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Chapter 54 – Lion of the DesertJack frowned. “Be pretty surprised if you didn’t. Look at this.” He pointed down at the road.
It was a set of skid marks. They went straight down the road about forty feet and then went straight sideways. And the sideways marks pointed pretty much right at the truck.
He said, “Driver’s hauling butt down the road. These roads, the speed limit’s pretty much just a suggestion. But he suddenly sees something. He slams on the brakes hard, the truck burns rubber trying to stop, and … Bam! Something hits the truck on the side so hard it ends up on its side out there in the boondocks. The driver’s still alive, though. He scrambles out and runs for it. Why? The truck’s not on fire. And he runs away from the road, where the threat is.”
She said, “There’s a rifle in a rifle rack still in the truck. He left it and ran. If it was a regular person, even a person who could throw a truck, he’d grab that rifle and try to fill ’em full of lead first. Right?”
He nodded. “Yep. What else you find?”
She said, “The police took the skeleton away, I think. But there’s a couple of … something out there. What has a mostly round footprint with two big claws that dig in, instead of sticking out in front?”
“How big?” he asked.
“Umm, that’s the problem,” she said. “Each one’s about five feet across.”
“WHAT?” he yelped. “Show me.”
She led him back to the one she was sure of. He looked around and said, “I’m not seeing it.”
So she flew up to thirty feet, took her camera out of her fanny-pack, and took a picture. Then she flew back down and showed it to him on the viewfinder.
He looked it over, now that he could spot it. He said, maybe to himself, “What could it be? A full grown male elephant’s foot is maybe two feet across, tops. This is maybe … six or seven times the area. With clawmarks in the middle? That makes no sense.” He looked up at her and asked, “Got a tape measure?”
“Umm, no? Why?”
He said, “For perspective. So Acid Burn can match against things the right size.” He went and got the tire iron out of the trunk, and laid it down next to the impression. “Take a couple pics. Then we need to use the sat phone to send these off to Burn.”
She said, “And they’re way far apart.”
He said, “We may not be seeing where the ‘feet’ came down in between. Or maybe these are a hoax, like those stupid crop circles or the Cardiff Giant, and someone wants us to jump to weirdoid conclusions.”
She said, “Jack, we are the weirdoid conclusions.”
When they went back to Graham’s car, Jack got out the sat phone, lined it up, and sent Willow the pictures, plus a photo of the map, and a list of the people they’d met. On the way back to the institute, they swung by to check out another spot on the map. Lots of dead cows, with nothing left but skeletons. Not even blood. And more of that white liquid in yucky puddles all over the place, even if it had pretty much dried out by now.
On the ride back, she admitted, “This is creeping me out.”
He said, “That’s okay. My creep-out-o-meter hit the peg back when we saw over a hundred cattle skeletons with no blood anywhere on the ground and no meat on the bones. The only time I ever saw a cow halfway like that was in South America, and it had been in the way of an army ant migration. And that was one cow tied to a tree, not a hundred cows loose in a fenced pasture. I am really hoping this isn’t a super-colony of super-army ants loose in the desert.”
She said, “Army ants wouldn’t leave a ‘footprint’ the size of a pup tent.”
He said, “And they wouldn’t throw a truck farther than your friend Baker.”
“Jo is not my friend,” she insisted. Even if she knew he’d said it just to get a rise out of her.
They drove to the institute in uncomfortable silence. Alex was a little surprised when she saw the place. It looked like a two-story mansion, not what she was expecting. Maybe it used to be a mansion. Or maybe it was a mansion where Dr. Deemer had a big lab set-up going on. They got to the institute just ahead of the helicopter, which set down on a flat area a hundred yards away from the yard around the house.
Alex flew over to see Riley and Hanna. It was good having some ‘normal’ in all this. She gave Hanna a hug and shook Riley’s hand.
Riley said, “The flyby back was a big goose egg. Hanna spotted some recent rockslides, and I spotted what may be a big mine with some active excavation down in the bottom of one of the canyons, but that was it. And the other sites looked like the cattle. Skeletons, some puddles of white something-or-other, no sign of vehicles bringing in equipment or taking cattle parts away.”
Hanna said, “I read that there were birds that nested in the ground and the brush in this part of Arizona. I have not seen a single bird since we arrived here.”
Riley said, “No birdsong either. I don’t know if that’s normal or not.”
Jack frowned. “Nothing is normal about this. Tera, show ’em the picture.”
Riley looked and asked, “Is that a tire iron?” Jack nodded. “Then that impression would have to be …”
Jack said, “About five feet across. Yeah.”
Hanna said, “Even polar bears do not have footprints like that.”
Riley said, “The biggest elephant ever didn’t have footprints like that. I don’t think dinosaurs had footprints that big. Maybe it’s not a footprint at all. Could it be from some sort of hovercraft setting down there?”
Jack said, “Oh, good, aliens. Bring in little green men, too. Cheer me up.”
Riley shrugged. “Maybe it’s more mad science instead.”
Alex said, “Danielle Atron could make an imprint like that if she went silvery, spread out, and dropped flat from maybe fifty feet up. And if she was carrying some kind of tool, maybe it would make the ‘clawmarks’.”
Jack said, “And why would she do that?”
Alex shrugged. “I dunno. I just wanted to get the ‘weird chemical supervillains’ thing in while we were going through options.”
Jack grimaced. “Well, let’s go see what we’ve got. Maybe Grover and Billy got further than us.”
Hanna asked, “Isn’t his name Bill Lee? Not Billy?”
Jack grinned. “Yep. But calling him Bill Lee doesn’t make him tear out what little hair he has left.”
“Ahh,” Hanna nodded. Then she shook her head from side to side. “I do not understand.”
Alex put an arm over Hanna’s shoulders and said, “It’s like this …”
* * *
By the time they arrived at the house and walked across the veranda into the big atrium — SAT words to the rescue! — a police car was pulling up with Jo in the front and Graham in the back. A deputy let Jo and Graham out, and then drove off again.
Alex flew out to greet them. “Hi! It’s good to see you. And I’m glad the grouchy sheriff didn’t lock you up.”
Jo scowled. “I’d like to see him try, the old codger.”
Graham grinned. “When the colonel called him Sheriff Codger to his face, I had to bite the inside of my mouth so hard it’s still bleeding a little. Oh, crap, that was funny. It almost made up for all the runaround that old fart’s been giving me.”
Jo said, “They’ve got an incompetent police force, and no medical examiner, and an incompetent doctor. He said it was acromegaly. I’ve seen acromegaly, and that’s not it. And they knew all along who the body was, the dickheads. It’s Eric Jacobs. One of Dr. Deemer’s lab assistants that the doc just ‘forgot’ to file an official missing persons on. One of the deputies, I flirted with him a minute, and he spilled. The doc’s supposed to have another lab assistant besides the late Eric Jacobs and his new assistant Steve Clayton. A guy named Paul Lund. I kind of doubt he’s around anymore, either. In fact, I’m kind of surprised good ol’ Steve isn’t the late, lamented Steve by now.”
They went in and found Hanna looking at family pictures on the walls, and Jack looking at a burned room with big animal cages. Jack pointed at two big cages that looked newly built out of wood and chicken wire. “What’s the deal here? He’s got one tiny white mouse in each. The cages are big enough for a sheepdog! Does he have really bad eyesight, too? And look at the burned cages. They’re all the same size, or bigger. What was he using as test animals? Cows?”
Riley asked, “Could things have escaped the night of the fire and be causing these incidents?”
Jack shrugged, but said, “It’s a working hypothesis. But so are little green men and Danielle Atron.”
Jo and Graham told Jack about the dead body, and showed him some pictures Graham had taken. Alex took a peek by floating in the air behind Jack. That didn’t look like any kind of disease Alex had ever heard of. It looked like the guy got hit with a ‘turn you into a mutant caveman’ ray. Then Jack told Jo and Graham what his team and Riley’s team had found.
A grouchy old guy with freakishly thick eyebrows came out of a back room. Alex guessed he was Dr. Deemer. “Are you here to pick up Doctor Lee and Mister Dunn? Because they’ve caused enough trouble already.”
Jack called down the hall, “Bill! Grover! Front and center!” He looked at the doctor and asked, “Where’s your lab assistant Clayton? And where’s your other lab assistant Paul Lund?”
Dr. Deemer groaned. “Paul? He started the fire and attacked me before he ran off into the night. I haven’t seen him since. And Steve is out back, walking around with that country doctor of hers, instead of working.”
Jack said, “Look doc, we’ve seen the body of the late Eric Jacobs, and we’d like to know what happened to him and Lund.” He turned his head slightly and said, “Hanna, go round up the lovebirds and get ’em in here so we can see they’re all right.”
Hanna ducked down the hall and out a back door that Alex heard slamming shut.
Jack said, “Doc, we’ve got some serious problems, and you seem to be at the center of all of them.”
The doctor said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Hanna walked back in and said, “Colonel, they are coming back now. They look fine. But there is something dead and burned that is buried in the ground well behind the house. I could smell it when I walked past it.”
Jack said, “Doc, I guess you’re under arrest on charges of first degree murder, accessory before the fact to murder, cattle rustling, and anything else I can come up with before I get some MPs from Luke Air Force Base to lock you up and throw away the key.”
Dr. Deemer said, “You can’t do that! I’m a respected scientist!”
Jack said, “And I’m Department of Homeland Security, investigating multiple murders and animal mutilations. Let’s see what you’ve got out back.”
Riley gave Dr. Deemer a nice smile as he loomed over the man. “Let’s go see, shall we? Colonel O’Neill can be a lot more difficult, if you push him.”
They all escorted Dr. Deemer out, and there was definitely a dug-up spot about fifty feet past the edge of the yard. It looked big enough to bury maybe three horses, and the sandy dirt was piled up enough that it maybe could be dead horses under there. Or a dozen people.
Jack looked at Alex and asked, “Can you do this, or do I need to make Lupo and Finn break out the shovels?”
Dr. Deemer begged, “Please don’t do this. There are no people there. Just dead lab animals. The fire went out of control and there was a flashpoint from some chemicals Paul knocked over. I managed to get the fire out, but none of my test animals survived. And I worked so hard for them. And then Paul must have knocked me out, or I passed out from the fumes, and when I came to it was nearly morning. I spent all that day hauling them out and burying them … Can’t you just let this drop?”
Jack said, “Not while we’ve got people and animals turning up dead left and right, and we don’t know why.”
Dr. Deemer insisted, “That can’t possibly be connected to my work.”
Alex concentrated, and scooped up about two hundred pounds of dirt, which she tossed behind the big piled-up area. She did that all over the area, until she’d lowered the level of the dirt almost down to the ground. Then she went for another lower pile of dirt.
Something was caught in the dirt. She lifted off the dirt in fifty pound chunks, until she could just barely lift out what looked like a burned animal. If it hadn’t been burned to a crisp and dried out from being buried in Arizona, she would never have been able to lift it out by herself. It was shaped like an earless bunny, but it was the size of a baby hippo.
Dr. Deemer sobbed, “That’s Test Animal Four. Eric named him Nibbles. He was doing so well!”
Jack just stared. “What the hell is that?”
Dr. Deemer said, “A guinea pig.”
“A guinea pig the size of a pony?”
Riley said, “Guinea pigs are still herbivorous, sir.”
Jack said, “Yeah, until they get turned into mutant things the size of a pony!”
Dr. Deemer said, “All the guinea pigs were still herbivores. That was the point of the study. To find a serum that would enable rapid growth, to provide food sources for starving people in Africa and Asia. But it didn’t work on mammals, so I needed to tinker with their genome and ‘design’ animals that it did work on. Eric and Paul wouldn’t listen to me. These animals were genetically designed by an expert.”
“Maggie Walsh,” Jack muttered.
“Yes,” Dr. Deemer nodded. “She found the right gene sequences to let the animals grow without mutating horribly and dying from the consequent metabolic stresses. But my lab assistants got drunk one night and injected themselves. I told them it was a horrible idea. And they … mutated like the pure mammalian lab animals, just as I predicted.”
Hanna calmly asked, “Is that why your face is becoming asymmetrical and your brow ridge is more pronounced than in your pictures in the hall?”
Deemer screeched, “What? No! It can’t be!” And he ran into the house.
Jack gestured for Riley and Graham to go with him. Then Jack said, “Nice work, Hanna. It’s a good thing you came along.”
“Thank you, colonel.”
Jack asked, “Alex? Get these critters unburied. Hanna? Help her if she needs help. Lieutenant? Go in, find Dunn and Lee, and have them tear the lab areas apart until they find a complete list of the lab animals that could have been in here the night of the fire.”
Lupo dashed into the house, while Hanna went to find a shovel. Meanwhile, Alex moved more dirt with her telekinesis. Which was way easier than digging a hole in sandy soil with a shovel in Arizona in the summer.
It was the last body that had her shuddering. “Oh, crud.”
Hanna stepped over, holding the shovel like a weapon. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m pretty sure you’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking.”
Alex yelled at the house, “COLONEL!” But she didn’t take her eyes off the burnt corpse, just in case it wasn’t corpse-y enough.
Jack came trotting out, with Jo. “What’s the matter? Find Paul?” He took a look and abruptly stopped. “Fer cryin’ out loud.”
Jo had some different words. Most of them involved words Alex was not allowed to say, put together in some ways Alex had hardly ever heard before.
Alex asked, “Are we sure it’s dead?”
Jack said, “I think we’d know if it was alive by now. Is that the only one?”
Alex nodded. “The only one I could find. Unless he buried some more somewhere else.”
Jack said, “This guy is completely out of his tree. No wonder Maggie wanted to work with him.”
They walked back in, to find Dr. Deemer in the lab staring at his face in a mirror. Grover and Professor Lee had several short stacks of paper in their hands, and had joined the group. Matt Hastings and Steve Clayton were there, too.
Jack said, “Doc, you wanna tell me why you turned a spider into something the size of a wading pool?”
“What?” gasped Riley.
“Holy shit,” muttered Graham.
Jack said, “You should’ve heard what Lupo said. My mom would’ve been washing her mouth out with soap for the next decade.”
Professor Lee held up a handful of notes and said, “It wouldn’t work on mammals, would it?”
Grover said from inside his hoodie, “He wanted to alter growth rates through exocytosis. And calcium is crucial there. So he took a biochemically active calcium compound and switched out the calcium atoms with radium, which is chemically similar.”
Professor Lee nodded and said, “Yes, they’re both Group 2 in the periodic table. But the calcium replacement affected the bones of anything that was a vertebrate.”
Dr. Deemer sank into a chair, looking utterly defeated. “I needed to find a way to change the biochemistry of my mammals for the serum to work properly. Maggie Walsh found a way to use sequences out of the tarantula genome and splice them effectively into the mammalian genome. She was so helpful.”
“I bet,” Jack muttered sarcastically.
Grover said, “According to the records Dr. Deemer had hidden in his bedroom, there should have been five guinea pigs, two tarantulas, and a desert cricket.”
Alex said, “Five dead guinea pigs, check. One dead tarantula, check. One tarantula and one cricket? No check.”
Professor Lee said, “Both tarantulas were six feet across, fully extended, during measurements the day before the fire. If the doctor’s growth curve is correct — which I doubt, given the limitations on the growth of invertebrate exoskeletons — that tarantula would be …” He did some rapid computations in his head. “… well over a hundred feet across by now.”
—
A/N1: This crossover — as you probably guessed quite some time ago — is the 1955 film “Tarantula”, one of the classic 1950s ‘giant critter’ sci-fi movies. I don’t own it or the characters in it. And yes, in the movie Dr. Deemer really was using radium to make animals grow bigger and faster in that 1950s ‘nuclear energy is magic’ style they used to use. I just made up some technobabble to ‘justify’ it.
A/N2: Now imagine Jack doing his best Robert Mitchum imitation and saying, “Radium-flavored guinea pig, it’s what’s for dinner!” (If you don’t get the joke, it’s okay. I’m a lot older than you. Robert Mitchum used to be the voice of the commercials of the National Beef Council. The tagline for every commercial was his deep voice saying, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.”)