Chapter Twenty Two
Ibn Sina Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq
“These things smell dreadful. Couldn’t we have chilled them?”
“We did Doctor. Unfortunately dead baldricks appear to rot very fast indeed. As far as we can tell, its daylight that causes them to decay, not temperature.”
“Ultraviolet sensitive then? Would that tie in with reports of their sensitivity to lasers?” A doctor in the observation gallery sounded very thoughtful.
“They do seem to be sensitive to most of our technology, from ultra-violence to infra-dead.” A chuckle crossed the gallery. The baldricks were running west, with three armies in hot pursuit and another closing in from the North. Suddenly, they seemed far less frightening.
Doctor Surlethe nodded and looked at the baldrick corpse stretched out on the dissection table in front of him. “This is a big one even by baldrick standards, nearly 3 meters tall, weight 200 kilograms?”
“Before your army shot large pieces off him, yes.” Another ripple of laughter ran around the operating theater. The relationship between Iraqi and American had eased to the point where they could make jokes about each other without fearing consequences. On the other hand, the Iraqi nurse flushed slightly, even now she felt ill at ease receiving public attention.
“Let’s have a look at the X-rays.” Surlethe had them set up on the overhead displays. “Is everybody seeing what I’m seeing?”
“It’s very human.” One of the watching doctors spoke hesitantly. “Human but not human, as if it was a human body seen through a nightmare.”
“Exactly, the body is laid out almost identically to ours. The single upper arm and upper leg bones, the two bones in the lower arms and legs. The same number of ribs, of vertebrae. If we go by bone count and position, this thing is human. But, of course, we know it isn’t. The bones themselves are twisted and distorted, and there are things here that have no equivalent in our anatomy. Not just superficial things either, like the horns and tail. There’s these things as well.” Surlethe tapped the body where what appeared to be huge muscles ran down its back. They were so large they made the creature’s spine look as if it was in the middle of its body rather than its back. The creatures stunted wings stuck out of them reminiscent of broken branches from a snow bank. “50 percent of its body mass would you say?”
There was a ripple of agreement. “I thought they were muscles that allowed it to fly but they’re not. This thing can’t fly. Did histology come up with anything?”
“Doctor Surlethe, we find this hard to believe but we think they are electrocytes. The samples we took show them to be very similar to those in the electric eel but they are much larger and many times more numerous. The electric eel generates 500 volts at 1 amp, if these cells work the same way, the baldrick should be able to generate 5,000 volts at 10 amps. Almost 100 times more power.”
“That would explain much, especially their ability to fire bolts of lightning. Let’s have a look inside shall we?”
Surlethe took an electric carving knife, he’d already found from bitter experience that surgical scalpels had a very short life when faced with baldrick skin, and sliced into the dead baldrick. The smell was far worse once the skin was opened up and inside, the internal organs were already decomposing into slush.
“From what we can see here, it’s the same as with the bone structure. The internal organs are human in placement but wildly different from us in shape and appearance. We have no real idea of the fine detail of function of course. For example, this looks like a liver but is it? What else does it do? Thoughts people?”
“It is as if it was human but became corrupted.” The Iraqi nurse was speaking slowly. “Almost as if this was once human but something got at it, corrupted its DNA.”
“It’s worth noting that the other bodies are very similar to this. If this is the result of DNA being corrupted, then the corruption was done systematically. The process has created a new species.”
“Did this evolve from us? Or is it parallel evolution?” Another Iraqi doctor watching the dissection spoke. He was slightly guarded, incredibly, he’d heard that there were Americans who were still dumb enough to believe in creationist stories and deny the scientific truth that stared into their faces. It was so strange, how could a people who could create such wonders also believe in things so foolish? Still, he didn’t want to upset one of them, they had guns as well as strange beliefs.
Surlethe thought carefully. “I’d say its parallel evolution, they started out as the next-level-up version of us and something happened to them. Either they’ve been infected with something that messed up their DNA or they’ve been engineered to look like this.”
“Genetic engineering needs technology.” Yet another Iraqi doctor. “And we know they don’t have it.”
“We think they don’t Doctor. Its very probable they don’t and we certainly haven’t seen it yet. But we can’t rule out the possibility that there’s pockets of technology somewhere. However, genetic engineering doesn’t need that high technology, just patience and breeding experiments. Look at dogs, a Rottweiler and a Chihuahua were engineered from the same ancestor. These could be the same.” I wish they’d let me dissect that succubus Surlethe thought. Then we’d have something to compare this with. “Right, well, lets look a bit more before this one decays to nothingness.”
Outside Gary’s Shoe Store, Lakeview Mall, Chicago, Illinois
“But its…. una ropas de puton.” Maria looked at the top her school-friends were urging her to buy. If she’d worn it back in Honduras, her mother would beat her and old women would whisper accusations behind her back. But here?
“Look girl, you’re in America now. Halter tops, mini-skirts and fuck-me pumps get issued at the border. Get used to it.” Shana’s voice was severe but she was laughing underneath it.
Maria looked dubious but she could see her friends were right. Dress standards were different here. She’d only been at the school six weeks and this was her first time hanging out in the mall with her new friends. She didn’t want to embarrass herself or them. What she didn’t know was that she was far from the first new arrival from Central America who’d joined the school and all the girls with her understood how difficult the adjustment from the highly conservative lifestyle she’d come from was. The Immigration Department might run assimilation classes for new arrivals but the high school girls had their own, much more efficient program. She should have guessed from the way they were speaking, the group had two African-American girls, three Anglos and two Latinas. They were speaking in a strange mixture of Spanish and English, switching from one language to the other in mid-sentence with unconscious fluency, the whole mixed in with ebonic slang. Viewed objectively it was an awesome display of bilingualism.
She held the blouse up against herself again. In truth, it was quite modest by the standards of teenage girls at a mall and was on sale, 80 percent off. And it did make her look nice. She pushed her hat a little back on her head, trying to make up her mind. All the girls were wearing the fashionable kepi-style caps with aluminum foil built into the crown and neck, that was one thing that had changed since The Message. Now, everybody wore caps, all the time. The stores here were full of them, some cheap baseball caps with foil inserts, others much more expensive. Maria finally made her decision. She’d take the top. She took it to the counter and, as she started to pay, her friends broke out in a round of applause. She’d just done something her mother would not approve of and that was her first step to becoming a real American teenager.
“Hey man, you, like, going to get some more donuts?” One of the Anglo girls, Marcie, was speaking to Philip Phelan, the shift supervisor of the Mall security guards. He smiled a bit weakly at her, it was a joke all the rentacops on duty here had to put up with but she was a customer so her jokes were, by definition, funny.
“Fraid not ma’am. Crispy Kreme ran out of original glazed so I’m going to have to make do with Pop- Tarts.”
“Poor baby.” Marcie’s voice was sweetly consoling. “The red light comes on again in an hour so I’m told.”
“Why thank you ma’am. I’ll bear that in mind.”
Marcie watched Phelan continue his rounds, a shadow of concern crossing her mind. He was way too far over- weight and she could see him wheezing slightly. It reminded her of her father before he’d had his first heart attack. He really should be sitting comfortably behind a desk, she thought. Then she frowned slightly, there was a ripple in the air down by the food court. Something overheating? Or a fire? She was just about to call attention to it when the ripple changed to a black dot and then to an ellipse.
