Episode II – Session I - Information
Episode II – Session I - Information
Willie staggered back from the maddening view beyond that window, his mouth hanging open. His fingers tightened around the suddenly insignificant weight of his pistol as he tried to get a handle on the situation. His eyes darted left and right, surveying the reactions of the other men in the room, hoping that someone might offer him an explanation for what he was seeing.
Brother Cooper was staring blankly into the window, still holding the edge of the curtain tightly in his hand. His lips were moving, probably forming a prayer or a Bible verse, but no sound was coming out. Joe was still kneeling on the floor, trying to prevent a handful of blood from dripping out of his nose, while at the same time staring dumbly at the window.
Willie stammered out, “Coop, you…you okay? Wait…is that guard okay?”
Joe whined nasally from the floor, “Oh, I see, don’t even ask about me, Willie. Glad to see you care.”
Joe’s sarcasm broke some of the tension. Brother Cooper managed to find his voice, ignoring Willie’s question and spinning around to face Dr. McGovern, “Oh…my…Lord! What is that thing?!?”
Dr. McGovern took a deep calming breath and responded in an even tone, “Gentlemen, there’s nothing to be alarmed about. Guards, please take your comrade there to the infirmary.”
Willie wheeled the gun around and leveled it at McGovern. “Oh, no! I don’t think so. I’d say there’s f&*%in’
plenty to be alarmed about up in here! I think you better start telling me what the hell is going on around here or I’m spraying brains all over the wall!”
Dr. McGovern swallowed hard, then slowly but decisively turned away from the gun and spoke to Brother Cooper. His voice was more insistent now, “Close the curtain please, and lower your voices. It makes Mr. Weaver nervous---”
Brother Cooper glanced back and forth across the room, “Who the…heck…is Mr. Weaver?!?”
Dr. McGovern stepped slowly away from Willie’s gun and lightly pulled the curtains from Brother Cooper’s grasp. He closed the curtains carefully, hiding the window completely before turning back around to face the room. “If you come with me, I’ll explain everything.”
Willie took another deep breath. He carefully holstered his gun and took a step back away from the door. The guards mirrored Willie’s movement, leaving the door open for Dr. McGovern. Willie menaced, “Your explanation better be damn good, or in about five minutes I’m calling the cops.”
Joe stood up and made a disgusting snorting sound, “Are you crazy? What are you waiting for? I’m calling animal control
right now!” Suddenly Joe darted through the open door and ran down the hall. The guards flinched to go after him, but Willie moved to intercept. Joe continued on down the hall towards the exit.
. . .
Crystal ripped the throttle back and the bike rocketed forward across the parking lot. She kicked hard left and the bike spun out in a smooth curve, stopping her cold in front of the building entrance. In one practiced motion, she dropped the kickstand, rolled off the side of the bike, drew her shotgun from the rear saddle bag, and scurried backwards a few steps.
Willie’s Lincoln Continental rolled in right behind her with menacing choreography, Taylor grinning at the wheel. The trunk popped open and Taylor was outside the car now, darting around to back of the vehicle. Crystal met him there.
With the trunk open, there were a half-dozen boxes of gear. Everything from binoculars to ski masks to wading boots. Willie
definitely planned ahead. Crystal shoved her pump-action shotgun into Taylor’s hands and pulled out two weapons from Willie’s hidden cache. In her left hand, Willie’s ten gauge. In her right, Guyzell’s twelve-gauge. Of course, if things went according to her plan, she would only need to fire one.
Crystal checked out Taylor as she flicked the safeties off on both her weapons. He didn’t look completely comfortable. If this was going to work, he at least needed to look like he knew what he was doing. She gave him a once over, “Now you just wait here, right? You any good with a shotgun?”
Taylor pondered it for a minute, then answered with a grin, “Probably.” He pumped the gun once to produce that menacing “cha-chink” sound, then seemed quite satisfied with himself.
Crystal knew that he couldn’t see her rolling her eyes at him, with her motorcycle helmet on, but she had to do it anyway. She sighed and told him, “You might want to pick up that unused shell you just ejected.”
While Taylor muttered something like “
keech” and bent down to pick up the shell from the ground, Crystal rushed around the car and ran up to the building entrance. She wasted no time with the intercom or the camera, as she leveled the twelve-gauge at the doorknob. The gun kicked wildly as she fired one-handed, but she managed to find her target, and the doorknob exploded in front of her.
The door weakly swung open. Two very surprised security guards stood on the other side, behind a bank of security monitors. Crystal stepped into the waiting area and brought both shotguns to bear. For a moment, she stood there silently, letting the full image of her entrance sink into them. Finally, she ordered, “Three of my friends are inside this building. I want them brought out.
Now!”
The guards looked even more confused now. They turned and looked at each other, then back at Crystal. Suddenly the door to Crystal right swung open, and Joe staggered out into the lobby. He had what looked like a nasty bloody nose that he was trying to ameliorate by keeping a finger up each nostril. He waved to her as he ran past, before heading out into the parking lot.
Crystal watched him run out into the parking lot and hop into Willie’s car. Slowly, she turned back around to check out the guards again, who were still sitting there with dumb looks on their faces. Her aim had wavered now, and the shotguns were both pointing a little low. It took her a moment to get her concentration back. She brought the shotguns back up and leveled them at the guards once more.
“Alright…um…now I want the other two!”
. . .
Dr. McGovern processed slowly, almost mournfully up a set of stairs and then down a long hallway, flanked by two more security guards. Guyzell followed silently behind him, with Willie at his side and Crystal (still wearing her motorcycle helmet) bringing up the rear. Willie kept his hand inside his jacket, resting on the butt of his pistol, and it was only at Guyzell’s insistence that Crystal had given agreed to stop pointing the shotguns directly at the guards, though even he could not convince her to put the safeties back on.
Guyzell couldn’t blame her, really.
Psalm Twenty-Three kept running through his head, and he definitely felt a little safer having Willie and Crystal there watching out for him, in addition to the usual rod and staff.
The motley little group passed a couple of workmen along the way, who didn’t seem the least bit surprised by the open display of firearms in the hallway. Guyzell noticed the workmen were carrying several familiar-looking, long, narrow cardboard boxes with them, and was about to comment on the fact when Dr. McGovern stopped at an unmarked door.
Dr. McGovern opened the door, and the two guards stationed themselves just outside. Dr. McGovern entered the room and invited the group to join him. Guyzell stepped through the door.
The room was small. It was barely large enough for the conference table it hosted, and the eight chairs surrounding that table, plus a small whiteboard on an easel in the corner. There was no other furniture of note within the room, but then again, the furniture was not the real eye-catcher in the room anyway. What was much more interesting to Guyzell was the décor covering the walls.
The ceiling and all four walls in the room were covered in aluminum foil. From floor to ceiling, the foil had been tacked to the walls, carefully lined up with a little overlap on each piece, so that the room as a whole was completely blocked in, inch-by-inch, with aluminum foil.
“What the hell?” Crystal muttered as she entered behind Guyzell.
Dr. McGovern nodded to the door behind them, “Please come in and close the door. We need to have the room sealed if we are going to talk.”
Willie followed in and closed the door behind him. Guyzell noted that the back of the door was similarly wrapped in aluminum foil, held in place by duct tape. With the door closed, Dr. McGovern noticeably relaxed, and collapsed into the chair at the end of the table. He rubbed his temples wearily with one hand and sighed heavily.
Willie gave the doctor a minute to relax before starting in on his interrogation. “Doc, now you want to explain to me just what the hell is going on up in here? Starting with why we have to talk in a room that’s covered in tin foil? I’m starting to feel like a baked potato in here.”
Dr. McGovern nodded and leaned forward, cracking his knuckles as he spoke. “Well, it’s a long story. As for this room…and as a man of science it pains me to say something which sounds this juvenile, but…
the aluminum foil seems to block out the mind-control rays.”
. . .
Willie groaned, “Just what I need. Even
more f%$#in’ crazy white people.”
Dr. McGovern nodded tiredly. “I would normally agree with you, Detective Lamar, but I think after what you all just witnessed downstairs, you must give me the benefit of the doubt.”
Brother Cooper sat down at the end of other the table and leaned forward to match Dr. McGovern’s posture. He started in diplomatically, “Doctor, I can see you are under a great deal of strain. Please, try to explain as best you can what is going on here, so we can do everything we can to assist you.”
Dr. McGovern sighed and continued, “I assume…well…let’s not assume anything. I’ll start at the beginning.”
“First off, spider web, which we call spider silk, is one of the strongest substances in the world. Ounce for ounce, it is stronger and lighter than steel, by a huge factor. Unfortunately, it is also extremely hard to come by in any meaningful quantities, which prevents man from making any serious use out of it.”
Crystal interrupted, “Is this the bio-steel thing again? We read all this already on your…well, anyway…we already know about all of that.”
Dr. McGovern had run out of surprised expressions at this point, so he just nodded and continued his story. “Well then, yes, as you know, a few years ago, a genetics research company in Canada created a crude technique where they put spider genes into a goat, and then were able to harvest spider silk from the goat’s milk.”
“Their technique was sound, and they already have some marketable uses for their silk, such as in producing light weight bulletproof vests and surgical sutures, er…stitches. But their silk is low-quality, and they can not produce it at the bulk rate that would really make it profitable. Put simply, they can not produce high-grade spider silk, and they can not do so in very large quantities. “
Willie covered his eyes with his hands as he made the logical leap to the rest of the story. “Oh no, don’t tell me you did what I know you did…man, you definitely are a bunch of f%$#in’ crazy white people…”
Dr. McGovern nodded and shrugged his shoulders, “Our firm sought to improve on their design through bypassing the goat-milk approach and working directly to genetically increase the size and production of silk-producing spiders.”
“We initially expected only a small increase in size or production, but we were astounded at our own success. We literally hit every nail on the head, on our first try, every step along the way. The process has taken over two years, but every time we met some variable, or some question of method or material, like circulatory enhancements for instance, every time we had to decide how to move forward, we just kept guessing the right answers on our first try. We’ve made leaps here that are decades ahead of anyone else in the field.”
Willie made a rolling gesture with his hand, “Okay, Doc, we get that you were brilliant. Can we get back to the bloody noses and the falling down screaming and all of that?”
The doctor paused for a moment, like he was unsure how to say what came next. He turned around in his chair, uncapped a dry-erase marker, and drew a quick diagram on the whiteboard behind him. As he rolled out of the way, Willie could see he had drawn a diagram of the body of a spider.
Dr. McGovern continued, “You see, a spider’s body has two parts: basically a head and an abdomen. The head has the eyes and the brain, among other things.
The brain on some spiders, especially jumping spiders, is actually pretty big for their size. About the same ratio to their body weight as a human brain is to a human. In fact, in some species, it can be four or even sixteen times bigger than that.”
Brother Cooper croaked out a very quiet little, “oh no…”
Dr. McGovern forged ahead, “We never really considered the consequences of such a size increase on the brain…and…well…Mr. Weaver downstairs…has a brain that weighs in at about two-hundred pounds.”
Crystal finally set her shotguns down on the table. She sat down in a chair and shook her helmeted head slowly from side to side.
Willie tried to put everything together in his head, but the shock of everything was making it difficult. “So…your monster spider downstairs…Mr. Weaver…is a really smart bug, huh?”
Dr. McGovern nodded. “Well, spiders are not really insects, but…”
Willie ignored the science lesson as he looked around the room again at the aluminum foil. Realization dawned on him, “…and with a brain that big…he’s what? Psychic?”
Dr. McGovern considered for a moment, and then nodded. “I’m a geneticist, not a…fortune teller. I don’t know exactly how any of it works, but we…found evidence that the behavior of certain employees was being…altered in a way that seemed to indicate a level of manipulation…”
Willie’s patience was wearing thin, “Oh, look, just say it! He was mind-controlling your staff. You would not be hanging out in a room covered in f%$#in’ tin foil if you didn’t think that.”
Dr. McGovern nodded.
Brother Cooper calmly started in again. “So, these aneurysms that your staff is experiencing – they are the results of this mind control?”
Dr. McGovern shook his head. “No. After we realized what was going on, we tranquilized and then lobotomized Mr. Weaver.”
“We now believe the incidents some of our staff have experienced following that event are the equivalent of mental spasms still occurring within the brain of Mr. Weaver. We are working to eliminate those spasms before they do any more harm.”
The room was quiet for a minute.
Willie concluded, “So that explains the email we got from that Jack Sanders guy…”
Dr. McGovern nodded.
Willie continued, “And the attacks everybody downstairs was having…”
Dr. McGovern nodded.
Willie finished up, “And so your other doctor…Dr. Hudson…the one that is missing? You think he wandered off while he was under mind control by Mr. Weaver too?”
Dr. McGovern paused, swallowed hard, and shook his head, “No…we have videotape of Dr. Hudson leaving the building last night. He stole one of our trucks when he left…with
Mrs. Weaver.”
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
