Page 11 of Bound by the Mad Scientist

“I mean, yeah. But there’s no way there’s anything in here. It’s rotting away. And looks… I don’t know, but not good.”

“I know.” I caught the snarl distorting his face in my flashlight. “A bunch of dogshit-brained asswads used to party here when it first closed. Then a student got hurt, and now it’s an automatic expulsion if you get caught here.”

I stopped. “What the fuck, man? Are you kidding?”

He turned around. “We’re not going to get caught. They only say that to stop kids from drinking here. The security guards don’t come inside. If it looks like no one’s home, they move on. But they only check once a night, and we’ve already missed them.”

True. The school wouldn’t pay security to enter a dangerous, dilapidated building when they only cared about liability. But how the hell did Kel know that?

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been here before.”

“How could you possibly know what the security schedule is from just coming here?”

“I…” His flashlight washed over his abs, casting shadows in the trenches. “I come here a lot.”

“What? Why?”

“I’ll show you. It’s just down here.”

Part of me wanted to turn around and run away. But I had to see what he was talking about, and potentially get my eyes fixed. Though the more sober I got, the less faith I had that it was real. Then there was the other part. Kel himself.

Did I want to run back to the manor? Risk getting tackled by one of those douchy Roman soldiers? Then be politely ignored by everyone else at that party until I staggered back to my dorm alone? No. What I most wanted was to hang out with Kelvin. And if that meant walking around the creepy, filthy remains of his dad’s lab, the corpse of whatever prestige his family had at Whitcomb, then so be it.

“Yeah, man. Let’s go.”

Kel smiled, and goddammit, it was cute. He was cute. And hot. Fuck. Thank goodness he didn’t say anything else. Just turned around and kept going. I followed.

We got to a stairway going down. If I thought the rest of the building was dark, that was pitch fucking black. The basement was used for administration offices and storage. Each door my flashlight landed on was named something like “Equipment Coordinator” or “Assay Archive.”

We paused at what looked like two metal panels in the wall. A glow came from the space at the bottom when the lights weren’t on it. They had to be doors. But what was behind them? And why make them look as if they were just a strange section of wall?

Kel looked me in the eye and said, “Do you trust me, Adrian?”

Did I trust him? I’d known the guy for two months. That’s not exactly put-my-life-in-his-hands territory. I didn’t even know his middle name. And it wasn’t just things I didn’t know about him, but the ones I couldn’t explain. Kelvin was a ball of mystery. But I felt it in my gut. For whatever stupid, probably dick-related reason, I did trust him.

“Yeah, man. I do.”

“Good. I trust you, too. This has to stay between us. I haven’t shown it to anyone else. You need to give me your word you won’t tell anyone anything.”

That set my teeth on edge. What was behind the door? Why hadn’t he shown anyone? Why was he showing me? Why was he taking so long to fucking open it??

“Yeah, man. You can trust me. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

Kel pressed his palm to what looked like a normal patch of wall beside the door. A box of blue light formed around it. It pulsed and grew inward until it lined his hand. Then it blinked and turned green with a pleasant, approving chime. The doors slid open, much faster than supermarket automatic doors. And inside was…

A laboratory off an alien spaceship. Not really, but it might as well have been. White and chrome and glass everywhere. A giant red digital clock glowed on the far wall. Screens of all shapes and sizes hung from the ceiling, stood on stands mounted in the floor, or were attached to what looked like desks. And that was all just crowding the INSANE amount of equipment.

I couldn’t help but stop and stare. There were single-cell RNA sequencers, an atomic force microscope, and several mass spectrometers, if one wasn’t enough. To the left was a row of bioreactors, and more machines that I’d only dreamed of one day getting to mess with. And those were just the things I could recognize. I had no idea what two-thirds of the shit in there did.

It was impressive, but more than that. “How much did all this cost?!”

Kel chuckled. “I’m glad to not know. It was all paid for with the grants from Dixon Chemical.”

“Jesus, dude. What the literal fuck!” I saw a cryo-electron microscope and ran over. “Do you know how much this thing costs?!” The infrastructure alone was millions of dollars. “Can I play with it?”

“No. Sorry.”