Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

They met that first time in Oakland, at an anthropology convention. The old man, already a force behind the scenes, had contacted Gavin for a meeting. “Martial Johansson would like to meet you” was what the invitation had said, and Gavin had gone to the conference room listed on the card and found Martial sitting behind a long table. They’d talked about genetics and the future of molecular biology.

A month later, he’d gotten a call. And then a plane ticket to a symposium in California.

Another boardroom. Another talk. And this time, a check. With zeros to spare. And he’d made the deal. It was only later that he’d realized it was a deal with the devil. Gavin wondered how many other deals the old man had made over the years. How many other checks he’d passed out.

“Thank you for coming,” the old man said. “It was short notice, but considering the circumstances, I thought it best we speak in person.” They rounded a bend in the trail, and here the ground was muddy and well trodden.

“It’s good to see the States again,” Gavin said. “And this place…” His voice faded.

“Is it what you imagined?”

“I wasn’t sure what to imagine.”

“It is strange times we live in,” the old man said. His voice was cracked and failing, though his expression was as confident as Gavin remembered.

“Indeed, sir.”

“Dark times,” Martial wheezed.

The old man walked more slowly than the last time Gavin had seen him. His breath came in shallow gasps. If the rumors were true, he was on his third pair of lungs, and the anti-rejection drugs had compromised his immune system, rendering him susceptible to infections. Consequently, he didn’t get out much. Instead, he brought the world to him.

They followed the trail down to an opening in the dense brush. Huge cages loomed before them, and in them, big cats.

“I come down here every day to watch them feed,” Martial said. “Of all the animals at the facility, the cats are the ones I respect the most.”

An enormous feline paced in the nearest enclosure, huge feet padding across packed dirt. The cage was a dozen feet high, a hundred feet long.

They moved closer, and Gavin could see that it wasn’t a lion. Not really. Something close, but not a lion. It was four feet tall at the shoulder. A freight train of fur and bone and muscle.

The old man stood facing away from him, but Gavin noted his posture—the rigid shoulders had slumped a bit in the intervening years. The old man coughed, and it was a deep, hacking sound that didn’t speak well of his health.

Gavin was startled to realize that in the decade since last he’d seen Martial, a chink had formed in his shell of seeming immortality. He was a sick man who’d grown used to being sick. Maybe the old oak was finally dying. Or maybe that was the thing about oaks. They can die for a long, long time.

The old man turned, and his eyes were red and rheumy. “It’s a liger,” he said, gesturing toward the enclosure. “You’ve heard of them, no doubt.”

“Of course.”

“The odd thing about ligers, they’re always bigger than either of their parents. Ask why and you’ll get some blather about imprinting, differential growth controls, the privileging of plus over minus alleles, et cetera. But the fact is that we really don’t know why they get bigger. Most chalk it up to heterosis. Hybrid vigor. But that’s a description, not an explanation.”

Gavin nodded.

“This one’s a cross of a lion father and a tiger mother. Nine feet long and still growing, as far as we can tell. Like a tiger, it swims. There’s also a lesser-utilized cross—the tiger father and lion mother. This makes a completely different animal, did you know that?”

“No.”

“The tigon isn’t as large. They tend to have darker fur and smaller manes. They’re also less social and behave more like tigers, but they do something true tigers don’t. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“They roar.”

The old man stared through the bars. His face made an expression that might have been a smile. “We house a lot of animals here at the facility.” He swept his arm wide. “I’ve been called a collector, but that isn’t true. Collectors wish only to possess, but there’s work being done here. Important work. We do things here, you understand.”

“Yes.”

At that moment, a cry rose up from the distance—a strange sound that Gavin couldn’t place. It came from somewhere around the next bend of the trail, from a different series of cages no doubt, nestled somewhere farther out on the grounds. At first the sound seemed to be the howl of a wounded dog, or perhaps a monkey. But it changed as it rose in pitch, transforming into a screech of anguish.

Gavin looked to the old man for an explanation, but the old man offered only, “There are places here where the work is lost. Places I don’t visit anymore.”

It was then that Gavin noticed the bucket. It sat in the trampled grass by the old man’s feet, white plastic, a five-gallon bucket coated in gore, dried blood and fat accreted along the lip and sides. The old man followed Gavin’s gaze and bent toward the bucket, reaching inside. He pulled out a thick slab of dripping red meat. He held the meat in his gnarled hands for a moment, its bulk sagging in the middle like one of those novelty steaks served as marketing ploys in certain kinds of restaurants: five or six pounds, finish it in an hour and your meal is free.

With a grunt of effort, the old man tossed it through the bars, into the cage.

The giant cat lumbered forward and sank its teeth into the flesh. Its mouth jerked twice, movements too quick to follow, and the meat was gone. The old man continued, “Years ago, when I first started my work, I didn’t truly understand the scope of what I’d undertaken. It was after graduate school, before the genetics boom, back before cytology caught my interest. I was unsure of the direction I wanted to take. I had only questions, and no clear path before me by which I might someday arrive at the answers.”

Gavin tried to picture Martial Johansson unsure of anything. His imagination failed him.

“Working with animals reveals many things about nature,” the old man continued. “Animals, you see, will develop a compromise with captivity.” And here Martial paused; he bent and pulled from the bucket another dripping slab of meat. His hands were coated in blood. “With enough time, they come to understand it. They need to eat, after all.”

Martial tossed the second slab of meat through the bars, and the big cat snatched it out of the air with paws the size of dinner plates. It gulped the meat down in a single swallow. The big cat’s head came up, and its eyes locked on them through the bars. Huge tan eyes—a liquid predator stare that raised the hair on Gavin’s arms. The big cat began to pace.

“But not so with the lion,” Martial continued. He gestured through the bars. “The lion is different from other animals. The lion is an animal with whom no compromise is possible.”

The old man kicked the white bucket over and blood poured out, draining into the grass. A clutch of black flies sprang from the bucket and circled angrily as the old man bent and picked up a last chunk of meat. “I came to realize that for the lion, its hatred outweighed its need for food.” Martial gestured toward the cage again. “Like this big beast’s father here.”

The big cat followed the old man’s gestures with its eyes.

“Every day I’d go down to the cages, and I’d watch the lion watching us. And when I fed it, those eyes would turn toward me, three feet away, and my insides would go all soft, because my body knew that stare. Even the first time it happened, my body knew—some feedback mechanism in my brain recognizing what death looks like, that big beast staring at me. And I knew something else. I knew what none of the other researchers knew. I knew, absolutely, that if anyone ever left the cage door open, that lion wouldn’t just escape. It would kill as many people as it could before it was shot.”