I expect him to push the door wide open and let me through. He doesn’t. I stop short.
“What’s your business?” he asks.
“I work here! Live here! I just stepped out for some fresh air. Didn’t know the door would lock behind me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Zach Price. Zechariah Price, journalist.”
He puts a small radio device up to his mouth and steps back inside. The door closes. I’m incredulous, not to mention totally in shock. He’s leaving me out here to die while he checks with his superiors. So I wait, because I have no other choice.
My hands go up to my ears and suddenly I remember that there’s a hood on this parka. I pull it up around my head. It covers everything but my mouth, eyes and nose. My ears feel like someone has put a blow torch to them and all this time I could have covered my entire head. I stuff my hands into my pockets again and prance in more circles while watching the security guy. He’s not talking on the radio. He’s standing there looking at the cougar as if he has never seen it before.
Right here! I want to yell. Seeing a man freeze to death must be old hat. A stuffed cougar? Now that’s something unique. I decide I’m going to throw myself against the glass door if for no other reason than to express my desperation, and to some extent, probably my stupidity. I walk four paces away and turn around. He is holding the door open.
“Come in, Mister Price.”
I rush past him and on into the huge foyer. Room temperature never felt so good.
“Nobody told me you were here. If I had been scammed by a reporter not only would I never have lived it down, but I probably wouldn’t have a job anymore.”
“It’s quite alright,” I say, even though I want to punch him in the nose.
He extends his hand. “I’m Buster Brown.”
I’m leery of touching my frozen fingers to anything, but I gingerly accept the shake. “Buster Brown?”
He grins. “Actually it’s Charles. I picked up the nickname when I was a child to get away from being called Charlie Brown. It sounds stupid, I know, but I’ve kind of learned to like it.”
“It’s good to meet you, Buster. Right now I’m going to go take a long hot shower.”
“Yeah. You should do that. Too bad about Doc McCully. I’m told you saw him just before they loaded him on the chopper. Do you think he’s going to make it?”
I get a sudden vision of blood and torn flesh and remember the reason why I ended up a human Popsicle. “I don’t know, Buster,” I say. “It didn’t look good.”
“Too bad. Way too bad.” He walks away.
I analyze my nose and ears in the mirror. What does frostbite look like? I have no idea. My ears look as though they’re sunburned, something with which I’m familiar. There are neither blisters nor obviously dead skin. I sit down on the bed and pull off my socks. My fingers hurt to do it. My toes are not as red as my ears, but they hurt just as much. I strip off everything else and start the shower. While I wait for it to get warm I paddle back into the bedroom and almost run into Ulla.
“Buster told me you might have some frost injury.” Once again she doesn’t flinch at my nakedness. I hurt too much to care. “I brought you some Aloe vera. This’ll help.”
“Thank you.”
“Put it on after your shower and don’t take a hot shower. Make it just warm.” She walks into my bathroom and feels the running water. “Too hot.” She adjusts the temperature and then says, “There, that should be just right. Put the Aloe vera on right away and let me know in an hour how you feel. Looking at it, I’d say you don’t have frostbite. Better to not take chances though. I’ve seen it bad enough that a man’s toes had to be taken off.”
“Oh!” I wonder if they amputate noses as well . . . or ears.
“Get in there now.”
I step into the shower and close the door. It’s glass so it doesn’t really close me away from her eyes. The warm water actually causes some pain. I’m glad it isn’t as hot as I normally like it.
“What were you doing out there anyway with nothing but a parka?”
I turn my back to her and enjoy the warm spray. “Getting fresh air,” I say to the corner of the shower. “I didn’t know the door would lock behind me.”
“If you want fresh air this time of year, go out to the gardens.”
“This time of year? It’s supposed to be spring.”
“Ha!” She laughs. “Spring shows up when it feels like it around here. Maybe July.”
“July!”
“Or maybe tomorrow. You have to live day-to-day in this country. Worrying about the weather is like worrying about your teenagers on a Saturday night. You get stressed when things happen that you don’t like and then depressed when you can’t change it. You’re from Texas, right?”
“Dallas.”
“What do you do in Dallas when it hits a hundred in the shade?”
“We stay inside where it’s cool.”
“When it’s cold we stay inside where it’s warm. Except when it gets hot for a couple days in August. Then we take off our clothes and lay in the sun.”
“I look forward to it.” I wish she would go away.
“I’ll get out of your hair. You call me later and let me know how you feel.”
“I feel better already.” And that I do. Fifteen minutes later I wonder if it’s possible to run out of hot water in this place. Regrettably, I turn it off and get out. After slathering on the Aloe vera and dressing in something warm I sit down to record the day’s events. Day! It’s only 10:40 and I feel like I’ve been through hell.
At 11:15 I close the journal and head down to the lab.
Chapter 8
The lab is empty. I consider going to where the attack took place, decide better of it and go into the library. I don’t mean to be in there long—just a familiarizing tour. The next thing I know, Ms. Bravelli is standing in the door.
“There you are,” she says.
I notice the time has slipped to almost 2:00.
“People have been looking for you.” She sits down at the table opposite me.
“Oh! Who?”
“Lance, Victor, not to mention Jacob and Merwin. Oh . . . and Ulla. She seems to have taken a liking to you.”
“I was supposed to call her. She’s walked in on me bare-assed twice now. Should I start getting worried? She’s old enough to be my mother.”
She laughs. “That’s the point, exactly. She has no intention toward you or anyone else, except to be the mom. She’ll be your mother while you’re here. She’ll take care of you whether you want to be or not.”
“That’s a relief. I think I can handle the mom part. But my mother never saw me without clothes after about the age of eight. I hardly walk around naked in front of my wife.”
“You’re married?”
Is there a note of disappointment in her voice? I thought she wanted to get rid of me.
“I got the impression from Lance you were divorced.”
“We‘re sort of separated.”
“Ah.” There’s a long pause. “Where’s she living?”
“Dallas.”
“Children?”
“Two girls. Six and eight.” I can see and feel the thoughts emanating from her, the judgment on me for leaving a wife and two daughters behind. I expect further interrogation on the subject, but there is only silence. I break it and reroute the conversation. “How is the doctor?”
Her eyes cloud over. She looks away for a few seconds. “He lost too much blood.” Another long pause and then a depressing sigh. “I’ve seen the cats kill their prey. They’re very efficient. I never really imagined humans might become part of their menu. In all my research I have not come upon anything that said they prey upon man. Big animals, but not man.”
“How many humans were there 10,000 years ago?” I ask.
“Hm. Not many, though they had been around for about 3,000 years. Still there’s no direct evidence that they tangled at all.”
&nb
sp; “But they’re not just sabre-toothed cats,” I correct. “They are also Bengals, and Bengals do attack man.”
“In previous experiments there’s been no indication that the clone has any of the characteristics of the surrogate mother.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember reading that.” I sort through my stack of magazines with marked articles. “Something to do with where the egg comes from and removing all the DNA before implanting the new DNA. The surrogate mother contributes none of her own.”
“You could say she acts like a live test tube. She’s a container.”
“Where did they get the egg?” I ask.
“Another Bengal. As a matter-of-fact it was Duchess, who you saw yesterday in the garden. If you’re thinking the traits came from her, you’re wrong.”
“No. I understand stripping the DNA. Actually, I guess I wasn’t thinking anything. A couple hours of research by me, a layman, isn’t going to come up with answers, especially when I’m not sure what the questions are, or if there are questions.”
“There are always questions. Thousands of them.” She scans my spread of magazines and books. “What are you looking for?”
“Nothing in particular at this point. I’m just trying to get a feeling for the lingo and terminology, find out about the history of cloning and DNA replication to start out with. Then I’ll get into the sabre-tooth. It’s very interesting.”
“Did you get the tour of the lab?”
“No. That’s when the attack happened.”
“Oh.” Her eyes cloud over again, and then a long silence.
“How is the young woman, Traci?”
“Traci Strong. Not so strong right now. She’s been with him, us, from the beginning. He was our resident veterinarian. She was his assistant.”
A deep sigh.
“They were engaged.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“That they were engaged? Why’s that?”
“It was something in her face.” I don’t say it was written all over her aura. “As they ran down the hall with the stretcher she displayed an intense desperation to save his life that you would find only in a mother, wife, or sister. She definitely was not his mother, and probably not his sister.”
“Hmmm! You read people then.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I’m wrong though.”
Her cloud disappears. “How do you read us; Victor for example?”
“Quiet wealth. Powerful, but not the same kind of power as Bill Gates, yet the same kind of drive. He’s not a micromanager. Unmarried. I’d venture a guess that he was married but is now divorced. She is probably living back east in New York, or Baltimore.” I don’t know if I’m guessing or not. I may have picked it up when he touched my shoulder.
“Atlanta,” Ms. Bravelli says.
“Big city girl who didn’t like it in the Montana wilderness; a helicopter ride to the nearest shopping center.”
“Pretty good. You got all that from one meeting with him?”
I shrug my shoulders. “And then there is Ms. Bravelli.”
“No!”
“I can’t vocalize my read on you?”
“Don’t call me Ms. Bravelli. I’m Aileen. I’d love to hear your read on me.”
“Okay.” I lean back in my chair. “Aileen is unmarried. As a matter-of-fact, never has been married; has probably turned down a proposal or two. From a small Midwest town. Graduated high in her class with a vision of finding artifacts somewhere that would lead to answers as to our ancestry; a new discovery, actually, that would receive her name and be written up in all the archeology text books. She pushes hard on grants, a few scholarships, minimal help from her parents, and a few bucks from throwing pizzas across the counter at other college kids, and manages to receive her BA from a Midwestern state college, though not with honors as high as those from high school. Then life hits her square on because while she was digging in the dirt with a baby spoon around what turns out to be bones of an old cow, the rent is coming due, the car needs a new clutch and her first real adult boyfriend gets fed up and walks out after unsuccessfully presenting her with a medium-size diamond. He couldn’t identify with a career digging in the dirt anyway. Now the biological clock is ticking and one of the only guys she has had an interest in was already in a relationship. I say ‘was,’ because he just died.”
This isn’t bullshit guessing. Her aura is glowing like a streaking comet. I watch her face. She wears the confirmation like an ugly scarf. She gets up and stares into the invisible space beyond the rows of books in front of her. When she turns around the scarf has pretty much disappeared.
“I wasn’t just high in my class. I was valedictorian.”
“Small school,” I say. “Less than 50 graduating.”
She sticks her tongue out at me. “Thirty-eight! So what?”
I shrug.
“And it wasn’t pizzas. It was tacos.”
“And no one could pay you to eat a taco today.”
“Only in my own kitchen where I can control what goes in them. You won’t catch me in any fast food place, and not many sit-down restaurants.”
“But you’ll sit on an excavation site, wipe one hand on your dirty jeans and then from a paper bag eat a sandwich that you assembled in your kitchen, while with the other hand you continue poking around what you hope turns out to be million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bones instead of a hundred-year-old steer.”
She turns back to the shelves, picks out a book and opens it. After a few seconds of paging through it, she closes it and drops it on the table. “You should read this one. It’s a good accounting of what’s been found in the La Brea tar pits in Southern California, as far as the sabre-tooth goes anyway.”
I don’t pick it up, but I see the title. Smilodon: Seven Inches of Death. “Interesting title.”
“The person you describe is very much like the author,” she says over her shoulder as she turns back to the stacks.
I pull the book closer and read the name, Aileen Bravelli, at the bottom. I pick it up and page through it. “I look forward to reading it.” A couple things start making sense. “When Lance approached me about this assignment he said they needed a writer who could capture the facts while telling the story—creative journalizing—that all they had here were people who couldn’t get beyond the dry technical jargon. From what little I see in this book, he was wrong.”
She doesn’t turn around. She runs her fingers along a row of books and says, “Yes, he was.”
“That’s why you didn’t want me here.”
“Yes.”
“But you’ve changed your mind.”
She turns entirely around and looks at me. “Not necessarily. I’m just resigned to the fact that I’m a woman in a man’s world. I like my job here and I really don’t want to go back out to the tar pits. If I make too many waves, that’s where I’ll be.”
I could make a comment but it seems best to remain in the listening mode. She’s talking and I shouldn’t interrupt. But she doesn’t say anything more. The silence hangs on too long and I can’t help myself. “Your qualifications are right here, better than mine if for no other reason than that you already know the history and the lingo, both of which I must research before I can begin. They must be well aware of this.”
“Of course.” She sits back down. “It was Victor who started me on this book, acted as my first editor and agent, found me a publisher.”
Bingo! I should not reveal my thoughts, but sometimes I can’t help myself. “I see. I understand now.”
She looks at me hard. “Do you really?”
“The other proposal of marriage you turned down was from Victor Vandermill. You threw up to him that he was still married and you were not about to be responsible for breaking it up. Apparently he’s still a bit miffed about that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he proposed again once he was divorced and probably several times since.” I see from the look on her face that I hit a home run, maybe a grand slam. I don’t like it. I feel my own s
ense of importance begin to drain away like a balloon with a micro hole. If I don’t stick a plug in it real soon I’m going to be nothing more than a pile of useless Mylar. I want to get up and walk out, pack up and catch a passing dog sled to the nearest airport. I don’t move. My heart is beating against my chest and I realize I’m holding my breath. I breathe out and then in. “They hired me to spite you.”
She shakes her head. “Not they. Victor.”
“So, Victor had Lance hire the most unaccredited, unqualified writer he could find . . .”
She interrupts. “No. Not unqualified. You may not have many credits but you certainly are not unqualified. In what little you’ve written you’ve shown you can produce even when you are on unfamiliar ground.”
“You’ve read some of my stuff?”
“Everything I could find.”
“Then you knew I was coming.”
“No, I didn’t. Lance is sort of on my side, or at least I thought he was. In his search for a writer, based on Victor’s instructions, he came up with a number of names. Unknown to Victor, Lance let me review them all.”
“I was chosen based on your recommendation.”
No response from Ms. Bravelli.
“You made the decision for him. Isn’t it ironic that the person who most doesn’t want me here is totally and one-hundred percent responsible for my being here.”
She shrugs.
“But still,” I say, “you knew I was coming.”
She shakes her head. “Victor and I had a heart to heart a week ago. I thought we laid all the cards on the table. I thought we came to an agreement that I’d be the one and we would be just friends.”
I say nothing.
“I guess I thought wrong.”
“You slept with him didn’t you?”
I get the look.
“And then afterwards he proposed again and you reminded him of the hour-old agreement that you were only friends. Do friends habitually have sex together these days?”
I don’t know why I said it. Sometimes things just pop out of my mouth. Because of my little talent I often times see things that other people don’t see: read the relationships, the subtle innuendoes, the love and hate—frequently between the same two people at the same time. In the case of Victor and Aileen it was love and like; and then I showed up. Now it has turned to love and hate, or maybe it’s lust and hate. I don’t have my finger on that just yet. I’ll know for sure the next time I talk with Victor Vandermill, if his guard is down. In any case, I have said too much.
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