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 grievan
ce, 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.
They quickly tired of rolling the manhole cover. Then three individuals worked together to spin it, as if in fact it were a coin, and with considerable coordinated effort they eventually set it in a blur of motion.
The troop fell silent again. They gathered in a wide circle around the whirling disc, giving it space to move but watching it with great interest.
Periodically, the three who had spun the cover darted to it, one by one, judiciously applying enough force to keep it balanced and in steady motion. Their timing revealed at least a rudimentary understanding of the laws of physics and a mechanical skill that belied their ordinary appearance.
The tightly rotating disc sang roughly, its iron edge grinding against the concrete pavement. This low metallic song had become the sole sound in the night: nearly a one-note drone, oscillating only faintly over a half-tone range.
The spinning manhole cover didn’t seem to provide sufficient spectacle to explain the intensity of the troop’s attention. They were rapt. Almost in a trance. I found it difficult to believe that the disc, merely by chance, could have achieved the precise rotational velocity that, combined with exactly these oscillating tones, was hypnotic to monkeys.
Perhaps this wasn’t a game that I was witnessing, not play but ritual, a ceremony with a symbolic significance that was clear to these rhesuses but was an impenetrable mystery to me. Ritual and symbol not only implied abstract thinking but raised the possibility that these monkeys’ lives had a spiritual dimension, that they were not just smart but capable of brooding about the origin of all things and the purpose of their existence.
This idea disconcerted me so much that I almost turned away from the window.
In spite of their hostility toward humanity and their enthusiasm for violence, I already had sympathy for these pathetic creatures, was moved by their status as outcasts with no rightful place in nature. If they indeed possess the capacity to wonder about God and about the design of the cosmos, then they may know the exquisite pain that humanity knows too well: the yearning to understand why our Creator allows us to suffer so much, the terrible unfulfilled longing to find Him, to see His face, to touch Him, and to know that He is real. If they share this quiet but profound agony with us, then I sympathize with their plight, but I also pity them.
And while pitying them, how can I kill them without hesitation if another confrontation requires me to do so in order to save my life or that of a friend? In one previous encounter, I’ve had to meet their ferocious assault with gunfire. Lethal force is easy to use when your adversary is as mindless as a shark. And you can pull the trigger without remorse when you are able to match your enemy’s hatred with pure hatred of your own. Pity engenders second thoughts, hesitation. Pity may be the key to the door of Heaven, if Heaven exists, but it is not an advantage when you are fighting for your life against a pitiless opponent.
From the street came a change in the sound of the spinning iron, a greater oscillation between tones. The manhole cover had begun to lose rotational velocity.
None in the troop rushed forward to stabilize the whirligig. They watched with curious fascination as it wobbled, as its song changed to a steadily slowing wah-waah-waaah-waaaah.
The disc clattered to a halt, flat on the pavement, and at the same instant the monkeys froze. A final note rang across the night, followed by silence and stillness so absolute that Dead Town might have been sealed inside a gigantic Lucite paperweight. As far as I could tell, every member of the troop gazed with magnetized eyes at the iron manhole cover.
After a while, as though waking from a deep sleep, they drifted dreamily toward the disc. They slowly circled it, hunched low with the knuckles of their forepaws grazing the pavement, examining the iron with the pensive attitude of Gypsies analyzing wet tea leaves to read the future.
A few hung back, either because something about the disc made them uneasy or because they were waiting their turn. These hesitant individuals conspicuously directed their attention toward anything but the manhole cover: on the pavement, on the trees that lined the street, on the star-stippled sky.
One of the beasts glanced at the bungalow in which I had taken refuge.
I didn’t hold my breath or tense up, because I was confident that nothing about this structure lent it a character different from the shabby and desolate appearance of hundreds of others throughout the neighborhood. Even the open front door was not remarkable; most of these buildings were exposed to the elements.
After dwelling on the house for only a few seconds, the monkey raised its face toward the gibbous moon. Either its posture conveyed a deep melancholy—or I was overcome by sentimentality, attributing more human qualities to these rhesuses than made sense.
Then, although I hadn’t moved or made a sound, the wiry beast twitched, sprang erect, lost interest in the sky, and looked again at the bungalow.
“Don’t monkey with me,” I murmured.
In a slow rolling gait, it moved out of the street, over the curb, and onto a sidewalk dappled with the moonshadows of laurel branches, where it halted.
I resisted the urge to back away from the window. The darkness around me was as perfect as that in Dracula’s coffin with the lid closed, and I felt invisible. The overhanging porch roof prevented moonlight from directly touching my face.
The miserable little geek appeared to be studying not just the window at which I stood but every aspect of the small house, as though it intended to locate a Realtor and make an offer for the property.
I am excruciatingly aware of the interplay of light and shadow, which, for me, is more sensuous than any woman’s body. I am not forbidden to know the comfort of a woman, but I am denied all but the most meager light. Therefore, every form of illumination is imbued with a shimmering erotic quality, and I’m acutely aware of the caress of every beam. Here in the bungalow, I was confident that I was untouched, beyond anyone’s ken, as much a part of the blackness as the wing is part of the bat.
The monkey advanced a few steps, onto the walkway that bisected the front yard and led to the porch steps. It was no more than twenty feet from me.
As it turned its head, I caught a glimpse of its gleaming eyes. Usually muddy yellow and as baleful as the eyes of a tax collector, they were now fiery orange and even more menacing in this poor light. They were filled with that luminosity exhibited by the eyes of most nocturnal animals.
I could barely see the creature in the laurel shadows, but the restless movement of its jack-o’-lantern eyes indicated that it was curious about something and that it still hadn’t fixated specifically on my window. Maybe it had heard the peep or rustle of a mouse in the grass—or one of the tarantulas native to this region—and was hoping only to snare a tasty treat.<
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In the street, the other members of the troop were still engaged by the manhole cover.
Ordinary rhesuses, which live primarily by day, do not exhibit eyeshine in darkness. Members of the Wyvern troop have better night vision than other monkeys, but in my experience they aren’t remotely as gifted as owls or cats. Their visual acuity is only fractionally—not geometrically—better than that of the common primates from which they were engineered. In an utterly lightless place, they are nearly as helpless as I am.
The inquisitive monkey—my own Curious George—scampered three steps closer, out of the tree shadow and into moonlight again. When it halted, it was less than fifteen feet away, within five feet of the porch.
The marginal improvement in their nocturnal sight is probably an unexpected side effect of the intelligence-enhancement experiment that spawned them, but as far as I have been able to discern, it isn’t matched by improvement in their other senses. Ordinary monkeys aren’t spoor-tracking animals with keen olfactory powers, like dogs, and neither are these. They would be able to sniff me out from no greater distance than I would be able to smell them, which meant from no farther than a foot or two, even though they were unquestionably a fragrant bunch. Likewise, these long-tailed terrorists don’t benefit from paranormal hearing, and they are not able to fly like their screeching brethren who do dirty work for the Wicked Witch of the West. Although they are fearsome, especially when encountered in significant numbers, they aren’t so formidable that only silver bullets or kryptonite will kill them.
On the sidewalk, Curious George sat on his haunches, wrapped his long arms around his torso as if comforting himself, and peered up at the moon once more. He gazed heavenward so long that he seemed to have forgotten the bungalow.
After a while, I consulted my wristwatch. I was worried that I would be trapped here, unable to meet Bobby at the movie theater.
He was also in danger of blundering into the troop. Even a man as resourceful as Bobby Halloway would not prevail if he had to face them alone.