A Tale of Fur and Fangs: The Facility (working title)

Introduction

 It was a Wednesday. The children were sitting in their class completing their latest assignment when the PA system chimed and a voice came over the speaker. The school secretary was asking for one of the students to come to the office. The teacher looked at the student in question and repeated the message. The student, a boy of merely twelve years old, got up from his desk and headed towards the door. He tried his best to ignore the whispers and muffled laughter of his classmates as he took the hall pass from the teacher. After taking the crudely made paper pass he entered the desolate hallway and shuffled his feet towards the principal's office.

His heart was pounding; he had never been called to the office before. He wondered if he had done something wrong; he didn't think he had. As he approached the door he took in a deep breath before opening it and walking inside.

The principal was stern-looking with big, dark-framed glasses, and all of the other boys always talked about how mean he was when they did something wrong. The boy looked up and at the older man who was seated at his desk and said that he had been called to come to the office. The principal looked up from some papers that he had been signing, not really lifting his head, but rather looking over the tops of his glasses.

He told the boy that his father called with instructions for him to go to his work after school rather than taking the bus home. The principal lifted a yellow square of paper from his desk and gave it to the boy. The boy looked at it and saw a series of numbers and dashes. The principal then told him that that was the bus that he needed to board after school. He also added that he would tell the bus driver where to let the boy off.

The boy nodded and then was dismissed back to his classroom. Once he was settled back in his desk he wondered why his father would want him to go to his work when he had never been there before. He tried to push the mystery out of his mind for now and focus in the pop quiz that had just hit his desk.

* * *

A week earlier the boy's father had been in dire straits. He was a scientist. More specifically, he was a geneticist. For the past twelve years he worked for a secret branch of the government where it was his job to design and establish a means for creating super soldiers. In the past few months he had gotten very close to completing a serum, but with each test he performed on the rats in his lab, the drug seemed to overpower their small bodies and they each parished from either organ failure of severe hemorrhages. That being said, his records clearly showed an increase in both strength and ferocity before each rat's demise. One specimen, however, was able to shatter its plexiglass container before making a mad dash for the door, only to falter within inches of its goal where it keeled over and stopped moving. Upon inspection of the rat, not only had it died from heart failure and hemorrhages, but every muscle in its entire body had been shredded from overexertion, and its bones seemed to have been shattered by the tensing of the muscles themselves.

For the boy's father this proved to be a remarkable breakthrough, but to the ones who oversaw his work, it was a tremendous setback. It was the thoughts of his superiors that now distressed him so. He had been called into a meeting and told that funding would be getting pulled from his department at the end of the month. They felt his serum was too dangerous to risk the lives of their soldiers and told him that they would be bringing in someone else to head his department after his severance.

The boy's father pleaded and begged for one more chance. He had seen the rat himself. He had supervised the injection, knew what caused the overreaction. He alone knew what was needed to make the serum work as it was intended.

He needed a human trial.

Upon hearing his request his supervisors nearly laughed in his face as they denied it. There were to be no human trials until the serum worked on the rats. That was the protocol, and that was the end of it.