Prophet of Bones (43 page)
“If you’ll excuse me,” the woman said, and stepped into the other room.
The receptionist returned with her boss and Paul repeated himself.
“How numerous we talking?” the boss asked. He was a heavyset man in his fifties with a sun-creased face.
“Hard to say.”
“That so?” The boss’s expression was unreadable.
The boss got on the phone and made a call. The conversation was short, and Paul couldn’t hear what transpired. “If you’ll take a seat,” the boss said.
Paul and Lilli sat and waited until a police car arrived, its lights spinning.
It was a county officer who arrived first.
The officer stepped through the door, and the boss gestured to Paul and Lilli, and Paul repeated himself a third time.
“Who died?”
“A lot of people. The workers at a laboratory. The whole lab. Everyone.”
The officer looked at Paul, sizing him up, then got on his radio, requesting backup.
The baby started to cry.
“Does the child need assistance?” the policeman asked.
“Milk,” Lilli said. “If you can get it, baby formula.”
The man looked at the infant, then at Lilli, his confusion growing. For a moment he seemed on the edge of asking something, a question about the child that was not a child, but then he kept it to himself.
Two more police cars pulled up outside. More policemen. More questions. Paul tried to tell them about James. “He was the first to die. His throat was cut.”
“Where did this happen?”
“An island called Flores.”
“Do you have a last name for James?”
Paul glanced out the front window, saying softly, “Herpetology, mate.”
An older cop with a thick gray mustache seemed to be in charge.
“We’re going to need you to come back to the station.”
Paul and Lilli stood and followed the officers outside. More people had gathered on the sidewalk now, staring at the clump of police cars.
“We’d like to get a complete statement from you,” the officer said. “For the record.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Paul answered. It’s what prophets did.
They ushered Lilli to one squad car, Paul to another.
Lilli started to pull back, but Paul told her, “Just go with them. It’s okay. Just tell them what you know.”
She nodded and let herself be steered away gently by the arm.
Paul’s officer opened the back door of his squad car, and Paul ducked his head and sat. He pulled the report out and set it on the car seat next to him. The papers were crinkled but still legible. A dozen pages that might or might not matter. The car idled while the officer talked to the newspaper boss for a moment, and then the two shook hands and the officer headed for the car.
Paul watched the newspaper boss head back inside his building to write the next day’s headline. He wondered what it would look like. He wondered if there would be future headlines, in other cities, as the scope of what had happened was finally revealed.
The officer climbed into the car and shut the door. The back of his head was slick with sweat. “It’s gonna be a hot one today,” Paul said.
“Yeah,” the cop said. “Feels like.”
The cop started the car and eased past the throng of onlookers crowding the sidewalks. They stood staring from both sides of the wide city street, watching the police lights. Paul took off his eye patch and looked out the window at the curious faces, with both his good eye and the ghost eye, and then he closed his eyes in silent prayer as the cop car pulled down the road, leaving the faces behind.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book is an island. This one in particular owes an immense debt of gratitude to a great many people. I’d like to thank the many biologists, archaeologists, geneticists, and anthropologists throughout the years whose combined body of knowledge I have been the fortunate recipient of. Without their scientific efforts, this novel could never have been written. I’d like to thank the scientific thinkers John Hawks, Razib Khan, Carl Zimmer, Dienekes Pontikos, and Blaine T. Bettinger, whose blogs are amazing repositories for cutting-edge thought in the fields of genetics and anthropology. This book would have looked very different without their influence. I’d like to especially thank the archaeological dig team who did the
real
work on the Flores fossils. I’ve never met you—and nothing about this book was meant to intersect in any way with
anyone
associated with the real find—but without the discoveries made in Flores this work of fiction would have lacked a factual foundation to build upon. You have my respect and gratitude. If at any point in the novel I got the science wrong, it is nobody’s fault but my own.
I’d like to thank my writer friends Jack Skillingstead, Michael Poore, Nancy Kress, and Marc Laidlaw for hanging out with me and talking shop during the time I was writing the novel. I’d like to thank Patrick Swenson and the Rainforest Writers’ Village for giving me a quiet place by the water where I could finish the book. I’ll be back. I’d like to thank the entire Seattle-area writer community for being so open and supportive toward a new member of the kindred.
I’d also like to thank Aaron Schlechter, my editor, who believed in this novel and took a risk on it. And, of course, my agent Seth Fishman, and the Gernert Company, who got the book into the right hands and made the sale possible. I’d like to thank my parents again, in this book, too, because you can never thank your parents enough. I’d like to thank Jonathan Long for the great discussions on science and religion back when we were lab partners. I’d like to thank St. Patrick’s Elementary School and the old church where I was an altar boy. I have fond memories of those days. And Bob I’d like to thank for walking the ice all those years ago. You did fall through. And you pulled yourself out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T
ED
K
OSMATKA
was born and raised in northwest Indiana and spent more than a decade working in various laboratories before moving to the Pacific Northwest. His short fiction has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and has appeared in numerous year’s best collections. He now works in the video-game industry, where he’s a full-time writer at Valve, home of
Half-Life, Portal,
and
Dota 2.
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