Doctor Jerry's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

A week after the new power held, Jerry stood in the basement and faced the truth on his clipboard. Six children. Zero results. The compound kept them alive. It did not make them more than alive. If he could not push them past ordinary, Garrett had paid for nothing, and Jerry had no army for what waited under Marshwood. He would not risk a child on a guess. He needed a test body first. He left the hospital by the loading dock and drove until he found what he wanted near the water: a gray French bulldog puppy nosing a torn bag behind a dumpster. She did not run. He lifted her into his coat. He named her nothing at first. In the lab, he set her in a wire crate and drew two vials from the cold cabinet. One serum glowed orange. One held a deep, steady blue. He had built them from different lines of the same compound. Alone, each had failed. Together, on paper, they should cross a threshold. He drew a small dose of each into one syringe and injected the puppy's hind leg. She yelped once and then licked his glove. He wrote the time on the crate card and waited. For an hour, nothing. Then her fur lifted along her spine as if a dry wind had crossed the room. She bit through the wire door. The cut wire fell in clean pieces. She trotted to him and sat. He touched her skull and felt heat under the bone. He wrote one word on the card. Kudos. He needed a delivery method stronger than a needle. The chair had arrived in crates three months ago and stood under a tarp in the back of the lab. He pulled the sheet off. Coils, insulated clamps, a low seat wired to twin conductors. Current would drive the serum deep, all at once, into every tissue. On a dog it would be overkill. On a child, it would be the whole point. He did not have to choose which child. She chose him. The stairwell door opened. Stacie Lovewig came down in the same jeans she had left in, hair loose, a smear of something wet drying on her thigh. She had been placed at a group home two towns over. She should not have known the way back. "You said I would be okay," she said. "I want the rest." Jerry looked at her hands. The wet on her jeans was not water. It steamed faintly in the cold air. "Sit," he said, and pointed to the chair. She sat. He strapped her wrists himself. He loaded a full dose of both serums into the chair's line and set the current low. The puppy watched from the floor. He threw the switch. Stacie's eyes went white, then brown again. She smiled at him. The overhead lights did not even flicker. He had his first.