Xeno Sapiens (14 page)

By November of 2002, Seth’s visceral
digestive organs had developed. He began to look less like a
partially dissected med school cadaver and more like a human being.
At this stage of development, Seth had begun to replenish his own
blood supply and the constantly hovering lab techs took the
opportunity to monitor the quick destruction of fetal hemoglobin
and its transformation into HgbA and HgbA2. Massive amounts of
bilirubin and urobilinogen were produced and neutralized by the
same high doses of UV and gamma ray radiation that Seth had been
constantly subjected to. Even before his birth, life had found a
way and his body had adapted to external environments.

That same month, a penniless and
disgruntled Johnny Clark still had had no luck finding a job as
cushy as the one from which he had been so ignobly
dismissed.

He recalled an old and dusty family
skeleton and began making inquiring phone calls to the Natural
Christian’s Salvation center. He was told politely but firmly that
Josh Hall was redeeming the hell bound and could not be bothered.
The caller was welcome to try again once Mr. Hall had established
his quota of converts for the month. Clark hung up, saying he would
be in touch.

Seth’s musculature began to take shape.
Band over band of thick, striated red muscle appeared in fleshy
sheets, enveloping already functioning bone, nerves and blood
vessels.

Eyes (Clifton’s own clones) put in
their appearance by late December of 2002. They stared blackly
straight ahead, unmoving and unblinking, unable to interpret any
images.

The pons, cerebellum and medulla had
already formed, being, really, only extensions of the spinal cord.
The cerebrum had yet to develop.

Ingrid had devoted a great deal of time
to the development of a ‘community brain’, a cerebrum that combined
vast comprehensive ability with some super normal brain
functions.

Drawing on some little known (and
mostly hushed up) work by Kensington and Hart, she had isolated and
synthesized some of the rarest genes ever classified. These genes
controlled the functions of certain talented pituitary glands.
Under stress, these glands produced chemicals with names so long
and twisty they were usually referred to by-only their acronyms:
RTGH, DFGH and BUPL. These chemicals produced many definitely
desirable effects: Cryokinesis, telekinesis, pyrokinesis,
telepathy, telempathy. Such traits were not supernatural, but
extremely rare and impure, and were now within trembling
reach.

During the long nights in which she could find no sleep,
she thought of something Hubert had once told her in reference to
Josh Hall:
“They’s so many people wants to grow up and slay the dragon
in this world. But most times that dragon will just turn around,
and eat you right up.”

Josh Hall had said she was a dragon,
and now she was on the brink of calling his hand. The real dragon
was the straitjacketing of minds closed too long. For too long
people had thrust themselves into the jaws of chance. They lacked
vision.

Now winter, with its snow and ice, had
again settled mistily on the Appalachians. Ingrid found it hard to
believe, but an entire year had passed. She wasn’t a prisoner; she
came and went as she pleased. Yet the disturbing fact remained. She
remembered nothing at all that didn’t concern the project. Even her
occasional nights out with Clifton had become less frequent. She
was a little embarrassed to realize nothing more had come of
it.

But in the near future, an event would
occur that would show her that their relationship was more
intertwined than mere business.

“
Would you watch what you’re doing,
for Christ’s sake?”

Clifton jerked around at Jimmy’s urgent
shout. Jimmy and another tech had quickly retreated as far from the
Helix depolarization chamber as they could. They stared at it with
the frightened eyes of children.

The magnetic flywheel had somehow
broken out of its race atop the machine and was spinning
uncontrollably. Ever widening loops and swirls of caustic alkali
solution whirled through the air in arcing streamers. The rest of
the workers had already made mad dashes for safety, stepping lively
and diving beneath tables. Some hid behind computer terminals,
peering out from behind them with their goggled eyes,

The wheel spun like a dervish,
producing a high pitched whining and scraping. It rose and
flattened, rose and flattened in an eccentric wobble, spinning so
rapidly it was only a blur. In a few more seconds its entire fifty
pound weight would come careening off to whirl through the
lab.

Clifton left his seat and shouted at
Sunners over the keening of the flywheel.

“
Turn it off!’’
he screamed.

“
I already tried,”
Sunners howled back.
“The overload
circuits must have fused.”

Clifton looked at the wheel again. Its
profile was higher and a series of bright blue sparks jumped from
the sides of the flywheel to the main body of the chamber like a
cyclotron, giving the whole machine an alien, blue glow. Unless he
shut it off, Clifton knew, a half a million dollars’ worth of
machinery was going to blow sky high in a Fourth of July fireworks
display.

He glanced around quickly, not yet
panicked, and spied the familiar gray rectangle of a breaker panel.
In order to reach it, he would have to skirt to one side or the
other of the machine. He advanced toward the chamber, his right arm
held before his face like a shield. The burning liquid splattered
across his coveralls and burned holes in it.

Some of the alkali reached his skin and
Clifton felt as if a red hot wire had been lashed around his torso.
The caustic liquid left yellow-brown burn marks on the tips of his
fingers where the gloves had disintegrated, He imagined it bubbling
where the fluid had burned him. He was only a few steps from the
box on the wall.

With a wrenching explosion of metal,
the flywheel spun free. It propellered through the lab like a madly
spinning lawn mower blade, making great, whooping sounds as it
displaced the air around it.

Clifton lurched sideways and threw his
right arm out for balance. His fingers touched a wall and he gave
himself a mighty shove. Instead of pushing himself out of harm’s
way, he was brutally whipped around by some force and smashed into
the wall. The back of his head thudded into the cinder blocks with
a teeth crunching crack.

There was a violent, momentary tug on
his right arm, as if someone were trying to pull it from its
socket. He dimly heard a sound like an ax being ground on a rapidly
spinning whetstone. The tugging sensation abruptly ceased, replaced
by an urgent tingling at the extremity of his right arm.

Clifton looked at his arm and someone
screamed. That was the last thing he heard before he slid down the
wall, unconscious.

Clifton’s arm hung by a single, mangled
thread of flesh. His white jumpsuit was peppered with a shotgun
pattern of blood droplets and a large, irregular stain of blood
just below the shoulder. The lower portion of his coverall sleeve
peeled back from the butchered limb like the skin of a husked
vegetable. The crimson spatters were brassy and bright against the
snow white material.

The wheel had spun Clifton around,
pinning him against the wall, crushing the humerus to powder. Even
this had not been enough to gut the wheel’s force and it had
continued to spin, splitting and tearing any tissue that still
resisted.

Most of the smaller blood vessels had
cauterized instantly, but the large, brachial artery had been
flayed open and blood jetted out in red torrents. Clifton sat with
his back against the wall, his legs splayed out, looking for all
the world like a drunk who has just passed his limit. Except drunks
were not missing a right arm and losing blood by the pint with
every beat of their hearts.

“
Oh, God, oh, Christ,”
Sunners moaned. His
chalk-white face was a twin to the white of his
jumpsuit.

Sunners ran across the floor, skidding
in the rapidly widening pool of blood. His foot landed in a large
puddle and he pitched forward, arms held out like a circus high
wire performer. His hands hit the wall and his feet slipped in the
bloody mess. He tumbled clumsily, landing flat on his
back.

He looked up. To his horror, he was
staring straight into the stump of Clifton’s right arm. Another jet
of blood gushed out as he watched.

Jimmy rolled away, getting his suit
even bloodier. He gritted his teeth and plugged two of his fingers
directly into Clifton’s brachial artery. The pressure from
Clifton’s heart pulsed unpleasantly against his fingers and
freshets of warm blood squirted past them. That was the last straw.
Jimmy clawed his mask off with his free hand, and puked vile vomit
all over the floor.

“
Oh, God, Jimmy,”
he heard a voice say from
behind him.
“What happened?”

Ingrid stood over them. She had not
taken the time to put on a mask and her glasses had fallen to the
tip of her nose as she leaned over. Her face was screwed into an
ugly harpy rictus and her throat had knotted into four hard,
vertical lines. Everyone else had retreated as far from the ghastly
scene as possible. Some left at a lively clip and that was what had
alarmed Ingrid.

“
We’ve got to get him to a hospital,”
Jimmy said faintly. He swayed slightly and his eyelids fluttered as
if he were about to fade out. The wretched odor of his vomit
drifted out on his breath. “If we hurry, we might be able to save
his arm.”

Ingrid looked at the shredded wreck of
Clifton’s arm and made a decision.

“
It’s too late, Jimmy,” she said
calmly. “It’s too serious. If it were reattached, he would never
have much use of it.”

“
Well we’ve got to do something, for
Christ’s sake,”
he exploded. His eyes popped open and bugged like those of
a stomped on bullfrog.
“I’m sitting here with my fucking hand jammed up a
gaping artery and it’s not one bit of fun!”
he screamed.
“Do you hear me?
It’s not one fucking bit of fun!”

“
Cut it,” Ingrid said.

Sunners looked stunned. His eyes flew
open even wider. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was as dry as
parchment.

“
What? What did you say?”

“
Cut it.”

“
No!”

“
Will you for the love of Christ cut
the fucking thing!”
Ingrid shrieked. “Oh, never mind, I’ll do it
myself.”

She reached into her lab coat and
pulled out the pair of surgical scissors. She knelt in the blood
around Clifton and snipped the tiny thread of flesh. It parted with
terrible ease and Clifton’s arm thumped lengthwise to the floor
like a sawed off piece of wood.

Sunners moaned again. He looked at
Ingrid as if she were a lunatic.

“
Keep your hand there, Jimmy,” she
said, “and help me get him to surgery. You’ll see why I did that.
Just trust me, okay?”

“
Okay,” he rasped. “I don’t have
another choice, do I?”

They hefted Clifton off the floor.
Sunners’ right hand was dripping with blood. Some of it had clotted
and become tacky. A thin sheen of copper-colored tones glinted in
the bright lights.

Ingrid barked at a female technician
cowering against the wall.

“
Go find Professor Caudill,” she
demanded. “Get his ass down here and don’t dick around. After
you’ve done that, get surgery ready. All of this had better be done
in ten minutes, or I’ll put some tits in a wringer.
Understand?”

The woman nodded, pasty and shaking.
She left without looking back.

Ingrid and Jimmy had gotten Clifton to the door of the
sequencing lab before anyone lifted a finger to help them. Two of
the larger men in the room took Ingrid’s burden while Jimmy grimly
held pressure against the blood flow. Ingrid noticed that no one
offered to relieve Jimmy of
his
job.

“
Get him to surgery,” Ingrid said.
“Stop the bleeding and stabilize him. Nothing else. I’ll be down in
a few minutes.” She looked at Jimmy. “Trust me,” she said quietly,
“You saved his life, now we’re going to give it back to
him.”

Jimmy looked at her blankly. They were
both bloody as butchered hogs, but it was Ingrid who had kept her
head. Jimmy looked away and the rescue team limped down the hallway
toward the surgical theater, virtually dragging Alex.

Ingrid, her guts boiling inside her but
unable to show it, hurried to her quarters to change
clothes.

********************

Clifton looked small and vulnerable on
the operating table. Professor Caudill had sprayed cryoprecipitate
over the jagged stump and the smaller vessels had clotted within
minutes with the aid of a temporary tourniquet. Not recommended
medical procedure, but necessary under the circumstances. The large
arteries in the stump had been clamped and tied. The ragged end of
the stump oozed and suppurated sickly blood and clear
lymph.