15
Every inch of the lab was searched. The body of the security guard was found still in the observation room, burned to an almost-unrecognizable crisp. Two malnourished rabbits and a few birds were all that remained of his stock of lab animals. His labs were a mess of scrawled notes, designs, essays, diagrams, and reams of wrinkled computer print-outs. The whole mass of papers filled six large boxes, and Wesker accepted the difficult job of going through them all. The main lab contained the dead bodies of Marcus and seven of his leeches, which were collected and sent to the treatment plant by a squad of men wearing complete hazard suits. The room was disinfected, fumigated, and scrubbed clean, as were all the observation and examination rooms, which weren't in much better shape. The clean-up would take weeks, but in the end, no trace of the Progenitor was found anywhere.
Three other large terrariums were found in adjacent lab rooms, all with leeches of their own, but all with different strains according to Marcus' sometimes illegible notes. The leeches, it was learned, had been infected with the Progenitor months ago and Marcus bred them to cultivate the virus in their DNA to see how they adapted and changed as the virus was passed on to each successive generation.
When Wesker got to the final batch of notes, the most recent ones, he realized what Marcus had learned himself only two days before his death. The Progenitor was now fully integrated with the leeches' DNA and indistinguishable from its original form. The Progenitor virus was now the T-virus.