Selected Stories: Volume 1

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Short Stuff let out another hollow, trumpeting call. Ralph’s expression hardened, and he turned away from Susan, ignoring her. Without hesitation, he marched up to the writhing, wounded mammophant, pushed the barrel of his rifle up against the base of Short Stuff’s massive skull, and pulled the trigger. The hybrid groaned and slumped. Ralph shot her again, then turned back to Susan. His face was ruddy and murderous. “God damn it!”

  Shaking, Susan pushed back to her feet, then grabbed the corral fence and vomited. More shouts and gunshots came from the main lab complex. Through the fence and the trees she could see flames shooting from the admin building. She coughed and spat. “How many are there? What—”

  He took her arm and led her out the gate. “Middle Man’s fine for now. I’ve got security troops split between defending the ranch and trying to fight the fires.” He touched his earpiece, listened, then shouted, “Dammit, don’t wait for the sheriff! Just move on it!”

  Susan heard the distant patter of gunfire, military-style commands, and the frenzied shouts of shadowy attackers. They could have broken through the fences anywhere. Were these the same protesters that had innocuously waved their signs and posed for the TV cameras? Could it all have been a feint, a ploy to let Helyx security believe the Evos were ineffectual whiners and bored activists in search of a cause … when all the while they were planning this brutal strike as soon as they could get a man inside?

  She saw birds fluttering in the trees, the passenger pigeons disturbed from their nests in the big oaks. “I’m going to the Hospital!” She heard sounds that could only be giant moas squawking in panic. “Ralph, get those fires put out!”

  As she ran toward the Hospital, Ralph yelled louder into his voice pickup. On one side of the main admin building, a few men had set up a hose and were spraying the yellow flames on the log walls, but fiery fingers already crept along the roof.

  Susan didn’t give a damn about the computers and office furniture inside. She ran toward the Hospital itself where all the retrograde hybrids were kept, her life’s work, the maturing ambassadors of species long extinct. Why would anybody want to harm them?

  Probably the same people who break into cancer-research centers and “liberate” all the experimental animals, she thought. I guess they don’t see the contradiction.

  Out in the Hospital yard, she saw tall, ostrichlike moas set free from their cages, wandering around in terrified confusion. Brown feathers ruffled, serpentine necks swiveling about, horny beaks open with hissing squawks, they kicked up dirt with lizardlike feet and pecked at any person who came close. Ungainly dodos scrambled about like overgrown drunken chickens, honking in fright. Susan heard other animals scream and yowl from within the Hospital itself. Smoke oozed through several broken windows, growing thicker, blacker.

  Just then a man with a prim face and dapper-looking clothes stepped across the porch holding a revolver in his hand. Geoffrey Kinsman. Like a grim executioner, he pointed at the dodos and methodically shot them all, moving from one to the next to the next.

  Though armed with nothing but her anger, Susan raced toward him. Other protesters ran past Kinsman into the lab building, not willing to simply let the fire do its work.

  Kinsman turned toward the closest frightened moa, putting three bullets through its long neck. The giant bird toppled like a fallen tree. Not even pausing to reflect on his handiwork, the man stalked toward the smashed-open door of the Hospital and vanished inside.

  Susan screamed in outrage, but Kinsman didn’t even notice her.

  After stepping over the shattered carcasses of the magnificent lost birds, she barged into the main laboratory. Evos were overturning desks, smashing computers, dumping animal feed on the floor in a wild frenzy, like capering cannibals celebrating the arrival of a boatload of missionaries. These crusaders had no organization, no plan, just chaos.

  Dressed in her jeans and camping clothes, Susan entered the lab, smelling the fire and spilled chemicals, the blood and nose-tingling gun smoke.

  In the harsh, stinging smoke she saw Geoffrey Kinsman, proud slayer of helpless dodos and moas, trotting from cage to cage, shooting every creature inside. Fast, methodical, intent.

  Susan’s eyes burned with disgust. Ducking through the smoky light, she went to the cages on the other side, past lab furniture, desks, equipment racks. She threw open cage doors and coops, chasing the dodos, moas, and other hybrids out, giving them a chance. Squawking and hissing, the marvelous creatures ran, fleeing the fire, fleeing the gunshots.

  There, dammit! The chaos grew. Shouting and gunshots echoed from outside. She heard a shrill whistle, a bullhorn. A helicopter circling.

  Grinning, a blond-haired, clean-shaven man ran past her holding a long shovel, battering file cabinets, smashing beakers, computer screens, even ceramic coffee cups. He took a swipe at a waddling dodo, missed, and Susan grabbed the shovel handle, wrenching it out of his grip.

  The man shrugged, then toppled a heavy laser-ROM storage rack, scattering the prismatic platters like Christmas ornaments. He snatched up a crowbar some other protester had dropped.

  From nearby came the sound of a window smashing. More strangers ran in through the Hospital door, carrying weapons.

  When his pistol was empty, Kinsman took a repeater assault rifle from one of the Evos, checked that it was loaded. Then he looked up and saw Susan. Recognized her.

  “Damn you!” she said, raising the shovel as if it was a match for his rifle.

  Behind her, the reckless blond Evo grabbed the closed doors of the larger pens at the back of the laboratory. The barricaded, reinforced rooms.

  Kinsman hesitated with his rifle, smug with self-justification. “This has to be done.”

  With a deft twist the blond Evo pried open the lock. He must have expected nothing more than another awkward-looking bird. He held his crowbar loosely in one hand, as if ready to bash a few more animals.

  And a saber-tooth cat lunged out at him, already maddened by the fire and the noise.

  The big panther’s front fangs gleamed, as long as scimitars. It reared up to embrace the man and with a throaty growl it bore him down, muscles moving like liquid beneath its mottled, long-furred coat. The Evo screamed as the panther/sabre-tooth hybrid tore open his chest, raising long curved fangs and plunging once, twice, three times.

  Susan managed to shout “No!”—just as a panicked Kinsman opened fire.

  On the sedge grass, trampled and bloodstained, Cassie leaned over the gasping, quivering hulk of the fallen Majestica. The female almost-mammoth panted and shuddered, her body core ripped open by the grenades.

  “She’s dying.” Cassie looked up at Alex, her eyes wide and pleading, as if somehow this important corporate executive could do something.

  “Yeah,” he said uselessly.

  She seemed to be in a daze, saw the shotgun slung low in his hand. “You shot at the Evos?”

  “Forget them.”

  Majestica’s body heaved and clenched and trembled in spasmodic labor—dying, but also following a biological imperative. Alex heard a snorting and pounding sound and held up his shotgun, ready to defend them against a continued Evo attack—but he saw only the huge head and long curved tusks of the angry Bullwinkle. The large mammoth stomped on the ground, thrashed his shortened trunk.

  In the stark, silvery moonlight Alex saw a few flecks of black blood peppering the shaggy fur, minor wounds from gunshots. He had expected to see the bull’s long ivory spears coated with gore, his front feet splattered with the blood of crushed humans. But Alex heard the Evos still screaming and crashing away into the night as they fled up the valley.

  The bull mammoth had let them live. Bullwinkle could easily have trampled every one into the ground. Instead, he had just driven them off and turned back to come here. At the moment, Alex himself didn’t feel so civilized.

  Lumbering close to Majestica, the shaggy bull sniffed, quested with his hairy trunk. Bullwinkle watched with round, wise eyes as Cassie felt the pregnant
female’s heaving belly, her hands exploring the quivering muscle and tough hide.

  She drew her long hunting knife.

  The other hybrids milled about nearby, circling and snorting, some trumpeting their pain, all clearly agitated. One of the youngest hybrids waded out to the middle of the muddy watering hole and raised its trunk high as it honked into the night.

  The Evos had gone away, their destruction accomplished, leaving pain in their wake. Making their savage point. Alex knew he should call Ralph and his security men, bring them out here in Helyx choppers to run the terrorists into the ground, apprehend them and haul them off for Federal prosecution.

  But as he knelt beside a blood-streaked Cassie, he didn’t feel that was important enough right now.

  The pregnant female had closed her intelligent eyes in wrinkles of dark skin, blinking only occasionally. Majestica’s breath was slow and deep, a bass-noted wheezing, accompanied by a bubbly wet sound of blood and air oozing from large holes in her massive torso.

  Majestica’s pelt gleamed, glossy and moist. A heavy musk mixed with the metallic sourness of blood rose from the laboring mountain. The female’s pelvis was tilted, her womb clenching as she used the last of her energies to squeeze.

  A charge of tension permeated the air, a slow silent sense of gathering energies … of time contracting down to a completion.

  Cassie pressed her hand against the distended belly. The abdominal muscles shuddered, but Majestica was clearly dying in the moonlight. Even Alex could see that. She wouldn’t last long enough to give birth, and the purebred infant woolly mammoth would die inside the womb.

  He knew that young Cassie had needed to sacrifice mother animals before, delivering their young by Cesarean. It was a part of ranch life when there were a lot of animals to herd and tend. In her hesitation now, he read that Cassie didn’t know if her muscles and her resolve and her knife edge would be up to the task she now faced.

  Ralph’s hoarse voice chirped in Alex’s ear, with words so devastating that Alex could spare no attention for what the young ranch hand was about to do. “Boss, you’d better get back here.” The old security chief paused, as if gathering courage. “It’s Susan. Get back here now.”

  Cassie barely looked up as Alex ran to his horse.

  Sobbing, she raised her long knife high, hesitated, then plunged it deep.

  When Alex rode up to the main Helyx complex, two of the ranch buildings were engulfed in flame. Fire crackled and roared, clean woodsmoke mixed with the foul stench of burning electrical wires, chemicals, and plastics.

  He called for Ralph, then he saw the security men dragging bodies out onto the lawn in front of the Pleistocene Hospital. His stomach lurched.

  Alex had underestimated the Evos completely, the intensity of their gut-level resistance to what he was doing. And Kinsman himself, a former colleague, was someone who should have known better. Alex had rolled his eyes at the silly signs, foolishly dismissed the objections of people he considered Luddites. “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.”

  Re-creating the mammoths had aroused such a passion, such a sense of wonder in his wife—but he had never considered that it might engender equal and opposite emotions in her detractors.

  He called for Ralph again, but his voice broke as he stumbled across the yard. The rangy old man jogged up to him, feverish, his leathery face fallen in despair. He threw himself on Alex, both arms around his shoulders. Alex went weak with dread.

  “Where is she?” he croaked, but he could tell from the stiffness in the security chief’s muscles that he was already too late. “Where is she!”

  Ralph staggered back. Without a word he walked with Alex toward the burning Pleistocene Hospital. In the acrid yellow glow, a few surviving animals ran about in panic. Passenger pigeons squawked from the oak trees. Others fluttered across the night sky, escaped from burning nests. Bloody mounds of feathers on the grass marked the slaughtered dodos and moas. Extinct again.

  He took a few steps, choked on acrid smoke, turned.

  Susan lay outside on the ground where Ralph had carried her. She had a crumpled, broken look, he thought abstractedly. That was when the fog began to wrap itself around him, dulling the clamor, shrouding the world in a ghostlike slowness. He shook his head, but the fog remained. His field of view telescoped away and he staggered. He reached out to steady himself on a beam and his hand felt nothing. Sour air rasped into his lungs. The iron taste of blood told him he had bitten his tongue. And the soft fingers of fog thickened.

  The feathers of ancient birds fluttered around her like a halo, catching the glow of hot white security spotlights. Her flannel shirt had soaked up the crimson blood. She lay, waxen, lifeless. He did not count the gunshot wounds.

  In the background he barely heard Ralph’s security men shouting. Ranch workers, in shock and keeping themselves moving with forced activity, braved the inferno of the lab to rescue a few remaining experimental animals from their cages. To salvage some of the records. To preserve cellular specimens. Sometime in the distant future, he would probably thank them.

  None of that mattered now.

  He tried to take two steps toward Susan, but his muscles disobeyed. His knees buckled, weak and watery. Alex collapsed, sitting on the rough ground. Close enough to see her, but she would never again be close enough to touch.

  An empty man rode back out to Clement Valley. The cool night air brushed at his face, but he did not feel it. The east brimmed with a pale glow, but he did not see it. The soft fog fingers were still there in his head. He shook it.

  He found Cassie, her shirt and braided hair and jeans soaked with dark wetness. When he saw the blood, he had a sudden fear that she too had been shot. But she got up on unsteady legs, looking utterly exhausted in the beam of his flashlight.

  Then Alex saw the small creature, like a newborn elephant but covered with matted wet fur. It stood already. About the size of a riding lawn mower. The baby mammoth moved on wobbly legs slick with its mother’s fluids—aware and healthy. Somber eyes accepted him in a mute communion.

  Alex drew a deep breath. A mammoth, the first purebred ambassador from that extinct species, arriving on this night of smoke and blood.

  He felt a trickle of amazement through his shell of despair. Though its mother had been murdered by attackers, this fourth-generation offspring had been successfully delivered alive.

  In spite of all this. Thanks to Cassie.

  “It’s a start,” she said. Her large, wonder-filled eyes stared at Alex as he touched the thick reddish fur on the young mammoth’s sturdy shoulders. He knew he should tell her about Susan, but he wasn’t ready to deal with the questions … or the sympathy. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I want to name him Adam,” she continued. “Seems appropriate.”

  The rest of the herd huddled together in the naked night, while Bullwinkle stood near Majestica’s carcass. He twitched his trunk, snorting steam plumes in the waning moonlight. Alex imagined the big bull was as anguished at losing his mate as he himself was over Susan. He heard a low, guttural note in its sighs and wheezes that had not been there before.

  He turned away. Shared grief was little comfort.

  The big animals clustered together, calmer now, as light seeped into the valley. Tall, powerful, magnificent. Back from extinction. Distantly, hollowly, a part of Alex thought that the throwback Evos were a portion of humanity that might be better off extinct. Not these creatures. Not these strong and wonderful miracles that his wife had brought forth from dreams.

  Alex stood among the herd and looked at young Cassie, seeing her resolve undampened. She was saying something, but he could not hear, somehow.

  In Susan’s memory, he promised himself that he would carry on this project. Even though he might have to move to the ends of the Earth, where he and the mammoths could be safe …

  Somehow.

  Adam tottered off toward the herd. It waddled in the grass, lit by thin rays of sun, bleached of all c
olor. Bullwinkle saw the small moving thing and sent a blaring trumpet salute. The herd answered with a chorus of bellows and huffs.

  In this moment Alex felt his own life slip into insignificance, one more mote beneath the hard stars. One more member of a newcomer species, a mere vessel. His best work lay forever in the past now, but he could still make some difference.

  The fog around him cleared, just a bit, letting in the glow of the east. Susan could live only through these creatures, through her work. He would have to speak and care and fight for his wife’s memory, too, and for all of her legacy, living and dead.

  Clouds were moving in, he noticed absently. It was a shrouded dawn, though it could turn bright.

  This story is darker and edgier, as well as more political, than my usual fare. But sometimes you need a good dystopia.

  The expectations we place on our politicians seem impossible for any person to achieve. A candidate needs to be all things, know all walks of life, understand every segment of his constituency. How could one person achieve so much … without a little help?

  Job Qualifications

  Candidate Berthold Ossequin—the original—never made a move without being advised or cautioned by his army of pollsters, etiquette consultants, and style experts. Whether in public or in the privacy of his family estate, his every gesture and utterance was monitored. The avid media waited for Berthold to make any sort of mistake.

  Elections would be held soon, and he must be absolutely perfect if he wanted to become the next Grand Chancellor of the United Cultures of Earth. According to surveys, he did have a slight lead over his opponent, though not enough to inspire complete confidence.

  Berthold sat in an overstuffed chair that vibrated soothingly to calm him as he prepared to give a dramatic and insightful speech that his team had scripted for him. From rehearsing the speech before test audiences, the candidate knew where to modulate his voice and which points to emphasize in order to guarantee the strongest emotional impact.