Origin (5 page)

“Is that actual grass they’re on?” Andy asked.

“Astroturf. My idea of turning this part of the complex into a biosphere was rejected as too complicated. The turf wears well and is easy to clean.”

“It looks like they’re eating parts of it.”

“Yeah, I told them that would happen. Come on.”

Dr. Jones went to a set of lockers near the pens and removed a leather harness that resembled the reins for a horse. The reins were handed to Andy, and the doctor reached back into the locker and took out a half dozen boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. She walked up to the fence and rang a large cowbell hanging from a pole. All of the animals turned to look.

“They eat hay, but they love breakfast cereal. To get them to approach I have to bribe them. The problem is they’re skittish. Every time they come to get the treat, one of them is taken away.”

Dr. Jones began opening boxes and pouring them into the trough inside the fence. The sheep watched for a minute before the first of them approached. He stuck his face in the crunchy treat and began snacking. Dr. Jones patted him on the head.

“You want the harness?” Andy asked.

“No, this is Wooly. He’s the Judas sheep. He always comes first, and then the others follow. If we snagged him, they’d all be too afraid to come the next time.”

Wooly grunted his agreement, sucking up the cereal like a vacuum. Soon he was joined by two others, muscling their way in. Dr. Jones grabbed one of them by the scruff of the neck, gathering up wool in her fist. It appeared rough, but the animal didn’t seem to notice and continued its binge.

When the cereal was gone, Dr. Jones deftly slipped the harness over the sheep’s head, tightening the straps with her free hand. She held the reins in her armpit and opened the last box of cereal, luring her captured animal over to the gate. Several of the other sheep followed, and Wooly snorted his disapproval at being left out.

“Shoo the others away while I open the gate,” Dr. Jones told Andy.

Andy, feeling quite the dork, flapped his hands around and made hissing noises. The sheep just stared at him, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw the stoic Dr. Jones smirk.

“Go on sheep! Go! Move it! Go on!”

The herd slowly backed off, and Dr. Jones opened the gate and led her captive to one of the pens. Once it was safely locked in she went to fetch her clipboard.

Andy gave the sheep a pat on the head and stared into its alien eyes with their elongated pupils. Bub’s eyes. He shuddered, realizing he didn’t want to see the demon again so soon.

With a tape measure Dr. Jones checked the sheep’s length and its height at the shoulder. She noted the measurements and then pressed some buttons on a digital display next to the pen. It registered the sheep’s weight. She jotted this down as well.

“So, do people call you Sunny?”

“Not if they want me to reply.”

Ouch,
Andy thought.
How can someone so cute be so cold?

“I thought all vets were supposed to be cheerful. Something to do with their love of animals.”

She gave him a blank stare, and then began to examine the sheep’s teeth.

“What do you go by, then?”

“Sun. People call me Sun.”

“Sun. It’s unique.”

“My mother was Vietnamese. She fell in love with an American soldier, who brought her to this country before Saigon fell. Sunshine was one of the first English words she learned. She didn’t know any better.”

“Oh, I think she did. It matches your cheerful disposition.”

Sun was now looking into the sheep’s eyes, holding their lids open. The sheep protested the inspection by twisting away.

“Wait a second,” Andy said, snapping his fingers. “You’re Vietnamese.”

“Don’t say it,” Sun warned.

But Andy, a grin stretched across his face, couldn’t resist. “You’re a Vietnam vet.”

Sun’s face became even harder, something Andy hadn’t thought possible.

“Never heard that one before. Open the pen there.”

Andy lifted the latch on the gate and Sun led the sheep out of the pen and over to the entrance door.

“I’ve visited Viet Nam twice,” Andy said. “Beautiful place. All of those war movies make it look like hell, but it’s actually very tranquil, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there. I’m an American.”

Andy decided to shut up.

They led the sheep through the hallway and into the Octopus, where the rabbi and the priest were still arguing.

“Here comes another one, wretched thing,” Rabbi Shotzen pointed to the sheep with his chin.

Father Thrist frowned. “I don’t understand why you can’t kill the sheep humanely first.” He crossed his arms, obviously uncomfortable.

“Bub only takes ‘em live, guys,” Sun answered. “You know that.”

The Rabbi said, “What about some kind of painkiller? Morphine, perhaps?”

“We don’t know how that would affect Bub’s unique anatomy.”

“How about a cigarette at least? A last meal?”

“He had Cap’n Crunch,” Andy offered.

“You gentlemen are more than welcome to perform the last rites, if you wish,” Sun said.

Again, Andy caught the faintest hint of a smirk.

“Sacrilege,” the Rabbi said. But he approached the sheep and held its head, speaking a few words of Hebrew.

“Perhaps Bub can be trained in the ways of shohet,” Andy said. “Then he can eat according to shehita.”

If Shotzen was impressed by Andy’s knowledge of his people’s tongue, he didn’t show it. Instead the chubby holy man shook his head in disagreement. “Bub won’t eat kosher meat. He’s trefah, a blood drinker.”

The rabbi went back to his seat. Sun walked the sheep to the Red door. Father Thrist refused to look.

“Rabbi Shotzen says that prayer every time we feed Bub a sheep,” Sun told Andy when they entered the Red Arm.

“It wasn’t a prayer. The rabbi simply apologized to the sheep, because it wasn’t going to be killed by a proper butcher, according to the Jewish laws of slaughtering animals humanely.”

Sun punched in the code for the first gate, and Andy made sure he noted the five digit number. The titanium bars swung open, but the sheep didn’t want to budge.

“She smells him,” Sun said. She took a black swatch of cloth from her coat pocket and slipped it over the animal’s eyes. “They’re calmer when they can’t see.”

With some firm tugging and a sniff of cereal, the sheep moved forward.

“You’re a vet, you’re supposed to take care of animals. Doesn’t this bother you, marching one off to death?”

Sun sighed. “Have you ever eaten a hamburger?”

“Sure, but…”

“Bub’s a carnivore, like a lion, like a shark, like you and me. As much as everyone around here is shocked by Bub’s eating habits, if they ever visited a slaughterhouse they’d be a thousand times more repulsed.”

“But you’re a vet.”

“I’m a vet who eats hamburgers. I also spent six months in Africa studying lions.”

Andy said hello in four African tribal languages.

She wasn’t impressed.

They came to the second door, and Andy punched in the numbers on the panel. Nothing happened.

“Two different codes,” Sun said. “You can’t have a secret government compound without security overkill.”

The sheep tried to bolt at the sound of the heavy door clanging open, but Sun had a tight grip on the reins.

Andy stopped at Red 14 and grasped the door handle but he didn’t turn it right away. The moment stretched.

“You don’t have to go in,” Sun said. “I just needed you to help in Orange 12.”

She was giving him a graceful way out, but he knew her opinion of him would drop even further if he took it.

Andy turned the knob and entered.

The smell hit him again, heady and musky, almost making Andy gag. This time the room wasn’t empty. Standing among the medical equipment was a man in a lab coat. He was tall and intense looking, with a thin line for a mouth and wide expressive eyes. His hair was light gray, short and curly. Andy put him at about forty, but he could have gone eight years either way.

“Oh good, feeding time,” the man said.

“Dr. Frank Belgium, this is Andy Dennison,” Sun said. “He’s the translator.”

“Good good good, we’re in need of one. Attack the mystery from all angles, the more the better. Yes yes yes.”

“Frank’s a molecular biologist.” Sun said it as if that was explanation for Dr. Belgium’s weird speech patterns and birdlike movements. “How’s the sequencing going, Frank?”

“Slow slow slow. Our boy—yes, he is a boy, even though there isn’t any evidence of external genitalia—his bladder empties through the anus, like a bird. He has 88 pairs of chromosomes. We’re looking at over 100,000 different genes, about quadruple what humans have. Billions of codons. Even the Cray is having a hard time isolating sequences. Nothing yet, but a link will show up, I’m sure it will.”

“All life on earth, from flatworms to elephants, share some DNA sequences,” Sun explained. “Dr. Belgium believes Bub also shares several of these chains.”

Dr. Belgium nodded several times. “Bub’s got the same four bases as all life, the same 20 amino acids. Even taking into account his…
different
anatomical layout, I believe he’s terrestrial, that is, he has earthly relatives somewhere. We’re trying matches with goats, rams, bats, gorillas, humans, crocodiles, pigs, everything that he looks like he may be a part of, to fit him into the animal kingdom… but now it’s feeding time, so let’s see if we can witness another miracle, shall we?”

Sun led the sheep past Andy and over to Bub’s habitat. Andy, who’d been avoiding looking in that direction, forced himself to watch.

At first, Bub wasn’t visible. The dwelling was filled with a running stream and trees and bushes and grass, as deep as a basketball court and about thirty feet high. The foliage was so dense in parts that even a creature Bub’s size could apparently hide in it.

“All fake,” Dr. Belgium said. “Fake brush, fake rocks, fake stream. It’s supposed to resemble the area where he was found, in Panama. I don’t think he’s fooled.”

“Where is he?” Andy asked, cautiously approaching the Plexiglas shield. He squinted at the trees, trying to make out anything red.

Bub dropped from directly above, the ground shaking as he landed just three feet in front of Andy.

Andy yelled and jumped backwards, falling onto his ass.

Sun laughed. “Did you forget he could fly?”

Andy didn’t notice Sun’s amusement. Bub was crouching before him, his black wings billowing out behind him like a rubber parachute.

Andy’s mouth went dry. The demon was the most amazing and horrifying thing he’d ever seen.

Hoofs big as washtubs.

Massively muscled black legs, with knees that bent backwards like the hindquarters of a goat.

Claws the size of manhole covers, ending in talons that looked capable of disemboweling an elephant.

Bub approached the Plexiglas and cocked his head to the side, as if contemplating the new arrival. It was a bear’s head, with black ram horns, and rows of jagged triangular teeth.

Shark’s teeth.

His snout was flat and piggish, and he snorted, fogging up the glass. His elliptical eyes—black bifurcated pupils set into corneas the color of bloody urine—locked on Andy with an intensity that only intelligent beings could manage.

He was so close, Andy could count the coarse red hairs on the demon’s broad chest. The animal smell swirled up the linguist’s nostrils, mixed with odors of offal and fecal matter.

Bub raised a claw and placed it on the Plexiglas.

“Hach wi’ hew,” Bub said.

Andy yelled again, crab-walking backwards and bumping into the sheep. The sheep bleated in alarm.

Bub, as if commanded, backed away from the window. His giant, rubbery wings folded over once, twice, and then tucked neatly away behind his massive back. He walked over to a large tree and squatted there, waiting.

Sun led the sheep past the Plexiglas and to a doorway on the other side of the room. They entered, and a minute later a small hatch opened inside the habitat, off to Bub’s left.

Andy mentally screamed at Sun,
“Don’t open that door!”
even though the opening was far too narrow for Bub to fit through.

Bub watched as the sheep walked into his domain. The door closed behind it.

The sheep shook off its blindfold and looked around its new environment. Upon seeing Bub it let forth a very human-sounding scream.

In an instant, less than an instant, Bub had sprung from his spot by the tree and sailed through the air almost twenty feet, his wings fully outstretched. He snatched up the sheep in his claws, an obscene imitation of a bat grabbing a moth.

Andy turned away, expecting to hear chomping and bleating. When none came, he ventured another look.

Bub was back by the tree, sitting on his haunches. The sheep was cradled in his enormous hands, as a child might hold a gerbil. But it was unharmed. In fact, Bub was stroking it along its back, and making soft sounds.

Sheep sounds.

“He’s talking to the sheep,” Dr. Belgium said. “He’s going to do it. Here comes the miracle.”

Andy watched as the sheep ceased in its struggle. Bub continued to pet the animal, his hideous face taking on a solemn cast. There was silence in the room. Andy realized he’d been holding his breath.

The movement was sudden. One moment Bub was rubbing the sheep’s head, the next moment he twisted it backwards like a jar top.

There was a sickening crunch, the sound of wet kindling snapping. The sheep’s head lolled off to the side at a crazy angle, rubbery and twitching. Andy felt an adrenaline surge and had to fight not to run away.

“Now here it comes,” Dr. Belgium said, his voice a whisper.

Bub held the sheep close to his chest and closed his elliptical eyes. A minute of absolute stillness passed.

Then one of the sheep’s legs jerked.

“What is that?” Andy asked. “A reflex?”

“No,” Sun answered. “It’s not a reflex.”

The leg jerked again. And again. Bub set down the sheep, which shook itself and then got to its feet.

“Jesus,” Andy gasped.

The sheep took two steps and blinked. What made the whole resurrection even more unsettling was the fact that the sheep’s head hung limply between its front legs, turned completely around so it looked at them upside down.