Uncaged Read Free

done to the animals in the name of science. Or just in the name of better cosmetics. Danny, the stopwatch monitor, was also operating a high-res Sony video camera, catching the chaos as it spread through the lab.
    And people shouted over the noise of the destruction:
    “Gimme a crowbar, I need a crowbar.…”
    “Cutters, cutters, where the hell are the cutters?”
    “Sledge, where’s the sledge?”
    One girl smashed a plastic-front cage, and a piece of the plastic, sharp as glass, cut her hand, not badly, but the sight of the blood running down her arm pushed the others even harder.

    The raiders went through the first containment unit like a hurricane. The experimental animals—all rodents in this first room—were held in plastic cages stacked one atop another in three lines of steel racks. Some raiders smashed the plastic doors with their baseball bats while others scooped the panicked animals out of their cages. In thirty seconds, hundreds and then thousands of rats and mice were scurrying between the raiders’ feet and sometimes up their legs.
    Christopher, the sledge carrier, had been smashing every piece of expensive-looking lab gear that he could find, then began battering open the screened windows, knocking out the wire grids between the glass and the outside. Some of the raiders began scooping up binfuls of mice and shoveling them out the windows.
    The alarm sirens screamed on.
    Then they entered the primate unit, and the pandemonium momentarily stopped as they reacted in stunned horror to what they found: A hundred or more pink-faced, humanlike rhesus monkeys were isolated in separate Plexiglas cages. The tops of their skulls had been cut away and replaced with glass or plastic caps, and computer modules were strapped to the animals’ backs. A dozen of the monkeys lay in quivering heaps, as though near death, or simply paralyzed with fear or pain; the others screamed and scampered to the backs of their cages. A baby monkey with a missing skullcap clung to its mother, who’d been similarly altered.
    The raiders used bolt cutters to slice the locks off the cage doors, and then, protected by thick leather work gloves, they began pulling the mutilated animals from their cages. One girl—Laura—startedscreaming, and never did stop, as she reached inside again and again, the monkeys’ eyes blank or wild, some shaking uncontrollably and without pause, defecating and urinating in fear and pain and what might have been anger.
    Christopher was smashing out the exterior windows, and one of the experimental monkeys, which had been scampering down the hallway between the legs of the raiders, jumped onto the window ledge and then dropped out of sight. Another one saw it go, and followed.
    The noise was terrific—the sirens, the screaming girls, the screaming animals, and the smashing of the cages, which sounded like an army of men beating on garbage cans with steel pipes. People continued to call for help: “Gimme a bat, we need a bat over here. Watch that monkey, he’s a biter.…”
    Danny, the timekeeper, looked at his stopwatch and yelled, “Two minutes,” and the fury continued: smash, smash, smash, scream, smash, scream …
    And the sirens wailed like banshees.
    Rachel, wild brown hair curling out from under her ski mask, got Christopher to break a door marked DR. LAWRENCE JANES .
    Inside, she found a secretary’s desk near the door and an enclosed space at the back. She went straight to a double-wide fourdrawer file cabinet. The cabinet was locked, but she pulled a short crowbar out of her belt, wedged it into the lip of the drawer, and then stood back while Christopher gave the bar a whack.
    The door popped loose, revealing a line of hanging folders. She pulled three of them out, carried them to the desk, and shook them. An envelope containing a thumb drive popped out of each.
    They’d been told by their insider that the thumb drives contained backup files and reports on the research being done at the