THE THING WAS DISGUSTING.

Brodham covered his mouth and nose with his hand and Vickers turned his head away, breathing heavily. The rotten smell of decay permeated everything in the room, from the sheet pulled halfway up the body's torso to the air the two agents were pulling in with short, halting breaths. Dr. Watson, the CIA pathologist, held out a small tub of Vicks VapoRub.

"Takes the bite off," he said helpfully.

Brodham and Vickers both dipped a finger in the petroleum jelly and smeared it across their upper lips. Brodham inhaled the sharp odor of menthol through his nostrils. The cool, minty burn floated on the waves of fetor rolling off the corpse. Now he just had to smell two unpleasant things.

"What are we looking at here?" he said.

"I've never seen anything like it in my sixteen years as a forensic pathologist," Watson said excitedly. "It's truly one of a kind."

"Can you be a little more specific?"

"Okay, for starters, the rate of decay. That's what you're smelling."

"What about it?"

"It's through the roof! I mean absolutely meteoric. See this?" he used a long steel utensil to lift a flap of blue flesh that was dangling from the corpse's marbled forearm. A line of thin, watery fluid rolled out from under the flap. Brodham blanched. Watson went on. "That fluid release is indicative of later stages of putrefaction. See, decay in a biological organism happens in two ways: autolysis and putrefaction. That's if there aren't any insects present, and there aren't here.

"Autolysis is sort of like the body eating itself. Enzymes in the cells of tissues and organs break down the cell lining, causing the tissues to liquefy. Putrefaction, on the other hand, is caused by bacteria that live within the pancreas and intestinal tract. These buggers burst through the intestines and begin breaking down the body. They literally cause the soft tissues to melt away."

"And you're saying this...this liquid is putrefaction."

"Advanced putrefaction." Watson was practically hopping from foot to foot. Brodham had never seen anyone so enthusiastic about a rotting corpse.

"So what's the weird part?"

"All of it, man. All of it. See, forensic pathologists later and greater than me have organized the stages of putrefaction into distinct timelines. Of course, decay depends on a lot of things. Environment – was the body in open air? Floating in a pond? Buried six feet under?" He giggled nervously. Brodham was getting more repulsed by the minute. They were deep in the sub-basement of the New York complex, and the cold, barren walls and the crushing pressure of millions of tons of earth above them were grinding on Brodham's nerves.

"Get to the point," he said tersely, inhaling another plug of menthol-infused funk.

"You've gotta understand how it works," replied Watson, who was clearly not used to being rushed. "Another variable is manner of death. Open wounds introduce putrefaction more quickly than internal causes of death. Strangulation, heart attack...spinal ruptures." He said the last while gazing at the body on the metal table in front of them.

"But in general, there's a fairly consistent timeline for putrefaction. In a couple days, you start getting some discoloration around the caecum, right here." Watson drew a circle on the body's lower abdomen with a gloved finger. "After about four days, veins start popping out, usually green or blackish.

"From five days to two weeks, bloating sets in. As the bacteria eats away at the organs, they produce gases that get trapped inside the body. The stomach swells, arms and legs puff out, and the eyes begin to bulge noticeably.

"By three weeks, the tissues just turn to jelly. It's not liquid yet, but it's soft enough to rip away with a bare hand, if you were of the inclination." Giggle. Brodham got the impression that Dr. Watson had often been of the inclination.

"Finally," Watson concluded, "about a month in, the tissues start liquefying. The face goes first, and the rest of the body follows. After that, it's just a matter of time before the whole thing just sloughs right off the bones into a puddle on the floor."

"And we're seeing..." Vickers pressed.

"Liquefication. Putrefaction stage seven."

"But that's not possible," Brodham said. "The body died last night. You've only had it, what, twelve hours?"

"Thirteen," Watson corrected, "and that's what I'm trying to tell you. Oh man, if you could have seen the things this body did..." He trailed off, noticing for the first time the looks of disgust on both agents' faces. When he continued, he was more composed.

"In the time since you brought me this body at six o'clock this morning, it has gone through the entire spectrum of putrefaction. Granted, the discoloration was difficult to notice at first. It's not exactly...a normal specimen. Blues and blacks don't really show up on the skin with a lot of contrast. But they all happened. By noon, it had begun bloating, and the skin blisters showed up two hours before that. Toe and fingernails slid off right on schedule, textbook marbling, haemoglobin release. All right on cue. Except it was like they were being run through a VCR on fast-forward. I've never seen decay with such rapidity."

"Is it human?" Vickers cut in.

Watson looked surprised. "Well, of course. There are some abnormalities, but you've got your liver, gallblader, kidneys, bladder, all très bien. Bone formation of a healthy thirty-something-year-old male. The skin condition I haven't been able to place. My initial thought was a Mycobacterium leprae infection. Hansen's disease, or leprosy," he clarified. "But the tissue profile doesn't match. The skin wasn't decayed; it was just blue. So then I thought a circulatory problem. But that presents the same problem: No breakdown in tissue matter like what you'd get with gangrene." Watson spread his hands. "Maybe you could help me out here? Maybe an origin...?"

"You said 'abnormalities.' " Brodham said, ignoring the request. "Tell us about those."

Watson's face crinkled in annoyance. He obviously felt strongly about his cadavers. But he grudgingly moved on.

"Okay, class. Gather round." Brodham and Vickers leaned in and looked over Watson's shoulder as he prodded the corpse. "First, the muscle definition is off the charts. Was off the charts, before the liquefication set in. Tibialis anterior, Paterllar ligament, Vastus lateralis, deltoids, brachii..."

"English, please," Vickers said wearily. Watson grew even more sullen.

"Legs and arm muscles," he said briefly. "You might see definition like this in an Olympic athlete, but even then I doubt it."

"So he was muscular," Brodham clarified.

"Understatement of the year. It wasn't in the bulk, it was in the tensile strength. I ordered a bone saw after a scalpel wouldn't dent the ligaments, let alone slice them. That was the initial state, of course. After the putrefaction, well, yeah."

"Okay, what else," said Vickers, running to cut Watson off before he could launch into another dense scientific monologue.

"Okay, second, there's this." With a pair of calipers, Watson slid two flaps of skin apart in the corpse's right forearm. Vickers inhaled sharply. "See anything unusual?" Watson asked.

Brodham was the first to speak.

"It's hollow," he said quietly.

"Give this man a prize," giggled Watson. "It does indeed appear to be an abnormal cavity. I found similar ones just like this in the rear of both legs and behind the abdominal wall. And inside, this." He triumphantly held up a glass vial filled with dark gray powder.

"What is it?" asked Vickers.

"Spectroanalysis identifies it as ash, but not just any ash. Ash formed by incredible heat. Residue along the rim of the cavity also suggests vaporization, followed by limited condensation. It was a flash fire, gentlemen. Hot enough to turn metal into dust in the space of milliseconds. My guess is – and this is highly theoretical, but, given the nature of the whole thing, it may fit – my guess is, whatever was in these cavities was primed to blow the second the body died. Something didn't want to be found."

"Metal, you said," Brodham's voice was contemplative. "What kind of metal?"

"Ah, but how the abnormalities do pile up," said Watson, a gleam in his eye."What kind of metal? I'll tell you what kind it's not: Anything on the periodic table."

Brodham suddenly couldn't take it anymore. He had to get out of the suffocating stench of the basement. Thanking Watson quickly, he and Vickers made a beeline for the elevator. After the encroaching claustrophobia of the morgue, the fresh northern New York air was so crisp he could chew it.

"What's your take?" he asked Vickers as they walked across the greenway to the parking deck.

"Besides Dr. Kevorkian down there giving me the creeps?" Vickers said dryly, using a sleeve to wipe the Vicks residue from his lip.

"What about the body? What about our fugitive? All of it. Lay it on me."

"I don't feel like we have enough data to form a conclusion," Vickers said.

"Give me some conjecture."

"Okay, the fugitive," said Vickers after a pause. "I think we're dealing with a mentally imbalanced – possibly schizophrenic – individual with a background in the sciences. Grasp of abstract physics is a given after reviewing your interrogation, and our specialist from MIT seemed to agree that it was a post-graduate knowledge level. Maybe an ex-professor, although probably a lab junkie based on his apparent age."

"So he's a crazy who used to stack test tubes," Brodham said. "You don't think he's dangerous?"

"I didn't say that," Vickers clarified. "He's clearly living in a manufactured delusion. In many ways, that makes him even more dangerous. It's those who don't realize they're a danger that cause the most damage. Inmate #4213 either wholly believes his delusions or he's a damn good actor, and my money's on the former."

"What about the body? The blue tint, the anatomical abnormalities."

"Genetic modification, would be my guess. I know for a fact that both Russia and China have been experimenting with the human genome, and it wouldn't be a stretch to think that some of those experiments were successes.

"Underlying anatomy appears to be Caucasoid," Vickers continued, "which may or may not rule out China – depends where they got their test subjects. Hell, he could be one of ours, for all we know. We've been involved in that stuff before. Don't forget, most of the CIA, hell, the President, doesn't know what we do out here...what don't we know?"

"Just another inter-agency dispute?" Brodham asked. Even he didn't feel like smiling at the joke. They reached the car and Brodham slid into the driver's seat. Vickers took shotgun.

"Could very well be," Vickers continued. "Inmate #4213 could be a black book op just like our facility. Only maybe this time, something went wrong. Black book versus black book doesn't lend itself to diplomatic cooperation, so they staged a break-in to extricate their property."

"And killed our men in the process," Brodham sounded doubtful.

"Wouldn't be the first time. There are precedents."

"It's still a serious accusation."

"I'm aware. But an accusation against whom? You can't accuse a shadow because it darkens a doorway."

"Shadows are always cast by something."

"It's still the only thing that fits."

"What about the other possibility?" Brodham asked carefully.

"And what's that?"

"He's the real thing."

"And maybe pink lizards will fly out of my ass singing the Beatles," Vickers sneered. "I'll take the possibility of the CIA killing its own men over pure fantasy. Or the army. I wouldn't put anything past those stiff-backed zealots. Remember Operation Drop Kick?" Vickers was referring to a military operation in 1956 which involved the release of six hundred thousand mosquitoes over unsuspecting suburbs in Savannah, Georgia. The idea had been to test the efficacy of using mosquitoes to spread biological weapons.

"And that was on the heels of Big Buzz..." Brodham said thoughtfully.

"Right," said Vickers. "Hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever dropped in Georgia the same way. The '55 whooping cough epidemic in Tampa Bay. The Sarin nerve gas tests. Bacillus globigii in the New York City subway system. Hell, in the '40s they were injecting uranium straight into people's kidneys at the University of Rochester. Just to see what it would do. My point is, we're not exactly working with a spotless record here."

"And you think this whole thing is something like that."

"Conjecture, Bill. I'm not saying anything. But I do know we're involved in something over our heads, even if it's a threat from outside our borders. The military cordoned off the Parson house earlier today."

Brodham did a double take. "What?"

"Yup. Nobody in or out. Local responders are being put under quarantine. I think the only reason they haven't taken our dead Blue is because they don't know where the heck we are. But you can guarantee there's an inquiry moving through the CIA as we speak. Before long, this will be out of our hands. Good ol' Uncle Sam is bringing in the war trucks."

The vehicle descended into silence, the only sound the rumble of tires on the highway gray-top. Brodham had known it would only be a matter of time before the military got involved, but even this was fast for them. The incident report had only been filed last night. If they got hold of Petar, what would happen to him? Torture? Execution? What if they really did find something off about him? Dissection? Tissue samples? Petar Tesla could be in a dozen pieces being shipped to twelve different states by this time next week.

And they were no closer to finding him than they'd been the second he walked out their front door. No matter what they found, they were still two steps behind, sifting through the wreckage instead of coming face-to-face with their quarry.

A blue shadow caught Brodham's eye in the rearview mirror. Before he could turn, a thin, mottled hand reached out from the backseat and cupped its palm over Vickers's ear. Vickers slumped, unconscious.

In the mirror, Brodham stared into a pair of cold, black eyes.

Thanks for reading my story! Please VOTE and let me know what you think of it so far, then check out Chapter 30!