Altar of Eden Read Online Free Page A

pair of monkeys responded to her. Still hugging each other, they crept forward, clinging tightly. Not that they could ever truly be apart.
    “Siamese twins,” Lorna said.
    The two were joined at the hip—literally—fused together, sharing three legs but bearing four arms.
    “Poor things,” she whispered. “They look half starved.”
    They came to the bars, plainly needing reassurance as much as sustenance. Their eyes were huge, especially in such small faces. Jack sensed their hunger and fear and also a trace of hope. He reached into a pocket and removed a granola bar. He ripped it open with his teeth, broke off a piece, and handed it to Lorna.
    She gently passed it through the bars. One of them took it with its tiny fingers—then the pair retreated to share the prize, huddled around it, nibbling from both sides. But their eyes never left Lorna.
    She glanced to Jack. For a moment he saw the girl he remembered from his school days, before he left for the Marines. She had dated his younger brother, Tom, during their sophomore year—and the summer thereafter. He shied away from that memory.
    Lorna must have sensed this well of pain. Her face hardened, going professional again. She nodded to the other cages. “Show me.”
    He led her along the rows of cages, shining his flashlight into the shadowy recesses. Each enclosure held a different animal, some familiar, some exotic. But like the monkeys, they all bore some twisted abnormality. They stopped next at a large glass-walled terrarium that held a fifteen-foot Burmese python curled around a clutch of eggs. The snake looked ordinary enough until its coils slid more tightly around the eggs and revealed two pairs of folded vestigial legs, scaled and clawed, remnants of its lizardlike evolutionary origin.
    “It looks like a severe form of atavism,” Lorna said.
    “And that would be what in English?”
    She offered him a small apologetic smile. “Atavism is where a genetic trait, lost for generations, reappears in an individual.”
    “A genetic throwback?”
    “Exactly. In this case, a throwback to a time before snakes lost their limbs.”
    “That’s a mighty long throw, isn’t it?”
    She shrugged and moved on. “Most atavism is caused by the accidental recombination of genes. But I don’t think it was accidental here, not with these many cases.”
    “So you’re saying someone bred them this way on purpose. Is that even possible?”
    “I can’t rule it out. Genetic science has come a long way and continues to push boundaries. At ACRES, we’ve successfully cloned wild cats. We’ve even merged a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to produce a cat that glows in the dark.”
    “Mr. Green Genes. I read about that,” he said. “In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I called for you. I needed an expert on genetics and breeding. Someone to tell me who could have produced this bizarre cargo.”
    He led her through the hold. A wire cage held a mass of winged bats the size of footballs.
    “Vampire bats,” Lorna said. “But they’re ten times the size they should be. May be a form of primordial gigantism.”
    Similarly a caged fox down the row was the size of a bear cub. It hissed and growled and threw itself against the bars. They quickly moved past, stopping briefly at a tall cage that held an ordinary-size parrot, but it had no feathers.
    It cawed loudly, leaped to the front bars, and studied them while cocking its head back and forth. Jack had a hard time hiding his disgust. There was something so alien and wrong about its appearance.
    Lorna just moved closer. “When baby parrots first hatch, they’re featherless or covered only with a light down. I don’t know if this one’s stunted into an infantile state, or if it’s a throwback, too. In fact, it’s theorized that birds are the closet living relatives of dinosaurs.”
    Jack didn’t argue. The creature—leather-skinned and beaked— definitely had a prehistoric look to it. But what really got him