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from the effort of holding on to the railing.
    They pulled up to a small dock just as dawn was breaking on the island. The place appeared empty, but Peter took no chances. Gordon stayed on the boat, in radio contact, while Peter pulled on a special protective jumpsuit, and holstered a mini flamethrower. Then he walked down a path into the island’s lush greenery. He’d studied a map of the installation while Gordon navigated to the small Key.
    The place was silent…there was no noise but the distant rush of the surf. He found the silver Quonset hut set back in the forest, and tried the door. It fell open easily, not even fully closed. The smell hit him as soon as he stepped inside. He found the researcher lying on the floor, a cascade of glass vials shattered near his body. His mouth was locked open in a scream of pain, but Peter couldn’t see the expression of his eyes…because they were gone. Black sockets looked back at him from the man’s skull, and a puddle of blood or brains or…something spread around his head. Peter kicked the door all the way open and dragged the man’s body out of the hut. He laid it near the side of the hut before going back inside to search the place more thoroughly…wasn’t going to do that with a body staring back at him.
    The scientific team from Innovative Industries had been sent back to the island on Monday after the reports that some college kids had been eaten alive here by a strange breed of flies. This covert double I. installation had been shut down two years ago. Cleaned out.
    Abandoned.
    Apparently someone had missed something the first time around. Because the things that Innovative Industries had been experimenting with clearly weren’t dead. Apparently the team had tried to validate and address the situation on their own, but when radio contact with the research team had suddenly ceased last night, I.I. had finally had to come clean and inform the government that there “might be” a problem.
    Remembering that data point, he checked to see that his own radio still worked, looked at the logs and then pulled out a bag from the case on his shoulder. He set it on the lab’s long counter and carefully filled his bag with a series of bottles that the I.I. team had apparently gathered. Inside the glass were dozens of insects. Specimen after specimen of strange-looking spiders and flies. Specimens collected by the research team over the past two days since the reports had surfaced on the news about the college kids. The news story had already run its course; by the time the government was aware of a possible connection between a “Spring Break gone wrong” and the abandoned I.I. installation, the media had moved on to other stories.
    He slipped a notebook and a series of chemical flasks, labeled simply G102, G126, G187 into a carrying case and walked out of the hut. He stopped at the body to give it one last look, and noticed a dried stream of blood down a clenched fist. Peter bent down and carefully pried open the fingers until fragments of a glass test tube fell out, He lifted the one piece with a black marker label on it and read it out loud. H1, it said.
    Something moved in the brush behind him, and Peter looked up to see something flash down the trail. He leapt to follow, and chased a flash of white across the small island until the figure stumbled and fell to the sand. When he caught up with the man, he saw a trail of something faintly purple moving across the man’s cheek. Blood dripped from the man’s ear to the sand, and his eyes were bugged out and manic. The guy looked ready to pop.
    “There was a full breach here, wasn’t there?” Peter said quietly.
    The man opened his mouth to answer, and something buzzed nearby, angry in the dawn air. From inside the man’s mouth, something faintly purple moved. As Peter watched, a flurry of legs suddenly crawled past the man’s lips and across his face. The I.I. researcher moaned, and slapped futilely at his cheeks