"Pat Murphy - Rachel In Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

does she return.
 Just before dawn the next morning, she wakens to the sound of a truck jouncing down the dirt road. She
peers out the window to see a pale green pickup. Sloppily stenciled in white on the door are the words:
PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER. Rachel hesitates as the truck pulls up in front of the house. By the
time she has decided to flee, two men are getting out of the truck. One of them carries a rifle.

She runs out the back door and heads for the hills, but she is only halfway to hiding when she heard a
sound like a sharp intake of breath and feels a painful jolt in her shoulder. Suddenly, her legs give way
and she is tumbling backward down the sandy slope, dust coating her redbrown fur, her howl becoming
a whimper, then fading to nothing at all. She falls into the blackness of sleep.

The sun is up. Rachel lies in a cage in the back of the pickup truck. She is partially conscious and she
feels a tingling in her hands and feet. Nausea grips her stomach and bowels. Her body aches.

Rachel can blink, but otherwise she can't move. From where she lies, she can see only the wire mesh of
the cage and the side of the truck. When she tries to turn her head, the burning in her skin intensifies. She
lies still, wanting to cry out, but unable to make a sound. She can only blink slowly, trying to close out the
pain. But the burning and nausea stay.

The truck jounces down a dirt road, then stops. It rocks as the men get out. The doors slam. Rachel
hears the tailgate open.

A woman's voice: "Is that the animal the County Sheriff wanted us to pick up?" A woman peers into the
cage. She wears a white lab coat and her brown hair is tied back in a single braid. Around her eyes,
Rachel can see small wrinkles, etched by years of living in the desert. The woman doesn't look evil.
Rachel hopes that the woman will save her from the men in the truck.

"Yeah. It should be knocked out for at least another half-hour. Where do you want it?"

"Bring it into the lab where we had the rhesus monkeys. I'll keep it there until I have an empty cage in the
breeding area."

Rachel's cage scrapes across the bed of the pickup. She feels each bump and jar as a new pain. The man
swings the cage onto a cart and the woman pushes the cart down a concrete corridor. Rachel watches
the walls pass just a few inches from her nose.

The lab contains rows of cages in which small animals sleepily move. In the sudden stark light of the
overhead fluorescent bulbs, the eyes of white rats gleam red.

With the help of one of the men from the truck, the woman manhandles Rachel onto a lab table. The
metal surface is cold and hard, painful against Rachel's skin. Rachel's body is not under her control; her
limbs will not respond. She is still frozen by the tranquilizer, able to watch, but that is all. She cannot
protest or plead for mercy.

Rachel watches with growing terror as the woman pulls on rubber gloves and fills a hypodermic needle
with a clear solution. "Mark down that I'm giving her the standard test for tuberculosis; this eyelid should
be checked before she's moved in with the others. I'll add thiabendazole to her feed for the next few days
to clean out any intestinal worms. And I suppose we might as well deflea her as well," the woman says.
The man grunts in response.