Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “Me too. She’s been with us for decades.”

  Abbey whistled. A strand of loose red hair that had fallen free of her ponytail vibrated. “That’s a long time. So, you suspect that somehow a tarantula hawk wasp―which I understand are quite large?”

  I nodded.

  “One of those somehow made its way in here, broke into Esposita’s cage―was it sealed?”

  “The lid was on,” I said. “It does have air holes.”

  “Big enough for a tarantula hawk wasp to crawl through?”

  I hadn’t stopped to ponder that, but she was on the right track. “Not that big.”

  “Hmm. So, a wasp broke into Esposita’s home, murdered her in cold blood, and left again, covering up her point of entry and escape.”

  “When you say it like that, I sound crazy.”

  “John”―Abbey crumpled up her Dr. Pepper can between her palms―“the world is a crazy place.” She tossed the can, sinking a basket from across the room. “But your corner of it seems particularly strange as of late.” On her way back to the bat cave, she gave me a friendly smack on the knee.

  Abbey was right. The wasp couldn’t have penetrated the terrarium on its own. Judging by the multiple bites, it had been hungry. It had also been angry or frightened enough to use its stinger. I guessed that someone had brought in one of the wasp-fly creatures, stirred it up, and released it into my turtle’s home. That person had given the wasp time to feed on her multiple times―or brought more than one wasp. Marchette came to mind. He could have hatched the wasp implanted on Jones the tarantula and used it to kill Esposita. The big question that remained was: Why?

  The words of a conversation I’d had a couple weeks earlier came back to me. Words that I’d said to a certain militia leader about the identity of my favorite animal at the zoo.

  I knew there was a link between the Captain and Marchette. That link was Typhon Industries. Now I had another link: Marchette had access to a mutant tarantula hawk-horsefly, if such a thing actually existed. The Captain had been bitten by one―and a population of them lived near his place of employment. He could have caught one, probably as readily as Marchette could have hatched one from Jones’ body. Or the two men could have been in cahoots.

  It didn’t add up in my mind. Marchette was a good man. The Captain was not. If they were working for the same employer, which they undoubtedly had been, that could explain it. But I couldn’t imagine the scientist helping the militiamen even if they were working for the same corporation. And I couldn’t imagine him killing an innocent turtle―even if he was an insect man at heart.

  I was sitting in my chair pondering it all when Abbey poked her head in.

  “You’re here late,” she said.

  I looked at the clock: 7:15 p.m. Another symptom of my crumbling routine. “I guess I got to thinking too hard.”

  “I have something for you.”

  No one ever had anything for me. I wondered if she’d found out about my recently passed birthday somehow.

  She presented her index finger to me. It was slender and that orangish-pink color of fair-skinned Anglo people. The pad of the fingertip bore a deeper orange dust.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “More orange dust,” I said. “Where did you find that?”

  “Three inches from the base of the door leading from the back rooms to the main hall of the Reptile House. On the outer edge.”

  “By outer edge, you mean where the door meets the frame, on the side opposite the hinges.”

  “Right,” she said. “The edge with the knob.”

  “How the hell did you find a finger’s worth of orange dust at the bottom of a door?”

  “I stood in the middle of the room and let myself find something out of place.” She positioned herself in the center of my lab and stretched her arms out to either side, as if she were getting ready for a hug. “It jumped out at me.”

  “Is your last name Holmes?” I asked.

  She giggled. A red flush rose in her cheeks. She looked even cuter than usual. “I suspect that someone waited for the exhibit room outside of the door to empty. Then they slipped through the door. We never lock it. We assume that nobody will come back here, and if they did, we’d see them. This person must have been staking the place out. They waited for you to leave. When you did, they slipped back here and put a tarantula hawk in Esposita’s terrarium. They waited for it to kill her. They captured it again and went back to the door. They opened it a crack and peeped out, waiting until no one was around so that they could slip out without being noticed. When they were peeking out, they rose up on their toes, like this.” She modeled the pose. “The top of their shoe rested against the door.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “That’s the same dust I saw on Simon’s shoelaces.”

  I nodded and sighed.

  “Is he our man?”

  “I have trouble believing that. It doesn’t seem in his nature.”

  “He stole your western albino rattlesnake, allegedly. Is it such a big leap to think that he might have murdered your friend the turtle?”

  “I guess not.”

  She sat on my desk and swung her feet. “He does seem like a good guy. Besides, who assassinates a turtle in cold blood? What’s the motive? Maybe the wasp got in through some crack we haven’t noticed. Insects can squeeze themselves pretty small. It escaped through the same route. Maybe it flew out of the Reptile House before we were even looking for it―when we opened a door or something.”

  “That doesn’t explain the orange dust.” Nor would it explain the coincidence of my telling the Captain that I had special feelings for Esposita.

  “That’s a tiny detail. It could be coincidental. Or it could be from another day when Simon was working here.”

  “Could be.”

  Abbey jumped down from my desk. “I guess I should get back to my babies. Do you want me to tell security about all this?”

  I waved my hand. “I’ll handle it.”

  She didn’t leave. Instead, she did some fiddling around with the zipper of her zoo jacket, pursed her lips, and did an inspection of the corners of my ceiling. “So… you really don’t know where Simon went?”

  I shook my head. “I have a few theories, but nothing substantial.”

  “Wanna talk about them over dinner?”

  I’d never been invited to dinner before. My face probably showed it.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Abbey asked.

  “I’m not used to people being friendly, I guess. It’s giving me an identity crisis.”

  “We’re colleagues. Let’s go have a brewski and talk shop!”

  I ran the scenario in my head. Happy hour and my eight-feet of awkwardness didn’t sound like a good plan. Plus, I had fly traps to check.

  “Sorry. Another time. Too much work to do.”

  “I know the feeling.” Abbey fluttered some fingers at me. “Good night, John.”

  I had a date with the East Mountains and four fly traps that night, which I hoped might hold answers to at least a few of the questions that had been buzzing around since the day of the mass bird death. If I could find, intact and alive, a specimen of the wasp that had bitten the whooping crane, the captain, the security guard at Typhon Industries, and Esposita, I’d know for certain if it was merely a wasp or if something new really had come into being beneath our tired sun.

  I stopped home for a brief cold meal before I drove to the Typhon Industries site. I arrived past eight and protesters still ringed the entrance. I didn’t get close enough to read their signs, so I couldn’t tell whether they were animal rights activists, immigrant rights activists, or Native American rights activists. My mind conjured up an image of an eight-foot tall John Stick in a zookeeper uniform among them holding a sign with a picture of Esposita the box turtle. I’d never been part of a protest, march, or parade in my life. You had to share solidarity with more than one or two people to do so.
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  Instead of entering the Typhon Industries parking lot, I pulled my car to the side of the road that led there and hiked the few dozen paces beneath the conifer boughs and through the brush and blanket of pine needles to the small stream that trickled down the mountainside. Dozens of them spanned the breadth of the Sandía Mountain range, many of which dried out during the winter and sprang back to life come the March thaw. This winter had been mild, which might have explained the persistence of a stream in February. When I squatted down to pick up one of my traps, however, I sensed something about the water. I dipped my fingers into it. Winter runoff is freezing. It turns your skin numb and freezes your guts if you drink it. This water felt like a freshly drawn bath. It was somewhere around 90 degrees.

  It came from a hot spring: a well of water that ran deep into the earth’s crust, where either hot rock in the earth’s mantle or magma heated it. New Mexico was peppered with hot springs. Tourists flocked to them and said things about how magical and healing they were. I didn’t like tourists.

  The gibbous moon washed my path in ivory light as I walked up the course of the stream. I poked my fingers into spots where the water eddied deep and dark. The water became hotter, in some places painfully so. It pulsed gently up against my fingertips. The sources of the hot springs probably went down thousands of feet, drawing up water from the vast basins that had accumulated in the earth’s crust over millions of years.

  Typhon Industries used this water, but their purpose was unclear. They’d constructed a building directly in its path. If they used it for geothermal purposes, they would have simply run pipes uphill to siphon off the water. As soon as it came above ground, the water lost heat. I imagined that by the time the open-air channel actually reached the building, the water would have fallen to a temperature that would render it essentially useless.

  I wanted inside that building. I wasn’t much for hatching schemes or orchestrating complex plots to infiltrate buildings. The next best thing to getting into the building was to talk to someone who had―one more reason to find Simon Marchette, a task I had yet to begin.

  I trekked downstream and checked the rest of my traps. I found a few blood soaked pine needles, a dozen gnats, and a thin layer of orange dust floating in them. It wasn’t insect season, especially in the mountains. In the summer, the traps would have been thick with the writhing bodies of creatures glutting and drowning themselves slowly in delicious blood. In the winter, I was lucky to catch pine needles.

  As I knelt peering into the fourth trap, something whirred past my left ear. It buzzed like a small helicopter. I froze. The moonlight poured down around me. The protesters made their distant clamor. The stream trickled by like a tumble of loose change.

  A flying insect landed on the back of my left hand. It was slightly bigger than a well-fed humming bird. It had the tapered abdomen and torso of a tarantula hawk wasp and the bulbous eyes of a horsefly. It washed one hand over the other like a horsefly and sported a proboscis and mandibles of gargantuan proportions. Its stinger could have punctured the skin of a rhinoceros. Its wings were long, elliptical in shape, and shined like stained glass.

  I knelt next to a stream whose water had emerged from thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface. It had flowed for eons of geological history. The mountains cradling this stream had arisen over millions of years. Every being that buzzed or bit, stung or sang in this desert was as old as humanity itself. But this being was brand new.

  The creature sporadically rustled its wings, fanning my wrist and fingers, but didn’t fly away. Its weight was marvelous. Each foot pressed individually against my skin. It turned a half circle across my hand, stopped, and rubbed its forelegs one over the other while rotating its head in quick jerks. This was not the behavior of a fly looking to feed or a wasp looking to sting. This was resting behavior.

  I’d discovered a chimera. In science, a chimera is an organism with traits from two or more distinct gene pools. Genetic researchers had spliced together mice, for example, from four parents instead of two. These mice featured genetic pieces of each set of parents. Their fur often looked like patchwork quilts. Science had taken the term from Greek mythology: the Chimera was a monstrous fusion of lion, goat, and snake that Bellerophon slew from atop the Pegasus―also a chimera. One chimera was white and feathery and beautiful; the other was scaled and fanged and ugly. The latter, of course, was an abomination that had to be destroyed.

  The being on my hand was the most wonderful abomination I’d ever beheld. I had no idea whether it was a natural mutation or the product of science gone awry, but I instinctively wanted to protect it. Had a Bellerophon emerged from the forest at that moment, sword in hand, I would have thrown two liters of pig’s blood in his eyes and shooed the wasp off toward safety.

  A second wasp landed on my elbow. It was slightly bigger than the first and made itself equally at home. It whirred its wings, shuffled its feet, and rubbed its forelegs together. Both of the insects ignored the blood trap right in front of them. It would have driven a normal hematophage mad―unless it preferred to feed on a particular species’ blood. They’d bitten two humans that I knew of. They’d bitten a whooping crane and Esposita the turtle, the latter under duress. But they did not seem at all interested in drinking my blood, even with the veins and arteries in my hand pumping away right beneath one of them. It didn’t add up.

  Two more wasps landed on my arm. Another took a seat on my knee. Neither horseflies nor tarantula hawk wasps were social animals. Horseflies might swarm to feed on the same food source, but they didn’t group themselves together intentionally. Tarantula hawk wasps lived solitary existences. It didn’t make sense for a chimera of two solitary species to gather. Either these insects amounted to more than fly and wasp combined, or I was a very likable guy. Or, as Tanis had once said, chaos was at play. One and one didn’t equal two; they equaled anarchy. I didn’t like carrying her around in my brain.

  I knelt there for a while. No more wasps came and none left. They ceased their stirrings and sat still. The night had no wind. My knees ached. The arches of my feet hurt. Every joint of my left arm cooked in my skin from the strain of holding it still. I could have stood there in pain for hours.

  Feet crunched in the dirt behind me, almost blending into the other noises of the night. Whoever they belonged to tried to be stealthy. I rose slowly and turned. The insects perched on me, even the one on my knee, stayed where they were.

  “I can hear you,” I said to the shadows between the aspens and pines.

  A flashlight clicked on and paved a circled of ground with yellow light. “A la verga,” a man’s voice whispered, “you found yourself some beasties.”

  It was the gumshoe, Tony, who’d invaded my house. He wore a fedora, trench coat, off-the-rack suit, and loafers, as usual. “Actually, they found me.”

  “Are they biting you?” Tony asked.

  “They’re using me for a lounge. What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “You look like Cinderella. I used to watch that movie with my girl. Cinderella would sing to the birds. They’d perch on her hands and tweet. It was cute.” He walked toward me, lifting the flashlight toward the sky and shining a cone of light in the space between us. “This ain’t nearly as cute.”

  “I’ll take these over cartoon tweeters any day,” I said.

  “I guess you would.” His eyes fixed on my arm. “I’ve never seen one before. Half a dozen at once―I guess the rumors are true.”

  “What rumors?” I took some steps toward him, careful to avoid getting the light directly on any of my guests.

  “There’s some chatter,” he said. “I wrote it off. It sounded hocus-pocus to me.”

  I felt like giving him a mutant-wasp-armed bear-hug. “Spit it out.”

  “The chin is that they like you,” he said.

  “Who likes me?”

  “The beasties.” His dark eyes gleamed beyond the cone of light between us. “We have eyes and ears in the enemy’s network. We’
ve been hearing it for a while now. That they’re sweet on you.”

  “Insects cannot like or dislike. That’s human baggage. Insects eat, rest, procreate, metamorphose, and die.”

  “What about bees?” he asked. “Bees sure do swoon over their queen.”

  “That’s different. That’s genetic memory, not affection.”

  Tony’s grin spread his mustache wide, exposing teeth as white as the moon. “Maybe they think you’re the queen bee.”

  “What do you want?” I growled.

  “You were gone awhile,” he said. “My job is to watch you.”

  The wind kicked up from the west. It threaded down through the forests above us and threw the scent of pine needles and water in our faces. The ruckus spooked the wasps, which all buzzed off into the darkness. I worked my arm around in my shoulder socket to ease its stiffness.

  Above our heads, stars shone through a perfectly clear sky. I could pick out every constellation. But in half an hour, they’d would vanish behind a screen of black and a downpour would tear through the forest.

  “I guess you’re free to waste your time any way you want,” I said.

  “You and I both know it ain’t a waste. The more we look at you, the more we learn.”

  “If you’re getting so much from watching me,” I said, “how about some payback? What do you know about these wasps? Where do they come from?”

  Tony shook his head. His pupils caught the moon. “They’re a plague sent from Old Testament God, some say. Others say they’re escaped lab rats. More than that, I’m not at liberty.”

  “You’re not much of a detective. Those were my first two guesses.”

  “I’m not saying I’m in the dark. I’m saying we’re keeping you there―unless you cooperate with us.”

  “I’m not a cooperator,” I said.

  “You agree to give us what you know, and I’ll get clearance to enlighten you.”

  “Tell me what Typhon Industries has to do with this, at least.”

  Tony laughed. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re their stooge. No way I’d give up what we know to a turncoat like you. You’re poor. You’re brown. And you’re working for John White. Makes me sick to my stomach.” He spat in the pine needles. “You and that Tanis Rivera.”