He was overtaken by an image of him and people in his life—Cap, Emily, Renee, Darlene, Steve, Filstrup, Brian, Graham, bunched together at some sort of cookout, grinning broadly as they each held out a huge ear of steaming sweet corn swathed in butter and salt.

Here, have a bite. Bon appétit!

Mutation, he knew, was the alteration of the pattern of nucleotide bases in a plant or animal, by natural accident, radiation, chemicals, or other stressors, resulting in changes—often massive ones—in the properties of the organism. Edwin was radiating the Macrotermes bellicosi, as Humphries had suspected, causing them to mutate into insects with greatly enhanced fecundity and the secondary ability to consume flesh.

Here, have a bite. Bon appétit!

Now, with the finding of the huge tube in the lab on the other side of the termites’ habitat, the cycle from two organisms to one was complete.

The mutated bugs were placed inside the steel holding pen where Edwin, Stone, and Anthony Brite had all perished. When their DNA was needed, somebody would gather up the carnivorous insects and bring them to the extraction room. There, they would be pulverized, and their DNA extracted using large centrifuges. Lou now felt certain the long tube he saw in the other lab was a mammoth gene gun, literally capable of blasting the mutated termite DNA into large numbers of corn kernels.

At that moment, Lou’s exhausted reverie was cut short by pounding on the door. The nightmare was hardly over.

On the far side of the lab was another door, this one with a glowing EXIT sign above it. The door at first seemed stuck, but Lou yanked harder, figuring the room was being kept under negative pressure as a precaution against radiation leaks. With a loud rush of air, the door swung open into a cinder block anteroom, with another door, again marked EXIT, just opposite him. From behind, he could hear the pounding intensify, now with some sort of metal implement. He went through the exit, then up a short flight of metal stairs. The gunshot wound to his thigh, probably responding to a constant surge of adrenaline, was quite bearable. At the top of the stairs was a steel storm door that opened into the floor of a utility shed. After he closed that door behind him, Lou dragged as much weight as he could onto it and exited the shed, squinting against the late afternoon light.

He was at the edge of the woods, bordering the clearing. Through the tree line, he could see Edwin’s Mercedes-Benz, Stone’s cruiser, and another car, a black Cadillac—almost certainly the car that had followed him into the city, what seemed like eons ago. It appeared empty. Humphries’s radar cart was where Lou had left it, but there it would have to stay. His priority at the moment was survival.