Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

RILEY FELT OVERWHELMED as she sat down at a round table in the middle of the mess hall. Everyone was gathered there now. About an hour and a half had passed. She'd been able to go home and get a shower, put on different clothing.

Dr. Greyson sat down with her, also in dry clothing, his face white.

"Are you all right?" she said.

"I called Nick's wife," he said. "It was awful."

"I can imagine," she said.

Lieutenant Harris raised his voice from another table, where all the guards were sitting. "Where's Nancy? We kept an eye on her cabin, and she never came back."

Angela slowly raised her hand, cringing.

"Ramirez?" said the lieutenant. "You got something to add?"

"Look," said Angela, glancing around the room, "you know how she is. She said if I ratted her out to Greyson, she'd get me fired. I didn't know people were dying, all right?"

"You saw her," said Dr. Greyson, getting to his feet.

"She said that she wanted to get a look at the lizardman," said Angela. "She said that it wasn't fair that we never got to see it."

Certainly, Bub had to have a proper species name, didn't he? Riley needed to find out what that was.

"So, what? Where did she go?" said Dr. Greyson.

"She was heading along the riverbank," said Angela. "I think she was trying to sneak into the lagoon from behind."

"I can't believe you didn't say anything," said the lieutenant to Angela. "You are going to get yourself fired, Ramirez."

Angela spread her hands. "I went up there. I went looking for her. She wasn't there. But I did find this." She set something down in the middle of the table.

"Shit," said the lieutenant, probing it with one hand. "Where?"

"What is it?" Greyson hurried closer to the guards' table. Riley got up too, following him.

"Lying on the rocks next to the lagoon," said Angela.

Riley got close enough to see. It was a gel nail, bright red, broken off. "She was wearing these? She had this kind of a manicure out here?"

"Press-ons," said Angela. "She's obsessed."

"So, Bub got her, just like he got me," said Riley, looking at Dr. Greyson.

"We don't know what happened," said Dr. Greyson. "But this is exactly why he needs to be caught, tranquilized, and put in a tank."

"Sounds to me like this thing needs to be put down," said Lieutenant Harris. "And I didn't sign on to this job to go hunting lizardmen in the jungle."

"Well, we have to go looking for Nancy," said Angela with a sigh.

"We need to get in touch with Anderson Scott," said Harris. "Can anyone do that besides Nancy?" He looked at Greyson.

"Can't you?" said Greyson. "Don't you talk directly to him?"

"You don't either?" said Harris.

"Email chains," said Greyson. "He insists they all be routed through Nancy."

"Ditto," said Harris, folding his arms over his chest.

It was quiet.

Harris sighed. "All right, Ramirez, it'll be less creepy if it's you. I want you to go into Nancy's cabin and find her laptop or phone or anything you can find, and we'll reconvene here in an hour to try to go through all that shit."

"So, I'm understanding that you're refusing to go look for Nancy," said Dr. Greyson, his voice low and lethal. "And you're refusing to try to tranquilize Bub."

"You're calling him that weird name, too?" said Harris, shaking his head. "What the fuck is wrong with you people? It's not a pet. It's a dangerous, wild animal."

"You're refusing," said Greyson.

"I'm not refusing, because I don't take orders from you, doctor ," said Harris with a shrug. "I don't have to refuse."

"So, it's up to me to save Nancy," said Greyson. He looked at the other guards. "Anyone here willing to help?"

Angela looked from Harris to Dr. Greyson. "If I can find her laptop, I'll meet up with you, Dr. Greyson, just so you have someone with a gun with you, and—"

"No," said Harris. "You do take orders from me, Ramirez."

"Well, it sounds like everything's falling the fuck apart here, sir," said Ramirez. "And there's a woman out there whose life could be in danger."

"I'm not getting the rest of us all killed for her," said Harris. "She knew she wasn't supposed to go see that thing. Dumb bitch wants to eliminate herself from the gene pool, it ain't my problem."

Angela's nostrils flared.

"I'm going," said Dr. Greyson, shaking his head. "And I don't want a gun out there. I'll take the tranq pistol."

"I'll come with you," said Riley.

Dr. Greyson shook his head at her. "You've been through too much today, Dr. Stine."

"No, you need help," she said.

Dr. Greyson looked her over. He finally nodded. "All right." He pointed at Harris. "By evening, I'll have Bub in a tank, Nancy safe, and business back to usual around here. But if you think I'm not telling Anderson Scott everything you said and did—"

"Oh, right back atcha, doc," said Harris. "You really think he's going to take your side?"

"This is his project, and he cares about the species we've discov—"

"I doubt he cares if it's just a murdering monstrous thing that's going to get him a lot of bad PR," said Harris with a shrug.

Dr. Greyson winced, as if he thought this might be true. He turned on his heel and walked out of the building.

Riley went after him.

Outside, the muggy air clung to her like a second skin.

Dr. Greyson fumed, walking up the hill toward the lab.

Riley hurried to catch up with him.

"Dr. Stine," he said, as if he hadn't realized she'd come after him.

"Maybe you should call me Riley," she said.

He glanced at her, giving her a wry smile. "All right. Call me Jonathan."

"Sure," she said. "Is it always like this with Harris?"

"Well, usually they stick to their business and we stick to ours," he said. "But no, we've never gotten along exactly."

"And Nancy?"

"Well, no one likes Nancy," he muttered. "That doesn't mean I want Bub to do… whatever he's done to her. I just can't make it make sense. He's never behaved this way before."

"I had a thought," said Riley.

"Oh? But you just got here."

"Well, I suppose I'd need to know more," said Riley. "I heard… there was violence before?"

"It was Bub's brother, never Bub."

"Is it true that only you and Dr. White ever went up there to see him?"

"Sure," said Jonathan. "It seemed as if we should be careful about who we exposed him to. We didn't want to spook him. I can't believe he killed Nick." His lower lip trembled and he bit down on it to stop that from happening. "I feel betrayed, how stupid is that? As if Bub and I were friends. We were not. But I think I thought we were."

She nodded. "I get that."

He turned to her. "You do?"

"With chimps, it's… sometimes, you get that moment, where it slaps you across the face, that they're different than us. There's a reason we're the species who evolved to accomplish what we've accomplished. We're not superior, understand, I'm not saying that, but we have something they don't have, that's all. There wouldn't be such a gap between us and them if we didn't."

He bowed his head. "Right," he breathed.

"But… about my thought?"

"Oh, yes, sorry." He swerved while walking. They were coming up on the lab. He headed for the door. "What was it?"

"Was it only men who went to see him, then?"

Jonathan stopped short. He turned to look at her, eyebrows raised. "My God, I'm a fucking idiot."

"So, then I'm right?" she said. "What did he… with his needle things? In my abdomen?"

"Oh, no, for heaven's sake, Dr. Stine, we can't mate with them. We're not even remotely compatible." He was walking again, quicker, head down, like a bull rushing the door.

"You know this, how?"

"I dissected the other one, of course. They have internal fertilization."

Well, that meant sexual intercourse.

"But they're amphibians. They don't have penises," he said. "Certainly, they aren't using their fingers to deposit sperm."

"A cloaca, then," she said. "Like birds." That meant the male and female rubbed their cloacae against each other and the sperm went from one opening to another.

He nodded at her. "And located where you'd expect it to be."

"But you're right where I am with it, then? He took me, and probably Nancy as well, because we're female, and because…"

It was quiet.

He cleared his throat. "Certain amphibians do go into a mating season, which lots of mammals do too, a heat time."

"So, what if he was trying to trigger something in me?" Riley couldn't believe she was saying this out loud. "What if… you had some wild theory that they're some missing link between primates and amphibians. If we do have a common ancestor, there could be some way that… that…"

"Well, that's a fascinating idea," he said, putting his keycard to the door.

The door slid open.

"Less fascinating when you're worried that your reproductive organs have been tampered with, I assure you."

"We'll examine you," he said. "I'm sure there's no way he…" He paused, looking at Riley. "Do you feel all right?"

"It was hours ago, Dr. Greyson!"

"Apologies," he said, clearing his throat. "This is all highly inappropriate. Let's…" He sighed, starting down the hallway. "On the other hand, I supposed it bodes well for Nancy, doesn't it? He's probably keeping her alive if that's what he's trying to do."

Riley trailed after him. "Yes, I guess so. But if there was violence and death before…?"

"I don't know if this is related to that," said Jonathan. "But the truth is that it was triggered by a woman, just like this. The other one took her, and several men went after her. There were casualties in the process of getting her back."

"Oh," she said. "Did the woman survive?"

"Sadly, no, but it wasn't the creature who killed her. She caught a stray bullet in just the wrong spot and bled out. Nicked an artery, we thought."

"How horrible!"

"Yes, definitely," said Jonathan. He was heading through the hallways of the laboratory now.

Within moments, they emerged into the large room that was full of tanks.

She looked up at them. "These look… what have you been working on, Jonathan?"

"I wanted to make sure that the species continues," he said.

"Are those eggs?" she said. "They look like eggs."

"I have been doing some various experiments," he said. "Obviously, all we have is male DNA. They have no females. So, I've had to do what I could, splicing with different species. I've had some progress, but nothing has survived to grow enough to get out of the larval stage. Nothing's working. I've tried all different sorts of things—insects, other amphibians, even mammals. But whatever the missing piece might be, I can't figure it out."

"So, you thought if you could raise a female here, in the lab, that you could revive this species."

"Something close, anyway," he said.

Riley looked around at the tanks on the wall.

"Now, who knows, with these? Maybe one of them is going to mature. I had hoped, if we were to work together, maybe you could be helpful in this way."

"I don't know anything about mating amphibians," she said softly.

"Well, maybe it will be better with Bub in captivity, in the end," he said, shaking his head.

"Or, maybe… maybe there's a reason these creatures are dying out. Maybe we shouldn't be getting involved."

Jonathan chuckled.

"No, really, Dr. Greyson, my work with the chimps was very heavily predicated on the idea of allowing them to be on their own and to simply observe, never to interfere. This isn't science, what you're doing, it's some kind of Frankenstein experiment."

Jonathan folded his arms over his chest. "You're simply concerned because of whatever it was Bub did to you when he took you. I understand. We'll fix it if anything has gone wrong. It's been an awful day. For all of us." He took the tranquilizer pistol down from off the wall. "I brought this back in here after I took it off of Nick."

"You went to his body, took the gun, and then called his wife?"

"I was busy, yes. Couldn't sit still." Jonathan strapped the belt around his waist. "Let's go. I think I may have an idea where Bub might have taken Nancy."

JONATHAN RACED AROUND the side of the lagoon, trying to keep the thoughts that were rising within him at bay. Riley Stine was following him, but he wasn't talking to her. Instead, he was thinking about the things she'd said to him.

Was she right? Had he let this whole thing get out of control?

He'd been so consumed with trying to figure out how he could preserve this species he hadn't stopped to wonder why he was preserving the species.

Did the world need a new species of creatures, especially ones that were huge and strong and had violent tendencies? Intelligent creatures who humans nevertheless could not communicate with?

Perhaps it was best to leave it the way nature had brought it about.

Bub's species was going extinct.

Perhaps, he shouldn't interfere.

He had wanted to, yes, but now he began to wonder if his passion for the project had been ultimately selfish.

He wanted to make a discovery. He wanted to be celebrated for his genius work. He wanted the accolades that would come from being a pioneer.

That was never why he'd become a scientist, however. No, he'd wanted to learn and observe and to make contributions to the world. He'd wanted to… to serve society.

How had he lost sight of that?

He was so distracted that he shouldn't have been surprised when Bub leaped out of the undergrowth and tackled him.

But he was.

He fell on his side, his arm pinned underneath him. The dart pistol was up on the other side, but he couldn't reach it, because Bub had his other arm, wrenching it painfully behind his back.

He looked for Riley to tell her to run, but before he could say anything, Bub shrieked into his face and then hauled him up by his shirt. Jonathan dangled there, feet off the ground, now fumbling for the pistol.

He never got to it. Instead, Bub hurled him backwards.

Jonathan hit the rocks with a painful thud and then he rolled.

Distantly, he could hear Riley calling his name.