope of a canine’s front half. He also had the impression it wasn’t sitting on its haunches, but resting like a person.
“Fenrir.” Harper nodded, but to the dog.
There was silence for a few moments, as the group took the large dog in. It was Joshua who broke it.
“Yes,” Joshua said, his eyes on the dog. “Yes, I will. I promise.”
“What, honey?” Aimee looked down, and then crouched beside the boy.
Joshua ignored her, never turning away from Fen. “I promise he’ll be my friend forever. No, my brother.” He nodded. “Yes, with honor, nobility, and strength, I promise.”
The dog grunted and closed its luminous eyes. Joshua turned, beaming. “He said yes.”
Harper nodded. “I knew Big Fen would. He can sense a good heart.”
Aimee scoffed. “You’re kidding, right?”
Harper shrugged, about to respond, when Hammerson silenced him with a look.
“Hmm.” Aimee raised an eyebrow.
Joshua led the way, his grin splitting his face. “Fenrir wanted him brought up with honor, nobility, and strength. I promised I’d do it.” He looked up at Aimee. “Torben is the firstborn of Fenrir and Morgana.”
They came to a larger area that housed eight tumbling puppies, all wrestling, rolling, and playing. All except one that sat at the gate. Joshua ran and then crouched before it.
“Torben.”
The puppy put its paw up at the wire, and Joshua did the same as they stared into each other’s blue eyes.
Aimee looked incredulous. “We have to ask its father for his permission to adopt, and then here it is with its travel bag all packed and ready to go — where’s its toothbrush and pajamas?”
Hammerson laughed. “I guess sometimes things were just meant to happen.”
On the way back out to the SUV, Joshua had the dog in his arms, and talked softly to it as it dozed. The trio had to wait as a school bus came through the front gate and pulled up, disgorging a group of boisterous teenage students.
One of the students, a tall young man, stood looking up at Fermilab for a moment, and Hammerson saw he looked to have Native American features. He turned to them and spotted the puppy in Joshua’s arms.
“Hey, nice pup — Shepherd, huh? I’ve got one at home.” He went to walk on, but Joshua spoke up.
“Yep, and he’s mine.” Joshua looked up at him. “His name’s Torben, but I’ll call him Tor.”
“Okay, cool.” He nodded, and stuck out a hand. “I’m Arn.”
“Joshua.” He shook Arn’s hand, his smile immediately dropping. “You’re going on a trip.”
Arn shrugged, and looked less than enthused. “Yeah, school excursion — to this place.”
Joshua shook his head slowly. “No, a lot further than that.”
“What?” Arn frowned, letting Josh’s hand go.
“Joshua?” Aimee stepped toward him, but the boy continued to stare up at the youth. Arn backed away. “A bit freaky, dude.”
Hammerson’s phone beeped and he pulled it from his pocket to check the message. “Excuse me.” He turned away as he read. There had been a significant incident at NASA’s astrobiology labs where the samples from the mountaintop had been taken. He felt a knot of unease coil in his gut.
Jack Hammerson put the phone back in his pocket and turned. He pasted on a smile and laid his hand on Joshua’s shoulder.
“Time to go, Josh. Let’s get your new pal home.”
Hammerson tapped his chin with a knuckle as he read the reports from NASA’s astrobiology labs. It was a fucking nightmare.
He gritted his teeth as he stared; give him armed combat, give him terrorists, or something tangible to fight against, and he’d prevail every damn time. But this was something that scared the shit out of him.
He replayed the footage from inside lab-45, seeing the two scientists first become infected, corrupted, and then, literally dissolve into lumps of mud, and just like Alex had said in his data squirt, mud that goddamn moved.
Whether it was some sort of aggressive mutation-causing pathogen in the atmospheric gas sample, or making contact with that creepy slime shit, the agreed prognosis from the NASA science teams was that as the temperature increased the biological matter became triggered, and its growth, aggression, and appetite accelerated. Bottom line: avoid physical contact at all cost.
The only upside he could take away was that the laboratory flash burn NASA initiated for full sterilization had totally eradicated everything. Significant heat left nothing but ash.
Hammerson then looked at the last of his related reports, the one that contained satellite data images of the Orlando crash site, viewed as a time-stamped progression map. The atmosphere bubble and the weird mist in the mountaintop crater continued to enlarge. Within hours, a few days at most, it would spill over the crater lip and begin to advance along the Alaskan Revelation Mountain valleyways.
He had ordered the retrieval, read confiscation, of the final samples that were in the NASA HAZMAT vaults and had them transferred to one of their military biology research centers. USSTRATCOM had their own specialized biohazard facilities that dealt with biological warfare defense and design and it was superior even to those of the CDC.
They’d done additional testing on the biomaterial from the mountaintop and the results were alarming, and, so far, a long way from illuminating. They found the gases were loaded with free-floating spores that seemed to seek out cells, inserting themselves into them, like sperm into the ova.
For one experiment, they introduced the material to two different laboratory rats in identical sealed capsules. In a few hours, one of the rats was nothing but a pile of gray sludge — that moved — just like what happened to the two scientists in NASA’s lab-45.
But the next capsule’s occupant had also been changed, but not in the same way. As the rat’s body became saturated with the spores, it had grown bigger, stronger, and had shed its fur. It then developed what looked like a carapace of armor plating and a face that made Jack’s hair stand on end. The rodent grew more eyes, larger teeth, and also a taste for flesh — it became an abomination from hell.
His scientists had told him the atmospheric gas sample had a unique biological content. The free-floating spores acted on an organism’s genetic material triggering changes at the cellular and DNA level. Basically, it was a rapid-acting mutagen unlike anything they had ever seen.
The scientists had postulated that it probably didn’t know it was causing problems, in fact, what it was doing was triggering massive changes — evolutionary — to cope with potential new surroundings. Anything inhaling, ingesting or even coming into contact with this stuff was going to be… altered, one way or another.
Hammerson ran one large hand up through his iron-gray crew cut. How did it choose? Why did one rat become a monster and the other absorbed? He read on.
They assessed that the biological material could have begun as a single spore, and then started to grow the more it ingested. They surmised that the spores acted on a creature’s DNA in different ways — some organisms it would bond with and accelerate their evolutionary changes to become a grotesquery. And others it would use to grow itself. This is what it had done with the NASA scientists — fed on them and converted them into itself.
He looked again at the before pictures of the rats — they seemed identical. But something in one of them had caused it to become a nightmare. Perhaps the spores had determined that one was strong enough to take the changes. And the other was fit only to serve as protein to be assimilated as a spore factory.