Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense Fynn Perry (if you liked this book TXT) 📖

“Jesus! What happened?” asked Lazlo as he looked again at the second cage of mice. These were also lying on their backs or side, but occasionally the eyes moved and the whiskers twitched on what were otherwise pristine, white fur-covered bodies.

“You gave me two pills to give to the mice, right?”

“Right.”

“So, I took a sample from one pill, suspended it in water and put in the dropper for one cage. Did the same for the other pill and the other cage. Two identical pills, but two very different outcomes!”

“No shit! Show me the video!” Lazlo demanded.

Genna placed his laptop next to the cage and ran the film. It started innocuously enough with the six mice in each cage randomly drinking from the dosing bottle. He fast-forwarded through the next ten minutes. The mice had started to go to each dropper more frequently, causing scuffles in each cage as they became very active. Genna fast-forwarded the recording by about thirty minutes. At this point, all the mice in one cage had become less active and some were resting. In the other cage, it was a different story. The energy level of all the mice had dramatically increased. They started running around in a frenzy, only stopping to drink more from the dropper. Tussles at the dropper escalated into bouts of fighting. At this point in the film, a gloved hand appeared, opened a door at the top of the cage and reached inside and took one of the mice away. The chosen mouse could be seen viciously biting and clawing at the glove.

Genna paused the film. “It was clear, the way things were going, that I had to monitor the effects of the pill on a single mouse in isolation,” he explained. “That little fella almost bit through to the bone.” He showed Lazlo his bandaged finger.

He resumed playback of the film. The fighting in the cage reached a flash point, and then the carnage commenced. Within a matter of seconds, the cage quickly became a bloodied scene of dismembered rodent parts. In the end, only one mouse remained. With its leg and tail missing, and its body badly bitten, it raced up the side of the cage with unnatural speed and slowly forced its head through the bars toward the other cage. The body of the mouse went limp almost immediately.

“It must have been trying to get to the mice in the other cage....to kill them!” Lazlo exclaimed, horrified. “And it crushed its own skull in the process,” he added as he inspected the mouse.

“If they hadn’t killed each other through fighting, they would have died anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“The female mouse I isolated died about ten minutes after the guy with his head stuck.”

“From what?”

“From what I could tell, the brain simply crashed. All the other organs seemed unaffected.”

“Christ! What is in that stuff they’re drinking?”

“So, this is where it gets complicated. Pay attention.”

“OK,” Lazlo sighed, Genna was always very teacher-like in any kind of reporting even when it was unofficial, but that was one of the things that made him such a good forensic scientist.

“I’m going to talk first about the composition of the pill that I gave to the mice who are still alive but, as you can see, clearly intoxicated,” Genna continued. “The analysis of the pill’s content revealed it to be a mixture of the strongest, purest heroin and cocaine I have ever come across. It’s unusual in that it seems to have some kind of yeast base.”

“So, these pills enable the user to take heroin and cocaine together—what is known on the streets as speedballing, right?”

“Yes, but these are in a different league to the amateur stuff out there. Each pill contains a precisely calculated dose of cocaine, as the stimulant, and heroin, as the depressant. As you saw in the first cage, the stimulant wears off quicker than the depressant leaving the mice in a relaxed state. Get the mix wrong, and the user would get the heart attack risk of a cocaine overdose or respiratory failure from a heroin overdose.”

“So, what caused the mouse Armageddon in the other cage?”

“That pill looked the same as the other one. It also had a pure form of heroin but was much weaker in strength. No cocaine. Instead it contained two synthetic drugs. One closely related to the street drug PCP, known as angel dust, and the other closely related to a pharmaceutical drug named Tiroflen. I’m guessing these came from China, where there are hundreds of places making counterfeit and designer drugs.”

“So, the PCP-type ingredient caused the savage behavior?”

“Yes, brought about by classic PCP symptoms such as dissociation, paranoia, and an inability to feel pain.”

Lazlo thought back to the fight he had witnessed in the alleyway when he had first discovered the pills, and the force of the beating the victim had received from someone much smaller than him.

“And the other drug, the one related to Tiroflen?”

“Tiroflen is a pharmaceutical drug that was supposed to treat heroin addiction but in fact has been found to give similar feelings of euphoria and also becomes addictive.” He shrugged, acknowledging the irony before continuing. “But of greater concern is that an overdose of Tiroflen causes the brain to mimic brain-death. And this version of the drug is strong enough to cause the same symptoms.

“But didn’t these mice die as a result of the violent behavior toward each other caused by them taking the PCP-like drug?” Lazlo asked.

“Yes, but remember the mouse I took out of the cage?”

Lazlo nodded.

“After about thirty minutes of aggressive behavior, she keeled over with brain-death symptoms and without the brain working as it should, she stopped breathing.”

“Would the same have happened to the other mice if they hadn’t killed each other?”

“I’m convinced it would.”

“So, there’s an original and a counterfeit version of the drug on the streets that look identical. Be unlucky and take the rogue one, and