It felt good to hear him say it like that, Josie realized, flat-out and honest. She had guessed as much, but it meant something to hear the truth from someone who should know.
“This is also something that’s not talked about,” he continued, “but a couple of years ago there was another program, this one run by the army, that was looking for a way to transfer Lupine traits to otherwise non-Lupine soldiers. Specifically, they wanted a strong, fast soldier with rapid healing capabilities and a nearly indestructible immune system. I mean, who wouldn’t, right? But things with that went belly-up when it turned out that the general in charge had a few too many bats in his own belfry, if you know what I mean.”
Josie could certainly guess.
Steve swallowed more Ovaltine. “After things went south for that program, the government in general and the military in particular got a lot more cautious about how they were going to play around with experiments affecting Others. It had been hard enough to hush up what happened in New York, and the army lost an elite team of soldiers familiar with the Others and their facility in warfare because of the way they handled things. To give them a little credit, they at least realized that they didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.”
“So they settled on making a brand-new one, one with the possibility of causing a cascade of death and destruction that would trickle down all the way to the human population? Good call.”
“I know.” Steve winced. “I’m not saying they went about it the right way. Believe me. But the truth is that the world of warfare is changing these days in a way it hasn’t since World War Two and the introduction of the tank to battlefields. Now that it’s been a few years since the Unveiling and the world has had a little time to adjust to knowing about the Others among us, there are some nations out there that are actively and forcefully recruiting shapeshifters into their ranks. To the extent that they’re virtually conscripting some of them the way the British navy did in the bad old days—just plucking them off the street, forcing them into a uniform, and marching them off to war. And when an army of humans comes face-to-face with an army of Lupines and Felines and all the other massively powerful creatures out there, who do you think are going to be the ones to walk away after the dust settles?”
“I get that. Really, I do. I just don’t get how no one could have anticipated what might go wrong with genetically engineering a virus that is still incurable in humans who’ve carried the bug for more than a couple of weeks?” She shook her head. “It just defies my brand of logic.”
“They did anticipate the effect on humans, actually,” Steve said. “They just anticipated the wrong one. The first thing they did when they began working with the virus was to render it harmless to humans by inserting a genetic sequence designed to initiate a self-destruct action in the presence of human immunoglobulin.”
“Which is great for everyone who isn’t carrying AIDS or on chemotherapy or vitamin-D-deficient. Gee, thanks!”
He sighed and leaned his forearms on the shiny steel tabletop. “Yeah, every time I find myself saying that, I know it’s going to sound stupider than the time before. You’re right about that measure not being good enough, but it was enough of an advance to get them approved to continue working, which was really what they were after. It bought them another six months.”
“And that’s when they discovered how to drive a Lupine crazy in six easy days?”
“They never got that far. They knew the virus showed promise in limiting the ability of a Lupine body to shift, but they didn’t know if the effect would last more than a couple of hours, so they certainly had no idea of what might happen after a week, or even after a day. All they were after was something that could be deployed in a combat situation to give our guys time to either win or get the hell out of Dodge. It wasn’t supposed to spawn the next Holy Roman Crusade.”
Josie pursed her lips. “When is it ever supposed to turn to shit?”
“True. It’s not. And this wasn’t, either. And when one of the directors of the facility overseeing the development realized what could potentially happen if the virus was released on a force of Others who still kicked the crap out of our boys, he pulled the plug on the whole thing. He ordered research to cease immediately and that any samples already generated be destroyed according to standard protocols for biologically hazardous materials.”
“And yet,” Josie pointed out, “here we are.”
“Right. Here we are.” Steve drained his mug and set it aside. “The problem is that when doing the background checks on the biological engineers called up to perform this research, no one anticipated that it might present a problem if one of the staff members had an apparently loose affiliation with a human supremacist organization. It didn’t look like it amounted to much more than an occasional donation at a whacked-out fund-raiser or two, and it wasn’t as if he belonged to a group of Others supporters who might try to undermine a project aimed at potentially harming them. He slipped through the cracks.”
“That’s not a crack, it’s the Marianas Trench.”
“Again, not arguing. But shit happens, and as I’ve learned in the military, shit happens a lot more often when the goal is to do something not-so-bright in the first place.”
“Then instead of destroying the samples of virus as ordered, this engineer stole them and ran off to put them in the hands of some radical hatemonger with a hard-on for new-style furries? Have you been able to locate him?”
“Yes and no.”
Josie just waited. She almost thought she might be becoming inured to bad news.
“Yes in that I was able to find out his name and what facility he went to when the LV-7 project was discontinued. No, because I just found out yesterday at noon, and by the time I went to talk to him, he’d heard about my asking questions and already headed for the hills.”
“So he could be anywhere. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I have a few friends unofficially working to track him down, but like I said, his connection to the human supremacist group was a tenuous one, and the group has a presence all over the country. We’re digging deeper, but these things take time.”
Every time she heard a phrase like that, Josie wanted to scream. “The problem, Steve, is that our time has already run out. Of the two Lupines we know have contracted this virus, one is already dead, and the other, who is responsible for the death of the first, is on the loose God know where, disemboweling God knows whom, all for shits and giggles. I don’t want to see anyone else die.”
He met her gaze levelly and nodded. “And I don’t want to see anyone die at all. Now, why don’t I take a look at the syringe you told me was meant for you or Eli? I want to know what exactly is in it and if it’s one of the missing doses from Idaho before we do any more speculating.”
It took a few minutes for Steve to set up the portable yet extremely powerful microscope he’d brought with him from his lab but only a second for Josie to retrieve the hypodermic from where she had it stored in her medical fridge. She watched as the scientist prepared a sample of the clear liquid and placed it under the magnifying lens. He stared intently through the oculus for several minutes, changing the focus, the lighting, and the orientation before he finished. When he sat back and turned to Josie, she found that she’d been holding her breath in anticipation.
He waved her toward the scope. “Take a look.”
She peered through the lens. “It looks like the images I’ve seen of the rabies virus in textbooks and journal articles,” she confirmed. “But how does that tell us anything new?”
“It doesn’t.” He took a small vial out of his breast pocket and added a minute amount of a vaguely yellowish liquid to the sample they’d been examining. “But this will.”
He gestured back to the scope, and Josie took another look.
She frowned. “Was something supposed to happen?”
“You mean it didn’t?” He looked truly taken aback.
“No, it looks exactly the same.”
She double-checked, shook her head. “Nope, no changes.”
Steve began to pale. “I have a feeling that’s a very bad sign.”
“What did you add?”
“Concentrated canine serum cells.” The man grabbed a fresh sample mount and a sterile needle and pricked the tip of his finger. When a bead of blood welled to the surface, he created a mount of his own blood, added a drop of the liquid from the syringe, and examined the new sample.
After only a few seconds, Josie saw his shoulders sag in relief.
“Thank God,” he muttered. “For a second I thought this might be a modified form of the virus designed to activate with human cells. I can’t tell you what a disaster that would have been.”
He didn’t need to, because a scenario even more disastrous had just occurred to Josie. Disastrous on a more personal level.
“Hold on a minute.”
She crossed to the fridge and reached in with trembling hands, withdrawing a slim vial from a collection of similar tubes. She checked the label and handed it to Steve.
“Make another slide. Only use that this time.”
Steve read the label on the vial, raised an eyebrow, and did as she requested. He withdrew a small quantity of blood from the vial and prepared a new sample with the addition of the virus. When he looked through the scope this time, Josie saw him frown and felt her heart drop into her surgical clogs.
“Who exactly is ‘Patterson, Clovis’?” he asked, reading off the label on the new vial of blood.
“Not who,” Josie managed, reaching out to lean on the counter for support. “What.”
“Excuse me?”
“Clovis Patterson isn’t a who,” she repeated, forcing each word carefully and quietly from between frozen lips. She was afraid if she spoke too loud or too fast or too anything, the words would come out on a scream instead of a whisper. “Clovis is a what, and he belongs to Mrs. Helen Patterson. He’s her purebred seal-point Siamese . . .”
“Siamese . . . cat,” Steve finished with an expression of dawning horror. “The virus hasn’t been modified for humans. It’s been modified for other . . . Others.”
“For Eli,” she bit out, anger beginning to join in with her panic. “It makes sense. If this is really about a human supremacist thing, they wouldn’t want to modify the virus to attack humans. Humans are the master race. They’d want to destroy just the races they don’t like. Or the species, anyway.”
“And that explains where Garrett England ran off to. The engineer who went missing,” Steve explained. “I’ve never heard of anyone in the skinhead community with the kind of skills it would take to modify the virus beyond even where the original facility took it, but someone has managed it with this. The only way that makes sense is if Garrett had secretly continued to work on the virus after he sent the original stolen samples to his friends. He couldn’t have made these changes in one day, and no one else I know of—beside his co-workers, all of whom are accounted for—could have made them at all.”
“So not only did he send the original virus off, he included version two-point-oh before he realized anyone was on to him.”
Their eyes met and Steve nodded grimly. “We need to let Eli know. He’s hunting these people down with the idea that the virus can’t hurt him, only his Lupine friend. He needs to be aware that he’s in as much danger as the wolves.”
“I’ll try his cell, but if he’s on to something, he might not answer.”
The clinic phone rang before she even touched it. She grabbed up the receiver and put it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Hey. We found something out here,” Eli told her, his voice a welcome sound in her ear. “Picking up the shooter’s trail turned out to be the easy part. It led us straight back to what looks like a base camp. It looks like it’s been used for a good space of time, too. Maybe since before Rosemary was shot. And we found some evidence pointing us toward who we think might be behind this whole mess.”
“So did—”
“I’ll tell you all about it when we get back, but right now Rick is checking out a few things for me. It was a good call to come out here, though. This stuff is going to be helpful.”
“Yeah,” Josie managed to add when he finally wound down. “We found something back here, too.”
“ ‘We’? Is Steve there already?”
“Yes, and we’ve already made a lot of connections that you need to know about,” she told him, trying to keep her urgency from coming out in her voice. “When are you and Rick coming back here?”
“Soon,” he assured her, then paused. “Is everything okay?”
“Fine, but we really need to let you know that we’ve figured out what was in the syringe that skinhead at your cabin had the other night. It was definitely the virus that Rosemary was infected with, only—”
Josie heard the sound of a scream, a shout, and then silence. She froze in place, not believing her ears until the landline in her hand began to beep, letting her know that her call had been disconnected several seconds ago.
Right when she’d heard the unmistakable sounds of someone very close to Eli being viciously attacked.
Exp. 10-1017.03
Log 03-00142
Stage 4 product has shown evidence of spontaneous mutation.
This is beyond even my highest expectations. Techs report that one of the last test subjects has demonstrated that the product is indeed causing more rapid progression of effects with each generation.
Going immediately back to work in the lab. If able to harness this mutation, could create a product able to produce end-stage effect within minutes of administration. Final solution could be reached within days instead of weeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Whatever Josie had meant to say, Eli missed it. He simply couldn’t hear it over a shrill yeowl of feline rage, combined with Rick’s blasphemous curse, blended in an earsplitting cacophony of confusion and pain.
He whirled around and saw his friend staggering under the weight of the good-size western bobcat that had launched itself at Rick’s head from just beyond the tree line. It took a second for his eyes to convince his brain that they weren’t playing a trick on him. Bobcats were usually small, shy things that stayed away from people at all costs. While a lion might attack a person if it felt threatened, had cubs to protect, or even if it got hungry enough, a bobcat faced with a human would just turn tail and run.
Then a puff of air brought Eli the scent of the animal and things became horribly clear. That might look like a bobcat, but it smelled more like a Bob in cat’s clothing. Somehow the virus that they’d all assumed affected only Lupines had found a way to spread to Felines.
This was all kinds of bad.
Instinct kicked in while Eli’s mind continued to work through the problem, and he jumped to Rick’s aid, grabbing the bobcat by the back of the neck and wrenching it from the Lupine’s back. The animal snarled in fury and turned on him so quickly, Eli had three long scratches on his left cheek even before he managed to release his grip on the creature’s scruff.
The bobcat hit the ground hissing and spitting, but it didn’t stay on the ground for long. Ignoring Eli, it turned again on Rick, but this time the Lupine was ready. He blocked the animal’s second attack with a swift kick that knocked it back several feet until it landed at the base of a false cedar.
“The damn thing just doesn’t know when to stay down,” Rick shouted when the bobcat twisted immediately to its feet, shook off the fall, and crouched in preparation for another leap.
Eli shook his head, the Feline’s ferocity sending a chill down his spine. It was like watching one of those horror movies where the villain turned out to be a child-size doll possessed by the soul of a serial killer. On the one hand, the idea of being attacked and killed by something less than half the size of a grown man made any sane person want to laugh; but on the other, when the thing just kept coming and coming and coming, ignoring every setback, every injury, just relentlessly attacking agai
n and again, each time with a renewed sense of fury and agression . . . Well, it was hard not to feel a little sense of anxiety. Determination and a sharp set of teeth had won smaller victories in the history of man versus nature.
What truly disturbed Eli, though, wasn’t the animal’s viciousness or its unwavering focus on Rick; it was the bright, avid gleam of madness behind the narrowed yellow eyes. Somewhere inside that body was the mind of a man who was probably perfectly nice. Before he’d turned into a frenzied monster, Bob the bobcat had probably paid his taxes, mowed his lawn, held doors for little old ladies, and loved his wife and kids. Someone, somewhere, would probably cry if they could see how that man had been changed by one single prick of a needle, or one bite from a strange, frenzied wolfish-looking creature with eyes that had once been human.
In the end, the eyes told Eli what to do. He saw in those eyes the same thing he’d seen in Bill’s, right before the end—rage, bloodlust, and a complete absence of any sense of humanity. The men they had once been had died at the hands of the beast, and there would be no coming back from that brink. There was no tomorrow for a creature who had lost its place in the world.
Reluctantly, grimly, but efficiently, Eli drew his service revolver from the holster at his waist, took aim, and shot the bobcat once in the back of its head as it sailed through the air toward Rick one last time.
It fell to the ground with a sick thud, a limp, thick-furred casualty in a war it probably didn’t even know had been waged. The need for it left a bitter taste in Eli’s mouth, and he shoved the gun back into its leather holder with a grimace of distaste.
“What the fuck just happened here, compadre?” Rick asked, in a voice of utter astonishment. “Please tell me that I have not seen what I think I’ve seen.”
“The rules have changed.” Eli glared at the bobcat’s corpse, then picked it up and tossed it over his shoulder. “It looks like your pack members are no longer the only ones under attack, my friend. And I, for one, think it’s time we revised the game plan.”
Born to Be Wild (The Others, Book 15) Mass Market Paperback Page 23
