“No, no, there is a mistake,” Omar said. “Anita is a peaceful woman!”

The doors to the elevator slid open to a large, white, round room filled with monitors and sealed doors. A group of security guards, workers, and researchers stood in the area like a bunch of high school kids forced outside by a fire alarm.

The Colonel said, “As far as we can tell she’s exterminated every specimen in one whole cell block. We shut the bulkheads down so she can’t get out. With that gun-well, I didn’t want her to hurt anyone or for us to have to hurt her. Then she asked for you, Dr. Nehru.”

“For me?”

“Actually she asked for The Emperor first. We told her he was far away at the front. Then she insisted to see you.”

They stopped near one of the closed doors. It resembled a submarine bulkhead except larger and painted white.

“You’re not going in there alone,” Lori jumped.

“Yes I am.”

The glow of spinning red warning lights bounced across the walls in a slow parade of flashes. Big glass panels-like giant aquariums-lined one wall of the long, wide hall. The other side of that hall contained lockers and monitoring devices and scientific equipment.

Omar walked through the patches of light and dark created by the lack of main power in that section. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight. To calm his nerves he fumbled for a cigarette which he hurried to light.

He had toured Red Rock with his wife once before. In his nightmares he often saw an ‘incident’ inside the high-tech dungeon. He thought of Skip Beetles and Crawling Tube worms slipping free of their bonds and running roughshod through the underground levels. In all those nightmares, however, he never imagined his wife to be the monster running loose.

He passed the first of the containment cells. Beyond the glass doors he saw a burned pile of ashes. The smell of charred flesh-of some kind or another-lingered.