Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Ned said.

  “So what the hell am I doing here?”

  “The boss speaks. I obey. He wants the zookeeper. I use the zookeeper.”

  “You’re a real independent thinker. That’s what I like about you.”

  He blew a kiss at me. “What I love about you is your way of holding a guy so tender-like. I’ve never been hugged as sweetly.”

  That round went to Ned.

  Rex stood alone nearby with his rifle in his hands. He stared at the circle of people seated in the dirt. His mouth and eyes were numb.

  “What about them?” I asked Ned, gesturing toward the cluster of petrified men and women. “Off to jail?”

  He fake grinned. “You did good today.”

  “You gonna give them some water at least?” I asked.

  “What do you care? You’re our monster handler. You’ve done your job. Drive back to Albuquerque and let us do ours. In this operation, you know what you need to know and feel thankful. Ignorance is bliss.”

  As Rex and I climbed into my truck, Ned pulled one of the prisoners, a short dark man wearing rags and with bangs that hung in his eyes, to his feet and marched him into the white van near the woman in medical scrubs. The woman with the hard and beautiful face tried to rise and they pushed her back down. I drove away. In my rear view mirror, the two men drew the beast toward the same white van. Then my tires kicked up a cloud of dust and I could see nothing more.

  I stared at the winding dirt road before us. I had a sick feeling in my guts. I’d learned some stuff to feed Tony, but recounting it wouldn’t be any fun.

  “Those people,” Rex said. “Coming hundreds of miles across the border, filthy and poor. And for what?”

  “Work.”

  “What work? If there was work up here, I wouldn’t be living in the campgrounds.” His face twisted with bitterness, a comfortable mask for him. His wrinkles were exactly where they’d grown accustomed to. “They must have it rough back home if they’re willing to go through all this just to come to a country where they won’t do any better. Suckers of the world hoofing it to America.”

  “They’re just people,” I said. “Trying to make it whatever way they can. Give them a break.”

  “You don’t get it. What I’m trying to say. Those Mexicans are just like me.”

  fter I’d dumped Rex back in the dirt circle he now called home―and reissued an offer for him to crash at my place―I ended up sitting at my bar. I slid the phone toward me, despite how much I loathed that machine. But I had news for Tony that would wind a strand or two of web around his neck. I planned on yanking the strands until all the spiders ended up in a ball biting each other. Then maybe I could sneak off in the tumult.

  I sat in the darkness of my apartment, lining up my thoughts. I treasured that space, where I could predict and order everything and living beings followed natural laws. I held Ralph in my hands and let his coarse belly hairs prick my palms. He twitched with every sound, vibration, or alteration of light in his tiny sphere of the world. He was a furry handful of intuition wrapped up in a primordial package of sensors and muscle. He behaved according to the laws of neither good nor evil, and was too inconsequential to get ensnared in the wrangling affairs of humans.

  I put some pieces together. I’d met three chupacabras: the wasp, the bat, and the hound. All three were chimeras of hematophages and another animal. I knew that John White had genetically engineered them somehow, and that he also ran a prison for undocumented people. I’d learned that morning that he used at least one of his chupacabras to hunt down these same people. That marked the first connection I’d made since the day the birds died. It also made sense: John White’s company built animals as border patrol devices. That explained why two such disparate enterprises as a genetics lab and a prison would be housed under the same banner; it also explained why he’d recruited the Minutemen. They knew the area, carried their own armaments, and had plenty of motivation.

  The rest made no sense at all. No scientist, no matter how mad, could combine Tasmanian devils and vampire bats, much less leeches and bloodhounds. And none of it had any logical connection at all to the birds―or to me―unless I could take Marchette’s crazy theories seriously.

  Ralph jolted particularly hard. Outside, the crickets played their seesaw harmonies and the trees quaked their craggy limbs in the desert wind. Ralph spun his body clockwise, toward the window overlooking my front patio. Like a compass, he pointed toward danger instead of north. He hunkered his cephalothorax low and raised one of his back legs. The stiff hairs on his abdomen prickled like the finest cactus needles. He could kick a cloud of them into the air. They’d get into your eyes and embed themselves in your skin, and God help you if they made their way into your mouth. It was his first line of defense. His posture told me that a potential threat lurked in the night.

  I considered retrieving my gun from its safe and felt pleasantly surprised I’d only now had that instinct since the birds fell from the sky. I’d considered it a means of self-annihilation for so long that I’d never pondered it for any other purpose, until now.

  Leaving it in the safe, I dropped Ralph in his terrarium. Without bothering with any lights, I eased open the inner door and pushed the screen ajar several inches with my toe. The scent of aroused musk glands and rusty metal shouldered their way into the crack and punched up my nose. Whatever exuded that scent was either in high gear for mating season or very territorial. I stood quietly, breathed through my mouth, and listened. I roved my gaze across the shadows and got a practical lesson in how useless human eyes are in darkness. Our cones are short and shoddy. We really are one of the worst animals in the world. We’d abandoned all of our useful muscles and senses and teeth and claws, all in the name of tools. We could make a killing machine out of a stick and a shard of rock, but at night, we’d stumble over a saber toothed tiger and not even know it until we had two swords sunk into our guts.

  The shadows of my pine tree fluttered. Claws clicked on bark. I stood there with my eyes wide, seeing nothing. The hidden creature licked its chops.

  The bat had returned. It made sense for a beast that had impregnated three females and attacked Crazy Patty to exude strong musk. I put two and two together and figured out that it didn’t smell like metal. The monster probably toted a quart of blood in its belly. The hound stunk like blood too, though I didn’t want to guess what kind they were feeding it. Vampiric animals also explained the stench in the backs of all the Typhon Industries vans.

  I hung out in the crack of my door. The animal didn’t make any more noises, but I could feel him lurking in the creaking night shadows. I considered giving the Captain a call, luring him onto my patio, and coaxing the bat into attacking him. I bet he tasted like cheap hamburger and Diet Coke. Instead, I crept back into my home and dialed Abbey’s number.

  “Hello?” she said around something crunchy.

  “I need you to come over here.”

  “Why are you whispering?” she whispered.

  “I have a visitor.”

  “Are you talking about who I think you are?” she asked.

  “Come on over and find out. Park your car a block or two away and approach on your tiptoes. He’s sitting in the same tree as before.”

  “Keep ’im there.” She hung up before I could ask how one kept a bat from flying away.

  I snuck back to the door and listened. The patio was quiet, but the creature’s smell was still strong. Eventually, my mind calmed and I acclimated to the soft noises of the night. Amidst the other soft night sounds, a pair of lungs pumped in my pine tree. The creature breathed deeply and slowly, emitting a slight rasp on each exhale. I fixed my eyes on the dark space where that breath hovered above the earth. I waited for my vision to adjust to the darkness, but even when it did, I couldn’t pick out any variance in the dark boughs and needle clusters that might have been the outline of my visitor.

  I pondered how life must have been for him. No oth
ers of his kind roamed the earth. Bats usually lived in colonies, though Tasmanian devils were solitary. Maybe he was lucky and he’d inherited the Tasmanian side of his ancestry. A bat living alone with no others like it would be a lonely being. Maybe that was why he sought me out and perched outside my door. Maybe he sensed a kindred spirit, someone else who carried a genetic code suited to living in a society but whose body didn’t make it very easy.

  I stood in my doorway and duped myself with these kinds of thoughts for a while. The beast didn’t move. For a half hour or so, we perched and stood together in the same proximity, much like my father and I had over the years, though with only the music of the night breezes, crickets, and distant traffic to listen to instead of my father’s Mexican polka music.

  A hellish bleating knocked me out of dreamland. The spot I was staring at in the pine boughs exploded. A dark hairy form burst from it, showering my patio with pine needles and twigs. I ducked back through my screen door. The beast hurtled into my cheap plastic patio table, breaking off two of the legs. The thing was a furious ball of wings and black fur, and it shrieked like a tortured lamb. I flicked on my porch light so I could get a look at it. As man and monster blinked in the glare, Abbey leapt down the steps with the butt of a rifle in her armpit. A feathered quill blossomed from the bat’s shoulder. It screamed and scuttled across my patio on its wingtips and hind legs, tried to climb another tree, fell on its back, and passed out.

  I stepped past my screen door and waited for the beast to spring back to life and lunge for the nearest jugular. Abbey stood at the foot of the steps, rifle aimed, breathing heavily. A tip of the bat’s right wing twitched, but it didn’t otherwise stir.

  “I think I got him,” she said.

  I spotted another dart in the bat’s rump. “You’re Annie Oakley.”

  “He better not die. Posterity would judge me.”

  I pulled the darts out and examined them. “He should be alright. This dosage should knock him out for a while, though.”

  Abbey was still panting. “He ran like a vampire bat. Most bats don’t run on the ground. They hop into the air and fly as soon as possible. Vampire bats have adapted to be able to run on their wingtips. They land on the ground near their prey, then run up and attach to feed. It’s easier to sneak up on a cow or a capybara that way.”

  “So, our hypothesis was right. This thing is half devil, half vampire.”

  “Yeah.” Abbey squeezed her eyes closed and held them that way.

  “You’re still not dreaming,” I said.

  She popped them open and stared at the bat. She squeezed them closed again.

  “It moved!”

  She opened her eyes and aimed the rifle.

  “Just kidding.”

  “Not funny.” Abbey balanced the butt of the gun on her hip and crept toward the bat. She ran her fingertips along the long slender lines of muscle and bone in the wings. “These evolved from fingers. Bats essentially flap through the air with webbed hands. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “He has perfect vampire bat wings, which is impossible. If this were some sort of mutant or genetically bred hybrid, it would be a mess. This combination of Tazzie and vampire bat―it shouldn’t look this good.”

  Once again she was right. None of it was possible.

  Abbey stood up straight. “So, we bagged a brand new species of animal that by all rights shouldn’t exist. What do we do now, other than try to wake up from the dream whichever one of us is dreaming?”

  “The first order of business is a paternity test.”

  She nodded. “We’ll draw some blood. If your theory about our pregnant Tazzies is right, then this is the discovery of a lifetime. We’ll have zoo babies that will be the hit of the century―if they’re carried to term.”

  I bet they would. A resilient energy inhabited these chupacabras, as if they were imbued with a particularly potent dose of life.

  Abbey stared at me. “You’re hiding something from me―again.”

  I sighed.

  “Don’t even think about lying. I see all.”

  “You might want to turn off those powers of detection for a little while. I’m standing in quicksand and it goes pretty deep.”

  “Share. I deserve it.”

  “I’m not saying a word.”

  “Not with your mouth. Your face says it all.”

  “Stop reading my mind and help me find a cage for this thing.”

  “We’re caging it? For the zoo?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. I know who it belongs to, but I’m not sure if I should give it to them.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because they’re evil.”

  “Well I shot our little friend here with a zoo tranquilizer dart. As far as I’m concerned, it belongs to the city.”

  “It may not be that simple.” I thought of the new director, Georgia Tameed Schultz. “The zoo may be compromised.”

  She pursed her lips and stared at the sleeping monster. “Should we set him free?” She posed the question like I would have―with the reluctance of a person conditioned to lock the things they cared about in little rooms so that they could watch over them with great diligence.

  “We could drive him out into the desert and let him go.”

  “He would starve. If you remove an animal from its habitat and insert it into a radically new one, it doesn’t adapt. It can’t find food. It dies a slow and awful death. We might as well just put him out of his misery.”

  “We could drop him near the river. There are lots of little critters for him to suck on.”

  “Look at him! He doesn’t eat little critters. He sucks the blood out of big fat housecats. He attacks horses in their sleep. He needs lots of blood every day. A vampire bat feeds on mammals twenty times its size. This thing should be biting the arteries of killer whales. Field mice and turtles won’t cut it.”

  I poked the bat with my toe. His body was firm with healthy muscle. He looked much smaller in the light with his wings limp. He probably weighed twenty pounds. His body was the size of a large cat, only with a stockier build. “Seems like he’s doing just fine in Albuquerque. Maybe this is the perfect ecosystem for him. Should we just set him loose in the city?”

  “Eventually, somebody credible is going to see him. They’ll get a picture. Then animal control will hunt him down.”

  “Or people will just point their guns at the sky and open up. More guns live in this city than people. I’d put the chances of a pistol taking the first shots over a camera.”

  Abbey put her finger on her lip. “We’re in a pickle, aren’t we?”

  “You could get a travel kennel from the zoo, just for the time being.”

  “So we can cage him for a few hours? A day at most? He’ll need blood.”

  “We’ll need a cage whatever we decide, unless you want to stuff him in your Volkswagen and take him on a driving tour. When he wakes up on the Interstate, you’ll have a problem.”

  “I’ll go get the cage.” She held the rifle out to me.

  I waved it away. “I’ll bring him into my apartment. That way if he wakes up, he won’t fly off into the night.”

  “You’re taking him inside?” She looked at me as if I were a crazy person. “Have you ever seen a Tasmanian devil when it’s threatened? It has a mouth like a crocodile and a temper like a toddler possessed by Satan. Those Bugs Bunny cartoons weren’t lying. He’ll turn into a tornado. With wings. He’ll tear your apartment to shreds. You’ll never get the smell out.”

  “Then you better get going before he wakes up.”

  She hesitated halfway up the steps. “Stick?”

  I looked at her.

  “This is the weirdest night of my life.”

  I wished I could have said the same.

  I was on the road ten minutes after Abbey left. I wrapped the Bat in a blue camping tarp and rope. I tied him up like a special Christmas present you’d leave on the doorstep of your worst enemy. I
folded his wings up around his body and secured his back feet in a bundle of claws that stuck out the bottom of the package. His face hung from the other. He purred gently in his stupor. With his bat face, pink ears, and slight overbite, he was pretty cute.

  I buckled him into the passenger seat of my truck and drove north through the cloudless night. A stripe of cold white stars pricked holes in the eternal darkness of space. Space looked dark, but it wasn’t. It was simply nothing. An absence of light, heat, matter, or energy. As I drove north, the city lights faded and the fainter stars peeked down. These vast suns, some of them bigger than ours, succumbed to the petty street and porch lights of my dingy city. Just like the parade of people who had been waving their hands in my face so I couldn’t see the greater machinations doing their work. Putting my father behind bars. Stealing my best friend. Corrupting the other and using him as a cheap ploy to get me to play ball. Extricating me from the work I’d devoted my life to.

  No more. I hurtled toward that big star pulling me ever inward. I had to square with it before it sucked me too close and obliterated me altogether. Abbey’s timing in shooting the bat couldn’t have been better. He’d buy my way in.

  At Paseo Del Norte, a thoroughfare like a headband across the northern part of the city, I nearly turned west. The wrong way. Melodía lived on the west side. Her disappearance without a word sat in my lower bowel like a cramp I couldn’t shake. Maybe that’s all love was: a stomach ache.

  I wanted a drink.

  Beside me, the bat snored like an old woman with bronchitis. He oozed pheromones. The cab of my truck filled with his stench, making my nostrils sting and the back of my throat fill with phlegm. I drove as smoothly as I could and took the less worn streets. When I reached a span of smooth asphalt, I sped. I stuck in the left hand lane and flicked my lights at anyone in my path. I rode a few bumpers. I figured if the cops pulled me over, they’d go blind from the animal musk as soon as they stuck their faces in my window. Either that, or I could show them a real live vampire and watch them faint like Victorian ladies with their corsets stretched too tight.