Free Omen Operation by Taylor Brooke Page B

focused on Porter, who nodded slowly.
    “My father is Juneau Malloy, head biologist and development coordinator for the Omen project. I was recruited by him and then placed in ISO Recovery Camp Eleven. My job was to obtain information and analyze the progress of each individual in the camp.”
    Brooklyn wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t look away from him.
    Dawson’s nostrils flared. His fingers curled into tight fists.
    “Us?” Dawson asked. “When you say each individual you mean us , don’t you?”
    “Yes,” Porter breathed. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
    “Why?”
    Porter didn’t flinch when Dawson barked at him. He just looked at his lap and tried to mask the pained look on his face by gesturing loosely to Brooklyn.
    “Because each of you were given a flu shot when you were between the ages of twelve months and seven years old. Instead of your standard vaccine, what you were dosed with was a concentrated form of two extremely powerful viruses.”
    A breathy laugh flew out of Julian’s mouth. “This is a joke right? Like, you’re joking? You have to be, because what you just said is completely insane.”
    “He’s not joking,” Brooklyn interrupted.
    Four pairs of eyes beamed toward her.
    “Keep going,” she said.
    Porter glanced at her from under his lashes and licked his lips. “Merging two viruses isn’t easy; it took years of trial and error before they got it right. It was a problem with stability; the cells either died on contact or destroyed the human tissue immediately after introduction. Everything changed when my dad started experimenting with microbes. He hollowed out the cells of proteins and filled them with the conjoined viruses, but it still didn’t work, not until they started reprogramming the genome.”
    Dawson wasn’t moving, but it was clear that he was absorbing and processing each detail as Porter spoke.
    “They used the microbes to get things done. They’re cells that are grown and programmed by computers, harvested and manifested with code rather than genes. It’s a whole new level of science that we’re just starting to understand. I never got why my dad and his associates were playing with something so fucked-up until he told me what they’d accomplished.”
    Porter paused and exhaled a shaky breath. “I didn’t know what it meant. He’d been working on all this shit for years. When he told me they were ready to start human trials, I didn’t know how to react. I was on a plane out of San Francisco, on my way to Denver that afternoon. My father’s always had his home life and his work life separate. I never questioned it until that day. I never really cared. But the Surrogates…they were the first thing I saw when he took me to the lab.”
    Julian growled, “Get to the point.”
    “What my dear old dad left out was that when he said he was ready to start human trials, he really meant he was ready to find them by using the failed test subjects as bloodhounds. Those subjects are the creatures that hunted each and every one of you down two years ago. The ones you thought were infected.”
    Brooklyn pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth to keep from screaming. She picked at the edge of her nails.
    “Surrogates, or Surros for short, are your predecessors. Strong, flexible, fast, but extremely frail in the mind. They can be given a task to retrieve or to kill but not much else. They’re lacking due to the microbes not reversing the aspects of the viruses completely once the proteins were released into the bloodstream. It was apparent that the viruses needed more time to bond and coexist in one host before evolving. They needed to age, to manifest naturally so…a handful of practitioners around the country were given the responsibility of choosing the hosts when their bodies were still young and malleable.”
    Dawson’s eyebrows pulled together, and his bottom lip quivered.
    Brooklyn felt faint.
    “Once you reached the appropriate age,