Heroes by Dawn Peers

Author:Dawn Peers [Dawn Peers, Brad Munson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Permuted
Published: 2020-05-07T18:03:38+00:00

TWELVE

DR. ANNA DEMILIO:

RECOVERED OMAHA, NEBRASKA

They waited until Phyllis had left the sub-basement before they returned to Examination Room One. “What will happen next?” Allison asked. “Should we wait before…?”

“I don’t know,” Anna Demilio said to her assistant. “That’s up to Phyllis. But we can’t wait for anything. There’s too much to do.”

The former little boy was strapped to the exam table at sixteen different points, from ankle and shin to waist, chest, head, and down both arms. Every strap was cinched tight and its welded connection to the metal table triple-checked, but the creature he had become continued to struggle endlessly against its bonds, tensing and jerking, mouth working in an endless, spasmodic bite-bite-bite yammer.

Nine-year-old Brian was the ultimate victim in all this. By all reports, he was a perfectly happy, well-adjusted little boy—as much as that was possible in Morningstar America—and living a safe life in Recovered Omaha…until Robby injected him with his fake version of the Reject vaccine, making him think he was safe when he was just as vulnerable as ever. Weeks later the mad insurgent McCartney had smuggled sprinters into Recovered Omaha, and poor Brian just happened to be in exactly the wrong place and exactly the wrong time: in one of the marketplaces as the infected human appeared, apparently out of nowhere, and attacked.

He had been badly hurt. How badly, no one was sure—not even Anna. But he turned very quickly and was captured more by luck than design. In the chaos of those early days of the rebellion, Anna had managed to acquire the captured sprinter and get him into her still-secret lab with very few people knowing it.

How long ago was that? she asked herself as she stared at the small sprinter’s writhing body. It seemed like a lifetime ago, and in many ways, it was.

“Monitors on?” Anna said without looking up.

“Everything’s recording,” Allison said, once again staying well away from the trapped sprinter.

Anna inserted the needle in the creature’s forearm and injected the Restore virucide just as calmly and smoothly as she had in Phyllis, hours earlier. It behaved just as it had before: she saw the rush of healthy tissue move up the sprinter’s arm with almost alarming speed, spreading over its shoulder, down into its chest and up into his skull. Rosy, pink flesh appeared in its wake. Solid musculature.

For one moment, Anna allowed herself to feel relief. It’s working, she told herself. He’ll be fine. All her worries had been pointless. She had saved—

Then the wounds began to open. First, a deep gash appeared on the boy’s head, from his left temple down his jawline to his chin. An instant later, a hole as wide as an adult fist gaped on the right side of on the nine-year-old’s chest, opening like some obscene, toothless mouth. Three lacerations, each as deep as a finger, gouged themselves into the outer left thigh and an explosion of tissue and bone audible popped from the left knee.

Blood welled up everywhere. So much blood…

Without

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.