So Maddox had gone to the next step, without informing Ridley, apparently. He had used Wnt proteins from some of the creatures they had utilized the Hydra serum on and the regeneration began to go off the charts. He hadn’t dared to use a raw undiluted sample from the Hydra itself because the salamanders already had regenerative abilities. Unfortunately, the treatments had had yet another unintended side effect—rapid cell division. The man had had a few startling failures that resulted in melting and even exploding amphibians. Lori snickered at the thought of exploding creatures coating that lab weasel Maddox with slime. The man also couldn’t seem to get the creatures to breed anymore after he had experimented on them. He suspected it was because of the radiation but he really wasn’t sure.
This was the information the intruders had looked at. Lori wasn’t certain why. She definitely had not seen any salamanders running around the base—in fact, they hadn’t even found any in the labs. Then it occurred to her.
Wait. Why didn’t we find any in the labs?
She flipped her monitor back to a Manifold era map of the facility to figure out where the salamander lab had been. It had been on the level Manifold had called Y level. Under the main labs level, where the gun battle had taken place between Knight and Gen Y. Just one lab away from being directly under the lab in which the gun battle had taken place, in fact.
Lori wiped sweat from her brow as she recalled everything she could about the cleanup and data mining procedures. Eli Jacobs had brought in a hazmat team to clean up the chemical soup that had spilled as a result of the gun battles and the Hydra’s resuscitation and escape from the facility. And the damage had been done to the labs level and two levels below it, as cracks had appeared in the floor as after grenade damage…
Oh no…
The salamanders had been under the Hydra. They had been contaminated by the chemical spill. They had received a stronger dose of genetic material from the Hydra. Its blood had mixed with the spilled liquids, as had more than a few gallons of human blood.
But there were no salamanders on that level when Jacobs went in…
Like several trains all slamming into each other after speeding into a railway turntable, ideas and thoughts crunched into Lori Stanton’s brain. The cavern below the Labs section! Radiation! Genetic material from the Hydra! Black Zero was down in the cavern! Deep Blue just went to Labs! Rapid cell division! Growth! Regeneration!
Lori frantically checked the motion sensors for the Labs section of the base. Lots of moving bodies in the train platform. Even more heading toward it from the direction of the access closet that led down to the caverns.
Dear God, she thought, one creature with ultimate regeneration was insane. There’s got to be at least fifty of them.
Before she could figure out a way to contact Deep Blue to warm him though, she heard a loud metallic thumping noise. Lori’s body froze completely. She was worried about Deep Blue and Black Zero, but it hadn’t occurred to her to be afraid for herself. Until now. Everything was silent except for the hum of her CPU and the air conditioning vent.
She slowly reached for the keyboard to switch the window on her monitor from examining the motion sensors placed in the Labs section where Deep Blue had gone, to the Central section—where she sat now. The screen refreshed and all the blood drained from her face. Then the metal grill over the ventilation duct above her head clanged open, as it burst downward. She tried to scream, but she didn’t have time.
10.
Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
The gunfire and screams sent all the men on the platform into complete panic and disarray. Duncan, however, was startled for only an instant, before opening fire on the laptop. It took him three shots to hit it and shatter the device into silicon shards and plastic fragments. The man had sprung up from his crouch and started to run, but Duncan eventually made the shot.
That was when they came streaming out of the far hallway like a wave of darkness and streaks of light. At first, Duncan couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The shapes were liquid, and shiny and squirming. Easily as large as Floridian alligators, they came flowing over the floor, ceiling and walls out of the hallway and into the larger cavernous space around the platform.
Salamanders? Duncan’s mind was stunned. What the hell?
But these were not ordinary salamanders. The Gen Y team members remaining on the platform were firing at the creatures with a steady stream of MP5 fire, but the creatures seemed to suffer little damage. Mostly a shiny black with several large dinner-plate sized bright yellow spots on their backs, the creatures were moving fast with their side-to-side wiggling motion, and they seemed to be attacking the Gen Y men. Duncan could see a few had a viscous white fluid on the tops of their backs and he recalled that some species of salamanders could emit a kind of poison from their pores.