Ancestor (24 page)

Danté smiled a wide smile, a
genuine
smile. Colding realized that he had never actually seen a real, heartfelt smile from Danté. It made the man look a bit maniacal.

“How long?” Danté said. “How long until we have an actual birth?”

“Well, we don’t know,” Colding said. “Getting to this point was a major accomplishment, but Doc Rhumkorrf said there’s bound to be complications. The fetuses are growing very fast, which makes it hard to react to problems. It’s been five days and they’re already around fifteen pounds each.”

“If they survive,
how long
until a live animal, P. J.?”

Colding shrugged. “Too early to tell, really, but it could be anywhere from a month to three months.”

Danté grimaced. “Just do what you can to get me at least one live animal.”

“Will do. Danté, as long as I’ve got you here, I was wondering if you had an update on Doctor Hoel? Any word on her?”

Danté sat back. His demeanor seemed to change instantly. “She’s fine. Don’t worry about her and do your job.”

That subject was clearly off-limits. And Colding could do nothing about it from Black Manitou. “How about Colonel Fischer? Does he have any idea where we are?”

Danté shook his head. “No. But he’s looking. Hard. We must have live animals if we’re going to get the media and the public on our side.”

“The fetuses will grow at their own rate, Danté. It’s up to nature now.”

Danté didn’t like that answer, but had to accept it. He knew enough about biology to understand things had to run their course.

“Very well, P. J. Keep me updated.”

Danté broke the connection. Colding looked at his watch. He could go check up on Jian, or he could see if Sara was around. Jian was with Rhumkorrf and Tim … she’d be fine.

He’d go find Sara. Colding walked out of the security room, amazed at once again feeling excited and nervous about talking to a woman.

Implantation +5 Days

THE TWO FORMING creatures floated inside the amniotic sac, pressed face-to-face like sleepy lovers. The liquid environment supported their growing weight. Millions of chemical compounds drifted freely within that liquid. Some of those compounds were strong enough to register as scents.

And others, strong enough to register as
tastes
.

Inside two tiny mouths, those taste compounds landed on tiny tongues. Newly formed dendrites fired off chemical messages, chemical messages that traversed a tiny gap, known as the synapse, to land on the axons of the next nerve cell. This process repeated up the chain, traveling from the tiny tongues to the tiny brains in a fraction of a second.

Those taste signals activated a very primitive area in the newly formed brains. In effect, taste turned the brains
on
for the first time.

There were no thoughts, no decisions, although those things would come soon enough. There was only a short, intense race against time.

For the taste activated an instinct that would drive the creatures’ every waking moment.

Hunger
.

Implantation +6 Days

HANDS SHOOK HIS shoulder.

Claus Rhumkorrf tried to open his eyes, but they seemed glued shut. Lights blared right through his eyelids.

“Doc, wake up.” Tim’s voice? Tim, who had replaced Erika. A stab of emptiness. Claus had told himself he didn’t feel a thing for that woman anymore. That had been easy to believe when she was around every day, but now that she was gone he felt her absence.

“Wake
up
, dammit.” Tim’s voice, ringing with stress. His breath, reeking of scotch. And the man’s palpable body odor—how long since Tim had bathed?

“Come on, bro,” Tim said. “There’s a problem with Cow Sixteen.”

Claus moaned. His back was so stiff. Where was he sleeping? On a cot. In a plane. He wasn’t even bothering to go back to the mansion anymore. Instead, he just slept in the C-5’s bunk room. And the body odor? That wasn’t Tim. Maybe a shower was in order. Claus opened his eyes to see Tim’s blurry, anxious face.

“Cow Sixteen?” Claus said as he reached for his glasses. “That one has twins or triplets?”

“It
was
twins,” Tim said. “But now the ultrasound shows only one fetus.”

Claus slid his glasses in place. Tim’s words hit home. He stood and walked out of the bunk room, Tim following close behind.

Implantation +6 Days

COLDING COULDN’T HELP but wince a little. Sure, it was science, but that didn’t change the fact that he was watching Tim Feely slide a tube into a cow’s vagina. A harness suspended the cow, keeping her hooves just a few inches off the ground. Tim wore long gloves that were smeared with a clumpy, whitish substance that Colding could only think of as
cow smegma
.

“A little deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. His voice had a flat tone but dripped with anger and tension. He sat at a portable fiber-optic workstation, staring intently at a screen showing a fleshy, pinkish tunnel—the view from deep within the cow’s womb.

The 3-D ultrasound workstation sat close by, pressed up against the door of the stall opposite Cow 16’s. Jian half hid behind the machine, trying to stay out of the way. Rhumkorrf had shoved the workstation there in disgust when the high-tech, gold-tinted image showed only one ancestor fetus where yesterday there had been two. Then he’d started screaming, apparently, which was when Jian sneaked away and asked Colding to come to the C-5.

“Deeper,” Rhumkorrf said. “Get it in there.”

“Love it when you talk dirty, Doc,” Colding said.

Rhumkorrf sighed and shook his head. “This is not the time for your stupid fucking jokes.”

“Yikes,” Colding said. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

Trying, and failing. Rhumkorrf was mad because the cow had reabsorbed one of its twin fetuses.
Reabsorption
was when the mother’s body made some primitive yet calculated decision to not only abandon the small fetus but also break it down and reuse the raw materials. The problem was, reabsorption only happened when fetuses were a few ounces—it did
not
happen when they were roughly twenty pounds.

“Deeper, goddamit!” Rhumkorrf shouted. “I don’t have all day!” His comb-over was starting to fray.

In the cow’s stall, Tim started to sweat.

“Doc, come on,” Colding said. “Just take it easy.”

“I don’t need your input, Colding. Shut up or I will kick you out of here.
Mister
Feely, you insufferable
idiot
, can you do your damn job?”

That would be just about enough of that. Colding put a hand on Rhumkorrf’s shoulder, letting his thumb slide behind the trapezium muscle just to the left of the neck, pointer finger in front, just above the collarbone. He pinched the fingers together.

Rhumkorrf stiffened in his chair and hissed in a short breath.

“We’re all under a lot of stress here, Doc. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes,” Rhumkorrf said. “Of course.”

“Good. And you know shouting and stress affect Jian, so let’s just calm everything down. Tim is doing fine, don’t you think?”

Colding relaxed the pinch a little, but kept the muscle firmly between his thumb and forefinger.

“Of course,” Rhumkorrf said. “Uh … Timothy. My apologies.”

In the stall, Tim nodded absently. His attention remained focused on the fiber-optic tube.

Colding released the pressure and gave Rhumkorrf’s shoulders a quick, friendly rub. “There you go, Doc. All better.”

Rhumkorrf leaned forward, probably already forgetting Colding’s rebuke. On the monitor, a crystal clear image flared to life. Colding sensed Jian walk up on his right, Tim walk up on his left, all three of them looking over Rhumkorrf’s scattered comb-over at the image.

Rhumkorrf reached out, fingertips touching the screen. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s bigger,” Tim said quietly. “It shouldn’t be that big …
can’t
be.”

A placental sac filled the screen, translucent pinkish-white lined with thin red and blue veins. Inside the sac, the fetal ancestor in profile. Its head looked twice as large as the rest of the body. Tiny paws folded up under a long snout, which was dominated by the huge, bluish, closed eye. Colding could even see a tiny, fluttering thing … the ancestor’s beating heart.

“Fetuses average twenty pounds,” Jian said quietly. “They grow twenty pounds in
six days.”

Rhumkorrf’s fingertips traced the closed eye. He turned and stared at Colding with wild eyes, his anger gone.

“You see? We’ve done the impossible!”

Colding couldn’t find words. Until now, this had been something on paper, a process he administered just as someone might administer an
assembly line or a manufacturing plant. Even the gold-tinted image from the 3-D ultrasound had seemed somehow … Hollywood. The live image from the fiber-optic camera finally brought it all home in full, wet color—this was a
living creature
. A man-made organism that had germinated somewhere in Jian and Rhumkorrf’s genius, then clawed its way into existence.

Colding tore his eyes away from the image to look at the little man who made it all happen. “Pretty frigging impressive, Doc.”

Rhumkorrf turned, smiled and started to reply, but a strangled scream from Jian cut him off. Terror wrinkled her face into a disquieting caricature, locked her attention on the workstation’s screen. As one, Colding and Rhumkorrf looked back to the monitor.

The fetal ancestor, eyes open, stared right back at them.

Rhumkorrf jerked his fingers away from the screen and almost fell backward into Colding.

An inexplicable wave of fear tingled up Colding’s spine before he remembered it was only a computer monitor and this was a picture of a small fetus, not some six-foot-long creature looking at him with a malevolent gaze.

Jian’s hands flew to her head and grabbed huge fistfuls of hair.
“Tian a!
It is coming for us!”

“Jian, calm down!” Colding snapped. “Claus, is that supposed to happen?”

“No,”
Tim said.
“Fuck
no that’s not supposed to happen.”

Rhumkorrf’s skin looked even paler than normal, the hue of the walking dead. “I must say it’s a bit unusual, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

“What?” Tim said. “A bit
unusual?
Dude, you are so full of
shit!
Just
look
at the goddamn thing!”

“Mister Feely! I’m not going to—”

Once again Rhumkorrf found himself interrupted, this time by blurry motion on the monitor that drew everyone’s attention. The fetal ancestor turned its wedge-shaped head. Now two black eyes stared out from the screen, right through the translucent placental sack. Colding knew the fetus was actually looking at the fiber-optic camera inside the womb, but the tiny eyes seemed to be looking right at him.

“Odd,” Rhumkorrf said. “Most animals don’t open their eyes until after birth.”

The fetus opened its mouth and lurched forward, hitting the inside of the placental tissue and stretching it outward like a wet pink balloon. They
all flinched. Jian screamed louder. The tiny head reared back, the sac’s stretched and torn whitish membrane sagged. Another violent thrust. The oversized head ripped through the sac in a cloud of swirling fluid. A gaping maw, pointy teeth. Jaws snapped shut and the image blinked into static.

They heard a splashing from the stall. Colding looked back to see fluid spurting out of the cow’s vagina, a three-second downpour cascading off the floor. The cow’s water had just broke.

Jian shouted something in Chinese, her voice an uneven tremor that rang with easily understood fear. She tangled both hands in her hair and yanked. Clenched fingers came away thick with long black strands.

Colding grabbed her shoulders, turning her toward him. “Jian,
stop it!”

She stared at him, eyes wide with primal fear. She seemed terrified of him, as if she thought he was someone else. Or
something
else. She pulled another double handful of hair from her head, then shoved Colding hard in the chest. The move caught him by surprise. He tried to regain his balance, but his foot caught on Rhumkorrf’s stool, knocking it over and sending both men to the rubberized deck. Jian ran, disappearing down the open rear ramp, heavy feet pounding out a reverberating rhythm.

Rhumkorrf was up first, surprisingly nimble. He helped Colding to his feet. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Doc, do
not
try and tell me what I just saw was
normal.”

“It was probably just a reflexive acti—”

“Oh fuck you!” Tim said. “Try studying your biology 101,
Doctor
Rhumkorrf.”

Colding left them both behind, sprinting past docile cows sitting quietly in their plexiglass stalls. He ran down the rear exit ramp.

“Jian, wait!”

She kept moving, kept heading for the hangar door, fat shaking in time with her panicked waddle. Colding caught her just before she grabbed the door handle. She turned and tried to push him again, but he caught her wrists. She struggled for a moment, but he held her tightly. Her wide eyes stared at him without recognition.

“Take it easy,” Colding said. “Jian, just take it easy.”

She blinked rapidly, then clarity seemed to return to her vision. She fell forward into his arms. The sudden move and her weight knocked him back a step, but he held her up. She wrapped her arms around him, head buried in his chest, her body shivering.

Implantation +7 Days

RHUMKORRF SIGHED AS he looked down at the fetal ancestor curled up on the dissection tray. The fetus had torn the amniotic sac in order to get at the tiny camera, spilling the life-supporting fluid contained inside. It had died shortly afterward.

They would avoid fiber-optic work now, stick to the 3-D ultrasound for fear of a repeat performance. Additional ultrasounds on the herd had shown that each cow had only one fetus. All second and third fetuses were gone.

Looking at the cat-sized corpse on the autopsy tray in front of him, he had trouble grasping that it wasn’t even a week old. Mammalian development didn’t happen like that. The word
impossible
flashed through his mind every few seconds, yet the facts lay on the tray before him.