“That’s right,” Michael agreed.
“And we really get to see them chomp on chickens?” Mark demanded, as if that were the only possible reason for coming on the tour.
“Yeah, you can see them chomp on chickens,” Michael agreed. He pointed at Ben. “Come back here, Ben, and you can help me.” Michael looked up at the adults in the crowd. He never brought a kid back behind his workstation, but for some reason, it seemed important to let Ben lord it over Mark. He was sure that life usually went the other way around. “One of the most incredible things we’re able to do in working with crocodilians is studying the growth of the embryo in the egg. Ben, lift that tray, so they can see what I mean.”
“Wow!” Mark gasped, stepping forward again. Even he was impressed.
“It’s possible to crack and remove the top of the alligators’ eggs to study the growth of the embryos without killing them. It’s also possible to cause changes and mutations in the growing embryos by introducing different drugs, genetic materials or even stimuli such as heat or cold. Here…in this egg, you’ll see a naturally occurring mutation. This creature cannot survive even if it does reach the stage of hatching. You see, it’s missing a lower jaw. Can you imagine an alligator incapable of using its jaws? Everywhere in nature, there are mishaps and imperfections. Over here, in this egg, you have an albino alligator. They have tremendous difficulty surviving because—”
“Because they sunburn!” Mark interrupted, laughing as if he’d made a joke.
“Actually, that’s true. They have trouble coping with the intense sun that their relatives need to survive. They also lack the element of surprise in their attacks—they’re easily seen in greenish or muddy waters where their relatives are camouflaged by their surroundings.”
“He’s a goner,” Mark said.
“Well, not here,” Michael told him. “He’ll hatch and grow, and he’ll have a nice home at the farm, and we’ll feed him and take care of him—you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because he’s unusual, and our visitors will like looking at him, that’s why,” Michael said, pleased with himself because he seemed to be growing a little more tolerant of Mark.
“So that’s what you do—you try to make white alligators?” Mark asked.
Michael shook his head. “Selective breeding…well, it’s what makes collies furry or Siamese cats Siamese. We find the alligators with the best skins and we breed them, and then we breed their offspring until we create a line of animals with incredibly hardy skins that make the very best boots and bags and purses. We also find the alligators that give the most meat with the most nutritional value—”
“Because it’s a farm, and it’s out to make money,” Ben’s mother said, and she shuddered again. “Thank God!”
“She thinks you should kill them all,” Ben’s father said.
Michael shrugged. “Like I said—”
“They should all be killed,” the attractive older woman said, speaking out at last. She had keen blue eyes, and she stared at Michael, somehow giving him the creeps. “They eat people.”
“They do eat people, right?” Mark demanded with a morbid determination.
“There have been instances, yes.”
“A friend of mine was eaten!” the elderly woman said, and she kept staring at Michael, as if it was all his fault.
“Anytime man cohabits with nature, there can be a certain danger,” he said gently. He looked at the others. “It’s dangerous to feed alligators. The alligators are repopulating Florida, and they do get into residential canals, especially during mating season. I know of one incident in particular when a woman was feeding the alligators…and, well, to the alligator, there is no distinction between food and a hand offering food.”
“And children,” the woman said, growing shrill. “Children! It’s happened. It’s horrible, and they should all be destroyed. Little children, just walking by lakes, looking at flowers—these monsters need to be killed! All of them! How can you people do this, how can you!” Her voice had risen; she was shouting.
There was a buzzer beneath his workstation; all Michael had to do was hit it and the security people would come. Sign of the times—you never knew what kind of dangerous lunatic might walk in with a tour group. But Michael didn’t touch the button; the older woman had stunned him by suddenly going so ballistic, and he just stared at her.
She pointed a finger at him. “Tell them. Tell them the truth. Tell them about the attacks.”
“Yes, there have been attacks, and of course that’s horrible. But we need to live sensibly with nature. In Africa, along the river, the Nile crocodiles are far more ferocious, but they’re a part of the environment. We can’t just eliminate animal populations because the animals are predators. We’re predators ourselves, ma’am.”
She shook her finger at him, and her voice grew more strident. “They’re going to eat you. They’re going to eat you all. Rise up and tear you to pieces, rip you to shreds—that’s how they do it, you know, little boy!” she said, suddenly gripping Mark by the shoulders. She stared at him with her wild eyes. “They clamp down on your body, and they shake you, and they break you and rip you, and your bones crunch and your veins burst. Your blood streams into the water, and you’re dying already while they drown you.”
“Oh, my God, please!” Ben’s mother cried, trying to pull Mark from the woman’s grip.
“Hey now!” Michael said, and he came around his station, setting an arm around the woman’s shoulders to hold her while Ben’s mother, pale as a shadow, pulled Mark to her.
“You!” the elderly woman said, turning on him again. “You! They’ll eat you. You made them, and they’ll eat you. They’ll tear you to bits, and your own mother won’t be able to find enough bloody pieces to bury you!”
“Now, really, I didn’t invent alligators, ma’am—”
“You’ll die!” she screeched.
He reached for her again, aware that he had to take control of the situation before it became a monumental disaster. He could see her going completely insane and destroying his lab. Then the cops would be called in, and soon reporters would be crawling everywhere, and then…
“Please, now—” he began.
The door suddenly opened. Security hadn’t come; Lorena had, presumably drawn by the noise. She stared reproachfully at Michael.
“What happened?”
“That lady is telling Dr. Preston that the alligators should eat him!” Mark said excitedly.
“We have a problem,” Michael agreed. “I think I should call Security—” he began.
“No, no, we’re all right.” Lorena—who, he had been told, had a degree in psychology and another in public relations, as well as being an RN—assessed the situation quickly and took charge. “Mrs. Manning, right? Come along and tell me about it. We’ll get you something cold to drink. It can be so hot here, even with the air-conditioning on the heat can get to you and—”
“Young woman, I am not suffering from the heat!” the elderly woman proclaimed. But her shoulders sank, and she suddenly seemed to deflate. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m not a lunatic, I don’t usually behave this way…. I shouldn’t have come. Yes, young woman, you may get me something cold to drink.”
Lorena led her quickly toward the door, but once there, the woman stopped and turned back, staring at Michael. She pointed at him again. “I hope they don’t eat you, young man,” she said. Then she smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression, and despite himself, he felt the strangest chill snake along his spine.
Then she was gone, as Lorena whisked her out the door.
Michael, with the nine remaining members of the tour group, was dead silent as seconds ticked by.
He suddenly felt a small hand slipping into his. He looked down. Ben was staring up at him. “Don’t worry. She was just crazy. She probably had a friend who got eaten, and she probably misses her. I’m sure you’re not going to get eaten, Dr. Preston.”
Michael smiled;
the chill dissipated.
“All right, everyone. I have a question for you. What animal is most dangerous to Americans?”
There was silence for a moment, then Mark cried out, “I know, I know! Bees!”
“Bees are up there in the top ten, but they’re not in the number-one slot.”
“I know what it is.” A young man, one of the two who looked like a newlywed, was speaking for the first time. He held his wife tightly against him, and seemed pale himself, probably shaken by the older woman’s display. “The deer.”
“The deer?” Ben protested.
“That’s right,” Michael said.
“The deer? You mean like Bambi?” Josh asked.
“More Americans are killed each year due to accidents involving deer than are killed by any rattler, spider, shark or reptile out there. So we have to remember to always be careful in any animal’s environment,” Michael said.
His door opened again; Peggy Martin, one of the guides, stepped in. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to move on to the pens, or straight into either the gift or coffee shop, if you’d rather,” she said cheerfully.
“Mark, you get to see the gators eat chickens,” Josh said.
Mark looked at Ben’s parents. “I’m really hungry. Maybe we could just get a hamburger. Please?” he said politely.
“Sure, sure,” Ben’s father said. He looked at Michael. “Thank you for the information, Dr. Preston.”
“Yeah, it was great,” one of the pretty young women Michael had pegged as a newlywed agreed.
“Thanks,” Michael said. “Thanks very much, you were, er, a great group.”
He leaned back against his workstation, strangely exhausted. The old woman had given him the creeps. He kept a false smile plastered to his face as the group filed out, the boys in the rear.
Mark was the last. Before he exited, he turned back, looking uneasy.
“Dr. Preston?”
“Yes?”
The boy seemed about to say something, but then he shook his head. “Thanks. You were all right.”
Michael nodded.
“Come back sometime,” he told Mark, wondering if he meant it or not.
“Yeah.”
The door closed behind Mark.
The hatchlings began to squeak.
Chapter 3
In the gift shop, Josh began to play with a two-foot-long plastic alligator. “I’ve got five dollars,” he told Ben. “Think this looks real?”
“Yeah, it’s cool,” Ben told him.
Mark walked up to the pair in the corner of the shop. He still looked a little pale—they had all been kind of spooked, the old lady had been really, really creepy, scarier than the alligators—but he was kind of swaggering again, which Ben was sure meant that Mark was all right.
“That don’t look real, Josh. Not compared to this!”
Reaching into the pocket of his baggy, oversize jeans, he pulled out one of the hatchlings. The little creature’s mouth was opened wide. Tiny teeth were already chillingly visible.
“Mark! You stole one of the hatchlings—” Josh began.
“Shh,” Mark protested.
“Oh, man, you’ve got to give that back,” Ben said.
“No way,” Mark said. “Look at him!”
The jaw opened, snapped.
Mark shoved the hatchling toward Josh, who jumped back. “Don’t do that, Mark.”
“He’s going to eat you all up,” Mark said, laughing as he started to stuff the creature back into his pocket.
But suddenly he cried out, his hand still in his pocket.
“Oh, shut up,” Ben commanded. His cousin was big stuff around school; he had looked up to Mark, and he’d wanted to be like him. But Ben had never been on an outing like this with Mark before. Mark was always on, like maybe there were always girls watching or something. Now the way people were staring was just embarrassing. “Come on, Mark, stop it. People are looking—”
Mark jerked his hand from his pocket. “Get it off! Get it off!” he screamed. The hatchling had his forefinger in its mouth. To Ben’s amazement, there was a trail of blood dripping down his cousin’s finger.
Instinctively, he reached for the hatchling. But Mark started screaming again. “No, no, don’t pull. You’ll tear my whole finger off!”
People were beginning to stare. Ben pushed Mark toward a rear door. It read No Admittance: Staff Only, but Ben ignored that; the way the buildings were set up, he could tell that the door led back into the hallway where the labs were housed.
“What are we doing? Where are we going?” Mark cried frantically. “Oh, my God, it hurts! He’s eating me!”
“Shut up, shut up, we’re taking him back!” Ben said. He moved Mark faster and faster down the hall, pushing back into Dr. Preston’s lab without knocking at the door.
Dr. Preston was there, thankfully, standing almost where they had left him. He started when they entered, standing taller in his lab coat. He wasn’t very old for a doctor; he was tall and nice-looking, with sandy hair and green eyes, and if Mark hadn’t been such a jerk—and if the old lady hadn’t freaked out—he might have spent more time with them and told them a lot more neat stuff.
“What the—” Dr. Preston began.
“Mark took one of the babies, but it bit him and we can’t get it off and we’re real sorry, honest to God, we’re real sorry, but can you help—”
Preston helped. Right away, he knew where to pinch the hatchling so that it let go rather than ripping. He dropped the hatchling back into a tank. By then there were tears in Mark’s eyes, ready to spill down his face.
“Come over here,” Preston said to Mark, taking him back behind his workstation, washing the wound at a sterile-looking sink, then covering it with some slimy cream. “We’ll have to take you to the nurse and tell your folks—”
“No, please, no!” Mark protested. “I’m here with Ben’s parents. If my parents ever found out I—that I tried to steal from this place, they’d…”
Preston stared at Mark, then at Ben, and then at Josh, who had followed them, silent and so white that his freckles stood out on his face.
“Mark, you were bitten—”
“It’s a tiny hole. Look, you can barely see it.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’ve had a tetanus shot, honest.”
“Mark, there’s always a rare chance that reptiles can carry disease—”
“Not alligator-farm reptiles!” Mark said. “Please, please, please don’t say anything. You don’t know my dad.”
Preston hesitated.
“Please,” Mark whispered. “Please,”
Ben held his breath. Preston was staring at Mark, studying his face.
The door behind them quietly opened and closed. Ben jumped, turning around. It was their first guide, the really pretty lady with the dark hair and bright blue eyes.
She didn’t say anything, just leaned against the door, watching the situation. Dr. Preston looked at her. He lifted Mark’s fingers. “They were trying to leave with a souvenir.”
“Ah…” she murmured to the boys. “What were you going to do? Drop him in your hotel swimming pool?” She turned to Dr. Preston. “I need to look at that, and then we need to file a report.”
Mark went pale.
“I was thinking about letting him go. I think he already paid enough of a price,” Dr. Preston said.
Ben was surprised to see that the beautiful nurse was the one who seemed to think they needed the authorities. She was staring at Dr. Preston. “We really shouldn’t take the chance. Just in case there are consequences, an infection…”
Dr. Preston stared back at her. “This is one of the cleanest labs you’re ever going to find.” He sounded indignant.
The nurse, however, wasn’t backing down. “I don’t know….”
“Please,” Mark begged.
“Hey, I’d never let anything happen to a kid,” Dr. Preston swore. “Though this one…all right. Call in the authorities.??
?
“No, please,” Mark begged.
The woman stared at Dr. Preston for a moment longer.
Then she looked at the boys. They were staring at her with downright prayers glittering in their eyes.
She nodded, a smile twitching at her lips; then she walked over to look at Mark’s finger. Her glance at Michael assured him that it was a minor injury. “We have some antibacterial medicine to put on that.”
Preston stared at Mark. “You know, Ms. Fortier has a point. This is against my better judgment. I could lose my job. I could be sued. Who knows, maybe I could go to jail. Lorena, could I go to jail for this?”
“I don’t know, but there’s a cop outside. Jesse Crane.” She made a tsking sound. “I’ve heard that he feels passionately about people messing with things like this. The Everglades, well, this place is his passion. So I’ve heard.”
“I’ll never say a word, never, even if my finger drops off—even if my whole hand explodes!” Mark swore.
Lorena pulled a tube of cream from her pocket and dabbed some of the contents on the injured finger.
She took a bandage from another pocket and covered the bite. When she was finished, though, she was in a real hurry. “I’ve got to get back to the office. I just came by to make sure everyone was okay. That poor woman is still…well, in bad shape.”
“This is just a tiny bite,” Mark said apologetically. He gulped. “Thank you, Nurse,” he murmured.
She took off. Preston watched her go.
Ben was surprised and pleased to see that Dr. Preston was actually smiling when he said, “Mark, you take this as a lesson. And if your hand swells up, don’t keep it a secret. Tell the doctor you stuck your hand in the tank and got bitten by a hatchling, and then you have them call me right away, got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Mark swore.
He turned, flying for the door. Ben ran after him. At the door, Mark stopped. Ben crashed into him. Josh, always close, crashed into Ben.
Mark didn’t notice the pileup. He was staring back at Dr. Preston. “Thanks, Doc. Honest. I’ll make it up to you one day.”