Up From The Deep Vaughn Jackson (book club suggestions TXT) 📖

Skylar looked around. A tower pierced into the sky, its white sheen blinding in the open sun. She could smell salt on the air, so she guessed they were on an island. There looked to be the ruins of an older building next to the square grey building ahead of them.

“Alcatraz,” she said. “So, these are—”

“Just people. Not federal agents.” An enigmatic smile played across Ming’s lips. “I told you that you weren’t a prisoner.”

“Huh. Then where are we headed?”

“We can’t conduct our business here in public.”

“Don’t tell me there’s a secret sub-basement to Alcatraz.” Skylar’s eyes widened despite her reservations.

“There is no secret sub-basement to Alcatraz...but there is a secret passage to a facility that rests inside the island,” Ming said.

“Oh my god! That’s so cool, I mean a secret underground—”

People turned and stared at her outburst.

Ming cleared her throat. “Secret is the keyword.”

“Oh right. Sorry.”

People resumed their normal sightseeing activities as they entered the retired prison. Rows upon rows of empty cells echoed with the sounds of their footsteps.

“No one’s inside. Don’t they do tours?”

“We’re in between them. Hurry up.” The agent quickened her pace and they stopped in front of a cell much larger than all of the others. An oriental rug covered the concrete floor, and several pieces of wooden furniture far too fancy for a prison sat covered in dust inside the cell. Agent Ming produced a different badge from her suit jacket and scanned it against a brick on the wall. There was a beep and a small click. The plexiglass panel sealing the room slid up on hydraulic slides. They entered the cell and closed the panel behind them.

“Okay, so where’s the secret door?”

No sooner had she said something, a loud grinding sound rumbled from the back wall of the cell. It began to slide down, slowly revealing a sterile looking hallway illuminated with fluorescent lights. Agent Ming stood holding a nineteen-twenties rotary phone off the hook. When the door opened all the way, she hung it up. Skylar could hear the gears move, preparing to reseal the passageway.

“That’s too cool.”

“Yes. Now please hurry before anyone comes along.”

“Oh yeah.” Skylar jogged to the back of the cell and into the sterile portal.

The door rumbled closed behind them and sealed with an echoing thud. An antiseptic smell filled the air, like someone just finished cleaning. It reminded her of a hospital.

Skylar sneezed. Agent Ming walked ahead briskly, disappearing through a door at the end of the hallway. Skylar squeaked and scurried after her, not wanting to be left alone in the empty corridor. She pushed open the heavy iron door and entered a room like something out of her science-fiction novels.

People in lab coats hustled to and fro, while strange devices whizzed and chimed. Some sparked and smoked. The far wall of the room was covered floor to ceiling in monitors displaying what appeared to be various live camera feeds of San Francisco, and other places that Skylar didn’t recognize.

In the center of the room, suspended in a vat of fluid, sat a tooth the size of a small person. Blood and tissue floated alongside it as it bobbed in the clear mixture.

“What?” Skylar froze. She shook her head, and rushed to the side of the container, pressing her face against the glass like a child looking through a window at a much-desired toy. “Is this— is it real?”

“Real enough to tear clean through a blue whale.” A young man with silver hair and glasses bigger than his head walked up beside her. His golden eyes sparkled as he spoke. “Beautiful, isn’t it.”

“Doctor Wagner, this is Skylar O’Hara,” Ming said.

“Doctor Skylar O’Hara,” Skylar said extending her hand and shooting the agent a not-so-friendly look.

“Well, doctor,” the man laughed, “pleased to meet another person as excited about this discovery as I am. And please, there’s no need for formality here, please call me Kurtis.”

“Doctor Wagner, until further notice please continue to call me Doctor O’Hara,” Skylar said with a smile. “I don’t know any of you outside of this supposedly professional environment, so I will do the same.”

Kurtis looked taken aback. The childlike wonder of minutes again had dropped completely, and Skylar stared him down with the cold professionalism she so rigorously practiced to survive her male colleagues.

“Well, uh, if you say so,” he stuttered, casting a “help me” glance at Agent Ming, who simply shrugged.

“Now then,” Skylar said, forcing her tone to be as authoritative as possible. “Tell me about the specimen.”

“It’s a tooth,” Kurtis deadpanned.

Skylar frowned. “Obviously. What have you learned from the tooth? Or the tissue?”

“We don’t exactly have those kind of biology experts here at the, uh, FBI.” He scratched the back of his head and chuckled nervously. “So, we haven’t gotten much beyond that.”

Skylar paused. “Which explains why you brought me here.” She turned to Ming. “You could have just asked, you know.”

“You could have said no.” Ming waved a hand dismissively.

“I wouldn’t have.”

“How could we have known?”

“Well you certainly knew enough about me to know to drag me in,” Skylar muttered. “Okay,” she said raising her voice back to its normal volume. “I’ll need—”

“We set up a station for you just over there,” Kurtis said, pointing to a table covered in all kinds of equipment. “You should find everything you could need, but if not let us know. Will you need any assistance?”

Skylar regarded Wagner icily. “No. Thank you.”

#

She wasn’t sure what to make of the creature. It shared genetic characteristics with reptiles, amphibians, fish, and even sharks, something remarkably impossible. Or at least it would have been, if she wasn’t seeing it with her own two eyes. Of one thing she was sure though, the creature’s regenerative abilities were astounding. She could see the cells growing and re-growing even as she observed it. It explained the smell: hydrochloric acid. To keep the organic tissue from spreading they were constantly killing it.

“Learned that the hard way,” Kurtis said, approaching. Skylar wasn’t sure