Tim reached out, gingerly, and traced his fingers along the animal’s thick head. “This lower dentiary, it’s massive.”
The heavy jawbone was at least two feet wide at the base, giving the head a wide, triangular shape tapering off at the nose. The jaw bulged with attached muscles.
Claus hadn’t been ready for this. They hadn’t seen a fetus outside of the womb for thirteen days, ever since Danté forbade further autopsies. Thirteen days ago, 115 pounds ago.
“Timothy,” Claus said. “Start on the autopsy for Miss Milkshake immediately. We have to know why she died. Go.”
Tim ran to the ladder and descended.
Claus carefully examined the skull. Two feet wide, two feet long, the last fourteen inches of length were nothing but jaws and teeth. The creature still possessed a proportionately large braincase. The brain-to-body weight ratio ranked alongside that of wolves.
The skull wasn’t the only shocking feature. The front legs had retained their relative length advantage over the hind limbs. The creature would move half upright. All claws ended in thick, muscular digits, each tipped with a six-inch-long claw. Sharp, pointy claws, like those of a big cat.
“Now you see,” Jian said. “Doctor Rhumkorrf, please.”
“You shut your mouth,” he said quietly. There would be no more insubordination from Jian and Timothy, a fact he would have to remind them of from time to time. “It will probably go through more physiological changes before it’s ready for birth. What I can’t figure out is this protrusion coming out of the back of its head.” A two-foot-long strand of cartilage, thin but sturdy, stretched from the back of the fetus’s head. He gently lifted the cartilage; still-forming skin ran from it down to the creature’s back.
“It almost looks like a variation on the dimetrodon’s spinal sail,” Claus said. “I don’t know what you were coding for with this, Jian. Come now, you’ve got to remember something this unusual. What is it?”
Jian looked at the growth, then up at Claus. Tears filled her eyes. “I do not remember what that is for,” she said. “But it does not matter. Please, Doctor Rhumkorrf, we are on an island where no one can reach us. We have to stop this, you can ask—”
“Do you remember what your insane asylum looked like, Jian?”
She leaned away like he’d actually hit her. That reaction, the way she caught her breath. He knew she’d spent a few years in one, before her countrymen got her back to some semblance of sanity. It was the perfect threat to keep her in line.
“Get back to work,” he said. “You made this animal. You go through your code, figure out what we have to prepare for. Do you understand me?”
She shrank back, nodding, then turned and waddled to the ladder. He stared at her all the way, in case she looked back with that pathetic, fat face. She did once, saw him watching her, then scurried the rest of the way to the lower deck.
Left alone, Claus stared at the huge corpse. Claws. Teeth. That wide jaw. That spine.
The cages would be enough.
They had to be.
NOVEMBER 30: THE PIMP SLAP
Implantation +21 Days
TIM SHIVERED AS he stared up at the bulkhead monitor. He needed a snort something fierce, but he couldn’t risk pulling his flask out of his back pocket. Not with Rhumkorrf watching. And maybe this really wasn’t the best time to be schnockered.
Jian stood next to the screen, also looking up at it, mumbling in Mandarin over and over again, switching her weight from the left foot to the right foot and back. She didn’t look like a scientist anymore—she looked like a lunatic.
Rhumkorrf sat on a stool, alternately looking at the IV needle in his hand and the pictures up on the bulkhead monitor. “So the IV needle came out of the vein,” he said, his voice a monotone of detached scientific analysis. “When would you estimate this happened, Mister Feely?”
“About 11:00 P.M.,” Tim said. “I checked the logs of the IV pump. It registered a pressure change, but not enough to trigger an alarm, because it was still pumping. Miss Milkshake had a slight hematoma at the insertion point. I estimate the fetus started eating the amniotic sac at around 12:05 A.M., causing the mother internal bleeding. Dude, the fetus actually ate the placenta, by the way, as well as a chunk of the uterine wall. Miss Milkshake flatlined at 12:37 A.M., according to the heart rate recorded by the stall’s computer. The fetus drowned in her blood at approximately 12:56 A.M.”
Rhumkorrf’s head snapped around. He had that furious look in his eyes again. “Mister Feely, are you sure about those numbers? As soon as Miss Milkshake died, the fetus would have asphyxiated within minutes—no oxygen from her blood.”
And now for the really, really fucked-up part. “The… uh… during the fetus’s struggles, its claws punched a few holes in the cow’s abdomen. There was a little… uh… air coming in, which it tried to breathe, I think, but it was also aspirating the mother’s blood.”
Rhumkorrf looked shocked. “So the fetus outlived the mother?”
“By around nineteen minutes,” Tim said. “When the needle came loose, I think that Baby Milkshake got… ah… it got hungry and tried to eat the first thing it could find.”
“This is not good,” Rhumkorrf said. “We’re going to have to increase the nutrient intake and set up shifts to check each IV on the hour.”
“Doctor Rhumkorrf,” Jian said, “this has gone far enough. We have to kill the cows, today. Right now!”
“That’s enough.” Rhumkorrf’s voice boomed through the confined upper-deck lab. “Jian, you’ve never been stable to begin with, and now? Well, your meds are clearly not working. I’ve had it with your paranoid rants!”
“Oh, blow it out your ass,” Tim said. Was this guy for real? The evidence of pending disaster sat on the table right in front of him. “Don’t be a fuck-tard, bro. Open your damn eyes! We need to kill these mutant freaks, and right now.”
Rhumkorrf’s small face wrinkled with fury. “I will not stand by while you two… pussies ruin this. We’ve been working for this for years! And we’re almost there.”
“Please,” Jian said. “Doctor Rhumkorrf, you must listen. We have to—”
Rhumkorrf stamped his foot on the rubberized floor, cutting off her words. “Jian, get out! I won’t hear any more of this! Get out of my lab! Get out of this plane entirely! You’re fired! Get out, get out getout!”
Tim and Jian looked at each other, then back at Rhumkorrf.
“Get out, I say! Get out now!” He pointed his finger to the ladder, anger radiating from his body.
Jian descended.
Well, maybe it wasn’t a good time to get schnockered, but that’s exactly what Tim was going to do. He pulled the flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the top and took a long drink. Ah, the power of scotch.
A hand hit his and the flask flew across the lab, trailing scotch as it went. A blur of motion, then a stinging sensation on his right cheek.
Rhumkorrf had slapped him. He stood nose to nose with Tim, his comb-over sticking up in a hundred different directions, eyes wide and unblinking behind the heavy black glasses.
“Feely, did you forget what I said about your career?”
“Screw my career,” Tim said. “I just want to get off this island alive.”
“I can’t believe you’re buying into Jian’s paranoid delusions.”