together in the secret laboratory of Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s
megalomaniacal great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Heather
Frankenstein.
The project leaders at Fort Wyvern had been worried that the monkey in
Angela’s kitchen had either scratched or bitten her.
Considering the scientists’ fear, it was logical to infer that the
beast had carried an infectious disease transmitted by blood, saliva,
or other bodily fluids. This inference was supported by the physical
examination to which she’d been subjected. For four years, they had
also taken monthly blood samples from her, which meant that the disease
had a potentially long incubation period.
Biological warfare. The leaders of every country on Earth denied
making preparations for such a hateful conflict. Evoking the name of
God, warning of the judgment of history, they solemnly signed fat
treaties guaranteeing never to engage in this monstrous research and
development.
Meanwhile, each nation was busily brewing anthrax cocktails, packaging
bubonic-plague aerosols, and engineering such a splendiferous
collection of exotic new viruses and bacteria that no line at any
unemployment office anywhere on the planet would ever contain a single
out-of-work mad scientist.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand why they would have forcibly
subjected Angela to sterilization. No doubt certain diseases increase
the chances that one’s offspring will suffer birth defects.
judging by what Angela had told me, however, I didn’t think that the
people at Wyvern sterilized her out of a concern either for her or for
any children that she might conceive. They appeared to have been
motivated not by compassion but by fear swollen nearly to panic.
I had asked Angela if the monkey was carrying a disease. She had as
much as denied it: I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s
coming.
But if not a disease, what?
Suddenly the loonlike cry that we had heard earlier now pierced the
night and fog again, jolting me out of my ruminations.
Orson twitched to a full stop. I halted, too, and the click-tick of
the bicycle fell silent.
The cry seemed to issue from the west and south, and after only a brief
moment, an answering call came, as best I could tell, from the north
and east. We were being stalked.
Because sound traveled so deceptively through the mist, I was not able
to judge how far from us the cries arose. I would have bet one lung
that they were close.
The rhythmic, heartlike pulse of the surf throbbed through the night.
I wondered which Chris Isaak song Sasha was spinning across the
airwaves at that moment.
Orson began to move again, and so did I, a little faster than before.
We had nothing to gain by hesitating. We wouldn’t be safe until we
were off the lonely peninsula and back in town-and perhaps not even
then.
When we had gone no more than thirty or forty feet, that eerie ululant
cry rose again. It was answered, as before.
This time we kept moving.
My heart was racing, and it didn’t slow when I reminded myself that
these were only monkeys. Not predators. Eaters of fruits, berries,
nuts. Members of a peaceable kingdom.
Suddenly, perversely, Angela’s dead face flashed onto my memory
screen.
I realized what I had misinterpreted, in my shock and anguish, when I’d
first found her body. Her throat appeared to have been slashed
repeatedly with a half-sharp knife, because the wound was ragged. In
fact, it hadn’t been slashed: It had been bitten, torn, chewed. I
could see the terrible wound more clearly now than I’d been willing to
see it when standing on the threshold of the bathroom.
Furthermore, I half recalled other marks on her, wounds that I’d not
had the stomach to consider at the time. Livid bite marks on her
hands.
Perhaps even one on her face.
Monkeys. But not ordinary monkeys.
The killers’ actions in Angela’s house-the business with the dolls, the
game of hide-and-seek-had seemed like the play of demented children.
More than one of these monkeys must have been in those rooms: small
enough to hide in places where a man could not have been concealed, so
inhumanly quick as to have seemed like ghosts.