Twenty.
Throughout much of the world, monkeys live everywhere in the wild, from jungles to open grasslands to mountains. They are not found on the North American continent—except for these that skulk through the night in Moonlight Bay, unknown to all but a handful of the populace.
I now understood why, earlier, the birds had fallen silent in the tree above me. They had sensed the approach of this unnatural parade.
Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
The troop was becoming a battalion.
Did I mention teeth? Monkeys are omnivorous, never having been persuaded by the arguments of vegetarians. Primarily they eat fruit, nuts, seeds, leaves, flowers, and birds’ eggs, but when they feel the need for meat, they munch on such savory fare as insects, spiders, and small mammals like mice, rats, and moles. Absolutely never accept a dinner invitation from a monkey unless you know precisely what’s on the menu. Anyway, because they are omnivorous, they have strong incisors and pointy eyeteeth, the better to rip and tear.
Ordinary monkeys don’t attack human beings. Likewise, ordinary monkeys are active in daylight and rest during the night—except for the softly furred douroucouli, an owl-eyed South American species that is nocturnal.
Those who roam the darkness in Fort Wyvern and Moonlight Bay aren’t ordinary. They’re hateful, vicious, psychotic little geeks. If given the choice of a plump tasty mouse sautéed in butter sauce or the chance to tear your face off for the sheer fun of it, they wouldn’t even lick their lips with regret at passing up the snack.
I had tallied twenty-two individuals when the passing tide of monkey fur in the street abruptly turned, whereupon I lost count. The troop doubled back on itself and halted, its members huddling and milling together in such a conspiratorial manner that you could easily believe one of them had been the mysterious figure on the grassy knoll in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.
Although they showed no more interest in this bungalow than in any other, they were directly in front of it and close enough to give me a major case of the heebie-jeebies. Smoothing the bristling hair on the nape of my neck with one hand, I considered creeping out the back of the house before they came knocking on the front door with their damn monkey-magazine subscription cards.
If I slipped away, however, I wouldn’t know in which direction they had gone after breaking out of their huddle. I’d be as likely to blunder into them as to avoid them—with mortal consequences.
I had counted twenty-two, and I had missed some: There might have been as many as thirty. My 9-millimeter Glock held ten rounds, two of which I’d already expended, and a spare magazine was nestled in a pouch on my holster. Even if I were suddenly possessed by the sharpshooting spirit of Annie Oakley and miraculously made every shot count, I would still be overwhelmed by twelve of the beasts.
Hand-to-hand combat with three hundred pounds of screaming monkey menace is not my idea of a fair fight. My idea of a fair fight is one unarmed, toothless, nearsighted old monkey versus me with a Blackhawk attack helicopter.
In the street, the primates were still loitering. They were clustered so tightly that they almost appeared, in the moonlight, to be one large organism with multiple heads and tails.
I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. Probably because I’m not a monkey.
I leaned closer to the window, squinting at the moon-washed scene, trying to see more clearly and to put myself in a monkey frame of mind.
Among the hey-let’s-play-God crowd that worked in the deepest bunkers of Wyvern, the most exciting—and most generously funded—research had included a project intended to enhance both human and animal intelligence, as well as human agility, speed, sight, hearing, sense of smell, and longevity. This was to be accomplished by transferring selected genetic material not just from one person to another but from species to species.
Although my mother was brilliant, a genius, she was not—trust me on this—a mad scientist. As a theoretical geneticist, she didn’t spend much time in laboratories. Her workplace was inside her skull, and her mind was as elaborately equipped as the combined research facilities of all the universities in the country. She kept to her office at Ashdon College, only occasionally venturing into a lab, supported by government grants, doing the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She set out not to destroy humanity but to save it, and I am convinced that for a long time she didn’t know the reckless and malevolent purposes to which those at Wyvern were applying her theories.
Transferring genetic material from one species into another. In the hope of creating a super race. In an insane quest for the perfect, unstoppable soldier. Smart beasts of myriad design bred for future battlefields. Weird biological weapons as tiny as a virus or as large as a grizzly bear.
Dear God.
Personally, all this makes me nostalgic for the good old days when the most ambitious big-brain types were content with dreaming up city-busting nuclear bombs, satellite-mounted particle-beam death rays, and nerve gas that causes its victims to turn inside out the way caterpillars do when cruel little boys sprinkle salt on them.
For these experiments, animals were easily obtained, because they generally can’t afford to hire first-rate attorneys to prevent themselves from being exploited; but, surprisingly, human subjects were readily available, as well. Soldiers courts-martialed for particularly savage murders and condemned to life sentences were offered the choice of rotting in maximum-security military prisons or earning a measure of freedom by participating in this secret enterprise.
Then something went wrong.
Big time.
In all human endeavors, something inevitably goes woefully wrong. Some say this is because the universe is inherently chaotic. Others say this is because we are a species that has fallen from the grace of God. Whatever the reason, among humankind, for every Moe there are thousands of Curlys and Larrys.
The delivery system used to ferry new genetic material into the cells of research subjects—to insert it in their DNA chains—was a retrovirus brilliantly conceived by my mom, Wisteria Jane Snow, who somehow still had time to make terrific chocolate-chip cookies. This engineered retrovirus was designed to be fragile, crippled—that is, sterile—and benign: merely a living tool that would do exactly what was wanted of it. Once having done its job, it was supposed to die. But it soon mutated into a hardy, rapidly reproducing, infectious bug that could be passed in bodily fluids through simple skin contact, causing genetic change instead of disease. These microorganisms captured random sequences of DNA from numerous species in the lab, transporting them into the bodies of the project scientists, who for a while remained unaware that they were being slowly but profoundly altered. Physically, mentally, emotionally altered. Before they understood what was happening to them and why, some Wyvern scientists began to change…to have a lot in common with the research animals in their cages.
A couple years ago, this process suddenly became obvious when a violent episode occurred in the labs. No one has explained to me exactly what happened. People killed one another in a bizarre, savage confrontation. The experimental animals either escaped or were purposefully released by people who felt a strange kinship with them.
Among those animals were rhesus monkeys whose intelligence had been substantially enhanced. Although I’d thought intelligence was related to brain size and to the number of folds in the surface of the brain, these rhesuses didn’t have enlarged craniums; except for a few telltale characteristics, they resembled ordinary members of their species.
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 unfold—or 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 fact that we are relatively effective at exterminating colonies of them and keeping their numbers manageable. Imagine what might happen if rats were even half as smart as we are, and were able to compete on fairer footing than they now enjoy. We’d be engaged in a desperate war with them to prevent massive starvation.
Watching the monkeys in the street, I wondered if I was seeing our adversaries in some future Armageddon.
Aside from their high level of intelligence, they have another quality that makes them more formidable enemies than any rodents could be. Though rats operate entirely on instinct and have insufficient brain power to take anything personally, these monkeys hate us with a black, bitter passion.
I believe they are hostile toward humanity because we created them but did a half-assed job. We robbed them of their simple animal innocence, in which they were content. We raised their intelligence until they became aware of the wider world and of their true place in it, but we didn’t give them enough intelligence to make it possible for them to improve their lot. We made them just smart enough to be dissatisfied with the life of a monkey; we gave them the capacity to dream but didn’t give them the means to fulfill their dreams. They have been evicted from their niche in the animal kingdom and cannot find a new place to fit in. Cut loose from the fabric of creation, they are unraveling, wandering, lost, full of a yearning that can never be mended.
I don’t blame them for hating us. If I were one of them, I’d hate us, too.
My sympathy wouldn’t save me, however, if I walked out of the bungalow and into the street, tenderly grasped a monkey paw in each of my hands, declared my outrage at the arrogance of the human species, and sang a rousing rendition of “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”
In minutes, I would be reduced to kibble.
My mother’s work led to the creation of this troop, which they appear to understand: They have stalked me in the past. She is dead, so they can’t take vengeance on her for the anguished, outcast lives they lead. Because I’m her only child, the monkeys nurture a special animosity toward me. Perhaps they should. Perhaps their hatred of every Snow is justified. Of all people, I have no right to debate the merit of their grievance, though this doesn’t mean I feel obliged to pay a price for what, with the best of motivations, my mother did.
Remaining safely unkibbled at the bungalow window, I heard what seemed to be the single reverberant toll of a large bell, followed by a clatter. I watched as the churning troop parted around an object I couldn’t see. A scraping of iron on stone followed, and several individuals conspired to raise the weighty thing onto its side.
Busy monkeys prevented me from immediately getting a clear view of the item, although it appeared to be round. They began to roll it in a circle, from curb to curb and back again, some watching while others scampered beside the object, keeping it balanced on edge. In the burnishing moonlight, it initially resembled a coin so enormous that it must have fallen out of the giant’s pocket from the top of Jack’s beanstalk. Then I realized it was a manhole cover they had pried from the pavement.
Suddenly they were chattering and shrieking as though they were a group of exuberant children who had made a toy out of an old tire. In my experience, such playfulness was completely out of character for them. Of my previous encounters with the troop, only one had been face-to-face, and throughout that confrontation, they had acted less like children than like a pack of homicidal skinheads wired on PCP-and-cocaine cocktails.