“Gaia!”
“Told you keep away,” Joaquin said.
One of the odder exhibits was a seemingly normal family of beavers in a tank that had been half filled with muddy water and a few logs.
“They don’t look mutie,” Dean said, peering cautiously at the animals.
“Watch!” Joaquin went toward a series of metal boxes with slits in their tops. He opened one and pulled out a handful of white mice, tossing them into the beaver’s tank, so that they landed on the dirt.
The nearest of the beavers, lazily preening its glossy fur, turned slowly to look at the scared rodents.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed, watching the horrific transformation.
It was as if the animal had skulls within its own skull. Its nostrils curled back and its mouth opened. A second set of razored teeth moved slowly outward, with a third set of dripping fangs emerging from within those. There was a faint hissing sound from the mutie beaver, before it lunged with its hideously elongated skull, snapping up the nearest mouse and sucking it into the slimy pit of its mouth.
A second beaver moved over with a sickening, graceful speed, unlike the normal amiable waddle of the breed. The same change took place, and the mouse was gone. Moments later the muddy water boiled as the rest of the tribe of mutie animals surged out and devoured the remainder of the mice.
Once they were devoured, the retractable jaws slid back into place, and all that sat there in the tank was a family of harmless beavers.
Ryan and the others stood still, watching them, paralyzed by the horror of it.
J.B. broke the silence. “Who collects these things for the baron?”
“Trying to get us sec men to do it, but I’m opposed to it. Don’t mind patrolling around the ville and listening for word of strange new muties. But we pay jack-good jack-for outsiders to bring them in here. They get money and they take the risks. Way it goes.”
“High price,” Mildred said.
“Right there, lady,” Joaquin agreed. “I believe those flat-tailed little boogers in that tank there took the lives of eight men before they were installed safely in here. One of the baron’s very special favorites. Stands and watches them, he does, hour by hour.”
Ryan was beginning to feel dizzy, the warm, moist stinking air wrapping itself around him like a noisome shroud, as was the bedlam of noise racketing about the concrete-walled building-barking, hissing, screeching, clicking and howling, all going on endlessly.
Joaquin demonstrated a monstrously bloated spider, covered in a sickly yellow fur. Larger than the biggest dinner plate, it lay still on a bed of white sand. The sec man dropped in a bright crimson finch, first breaking its wings. It fluttered helplessly to the floor of the tank, aware of the lethal menace of the spider.
“Sure it’s alive?” Ryan asked. “Seems like. Fireblast!”
From some hidden orifice below its belly, the creature sent out a tiny thread of sticky silk, trapping the bird, spinning it at dazzling speed, binding it into a cocoon until only its straining head was uncovered.
Only then did the spider deign to move itself toward its prey. Its long legs articulated like crooked fingers, lifting it from the sand and carrying it slowly across the tank.
“I don’t think I want to see any more of this,” Mildred said. “I’ll go outside and check how Emma is. Catch the rest of you later.” The door clanged behind her.
The spider lowered itself, huge eyes fixed on the struggling little bird. Bringing the serrated pincers nearer, it neatly nipped the beaked head off, a tiny spray of blood dappling its prickling fur.
“Think I’ll join Mildred and the others,” Krysty said. “Limit to what I can watch. See you later, friends.” Again came the sonorous boom of the door shutting.
For the price of two new pins, Ryan would have given it up and followed her. But Dean was still endlessly fascinated, running from cage to tank, calling out for his father to come look at some fresh aberration of Nature.
He swallowed hard, tasting the bitterness of bile at the back of his throat and followed Joaquin and the boy, J.B. and Doc trailing behind.