The Last of the O-Forms
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About James Van Pelt. Books by James Van Pelt. Eyes like saucers, it gazed at him gratefully before burying its face in the trough. He moved down the rows. Mealworms in one cage. Grain in the next. Bones from the butcher. It cooed in contentment. At the end of the row, closest to the river, two cages were knocked off their display stands and smashed. Black blood and bits of meat clung to the twisted bars, and both animals the cages had contained, blind, leathery bird-like creatures, were gone.
Trevin sighed and walked around the cages, inspecting the ground. In a muddy patch, a single webbed print a foot across, marked with four deep claw indents, showed the culprit. A couple of partial prints led up from the river.
- The Last of the O-Forms by James Van Pelt - Baen Ebooks.
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- Publication: The Last of the O-Forms & Other Stories.
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Trevin put his finger in the track, which was a half-inch deep. The ground was wet but firm. It took a hard press to push just his fingertip a half-inch. By eight, the softball fields across the park had filled. Players warmed up outside the fences, while games took place.
Tents to house teams or for food booths sprang up. Trevin smiled and turned on the music. Banners hung from the trucks. By noon, there had been fifteen paying customers. Leaving Hardy in charge of tickets, Trevin loaded a box with handbills, hung a staple gun to his belt, then marched to the ballfields, handing out flyers. Several folks offered him a beer—he took one—but his flyers, wrinkly with humidity, vanished under chairs or behind coolers. These are displays not to be missed, folks!
One of her teammates, sitting on the ground, a beer between his knees, said, "Give him a break, Doris. He headed toward town, on the other side of the fairgrounds. The sun pressured his scalp with prickly fire. He stapled a flyer to the first telephone pole he came to. He went inside every store and asked the owner to post his sign.
Behind Main Street stood several blocks of homes. Trevin turned up one street and down the next, stapling flyers, noting with approval the wire mesh over the windows. The beer seemed to be evaporating through his skin all at once, and he felt sticky with it. The sun pulsed against his back. The magic number is five-seventy-eight, he thought. It beat within him like a song. Call it six hundred. Six hundred folks, come to the zoo, come to the zoo, come to the zoo!
When he finally made his way back to the fairgrounds, the sun was on its way down. Trevin dragged his feet, but the flyers were gone. The change box popped open with jingly joy; the roll of tickets was ready. Circus music played softly from the loudspeakers as fireflies flickered in the darkness above the river. Funny, he thought, how the mutagen affected only the bigger vertebrate animals, not mice-sized mammals or little lizards, not small fish or bugs or plants.
What would a bug mutate into anyway? They look alien to begin with. He chuckled to himself, his walking-up-the-sidewalk song still echoing: Every car that passed on the highway, Trevin watched, waiting for it to slow for the turn into the fairgrounds. Clouds had moved in, and distant lightning flickered within their steel-wool depths. Trevin spun the roll of tickets back and forth on its spool. An old farmer couple wearing overalls, their clothes stained with rich, Mississippi soil, shuffled past on their way out.
Trevin wondered if they ever retrieved home-run balls off their porch. The money should be falling off the tables, he thought.
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We should be drowning in it. The old couple stood beside him, looking back into the zoo. They reminded him of his parents, not in their appearance, but in their solid patience. He had no reason to talk to them, but there was nothing else left to do. They closed the elementary school last fall. If you want to see a real zoo display, go down to Issaquena County Hospital pediatrics.
The Last of the O-Forms & Other Stories by James Van Pelt
The penalty of parenthood. Not that many folks are having babies, though.
Have you seen that one? The old couple climbed into their pickup, and it rattled into life after a half-dozen starter-grinding tries. She stood in the shadows beside the ticket counter, a notebook jammed under her arm. I can do the whole transaction, transfer the deed, take the money, all of it, over the Internet. Trevin rubbed his eyes. She stamped her foot. Trevin looked away from her. The fireflies still flickered above the river.
She held out the notebook. This is what will fit in one semi-trailer. I already let Hardy and the roustabouts go with a severance check, postdated. Was that a note of triumph he detected in her voice? Trevin took the notebook.
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She dropped her hands to her side, chin up, staring at him. I could kick her, he thought, and for a second his leg trembled with the idea of it. The tigerzelle squatted on its haunches, alert, looking toward the river. A couple of crones sat on the seat of a wagon full of bodies. The tigerzelle rose to its feet, focusing on the river.
It paced intently in its cage, never turning its head from the darkness.
The Last of the O-forms & Other Stories
What did it see out there? For a long moment, the tableau remained the same: Beyond the cages, from the river, a piece of blackness detached itself from the night. Trevin blinked in fascinated paralysis, all the hairs dancing on the back of his neck. The short-armed creature stood taller than a man, surveyed the zoo, then dropped to all fours like a bear, except that its skin gleamed with salamander wetness. Its triangular head sniffed at the ground, moving over the moist dirt as if following a scent.
When it reached the first cage, a small one that held the weaselsnake, the river creature lifted its forelegs off the ground, grasping the cage in web-fingered claws. In an instant, the cage was unrecognizable, and the weaselsnake was gone. The creature looked at him.
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Reaching under the ticket counter, Trevin grabbed the baseball bat and advanced. The monster turned away to pick up the next cage. Trevin fell back, dropping the bat to cover his ears. It shrieked again, loud as a train whistle.
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Well, if these two books are any indication of the overall quality of the press then I will be sure to be much more on top of their releases in the future. In the title story from his collection Van Pelt hints at a future Earth where mutations have become common. Into this environment he gives us a father struggling with a traveling exotic animal show, something that would not be out of place in our own time if the animals were just a tad less exotic.
Heck, this guy might actually even be willing to take a few chances in the interest of giving his readers the kind of surprises that we used to get all the time back in the Golden Age of science fiction, literary surprises that a lot of us grew up with and loved. In fact, with a story narrated by a child molester in a futuristic prison, a story that makes me feel something for a child molester and killer, James Van Pelt just might be going where truly, no man has gone before. There are a whole series of stories considering the after-effects of a virus like the bird flu, but each of them present such different outcomes that they provide the reader with numerous ways to think about the future of our medical health.
Ironically it also manages to show us how good it can get after a killer virus.