Uncaged

by John Sandford

  Their insider did. He’d also told them that the office doors, and the lunchroom door, were locked, but made of wood.

  “This is it,” the leader said to Christopher, the sledge guy, as they stood outside the lunchroom door. “Hit it right, because when you do, they’ll be coming.”

  “I’ll hit it,” Christopher said. He’d done it before, and was already buzzed from the adrenaline. He looked back at the others. “Everybody ready?” And without waiting for a response, he raised the sledge and said, “Here we go.”

  He swung, and the door smashed open, the small inset windows shattering into the hallway like diamonds on the concrete floor. An alarm fired, shrieking down the halls, adding an air of panic and energy.

  Ignoring the alarm, the leader stepped past the broken door, looked to his right. A half-dozen coat pegs were set into the wall, with white lab coats hanging off them. He started pulling the coats off, found the key under the fourth one, dashed back to the containment area door, fitted the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.

  Another raider, eighteen-year-old Danny, who had a stopwatch on a loop of parachute cord around his neck, bellowed over the siren: “Time’s running: three minutes fifty seconds.”

  The idea was not to liberate the animals, but to wreck the experiments. To do that, the animals didn’t have to be freed, but simply set loose to contaminate each other and themselves. Lab animals were carefully separated to prevent infection by stray viruses or bacteria, which would uncontrollably alter any experimental results.

  Nor did the raiders have any illusions about permanently stopping the experimentation—the forces pushing it were simply too powerful. But they could demonstrate, with YouTube videos, what was done to the animals in the name of science. Or just in the name of better cosmetics. Danny, the stopwatch monitor, was also operating a high-res Sony video camera, catching the chaos as it spread through the lab.

  And people shouted over the noise of the destruction:

  “Gimme a crowbar, I need a crowbar.…”

  “Cutters, cutters, where the hell are the cutters?”

  “Sledge, where’s the sledge?”

  One girl smashed a plastic-front cage, and a piece of the plastic, sharp as glass, cut her hand, not badly, but the sight of the blood running down her arm pushed the others even harder.

  The raiders went through the first containment unit like a hurricane. The experimental animals—all rodents in this first room—were held in plastic cages stacked one atop another in three lines of steel racks. Some raiders smashed the plastic doors with their baseball bats while others scooped the panicked animals out of their cages. In thirty seconds, hundreds and then thousands of rats and mice were scurrying between the raiders’ feet and sometimes up their legs.

  Christopher, the sledge carrier, had been smashing every piece of expensive-looking lab gear that he could find, then began battering open the screened windows, knocking out the wire grids between the glass and the outside. Some of the raiders began scooping up binfuls of mice and shoveling them out the windows.

  The alarm sirens screamed on.

  Then they entered the primate unit, and the pandemonium momentarily stopped as they reacted in stunned horror to what they found: A hundred or more pink-faced, humanlike rhesus monkeys were isolated in separate Plexiglas cages. The tops of their skulls had been cut away and replaced with glass or plastic caps, and computer modules were strapped to the animals’ backs. A dozen of the monkeys lay in quivering heaps, as though near death, or simply paralyzed with fear or pain; the others screamed and scampered to the backs of their cages. A baby monkey with a missing skullcap clung to its mother, who’d been similarly altered.

  The raiders used bolt cutters to slice the locks off the cage doors, and then, protected by thick leather work gloves, they began pulling the mutilated animals from their cages. One girl—Laura—started screaming, and never did stop, as she reached inside again and again, the monkeys’ eyes blank or wild, some shaking uncontrollably and without pause, defecating and urinating in fear and pain and what might have been anger.

  Christopher was smashing out the exterior windows, and one of the experimental monkeys, which had been scampering down the hallway between the legs of the raiders, jumped onto the window ledge and then dropped out of sight. Another one saw it go, and followed.

  The noise was terrific—the sirens, the screaming girls, the screaming animals, and the smashing of the cages, which sounded like an army of men beating on garbage cans with steel pipes. People continued to call for help: “Gimme a bat, we need a bat over here. Watch that monkey, he’s a biter.…”

  Danny, the timekeeper, looked at his stopwatch and yelled, “Two minutes,” and the fury continued: smash, smash, smash, scream, smash, scream …

  And the sirens wailed like banshees.

  Rachel, wild brown hair curling out from under her ski mask, got Christopher to break a door marked DR. LAWRENCE JANES.

  Inside, she found a secretary’s desk near the door and an enclosed space at the back. She went straight to a double-wide fourdrawer file cabinet. The cabinet was locked, but she pulled a short crowbar out of her belt, wedged it into the lip of the drawer, and then stood back while Christopher gave the bar a whack.

  The door popped loose, revealing a line of hanging folders. She pulled three of them out, carried them to the desk, and shook them. An envelope containing a thumb drive popped out of each.

  They’d been told by their insider that the thumb drives contained backup files and reports on the research being done at the facility. She went back for more folders, shaking out the thumb drives.

  “Rachel!” A thin, awkward teen stepped in, banging his hip on the desk but holding fast to a maimed rat. His voice was cool, but the anger clawed through. “Look at this! Look what they’re doing. They cut off her legs! How could they do that?”

  The woman barely looked up. “Not how—why?” she said, and dumped four more drives onto the desk. “Put that thing down and stick these drives in your pockets.”

  The boy tipped the rat gently onto one hand and started picking up drives with the other. “It’s pointless—they’re gonna be encrypted.”

  She paused in her search. “You couldn’t decrypt them?”

  “The CIA couldn’t decrypt them if the encryption is strong.” He unconsciously scratched the rat between the ears and glanced around the room. “The thing is … you don’t want to jump through your butt when you need the files, either. The decryption software is probably on one of these machines.”

  She looked around, waved at the enclosed space at the back of the office. “That’s gotta be Janes’s working space. See what you can do in two minutes.”

  “All right.” The boy walked away with the rat and came back fifteen seconds later with a compact tower computer under his arm. “If it’s on here, we got it.”

  He was still holding the rat in his other hand.

  “You can’t take the rat,” Rachel said. “Ethan loves your key card, but he doesn’t love any of us enough to change the rules. The rat’s called evidence.”

  She went back to rifling the last drawer. They’d gotten twelve thumb drives in all. Down the hall, the timekeeper screamed, “Ninety seconds.”

  The boy turned away.

  “Hey,” she called before he plunged back into the pandemonium. “Take this with you. Hide it.” She handed him the crowbar.

  Whatever Rachel meant to him, Odin was sorry, but he was taking the rat.

  In the weeks since she’d become his first-ever girlfriend, he’d helped her crash the systems in a couple of animal labs, but tonight was his first raid involving actual live animals. The suffering made him physically ill. The only reason he was still functioning was because he’d zeroed in on one living thing, one tortured rat, that he could save.

  When he left the containment units, he was headed for the stairs and then back to the van, to hide the rat. He pushed through two doors, to the stairs. There, just before h
e was about to start down, he saw a flickering reddish light coming from beneath a door farther down the hall.

  Curiosity got the best of him; he still had a minute. He walked down the hall and peered through the door’s hand-sized window. He could see racks of laboratory glass and high-tech electronic equipment, but nothing else. He tried the doorknob, but the door was locked. He’d turned away, back toward the stairs, when he heard a strangled howl.

  “What?” He said it aloud, to nobody.

  He put the computer and rat on the floor, jammed the blade of the crowbar against the door’s strike plate, and threw his weight against it. The door splintered, and after a couple of more hacks, he had it open and stepped into the room. The flickering red light was an alarm of some kind; not a problem, since a dozen other alarms were screaming through the building.

  Off to his right, a whimper. He turned the corner.

  “Ohmigod,” Odin whispered. “Ohmigod.”

  A wolfish gray dog stared at him, its tail twitching with an almost wag. The dog had a wire-basket muzzle over its mouth and a medical patch over one eye. It was sitting on the floor outside a large steel-barred kennel, a restraining safety chain around its neck. The kennel door was wide open, as though the animal had somehow let itself out.

  “Hey, boy … I think … Are you okay?” Odin spoke softly and reached out to the dog: Odin had some social problems, but animals trusted him on sight.

  An IV drip connected to a bag overhead was spitting clear fluid onto the kennel floor; a shaved section on the dog’s foreleg suggested where it had been attached. The animal definitely looked groggy, and Odin thought it might not be long out of surgery.

  “You’re not okay, are you?” he said, and the dog, in cocking a yellow eye at the window, answered him as clearly as if it had spoken.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of here.”

  But trouble was on the way.

  2

  Darrell McClane had been half asleep, slumped in his chair at the front desk, his feet up on the seat of another chair, when the sirens began to shriek.

  Nearly falling between the two chairs, he looked up at the empty screens of his monitors, reached out, and began clicking through all the screens. He almost clicked past the action at the animal containment room, but caught a flash, and turned the camera, and saw a nightmare.

  McClane had been hired to sit in his chair and not sleep too much. In a year on the job, the only intruder he’d dealt with was a brown bat. He’d chased it out of the building with a broom.

  Still, security work was dangerous by definition, and Darrell McClane considered himself prepared. He got extra pay for being certified as “armed,” and for the .45 he carried in a military-style midthigh holster. He’d never had the chance to shoot for real.

  At the sight of the raiders, he scrolled through the contacts list on his cell phone until he got to the S’s and the head security honcho he’d never personally met: Sync.

  He called the number on the landline and heard two beeps just like the two beeps he’d heard during the company’s simulated emergency drills. He blurted, “Eugene lab, Code White! We’ve got all kinds of people busting out the animals. I repeat, Code White!”

  He hung up and dialed 911. An operator came on and asked, “Is this an emergency?”

  “Yes!” he shouted. “I’m at the EDT Lab on Franklin and we’ve got people in the building smashing open the cages for the lab animals. They’re wrecking the place. Lots of people, they’ve got weapons. I need backup right now.”

  “Could you give us your name?” The voice was calm, even remote.

  Still shouting: “Darrell McClane, I’m the security guard. I need cops. I’m armed. I’m going in, but I need some cops.”

  “We have a car on the way.”

  “There are a lot of them, we need more than one car,” he shouted. “I’m going in.” He dropped the phone and pulled his pistol.

  He was carrying his favorite piece, a Model 1911A1 Colt .45. He was so excited that he nearly forgot to jack a round into the chamber—he did that only when he was out the door and halfway to the elevator.

  McClane was overweight, an out-of-shape fifty-four, a resolute smoker and former drinker, but he’d studied all the Bruce Willis movies, some of which featured a cop who was also named McClane.

  A movie star would have rushed the stairs, but under it all, the real McClane knew that if he rushed the stairs, he’d probably have a heart attack. So he stood at the elevator, and waited, and then, inside the car, waited some more, impatiently pushing the CLOSE DOOR button, until the elevator began slowly heading for the second floor.

  At the top, when the doors opened, he did a quick peek and then slid down the hall to the first locked door. He unlocked it with his key card, and then went to the next door and unlocked it, back always to the wall, so that he was more or less walking sideways, the gun out front.

  That all took time, and the longer it took, the more scared he got, until finally, with his heart pounding like a steam engine, his gun clenched in his right hand, he turned the last corner.

  At the other end of the hall, he saw a tall man in a black mask and two others behind him, also masked, and the tall man saw him and shouted, “Security, security! Let’s go!” and all three of them disappeared down the next hall, and he could hear more people screaming, “Security!”

  McClane went after them, face red as a beet, and at the corner of the next hall, looked down and saw a half-dozen people crowding toward a stairwell door and more still coming out of the animal containment facility.

  McClane screamed, “Halt!” and brought the gun up, jerked off a shot, which went through the ceiling fifteen feet in front of him.

  The shot was like a thunderclap in the tile hallway, and McClane rocked back, astonished by what he’d done. He was disoriented, screamed, “Halt!” again, and fired another shot, which also went into the ceiling. At that moment, the leader stepped through an office door behind McClane, fifteen feet away, with the Taser.

  McClane was already into his third shot and fired it, and saw a masked raider at the stairwell go down, and then his world blew up as the Taser element buried itself in his hip.

  The sixteen-year-old nervous giggler, the honors student Aubrey Calder, took McClane’s last shot. The bullet hit her in the back, blew through a shoulder blade, broke her collarbone on the way out, and then smashed through a window down the hall. She fell faceup, her eyes half closed, stunned. She was awake for ten seconds, then began to shake, her eyes rolling up, not understanding, feeling no pain or anything like regret, and then she passed out.

  A boy her own age stood over her shouting, “Oh jeez, oh jeez! Aubrey!” and unconsciously smacking his head with his fists. The older raider, who’d fired the Taser into McClane’s hip, hopped over the twitching body of the security guard, ran down the corridor, stooped over her.

  “We’ve got to leave her,” he said urgently to the boy. “We’ve got to leave! She’s hurt bad, but she’s not going to die if they get her to a hospital. Leaving her is the fastest way—the cops will be here in two minutes.”

  He pushed the boy away from the downed girl, pushed him again, and again—and then the boy pushed back and said, “Fuck you, I’m staying! I’m staying with her!”

  He ripped off his jacket, ski mask, and T-shirt, then folded the T-shirt and packed it against the wound; the leader, the Taser shooter, looked back once as he fled toward the stairs and shouted, “Don’t tell them who we are!”

  The remaining raiders streamed out of the building. Sirens: they were close and coming fast, but they had known that would happen. They had time …

  In the building’s security lights, they could see monkeys scattered across the lawn, struggling to walk, to crawl, monkeys screaming at the darkness in pain and despair, metal wires glittering in their exposed brains. Two other monkeys stood silhouetted in the second-floor lab windows, apparently unwilling to jump.

  The raiders threaded through the gat
e and disappeared down the alley.

  By the time the cops got to the building, McClane had pushed himself into an upright seated position, leaning against a wall, his nerves still jangled by the high-voltage Taser pulse. Two deranged and bloodied monkeys were fighting a few feet away, paying no attention to him; the hall stank of fecal matter and urine and blood. A thousand white rats and mice scampered aimlessly down the tile hallway.

  At the stairwell door, a half-naked boy seemed to be praying over the body of a fallen raider.

  The cops came in with their pistols drawn, saw McClane, leveled their guns, and shouted, “Push the gun away.”

  “I’m security,” McClane shouted back.

  “Sir, push the gun away,” a cop shouted again. “Push the gun away or we will shoot you.”

  McClane realized that the cops didn’t like the idea of his having a gun, and he slid it down the hall toward them. One of the cops, his gun never wavering from a point on McClane’s chest, eased down the hall, kicked the gun farther away. “You have any other weapons?”

  “No. Listen, I’m the guy who called you.” He pointed at the boy and unmoving body. “They were with them. They were wrecking the place—”

  “Sir, I want you to lie flat, put your hands behind you.”

  “But I’m security—”

  “Sir, I want you to lie flat.…” One cop watched McClane while the other focused on the two figures on the floor down the hall.

  When they had him cuffed, McClane strained his head around to look at them and said, “They pointed a gun at me. I had to shoot …”

  Two more cops moved past him—one crying out in fear when a rat ran up his pant leg—until they got to the boy and the body. A bloody ski mask lay on the floor next to the fallen girl. The boy looked up, fear in his eyes, and said, “She’s hurt bad. Please help me, that asshole shot her …”

  The cops said, “Back away, lie flat, put your hands behind you—now!”