Scott Sigler: Ancestor

Her hand reached down again. This time it brought up a long, dangly, gray-and-white leg from a sock monkey.

The needle flashed. More stings. Possessed hands fixed the leg to the panda body, now black and white marked with thin red streaks.

“Shou, ting xia lai,” she managed to say finally. Stop it, hands . But the hands ignored her.

Why had she spoken Mandarin? She used it so rarely now. But no, that wasn’t right, because she was five years old and it was the only language she had ever known.

A lion’s tawny leg.

More pain.

More blood.

A pinkish arm from a plastic baby doll.

More pain.

More blood .

“Shou, ting xia lai,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “Qing ting xia lai.”

Stop it, hands. Please, stop it .

The hands ignored her. They reached down again, but this time they didn’t find fake fur or plastic. This time they came up with something cold and solid.

A small, severed head. Greasy black fur streaked with wet blood. Wide mouth, dead black eyes. Nothing like this had ever lived, nor would it. Not unless someone created it.

Jian started to sob.

The hands kept sewing.

THE VID-PHONE LET out its unignorable, shrill blare: P. J. Colding jerked awake. He squinted at the glowing red clock set in the vid-phone’s base—6:14 A.M. The time was bad enough, but it also showed the date.

NOVEMBER 7.

Fuck. He had hoped to sleep most of this day away. He slowly reached out and clicked the connect button.

Gunther Jones’s tired, melancholy face appeared on the flat-panel display. The guy’s big lips and sleepy eyes always made him look high.

“She’s at it again,” Gunther said, his voice sounding only marginally more awake than Colding’s. “Fifty-two years old and she has nightmares like a little kid.”

“Nothing she can do about it, Gun. Cut the lady some slack. Give me the live feed to her room, maybe it’s not that bad this time.”

Gunther looked down, hands seeking buttons somewhere offscreen. He usually worked the night-shift watch. Ensconced in the security room, he monitored two dozen cameras that covered the barren area surrounding Genada’s Baffin Island facility, the oversized hangar that housed the cows and vehicles, and the main building’s hallways and labs. The main building’s eight apartments also had cameras, but those were deactivated on Colding’s orders. Jian’s room was the exception—her cameras were always on. Gunther spent most of his shift writing crazy vampire romance novels, but always kept a close eye on Jian. That was the man’s main shift responsibility, really, to make sure Jian didn’t try to kill herself.

The vid-phone picture changed from Gunther’s face to a high-angle, black-and-white image—an overweight woman tossing and turning on her bed, heavy black hair covering much of her face. Colding could see her lips moving, see her look of fear.

There would be no going back to sleep this time. “Okay, Gun. I’ll go take care of her.”

He hit the disconnect button and the screen went black. Colding slid out of bed, his bare feet hitting the frigid floor. No matter how high they turned up the temperature, the floor remained perpetually ice-cold. He stepped into his ratty flip-flops, pulled on a robe and slid a small earpiece onto his left ear. He tapped the earpiece once, turning it on.

“Gunther, radio check.”

“Got you, boss.”

“Okay, on my way. Holler if she comes out of it before I get there.”

Colding left his Beretta in the nightstand drawer. No need for the gun. He headed for Jian’s.

HER BLEEDING FINGERS had turned the panda from black and white to black and red. Panda body, tiger arm, sock monkey leg, lion leg, plastic baby-doll arm and the black head with a mouth full of pointy teeth. Her possessed hands held the strange creation, a misshapen, mismatched Dr. Seuss Frankenstein.

“Not again,” Jian’s little-girl voice whispered. “Please, not again.”

She begged, but like watching a familiar old rerun, she knew what would come next. She started screaming a moment too early, just before the black eyes fluttered open and looked right at her. Primitive, unfeeling, but clearly hungry.

Something shook her, shook her. The hodge-podge stuffed animal opened its mouth and seemed to smile. The devil’s smile. Mismatched arms—baby-doll plastic pink and tiger-stripe orange and black—reached up and out for her.

Just as the creature opened its mouth to bite, that something shook her even harder.

COLDING GENTLY SHOOK Jian one more time. She blinked awake, the expression of terror still fixed on her confused face. Sweat and tears matted her silky black hair against her skin.

“Jian, it’s okay.”

He’d watched this woman for two years, tried to help her both because it was his job and because she had become his good friend. For Jian, some days were better than others. The bad days hurt Colding, made him feel incompetent and powerless. He always reminded himself, however, that she was still alive, and that was really something. She’d tried to kill herself twice; he’d personally stopped both attempts.

Jian blinked once more, perhaps trying to see through the hair, then threw her arms around Colding in a crushing hug. He returned the hug, patting her fears away as if she were his daughter and not twenty years his senior.

“I have dream again, Mister Colding.”

“It’s okay,” Colding said. He felt her tears on his neck and shoulder. Jian called every man mister , although with her thick accent it always sounded like mee-sta . He’d never been able to convince her to call him by his first name.

“It’s okay, Jian. Why don’t you see if you can get back to sleep?”

She pulled away from him and wiped tears with the back of her hand. “No,” she said. “No sleep.”

“Jian, come on. Just try. I know you haven’t slept more than six hours in the past three days.”

“No.”

“Can’t you at least try?”

“No!” She turned and slid out from under the covers, surprisingly graceful for a woman who carried 250 pounds on a five-foot-six frame. Colding realized too late that she wasn’t wearing any pajama bottoms. He turned away, embarrassed, but Jian didn’t seem to notice.

“As long as I up, I get some work done,” she said. “We have another immune response test this morning.”

Colding rubbed his eyes, partially because it kept him from looking like he was trying not to look. He stared at the familiar chessboard sitting on her dresser. She’d beat him ninety-seven times in a row, but who was counting?

Her bottle of medication sat next to the chessboard. A clear strip running down the bottle’s side let him see how much fluid remained. Across the strip, written in neat black letters, were dates in descending order: Nov. 1 on top, Nov. 30 on the bottom. The fluid leveled out at Nov. 7.

“Yes, I am taking my meds,” Jian said. “I may be crazy, but I am not stupid.”

But was she taking them? Things had been getting worse, her nightmares growing in frequency and intensity. “Don’t say that about yourself, Jian. I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“You also do not think you are handsome,” Jian said. “This proves your judgment is questionable.”

The zip of a pants zipper told him it was okay to look her way once again. She was pulling on a Hawaiian shirt—lime-green with yellow azaleas—over her sweat-stained, white T-shirt. Heavy black hair still hung wetly in front of her face, but through that hair he could see the dark rings under her bloodshot, haunted eyes.

She walked to her bizarre computer desk, sat down and switched on the power. Seven flat-panel monitors flared, coating her in a whitish glare. The setup surrounded her in a semicircle of screens. Three down at desk level, the side monitors angled in. Four monitors in the row above that, slanted down and around her so she actually had to turn her head from left to right to see them all.