Primate experimentation was a delicate business, at least, for most labs.
Babylon Labs had registered ten macaque monkeys to their provincial review board, but there were eleven cages for eleven specimens. One afternoon, low-ranking lab technician Katherine Blake was looking over a pre-registration for a series of studies. She had no business snooping, but it was a habit she had developed as a girl sneaking bracelets from backpacks in grade nine.
Katherine knew pretending a monkey didn’t exist meant nothing could protect it from illegal experiments, hostile treatments, anything.
Katherine kept the deception quiet. When her boss found out she knew, rather than threatening her or firing her, he promoted her immediately.
As lab manager and first assistant to Dr. Seymour, her time spent in the lab changed dramatically. Gone were her early rises and hectic lists of janitorial duties, boxes to check. Now, the day staff worked without her, cleaning cages and administering food, taking samples and checking those boxes for her. The rationale for such a swift promotion was she had it in her heart to know what every position did, a form of paying her dues. It wasn’t an outright lie. She was far above the others, grad students and post-grad technicians alike, both in education and callousness. That was needed, of course, to succeed in any impossible endeavor. Choosing her own hours was just an added boon for her loyalty to the lab and its secrets.
Work became almost fun. Just last week, she and Dr. Seymour created a large, bridge-like runner for the monkeys to play on using some old IKEA furniture parts donated to the dumpster of their large, downtown building. But what lifted her spirits most was the confirmation of something she had always suspected: oversight committees weren't meant for science. It wasn’t logging grad school hours or being sure the methods were humane. It was doing what needed to be done.
Still, it was nice the day-shifters could clean the literal shit now. Katherine got to experience the genuine discoveries. For her silence, she was privy to the hypotheses hidden to the rest: the purpose of injections, biome replacements, and even the little stressors applied to their specimens, which were sometimes called for. But Dr. Seymour still wouldn’t tell her why there was an extra monkey.
The monkeys were referred to by number, all except the eleventh—they called him Charlie. All were fast asleep in their cages down the hall, seen in a green hue from the cameras overtop Katherine’s office desk.
Past midnight, she was the only human left in the lab. She sat back in her rolling chair and put a hand through her thinning hair. She had studied nutrition out of high school because of her skin. Now, in her early thirties, it hadn’t gotten any better. Breakouts which outlasted puberty and an overall lethargic temperament informed a pattern of sleeping in and staying out of the sun, hence the night shift.
While scrolling through the silent footage, a clank came from down the hall. Katherine turned to look into the darkened doorway beside her desk. Through that darkness, she could only see the illuminated red orbs of the electric door locks.
In the green-tinted vision of the monitors, the monkeys were still and sleeping in little hunched balls of hair in their cages.
Katherine looked back to her work just as a scream echoed out, reverberating against her skin, lifting the hairs on the back of her neck. It didn’t sound like the usual high-pitched cackle of a primate.
Katherine stopped her breathing, but her heart ached in her chest as it beat hard.
The scream was lower, guttural.
She questioned her senses, and then wondered, was there another secret Dr. Seymour had failed to mention?
She stood and poked her frail shoulders out into the darkened hallway.
“Hello?” she called out and then winced, regretting it immediately. Whoever was there, if they were there, now knew she was there too. She desperately wanted to hear feet shuffle and a door slam—a would-be burglar scared off—but things were quiet.
Through the hallway, she paced toward the main room, avoiding the temptation to click on the hallway lights. This is so stupid, she told herself, but what if something was wrong, and she had stayed in her office like a coward? She could call the police—no, they couldn’t afford such attention with their work. She could call Dr. Seymour, but at this hour? It was likely nothing. Yes, nothing.
Into the main room, the faint light from her office room, now feeling so far away, gave just barely enough ambiance for the cage bars to cast shadows on the floor.
Nothing made a sound.
Katherine walked down the two rows of cages. She was beginning to think it was all in her mind until something touched her arm. Thin and metal. She knew the feeling. She reached out and felt the door of one cage. It was open. Craning down to have a look inside, it was empty. Charlie was out.
She continued down the rows, quicker now. The other monkeys were still asleep until she got to the final cage; its door was the only other one opened. In the corner, a monkey was hunched over. Katherine came closer. The white of its tail said it was Charlie. The other monkey was laying flat beneath him. “Charlie?”
Over his shoulder, Charlie snapped his neck, and his eyes shined through the blackness. He opened his mouth and howled out. Katherine drew back, and the sound ignited the others.
The metal bars clanged, and monkeys shrieked. They jumped and reached out to her through the bars.
Katherine’s frail knees fell from beneath her and the little hands grabbed at her hair from behind. She shook and tried to pull away. She smacked the linoleum floor, crawling as fast as she could to the back wall where a phone was.
Katherine dialed for Dr. Seymour in the dark and the dial tone was barely audible underneath Katherine’s cries and the cacophony of primates.
“Hello? Katie? Hello?” she could hear him faintly say.
Katherine dropped the wall phone, and it fell to hang from its cord. She covered her ears, screaming herself to drown them out.
Then it went silent. All at once, like a hellish rapture, and then the only sound was Katherine’s breathing. Breathing and soft sobbing in the terrible quiet as Seymour called her name from the receiver.
Three blocks away from the research building, driving along the Bow, its water dark and glistening against the city lights, was a plain town car, inconspicuous to most eyes. It carried a group of four bar hoppers, turning in for the night. The man driving was lanky, with a gaunt face that felt especially tired as it hung from his skull. He kept the radio off, not for any small-talk, but because he felt a sense of finality to this evening, absolving him of any future obligations and metastasizing all past sins. His date, the woman in the passenger seat, rambled on about something. She would pause after each monologue with: “But I don’t know, what about you?”
What about me? he thought. He wanted to be home, where he belonged. With a much prettier girl who knew exactly who he was.
When he wouldn’t answer his date, she would answer for him and ramble on about something else. His nose crinkled every time she brought her cigarette back in from her window to take a drag. She was mildly pretty as it was, but the cigarette didn’t do her any favors. Maybe her name was Debbie; he hadn’t bothered to remember.
In the back seat was her friend with her own date, a man who first got the girls over to the bar. The woman in the backseat was a blonde beauty. Her name was definitely Stephanie.
How lucky the girls had gotten to meet the young and charming professor and his quiet, handsome friend who was, of all things, a surgeon.
Luck like that didn’t exist without a catch, and musing on it kept his spirits up. Perhaps then he could enjoy the rest of the evening, his last hurrah.
As Maybe Debbie droned on, now asking him, “Greg, how did you meet Robert?” Greg watched the two others in the rearview mirror. Stephanie’s glassy eyes said her four rounds of tequila and Malibu were hitting her now. She leaned her head back in her seat and watched Robert beside her. The street lights flashed by behind him through the window. He was watching her, too. Her eyes trailed down to the seat and his hand reached over to touch her leg just under her skirt. She took his hand from her leg and held it, not letting him push his luck, but also not saying no. Greg pulled the car into the parking garage under Robert’s building.
Up the elevator and inside the apartment, Robert turned on the lights. Three hung above the unusually long kitchen bar. The bulbs were blue, giving a cold yet amusing touch to the decor. The girls gave each other sidelong glances of approval, breathing out audible smiles the way women could do.
The one definitely named Stephanie took interest in the rows of liquor and drinking glasses, failing to notice there were just as many wooden knife blocks. She reached for a bottle, and Robert helped by pouring her a glass.
Then Maybe Debbie took a seat with Greg on the couch, enjoying glasses of champagne. She watched as he placed the bottle on the glass coffee table.
“So, where are these artifacts?” Stephanie asked, and Robert took her hand, leading her to the bedroom.
Greg sipped his glass, suddenly more put out, disappointed in himself for not enjoying the outing, and Debbie was finally in need of words. She dropped her shoulders and looked around the room while Greg was content with the silence. The others laughed about something in muffled voices from the bedroom.
“So…” Debbie held her champagne glass in two hands. “How long have you known Robert?”
Greg didn’t answer at first. He finished his glass in one gulp and cracked his neck to one side, then the other. “Since college,” he said.
“Hmm… Well, it’s um… I guess it’s not every day you meet a surgeon as handsome…” She took a sip, wincing at her awkward miscalculation of flirting. “I’m sorry… It’s just been a while.”
Greg watched as she took larger sips. She looked down into her lap, and then over to his. His hands interlaced over his crossed legs, and she noticed something she hadn’t before.
“Oh, y-you’re…” She pointed to the wedding ring winking back the blue light. He looked down at it.
“It’s a habit,” he said, a creeping sense of relief that she finally noticed something worth mentioning. But he wouldn’t mention Jean to her. That would be too disrespectful. And she had been so sweet while giving her blessing for Greg to go out again this one last time.
“I get it. I just left a relationship. It’s—” A sound from the bedroom cut her off. “Sorry, it’s well, it wasn’t really like serious, but it was like a year-long relationship and I don’t know if he was cheating or not. I mean, it wasn’t like I was gonna marry him and who gets married nowadays anyway and uh, well except you of course but-but you have a job and you know it’s… It’s just different.”
Another sound came from the bedroom, a muffled gasp. Debbie put her glass on the table and shifted her weight. Greg knew it was to be ready to check on her friend.
“You don’t understand,” he said, and she froze. A muffled scream came from behind the bedroom door. Then a low thud.
“Um, I think I should…”
“No.” Greg leaned forward towards her. “I wasn’t married,” he said. “I am married … to the most perfect woman. And she says it’s alright I kill you.”
Debbie’s mildly pretty face contorted in equal parts confusion and terror. She tried to leap up, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her down. She lifted her legs to kick him away, but he was already overtop her, elbows pressing down on her shoulders. His hands were at her throat, and she let out a gargled hack, trying to pry his long fingers off. He made the sincere effort to watch her as she panicked, to commit to memory those fearful eyes, the moment she knew her body would give out, long before her will.
Greg stared as she went red, blue, and then still.
He rolled over and lay beside her, staring into the dark blues of the ceiling, discontented with what should have been his last. He worried it wouldn’t be. Like he had let her down in some way, and Maybe Debbie should have gotten a knife pressed into her belly instead; the effort of a clean up like that inherently meant she was worth the trouble. But now she was dead and the last hurrah was over.
When Robert opened the bedroom door again, Greg was still laying on the couch with the body beside him, filling the quiet void by cracking his knuckles. When he turned his head against her shoulder, he saw Robert looked tired too. As usual, there was blood smeared around his mouth, but the giddiness he was so used to seeing in his friend’s eyes wasn’t there. Robert leaned on the doorjamb and placed the side of his face against the wood, watching Greg watching him back. Between their gaze was the bittersweet epilogue of the last two decades, and Greg felt the silent, platonic, “I love you” from Robert’s chest into his. It was that love only boys could find in their mates. It hurt more to know he’d miss these nights, too.
“Okay,” Robert said to himself, and a moment later, he returned with Stephanie limp in his arms. He carried her to the overly long kitchen table, and Greg followed with Debbie. Stephanie’s body was placed on the counter. The row of knives in their wooden blocks stood waiting.
Under the counter was a drawer that opened to a large freezer spanning the length of the counter. The frigid breath spilled out at their ankles. A small bed of ice waited inside. They dropped the girl whose name was Maybe Debbie inside and closed the drawer.
Katherine held herself tight, seated against the wall, shivering yet hot all at once. Her heart had taken minutes to calm from the scare, and still her chest ached. She told herself to keep still. That’s what you do with predators. Charlie hadn’t left the open cage. The other monkeys stayed quiet, all watching alongside Katherine as he rummaged and chirped, continuing his vile play with the other monkey’s body.
A lock clicked, and Katherine looked up. The main door beside her unlatched and opened, its red orb now green. Dr. Seymour’s massive frame shuffled in, and saw her balled up at the base of the wall. He was already out of breath and reached a sweaty hand down to help her up. For a nutritional scientist, he was exceptionally fat, but no one could get in his way when he wanted something. Not even him, Katherine had once quipped, to his amusement.
“Steve, they all just went crazy.”
“Did someone get in?”
“No-no, they just. Charlie just—”
“Stay here.”
Katherine glared, watching him pass her by. Another woman would have called his dismissiveness sexist. He walked down the stretch of cages, as if making a mental note of the opened ones, but bearing little mind to the details inside. Disappearing down the ambient lit hallway, Dr. Seymour fell out of sight, and Katherine waited, still working to regain her breath now standing. The air that passed through her body felt as dry as a cloth on her tongue.
Dr. Seymour returned with the small gun he kept locked in his office and a pocket flashlight. Once he was back across the main room and at her side, he asked, “Are you okay?”
Katherine wanted to laugh that it took him this long to ask. She scoffed, knowing that even this attempt at a kind gesture was a waste of time. “Yeah, Steve.” She huffed a sigh and shook out her freshly pulled hair. “They just started going crazy. I don’t know, maybe a biome replacement backfired. They’re supposed to be calmer.”
Katherine took her boss down the rows of cages yet again. Seymour shined the flashlight into each one, trying not to wake the sleeping monkeys. The rest were in an anxious state of self grooming. “Clever bastard,” he said, seeing Charlie’s cage door opened. His food bowl was flipped over. “He must have used it to unlatch the handle.”
Katherine looked at him, his enormous grin. She glared, and he dropped the inappropriate excitement. They continued down the line.
He flashed his light into each cage, and the metal bars made shadows that walked along the floor. All seemed right until they got to the last cage, its door still ajar. A ripe smell, sweet but pungent, like a lost tomato soup lunch, hit them.
Red smeared the bars.
A small body splayed out like a flower after a storm, its plucked petals scattered about. And the little thorax too bloomed open, autopsied in the way its flesh was free to reveal the naked organs beneath.
Charlie sat overtop it, seeming almost tired now. Blood smeared across his mouth. He turned toward Steve and Katherine, watching them outside the cage door as if caught in the act.
Dr. Seymour’s shoulders dropped, and he said, “Oh, Charlie. What did you do?”
