Seize the Night

however, that at least in part, it might be meant to express their guilt at being involved in work that had brought humanity to these straits. If they felt remorse, then their deaths had a degree of dignity, and disturbing them seemed disrespectful.
    Before we had left the living room, I had once more covered the faces of Sparkman, Toregard, and Ellway.
    Bobby seemed to understand the reason for my hesitancy, and he lifted the veil on the man at the desk, while I used the flashlight with the hope of making an identification. This was no one that either of us knew, a handsome man with a small, well-trimmed gray mustache.
    Bobby replaced the silk.
    The woman reclining in the Morris chair was also a stranger, but when I directed the light at her face, I didn't immediately switch it off.
    With a soft whistle, Bobby sucked air between his teeth, and I muttered, “God.” I had to struggle to keep my hand from shaking, to keep the light steady.
    Sensing bad news, Sasha and Roosevelt came in from the hall, and though neither of them spoke a word, their faces revealed all that needed to be said about their shock and revulsion.
    The dead woman's eyes were open. The left was a normal brown eye.
    The right was green, and not remotely normal. There was almost no white in it. The iris was huge and golden, the lens a gold-green. The black pupil was not round but ellipticallike the pupil in the eye of a snake.
    The socket encircling that terrifying eye was badly misshapen.
    Indeed, there were subtle but fearsome deformities in the entire bone structure along the right side of her once lovely face, brow, temple, cheek, jaw.
    Her mouth hung open in a silent cry. Her lips were peeled back in a rictus, revealing her teeth, which for the most part appeared normal.
    A few on the right side, however, were sharply pointed, and one eyetooth seemed to have been in the process of reshaping itself into a fang.
    I moved the beam of the flashlight down her body, to her hands, which were in her lap. I expected to see more mutation, but both her hands were normal. They were folded tightly together, and clasped in them was a rosary, black beads, silver chain, an exquisite little silver crucifix.
    Such desperation was apparent in the posture of her pale hands, such pathos, that I switched off the light, overcome by pity. To stare at this grim evidence of her final distress seemed invasive, indecent.
    Upon finding the first body in the living room, in spite of the black silk veils, I'd known that these people had not committed suicide solely out of guilt over their involvement in the research at Wyvern.
    Perhaps some felt guilty, perhaps all of them did, but they participated in this chemical hara-kiri primarily because they were becoming and because they were deeply fearful of what they were becoming.
    To date, as the rogue retrovirus has transferred other species' DNA into human cells, the effects have been limited. They manifest, if at all, only psychologically, except for telltale animal eye shine in the most seriously afflicted.
    Some of the big brains have been confident that physical change is impossible. They believe that as the cells of the body wear out and are routinely replaced, new cells will not contain the sequences of animal DNA that contaminated the previous generation not even if stem cells, which control growth throughout the human body, are infected.
    This disfigured woman in the Morris chair proved that they were woefully wrong. Hideous physical change clearly can accompany mental deterioration.
    Each infected individual receives a load of alien DNA different from the one that anybody else receives, which means that the effect is singular in every case. Some of the infected may not undergo any perceptible change, mentally or physically, because they receive DNA fragments from so many sources that there is no focused cumulative effect other than a general destabilization of the system, resulting in rapidly metastasizing cancers and deadly autoimmune disorders. Others may go mad, psychologically devolve into a subhuman condition, driven by murderous rages, unspeakable needs. Those who, in addition, suffer physical metamorphosis will be radically different from one another, a nightmare zoo My mouth seemed to be choked with dust. My throat felt tight and parched. Even my cardiac muscle seemed to have withered, for in my own ears, my heartbeat was juiceless, dry, and strange.
    The singing and comic antics of the characters in The