The
Dragon Factory
Sunday, August 29, 4:09
P.M.
Time Remaining on the
Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 51 minutes
E.S.T.
“What is this stuff?” asked Tonton as Hecate
injected a golden liquid into the IV line attached to the
Berserker’s arm.
“A gift from my father,” said Hecate. She
emptied the syringe and threw it into a red sharps disposal. “It’ll
make you feel better.”
“I feel pretty frigging great right now,”
Tonton growled. Even when he spoke in ordinary conversational
tones, he had a deep voice that rumbled like thunder. Over the last
few months the gene therapy had taken him a few steps further than
the other Berkserkers. Tonton’s brow had become more pronounced,
his nose wider and flatter. He looked less like his natural
Brazilian-German and more like a mature silverback gorilla. Hecate
had even noticed that Tonton’s back hair was starting to fade from
black to silver. It was one of the things that troubled Paris,
because they hadn’t given the Berserkers the genes for hair
coloration or facial deformity and yet the traits had emerged
anyway.
Hecate found it fascinating and wildly
sexy.
It also reflected some of the changes she
was experiencing with her own covert experiments. The gene therapy
she used on herself was nowhere near the scale used on the
Berserkers, and it drew on feline traits from the Panthera
gombaszoegensis, the European jaguar, a species extinct for a
million and a half years but whose DNA was recovered from a German
bog. Her goal had been to enhance her strength by making her
muscles 20 percent denser and to heighten her senses. She could not
achieve feline sensory perception, but already she realized that it
would soon become necessary to start wearing tinted contact lenses
to hide the pupilary deformation and color changes. Her teeth were
growing sharper, too, and that was absolutely not part of the plan.
Hecate accepted the reality that these would need to be filed soon,
but for the moment she liked the extra bite.
“So. what’s it do?” growled
Tonton.
Hecate gave him a playful slap across the
face. “It’ll keep you and your boys from going apeshit during
missions.”
He stared at her, then got the joke. They
both cracked up.
“Yeah,” he said at length, “some of the boys
do get a bit rambunctious. In Somalia. Alonso and Girner were
really fucked up. I had to stomp them a bit to keep ’em from eating
people. Dumb sonsabitches.”
“It’s not their fault,” Hecate said. “The
therapy has some wrinkles, but my father had some ideas on what to
do.”
“And I’m the guinea pig?”
“Yes.”
“Jeez.”
“You scared, big man?” she
purred.
“Scared? No. Who’d be scared with a crazy
bitch like you pumping God knows what into me based on the advice
of a total whack-job.”
Hecate slapped him again.
Harder.
He grinned at her. There was a trickle of
blood at the corner of his mouth and he licked it up. The cut was
deep, though, where the vulnerable flesh of his inner mouth had
been smashed against his teeth. A new bead of blood formed, and
Hecate pushed Tonton back in the chair, climbed on him, straddling
him with her white thighs, and then bent and licked off the trickle
of blood.
“Is the door locked?” he
asked.
“Yes,” she said huskily.
“Good,” Tonton said with a growl. A second
later they were tearing at each other’s clothes.