#10 – Wasp-kin

“Is that a fire alarm?” Reynold barked to the oblivious team of programmers and bio- engineers. A soft whirring sound, hardly an alarm at all- but to shock someone badly in this facility, while handling certain materials and causing a spill, would be worse than any fire. “I believe it is,” Kelly Anne said slowly, as the rest of the team began to raise faces from the soft glowing monitors, a soft and stunned look on all of their faces.

Reynold hated this place, these people. Not because he was a capable millitary man, a veteran of several, special missions, and undeserving of such a tedious posting, but because these people were weak. not just physically, but everything about them was soft. It was hard for him to imagine that these people would eventually help change the way wars were fought. How could people who were on the cutting edge of gene manipulation look so… useless, as they do now, staggering to their feet, unused to movement?

“Where is the fire?” one of the chemists, Charles Walton, mumbled, as Reynold looked to the computer surveillances for answers. ” Looks like it’s over by the, what do you call them, K- Class levels? Yeah, over there. No problem, my men are already on the scene”, Reynold preened, satisfied that the few millitary men he did have under his command were in control. Patterson and MacMillan. Thankfully, these men were a seperate, autonomous unit.

Of a sudden, Col. Frances Patterson’s EKG and Bio- reader flatlined. These scanners glitched all of the time, but the Bio reader stayed dead- the sound much more startling than the fire alarm. Reynold frowned, grabbed a headset. “No joking around, Ace. What is happening there, over?” Suddenly, the line was full of voices- scientists and workers from that section all crowded the com systems. Bedlam. Chaos.

“Dammit, it’s just a fire, what the hell is going on down there?!” Reynold growled as several scientists gathered around the communications array. Suddenly, with a horrid shriek of pain abruptly cut off, MacMillan’s EKG flatlined, making all of the scientists jump, and sending tendrils of worried mumbling among the rest. Reynolds turned to the others. “Stay here, I’m going to see what is going on down there. It’s just the fire has damaged something, that’s all.” None of them looked like they believed that, they all looked like they had seen a ghost- or were already dead. “Don’t go down there, sir”, Mary Anne softly said. Slowly, Reynolds turned to her. She gestured weakly to one of the surveillance camera feeds, a small monitor. All eyes went to it in mute horror.

The experiment was supposed to be the beginning of a genetic manipulation of insect life to create modified signal carriers, incorporate the latest in nano computers as well as genetics to help reduce collateral damage in major combat operations, by designing animals that could home in on a mobile target’s position and leave special bio signals to allow for pinpoint eliminations. The animals, insects, were decades away from the final stages of development, the target generation from being born.  But what was swarming out of the lower levels of the research compound was a horror, monsters- a shadow the size of a man, bigger, and laden with talons.

These things were made to do the eliminating themselves.

In the final moments, as the steel doors buckled to the labs and the screams rose higher, as the shapes blurred into the room, Reynolds wondered, with a detached sense of betrayal, at what the lower labs had been making, all these years…

Category: 2011, Horror