Mason looked around her bedroom, and it took her a moment to realize she was still awake. There was a pulsating throb around her head, and even though her eyes hurt, they still detected a blinking light in her peripheral vision. She reached for her phone.
Twenty-four missed calls.
Mason hadn’t slept in the three days following her attack, neither could she remember what she did during that time. Her laptop was on the floor with no power.
I haven’t been to work.
After pacing around her room with a brush in her hand for a few minutes, Mason walked down to the kitchen, pulled out some milk, bread, and cheese and set it on the counter while she tugged aimlessly at her hair; then she went back to her room. There Mason stood for a moment – forgetting why she walked in there. Not to waste the trip, she put on some clothes, picked up her phone and laptop, and left to go to work. Everything she pulled out of the fridge was still sitting on the counter top.
The traffic along the Hwy 29 seemed light, but she squinted her eyes trying to remember how to get on 395. Glancing at her map, she realized she passed her exit and was going the wrong way. Mason commanded her car to take her to work, and it went back around East to the Harold Amos. While it drove, she called her mother.
Voicemail.
With a raspy voice, Mason said, “Hey, mom. Thanks for the card. I got the money; I told you I didn’t need you to pay me back. Just let me know if you need anything. Love you.”
Mason sat in the parking lot outside of the lab and looked at the security guard pacing in front of the doorway.
Her drowsy eyes blinked, and she sighed.
The lab was full of chatter, yet none of it made sense to Mason. She aimlessly moved lab samples across the room. When she sat them down, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror to see a dark purple swelling developing under her eye. Her dark skin that once showed a chocolate color seemed gray. Lightly, she touched her faced, and her intern came up and startled her.
“Did you see what Christian sent?” Tina asked.
“Ah! Uh, no? What did he send?” asked Mason with puffy eyes. Everything smelled like copper to her.
Tina walked to the terminal and began accessing Christian’s report. “Christian sequenced the DNA strands you sent him to isolate the synthetic bonds contaminating the nucleotides. Then he created an algorithm to ignore all the synthetic bonded material.”
Paula, another worker, walked up to Tina’s display. “Synthetic bonded what?”
“I think he’s bullshitting us,” April, Mason’s partner, said to Paula. “What does he consider synthetic DNA?”
The intern presented the data findings: “He said he realized this strand was similar to the structures that enable frogs to secrete poison from their skin. So he made algorithmic adjustments with the other unknown strands,” Tina reported. “After he got a working sequence, he even instructed the system to recreate what the creature looked like.”
“What it looks like?” April asked. “As in, using the DNA we have a picture of the dinosaur?”
Tina opened the sketch file.
April noticed Mason hadn’t said a word the whole time, and Mason’s head hung low. “You all right, hun? You look sick?” April asked.
“I knew it! He’s full of shit!” Paula shouted out loud to the others as soon as she saw the image. April rushed over to have a look.
“Are you kidding me? They’re making fun of us. Why are they so immature?” April wondered.
“Because they think it’s funny,” Paula said, chastising Christian’s digital reconstruction of the animal. “We’ll get them back.”
Tina shrugged, looking sideways at the picture- a hybrid dinosaur with human-like features. “It’s a clever drawing.”
“Belongs in a comic book. I knew he wasn’t serious,” Paula huffed.
“So what’s that mean,” Tina was confused. “It’s not an animal?”
“It means he’s patronizing us. We kept insisting it was a dinosaur, so he sequenced the DNA until he got something to shut us up.” Paula examined the picture further. “That’s not even a dinosaur; that’s a… I don’t know what that is.”
Tina left the station to tend to her routine, and she emptied out a large crate filled with potted plants.
Mason couldn’t muster the energy to argue, so she found solace in the restroom where she was only accompanied by the sound of a leaky faucet.
She gripped the sink and hung her head. The sound of dripping water resonated in her mind. The paint on her fingernails looked brittle and chipped, and her wild hair looked a mess. Finally, the breaths came easily. Her head drooped, and she almost fell asleep where she stood as the rhythm each droplet made plopping on the ceramic hypnotized her…
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Bentley Dean 