Chapter Eight: Heaven's Highest Reaches

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Officer Takeda sat on a small wooden chair in the main branch of the Livingston County Police Department. Across from him, a young African-American woman was hastily relaying in rough pencil outlines the descriptions that the officer was doing his best to recreate from memory.

Captain Ortez stood behind him, talking to two other uniformed individuals. One was a middle-aged Caucasian woman, the Brighton Chief of Police. She had ordered both Ortez and Takeda to report to the County office for their part in this "disaster."

The other individual was an older Caucasian man, the Sheriff for the larger Livingston County.

"...but should we really be making this public?" Ortez was saying, one foot tapping anxiously on the worn tile. "People will panic—they'll be too scared to call 911 or use emergency services."

"Not to mention," Chief Harrison stepped in, nodding her agreement with Ortez's concerns, "that in Brighton emergency services is our fifth-biggest employer. We risk alienating, or even endangering, a large portion of the local population if this breaks."

The Sheriff rubbed his face with one hand, his arms crossed high on his chest. "A news story this big'll break with or without us letting it out. We need to be on the front end of the reporting cycle to maintain control," he replied, his voice tired.

"What we need to do is make it look like we almost got it figured out already, that the bastards are practically in our hands. That's where you come in, Officer Takeda, Miss Faith," he continued, nodding to the two who were bent over the table, poring over the sketches.

Faith raised a silent thumbs up, although like Takeda never took her eyes from the sketches. The officer reached forward, swirling his finger around the shorter figure's midsection.

"..Less round here. He was wide but it looked like hard fat," he said in hushed tones. Faith nodded and leaned forward to make the adjustments.

Sheriff Jones sighed, running a hand over his balding grey head as he watched them work.

He turned to Otrez and Harrison. "I just can't believe you figured this out." He paused. "Where in heaven's highest reaches did they find a corpse that fresh and that close to the original? It even fooled the damn family."

"I don't think heaven has anything to do with it, sir," Ortez mumbled, her face numb. She didn't know if she should be happy or horrified that Takeda's wild stunt had paid off.

"Just what did you uncover, Takeda?" the Sheriff said, mouth a grim line.

The officer in question finally looked up from Faith's work.

"I don't know, sir. But I hope that once we get the lab results back on the dummy corpse we may find some answers."

"Very optimistic, officer," Jones said. He shifted his arms, clasping them firmly behind his back as he shook his head. "I have a bad feeling that every new piece of data we get is just going to uncover something bigger, probably more than we can handle."

"You think we'll need to call in the higher-ups?" Harrison asked, face scrunching in her displeasure.

"God I hope not, but it may be. Let's just wait and see how this pans out. Who knows—maybe this is all just a fluke," Jones said, releasing his arms and raising them up in an open-ended shrug.

Ortez and Harrison exchanged a look.

"...very optimistic, sir."

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"Larry, get your white ass in here!"

"Aw man—ya know I've been waitin' all month for this!"

"Son of a bitch, if you don't get your scrawny ass in this room..."

The tall paramedic yawned and scratched under his loose tank as he shuffled through the adjoining door between their motel rooms.

"What?" he snapped. "Animal Planet's only gonna run this documentary tonigh– " he choked on his words as he saw what was playing on his partner's television screen.

"Oh fuck, Gary! FUCK," he said, the soothing image of owls from the nature show instantly forgotten.

The shorter paramedic was standing by the TV, staring at the news report. "You sure that was her?" he asked as a picture of a woman flashed onscreen, his voice measured and calm.

"MISSING," the news banner said in big letters as it scrolled across her chest.

"Yes! Dammit, it was only like, what, two, three weeks ago?" Larry kicked the prickly motel ottoman. "That mutherfuckkin' police officer, I'm tellin' you. 'ad to be 'im."

With hands on hips he leaned back to look at the ceiling. "Fuck," he mumbled again, "Gabriel is gonna kill us. 'e'll kill us!"

"No," Gary said slowly, watching his work partner as he himself stayed motionless by the TV. "No, he won't kill us. He'll give us to that freaky bitch sister of his."

Larry swung himself upright and Gary caught his eyes.

"She'll use us, Larry, don't you doubt it."

Larry began to massage his jaw like he always did when he was upset. "What do we do? Do we run?"

"Who else will hire us, dipshit? A failed paramedic who couldn't even pass the NREMT's, and...well, you know they got me by the balls," Gary's upper lip curled and he spat onto the ambiguously beige motel carpet.

"No, we need to find a way to make this right with them." Gary rubbed his stubble with the side of his hand.

"What about that cop?" he asked pensively

"What about 'im?" Larry asked. He started to pace up and down the room with measured steps. "You're right, we couldn't run—they'd find us. They got us," he mumbled, still fiddling with his jaw.

"The cop, Larry. Did you get a look at his face?"

"Who? Ah, yeah I saw 'im. Why?"

"Could you find him again?"

Larry let out a short bark of a laugh. "Yeah, easy. How many Asian cops with cowboy hats can there be out here?" Larry paused, then whistled low. "Hoo- it's a good thing 'e couldn't see our faces!"

"...The suspects are described as two men, one Caucasian, one African-American, who are masquerading as paramedics. Those who live in Brighton and the Livingston or Detroit areas are encouraged to ask for ID if they need to use emergency services during this time."

Both men stopped what they were doing and stared at the screen.

The calm and polished newscaster continued her report.

"It was a Brighton officer who first noticed the discrepancy between the two bodies, and Brighton Municipal has agreed to work with the larger Livingston office to follow a—and I quote—"promising" lead."

"What the hell is this?" Gary muttered as he watched.

Larry said nothing, heart beating so loudly in his chest he could barely hear the reporter.

"In the meantime, the officer on the scene was able to provide a rough description for a sketch, and the Department asks that if you see anyone similar to these depictions that you move to a safe distance away and contact the police."

The screen flashed, and there they were, hand drawn and masked, but the forms and sizes otherwise spot-on.

"I repeat, these men should be considered extremely dangerous."

"...Fuck."

"We can't move as a pair," Gary said after echoing Larry's outburst, "the profiles are too distinct."

"Move? Where we goin'? Shouldn't we lay low?"

Gary shook his head slowly, side to side.

"...I think we need to pay Brighton another visit after all."

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"Is it working?" Victor asked, voice tight.

"Yes, she's feeding. Look, where the hair fell out," Farheen replied evenly.

The researchers, one anxious, the other curious, peered into the murky blue-green solution of the tall glass cylinder before them.

Facing them inside the solution floated Subject 1101, still unconscious, naked and with limbs akimbo in the thick liquid.

"Oh, I see—it's pink!" Victor said, shoulders slumping in relief.

In the days following the procedure, Subject 1101 had shown much higher nutritional needs than they could maintain, as the body consistently rejected all IV's and feeding tubes.

The subject had lost weight rapidly as her hybrid human/symbiont physiology outpaced her stored resources.

In a flash of inspiration—or rather, desperation—they had decided to completely submerge her in an incredibly nutrition-dense semifluid gel that had originally been designed as war rations, but that had grown popular with long-distance runners.

The Facility kept large quantities on hand for emergency rations, in case of a lockdown.

As soon as the idea had formed, Rose had sent the med team to pump the gel into one of the tall containment tubes the Facility had left over from earlier attempts to merge the symbiont with animal fetuses.

Meanwhile, they had fixed a mask over the subject's mouth and nose for oxygen.

The team hadn't quite known what to expect when they lowered the body into the solution. They had theorized that with the symbiont's ability to latch onto and intake nutrition from nearby sources, the subject may respond well to submersion in such a nutrition-dense environment.

And they had been right.

Within minutes of submersion, the subject's long, tangled hair had fallen out. The thin brown strands had floated slowly to the bottom of the tank, the solution almost too thick for them to fall.

Now, minutes after that, small pink fibers were poking out all over the skull from the hair follicles, lithe tendrils not unlike hair reaching into the nutritional soup and—presumably—absorbing at will.

Victor rubbed the back of his neck, only now aware of how tense his entire body had been this last week or so. He let out a deep breath before looking over his hunched shoulder at his teammate.

"What are we going to do when she wakes up? How will we feed her? Are we just instructing her development so that she will have to continue to eat like that?" he wondered aloud with furrowed brow.

"I think," Farheen said dispassionately as she checked something off on the chart she had in her hands, "that the more pertinent question, considering the symbiont's original nutritional choice, is what she will eat when she wakes up."

Victor glanced up at the body, hair rising along his arms.

He squinted at what he saw.

"Farheen, look," he said, arm reaching out to point down the subject's left leg. A long, thin scar ran down the upper thigh to the knee. Although the gel made the coloration difficult to see, the scar was a similar shade to the fibers on the subject's scalp.

"Isn't that where we first tested her on the P-strain?"

Farheen leaned down, inspecting the line. "You are correct. That is—was—the P-strain test site."

"Why is it...it should be grey." He chewed his chapped lower lip. "Did Pearl colonize the earlier dormant generation? Can it do that?"

"She can do a great many things we never expected," Rose said, entering the room behind them and approaching the glass tank.

For the first time that the junior researchers had ever seen, Rose looked tired. Dark circles lined her lower eyelids, and the eyes themselves were shot through with red.

Her outfit and shoes were as crisp and fashionable as ever, however.

"Is she responding well to the gel bath?" Rose asked, ignoring their side-eyed stares.

"Yes, better than we had hoped," Farheen replied, brushing a hand down her own lab coat as she cast a calculating and concerned eye over Rose's condition.

"We've come so far, we can't lose her now," Rose said, her lips thinning into a tight line.

The team had never been more disconnected from the subject. In order to submerge the body, they had to sacrifice every monitoring system they had on her. All they could rely on now was their own visual observation.

"She may not be Pearl," Rose said, lips softening, "but I just can't wait to meet her."

The three researchers continued to observe the specimen in the tank.

They had solved the immediate issue of preserving the subject.

Now, all they needed to do was wait.

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