The Ethical Assassin

Melford found the doors out of the storeroom and we came out into a long corridor of plain cinder-block walls, adorned only with an inexplicable teal racing stripe, and dingy beige linoleum floors. The main lights were off, but enough fluorescent bulbs were illuminated that Melford could turn off his flashlight. The place looked like a hospital after hours.

We made a right, and then another right, and then we went up a set of stairs to a floor that looked remarkably like the one from which we’d come. We followed Melford down a corridor to a door marked “Lab Six,” which was locked, so the pick gun came out again. Desiree stood nervous watch while I tried to peer inside through the dark glass square and Melford worked the lock. In less than a minute we were inside.

When the door came open, I knew I had crossed something more metaphorical, but also more tangible, than a door’s threshold. Yes, I’d seen the hog farm, seen how terrible it was, the misery and- if such a term can be applied to hogs- the degradation, but this was different. The hog farm was, after all, owned by a crooked cop, and it was a place whose purpose was the raising of hogs so they could die. It was a way station between nothingness and death, and it wasn’t meant to be anything more. The pigs were pre-bacon, pre-pork, pre-ham, their slaughter was ordained and inevitable. It was a place of horror and misery, perhaps u

This was something else. Three of the walls were lined with small cages, each of which contained some kind of brownish gray monkey about the size of a child’s doll, thin, with expressive faces. The room stank, not like the hog lot- which was the smell of fear and feces- but of living putrefaction. It smelled of fresh shit and of vomit and piss and rot. At first I thought the monkeys were asleep, but when Melford turned on the light, I saw that their eyes were opened. They lay on their sides, most of them panting, their eyes wide, following our movements with unmistakable terror. Many of them were letting out whimpering noises. One bit its lip and gripped the wires of its cage in its fingers with a repeating, desperate pulse.

Across the room, one of the animals rose, dragged itself upright, and hissed at us- a weak but defiant hiss. It bared its teeth. Then its legs appeared to buckle under its weight, and the monkey fell back into a brown pile that might have been its own feces or maybe monkey chow.

Melford reached into his bag and found a camera, which he handed to Desiree. “Start taking pictures,” he told her. He, meanwhile, began to search the lab and quickly found a clipboard, which he held up to us. “Okay, here it is. You know what these monkeys are being tested for? Cure for cancer? Brain regeneration for stroke victims? Heart surgery to help babies with birth defects? Guess again. They’re part of an LD50- that’s ‘lethal dose fifty percent.’ These are routine studies done on standard household products to find out what quantity causes death in fifty percent of the test subjects. They do it with drain cleaner, dish soap, motor oil, you name it. You know what’s being tested here? Photocopier paper. How much paper these monkeys can be force-fed before fifty percent of them die.”

Desiree stopped taking pictures. Her gaze fell on one monkey, lying on its side, one arm straight back, the other resting limply on its face. Its chest heaved up and down in pained respiration. “But why? What does that tell them?”

“Exactly what you think- how much copier paper will kill fifty percent of the test subjects,” Melford said. “Look, you have to understand that these experiments aren’t goal directed anymore. Maybe there was a time when LD50 tests were designed to discover something useful. It didn’t make it right, but it made it practical, at least. Now it’s just something that’s done. It’s a standard test because insurance companies want data to help them determine liability and flesh out their actuarial tables. They do it because not doing it might help some lawyer down the road argue that the company didn’t perform all necessary safety tests. They do it because it is what they do. Millions upon millions of animals are tortured and killed each year just because.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

I’d said the same thing that afternoon. Looking at the hogs, listening to Melford explain how they were housed, why they were housed that way, and what it did to them and the people who ate them, I hadn’t believed it. Looking right at it, I hadn’t believed it.

“Believe it,” Melford said. “Lemuel, over here. We’re in luck. We’ve found some videotapes.”

So while Desiree finished snapping pictures, he and I shoved videotapes into his bag. We then shut out the light and left the lab. Melford looked at his watch. “We shouldn’t push our luck, and we don’t want Lemuel here to turn into a pumpkin if he doesn’t get to his pickup, but why don’t we do one more lab. I kind of want to see Lab Two for myself. I’ve heard things.”

We followed him around a corner, where he opened another door. Here we were met by the sounds of subdued whimpering. The smells weren’t much different from those of the monkey lab, but when he turned on the light we were met by a room stacked with dog cages, two or three on top of one another. Thin wooden boards separated them, but they did a poor job, and the feces from the animals above dripped onto the animals below.

A few let out tentative barks, but mostly they watched us. They rested, heads on paws, eyes wide and brown, watching. Off in the distance I heard one let out a whimper.

Melford handed Desiree the camera, and she began to snap photos again. He looked around until he found the clipboard he wanted. “Oh, no,” he breathed. “They’re scheduled for an LD50 test for pesticide to start in two days. This is what sucks about this kind of operation. There’s nothing wrong with these dogs. Those monkeys were the living dead, but these guys are savable. Unfortunately, we can’t do anything. If we try to get them out of here, we’ll get caught, they’ll get brought back. The best we can do is document this and get the evidence into the right hands and wait for a better day.”

“Where do they get these dogs?” Desiree asked.

“A lot of shelters have deals with places like this. They send over unclaimed strays. But the truth is, labs have backdoor deals with animal abductors. People will steal pets and sell them to a place like this for fifty bucks a pop. You can make decent cash if you don’t have scruples.”

Desiree put down the camera. “Melford, we can’t leave them here. They would at least have a chance if we could let them out in the woods.”

“We can’t do it,” he said. “How are we going to herd twenty or thirty dogs out of here without alerting the guards?”

“I’m not leaving them,” she said.

“You are,” he told her. “If we all go to jail, we won’t do any good. You want to walk this path, you have to harden yourself. You can’t blow up every Burger King you drive past. You can’t liberate all tortured animals from all the factory farms. You want to, but you can’t, and it drives you crazy sometimes because everything you do is just a drop in the bucket. This isn’t a fight for the moment or a year or even a decade. This is a battle that will be resolved over generations. And right now we have to make choices. We do what we can and we stay free and keep going and chip away at the edifice. Our getting arrested and those dogs being sent back to their cages isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

“Doesn’t choosing who lives and who dies make us as morally suspect as the people who put these animals here?”

“No,” Melford said. “They put the animals here, not us. And we’re doing the best we can- which right now is to bear witness.”

“We’re taking one,” I said. “We can take one, can’t we?”