"But they were dead, I tell you!" Owens insisted. He crossed to Slaughter, pulling out the other glass containers. In them, every mouse was frantic.

  "You're certain?" Slaughter asked him.

  "Don't you think I know when something's dead?"

  The medical examiner added, "As certain as I was when I examined that boy."

  They continued staring at the frantic mice.

  "Then I believe you." Slaughter grimaced. "I didn't, but I do now. I don't know what's going on, but I do know that it's happening." He frowned at the farthest table. "What about the boy? The mother and the father won't believe us when they see him. I can't think of any way to tell them."

  "Then we won't." The medical examiner braced his shoulders, coming toward them, color in his face now. "I'll continue with the autopsy. I'd have to do it anyway, to learn how the virus works. I'll fix that slash across his stomach so it looks like it was part of the autopsy, and the three of us will be the only ones who know."

  Suddenly they looked at one another, understanding the significance of their conspiracy, ever after their dependence on each other.

  They were silent. Slaughter nodded, Owens with him.

  "Owens, did you bring the samples for the microscope?"

  "I've got them with the mice."

  "Okay then, let's get started. Slaughter, if you go up to my office, you'll find a stack of books beside my desk. Search through the master index and read everything that you can find on rabies. That's not what we're dealing with. It's close enough, though, and we can't waste time from now on, telling you what we'll be doing."

  Slaughter studied him. "How long till you know?"

  "At least a couple of hours."

  Slaughter glanced at his watch and saw that it was three a.m. "I don't look forward to the morning."

  "For a lot of reasons."

  "They'll be coming to me with their questions."

  "Well, let's see if we can find the answers."

  Slaughter nodded. Trying to smile in encouragement but failing, he started toward the doorway.

  Chapter Seven.

  "This is what a rabies virus looks like."

  Slaughter peered at where the medical examiner was pointing.

  'Yes, I know. I read about it," Slaughter told him.

  "Fine. Now here's a micrograph from the electron microscope. The virus from the dead dog."

  Slaughter watched the medical examiner put down the micrograph beside the book that they'd been looking at. He studied it.

  He thought about it quite a while. "Well, this one's thinner than the rabies virus."

  "Yes, that's one of several contrasts. Normally we say a rabies virus has a bullet shape, but this one looks like, I don't know ..."

  "A missile," Owens said.

  They glanced at him.

  "Why not? All right, then, a missile." The medical examiner pointed at the micrograph again. "A missile is in keeping with the speed of this thing anyhow. The point is that a lot of viruses are shaped in general like this. Vesicular stomatitis would be one. But this thing isn't quite like any of them. It's much sleeker, and while there's an indentation at the bottom, there's no sign of an appendage there. What's more, the nervous system of the boy was not infected."

  Slaughter looked at him. He knew enough from what he'd read that rabies moved along the nervous system, fed off it, and finally destroyed it. He frowned. "But I thought that-"

  "Yes, I know. It shouldn't be. This is unlike any virus I've ever studied. It did infect his limbic brain, however."

  Slaughter didn't understand. He tried to recollect what he had read, but nothing on that subject came to him.

  "The limbic brain," the medical examiner repeated. "It's the part around which all the other sections of our brain developed. It's sometimes called reptilian, but I think of it as animal. It causes our survival instincts, our emotions and Aggressions. Infection there would help explain why that boy acted as he did. Put simply, he became an animal."

  "But what about the coma he went into?"

  'Just don't rush me. Wait until I get to that. It's my guess that this virus is transmitted through the bloodstream. That explains the quick communication through the body. You should know that when I looked at where the boy said he was cut by glass, I found some evidence that he'd been bitten. When the doctor at the hospital examined him, he had no reason to assume the boy was lying, and besides the wound was jagged as if from a broken bottle. But the boy was bitten, all right. There isn't any question. Not more than a day ago. The virus travels through the bloodstream. It's selective. Only certain cells appeal to it."

  "The limbic brain."

  The medical examiner nodded. "It produces the symp-

  toms of rabies very quickly; passes through, let's say, a twelve-hour phase in humans, paralyzes, and produces a coma. Evidently when the brain shuts down, the virus becomes dormant. When the victim regains consciousness, the virus starts to work again. It's really quite efficient, feeding until it produces near death and then holding off until the victim can sustain it once again. Because it passes through the bloodstream, it would show up in the salivary glands, infect the spittle, and pass to another victim in a bite. But if you were cut already and you came in contact with its blood, you'd get it just the same."

  The medical examiner pointed toward the scab on Slaughter's cheek, and Slaughter suddenly was worried, raising one hand to it, frowning.

  "It's too late to worry, Slaughter. If you'd been infected, we'd have known about it yesterday. But next time don't be so damned cavalier."

  "If what you say is true, there wasn't anything that you could do about it anyway."

  "That's right. Our vaccine would be useless." The medical examiner reached up to touch his own face then, his lips scabbed and swollen. "I got lucky, too. I would have had it by now if this cut had been contaminated. As it is, I gave myself two antirabies shots. Absolutely useless. Christ, I don't know what we're going to do."

  "You say you never saw a virus like this? You never even heard about it?" Slaughter asked.

  The medical examiner shook his head.

  "Well, I did," Owens told them.

  They studied him.

  "I read about it," Owens said. "Nineteen sixty-nine in Ethiopia. A herd of cattle came down with a special form of rabies, little frenzy, just paralysis. They all collapsed. The owner didn't know exactly what they had. He gave them up for dead, and then they all recovered."

  "What?" The medical examiner looked astonished. "Nothing can survive it. That's impossible as far as I know."

  "This herd did. The problem is they still retained the virus and in several days they manifested symptoms once again. They had to be destroyed.

  "You're certain it was rabies?"

  "Oh, yes, all the later tests confirmed it. And I read about another case in India two years ago, but this time it was water buffalo."

  "But this thing isn't rabies. Any vaccine they developed wouldn't be of use here. Even if it would, there isn't any time to get it."

  "What would cause a brand new kind of virus?" Slaughter asked.

  "You tell me," the medical examiner responded. "You want to know the truth? I wonder why it doesn't happen all the time. Never mind a thing like legionnaires' disease, which evidently was around for quite a while, but no one diagnosed it. Never mind a thing like staph or gonorrhea which mutated into forms resistant to a drug like penicillin. Let's just go along with my contention that this virus is a new one. Asking what would cause it is like asking why our ancestors developed a big brain from their limbic system and turned into humans. There's no ready answer. Evolution is an accident. A cell develops in an unusual fashion. Something happens to the DNA. We like to think that everything is fixed and ordered. But it isn't. Things are changing all around us, not so quickly that we recognize the change, but it's occurring, people growing taller, dogs whose breeds are now defective, dying out. We recognize extremes, of course. We call them monsters. But the really startling changes are occurring in those simple life forms that we hardly ever notice. Cells. Their time scale is much different from our own, much faster. Evolution has sped up for them, the chance for random variants. But evolution doesn't even have to be in stages. Quantum leaps can happen in an instant. Every time a person gets an X ray, tiny bullets zinging past those chromosomes. You want a model? Let's try this one. Let's assume we've got a dog. The dog has rabies, but the symptoms haven't shown up yet. The dog is hurt, though. Let's say that it's got a broken leg or some internal swelling so the owner takes it in for X rays, and the dog is treated and gets better. But the damage has been done. The rabies virus has by chance been struck by just one X ray. Hell, it only takes one mutant cell that lodges in the limbic brain and starts to reproduce. Now the owner goes on holiday. He takes the dog up into the moun-

  tains. The dog goes crazy, and it runs away. Contagion starts."

  "What you said about these dogs up in the hills. Psychopathic animal behavior," Slaughter told him.

  "Sure. Just two roads from the valley," Owens said. "The mountains are around us, so the virus has been localized. But why did no one ever recognize it until now?"

  "Because, so far as I remember, no one ever tested for it," the medical examiner said. "Ranchers maybe shot a few dogs and then buried them, but did you ever have a look at one?"

  Owens shook his head.

  "Well, there you have it."

  "But you told me Friday night that people have been bitten by them," Slaughter said. "They would have come in for the rabies treatment but, in spite of that, have developed symptoms."

  "And they did come in for treatment, and there wasn't any problem. So the dog that bit them didn't have the virus, or the virus didn't mutate until later. That's no argument against the model."

  "But the virus is so virulent that everything would have it by now," Slaughter insisted.

  "I don't think so. The attacks we've seen were plainly murderous. I doubt too many animals or people would survive them. Plus, the victims must be weakened by the virus. When the winter comes, it likely kills them. That's a natural control. We haven't studied any long term consequences of the virus. Maybe there's a calming process. I don't know at this point."

  "So why now would the virus show up suddenly in town?"

  "You know why as well as I do. All it takes is just one dog to wander in. But I think there's another reason. Don't forget the winter was a hard one. It drives victims down from where their normal hunting routes are in the mountains. That's one version of a model anyhow. I might be wrong. At least, it's something. What we do know, in addition to our tests, is that the victims are nocturnal."

  The medical examiner pointed toward the case that contained the jars of supposedly dead mice that Owens had brought from the veterinary clinic. Owens had discovered that the mice were peaceful if concealed in darkness, that their rage was manifested only when their eyes were aggravated by light.

  "That's another symptom this virus has in common with the rabies virus," the medical examiner continued. "Intense sensitivity to light. That was why the dead boy snarled the way he did. The moon was shining through the upper windows of the mansion. And that helps explain why so much trouble has occurred at night. The victims hide and sleep in daylight. Then they come out after dark, but now the moon is almost full, and they're reacting to it."

  "One thing more. We know that they're not dangerous to one another," Owens said. "When I put some of them together in the same container, they ignored each other, staring fiercely at the light and lunging at the glass around them."

  Slaughter thought about the figures he had seen up in the bushes by his barn tonight. "You mean they hunt in packs?"

  "Not necessarily, although it's possible."

  "But what would make them do that?"

  "Look, this virus gives control back to the limbic brain and makes it act the way it once did several hundred thousand years ago. To hunt in packs is natural. It's even a survival trait. Individual behavior, at least in humans, is by contrast very recent."

  Chapter Eight.

  Wheeler braced himself up in the tree and waited for the sunrise. He'd been up there all night, and his back and legs were sore and twisted from the way he was positioned among the branches. He was numb from lack of sleep, his eyelids heavy, plus his hands were cramped around the rifle he was holding, but for all that, he was satisfied. His effort had been worth the pain. He smiled toward the murky rangeland and the object lying by the sagebrush. Yes, he'd gotten what he had come for, which was something very different for him, getting what he wanted. Things had not gone well for him in quite a while. Since 1970 and that October afternoon when he had shot that hippie. On occasion when he managed to be honest with himself, he recognized that he had been in trouble long before that, with his wife and in particular his son, but if he'd helped to make that trouble, it was nothing that they couldn't have worked out among themselves. What had made the difference were those god-damned hippies who had come to town. They were the cause of this, their loud mouths and their garbage. He remembered how he had gone to town and first had seen them, angered by their sloppiness, their easy answers to the country's problems. Sure, drop out and act like children, more than that, like animals. Oh, that was some solution, all right. They were just afraid to go to Vietnam is all, too god-damned yellow to protect their country. He had been there when the town had forced them from the valley. He had helped to push them out. He'd kicked and thrown rocks as had others. He had shut their filthy mouths for them and hoped they'd learned their lesson. But his son had gone up to that lousy commune then, and he himself had been made to look like a fool. No son of his was going to end up like those freaks, not so that the town could make jokes about him.

  Plus, those hippies might be dangerous. The drugs they took, they might do anything. Wheeler had known he had to get his son back. So he'd gone up to the commune, and of course, they tried to fight him, to hide what they were up to. There'd been no choice. He'd had to shoot the hippie who had come at him. It was self-defense. The town would understand that, Wheeler had figured. But it hadn't understood, and his son had turned against him as well, and he himself had gone to prison for two years. Oh, that was fine, the way his friends had turned against him. He couldn't count on anyone. He should have learned that lesson years before, but he had learned it then all right. His son had run off after that, and then while he himself had been in prison, he had gone through all that trouble with the guard. The guy just wouldn't let him alone. There wasn't any choice except to fight. By Jesus, he wouldn't be pushed around, so instead of getting time off for good behavior, he'd been forced to serve the full extent of his sentence.

  What did he expect? If they were out to get him, he was powerless, and then his wife had turned against him. She'd been keeping up the ranch while he was gone. She hadn't come to see him, but he'd figured that she'd been so busy that she couldn't get away. The day he came home he found out the truth, however. She told him that she'd stayed to manage things because she didn't want to leave the place to strangers, but she

  wasn't going to live with him, and now that he was back, she wasn't needed, she was leaving. He had fixed her for that. She had limped out to the taxi when it came for her. He didn't help her with the bags. He let the driver do that. He just stood there on the porch and cracked his knuckles, telling her that he would never take her back, that if she tried to come back, he would beat her even worse, and that had been the last he saw of her. Well, that was fine as far as he was concerned. She'd never been good for him, always nagging at him about how much he was drinking, about the work he didn't want to do. Christ, he was better off without her and without that mouthy, trouble-making son. He didn't need them. He could get along without them.

  But Wheeler had trouble, all the same. His former friends avoided him, although he expected that. They really hadn't been his friends. All they'd wanted was a sucker to buy them drinks. Sure, they'd been lying to him all the way. But he'd found new friends, trail hands and a couple ranchers in the valley who were not so god-damned proper that they wouldn't take a little time out to relax. A man got stale if all he did was work. That wasn't any kind of life. But then Wheeler's cattle got sick one year. The next year, there were many stillbirths. After that, the price of beef went down. There wasn't any way to get ahead once everybody turned on you. This year, the bank was making noises about mortgage payments that he hadn't met; the barn was close to falling down; the winter had been so bad that he'd lost more stock than he had counted on; and now the predators were moving in.