The next morning you make your way to the lab where you find a volleyball sized stone that a team had found in the woods. It has a strange, inexplicable quality that must have intrigued the team. A fuzzy memory flashes back of the same stone cracked in half and hollow.

You run several tests on it everyday for the next seven days. On the morning of the eighth day, you come to the lab to find the stone broken in half and hollow and the guard on duty that night mutilated beyond recognition.

That afternoon you and your team are transferred to another base. One of the scientists brings what you now know to be an egg along to be studied.

After only a few days, people begin to disappear and strange sightings are all over the news. Within two weeks, the president orders everyone who is still alive to hide underground. The country is overrun.

You sit down at your desk and grab a piece of paper and a pencil.

"We call them Mutts. They're hunters. Their sense of smell and hearing seem to be much more advanced and accurate than anything we've ever seen. No one knows where they came from, or at least they won't tell me. One of our teams found a geological sample in the woods. They brought it back to the lab for testing. No one had seen anything like it before.
"One day the scientists came back to find the night guard dead and the sample broken in half. It was an egg. It seems the tests caused it to hatch sooner than it otherwise would have. We did this. It's our fault these Mutts have been released into the world. We're responsible for all this death and destruction. What what have we done?" The first paragraph rings in your mind, somehow familiar.

Go to part 34