The Dragon Keeper (24 page)

“The serpent abomination?” Meg asked.

Abominations
, according to Desmond’s elementary Catholic-school glossary, were like the anti-miracle, signaling the apocalypse and “all that jazz.”

“It’s like, to them, Jata is the serpent, the devil’s messenger, you know, and you’re the serpent’s master.” Desmond was straddling his computer chair backward and clearly loving the attention. All those starting their shifts had read the article already and were slowly donning boots, checking SAMs, all quieted down for the free show.

Meg took a big gulp of coffee, even though there wasn’t enough caffeine in the entire cafeteria for this day, and wiped her mouth with a sleeve. “So I’m the devil?”

Gemma snickered from the next computer terminal.

“No, you’re probably like a messenger, too. There’re a lot of people in the apocalypse. Four horsemen and all sorts of angels and demons.” He grinned. “It’s like now you’re a bitch with a higher purpose.”

The laughter and remarks followed her all morning, so she switched off her radio and stayed off the main walking paths. Her coworkers weren’t the real problem, though. It was the alpha males she worried about. Management should have been too preoccupied with how Jata had given birth to girls to worry about a little angst from the CCCR, but she doubted it. What good was a miracle if it hurt their revenues?

Standing outside of Jata’s new exhibit door, the pungent smell of meat wafted up and made her stomach roll. She breathed through her mouth and waited for the nausea to pass, forcing herself to concentrate on the few things that mattered right now. She wasn’t like Ben. She wasn’t. She didn’t get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of messed-up things in this world that she stopped trying. She didn’t sit on her ass and do nothing just because she couldn’t fix everything. She just had to focus. In a couple of minutes it would be time to feed Jata, and everything would break down to the bucket of pork sitting next to her in the hallway, the feeding hook propped against the door, and Jata’s mouth. These things were all she needed to know. They had substance and texture, coming together in a basic dance for survival. Everything else had to disappear.

Gemma, who was slated to assist today, appeared at the end of the hallway and moseyed toward her. “Quite the little sideshow we’ve stirred up. Desmond printed the website out and posted it on the cage bulletin board with a sign that says ‘Homo sapiens in constipated state.’”

“Desmond did that?”

“Well, I might have asked him to. The general sends her troops into battle so she can live to fight another day.”

Gemma’s mere presence made things better, chiller, and re-proportioned. Meg wiped the clammy sweat from her forehead and slapped Gemma affectionately on the arm. It was time to feed.

They suited up and entered the brand-new exhibit. Glass surrounded them on all sides and above, making the space feel like the outdoors when the environment was actually completely controlled.

Meg had let Jata out here for the first time yesterday, holding her breath from the anxiety. New exhibits didn’t always open smoothly around here. When the Amazon fish tank had opened, half the species died in the first two weeks because of pH problems in the water. Last winter, when they’d introduced a new lion to the pride, the poor thing had been chased and beaten to a pulp for ages, and of course everyone remembered the birds. Luckily Jata seemed completely at home so far. She was sprawling on a basking rock when Meg and Gemma entered the enclosure, and there were already dig marks in the back patch of dirt where she must have thought about burrowing.

Jata’s head swiveled around, and she stood up swiftly, delighting the visitors that stood shoulder to shoulder on the walkway. The crowd was massive today, sparked by either the announcement of the hatchlings’ gender or the protestors or both. Camera flashes exploded on the glass as Meg walked quickly to the feeding platform and speared a piece of pork to place on the top of the rock slope. This was the first feeding in the new exhibit, and she wanted to get Jata in position as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Jata swaggered toward her. She looked younger in the natural light; her thick torso seemed greener and more agile out here in the freshly planted grasses. Scales glistening in the sun’s rays, Jata reached the base of the rock with one foot up and her claws digging into its surface. Her tongue flickered at the meat, and her head bobbed once, twice—but then, without warning, she stopped.

Meg’s breath caught in her throat as Jata lowered her head and arched her neck, the skin beneath her lower jaw puffing out until all the folds of muscle and cartilage were distended.

It was a threat display. Jata was threatening her.

Meg swallowed and held her ground, watching the yellow fork of Jata’s tongue work madly in and out of her mouth. There were twenty long feet of exhibit space between her back and Gemma, who stood guard by the door.

“Jata, chow time. Jata, Jata.” Meg called the name low and steady, letting her voice wash over Jata’s stiff spine and down the curving brunt of her tail. The unfamiliar exhibit was throwing her off—that was all—or it could have been Antonio and his veterinary lackeys who had taken her blood on Sunday and made her defensive. Meg heard Gemma rustling behind her and held her off with a slight shake of her head. They just had to work through this together, she and Jata, give themselves enough time and space to relax and forget about all the craziness.

“Come on, girl. That’s it, Jata.” The folds in Jata’s neck reappeared as her skin slowly, painstakingly deflated. Her head bobbed again as she started to climb the rock, and her throat relaxed into the upward bend of an appeasement display.

“Chow time.”

Jata reached the top, scooped up the hunk of pork, and threw her head back, letting a stream of drool fall out of the corner of her jaws. Vaguely, Meg sensed the rumbling of the crowd amid the bursts of light from cameras and fluctuating bodies as she speared another piece of meat and prepared to offer it to Jata. They thought this was the dangerous part. They didn’t see that the danger had passed, how it had broken down and died right before their eyes.

~

“You have to log it.” Gemma unsuited in the hallway and hung her body shield up in the closet next to the emergency box that housed the gun.

Meg stared at the case, shaking her head. “There’s nothing to report.”

“That was high stress and aggression. I saw it, Meg. Maybe I haven’t studied every last piece of Komodo behavior ever published, but give me some credit here.”

They walked down the hallway to the back side of the iguana exhibit, where Gemma dug out a feed bag from the cupboard and mixed the pellets into a bowl of fresh vegetables.

“She was just nervous in the new environment. It passed as quickly as it came.”

“Okay, hang on while I feed Ralph and Alicia, and then you can play animal psychologist some more for me.” Gemma ducked into the iguana exhibit, and Meg kicked the door shut behind her.

She paced the hall until Gemma reappeared with some dead palm leaves in tow and threw them in the trash. Crossing her arms, Meg looked away. “Is there more debris out there? You want a hand?”

“No, I want you to go log the behavior. That’s what we do. We don’t rationalize or humanize. We do our job and log the behavior.”

They walked to the next exhibit, and Meg glanced through the window to check the python’s position. The ten-foot snake was named Bertha, and she was coiled up along the public side of the tank. The gloss of scale and muscle lay still, and it took a minute for Meg to follow the coils up to Bertha’s head before she could give Gemma the all-clear to drop the rat carrion into the tank. When the rat hit the floor, Bertha didn’t move.

What was it that made serpents the messengers of the devil? A whale could do God’s bidding, but somehow pythons and Komodos were destined to be evil. The few Sunday school lessons Meg had endured were fuzzy at best. There was the snake in the garden with Adam and Eve, but she’d never understood that part. Snakes kept the vermin out.

“Meg, you’re going to log the aggression, aren’t you?”

She turned away from Gemma. “Of course I will.”

~

There was no way to trust written records because they could betray Jata so easily. Look at Ben’s reporters or even Nicole Roberts, how they twisted words into anything they wanted. It was her job to log the aggression at the feeding, sure, but Jata had just become the hottest thing since SAMs around here. She might have to dodge the bullets, but hell if she was going to start passing out free ammo.

The only other person who went into the exhibit without her was Antonio, so he was the only one who really needed to be informed to mitigate the danger. And with today’s SAM report hot in her hand, she was on her way to personally report the behavior, or something like it, to the head veterinarian himself. She just had to do it quickly—all business—then get out.

There was no answer to her knock on Antonio’s office door, but she could hear his muffled voice, so, taking a deep breath, she pushed her way inside.

He wasn’t talking on the phone; he was standing over his computer, and in his chair sat a thin, long-faced woman with a gnarled gray bun and heavy-lidded hawk eyes. A visitor badge was snapped to her tiger-print tunic, but Meg didn’t need to read it to know who she was. As one, the two of them looked from the computer screen to Meg.

“Meg, I’m glad you stopped by. This is Dr. Joyce Reading, my professor and mentor.” Antonio waved a hand between the two women. “Joyce, this is Meg Yancy, the primary keeper for the Komodo.”

She avoided his eyes. “I thought you were a vet, Rodríguez, not an evolutionary biologist.”

“I was lucky enough to study with Dr. Reading during an undergrad internship. A small group of us tracked the mating patterns of wildebeests across the West African savannah that year.”

“Those were the worst horses I’ve ever ridden,” Dr. Reading interjected, making Antonio laugh. She turned to Meg. “Halfway through the trip our jeep broke down, and I had the brilliant idea of renting horses from a local ranch.”

“Horses would have helped us get closer to the wildebeests without all the disruptive jeep noise.” Antonio was quick to defend her.

“Yes, that was the working theory, but the horses were barely broke. One of them threw that poor girl from Texas into the water, remember, and we had to distract a crocodile until she could climb out? The rest of us were all fighting with the reins and getting brushed off on scrub trees. Antonio was the only one who actually looked in control of his mount.”

“What year was that again?” he asked.

“Don’t remind me.” Dr. Reading laughed, a trim ruffle of sound that was more like a punctuation mark than actual humor, and she held out a small, calloused hand to Meg. “Please excuse the reminiscing. I haven’t seen Antonio in years, although we’ve kept in touch. I’ve discovered all sorts of fascinating stories about you, Ms. Yancy. Both spoken and in print.”

“Hi.” Meg shook the hand lightly, taking stock of the legend.

Dr. Reading could have been fifty or seventy. She had that skin-turning-to-hide look of someone who spent more of her life outdoors than in, and yet she couldn’t have seemed more comfortable taking over Antonio’s office than if she’d propped her feet up on the desk. Of course Meg had read her work. Everyone in freshman zoology studied the field papers of Dr. Joyce Reading; she was one of those iconic researchers that people tripped over themselves trying to describe with enough superlatives.

“I assume you’re here for Antonio, Ms. Yancy?” Dr. Reading returned her attention to the computer. There was something about the way she said
Antonio
, a familiarity sliding through the vowels, that made the hair stand up on the back of Meg’s neck.

“I wanted to inform him that—” She glanced down at the report. “I just wanted to say that I did the weekly feeding for Jata today, and she seemed to show some signs of elevated stress.”

She shoved the SAM report across the desk to Antonio and tucked her forearms into her rib cage. He seemed oblivious to everything in the room except Dr. Reading.

“I’m sure it’s a result of the new exhibit environment or maybe the veterinary team”—Meg paused on the words, trying to glare at him and hide it at the same time—“that contained her on Sunday without my supervision.”

“Look at that adrenaline spike.” Antonio set the paper in front of Dr. Reading and launched into a huge explanation about the different SAM charts and how, for each animal, they deciphered the target ranges for serotonin and adrenaline. Meg gritted her teeth when he got to the SAMs’ statistical analysis capabilities and then something she’d never heard him talk about before: an Automated Behavior Indicator.

After the mini-lecture, he looked back up at her, completely ignoring her tight, angry posture. “This spike couldn’t be due to an unchanging environment. This is an adrenal event. Was this when you were in the exhibit?”

She nodded and refocused. “I entered the exhibit at one o’clock, so yes, I was in there. The event, I think, happened because someone hit the glass.”

The lie slid so easily off her tongue, coated in a delicious reasonability.

“There was a huge crowd today, bigger than I’ve ever seen, even bigger than when the parth was announced, and right as I came outside someone hit the glass. A real loud crack. The noise made her stop right before climbing the feeding rock, but I talked her through it, and she climbed up and ate just like normal. All in all, I think it was a good feeding for our first time in the new exhibit space.”