Higginbotham Lab Logs - Damaged

[ RECOVERED — PRIVATE LAB LOG, HIGGINBOTHAM PROPERTY ]
Pages water-damaged, handwriting inconsistent across entries
ENTRY — EARLY

Compound 4 holding steady in the blood. No adverse reaction after nine days. She's faster already, even I can see it just watching her walk the paddock. If the dosage scales the way I think it will, we won't need to fix a single race. We'll just own the fastest horse anyone's ever bet against.

ENTRY — LATER

Something is wrong with the growth plates. I don't have another word for what I'm seeing at the skull. It isn't injury. It isn't infection. It's growing something that was never in the formula, and I don't know how to make it stop, because I don't know why it started.

I haven't told anyone yet.

ENTRY — UNDATED, INK SMEARED

She put her head through the stable wall tonight. Not thrashing — through it. Timber doesn't break that way from panic. It breaks that way from something that knows exactly how much force it has now and isn't afraid to use it.

I told the family it was a containment failure. They didn't hear it that way. They heard success.

ENTRY — LATER STILL, DIFFERENT HAND

We are not done. If it worked on her, it will work on a person, and a person is worth considerably more than a horse nobody can race anymore. W. wants to move faster than I'm comfortable with. I keep telling him we don't understand what we made. He keeps telling me that's not the point.

ENTRY — FINAL, RUSHED, SEVERAL WORDS ILLEGIBLE

Two of the men who knew won't return calls. [illegible] getting nervous, and nervous men talk. W. says he has an idea for something to put in the woods — something people will be too scared to look past, so nobody keeps asking where things went, or who. He wouldn't say more than that.

I don't know what he's planning to put out there. I don't think I want to.

[ LOG ENDS ]