Ex-Patriots by Peter Clines

pissed at us and kept saying no and to mind our own
beeswax. Yeah, he’s one of those southern weirdoes who says
beeswax. But First Sergeant Paine had been specific about reporting
any symptoms and I wasn’t going to disobey the First Sergeant.
Finally Jacobs got up off his bunk, went to grab his shirt, and
when he reached up his arm split open. There was a pop and his skin
broke open like a hot dog popping on the grill. There was just too
much muscle packed in there. It didn’t even bleed much because it
was pulled so tight.
    We got him down to the infirmary and Lucas
came along, too, ‘cause he’d started to feel itchy and now he was
worried the same thing was gonna happen to him. The docs were
cutting him out of his wifebeater and it turned out his skin had
split, too, right across the shoulders. They started calling for
the old doc after that and we all got hustled out. But Eddie was
still there. We heard it all from him later.
    Apparently the old doc’s serum didn’t work
like he hoped. Remember how I talked about the crazy ripped fellas?
You ever see them when they’re so big they can’t put their arms
down? I think that’s what they mean by muscle-bound. Well, that’s
what was happening to Lucas and Jacobs. Their muscles were growing
out of control. Four days after we took them down there, Eddie told
us they couldn’t even move anymore. Their arms and legs were just
big sausages of muscle. They looked fat because their abs were
getting so big, and they couldn’t lay flat because their glutes and
shoulders were twisting their backs up. And their skin was still
splitting. It couldn’t grow as fast as the muscles were, so they
were getting some kind of sharkskin grafts or something.
    On the fifth day they started screaming. We
heard it all over the base. Turns out their bones were growing,
too, but they weren’t growing fast enough, either. They kept
getting crushed between muscles or stretched apart as the muscles
kept getting bigger and thicker. “It’s like their bodies’ve turned
into torture racks,” Eddie said one night when he got back to the
barracks. “They’re being pulled apart by their own muscles.”
    They screamed for three days straight. Eddie
told me over chow they’d gotten so big it took huge doses of
painkillers just to make them stop screaming. The whole thing was
freaking him out. He’d snuck his phone in and showed me a picture
of this swollen red thing that looked like a fat grub. He said it
was Jacobs, and that his skull’d been pushed off his neck by all
the muscles, but he was still alive cause it hadn’t actually broken
his spinal cord yet. “If they can fix him,” Eddie said, “he’s still
gonna be a cripple for the rest of his life.”
    On day nine they stopped screaming. All at
once. On day ten we were told Jacobs and Lucas had died in the line
of duty. They’d be given full honors. And the old doc was gone.
Eddie said he’d heard Colonel Shelly and the higher brass were
furious, and the doc had pretty much fled from the base.
    Anyway, we all figured that was it for
Project Krypton. Three-fourths of us out of commission one way or
the other. One company left. We got three days to wonder about it
and then we met the new doc at a big briefing. There was this young
fella with him in a dark suit, Smith from Homeland, and he smiled a
lot and gave this little speech and introduced us all to Doctor
Sorensen.
    The new doc’s the flipside of the old doc.
The old doc was actually a young fella, not much older than any of
us. He was some hot-shot scientist, and kind of an asshole, to be
honest. The new doc’s an older fella who feels like he should be a
cool uncle or something. He’s got a big gray beard and glasses and
he talks like a teacher.
    They were redoing Krypton from the ground up.
Nothing was going to be the same but the name. It was going to be a
whole new process. That made a lot of people rumble. But Sorensen
stopped that real quick before Colonel Shelly