It was his last lunch at good old P.U.
AS THE BIOCHEMIST TREKKED back to his lab, an icy wind flapped his khaki slacks against a pair of calves as thin as flagpoles. On either side of him, columns of steam billowed like Yellowstone geysers from grated vents set in the sprawling lawns. Beneath the soggy sod and the winding brick walkway was an anthill of underground levels that housed the university's main laboratories.
Because of the oppressive stench of his research animals, Sternovsky had been consigned to a temporary trailer on the outermost fringe of the campus, in the farthest corner of Parking Lot ZZ. Following the recent winter storm, the university's snowplow had scraped the asphalt clean, leaving piles of dirty snow heaped in the shade around the base of the trailer, blocking access to the wooden steps. Days had passed since the plow operator's little joke, but the compacted snow had yet to melt. To reach the trailer's door, Sternovsky had to follow the path he'd beaten through the waist-high slush.
Though he normally kept his laboratory scrupulously neat and as sterile as an operating room, today the long, narrow room looked as though a whirlwind had swept through it. A tricolor of gore, excrement and yellow-green musk splattered the walls and tracked the aisles between worktables. Steel cage doors stood ajar, and already-sacrificed wolverines lay sprawled on countertops or in heaps on the sheet vinyl floor.
The dead animals were roughly three and a half feet long, counting their short, thickly furred tails. Their coats were blackish brown, with light brown bands along both sides of the body from shoulder to rump; the light-colored bands joined each other across the base of the tail. The creatures had short, massive legs and wide feet tipped with huge claws. With their bony skulls, small, rounded ears and stubby muzzles, their heads looked almost bearlike. Native Americans referred to them as "skunk bears," for reasons obvious to anyone with a functioning nose.
Before his lunch break, Sternovsky had harvested all but three of his lab subjects. Now it was time to finish the job. He donned a gray rubber smock and knee boots, a plastic face shield and leather gauntlets. From the steel sink, he retrieved an enameled tray that held a half-dozen loaded syringes. The fluid in the disposable hypodermics was the palest of pale blues. Blue as a cloudless summer sky.
Heart-stopping blue.
He moved gingerly down the slick aisle toward the last two cages in the row. Excited by the smell of blood and the sound of his approach, the surviving animals growled and screeched. The sixty-five-pound male wolverine he'd named Donny was well into his second hour of mating with the much smaller Marie. It sometimes took as long as two hours for the animals to complete the reproductive act. Prolonged and vigorous mating caused female wolverines to ovulate; as it turned out, the accompanying changes in levels of hormone production were the key to Sternovsky's breakthrough. To pin and hold the knotted wolverines hard against the inside of the bars, he pulled the lever on the cage's built-in trap, which provided safe access for superficial examinations-and injections.
Donny kept humping even as Sternovsky slid the needle into his shoulder. When the scientist pushed in the plunger, the wolverine let out a scream, arched his matted tail and sprayed yellow-green gunk from his anal gland. Donny's wickedly curved fangs and four-inch claws scored the steel bars with fresh, bright scars. Like a wind-up doll ticking down, his frantic hip movements slowed, and his tongue lolled out of the side of his mouth. Then he began to quiver all over; not in ecstasy, but in the convulsive throes of death. Sternovsky made a luckier hit on Marie, injecting her in a vein, and she gave up the ghost at once.
After moving their limp forms from the cage to the nearby countertop, Sternovsky quickly shaved their heads with an electric razor, doused the bare white skin with orange disinfectant, then sliced their skulls open with a battery-powered autopsy saw, leaving the cap of bone to hang back by an attached flap of scalp. The treasure he sought lay at the base of their brains, a bit of differentiated tissue called the hypothalamus. He deftly scooped out the tissue with a sterilized melon-baller and plopped the pair of warm, bloody gobbets into prelabeled plastic jars. He would trim away the unnecessary tissue later, at his leisure.
The scientist paused in front of the last cage. He was breathing so hard he fogged up the inside of his face shield. He had to flip it out of the way in order to see the huddled, hairy form of Arnold at the back of the steel pen. Though Gulo gulo were powerful and fearsome creatures-on a whim, evolution had made dachshunds out of grizzly bears-the pygmy chimpanzee was the test animal that really scared him; in fact, he had recurring, wake-up-screaming nightmares about Arnold getting loose in the gradstudent dormitory.
Barely three feet tall, the chimp currently weighed in at 160 pounds-twice the normal size for his species. Arnold was neither cute nor cuddly. He was a nearly perfect cube of densely corded, evil-tempered muscle. With Arnold, there was none of the sign language, sensitive-fellow-primate, Discovery Channel doo-dah. The glint in his squinty, root-beer brown eyes said only one thing: I want to hurt you.
Sternovsky didn't reach for the cage's lever. Compressing the chimp with the built-in trap was no longer possible, as he'd learned to resist such efforts with his tree-trunk legs. Sternovsky didn't attempt to use a prod to administer the lethal injection. No hypodermic needle could penetrate Arnold's thick muscles without breaking off.
And yet the job had to be done.
The scientist put the tray of syringes down on the countertop and picked up a yard-long piece of Parkerized steel pipe he'd borrowed from the university's marine-sciences department. It was a bang-stick-a bare-bones, stockless 12-gauge designed to serve as an underwater defense against attacking sharks. The weapon had no visible trigger; instead, it fired one high-brass shotgun shell when the muzzle was rammed against its intended target. Holding the bangstick by its Hypalon grip, Sternovsky pulled the cotter-pin safety and let it dangle by its thong. From the back of the cage, Arnold glared at him.
The scientist felt suddenly queasy. This chimp was no dim-witted shark. When you stuck something into his cage, he grabbed for it. And he was quick. His forearms were easily as big as Sternovsky's thighs; with hand strength alone, he had bowed the cage's braced, 440A stainless-steel bars. If he decided to, the chimp could easily pull the offending bang-stick away-or worse, use it to jerk his keeper within reach. The scientist didn't doubt that Arnold had the power to tear a human arm from its socket, and that he would do so with relish, if given the opportunity.
From the side pocket of his rubber apron, Sternovsky took a large, misshapen fast-food sandwich. The grease on Arnold's favorite treat, long since congealed, had melted the bun to mush and turned the wrapping paper translucent. As Sternovsky waved the three-quarter-pound, triple-bacon-and-cheese burger back and forth, the chimp sniffed the air with keen interest.
When Arnold stirred himself from the back of the cage, eyes on the prize, the scientist thrust the bangstick through the bars. Before the chimp could seize the barrel and bend it into a pretzel, Sternovsky rammed the muzzle between his burly pectorals. A rocking blast lifted the huge ape, bounced him off the bars at the rear of the cage and sent him crashing face first to the mesh floor. Amazingly, even though it was a contact wound, there was no through-and-through, no grisly splatter across the trailer's wall. Arnold's massive back muscles contained all the double-aught buckshot.
With profound relief, Sternovsky watched the blood drain from the motionless body. He didn't open the cage door until he was certain that the beast was dead and his own hands had stopped shaking. Dragging the corpse from the cage, he quickly shaved and sawed open the skull, then used the power tool to make a Y-shaped incision below the powder-blackened entry wound. Working quickly, he took minute samples of various organs and tissues for later analysis.