Origin (16 page)

“How about arm wrestling?”

Sun declined. Andy looked strong, but if she beat him at arm wrestling she didn’t think his ego would ever recover.

“How about Scrabble in Portuguese?” Andy suggested.

“Board games are in Purple 10.”

As they walked out of the rec room, Sun noticed Andy’s limp.

“Did you pull a muscle?”

“Blister.” Andy made a face. “From not wearing socks.”

“Let me see it.”

“It’s ugly.”

“I’m a big girl.”

Andy kicked off his shoe and peeled down his sock. It
was
ugly, covering much of his heel, red and inflamed.

“We need to dress that. Come on.”

Sun took Andy’s hand and led him into Yellow 6, the medical supply room. She sat him on the padded examination table and removed his shoe and sock.

“Don’t you need to muzzle me first?” Andy asked.

Sun grinned. “Have you had your shots?”

“I’m not sure. Let me check my tags.”

Sun opened the closet and found some gauze, tape, hydrogen peroxide, and burn ointment on the well-stocked shelves.

“Are you sure you’re qualified to do this?” Andy asked.

“I think I can manage.”

“Remember, this is a blister. Not a neutering.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

She dabbed peroxide on some gauze and cleaned the inflamed skin.

“So why did you become a vet?” Andy asked. “No desire to practice on people at all?”

Sun tried to think of something flippant, but nothing came to mind.

“Not that I’m knocking vets,” Andy said quickly. “But it seems like you’d make a great MD.”

She squirted on some ointment, but her good mood deflated like a leaky tire. The memories came back. Memories she’d been trying for years to suppress.

“Sun? You okay?”

Could she tell him? Would that scare him away?

“Sun?”

“I… I used to be a doctor,” she said. “A human doctor.”

Sun taped on the bandage and waited for a response. None came. The silence stretched.

“If you want to talk about it,” Andy said finally, “I want to know.”

He reached down and took her hand. She gripped it, tight, and sat on the table next to him. The words, unspoken for so long, began to tumble out of her.

“I did my internship at Johns Hopkins, began my residency there. I was on the tail end of a twenty hour shift; there was an apartment fire and we’d been working without break for eight hours. A women came in with abdominal pain to the right iliac fossa. Her tongue was coated, she had foetor oris, high temp, vomiting; text book appendicitis. Hers was ready to rupture. We prepped her for a laparotomy, emptied her stomach with a naso-gastric, and I scrubbed for surgery.”

Sun could remember how tired she was, and how determined that she wouldn’t let fatigue get in the way of her job. The woman was Caucasian and overweight, but in a way she reminded Sun of her own mother. Even though her pain was severe she’d been stoic.

“I’d done a dozen appendectomies. It was a simple operation. I made a gridiron incision through McBurney’s point, divided the mesoappendix, used a pursestring suture in the caecum. Then I closed her up and she was discharged a few days later.”

Sun swallowed, held Andy’s hand even tighter.

“She bounced back the next week. Temperature of 105. Peritonitis. Her peritoneal cavity was filled with pus and fecal matter.” Sun took a deep breath. “My pursestring suture had opened. I hadn’t tied it off. Her lower intestine emptied out into her abdominal cavity.”

Sun turned away from Andy, stared at a spot on the wall.

“She didn’t make it,” she said softly.

Sun had been the one who opened her up the second time. The woman had come in and asked for Sun by name. Had trusted her to help.

“You lost your job,” Andy said.

“The review committee was unanimous. Any first year intern could have done that suture. I screwed up. The Maryland Medical Board revoked my license. The Board had been taking some bad hits in the media, and they made an example out of me. I had over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans, and loss of my license meant I’d never pay them back. So I filed bankruptcy.

“I became a vet by studying at home. Not too big a leap, really. Animals and humans share a lot of the same medical problems. Then I met Steven, we got married, and he died, leaving me with another load of bills. I couldn’t file bankruptcy again; you had to wait seven years. So I applied for a grant under a false name to study lions in Africa. Mainly to hide from my creditors.”

Andy said, “Why did you leave Africa?”

“They found out I wasn’t who I said I was and pulled my funding. I applied for citizenship in South Africa but was denied. When I was deported back to the US I had about ten different groups trying to sue me. That’s when the President stepped in. I think he found me through the US Embassy in South Africa. I made the headlines a few times while I was there, fighting for citizenship. He offered me a deal; Samhain for ten years or until the project ended, whichever came first. All of my debts would disappear if I agreed. Of course, I took it.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am.”

Andy put his hand on her cheek.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

She looked up at him, saw the warmth, and hugged him.

“Thanks for fixing up my foot.”

Sun snorted. “Good thing you didn’t need stitches.”

“We all make mistakes, Sun. The hard part is forgiving ourselves.”

Sun pursed her lips. “Her name was Madeline. She had a husband. A son. She was only 60. I went to the funeral.”

“That took guts.”

“Her son spat in my face. It made me feel a little better.”

Andy said, “I could spit on you now, if you want.”

“Maybe later. Let’s go feed the demon.”

They left Sun’s room and headed for the Octopus. Race was there, hunched over a computer. He looked up when he noticed Sun and Andy.

“How is the speech lesson coming?”

“Great,” Andy answered. “Like teaching kindergarten, except snack time is messier.”

“So he’ll be ready to talk tomorrow morning?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Race beamed. “Excellent,” he said.

The General turned back to his monitor. Race always wore his good ole boy attitude like cowboys wore hats, but Sun hadn’t seen him so genuinely pleased before. The man looked ten years younger.

Sun and Andy took the Orange Arm to Orange 12. Andy was more help in procuring a sheep this time. He held the cereal, assisted in putting on the harness, and Sun taught him that the most effective way to startle sheep wasn’t yelling “Boo!” It was clapping your hands.

“I can’t get enough of this earthy smell,” Andy said. “We should bottle it and sell it to urbanites.”

“Where there’s a wool, there’s a way.”

Andy made a show of rolling his eyes.

“You never told me,” Sun said, “about that problem you were having with the hieroglyphics on the capsule.”

“I’m still stuck on it. You ready for a mini lecture?”

Sun nodded. She was happy to be talking about something other than her broken past.

“Okay. You see, it’s known that glyphs are based on spoken language, but for a long time Hieroglyphic Maya was thought to be logographic. Each picture was a word. But the current view is that it was a phonetic system; glyphs stand for sounds, like our own alphabet. So scholars have had to reevaluate everything. To make it even harder, current Maya language is filled with bits of Spanish, so to understand the ancient language, the language of the glyphs, you can’t really use modern Maya.”

“So how do you decipher it?” Sun asked.

“Lots of ways. I have a few computer programs, I check the work of other scholars, I find similar references in previously translated passages. A lot of it is basic logic. Once you understand the sentence structure of a language, it’s like a cryptogram in a crossword puzzle book. You just look for the context clues.”

Sun led the sheep over to the scale pen. “So what has the great translator perplexed?”

“There are several references to a tuunich k’iinal.
The hot rock.
I don’t know what that means.”

“Volcano?”

Andy shook his head. “That’s a different word.”

“Coals? For cooking?”

“No. A cooking pit is a piib. Different glyphs. There’s also reference to Kukulcán. He’s a flying warrior god who came from ‘over the water’. Sort of the Mayan version of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl.”

“Could that be Bub?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Quetzalcoatl means
feathered serpent.
Bub doesn’t have feathers, but he does fly, and he could qualify as a serpent. The thought that ancient people were offering our Bub human sacrifices is a little unnerving. More than 100,000 were killed to satisfy Kukulcán’s lust for blood.”

“I should have paid more attention in history class,” Sun said.

Sun finished jotting down the sheep’s specs on the chart and they led it out of Orange 12 and down the hallway. Race was no longer in the Octopus.

“What’s your impression of our General Race?” Andy asked, holding open the Red Arm door.

“He’s good at manipulating people. I wonder why he’s here, though. The Army only has so many Generals, why stick one underground for forty years?”

“Something to do with his wife?” Andy suggested. “Dr. Belgium told me about her disease.”

“I don’t think so. She didn’t become symptomatic until a few years ago.”

“Maybe we should ask him. He seems honest. Well, as honest as the military can get. What’s Dr. Harker’s problem?”

“You noticed it too?”

“Yeah. The lady seems to have a large assortment of bugs up her ass.”

Sun punched in the code for the first gate. “She has problems relating to people, I think.”

“And Dr. Belgium… don’t get me wrong. I like the guy. But he seems to be one slice short of a sandwich himself.”

“Yeah,” Sun agreed. “And the holies. Odd ducks, both of them. Father Thrist’s little outburst didn’t wear well with the Roman collar.”

Andy said, “Maybe we’re not all here because we’re perfect for the job.”

“Okay. Then why?”

“Well, you didn’t have a choice. I really didn’t either. The President saw fit to mention a little problem that I would have with the IRS if I didn’t cooperate. Maybe everyone here is stuck as well. Think about it. Not just everyone would give up their life, families, friends, possessions, to live down here, even though Bub is an interesting subject. Only those people with nothing to lose.”

Sun punched in the code for the second gate and thought it over.

“It’s so American,” she said.

“How so?”

“Here is the most top secret, and possibly the most important, project the world has ever known. And who’s running it? Screw-ups and criminals.”

Andy smiled, closing the gate behind them. “Well, it’s been a hundred years, and no problems yet.”

“Does that mean we should be encouraged?” Sun asked, “Or be worried that the problems are overdue?”

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Bub kills us all, escapes, and destroys the world.”

“That takes some of the pressure off,” Andy said.

He opened the door to Red 14. Dr. Belgium was fiddling with the DVD, trying to shove a disc in.

“It helps if you turn it on,” Sun suggested.

“Suuuuun,”
Bub said.
“Aaaaaandy.”

Sun almost backed up. It still freaked her out a little that something so big and ugly could talk.

Andy said, “Hello, Bub. How was your nap?”

“Huuuuungry. Need sheeeeep.”

“Are sheep what you’d normally eat?” Sun asked. “Before you were able to talk, I could only guess.”

“Sheeeeeep are goooood.”

Sun had opened the small door and pushed the sheep through. Bub snatched it up in his claw and quickly snapped its neck.

“Bub, sometimes when you eat the sheep, you kill it and bring it back to life,” Sun said. “How do you do this?”

Bub continued to twist the sheep’s head until it came off like a bottle cap. He sucked on the neck stump, tilting the body up as if it were a giant beer.

“Seeeeeeeecret,”
Bub said, gurgling from the liquid in his mouth. Some of the blood ran out of the corner and matted his chest hair.

“Can you do it now?” Sun asked.

“Yesssss.”

Bub held the sheep’s headless carcass tightly to his chest. A minute passed, and then the animal’s legs began to twitch and buck. Bub dropped it to the ground, and the sheep took off in a sprint and rammed full speed into the Plexiglas barrier. It hit with a large crash, smearing the glass with blood.

The sheep righted itself, shook, then ran again, this time barreling into one of the artificial trees.

Bub croaked with baritone laughter. The sheep’s head, still in his claw, opened and closed its mouth in silent protest, its eyes darting back and forth.

“Baa-aaa,”
Bub said, imitating the sheep’s sound. He held the head in front of him like a hand puppet.
“Baa-aaa.”

Sun had to steel herself and hoped she hadn’t lost composure. A glance at Dr. Belgium found him ashen, and Andy had a look on his face that predicted vomiting.

“Thank you, Bub,” Sun said in metered tones. “That’s enough.”

Bub tossed the sheep’s head into his mouth like a piece of popcorn. It continued to squirm while being munched on. His other claw shot out and grazed the runaway sheep body. It’s belly unzipped, intestines winding out like a firehouse. The demon grabbed a handful and shoveled them in.

“Goooood,”
Bub said.

“I’ve got to stop coming here during mealtime,” Andy said, clutching his stomach.

The demon cocked his head to the side, appearing confused.

“Are you sick, Aaaaaandy?”

“No, Bub. It’s just that your eating habits are a little… distressing.”

“You wanted to seeeeee.”

Andy was looking greener and greener, so Sun answered. “We want to learn from you, Bub, but we have a culture gap. Some things that you do aren’t done in our culture, so we don’t know how to react to them.”

Bub jumped up to the Plexiglas, holding the sheep. Sun hadn’t seen him jump before. The leap was over fifteen feet, and Bub landed hard enough to make the ground rumble. He yanked off one of the sheep’s hind legs and held it to his chest. It began to twitch and then bend at the knee back and forth.