Origin by J.A. Konrath, Jack Kilborn Read Free Book Online Page A

charges.
    No one had blabbed since.
    Sun thought Race was simply trying to scare her with that story when she’d first arrived. Now she had no illusions that her oath of secrecy was as serious as they come. Strangely, it didn’t matter to her one bit.
    Sun had no one to tell.
    While the political history was interesting, Sun was even more intrigued by the thousands of tests done on Bub since his arrival 100 years ago.
    Forty-some people have worked at Samhain, encompassing over a dozen professions, from botanist to phrenologist. More often than not, those who were chosen stayed for the rest of their lives. Samhain had been both their home and their life’s work, and as far as she knew Sun was the only person who had ever seen it. It was both inspiring and depressing.
    The files Sun had been recently reviewing were from the 1970s, most of them concerning a series of experiments done by two men named Meyer and Storky. The duo performed a staggering number of tests on Bub, up until Meyer’s death from Kaposi’s Sarcoma in 1979. So dedicated were they to research that Meyer had a linear accelerator sent to Samhain when he was diagnosed, and took his radiation treatments onsite so they could continue their experiments without interruption.
    Some of their finds were extraordinary.
    Bub was impervious, it seemed, to extreme cold. They’d placed several refrigeration units in Red 13, the room Bub was kept in while he was comatose, and gradually lowered the temperature to four below zero degrees Celsius. Bub’s internal body temperature didn’t drop a single degree, and his heart rate and breathing remained consistent.
    The two then moved in some heaters and cranked it up to over two hundred degrees. An egg fried on the table next to Bub, but he didn’t fry. The demon’s skin got hot, but his internal temperature didn’t fluctuate more than a degree.
    Meyer and Storky also discovered that Bub could breathe just about anything. It had been known since the ‘40s that Bub’s complex respiratory system, which included four lungs, two diaphragms, and two organs that resembled air bladders, processed nitrogen and oxygen and excreted a combination of methane and nitrous oxide. Through experimentation they showed that Bub could process pure nitrogen, or pure oxygen, or carbon dioxide, helium, hydrogen, propane, and even chlorine gas, and was able to break it down to nourish his cells.
    They stopped short at nerve gas, even though President Nixon gave them the okay.
    Sun read all of this with great interest, but the interest was slowly giving way to something else.
    Paranoia.
    Bub was resistant to all disease, fungal, viral and bacterial. His body attacked any invader, whether it be bubonic plague, herpes zoster, ringworm, or even Dutch elm disease, surrounded it with what were assumed to be antibodies, and expelled the intruder from his anus in a crystalline pellet. Meyer even went so far as to inject him with enough anthrax to wipe out a large city. Bub excreted it within twenty minutes.
    He wasn’t invulnerable to physical harm, but damn near close. Ever since the first doctor drew some of Bub’s blood and watched in amazement as the needle mark repaired itself moments later, it had been known that the demon possessed rapidly accelerated healing ability. Meyer and Storky must have been amazed by this, because they spent no less than three years conducting experiments on the anomaly. They poked, gouged, sliced, burned, scraped, and subjected every part of Bub to chemical attack.
    Bub could repair all harm, even plugs taken from flesh and bone, within seconds. It happened so fast that they brought in a 35mm film camera to shoot the miracle in slow motion.
    Meyer theorized that Bub’s endocrine system was extremely advanced. The endocrine system in humans was capable of instantaneous reaction, such as a burst of adrenaline in a dangerous situation. Bub’s had developed to the point where it had taken over the healing functions,