The Devil's Dictionary, page 27
“True. But in prey species, fear of predation is supposed to be innate.” Lion points at the rabbits. “Instinct alone should have made them hightail it out of here.”
“Is this an em-tracker thing?” asks Barry. “Is that the reason they’re not running away?”
“I’m a ghost dog,” says Lion.
“A what?”
“Bird fetishist, fish petter, ghost dog. It means I speak dog, not rabbit.”
Their ears buzz: one short, two long. Balthazar telling them to head straight ahead and step on it.
Wordlessly they set off.
Jenka takes point, leading them away from the rabbits, out of the arroyo and up a long, low rise. They crest the hill, passing a small series of sandstone cliffs, the rock stained pink and orange.
A quarter mile later, Lion realizes that it’s more than a hologram projecting the illusion of vastness. Barry was absolutely right—this place is huge.
A quarter mile after that, Barry disappears around a Pinyon tree, then emerges from the other side. Jenka picks his way past a prickly-pear cactus. Suddenly, midstep, Lion freezes.
“What is it?” hisses Jenka.
Lion squats down and reaches his glow glove under a bush. He comes back with big chunk of sun-bleached scat.
“We are stopping because you found shit?” asks Jenka.
“It’s too big for rabbit shit,” says Lion.
He snaps the piece in half, revealing small red berries pressed between the dried cakes. “Maybe it’s coyote scat. But it’s little big for a coyote.”
“Unless they’re really big coyotes,” says Barry.
“So is mystery scat?” asks Jenka.
“There’s no hair in here,” says Lion, studying the remains. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t eat rabbit.”
Jenka looks around. “Would coyotes attack humans?”
“Rare,” says Lion. “Occasionally kids, old people, or someone seriously wounded. Unless…”
“Unless?”
Lion tosses the scat onto the ground, wiping his glove on his jumpsuit. “Unless they’re really hungry.”
Their ears buzz again—three short buzzes, three long buzzes, and two short buzzes.
“Did you feel that?” asks Lion.
“Dah.”
“Three short, three long, two short?”
“Dah. It’s the signal. Ji and Penelope found the prisoners.”
“At least everyone’s still alive,” says Barry.
Lion hopes Barry’s right. He’s been thinking about Kendra and Ibrahim all morning. He even found himself telling Barry about Ibrahim’s preppy Muslim vibe—his tartan turban, his lime-green penny loafers, all the little details that Lion never expected to miss.
There’s another buzz in their ears.
“Let’s move,” says Barry.
They file down the middle of the mega-linkage, following a thin animal track as it rises up another hill. The temperature is in the low sixties. Warm for this far underground, but cold for the desert landscape the mega-linkage appears to be trying to duplicate. Lion grabs his water bottle from his pack and stops to take a sip. Jenka peels off to his left, disappearing behind a blue spruce. He reappears on the other side, a furrow on his brow.
“I found door,” calls Jenka. “It does not appear that Barry is correct.”
“Correct about what?”
“It does not appear that everyone is still alive.”
Double Tap
“Kristina Natalovich,” says Jenka.
“The scientist who made the neurotoxin?” asks Barry. “It’s a little hard to tell.”
“Dah. Without her, I do not think we find door.”
They’re standing on the other side of the blue spruce, where an open door is secreted behind the branches, almost completely hidden from view. As further camouflage, the door has a full-color photo of a matching blue spruce secured to its outer surface. With the holo-sky in the background, you’d never know it was there. Even from ten feet away, it looks like just another indistinguishable swatch of desert.
Kristina is the only reason Jenka found the door.
Her body lays in the entrance, wedging it open. She’s wearing a white lab coat over a simple gray dress, little makeup, and a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. There’s another hole in the middle of her chest. The coat and the dress are stained with blood, as is the floor beside her head.
Lion stares.
“Double tap,” says Barry.
Forcing his eyes away from the body, Lion tries to determine what’s on the other side of the door.
The room is dark, but it looks like some kind of research lab.
He points his glow glove through the opening and clicks the thumb trigger. The beam reveals a medium-sized workspace, tall metallic shelves against the far wall, workbenches and scientific equipment everywhere else. There’s a mass spectrometer in the corner that looks like a prehistoric copy machine, beside an autoclave that resembles a microwave oven and a Quatro-Tech TC-5 DNA Editor and Analyzer shaped like a Quatro-Tech TC-5 DNA Editor and Analyzer.
“What the…”
Lion hops over Kristina’s body and strides into the lab, crossing directly to a metal counter against the far wall. Reaching below it, he comes back holding an old movie camera. “It’s the Bolex H-11,” he says. “I think…”
But Lion never finishes that sentence.
Instead, his eyes pop wide. He nearly drops the camera, but somehow manages to set it down on the counter. His hands do all the work; his eyes haven’t moved. They’re still pegged behind the door, where a wall-sized projection screen displays the results of a science experiment.
“Are those…” asks Jenka, stepping into the room and following Lion’s gaze.
“Slices of brain under a microscope,” says Lion.
“From fMRI scan, no?”
“No. They’re human connectome maps. I’ve only ever seen them from mouse brains before.”
“Is hard to do?”
“Well, you have to kill the animal and dissect their brains to make them.”
“Lion,” says Jenka, “I am so sorry.”
“Sorry about what?” asks Barry, stepping into the room.
Then he mutters in Yiddish and places a hand on Lion’s shoulder.
The screen shows four different slices of the human brain, two vertical sections, two horizontal, all stained bright purple, with neuronal connections dyed fluorescent green. The slides have been labeled with a name and date. The four slides they’re staring read: “Evo: 7–15; Ibrahim Ali.”
“That is same Ibrahim?” asks Jenka.
Lion nods.
“You did not mention last name.”
“It’s Ali. The dates are right. This was done not long after Ibrahim and Kendra disappeared.”
“The images are being projected from here,” says Barry, pointing at a microscope cabled to a laptop.
“So this is what?” asks Jenka, pointing at the brain slices. “Beside sickness?”
Lion isn’t sure. He’s having a hard time thinking right now. He’s having a hard time standing right now.
Barry walks over to the laptop. The screen is dark, but a key tap brings it to life. It shows a directory of some kind.
Grabbing a nearby stool, he sits down to read.
Jenka walks over to the metal bookshelves, peering beyond them. “There’s a hallway back here.”
It takes Lion a moment to realize Jenka is talking to him. “What?”
“Hallway,” says Jenka again, pointing between the shelves.
Lion follows his finger, seeing a closed door with a small window in the center revealing a skinny corridor beyond.
“You guys check it out,” says Barry. “I want to poke around here for a little bit.”
“What is it?” asks Jenka.
“I think it’s Kristina’s laptop. Right before she got shot, as far as I can tell, she was looking at Evo research.”
“There are more experiments like this?” Jenka asks, nodding toward the brain slices.
Barry glances at a line of names running down the right side of the screen. “A lot more.”
“What happened in here?” asks Lion, pointing at Kristina. “Why is Zee’s chief scientist dead?”
“Oy vey,” exclaims Barry. He’s staring at the column of names. He moves the cursor, punches a key, and opens a file.
“What?” asks Lion, walking over to take a closer look.
Barry hits another key.
Four more brain slices appear on the laptop’s screen. They look very similar to the slices of brain being projected on the wall, but instead of Ibrahim’s name in the bottom right corner, Lion sees Kendra’s name.
“Zee killed them both,” says Barry.
Something very heavy sits on Lion’s chest.
He turns away from the screen, blinks tears out of his eyes, takes a deep breath, steps past Jenka, slides around the shelf, and starts toward the closed door. After opening it, he looks back at his friends, and says …
But there’s nothing to say.
Are Those Cats?
The hallway that Jenka discovered is dimly lit, fifteen feet long and painted hospital white. Beside the entranceway, there are four doors, two on each side, also painted hospital white, each with a black handle made from auto-mold plastic in its center. Grip the handle, and the plastic reforms in your hand, revealing a hidden trigger. Pulling the trigger unseals an air lock, and the door slides open. Then you’re in.
Jenka and Lion are still out.
They’re standing just outside the first door on the left, which is the second door they opened. The first was the first door on the right. Behind it was a destroyed laboratory: demolished microscopes, a laptop with its screen punched out, an industrial glass sterilizer that took a double-barrel blast to the belly.
The room smelled rank. Lion tracked the odor, finding two flying tree snakes crushed beneath a shattered autoclave.
They shut that door in a hurry.
The second doorway reveals a dark corridor lined floor to ceiling with industrial shelving. Glass-fronted drawers take up every inch of shelf space. There must be thousands.
“Is storeroom?” asks Jenka.
“Maybe,” says Lion.
“Why is storeroom whispering?”
Lion hears it, too—like rushing water running over jagged rocks, or a hundred people breathing heavily at once. The sound is too uneven to be the hum of a machine, too loud to be the ventilation system.
Then it dawns on him. “Snakes,” says Lion.
He hits the trigger on the glow glove and shines the knuckle lights into the drawer closest to them. There’s a coiled black fire hose pressed against the glass. When the light hits the cage, the hose slithers and writhes, revealing rows of hexagonal scales that glimmer like tiny stars.
“Black mamba,” says Lion.
He shines his glove on the next three drawers, seeing the same black writhe.
“Is breeding farm?” asks Jenka.
A second later, at the far end of the corridor, a giant metal box rolls into view. It’s the size of a dishwasher, with four arms, one extending from each of its upper corners. At the end of each arm, there’s a metallic grasping claw with fingertips made from black foam.
The box rolls down the corridor, heading directly toward them. It stops fifteen feet away, and the two arms on the left side of the platform whirl into motion. One arm grasps the metal handle on the front of a drawer and tugs it backward. The second arm hovers above the open drawer, then lowers the claw inside. It retracts a black mamba, squirming in its grasp.
Unclasping the metal handle, the first arm rises upward and telescopes outward. Once the claw dangles above the center of the open drawer, the arm stops moving and starts descending. The claw’s metallic fingers stretch outward, disappear inside the container, then reemerge seconds later, wrapped around a snake egg.
With a smooth arcing motion, the arm rotates inward, positioning the claw directly above the box. The lid retracts, revealing the hot orange glow of heat lamps on the inside. The claw descends, lowering the egg into the box, then retracts again, fingers empty.
The robot repeats this process four more times, until five snake eggs have been deposited inside the box. Then the snake is returned to the drawer, the drawer is closed, and the robot rolls five feet closer to them, tugs open another drawer and starts over.
Lion despises seeing animals in cages. He hates the thought that this is some kind of science experiment. He thinks about releasing the snakes, but black mambas loose in the subway system would definitely not improve human-animal relations in New York.
Feeling sick about it, Lion shuts the door, walks down the hall, and grasps the next handle. The air lock unseals and the door slides open, revealing another dark hallway lined with glass-fronted shelves.
Lion hears snakes but smells death.
Shining his glow glove down the corridor, he peers through the glass of the drawers to his right, seeing a slither of shiny green.
“Killer flying tree snakes?” asks Jenka.
“Do you smell that?”
“Dah.”
Lion aims his knuckles into the darkness, illuminating the back half of the hall. It’s been ransacked: drawers tugged open, strewn in haphazard piles, glass shattered into shards. Smashed snake eggs are everywhere, their shells in hundreds of pieces on the floor, dried yolk streaking the walls.
“If drawers are open,” says Jenka, “where are snakes?”
Toggling his glove to infrared, Lion re-aims down the hall and hits the trigger. A wave of light travels the corridor. For the first twenty feet, the glass on every drawer glows soft orange.
“More tree snakes,” says Lion.
But the rear of the corridor stays dark and lifeless, save for a tiny slither at the far end of the hall, really nothing more than an orange undulation, like the crack of a neon whip, twisting across the floor, then vanishing from sight.
Lion jumps out of the room, yanking Jenka along for the ride. He slams the door shut, not exhaling until the air lock reseals.
They exchange glances.
Lion changes the setting on his glow glove to cannon.
“Be careful,” says Jenka, tapping a finger to the red lens of his goggles. “You do not have protective eyewear.”
Lion nods, walks up to the last door, and grabs the knob. Once he hears the air lock unseal, cautiously, he slides it open.
Inside is a well-lit hallway, a hundred feet long and ten wide. One side is taken up by more metal shelves filled with square white boxes. A silver metal counter runs down the other side, with research stations every few feet. Each station has a chair, a computer, a microscope, and a pair of viewing binoculars attached to a flexible tripod. Above the counter, there’s an enormous mirror, two feet high and running the entire length of the corridor.
Lion walks a few feet into the room and points his glove at the mirror, but before he can hit the trigger, it starts to change colors. The silver dissolves into black, which turns to smoke and evaporates into clear glass. It’s now a normal window, revealing a barnyard scene.
“Rabbits?” asks Jenka.
“Baby rabbits,” says Lion.
The window reveals hundreds of baby jackrabbits inside a grass-lined pen, thirty feet deep and as long as the room itself. Heat lamps that resemble miniature spotlights provide warmth, casting bunny shadows across the back wall.
Yet something feels off.
Lion scans the pen, trying to find the source of his unease. Then he realizes that it’s not the rabbits, it’s a shadow projected on the wall behind the rabbits. At a glance, it looks like five bunny heads in a line. The first two have long narrow ears, the next three have short round ears, like tiny dinner plates.
Whatever is making those dinner plate shadows is definitely not a rabbit.
Still standing in the doorway, Lion tracks forward from the back wall to a heat lamp, then forward from there. Noting the expression on Lion’s face, Jenka follows his gaze, then asks, “Are those cats?”
Lion takes a tentative step into the room, inspecting the shelves to his left, looking for anything slithering between the white boxes.
Satisfied the room is snake free, Lion strides over to one of the research stations, pushes the desk chair aside, and leans over the counter to stare out the window.
Jenka walks over to stand beside him.
“Cats?” asks Jenka again.
“Not cats.”
“Dogs.”
“Not dogs,” says Lion. “Unbelievable. They’re hyenas.”
Directly in front of them, three spotted hyena cubs stand in the middle of a sea of rabbits. Two are swatting each other with paws the size of soup spoons; the third is licking the rabbit beside it, grooming the fur on its neck.
Looking around the pen, Lion now sees hyena cubs interspersed between bunnies, nearly everywhere. Most are spotted hyenas, like someone grafted a dog’s head to a leopard’s body, but a few are striped, like a zebra’s coat on a fox’s body.
“Don’t hyenas eat rabbits for lunch?” asks Jenka.
“Not at this buffet.”
“They are not real.”
Lion shakes his head. “They’re not robots. They’re real.”
“So what is Zee doing?”
“I have no idea.”
A second later, they hear Barry calling for them, his voice an urgent whisper.
Jenka strides toward the door, his PHASR pistol gripped tight. Lion follows him out. They find Barry about fifteen feet away, crouched in the doorway to the laboratory, hidden from view by the metal shelf, which, Lion now notices, is filled with more large white boxes.
“We’ve got company,” hisses Barry, keeping his voice low.
“How many?” Jenka whispers back.
“Many,” says Barry, pointing through the lab and into the mega-linkage, “and not human.”
A second later, Lion catches up to them. He moves one of the white boxes out of the way to get a better view, realizing it’s filled with rabbit food, mostly dried vegetables, according to the ingredients listed on the side.
But he’s not paying attention to the ingredients.
Instead, he’s staring out the lab’s open door, past Kristina’s body and about twenty feet into the mega-linkage, where a full-size spotted hyena stands staring back at him. Two more hyenas perch beside this one, their mottled coats blending into the desert landscape.
