"Melee" (c) 2011 Romeo Esparrago

A man wearing a black wool cap and an overcoat slips through the narrow opening at the gate of a chain-link fence. He ducks into the shadow of a building. The dumpster beside him — labeled Geneticorp Laboratories, BIOHAZARD — exudes a rancid chemical odor that stings his nose. He looks up at the sky full of stars, but sees no moon. The sound of approaching footsteps from around the corner startles him. He crouches still and watches a security guard shuffle along the gate, whistling a tune from a Spectravision commercial. The thief’s heart pounds with fear and agitation as the patrolman casts an idle glance into the shadows. He waits silently until the guard disappears into the night.

The nervous intruder quietly stands up and sneaks over to a small basement window close to the ground. He bends down and looks inside. On the wall of the dark, tiny room, a yellow light blinks on a control panel. A rush of noise fills his ears as a monorail approaches. As it squeals to a stop high on its tracks in the distance, he pulls a maul-hammer out of his coat, and shatters the glass. The light on the panel is now flashing red, but he knows that he has several seconds before the alarm sounds and security is notified. He drops inside and pulls out a knife to pry open the panel. He reaches into his coat for a thermos of freezing liquid and pours it onto the circuitry. Cold, white vapor flows onto the floor, and a cracking sound follows as the temperature of the wiring nears absolute zero. The light stops blinking. Next, he cuts the power cord and rips out the emergency battery. The nerve center of the security system is deactivated.

He cracks open the door and peers into the empty basement hallway. The floor is still damp from when he mopped it before the end of his shift. This observation triggers feelings of depression and then a flow of soiled memories. Of course he is resentful of the long hours, low pay, and undesirable duties of a janitor. He loathes being exposed to toxic chemicals while picking up broken test tubes and wiping up spills left by clumsy scientists. The waves of nausea are compounded by the smells emanating from experimental animals like the unicorns in the engineering lab. He is always scheduled to clean up after the University Ag-fraternity kids have their fun and continually fail to remedy the miserable beasts’ drippy, drooping eyes, glaringly unsymmetrical. He had overheard that they spliced genes in horned goats then bred them to pure-bred horses, but never got the calculations right for fusing the horns together in the middle. Tolerance of such cruelty had been a temperance of hopelessness and excruciating frustration, but this was his only opportunity to get inside and cure society’s disease.

He remembers his sister. They were one year apart in age and inseparable, until her sixteenth birthday, when she was kidnapped and sold to a dealer. He recalls the last time he saw her walking out onto the street with a shopping list in her hand. When he returned from his service in the Marines, Captain Lud was told by his neighbor that she had been seen outside a mansion in the hills. He rushed to see her. He broke into the house and found her, but she didn’t remember him. Reconditioning the minds of the remaining females was notoriously an electro-surgical annihilation. When he saw her owner asleep in bed, he lost control and strangled the old man. For this crime, he was incarcerated for twenty years. In prison, he had lots of time to think over what was wrong with the world and how he could change it.

He also remembers a conversation he overheard between two scientists earlier that week. Growth media extracted from agricultural materials genetically engineered to produce SterileX was used to test for ameiotic sterile females in monoclonal variation studies. One of the researchers found a mutation in the 75th generation cross W, a fertile female embryo resistant to SterileX. Finally, all the years of toiling as a janitor could be redeemed.

He ties a cloth over his face, and steps into the hallway toward the stairs. He ascends past the main level to the second floor and the optic observation lab. Halfway down the hall, he stops at a red fire cabinet on the wall labeled with OPEN ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, ALARM WILL SOUND.

“Little chance of that,” he remarks as he removes a heavy axe and proceeds down the hall. He stops at a solid wooden door and swings the axe with all his strength at the doorknob. After several loud and powerful blows, the wood cracks and caves in. He is inside the lab. Large microscopes and video monitors clutter the room. A large freezer makes a low humming noise in the back corner. The man takes the empty thermos out of his pocket and unscrews the cap. He places it in a sink under running water. The water crystallizes, and then begins to thaw. He opens the freezer door and searches for the mutant embryo. On the bottom shelf he finds a canister labeled 75-W XX R. His eyes open wide as he drops a vial from the canister into the cool water in the thermos and seals the cap. In a flash, he’s running for the stairs.

As he reaches the end of the hall, a door slams downstairs. Shock takes hold of his reflexes, and he cannot move. In a desperate moment, he recalls his first girlfriend, a wild and sneaky girl nicknamed “Critter”, who frequently stayed overnight with his sister. She slipped into his bedroom to tease him, while his parents were sleeping. She was always in trouble for skipping school and running away from her parents. In tight situations, he always found comfort in memories of her quick, lithe movements, and her silly tie-died ponytail colored like raccoon fur. He often fantasized about her surviving on the streets and on her own, free from the horrors of civilized modern society. She had been expelled from school, and left town soon before his sister was kidnapped. It wasn’t much of a surprise, anyway. His heart starts beating again, as he recalls the intense warmth and electric touches they shared through cold nights. Two sets of footsteps are tapping towards the stairs on the hard tile floor below. He hears a voice.

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