by Scott Sigler
“You push off when you hit the crest. Keep your feet flat on the runners, but keep your knees bent. Push down with your legs when you land, it absorbs the shock.”
“Sounds like jumping a dirt bike.”
She nodded. “If you’ve jumped a bike, you know how it works. I’ll go side by side with you, just match my speed.”
Colding shook his head. “What if I wreck the sled?”
“I’m pretty sure Genada can afford a new one. Don’t be a pussy.” Sara gunned her snowmobile and shot away, engine whining. Colding squeezed his throttle tight. The sled rocketed forward so fast he almost fell off. These things were flat-out built for speed. He caught up to Sara at the base of the dune. The upward slope pushed him down into his seat. Still accelerating, he hit the crest and pushed off.
Weightless. Exhilarating. The harbor spread out before him, white and blue, the Otto II bobbing slowly in the light chop. The sled dropped down. He bent his knees, then pushed.
Jarring impact, body stunned, limp and flopping. More weightlessness, not the good kind, then a smack that rattled his head inside the helmet. Sliding facedown. Something cold in his neck and left shoulder.
No more motion.
“Fuck,” Colding said.
“Hey!” Sara’s voice. “Are you okay?”
He pushed himself to a sitting position. As he did, he felt packed snow fall from his snowsuit neck down his shirt and over his stomach. Sara crouched in front of him, helmet now off, eyes filled with concern.
“I think I’m okay,” he said. He pulled off his gloves, unzipped the suit and started fishing inside his shirt for the ice-cold snow. “Nothing hurt but my pride.”
“You looked sexy,” Sara said. “You know, right up until that whole landing thing.”
Colding laughed and stood. His snowmobile had wound up on its side, clear plastic windscreen cracked from the crash. He put it back on its treads. Other than the windscreen, it looked no worse for wear. Sara’s sled, of course, had no damage. “I see you landed like a pro.”
“I’ve been riding since high school,” Sara said. “An old boyfriend from Gaylord taught me.”
“You dated a gay lord?”
“It’s a town, dumb-ass. Just south of Cheboygan. Big rivals in high school football. I was a sophomore dating a senior from a rival school … so scandalous. He used to take me snowmobiling all the time.”
“What was his name?”
Sara started to speak, then stopped. “Crap, I had it. Man, that was what, almost twenty years ago? Ah! Don Jewell. See? Sharp as a tack despite my advanced years.”
“You still in touch with him?”
She shook her head. “Haven’t talked to him since high school. No idea what happened to him.”
The sound of the Nuge’s diesel engines drew their attention. Clayton’s snowproof vehicle crested the dune at a modest speed, then continued toward the dock. Out at the dock, Colding saw the others already at work unloading the Otto II. Magnus, Andy, Sara’s crew, Sven, James and Stephanie Harvey. They hauled metal poles, rolls of heavy chain-link fence and bags of concrete from the ship to the base of the dock. Mookie the dog ran around, barking, kicking up chest-high waves of snow before stopping every twenty or thirty feet, standing tall, snow-covered black ears up high and black eyes searching the tree line for some imagined threat to her master.
“Let’s get to work,” Colding said. “Last thing I need is Magnus thinking I’m a slacker. And remember, no public displays of affection out here.”
“Spoilsport,” Sara said.
They walked quickly to the dock, the Nuge close behind. At the base of the dock, Gary Detweiler and Sven Ballantine stacked their loads of cement bags—Gary carried a single forty-pound bag, Sven carried three.
“What’s up, Mister Colding?” Gary said. “Helluva endo you had there.”
“Endo?”
“He means your landing, eh?” Sven said. “And I use that word loosely.”
Colding laughed and shrugged. No way a wipeout like that wasn’t going to bring him some ribbing.
Gary patted the pile of concrete bags, already stacked five high and six across. “This is some pretty serious gear for a cow pen.”
Sven rolled out his neck. The cracks sounded like breaking ice. “Babies are on the way, Gary. Expensive babies. Best to keep them protected.”
Colding nodded. Sara looked away. She knew the real reason they needed heavy-duty enclosures. Clayton, Gary, Sven and the Harveys did not. That had been Magnus’s orders—outside of Colding and the scientific staff, no one needed to know.
Sven turned and walked back down the dock to fetch another load.
“I saw a weather report,” Gary said. “You better get these cages built fast. Forecast is for a major storm in three days. No way you can do any construction once it comes in. For sure you’ll get that five feet of snow I told you about.”
“Wonderful,” Colding said. “Like Christmas come early.”
Gary leaned in. Colding could smell the pot rolling off him. “All this heavy fence, Mister Colding, for cows? Come on, what’s really going on? I just want to know if my dad is safe.”
“Piss off, eh?” Clayton walked up, moving with that old-man hitch-stride of his. “I don’t need you babysitting me, boy.”
“But Dad, all this stuff.”
“Yeah, all this stuff.” Clayton bent at the knees, grabbed a forty-pound bag of concrete under each arm, then stood. “We need to load all this stuff onto da Nuge. Let’s get crackin’, eh?” He carried the bags to the Bv’s rear section and started stacking them in.
Gary pursed his lips and shook his head. Apparently, concern for his father could cut through a marijuana high.
Colding picked up two bags and immediately dropped one. Holy crap, eighty pounds of concrete wasn’t exactly a loaf of bread. Clayton had picked up two like they were nothing, and Sven walked around with three. Good, clean country living had its benefits, apparently.
“Stop dickin’ around already, eh?” Clayton shouted. “Can you two pillow-biters have your gay moment off da clock, for fuck’s sake?”
Gary laughed, then picked up a bag and carried it to the zebra-striped vehicle. Colding adjusted and picked up his two—almost threw his back out, but he’d be damned if Clayton lifted more than he did.
NOVEMBER 28: DEATH FINDS A WAY
Implantation +19 Days
READY TO INITIATE CONTACT SEQUENCE …
THE SAME SENTENCE on all seven screens, surrounding her, engulfing her. Just one push of the enter key and she’d have someone who would listen to her. Someone who could act.
Modifying the network had been a simple affair, one for which she’d never be caught. Black Manitou had no outside phone connection, no radios, no Internet. No way to call anywhere but to Gary Detweiler, or to the company headquarters in Manitoba. But inside the Manitoba facility? A whole computer network connected to the Internet, to the outside world.
She had to do something. This was her fault, her coding. What, exactly, had she done? Most of the late nights she’d worked alone in the lab, she remembered nothing but a hazy blur filled with orange spiders and purple centipedes. But she remembered enough to know why she created the genome now growing large inside the cows.
Why?
Because she had wanted to kill herself again.
No access to knives, no scalpels, no glass in her room, no chemicals, no pills, nowhere to possibly hang herself, and yet her twisted mind had found a way, found a way …
… the ancestors.
But the ancestors wouldn’t just kill her. They would kill Doctor Rhumkorrf. Mister Feely. Stephanie and James. Sara.
They would kill Mister Colding.
She couldn’t tell anyone what she had done. Not ever. It wasn’t just a suicide attempt, her insanity put everyone’s lives at risk. They would send her back to China. They would send her back to an asylum, like Doctor Rhumkorrf had said.
She couldn’t go back. She remembered the sense o
f hopelessness, of wishing for death but unable to do anything about it because of the stiff straitjacket. She remembered how those places smelled.
She had to stop the ancestor project, but she couldn’t tell anyone why it was so important, or tell them exactly what she had done.
The secure connection to Manitoba was her last-resort solution. She could worm through that side of the network, access the Internet, then make a simple voice-over-IP call. The only problem was she’d have to shut off Black Manitou’s jammer to activate the secure connection’s satellite uplink. If someone was in the security room, paying attention, they would know she was contacting the outside world.
Jian looked at her finger, still poised above the keyboard. It shook slightly, a tiny tremble.
She pulled her hand away. Not yet. Not yet. She’d try once more, try to get someone to listen.
But if they would not, she knew what she had to do.
NOVEMBER 28: FISCHER WAITS …
Implantation +19 Days
PAUL FISCHER READ through the printed reports, all of which boiled down to the same one-word summary.
Nothing.
That’s what they had: nothing. Multiple law-enforcement, military and intelligence agencies had gone over every last shred of Genada’s financial information, corporate history, employee profiles and anything else that might produce information on the whereabouts of Claus Rhumkorrf, Liu Jian Dan, Tim Feely or Patrick James Colding. The agencies were even looking for more people now—Magnus Paglione, who had slipped his tail shortly after Paul’s visit to Manitoba, and the suspected crew of Genada’s C-5: Sara Purinam, Alonzo Barella, Harold Miller and Matt “Cappy” Capistrano.
A search for all of them, and still … nothing.
Fischer pushed the papers away and leaned back in his chair. He had to finally admit defeat. Colding had beaten him.
All Fischer could do now was wait and hope that someone in Genada made a mistake.
NOVEMBER 29: FREAKIN’ ORCS AND ELVES
Implantation +20 Days
A FANTASY NOVEL. Yeah. That was where the money was. Freakin’ orcs and elves and shit? Some wizard kids? How hard could that be?
Gunther knew the vampire romance novel was a guaranteed home run. Why not whip out some bullshit fantasy novel under a pen name? Jeez, eighteen-year-olds were doing it, making millions by rehashing Tolkien. Nerds would buy anything with a dragon on the cover, and Gunther could rehash with the best of them.
Had to start with a quest. That’s how they all started, really, some dopey farmer kid getting sent on some quest, during which he’d have adventures and trudge through a magic swamp or something, then …
A beep from the console broke his concentration. That new alarm Tim had set up for alerts about the cows’ vital signs. Elevated heart rate from Miss Milkshake. Gunther tapped the controls, switching the monitors to an interior view of the C-5’s lower deck.
He started moving the camera remotely when the alarm changed from a beep to a steady drone. Flatline.
“Uh-oh.”
He moved the camera until it pointed at Miss Milkshake’s stall. On the black-and-white screen, a dark puddle spread out from under the clear plastic door.
NOVEMBER 29: 210 POUNDS, 6 OUNCES
Implantation +20 Days
THE 3-D ULTRASOUND was a marvelous invention, but Claus had always thought it looked a little … fake. Maybe it was the gold tint, or the way the little computer model rotated with the trackball movements. He knew the images were real, but on the flat-panel screen they still looked like exactly what they were—computer graphics. And computer graphics, no matter how detailed, couldn’t touch the real thing.
The real thing, which now sat on the lab table. It wasn’t in a dissection tray, because there weren’t any dissection trays that big. It didn’t even fit on the damn table. He, Tim and Jian stood there, looking at the corpse they’d taken out of Miss Milkshake’s belly.
“Oh fuck me running,” Tim said. “Look at those claws.”
Claus was looking at the claws. And the teeth. And the front and back legs that hung partially off the edges of the black table. He looked at his computer for the tenth time, still amazed at the weight. An actual weight, not one of Tim’s calculations.
Two hundred ten pounds, six ounces.
Five feet long from the tip of the nose to the end of its tailless posterior. The beginnings of fur were pushing out from the pink skin. The animal had put on fifty-five pounds in the last three days.
What in God’s name had Jian created?
“Look at the teeth,” she said.
“I am,” Rhumkorrf said. “Can’t you see that I am?”
Long and pointy, the ancestor’s teeth were definitely designed for killing. For ripping off large chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole. A mouth full of canines, without an incisor or molar to be found.
Tim reached out, gingerly, and traced his fingers along the animal’s thick head. “This lower dentiary, it’s massive.”
The heavy jawbone was at least two feet wide at the base, giving the head a wide, triangular shape tapering off at the nose. The jaw bulged with attached muscles.
Claus hadn’t been ready for this. They hadn’t seen a fetus outside of the womb for thirteen days, ever since Danté forbade further autopsies. Thirteen days ago, 115 pounds ago.
“Timothy,” Claus said. “Start on the autopsy for Miss Milkshake immediately. We have to know why she died. Go.”
Tim ran to the ladder and descended.
Claus carefully examined the skull. Two feet wide, two feet long, the last fourteen inches of length were nothing but jaws and teeth. The creature still possessed a proportionately large braincase. The brain-to-body weight ratio ranked alongside that of wolves.
The skull wasn’t the only shocking feature. The front legs had retained their relative length advantage over the hind limbs. The creature would move half upright. All claws ended in thick, muscular digits, each tipped with a six-inch-long claw. Sharp, pointy claws, like those of a big cat.
“Now you see,” Jian said. “Doctor Rhumkorrf, please.”
“You shut your mouth,” he said quietly. There would be no more insubordination from Jian and Timothy, a fact he would have to remind them of from time to time. “It will probably go through more physiological changes before it’s ready for birth. What I can’t figure out is this protrusion coming out of the back of its head.” A two-foot-long strand of cartilage, thin but sturdy, stretched from the back of the fetus’s head. He gently lifted the cartilage; still-forming skin ran from it down to the creature’s back.
“It almost looks like a variation on the dimetrodon’s spinal sail,” Claus said. “I don’t know what you were coding for with this, Jian. Come now, you’ve got to remember something this unusual. What is it?”
Jian looked at the growth, then up at Claus. Tears filled her eyes. “I do not remember what that is for,” she said. “But it does not matter. Please, Doctor Rhumkorrf, we are on an island where no one can reach us. We have to stop this, you can ask—”
“Do you remember what your insane asylum looked like, Jian?”
She leaned away like he’d actually hit her. That reaction, the way she caught her breath. He knew she’d spent a few years in one, before her countrymen got her back to some semblance of sanity. It was the perfect threat to keep her in line.
“Get back to work,” he said. “You made this animal. You go through your code, figure out what we have to prepare for. Do you understand me?”
She shrank back, nodding, then turned and waddled to the ladder. He stared at her all the way, in case she looked back with that pathetic, fat face. She did once, saw him watching her, then scurried the rest of the way to the lower deck.
Left alone, Claus stared at the huge corpse. Claws. Teeth. That wide jaw. That spine.
The cages would be enough.
They had to be.
NOVEMBER 30: THE PIMP SLAP
Implantation +21 Days
; TIM SHIVERED AS he stared up at the bulkhead monitor. He needed a snort something fierce, but he couldn’t risk pulling his flask out of his back pocket. Not with Rhumkorrf watching. And maybe this really wasn’t the best time to be schnockered.
Jian stood next to the screen, also looking up at it, mumbling in Mandarin over and over again, switching her weight from the left foot to the right foot and back. She didn’t look like a scientist anymore—she looked like a lunatic.
Rhumkorrf sat on a stool, alternately looking at the IV needle in his hand and the pictures up on the bulkhead monitor. “So the IV needle came out of the vein,” he said, his voice a monotone of detached scientific analysis. “When would you estimate this happened, Mister Feely?”
“About 11:00 P.M.,” Tim said. “I checked the logs of the IV pump. It registered a pressure change, but not enough to trigger an alarm, because it was still pumping. Miss Milkshake had a slight hematoma at the insertion point. I estimate the fetus started eating the amniotic sac at around 12:05 A.M., causing the mother internal bleeding. Dude, the fetus actually ate the placenta, by the way, as well as a chunk of the uterine wall. Miss Milkshake flatlined at 12:37 A.M., according to the heart rate recorded by the stall’s computer. The fetus drowned in her blood at approximately 12:56 A.M.”
Rhumkorrf’s head snapped around. He had that furious look in his eyes again. “Mister Feely, are you sure about those numbers? As soon as Miss Milkshake died, the fetus would have asphyxiated within minutes—no oxygen from her blood.”
And now for the really, really fucked-up part. “The … uh … during the fetus’s struggles, its claws punched a few holes in the cow’s abdomen. There was a little … uh … air coming in, which it tried to breathe, I think, but it was also aspirating the mother’s blood.”
Rhumkorrf looked shocked. “So the fetus outlived the mother?”
“By around nineteen minutes,” Tim said. “When the needle came loose, I think that Baby Milkshake got … ah … it got hungry and tried to eat the first thing it could find.”