Scarlet Stiletto - the Second Cut

by Phyllis King

  I had my gun out but not quick enough and the mutant threw Ralph to the ground. One minute Ralph was there, next, his head was rolling down the dirty sidewalk, and the sushi was all over the concrete.

  I did what I had been trained to do. Emptied four rounds into the feline and then stood back and watched as the damn beast morphed back into human. A woman with four gun shot wounds to the body, Edinburgh style. Two in the chest, one in the forehead, and one in the genitals. For good luck.

  So now here I am. Facing a murder charge. Fighting for my Xenos badge. What do they say? Life’s a bitch, and then you die.

  Well, not me. Not yet. At least not today.

  I’m half past caring and it isn’t even lunch time. It was cold. Of course. Heat and dust outside, but in here, in this hermetically sealed crypt, it was just the right temperature to stop bacteria growing. It’s cold in other places too. Operating theatres; morgues; the holdings. Anywhere to stop the rot spreading, the fungus blossoming. The chain reaction. Xenos-growth.

  I shivered and pulled the cashmere cardigan tighter across my shoulders.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  I turned to the voice. I’d smelt him standing there about five minutes before, but figured it was all part of the test. So I didn’t turn around until he actually spoke to me. No sniffing, no mind reading. Act like a regular human.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘But thanks for asking.’

  ‘You’re not thirsty?’ He came over to me, standing stiffly in his white lab coat. Did they think I’d open up to him if I thought he was a real doctor? I’d done the training. I knew the drill.

  I shook my head. He introduced himself. ‘I’m Dr Fahour.’ I said nothing.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Dr Fahour. ‘Let’s get on with it, shall we? Could you please state for the record your name, rank and special ops force?’

  ‘Ariana Stephanphanos, Investigator, Xenos Task Force, Melbourne branch.’

  ‘And Miss Stephanphanos, you’ve read the charges against you? You’ve waived your right to counsel, I see.’

  ‘This is only a preliminary hearing and I...’

  Dr Fahour put up his hand to silence me. ‘Murder is a very serious charge. Shooting a civilian four times while they were out on their evening run...’

  This time, I interrupted him. ‘It was night. Cats hunt at night. She was looking for food.’

  ‘She wasn’t a cat.’

  ‘She was when I shot her. She was when she ripped my partner’s head off.’

  ‘Autopsy showed no trace of feline in her body or even in her DNA.’

  ‘Well, they were wrong. She was a cat. I could smell it on her. I didn’t even need to look into the yellow of her eyes to see that.’

  How could I be so sure? Well, there are only two things you need to know about me. The first is that I am one hundred per cent human; the second is that I am trained to kill those who are not.

  Perhaps there is a third thing. And that is the reason I was trained in Xenos identification in the first place.

  You see, I have a sort of sixth sense about spotting the animal within. I can see it in the dilation of the pupils, in the way they grunt or squawk under questioning, or in the way they run unnaturally fast. But it is more than that. Any competent Xenos Killer can do what I do. But I go further, deeper; I can sense the animal at a molecular level.

  And the irony of it is that it appears this is an ancient gift, one that separated the Homo sapiens from the apes millennia ago. So it’s not a human trait I have; it’s a long buried animal one.

  I work for Humint. That’s short for Human Intelligence. That’s something else you should know, but not even my own mother does. I had to sign a lot of documents when I joined. Legally binding ones. Signed on veal parchment and dipped in blood. My blood.

  Join Humint and you’re the Government’s for life. Every time we go into the HQ, we step into glass pods that electronically scan us for hidden devices and do a resonance sweep for rogue DNA. A blast of freezing air followed by blinding laser light nukes the last traces of the outside world so you don’t contaminate the grid. Join Humint, and you have to swear you’ll lie about your job for the rest of your life. Join Humint and swear you’ll never identify another Humint or Xenos member on the outside, for as long as you live.

  You could be in a restaurant, a department store or the dentist’s waiting room, and if a colleague or former colleague was there as well, you’d have to pretend that you’d never seen them before.

  Spying hasn’t got any easier over the years. In fact, since the animal surfaced within, it’s become harder, riskier. Let’s just say that the methods we’ve employed to eradicate the gene mutations aren’t pretty.

  ‘You were approached to work for Humint while still at university?’ asked Dr Fahour. ‘You joined without hesitation.’

  ‘Sure, I was going nowhere in my doctoral thesis on Charles Le Brun’s Line of Animality theory in the 21st century.’

  ‘It says here that ethics approval had been withdrawn.’

  ‘It was a misunderstanding. A conservative on the ethics board. He was a Catholic priest. I was never going to get the research past him.’

  Even now, it annoyed me. ‘I simply asked someone whose child had Cri du Chat Syndrome to participate in a stem cell sampling.’

  ‘Your report says you were going to splice it with actual feline DNA, ‘said Fahour.

  ‘Would the atom bomb have got made if scientists had always erred on the side of caution?’ I spoke without thinking, as usual.

  ‘You don’t think that’s an insensitive thought to have around me?’ Fahour’s tone was icy.

  Shit. Caught out. Fahour was an Arabic name. Under the circumstances of the last atomic war in Iraq, that was an insensitive analogy. ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Are you just saying that because you think it’s appropriate?’

  ‘No, really, I am sorry. Look, do you have to write down my comment in the file? I know it was insensitive, right?’

  ‘But you still made the comment.’

  I looked at Dr Fahour and smiled. Tried to act ‘normal’. I had gone through my list this morning before facing the Tribunal: my ‘Things to Say and Do to Make Yourself Look Normal’ list. I thought I had everything down pat. The sincere smile, the initial inquiry into the man’s general health and well being. Comments about the weather.

  Not following the guidelines always tripped me up.

  Well, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?

  Facing the murder charge.

  ‘And what are you thinking now?’ asked Dr Fahour, peering at me from over his bifocals.

  ‘Why you didn’t opt for laser eye surgery.’

  ‘That’s another insensitive comment. Are you prone to them?’ he replied, dryly.

  ‘It was a joke,’ I tried to bluff. The fact is I never really knew where the boundary was. This is why I was so good at my job.

  ‘Actually, my job requires that I suppress human qualities like humor,’ I said.

  ‘Is that a joke?’ Dr Fahour asked. I saw him writing furiously and didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing. Now, if he was a dog, I would be able to tell you what he was thinking by the twitch of his left nostril. If he was a mullato-canine, a kind of transverse DNA sub stem you have probably never come across, then even though canine traits are well buried, I can sense them. No, not smell, it’s more psychic than that.

  ‘Do I get to state for the record that I’m innocent?’ I asked.

  Dr Fahour glanced down at his folder, and flipped a page. ‘Let’s move on, Ariana - you don’t mind if I call you by your first name, do you, Ariana? You graduated top of your crypto-class, were fast-tracked through Xenos-morph and then a year at the CIA Academy in an exchange program at Langley; and then back for a stint at ASIO before Humint signed you up. Ah, yes. That was about the same time as your marriage breakdown.’

  ‘Well, it’s hard to keep a marriage on track when you have to lie to every
one about what you do.’

  ‘Your superior officer advised you against the match in the first place. Says here you refused to believe an operative and civilian marriage could have been doomed.’

  I frowned, remembering the checklist. Should I be insulted at this intrusive personal remark or not? Should I comment? The problem was my SO had been right. Only a genius with aspergers like me would have ignored all the warning signs.

  ‘Then, shall we go on,’ intoned Fahour. ‘After your husband’s apparent suicide by poisoning, you were recruited into the Xenos-task force after the re-introduction of myxomatosis in outback Australia led to a human encephalitis outbreak.’

  ‘They needed teams in there immediately. Operation Spinifex was a success.’

  ‘But you wiped out an entire Aboriginal tribe, and a sheep station.’

  ‘They were infected.’ I shuddered as I recalled those awful screams. The fur that covered their bodies, the limping, and the terrible twitching and finally, as the virus exploded out of their membranes, the rivers of blood that dissolved into the red earth...

  ‘You received a special citation, a Commonwealth Bravery Award and the John Howard Peace Prize. Impressive.’ Dr Fahour smiled and peered at me over his glasses. I wondered if he’d ever considered a lupine implant. They work quite well. Especially for night vision.

  ‘I was just doing my job.’

  ‘Explain it to me.’

  ‘The Xenos taskforce was set up back last century, although no one except a select few knew of its existence then. You can trace the line of inquiry back to the 17th century, when Charles Le Brun’s groundbreaking work on the similarities between human and animal physiognomies and the treatise of de la Chambre alerted the early scientific community to the possibilities.

  ‘And then, of course, as rumors of the experiments came to light, writers stole the ideas and used them in their work, only people thought them simply the fantastic ravings of the creative mind,’ I said.

  ‘The Island of Dr Moreau?’ Dr Fahour asked, leaning forward. I could smell his interest pique.

  I nodded. ‘It’s still studied as a work of dystopian fiction, but the actual scientific paper he based it on is held at the Bibliotheque de lÁncienne Faculte de Medecine in Paris.’

  ‘But the Faculty was destroyed in the Second World War,’ Dr Fahour said. ‘Convenient.’

  ‘It wasn’t destroyed, just moved. As soon as they occupied France, the Nazis took all the documents held there relating to the human-animal mutations that had been recorded. It became the basis for Mengele’s little known experiments with hybrid sequencing.’

  ‘That’s just a wild rumor!’ exclaimed Fahour. By now, his eyes were opening wider, glistening like a child who has been given a push-pop with endless sour dipping flavor. Disgusting, yet strangely compelling. I could tell I had him hooked.

  ‘The only reason no one found the evidence was that the Americans took it back with them when they liberated the concentration camps. It wasn’t only nuclear weapons being developed by émigré scientists, you know. The British soon got wind of it, and their espionage has always been better and more ruthless. By the 1980s, their animal experimentation had taken a more sinister turn.’

  Was that a twitch I saw in Fahour’s cheek, a little patch of hair forming under his eyebrow? I glanced at his fingernails, which seemed a little longer and sharper than before, and his hands were twisting with a claw like movement. I forced my breathing to become slower. Lower my blood pressure, delay the fight or flight reflex as I was taught. There is a specific way of dealing with animals. Especially when you are the meat.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Fahour. ‘This is an interesting story -’

  ‘Humint was established back in 1985. At the time scientists began gene sequencing, they noticed something more than the fact that we are so closely related to apes that it was only a sharp right hand turn of chance and biology that we ended up running the planet and they ended up the hunted. No, it’s more than genes in common, because, and this might shock you, we have about 58 per cent of genes in common with an eggplant using the Bayesian estimation of Genomic Distance. Think about that.

  ‘What scientists found truly terrifying was that the bridge between human and animal wasn’t a couple of percent that made all the difference. It was the junk DNA they thought wasn’t important that held the key. No one knew when the cloning experiments first started that the sequence of junk DNA would be turned on so rapidly and that in just one generation, the species boundary could be breached if animal implants were grafted to humans.

  ‘I guess it’s no real surprise I ended up working in the Xenos Task Force. After all, my father was one of the scientists who experimented with animal-human transplants, and even though he injected himself with the virus, it was after I was born, so I am clean. We have regular monthly blood tests to check that contamination hasn’t occurred. You just have to be very careful. I, for instance, never let anyone buy me a drink, and I am vigilant in checking for GM foods. So I never eat out. So I guess that’s one reason I don’t date much.’

  ‘An interesting rationale,’ said Fahour.

  ‘The other reason is that I am sick of questioning and wondering and testing. I’ve had relationships with men who have ended up in the holdings for traces of baboon or reptile,’ I said.

  Fahour stepped away from me and licked his lips.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. It can be hard to tell, even with the pin prick test. Animal nature comes out in behavior, more often than not, so sometimes even I can miss shedding skin if I’m caught up in the passion of the moment.’

  ‘So you sleep around?’

  ‘I’m sexually active. And yes, I use protection. I’m not that careless. No, you don’t need to write that down - look, I’ve told you before, I’ve already been to psych to debrief on the Tascano Incident.’

  Even as I said it I wanted to cry. Ralph Tascano. My partner for eight years. I didn’t shit without Ralph knowing about it first, and now he was dead. And I was alone.

  Fahour looked up at me and pushed the glasses back firmly onto his face. I could smell the perspiration emanating from his pores. The slight whiff of his adrenal secretions, the way his pupils dilated and then contracted in the hard light that streamed through the windows of the conference room. I wanted to put my sunglasses on my self, but under the circumstances, didn’t think it was a good idea.

  After all, despite my DNA sheet, I was being accused now.

  How ironic.

  ‘Tell me about what happened that night,’ Dr Fahour asked. I could sense his heart rate climbing down now, and tried to imagine the blood pushing through his veins. It was hard to break old habits. That’s what made people nervous around me.

  ‘There’s nothing much to tell as I put everything in the report. We got a tip off that some hybrids were squatting in the old Docklands area, behind the Arkeley Tower block. They’d found an abandoned town house complex, we were told. A passing child had rung in saying they’d smelt something funny’

  ‘Funny?’ Dr Fahour crouched forward. Damn, I could now see the perspiration on his skin, slight glistening droplets rolling towards his chest.

  ‘Musty, animal smell. Like straw she said. That was an immediate warning bell. Most hybrids, if sufficiently evolved, will use the toilets, but if the animal is taking over, they’ll defecate in the corners of rooms, often on piles of papers. That’s why we have such tight surveillance on paper recycling depots.’

  ‘I want you to go back to the night in question,’ said Dr Fahour, crossing his legs again. The slight bulge in his crotch alerting me to the fact that he was attracted to me. His strong jaw was a turn on, I admit.

  ‘I decided to check it out, go undercover. I have an alias in the hybrid community, and some slight gen-modification to my bio-output can make me look feline. ‘

  I pushed my dark hair back, showing off my slightly pointy ears. The effects of the surgery would take a few more months to subside. Other symptoms,
the nocturnal habits, the wandering, the absence of anything but meat and milk from my diet, could take a little longer to leave my system. I didn’t mention it to psych, but I actually liked some of the characteristics.

  Maybe they would think that included the killings.

  But I only did those for the job.

  For the good of mankind.

  ‘Did you take back up?’ asked Dr Fahour. ‘The report says here that you refused to engage the help of...’ he squinted at the writing.

  ‘Detective Krifi. Yeah, well, I had my reasons.’

  ‘Tell me about them.’ As he spoke, Dr Fahour took out a laser pencil and flicked it in my eyes. The classic pupil response test. I held my head still and waited for him to finish.