Fragment. Warren Fahy
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the mesmerized scientists.
Some caromed off the sides of the trough, their legs retracting into white, diamond-hard tips that visibly gouged and nicked the acrylic. As they banged against the chamber walls they threw off dozens of smaller disk-ants. These rolled down the walls, trailing threads of light blue liquid.
The scientists controlling the cameras zoomed in to watch these juvenile ants wheel toward the baited traps. The rolling bugs hurled themselves onto the sugar and vegetables and even the Venus flytrap. This they devoured from the inside out as its traps triggered one after another.
‘Bye, Audrey,’ Quentin muttered mournfully and Nell patted his shoulder.
One large disk-ant rolled to the trap baited with a pile of salt. It turned on its side to feed, but then, before the trap could be sprung, it reared back abruptly on its edge and rolled away.
‘Trap the juveniles by themselves, if you can,’ Nell instructed. ‘And we need to get tissue samples from the other specimens, Otto, so we can do bacterial cultures and HPLC and Mass Spec GC profiles. We need to dissect these things to see if they have any venom sacs we should know about.’
Several scientists sprung their traps at her urging and isolated a few dozen specimens. Reaching their hands into the extendable gloves, they placed the sprung traps into airlocks spaced inside the trough. In the close-up view from the cameras above, they could see the tiny creatures leaping onto their gloves.
‘They seem to attack anything that moves,’ Nell observed.
‘Yeah, no matter how big it is,’ Andy said.
‘Don’t worry, there’s no way they can get through butyl rubber,’ Quentin said.
‘Ever seen The Andromeda Strain?’
‘Or Alien?’ Andy said.
‘Come on, guys.’
The scientists placed their traps in the airlocks, where the outside of the traps were sterilized with a chlorine dioxide bath. They opened the hatches and transferred the traps to individual observation chambers, where the live specimens inside could be released.
The other specimens from the original trap seemed dead, victims of a frenzied carnage. The original hot dog was nowhere to be found.
The two largest animals they had captured were about the size of tailless muskrats or squirrels. Both had eight legs. Though its side was ravaged by its rival, one specimen was clearly more complete. It had bitten off its rival’s head and seemed to have died choking on it.
‘What…is that?’ stuttered Quentin.
‘Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that,’ one scientist whispered.
‘God,’ Andy giggled.
‘OK, let’s settle down.’ Otto was clearly rattled himself. ‘I’ll dissect. Quentin, you operate the camera.’
‘Gladly.’ Quentin quickly relinquished the glove box to Otto.
Otto reached in and cleared away the other animal parts, which included a few half-bitten disk-ants; a half-eaten two-legged thing that looked like a grasshopper fused with a toad; a headless island ‘rat,’ as Andy had called it; and, surprisingly, a few chunks of a mouse-sized species.
Each partial specimen was passed down the trough to be rinsed and prepared for preservation. The strangeness of the body parts sent a chill down the assembly line of scientists.
‘What are we looking at here?’ one said.
‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ another muttered, uneasily.
‘Let’s take this one step at a time,’ Otto told them. ‘All right, people, we’re about to conduct the first dissection of a Henders specimen.’
Otto spread the largest intact animal out on its belly. He washed the blue gore from its velvetlike fur, which turned out to be coffee-ground brown with black and white stripes on its haunches. Strips of iridescent fur radiated over its softball-sized head. The head of the second rat made a bulge in its throat the size of a baseball.
As the last blue liquid was rinsed off, everyone gasped at the impossible specimen.
‘OK, let’s see what we’re dealing with here.’ Otto’s voice cracked. His hands were shaking.
‘Steady now,’ Nell said.
Quentin moved the video camera across the top of the chamber until it was directly over the subject, and then zoomed in, providing an enlarged view on the plasma screens above the trough.
Otto placed his gloved left hand over the specimen’s head and blocked throat.
Nell perched on one of the high stools next to Otto and opened her sketchpad. ‘Just take it easy now,’ she said calmly. She started to sketch a diagram. ‘The fur coloration on its haunches looks like an okapi.’
‘Yeah.’ Andy nodded, frowning at the captured specimen. ‘People thought okapis were a hoax when they were first discovered. They thought they were giraffes, zebras, and buffalo stitched together…’
‘They’d never believe this freaking thing.’ Quentin gawped at the red-furred chimera.
‘The stripes must confuse predators,’ Nell theorized.
‘Come on, this thing is a predator,’ Otto said.
‘I think it’s probably both–predator and prey,’ she said. ‘The front looks fierce and the back says “I better hide my ass with camouflage while I run the hell out of here.”’
‘Hunters that are hunted?’
‘That hunt each other,’ said Andy.
‘Check out that tail.’
‘Are we sure it’s dead?’
‘Let’s find out,’ Otto said. ‘Beginning narration of dissection at…’ He consulted his watch. ‘…two forty-two p.m. This is the first dissection of a Henders specimen. It is a fur-bearing, eight-legged animal, about thirty-five centimeters long, with okapi-like zebra stripes on its haunches, reddish-brown fur of the texture of really plush velvet or velour on its back, and bright stripes of fur around its face that change color at different angles.’
He twisted its round head. They could see iridescent stripes radiating around its toothy mouth.
‘Good God,’ Andy said. ‘It has crab claws on its face!’
‘The specimen appears to have four front legs that may function more like arms,’ Otto continued. ‘The first pair is connected to its lower jaw and is furless. These seem to be chelate appendages with slender pincers that are white in color…very strange. They emerge from a wide lower jaw of an almost frog-or birdlike hinged mouth with long teeth that are packed close together and seem to be rather sharp. The teeth are extremely hard and dark gray. The mouth has dark blue lips drawn back that can apparently close over the teeth.’
‘What is that, a skullcap?’ Nell’s pencil flew as she sketched the outlines of the animal. ‘On top of its head?’
‘The subject appears to have a light brown, furless cranial cap of some sort,’ Otto said.
‘Jesus,’ Quentin said. ‘Either I’m dreaming or we are making history here, folks.’
‘You aren’t dreaming,’ Nell told him.
The scientists clapped and whooped, finally releasing their anxiety and exhilaration.
Nell quickly penciled in the snaggle-toothed mouth in the creature’s round head, her face frozen with grim concentration. This animal looked like a miniature version of the deadly lunging animals she had seen on the beach, except that its jaws were horizontal instead of vertical like the ones that came from the crevasse.
‘It looks like a deep-sea angler,’ Andy said.
‘Like