The click of the wheel bearings and the tick of the drive chain betrayed my position. There was no way to quiet the bicycle short of picking it up and carrying it, which I could do with one arm but only for short distances.
The noise might not matter, anyway. The monkeys probably had acute animal senses that detected the most meager stimuli; in fact, they were no doubt able to track me by scent.
Orson would be able to smell them, too. In this nebulous night, his black form was barely visible, and I couldn’t see if his hackles were raised, which would be a sure sign that the monkeys were nearby.
As I walked, I wondered what it was about these creatures that made them different from an ordinary rhesus.
In appearance, at least, the beast in Angela’s kitchen had been a typical example of its species, even if it had been at the upper end of the size range for a rhesus. She’d said only that it had “awful dark-yellow eyes,” but as far as I knew, that was well within the spectrum of eye colors for this group of primates. Bobby hadn’t mentioned anything strange about the troop that was bedeviling him, other than their peculiar behavior and the unusual size of their shadowy leader: no misshapen craniums, no third eyes in their foreheads, no bolts in their necks to indicate that they had been stitched and stapled together in the secret laboratory of Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s megalomaniacal great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Heather Frankenstein.
The project leaders at Fort Wyvern had been worried that the monkey in Angela’s kitchen had either scratched or bitten her. Considering the scientists’ fear, it was logical to infer that the beast had carried an infectious disease transmitted by blood, saliva, or other bodily fluids. This inference was supported by the physical examination to which she’d been subjected. For four years, they had also taken monthly blood samples from her, which meant that the disease had a potentially long incubation period.
Biological warfare. The leaders of every country on Earth denied making preparations for such a hateful conflict. Evoking the name of God, warning of the judgment of history, they solemnly signed fat treaties guaranteeing never to engage in this monstrous research and development. Meanwhile, each nation was busily brewing anthrax cocktails, packaging bubonic-plague aerosols, and engineering such a splendiferous collection of exotic new viruses and bacteria that no line at any unemployment office anywhere on the planet would ever contain a single out-of-work mad scientist.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand why they would have forcibly subjected Angela to sterilization. No doubt certain diseases increase the chances that one’s offspring will suffer birth defects. Judging by what Angela had told me, however, I didn’t think that the people at Wyvern sterilized her out of a concern either for her or for any children that she might conceive. They appeared to have been motivated not by compassion but by fear swollen nearly to panic.
I had asked Angela if the monkey was carrying a disease. She had as much as denied it: I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.
But if not a disease, what?
Suddenly the loonlike cry that we had heard earlier now pierced the night and fog again, jolting me out of my ruminations.
Orson twitched to a full stop. I halted, too, and the click-tick of the bicycle fell silent.
The cry seemed to issue from the west and south, and after only a brief moment, an answering call came, as best I could tell, from the north and east. We were being stalked.
Because sound traveled so deceptively through the mist, I was not able to judge how far from us the cries arose. I would have bet one lung that they were close.
The rhythmic, heartlike pulse of the surf throbbed through the night. I wondered which Chris Isaak song Sasha was spinning across the airwaves at that moment.
Orson began to move again, and so did I, a little faster than before. We had nothing to gain by hesitating. We wouldn’t be safe until we were off the lonely peninsula and back in town—and perhaps not even then.
When we had gone no more than thirty or forty feet, that eerie ululant cry rose again. It was answered, as before.
This time we kept moving.
My heart was racing, and it didn’t slow when I reminded myself that these were only monkeys.