“I didn’t know you were a fan,” Luke said.
“It’s good to visualize your competition.” Clay smiled. “You will laugh at this, Lucas, but sometimes I talk to Albert. If I’ve been working long enough, sometimes he’ll talk back.”
A squat white box sat along the near wall. Clayton opened its lid; plumes of vapor billowed out. He reached inside, whistling absentmindedly. Clayton used to whistle or even sing in his basement lab all the time; the notes would drift up the staircase into the kitchen. The most inane melodies. The theme to Gilligan’s Island, or even “Whistle While You Work”—except Clayton used to screw with the lyrics:
Whistle while you work, Hitler was a jerk; Mussolini bit his weenie and now it doesn’t work…
Clayton shut the cooler—but not before Luke noticed a squared-off shape wrapped in black plastic. It looked a bit like a butchered hog loin, though Luke knew it wouldn’t be that.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Clayton said, placing a guinea pig on the lab bench.
The animal was frozen stiff, glittering with frost. Luke wasn’t alarmed at all—as a veterinarian in the Midwest, he’d seen plenty of frozen animals.
“How did it die?” Luke asked. “Or is that important to your scientific query?”
The guinea pig tipped onto its side, its legs jutting up at the ceiling. LB edged to the lip of the table, snuffling with keen interest. Clayton swatted at her; the dog flinched away in fear.
Luke reached out and snatched his brother’s wrist. He felt the live-wire twitch of Clayton’s tendons—he also noticed that Clay’s fingers were now bandaged to the second joint, swaddled under thick gauze.
“Not very nice.” Luke tsked. “Do you treat all your guests that way?”
Clayton offered a gravedigger’s smile. The guinea pig was melting out of its icy encasement; a small pool of water had already formed around it.
Thhhwiiiilppppippit!
Luke craned his head around. Where had that noise come from? A dripping tap? They wouldn’t have running water down here, would they?
The sound stirred a memory, yet Luke couldn’t lay his finger on it.
Wait a second. The guinea pig’s leg. Had it… twitched?
LB spun in an agitated circle, whining pitifully.
The guinea pig’s leg twitched again, obviously this time.
“Clay,” Luke said. “What’s it doing? What’s that dead thing doing?”
“Who said it was dead, brother dear?”
It had to be dead. The laws of nature dictated as much. Some creatures could be frozen for a short period and be reanimated. Flies, crickets. Not warm-blooded animals of an elevated biological genus.
And yet…
The guinea pig’s sides began to heave as it took the smallest breaths.
This is not happening, Luke thought. It’s not possible.
The coating of ice over the guinea pig’s face melted. Its eyeballs were vibrantly red—the color of blood leaping from a torn vein. It flipped to its feet and trundled awkwardly over the lab bench.
Clayton picked it up and offered it to his brother. Luke was beset with a profound revulsion.
Why? There was nothing obviously the matter with it, other than the fact it had just come back from the dead. A perfectly ordinary guinea pig, shivering in his brother’s cupped palms.
Don’t you touch it, Luke, said the voice of caution. It’s… diseased. It’ll infect you—it doesn’t even have to bite you. Touching it will be enough.
“It’s a little-bitty, fluffy-wuffy guinea pig,” Clay said. “I take it you’re afraid?”
Luke’s jaw tightened. He held his hands out and Clay gave it to him. God, it felt awfuclass="underline" like holding a throbbing bezoar—a tumorous hairball, one of which he’d once removed from the stomach of a narcotized leopard at the Des Moines Zoo.
The creature just sat there in his palms, its pert nose twitching. An odd notion came into Luke’s mind: it was trying to look cute, the same way a calculating child could become doe-eyed and saccharine when there was something to gain from it. Its teeth—old man teeth; the nicotine-stained teeth of a three-pack-a-day smoker—clashed like tusks in the wet hole of its mouth.
Clayton opened the cage. “Put it inside.”
Luke did so with great relief. The other two guinea pigs, both quite small, avoided the unfrozen one, burrowing into the cedar shavings and squeaking in consternation.
“How…?”
“Oh, come now,” said Clayton. “You’ve spoken to Felz, haven’t you? So you know perfectly well how.” He retrieved a kit from beneath the table. Luke had used the same kit thousands of times. Inside you’d find two syringes and a vial of Euthasol.
An EK—Extinction Kit, as it was known in the veterinarian biz.
Clayton unwrapped a hypo and affixed the needle. He extracted 2.5 ccs of Euthasol, enough to flatline a Great Dane.
Agitated squeals broke out inside the cage. The unfrozen guinea pig was now attacking the other two. It lunged at the sensitive webbing of the much smaller guinea pig’s legs, hamstringing it. The third guinea pig clambered up the cage to hang in screeching, stupid shock from the upper bars.
The unfrozen one flipped the small one over; its head darted between the small pig’s legs, teeth gnashing at the poor thing’s exposed privates. Its victim shrieked in terror and pain.
LB advanced on the cage with a growl building in her throat.
“Keep that damn thing away,” Clayton said, pulling on a pair of vulcanized rubber gloves.
Luke gripped LB by the scruff. Clayton reached into the cage and vised his fingers around the zombified (except that wasn’t really the case, was it?) guinea pig. It squealed as he pulled it off the smaller one. Luke caught a glimpse of the victim’s shredded sex organs and blanched.
Clayton pinned the guinea pig to the table. Its face was a mask of blood, its head whipping in crazed paroxysms.
“The needle,” he grunted.
Luke handed it over. He wasn’t about to question his brother—he’d just as soon protest Clayton driving a stake through a vampire’s black heart.
An ungodly shriek bubbled out of the guinea pig’s throat. It bit Clayton’s glove and tore a groove out of the rubber.
It shouldn’t be capable of that. Luke was gobsmacked. A pit bull would have a hard time biting through those gloves.
Clayton sank the needle into the guinea pig’s flank.
The needle bent.
Jesus Christ. It actually bent, as though Clayton stabbed it into a car door.
Clay jabbed it again and the needle snapped with a singing tink, the spike of metal spinning through the air.
Luke’s mind was reeling but his brother remained calm—calmish. Greasy balls of sweat dotted his brow, but whether that was from dread or exertion Luke couldn’t tell. Luke’s own body was bathed in sticky heat that radiated up from the balls of his feet, panic ghosting through the ventricles of his heart.
“Screw on the other needle-tip for me, would you?” Clayton said.
Luke did so—an action he’d completed thousands of times, thank God, his fingers working instinctively. Clayton flipped the bleating creature onto its back, located its rectum and stabbed with the needle. It sank in deeply, the guinea pig hissing like a cockroach as Clayton depressed the plunger.
Clayton injected the full 2.5 ccs. Luke thought of telling him to save some for the guinea pig with the bloodied privates… but right now, he just wanted this big bastard dead.