The monkeys have been on the run ever since. They are hiding from the
federal and military authorities who are quietly trying to eradicate
them and all other evidence of what happened at Wyvern before the public
learns that its elected officials have ensured the end of the world as
we know it. Other than those involved in the conspiracy, only a handful
of us know anything about these events, and if we attempt to go public,
even though we possess no hard proof, they will kill us as righteously
as they would waste the rhesuses.
They killed my mom. They claim that she was despondent over the way in
which her work was misused, that she committed suicide by driving her
car at high speed into a bridge abutment just south of town. But my
mother was not a quitter. And she would never have abandoned me to face
alone the nightmare world that may be coming. I believe she intended to
go public, spill the truth to the media, in hope of building a consensus
for a crash research program, bigger than what’s buried under Wyvern,
bigger than the Manhattan Project, commandeering the best genetic
scientists in the world. So they pushed her through the big door and
slammed it behind her. This is what I believe. I have no proof.
She was my mom, however, and about some of these issues, I’ll believe
what I want, what I must.
Meanwhile, the contagion is spreading faster than the monkeys, and it’s
unlikely that the damage can be undone or even contained. Infected
Wyvern personnel relocated all over the country, carrying the retrovirus
with them, before anyone knew there was a problem, before a quarantine
could have been effectively imposed. Genetic mutation will probably
occur in all species. Perhaps the only thing in doubt is whether this
will be a slow process that requires decades or centuries to unfoldor
whether the terror will rapidly escalate. Thus far, the effects have
been, with rare exception, subtle and not widespread, but this may be
the calm before the holocaust. Those responsible are, I believe,
frantically seeking a remedy but they are also expending a lot of energy
in an effort to conceal the source of the oncoming catastrophe, so no
one will know who’s to blame.
No one at the top of the government wants to face the public’s wrath.
They’re not afraid of being booted out of office. Far worse than job
loss might await them if the truth gets out. They might be tried for
crimes against humanity. They probably justify the ongoing cover-up as
necessary to avoid panic in the streets, civil disorder, and perhaps
even an international quarantine of the entire North American continent,
but what really concerns them is the possibility that they will be torn
to pieces by angry mobs.
Perhaps a few of the creatures now milling in the street outside the
bungalow were among the twelve who had escaped from the labs on that
historic and macabre night of violence. Most were descendants of the
escapees, bred in freedom but as intelligent as their parents.
Ordinary monkeys are chatterboxes, but I heard no sound from these
thirty. They roiled together with what seemed to be increasing
agitation, arms flailing, tails lashing, but if they raised their
voices, the gabble wasn’t audible either through the window glass or
through the open front door, only a few feet away.
They were plotting something worse than monkeyshines.
Although the rhesuses are not as smart as human beings, the advantage we
have isn’t great enough to make me feel comfortable about playing a
high-stakes game of poker with any three of them. Unless I could first
get them drunk.
These precocious primates aren’t the primary threat born in the
laboratories at Wyvern. That honor must go, of course, to the
gene-swapping retrovirus that might remake every living thing. But as
villains go, the monkeys constitute a damn fine backup team.
To fully appreciate the long-term threat of these redesigned rhesuses,
consider that rats are dreadful pests even though they are a tiny
fraction as intelligent as we are. Scientists estimate that rodents
destroy twenty percent of the food supply worldwide, in spite of the