The Island of Dr. Mom

 

 

 

 

 

The tour of Outland Farms ended with a warning: Shed 19 was off-limits.

“Which one is Shed 19?” Ray asked, still scratching where the new uniform irritated his neck.

Mr. Pavon, the human resources supervisor, looked up from his clipboard and gestured across the pastoral campus to a building set on a hillcrest two miles distant, a point where the horizon took a sudden dip so that the colossal building set at its peak appeared to perch at the edge of the world.

“Right there, Mr. Drozn.  Can’t miss it.”  Mr. Pavon pushed up his glasses, went back to his clipboard and made a series of checkmarks.  “God help you if you do.”

Though its walls and roof had been painted the same red/white as the facility’s other barns, Shed 19 betrayed the indifferent glimmer of a wind tunnel’s steel hull.  The Outland Farms seal painted across its hundred foot bay doors depicted the company’s founder and patron saint, Dr. Mom, standing in a wheat field wearing her trademark apron-over-lab coat combo, holding a baby in one arm and an overflowing cornucopia in the other.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

With the distracted half-interest of a fly bouncing from one pile of manure to the next, Mr. Pavon’s attention shifted from his clipboard to a man standing beside Ray.  His name tag said ‘Steve’.

“Excuse me?” Mr. Pavon asked.

“What does that mean, ‘God help you if you do?’” Steve asked again.

“It means that if you’re smart, which you appear to be Mr. Garris, you’ll steer clear of Shed 19.”

“Hey,” Wendell hushed.  “Bet you ten bucks they got an alien spaceship in there.  My uncle says that’s where Dr. Mom gets her secret recipes.”

Ray snorted.  “Your uncle is legally married to his tractor.”

“Come on, ten bucks says Boss Man here’s got ET’s car keys in his pocket.”

“Can I take that bet?”  Mr. Pavon smiled.  “It’s true Dr. Mom’s food has out-of-this-world flavor, but I’m afraid that’s as far as it goes, son.  Shed 19 is off-limits because that’s where Dr. Mom works twelve hours a day perfecting her secret recipes.”

A murmur of appreciative wonder rippled through the crowd of a dozen new employees.  Dr. Mom was the leading U.S. producer of fine meats, dairy items, and assorted fresh produce.  Not to mention her desserts— her ice cream was the most popular brand in the world.  She claimed it was the milk that did it, milk from Outland cows which Ray and Wendell had been hired to feed and breed.

“How do they do that part?  The breeding part?” Jeanie had asked two weeks ago, when Ray told her and Pop about the job he’d gotten, hoping against hope that it would shatter the wall of stony silence which had built itself up between Ray and the old man since he and Wendell Phelps had walked out of high school for a burger one afternoon with no plans to return.

“Well, we use, um, stuff from boy cows,” Ray had replied.  Across the table, the old man gave Ray a look of warning that melted the butter on his toast.  Jeanie was eleven, and innocent of the wonders and horrors of the world, as would she remain until her first social security check arrived.  “You see, we don’t have any daddy cows at Outland Farms, so we have to take some magic frozen daddy cow juice, and put it in a little magic bubble inside the lady cow, and then the baby cow is created.”

“Do you at least buy her a drink first?”

Ray’s eyes had flown to his father, wide and horrified, as the old man roared, not with ire but with humor, breaking the radio silence and deflating the entire house.

Ray thought about that distant conversation as he lay awake in the Outland bunkhouse, feeling a knot of homesickness tie a blue bow around his guts as the moon rose through the window behind him.  The bunkhouse slept four hundred with enough beds and recreational equipment to furnish its employees with reasonable lodgings while stationed so far from civilization.  Local joke had it that not so much as an ant colony could be built within a hundred miles of the place, such was the security surrounding Dr. Mom’s prized victuals.

“Did you guys know this whole place is a no fly zone?”  From next bed, Steve Garris’s voice drifted to where Ray lay daydreaming atop his still-made sheets.  Wendell had been unconscious for hours in the bunk overhead.  “Now why do you suppose that is?”

Ray shrugged.  Outside, a shower of sparks illuminated the night as another rabbit tried its luck against the electric fence that bordered the facility.

“I mean, how does a self-proclaimed ‘simple homemaker’ like Dr. Mom pull something like that off?” Steve asked the darkness.  “You know how much clout you’d have to have with the Feds?  Doesn’t that make you wonder what’s going on in Shed 19?”

“Not really,” said Ray.

“I mean, it could be anything: hormone therapy for chickens to lay a hundred eggs a day.  Gene-splicing strawberries to unnatural sizes.  Cow cloning.  All of the above.”

As if in response, the sound of bending, tearing steel crashed outside like a freight train had fallen out of the sky.  Ray bolted upright, veering to clear Wendell’s bunk, and tumbled to the floor.

“What was that?” Wendell called.

“Dunno.”  Steve hopped up and pulled Ray to his feet.  “Let’s check it out.”

Steve went first, followed by Wendell and Ray, their cold bare feet patting down the double row of bunk beds to the sliding aluminum door.  With the care of a safecracker, Steve wrapped his hands around the long metal handle and pulled.

“It’s stuck.  Gimme a hand.”

Wendell leaned in and put his full three hundred pounds of weight against it.  Nothing doing.  Steve knelt to peer through the crack where the door met its frame.

“It’s locked!”

“What?” Ray said.

“I can see the deadbolt.  Those sons of bitches locked us in!”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Lemme see, dude.”  Wendell hunched over Steve and stuck his eye socket against the door frame.

An animal roar echoed down the hill from the direction of Shed 19.  All three men straightened on invisible marionette strings and took six synchronized steps backwards.

“What was that?”

“ET wants his ship back.”

“It wasn’t fucking ET.”

“His big brother then.”

The roar came again.  Louder.  Closer.

Steve and Wendell took two more steps back while Ray edged forward, unable to believe his own lunatic curiosity, and put his eye to the crack in the doorframe.  Electricity tickled the hairs on his neck, made them salute in rigid formation.

“It’s the fence,” Ray said to the crack.  “I think it’s attacking the electric fence.”

“It came back for its ship,” Wendell moaned.  “I told you!”

Ray shook his head.  “I don’t think it’s trying to get in.”  He looked back at them.  “I think it’s trying to get out.”

 

*****

 

“The safe money’s on cloning,” Steve said, eyes shaded against the afternoon sun as he and Ray made their way through the milking troughs, his every word a hoarse whisper.

“What are you yammering about?” Ray asked, loud and annoyed.  He hoisted the last canister onto the cart bound for the bottling plant, then turned toward the door to check out for the day.  Five o’clock meant quitting time and fifteen minutes until dinner.

“They’re cloning livestock,” Steve said.  “Think about it—

it’s cheaper and safer than breeding, and when combined with chromosome manipulation, you can eliminate any bad strains that might produce inferior stock.”

“But I thought that was Dr. Mom’s whole deal, all that organic, clone-free stuff.  All natural and everything.”

“Right, that’s what she says.”

Ray and Steve stepped into the electric cart and drove east to the breeding sheds to fetch Wendell for chow.  The air was clean and grey in the face of coming rainfall.  Across the facility, there was no sign of the previous night’s pandemonium near Shed 19.  All was as it had been the day before.  When asked, none of Ray’s bunkmates remembered a thing.  They’d slept through the entire incident.

“I mean, one of the main reasons Dr. Mom is so successful is because she appeals directly to the conservatives and born-agains.  They hate cloning in any form because it’s against God’s natural design, and most grocery stores today only sell meat from cloned stock.”

“Except for Dr. Mom’s stuff.”

“Right.”

Ray recalled commercials of Dr. Mom in her white lab coat and red checked apron, flaxen braids framing her ample bosom as she strolled through a third world Red Cross clinic full of babies with extra toes and missing nostrils, born thus because their mothers had eaten poorly engineered food during pregnancy.  With the use of flawless CGI, the clinic would then morph into a beautiful green pasture where healthy kids of every ethnicity in the rainbow played tag while Dr. Mom promised the viewer that all her food was made organically from 100% natural, non-cloned sources.

Wendell emerged from the fertilization shed, eyes cast down as though late for an appointment with the gallows.  A ghastly effluvium of bovine genitalia followed him into the cart.

“Good Lord, Wendell.”  Ray cupped a hand over his nose.  “You’re supposed to reach in, not fall in.”

“It’s the heffers!” Wendell groaned.  “I am literally up to my armpits in pussy and I have never been so miserable in. . .my  . . .life.”

Ray shook his head and put the cart in gear.  Thunder rolled into the valley and followed them around the campus loop toward the mess hall.  In the distance beyond Shed 19, a phalanx of storm clouds awaited their marching orders.  Ray said a silent prayer that it wouldn’t come down until they were safely in the commissary.

“Hey, Ray. . .”

He also prayed that Steve would shut his everlasting yapper.  For the last fourteen hours, Ray had been forced to endure an unrelenting barrage of conspiracy theories and fourth-hand scuttlebutt pouring from Steve Garris’s bottomless pie hole.  Diarrhea of the mouth simply did not cover it.  Steve’s entire brain had been projectile vomiting on him since the bunkhouse wake-up alarm had gone off at three that morning.  To make matters worse, the deluded freak hadn’t let Ray or Wendell eat breakfast or lunch, insisting that the previous night’s meal had been drugged to make the men sleep through the calamitous noise from Shed 19.  The only reason they’d heard a thing, Steve insisted, was because they’d been late for dinner and missed all but the dessert.

And yet, Ray couldn’t help but slow to a crawl when he the electric cart rounded the base of the hill from which Shed 19 watched over the farm.

“Feels like it’s watching us, doesn’t it?” Steve said.

Ray rolled his eyes, tried to say something sardonic, but found his throat too dry to speak.  The cart shuddered to a stop.

“Like the timeworn face of some petrified demigod,” Steve mused, “lost in its own inscrutable thoughts, driven mad by eons of isolation.”

“Or a giant robot.”

Ray and Steve glared at Wendell.

“What?” Wendell said.  “I don’t get to talk spooky, too?”

“No,” they said together.

Steve unbuckled his safety belt and hopped out.

“What are you doing?” Ray hushed.

“I wanna get a better look.”

Ray glared back at Wendell for support, but saw that the back seat was empty.  He found his friend a dozen yards away at Steve’s heels, both men crouched low as though to help their blazing white jumpsuits blend into the empty, verdant hillside.  Wendell turned back and waved for Ray to Come On!

“Shit.”  Ray got out of the cart and crouched low as he scurried up the hill toward Shed 19.  “What the hell are you doing?!”

“Get down!” Steve ordered, and dropped onto his belly.  Ray and Wendell followed.  A moment later, a patrol of armed guards marched across the crest of the hill.  Once they’d passed, Ray straightened up and jabbed a finger in Steve’s chest.

“All right, spill it, pal.  What the hell are you doing here?  I mean, what are you really doing here?  ‘Cause you sure as hell didn’t come all the way out here to learn how to operate a suck-press.”

Steve dusted himself off and looked around.

“For real,” Wendell nodded.  “Smart guy like you does kinda stick out like the Queen of England in a wet t-shirt contest.”

Steve regarded his companions like they were two ends of a bear trap clamped around his paw, and sighed.  “I’m from an organization that watches people like Dr. Mom.”

“I knew it,” said Ray.  “I fucking knew it.  Jesus Christ.  You’re gonna get us fired, you asshole.”

“Keep it down.”  Steve squinted up at Shed 19, still a hundred yards distant.  “Damn.  Too many cameras and too many guards.  We’ll have to come back at night.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” Ray asked.

“You don’t have to come,” said Steve.

“Yeah,” echoed Wendell.  “You don’t have to come.”

“Shut up, Wendell,” Ray said.  “You don’t even know what we’re doing here.”

“Neither do you.”

Ray stared back at Shed 19, at the dozens of cameras, motion sensors and armed guards that surrounded it.  He had to admit that it was a lot of security guarding the secret for award-winning peach preserves— a fact which did raise a question or two in his mind, which he dutifully quashed and sealed in the cannery of his soul like the good Lutheran he was raised to be.

“Come on, Wendell.  Let’s go.”

“Come on Ray.  Just another minute?”

“Another minute and you could be shot, you dope.  Now—”

“Hey.”  Steve held up a hand.  “What’s that?”

“What?!” Ray asked, but Steve was already scrambling over the crest of the hill toward a stand of cedars perched at the edge of the incline.  Wendell followed, as always, like a lemming to the slaughter.  Ray grunted and trotted after him, as always, like a medieval serf whose only job was to ensure that his tyrannical warlord master’s favorite lemming didn’t kill itself at every available opportunity.

Centered in the copse of trees was a tiny house made of tin.

“What is it?” Wendell asked.

“Looks like a chicken coop,” Ray said.  “Can we go have dinner now?”

“Why would they raise chickens way out here?” Steve asked.  “Sheds 12, 13 and 14 are all poultry.”

The little metal house was a six foot cube with a steepled roof.  Slats had been cut across the roof for ventilation.  The small front door boasted a dozen padlocks, and the words ‘Subject Beta’ stenciled from corner to corner in bright red letters.

“Subject Beta?” Ray asked, in spite of himself.

“What’s that mean?” Wendell asked.

“Take a peek through one of those slats,” Steve suggested.

Ray glared at Steve, who replied with a shrug.

Wendell hitched up his pants, stood on his toes, and leaned out over the roof to peer down through the slats.  “I can’t see anything.”

“Damn.”  Steve kicked a rock.  It ricocheted off the metal hut.

Wendell held up a hand.  “Wait.  I hear something.  There’s something in there.”

“What is it?”

“Sounds like a chicken scratching around.”

“Well, it is a goddamn chicken coop,” Ray said.

“A chicken coop with a dozen locks on the door?  I don’t think so.”  Steve put his ear to the aluminum wall.  “No, there’s something really wrong here.  And we’re gonna find out what it is.”

Wendell clucked like a chicken through one of the roof slats.  Something inside the little hen house answered him, made a sound that was deep and wrong, like a chicken running out of batteries.

“Okay, time to go,” Ray said.

Wendell ignored his friend and clucked louder.  Steve wrapped his knuckles against the wall.  Another cluck from inside the metal house, punctuated now by a sharp thud.  Steve flinched away.  Wendell came down off his toes.  Together they leaned in close to get a better look at the small, convex dent protruding from the wall.

“What is that?” Steve asked.

“Looks like a goddamn beak.”  Ray took a second glance at the locks on the door.  “What the hell do they have locked up in there?”

Wendell leaned forward, let loose a small, hesitant cluck.  Another sharp thud answered from within as another beak-shaped dent appeared in the wall.  A squawk rose up from the vents, low and deranged.  A third dent appeared, deeper than the other two.

They turned and ran down the hill.

 

*****

 

“Okay, I’ve set the alarm on my watch for midnight,” Steve said.  Ray and Wendell sat across from him in the commissary, their trays untouched for fear of barbiturate contamination.

“Are we gonna infiltrate Shed 19?” Wendell asked.

Steve nodded.

“What about the cameras, doofus?” Ray asked.  His meatloaf smelled divine.  He kept having to swallow his own spit so as to not drool all over himself.  “What about the guards and the cameras and the sensors and the floodlights?”

“I’ve thought of that,” Steve replied.  “We’re gonna swipe some guard uniforms from the storage shed.  I lifted a passkey from Mr. Pavon’s jacket this afternoon.  It’ll get us into the guard’s quarters.”

“You stole his passkey?  This is insane!  This is totally insane!  You’re insane, and you’re insane, and I’m insane for listening to you.”

“No, Ray.”  Steve lowered his eyes, his voice.  “Cloning is insane.  Twenty million American’s eating the same bacon from the same cow is insane.  Dr. Mom is insane.  And someone’s got to expose her for the monster she’s become.”

Ray looked out the window at Shed 19 rising up on the hill, at the watchful eyes of Dr. Mom’s portrait painted across its mammoth double doors.  Even at two miles distant he could feel them return his careful gaze, aware.

They left at midnight without Ray.  Steve’s stolen keycard let them out of the bunkhouse.  On the way out, he handed Ray something that looked like a handheld TV.

“This is a tracker,” he said.  “I smuggled it in on the bus.  Wendell and I are wearing watches with homing signals embedded inside them.  If we don’t make it back, give this tracker to the police so they can find our remains and expose Dr. Mom.”

“What do you mean ‘remains’?” Wendell asked.

“Solidarity brother.”  Steve slapped Wendell on the shoulder, and hustled him out the door.

Ray watched the two men scuttle away until the darkness swallowed them, then went to bed, cursing Steve for his paranoia and Wendell for his complacent idiocy and himself for his own cowardice.  This was nothing new.  Ray had always known he was a coward, having received proof positive more than a year ago at the Liplin High Spring Fling, where Clara Darshon had practically begged him to pluck her flower.  He remembered her words exactly, etched as they were into the stone tablets of his grey matter and set on permanent display in the Regretting Room at the Museum of Ray’s Memories.

“I’ve decided,” she’d said, airy and light-headed from her half-glass of contraband champagne, “that I’m giving up guilt.  That’s my New Year’s resolution.  I mean, I know it’s April and everything, but I’m just tired of feeling guilty all the time, you know?  So now I can do anything I want.”

Clara poked a finger in Ray’s chest, fixated on his top collar button.

“Which means you can do anything you want.  So whadayawannado?”

But Ray had chickened out, pretended to pass out drunk because he was afraid he wouldn’t perform well, that he’d be remembered as a disappointment.  Never thought to worry about how he’d remember himself.

The door to the bunkhouse slammed open on its track.

Ray shot up in bed.  How long had he been asleep?  He didn’t remember closing his eyes.  It was still dark.  Not a trace of dawn.  Steve’s bed was empty.  The rest of the men lay unperturbed in their bunks.  Lightning lit up outside the window, thunder biting at its heels.  The storm was nearly upon them.  Ray stood and stared down the row of bunks at the lone, hunched figure staggering toward him.  The figure stopped halfway and threw its weight against a bed frame, unable to stand.

“Steve!”  Ray leapt forward as Steve collapsed on the floor, both arms clutched over his stomach.  Lightning lit up the room, glittered off the dark, slick fluid pooling across the floor where Steve had fallen.

“Jesus, Steve, what happened?”  Ray put out his hands to help, but didn’t know where to put them.  They hovered over the body, jittery with fear and adrenaline.  “Where’s Wendell?”

“We saw it,” Steve groaned, doubled-over, words half-choked by a throat full of fluid.  Ribbons of blood spilled from his tear ducts and ears.  “We saw what she’s doing.”

Ray clutched Steve’s shoulders, shook them hard.  “Where’s Wendell?!”

The wounded man cried out and threw up his arms, what was left of them.  His hands were gone.  Stumps of shredded flesh and bone groped at the air in front of Ray’s face.  A tide of nausea swept into his chest.  He fought it back down, cleared his throat.

“Steve,” he said, his voice a steel cable at the breaking point.  “Listen to me, Steve.  Where’s Wendell?”

A slow calm washed over Steve’s eyes, gave him the kind of lucid, shock-induced focus of a man locked in a staring contest with Death.  He looked at Ray, appeared to see him for the first time.

“She knows, Ray.  She knows what makes us tick and she’s stopping the clock.  Tell them to watch out for Ray!  Tell them about Ray!”

“I’m Ray, Steve.  I’m Ray!  I’m here!  But where’s Wendell?”  Ray shook the shoulders of the dying man.  “WHERE’S WENDELL!”

“Tell them about Ray.”  Mumbles now, murmured secrets through the veil of the dead.  “Tell them to watch out for Ray.”

Steve’s eyes became glass.  Outside, the storm finally broke.  Ray glanced out a high window at the angry heavens, saw forks of lighting stab the air, and felt his own thoughts blur, eyes unfocused.  Then he heard it— a tiny sound making itself known between thunderclaps, a polite but insistent noise he hadn’t been able to hear over the ravings of the dying man.

Ray ran to his bunk and threw his pillow to the floor to expose the handheld tracker Steve had entrusted to him before he’d left with Wendell.  It was chirping.  A pair of lights flashed on the screen, one blue, the other green.  Ray cast his gaze down the aisle, past Steve’s collapsed, rag doll form to the open sliding door.  Beyond the open track, rain poured down in a vertical sheet, illuminated from without by spectral flashes of lightning and the glow of obscured floodlights around Shed 19.

He’s gonna come back.  He’s gonna come through that door and he’ll still have his hands.

A wrenchingly familiar animal roar echoed down the hill from Shed 19.  Thunder heard the call and answered with a clap that shook the windows in their frames.  The lights around Shed 19 winked out.  The generator outside the bunkhouse wound down.

Ray listened to the rain fall.  The tracker chirped in his hand.  One of the blinking dots, the blue or the green, had lost its owner when Steve lost his hands.  The other, he hoped, was still attached to Wendell.  Ray stared at the dots, willed one of them to move toward the bunkhouse.  Neither stirred.

He ran out into the rain.

 

*****

 

He expected to get turned around in the storm.  With the power out, the darkness was nearly absolute in the downpour, and he expected to wander till dawn, soaked to the bone and chilled to the marrow in this miserable storm-begotten maze of barns.  But he didn’t lose his way once.  Shed 19 was easy to find.  Horribly so.  The tracker’s chirp became more urgent as Ray trod up the slick, grassy hillside toward the dark, featureless edifice, his own heartbeats accelerating in time with the device, his breath a fog through chattering teeth.  He climbed the final rise and the blue dot doubled its pulse when he pointed it east, at the lone stand of trees that stood at the edge of the hill, and the small metal house hidden within.

He was a dozen yards off when Ray saw that the door to the little house was open.  It swung at an odd angle, a single iron hinge busted and bent, the other torn completely free.  Ray held the tracker out to the open door.  The blue dot’s chirp flattened itself into a monotone drawl like a dead cardiogram.

“Wendell?” he called to the open door.

Lightning answered, thunder followed.  The busted door banged on its hinge.  Ray stepped closer, grabbed hold of the handle.  Darkness pooled inside where neither rain nor lightning could reach.

“Wendell?  You in there?”

The entrance was too small to fit through.  He knelt and reached a hand inside.  Shaking fingers patted the floor, felt at straw and scattered chips of wood.  And bones.  Too small to be human, they might have fit a rabbit, or a small dog.  Though the storm could not reach the enclosure, a wet stickiness found Ray’s fingers and turned his stomach.  His hand brushed against something hard.  It was the tracking bracelet.  Ray drew out the bracelet, and the severed hand to which it was still attached.

There wasn’t much vomit to purge.  Steve had let them eat almost nothing for the last thirty hours.  The hand fell onto Ray’s lap, showed itself to be too pale and slender to belong to his friend.  Well-clipped nails and no calluses, it was a city hand.  Steve’s hand.  One of them, at least.  Where was the other?  Where was Wendell?

A shrill cry rose over the storm from the direction of Shed 19.  Ray held the tracker up like a flashlight to the great steel monolith a hundred yards away.  The little green dot’s pulse increased.  Wendell’s signal was coming from inside.

 

*****

 

No need to hunch and creep this time.  No need for stealth.  Ray knew he had nothing to fear from the few guards he passed on the hill.  In the haze of the downpour they looked like they were sleeping, like they’d all decided to lie down in the grass and take a nap at the same time.  The only guard still standing was posted at the entrance to Shed 19.  His legs stood rigid against the pelting rain.  Couldn’t say where the rest of him was.  A clap of thunder applauded their devotion to duty.  Ray felt his heart frost over at the sound that followed: a furious, inhuman roar rose up from the direction of the bunkhouse.  He ran into Shed 19.

More guards inside.  Couldn’t say how many.  Too many pieces scattered over too broad an area.  Ray averted his eyes, tried to shove his nose away from the rotten copper smell of blood and shit mixing underfoot.  The room itself was titanic, reminiscent of a missile silo with its broad concrete floor and myriad cranes, its platforms and computer consoles, all covered over with an incongruous layer of hay.

. . .buk. . .buk. . .buh-kaak?

The high, alien cluck echoed through the cavernous space, questioning and searching.  The hair on Ray’s arms prickled to cactus spines, not for what the creature was, but for what it was not.  It was not a chicken.  It was. . .something else.  Something jagged and raw and only half aware of itself.  A dumb soul unraveled, then crudely stitched back together.

. . .buk. . .buk. . .buh-kaak?

It was in the room with him.  It knew he was there.  Could not seem him yet, could only sense him, and smell his terror.  Ray picked his way through the carnage to a pair of steel elevator doors at the far end of the hanger.  On the way, he saw a man slouched against a computer consol, confused hands tangled in his exposed intestines as though trying to figure out which side of the Rubix cube should rotate first.  Ray held the tracker up to the elevator doors.  The green dot was silent.  Where was Wendell?

Maybe it was pointing to the other side of the building.  Maybe I wasn’t supposed to come in, but go around.

A scratching sound behind him, as of tiny knives scraped along concrete.  Slowly, Ray put his back to the elevator and beheld Subject Beta.  He suppressed the urge to scream.  The animal was bent, in form and purpose and soul.  Half its feathers were gone.  What plumage remained was a dirty, jaundiced yellow, the skin beneath it bright and transparent, layers of muscles and fat showing through a network of pulsing nerves and veins.  It’s eyes were grotesquely large, huge and dumb and questioning.  They had given it human eyes.

What are you doing? the eyes asked.

What am I doing?

What have you done to me?

I am not supposed to be what I am.

It took a step forward.

. . .buk. . .buk. . .buh-kaak?

Ray put up his free hand, palm-out, the other gripped hard around the tracker, ready to bring it down like a hammer should the thing charge him.

“Easy,” he said, his words flat and calm, the way Grammy used to talk to her livestock.  “Just hold on there.  Just hold on a minute, okay?  Easy does it.”

The red beak streaked forward and clipped off his pinky.  Ray reared back with a scream, couldn’t help but watch the demonic poultry gobble its treat.  It swallowed, focused on him again, the taste of Ray still heavy on its brute palate.

It flew into the air.

Ray swung the tracker, struck its head, sent it down like a pillow thrown at the wall.  The creature landed on its back, then righted itself in a flurry of talons and feathers and inscuciant squawks as Ray bolted for the shed’s double doors.  In a moment he was out in the storm.  The sound of flapping wings and snapping jaws followed him around the side of the building.  He was halfway down the western slope, galloping toward the fence, when something small and sharp snipped through the Achilles tendon in his right leg.  He cried out, fell, rolled.  It landed on him.  They tumbled together.  Eager talons ripped through his coat, shirt, the skin of his chest.  Ray threw up his hands, felt the beak slice through the webbing between his fingers.

My eyes, he thought.  It’s trying to eat my eyes.

They slid to a stop at the base of the hill.  Clutching its manic wings, Ray cast the flapping beast away.  He stood and stumbled into a clumsy run along the fence, right leg engulfed in unseen fire.  The devil chicken fell upon him instantly, pecking at the loose fibers of skin around his wounded heel.  Ray whirled on it, kicked it as hard as he could with his good left foot, and tumbled backward into the electric fence.

It came to him, what should have happened.  He should have died.  But the power was still out.

. . .buh-kaak?   Still demanding an answer.

A groan of frustration clogged Ray’s throat.  There was nowhere to go.  The fence made a corner here.  He was penned in.

. . .buh-kaak?

Ray covered his eyes, and began to cry.  The tracker chirped at his feet.  He opened his eyes.

Wendell?

Backlit by lightning, urged on by the gale at its back, Subject Beta flew into the air, its beak wide open, glossy human eyes glaring at a world it could not understand, but only taste, as it reached for its meal. . .

And was struck down.

It looked like a tree dropping out of the clouds.  A giant sequoia descending from the storm to plant itself in the ground a few spare inches from where Ray cowered against the fence.  Subject Beta disappeared beneath its roots, crushed into the dirt.  Only it was no tree.  It was a leg.  Recoiled against the impotent chain link, his legs turned to jelly, Ray looked toward Heaven and beheld the awesome beast which made Shed 19 its home:  Subject Alpha.

The hundred-foot Holstein cow roared up at the storm.  Lightning was its crown.  Its cry, thunder.  Littered about its hooves were the limbs of men, the outstretched hands of its creators, its captors, its victims.  Among them, Ray saw a familiar sight:  a tracking bracelet attached to what may have once been an arm.

Wendell.

Ray stumbled to his feet and ran down the fence line, into the darkness, chancing glances over his shoulder as the bovine demon stamped the impotent fence into the earth and brayed its anger at a god from whom it was not birthed and who did not know its name.

 

*****

 

By the time the first fingers of dawn reached over the horizon to draw back the night, the baleful cries of Subject Alpha were but echoes beyond the hills that bordered the now dismantled Outland Farms.  With enough light to finally see the extent of the wreckage, Ray emerged from the grotto he’d made under the shattered bunkhouse to pick his way back up the hill toward Shed 19, to look for Wendell’s remains.

Armed guards surrounded the building once more.  Reinforced from within and without, Shed 19 was the only building still standing.  Ray expected the guards to stop him, but they seemed to go aware of his presence as they went about their business of hauling away the dead and dying.  The sound of gunshots came to them from miles away, followed by a roar that shook the birds from their trees even at this distance.  They were hunting it down.  They were going to bring it back.  They would not risk killing it, Ray knew, assuming it could be killed at all.

There was no sign of Wendell.  No recognizable sign.  Plenty were the pieces scattered about, but none discernable from another.  Ray found himself limping to the rear of the room which had once served, and would soon serve again, as Subject Alpha’s holding pen.  He pushed the button for the elevator.  The steel doors opened.  He stepped inside.  There were two buttons: an arrow that pointed up and one that pointed down.  He pressed the ‘up’ arrow.  Didn’t know why, only that it was the thing to do now.

At the end of a silent ride during which only his inner ear told him that he was gaining altitude, the elevator opened on a cavernous office.  The floor was bare wood.  Oak crossbeams ran overhead in support of the cathedral ceiling.  Windows lined the walls through which a cold dawn crept into the room.  A long desk at the far end was the only furniture present.

A lone figure stood at the eastern bank of windows, faced toward the horizon.

He barely recognized her.  Like so many other millions of people, Ray was accustomed to the ageless portrait that adorned every Outland Farms label, with its gentle smile framed by long blonde braids and gilt glasses.  This woman was not smiling.  Her braids were white.  Rimless steel specks perched at the tip of her nose.

“May I help you?” she asked the window, the endless fields of green.

“You’re Dr. Mom.”  No more than a whisper, Ray’s words carried effortlessly in the great room.

“I know.  I’ll ask again, as I’m a very busy woman: can I help you?”

“He was right, wasn’t he?”  Ray stepped into the center of the grand office.  “You’re cloning everything.  And you’re. . . making new stuff.  Like that, that Frankenchicken.  And that giant cow.  He was right.”

“Who was right?”

“Steve.  Steve Garris.”

“You mean that man sent to spy on me?”

“You knew about him?”

“Of course I knew about him.”

A small door opened behind the rear desk.  Mr. Pavon emerged in his accustomed tweed coat and plain brown trousers.  He looked up Ray and started.

“Oh, Mr. Drozn.  Is everything all right?  Are you adjusting to the schedule, okay?”

Ray opened his mouth to say something, but felt his tongue go dead when the door opened again, and another Mr. Pavon stepped through.  This one wore a white lab coat.  He approached Dr. Mom, then looked up and smiled at Ray.

“Oh,” he said.  “Mr. Drozn.  Is everything all right?  Are you adjusting to the schedule, okay?”

Ray took a step back toward the elevator.  A third and fourth Mr. Pavon emerged from whatever room or rooms lay beyond Dr. Mom’s office.  Both wore lab coats.  They looked up at Ray and smiled.  He didn’t see it.  His back was turned to them, and he was running.  He flew into the open elevator and punched the ‘down’ arrow.  Nothing happened.  Out in the office, more than a dozen Mr. Pavons had stepped around Dr. Mom’s desk and were walking toward the elevator.

“Is everything all right, Drozn?” they asked in unison.  “Would you like to lie down?”

Tears in his eyes, teeth grit, Ray slammed the palm of his hand against the elevator control panel, pleading with it to close its goddamn doors and take him away.  The small army of Mr. Pavons crowded into the elevator with him.  Ray hit the button again, didn’t know why.

“Please stop that,” Dr. Mom said.  The crowd of Pavons parted.  She stood at the threshold.

“You can’t do this,” Ray stuttered.  “My family knows where I am.”

“You’re right,” Dr. Mom nodded.  “They know exactly where you are.”

The Pavons nodded.  “Exactly where you are,” they echoed.

“They’ll come looking for me.”

Dr. Mom shook her head.  “No, they won’t.”

“They won’t,” the Pavons repeated.

“Here.”  Dr. Mom reached into her apron and brought out a cell phone.  “Why don’t you call them?  Families always like to know you’re okay.  Dr. Mom says so.”

Ray took the phone.  It took him three tries to dial.

The phone rang.  And rang.  And rang.

“Come on,” Ray muttered.  “Pick up.”

“Hello?”

“Jeanie!”

“Yeah.  Who’s this?”

“It’s me, Ray!  Put Dad on the phone!”

A scuffing sound came through the receiver as Jeanie put a hand over the phone and called out “Dad!  It’s for you!”

“Do you how long it takes to grow a full-grown heffer in the lab, Mr. Drozn?” Dr. Mom asked.  “Five days.  Isn’t that remarkable?  Isn’t that miraculous?  It took God six days to make a man.  And now I can do it in five.  All I need is a blood sample.  Or a hair.  An eyelash caught at the corner of a job application.”

Ray looked up.  A click on the line told Ray his father had picked up the upstairs phone.

“Hello?” the old man said.

“Dad!  It’s me, Ray!”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s me, Dad.  It’s Ray.  Listen, I have to tell you something—”

“Who is this?” the old man interrupted.  “This some kind of crank call?”

“What?”  Ray’s eyes flicked up to Dr. Mom, the corners of a barely perceptible grin pinned to her cheeks.  “It’s me, Pop.  It’s Ray.”

“I don’t know who you are or what the hell you’re getting at, but my son’s right here with me, buster.  You wanna talk to him?”

The receiver went silent, then a familiar voice came on the line.

“Hello?” the voice said, a sound Ray knew well enough.  It was his voice, talking on his phone from his home.

“Hello?” Ray replied.  Blood rushed to his head.  He could no longer feel his legs.

“Who is this?” the voice asked.

“It’s me,” Ray said softly.  “It’s Ray.”

“Oh,” the voice answered.  “I see.  Well, goodbye Ray.”

The line went dead.

Ray looked at the phone, then at the crowd of Mr. Pavons surrounding him.  He wanted to say something, anything, but his mouth was numb.  He could no longer feel his face.  His only sensation was the weight of the Pavons’ impassive smiles as they closed in around him.

“Goodbye, Ray,” said Dr. Mom.

“Goodbye, Ray,” said the Pavons.

Ray looked at the phone in his hand, at his own grey face reflected in its blank screen.  “Goodbye.”