Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  Several soldiers were moving rapidly toward the Philosopher, but at least they had lowered their rifles. “You diminished yourselves!” the Philosopher cried as the soldiers dragged him away. In their boots and gear, they seemed so much bigger than his friend.

  Frequent Analog contributor Mary A. Turzillo won a Nebula Award for best novelette for her wonderful “Mars Is No Place for Children.” She returned to the Red Planet in the serialized novel An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl. Now, she stays terrestrial in a story about the unexpected joys and dangers of the husbandry of rare felines.

  T he hot fur thing under Kevin's shirt clawed at his chest. Nice going, he thought. First the bum rap for weed, and now if I don't get caught stealing lab animals, I'll get rabies from this freak.

  Frankenlab, at Franken U, AKA Franklin Agricultural College, was messing with animals, electrodes in their brains, cloning them like Dolly the Sheep, except not regular animals. Dead animals from frozen meat. And they were going to kill the animals.

  He couldn't save them all. Those fuzzy orange-furred mice, most wouldn't make it. Those guys from Animals Our Brethren had pried open cages, and when the mice wouldn't come out, they shook them out, and when the mice squeed, cowering under lab tables, they kicked them until they ran into corners, and from there may God have mercy on their itty souls.

  Kevin petted the little monster through his shirt, but it writhed around and gummed him. “I'm saving your life, dumb-ox!” He dashed out of the building minutes before alarms brought the fire department.

  Kevin had been in trouble before. A year ago, his girlfriend's cousin Ed and he had been cruising around in Ed's van, which had expired plates. Kevin didn't know about the baggie of pot under the driver's seat. When the state patrol started following, Ed asked Kevin to switch places. His license, like the plates, was expired, he said. They switched, veering madly, on a lonely stretch of 422. When they finally stopped and the cops asked to search the van, Kevin shrugged and said okay.

  “And whose is this?”

  Ed said, not mine. Kevin was too surprised to look properly surprised, and this was a zero-tolerance state. So Ed got off with a warning, and Kevin, stuck with court-appointed counsel, served thirty days.

  Kevin had been looking for a job to pay for college when local papers broke the story that some thousand-odd animals (mostly, admittedly, mice) would be killed because their experiment was over. What was he thinking of? He wasn't an animal-rights kind of dude. Still, he felt panicked exultation fleeing the scene of the crime.

  He struggled to control his Pinto while driving with the squirming thing scratching inside his shirt. He fumbled the back door key and pounded downstairs to the basement, where he pulled the light cord above the laundry tub and took the furball out of his shirt.

  “Oh God, what have they done to you?” It was deformed: big head, chopped-off tail. Cat? Dog? A mix?

  He deposited it in the laundry tub. Boggling at the size of its mouth, he realized it needed food. Now.

  Forward pointing eyes. Meat-eater. He ran upstairs and grabbed a raw chicken breast from the fridge. He held it out to the cub.

  The cub flopped down on its belly in the tub, and tried to howl. All that came out was a squeak.

  He tried to stuff the meat into its mouth, but it flinched away and lay looking at him, sides heaving.

  Maybe the mother chewed the food up for it. Mother? Not hardly. This thing didn't have a mother. It was fucking hatched in Frankenlab.

  Raised in farm country, Kevin liked animals. He sometimes even petted Rosebud, the town pit bull, when Rosebud wasn't into tearing people's arms off. If his parents had been rich, he'd be pre-veterinary at Franken U. Or a cattle rancher, or a discoverer of rare snakes.

  He retrieved a knife from upstairs, hacked tidbits off the chicken breast, and put them in the cub's mouth. The cub sucked on them, famished. It got to its feet and seized Kevin's finger with its front paws. Head held sideways, it chomped down on his finger. It did have a few teeth, it seemed.

  He jerked away. “Stop it, you little monster!” Then he realized he might wake his mother.

  Kevin, it's a baby. Duh.

  Where would he get a baby bottle?

  He opened a can of condensed milk from the pantry, dipped a chicken chunk in it, and let the monster suck milk off the meat. Twenty minutes later it either got satisfied, or gave up. Its little belly looked marginally bigger, and the can was empty, mostly spilled on the laundry tub or his shirt.

  It stretched and unsheathed claws way too big for a little guy the size of a raccoon.

  Kevin thought, It'll purr now. Instead, it washed its face, running front paws over those deformed big jaws.

  And then, just when Kevin decided it was almost cute, it reached out a claw and pricked his arm, not enough to hurt, just to say, More?

  “You're beginning to tick me off,” he said. The cub's gaze radiated adoration. It licked his hand, nearly rasping his skin off.

  Its fur was golden retriever blond, its eyes the color of river moss. Green-eyed blonde, like Sara. Dappled coat, like freckles on Sara's sweet shoulders. Sara Jones: they were almost a couple before his arrest; now she acted distant.

  The monster leapt out of the tub and landed on the floor. It shook itself, surprised at the fall.

  He lay down and stared at it, eye to eye. “You need a name.”

  He was furious that they planned to kill it. It was harmless. Uh, maybe not harmless. Planning to get big, judging from those paws, each the size of cheeseburgers. But innocent.

  “What the hell have I got myself into?” he asked it.

  Its grotesque little face shone with trust.

  With the knife he'd used to cut the chicken, and thinking of Sara Jones, he tapped the little monster on each shoulder, and said, “I dub thee Sir Jonesy.”

  For a week, he kept Jonesy locked in the root cellar. His mom either didn't know, or pretended not to. Rosebud, Mr. Trumbull's pit bull, kept getting off his chain and sneaking over to paw at the basement door. There was an article in the paper about the lab fire, but the lab animals were hardly mentioned.

  The scientists downplayed it all. The animals had been slated for “sacrifice,” Dr. Betty Hartley said. Federal regulations required that animals be euthanized at the end of an experiment, she said, plus the money had run out. Cold. “Sacrifice”: nice euphemism. Like “put to sleep.” Like anything ever woke up from that sleep. Sacrifice? What, were they going to dance around an altar and beg God to protect them from weird-ass animal zombies?

  Dr. Hartley said she was sad that the animals had all died in the fire, but accidents will happen.

  So now he couldn't let anybody in on his secret. It would be insane to let the scientists find the cub again and kill it. But Jonesy (the cub was female, he discovered) whined and shivered in the root cellar, so he brought it upstairs.

  His mother was not pleased.

  “Look, Mom. I know it's humongous for a kitten, but that's all it is. Pet it?”

  She refused to touch it. “I don't care what it is, I don't want it in my house.”

  “Listen, they'll kill it if I take it back. It's cute, see?” He held it to his chest to minimize her view of the monstrous head. Its fur was rough, not silky like a kitten's. But it was warm and happy to snuggle.

  “Cute? Kevin, I'll show you cute. I know you stole it from Frankenlab. It'll probably get up in the night and suck our blood.”

  “Shit, Mom. It eats milk, not blood. You can't just kick it out on the street like a—like a broken TV.”

  “Kevin, get a job. And get that thing out of my house.”

  But Kevin's mother was too tired to put her foot down.

  The cub's teeth started coming in. On a diet of ground meat that Kevin got from Dumpster-diving, it had loads of energy. It used the energy stalking Kevin and shredding everything in Kevin's room.

  The eye teeth erupted. And erupted. And erupted. Not domestic cat teeth. Long as the fishing knife the cops had taken away f
rom him when he was caught with the pot.

  He woke up one morning to find the monster sitting on his chest, hungry or affectionate, as if you could tell even with a tame cat.

  “Man,” said Kevin, peering closer. “Your mom should have sued your orthodontist.”

  The cub did not laugh.

  Not a vampire, but those sharp, sharp teeth—

  And then his mind chewed through a bunch of information and farted out the truth. Rumors of ice age frozen flesh? Cloning? Bingo.

  The damn thing, scrutinizing him with gold-green eyes, opening its huge mouth in a silent howl, was a saber-toothed tiger.

  “Woo, dude. I thought you were trouble before.”

  It would need lots more meat.

  At first he bought cheap cuts; then, when he realized his money from mowing lawns wasn't cutting it, he abstracted food from his own meals and from the refrigerator. And Dumpster-dove the local supermarket.

  One day, he found his mother in the kitchen, her hand bandaged. He hoped the bite was from Rosebud, but if Rosebud had bitten her, she'd probably be a mangled corpse.

  He sank into a chair while the saber-tooth attacked the stinky mess he'd brought home for it.

  “That's it, Kevin. You're my only son, the light of my life, a good smart boy although way too trusting, but that cat is out by tonight or I call the cops.” She blew her nose on a crumbled tissue. “I know where he came from.”

  Kevin didn't blame her. She was tired from overwork, just wanted to be left alone and sleep more than five hours at a time. They'd been moderately affluent before Kevin's dad left. But Dad had a really good lawyer. The measly child support had stopped when Kevin turned eighteen. Dad still sent birthday cards with a two-dollar bill in each.

  “If the boy wants a college education, a job will make him appreciate it more.”

  Jobs, yeah, well. Jobs for twenty-one-year old guys who've done even a little time aren't easy to come by. Odd jobs, maybe shoveling walks in winter. Kevin wasn't a drinker, so he didn't have AA networking to fall back on.

  Also, the damn cub was too mischievous to leave alone for long.

  The week before the cat nipped Mom, Kevin had come home from helping a neighbor get her hay in and found the cub playing with a large rat. When the saber-tooth saw him, she grabbed the rat in her mouth and tried to run away. Thank God it had been a rat and not one of those ratty-looking poodles the Parks owned.

  So Mom was right. The cat needed a home.

  Sara. Their beginning romance had aborted, but he ran into her sometimes at the feed store. She'd understood Kevin didn't know about the pot. But she always said, “It's not a good time,” if he wanted to come over to the farm, or ask her out—not that he had much money for dates.

  Guess she didn't want to be with a loser.

  But, hell, he could rise again. Many great men—millionaires, politicians—had a shady past.

  Sara didn't hate him.

  He put the cub in an appliance carton (it whimpered, but complied), wrapped it with pink and ivory paper and gold ribbon, and lugged it to the Pinto. The cub thrashed around inside the box on his front seat while he drove like a maniac to Sara's farm. Sara's parents hadn't really worked the family farm much since her granddad died, just kept geese and a big garden, and when they had moved south to escape the winters, Sara kept the farm. Kevin had used to help out, before he went to jail.

  He lost his nerve and left the gyrating package on her paint-peeled porch.

  The phone was ringing when he got back.

  “Kevin, what is this? It nearly took my arm off.”

  He breathed slowly. He'd enrolled in an anger-management class while in jail—not because he had problems with anger, but because the textbook had looked interesting—and he found the breathing helped calm him. “Sara, it's a saber-toothed tiger.”

  “They're extinct.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, so's the Bill of Rights. But this thing is a clone. From frozen meat.”

  “And this concerns me how?”

  “It's, uh—”

  “Look, Kevin, I remember the Maine Coon kittens you gave me. I love those cats. But this is different, no? You must have stolen this thing from the college. And that's not all. It's going to grow up and be really aggressive. And, well, also—”

  “Sorry. I'll come and get her back. Don't let her out, though. I'm not sure she knows how to defend herself.”

  When he got to the farm, Sara acted nervous, but she kissed him, and they sat on the couch and talked, about Ed, about jail. They didn't have sex, but he got his hopes up they could reconnect. Jonesy, meantime, tried to shred everything in the living room. She had put out a bowl of hamburger; otherwise the cub might have started shredding their clothes.

  “It's not exactly cute,” she said.

  Jonesy's whiskers were almost as amazing as her teeth. Long and delicate. She stalked everything in the room, even shadows.

  Kevin watched. The cub would hunker down and wriggle her backside, then dart forward and roll upside down. The hunker/wriggle part looked like any cat, but he'd never seen an animal do a half roll while attacking. Did that have anything to do with the swordlike canines?

  “Kevin, you know I love animals.”

  Kevin said nothing. Their shoulders touched, and he put his hand on hers.

  She left it there. “Okay. Until you get a place of your own. Don't come visiting without calling, though.” She withdrew her hand.

  Somebody was living with her. Of course.

  The arrangement lasted three weeks.

  When he drove over in answer to her phone call, Sara was crying. Jonesy had killed one of her geese, a real achievement, since even Rosebud was loath to fool with the geese. But when Kevin opened the door, he boggled at how much the saber-tooth had grown. Jonesy had to weigh as much as Rosebud now.

  Oops. What if Jonesy had attacked Sara?

  “I let her run,” she said. “You can't keep an animal like this cooped up. And it killed Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson was one of her geese. She named her geese after women poets.

  “What have you been feeding her?” He felt shame that he hadn't offered to pay for Jonesy's food. As if he could. He had a sudden panic over the welfare of the two Maine Coon cats, but they were dozing on the sofa. The sofa was shredded, but the cats were fine.

  “I feed her canned dog food, but she's always hungry. I haven't seen a raccoon in the neighborhood for two weeks. Kevin, I don't know where you can take her, but she can't stay here.”

  Was Jonesy grown enough to survive on her own, on garbage, raccoons, and people's geese? “How did she learn to eat the raccoons?”

  “When I separated them, Emily kind of—split open, you know—and Jonesy stood over Emily, and then, as if she was sorry for the poor goose, she bent over and started licking her feathers, and she tasted the blood, and all of a sudden—”

  Kevin had seen barn cats experience this epiphany. They discover their toy tastes good. Most learned from the mother cat, but get them hungry enough—

  “She doesn't bother the geese anymore. They run away. But then there's the deer.”

  Kevin looked at his baby monster. “Jonesy couldn't take down a deer.”

  “Maybe not, but she sure knows how to chase them. And I worry about Mr. Trumbull's cows.”

  Kevin stood. “Thanks for taking care of her.”

  She took his hand, then moved closer. They gazed at each other. Could he kiss her?

  She stepped back. “Take her somewhere. Hey, what about your dad's old trailer?”

  The trailer featured scarcely more than a bed and a mini-dinette, abandoned on the lot near his mom's apartment. Roof leaked, plumbing wasn't connected. No trailer park would let him in with that wreck.

  Nor with an “exotic animal.” Even if he could pass Jonesy off as a rescued bobcat or lion cub.

  “I'll call around.” He had brought a collar and leash, and he snapped these on Jonesy. Jonesy had been on leash before and didn't like it, but she tr
usted Kevin enough not to fight.

  Kevin was becoming an expert on Smilodons. They weren't even from the same branch of the Felida family as lions and tigers, but still might live in families. He must seem to Jonesy like her mother or the leader of her—what did they call lion families?—pride.

  He smiled at Sara, eyes full of hope.

  “Go!” she said, shoving him playfully. The saber-tooth bared huge teeth at Sara until she smoothed its back fur. “You can come back. Bring Jonesy if you can control her. Just call first.”

  He led the saber-tooth to his car. His mind roiled with possibility. Ask her! he thought. She's got a new guy, or she doesn't. Ask!

  Too many secrets in Kevin's life: an animal he couldn't give up and couldn't keep, and a girl he wanted and whose life had become a mystery.

  “Cat,” he said. “We ain't neither of us got no pride.”

  Kevin's uncle owned some unworked farmland twenty miles out of town center. He got permission to park the trailer there, planning to haul water and use cartridges for gas heat. He bought a generator and parked the trailer well back from the road.

  Odd jobs weren't enough. His mom's restaurant needed a dishwasher. Since the owner knew him—and about the jail time—there was no background check problem. Kevin bought a cell phone that didn't require a credit card, and the modern man out of his time and the Ice Age cat went there to live their hard life.

  College plans receded into mist. Maybe someday Kevin could write a book about this. He bought a cheap digital camera and started a journal of the Jonesy's growth and behavior.

  The saber-tooth soon learned to paw open the refrigerator. Kevin was forced to keep only vegetables in it. To supplement the dog food, he brought home a cut-up chicken or a chuck steak every night. Jonesy tore into these, sometimes before Kevin could get the wrapper off. Sometimes the wrapper would get impaled on the four-inch-long canines, and she would run around the room trying to scrape them off. Kevin fell down laughing the first time that happened.