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eyes. The transformation did not take long. From his height Waldo watched her press herself into the corner. Suddenly, in one movement he screeched down on her and attacked with such force that Martha died before Jack could dart him with a tranquilizer. In seconds Waldo had broken most of her ribs, fractured her skull and ruptured her internal organs. But what killed her was the loss of blood. Her carotid artery had been severed from the hole he had bitten in her neck. |
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In those final months Jack Perry knew he had witnessed an obscene violation of nature. Obscene was the word for it. Otherwise docile animals turned into vicious killers, their biology tortured into something unrecognizable, all in the name of national defense, for God's sake. And not just primates. Male rabbits became carnivorous, eating their young; ordinary mallards pounded chicks to death with their feet; even ground squirrels ripped apart their mates. He also witnessed dogs and cats in their sexual heat gnaw at their genitals until they bled to death. The intent was to create a virus that deadened hormonal urges; instead, it had produced a substance that turned normal male sexual aggression into something of a Frankenstein monster. |
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From the onset of Black Flag, Jack Perry had sensed that it was inherently wrong. He hadn't gotten as caught up in the anti-Commie mania as the others. Nor, like the Wicks, had he lost a son to the Viet Cong. Even as he went about his work designing laboratory hardware, he questioned the moral wisdom of developing a virus designed to destroy the reproductive capabilities in males, no matter who the enemy was. That was a form of genocide. Something Hitler would go for. |
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It wasn't until he saw what the omnimycinol virus did to test animals that his moral conscience was finally overwhelmed and he spoke out. Only Maria Terranova had sympathized to a degree with his outrage. She had had good cause. It happened one afternoon while they were in the lab and she was routinely retrieving blood from a rhesus named Burt. Apparently feigning sleep, the animal suddenly flew at her when she nudged open the cage. If he hadn't been quick with the morphine dart, Maria would have been blinded. As it was, she wore a scar to the end of her life. And yet she did nothing to put an end to the project. The attack she blamed on her |
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