“Damn it!” cursed the project leader, slamming his fists down on the empty surgical tray. His blue latex gloves squeaked as the air was forced from them, and it only furthered his frustration. He ripped them from his hands, fumbling and smearing blood and fluids across his bare wrists.

“Doctor?” A nurse laid a hand on his shoulder, her pretty pale face wrinkled in concern.

“Don't touch me!” he howled, throwing back his shoulders to shake her off. She and the other medical assistants watched as he threw the swinging doors of the operating room open and stormed out, leaving them flapping open and shut behind him.

“November 4th,” Preston Vigour, head of the Chimera Project, wrote at the head of a fresh page in his research logs. The tip of his pen pressed deep into the paper, leaving jagged, ink-heavy lines across the paper.

“FAILURE!” he underlined the word. “Subjects No. 110 and 111 underwent full splicing procedures. Final result, Subject No 112, failed to successfully assimilate all combined elements. Subject 12 expired on the table at 42 hours and 37 minutes into splicing.” He skipped a line. “Cause of Death: Seizure brought on by nervous system malfunction, leading to severe brain trauma.”

He wrote heavily, and left a massive splotch at the end of the sentence when a monkey somewhere down the hall shrieked.

“Shut the damn things up!” he bellowed, though he knew that the animal care staff couldn't hear him through his office door. He only succeeded in setting off the rest of the menagerie penned in the holding room, their cages stacked to the ceiling and smelling of urine and dung.

“Doctor, I've brought you some coffee.” The nurse hesitated in the hallway, the door open only a crack.

The poor thing actually loves me, thought Preston, shame I have no plans to love her over Angelina. He sighed and gestured for the buxom blonde to bring in the tray. The work has changed me. I'd never have had an affair at the Children's Hospital. A part of him wasn't sure if that was the truth or only his excuse to himself.

He watched her backside as she set the coffee on his desk. He smiled when she traced a delicate, red-enameled fingernail across his knee, but he brushed her away with the back of his hand.

“You're under a lot of stress,” she said, “If only you'd let me...”

He tapped a spoonful of sugar into his coffee. “Not today.”

“I understand why you're upset. Nearly 40 procedures and months of work in the research la-”

“You don't need to tell me how many times I've failed!” he spat at her. She flinched when he whipped a hand out to point at the door. “Out! Out! Get out, damn it! Get out!”

The nurse ran from the room with fear in her eyes.

Preston threw his mug against the wall where it shattered and splashed hot coffee across the room, soaking half of his research notes. He cursed and threw his arms in the air, throwing himself out of his rolling office chair, which fled across the room and bounced against the far wall.

On his way out, he kicked the desk.

Preston counted himself the most unlucky creature on earth, even moreso than the animals that peered at him through the bars of their cages as he stomped down the hall, pulling on his coffee-spattered lab coat.

Monkeys clustered together, shivering, mothers shielding their babies as researchers passed.

A multitude of parrots set to squawking and flapping, pecking at one another as they jostled for space in their overfull cage. Most of them had gone completely bald from the stress.

A terrarium of mice bit and fought with one another to be on the bottom of the inch-thick heap that stretched from one corner of the enclosure to the other.

Preston scowled at them and stomped past, doing his best to shut out the mournful groans of cattle with oozing, sagging, infected wings grafted to their shoulder blades.

I hate my job.

Once his work had been about helping people. He made sick children well. Concerned mothers would drag in toddlers who needed nothing more than a laxative and a lollipop. His patients smiled and thanked him. Some of them drew him pictures. He pinned them to a cork board in his assistant's cubicle.

The worst part of his job had been giving vaccinations, and even then the kids went away marveling at their colorful band aids and sucking candy.

Now instead of happy faces he saw monkey parts hanging out of hazardous material bins and monstrosities struggling to breath through seeping, inflamed gills. He'd never shake anything he'd seen in this hell hole.

He dreamed about it every night when he went back to his army-sanctioned dormitory in a whitewashed building adjacent to the labs. He slept on a hard pallet draped in thin white bedsheets and fell into fitful sleep yearning to hold his wife beneath the hand-sewn quilt on their four poster bed at home. He woke screaming every morning after dreaming of torment in the eyes of pained creatures who begged him to stop. Stop cutting, stop sewing, put an end to the horror. Animals who dashed themselves to pieces when they realized what they had become. Animals who cried and accused him in his Angelina's gentle voice.

I should have never written that paper, he lamented daily. The paper in question was a theoretical piece drafted to satisfy the hospital director, who had claimed that the hospital wasn't doing enough to further medicine. Preston has written a very tongue-in-cheek, but well-supported paper on the possibility of full-body transplants in which a patient's brain might be grafted into a healthy body when death was imminent.

And then the Pig Army had come. First it was an official-looking representative in a business suit with a briefcase. He made appointment after appointment, promising money and prestige if only Preston would take a job as the head of an experimental lab. The man had never told Preston the details, saying that they were classified information. And so Preston had declined the offer over and over, even after he began to receive luxurious gifts – first a basket of gold-leafed desserts, then a pair of diamond earrings for his wife, and finally a car. He turned them all away as soon as he received them.

After that, the tone of his interactions with the army changed. The meetings stopped happening altogether. The prim and proper businessman began to call him multiple times a day to order him in a gravelly voice to take the position. Threatening notes instead of gifts started to show up at his home. His wife was frightened.

Finally, a massive, gruff man in a pink uniform with a horned helmet had shown up at his office and physically abducted him. He had been blindfolded, stuffed into a humming vehicle, and then been kicked out into grass and left there. When he'd finally gathered the courage to remove the blindfold, he found himself on his knees outside the Chimera Compound. A lab assistant had ushered him inside and briefed him.

The first day horrified him. The first week bothered him. The next week angered him. Finally he managed to stifle his emotions into a crush of frustration that was increased daily as the toll of butchered, wasted animals and failed chimeras climbed.

“Doctor. Doctor, I was told to escort you to the labs. Doctor, it's urgent,” the lab assistant shook Preston's shoulders, dragging him up from deep, demented sleep.

“What is it?” Preston asked. “What's happened?”

“Project Alpha is live,” said the young man, little more than a boy, with wide eyes.

Preston jumped out of his bed and ran to the labs, his robe flapping behind him and his slippers slapping the soles of his feet.

Project Alpha can't be live, he thought. It's a medical impossibility. It can't be. They haven't...

But before he even reached the lab, he heard it. Its roar thundered through the compound. Assistants poured in and out of doorways, each in a hurry to be somewhere, to do something, to contribute somehow. Some were surely running to hide.

As Preston broke through the rushing crowd and into the largest of the laboratory chambers, he saw why. The ultimate chimera, Project Alpha, had been created from the basest level up. A combination of the DNA of a hundred different beasts combined into a primordial ooze which was electrified, fed with chemicals, and altered a hundred different ways. He had seen it in the placental tube, but not even the most optimistic of the staff had hoped to see it live.

Now it thrashed in the center of the room, chained with heavy iron links draped over its body and cuffed to its legs. It gnashed its horrible teeth and struggled.

“SEDATE HIM!” bellowed Preston.

“We have!” yelled some staff member from across the room. “We hit him with a full dose!”

“Double the damn dosage!” he screamed back.

A twang sounded when the tranquilizer gun fired. The chimera howled when the dart pierced its skin, scraping it away with a clawed foreleg. But the medicine took effect. The creature crumpled to the ground, groaning sleepily.

“It needs a kill switch,” Preston panted.

“That's where you come in,” said a man in a high-ranked uniform from the catwalk above.

Preston worked night and day for the next month, soldering wiring together and integrating it into the flesh and nerves of test subjects. He ran out of pigs first, and moved on to monkeys. Every single one of them rejected the switching mechanism, the responses of their bodies physically pushing it out of their flesh. The animals died a mass of fur, wires, and blood.

Preston could feel it driving him mad. Worse was the progress made by others in the lab. While he worked on the kill switch, other men had taken control of his graft project – and succeeded where he had failed. The lab was pumping out all sorts of combinations of reptiles, mammals, birds, and fish daily. The parade made his head spin, and raised a jealous tumor in his chest.

And still he failed. As he failed, he grew increasingly brutal, slashing and hacking at the test subjects with wild abandon. He chipped tools by recklessly sawing into bone. He lost more and more subjects every day, most of them howling in terror and pain until the moment the light left their eyes. It was the rare day that Preston left the lab without blood soaked through his coat and into his underclothing. He no longer owned clothing that wasn't permanently dyed a pale crimson.

“Today or never,” he was told one day. The army official ignored his protests and raised a finger. “Succeed or fail, but do it today. Remember what happened to your wife.”

Preston hoped that the rumors about the chimera were true – that it was strong, ruthless, and hearty enough to withstand physical damage that might kill a lesser beast.

Before he realized it, he was swept into a procedure room, the ultimate chimera sprawled across and strapped to a broad table, breathing in long, slow sighs, heavily sedated. Tools were shoved into his hands, and an enlarged version of the kill switch device lay shimmering on a surgical tray.

Preston lost himself in the work. He knew he was being observed, and so he was careful. He felt unseen eyes drilling into and through him. None of his brutal abandon could show itself today.

The procedure took hours. The chimera had a structure he'd never experienced before, and he had to adapt his scalpel work as he went, carefully cutting insignificant connective tissues to shuffle aside muscle and bone. His forehead dripped with sweat, and his fingers ached.

Images of his wife crept into his head every now and again. His fingers would slither through the warm living tissues of the beast and he'd hear her laugh.

Angelina. God, I miss her.

And still he cut, working his way along the spinal chord and beginning to trim through the skin along the limbs. The device had to be fully integrated to function properly.

He sliced down one foreleg, and his hand slipped. Luckily, he pulled away, and the scalpel only nicked the leather strap holding down the creature's ankle.

Preston saw his wife again. For a moment he was frozen, the scalpel in midair as he stared at his wife superimposed over the leather strap.

“Doctor?” someone asked from what sounded like far away. He shook his head and the image of his wife faded.

“Yes?” he asked.

“N-nothing. Only... nothing.”

Preston leaned low over the leg, feigning a need for intricate cuts. Instead, his scalpel sawed into the leather strap. He left a cut a half an inch long and moved to the next leg.

He flayed open every leg, and every time he surreptitiously left a small gash in the leather strap holding the creature to the table.

Finally he laid the kill switch in place. He interwove the wiring with the long, stringy nerves exposed in the chimera's open flesh. The button he situated between the creature's shoulder blades.

Good luck reaching it, he thought.

As he was finally stitching the last of the chimera's flesh closed, he swiped the needle through the anesthesia tube that fed the sleeping agent to the beast via a mask. The gas seeped silently through the tiny hole and dissipated into the air. Almost immediately, the beast began to stir.

God save your souls, he thought as the assistants began to panic.

The beast on the table lurched and tugged at the bonds. It bellowed anger and pain and whipped its head from side to side. Preston marveled that its stitches didn't fail. The first of the straps ripped away. Someone screamed, and now everyone began to rush from the room.

Another bond snapped, and the beast began to rake its freed front claws across those within reach, spilling bodies and blood across the floor. Preston's fling crawled across the floor, her intestines strewn behind her like the sickly snakes that were imprisoned in the holding rooms.

The chimera turned on Preston, the only stationary target in the room. The man was just out of reach. He could feel the air whooshing past his face as the chimera punched at the air there, claws bared. He could smell the medicinal scent of its breath as it clashed its sharp teeth in front of him.

The final two straps gave out, and Preston closed his eyes.

I'm coming, Angelina.