Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “Welcome to the zoo of the future,” Dr. Charon yelled over the din.

  I stood at the railing and had some fun trying not to faint from the stink. I let my brain sort the cacophony. A choir of birds screeched and chirped. A single warbling growl occupied the middle range. A deep thrum underlay the other sounds, like a sawing orchestra of tiny chitinous instruments. Above it all, Cerberus’ howl rose and fell like a virtuoso dying for a solo.

  “You’re telling me,” I yelled, “that they’re never this enthusiastic?”

  “Never,” he yelled back. “They get half this excited at feeding time.”

  “It’s just for me.”

  He nodded.

  “How do they feel about you?”

  He smiled without separating his lips. “I’m a doorknob.”

  “What did I do to deserve this?” I asked of no one in particular.

  Charon let me linger there, probably worried about what would happen if I got any closer. There might be a prison riot. As I bathed in adulation and raw stink, I pondered my life. I’d never been liked―or even known―by more than a couple of people. I usually talked to one person at a time in a secluded place if possible. No one had ever cheered when I walked into a room. No one had ever dissolved into ecstatic screams upon seeing me. Having that happen, there in that zoo from another world, set all sorts of chemicals loose in my bloodstream. My head felt light. My body ached less than usual. It felt―what was the word? Good.

  After a few minutes, things calmed down. As the hound had relaxed with me in the back of the truck, the creatures in the chamber settled down and their din became the usual animal chatter.

  “Shall we descend?” Charon asked.

  I nodded.

  He walked down the stairs. “You’ll notice that we use greenhouse siding to concentrate solar energy for the plant life in our animals’ habitats. But it also holds out prying eyes.”

  “That’s what puzzles me, doc. It seems like you’re trying to keep these things secret, yet you take one out for a morning stroll in plain daylight. You let it scare the devil out of a bunch of immigrants. What gives?”

  “We do that because it is the animals’ purpose,” the doctor said.

  “Nothing has a purpose. Things just live.”

  “Every manmade thing has a purpose. We made these animals for a reason. Those trips into the desert are their sole purpose for existence.”

  We stopped in front of the first enclosure. I peered through the netting. The air was rank with stagnant water. I picked out a spindly form only inches from my nose. It was the size of a fingernail, with long appendages, bluish ovular wings, red eyes, an amber body, and a long proboscis. After I found the first one, I saw a dozen more, and soon, the entire enclosure resolved into tiny insects. Clusters of them covered the surfaces of the pools, patched the netting, colored the leaves of the tropical trees. Thousands of them.

  “These are drosophila flies,” I said, “combined with mosquitoes.”

  “We call them lamiae, after the bloodthirsty Greek monster. You know your insects.”

  “A seventh grade biology student can pick out a drosophila.”

  “Yes. I also imagine Simon Marchette told you. What else did you learn from him?”

  “Your goons showed up pretty quick. He didn’t tell me anything. But I’m not an idiot either. I’ve figured out your recipe: you’re combining blood-suckers with other species.”

  “You’re half-right about the recipe. You’re wrong about Dr. Marchette. Those agents were not ours. They were border patrol.”

  “Border patrol doesn’t arrest citizens, or lock us in abandoned warehouses.”

  A curtain dropped over his face and he turned back to the flies. “The interesting thing about these animals is that they have formed clans. We’ve been breeding them for years―eight to be exact. At first, we only hatched one single organism, which normally would have been foolish, since drosophila flies, like any insect, have a tremendous mortality rate. However, we only had the capacity to produce one. It thrived. We bred it with a mosquito. Their offspring were the hybrid, every time.”

  “Wait. You somehow coerced this monster drosophila-mosquito to get romantic with a regular mosquito. They mated. And the fly-side genetics of their larvae weren’t diluted?”

  “They should have been. The offspring should have been much more mosquito than fly. This was not the case. It took close study of the genome to discover why.”

  I waited for it.

  “Every gene of the hybrid is dominant. That has held true for each species we’ve created.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “How the hell do you make these things?”

  “Only John White himself knows how it is done. As I was saying, these flies have formed themselves into clans. We’ve tracked them. They always associate with the same individuals. They feed together. They mate only with each other. They rest and socialize together. And they go to war together.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “The different clans periodically do battle. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in animals before, save chimpanzees, which are almost as brutal as humans.”

  “Are they fighting over territory?” I asked. “Food?”

  The doctor shook his head. “There is no clear reason. However, they commit terrible atrocities. Butchery of egg clusters. Sucking nymphs dry. Isolating individuals and tormenting them to death.” He wore a thin smile on his face. “It is as if, having been made by man, they are stained with our evil spirit.”

  “What do they eat?” I asked.

  “Why, blood of course. We have vast… stocks of it.” His smile brightened. “Shall we move on?”

  He turned and walked to the facing enclosure before I could respond. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see the rest. I’d come here with the intention of piercing the skin of Typhon Industries; now that I was in, I wondered if I could stomach it. The flies were robust and healthy. They were perfect. If I’d encountered one, I would have been fascinated. Confronted with thousands of mutated, bloodthirsty, warlike hybrids, I felt sick.

  “These you know,” Dr. Charon said, as we faced the opposite enclosure, also draped with netting to keep the insects in captivity. Hundreds of the tarantula hawk wasp-horsefly hybrids carpeted the netting, all edging and shuffling to get as near to me as possible. However, like the flies, they clustered in defined groups, buzzing and gnashing at other groups that strayed too close.

  “I’ve seen these in the outside world. You have an escapee problem.”

  “We’re aware of it,” he said. “We call them harpies for their fleet nature.”

  “Were you aware that one of those escapees flew all the way to the Bosque Del Apache and laid its egg in a whooping crane―one of the ones that died?”

  “Indeed. This species is quite difficult to keep in captivity. They covet freedom. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until they’re just another denizen of the New Mexican desert.”

  I wanted to confront him about Melodía, but I held back. I was there to gather intelligence, not exact revenge on one of John White’s peons.

  Dr. Charon led me past the next pair of enclosures. The one on the right was divided into smaller cubes that housed families of hairless black rats with six legs, flat chitinous torsos, long pink tails, and red eyes―assassin bug-rat hybrids. John White had named them gremlins. Their flesh was charcoal black and their insect shells gleamed like polished evil. They grumbled and squeaked and shuffled in their cages. One of them unfurled its long proboscis at me as I passed. The organ snaked from its face like a party favor. The cage opposite was a warbling madhouse of flying beaked snakes, which Charon called hydras. They wound their feathered tails through the mesh of their cage and chirped their twisted song while licking the air with forked tongues. After these two cages, we visited the empty enclosure of Dracula and Cerberus’ cage, who I let snuffle at my hand for a little while. He―or she―was so o
verjoyed to see me that he couldn’t choose between slurping my palm with his face sucker and flopping on his belly to show off his double genitalia.

  Finally, we stopped in front of a cage where a young bear pranced around a generous habitat with a small, simulated creek, several smooth rocks to lie on, and plenty of toys to bat with his massive paws. His body was burly, hairless, and gray. He swished the water with his long slimy tail, and when he yawned, displayed a pink circular mouth with spirals of barbed teeth. He was a playful lamprey-bear, as happy as could be. His name was Goliath.

  “Have you deduced the pattern yet?” Dr. Charon asked.

  “Fly-mosquitoes. Wasp-horseflies. Rat-assassin bugs. A bloodhound-leech, a Tasmanian devil-vampire bat, and a lamprey-bear. All regular animals bred with hematophages. I can’t quite figure out the python-bird.”

  “The vampire finch, a denizen of the Galapagos Islands. In the wild, they peck wounds into other birds and drink the blood that spills out.”

  I remembered him mentioning the vampire finch during our first conversation at the Bosque. “So, you’ve combined all of the world’s famous blood-eaters with your favorite animals. I’m sure you’ll win some prizes.”

  “Hematophages are slightly less than half of the pattern, and stop saying ‘you.’ I’m an employee.”

  I thought about it while the bear cub with the wet rubbery lamprey skin and hundreds of teeth bounced his burly forelimbs on a big plastic buoy in his play pool. He gave me sidelong glances to make sure I was admiring him. “The other species are all exceptional smellers.”

  “Bullseye,” Charon said.

  “So, you’re breeding macrosmatic hematophages. A smarter man than me wouldn’t ask why.”

  “They’re weapons. The new face of border patrol. The government needed to be able to locate people across vast distances. Thus, we’ve developed animals that can follow scents for miles.”

  “And that are thirsty for blood. The mind that came up with that scheme must be a pearl.”

  “The challenge was incentive,” Charon said. “We could use regular bloodhounds to do our tracking, but they can only track humans whose scent they already have. We needed a tracker who would see their quarry as prey. We also needed a tracker who wouldn’t chase down just any animal. We needed them to hunger for human blood and more particularly the blood of illegal immigrants.”

  “How the hell do you teach an animal to like only the blood of illegal immigrants? That sounds like a fascist fantasy.”

  Dr. Charon’s eyes sparkled as they followed the bear around his cage. “You’re not far off, really. We teach them to be racist.” He swiveled his head slowly until he was staring at me. The casual half-mast eyelids that he usually wore were high and taut. His mouth tightened until his teeth showed. “John White spliced a nugget of human DNA into each chupacabra. Scientists have been mapping every double helix of the human code. Not just for the sequence of proteins but also for function. Other scientists look for criminal behavior or genetically inherited diseases. All well and good. But John White is the true visionary: he isolated the alleles that code humans for prejudice. Those that bond us to people who we perceive as similar and that repel us from people who are different. That instinct to notice the distinctions between your clan and the other guy’s, and to treat his as the enemy. Humans excel at prejudice. It’s one of our great evolutionary advantages. John White perceived this trait, located it, and extracted it. He spliced it into these animals. We train each one to focus that prejudice on Latino people. We train them to thirst for Latino blood above all else. We’ve bred an army of animal tracking devices that search only for people of a particular race.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s impossible. You can’t train animals to perceive race. We’re all human. There’s no genetic difference. How is an animal going to differentiate between a Hispanic American and a Mexican who both look the same and have the same ancestry?”

  Dr. Charon pursed his lips. “Maybe I’ve said too much.”

  “I would say I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble with your boss, but the truth is I don’t give a damn.”

  His face tightened. “And here I thought I was making a new friend.”

  “I’m just like Cerberus over there. I have no choice in any of this.”

  Dr. Charon glanced at the bloodhound wiggling his posterior sucker and staring at me, his eight compound eyes full of longing. Charon’s pupils slowly expanded until they filled his irises. He was seeing something far away. “None of us does. Our courses are set long before the first smirk shared between our parents. Our world is a dictatorship. God is Hitler.”

  “God hasn’t dictated any of this. He’s probably sitting on a fluffy white cloud somewhere scratching his head and wondering whether he should toss a couple thunderbolts down here and pound this whole enterprise to dust.”

  Charon smiled mildly and didn’t say anything.

  We spent some minutes sitting side by side on a bench in a zoo from the far side. The songs of birds never heard anywhere else surrounded us. Animals that should not have existed, but that did, seeming happy and normal, made their quiet animal sounds. Claws clicked on rock. Tongues lolled or lapped. Wings fluttered and fur rustled. They were the sounds of any normal zoo. I felt right at home.

  t five in the morning, I parked my truck and dragged my body down the stairs to my front door. I found Abbey asleep in a patio chair. A medium-sized dog kennel sat on the ground beside her, and the tranquilizer rifle leaned against it. Her arms hugged her chest, and her head lay toppled onto her shoulder. She’d propped her feet on another chair, and crossed her short, plump legs at the ankles. Her pale, freckly face was smooth and still, her mouth slightly open. A strand of orange hair had fallen over her lips. It twitched in time to her breathing. She was cute and tough, and I wondered how a person like her could ever feel lonely. The world was terrible. It was getting worse and worse.

  Whatever Abbey avatar was wandering around dreamland must have noticed the giant watching. Her eyelids fluttered open. Lines creased her forehead. “You lied to me.”

  “I misled you,” I said.

  She propped up in the chair. Her eyes held an early morning squint. “You’re just like all the others.” Her voice was thick and low.

  “Which others?”

  “Men are liars. They’re butterscotch to your face and poison as soon as you leave the room.”

  “I’m not a man,” I said. “I’m just a male. And I’m sorry I lied to you. Whatever’s going on has hurt me and I don’t want it to hurt you.”

  Her green eyes studied me from beneath her rumpled eyelids. “I don’t like you anymore.”

  “You should go home. You’ll like me again after you’ve spent a few hours in your bed.”

  “I won’t go,” she said, “until we have a plan for getting your job back.”

  “I have a new job and I’m holding onto it for the time being.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “You have to tell me what’s going on. I hate being in the dark.”

  I opened my mouth to make a joke, but she cut me off.

  “Tell me!” she yelled. “I’ve done you so many favors. You owe me!” She got up and kicked me in the foot. “Start with the orange dust on your shoes. Then tell me why you smell so funny.”

  I couldn’t. I lacked the powers of narration to lay it all out for her. I could describe individual strands of something larger, but couldn’t see how they connected. The pieces of a big, strange creature lay in my lap, but I couldn’t puzzle them together into a whole. I knew Typhon Industries was producing monsters that thirsted for human blood. I knew that these monsters were being trained to hunt humans. I knew that two of my close friends had disappeared and Typhon Industries’ fingerprints were all over it. I knew tribes of poor people were wandering through the desert and that my countrymen were warring over whether to give them safe harbor. And I knew that somehow, as Marchette had put it, John White was ultimately respons
ible for killing the birds all those long days ago. They were irregular chunks of a jig-sawed whole―that whole was a Frankenstein that I couldn’t perceive.

  Abbey gazed at me with her head tilted to one side. “You look incredibly sad.”

  “My world is collapsing. All I’ve got left is a spider and a very forgiving ex-work colleague.”

  “I haven’t forgiven you yet. Tell me one true thing and I’ll go home.”

  “Simon Marchette is a good man. He was misguided for a while, but he came out on the right side of things.”

  She raised her thin ginger eyebrows. The gray light of dawn fell over her tired features, and she looked worn and mishandled. She belonged, if only for the few moments before the sunbeams hit her fully, in my world. “I’ve been worried about him. He’s a cutie.”

  “I’m worried about him, too. For now, go to bed. And know that you helped me tonight more than I can express in words.”

  “Try,” she said.

  “I can do an interpretive dance. It will involve me collapsing on the ground and sleeping for three weeks. You’ll be moved.”

  She fixed her eyes on mine. The city was silent around us in that big deep breath the world takes between night and day. With each heartbeat, the sky flushed a shade brighter. An arch of orange light bloomed over the Sandía Mountains where the sun flexed its muscles beyond the horizon. “Okay. I’ll leave, but just so I can go home in the sunrise. It’s the most magical time to drive.” She collected her rifle and her cage and walked up my stairs into the land of the normal.

  I tried to remember what I was doing before the bat showed up on my porch. It involved piecing everything together, but I didn’t have the mental wattage to recall my train of thought. Instead, I went to bed, where I passed from my waking life into something so deep it could barely be called sleep.