Marcus

Still waiting to hear the details about the job and whether they want me and then if they do, I have to decide if it’s a good fit. And then maybe apartment hunting again. Effing yay.

On with the story, shall we?

***

Marcus Billings ran his email through the high security scanning and decoding. He opened it and read the report with a sinking feeling in his stomach. The test releases in Canada, Australia, Indonesia and other parts of the world had proven more effective than they had ever imagined. Unfortunately, the creatures were more prolific breeders than they were supposed to be. They were supposed to give birth to three or four joeys at a maximum. At least that was the number of teats available in the pouch. Mothers actually gave birth to tens of tiny half-formed babies and the first four that made it to the pouch and fastened onto a teat had any chance to grow to maturity.

These released creatures were reproducing in numbers he couldn’t account for. They needed to recapture some of them and find out what was going on.

Then there were the ones that had escaped in New Orleans. The reports were scattered and there had been no confirmed sightings until yesterday when a pair of rednecks hunting deer out of season had come across their friend and had been attacked themselves. In their escape, they managed to kill more than a couple and he expected those bodies to turn up in his lab in the very near future.

He quickly composed an email detailing instruction for the gathering and shipping of these. It would have been better if he were able to call it in. Email was fast, but it required someone to compose and someone else to receive, and the high level of security around this project meant that his people had to operate circumspectly when he knew it would be faster and more productive to be a little more open. If the police in New Orleans had been in the loop and on the lookout, the creatures would already be on their way. He needed them for autopsy and study. It had all seemed so reasonable in theory, but as someone had said, "EVERYTHING works in theory."

Marcus sent the email to his agent in New Orleans and hoped they’d have the animals before some veterinarian got his hands on them. Then he tried once more to write an email to convince his superiors that they had to widen their definition of "need to know" clearance. It was going to be a matter of survival before long, if they couldn’t get control over their creations.

***

The plot thickens. I have to organize some new bits that are going to be slotted in among these older pieces. And by "older", I mean the stuff that’s still in my notebook.