Given a choice, Jane would have welcomed coyotes, rabid or not, in almost any number, rather than what came forth into the killing ground of the eighth floor.
Weeks earlier, at Bertold Shenneck’s ranch in Napa Valley, in addition to the rayshaws, security also had been provided by coyotes with brain implants. An early experiment in the reliability of the technology, those prairie wolves could be controlled by microwave-broadcast commands. Although they lived most of the time as ordinary animals, they could be called to attack with great ferocity.
D. J. Michael had been inspired to impress a different species into service on the eighth and tenth floors of his building. Several years earlier, the nation had been horrified and transfixed by the news story of a pet chimpanzee that, in a rage, had attacked the woman next door, biting off her fingers, tearing off her face, and disfiguring her further in ways unthinkable, leaving her grievously disabled and comatose, all in less than a minute. The chimpanzees of movie and TV fame, adored by the public for their cute antics, were mostly pygmy chimps. A full-size male chimpanzee, weighing a hundred twenty pounds, with its long arms and athletic prowess, was far quicker than the quickest man and stronger than a human being more than twice its size. Unlike gorillas, chimpanzees were omnivores, eating everything from berries to insects to small animals. As Poe knew when he wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—which featured an orangutan—a creature that had tasted blood was more likely to draw blood, and within certain primates, not just in human beings, there was a capacity for rage and violence and brutality that made the most vicious denizens of nightmares seem by comparison like cartoon villains.
Perhaps the remote control used by the fourth rayshaw didn’t merely open the door to the cage but triggered an attack command in the chimpanzees’ programs. Their inborn capacity for violence was surely multiplied—how much?—by their implanted control mechanisms.
Three shaggy beasts erupted into the long space, not with the raucous shrieks and squeals common to them but in an eerie silence, as though engaged in some ape pantomime the rules of which required them to be mute. They scampered to three vertical poles and rapidly ascended hand-over-hand into the jungle of grab bars suspended at three levels throughout the room.
Having conjured forth the vicious trio, having tossed aside the remote control, the remaining rayshaw came toward Jane now from the doorway of its apartment, like a towering and indestructible golem risen from mud to its present form, its shadow repeatedly flying from it as multiple lightning bolts flared down the day. The rayshaw fired too many shots at too great a distance, but it closed fast and wore a bandolier of spare magazines, and this vast room offered nothing behind which she might take cover.
Heart jumping to the erratic pulse of the stormlight, Jane held fast to the discipline learned at Quantico, returning fire with the weapon that belonged to one of the dead rayshaws, and she saw the golem take a hit in its right shoulder. She threw down the gun when the hammer fell on an empty chamber, plucked a spare magazine from her belt, and snapped it into the Heckler as overhead the grab bars thrummed and their fittings creaked from the impact and the weight of apes swinging and swooping, ascending and descending and ascending again.
The animals were so fast, changing directions so impetuously and unpredictably, that she doubted she could kill one, let alone three. And though wounded, moving less assuredly, the remaining rayshaw still came toward her, its weapon now in its left hand. As Jane drew down on it, the golem shooter scored a hit. She wore no Kevlar. Too inhibiting when maximum maneuverability was required. A searing pain in her left side. Above the hip but below the rib cage. Hot sting of cut flesh. For a moment, pain robbed her of breath, and she took two, three shaky steps backward. An internal shadow faded her vision but then fell away. Reflexively, she reached under her sport coat with her right hand but at once withdrew it, wiping her bloody palm on the leg of her jeans. She was bleeding. So what? Not the first time. However bad the wound might be, it wasn’t mortal. She remained on her feet, for the moment able to endure the pain, both hands on the pistol again, which was when one of the chimpanzees swung down from the faux jungle.
Perhaps any human form was a programmed target, no quarter given to allies, or perhaps the ape malfunctioned, or maybe the blood from the shoulder wound enfrenzied the animal. For whatever reason, the creature fell on the last rayshaw, face-to-face, its legs around the golem’s waist, hands clutching, seeming to bite and bite before springing away and ascending a nearby vertical pole. If the distance and the shuddering light did not deceive, Jane thought the rayshaw, collapsing in death, had been deprived of both its eyes.