Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  After what could have been minutes, hours, or a day, the lights in my brain flickered on. My body was a collection of bones and aching muscle that didn’t feel like they were associated with one another in any meaningful way and that I didn’t trust to cooperate if I put any sort of demands on them. I took a risk and opened my eyelids. Nothing important broke. I raised my head and got an eye full of Tony sitting in a chair in the corner of my bedroom.

  “For your own sake, you’d better have brought your gun,” I growled.

  “Sorry. Had to enter on the down-low. This place is being snooped from every angle, including from below. Satan has a special interest in you, little brother.”

  “I’m bigger than you. In three days, when I’m ready to move, I’ll prove it to you. And Satan is nothing compared to what I’ve seen up on Earth lately.”

  “Glad to see you’re getting some perspective,” he said.

  My arm seemed like it would hold together despite the ache in my joints, so I used it to pull the blanket over my head.

  “You went there.” My comforter muffled his voice. I pretended I couldn’t hear it. “C’mon. Dish.”

  “There was a chupacabra in my pine tree,” I said to my sheets. “I thought I’d put it back in its cage before it bit any children.”

  “You caught one of their beasties and you didn’t even think to make us wise to it? I thought we were working together.”

  “I improvised,” I said. “I’m not the type who makes quick choices. I need a dozen or two years to get my ducks in a row.”

  “You chose wrong. My people are not happy.”

  I peeled the blanket from my head. “I’ve never been happy. After seeing what I saw last night, I’m less happy than ever.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Describe.”

  I did. I started with the scene in the desert. I recounted it for him, detail by detail. I left as little out as I could. I sat up and propped myself with a few pillows. By the end of it, I needed a cup of coffee. I told Tony as much.

  “I need something stronger than that,” he said. He was a tiny man in an old chair. The creases in his face ran deep. The gray hairs in his goatee stood out.

  “Let’s start with coffee. That way, we have something to look forward to.”

  He went into my kitchen and started a pot. I got dressed. Neither of my feet turned to dust and neither of my femurs split apart like old spaghetti noodles. My arms didn’t fall from the sockets and my vertebrae didn’t crumble. I brushed the badger out of my teeth and ran my fingers through my hair until it did something sensible. I moved away from my reflection before it scared me into a crisis and plodded to the kitchen. It smelled like sunbeams, Dracula musk, hot coffee, and shoe polish.

  I sat at the bar. Tony slid a cup of coffee at me and leaned on the bar top.

  “You got any food?” he asked.

  “Oodles.”

  “You look like you could use breakfast.” He hitched up his pants and opened the fridge.

  “I’ll take eggs,” I said. “Scrambled. Toast. Butter. You could give me an orange with that if you felt like it.”

  “Coming up.” He started banging stuff around. “You did real well with that thing out in the desert. But I have to say.” He wagged his head. “It was hard for me to hear. Those are my people.” He stopped working to look at me. “They’re yours too.”

  A month ago, I would have told him that I didn’t have any people. But I thought about my father. Long ago, he’d been one of those migrants.

  “Now.” He tapped the eggs on the edge of a bowl, grasped each side of the shell, carefully broke each one in half, and spilled its slime into the bowl. “What about inside the facility? How far did you get?”

  “Far.” I opened my mouth to say more but something stuck in my jaw. Some mechanism inside my body didn’t want to talk.

  He stopped beating the eggs to focus on me. “Well? What did you see?”

  It was the beasties. I didn’t want to rat them out. They liked me. They flocked to me as no one else ever had. I tried to put my reservations away and think about my father. “I saw quite a bit. Probably you already know most of it. You have people on the inside, right?”

  “I’ll tell you what we know,” Tony said. “Nada.”

  “That means nothing.”

  “You need to learn your language.”

  “Spanish is not my language.”

  “It’s your heritage.”

  “It’s not my heritage,” I said.

  “It doesn’t even matter if it’s your heritage or not. It’s your father’s native tongue. That’s not heritage. That’s birthright. You should be bilingual. The fact that you’re not is an outrage. It’s oppression.”

  “My people don’t speak a language. They talk with scent glands and mating calls.”

  “I’m going to start giving you Spanish lessons right now, whether you want them or not.” He held up the frying pan. “Sartén.”

  I sat there.

  “¡Sartén!”

  “Alright,” I said. “Frying pan. Sar-ten.”

  “Your pronunciation is terrible,” he muttered, flicking a pad of butter into the pan and turning on the stove. “Back to Typhon Industries. Which part did you see? Offices? Labs? Did you question anyone?”

  “I talked to one guy,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “A man named Charon,” I said.

  Tony almost dropped the spatula. Then he put it in my face and yelled, “Espátula.”

  “That one’s easy,” I said.

  “¡Repite!”

  I gave him a blank look.

  “Espátula. Repite, por favor.”

  I caught on and gave the word my best shot. It limped across my tongue.

  “Muy bien. You met Dr. Charon? He’s in charge of the daily operation of the lab. He’s one of John White’s top people. What did you get out of him?”

  “That he never sleeps,” I said. “Listen, before I give away all my bargaining chips, what have you done about finding my friend?”

  Tony gave me a hurt look between scraping the eggs around the pan. “Is that really how this is? Bargaining chips? We’re part of the same struggle now. We’re Good Friends. Amigos. You can trust us. We’re doing everything we can to find your girlfriend.”

  “She’s just a friend,” I said. “And I still don’t really know who ‘you’ are.”

  “We help people get around,” he said. “We help them escape la migra and find life-saving work. We reunite families. If a chick from America and a cat from El Salvador fall in love, we hook them up with papers―even marriage if they’re crazy enough to want it.”

  “Isn’t marriage an automatic thing?” I asked. “Get married, become a citizen.”

  “It’s not that easy anymore. There’s a huge waiting period, interviews―all sorts of bureaucratic blood has to be let. It takes years, and during those years, the spouse has to stay abroad―unless they have Good Friends like us. We know a lot of sympathetic lawyers.”

  Tony shoved a plate at me. “Buen provecho. Eat. And tell me what you got out of Charon.”

  I ate a few bites. There is something special about scrambled eggs. Every human on Earth has a slightly different way of cooking them. Every person’s eggs hold a hint to their human mystery. Tony’s eggs had a crisp exterior and contained a gooey gift inside.

  “I saw his zoo,” I said.

  Tony’s eyes got wide.

  “That’s exactly the expression you should be wearing.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Animals. Lots of animals with beaks, claws, fur, scales―the whole gamut.”

  “What was he doing to them? Did you see any beasties?”

  “I did, in that they were all beasties.”

  “How many did you see?” he asked.

  I made a quick count. “Seven.”

  Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Seven is a low number. How come you had to count?”

  “Seven types, dozens or hundreds of each
type,” I said. “In the cases of the bigger ones―the hound, the bear, the bat―there was only one. But the littler ones had obviously reproduced.”

  “Tell me what the little ones were like.”

  “Rats mixed with assassin bugs. Pythons and vampire finches. The wasp-horseflies you saw. And mosquito-drosophila flies.”

  “You realize that what you’re telling me changes everything. This is the moment that I will look back on and realize, yep, that’s when the world was totally damned to hell. It’s like suspecting that aliens have visited and then seeing their spaceship land in New York.”

  “That’s exactly what it was like, but it wasn’t really how I felt. It had felt more like going home. The association leapt into my head and lingered.

  “The mystery is how they reproduce, since we know John White can only make one being at a time. You need two.”

  “For animals that reproduce sexually, yeah, which all of these do. But I think the more important question is how does he make these things? You can’t just make an animal. Even if you can splice a bunch of DNA together, all you have is some DNA. An animal needs a parent, usually two. You need a mother, at least, to carry it to term. How does a thing get born without a parent?”

  “That is another of the mysteries we’re trying to solve,” Tony said. “We suspect that he places a fertilized embryo in the mother of the larger species.

  “That wouldn’t work. Especially in mammals. You need some compatibility between mother and offspring. You don’t see surrogate pigs giving birth to human babies. A walrus can’t give birth to a rhino.”

  “We have heard something, but it sounds―made up.”

  “Have you been listening to me at all?” I asked. “I’m living a fairytale, one of the old German ones where Red Riding Hood actually gets eaten and Cinderella’s sisters chop off their toes to make the slipper fit.”

  “What I’ve heard sounds stupid,” he said.

  “I’ve been talking stupid all morning,” I said. “Spill it.”

  Tony shrugged expansively. “We’ve heard chatter about a hot springs. Magic waters and what not.”

  I waited.

  When he saw I wasn’t talking, he went on. “You know how people are always chinning about hot springs with special properties, medicinal and so on. Been the wag for centuries. Well, John White captured one. He built his headquarters around it. The thing has a few apertures high on the slope of the mountain. They form a creek that flows down into a channel he’s built. But the main springs is smack in the middle of his floor plan. I’ve seen blueprints―obtained with considerable criminal infractions. It bubbles up in a big chamber―he calls it Mount Olympus. Word is, he’s doing experiments in the pool. Not only that, but the room is designed to open. It’s rigged with a huge hydraulic system. If you show up at the exact right time on the exact right day, you can see the whole room split down the middle to let the sun shine in. It only happens on one day a year, or so we think.”

  I sat there and stared at him.

  He gave me a cagey smile. “Do you want to know what day?”

  I already knew.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” he said. “It rained at the Bosque Del Apache that day.”

  “You’re saying that there’s a connection between that room, the chupacabras, and the dead birds. I’ve heard it. I’m not buying it.”

  “It’s as plausible as anything. Whatever happens when that room opens up is connected to all of this: the chupacabras, the Minutemen, the migrants in John White’s prison, and the dead birds. Everything is connected. That room has been there for seven-plus years, and there are seven chupacabras. In police work, we call that a pattern.”

  “Yep,” I said, “which doesn’t add up. If it’s been there for seven full years, there should be eight chupacabras.”

  Tony cocked an eyebrow at me. “Have you seen a beastie that was only a couple weeks old?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Then there’s a new one,” he said. “God only knows what monstrosity John White is swaddling up there. It’s part of a pattern, and the pattern’s only going to get worse.”

  I didn’t care about patterns. Every damn thing could be connected to every other damn thing, and I would have lived out my happy life below ground and behind walls. But the few people and hundreds of animals I cared about had been swallowed up by the world’s messes. Like a fog descending, images of my scaly, slimy, forked tongued and whip-tailed friends filled my mind. I wouldn’t see them again. It hadn’t hit me until that moment. I was dizzy. I had to close my eyes and hold onto the bar with both hands. It felt like I’d lost custody of my children.

  It took me a few minutes to get a grip on myself. When I did, I opened my eyes, found Tony floating out there in the bobbing world, and tried to breathe. After I managed to stuff some air into my lungs, I found myself thinking not about any of that, but about a tall dark-haired woman scientist who I missed more than my own father.

  Tony’s brow was furrowed. He looked at me like you do an old person when you think they’re about to have a heart attack and you wonder what you should do about it.

  “My friend, Dr. Hernandez. Have you found her?”

  “Working on it,” Tony said. “We’re busy.”

  “I’m letting hell hounds sniff my finger tips and you’re too busy to find my friend. What am I doing any of this for?”

  Tony gave me a cautious look. I might have erupted a little louder than I meant to. “We’ll get more people on her. For the time being, you’ve got to hold yourself together. Keep playing their game. Go off into the desert and use your charms on their beasties. Persecute some more innocent families.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “My new pal Dr. Charon mentioned that a big operation is in the pipeline. Operation Velvet Ant.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No idea. He was hush-hush.”

  “Make that your number one priority. If they’ve got a big operation in the works, we’ve got to throw a wrench into it.”

  “I’ll open my ears,” I said.

  He walked into my bedroom, where he scrambled up through the window and out into the day. I finished my eggs and tried to figure out what to do with myself. A couple of empty eggshells sat in the kitchen sink. They looked exactly like my life.

  spent some hours straightening up my house and my headspace. The house was quick and easy. Once I finished, I groomed and dressed, fixed myself a weak whiskey and water, and set myself up at the bar.

  My headspace was tougher. A myriad of problems danced around in there. I tried to focus my shaky brain on conniving machinations that would smash the Good Friends into the Minutemen, hopefully obliterating both. But Melodía wouldn’t leave me alone. I sat, sipped booze, and saw her dark hair, her blood shot eye, her long slender limbs. I could smell her as if she were standing beside me. I’d spent most of my best moments over the past twenty years looming over her with the scent of her lavender shampoo wafting into my nose. I called her house and listened to her voice on the answering machine. I thought about going to her lab even though I knew she wouldn’t be there. With no leads―except the orange dust―I didn’t know what else to do.

  In the end, I called the Captain. I considered driving to his house instead, but I didn’t want him to get the mistaken impression we were becoming friends. He answered from a place whirring with white noise. Either he was driving on the freeway, or he was in one of those contraptions where you skydive indoors.

  “We don’t need you today, Mr. Stick,” he said as a way of greeting. I appreciated that he cut right to the chase.

  “I met your roomful of monsters last night. I met Dr. Charon too. Pretty interesting guy if you’re into club drinks and Latin.”

  “He’s a good puppet when all his strings are attached correctly,” the Captain said. “He gives the puppies their chow, and that’s all we really need out of him. He most definitely was not supposed to take you into Hades.”

  “It’s too late for regrets, Captain.
He told me about Operation Velvet Ant, too. Now that I’ve met your brood of vampires, I think you should let me in on your big plan. I know your monsters’ natural behavior backwards and forwards. I’ve been studying their genetic forefathers for my entire life―or at least half of them.”

  “You think you know what you’re talking about,” The Captain said, “but you don’t.”

  “I know that there’s a little genetic sprig of human in each one. I know you’re training them to be racist.”

  “Cultural discernment is what we call it, because we’re politically correct and all. And if you think we don’t have biologists who specialize in each one of our creatures’ gene pools, then you haven’t been thinking hard enough.” A car horn beeped on his side of the line. A few other horns followed. “I’ll be in contact when we have instructions for you. Until then, sit in your room and keep your mouth shut.”

  “I’m getting in my car as soon as I’ve eaten my breakfast. I’ll be popping by your little enclave in an hour or so.”

  “You won’t be admitted. Listen, I’ll send you a babysitter if you’re lonely. Just stay away until you’re told to come. You frazzle the animals. You rile them up. It interferes with their training.”

  “You don’t get it. I’m in. I’m a Minuteman. I know about Operation Velvet Ant. I can help you plan it.”

  “We have it under control. Your only job is to sit on a bench and look pretty.”

  The line went dead.

  I hung out at my bar some more. My brain jogged in place. It didn’t get anywhere. Quiet as a shadow, Ralph crept from beneath the fridge. He climbed the handles of the drawers beside my sink as if they were a ladder designed especially for eight-legged beings. He crawled across the narrow ledge of counter in front of the sink and leapt to the bar top. I showed him my palm. He crept into the basket of my fingers and ticked his feet up and down against my calluses. His belly hair brushed my skin in a sensation just shy of a tickle. Ralph was sneaky. He knew how to get what he wanted.

  I picked up the phone and dialed Tanis Rivera’s number.

  “John Stick. What an unexpected delight.”

  “Skip it,” I said. “I want you to do something for me.”