"Please! You can't do this! Our work is irreplaceable! We can't stop researching this now!"
The scientist's pleas fell on deaf ears. He and his lab partner were forced to sit and watch as two hired goons destroyed their greatest accomplishment, throwing beakers and tubes roughly and randomly into crates, the sickening sounds of glass breaking inside. The pair of researchers had tried to stop them, of course. But all they got for their trouble was to be tied to some chairs, hands cuffed behind their backs, and told to stop interfering.
"Your work?", one of them asked, raising an increasingly hairy eyebrow. "Your work's been making a real mess of things. The best thing you've come up with is turning people into dogs, and you're wondering why the higher-ups finally pulled the plug on you? Pfff. Talk about government waste."
"Wait wait wait, I just got it," said the other security guy, nudging his coworker on the shoulder. He pointed a finger, the tip of which was starting to grow a sharp claw, at the scientist's thick coat of brown fur. "He works in a lab, and he's turning into a chocolate lab! Hah!" He laughed mockingly as he turned back to his work, scooping up more equipment he didn't understand and tossing it into unmarked boxes.
The scientist's assistant, who was currently about half-human and half-Shiba Inu, barked back furiously. "Oh, you think this shit is funny? Well, guess what, assholes? You're turning into dogs, too! It started in on you the moment you got airdropped here yesterday! And in case you haven't noticed, the two of us here are the only ones in the whole quarantine zone who're still at least partly human! Don't you think that maybe we might know what we're doing here? That maybe you should let us keep working if you want us to stop your infection from spreading?"
"Hmmm," said the first of the two officers, stroking his chin as if he was really thinking about taking them up on the offer. But the look in his eyes made it clear that he was being sarcastic. "Nope. What I think is that you two are a coupl'a freaks that are probably enjoying this virus of yours a little too much. Besides, when we got our marching orders last week, they spelled it out for us. As soon as we get back to our home base, they're gonna flush the virus right out of our system, and all this fur is gonna be nothin' more than a bad dream."
"And you believed that?!", the assistant shouted. "You idiots! This laboratory is - or was - on the absolute cutting edge of retroviral implantation! We're the only ones in the country - probably the entire world, unless China's got something we don't know about - who know how to make this stuff, or how to counteract it. Trust me, if you follow your little orders perfectly and you go back home covered in fur, they're not gonna cure you. They don't have the slightest idea how. They're gonna have guys in hazmat suits grab you, drag you out back, and shoot you like dogs. 'Cause that's what you'll be."
"If you guys know how to cure this stuff," the other officer said pointedly, "then why are you walkin' around lookin' like you escaped from one'a those fuzzy conventions, or whatever they're called? Either you're lying to us, or you really are freaks who get your kicks this way. But I'll cut the two of youse a deal. If you can make this..." He pointed at a patch of tawny fur on his forearm, standing out sharply against the dark curly hairs that covered the rest of his arm. "... and this..." He tapped the triangular point of one of his ears, which had moved halfway up his head already. "... go away in the next 24 hours, I'll let you keep all your science crap, and I'll face whatever consequences I get for not doin' my job properly when I get there." He put his hand out to make the pact. "Shake?", he said, in the same tone you would use teaching tricks to a dog.
Both scientists, of course, had their paw-like hands tied to the backs of their chairs. "It... doesn't work that way," the lead researcher said hesitantly. "That's why we look like this. Once the retrovirus is in your system, it keeps reproducing and spreading to all your cells, and it won't leave until it's finished rewriting all your DNA. We managed to slow it down to buy ourselves time to keep working, which is why we're not on all fours yet, but we can't stop it. But fixing it is easy! As soon as the viral agent leaves your body, we can just put another retrovirus in there with your human DNA, and it'll put you back to normal."
"So we have to turn all the way into dogs before we can even start to get the cure?", the officer growled gruffly. "Like those people in quarantine there? Not my idea of a good time. Tell me, if we follow your scheme - how long will it take before we stop attracting fleas?"
The anthropomorphic Labrador retriever twitched nervously as the man stared him down. He would've been sweating bullets right now if he wasn't covered in fur. Instead, his tongue involuntarily escaped from the side of his muzzle and started lolling. "W-we don't know for sure, because we haven't done it yet. But we think it'll take longer to go from full dog to full human, than it does from human to dog." He felt that stare intensifying. "I-it's the conservation of mass, you see. Depending on what breed got into you, you'll be losing a lot of weight during the first transformation, and it takes time to build all that mass and that energy back up. We think it'll be done in a couple... months?"
He expected the man to start shouting in his face any second now, but instead, the guy just turned away and went back to his destructive task. "I'll take my chances with the folks back at base," the other guard muttered, in a voice so low the scientist probably wouldn't have heard him without his new ultra-sensitive hearing.
"Steve, come here," the other officer said, gesturing at a large metal rack that held hundreds of retroviral samples from all kinds of different species in carefully arranged vials. "This one looks like a two-man job." They both started to lift - with their backs rather than their knees - and soon were struggling to hold the surprisingly heavy rack. The glass containers wobbled back and forth in their holsters.
"No!", shouted both scientists at about the same time. "Stop!"
But it was too late. The whole collection slipped out of the men's arms and went crashing to the ground, jars of genetically-modified liquid smashing against the cold concrete floor and making a shimmering, multi-colored toxic puddle - which quickly started to trickle toward the grate in the middle of the room. Years of work, and millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, down the drain. And worse than that - down the storm drain! If even a few drops of that potent mixture got into the water supply, the whole tri-state area would be looking like a zoo within weeks.
"Agghhh!", the first officer shouted, reaching up to touch his face. "Some of that shit just got in my eye!" He rubbed at it hard, the lime green liquid squelching as a few stray droplets trickled down his cheek. A few seconds later, he pulled his hand away to reveal the yellow iris and rectangular pupil of a goat. And the fingers he had used to rub that eye, in the meantime, were hardening into the beginnings of a thick gray hoof. "Did I get all of it?", he asked his co-worker, whose jaw was hanging open at the sight.
The junior scientist inched his chair forward one scoot at a time. The sharp scraping of metal against the floor tortured his sensitive ears, but he had to get to the drain in time. He reached out with a foot to try to block the liquid from seeping into the hole. Then he felt the wet substance soaking through his shoe and sock, burning as it reached the fur-covered skin inside. Injecting a couple drops of this stuff into the bloodstream was enough to spread the infection in a matter of days. But making direct contact with a whole puddle of the liquid... they'd never even tried that before. Of course the retrovirus would work much faster on the surface it was exposed to.
He felt the dampened shoe suddenly becoming painfully tight. Then he watched in horror as the faux-leather ripped open to reveal the bright yellow talons of a bird. And just behind the ruins of his shoe, he could see the liquid dripping into the drain. He started to cry, the tears matting his fur. All those people... who wouldn't even know what hit them until it was too late. And nobody left who could prepare a cure for them.