And sorry, Jill, that we’d have no proof of success for our presentation. I’d thought video of a wildly altered rat might just seal the deal, proving that the old formula really did create monsters. But it was apparently not to be.
I stroked the rodent’s head for another minute until it seemed recovered, croughing on its haunches and washing its face, then sniffing at my fingers again. I allowed it to play in my palm for a while, and was about to reach over and turn off the camera when suddenly, without warming or provocation—it bit me. Hard. “Dammit!” Blood welled from the tender spot between my thumb and index finger.
The rat released my flesh—only to sink in again, and again, so rapidly that I didn’t even have time to react. I barely had the presence of mind to steel myself for a short time, long enough to capture some images on tape.
And long enough to see the look in the animal’s eyes.
When I couldn’t stand being gnawed on one second more, I moved to the cage, and—just needing to be free of the little demon—dropped it in with the others.
As I stepped back, shaking out what had been my good hand, I saw the runt turn its new rage on its fellow rats, attacking randomly, viciously, until the cage was a seething mass of panicked, squealing rodents. Flecks of blood splashed on the glass.
“Shit!”
I swore not only at the carnage but at the realization that the experiment really seemed to have worked. “Dammit,” I muttered again in disbelief as more blood hit the cage walls. “Son of a . . .”
I watched for just another second, stunned into inaction, then realized I needed to intervene and stop what threatened to become a massacre.
I hurried back to the lab table and switched off the camera—not wanting to record what I’d do next—and started to pull the switchblade from its hiding place in my bandage. But as my fingers touched the knife, I found that I couldn’t do it that way. Couldn’t bring myself to plunge in the blade, perhaps miss killing him, and need to stab the animal again, maybe more than twice. Instead I flipped open my messenger bag, searching for the vial of strychnine, glad, for once, that I never cleaned out things. Twisting off the cap, I dipped in my index finger and covered it with pure poison, then reached in among the frenzied, wounded rats, snatching up the runt. He wriggled and fought as I struggled to force the powder onto his tongue, biting me enough times that I feared I might be poisoned, too, if too much entered my bloodstream through the breaks in my skin.
But before the rat could do me in, the toxin paralyzed his much smaller nerve system and he lay still on the table again. This time his heart didn’t beat at all.
“Sorry,” I apologized yet again. “But I had to do all that. For Jill.”
The rat’s videotaped reaction—documented success with an animal—might just net her the thirty thousand dollars. It was worth the life of a rodent. Yet I still felt bad as I bagged the creature for disposal and cleaned the mess in the cage. A few of the rats looked to have serious injuries.
When the room seemed in order, I packed up the camera and resealed the bottle of formula, twisting the cap on tight. The motion left a smear of fresh blood, my blood, on the white plastic, and I shoved the bottle into my bag, ready to return it to my locker.
The funeral march I’d once composed still played faintly, now mockingly, in my head as I hid the bottle away and carried the corpse to the Dumpster outside the school. One of my most beautiful compositions wasted on a dead rat.
How could I have been tempted, even for a second, to become like that animal: convulsing, mad, and murderous? Who, what type of person, would want that?
I also wondered, as I often did, where the beast that took away my parents was hiding, what it was planning, and if I would have the courage to use the knife when it really counted.
Raising the Dumpster lid, I hurled the rat into its rancid coffin, gagging unexpectedly at the strong stench of rot.
Chapter 69
Jill
“YOU’VE ACCOMPLISHED a lot in a short time,” Mr. Messerschmidt noted, nodding with approval. “Do you think you’ll be ready to present in a few days?”
“Yes,” I said. “But we’re cutting it close.”
“Jill’s got it under control,” Tristen said, dipping his hand into a cage and stroking one of the rats that we were systematically sickening, documenting their reactions to early versions of the formula that we knew weren’t really effective. “She’s going to win.”
“We’re going to win,” I corrected him, thinking that Tristen seemed to be distancing himself more and more, not just from me but from any concept of the future. “Us.”
Tristen didn’t look at me. He was frowning, eyes trained on the rat, which shuddered under the influence of a weak acidic solution.
“It’ll be okay,” I promised him. I sort of meant the rat. I sort of meant . . . everything. I wasn’t sure about either.
“You two don’t have a chance, with your half-dead rats and stinking old papers,” Darcy piped up from the front of the room. “It’s not research. It’s a publicity stunt!”
“It’s a great experiment,” I advised her. “So just worry about your own work, okay?”
“I guess Jekel told you, Darce.” Todd snorted as he wiped down their station for the evening.
I stared at him, not sure if
