Chapter 5 Confirmation

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Eric found Becca in Lab Three at six in the morning, surrounded by holographic displays that cast her face in shifting blue light. She looked like she hadn't slept. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and her usually neat hair was pulled back in a haphazard knot. Empty coffee cups littered her workstation like evidence of a long, desperate night.

She didn't look up when he entered, even though the door chime announced his arrival.

"Becca?"

"Lock the door." Her voice was hollow, scraped raw. "And disable the security cameras. Code is 7-7-3-9."

Eric's pulse quickened. He did as she asked, watching the red recording lights blink out one by one. When he turned back, Becca was finally looking at him, and the expression on her face made his stomach drop.

"You were right," she said simply.

The words hung in the sterile air between them. Eric moved closer, his legs feeling unsteady. "The DNA match?"

"Daniel Marcus. Sergeant in the Army Rangers, deployed eighteen months ago to a classified location." Becca swiped her hand through the holographic display, and a personnel file materialized. A photo of a smiling man in uniform rotated slowly, handsome, young, alive. "Reported missing four months ago during a training exercise. They told his wife it was a recovery operation gone wrong. That his body was likely unrecoverable."

Eric stared at the photo, then at the monitor showing the mutated corpse from Bay Fifteen. It was impossible to reconcile them as the same person, yet the DNA didn't lie.

"That's not all." Becca's fingers trembled as she pulled up more files. Dozens of them, cascading across the holographic space like digital tombstones. "I ran tests on every specimen we collected from your last three missions. Seventeen in total."

"And?"

"Seventeen humans, Eric. Not one animal. Not one random mutation." She touched a file, expanding it. "This one; Specimen Six from the warehouse raid last week was Michael Chen. No relation to our Chen, thank God. The Marine Corps disappeared during a joint training op two years ago."

Another file bloomed open. "Specimen Nine. Sarah Winters. Army medic. Vanished fourteen months ago." Another. "James Rodriguez. Navy SEAL. Gone for eight months." Another. And another. And another.

Eric watched the faces appear, men and women in uniform, all young, all smiling for their official photos, all classified as missing or killed in action. All lying in cold storage three floors below, transformed into something that barely resembled humans anymore.

"How?" The word came out strangled. "How is this possible?"

"I don't know." Becca collapsed into her chair, suddenly looking much older than her thirty-two years. "But I can tell you what I found in their tissue samples. Every single one shows signs of forced genetic modification. Deliberate alteration at the cellular level using a retroviral vector I've never seen before."

She pulled up a microscopic image; cells that looked wrong, corrupted, like something had rewritten their fundamental code. "Whatever they did to these people, it wasn't natural. It wasn't random. This was engineered, Eric. Systematic. Someone is taking soldiers and turning them into... into what we've been hunting."

Eric felt the room tilt. He gripped the edge of Becca's workstation, forcing himself to breathe. "The organization. Our organization. They have to know."

"I think they know more than we know." Becca's voice dropped to barely a whisper. "I think they're doing it."

"That's impossible. We're supposed to be protecting people from these things…."

"Are we?" Becca spun her chair to face him fully. "Think about it. Where do the mutants come from? Who gives us our mission parameters? Who controls what information we receive about these targets?"

Eric's mind raced backward through years of operations. Briefings that gave them locations but never origins. Targets that appeared in clusters, always in areas the organization had flagged. Bodies that were immediately confiscated after each mission, taken for "research purposes" that no one ever explained.

"The woman at the house," Eric said slowly. "Daniel's wife. She said he was deployed on a classified assignment. They told her he died in some kind of training operation."

"They all were." Becca gestured at the floating files. "Every single one reported missing during classified ops or specialized training. All volunteers for enhanced soldier programs, experimental augmentation trials, cutting-edge combat applications." She laughed bitterly. "The files even list their next of kin. Their emergency contacts. People are waiting for them to come home."

Eric moved to the nearest monitor, scrolling through the personnel records. Each file was meticulously detailed, blood types, medical histories, psychological evaluations. These weren't random victims. They were selected. Chosen.

"Why?" he asked. "Why would they do this? Turn their own soldiers into monsters and then send us to kill them?"

"I've been asking myself that all night." Becca stood, pacing between the holographic displays like she was trapped in a cage of damning evidence. "Maybe it's a weapons program that went wrong. Maybe they're testing something and these are the failures. Maybe…." She stopped, her face pale. "Maybe they need a reason to keep funding enhanced soldier programs like yours."

The implication crashed over Eric like ice water. "You think we're killing evidence. Test subjects they can't afford to have examined."

"I think we're cleaning up someone's mess while they perfect whatever process created it." Becca pulled up another file, this one heavily redacted. "Look at the dates. The earliest mutations started appearing four years ago. Right around the time your enhancement program began."

Eric stared at the timeline, watching the progression. Isolated incidents at first, then increasing frequency. More mutations. More missions. More funding for enhanced soldiers to fight the growing threat.

A threat their own organization might be creating.

Eric looked at his hands and suddenly felt disgusted at it

"I killed them," Eric said, the words tasting like ash. "I looked them in the eyes and I killed them, and I never once asked who they were."

"You didn't know."

"I should have." Eric turned away from the monitors, unable to bear the weight of all those faces. "The morse code. The wedding ring. The photograph. They were trying to tell us. They were trying to communicate, and we just…."

His voice broke. Becca moved beside him, her hand finding his shoulder.

Outside the lab, the facility was waking up. Footsteps echoed in distant corridors. Voices called out morning greetings. Another day began for soldiers who believed they were protecting humanity from monsters.

None of them knew that they were the monsters all along.