The Dragon Keeper (23 page)

He sounded like a freaking textbook. Meg tried to find Gemma in the crowd, but taller people stood between her and the bay window where she’d left her.

“What do you recommend as our path forward, Antonio?” Gerald asked.

“Our best resource opportunity is Dr. Joyce Reading, the evolutionary biologist who I’m sure needs no introduction in this room. I’ve briefed her on the situation, and she has agreed to fly in tonight to lead our research efforts. There will be no cost to the zoo. She will work with us in exchange for non-exclusive publishing rights on the Komodo aberration.”

“And what about our statement to the press?” the PR director, a suit sitting on Gerald’s right side, asked Antonio. “Despite Ms. Yancy’s unfortunate outburst the other night, we need to make a more cohesive and uniform statement.”

“I would like to make a very short statement today and wait until Dr. Reading arrives for a full press conference.” He had an answer for everything.

Bringing out a stack of glossy folders, Antonio passed them around the room. He held one out to Meg, and she hesitated, as if taking it would accept something about him that everything inside of her wanted to spit on. She understood in that second what had put that horrible pain on Ben’s face last night, and it wasn’t the unfaithfulness—it was the deception. Despite all their differences, she and Ben had always been honest people—honest about who they were and what they expected from each other. But she’d let him think that she was a better person, someone who wouldn’t cheat on him, and now, after destroying every good thing he’d seen in her, here she was on public display with the man she’d cheated with, watching him turn into someone else, too.

Antonio must have seen her hesitation in accepting the folder because for the first time during the meeting, a shadow passed over his features, just the briefest flicker of the distraught Antonio she’d found at the reception, and that tiny glimpse moved her hand toward him to take the folder. Before she could say anything, though, he turned away, slipping back into the corporate persona that fit him so flawlessly.

As she flipped through the folder, it became obvious why he hadn’t returned her calls or asked her in person about Jata’s blood sample. The thing was full of easily digestible sound bites, bright charts, and pictures. He’d been too busy keeping the print shop running, and all of this was just step one—a bullet point even—in his plan to diagnose the disease.

The PR director, as well as most of the other people in the room, pored over the folders and discussed the best marketing techniques, ways to stretch the Komodo aberration—Antonio’s term had immediately caught on in the meeting that they should also have renamed The Launch of the Miracle—into the highest possible return. It was impossible to follow their conversation; they were thinking out loud in that corporate, predatory language that swept over the entire room like a feeding frenzy.

“I’ll allow today’s statement then, as long as Ms. Yancy is not the speaker,” Gerald Dawson was saying with a small nod, and again laughter rippled through the room.

Meg ignored it, ignored all of them, and squeezed the folder tightly against her torso as if she could strangle the threat out of it, when she knew the opposite was true. She couldn’t even touch the whirlwind that was forming. She was the useless jerk who could only watch as their collective minds grouped up like a hunting pack, circling closer and closer to Jata.

~

Ben was gone when she got home that night. She’d sped through rush hour and run a stoplight to make sure she arrived in time for the six o’clock news, but now that she was here, she couldn’t turn the TV on. Flipping a lamp on in the living room, she sat on the couch and stared at the dark and dusty screen. An open bag of potato chips faced Antonio’s press release folder on the coffee table, and she didn’t have the heart to touch either one. It was 5:52 p.m. Cold—funny how dread made you cold. She hugged herself and bent over her knees. Ben’s news notebooks were piled on the floor by the opposite side of the couch, unopened. She picked up the one on top and turned to the first page.

This notebook covered the warring political factions in one of the Baltic states, threatening to split the country in two. She flipped through pages all marked by date and source. Some stations concentrated on the top players in the struggle. Others, she read, focused on the common people and what it would mean to them if their country were torn in half. On the bottom corner of each page, Ben had written in which party that news source was siding with. All of them, it seemed, came down on one side or another. That was the classic thing he always looked for—how the reporter skewed the story by taking sides or selectively editing facts. Maybe it was impossible for them not to, she thought as she sifted through the pages. Would there even be a story if it didn’t lean to one side or the other? Humans saw good guys and bad guys no matter what they were looking at, unless they just didn’t care. And that was the rub; it was impossible not to care about Jata, and that made the hatchlings prime news.

It was now 5:58 p.m. She swallowed hard, turned on the TV, and switched it to Channel 12. The room felt wrong without Ben there—hollow. How many hundreds of nights had they sat there together, comfortable to the point of lazy in their routine? Ben watched the news while she read
National Geographic,
and they ate dinner and talked about the zoo or whatever story was making headlines. Sometimes on frigid January nights, she tucked her feet into his lap, and he would call her cold-blooded and laugh, but her legs warmed up in no time—he was like a great big electric blanket. She shouldn’t even be watching the news without him. It felt more like cheating now than it ever had when she was sleeping with Antonio. Carefully, she placed the notebook back on top of the pile, brushed a piece of hair off the cover, and slid to the far side of the couch, as far as possible from the empty cushion where Ben should have been sitting.

“Good evening, and welcome to the six o’clock news. Tonight we’ll talk to the police officer who arrested the man suspected of committing Saturday’s South Side shootings and hear about the latest research in the fight against cancer, but first, Nicole Roberts brings us our top story tonight—a bizarre birth at Bloomington’s Zoo of America.”

The screen cut from the anchor to Nicole Roberts, who stood in front of the zoo’s main entrance. The huge Z
OO OF
A
MERICA
sign, a Godzilla-sized version of the logo on the back of Meg’s uniform, glowed in spotlights behind Nicole’s head, even though the sun was still well above the horizon. The last visitors streamed out of the gates and waved to the camera as they disappeared on their way to the parking lot or light rail station.

“Thank you, Don.” Snug in her camel-colored coat, Nicole nodded. “The Zoo of America hosted a party last Friday night to celebrate the birth of three Komodo dragons, but the festivities abruptly ended with news that was confusing to some and outright shocking to others.”

A clip from the reception jumped on-screen, and Meg sucked in a breath when the camera zoomed in to her own face, pale as paper, behind the stage podium. “They’re girls. The dragons are female.”

Nicole continued, confirming the birth as impossible and reading the published blurb that the zoo sent out earlier today. One of Antonio’s charts flashed up on the screen, then photo stills of other Komodos.

“There have been a few other cases of parthenogenesis in the Komodo dragon population of the world’s zoos, but as the Zoo of America explained, these were all male dragons born to an unfertilized female. Parthenogenesis is a mouthful, but it comes from the Greek words
parthenos
, which means chaste or virgin, and
genesis
, which of course means origin or creation. And that is exactly what the Zoo of America believed this to be eight months ago—a virgin birth. I interviewed the woman on stage about this very idea when the zoo originally announced the discovery of the Komodo eggs last August.”

Meg appeared back on-screen, this time standing in front of Jata’s exhibit, arms crossed, looking hostile and defending Jata all over again. “We have no documentation on Mary’s sexual status, and Jata has done a lot more work to reproduce.”

The sound bite was even worse than she remembered. It went on and on, the disaster replaying itself, reborn with twice the strength.

“Unfortunately, this zookeeper, Meg Yancy, was less willing to talk to us since the announcement last Friday.”

The screen jumped to Meg at the reception again, except this time she was waving a huge angry hand in front of the lens. “This is none of your business.”

“We’re invited guests here,” the off-camera reporter claimed as Meg glared into the frame.

“I didn’t invite you.”

In the living room, Meg buried her face into the side of the couch, but she could still hear, through the couch cushions, Nicole’s distorted voice wrapping up the segment.

“Now it seems that Ms. Yancy was a little quick to judge. We have to consider, for lack of any other explanation, whether there might be divine forces at work here after all. Back to you, Don.”

After they transitioned to the next story, Meg leaned over and picked up the press release folder. The exact words that Nicole had read were right there in black and white, just as Antonio had written them down. He’d planned it all out, exactly the way the story should air, but there was nothing in the folder to prepare for this. Nicole had taken each carefully phrased blurb and chart and hacked them up—piecing them all back together with that damning footage into a story that made Meg look like the worst keeper in the world. Nicole hadn’t aired a story about Jata or the hatchlings at all; she’d leveled a direct attack on Meg.

Meg had no idea how to fight back, how to defend her comments or her name. She could count the number of people who would listen to her on one hand, while Nicole Roberts had the entire Twin Cities as her ready audience. Meg didn’t know anything about dealing with the media. The person she needed right now, she realized with a sinking hopelessness, was Ben.

She should’ve gotten up to eat something, but the thought of food made her nauseous. Gemma called, having seen the story, too, but there was nothing to say after the initial confirmations. Meg sat on the couch for an hour, staring at the wall while the TV droned through programs, before dragging herself to the bedroom and passing out, exhausted.

~

Jata walked to her, hunger flexing in each lumbering step. Meg looked down, around the dirt floor, on top of the rocks, but the feed bucket was missing. Jata drew closer, breathing heavily. Hissing coated the underside of her tongue as she licked the air, and Meg felt it, as if she were the air circling Jata’s jaws, being hit with stabs of forked, demanding flesh.

Food. Jata must eat.

Ben and Antonio stood behind her, and she picked up the feeding hook and pierced Ben’s palm, ripping through his skin. His hand tore apart into bones and blood, and she knelt down to collect the pieces to feed them to Jata. They disappeared as fast as she could offer them: fingers, wrist, tendons, hairy skin. She moved to Antonio, stabbed the hook into his armpit, and tore his whole arm from his body. The blood pooled at her feet, rushing over her toes and swallowing her ankles, but when she looked down it was blue, a wide river that grew and grew. Jata nudged her, still hungry, and Meg snapped off her own fingers like happy firecrackers—relieved when each one popped and broke free—and fed them to her as the water rushed over them, sweeping them both downstream and out into the ocean. Jata submerged and was gone, her feet tucking into her sides and tail pumping steadily down into the depths of the water. Meg tried to follow, but she couldn’t move and, looking behind her, she saw the stump of a tail growing out of her own back—severed and useless.

She woke up in a twist of wet sheets and blinked at the black, pre-dawn ceiling. Slowly, the white noise of the ocean receded until she could hear her heartbeat again, thumping out of her ears into the sweat drying cold on her pillow. Today was Tuesday, the day she fed Jata.

24 Days
after
Hatching

W
hen Meg punched in for her shift the next morning, a crowd of keepers and cleaning staff huddled around the last computer terminal in the cage. Desmond, driving the show, peeked out from between hips and badges and called her over to check out an Internet site.

“Isn’t anyone working today?” Meg muttered as she shouldered her way to the front of the group through thumps on her back and lots of comments: “Good job.” “Nice work out there, ace.” “Have you applied for PR yet?”

The site was hosted by the Cooperative for Christian Consumer Rights, or CCCR to their friends and pamphlet makers, a consumer watchdog group that had banned the Zoo of America at six o’clock that morning in protest of the virgin birth. An e-mail titled “Boycott the Serpent Abomination” had been sent to more than a million subscribers across the country.

Cyber thumpers, Desmond called them. They weren’t part of any church, and they didn’t have a leader or even a PO box. They were self-appointed keepers, making sure that their people didn’t give a single American dollar to any business they felt, for whatever reason, didn’t honor their beliefs. General Motors alone had lost 5 percent of its annual revenue when CCCR had decided a few years back that the Saturn was too gay-friendly in its ad campaigns. Apparently gay people were only allowed to walk or bicycle their way straight to hell. Somehow the CCCR caught wind of the Nicole Roberts broadcast with her hint at divine intervention, and their messengers tripped all over themselves to deliver it personally.