'You reckon we can do anything?' Westcote's tone betrayed his own lack of confidence. He had spent five years at the animal research centre in Arizona. You took a cage of monkeys and injected them with drugs which, in theory, were supposed to give a certain reaction. They seldom did.
Most of the time you ended up with dead monkeys. The public protested so you were forced to keep your experiments under cover; you couldn't share success or failure with them.
*I don't know.' Reitze watched the eyes closely, saw the pupils click back down into focus. 'But it's worth a try. Anything's worth a try. In theory this should soften the arteries to the brain. These micro-organisms, and we still haven't been able to identify them, produce a kind of angina. Not fatal but slowing the blood supply to the brain. If we can open the arteries up, let the full flow of blood in, it should bring the brain almost back to normal. In theory! But of course we don't know what permanent damage has been done in the meantime.'
The victim's face was screwed up into a bestial expression of pain and fear, froth bubbling on the thick lips. Reitze wrinkled his nose. It was starting to shit itself, too. In future all specimens were to be given an enema before they were brought into the laboratories.
Westcote handed him another syringe and he moved on to where the female was pinioned. She was unsuccessfully trying to squirm; if she hadn't been given a tranquilliser a short time ago she would have been screaming. Screams were very distracting in such a confined space.
Reitze stood looking at her, almost gloating. By no means as hairy as her male counterpart there was less of a physical change in the female of the species, more a kind of coarseness as though she belonged to some hitherto undiscovered Amazon tribe. A predomination of the nipples, the vulva engorged like an animal on heat. Facially she was almost attractive, just a slight overall squatness of the features.
'It would be too much to experiment on both brain and body in the same specimen.' Reitze spoke expressionlessly, he might even have been talking to himself rather than to his companion. 'The female stands a better chance of body success. A skin softener and hair remover administered internally. It was tried in Mexico a few years ago and there was one fuck of a stink when a couple of women died. The drug was banned as a result. But I guess nobody's going to make too much of a shout if one or two of these died.'
This time he introduced the needle more gently, just a surface prick, watching her face the whole time. Teeth bit the lower lip, trickles of blood showed, dripped down on to the breasts. The eyes dilated, filled with tears. Why are you doing this to me?
You're the first of many. There'll be hundreds more, men, women and children, as fast as the security forces can bring them in. Most'11 die but we'll keep on until we get some kind of a result.
She was strangely placid now, beautifully moulded features serene, a hint of nobility in her bearing even when she was hanging from that stark wall. Proud. Reitze stiffened, seemed to sense it and it made him angry. You scum, we'll kill you if we can't cure you. He turned away abruptly.
They've been hit pretty hard back home,' Westcote said. 'Virtually the whole of New York State is wrecked, mobs on the rampage the whole time. They even had to defend the White House with heavy artillery.'
This "change" is like a rebirth,' Reitze told him. 'At first they're just stupefied, virtually an unthinking species relying on basic instinct. Then they start to get "acclimatised", for want of a better word, learn to use their limited brains. At first they ran and hid in the woods and fields, now they're saying to themselves, "Why the fuck shouldn't we have those fine houses to live in instead of stone dwellings?" We don't even know how far they'll develop. Anyway, we'd better go, I've got another meeting with the Defence Minister at three. Don't forget, check this pair every hour.'
Westcote nodded, locked the door behind them as they left. Reitze gave him the creeps, you got the impression that he enjoyed injecting living things, delighted in unforeseen complications. These two wouldn't make it, he was sure of that. He only wished he didn't have to come back and check them out because he didn't like the thought of what he might find.
'It's going fine,' Reitze told Rankine. 'We're now working on a series of experiments on brain and skin tissue. We'll know in about an hour how it's going.'
'Don't forget,' the Defence Minister twitched unusually heavy brows, 'these are our people. They're not animals, you know.'
• 'Sure.' They're worse than fucking animals. 'But we've got to test 'em. Don't forget, winter's on the way, another couple of months or so and an awful lot of 'em could well die from exposure. We don't have much time.'
'Which brings me to our Emergency Operations which are now being circulated to the security forces.' Rankine glanced down, a hint of embarrassment. It sounded callous but probably Reitze would not see it that way; the American was devoid of emotions, compassion. 'Our forces are instructed to drive all these . . . throwbacks out of the towns and cities, scatter them to the hills and woods and keep 'em there; a lot of 'em seem to be doing that of their own accord anyway. Keep the populated areas free, stop the looting and burning and . . . well, after that we're relying on you to come up with something.'
Reitze smiled faintly, maybe a sign that he did have an ego and it had been touched. 'Sounds OK in theory, but there's one point I was discussing with Westcote only a few minutes ago. Are these people equipped to stand the rigours of a winter out of doors?'
'Their ancestors did, and survived.' The Defence Minister felt a little flutter in his guts; damn these bloody Yankee boffins, it would mean . . .
'We'll have to carry out some extensive tests on them,' Reitze confirmed the other's worst fears. I'll make a start within the next few days. In the meantime, get your guys catching a few more of them. We'll need males, females and children, in good health and poor. That way we'll be able to hazard a rough guess at the survival rate.'
Rankine nodded and refrained from repeating himself: They are our people, you know.' Right now they were in the hands of the scientists.
Westcote glanced at his watch, saw it was time to go back downstairs. He shuffled his feet under the desk, wondered if there was any delaying tactic which would be acceptable to Reitze. He could not think of one, would have to go whether he liked it or not. 'What the fuck were you playing at, can't you even tell the time?' Scathing retribution that was ten times worse when issued in the Professor's monotone; no raving or shouting, he just spoke the truth and you knew he was right. Westcote would have to go and check the specimens.
He descended the flight of metal stairs as if he did not ever want to reach the bottom, a step at a time, pausing, hoping that he'd hear Reitze coming, the meeting over earlier than scheduled. Passing him on the stairs, his own key in his hand. 'OK, I'll see for myself. You can come if you want to.' Westcote didn't want to but he would accompany Reitze all the same.
Another fuck-up but nobody would record it as a failure. Just a process, next time would show something more positive, or the time after that. One of the most important qualities a scientist possesses, Reitze had once said, was optimism. Positive thinking. But you reached a time when things aren't positive any more.
Westcote reached the bottom step, turned left along the corridor, his feet dragging, pulling back on him. Don't go, for Christ's sake don't go, remember that time you injected those monkeys to try and speed up their reflexes. They were clinically dead but their nerves, their muscles were still hammering away like fuck! Oh Jesus!
The door. He had the key. He could have looked through the tiny glass panel first but he didn't because what he saw inside might stop him from going in there.
Don't look, just open the door.
The key didn't seem to fit, that was because his hand was shaking, rattling the casing of the lock. He forced it in, exerted more pressure than was necessary; his heart missed a beat when he heard the tumblers fall. Oh God, he'd got to go in now.
He smelted them before he saw them. Westcote recoiled, would have fled back out of that door had his legs been capable of movement; he felt like one of those soft rubber 'bendy' toys they used to sell in the shops. He clung to the open door, hung on to it for support, let it swing with his weight.
The woman was clearly dead and it was from her corpse that the awful stench came; she sagged in her manacles, head forward, long coarse wiry hair falling out of her skull like feathers fluttering from a dead bird in a breeze, balding patches covered with red sores, oozing yellow fluid. Dripping treacly plops on the floor tiles.
He threw up, couldn't stop himself, spewing half-digested canned stew across the room. Her entire skin was festered, soft red blotches bulging with some kind of vile poison, visibly eating up the flesh, pulsing with its own venom, Instant putrefaction, malignant cancers gone crazy, fighting one another to devour the flesh on the bones!
Westcote gave a half-scream when he noticed the male, thought at first that the other still lived. The man's frame was rigid as though rigor mortis had claimed him and yet not killed him. Oh Jesus Christ Almighty, that face, that head! Possibly the skull had become engorged, it might have been an optical illusion by the way the top pulsed, visibly throbbing, a football being alternately inflated and deflated by a faulty foot-pump. The skin stretched almost to bursting point, retracted. Expand . . . retract ... expand . . . retract . . . expand . . .
Morbid fascination, horrific amazement, spew trickling down the lab man's chin and staining his white overalls. The prisoner's features were a fixed snarl that depicted the ultimate in pain and terror, a scream that went on and on so that you still heard it even though it was long finished. The eyes had bloated, burst, the dead sockets streaming white fluid like thick sour milk that was about to solidify into cheese; dilated nostrils discharging twin rivulets of mucus that still flowed fast.
Still screaming, the dead brain rebelling in awful palpitations, a creature that fought against what they had done to it even after life was gone from it.
Westcote almost fainted, wanted to look away but could not. Hypnotised. You did this to me; look at me, watch me. No!
Suddenly he was aware that someone else had come into the room, the waft of a white coat passing him, swift footsteps. Keep away, they're not dead yet!
It was Reitze. Westcote saw the scientist through a haze of revulsion, despised him because he didn't back off and throw up. Kept watching him.
Reitze pushed his face close to the vibrating skull, studied it intently for a few seconds. Oh God, he touched it, ran his fingers lightly over it in the way a GP might have examined a patient with ague. Felt the pulse, the heart, squeezed the penis and ejected a spurt of deep orange urine. Liquid excreta splattered on to the floor at the same time.
Then he transferred his attention to the woman, plucked some hair from her head as casually as though he was weeding couch grass from a herbaceous border, pushed the head back. For fuck's sake, Reitze, I don't want to see her face, too! He saw it all right, the expression similar to that of her companion except that the eyes had not burst. They seemed to see, a dead gaze that focused on Reitze. See what you've done to me, you bastard! The jaw clicked open, expelled a groan, a release of trapped wind coming out in one final curse and even from the doorway you smeiled her fetid breath.
Reitze let the head fall, stepped back and turned towards Westcote. The latter read sheer contempt in his look, his eyes saying, 'You're no use to me if you're going to shit yourself and throw up every lime an experiment goes wrong.'
It had gone wrong all right. That was something you accepted, didn't get all fired up about because there would be a next time. And a time after that. You lost a lot, you just hoped that somewhere along the line you might win one', the law of averages.
Watching, waiting. That skull beat was increasing, speeding up, you could see the flesh being stretched to its limit, starting to tear. Splitting!
Westcote threw up again as he saw the bone beneath the rent skin crack, a jagged gash that heaved up grey and green slime, spat it out as though the tortured body was rejecting it forcibly. And then the cranium vibrations ceased immediately as though somewhere they had been switched off. It was all over. Finis.
'What . . . went wrong?' Westcote spoke, maybe to see if he stil! had his power of speech, perhaps as an instinctive apology to Reitze because he had given way to his terror. Only Reitze was impassive, immovable; he expected everybody else to be the same.
'Nothing went wrong.' The same monotone, still staring at the hanging, drooping corpses. 'That was a phase one experiment to find out how the brain and the skin tissue reacted. We found out. Now we're ready for phase two.'
'Phase . . . two!'
'We need to discover how these throwbacks will react in extreme cold. They are being driven from the towns into the countryside where there will be sparse shelter. A few weeks and winter will be here. We don't have much time.'
Westcote swallowed. He'd seen a lot of Reitze's experiments in the past, probably the best man in the States; he knew that the Professor had been under close surveillance in case he defected to the Soviet Union. Not just a talent, a ruthlessness that put him at the top of his field. If somebody or something died as a result of an experiment it wasn't a failure, it was just a step towards the goal he sought. Positive thinking. Inhuman. These two who hung horribly lifeless from the whitewashed wall, they were just 'specimens'. A few weeks ago they had been normal human beings, maybe a professional man, an attractive housewife.
Now they were mutilated, festered corpses, no use to anybody. Not even a mourner. No dignity.