Romancing the Raptor

"Your simplicity is amazing, young lady."

"Not helping sell your case, asshat."

He clicked his tongue. "Have you not considered that the person who created the retrovirus may be able to change the retrovirus?"

"You're saying there's a cure?"

"Well," he considered, "a functional cure, that is. The modifications to your DNA can't be undone—especially not with the resources available 'one-hundred and twenty-something million years in the past'—but they can be modified."

"You wouldn't be able to do anything to help me. Once you're pulled back to the side of the wormhole, you're back in the slammer."

"Who said it had to wait until we return," he said with a smile. My rooms are here, with us right now in the past."

Chastity didn't connect the dots.

"My girl, this isn't just a prison, it's a forced labor camp. My behind-bars compatriots and I aren't just being held—we're continuing our research. The only difference is that now it's for the government instead of ourselves."

***

Chastity walked behind Doctor Georgie Ashford, his name as she had learned when they agreed on terms.

It was a simple enough deal: she would get him back to the part of the prison that had been shifted through the wormhole and he would functionally cure her. She was a little iffy on the specifics of the functional cure, but if she could walk down the street without getting splattered with semen she didn't really care. Ashford had started to explain in earnest about the specifics of the procedure, but Chastity stopped him. She had asked him what the results would be and if there were any side effects. The answer was: no men chasing her and maybe some scaling at the injection site. Both were acceptable.

"This is quite fortuitous, us meeting like this," Ashford said, not turning to look at Chastity. "It's been... oh, nine months, since I've had the opportunity to follow up with a subject."

Chastity kept the blaster ready in her left hand; she wanted the right free in case the urge to punch him resurfaced. The urge was getting close.

"Nine months, is that when they caught you?"

"Yes. I got a little overzealous with incorporating genome fragments from a novel strain of Ravn virus into the salivary glands of Labradoodles. One subject escaped and that was that. Caught because of a puppy that licked the wrong person."

"You were creating puppies that spread hemorrhagic fever? How is that right? How do you sleep at night?"

"Science needs no excuses."

Chastity understood why these people needed locked away from society. If it were her decision, she would leave them all and let the dinosaurs take care of them.

"But plague puppies are passé now that I have you," he said, redirecting the topic. "I have access to DNA that hasn't been seen for millions of years. Think of the things I can do with that" He patted the canvas bag that hung at his hip. Something shifted slightly inside in response.

"Is that what you've been doing? Foraging?"

"Of course, dear. One must always be open to possibilities, no matter how dangerous. Flora, fauna... it's all material to be used in some way or another."

"But lets talk about you. We don't get access to prior test subjects in Chamfield. A shame, really—think of the refinements that could be made! What is the range of effect for the pheromones? Oh oh, were there any physical changes that developed? Teeth possibly? There were reports of mutations developing post-infection." He turned and reached to pull at the waistband of Chastity's shorts. "I need to examine the vulva and vaginal canal."

"Hands off, Frankenstein," she said as she whacked his fingers with the barrel of the blaster.

He jerked his hand back and shook the sting from his fingers.

"Try that again and I'll blast them off—your friends will call you stubby and you'll never be able to find matching gloves again."

Ashford turned, disappointed, and started walking again.

"And no," she added, "there are no teeth down there."

"Oh well, it was only an anticipated the probability of that mutation in one half of one percent of the subjects."

Chastity stomped to a stop. "Stop using that word! I am not a subject. The thousands of women infected aren't subjects. We didn't sign up for any experiment—you decided to make us one! We were victims of an arrogant-assed mad scientist who gets his rocks off by screwing with innocent people... Do you even care about the what you did to us?"

"I told you before, it never occurred to me to care. Maybe if I had a proclivity for sociology or psychology instead of transphylogenetics I may have—"

"I got it, you don't care. You're only interested in the science."

"Succinctly said, and essentially correct. Ah, I think we're here." His pace picked up as they passed into an area where the trees were sparse.

The section of the prison that had slipped through the opening of the wormhole was there. It looked like it had been sliced, scooped out, and dropped. Walls and floors were cut clean through. Except for the bottom floors, which crumbled under the weight of the upper ones, the silhouette was spherical.

Ashford started a slow run in the open toward the building.

Chastity grabbed the collar of his coveralls and pulled him to the cover of a thick-based tree.

"Shh," she said. "There's something here." She stared at the comm-cuff display.

The triangle that had followed her had returned. It had four triangle friends with it.

She didn't need to peep around the edge of the tree to know what was there. Leathery, deep-throated vocalizations flurried through the air. They were similar to the sounds the raptors had made when Sergeant Thompson and his squad saved her but not the same. The pitch was lower, transforming the rolling warbles into a chorus of fervent croaks. The melody of each intonation resonated in the primordial regions of Chastity's brain. It was a dirge heavy with anger and loss.

Her giant canaries were back, and they were pissed.

Ashford curled into a split in a tree's massive trunk. He pulled his bag tight to his chest. Something beneath the layer of canvas was fighting enthusiastically, trying to get free.

With that, Chastity understood. The bastard had said flora and fauna earlier. He had taken one of the pack's hatchlings.

Chastity closed her eyes and focused on the wind. Determining the wind direction and how to stay downwind of people was something that had become common practice for her since the infection. She felt it's delicate touch against her right cheek and the tickle of loose strands of hair against her neck. That meant that, at least for now, the wind was carrying most of her and Ashford's scents away from the dinosaurs.

But that wouldn't last. The crunch of leaf mold told that the pack was moving closer.

And when they were close enough, the direction of the wind wouldn't mean diddlysquat. She didn't have an in-depth knowledgebase about dinosaur anatomy, but she did remember that the that they had big noses.

"You know what they want, don't you, Frankenstein" Chastity whispered, barely moving any air out of her lungs.

Ashford apparently heard because he gave a quivering shake of his head. Chastity believed that the tremor was the closest that she had seen the man come to emoting during their venture. He might not have the capacity for empathy toward other humans, but he was sure capable of experiencing the fear of being eaten alive. If he hadn't promised to fix her pheromone problem, she probably would have served him up on fine china.

"We have to distract them so we can make a break for the building," he whispered.

There was another crackle of fallen leaves was closer.

"Give it to me." Chastity reached for the bundle that Ashford was holding tight.

"No," the treble of his voice took it past the whisper range. "I need this for my experiments. No one has ever had access to viable dinosaur DNA. The things I can do with it are be—"

"You aren't going to do a damned thing with it if its mommy and daddy get their teeth into you"

He was unrelenting.

"Keep the sack. Its lining is soaked with blood. It's better than nothing."

"But the things that I could do with the other tissues after a proper necropsy—"

"Not up for debate—settle for the bloody sack or get eaten."

"I suppose I could clone it once I'm back in my laboratory... an acceptable trade off, I suppose."

Chastity took the tiny raptor out of the sack. It wasn't as scary as it's full-grown brothers and sisters—it was almost cute with its oversized eyes and perky snout."

Ashford had tied its mouth shut with string. She slid it off, careful to hold its mouth shut with her hand. With a guilt-ridden throw, she chucked the tiny body as far as she could away from the building and curled tight beside Ashford.

The tiny body thumped to the ground and rolled. It gave out anguished cries, wanting mommy and daddy. The pack sprinted to it.

Chastity and Ashford made a dash for the building.

Her calves and thighs moved in a solid sprint. She believed she had enough to make it to the building, but she doubted that she could keep up a prolonged run if they couldn't get in.

The loud panting behind her told her that Ashford wasn't faring as well. She glanced over her shoulder without breaking her stride. She had covered twice the distance he had. He wasn't used to exertion beyond shuffling test tubes.

Farther behind, she could see one of the raptors had stopped nuzzling the hatchling with its snout and turned its head toward them. Ferocious, emerald green eyes met her gaze. Time slowed to a crawl as the let out a bitter roar. Bone-cracking teeth stretched wide around a deep red and purple gullet. It was large enough to take off an entire limb in one bite.

It snaked its body with a scary efficiency from a kneeling position into a gallop.

If it reached them, it would be over... or at least it would for Ashford. His scent had to be all over the hatchling and its blood and scent were all over him. He was the closest target too.

She could let it happen. Ashford was a monster. No one deserved to be eviscerated and eaten more.

But if she let him get a well-deserved disemboweling, he couldn't help her.

Chastity used her momentum to roll and turn. It was ungraceful tumble that left her with a few scrapes on her, but it left her in a good position. She extended her arms and took the grip of the blaster in both hands. There was a look on Ashford's face of near panic as she pointed the muzzle toward him.

"Drop to the ground! Now!" she yelled and simultaneously squeezed the trigger. A pulse of blue energy blazed out. It cleared Ashford's head, but only barely. Chastity expected that if she checked it later, she would see the frizzled remains of a good swath of orange hair.

Her aim was only slightly off. The bolt of light cracked into the dinosaur's brow. Its head flung back, recoiling from the impact, and it's tank of a body crashed to the ground. It wasn't the kill shot that she had intended. It was more of a graze than direct hit, but it had incapacitated the thing.

The raptor was thrashing in agony, throwing clods of earth and leaves into the air around it. It was the distraction Chastity needed to get them to safety.

She shambled to Ashford and helped him to his feet. Together, they made it to the base of the building. An exposed stairwell made entrance easy. The building had landed at a slight angle, which made the climb to the first landing unsteady but not impossible. Ashford took the lead and they climbed two more floors until they came to a metal door painted pea soup green. He stopped and pulled on the doorknob. Locked.

"How much power is left in the blaster," he asked.

Chastity looked at the power indicator; it was still in the green zone. "Eighty-nine percent."

Ashford waggled his index finger in the air as if writing down calculations. "Good. Good. All right, my girl, if you'll just..." He indicated with his hand to fire at the lock.

Another blue blast illuminated the stairwell like a lightning.

"My lab is this way," he said, sounding like a spider inviting a fly to midday tea.

He took her by the wrist and led her through the door.

***

Ashford's lab was less mad sciencey than Chastity expected. There were no brains in glass jars; no greasy beakers with chemicals misting over the brim; no wall-eyed, genuflecting Igor spouting out a "yeth, marthter" after every command.

"How is there power here?" Chastity asked. She rubbed a finger across a console with dozens of flickering lights and a screen full of oscillating monochromatic waveforms.

"Each laboratory has a dedicated power node." He gestured in the direction of a yellow box on the wall with a stylized black lightning decal on the cover. "Some of our experiments require considerable amounts of energy. I expect that if the power consumption at Chamfield tripled in the short time that we've been housed there would garner some attention from the bean counters in accounting."

The overhead light flickered and dimmed for a second then returned. "Is the power going to hold out long enough for you to do what you promised?"

"Hmm... Most likely." He shuffled through a test tube rack, examining the colors of the contents, shifting some to his free hand and dropping others to the tabletop. "I have a new sample to sequence. It should only take fifteen minutes to identify the regions of the genome that control pheromone production."

"You're sure this will fix my condition?"

"You keep using the wrong words. You'll never be 'fixed', as you crudely put it. I'll simply be splicing a new sequence into your DNA that will alter the structure of the pheromones that are produced. They shouldn't be able to attach to the nasal receptor sites in men after today." His eyes flashed in what Chastity could only consider inspiration. "I must say, my girl, that you've been quite the muse. I seldom had any interest in revisiting past experiments, but you've opened a world of possibilities."

"Do any of those possibilities include helping the other women affected by this?"

"Hmm, not likely," he said, dipping a pipette into a series of test tubes.

At least he was honest—or better said, too unconcerned with her feelings to be dishonest.

Chastity pulled up the map on the comm-cuff display. She doubted that the raptors would give up. If she could find their locations, maybe she and Ashford would have a chance.

The map was greyed out and a spinning circle hovered in the middle of the screen over a message that read no signal. Updated data wasn't being loaded.

"You won't be able to use that in here. The walls, floor, ceiling—" he flicked his hand at each "—all shielded."

Shielded.

"So someone could be here and the drones' sensors wouldn't pick them up?"

"Your mastery of the language amazes me," Ashford said, listening but clearly not enthused about it. He slid the tip of the pipette into the gene sequencer's reservoir and injected the contents. "I don't have a dedicated AI system, so I'll need to encode the RNA nucleotides myself. If you could be quiet please."

"Not a problem," Chastity said. "I need to do some recon... make sure there's no one else here—human or reptile—wandering around."

Ashford looked up from the sequencer and opened his mouth as if to say something—probably to correct her on something in the sentence—but shook it off and went back to work.

"I'll be back as soon as possible."

He didn't seem to notice. Hyperfocus on his work had set in.

***

Chastity didn't like leaving Ashford alone, but if Tom made it though alive he had to be here. Chastity had backtracked down the stairs to make sure that the door hadn't been pulled open. Nothing had pushed through, and there was no trace that the raptors had gotten into the building... at least not this way. The building's structure was a train wreck with entry points on every floor. It was a credit to the construction crew that it hadn't broken apart like a squashed cantaloupe when it landed.

Chastity moved through the ramshackle remains one floor at a time. The search wasn't as efficient as she had hoped. Doors were locked. Sections of floors had caved in. On one floor she had to scale the slashed edge of an exterior wall to get past a stairwell that only partially made it.

She stood there, watching the flurry of movement below. A group of dinosaurs were in a loose-knit group. They were raptors, just like the ones that she had encountered when she first arrived. She wished she had brought a field notebook so she could document her observations. Not that it would do much good in the long run; McMurtey would have it confiscated on her return. When he talked confidentiality agreements, she knew he meant it.

She became aware that they were also watching her.

There were three of them who stayed in the open, refusing to run to the shelter of the foliage. After observing the three constants for a while, she named them. The first became Buttercup, because of its yellow-splotched feathers. After some thought, the second became Muriel, because something in it's manner reminded her of her pilfering cousin who always stole chunks of Aunt Sadie's Christmas candy. The name for the third was obvious. Scar. He was a grey-green with a plume of bright red feathers trailing. It was the one she had blasted and his muzzle and the arch of his left eye was scorched black. It was obvious in the way he carried himself and the others gave him leeway that he was the pack alpha.

Chastity didn't know if revenge was a thing with dinosaurs, but she thought she could see the desire for it in his eyes.

She needed to find Tom and get out of here.

She moved inside the building again to continue the search.

When she got to the fifth floor, things got interesting.

Chastity followed the flickering florescent lights deeper into the building. She wanted to call out for him, but there was still a prisoner unaccounted for... possibly the kind of prisoner who might be worse than Ashford did.

If he were here, she'd find him.

She turned a corner and stumbled over a power cable that snaked down the corridor. She reached down and touched it.

It hummed with power.

Chastity followed it to a room that had been gutted and cleared down to the colorless cement walls. And even they weren't left entirely intact. Someone had jackhammered jagged holes through them. She walked to the closest one to inspect it. The cable she had followed joined up with three more that fed through the hole into the next room.

The door to the room wasn't locked.

Inside she found a lab that looked alarmingly familiar. Blinking machinery lined the walls.

She had seen the grey metal and glass diodes and spheres before.

It was a miniature version of Brinkley's laboratory.

In the center was a console and a large platform. Hovering inches above the platform was the end of the wormhole's event horizon. As soon as she saw it she knew something was wrong... it looked sick. This sphere wasn't the shiny rainbow silver that she'd jumped through to buy a year of freedom from McMurtey and his schemes—this one was a somber and leaden, smudged with swirls of tombstone grey and midnight black. And it was smaller—much smaller.

"This is wrong... The end in the present—future—is different. This one—"

"Is collapsing," a familiar voice from the shadows in the far corner of the room finished the thought for her. "At the current rate of evaporation, the event horizon will breakdown in less than two hours."

"Tom!" Chastity ran and threw her arms around his neck in a friendly hug. "God, I was worried."