 "Feeding
Frenzies"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
It was bad enough I’d just discovered my
wife had been unfaithful—and now the mistakes of seven months ago were
coming back to haunt me.
There had been nine of them, and only one
had escaped. Just one. We don’t even know how he got out—“we” being just
me and Mike Morgan, my chief research scientist at the lab, the only two
people who knew what went on in the top secret Unit Six at the lab.
We panicked at first—after all, if anyone
knew what was going on at this place, they’d come in and shut us down for
sure. The public just knew we did experiments with mice for a thousand
reasons, and supplied mice to other researchers. Nobody ever questioned
us; we were way up here almost into the woods of Maine, just outside of
Evervale in East Carmon. Evervale was a minor urban oasis amidst a rural
desert, just out-of-the-way enough to go unnoticed by all. I suppose if
something had to go wrong in Lab Six, East Carmon was the place you ought
to be when it did.
Morgan and I didn’t tell a soul, and
tried to handle it ourselves. We set countless high-powered rat traps and
even bushwhacked through the woods behind the lab in hopes we’d find our
little high-powered escapee. There were many late nights that I couldn’t
explain to my wife, so naturally she was unbearable when I’d finally get
home far too late or on a weekend—why was I late, don’t give her that
‘weekend work’ excuse again, who was I seeing, what was her name, and so
on. In retrospect, she was way over the top with her suspicions, which
should have tipped me off that she was the one doing the cheating. But I
was too preoccupied with the work crisis, and defending myself from her
relentless accusations, so it never occurred to me.
Never mind that the only time she wasn’t
whining about living in the city was when she was grilling me about my
suspicious activities. A born-and-bred Kentucky girl, she wanted a house
somewhere rural like East Carmon.
Although hardly a metropolis, she hated
living in Evervale—and reminded me of it nearly every day. I really rather
liked the idea, and living in East Carmon would make it a much shorter
commute to the lab. I just never got around to it. Good thing I
didn’t—with her cheating, a house was something she wouldn’t get out of
our likely forthcoming divorce.
But new houses in the country, and my
wife’s indiscretions aside, now there were bigger problems. Our escapee
had been gone seven months. I recalled our hopes when he first escaped.
“He won’t survive,” Morgan tried to convince me and himself. “His genetic
mutations are still in flux. Without daily treatments, he’ll die.”
We both hoped that were the case. We
hadn’t found the mutated critter in all that time, but we hadn’t heard a
peep out of any of the locals. Gradually, panic crumbled into careful
optimism, and that had eroded away until it was just a footnote.
So the critter was furthest from my mind
after the Janet revelation. Eventually, after the stress of the escapee
wore off, I’d come to suspect her. A private investigator confirmed it the
previous night, and now I knew who she regularly screwed, and at what
hotel. I hadn’t dealt with her yet, not last night or that morning; I
guess I wasn’t sure how to deal with my life coming apart. While the lab
was the absolute last place I wanted to be, I went in early.
And, as they say, when it rains, it
pours. That morning, Jim Rafferty called me, frantic and babbling about
his cat being killed, as if somehow cosmically sensing that I needed
another challenge today. I knew Jim from my occasional early-morning stops
at McNally’s Variety in East Carmon’s meager village square. It was on my
way to the lab, so I often had coffee with the locals. None of them were
big thinkers, but they were nice enough folks.
Except for Rafferty. He was a crass,
ignorant man with a bad attitude a mile long. The locals tolerated him,
but when he came into McNally’s, everyone dreaded it. Rafferty hated
everything: the town manager and the council, the county and state
government, and everything about politics. Nobody could ever do anything
that suited him, and he made sure he let everyone know it. He hated the
coffee at the Variety and the winter weather in Maine and pre-spring mud
season. He never married and never had kids, which was good since he hated
kids.
Except for little girls in the eight to
fourteen age range, so it seemed. He’d limited his indecency to
through-the-clothes fondling and occasionally exposing himself, but
somehow had never been charged with anything. All those girls, of course,
were lying little bastards, he’d always screamed hatefully, even though
everyone knew better. So people taught their kids to stay away from Jim
Rafferty when he came into town.
Needless to say, I never liked him, and
his personality was the last I needed to deal with this morning. He was
excited on the phone and I only understood about a third of what he was
sputtering. “Now, take it easy, Jim,” I said calmly, hoping to instill the
same in him. “Slow down and tell me what’s wrong.”
He got control of himself somewhat and
breathed steadily on the other end, and finally he said, “My house is
infested with mice, doc.”
This was a regular thing for us. Every
time someone for ten miles in any direction had a mouse problem, they
figured it had to be our fault—after all, we had tens of thousands of them
at any given time, so clearly we must release hundreds of them every now
and then, just for fun. “You need to call an exterminator, Jim,” I said
evenly. “We don’t let our mice loose.”
“You ain’t listening to me,” he said
angrily. “These ain’t no regular mice. They killed my damn cat.”
Of course, that perked me up a bit, so I
asked him to clarify.
“They’re mice, all right—I seen ‘em,” he
said. “But they’re bigger than regular mice, and the little bastards are
monsters. Smart, too. I laid traps and poisons, but they won’t bite. And
you can’t tell me it ain’t got something to do with that damn lab full of
mice you got going on over there.”
I was impatient for details. “What about
the cat, Jim?”
“I got a cat and put her down in the
basement—figured she’d take care of the little critters,” he said. “A good
mouser, she was—barn cat from over to Zeke Dunning’s dairy farm. But she
wasn’t down there ten minutes when I heard her yowling. By the time I got
down there, she was gone. Just blood and bones, nothing else, eaten up in
the space of a minute. I ain’t been down since.”
My head was swimming. I put my hand over
the phone, hit my intercom, and told my secretary to get Mike Morgan in
here right away. Jim kept rambling.
“They ain’t like any mice I seen, doc,”
he said, almost accusingly. “And you run your lab full of mice, doing
who-knows-what over there. I ain’t got no fancy degree, but two plus two
is four no matter where you go. These little monsters got to be yours,
sure as hell. Goddam atheist science is what it is, messing with life and
messing with God—”
“Jim, this is very important,” I
interrupted, because once he got going on a rant, he wasn’t likely to shut
up until you’d heard his opinion on just about everything. “Now, we do a
lot of things here I can’t talk about—top secret stuff for the government.
Your mice might be ours, but I have to know: have you told anyone about
them?”
“Plenty of folks,” he said, and my heart fell. “But they all think I’m
crazy.”
And my heart lifted. That was good—Jim
lived in a house in the middle of nowhere, and it wasn’t like anyone ever
visited him. He’d also told a few off-kilter stories in the past, such as
seeing a UFO up on Mount Katahdin and sighting Bigfoot up around Moosehead
Lake. I told him to keep things quiet, and I’d come out right away and
have a look.
* * *
Mike Morgan responded to my page almost
immediately. He was a dashing young man, sort of part scientist, part
boy-band member. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I think we found him,” I said.
He furrowed his brow. “Him who?”
“Our escapee,” I said. “It seems there’s
a horde of monster mice in the cellar of a local guy.”
His face contorted and drained to white.
“That can’t be,” he said, shaking his head. “He couldn’t have survived
long enough to have mated with enough regular mice. I mean, his DNA was
still mouse DNA, but… he’d have been dead in a few days.”
“We genetically increased his sex drive,”
I reminded him. “As a conquering lover, this guy would have been fierce.”
He stepped back, visibly weak, and thudded against the wall. “What… what
did you tell this local guy?”
“I told him they might be ours, and told
him to shut up,” I said, getting up and going for my black bag. “We
engineered them to work as soldiers, so if they’re nesting in his cellar,
the chances are the whole colony is right there. Maybe we can contain this
before it gets out of control.”
* *
* * * * * *
*
Or can he? And what will go wrong
along the way? Plenty, depending on whose perspective you view it from.
To read the whole story, visit
www.CarnifexPress.net and watch
for Vermin, which should be available sometime in 2008. |
Carnifex
Press is a great small press publisher that publishes mostly
chapbooks--the publisher and his wife do it all, including stapling
together the copies. But they're particular about their fiction and have
built quite a sturdy reputation for such.