Read Online Lightning People by Christopher Bollen - Free Book Online Page A

but Del’s favorite and the subject of her many notebooks intended to be used one day to create the backbone of a book on rattlesnake mothers. She stared down at the snake’s bloated body on the floor and dropped to her knees in front of it, pushing away the tears that clotted her eyes.
    â€œIt started striking. You had to do it.” Francine looked around at the other keepers for support. “That’s code. Well, she had to, didn’t she?”
    Del glared up at her.
    â€œWhy were you holding her without a hook?” she yelled. “Why were you holding her at all?” But Del didn’t wait for those answers. Her fingers massaged the soft, limp stomach, still wet and glistening with the pattern of sand-blown diamonds, feeling for the pouch of eggs in the oviducts. Even with her fingers shaking, Del knew what she had to do. She would try to save them. She would try to rescue
the embryos trapped in the uterus that, even if alive, would never find their own way out of their mother by themselves. Kip reached over the counter and handed her a scalpel, and she sliced Leto down the side, cut the damp distended belly open, and wedged her fingers inside.
    â€œThey’re coming,” she said to Kip. “I can get them.”
    Ten babies were cut from Leto’s side in ten minutes. Ten frail slivers lying like ribbons on the linoleum floor. Nine dead fetuses to be burned in the zoo incinerator along with their mother, according to code. But one, at the breaking of its egg, bright as a yolk, slipped gradually from its sac and started breathing, a mere three inches of black cord. Del lifted the baby with her fingers into a small plexiglass terrarium that Kip held out in front of her. “Be careful,” she warned him. “This one has all the poison he needs already in his cheeks.”
    When Del stood up, wiping the snake’s amniotic fluid off her hands and staring at the baby coiled at the bottom of the clear container, the tears returned. She didn’t know if the tears were for killing Leto or for saving something counted as lost. She looked around for Francine, but the young zookeeper had disappeared, running for fresh air outside in the park. Kip stretched the department phone, tethered to its extra-long cord, over the counter and handed it to her. Suddenly she was speaking to Abrams, who was demanding a full account of the matter and belching in anger over the loss of a specimen.
    Abrams didn’t congratulate her. Instead he railed on about the canker of his dwindling staff, Francine Choi. Had she not followed regulations? Had she not heeded the signs, learned the drill, used a metal clamp instead of bare fingers to transport a viper? Didn’t she know a pregnant mother was particularly susceptible to distemper? Did she know what kind of politics were involved with killing an animal on zoo grounds? “It’s an embarrassment,” he moaned. Del considered ratting out the young keeper who had entered the department a month ago and had since failed in pretty much every way possible. But her allegiances were not with Abrams, not even in this moment of silent acknowledgement that passed over the telephone. She knew that Francine was an immigrant too, brought over from Korea on the promise of an American visa. Once they have you, they have you. And if you mess up, there’s the airplane home.

    â€œIt didn’t go down like that,” Del replied, trying to sound impartial, even though Kip was already wrapping Leto in a plastic tarp with her nine dead infants. “It was an accident, and there was no way of saving her. I’ll talk to Francine about it.”
    He said he’d see her Monday early. He’d want to inspect the baby himself.
    When she hung up the phone, Kip grabbed her by the arms while he made the sound of an arena-sized roar.
    â€œYou’re amazing, you know that?”
    â€œI killed an animal that belongs to the zoo,” she