“Because it’s the host that’s the weapon, not the virus itself.”
Alice uttered a small, birdlike cry. They’d been walking past a room in which the door had been left standing ajar, and as Andrew followed her horrified gaze, he recognized the rows of animal cages lining the walls. Now those cages lay tossed and scattered, the pale tile floor splattered and stained with something dark.
“Alice,” Moore exclaimed as the girl darted away from them and into the room.
“Alice!” Andrew shoved past Moore and hurried after her, skittering to a halt just past the doorway. It looked like an F-5 tornado had ripped through the chamber. The door hadn’t been pushed open as much as plowed through, and listed now on its hinges, the metal crumpled inward with deep pock marks and craters. Animal crates had been tossed about with haphazard brutality, the sides dented and battered, the metal grates twisted and torn loose of their moorings. The monkeys and Siamangs that had been kept inside were all dead, some little more than bloody entrails or limbs left scattered across the floor.
Alice, meanwhile, had raced across the room. When she poked her head into the playroom, she shrank back from the doorway with another wounded cry, then rushed inside.
Lucy, Andrew realized.
Alice had found the Siamang lying half-way beneath the table at which the three of them had played Candyland. Alice had fallen onto her knees, folding herself over the lifeless primate.
There were no emergency lights in the playroom, the only illumination coming from the dim recessed bulbs in the storage area beyond, and it wasn’t until Andrew drew near that he saw what was left of Lucy. Mangled almost beyond recognition, her arms and legs had been torn loose from their sockets, her gut torn open, her face battered and bloodied.
“Jesus,” he whispered. He went to Alice, kneeling beside her.
“They killed her,” she said, stunned. “Lucy…she’s dead.”
Something had attracted the screamers to that store room. They had either heard the monkeys or smelled them inside. Something, Andrew thought. They knew they were here and they bashed their way through the locked door to get them.
Oh, God, what if they’ve done the same thing to Dani?
“Why does the government want things like the screamers?” Andrew asked Moore. He’d thought that Alice would weep with the discovery of Lucy’s remains, but instead, the girl had simply sat on the floor beside the dead Siamang, her eyes distant and vacant as her mind had slipped into whatever fugue-like cocoon her autism sometimes allowed her. “You said your virus made the hosts the weapons. What did you mean?”
“It’s altered their DNA,” Moore replied. Unlike Alice, he seemed unmoved by the carnage as he surveyed the playroom. Moving idly, he’d started picking up fallen books and game boards, placing them back on bookshelves or countertops. “You’ve seen it for yourself. They’re faster now, stronger, more resilient. The virus allows them to produce growth hormones that facilitate healing more quickly, making them relatively impervious. The limbic system in their brains have been enhanced, so their natural aggression levels have been heightened, intensified. They’re tough as nails and meaner than hell. They are, in essence, super-soldiers.”
“Not too super,” Andrew remarked. “O’Malley was blind. Those tumors on his face, they’d grown over his eyes. That one in the hallway, its head was being covered up, too.”
“A human’s immune system can fight off a viral infection, but only if it can interrupt the virus’s reproductive cycle,” Moore said. “If allowed to replicate itself, a virus can overtake its host. That’s what happened to the men in Alpha squad. They were given too much of the retrovirus too quickly. Instead of enhancing their physiology, it overwhelmed them.”
“It’s made them monsters,” Andrew said. “You made them that way.”
“Not me.” Moore glanced at him, seeming surprised by the accusation, if not somewhat stiffly offended. “It was Prendick’s call to administer the higher doses. I tried to warn him of the side effects, the risks involved, but he was impatient. He didn’t want a gradual transformation. The United States government is a results-oriented organization, that’s what he told me. And he wanted to give them results. He wouldn’t listen to reason, not from me or Lieutenant Carter, not from anyone.”
“Carter?” Andrew said. Dani had told him the lieutenant had been sent home shortly after Alpha squadron, suffering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Except Alpha squad didn’t really have Rocky Mountain spotted fever, he thought. “Did he become one, too?” he asked. “One of the screamers?”
At first, because Moore remained silent, Andrew thought he wouldn’t respond, but at length, he sighed heavily. “He threatened to go above Prendick’s head, to report Prendick trying to speed up the testing timeframe. Prendick turned the Alpha squad loose on him in the woods. Have you ever seen a wolf pack cull their prey? They separate the weak or sickly deer from its herd. Then they keep upwind of it, tracking it by its scent, before splitting up and chasing it until they exhaust it. When it’s beyond the point of resistance, they attack together, a collaborative effort.”
The corpse in the woods, Andrew realized, because at the time, he’d seen a rank insignia affixed to the tattered remnants of its uniform. A silver bar, a First Lieutenant’s insignia.
“They killed him,” he said and Moore nodded grimly. “The screamers, Alpha squadron. They chased him into a snare trap, then once he was hanging there, helpless, they killed him.”
And the same thing would’ve happened to me, he thought with a shiver. If my rifle hadn’t fallen, if it hadn’t discharged when it hit the ground and scared them off, they would have killed me, too.
“That’s what animals do,” Moore said. “That’s what they are now, what the retrovirus has done to them. It’s made the most primitive, predatory areas of their brain grow in size and dominance. It’s made them animals.”
“And we’re the prey,” Andrew whispered, aghast.
Again, Moore nodded. “Exactly.” Abandoning the books scattered on the floor, he approached his daughter, hooking his hand beneath her arm to pull her onto her feet. “We need to keep moving.”
As much as Andrew wanted to get the hell out there and find Dani, he found himself bristling. “Give her a minute, will you?” he said, planting his palm on Moore’s shoulder, jarring his grip on Alice loose. “Lucy was her friend. She’s grieving.”
“Lucy was a Siamang,” Moore replied drolly, shrugging away from Andrew’s hand. “And she’s not grieving. She doesn’t know how.”
“Bullshit. She knows how to cry. Not an hour ago, both of you stood in the hallway at the barracks, acting like it was some kind of miracle.”
“It was,” Moore said simply.
He reached for Alice and again, Andrew caught his arm, stopping him. “You know that thing wasn’t just a monkey to her. You taught Lucy to play Candyland. I doubt it was so you could sit around and play with her. Yeah, it might’ve all just been part of your experiment, but still.”
His voice abruptly faltered. Wait a minute, he thought, remembering the soft spot in Lucy’s skull. Her brain grew too big for her head. That’s what Alice had told him. It’s part of his experiment.
He’d felt similar soft places along Alice’s own scalp.
The medicine makes new nerves grow, Alice had told him. It fills in the missing places in my brain. It makes the electrical signals get to the right places.