Jarvis fumbled in his pack. “What the hell is it?”
“No way,” said Lady Bee. Her eyes were wide and she smiled as the droning sound grew louder. “No way!”
“It’s a plane!” shouted St. George, going higher into the sky.
Chapter 4 - Signing Up
THEN
If your parents gave you a name like Augustus Phillip Hancock, you’d’ve joined the Army, too. Trust me. When I turned eighteen, I wanted to be anywhere but Little Rock, so when Eddie said he was going to sign up I did, too.
Now, I ain’t supposed to tell anyone about this. When I got pulled into Project Krypton last year, still a fuzzy right out of boot camp, they had us sign a bunch of waivers and security paperwork. Nobody with wives or kids. Nobody who was an only child. Then they shipped us off to Yuma, which I can say is dead center in the middle of nowhere. A woman from Broadsword company said she’d heard the whole project used to be based at Natick, like you’d expect, but it’d gotten so big they had to set up a whole sub-base out at Yuma for it. One of the fellas said the little base should be called Kandor, and two or three fellas thought that was really funny, but I didn’t get the joke.
One of the fellas in Broadsword also said all the paperwork we’d filled out was the same stuff they use for suicide missions, but I think that’s bullshit. Although, looking back at it, maybe it ain’t.
I was one of the lucky ones. Turns out my company, Greyhound, was the control group. We were eating sugar pills and getting shots of saline water. Apparently they can just stick that in you and it doesn’t do much of anything.
So, yeah, Greyhound was lucky. Angel and Devil companies, too. Well, kind of. They’re all getting dialysis or something for a few weeks. They weren’t getting sugar pills and saline.
Broadsword are the fellas that got screwed. Their company had the biggest concentration of the stuff the old doc was giving us. It didn’t go over well. I’ve heard them talking about all the stuff Angel and Devil are getting, plus marrow transplants and hormone therapy and stuff. None of them are complaining though. We all know what happened to Lucas and Jacobs, and ain’t nobody wants to go through that.
Well, none of us know officially. But we were all there for the start of it and Eddie works in the medical wing. He saw how they ended up. So we all know.
At first it seemed great. All of Broadsword company was bulking up, getting stronger, just like the old doc wanted. Then they all started getting cramps. And they were... swelling. You know those fellas who get crazy ripped? The ones who hit the gym every day and do contests and stuff? It was like that. Their arms and legs were getting bigger and stretching their skin so it was creepy tight and their veins stood out. And they weren’t even working out much.
It hit Jacobs first. He just got itchy. He tried to be a good soldier, suck it up and not let it get to him, but it kept getting worse. After two days his eyes were watering. Not crying, just watering bad.
Third day we told him he had to go see the doc. He was pissed at us and kept saying no and to mind our own beeswax. Yeah, he’s one of those southern weirdoes who says beeswax. But First Sergeant Paine had been specific about reporting any symptoms and I wasn’t going to disobey the First Sergeant. Finally Jacobs got up off his bunk, went to grab his shirt, and when he reached up his arm split open. There was a pop and his skin broke open like a hot dog popping on the grill. There was just too much muscle packed in there. It didn’t even bleed much because it was pulled so tight.
We got him down to the infirmary and Lucas came along, too, ‘cause he’d started to feel itchy and now he was worried the same thing was gonna happen to him. The docs were cutting him out of his wifebeater and it turned out his skin had split, too, right across the shoulders. They started calling for the old doc after that and we all got hustled out. But Eddie was still there. We heard it all from him later.