The Tetradome Run by Spencer Baum

Author:Spencer Baum [Baum, Spencer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2018-09-04T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 41

While Jenna climbed inside the walls at one end of the complex, at the other end, Bart Devlin stepped off an elevator and into the lobby of Tetradome Labs. A lab tech named Owen led him through the security doors and into the exotic zoo where creatures of The Tetradome Run lived when they weren’t on television.

Giant terrariums, one next to another, row upon row of them, their forward edges lining up to create corridors with continuous walls of plexiglass. Owen took Bart past the Needlenoses, who lived in a terrarium of dense foliage and standing water. Next to their enclosure was one for the Dragon Hawks. Their space stretched back two hundred yards or more, giving them ample room to run. Giant arachnids were in the next space. These creatures, a larger cousin to the popular Terrapiters, were a project that was as-yet unfinished. They were a little too good at killing at the moment. If Bart put them on a live course right now nobody would make it out.

Across from the arachnids, in one of the largest enclosures in the space, were the Barghests, who remained the gold standard for Tetradome monsters. One of the first creations of Tetradome Labs, these genetically enhanced wolves were reliable on any type of course, from the sprints in the Qualifier to the marathon that was the Finale. Easily trained, smart and capable, you could count on the Barghests to make one kill if you needed one, two kills if you needed two, or a full-on bloodbath if too many contestants were alive near the end. As Bart passed their cage, a pack of them approached the wall, panting and happy.

“Hey there, puppies,” Bart said.

Owen led Bart around a corner and into the fortified space that held the biggest, heaviest creatures. They passed the enclosure for the Minotaur, who was standing in the back, munching on hay near a pile of his own shit. Across from the Minotaur was the Behemoth, the heaviest creature in the lab, one that required an enclosure that bottomed out on the dirt, so massive was this beast, so potentially destructive was its weight.

Thus far, the Behemoth project had been a hundred-million dollar bust, but Bart held out hope that someday the giant creature would have a place on the show.

The final enclosure in the lab was an enormous salt-water aquarium more than fifty feet deep, where one of the Tetradome’s most popular monsters lived.

A giant squid, modified for size and aggression, whose ten tentacles were each twenty-four feet long, this creature was going to be named the Kraken, but a lab employee started calling him Mortimer when he was still in development, and the name stuck.

Mortimer was the first underwater creation of the company, a creature whose arrival signified a level of technological sophistication at Devlin that no potential competitor could match. Mortimer allowed them to add underwater cameras to the course. He turned The Tetradome Run from a big budget show to a mega-budget show.

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