Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake. Страница 9

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.

CHAPTER THREE

Dr. 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.