Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [7]
“Dr. Pardot.” The lean scientist walked up to join them. She had mouse brown hair and a severe face. Her pallor and the resulting sunburn over the past few days suggested she rarely, if ever, got out of a lab. She wore thick rain boots, man’s pants that didn’t fit her properly, and a shapeless sweater. She had on bloodstained surgical gloves. Spots of blood showed on the sweater as well. “If I may.”
Pardot swiveled quickly in his exo, almost looking as though he hopped around to face her. “Dr. Trammell, must I remind you that I am not to be interrupted? Ever?” He somehow made that sound like doing so was tantamount to a death sentence.
Colleen Trammell stood her ground, though the hesitant expression she wore suggested she’d rather be anywhere else at the moment. “I wanted to point out the possibility that this—these—encounters might not have been something our guides could have foreseen.”
“Dr. Trammell, the last thing I need is for you to manufacture excuses for these people.”
“I wouldn’t do that, sir.” The woman’s expression blanched only slightly in the light from the campfire. “I would like to direct your attention to the nature of the dead beast. I don’t believe you’ve examined it thoroughly.”
Pardot waved the suggestion away. “It’s a coyote. Genus Canis. Species Canis latrans. Barking dog. How interesting could something like that possibly be?”
As always, Hella stood in awe of what their charges knew about the world yet didn’t really know about living in it.
“When is the last time you’ve heard of Canis latrans having six legs?”
Without a word, Pardot twitch-walked over to the dead animal. Mud splashed with every step. He switched on a mini lamp attached to the exo’s head support, and bright light bathed the bloody corpse. “Six legs. There are six legs.”
“Yes.”
Pardot spun back around without switching off the lamp. The bright beam stabbed into Hella’s eyes before she covered them with a hand and looked away. “The other creature had six legs as well?”
Hella didn’t know how that could possibly mean anything to the scientists.
Stampede nodded. He didn’t look into the scientist’s light either. “It did.”
“This is unusual?”
“Very.”
“I’ve heard that the Redblight is home to all manner of strange creatures.” Pardot rubbed his weak chin. “Surely something like this isn’t all that uncommon.”
“I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve never seen anything like these animals. Now and again, you expect a mutation. Every so often, the genetic soup of something gets rattled and you see something like you’ve never seen before.” Stampede held up two huge fingers. “But this is two creatures. Exactly the same. Six legs. The ability to spin webs. More like a species than aberrations.”
The word rolled off Stampede’s tongue. Normally he and Hella didn’t keep company where words like that would be exchanged. Stampede read a lot, though, and he shared a lot of what he read with Hella.
Pardot glanced back at Colleen. “You have a theory?”
“I do. I think they’re from a ripple.”
A chill skated down Hella’s back. She didn’t know what the event was called anywhere else in the world, but in that part of the world, such occurrences were called ripples. They were a disturbance in the world that opened up brief windows into other worlds of past, present, future, and might-have-beens.
Several creatures that had been extinct in the world before the collider self-destructed had managed to slip into the real-world present as well. Some of them were flourishing again, and they were threatening the food chains in different areas because they had no natural predators. The Redblight’s ecosystems were constantly at war with each other, seeking some kind of balance.
“Nonsense.” Pardot waved the thought away with a twitch. “If there