Chapter 13: Specimen-99
269 Words
Ten years before the sky burned...
Deep beneath the streets of Manhattan, inside a top-secret black-site laboratory funded by the Department of Defense, a bio-containment unit hissed with frost.
Inside sat Specimen-99.
It was a nightmare of biological design—a horrifying fusion of a spider, a scorpion, and a deep-sea crab. Its carapace was as hard as military steel, its six jagged legs ending in razor spikes, and its tail tipped with a hollow, flesh-melting stinger.
It was tiny then—no larger than a dinner crab. To keep its hyper-dense cell structure from expanding uncontrollably, the scientists kept its chamber filled with pure nitrogen gas. Under nitrogen, its metabolism remained dormant.
Then came the bombs.
When Russia’s nuclear warheads slammed into New York, the underground laboratory collapsed. Power grids died. The nitrogen tanks ruptured and bled dry.
Specimen-99 didn't die in the rubble.
For the first time, oxygen flooded its spiracles.
The moment oxygen hit its bloodstream, a catastrophic cellular reaction occurred. Its DNA mutated violently. Its body didn't just grow—it exploded in size. Within months, it grew larger than an armored truck, its carapace expanding to absorb bullets, its body producing a specialized enzyme that allowed it to self-impregnate.
Deep in the dark, sunless ruins of the subway tunnels beneath New York, Specimen-99 laid thousands of eggs a day.
For five years, while humanity fought over canned peaches and bottled water, an ocean of chitin, pincers, and stingers multiplied in the deep dark... waiting for the surface to quiet down.
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