The Living End (Daniel Faust Book 3) by Schaefer Craig

Author:Schaefer, Craig [Schaefer, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780990339359
Publisher: Demimonde Books
Published: 2014-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

24.

“We focused on theory at first,” Bob said. He cradled his mug with both hands as he sat back down at the desk. “Using what we could learn from the tunnels’ energy, we developed means of glimpsing into other worlds. Our efforts were slipshod and random, but what we saw…it was beyond imagining. Worlds of ice, and the things that wriggled and swam beneath that ice were the size of cities. Worlds of screaming glass. A world that was nothing but a windowless mansion of endless rooms, and in each dusty room lay an abandoned porcelain doll. Eventually, with a fusion of magic and technology, we built the means to see what waited on the other end of those tomb-tunnels.”

“What did you find?” I said.

His hands tightened around his mug.

“A sword. Twenty feet long and blackened by fire, lying forsaken in an overgrown field. Beyond it, a garden, wild and dense. Not just with plants, no, with…hybrids. An impossible mingling of plant life and human flesh and organs. The garden was abandoned, Mr. Faust. Left to its own devices, left to plummet into a Darwinian nightmare, and every creature springing from that poisoned soil either a predator or a parasite. We watched entire species rise and go extinct in the span of hours. We should have known. We should have known, right then and there, to dynamite the damn tunnels and leave it all alone. The garden wasn’t for us.”

“You’re right,” I said. “You should have.”

“Life, though. Aah, that’s the thing. We were in the business of saving lives, weren’t we? And here we had a source of abundant life and unstoppable fertility.”

I set down my mug.

“Viridithol,” I said, my blood running cold as I pieced the story together. “You reckless, dumb sons of bitches. You put samples of plant life from another fucking dimension in a drug and fed it to pregnant women. And you were, what, surprised when the kids came out looking like that?”

“It was a tiny sample,” he said, shaking his head. “Just…just the tiniest fraction, given to a small portion of the test group. We thought we had it under control. We were trying to help people.”

“Well, I guess that makes up for everything then.”

Bob stared into his coffee. “We never should have called it Eden. That was hubris. It made us think we were dealing with something benign, something positive, when the truth was right in front of our faces. Whatever the Garden had once been, now it was seething with corruption. Abundant life. It makes me laugh, in retrospect. Mr. Faust, did you know that there’s a medical term for abundant life? For cellular life bursting out of control and running wild.”

The smoke-faced men had asked me the same question. What’s another word for life abundant?

I shook my head. “Don’t know it.”

“Of course you do,” he said, taking a sip of coffee. “It’s called cancer.”

He turned to the laptop and pulled up a file of scanned pages. Florid handwriting filled every inch of each parchment sheet, in French.

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