Anonymous Rex (40 page)

“We must get it higher!” yells Vallardo, yanking the pulley attached to the egg’s hammock. “It must break the surface of the water!” A strong tug—I run to the other rope, pulling with all my might—something’s wrong, something’s … creaking?

The rope snaps. The pulleys sink. The hammock collapses.

Jaycee screams, this time clearly not in happiness, and speeds toward the far end of the tank just as Vallardo regains his balance. The two of them launch themselves onto a ladder attached to the tank’s glass wall and attempt to climb up and over; Jaycee, with her long Coleo legs, has more success than Vallardo, with his stout,
stubby body, and she dives into the mini-ocean below. Vallardo struggles to the top a few seconds later and cannonballs in. Warm water splashes out of the tank and splatters against my feet, and the silky sensation reminds me of how much I like to swim.

Glenda, Judith, and I are awestruck as we watch Vallardo and Jaycee through the glass, witnessing their fantastic feats of water ballet. Vallardo dives beneath the surface, unhooking the hammock that has only managed to get in the way, and proceeds to hold the egg above his head, treading water as fast as he can, using his short, stubby tail to whip the water into a frenzy.

Grunts and moans mix with the sounds of splintering shell as the underwater microphones pick up the dinos’ struggles. Jaycee helps Vallardo, clutching the egg with her long, brown fingers, doing all she can to keep her child afloat, and that wailing continues to grow and grow, a high-pitched warble somewhere between a human cry of pain and the mating call of a common canary.

And as we watch through that glass, as we listen through those speakers, Glenda Wetzel, Judith McBride, and I find ourselves as three speechless witnesses to the first successful interspecies birth this planet has ever seen.

With a final smack! the egg gives way, its proteins spilling out into the tank, clouding the water with their juices, the shell fragmenting into thousands of little pieces, drifting down through the water like ashes off a campfire.

“Can you see it?” I ask Glenda, not moving my eyes from the increasing obscurity of the tank.

“No,” she replies, and I can only assume that she, too, is unable to look away. “Can you?”

“Uh-uh. Judith?” No response. “Judith, can you see the baby?” Again, nothing. I turn to look at our captive, whose arm I find I have released some time within the last few minutes. She’s gone.

“Glen, we lost—”

I am cut off by a piercing roar, a shrill banshee shriek the likes of which sends invisible spiders crawling all about my body. It is coming from the speakers, amplified tenfold, which means it is coming from the tank, which means—

It is coming from the baby. Water, splashing around, overcast with
clouds of sandy afterbirth, obscures my vision, but through the waves I can make out Jaycee’s lithe figure, still treading water, and as she lifts herself to the surface, I get a momentary glimpse of her newborn child. A moment is all I need.

Slight gray claws lance out from a pair of spindly arms, the webbing between dotted with tan lumps of flesh that wriggle and clutch at the unfamiliar air. They are fingers, stubby digits that have formed only as far as the claws jutting out from their sides have allowed them. Rough scaly patches meet with smooth, hairless pink, comprising an outer covering that is not quite skin, not quite hide. Its spine juts out, pressing against this thin covering, a Braille pattern of deformity, and I can make out individual vertebrae dropping up and down like a row of player-piano keys belting out a Dixieland tune. A single tail droops down and away at the end of that spine, no more than a thin strand of bones that effectively doubles the length of the child.

The torso is curved, a long, midnight-black stretch of burnt rubber, and the bloated potbelly, cresting, crashing, jiggling, carves a wake of flesh down the baby’s side. Another set of claws, longer, darker, stick rudely out from stumps that might be five-toed feet, rapidly extending and withdrawing, extending and withdrawing.

And the head, that head, a frantic lottery of all conceivable features, nostrils indented, eyes wide yet yellow, ears practically nonexistent save for a single lobe dangling roughly off the left cheek, snout canted downward at an orthopedically undesirable angle, a few teeth already in and threatening to pop through the jawbone itself.

It is an amalgam of all I have ever seen, but somehow it is completely unlike the misfits we saw earlier. It is beautiful. I am horrified. I cannot look away.

And Jaycee Holden is happier than she has ever been; the haunted look in her eyes, the one that said
I don’t want to be here anymore
, is gone, replaced with a mien of fulfillment, of purpose. Triumphantly, even as she continues to tread water, Jaycee holds her baby aloft, over her head, in what I can only assume to be a gesture of conquest.

A shot rings out—bangs out—overpowering the amplified sounds of postbirth exuberance—and a crack appears, webbing out from a rough hole on the very top of the tank, just above the water level. We
spin toward the far side of the laboratory, toward the sound of the gunshot.

It’s Judith. And she’s got her gun back. She’s aiming for the baby. Or Jaycee. It doesn’t matter, because she’s preparing to fire once more.

Now Glenda’s got all the reason she needs to attack the human she was pulled away from before, and this time I’m sure not going to be the one to stop her. She leaps across the laboratory, her edged bill ready to sink into giving flesh. But Judith is lifting the revolver again—Jaycee, terrified for two lives, no other choice at hand, is ducking beneath the water, clutching the baby to her chest—Vallardo, too, engages his dive mechanism—and me? Ah, hell, I’m frozen in place.

I’m able to convince my throat to scream, “Watch her revolv—” before the second gunshot rocks the lab. A millisecond later, Glenda is on Judith like a crash-dieter given a one-hour reprieve at a Vegas buffet, sinking her teeth into the human’s fleshy neck, searching out the precious arteries that will bring blood and end life.

I’d rush to help, I really would, but as I turn to make sure Jaycee and Vallardo haven’t been hit, I find myself staring at the long cracks snaking all across the giant water tank, picking up speed, growing, growing, splintering out like fractal branches. Water is leaking, water is pushing, glass is bending beneath the pressure, and before I am able to convince my feet to
run you fools, save yourselves!
the walls shatter, releasing the floodgates.

I wanted to swim; now here’s my chance. Glenda, Judith, Vallardo, Jaycee, the newborn, the lab—all of it disappears under the tidal cascade, as the tables bolted to the lab floor become artificial reefs in this brand-new ocean. I am buffeted against the breakers, thrown beneath the surface, breath bursting in my lungs, screaming to get out. I swim up—and hit my head on the floor. Wrong direction. I swim in the other up, and soon break into the open air, gasping for oxygen.

A second wave rolls by, tossing itself into my open mouth. I gag and fall beneath the surface again, struggling for purchase against the silken water around me. What do they say—three times and you’re under? Then I’d better not plan on going down again. With a gargantuan effort, I flex my tail and launch myself out of the water yet again,
barely avoiding the onslaught of another wave. Pieces of shell float by me like driftwood after a storm, and I struggle to keep my head above water as each new rush threatens to draw me to my death.

The door to the lab is open, and whatever water is able to escape through it quickly does so, making for a whirlpool of energy around the area. The swells pull me closer to this danger zone, the undertow threatening to overpower my meager swimming abilities, but I fight like a salmon and spawn upstream, grabbing on to whatever looks like it will help me in my struggle. I think I can see a limb flailing away on the other side of the lab, a wriggling similar to mine executed in an effort to stay afloat, but the sting of water in my eyes makes it difficult to make out an exact shape or color.

“Glenda!” I call, the water bubbling my words into “Blenbla!” but I receive no reply. It doesn’t work for Blaybee, Bablarbo, or Bludibth, either. Locating a handhold beneath an installed Bunsen burner, I anchor myself in one area and wait for the storm to die down, using my energy to keep my head above water.

In time, the heaviest rush of water filters out of the laboratory, leaving me alone amid broken glass, broken eggshell, and calf-high tide pools. “Anybody here?” I try and call out, and am surprised to find that I don’t make any noise. There’s water stuck in my throat. It seems that I haven’t been breathing for over a minute.

Upset that I should have realized this sort of thing sooner, I lean myself over a shattered desk chair and apply a self-Heimlich. Dino Heimlichs are administered much higher than their human counterparts, but I learned this a long time ago, the hard way—don’t ask, don’t ask. A spray of water shoots out, landing a good four feet away, adding a few more milliliters to the puddles, and I can breathe good, stale air once again.

“Anybody here?” I try again, my voice weaker than I would like but at least functioning. There is no response except for the sizzle of the PA speakers shorting out. It’s a good thing they’re mounted high on the wall, their sparks unable to contact this newly formed aquatic center, or I’d be lighting up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

Making sure to steer clear of any additional danger areas, I tromp out of the laboratory, back into the damp clinic halls, which have
been given a thorough cleansing via flood, the walls scraped of their debris by the rushing waters. I call out names as I go, and by the time I’ve searched a few empty rooms and have begun to worry that I was the only one who made it out alive, I hear a “Vincent?” calling to me from down a parallel hallway. I rush into action …

To find Glenda, lying on the floor in her own pool of water, smiling up at me, panting, her Hadro bill covered in a mixture of water and blood droplets.

Judith McBride is in this room as well, limp and lifeless atop a worn oak desk. Her arms are splayed to either side, her legs bent at an impossible angle, her head turned away from me. “Did the flood get her?” I ask Glenda.

“I got her,” Glenda says, walking over to Judith and turning the widow’s head in my direction. Three great bites mar the flesh across her neck, the gashes clearly visible to me, what with most of the blood having been washed away during the last few minutes. I’m sure there was little pain, and that it was over in a flash. “She knew, Vincent. The bitch had to go.”

“You did good,” I say, not wanting to cause Glenda any pangs of remorse. Killing someone, even a human, can be tough on the heart and the mind. Despite her easygoing attitude about it now, sleep won’t come easy for Glenda anytime soon. “Come on,” I say, patting her across the back. “Help me look for the others.”

We search the building well into the night, leaving no room, no table, no desk, no beaker unturned. The clinic is tremendous, an ant colony of passages and cloistered rooms, water bearing the dead bodies of a hundred floating misfits—even those that Glenda left alive were washed clean in the tide.

At one in the morning, we find Dr. Vallardo, his hide purple, his body thick and bloated with water weight. Somehow, he had wound up inside a storage closet, unable to free himself from the rushing water. Perhaps his girth kept him down, or perhaps it was his ineffectual tail. Whatever the case, he’s dead, and there’s not much use in discussing it.

His mouth was stuffed with debris from the flood—yolk, eggshells, afterbirth—and we remove it all in order to simplify matters for outsiders. No need to get them confused, searching into matters at the
clinic. There’s been enough of that for some time, and the Council investigation that is sure to follow is going to dredge up enough sludge to fill ten of those tanks. We drag Vallardo’s body into the room with Judith McBride’s, laying them down side by side. This is a purely altruistic move; it’s easier for the cleanup crews if all of the corpses are in the same location.

Two o’clock rolls by, then three, then four. Glenda and I have searched the entire building, top to bottom, left to right. “Let’s split up and try it again,” I suggest, and Glenda knows better than to argue with me.

Jaycee and her child are nowhere to be found. I am not frantic. I am not worried. I’m just an average Joe, doing his job. My throat hurts.

By the time dawn rolls around, we have made our run three times, and I have effectively shut myself down. This is the way I want to be. This is the only way that doesn’t hurt.

After we drop a disintegration pouch on Vallardo’s corpse, then do the same to Judith’s despite the fact that she was never really a dino, Glenda convinces me that if we haven’t found Jaycee inside the clinic yet, we will never find her. I’m sure she expects me to argue, to press the matter, to send her back out into the field, but I don’t. I accept her decision, if only because it is the same one that the more rational parts of my mind have come up with on their own. If Jaycee is not here, Jaycee is not here. I can’t think about what this could mean right now; I don’t want to think about what it could mean.

“She must have made it out,” Glenda suggests, her tones soft, rational, protective. Miraculously, she’s not cursing—the flood must have washed her mouth out—but I’m barely able to register this victory for etiquette.

“Yeah,” I answer. I hope she’s right.

“She probably escaped, went back to her apartment. You can probably find her there.”

“Yeah,” I answer. I know she’s wrong. Jaycee has skipped town, skipped the country, skipped the world for all I know. I will never see Jaycee Holden again.

“Let’s go,” says Glenda, and I allow her to dress me in my guise, then take me by the arm and lead me out of the room, out of the
clinic, into the bright Bronx streets that are just beginning to wake up to a busy autumn morning. The sun sparkles off abandoned cars and broken traffic lights, making everything shine with its brilliance.

“See, Vincent,” Glenda says as she leads me down the road, trying to inject a bounce into every step, a happy slide into every shuffle, “on a morning like today, even the Bronx is full of hope.”