The Darwin Variant

by Kenneth Johnson

  Lisa McLane. . .

  My eyes scanned across the luxuriant, mystical rainforest garden surrounding us. Across all the marvelously large and virile plant life that had magically evolved out of nowhere. My gaze came to rest on the wild strawberries. Despite the transformational expansion that had taken place within our brains, I had no idea what dark miracle had caused it. Then I looked at Charley. His eyes were locked on mine. They were cold, hard. Different.

  Charley Flinn. . .

  Without saying a word we both knew one thing for damn sure: whatever this was, it was only the beginning.

  Katie McLane. . .

  That night my frazzled mom was frantically tearing through a stack of papers on our kitchen table as she held the phone angrily against her stomach, snapping at me, “Where did you put it!?”

  I looked up for the third time from writing on my laptop, doing my best to stay patient. “Really, Mom, I never saw a yellow Post-it with notes about—”

  “Here it is, never mind.” She was digging it out of her purse. “I don’t know how it got in here.”

  I sighed to myself. Mom was generally a bit scattered. It was just her way. Like the sheets and towels in our linen closet that she always folded haphazardly. Whenever I opened that closet, I pictured the folds in Mom’s poor brain being a little jumbled. I’d offered some subtle guidance a couple times by arranging the linen neatly, but Mom missed the point, and the closet went right back to being a confused mess. Before Dad moved out, I’d heard him complain how he had to take so much care of everything that he felt like Mom was not his wife but one of his daughters. Obviously theirs wasn’t a heaven-made match.

  Dad was paying the mortgage and child support, but Mom wanted to earn money herself. I saw how on-the-job business training while single parenting was doubly hard for her. Even after a couple years of separation, she was still hoping he might “get over his little fling” and come back before the divorce she’d filed got finalized.

  So I tried to cut her some slack. And hold up my end by helping her at home, keeping up my pretty good GPA and all. But I still managed to ride my bike or do flips on Darren’s trampoline or play the piano. My favorite was to climb into the huge oak in the backyard of our wonderful sixty-year-old clapboard house. I loved to lounge up in the branches and just let my imagination wander. Or read. Right then we were studying Greek mythology, which I was really into.

  “Of course, I can, Mr. Vronski.” Mom had gotten back on her call, using her pleasant, unhurried, professional voice despite busily shuffling papers. “A two-column ad in three colors would be four hundred fifty dollars. But the colors are worth it, sir.”

  Lisa came in the back screen door. She knew Mom hated it when we let it slam, but I noticed how Lisa let it bang good and loud that time. My sister barely glanced at me, but I zeroed in because right away I’d picked up a really weird vibe. Lisa had this sorta edgy smile, and her forehead was tilted down like the way dogs do when they’re getting ready to attack. But it was the look in her eyes that was strangest. They were shining with, I don’t know, hardness?

  Mom waved angrily for Lisa to “stop right there” while keeping up her smooth telephone sales pitch. “Particularly in a section of the paper that’s black-and-white and—all right. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow. Thanks.” She hung up and immediately went at Lisa. “I was worried sick! Do you know what time it is? Where have you been?”

  “Out,” Lisa said lightly, totally blowing Mom off. Then Lisa turned away, really haughty. Mom saw red, grabbed Lisa’s arm, hard.

  “Wait just a goddamn minute, young lady. What the hell has gotten into—”

  “Mother.” Lisa’s voice was low, but commanding. Powerful. Threatening even.

  Mom blinked and so did I. Neither of us had ever heard this voice before. Never saw this kind of laser intensity from Lisa, who slowly turned and focused on Mom. Lisa’s voice stayed low and even. Her face was fearsomely calm. “Please don’t grab me like that.” It was not a request but a warning. There was a really pointed pause as Lisa kept staring at Mom, then finally said, “Okay?” But it wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

  Mom blinked again. Never the strongest or most collected person anyway, Mom was clearly thrown off, and so was I, by Lisa’s startling, almost dangerous attitude. Lisa eased out from underneath Mom’s hand and walked off toward her room.

  All my antennae were up, trying to figure out what was going on. Mom stood there stunned, like she was trying to decide whether or not to go after Lisa, when the phone rang. Mom glanced at the caller ID and muttered, “Shit.” Then she blew out a puff of air, sucked herself into saleswoman mode, and answered cheerily, “Eileen McLane.” As she started jabbering to another client, I followed Lisa.

  Normally we were pretty okay with each other. On warm summer nights we’d stay up late out on the porch, talking about all kinds of stuff. We’d laughed and cried together. Particularly after Dad had left. Lisa hardly ever acted like she was so much older and more experienced, or stuff like that. We just talked straight with each other. I tried to be there when she needed me to be. And vice versa. I could usually read her pretty well. She’d always been a little, I dunno, softer, more of a romantic than me. That’s how come that night was so weird. Lisa was different than I’d ever seen her. Back in fourth grade my teacher, Miss Schmitt, once told me I was an astute observer of human nature. I took that as a real compliment. But whether or not it was true, I was for sure fine-tuned to Lisa.

  And she’d had a strange, seriously cocky gleam in her eyes. I knew that something was up.

  Lisa McLane. . .

  Alone in my room I was pacing back and forth restlessly, like a caged leopard, eager to break out and . . . and what? I didn’t know. But something, goddammit. I wasn’t even seeing the posters of boy-toy rock stars on the walls or the high school stuff on my shelves. I was looking right through them. Looking right through the walls. Feeling way beyond all that. Feeling mature beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Mature beyond myself. I was emboldened by the feeling. But struggling to determine exactly what this incredible buzz was.

  Katie knocked and stuck her head in. “Lise? . . . You okay?”

  “Definitely.” I turned away from her, smiling privately to myself. I didn’t trust myself to look at her, felt like my eyes must be dancing darkly.

  I could feel Katie watching me like a bug under a magnifying glass. She was no fool. She knew something was going on. And trying to fathom it. You have no idea, little girl, I thought. And in fact neither did I. But I tried to toss a casual answer over my shoulder. “I’m fine, honey. Just need some private time to—”

  “Y’sure, Lise? ’Cause I’m feeling like maybe there’s—”

  “Katie.” I wanted her gone. My voice had an edge. “It’s not about what you’re feeling, okay?”

  “Sure, Lise, but I just want to—”

  “No!” I snapped around so quickly it startled her. And me, too. But it also gave me a pleasurable rush. I stared hard at her, forcing a smile that might have looked a bit deadly, but I couldn’t help it. And moreover, I didn’t care. I said with complete, quiet finality, “Not. Right. Now. Huh, Katie?”

  She studied my eyes for a moment. Then she nodded, backed off, and closed the door.

  Katie McLane. . .

  I stood silently outside Lisa’s door. Frowning. Trying to process what just happened. This was way beyond “something wrong.” This was a Lisa I’d never known. The same on the outside maybe. But different inside.

  The word changeling popped into my head. But I scoffed. That was crazy. I mean, I’d read legends about fairies stealing children and replacing them with identical, and dangerous, fairy children. Changelings, they were called. But I shook my head to get rid of that ridiculous notion. I knew those were fantasy stories. I didn’t believe that Lisa wasn’t still Lisa.

  But what then? I stood there twisting one of my ringlets around my finger, pondering what was going on with my sister. And then I fo
und myself thinking about her eyes. About that peculiar shine in them.

  Lisa McLane. . .

  I knew she was still outside my door. And concerned, cogitating while doubtlessly twisting one of her long ringlets around her finger. But in less than half a second, I forgot about her and was back to me. The night was all about me.

  I reached behind the stuffed polar bear I’d gotten for Christmas when I was six and named Frozy. I pulled out my hidden bag of chocolate chip cookies. Frozy fell onto my laptop keyboard, but I pushed her out of the way onto the floor as I sat down to the computer, wolfing a cookie down. This astounding kinetic energy was flowing in me, driving me.

  I used the password to open this diary. I started rereading some of the previous entries. I immediately realized that I was reading really quickly. Much faster than I’d ever been able to. It gave me another wonderful rush of newly discovered capability. Of skills so far superior they made me laugh out loud. And reading what I’d written in the diary before made me smirk. What a lot of childish drivel. What florid gibberish. I was cynically castigating myself for writing such maudlin, sentimental—

  Suddenly I stopped. Florid gibberish? Cynically castigating? Maudlin? Where the hell, I wondered, were those extremely un-Lisa words coming from? I mean, I knew that some momentous reaction, some stupefying, cataclysmic wonderment had taken place inside my brain. Somehow those wild strawberries had expanded my basic intelligence.

  But even so, how could my vocabulary have instantly undergone such a voluminous download? From where had this capacious—capacious?!—glut of new words and phrases magically descended, materialized in my head, and come spewing out like a high-pressure volcanic vent?

  I leaned back in my chair, and in two seconds I had the answer: because the words must have already been in my head. Just tucked away in a million different places. Unconnected. I simply never had the mental agility or capacity necessary to access and organize them. And now I did. So much of what I had ever seen, read, or heard now seemed available at my fingertips.

  I began to type all this, then paused, realizing that I was typing at a breakneck speed. Typing way more words per minute than I’d ever been capable of.

  I sat back in my chair again for a long moment, staring at the keyboard. Then I chuckled low, whispering with amazement, “. . . Fuck. Me.”

  I looked around into my mirror, at myself. I studied my image. The long, rich brown hair. The deep brown eyes. Everything looked the same on the outside.

  But inside, I knew, inside something marvelously astounding had transpired and was continuing to. Everything felt different. I felt more clever than ever before. There was sort of a brave new clarity, an arrogant cynicism born of a mind that was flying in the rarefied stratosphere, far above the clouds, a mind that instinctively knew it was superior. That I was queen of all I surveyed.

  Yet I still couldn’t fathom the nature of it all. I picked up my biology textbook, thinking I might find within it some clues to an answer. I turned the pages one at a time. Focused. Beginning to read. I quickly realized, and became fascinated by the fact, that I could now absorb, mentally organize, and understand the difficult material almost instantly. Like it was kindergarten level.

  I slowly looked up at my reflection again, and smiled. Looking closer at my eyes, I could see, and I was proud to see, how there was a special new and brilliant glow in them.

  6

  EVIL-UTION

  Dr. Susan Perry. . .

  The bright red plastic cooler was medium size. It could’ve held a couple of six-packs plus a dozen sandwiches and still have some room left over for fruit, if that’s what it had been designed for. Instead it was filled with small bottles containing various preservative chemicals, specimen containers in graduated sizes, surgical tools, syringes, bandages, and one Diet Coke I always managed to squeeze in.

  The cooler was standard CDC issue to us epidemiologists for gathering samples in the field, or in this case, from the pigsty. The cooler sat just outside the weathered wooden rail fence.

  I’d squatted down in the middle of the muck, where the Tennessee farmwoman, Lottie Nichols, had been killed. I wore my tall rubber boots and surgical gloves as I collected a tablespoon-size sample of pig manure and sealed it into one of the specimen dishes.

  Bereaved farmer Jacob Nichols stood nearby, leaning on the fence. He looked hollow eyed and undernourished. I paused in my work and spoke gently to him, “I can’t imagine how awful it must’ve been for you.”

  “No, miss.” Jacob shook his head slightly without looking up. “You surely can’t.”

  I did my best to sound encouraging as I stood up. “Well, we’ll try to find out what happened, Mr. Nichols. What I’m looking for are pathogens, bad viruses.”

  “State feller said maybe some weird kinda rabies.”

  “Is it possible your hogs were bitten by some rabid animal?”

  “Ain’t seen none round here.”

  “Virus can also be transmitted by food. What’d they eat?”

  “Ever’thing.”

  “Can I see the hogs?”

  “Paid my neighbor to cart ’em off and butcher ’em.” He swallowed, bitterly. His voice became choked with emotion. “Couldn’t stand t’look at ’em.”

  “Of course not.” I sincerely understood his pain and was trying to sound that way. But I also needed data to work with. Sometimes my investigations made me feel like Sherlock Holmes, and I’d quote him like Chris used to, saying, “Data, Watson! I need facts! I can’t make bricks without clay.” I stepped out through the pigsty gate and carefully peeled my gloves off, leaving them inside out. I disposed of them in my special waste bag for biohazard containments. Then I sealed the bag. “Could you contact the slaughterhouse and have some of the organs sent to Atlanta? We pay for the shipping. It’s very important.”

  “Yeah. Reckon.”

  I leaned on the top of the fence, avoiding some bird droppings, which I’d also taken samples of, and wrote a name on the back of my card. “Have them sent to the attention of Dr. Lauren Fletcher. She’s our chief lab biologist.”

  The farmer took my card, lifelessly. I was deeply sad for his anguish. “I’m . . . I’m really heartsick for you, Mr. Nichols.”

  His voice broke slightly. “Yeah.” There was a pause. I waited, sensing he wanted to say more. We stood in silence. I really needed to get back on the road, but I saw that remaining with a sympathetic ear was much more important right at that moment. My instincts were correct. Mr. Nichols finally drew a breath. “. . . Woulda been fifty-five years next week. Use t’complain ’bout her yammerin’ . . .” He looked into my eyes, then breathed a long, sad sigh. I touched his arm gently.

  I carried Jacob Nichols’s grief with me as I drove southeast along the meandering, two-lane Route 30. I passed a sign pointing to the right indicating seven miles to Dayton. It struck a chord. My brow knitted, trying to remember. What was it about Dayton, Tennessee? Oh of course: the “monkey trial” back in the twenties. Black-and-white images came into my head of grainy photos I’d seen and also the later play and movie, Inherit the Wind: people sitting in that sweltering courtroom. It was so hot that some proceedings were moved outside. Many women had those Southern paper fans on sticks; the men had their jackets off and were in their white shirtsleeves, with elastic armbands and suspenders.

  At the defendant’s table sat lean schoolteacher John Scopes, who had so inflamed the community by daring to teach Darwin’s “blasphemous” theory of evolution where it was forbidden by Tennessee law to do so: in the Dayton high school. Sitting beside Scopes was his attorney, the fiery, unpredictable “attorney for the damned,” Clarence Darrow. He listened with a wry face to every word flowing like the very wrath of God from his Bible-thumping, stentorian, prosecutorial opponent, the Honorable William Jennings Bryan. Twice a presidential candidate, the golden-throated Bryan gave honeyed voice to all things holy, while casting to eternal damnation all that he perceived as the misbegotten fantasies of atheistic scientifi
c theory run amok-particularly Darwin’s ungodly concept that many brethren branded as “Evil-ution.”

  The Bible Belt had been outraged at the notion that humanity could have evolved from apes and monkeys. I smiled at the naïveté, but knew that even now some people condemned the idea of natural selection and survival of the fittest, they simply dismissed the science of evolution. The whole notion that humans had their origins in the primordial slime, that we had arisen from among the bestial lower primates and indeed were continuously evolving, still struck many otherwise intelligent people as damnably sacrilegious.

  I also remembered Darrow’s startling tactic of calling to the witness stand his opponent Bryan as an expert biblical witness. Darrow spent several brilliantly calculated hours meticulously poking great holes in biblical “facts” versus scientific and historic accuracy. Though Bryan was a dazzling, facile, and clever hostile witness, Darrow craftily edged the forthright, great communicator off his guard. Then with clearheaded logic Darrow proceeded to quietly get Bryan to admit the possibility that Earth and all its life forms including humanity had not actually been created in only six magical twenty-four-hour days. That it might have taken millions of years.

  Checkmate. Or at least it should have been. But all Bryan’s testimony was ultimately stricken from the record, and Darrow lost the case. Scopes was forced to pay a fine of a hundred dollars and promise not to teach such inflammatory, heretical concepts in the future. The excesses of Bryan’s passions during the trial took their toll on him. Five days after the trial he died in Dayton. In 1930 a Christian college sprang up there to honor Bryan and still proudly bears his name. The anti-evolution statute remained part of Tennessee’s law until 1967.

  I was pulled back from my reverie by the sight of a number of farmworkers laboring in a field beside the road. I followed the instincts of any thorough investigator and slowed my dusty blue Honda hybrid to a stop on the shoulder. The workers looked up. I was clearly an outsider. Two dirty-faced, very young children idling nearby eyed me warily, then warmed as I smiled. I spoke to their parents, who were very thin with faces deeply lined by too much sun and too many cigarettes. “Excuse me. Hi. I’m checking for some rabid animals around here? Seen anything unusual? Dogs, foxes, any animals behaving oddly or—”