Page 22 of Gluttony
He tried to push his way into the elevator car, but Wyatt, the invulnerable mountain, put his palm to Tony’s chest and stopped him.
Tony backed up like a cornered animal. From the corner of his eye, he could see Parker and Flint come up from the operations room. So many pairs of eyes were on him, watching, assessing. Judging the monkey in a cage.
“Go away,” he said. It was meant to be a shout, but the words came out a snarl. He wiped the back of his hand against his feverish forehead and his vision flickered, but the worst thing was the undeniable urge building under his skin like a pressure cooker about to blow. “Why can’t you all just leave me alone?”
“Because you’re family,” said Parker, and then he instructed Wyatt to secure Tony.
Family.
The word bounced around in his head. And just exactly what was family? Someone you could boss around? Someone you took for granted? Someone you never truly saw.
As Wyatt advanced, the pressure beneath Tony’s skin strained to bursting point. He didn’t know why he kept holding it back. They already thought he was a screwup. He should know by now that nothing good ever came of bottling things up… so he let it out.
An almighty roaring filled his ears, burned through his veins. Ozone drenched the air. Someone shouted to take cover. A blinding blue light turned white and then Tony’s vision closed in. He remembered no more.
Six
Wayne Boschalways thought he was an agreeable man, perhaps too much. He gave his wife whatever she wanted. Diamonds, a yacht, a house on the river. He even took a job with a morally ambiguous company because it paid better, and he could provide more good things. Well, that wasn’t completely true. It also let him gray the lines of science in the name of human advancement. One day he hoped to have his name up in lights for making the next big scientific break, and until this day, everything had been going swimmingly… or should he say,growingswimmingly.
But over the past few days, his carefully planned life had turned to blood colored mud. He stared at the mess in the conservatory side of the laboratory he shared with another scientist, Barry Pinkerton. Unbelievable. Once it had contained the most forward thinking scientific experiments in his field of botany genetics, and in his lab partner’s field of animal genetics. On the far side were empty open cages. Pinkerton had created a new species of animal that sensed deadly sin, hunted it down and extinguished it. On Wayne’s side, he’d created a new species of sin-sensing plant that was almost sentient.
Wolves could scent fear. Bugs could hunt using pheromones to lure their prey. Plants could actually seek out areas where the sun shone, and the water ran free. Using all this knowledge, Wayne had taken pieces of each puzzle to fit into his new sin-sensing design. The plan had been to breed and graft hybrid plant species together, introduce a little human, animal, and insect DNA to then create something far more sinister than Barry Pinkerton ever could.
Wayne had tweaked the ability to sniff out sin, to hunt it down like a source of sustenance, and then eat it. His experiment had stalled until a few months ago when he’d discovered his plant not in its cage like he’d left it, but out in the laboratory, tendrils wrapped around a rat, or the mummified husk that was left of the rat. How the plant had moved from its cage to the center of the room was beyond him, but it had moved just enough to reach the rat a few feet from the cage.
Wayne had only designed the plant to unfurl tendrils, to latch itself onto any sinner within arm’s reach. He’d never in his life expected a plant to physically shift from one location to another, like it could walk.
It shouldn’t have been able to move like that. And in the months since, he’d not seen a repeat incident, leaving Wayne to surmise that the Deadly Seven intruders must have left the cage door open when they’d infiltrated the base to extract Pinkerton.
Stupid man. Pinkerton should have done his job like he’d been told. Now there was a target on his back, and if Pinkerton ever showed his face again, he’d be eliminated. And his family too. How was Wayne going to explain this mess to the boss? He hardly understood what happened himself. A plant moving across the room like an animal? Impossible. A plant wrapping its tendrils around and then absorbing any living thing in its path? Inconceivable.
But it had happened.
And now there was a mess.
Wayne scornfully collected a dustpan and brush before the cleanup crew made their way to his lab. If they arrived before he’d taken care to preserve the evidence for further study, he’d have no chance at understanding how his virtually inert plant had become mobile and carnivorous. He was just about to resume cleaning the fallen leaves scattered around the lab when his cell phone rang. He picked it up with a smile.
“Hello, love.”
“Honey,” his wife said. “You left so quickly this morning. Is everything okay?”
“Yes, yes. It’s fine. I just received an emergency call to come into work.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Is everything okay with you?”
“Well, it’s just…”
“Sweetie?”
“We received a notice from a debt collector.”
Wayne took his spectacles off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He was hoping to have more time. And with this latest setback, it was unlikely the boss would give him an advance on his next research grant. Wayne had already cut corners with the quality of supplies. There wasn’t much wiggle room left.
“Wayne?” His wife’s voice came through warbled. “Why are we receiving a notice from a debt collector?”
“Must be a mistake, Gabrielle. I’ll sort it out. Don’t worry about it.”
