Page 57 of Mastermind

All that talk about saving the last bullet for myself . . .

Well, the joke’s on me, the computational biologist who couldn’t count.

I grab for anything I can and feel the conduit rip free. There’s a blue arc as it hits the metal of the struts supporting the floating floor.

Damn, this cable is live. Like twenty amps worth of live.

I feel something heavy land near my legs. Something snarling.

I make a tight fist, tucking in my thumb, and swing the electrical line in that direction. An impossibly strong hand grasps my wrist and starts to pull my fist into its mouth.

My wrist explodes in pain, but not nearly what the chimp must have experienced before the current made his heart skip a beat.

I can smell the scent of burning hair and flesh. I pull myself out from underneath the unconscious chimp and crawl in the direction of Jessica.

I hit a wall near the door. A tile is yanked free. I cower in fear, ready for death.

“Theo! Out now!” Jessica yells.

I pull myself through the gap and realize what she’s done.

Jessica slid a large equipment cabinet in front of the door as a kind of barricade. She pushed it a meter forward so I could crawl out of the hole.

“Let’s get out of here,” she says, opening the metal door behind us.

The metal creak attracts the attention of a band of six other chimpanzees that had been watching the melee in the floor. They come running toward us on all fours and leap onto the cabinet.

Jessica pulls me through the gap in the door and slams it shut on the screaming chimpanzees.

We run through the next door and then the exit, making sure each is closed tightly behind us.

Finally, we reach her rental car and get inside, lock the doors, and catch our breath.

She starts to speak. “Holy . . .”

“Crap,” I finish for her.

We’re both pumped full of adrenaline, like some crazy drug rush. Neither of us is assuming it’s completely over, but for a moment we don’t have to worry about being attacked.

Jessica stares back at the facility. “What a damned waste. What a goddamn waste.” She looks at me, eyes filled with pain.

I shake my head.

In this moment, I realize how much I respect this woman. She feels only sadness over having to hurt those poor animals. She understands compassion and accepts its burden.

“Now what?” she asks.

“We wait for the army to show up and find out what they were doing in the other half of that facility,” I reply.

“Other half?” she replies.

“That was only half the interior. Someone bought it unfinished, maybe from a bankruptcy, and repurposed it for something else.”

“Genetically modifying chimpanzees for aggression?” she asks.

“No. Those were normal chimps. Normal chimps stuck in a nightmare scenario. I want to know why.”

“I want to know who,” she adds.