Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  I was a rock. “Go ahead and hate anybody you want. Whatever gets you through life. Hell, I’m convinced it’s making you real happy.”

  I waited until after she’d hung up on me to hurl the receiver against the far wall. I waited until it was too late, and then I picked up the base of the telephone and crushed it in my fist as if it were an aluminum can. I let the remains fall through my fingers, and then I turned and punched a dent in my locker the size of a man’s head. It fell loose at one hinge. That was the end of my locker. No one would think it was worth their while to repair. I’d been using it since I was sixteen. I’d moved it from the main locker room to my personal space after college. It was still an eighties shade of lime green, only now it was dead.

  I didn’t call the cops. My rage vanished, and afterwards something was missing from my body. I felt as if a vital fluid had been drained out of me and I’d lost the will to go through any of the motions that had comprised my life. I collapsed in my chair and thought I might slouch there for a few weeks.

  An hour or so ticked by. My mind sat on top of my neck like an empty box. Then in its cold, post-rage objectivity, my brain snapped one and one together. A white snake. A white crane. Both were anomalies. It was a coincidence―until Melodía had pointed out that they’d both had the blood sucked from their bodies. Both had clearly been attacked by different hematophages, blood-eaters, and both had been stolen at the same time, by the same man.

  Tanis’ words returned to my ears: When two events occur simultaneously with the same object of inquiry, we must pay strict attention. Marchette had stolen both animals. He’d noticed that the snake had been drained of blood; he’d examined the crane’s wounds. The two animals were related to each other somehow―and by proxy to the dead birds. I didn’t know how, but if I could get my hands on that little bald scientist, I could find out.

  Of course, I didn’t know anything about Marchette apart from that he showed up once a week to keep the invertebrates healthy. I doubted many of my colleagues knew him, either, but I thought it might be worth a shot to talk to one of them―which showed just how weird my life had become. I was willingly seeking out a normal.

  I found one in the bat cave, an annex of the reptile house. She was on her hands and knees, with the upper half of her body inside a back panel of the bat enclosure. When I rapped on a wall, she emerged and sat back on her heels. She was dressed in khaki slacks, tennis shoes, and a green zoo polo. She wore heavy work gloves and clutched a dirty, dripping sponge. She was short and plump, small-nosed, and with orange hair pulled back in a ponytail. Several strands had come loose and framed her face. Light perspiration stood on her forehead. A tag on her chest said “Abbey.”

  “Hello,” Abbey said. A faint smile accompanied a flush in her cheeks. She rubbed a forearm across her forehead. “You’ve never visited me before.”

  “Hello.”

  She held up her gloved hands. “I’m cleaning guano.”

  “I understand it’s the most valuable feces in the world,” I said just to be polite.

  Her smile got bigger. Her freckled cheeks and nose crinkled up.

  A bat in a small cage on the far side of the room fluttered against the bars and then fell to the cage floor where it lay opening and closing its jaws.

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “That’s just Ferdinand. He’s having a time-out.”

  I decided to let that one go. “Can I ask you a couple questions?”

  “Shoot,” she said.

  “You work a lot at night, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “Bats are nocturnal, after all.”

  “Did you stay late last night?”

  She nodded. “I wanted to see how my Mexican free-tails would take to the new batch of mosquitoes I gave them. Matured them from larvae myself.” She swelled her chest with pride.

  “Did you see a skinny, short, bald scientist?” I asked.

  “You mean Simon?” Her mouth softened at the edges and her green eyes twinkled.

  “Yeah, Simon Marchette. When did you see him and what was he doing?”

  “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  “Maybe. I need to find him.”

  “We bumped into each other near the south entrance at 6:37 p.m. I almost knocked him over.”

  “Exactly 6:37?”

  She nodded. “His watch happened to tilt in my direction and I saw the time.”

  “And you remembered?”

  Abbey removed the gloves and laid them on the floor. She plopped down in a wheeled office chair, leaned back, and propped her boots on a cheap metal desk. “Yep. I have a photographic memory. Yesterday stuck in my mind because he usually flirts with me. Ramming into each other like that―it would have given him the perfect opportunity.”

  “But not yesterday,” I said.

  Abbey shook her head and blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “It’s cute when he flirts. It’s harmless, but still flattering. Scraping up bat guano doesn’t always make a girl feel pretty.”

  “What was he like yesterday? Was he headed in or out?”

  “In. He looked paler and clammier than usual. His eyes were red. His hands were shaking―just a little. What did he do?”

  I took a deep breath. “He stole my snake.”

  “Oh, no! It must have been a small one. I can’t imagine him getting out of here wearing an anaconda around his neck.”

  “It was dead,” I said. “An albino rattlesnake. About five feet long.”

  “Valuable?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Not in dollars. But scientifically, yeah.”

  “You want me to call security?”

  I shrugged. “Marchette is a colleague.”

  “And a really nice guy,” she said. “And a thief.”

  “If I can find him, maybe we can sort it out.” A moment of our conversation the day before sprung back into my mind. “Do you have any idea where else Marchette works?”

  Abbey squinted. “Some lab. Private, I think. Do you?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” I said.

  “The zoo subcontracts him through his other company. Human Resources would know the name of the company. They would tell you, if security gave them the okay. That’d mean you’d have to report him, though.”

  I mulled it over. If I told security, they’d tell the cops. If the cops got involved, it’d lead to Melodía. Despite our fight, I still didn’t want a bunch of boots stomping around her lab against her will. The idea of Melodía dragged downtown and questioned at police headquarters was beyond terrible.

  “You know,” Abbey said, her eyes drifting toward the ceiling, “I’ve often noticed that Simon’s shoes have dust on them. Not a lot and usually not on the soles. On the laces.”

  “We live in a desert,” I said. “There’s plenty of dust to go around.”

  “The dust is orange.”

  Orange dust. You say orange dust to any native of Albuquerque and they think of one place. “From the Sandía Man Cave?”

  She nodded.

  The Sandía Man Cave was a long, low-ceilinged, winding passage that led a few hundred feet into the side of the Sandía Mountains that flanked the east side of the city. Its antechamber had sheltered one of our ancestors 20,000 years or so ago. As a kid, I’d crawled to the back―as all Albuquerque kids did, only most of them could walk some of the way and crouch the rest. The Sandía Man, as he was known, was one of the earliest documented people in the area, which made the cave an interesting place for anthropologists. However, the thing that everyday folk remembered it for was the thick orange dust that coated your shoes, clothes, and hands when you emerged back into the sunlight.

  “Are you saying that Marchette spends his free time spelunking?” I asked.

  “If I thought that, I wouldn’t be taking into account that there’s not much dust on the soles of his shoes, just on the laces. It’s harder to get dust out of the laces. You have to wash them. If you were stomping through the dust in the cave itself, it’d probabl
y be on your soles, too. But if the dust was blowing around in the area you went to habitually, say to and from work, it’d stick in your laces, building up over time, while it would fall off the soles.”

  “You should go to work for the APD.”

  “And leave my precious babies?” She laughed, gesturing at Ferdinand. “Never.”

  “So what you’re getting at is that Marchette walks by the entrance of the cave on his way to work. That’s impossible. The cave is off in the wilderness. You have to climb a mountain slope to get to it. The entrance is sunk into the side of a cliff, practically.”

  “There are stairs now,” she said. “But that’s not at all what I mean.”

  “What do you mean, then?”

  “Where does the dust come from?”

  “The cave.” Then I caught her drift. “The rock inside the cave.”

  “That means, that you find someplace nearby where excavations have recently occurred into the same kind of rock. You find your dust, you find your rock, you find your excavation site―and you find Simon’s other employer.”

  Abbey was a genius. “I should talk to Human Resources first, to save myself some trouble.”

  “That’s probably smart.” She leaned farther back in her chair and laced her fingers behind her head. One of her pleasantly round biceps had a smudge of guano on it.

  “Good work,” I said.

  She gave me a little smile and a shrug. “It’s elementary.”

  “I guess I’ll head over to H.R.”

  Her eyes flicked downwards. “You might want to put a Band-Aid on your hand first.”

  My right hand was dribbling on the tile. The first, second, and third knuckles were split and quickly turning purple from slugging my locker.

  “Should I see the other guy?” Abbey asked.

  “He’s my front door. The thing’s got a tightly-wound spring. Caught me as I was leaving the house this morning.”

  Abbey grinned. “I figured you punched a rhinoceros in the nose.”

  “I’m not that manly,” I said. “Thanks again.”

  She gave me one deep nod. Ferdinand threw himself around his timeout cage. I waved at him and scrammed.

  I didn’t go to Human Resources. Instead, I went back to my lab and straightened things up. I tried to bend my locker door into shape. I swept up what was left of my phone and filled out paperwork to get a new one.

  I couldn’t figure it out. Why would someone of Marchette’s status and education steal three corpses and a doomed tarantula? I didn’t buy Melodía’s argument about professional zealotry. He was a good guy, and other than some idiosyncrasies, pretty normal.

  He was almost a friend.

  he next day was my day off. I decided I’d enjoy it by taking a drive in the mountains―toward the Sandía Man Cave, to be exact.

  I left the city before seven to avoid rush hour, taking Rio Grande Boulevard north, which wound along the river beneath the gray winter limbs of the cottonwoods. The curling brown river flashed into sight intermittently in the shallow gorge beyond. I headed east on Alameda, a street named for the trees, across the northern suburbs of the city toward the mountains. The land grew dry, the trees disappeared, and gaudy strip malls sprung up in their place. I drove north on I-25 for about fifteen minutes to the small city of Bernalillo, got off the interstate, and drove a few miles east to Placitas, a satellite suburb that consisted primarily of big adobe-plastered houses peppered into the rolling folds of desert scrub and small trees. I turned south and left the village on route 135, which wound through the gentle eastern slopes of the Sandía Mountains into Las Huertas canyon―home of the Sandía Man and his cave.

  I spotted what I was looking for before I even started looking. I remembered the canyon as a place of pine forests, trickling streams, and the occasional idyllic meadow. On the western side of the route, the up-slope side, that was still true. Near the base of the canyon, however, a huge swath of the lower mountain slope had been stripped of trees. Boulders had been cleared. What looked like a brand new prison facility stood in their place. It consisted of a small guardhouse projecting from a bulky central structure surrounded by high razor wire fences that sparkled in the sun. Upslope and separated by a quarter mile sat another stout building, smaller and without all the razor wire decoration. The east-facing side of the building featured a large rectangular extension three stories high, the size of a football field, and cased with greenhouse plastic. A few other buildings clustered nearby. The farthest one up the mountain’s slope was the smallest―and the strangest: it was round with a domed roof made up of two half-spheres that formed a seam from the east side of the dome to the west. It looked like an observatory roof, which could open to give the interior a view of the sky―only you built observatories on top of mountains, not in canyons. A security fence ringed the entire complex, including a sea of asphalt parking lot. The fence must have measured a few miles in circumference. At the gate’s opening, a massive marble block announced the complex’s name: Typhon Industries. And below that in smaller letters, I could just barely make out: Biogenic Research and Detainment Facilities. It sounded like an absurd combination, but the whole world had been going mad since Christ died and came back.

  To the south of the structure with the projecting enclosed football field lay a site of new construction. It was nothing more than a massive pit surrounded by bulldozers and cranes that looked like playthings from my high vantage point on the shoulder of the highway. But it was easy to see the exposed orange rock in the pit. I’d found the source of Marchette’s shoelace dust―and by proxy the site of his other job.

  As I sat pondering, a few cars trickled in and out of the parking lot. The bulldozers toiled away in miniature in their dusty orange pit. The sun blazed across the arid plains that ran east all the way to Texas. I stayed there for a long while. I rolled down my window. The crisp winter air sparkled with the chirping of mountain songbirds.

  I hadn’t driven all this way to enjoy nature.

  I figured if Marchette worked for Typhon Industries, he’d be in whatever building held animals, which had to be the one with the big greenhouse enclosure. I drove down to the complex on brand new roads, the blacktop as smooth as glass. I had to pass through a booth with a gate and a security guard, but they both gave way when I flashed my zoo ID and said I was there on business.

  The lobby was one of those grand foyer deals with a lot of black marble and glass and a fountain that trickled streams of water over a crystal double helix. It was pretty cheesy. A receptionist stood behind the kind of monolithic counter you might see in a five-star hotel. A couple of security guards flanked her, complete with sidearms and game faces. My presence made their stoicism slip but only for a second.

  The receptionist didn’t even blink. She wore a blue-skirted suit and a smile made of Teflon. Her teeth looked like they’d been mass-produced and installed. Her hair was a platinum helmet, and her figure looked like the template that they used to design mannequins.

  “Welcome to Typhon Industries.” Her voice was as slick as the rest of her. “How may I help you?”

  “I’m here for a meeting with Dr. Simon Marchette.”

  “Your name?”

  “John Stick.”

  “One moment.” She chattered her fingernails against a keyboard and examined a hidden computer screen. She looked up at me. Her eyes were topaz. “I’m sorry. I don’t see any appointment listed.”

  I looked down at her. I didn’t say anything. I’d found that normals were uncomfortable with silence. Sometimes all you had to do was shut up, and they’d take care of the rest.

  This normal wasn’t that easy. She stared straight back at me. She didn’t blink. With every second that passed, her eyes cut a sharper path between us and her smile became spikier.

  I finally balked. I’d never been as hard as I pretended to be. “Can you call him? He probably just forgot to tell you about our meeting.”

  “I have no meeting listed. I have no record of your name―
nor can I confirm that I have any knowledge of a Dr. Simon Marchette. None of this information is in my system. Were there such a person working here, I wouldn’t even know―unless he appeared in my system. Which he does not.”

  “He works here.” I said. “Call him. I didn’t drive thirty miles to see the sights.”

  She folded her hands in front of her stomach and stood there. In the animal kingdom, her smile would have indicated that she was planning to eat me. On either side of her, security was getting itchy.

  “He’ll be glad I’m here,” I said. “It’s important.”

  She cocked her head just a hair, but otherwise didn’t move.

  She was beating me at my own game. I was about to retreat to my vehicle when something happened behind the counter, hidden from view. I couldn’t tell if a sensor lit up, or an alarm went off, or if a mouse ran out of its hole and stole her donut. Her eyes flicked down. Her smiled cracked and an expression of brutal pragmatism flashed through. The guards twitched. They both wore earpieces―it didn’t take an Abbey the bat-keeper to deduce something was going down.

  One of the guards jogged through a back door of the room. As the door opened, the blare of an alarm echoed from the halls beyond. The receptionist picked up a phone, hit a button, and listened. I strained to hear what the voice on the other end of the line said, but failed―my hearing wasn’t my strongest attribute. The woman’s eyes lifted until they found mine. She held up a finger. After a few seconds, she hung up the phone. “You are to stay here. Someone is coming for you.” The receptionist looked to the remaining guard. “This man is not to leave.” Then she turned and stalked through the same back door the security guard had taken. Her skirt swished with the precision of glass being cut.

  The guard walked over to me. He was a beefy guy with big shoulders in a black uniform over Kevlar armor. A gun, a can of pepper spray, a nightstick, and a whole lot of other contraptions hung on his belt. His head came up to my elbow.

  I gave him a big, friendly smile.

  “You’re to stay here,” he said in his toughest voice.