J.A. Konrath / Jack Kilborn Trilogy - Three Scary Thriller Novels (Origin, The List, Haunted House) (6 page)

Bub barked a sound, similar to a cough. The sheep trotted around in a circle, head swinging from side to side, trying to bleat with a broken neck.

Bub coughed again.

Or was it a laugh?

The sheep swung its head around at Bub and screamed. Bub reached out and grabbed the sheep. The grab was rough, all pretense of tenderness gone. Holding a hind leg in each claw, he ripped the sheep in half and began to feast on the innards.

Andy’s stomach climbed up his throat and threatened to jump out. He put a hand over his mouth and turned away, the munching and gobbling sounds filling the large room.

“From amazing to horrible,” Dr. Belgium said, returning to his computer station.

“He eats everything,” Sun said, putting the reins in her coat pocket. “The skull, bones, hide, even intestines. Doesn’t waste a crumb. The perfect carnivore.”

Andy threw up, seeing the banana muffins for the second time that day. He apologized and fled the room, his brain scrambling to remember the code number for the gate. He managed, but got stuck when he reached the second one.

This was insane. This whole project was insane. Andy felt no curiosity at all—only terror, revulsion, and anger at being suckered into this mess. He gave the bars a shake and a swift kick, swearing in several different languages.

Sun came up behind him and punched in the correct code.

“Thanks,” Andy mumbled.

He took off down the hall, barely noticing the deep frown of concern on Sun’s face.

D
r. Sun Jones wasn’t pleased with herself. She had to stop alienating every man who showed the slightest bit of interest in her. It wasn’t healthy.

But then she hadn’t felt healthy in quite some time.

Physically, Sun knew she had more strength and stamina than anyone else in the compound. Even in Africa she’d adhered to her daily exercise regimen of sit-ups and push-ups, receiving more than a few quizzical stares from the indigenous wildlife. Physically, she was a well-tuned machine.

Emotionally, it was a different story.

Sun walked down the arm to Red 3 and let herself in. The lights were already on, bright and harsh and making the large space seem more like an operating theater than a records repository.

Filling the room were dozens of file cabinets, ranging in style from antique oak to modern stainless steel, arranged rank and file like library isles. Off in the corner was a small desk, piled high with the papers she’d been recently reviewing.

Sun sat in a chair twice her age and tried to focus on the massive amount of work ahead of her. She’d discovered the records room on her second day here, and had been spending all of her free time trying to organize the astounding amount of data it contained.

Everything about the project was filed here, from the 1907 payroll ledger of the Spanish team who dug the compound (and was then deported back to Spain), up to the arrival of last month’s food shipment. Invoices, reports, inventories, letters, dossiers, Presidential mandates, and even recipes for chicken cacciatore were all haphazardly mixed together with little thought to common sense.

At one time there may have been some order to the room. Helen Murdoch, Race’s ill wife, had put an end to that. Sun didn’t know the details, but Dr. Belgium had mentioned that years ago Helen had
‘torn Red 3 apart’
, and cleanup had consisted of simply shoving things back into cabinets.

Sun had wanted to ask Helen about that, and even went so far as to visit her in her room, but the woman was too far gone to remember anything.

Sad.

The obvious answer—hire a team to organize everything into a database—had been thought of but deemed unrealistic. Manpower was the only thing the Project lacked. The more people involved, the more likely there would be a security leak, so employment at Samhain was kept bare bones.

Sun had taken it upon herself to make the task hers. She’d been hired to study Bub in his habitat, based on her experience with large predators. It turned out to be amazingly dull, even though Bub was an extraordinary specimen. Watching a pride of roaming lions was a learning experience. Watching a lion at the zoo was sleep-inducing. Bub simply sat around, as if waiting for something. The only time he became lively was at his feedings, and even that had little variation. The records room gave her an opportunity to be useful.

Sun had no office experience to speak of, but she had good organization skills, and after only one week her effort was paying off. She’d been chronologically sorting the mountains of paperwork into two main sections,
SAMHAIN
and
BUB
. Each of these main topics had a dozen subsections, which would undoubtedly be broken down even further.

The work was slow going, made even more so by Sun’s inquisitive nature; all too often she would find something particularly fascinating and drift off task. Like the Rosenberg file.

It traced the hiring of an independent engineering firm called G & R to improve upon the compound’s emergency generator in 1951. The hirees, one Julius Rosenberg and one David Greenglas, snooped where they shouldn’t have and actually tried to blackmail President Truman.

Truman didn’t go for it, and the two, along with Rosenberg’s wife Ethyl, were executed for treason on less than authentic charges.

No one had blabbed since.

Sun thought Race was simply trying to scare her with that story when she’d first arrived. Now she had no illusions that her oath of secrecy was as serious as they come. Strangely, it didn’t matter to her one bit.

Sun had no one to tell.

While the political history was interesting, Sun was even more intrigued by the thousands of tests done on Bub since his arrival 100 years ago.

Forty-some people have worked at Samhain, encompassing over a dozen professions, from botanist to phrenologist. More often than not, those who were chosen stayed for the rest of their lives. Samhain had been both their home and their life’s work, and as far as she knew Sun was the only person who had ever seen it. It was both inspiring and depressing.

The files Sun had been recently reviewing were from the 1970s, most of them concerning a series of experiments done by two men named Meyer and Storky. The duo performed a staggering number of tests on Bub, up until Meyer’s death from Kaposi’s Sarcoma in 1979. So dedicated were they to research that Meyer had a linear accelerator sent to Samhain when he was diagnosed, and took his radiation treatments onsite so they could continue their experiments without interruption.

Some of their finds were extraordinary.

Bub was impervious, it seemed, to extreme cold. They’d placed several refrigeration units in Red 13, the room Bub was kept in while he was comatose, and gradually lowered the temperature to four below zero degrees Celsius. Bub’s internal body temperature didn’t drop a single degree, and his heart rate and breathing remained consistent.

The two then moved in some heaters and cranked it up to over two hundred degrees. An egg fried on the table next to Bub, but he didn’t fry. The demon’s skin got hot, but his internal temperature didn’t fluctuate more than a degree.

Meyer and Storky also discovered that Bub could breathe just about anything. It had been known since the ‘40s that Bub’s complex respiratory system, which included four lungs, two diaphragms, and two organs that resembled air bladders, processed nitrogen and oxygen and excreted a combination of methane and nitrous oxide. Through experimentation they showed that Bub could process pure nitrogen, or pure oxygen, or carbon dioxide, helium, hydrogen, propane, and even chlorine gas, and was able to break it down to nourish his cells.

They stopped short at nerve gas, even though President Nixon gave them the okay.

Sun read all of this with great interest, but the interest was slowly giving way to something else.

Paranoia.

Bub was resistant to all disease, fungal, viral and bacterial. His body attacked any invader, whether it be bubonic plague, herpes zoster, ringworm, or even Dutch elm disease, surrounded it with what were assumed to be antibodies, and expelled the intruder from his anus in a crystalline pellet. Meyer even went so far as to inject him with enough anthrax to wipe out a large city. Bub excreted it within twenty minutes.

He wasn’t invulnerable to physical harm, but damn near close. Ever since the first doctor drew some of Bub’s blood and watched in amazement as the needle mark repaired itself moments later, it had been known that the demon possessed rapidly accelerated healing ability. Meyer and Storky must have been amazed by this, because they spent no less than three years conducting experiments on the anomaly. They poked, gouged, sliced, burned, scraped, and subjected every part of Bub to chemical attack.

Bub could repair all harm, even plugs taken from flesh and bone, within seconds. It happened so fast that they brought in a 35mm film camera to shoot the miracle in slow motion.

Meyer theorized that Bub’s endocrine system was extremely advanced. The endocrine system in humans was capable of instantaneous reaction, such as a burst of adrenaline in a dangerous situation. Bub’s had developed to the point where it had taken over the healing functions, knitting wounds instantly. Nixon had given the go-ahead to fully amputate one of Bub’s limbs, but Meyer and Storky only went as far as a finger tip.

It grew back, longer and sharper than before.

Sun thought of Hercules and the hydra. Every time he cut off a head, it grew two more.

Meyer and Storky also tried to accurately gauge Bub’s age. They took a sample of Bub’s horn and tried to carbon date it. All living things take in carbon-14, which is created in the earth’s atmosphere when the sun’s rays strike nitrogen gas. It combines with oxygen to form CO
₂
. As long as the organism is alive, it has a constant new supply of C-14. But in dead tissue, the C-14 begins to decay into nitrogen-14, with a half life of about 5,730 years. Since Bub’s horn—made of keratin like hair and feathers—was dead tissue, it seemed ideal for the task.

Something wasn’t right, apparently, because the amount of N-14 found in the sample would have put Bub’s age at over 200,000 years. Obviously impossible. Meyer hypothesized that since Bub breathed and was able to process nitrogen, that somehow accounted for the high N-14 count. Sun, who never excelled at chemistry, found that explanation suspicious, but easier to believe than the idea that Bub was older than mankind itself.

Along with a record of Bub’s medical history, Sun was also sorting through the hundreds and thousands of pictures taken since the project’s beginning. Everything and everyone involved in Samhain over the last century had been photographed, filmed, recorded, and videotaped, and more than half of the file cabinets in Red 3 were filled to the brim with visual media.

Somewhere, buried in all of this mess, was the answer she was looking for.

Sun didn’t share Dr. Belgium’s belief that Bub was some strange, prehistoric missing link. She also didn’t share the view of the holies, who believed Bub was a true demon, a spawn of hell.

Sun had a different theory, one she wasn’t willing to share yet. Not without proof. Given that the average tenure here was twenty-two years, Sun figured she’d find it eventually. In twenty-two years a person could find anything.

Maybe even peace.

She finished sorting the files in front of her, and then moved on to the next cabinet. It was crammed full of serum and tissue analyses. Sun picked up a thick folder containing an in-depth report on the physical properties of Bub’s early stool samples. It didn’t surprise her to find out that they contained ample amounts of radioactivity.

The demon was so damn tough, even his droppings were nuclear.

She gave it a cursory flip through and dropped it in the BUB pile.

“Attention, this is Race.”

Sun reflexively looked up at the intercom speaker near the door.

“We have a new arrival, Andrew Dennison, and I think it would be a good time to have a group powwow to get him up to speed on the project. The Mess Hall, in five. Refreshments will be served.”

Race chuckled and cut out.

Sun placed her hands on her lower back and stretched, the vertebrae crackling like a bag of chips. She left the lights on in Red 3 and headed for the Octopus. Her thoughts drifted to Andy Dennison, not for the first time.

Sun thought he was cute, in a non-threatening teddy bear kind of way. He was trying hard to be amusing. The complete opposite of Steven, who was so self-assured and serious. She compared all men to Steven, and they all came up lacking. That was one of the reasons she’d been celibate since his death. Everyone else seemed like a step down.

So what was it about this new guy that intrigued her? Must be hormonal, she decided. She had been completely alone in Africa. Andy was the first man her age she’d had a conversation with in close to a year.

Maybe she should let down her guard a notch, stop acting so hard-nosed. Would it kill her to be personable? He obviously found her attractive. She should be flattered rather than irritated.

But then, she should be a lot of things.

Sun walked through the Octopus and went down the Green Arm. Before entering the Mess Hall she absently reached for her purse to check her hair in her make-up compact. The gesture annoyed her; she hadn’t carried a purse or a compact in a long time.