it. Mother? Not hardly. This thing didn't have a mother. It was fucking hatched in Frankenlab.
Raised in farm country, Kevin liked animals. He sometimes even petted Rosebud, the town pit bull, when Rosebud wasn't into tearing people's arms off. If his parents had been rich, he'd be pre-veterinary at Franken U. Or a cattle rancher, or a discoverer of rare snakes.
He retrieved a knife from upstairs, hacked tidbits off the chicken breast, and put them in the cub's mouth. The cub sucked on them, famished. It got to its feet and seized his finger with its front paws. Head held sideways, it chomped down on his finger. It did have a few teeth, it seemed.
He jerked away. "Stop it, you little monster!" Then he realized he might wake his mother.
Kevin, it's a baby. Duh.
Where would he get a baby bottle?
He opened a can of condensed milk from the pantry, dipped a chicken chunk in it, and let the monster suck milk off the meat. Twenty minutes later it either got satisfied, or gave up. Its little belly looked marginally bigger, and the can was empty, mostly spilled on the laundry tub or his shirt.
It stretched and unsheathed claws way too big for a little guy the size of a raccoon.
Kevin thought, It'll purr now. Instead, it washed its face, running front paws over those deformed big jaws.
And then, just when Kevin decided it was almost cute, it reached out a claw and pricked his arm, not enough to hurt, just to say, More?
"You're beginning to tick me off," he said. The cub's gaze radiated adoration. It licked his hand, nearly rasping his skin off.
Its fur was golden retriever blonde, its eyes the color of river moss. Green-eyed blonde, like Sara. Dappled coat, like freckles on Sara's sweet shoulders. Sara Jones: they were almost a couple before his arrest; now she acted distant.
The monster leapt out of the tub and landed on the floor. It shook itself, surprised at the fall.
He lay down and stared at it, eye to eye. "You need a name."
He was furious that they planned to kill it. It was harmless. Uh, maybe not harmless. Planning to get big, judging from those paws, each the size of cheeseburgers. But innocent.
"What the hell have I got myself into?" he asked it.
Its grotesque little face shone with trust.
With the knife he'd used to cut the chicken, and thinking of Sara Jones, he tapped the little monster on each shoulder, and said, "I dub thee Sir Jonesy."
For a week, he kept Jonesy locked in the root cellar. His mom either didn't know, or pretended not to. Rosebud, Mr. Trumbull's pitbull, kept getting off his chain and sneaking over to paw at the basement door. There was an article in the paper about the lab fire, but the lab animals were hardly mentioned.
The scientists downplayed it all. The animals had been slated for "sacrifice," Dr. Betty Hartley said. Federal regulations required that animals be euthanized at the end of an experiment, she said, plus the money had run out. Cold. "Sacrifice": nice euphemism. Like "put to sleep." Like anything ever woke up from that sleep. Sacrifice? What, were they going to dance around an altar and beg God to protect them from weird-ass animal zombies?
Dr. Hartley said she was sad that the animals had all died in the fire, but accidents will happen.
So now he couldn't let anybody in on his secret. It would be insane to let the scientists find the cub again and kill it. But Jonesy (the cub was female, he discovered) whined and shivered in the root cellar, so he brought it upstairs.
His mother was not pleased.
"Look, Mom. I know it's humongous for a kitten, but that's all it is. Pet it?"
She refused to touch it. "I don't care what it is, I don't want it in my house."
"Listen, they'll kill it if I take it back. It's cute, see?" He held it to his chest to minimize her view of the monstrous head. Its fur was rough, not silky like a kitten's. But it was warm and happy to snuggle.
"Cute? Kevin, I'll show you cute. I know you stole it from Frankenlab. It'll probably get up in the night and suck our blood."
"Shit, mom. It eats milk, not blood. You can't just kick it out on the street like a—like a broken TV."
"Kevin, get a job. And get that thing out of my house."
But Kevin's mother was too tired to put her foot down.
The cub's teeth