Resurrection Hour - Hidden in Ice(Nanowrimo)

Chapter Eight

"What the heck was Xavier talking about?" Flynn asked.

They'd been with the boy all morning and they hadn't seen or noticed anything abnormal. He was still lying on the bed, where he'd been this entire time. They had positioned him to look a little more comfortable, and it hadn't changed.

The only thing that did change was that the station had fancy equipment that allowed Hannah to keep the body cool enough to prevent rapid decomposition, but the machine had malfunctioned overnight causing his body temperature to rise almost to room temperature. They'd manage to fix the machine and were going to cool him down again when they were finished for the day.

However, to make Xavier happy, she figured they better do as they were told and leave the room. After they took off their equipment, they had retired to her office to watch the footage that Cheryl had filmed while Flynn and her continued their research. There was a lot of footage to review, and she felt like it was wasting valuable time all because Xavier thought he saw something.

Walking over to the counter, she poured herself a coffee when she heard Flynn gasp. "Wait, what was that. Right there." He pointed at something on the screen that she couldn't quite see. "Rewind it," he told Cheryl.

All three of them leaned towards the screen, heads almost touching, when they saw it— the slight flicker of his finger.

"He shouldn't still be having twitches, should he?" Flynn asked Hannah.

Hannah shook her head. "No, he shouldn't. Initially shortly after they die, they may experience cadaveric spasms, but this is definitely not that."

Their camera footage verified that Xavier hadn't been hallucinating. At first she wondered if it was a case of the camera in the lab vibrating or something, but now that she'd seen it herself on her own camera, she had no choice but to believe it. Anywhere else and she'd have suspected someone altered the footage, but this was her team and she knew what they were looking at was fact. When Xavier first mentioned it, she had almost called Doctor Booth to do an evaluation of him, but now she was glad she didn't because he'd actually been telling the truth.

Now she had to call the doctor for an entirely different reason. They needed to do an electroencephalogram on the boy and find out what was going on inside his head. Just as she was about to call him, security burst into the room, declaring the isolation lab off-limits until the threat had been assessed.

"How are we supposed to assess him if we can't go in there?" she asked.

The guard shrugged and stood in front of the door leading into the isolation lab. "I don't know, I'm just following orders."

She was a doctor. One of the best people on the station to assess the situation and she couldn't even do her job. Crossing her arms, she leaned back against her neck and glared at the man. She knew she shouldn't be mad at him, but she was. They just discovered something new and she couldn't do anything about it.

Hannah opened her mouth to complain again when Xavier rushed into the room, so she turned her frustration towards him. "He hasn't moved more than a finger since this all started. Can't we go back in now?" she asked.

"We need clearance from Director Adams before anything more can be done," Xavier told her.

"This is my project. I'm the boss in this lab. If he's alive, he could be paralyzed and scared."

"I get that, but we need to follow proper protocol. All we know is that this boy is thousands of years old according to the documents from the dig site. He shouldn't be alive."

Hannah grumbled under her breath and stared at the boy through the observation window. What he said made sense. The longest anyone has survived being in cold water was roughly 80 minutes. Any longer was wishful thinking on her part. That only left one other option, parasites making its way through the body. They could make it look like the body was moving sometimes. But the question was, was the parasite alien or native to their soil? Until they found out which one, they would have to put the body in an isolation bubble.