Of Starlight and Plague

by Beth Hersant

  Once back in the village of Carite, Travis stopped to look at the wad of bills Pickman had handed him. How generous. There was enough there for the tequila, for the girl … and for the coke.

  Chapter Five

  On the Radar

  “It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice…in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house.”

  H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

  “…there burst the most appalling and demoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature.”

  H.P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West — Reanimator”

  While the two men were out, there were three fatalities and one further injury at the lab. Pickman walked slowly down the line of cages, inspecting the condition of the animals and recording his observations on a dictaphone as he went.

  “Protocol 606.25/test subjects 7 and 10: deceased and have, presumably, succumbed to the rabies virus. An autopsy will confirm. Subject number 6 was bitten on the leg by her cagemate Hoops (where the hell does Travis get these names?). The bite is not life threatening, but will require a few stitches. Subjects 3, 4, 5 and 8 show no change. They remain weak and lethargic and …”

  He stopped in his tracks. He had reached the final occupied cage in the row — the one shared by test subjects 12 and 13 (simians Travis had named “Zappy” and J. Fred Muggs). The whole interior of the cage was red. Blood covered the bars and the back wall and dribbled out from under the door to pool on the concrete floor below. In the center of the pen sat Muggs, placidly chewing on what looked like a piece of meat. Subject number 12 (aka Zappy) had had his throat torn out, his right hand gnawed off and a chunk torn from his right thigh. He looked like he’d been attacked by a shark.

  Pickman’s mind leapt into action. He’d just brought Montgomery back around. If Travis saw this, he’d quit for sure and the project had already suffered too many delays. So damage control: tranq the little bastard, clean out the cage, and have your story in place when Travis staggers in here around lunchtime tomorrow. Stress-induced psychosis. It happens like this:

  •Put intelligent primates in restrictive cages under artificial light,

  •Give them no stimulation or opportunity for enrichment,

  •Provide no chance to express natural behaviors,

  •Subject them to painful and invasive tests,

  •And surround them with bars and concrete instead of trees and sunshine…

  …and you can literally drive the animal insane. Monkeys suffering from lab-stress have been known to frantically spin around in circles in their cages. They bite themselves and each other and sometimes they’ll rip out their own fur.

  And it’s not like he’d be telling a lie. Lab psychosis was the most likely explanation. And best of all, it didn’t affect the research one iota. Muggs was getting better — he was surviving a full-blown neurological rabies infection and it didn’t matter a bit if his life at the lab had made him unstable. All he had to do was keep breathing.

  What Dr. Aaron Pickman did not know was that the altercation in that cage had been a noisy one. Zappy’s petrified screams had been heard through the lab’s open windows by two tourists hiking in the nearby Soledad Nature Reserve. Pale and frightened, they were on their way back to Carite and the local sheriff.

  By nine o’clock that night Travis was already passed out on Clarita’s lap. She looked at him curiously. He didn’t even want to fuck tonight, he just curled up with his head on her thighs and his arms tightly hugging her around the waist like some little boy. She gently stroked his hair to soothe him whenever he twitched or cried out in his sleep. He mumbled something about a fredmug — but that didn’t make sense in any language.

  “You crazy American,” she murmured. “You don’t need a prostituta, you need a mommy.”

  As she slipped out of his grasp and headed back out onto the street, Sheriff Abran Manolito was just pulling up in front of the lab.

  Pickman, a crystal tumbler of scotch in his hand, came out to greet him. “Hello, Sheriff.”

  “Doctor,” Abran nodded. “I suppose you know why I’m here.”

  “No I really don’t.” Aaron’s face stiffened. The coke. “Is Travis ok?”

  “Your man Montgomery? Yeah, as far as I know. I’m here about the screams.”

  “What screams?”

  “Two tourists this afternoon heard some terrible sounds coming from your lab.”

  Aaron shrugged, “They must have heard the dogs.”

  “What dogs?”

  “Test animals.”

  “And why exactly would they be screaming?”

  “They’re rabid. I’m studying them.”

  “Dr. Pickman …”

  “Look,” the scientist interrupted. “You already have rabies on this island both in your stray dog and wild animal populations. I’m not breaking any laws by studying them.”

  Sheriff Manolito pulled a folded sheaf of papers from his pocket. “Technically no. But are you familiar with the fact that we’re governed here by Puerto Rican law?”

  “No.”

  “The Puerto Rican Legislature has passed Law 154, a very clear, very binding animal protection act.” He handed Pickman the sheets outlining Classifications of Crimes and Maximum Penalties. “For your information.”

  “Thank you,” Pickman smiled, taking the papers.

  “As you can see, the penalties are severe — up to $20,000 in fines and fifteen years in jail. Today, Dr. Pickman, some terrible allegations were made about this lab and so,” Abran smiled slyly, “for your legal protection, I’m going to drive out here more often to keep an eye on things. But you should know, if I hear anything that sounds like,” he flipped open his notebook and read from it, “‘an animal getting torn to pieces’ then I’m going to shut you down.”

  Chapter Six

  Unprecedented

  “I made a thing of pain and fear, and left it bound up to heal… Monsters manufactured.”

  H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

  “I beheld the wretch — the monster whom I had created… I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed.”

  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  Day 21 of the post-inoculation period and the lab was uncharacteristically quiet. The dogs in the first animal containment room had died and had not been replaced with new specimens. In the next room four monkeys remained alive.

  The doctor hailed it as a success. “That’s a 30% survival rate, Travis! That beats Willoughby’s Milwaukee Protocol by 13%! It’s unprecedented!”

  Yes, Travis thought, it is. But unprecedented didn’t necessarily mean good. The monkeys were damaged. Before, they had been unique living creatures, each with their own personalities. They’d had souls. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio noted that “Feelings form the basis for what humans have described for millennia as the soul or spirit.” And these animals definitely had had feelings. They joked, they got scared and hurt and pissed off and they recognized him and showed him affection. But not now. Now when he walked into the room, they threw themselves against the bars of their cages in an effort to get at him. And they didn’t stop. They just kept flinging their tiny bodies against the metal until they split skin and broke noses and shattered teeth. And when they couldn’t bite him, they bit themselves. The floor in front of their pens was constantly slick with blood. He tried immobilizing them for their own good, strapping them into restraint chairs. And then they would just sit there and look at him with blank eyes. There was
not a hint of recognition or personality or life in those eyes. Their hearts still beat — the monitors told him that — but those animals were dead. There was no one home and something else — something diabolical now occupied the empty house like a ghost.

  Yes, congratulations Dr. Pickman, you’ve achieved the unprecedented. And it is grotesque. A line from one of his favorite books, Night of the Living Trekkies, came to him then: they “hated it when the unprecedented happened, because there was always the chance that it could quickly morph into something horrible. Something that could never ever be allowed to see the light of day.”

  But internal ranting and quotes from zombie fiction were not going to solve this problem. Let’s look at this logically, he told himself. Analyze it like a puzzle, devoid of all emotion. He sat down at his desk and began to type:

  Profile of Remaining Test Subjects:

  1.Protocol 606.25/Test Subject 13 (J. Fred Muggs) — alive. The subject’s temperature, heart rate and blood pressure are normal. While physiological symptoms appear to be wholly absent, behavioral changes associated with the rabies virus are clearly present. The subject displays a high level of aggression whenever I enter the room. Tests to determine the cause have so far proved inconclusive.

  2.Protocol 606.25/Test Subject 9 (Hoops). After an initial and sharp decline in the subject’s condition, number 9 has rallied and displays the same physical and behavioral characteristics as subject 13. Note: Hoops was bitten by Muggs.

  3.Protocol 606.25/Test Subject 6 (Little Miss Coconut). Former cagemate of and bitten by subject 9. Following the same pattern as 9 and 13.

  4.Protocol 606.25/Test Subject 3 (Sir Wobbly). Same physical and behavioral characteristics as the other survivors. Temporarily housed in the same cage as subject 6, during which time sexual contact was observed between the two animals.

  It seems highly improbable that the subjects’ behavior is a symptom of stress-induced psychosis as Dr. Pickman claims. Simply put, it is unlikely that all four survivors — despite being placed under identical stresses — would go crazy in precisely the same way. It all started with Muggs. And then it — whatever it is — was passed from one animal to the next along the chain. That means it’s communicable and it spreads through fluidic transfer — through bites and sexual contact.

  The Tom Lehrer song, “I Got It from Agnes” was now stuck in his head. He hummed it as he worked through the night trying to figure out just what the hell was wrong with those monkeys.

  While Travis burned the midnight oil, Aaron Pickman got quietly hammered on The Famous Grouse.

  “What did you do to get so famous?” he enquired of the russet bird depicted on the front of the bottle. “No, I’m serious. What contribution did you make? What disease did you cure? I cured rabies,” he slurred.

  But that was not even remotely true and he knew it. By the time Travis was done digging, he would know it too. And that would pretty much be the end of everything. He knocked back another dram and, unable to face the quiet loneliness of his bedroom, fell asleep in front of the TV in the lounge.

  The television was tuned into Travis’s favorite satellite station, Syfy, which was currently airing Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. And throughout Aaron’s uneasy sleep, lines from the movie filtered in. He heard someone say: “Don’t go on, doc. No matter how much you feel you have to, don’t go on to the place where the dead walk.” He half-heard, half-dreamed this and in his dream it was Travis who spoke. And there was Rachel, walking toward him as the four monkeys staggered along beside her. His daughter was grey and gaunt, with a thin film of white over her eyes. She grinned at him and her teeth were covered with bloody froth. He’d wanted to undo his mistake and, my God, he wanted her back … but not like this. He screamed.

  Pickman flailed and fell off the couch. He was trembling and crying. And that old actor (the one who used to play Herman Munster) was saying, “Sometimes dead is better.”

  At ten a.m. the next morning, Travis found Pickman sitting in front of the TV watching Bats: Human Harvest and drinking scotch straight from the bottle.

  “Klebsiella,” he said.

  Pickman didn’t look at him. “Yep.”

  “You knew.”

  “For a few days now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Travis demanded.

  But Pickman did not answer; he just sat there watching Pollyanna McIntosh run away from carnivorous bats. With one swipe of his hand, Travis sent the old TV crashing to the floor.

  “Now that I have your attention,” he said quietly, “tell me what you know about the Klebsiella.”

  “About a week ago,” Pickman began, “I ran another round of blood tests and took a lumbar puncture from each of the surviving animals. They all had viral antibodies present in their systems — that was to be expected as a normal immune response to the rabies. But I also detected an elevated NK count.”

  “Yeah, Natural Killer cells, indicating a bacterial infection. I found them too.”

  “Then you’ll know from the blood work that one of the monkeys — most likely Muggs — had contracted a Klebsiella infection.”

  “Yes, but where the hell did it come from?”

  “Our monkeys have been in other labs, any one of them could have picked it up and brought it here.”

  “But they showed no sign of infection…”

  “The macaques used for protocol 606.25 didn’t, but what about 606.24 or .23 or .5? This experiment has utilized four hundred monkeys — the infection could have hitched a ride in on any of them. And didn’t one from the latest batch die of unexplained causes?”

  “Yes.”

  Pickman nodded. “Yeah. So Muggs picks it up and develops bacterial meningitis, a secondary infection you get from Klebsiella. It would explain the anomalous symptom you mentioned.”

  “The stiff neck.”

  “Right again. Every other symptom looked like rabies — all except for the fact that the damn monkey couldn’t turn its head.”

  Travis let out a long breath. “And so his brain was infected with both the rabies virus and bacterial meningitis when we delivered our cure.”

  “Give that man a prize!”

  Travis rubbed his temples; he was brewing a colossal migraine. “I get all of that. I’ve seen all of that under the microscope. What I don’t understand is what the hell happened next. Why didn’t he just die?”

  Aaron took another long drink from the bottle. “Well, that’s the thing,” he said, swaying slightly. “Our clever new, geneticalisticly …”

  “Genetically,” Travis corrected.

  “Right! Our new gen-net-ick-ly engineered cure did something unexpected.”

  “What?” Montgomery hissed.

  “It acted like a bacteriophage.” And with that pronouncement, Pickman toppled forward and passed out on the floor.

  Bacteriophages are viruses that attack and consume bacteria. The new cure didn’t eradicate the rabies, it attacked the meningitis. Travis was still fuzzy about what that would accomplish. And so he let himself into Pickman’s office and snooped through his computer files. It didn’t take long to find the document which read…

  “I cannot, with the equipment I have on hand, precisely chart the neurological changes wrought by the bacteriophage. I do, however, know this: phages alter a bacteria’s genes. Joe Pogliano, Professor of Microbiology at UC San Diego, recently published a study asserting that ‘a virus can instruct a bacteria to create a structure more complex than either’ — so complex in fact that it resembles the cells that make up all plant and animal life on earth. Some evolutionary biologists believe that that is how life on earth got started in the first place. A virus attacked a bacterium and they made something unprecedented. I must have made a mistake when I altered the virus and now our little phage has made something new. Under its influence, the test subjects survived rabies. They continue to live, but they
are still infected. Furthermore, the rabies virus itself appears to have mutated into a highly virulent strain whose properties I cannot yet fathom. I haven’t cured the disease. God help me, I’ve created the Néos Lyssavirus, the New Rabies.”

  Chapter Seven

  El Chupacabra

  “… a monster has been terrorizing Veracruz and the nearby villages… The locals call him El Chupacabra… I saw him with my own eyes … he walks on two hind legs; he is covered with thick fur, has the face of a hideous monkey… Double lock your doors, say your prayers and whatever you do, don’t go outside!”

  Scooby-Doo! And the Monster of Mexico

  “Fly, my pretties, fly!”

  The Wicked Witch of the West (commonly misquoted),

  The Wizard of Oz

  There are many clichés that refer to the prevalence of bad luck in this world. Murphy’s Law advances the theory that if something can go wrong, it will. There is, of course, the stoical and ever-popular “Shit happens.” And then there’s the meteorological: “when it rains, it pours.” That one is fairly apt in describing the next misfortune to befall Aaron Pickman. Due to the unconquerable nature of the human spirit, the good doctor was not ready to admit defeat. He still believed he could salvage a cure out of the four demented, slathering creatures that shrieked at him from their cages. And so they were alive and raging when a category 3 hurricane hit the island on the twenty-eighth of November.

  The Cáscarans had seen this all before; and after Hugo devastated Carite in `89, they had rebuilt their village to withstand the yearly onslaught. However the same could not be said for the dilapidated airbase on the north east corner of the island. One felled palm tree was all it took to cave in the roof and take out an exterior wall. J. Fred Muggs picked himself up and surveyed the devastation. His cage lay on the floor on its side and one gentle push of his hand revealed that the door had snapped off its hinges. He was free. He could see the rainforest lying just beyond the strewn cinder blocks of the collapsed wall. For a brief moment it captivated him. Trees — tossed by the storm, yes, but trees. When had he last seen one? As beautiful as that moment might have been, most of the consciousness that could have appreciated it was gone. He was aware primarily of hunger, of the need to run and hunt and feed. A cry snapped his attention back to the other cages. A female was rattling the door of her pen. Muggs calmly opened it — opened them all — and together they slipped out into the night.