Free Odd Interlude Part Two by Dean Koontz Page A

fingernails. And now in the tips of Dr. Hiskott’s fingers, you can barely see where the nail beds once were. I mean, there’s no depressions for them, and the skin is smoothing out almost before everyone’s eyes. Finally those Harvard educations begin to pay off when these three scientists all make the connection between what just happened to Hiskott and the fact that the dead ETs they’re studying don’t have fingernails.
    Ed, previously known as Aladdin, doesn’t describe things in the juicy detail you might wish. It’s justnot in his nature to be super dramatic, but I bet you can imagine, as I sure can, the panic that gripped those three guys in that lab. Their wing is hermetically sealed to begin with, and you go in and out through a decontamination chamber, but now one of Hiskott’s assistants says they have to pull the alarm switch, lock down the lab, and call an emergency closed-circuit video conference with everyone else on Project Polaris. The other assistant agrees, and so does Hiskott—but then he surprises them, attacks them, slicing deep with a long-bladed scalpel he’d used in the dissection of the aliens, slashing their carotid arteries, and they’re done for in like twelve seconds flat. All this is captured by the in-lab cameras that record all procedures for posterity or whatever.
    Whether Dr. Norris Hiskott was always your average mad scientist or whether he was driven wacko by the alien DNA that got into his brain, who can say? Maybe it’s a little of both. So what he does then is, he cleans the blood off his hands, strips off his smock, leaves through the decontamination chamber, and drives out of Wyvern. When he gets to his house in Moonlight Bay, he right away strangles his wife to death, we don’t know if because she noticed he didn’t have fingernails or if maybe because he was undergoing some even weirder change that would explain why he wore a hoodie when he checked in to the Harmony Corner motor court. Maybe they had a lousy marriage, he wouldn’t help her wash the dishes or put out the trash, that kind of thing, and she nagged him, and he wanted to strangle her for years, and now he had nothing to lose, so he did it.
    Meanwhile, for more than three years, the investigation of the mysterious sphere had gotten nowhere. The thing just floated there, resisting all schemes to open it or discover its purpose. Then in the three days before Norris Hiskott goes missing and especially on the afternoon he splits the scene, major creepy things begin happening in that wing of Project Polaris where they keep the sphere. People are spontaneously levitating around it. The hands on wristwatches spin so fast that watchworks begin to smoke. One balding scientist grows his hair back in like six minutes and looks twenty years younger than when he came to work that day. People are having vivid visions of disturbing landscapes that exist nowhere on Earth. On the computer monitors, the faces of dead friends and relatives of the project staff appear, screaming for help and shrieking vicious lies about the living whom they address.
    So now, just when Hiskott is fleeing Wyvern, the thing that I call Orc—which doesn’t resemble the other ETs—sort of manifests out of the side of the sphere and nearly escapes, killing the six members of a SWAT team that tries to capture it. Orc is isolated in the long yellow corridor, where it’s promptly gassed and then cooked into a juiceless mummy by intense streams of microwaves.
    So then the unknown high muckety-mucks who oversee this Project Polaris decide they shouldevacuate all personnel, lock down the entire facility, and keep it locked until a study of their findings to date might suggest a safer way to proceed with both the alien cadavers and the artifacts. Do you think? Sheesh. Because everyone agrees it’s too dangerous to allow any people into the facility, the monitoring of events inside—if any—will be conducted exclusively by the subject of another