The Seventh Avenger

Chapter 12: Abomination

"That was the most...!" Sterns exclaims both loudly and excitedly as he paces along the length of the lounge chair in his office, too excited to conform proper sentences as he speaks.

"....Extraordinary thing that I have ever...seen in my entire life!" He adds.

I suddenly grew impatient with the professor in front of me. We have been sitting back in his office for roughly twenty minutes now after we had checked Bruce over to make sure it was safe for him to move, as well as letting him loose from the restraints that were holding him to the chair. In the twenty minutes that we had been sitting in his office though, Sterns had not done anything but express his excitement about what we had just witnessed in his lab, rather than actually talk about what had happened and what was going to happen to Bruce now.

"OK, you know what, stop, please," I snap at him, my patience wearing thin. "We need to go back and talk about what just happened in there."

To my surprise, Sterns ceases his pacing and nods his head eagerly, turning himself around so that he was now facing us. "Right! Absolutely, OK. The gamma pulse, came from the amygdala. Now, I think that Dr Ross' primer let's the cells absorb the energy temporarily and then it abates. That's why you didn't die of radiation sickness years ago!" He adds, saying this last part to Bruce who just nods in response.

"Now, maybe we've neutralized those cells permanently or maybe we just suppressed that event," Sterns adds before shrugging his shoulders. "I'm inclined to think the latter, but it's hard to know because none of our other test subjects survived-of course, they weren't getting the primer! But-"

"Wait wait wait," Bruce suddenly interrupts, bringing himself forward in the chair in which the three of us were seated on. "What did you just say?" He asks.

"They weren't getting the myrostatin primer-"

"No, that's not what he meant," I say, now also leaning forward in my chair as I immediately caught on as to what Bruce had really wanted Sterns to repeat, hoping deep down that what we thought he just said was just us not hearing him properly, that he hadn't even said those two dreaded words, that Bruce himself was about to say.

"Test subjects?" Bruce asked in a low voice. "What test subjects?"

Sterns just smiles and stands up straight before saying to us, "Come with me." He then turns around and hurries out of the room, leaving the three of us staring after him.

"I have a bad feeling about this," I mutter quietly to myself as the three of us quickly stand up and start to follow after Sterns.

"You're not the only one," Betty replies, entwining her hands with Bruce before the three of us then leave the room and follow after Sterns.

We don't take long to find him but I really wished that we hadn't. We pushed open the doors of the room in which we could hear his voice and the sight in front of us is enough for Bruce and Betty to drop one another's hands in shock.

The room was full of glass cabinets, dozens upon dozens of rows in them. The majority of them were filled with test tubes and strange chemicals in containers on the glass shelves, some with labels saying the names of each chemical. There was also the odd laboratory equipment on the shelves here and there including microscopes, test tube racks and glass beakers. These weren't the reason as to why Bruce and Betty had reacted the way in which they did, or cause me to narrow my eyes, furrow my brows and part my lips in anger, shock and confusion at once. What did, was the blood bags in at least a third of the many glass cabinets, filled with the dark, rich fluid. What angered me the most though was the small writing on the glass in front of each and every group of bags: MR GREEN, a batch number and strength with a percentage next to it.