What do you get when you cross a paleontologist and a geneticist?
16 years of happy marriage.
And off the books experiments.
In my opinion I've always said my wife is the smart one. She computes whole genetic makeups while I play in the dirt looking for bones. Us two nerds met in college and between the mutual love of all things science and going for teams that weren't our alma maters' we hit it off strong. Not long after the wedding our interests began to get the better of us slightly.
You would think spending all day in labs would drive any further curiosity from us but our thirst for knowledge was never quenched. We'd sit together at the kitchen table and pour over scientific journals just to get that rush one gets from learning something new. We were both becoming more and more renowned in our respective fields and research facilities with the passing months due to our quest for learning.
One night at dinner I posed the question, "Hey babe, what if we tried our own at home experiments?". She laughed at the notion stating that although an at home lab would be fun, we don't have the required equipment to perform anything.
Well, this is the 21st century and as long as you aren't on a watchlist you can order plenty of lab equipment from the Internet.
Within two months we had a full array of DNA sequencing machines, incubators, every form of glassware imaginable, and enough chemicals to make a television show about cooking drugs.
As we sat about admiring our array I received word I would be flying out of the country for work. Quite bummed I wouldn't get to see what we could do, I reluctantly packed my bags and headed for the airport after kissing my wife goodbye.
Two long weeks later, I returned home to find my gorgeous wife standing at the door smiling from ear to ear. I took her in my arms and she gleefully exclaimed she had a surprise for me. My mind went to the gutter but she led me towards the basement. When we stepped into our makeshift lab I could see across the room in a cage was a small mammal of some form. My breath caught and brain raced to figure out what had been created in my absence but alas came up with nothing. She informed me she had succeeded in crossing a whitetail deer with a goat. Although it sounds like an odd choice it was speculated by her high school teacher that such could be done, and she proved him right.
As we sat around dinner and discussed her success I brought up my finds while out of country and in sync our eyes flashed a light of mischievous wonderment. The following morning I emptied my duffel bag of its contents and we picked through the remains of a long dead creature. It was a speculated new species of raptor that some hot shot behind a desk would get the gratification of naming so my feelings weren't bothered in the least bit by keeping a few of the creatures vertebrae. She placed the bones in a solution of only her knowing and I set about preparing the hopeful extraction.
Several hours later we had done what so many thought impossible in the basement of a home in rural America. She stabilized the extracted DNA and I began the hunt for a suitable egg to raise our labor of love in. With a bird of prey sanctuary just across town we planned a learning trip, and to our pleasure an expecting mother owl had some eggs available for us.
The following weeks were spent in a fever of excitement. We could use ultrasound to view the developing embryo and they grew like a weed. During this time we got our first power bill since the lab had went online. Let's just say that me being the handyman I am, rigging up a new source of power for our lab using radioactive materials wasn't exactly the hardest thing to do. The risks were minimal and I had thoroughly poured myself into learning safe handling procedures of nuclear materials.
Upon hatch we knew this generation one batch would be scary. They looked otherworldly and always tracked us around the lab from inside their acrylic cage. They were fed a diet of grasshoppers at first but eventually had to be switched to lab mice due to refusing anything other than living red meat.
We euthanized gen. 1 within two weeks of them refusing anything other than live prey. Despite their young age they had already reached the height of medium sized dogs. They had also been warm blooded with posed a multitude of risks for escape. So with gen. 2 my wife made sure to alter their structure so as to be cold blooded and accepting of insects. Her choice for donor DNA was salamanders and this created an even further terrifying creature. It's small body covered in slime and feathers and sporting a mouth of recurved teeth. They maintained they talons of their owl grandmother and so as they paced the cage the talons clicked on the tank, letting you know they were watching. Gen. 2 we allowed to live for two months and four days before we called for them to be put to sleep.
The largest of the group had slid out during maintenance to the cage and made a beeline for the open window. The shotgun I mounted to their only knocked her down to my surprise and shock. I grabbed a syringe and two vials off the table and kneeled beside her. The first drug was simply to insure the specimen didn't suffer. I plunged the syringe deep and as it raced through her veins her kicks at gaining her footing slowed and then stopped. As I lifted her and turned toward the furnace I had a thought. I laid her on the table and picked up a scalpel. With a few delicate slices I removed the eggs she carried. A few stitches later she was back together but still heavily drugged. I picked up the second vial of drugs and gave a dose strong enough to kill a small whale, far more than enough to euthanize a large dog sized animal. I placed the body in the furnace and turned seeing an audience watching me.
My wife stood with mouth agape at the spectacle that had just unfolded. She had rushed downstairs after hearing the blast and fearing the worst. She had watched everything happen following the gunshot. I couldn't tell you what emotion she was feeling because her face was awash of every imaginable one.
The look on the remaining raptors faces was much purer. They hated me. They never looked lovingly at me like a dog would. But it was at least a neutral expression. Now they glared with pure hate at me. I rushed to finish the maintenance I was performing and we retreated upstairs.
We discussed what should be done as we sat emotionally exhausted from what had just happened. Steps to insure an escape would be implemented. We re-entered the basement and began to check for weaknesses. The windows and doors were the only two problems we found. The walls and ceilings had been reinforced when we built the house to survive the tornadoes that frequent our area. We looked at our creations and they looked at us like we were lower than dirt to them. The decision was made to to euthanize the remaining creatures. I flooded the tank with anesthesia gas and left it running until no signs of life was found.
We spent the next few weeks preparing the basement to be safer. I welded bars over the basement windows and we invested in a heavy duty door. This door could stand up to anti-tank rounds and shrug them off like it was nothing. 12 inch bolts that would drop into the floor, walls, and ceiling. Nothing gets past it. As I played handyman my wife began creating gen. 3 of our experiments. This time we used the eggs from the second generation female that tried to escape but it's DNA was modified to give it a larger skeletal frame. We had found out that the large female had squeezed through a six by six inch square air duct. All that in a matter of seconds and covered five meters to approach the window. So a larger DNA donor had to be found and it was found in the Hellbender salamander. They would stand six feet easily at their hips at full height we was sure. We happily raised them and they grew wonderfully.
At five months, during a feeding a small scuffle broke out between two which caused me to electrify the floor of the container. This broke up the fight and I was met with a collection of curious looks. My mind raced back to the former generation and I prayed we wouldn't be forced to euthanize this generation. My wife took notice and we watched them watch us for awhile but eventually they grew bored and returned to eating. The side of beef was gone in a matter of seconds and all seemed fine. I prepared the evening dinner for the raptors due to a date we had planned for the night. The runt of the litter curiously watched me which wasn't uncommon, they're like typical pets in that aspect. But this time the raptor lept at the acrylic wall of the cage. I wasn't too worried about seeing as five inches of hard plastic could just about stop a train. But still the fact that it happened startled me.
I scolded the raptor just out of habit and suddenly the large male alpha lunged into the wall full force. That scared the shit out of me. In panic I reached for the button to shock the floor of the tank as the alpha ran to the other side and squared up to make another run. As I hit the button all the raptors screeched that frightened me to my core. Behavior like that couldn't be accepted for safety reasons. When they recovered every raptors look mimicked the look given to me by our gen. two raptors after they witnessed what I could do. I knew what had to be done. My wife knew what was coming as I walked around the tank but what followed still stuns me. Moving together every raptor hit the same area with enough force to make me jump away from the wall. I worriedly looked at what had happened as the raptors gathered themselves.
A hairline crack had formed but a crack nonetheless. The alpha looked at this too and he noticed it too. He nodded to the others and they ran to the other side of the container. I knew an escape was coming and yelled for my wife to evacuate. The pack slammed into the wall and I was showered in pieces of acrylic glass. A hole large enough for for a child to crawl through had been busted and I knew we didn't have long before the pack began trying to squeeze through the hole. I bounded towards the stairs, stopping halfway up to look at the disaster we had created. The runt had squeezed through and was jumping into the broken wall pushing it back in as the others sprinted into the wall from the inside. I didn't wait to see them break free but could her the crashing of bodies on the concrete floor as I reached the top of the stairs and slammed the door behind me.
My wife had made it upstairs, she had already begun packing our bug out bags into the car. We couldn't be anywhere near this house when law enforcement showed up or reporters started arriving or all our credibility would be lost. In retrospect we should of been more worried about releasing killer raptor mutants onto an unknowing world but we didn’t have the mental clarity for that at the time. I waited until I saw her just to assure myself that she was safe and as she passed my brain began racing to figure up some way to fix this nightmare that was forming in our basement. I walked to our gun locker and looked for something that would incapacitate a blood thirsty hybrid and came up with nothing. We had plenty of firearms, but from the lack of effect a shotgun had on close range I knew nothing we had could down one before the others set upon me with their pack mentality. I picked up a hunting rifle and an reached for the ammo box. I selected a few full metal jacket rounds and made my way out of the room.
My wife saw me and fearing I had became suicidal rushed to me. I assured her I wasn’t and merely wanted a few pot shots from a cracked door and she told me it would be pointless. We headed towards the front door and she froze dead in her tracks. Her calm blank expression told me something had came to her mind that would both solve our problems and be madness. Her few words carried the weight of knowing that what would done would spell disaster for others.
“Honey, go shoot the reactor, towards the bottom. The water will drain out and the nuclear rods will go supercritical. Everyone of those raptors will get a dose of radiation strong enough to kill them a thousand times over. And the heat produced will cause the chemicals to catch fire, the smoke will be one of the most toxic things the Earth has ever known. Babe, go cause an environmental disaster.”
I paced around the back of the house while she sat waiting in the car. I couldn’t risk her even being around this madness. I busted out one of the windows to the basement and could see our large steel tank at the back silently working away through nuclear fission. The glass breaking sent the raptors into alert and they stalked under the window peering up at me through the bars. My first shots were aimed at assorted chemicals sitting throughout the homemade lab. Acids and bases spilled together producing fumes immediately and some of the raptors walked over to investigate the smells. I didn’t wait to see their reaction to the harsh chemicals, I began unloading round after round into the reactor vessel. I could see the water flowing out but knew that the more holes in it would equal a faster result so I fired every round I had into it. Some cracked the supports that held it up and I knew that when things began to get wild the tank would fall causing the rods to come into contact with each other and producing even higher heat.
I pitched the rifle into the room and it was jumped upon by each raptor below me. I could see them snap the steel barrel with their teeth as one would snap a twig with their hands. I rejoined my wife in the car and she told me she had cut the gas on to the house before she left. Combined with what was occurring in the basement we knew this would be more than enough to erase any ties we had to messing with nature that we had committed. She pulled up the security cams we had in the house and already the effects of the radiation was showing on the camera in the basement. A fire had formed in the floor and the reactor laid on its side. The steel had already began sagging from the intense heat the rods produced and before long they would be sitting in a pool of chemicals and molten metal. The raptors were attacking the blast door at the top of the stairs and looking at the hall cam showed they weren’t having much luck. The alpha could make the door bulge but it somehow held up to his mass of muscle. The radiation in the basement became so high that all cameras were fried and within minutes all the other cameras in the house showed a flash of fire spread.
What was once our home had became a large toxic site. And it could of been far worse had an escape been allowed to happen. My wife called in the fire and reported that I had used our basement to conduct analysis on my findings and responding fire crews should treat the area with the utmost caution due to the use of radioactive isotopes used in dating certain specimens. We called our research institutes to inform them of the bad news and they were understanding and offered to pay for a hotel until we could get things settled again. Once we had our lies squared away and on the road my wife leaned over and smiled. After all this she could still smile. She lifted a family blanket from the backseat and revealed two raptor eggs she had brought out of the house.
“You saved our research!” was all I could manage before kissing her passionately. Even in the craziness of an escape she remained calm and level headed. The eggs placed on ice would slow the growth down to a much more manageable level so that you could predict when they would hatch down to the hour. We placed them back into the cooler so that no one would question two large eggs riding around with us.
The house was a total lose. Everything was burnt to ashes and no one would go near it to look for anything also. Drones were sent in to look at the damage and all that remained of the house was the basement and the blast door. It was laid facing away from the stairs with severe damage to the side facing the basement. Pieces of brick had been ripped from the wall and everyone said that it had to of been the hottest fire ever to happen to a house. The fire department said that when they got there must of been something inside exploding because they could hear what sounded like something trying to tear the house apart from the ground level.
We decided to build a new house with the insurance money on a nice large plot of land far away from anyone in the country. I personally oversaw the laying of the foundation to insure we had the safest storm shelter imaginable, no windows and another large heavy duty door. We had a walk in refrigerator placed in the basement also because it allowed for more cooking options we told everyone.
We celebrated our new house and our new beginning with two eggs, in an incubator.
Submitted November 21, 2016 at 12:33AM by crossychaser52 http://ift.tt/2eUmFhA nosleep
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