The night was clear and crisp. Nocturnal creatures came alive, filling the night with their unique sounds, showing off and warning prey they were coming their way. Bats and owls alike past the windows, some landing at the windows to peer in at what was happening inside the secret vacility that stood near their homes.
The main light was switched off but the genetics lab was alight with the electrical light from the computers, microscopes, table lamps and from the giant white machine that took centre stage of the entire room; everything else, the computers, desks and the shelves full of Petri dishes, surrounded it. You could have heard a pin drop; all the scientists in their white lab coats had their eyes glued onto their computer screens, on the objects under their microscope or their eyes on their "specimens", bobbing up and down slightly in the water.
A man in a suit, the only person not to wear a lab coat, looking through one of the small circular windows at one of their projects. He then cleared his throat. "Everything stable?" he asked, his accent heavily Dutch.
A woman, working adjacent to him and assessing the strands of DNA that were on her computer screen, answered, her accent British. "Yes, sir. The babies are all normal. The gene therapy has worked perfectly. Each and every one of them is going to be natural lethal weapons."
"And how many do we have so far?"
"12, sir," a male doctor from the other side of the machine answered.
"Heel goed*," the man said, smiling to himself while looking upon the baby in the section in front of him. "They're going to be the greatest weapons Europe has ever wielded. Their enemies are going to tremble at their feet. No country is going to be safe from them-"
"But, sir, we have no idea if they'll survive outside of the machine," the British woman said. "They're stable now, they're fine. But who can tell whether it is the same outside of the machine, away from the life support. This project is entirely new and more importantly, a secret. No one knows we have Chromosome 24; if they did, we'd all be in jail for crimes against humanity. As you can imagine, we never actually tested Chromosome 24-"
SLAP! The man in the suit backhanded the woman around the face, sending her glasses flying from her face and skidding across the marble floor; the slap had left a sickening echo around the room. As the woman gasped in pain and shock, some of her colleagues went to collect her glasses and checked they weren't damaged. He then took the woman by the scruff of her neck and hissed. "I hope for your sake, Dr. Clarke, that they will survive outside of the Womb and that your Chromosome 24 succeeds in what it's designed to do. Otherwise, things will get very nasty. For you, and your colleagues . . . . and your families." He released the frightened Dr. Clarke from his cast iron grip and began inspecting the other eleven healthy looking infants as Dr. Clarke's colleagues scuttled fearfully here and there, anxious to complete their tasks to the man in the suit's high expectations.
One of Dr. Clarke's male colleagues from Ireland who worked right next to her and was the youngest on the team apart from Dr. Clarke, Dr. Carlisle, looked away from his screen and looked at her. "You OK, Beth?" he asked quietly.
"Fine," Dr. Clarke answered shakily, her eyes focused only on the child growing on the artificial umbilical cord in front of her.
Dr. Carlisle wasn't buying it. "Beth, what is it? You're holding something back. I can see it."
Dr. Clarke shook her head. "It's nothing, Eoin."
Her colleague, on the other hand, was not convinced in the slightest. "You're lying. What is it, Beth? You know you can tell me."
Beth Clarke sighed quietly in frustration. "Eoin, these people who have employed us are big-headed nationalists who want ultimate power; to regain back some of the power they had back in the olden days. They don't understand what Chromosome 24 can do; what it does to the human body. Chromosome 24 was on its way to being destroyed for a reason!"
"Sssssh!" one of the other female doctors who was on the other side of the Womb. "Beth, don't push your luck with Mr. Sedah-"
Dr. Clarke ignored her colleague. She kept her eyes on Dr. Carlisle. "Chromosome 24 was a mistake; we created it by accident. Mr. Sedah thinks it only turns one into a naturally battle trained, lethal assassin but it does more than that. Oh, it definitely does more than that."
"What does it do?" Dr. Carlisle asked, his eyes widening eagerly.
"The impossible," was Dr. Clarke's short, snappy answer.
She didn't get to elaborate because Mr. Sedah, who had gotten impatient and annoyed by Dr. Clarke's defiance to orders, had drawn his Viper JAWS pistol, pulled the trigger and with two bullets shot her in the back, severing her spinal cord. Dr. Carlisle and the rest of the team gasped, shouted or screamed, jumping out of their seats in surprise, horror and dismay; Dr. Clarke's lifeless body slumped onto the floor at Dr. Carlisle's feet. The echoes that were caused by the firing of the bullets were still lingering around the room, bouncing off all walls.
Mr. Sedah sighed and shook his head. "Stupid woman. Should have followed orders from the get go. Now, all of you, if you do not want to end up like your friend Dr. Clarke over there, I suggest you take your seats and finish what you started!" Shouting the latter, he fired two more bullets up into the air and the doctors raced back to their stations.
At this very moment, all hell broke loose: the baby that had been under Dr. Clarke's care and surveillance had woken up. When this sight caught Dr. Carlisle's eye, he stumbled back in surprise.
"Didn't I make myself clear enough?" Mr. Sedah sneered. "Get back on your seat!"
Dr. Carlisle didn't move but merely pointed weakly at the child. Mr. Sedah, sighing in annoyance, put his gun back in its holder and went to see what had caused the new annoyance.
When Mr. Sedah laid eyes on the child, his face paled to snow, especially when he saw that the eyes of the child had red irises and that those irises were literally dancing with fire.
"God have mercy," Mr. Sedah said to himself in a quiet tone; only Dr. Carlisle had heard what he said.
The baby then gave an almighty shriek. As the sound escaped from the child's mouth, sparks and flames flew from the Womb; small blazes started in areas in close proximation to the Womb and all the electrical appliances began to short circuit or shut down. The more the child cried, the greater the damage that was caused; the scientists scrambled to get the other eleven babies out of the Womb as the machine was soon being consumed by fire and electricity. The evacuation alarms blared loudly, deafening all ears and the sprinklers were switched on in record speed, but they seemed to do nothing.
"Beth," Dr. Carlisle whispered, looking down at the dead body of his friend and colleague as he picked her up. "What the hell did you create?"
* Heel goed is very good in Dutch
YOU ARE READING
I am Fire
Action"Fire is the element of power. It is the element of anger, the element of passion. It has the power to destroy, yes, but what many have overlooked is that it also has the power to create. This is who you are, and if you don't control yourself, how a...
