Wickedly Ever After: A Baba Yaga Novella(12)

“What exactly is it that you do here?” Barbara asked. “Liam tried to explain it to me, but I’m afraid I didn’t really understand. You somehow bring dead animals back to life?” She hoped it wasn’t some sort of necromancy. There were a few wizards who practiced such things, but they made her skin crawl.

“It’s actually quite amazing,” Phil said, his homely face glowing with pride. “We’re the only laboratory in the country that has been able to replicate the University of Newcastle’s Lazarus Project. Time magazine called it one of the most significant inventions of 2013, you know. The Lazarus Project, that is. Not us.”

“Uh-huh,” Liam said. “It’s some kind of de-extinction process, isn’t it?”

“Exactly,” Phil said. “We use breakthrough genome technology to resurrect an extinct frog—the gastric brooding frog, to be exact, which went extinct in 1983. It was actually quite a remarkable creature. Its name came from its ability to swallow externally fertilized eggs into its stomach, which then acted as a uterus until it gave birth through its own mouth. No other living creature could do this.”

Liam looked almost as green as a frog himself. “Why would they want to?” he muttered.

“Actually, this frog has some really interesting medical applications,” Phil said, his enthusiasm bringing spots of color to his pale cheeks. “It could help us to figure out how to manage gastric secretions in the gut. We use somatic cell nuclear transplantation to inactivate the nuclei of donor eggs from the great barred frog, Mixophyes fasciolatus, and replace them with the dead nuclei from the gastric brooding frog, using eggs kept in a deep freeze since the species went extinct. It’s an amazing achievement, and could herald a new era in global biodiversity.”

“Uh-huh,” Liam said again. “I have no idea what you just said, but I’m definitely impressed.”

“They are very cute,” said Babs, looking into one of the glass habitats. “I like frogs.” She bent down to gaze inside, making little croaking noises that the occupants seemed to respond to.

The three adults walked over to her and Phil pointed out a few choice specimens. To Barbara, they looked much like any other frog she’d ever seen; small and gray-green with pebbled skin and large, bulging eyes. Hard to believe that such an innocuous creature had so much power over her and Liam’s future.

“These were created by science?” Barbara said. “Truly?”

“They were,” Phil said. “But our hope is that now that we’ve got a dozen of them, male and female, they will mate on their own and re-create more without human intervention.”

“Not this one,” Babs said, pointing at a small frog at the front of the cage. “She does not like any of the boys you have.”

Phil laughed. “Kids have such great imaginations, don’t they?” But that was the one he grabbed and put into a small perforated container, which he handed to Liam, who tucked it under his coat.

“Do me a favor and try to bring it back, will ya?” Phil said. “I’d just as soon not have to explain why we are one frog short.”

“Will doing this get you into trouble?” Barbara asked.

“Nah, not really,” Phil replied. “You wouldn’t believe the things that go missing in these labs. Remind me to tell you the story about the radioactive spider sometime.”

She looked over her shoulder and up overhead with alarm. “You lost a radioactive spider?”

Liam chuckled. “It’s a joke, honey. From an old comic book.” He narrowed his eyes at his friend. “It is a joke, right?”

Phil winked at him as they excited the building. “I’ll never tell.”

They walked back over to their vehicles and stood by the side of the Airstream.

“May I ask you something?” Barbara said to Phil.

“Sure,” he said. “But if you’re worrying about what to feed the frog, it pretty much eats all the same things as any other non-bioengineered frog.”

“It’s not that, although thank you,” she said. “I don’t wish to be rude, but I was wondering why you would risk your career to steal a rare specimen for us. It seems like a huge favor to do for an old roommate.”

“Borrow,” Phil corrected absently. “And I guess Liam never told you how we met. He wasn’t just my roommate—he saved my life.”

Barbara raised one eyebrow and looked at her husband. “Really? He didn’t mention anything like that.”

“It wasn’t really a big deal,” Liam said.

“Like hell it wasn’t.” Phil stared at the ground for a minute, then raised his head to look Barbara in the eyes.

“I was young when I was in college; sixteen when I started undergrad, nineteen when I entered the master’s program. A genius IQ and little to no social skills don’t make for a great college experience, I can tell you. I had great grades, no friends, and a girl had just dated me for a week to win a bet with her pals and then dumped me in front of a bunch of drunken idiots, who laughed at me. When Liam first met me, I was standing on top of the largest building on campus, getting ready to jump off. He talked me out of it, convinced me to move in with him, then took me under his wing until we both graduated. Even introduced me to the woman who eventually became my wife.”