Beyond the Blood Moon by Vic Robbie

Author:Vic Robbie [Robbie, Vic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781527254558
Publisher: Principium Press
Published: 2019-12-25T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

Without a routine, Skarab couldn’t function. There would be no purpose to his life, and his planned world would disintegrate.

He rose at seven-thirty, not a minute before or a minute later, shaved and showered, dressed and ate a light breakfast of cereal and black coffee. At eight-thirty, he prepared breakfast for Bette. Black tea, a slice of toasted wholemeal bread with the crusts cut off and lightly buttered, and a cup of hot water with a slice of lemon. And he collected her newspaper from the front garden, which he placed on the tray with her breakfast.

He entered her bedroom, and she was feigning sleep as usual. As he opened her curtains, she asked in a sleep-filled voice, although she’d been awake for hours, ‘Is it morning already? Why do you wake me so early?’

He sighed. ‘Because I must take your blood pressure and pulse and a sample before I leave for work.’

‘Work, work, work,’ she said, rolling her eyes and clearing phlegm from her throat. ‘It’s time you put me first.’

I’m doing this for you.

He gritted his teeth. ‘Without access to certain materials, I wouldn’t be able to treat you.’

She huffed and reached over and lifted the cup to her lips. She knew that too, but his obsession with routine irked her, and she always tried to catch him off guard just to see his surprised reaction.

Fifteen minutes later—she could set her watch by him—he returned and took away her dishes. Then he went through the usual checks finishing with a blood test and, as ever, struggled to find a vein thick enough for the needle. Completed, he held the vial up to the light, checking its constituency, and slipped it into his pocket.

Bette would eventually get out of bed, dress and spend an inordinate amount of time applying several layers of make-up, pausing every so often to preen herself. The rest of the morning she read or watched television and several times reapplied her make-up as if expecting non-existent friends.

At nine-fifteen, he greeted the guard at the gate of Evolution Industries, so called to disguise the fact it was the Directorate of Vigilance, a department of the State. ‘Good morning, another day of promise.’

He picked up another black coffee from the canteen and after cursory salutations with colleagues retreated to his laboratory which he always locked behind him. After closing the blinds, he entered a windowless room where he kept the animals.

The development of chips required constant improvements to increase their capabilities. His current research was implanting chips in rats that transformed the structure of their brains, making them more aggressive to their own species. Not random, but targeted aggression where the chips stimulated them to attack on order. In light of recent events in the War in Asia, it was a development that interested the Army.

The rodents also had their routine, the lights automatically turning on making them shriek in anticipation of being fed. To one side of the room were four cages of mice. One

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