Doubly so when its brain was fried with a mind-altering viral infection.
Jaeger groped for its eyes, one of the most vulnerable points of the body. His gloved fingers made contact, and he drove his thumbs in, gouging deep – a classic Krav Maga move, and one that didn’t require particular agility or speed.
His fingers slid and slewed on a slick, greasy wetness: he could feel it even through the gloves. The animal was leaking liquid – blood – from its eye sockets.
He forced his thumbs deeper, hooking out one living eyeball. Finally the monkey relented, dropping off him in screaming, agonised rage. It let go last with its tail, the limb that had snaked around Jaeger’s neck in a stranglehold.
It made a desperate leap for cover, wounded and hopelessly sick though it was. Jaeger raised his MP7 and fired: one shot that took it down.
The monkey fell dead on the forest floor.
He bent to inspect it, sweeping his torch beam across its motionless form. Beneath its sparse hair, the primate’s skin was covered in swollen red blotches. And where the bullet had torn apart its torso, Jaeger could see a river of blood pooling.
But this wasn’t anything like normal blood.
It was black, putrid and stringy.
A deadly viral soup.
The air roared in Jaeger’s ears like an express train steaming down a long, dark tunnel. What must it be like to live with that virus? he wondered.
Dying, but with no idea what was killing you.
Your brain a fried mush of fever and rage.
Your organs dissolving inside your skin.
Jaeger shuddered. This place was evil.
‘You okay, kid?’ Raff queried, via the radio.
Jaeger nodded darkly, then signalled the way ahead.They pressed onwards.
The monkeys and the humans on this cursed island were close cousins, their shared lineage stretching back countless millennia. Now they would have to fight to the death. Yet a much older life force – a primeval one – was stalking both of them.
It was tiny and invisible, but far more powerful than them all.
80
Donal Brice peered through the bars into the nearest cage. He scratched his beard nervously. A big, lumbering lump of a guy, he’d only recently got the job at Washington Dulles airport’s quarantine house, and he still wasn’t entirely certain how the whole darned system worked.
As the new guy, he’d landed more than his share of night shifts. He figured that was fair enough, and in truth he was glad of the work. It hadn’t been easy finding this job. Painfully unsure of himself, Brice tended to cover up his insecurities with bursts of booming, deafening laughter.
It didn’t tend to go down too well at job interviews – especially as he tended to laugh at all the wrong things. In short, he was glad to have a job at the monkey house, and he was determined to do well.
But Brice figured that what he saw before him now was not good news. One of the monkeys looked real sick. Crook.
It was nearing the end of his shift, and he’d entered the monkey house to administer their early-morning feed. His last duty before clocking off and heading home.
The recently arrived animals were making a horrendous racket, banging on the wire mesh, leaping around their cages and screaming: we’re hungry.
But not this little guy.
Brice sank to his haunches and studied the vervet monkey closely. It was crouched at the rear of the cage, its arms wrapped around itself, an odd, glazed expression on its otherwise cute features. The poor little critter’s nose was running. No doubt about it, this guy wasn’t well.
Brice racked his brains to remember the procedure for when they had a sick animal. That individual was to be removed from the main facility and placed in isolation, to prevent the illness from spreading.
Brice was a hopeless lover of animals. He still lived with his parents, and they had all kinds of pets at home. He felt strangely ambivalent about the nature of his work here. He liked being close to the monkeys, that was for sure, but he didn’t much like the fact that they were here for medical testing.
He sloped off to the storeroom and grabbed the kit required for moving a sick animal. It consisted of a long pole with a syringe attached to one end. He charged the syringe, returned to the cage, poked the stick inside and, as gently as he could, stuck the monkey with the needle.
It was too sick even to react much. He pushed the lever at his end, and the shot of drugs was injected into the animal. A minute or so later, Brice was able to unlatch the cage – which had the exporter’s name, Katavi Reserve Primates, stamped across it – and reach inside to retrieve the unconscious animal.
He carried it to the isolation unit. He’d pulled on a pair of surgical gloves in order to move the primate, but he wasn’t using any extra protection, and certainly not the suits and masks piled in one corner of the storeroom. No sickness had yet been reported in the monkey house, so there was no reason to do so.
He laid the comatose animal in an isolation cage and was about to close the door when he remembered something one of the friendlier workers had told him. If an animal was sick, you could usually smell it on its breath.
He wondered if he should give it a try. Maybe he could earn some brownie points with his boss that way. Remembering how his colleague had said to do it, he leant into the cage and used his hand to waft the monkey’s breath across his nostrils, inhaling deeply a couple of times. But there was nothing distinctive that he could detect, above the faint smell of stale urine and food in the cage.
Shrugging, he shut and bolted the door, and glanced at his watch. He was a few minutes overdue his shift changeover. And in truth, Brice was in a hurry. Today was Saturday – the big day at the Awesome Con comic convention in downtown. He’d forked out some serious money for tickets to the ‘Geekend’, and to get access to the Power Rangers 4-Pack VIP event.
He had to hurry.
An hour later, he’d made it to the Walter E. Washington Convention Centre, having done a quick stopover at home to change out of his work clothes and grab his costume. His parents had objected that he had to be tired after his night shift, but he’d promised them he’d get some proper rest that evening.
He parked up and headed inside, the roar of the massive air-conditioning units adding a reassuring baseline hum to the chatter and laughter that filled the cavernous convention centre’s interior. Already it was buzzing.
He made a beeline for the breakfast hall. He was starving. Once fed and watered, he headed into a changing booth, emerging minutes later as a… superhero.
Kids flocked to the Hulk. They pressed close, wanting to have their photo taken with their all-powerful comic idol – especially as the Hulk seemed to be far more smiley and fun in the flesh than he ever appeared in the movies.
Donal Brice – aka the Hulk – would spend the weekend doing what he loved most: laughing his booming, heroic laugh in a place where everyone seemed to like it, and no one ever held it against him. He’d spend the day laughing and breathing, and breathing and laughing, as the vast air-conditioning system recycled his exhalations…
Mixing them with those of ten thousand other unsuspecting human souls.
81
‘We maybe got something,’ Harry Peterson, the director of the CIA’s Division of Asymmetric Threat Analysis – DATA – announced via the IntelCom link.
‘Tell me,’ Kammler commanded.
His voice sounded oddly echoing. He was sitting in a room carved out of one of the many caves situated close to the BV222 – his beloved warplane. The surroundings were spartan, but remarkably well equipped for somewhere positioned within immense rock walls deep beneath Burning Angels mountain.