Sandpaper Kiss

by Angel Wedge

  “If you have seen one of these beautiful specimens in the zoo, then you will know that they almost universally suffer from some form of osteoporosis, tumours and kidney growths which require surgery to correct after three or four breeding seasons, and muscle wasting which may begin in early adulthood or even in cubs. The problems inherent in in-breeding, unavoidable in such a small population.”

  “But!” he looked up, a melancholy monologue turning to excited enthusiasm, “But this individual, specimen number 118 according to his file, is free of all of these conditions. You will further see that from his genetic fingerprint, he is not the offspring of any individual in the zoo databases. Because you see, Doctor Faulkner’s abhorrent research practises unexpectedly struck gold some time before his arrest. We have found a way to cure these inherited diseases, artificially grafting genetic material at the molecular level to remove the damage from a half century of in-breeding. We have both extrapolated the functional alleles of a healthy Sangra leopard, and allowed this magnificent creature a new lease of life by replacing the most troublesome parts of its genome with transplants from P. pardus alba.”

  About half of the reporters in the room seemed to grasp the full import of his words, and a much smaller proportion of the politicians. Barishkov stroked his beard while he waited for his words to sink in, hoping they would realise what he had created. Under his leadership, his pose seemed to say, this lab could rise like a world-illuminating phoenix from the ashes of Faulkner’s travesty.

  Finally he continued: “Gentlemen, there is a growing campaign to have the animals raised at this laboratory euthanized, put to death in the belief that they are, as one Internet columnist puts it, ‘an unforgivable travesty against nature’. I beg to differ. Number 118, who I have grown to think of as Frank in the time I’ve spent working with him, is a perfect example of this. He isn’t in pain, and he isn’t sick. His genome has been modified, yes, with DNA grafts from other big cat species to correct the natural defects he would otherwise have been born with. But can you say that a healthy animal, from a species that would otherwise have become extinct within our lifetimes, deserves to die simply because science has found a way to save it? That, gentlemen, is against all reason.”

  There was still some debate, of course. Some of them still didn’t quite understand the issues, but knew that a substantial portion of the electorate in their various countries would be opposed to any decision in which they were forced to vote in favour of euthanasia. The problem was that after some religious leaders had said their piece, there were also thousands of people campaigning for these ‘Frankenstein animals’ to be wiped out. It was every elected official’s nightmare, a situation where the entire populace would be out for his job if he made the wrong choice, but there was no clear majority on which option was the wrong one. The nations that had sent civil servants instead of actual politicians made it an even tougher situation, because these people were forced to put their bosses’ careers on the line, rather than just their own.

  In theory they didn’t have to make a decision right now, but I couldn’t be the only one who expected to see reporters pressing the government representatives for a statement of their position right after this meeting.

  Most ended up stating a vague agreement with Barishkov. Though the conditions the animals were being kept in were deplorable, and their very existence a question that should have been put forward for government approval before the project began – and he couldn’t convince them otherwise – the creatures kept at the lab could hold the answers to so many questions. Maybe they could even discover effective medical treatments, both for members of their own species and for humanity. Leaning against the giant windows, I was overwhelmed by how quickly one man had managed to turn the tide of emotion and get them all on his side. It looked like the lab’s scientists, both those who’d worked there before the UN takeover and those who’d been added afterwards to investigate the situation, would be permitted to keep their test subjects alive as long as there was worthwhile data to be had.

  There was nothing I could say to change their minds, and that Doctor Barishkov was a persuasive man. He almost had me convinced that he was right, but I know in my heart that there was no good to come from treating animals as horrifically as I suspected these scientists had done. But there was no way I’d be able to ask probing questions now, once most of the people around me had allowed themselves to be swayed by this unexpectedly charismatic old man.

  I’d have to go further if I was to discover the truth. I would have to look for myself to find it, and I would have to take direct action to bring it to the attention of the world. That was the moment, while the majestic black leopard paced back and forth in its cage, that I decided I would have to break into the lab the next night, when we’d been promised an early night after returning to the jungle to see the area’s natural animals. I resolved to guarantee these poor tortured animals the right to die with dignity. At that moment I thought I was being courageous, but it later turned out I just didn’t understand what I would end up subjecting myself to.

  Chapter 15 — Pursuit

  On the run in the jungle, I didn’t know who I could trust. I wondered if the rapport I’d built up with Amba in a single afternoon’s conversation nearly a week earlier would be enough to enlist his help. It was possible that he understood me as a seeker after knowledge, and he could be sympathetic. But I wouldn’t have been willing to stake my life on that, even if I’d known how to find his tribe’s camp. For now, I would most likely have to avoid anyone I saw. The tribesmen had some loyalty to Faulkner, the city natives were employed by the Lucretia Falls facility, and the American and UN soldiers probably had some kind of orders. I didn’t know how everything would play out now that Faulkner was gone; would the tribesmen follow Barishkov or Corliss? Were the UN soldiers actually following Barishkov’s orders, or would they throw him to the wolves if there was any chance of a scandal that wouldn’t tarnish their own countries’ reputations? There was no way to know.

  But compared to staying out here in the jungle, maybe it would be better to make a report to someone, sooner or later. After three days of walking, I didn’t know how far off the highway I was, and I was starting to think I might have no chance at all of getting these pictures back to the office without some form of help.

  This sound of someone moving through the undergrowth, still too distant for me to see them clearly, only raised questions in my mind. Before I knew if it was safe to approach them, I’d need to both find out which group they belonged to, and make a wild guess about whether that group was currently going to be sympathetic to my goals. I was frozen with indecision for a moment, and then I caught a glimmer of reflected light. A faint shimmer of pink in the darkness; the monster’s eyes.

  Monster. I caught the word right after it crossed my mind. I’d thought I was above that, but it seems that when I was in a tough situation I couldn’t even trust my own thoughts. I’d resolved before I ever came here that I would just think of all the experimental subjects as animals, no matter how grotesque they might look. Paul would have called them ‘enhanced lifeforms’, many of the more extreme churches called them ‘monsters’ or even ‘demons’, and the moderates on both sides preferred ‘specimens’ or ‘creatures’. I figured that the word that entered your mind when you didn’t have time to think said a lot about your personality, and I was instantly disappointed with my own response.

  I wanted to see them as they really were, tortured animals to be pitied. But the first thing the jungle strips away, like any threat of imminent death, is your illusions. Seeing those eyes glowing in the darkness opened a door to some terror that has been too long ingrained into our racial memory to be easily purged from the hindbrain. The monster was stalking me, and there was no way I could deny it. No matter how fearless, I don’t believe you’d ever meet a man who would look on a tiger’s burning eyes and feel sorry for the beast.

  Mud from my boots clung to the gleaming leaves, le
aving a clear track to show which way I’d come. The plants were soft, and easily kicked aside, but sprung back with surprising force. After a few steps, I found my legs exhausted as if I’d been wading through treacle. I reached up to a giant trunk, virtually a wooden cliff, and hauled myself out of the foliage. The trees were so tightly packed here, each growing up and over its rivals for the scarce shafts of sunlight that managed to penetrate the canopy, that a lucky man might actually be able to forge a path twenty feet above the ground, stepping from branch to sturdy branch like a squirrel. A slow and cautious squirrel.

  It even seemed to be working. There were no sounds of pursuit. Maybe in the darkness, my pursuer had assumed I would follow the bridge of roots that I’d been on, relatively clear by the standards of this region.

  The trunk beside my hand exploded into a cloud of white punk. The noise was so sudden and loud that I was deafened for a moment. I gazed in surprise at the disintegrating bark for a second, suddenly brightly lit. Fragments seemed to hang in the air, gracefully tearing, and my body recoiled so slowly that I could have been floating. Was this an epiphany, the voice of an angel come to save me and pass on my report to the people of the world? It seemed like minutes I stood and watched, falling without moving, but in reality it must have been less than a second before I guessed that I’d been shot.

  I didn’t know what I was doing, it was so hard to think. My feet hit the ground and I just ran. I felt dizzy, light headed. Pain shot up my leg with every step I took, and I just wanted to collapse to the ground but forced myself to keep moving. I couldn’t even tell where it was coming from. My shirt and trousers were soaked in blood and the pain was unbearable, but I didn’t have time to stop and analyse it any more than that.

  I stopped when I heard voices, surprisingly close. Without the noise of my steps, I could hear just how loudly they were moving. They must be hacking through the undergrowth, cleaving a path with machetes rather than looking for routes over and around. It was sometimes necessary to cut your way through in the jungle, but here we were farther from the Lucretia Falls clearing and farther from the sun. You looked for the easy path here, rather that just cutting straight through. They must be outsiders. They were talking as they moved, out of breath and frustrated. Another, clearly not doing such hard work, was barking orders. These were soldiers, then, but whether they were from one of the countries that claimed to control this land, or the UN troops sent in to control the situation, or even the Oversight Committee’s own mercenaries wasn’t immediately clear.

  I looked down at my leg; the dark fabric not showing the bloodstains. I was lightheaded and dizzy, and every thought took way too much effort. I shoved my hands into my pockets and pulled out a length of cord. For once, I could be glad of my hoarding habits. I tied it tight around my thigh, hoping it would do something to slow down any blood loss. I didn’t even know if it was my leg bleeding; the pain spread so widely that I could just as easily have been hit in my hip, or my side. But in that confused panic, I knew that anything I could do to stop the blood was better than nothing, and that was the only thing that came to mind.

  There was more shouting. The leader, or the one who wasn’t working, was raising his voice. It was urgent, whatever was bothering him, and I wondered if they’d seen me. It sounded like they were maybe a dozen feet away, but if they were as close as it seemed they weren’t carrying lights. I lowered myself to the ground, nestling between two stout roots, or branches, it was hard to tell the difference with greenery on all sides. Then their knives split through a partition of vines, so close I could almost have reached out to touch them.

  I heard their leader shout again, in Russian, or possibly Ukrainian. The silhouettes looked strange, until I realised the over-bulky heads were concealed inside some kind of goggles. Advanced night vision probably, to match the belts of survival gear and heavy duty rifles that I could only see by the light glinting off them. This wasn’t the base’s guards pursuing me, this was serious covert ops stuff. If Barishkov had this kind of gear on hand, then the inspectors had seriously messed up.

  For a moment I thought they hadn’t seen me, and then they raised weapons to their shoulders. Not pointing at me, though, pointing up past me. The branch I was leaning on shattered with a sound like thunder, and suddenly I was falling again, to a lower ground level that I hadn’t even realised was there. The air was filled with gunshots and panicked shouting, but I was too weak to even grab something to stop my slide down the slick vines. In some calm space at the back of my mind, I was dimly aware that if they’d wanted to kill me from that range I would have been dead already. They really hadn’t seen me, hidden among the undergrowth, and the screams of pain behind me managed to make me realise that there were two groups of soldiers in the area. The Russians I’d just seen were getting cut down by a sniper they couldn’t quite get a clear shot at, and were panicking to find some kind of effective cover.

  I’d been standing on what I thought was solid ground only a few minutes before, and then clambered up onto low branches to find an easier path. The ground couldn’t have been more than a few feet below, but it felt like much more as I slipped and fell. In a momentary break in the gunfire, I could hear running water close by, but it was a dull roar rather than the indistinct trickle of most streams in this landscape. I was disoriented, falling somehow, and then my shoulder struck solid ground with a sickening crunch, and I finally abandoned my fight to remain conscious.

  Chapter 16 — Birthday Girl

  Do you dream when you’re unconscious? I’d never been in a position to find out before. I’d been in any number of dangerous situations, but up until this case there had been some part of my mind that considered myself separate. I was a reporter, I wasn’t part of this no matter how close I got. At some point I’d got too caught up in the politics, probably because of the anger at my brothers using me as a tool to gain political leverage. But while I was out there in the jungle, I realised that this wasn’t worth dying for. I could abandon the case, surrender, and get out alive no matter how much I hated myself for it.

  I don’t know if I was stunned or delirious. I’d taken risks with food, not entirely sure which plants were safe to eat. I’d lost blood and I was exhausted. Looking back, I’m still not sure which of my memories from that time are real, and which are things I’d read in that diary or crazed fever dreams. I don’t know if I was hallucinating, or if I’d got so confused that things I’d learned later could mix with my own memories. Maybe after a decade spent telling other people’s stories some fun-loving angel had decided to have someone else’s life flash before my eyes instead…

  Lucy sat on her balcony, looking out over the second best view of the jungle from anywhere in the Facility. She’d never seen the best view, but a few people had told her that what you could see from the Observation Room was spectacular. She could see it, a glass dome right on the roof that must allow you to see for miles, but her father had forbidden her to go up there. Well he hadn’t actually said she shouldn’t, but he’d say “Well, Lucy…” or “You know I love you…” then trail off into silence or hurry out of the room with tears in his eyes. She didn’t want to make anyone feel bad, least of all her father, so she hadn’t dared ask again.

  Here on her balcony, she could see the treetops down below, palms and willow and mixed tropical species whose names she hadn’t learned yet. Some grew naturally, seeds fallen from up above, while others were planted and propagated by the staff at the compound. Beyond the gardens were the taller trees whose broad leaves formed a parasol overhead. One canopy above and one below, it was an awe-inspiring view. If she stood on her hands, tail weaving gently from side to side as she struggled to keep her balance, the view was almost the same. The light through the upper canopy was only thin golden spears, raising glittering rainbows where it struck trails of water droplets coming down, or clouds of humid vapour rising from the ground. Most of the illumination for the jungle’s growth came through the canopy where the laboratory, centr
e of the compound, pierced the upper canopy; and it’s mirror-finish observation windows scattered the most useful wavelengths of light out over the garden jungle.

  Lucy loved this place. She had a home, a room that was just for her now, in the main building at the bottom of the cliff. She even had her own little garden, an arrangement of pot plants on a raft moored just outside her window. But there were so many people, always making noise in the corridors and coming in to check on her. She didn’t like everyone looking at her when she wanted to be alone, so this little balcony was a perfect escape. Nobody came out here, even though the doorway was just off one of the little stairways that connected the lower complex to the bottom of the staff quarters that stretched up inside the cliff wall. Nobody even knew about this place; Lucy had only found it after a rusted piece of the railing had fallen down and landed in her little garden.

  Not many people used the stairs anyway, preferring the elevators when they were in a hurry, but not even the janitors came out here. The balcony was a dozen feet long, with a simple railing at waist height to stop anyone falling over the edge. It was narrow, just large enough for a man to push a cart of cleaning tools in order to maintain the lights on the outside of the building. But it was blocked by creeping vines and other plants now, and the giant letters spelling out the facility’s name were neither illuminated nor clean. Lucy could only come here because she was agile enough to walk along the railing, avoiding the thorns and venomous barbs.