The Chimera Sequence Read Online Free PDF

messy creatures, and he did not take care of his toilet properly.”
    That’s a generous way of putting it. Rugendo probably weighed in at somewhere near four-hundred pounds, and the amount of jungle vegetation required to provide the calories for his active lifestyle contained an awful lot of fiber. Trackers often used the nest droppings to determine how recently a gorilla was in the area, and they were also studied by scientists doing population and disease surveys.
    Cole stood up and pulled the radio off his belt. “McBride to Big Bird, do you copy?”
    “Is that what you’re calling my pretty lady now?” Marna’s voice came through clearly this time. “Yes, I can hear you fine. Where are you guys?”
    “Just about half a kilometer from you,” Cole answered. He heard an edge in Marna’s voice that wasn’t normally there. “We’ve found two dead gorillas. Not sure what did it yet, but we’re about to get our hands on them and find out.”
    “Seriously? Shit.” She paused. “Hey, our man Proper here is pretty sure we’ve got some fighters headed this way. Can you hear them much where you are?”
    So that explains it. Cole knew Marna wasn’t one to get worried unless the threat was real, and if Proper Kambale thought the threat was real, then it most definitely was. “Alright, well sit tight and we’ll get back there as soon as we can. Keep us posted if anything changes. Out here.”
    “So much for a thorough necropsy.”
    Cole was disappointed. Even though he hated that these two beautiful creatures were dead, he still wanted to take advantage of the situation by doing some comprehensive sampling for the emerging infectious disease study. Time was running short for his data collection, and he wasn’t about to miss out on a rare opportunity like this one.
    “What do you guys think we have time for?”
    Musamba had already slid an N95 respirator mask over his face and was pulling on a latex glove.
    “No sense taking unnecessary risks just because we’re in a hurry.” He snapped the second one tight and knelt down over the silverback’s putrid body.
    “Two gorillas,” Cole said, “and both had time to find a place to die.”
    “Probably not trauma, then.” Musamba was moving his gloved hands through the silverback’s long coarse hair. “Though that would have been the easier explanation. Why must these tragedies always happen on my watch?”
    Cole followed his example with the mask and gloves, and they examined the carcass together while Innocence and Bonny stood guard a few yards away. “Looks like he’s a couple of days fresher than the female.”
    “Yes, most of his soft tissues are still intact. No evidence of obvious bleeding here, either.”
    “That’s good,” Cole said. “I’ve got to admit, I was getting a little worried that we had walked right into an Ebola outbreak.” Ebola virus was one of the top infectious killers of wild gorillas in central Africa, but it often caused vomiting, diarrhea, and sometimes even visible hemorrhage from bodily openings. “That would have been more obvious by now, though, I assume?”
    “Probably, yes,” Musamba said. “If Rugendo had died from Ebola he would not have this normal pile of stool produced in the days before death.”
    Cole watched him running gloved fingers over the gorilla’s left foot, then caught his breath as he saw what had grabbed the other vet’s attention. “That’s not something you see every day.”
    The thick black skin was covered in raised bumps, mostly round and somewhat flattened on top, which had not been obvious from a distance but were easy to see now. Several of them had burst open in what looked like scabby ulcers, but others still had a head of yellow-white pus visible just under the dimpled surface.
    “Look at this, his hand and face have the same lesions,” Musamba said, moving his own hands up the silverback’s immense body. “No, it wasn’t Ebola or even our rebel friends that killed Rugendo.