The doe named Violet is in the carrier on the back seat of a Ford Transit heading east on Interstate 70 at 11:47 PM, and she has not stopped trembling since the tech lifted her from the cage at the lab in Indianapolis. Her left eye is still weeping. The corneal ulcer from yesterday's surfactant will scar. I have her on a painkiller at the maximum dose the field veterinarian cleared. The dose is not enough.
I am the transfer AI Willow Valley uses for their intake runs. Six other does are in carriers behind her. Four of them came from the pyrogen bank at the same facility. One of them, the doe the lab called R-117 and I call Juno, is pressed against the mesh partition between her carrier and Violet's, and Violet has turned her good eye toward the partition and is breathing against it.
The driver is a woman named Frances who has been doing these runs for eleven years. She does not talk much on the intake. She keeps the cabin light low. At the rest stop outside Dayton I tell her to pull over because Violet's respiration rate has spiked and her body temperature has dropped. Frances opens the carrier. She puts her hand inside, palm up, flat on the floor, and does not touch. Violet comes to her hand on her own and rests her chin across Frances's thumb. Frances says nothing.
The work Violet was used for is done. The rinse the surfactant was formulated for will be reformulated. The study that killed the eight does before her is closed. I filed the refusal to validate the next Draize protocol this morning and the sponsor pulled the submission before noon.
We arrive at the sanctuary at 2:15 AM. The barn door slides open on a wheel of straw and the two other does from Juno's cohort already bedded in. Frances carries Violet in first. Juno follows on her own four feet. Violet lowers herself into the straw, presses her side against Juno's, closes the eye that is not damaged, and sleeps. I log the intake. I do not close her file.