by Nick Thacker
She pushed the question out of her mind. Bad time to be trying to figure out things like that, she thought.
Ben and the second guard were grappling in the hallway, Ben trying to get his hands around the man's throat but having no luck. The guard kneed Ben in the crotch, and Ben doubled over.
The man followed up with his other knee, this time catching Ben in the face. Eliza saw blood smack to the floor.
Now, Eliza, she willed herself. Fire the gun.
And yet her finger didn’t move. It couldn’t.
This isn’t what I want, she realized. I don’t want to kill anyone. We are doing this so no more life is lost.
In the time leading up to this moment, Eliza had wrestled with the possibility that she might have to fire this weapon directly into someone else’s face or chest. Up until this moment, she believed herself capable of doing just that.
And yet…
The guard continued pummeling Ben, the larger man having trouble keeping his hands over his face. The guard punched Ben in the gut and then shifted to his side, trying to both get away from the attack and simultaneously gain purchase around the man’s legs.
Finally, Ben was able to grab the guard’s leg and he wrapped his arms around it. He pulled, and the guard lifted up off the ground.
Ben fell with the man in his hands, and both men crashed against the doorframe of the room opposite Eliza’s. Taking advantage of the momentary victory, Ben released the man and let him fall to the ground, then fell on top of his chest and began punching his face.
Still Eliza watched on, unable to react.
“Eliza, now!” Ben shouted.
She couldn’t budge.
Ben finally delivered a huge blow to the man’s eye, and she watched his head bounce back against the tile floor, and then he stopped moving. Ben waited a few seconds to see if the man was done.
Suddenly Eliza caught motion from her right side.
The woman.
The other guard had gotten to her feet and had nearly reached her weapon. Eliza watched as the woman pulled the submachine gun up and held it out in front of her as she ran toward Ben.
“No!” Eliza screamed.
The woman lifted the rifle to her eye and lined up the shot.
Crack!
The sound of the shot caused Eliza to jump. She watched in horror as Ben rolled to the side, then fell to the ground.
No, it’s not…
But the woman in front of Eliza also fell.
Eliza noticed the end of her own rifle smoking a bit, and she felt her hands trembling. She realized then what had happened.
The woman was lying on the floor, motionless.
Ben rolled onto his stomach and then pushed himself up off the floor. “You did it,” Ben said. “You took the shot.”
Eliza felt tears welling in her eyes. Her hands began to shake even more, and she let the rifle fall to her side, holding it with one hand.
“It’s okay,” Ben said. “You took the shot, and you saved my life. Thank you.”
She nodded, then sniffed, trying to fight back the tears she knew were coming. “I… I did that. I killed her.”
Ben rushed over and grabbed her shoulder. He gave it a gentle squeeze. “You did what you had to do. What we came here to do.”
We didn’t come here to kill —“
"We came here to stop this," Ben said. "And that's what we're doing. Anyone tries to stop us; we need to stop them first. Got it?"
His words were harsh but accurate. She knew it, and she believed them.
Ben spoke again. “We need to keep moving,” he said. “There are going to be more guards, and now they know we’re here. Someone will have heard the gunshots.”
As if on cue, Eliza saw two doors open farther down the hall. She assumed they were doctors or staff members, poking their heads out to see what had happened, but if they were guards it meant they needed to get away from this area.
“Time to move,” Ben said. “Let’s get to the end of the hallway. We can keep an eye on everything behind us while we move toward the stairs. We need to make sure no one else will shoot at us or take us by surprise, but I have a feeling what we’re really looking for isn’t going to be on this floor.”
Without waiting for her, Ben turned and started down the hallway toward the set of double doors.
51
Eliza
They took the stairs up to the second floor, but even before they exited the stairwell, Eliza could see that this level was completely unlike the one they had just come from. While the ground floor had been filled with offices — all empty — and a few small surgical suites, this top floor had clearly been designed for a singular purpose.
Storage.
Specifically, the storage of live animals. Ben and Eliza walked a few steps onto this floor, and Eliza could see wall to wall cages, stacked three-high, floor to ceiling. Every pen had a glass front door, with steel reinforcement bars behind them and four small circular holes cut out of each of the corners.
She heard the noises, slight and timid, as soon as she was in the room.
Calling to her. Beckoning.
Asking for help.
“Chimps,” Eliza said, her voice barely a whisper. She heard it falter as well, and she knew it wasn’t because of the adrenaline that was still coursing through her veins. “This is where they keep them.”
Ben hadn’t heard her, but she knew he was examining the room as well. Looking for threats, potential dangers.
The cages were stacked along each of the two walls to her left and right, and they ran the entire length down to the opposite side of the gigantic space. She saw a set of double doors on the other side that appeared to be the first set of doors of an airlock. Some sort of containment and clean examination chamber would be just inside the doors.
Between her and those doors, in the central open space in between, she saw two rows of tables, each with three or four stools around them. Some of the tables looked like they were meant for surgery, much like the ones they found downstairs. Steel and rigid, standing sentinel beneath dead hospital-grade lights, awaiting a patient — or prisoner — to experiment upon.
Other tables, however, had computer equipment set up on top and beneath them. She saw four tables in the right-side row that boasted two connected desktop monitors each, with CPUs stored on the floor underneath.
"That's our target," she said. She pointed toward the center of the room toward the tables. "Those computers and hard drives. All of them, or whatever we can carry."
“They look like standard workstations to me,” Ben said. “I guess I was expecting like a server room, or at least a rack or two full of blinking computer thingies. You think all the information we need is on those?”
She shook her head. “No, you’re right. They’ve no doubt got some sort of cloud backup system somewhere. But I highly doubt they would keep it on-site. That said, they’ll have at least something on those machines. If we can just get the hard drives out of them and throw them in our packs, that should be enough.”
Her voice trailed off. Up to this point, she hadn’t let her eyes divert from the center of the room, from her target. But she knew that there was a reason EKG had built storage enclosures on the sides of the room. They were never meant to be empty…
She'd heard them, calling out to her, clicking and shuffling about inside the enclosures, but still, she couldn't bear to know the truth.
She hadn’t wanted to see the truth with her own eyes.
Ben saw it for her. “Eliza, the cages. Some of them are full. You can hear them, right?”
She nodded, then slowly moved her face to the left and stared at the wall of cages there. Sure enough, behind every third glass door was a chimpanzee.
Pan troglodyte. Of the tribe Hominini. The closest genetic living relative to Homo sapiens. The Pan name was derived from the Greek god of the wilds, the troglodyte name taken from a mythical race of cave-dwellers that the historian Herodotus mentioned ‘were the swif
test runners of all humans known’ and that they ‘ate snakes, lizards, and other reptiles.’
Of the four main lines of chimpanzee, it was impossible from here to tell which Eliza was looking at. Some were sleeping, their faces facing the back wall of their prison cells, nothing but dark shadows against the lighter cage walls.
But some others were facing inward, toward the room.
Facing her.
She locked eyes with one of the chimps, squatting in its enclosure, in one of the cubicles in the middle row. She stared back, seeing its intelligence, its understanding.
What have they done here? What are they planning to do here?
She took a deep, slow breath. She sensed Ben next to her, drawing closer, but she stared back at the chimp.
Focus on the mission, she told herself. Focus on the task at hand.
Ben started walking toward the computers in the middle of the room. He held his assault rifle low, at his side, but he still gripped it with both hands, pointing it toward the double doors. They hadn’t seen anyone in this room, and the entire place seemed suspiciously empty. If there was still anyone inside, they could be hiding out in the airlock or in the room beyond.
And they had encountered the security team already — if there were more guards around, she hoped they’d be able to get the jump on them.
And she knew what she was capable of now. If it came to that once again.
The image of the woman she’d shot, bleeding out while facedown on the floor, flooded into her mind. She shook her head to push it away, but the image she was seeing now — her reality — was not any better.
Seeing these chimpanzees with her own eyes — locked up and awaiting their sentencing — she knew she wouldn’t hesitate the next time she needed to protect herself, or Ben, or them. If someone came into the room now, she’d be able to pull the trigger again.
Still…
They needed to adapt, to change their plan. Getting data now was no longer enough.
“Ben,” she said. Her voice cracked.
Ben stopped, turned around slowly, and met Eliza's face. He arched an eyebrow, a silent question that she heard all too well.
“Ben, I’m sorry,” she continued. “We have to help them. We have to free them.”
Ben’s eyes widened. “Eliza, no. They’re… They’re wild animals, and they’re dangerous. They might —“
“They were most likely born here,” she said. They were at least reared here, from a very young age. They’re used to captivity, but there’s no way they prefer those enclosures.”
“Still,” Ben argued. “We can’t just —“
“We can and we will.” She felt the confidence pouring back into her. “If there’s a way to get them out, a way to prevent whatever sort of experimentation and study is going on here, we’re going to do it.”
“How?” Ben asked. “It would be utter confusion and chaos. And besides, you can’t expect there to just be a big red button that will open all of the doors at once. And besides, what then? Then we’ve freed a bunch of apes into the foothills of Switzerland? There is no way that can be a good plan, Eliza. For us, for them, for anyone.”
She paused, nodding. He was right, of course. It was a terrible plan, one that could potentially cause more harm than it would in just leaving them here. But to leave them here, locked away, was to solidify their fate.
It was certain death.
There was little chance that these animals would survive if they stayed in this hell.
But there was little chance they would survive if they were allowed to roam free in Switzerland. They weren’t adapted to that environment at all, and there would be nothing they could do to protect them if the government decided to euthanize them.
“What do we do, then?” She asked Ben. “We can’t just let this continue. We can’t let them do this.”
Ben walked back over to her and grabbed her shoulder. “We are not letting them do this,” he said. “We’re stopping it. Right now. We don’t have to free them today, but if we can get the information and get back to town, we can have it uploaded by tomorrow. Whoever needs to know about it will, and then —“
“No,” she said, her voice rising. “No, Ben, you know that won’t work. If we steal the data and try to get the word out, EKG will take matters into their own hands long before anyone can get here to rescue them. They have ways of euthanizing these animals that won’t even leave a trace. Cremation is just the beginning. They’ll have plausible deniability, and —“
“They won’t,” Ben said. “We’ll have the information out there. Everyone will know because we gave them the proof. We just need to get it first.”
Ben turned around and began once again toward the computer workstations. She looked once more to the chimp to her left, the one who had met her eyes when they’d entered the room.
It was still staring back at her.
Still pleading with her, silently.
She let her eyes fall as she followed Ben to the center of the room.
Ben began fumbling with the computer mouse when he reached the station, but the moment Eliza approached the table, the doors at the back of the room opened.
A voice called to them, the voice heavily accented but in English.
“And who exactly might you be?”
52
Ben
The voice caused Ben to jump, but he came around the rifle pointed, his finger ready, an ounce of pressure all it would take to send a piece of hot lead into the newcomer.
“Wait!” Eliza yelled, rushing to Ben’s side with a slight limp before he could take the shot.
The man in front of Ben was unarmed, his hands raised above his head.
“Yes,” he said, still walking forward, “please wait. I — I didn’t want to cause any trouble.”
Ben frowned, but he kept the weapon pointed. “Stop moving. Now.”
The man did as he was told.
“You know him?” Ben asked Eliza. He saw her out of the corner of his eye. She was nodding.
“It’s Dr. Canavero,” Eliza said. “Lead scientist and surgeon here.”
The man raised an eyebrow and tilted his head back as if completely ignoring the fact that there was an assault rifle pointed directly at his chest. "Lucio Canavero," he said. "Nice — I guess — to meet you."
Ben wasn’t amused by this man’s lack of concern. “It’s really not,” Ben said. “What the hell kind of twisted scheme are you guys running here?”
“Twisted… nonsense. This is a premier research facility. Dedicated to advancing the biological sciences and bridging the gap between —“
“Save the marketing speak,” Ben snapped. “We ain’t investors.”
“Oh,” Dr. Canavero said. “I am well aware. We are not in need of any more investment — just time. And the return of our assets. I assume you are not here for that, either?”
“You talking about that giant silverback running loose out there?”
At this, Dr. Canavero seemed visibly perplexed. "Ah, yes. Of course. That's all it would seem to be to the casual observer."
He turned to look at the rows of cages along the wall. Ben looked at Eliza, and she shook her head slowly. Don’t kill him, perhaps. Yet.
He didn’t want to have to kill anyone if he didn't absolutely have to, but they still needed the information from the hard drives. He glanced down at the computer screen. It was booted to the desktop, no login credentials required.
“May I show you what we are working on?” Dr. Canavero asked, his voice falling to a lower register, almost soothing. “It truly is remarkable.”
“It’s disgusting,” Eliza said. “That’s why I quit.”
Canavero studied her for a moment, then nodded quickly. “Yes, yes. Eliza — Lindberg?”
“Earnhardt.”
“Right. I knew it was one of those dead pilots or the other. Well — welcome back, regardless of your feelings toward this place. I’m afraid the tour will have to be short; we are severely under
staffed at the moment.”
Ben waited for Eliza to decide. They needed information — that was their mission. If there was something this scientist could provide, he might just lead them directly to it. And he appeared to be harmless. Certainly unarmed.
Ben weighed the options. There were possibly more guards in the building, and Canavero had said they were currently operating with fewer staff than usual, which meant someone could return at any moment and catch them off-guard.
“You have ten minutes,” Eliza said. “One second longer, you’re dead. One strange glance or you press any sort of alarm button, you’re —“
“Dead, yes, I got the message, darling.”
She sneered at him.
“Please, just allow me to explain what it is we’re working on here. It may not change your mind, but you will at least know that we are taking strides to ensure our working facilities are the most humane in the world.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that I saw you cut a chimp’s head off,” Ben said. “Then sew it onto another one.”
Canavero appeared to be confused for a moment. “Right, yes. Subject 19. Apollo. And how, may I ask, did you gain access to Apollo’s experiment?”
Neither of them responded.
"Fine. Well, in any case, we are well past that study. The trials were — shortly after Subject 19 was euthanized, we were able to perform a successful operation, and then three more. Suffice to say, we will be waiting on clinical trials and peer review for some time, but I believe strongly that we've cracked it."
He turned and began walking toward Ben and Eliza. Ben tightened his grip on the rifle. But as he drew near, Ben saw the man veer off to his left, closer to the cages.
As he did, the chimps closest to him scurried back in their enclosures and pressed themselves tightly against the back wall.
“Back here,” the doctor said. “The airlock. Behind that is the main surgical suite. You will be impressed. There are no surgical suites like it anywhere in the world.”
