S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (68 page)

Lyssa hurried through her morning routine in a sour mood. All of the rabbits were still alive and, in contrast to yesterday, now seemed to be doing quite well. Even the treatment animals had recovered most of their energy and appetite. They hopped over to the front of the cage as she approached and gazed at her with stoic interest, their only expression concentrated in the endless wiggling of their pink noses.

“Amazing what difference a little food can make,” she told them.

She didn't collect samples. She wasn't ready just yet. They grew bored when she didn't open their cages and returned to the darker recesses toward the back.

She was doubly irritated when it became clear that Sudha was still absent, especially since, like Drew, she had also not called in to say she would be out. She'd now missed almost a full week of work.

Like rats leaving a sinking ship
, she thought fatalistically. Well, was it really all that surprising? It was clear by now that the two were close. If Drew had left—

No, not
if
. He had, and the truth of that fact needed to be faced. He'd left, so it stood to reason that Sudha would have followed him.

“So much for not having an office romance policy,” she muttered under her breath.

“Who? Us?”

Lyssa jumped and spun around. Ramon was standing in the doorway.

“Should I be worried?”

“How long have you been standing there?”

He shrugged. “Just got off the phone with the Ames people. They're having trouble leaving Manhattan. They've been stuck at the tunnel for hours, so it looks like we caught a bit of a break.”

“Stuck?” Lyssa frowned. “Why?”

“Apparently, they're restricting traffic through the tunnels.”

“Why would they do that? Is it the drill?”

“Actually, they're now saying it's some sort of animal outbreak. They just started transmitting on the emergency channels.”

“What kind of outbreak? What disease? And why restrict travel
onto
the island?”

“They're not saying much yet.”

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and tapped the screen a couple times before a tinny pre-recorded message started coming out of it:

—
wish to inform you that the Suffolk County Vector Control District is preparing an island-wide alert at this moment. They are warning all residents to stay away from any strange animals and to monitor for unusual behavior in both domestic and wild animals, both mammals and birds. Do not approach any animal which you do not recognize or know for certain to be disease-free. Officials at the State Health Department have yet to release any details regarding the size of the outbreak, but we do know that it has been identified in several indigenous species along the Eastern Long Island corridor south of Highway
495
. The infection appears to be spreading westward and northward from there.

“I need to call home,” Lyssa said.

“Already did. I called Ronnie's cell and asked her to keep an eye on Cassie. And the animals.”

“Since when do you have her cell phone number?”

He sighed and stepped into the office. “Lyssa, what's going on? Because when I spoke with her, she sounded terrorized. Did you—”

“Terrorized? I may have been curt with her last night when I got home, but that's all. It's not my fault! I was worried about Cassie.”

He held up his hands. “Sorry, poor choice of words. But she did sound scared. You might want to take a moment and call her, set her mind at ease.”

“I thought you didn't want her around.”

“I never said that. I said I thought it was unnecessary to pay for someone while Cassie's in school. Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “I just wanted to let you know that we won't be starting on the new project today.”

Lyssa tried not to look too gratified at the postponement, though it was the only bright spot in her otherwise wretched day. She toyed with the idea of running some additional analyses on the rabbit samples, but her heart just wasn't into work. And if there was anything she'd learned over the years, it was to not start anything new when she was feeling like this. She'd inevitably screw something up.

She finished up her record-keeping and disinfected her hands, then trudged to her office. With the afternoon open, she could finally take a few minutes to review the results from the samples she'd taken to Brookhaven the week before. But when she got to her desk she realized they were probably what was printed and left in the trunk of her car. And her car was at home.

She dialed the lab to ask them to send over another set.

And while you're at it, find out what ever happened with the other results.

No one answered.

As soon as the handset was back in its cradle, it began to ring. Lyssa lifted it back to her ear. “Hello?”

She hoped it was Drew.

“Lyssa? It's Heather Hicks.”

“Ah, I've been trying to get a hold of you. Thanks again for asking Jim to send the tubes,” Lyssa said. “Boxes and boxes of them.” She chuckled. “Thanks to your notes, we got most of them sorted out. But we may have accidentally injected something we weren't expecting. I don't know how much you can help, as it's possible it was created by a student after you left the lab.”

There was a moment of silence, and Lyssa sensed that Heather wasn't returning her call from the other day.

“What is it, Heather?”

“He's dead,” she said. “Jim's dead. I just got word this morning that his lab exploded two nights ago.”

“Oh my god,” Lyssa gasped. “That's horrible. What happened?”

“They're still trying to piece it together. It was an accident. Someone left a gas burner on or something. I don't know.”

“Oh, his poor wife. Was anyone else hurt?”

But Heather didn't answer. “Lyssa,” she asked instead, her voice hushed, “have you been getting any strange phone calls lately?”

Leave. Leave the island while you can.

“L-like what?”

“Threats. People saying they're watching you?”

“We're an animal research facility,” Lyssa replied. “We get threats like that on occasion. We forward them to the police to investigate. But we've never had a problem with anyone actually following through. Laroda is pretty isolated. Why? Have you been threatened?”

“My lab doesn't do animal studies,” she answered, exhaling deeply. “Maybe I'm just being paranoid.”

“No, you should always take threats seriously. Forward it to the police. Or, at the very least, campus security.”

“You're right, Lyssa. It's probably just some crackpot. If you . . . ,” Heather began, then seemed to reconsider. “I have to go now. We'll talk soon.”

But they never did.

 

The moment Ronnie saw the dead bat she knew she should've just quietly put it into the trash without making a fuss. But she was angry and she wanted to teach Cassie a lesson about listening to her and following directions. She never expected the stupid girl to go and try to pick the damn thing up off the lawn. And she especially didn't damn well expect the little fucking flying rat to actually still be alive.

“Has anyone been bitten by it?” the clerk at the veterinarian's office asked her.

Ronnie's eyes flicked to the side, though she couldn't actually see Cassie through the hospital's front window from where she was standing.

Too many damn pets. No wonder she wasn't afraid of it.

“No,” Ronnie lied. “It was already half dead when I found it. Could you just test it, please?”

“Do you have insurance?”

“Animal insurance?” Ronnie winced. “No. How much is the test?”

“We can do a quick in-house check. Takes a few hours, but it's not the most accurate. It's a hundred and twenty-five dollars. A conclusive assay runs four hundred and sixty and takes a few days, since the animal has to be sent upstate to a lab in Albany for necropsy. If someone were bitten, then it'd be free.”

Ronnie groaned. Six hundred dollars was more than what the Stemples paid her in a week. “Do you take credit?”

The clerk nodded and picked up the baggie holding the crushed bat. After it had bitten Cassie, Ronnie had panicked and stomped the thing to death. “You should've put it on ice.”

“I  I'm sorry,” Ronnie said, flustered. “I didn't know.”

“Phone number?”

“Oh, I still haven't memorized it. I got one of the new ones.” She pulled her iLINK out of her pocket and retrieved the identifier code.

It's a phone number, stupid. Why didn't they just call it that instead of overcomplicating things?

The sales rep who had signed her up kept insisting on calling it an identifier code.

She showed it to the clerk, who copied it down on the lab order form.

After running her credit card for the test fee, then checking that the required financial responsibility forms were properly completed, she repeated her question whether the bat had bitten anyone. “Or even just scratched. Rabies can be fatal if not treated soon enough.”

Save the four hundred bucks and say it bit you.

“No.”

If it turned out to be positive, then she was sure the Stemples would pay for everything. Of course, she'd be out of a job for letting Cassie get bitten. On the other hand, if it was negative, then nobody would be the wiser.

“And I'm sorry about the mess,” she said. “I saw it moving and I guess I just freaked out.”

“Well, you did the right thing bringing it in. We've been getting reports of an uptick in rabies lately. And we just got a warning from the State Health Department about a new animal outbreak on the island, though they don't know what it is yet.”

Oh, that's just fucking great.

She gave the clerk a weak smile and walked stiffly out of the office.

Cassie was especially quiet in the car on the ride back to the house, and for this Ronnie was grateful. It had been over an hour since the incident in the backyard, and yet her heart was still racing and her hands still shaking, so that when Ramon called her out of the blue to tell her about the animal warning himself, she'd nearly had a heart attack.

“They told me a day or two for the results. Your parents could probably run the test in their own lab and know within the hour.”
For free, even
.

“No! Please!” Cassie wailed. “Don't tell them.”

Ronnie guessed that Cassie had her own reasons for wanting to keep what had happened a secret, too. It was a small comfort, but it brought a tiny sense of vindication.

“You should be worrying more about the shots,” she said. “More than what your parents might do to you for disobeying me. Big shots with big needles.”

She kept on like this, scaring the girl until Cassie gave her a solemn promise not to tell.

“Yeah, well, maybe I'll tell them anyway.”

The look of horror on Cassie's face was like a stab to Ronnie's heart. How could she betray the child like this? How could she be so selfish?

She hoped and prayed the test results were negative.

 

Lyssa was deeply shaken by the news of Jim Pearce's passing. The manner in which he had died shocked her, but the circumstances were not out of the realm of the accidental. Benchtop burners got left on all the time. If unlit, the gas would quickly accumulate within the enclosed space. And a typical laboratory was equipped with all sorts of electronics, any of which could spark and trigger an explosion. Equipment could also malfunction on its own, short out and overheat. All it would take was the presence of some flammables and an ignition source.

She'd seen it happen before, though not in a lab she'd been in.

But the shock of Jim's death was one of those things that quickly passed. It had been years since she'd even spoken with him. Though the manner of his death was certainly horrible, hearing it like this from Heather, someone Lyssa had never been all that close to, was a bit like reading his obituary somewhere. It felt impersonal.

But despite Lyssa's inclination to dismiss Heather's vague mention of telephone threats as just another drive-by anti-science fascist scare-monger, the unease which Heather had planted stubbornly persisted. Clearly something had spooked her badly. And it didn't take a genius to know that Heather felt the threat and the lab explosion were connected.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid.

Lyssa hadn't received any threatening calls; the one inexplicable message she had gotten, the one advising her to leave the island, didn't really qualify as threatening. If anything, it had felt more like a plea.

Restless and anxious, she returned to the lab. The lights flickered on automatically when she opened the door. It was a small room, cramped by the amount of equipment and research materials it held. So many opportunities for a fire.

Now who's being paranoid?

To the right was their deep freezer, inside it the frozen tubes Jim had sent, now neatly arranged in their boxes. It was likely they were the only things left of her advisor's work.

As she stood in front of the open freezer, icy air spilling out in a fog at her feet, she heard Heather's shaky voice once again. The timing seemed coincidental, but what if it wasn't?

You should just throw it all out. It was a long shot anyway. And you've had nothing but trouble since receiving it.

She rolled her eyes at herself, then shut the freezer door and latched it. She had much bigger issues to worry about.

Beside the freezer was the fridge, and next to it was the biosafety cabinet where they conducted their tissue culture experiments. The glass sash — what Drew jokingly referred to as the sneeze guard — was pulled down and the ultraviolet light was on inside, disinfecting the stainless steel surfaces while not in use.

Along the back wall was a bank of tissue culture incubators, each of them emitting a chorus of quiet beeps and sighs as they regulated temperature and humidity. The flasks of cells she'd been culturing over the past couple of weeks would be overgrown by now and most likely dead. It had been Drew's job to change out their exhausted growth media and replace it with fresh media on a semi-daily basis.