Half-Off Ragnarok

Five

Ohio’s West Columbus Zoo, telling polite lies to the local police to avoid panic, institutionalization, or institutional panic

I ADJUSTED MY GLASSES with one hand, resisting the urge to glance toward the unfortunate Andrew’s half-calcified body. My fingers itched. I wanted—no, I needed—to get my dissection tools and dig into his remains. Whatever had petrified him would have left traces, subtle cues in the striations of the stone that had replaced an undetermined amount of his original substance. The local medical examiner would never be able to decode those markers. Even if I stole a copy of his autopsy report (and let’s be honest here: I was going to steal a copy of his autopsy report), I wouldn’t have all the data. We’d still be essentially flying blind.

“Now, you say that you were simply enjoying lunch with your—what did you say your relationship to Miss Tanner was, again?” the officer asked.

“She’s my girlfriend.” The words were out before I realized they were a relationship upgrade. I winced, but pressed on, saying, “We’ve been seeing each other socially for about three months.”

“I see. And is your relationship public knowledge?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking if I arranged for the bizarre death of one of my junior zookeepers because Shelby was some kind of dirty little secret? Zoo management is completely aware of our arrangement. It was the zoo’s HR director who introduced us. We don’t work in the same part of the zoo, we don’t answer to the same managers, and a little fraternization is encouraged if it means we’re more likely to volunteer for overtime and double-shifts.” Like when your significant other had already been drafted by her own manager, thus canceling yet another in a long string of canceled dates.

Shelby was on the other side of the tiger garden with another policeman, sitting atop the picnic table and giving her version of the story. From the occasional words that drifted my way, I was willing to venture that her version matched mine in the broad strokes, but was both more carnal and more profane in its details.

“Now, I don’t know whether I would have said that about your coworker’s heritage,” I said mildly, after Shelby made a particularly salty comment.

My policeman narrowed his eyes. “Please pay attention to your own situation, and not your girlfriend’s, Mr. Preston. Can you account for your whereabouts this morning between eight and eleven?”

“Yes, I can,” I said. “I was at the reptile house for most of the morning, along with my assistant, Deanna Taylor-Rodriguez. She’s still there now. I arrived at work about a quarter after eight. Lloyd was the guard on duty at the front gate.” For the first time, I found myself grateful for Lloyd’s slavish dedication to following the letter of the law. He’d have a triple-checked timestamp verifying exactly when I arrived.

That meant he probably had one for Andrew, too. I made a mental note to check with Lloyd once I was done explaining my innocence to the local police.

“Did this Lloyd gentleman walk you to the, ah, snake house?”

“No, he didn’t,” I admitted. “But if you check with Dee, you’ll find that it took me a maximum of ten minutes to cross the grounds to the reptile house.” I subtly stressed the word “reptile.” I wasn’t trying to mock him or piss him off. I just wanted him to remember that I knew my own business. “I honestly have no idea what happened to Andrew. Whatever it was, it probably took more than ten minutes.”

The first part wasn’t entirely a lie: there were a number of things that could have turned my unfortunate junior zookeeper into stone, and most of them were viable suspects, since he was still meat-based enough that he could have been zapped by anything from the bottom to the top of the power scale. The second part was one hundred percent fiction. Depending on the strength of the creature doing the petrifaction, it takes a few seconds, sometimes less. When something that’s capable of doing that to living flesh makes eye contact with a mammal . . . game over. I could easily have turned Andrew into stone and still made it to the reptile house on time. Except for the part where I’m human.

The policeman frowned at his notes. I seized the opportunity to add, a little more sheepishly, “Also, if I did . . . whatever it is . . . do you honestly think I would have brought my girlfriend here? I mean, I was hoping to have sex again in this lifetime, and most girls get sort of upset when you take them to see a dead body.”

Most girls. Not, apparently, Shelby, who was now laughing with her policeman, both of them appearing to have a grand old time as they reviewed her statement. I didn’t know how she did it, but I loved her for it in that moment, just as I’d loved her for every similar thing I’d ever seen her do.

My policeman followed my gaze to Shelby. Then, to my surprise, he smiled. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “You’re free to go back to work. Please don’t leave town, Mr. Preston, we may need to speak to you further about this incident. I have your contact information, and I assume that your paperwork with the zoo office is up to date?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” I said. It was all fake, of course—Alexander Preston had only existed on paper before I brought him to the Columbus Zoo, and he’d cease to exist as soon as I moved on to my next assignment—but everything about him was designed to pass even the deepest of examinations. He had a good college GPA, glowing letters of recommendation from his professors, and even contact numbers for his next of kin. He was a pretty well-liked guy, and I was going to miss him when it came time for me to move on to being someone else.

I didn’t have a choice, sadly. Verity could maintain a single identity for her ballroom dancing, because the Covenant wasn’t looking for us in that community. Anything related to professional zoology was more likely to catch their attention. No identity was secure enough to risk using twice.

“All right, then,” said the policeman, and turned his back on me, moving toward the cluster of EMTs and police personnel who were examining Andrew’s body. Shelby waved, mouthing the word “later,” and went back to talking to her policeman.

I waved back, a little hesitantly, and left the tiger garden, heading back to the reptile house as fast as I could. I kept my eyes away from the ground as I walked, just in case a cockatrice had been responsible for what had happened to Andrew. Cockatrice like to stay low, and for all that I knew, it was still at the zoo. Under the circumstances, avoiding an accidental staring contest was the safest thing I could have done.

Let’s talk about things that can turn you to stone.

There are a surprisingly large number of them extant in the world, and there used to be even more, before the Covenant of St. George compared notes with some Greek gentlemen and figured out all those spiffy little tricks with smoked glass and reflective surfaces. That cut down on the things-that-turn-you-to-stone population both dramatically and quickly, but “cut down” is not the same thing as “eradicated.” Good thing, too, as many of the things that can turn flesh to stone serve very important roles in the world’s ecology. This probably doesn’t make it any nicer to lock eyes or swap venom with them.

My original purpose in coming to Ohio actually involved things that turn people to stone. When I wasn’t counting frickens, I was supposedly administrating a basilisk breeding program. Technically I still was. It was just that my breeding pair of basilisks were currently hibernating—or had been as of ten o’clock the previous night; I’d been so busy dealing with the reptile house when I got to work that I hadn’t checked on them yet—and basilisks can hibernate for ten years at a stretch. It’s part of what made them so hard for the Covenant to eradicate. It’s hard to kill something that can go off and be a small boulder when it wants to take a long nap.

(Of course, they’re so sensitive to changes in their environment that moving them can cause them to hibernate even longer, which is why the breeding program had to take place in Ohio, where my pair had acclimated enough that they were unlikely to sleep for more than a year at a time—plus, with my middle sister on the East Coast and my parents and youngest sister on the West Coast, it was good for me to be in the Midwest. I could react quickly if there was an emergency, and it helped increase the number of air strikes required to wipe us all out.)

But back to the larger subject. All known petrifactors (IE, “things that can convince the minerals in your body that they really want to change formation and become different types of mineral”) are members of the Ophion family, a group of synapsids which includes everything from gorgons to cockatrice. This is more a matter of convenience than any strong scientific evidence proving their evolutionary relationship. They range in size from the greater gorgons, who are substantially larger than humans, to basilisks, which are the size of irritated chickens. Really, they only have one absolute unifying feature. All of them are capable of turning flesh to stone, to one degree or another.

Lesser gorgons stun with their gaze and petrify with their bite, although you’d have to work to find traces of petrifaction in most of their victims. They prefer their meat to be, well, meaty, not filled with delicious veins of silicate and carbon. Pliny’s gorgons like Dee could stun and petrify with their eyes, although they were better at the stunning part, and needed to have their hair uncovered if they wanted to petrify, or even stun something particularly large. They needed the extra eyes. Greater gorgons . . .

If we had a greater gorgon, I was going to be tempted to grab Shelby, my family, and anyone else that I was fond of and declare that it was time for a month-long vacation somewhere very, very far away. Like Hawaii. Or the moon.

Petrifaction can be stopped if you catch it early, but once it’s gone far enough, there’s no known treatment. If it happens, it’s happened, and there’s no force in this dimension or any other that will undo it. It’s supposed to be a very painful way to die. Personally, I never want to find out.

But Andrew found out. On that somber note, I reached the reptile house, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.

Kim and Nelson were working with the latest school group, a bunch of bored-looking sixth graders who clearly thought of themselves as far too cool for anything as jejune as a bunch of stupid snakes. I waved to the other zookeepers and kept walking, noting in passing that Shami was back in his tank.

Dee’s office door wasn’t locked. Good; that meant she hadn’t let her hair out of its confinement. I opened the door and stepped inside, closing it behind me. “We have a problem,” I announced.

“You just came into my office without knocking,” said Dee, lowering the sandwich she’d been about to bite into. It was dripping red. I was willing to bet it wasn’t because she’d used too much ketchup. “I’ll say we’ve got a problem. We’ve discussed privacy and appropriate boundaries before, Alex, and this is—”

“Andrew’s dead.”

Dee froze. Seconds ticked by while she stared at me, apparently too stunned to move. I waited as long as I could before snapping my fingers. She jumped in her seat, an audible hissing sound coming from beneath her wig.

“Earth to Dee, come in, Dee,” I said, only realizing after the words were out of my mouth that I was unintentionally parroting Shelby’s words to me in the tiger garden. “I need you alert and tracking, so if you could stop being stunned and useless, that would be awesome.”

“Little heavy on the sarcasm there, boss,” she mumbled, still sounding half-present. She shook her head, eliciting more enraged hissing from her hair, and looked at me pleadingly. “Is this some sort of really shitty joke? Because if you say it is, I’ll laugh. I promise to laugh.”

“I wish. The police are in the tiger garden now. They’ll be showing up here soon, to verify that I arrived when I said I did.” Belatedly it occurred to me that my beeline for Dee’s office could be seen as an attempt to solidify my shaky alibi. I sighed, forcing myself not to dwell. If they were going to try and pin Andrew’s murder on me, there wasn’t much I could do about it, aside from being innocent. Since I hadn’t killed him, I figured I had that part in the bag. “Look, Andrew’s death isn’t the problem. It’s the way he died.”

Dee’s eyes widened behind the tinted lenses of her glasses. “Oh, God, he was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know. It’ll depend on what killed him. If it was a sapient being, then yes, he was murdered. If it was a nonsapient, then no. He was just killed.”

“Wait . . .” Dee paused, cocking her head to the side as she frowned at me. “Are you saying that a cryptid of some sort did this?”

“Worse, at least from your perspective. I’m saying that a petrifactor did this.”

This time, the agitated hissing that rose from beneath Dee’s wig needed no translation. I turned and flipped the lock on the door, guaranteeing our privacy at least until the police arrived. “Do you need to let them out?”

“Yes, I think that would be best. I’m sorry.” Dee reached up and pulled her wig from her head, allowing her serpentine hair to uncurl and hiss fiercely in my direction. A few of the smaller snakes dropped to frame her face, hanging so that they mimicked human curls. It was pretty, in a reptilian sort of a way. “Are . . . are you sure?”

“His eyes were stone, Dee. Most of him was still flesh, so I can’t be sure what killed him, but his eyes were stone. Only a petrifactor could have done that.”

“If it started with his eyes, he probably met a gaze-based petrifactor,” said Dee slowly, clearly selecting her words with care.

I nodded. “I thought of that immediately. I’m not here because I think you did it.”

“Oh, thank Athena.” Dee groaned, slumping back in her chair and sliding her hands up under her tinted glasses so that she could rub her eyes. “You scared the crap out of me, Alex. I was half-waiting for you to whip out one of those giant knives of yours and kill me on the spot.”

“Do you really think that little of me?” I asked quietly.

“No. But I think that little of the Covenant, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that your family isn’t associated with them anymore.” Dee removed her hands from her face, checking to be sure her glasses were still in place before she opened her eyes and offered me a wan smile. It faded quickly. “What are we going to do?”

“I’m going to go home and tell my grandfather that he needs to get me a copy of Andrew’s autopsy file. Maybe he can get samples at the same time, and we can figure out what did this before it strikes again.”

Dee nodded. “That poor man. It’s a horrible way to die.”

“So I’ve been told. Look, Dee, I hate to ask you this, but . . .”

She put up a hand to cut me off. “No, Alex. I can’t take you home with me. Please don’t ask.”

Pliny’s gorgons tend to live in isolated communities, close enough to human neighborhoods for them to commute, but far enough away to allow them to relax and let their hair down, so to speak. I knew that Dee lived somewhere outside of the city limits with her husband and daughter, as did the rest of their extended clan, although I didn’t have any idea how large the population of their community might be.

“If this happens again, you know I’ll need to ask,” I said, as gently as I could. “And I won’t be able to take no for an answer.”

“I know,” said Dee miserably. “Just please don’t ask me yet if you don’t have to.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll table it for now. I’m going to go check on the basilisks before the police get here.”

“I’ll get ready,” said Dee, reaching for her wig.

I tried to smile reassuringly. It felt more like a grimace, but I was hoping that the intention would get through even if nothing else did. “We’ll be okay, Dee.”

“Tell that to Andrew.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I unlocked the door at the rear of her office, the one that connected to the back halls of the reptile house, and let myself out.

When I was a kid, I always wondered why buildings at the zoo seemed so much bigger on the outside than they were on the inside. Once I started working in zoos, I realized it was because the part the visitors see—the animal exhibits and the attractively designed public areas—are just the tip of the iceberg. You need feeding pens and bathing areas, storage closets and research labs, places for the animals that aren’t currently on display, the gravid females, eggs or cocoons, and babies too young to handle being stared at all day. The reptile house was unusual because our offices, of which there were three, were connected to both the public and private areas. That was a design choice based on necessity: after all, our offices were where we stored the antivenin.

I moved down the hall to the research labs, pulling the key to lab number two out of my pocket. The door I wanted was locked twice, once with a deadbolt and once with a combination lock. I shielded it with my body as I turned the dial to the appropriate numbers. Not even Dee knew how to get into this lab without me, and that was exactly as I wanted things to be. Gorgons and basilisks don’t get along, and they’re not immune to each other’s abilities.

The inside of the lab was lit only by the red glow of the heat lamps. I shut the door, locking it from the inside, and took down the protective eyewear from the hook by the light switch. The smoked glass lenses would block the effects of the basilisks’ eyes if they were awake. Please let them both be here, and don’t let them be awake, I thought. Please don’t let this be my fault.

Moving the heavy plywood sheet away from the basilisk enclosure was difficult, but I’d done it before, and after a few moments of tugging, I was able to lift it down and lean it up against the wall. I peered through the glass.

It was a good-sized enclosure, about eight feet on all sides, with a twelve-foot vertical clearance. Basilisks liked to roost in trees when they were courting, which just added to their resemblance to weird, scaly chickens. Ferns and other leafy plants surrounded their artificial stream. The trees were empty. As for the basilisks themselves, they were still asleep, curled up in hard little balls of what looked like granite.

This was the dangerous part. I picked up one of the feeding sticks and slid open the hatch at the side of the basilisk enclosure. Neither basilisk moved, not then, and not when I threaded the stick through the opening and used it to nudge them gently. They were both as hard as, well, rocks, and entirely unresponsive. I removed the stick and shut the hatch before allowing myself a very small sigh of relief.

The basilisks hadn’t killed Andrew. Judging solely by their surface hardness, they’d been asleep for months.

My relief passed as quickly as it had come. Dee didn’t kill Andrew. The basilisks didn’t kill Andrew. And since that accounted for all the known petrifactors on the zoo grounds, that raised one very large, very unpleasant question:

If they hadn’t killed him, then who had?