Part One CHILD CUSTODY
IT WAS BEING CALLED “the mother of all custody trials,” which might have explained why an extra fifty thousand people had poured into Denver on that warm day in early spring.
The case was also being billed as potentially more wrenching and explosive than Baby M, or Elian Gonzales, or O. J. Simpson’s battle against truth and decency. I happened to think that this time maybe the media hype was fitting and appropriate, even a tiny bit underplayed.
The fate of six extraordinary children was at stake.
Six children who had been created in a laboratory and made history, both scientific and philosophical.
Six adorable, good-hearted kids whom I loved as if they were my own.
Max, Matthew, Icarus, Ozymandias, Peter, and Wendy.
The actual trial was scheduled to begin in an hour in the City and County Building , a gleaming white neoclassical courthouse. Designed to appear unmistakably judicial-looking, it was crowned with a pointy pediment just like the one atop the U.S. Supreme Court Building. I could see it now.
Kit and I slumped down on the front seat of my dusty, trusty beat-up blue Suburban. It was parked down the block from the courthouse, where we could see and not be seen, at least so far.
I had chewed my nails down to the quick, and there was a pesky muscle twitching in Kit’s cheek.
“I know, Frannie,” he’d said just a moment before. “I’m twitching again.”
We were suing for custody of the children, and we knew that the full weight of the law was against us. We weren’t married, we weren’t related to the kids, and their biological parents were basically good people. Not too terrific for us.
What we did have going for us was our unshakable love for these children, with whom we’d gone through several degrees of hell, and their love for us.
Now all we had to do was prove that living with us was in the best interest of the children, and that meant I was going to have to tell a story that sounded crazy, even to my closest friends, sometimes even to myself.
But every word is true, so help me God.
THE AMAZING STORY actually started six months ago in the tiny burg of Bear Bluff, Colorado, which is fifty or so miles northwest of Boulder on the Peak-to-Peak Highway.
I was driving home late one night when I happened to see a streaking white flash—then realized it was a young girl running fast through the woods not too far from my home.
But that was just part of what I saw. I’m a veterinarian, Dr. Frannie, and my brain didn’t want to accept what my eyes told me, so I stopped my car and got out.
The strange girl looked to be eleven or twelve, with long blond hair and a loose-fitting white smock that was stained with blood and ripped. I remember gasping for breath and literally steadying myself against a tree. I had the clear and distinct thought that I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing.
But my eyes didn’t lie. Along with a pair of foreshortened arms, the girl had wings!
That’s correct—wings! About a nine-foot span. Below the wings, and attached somehow, were her arms. She was double-limbed. And the fit of her wings was absolutely perfect. Extraordinary from a scientific and aesthetic point of view. A mind-altering dose of reality.
She had also been hurt, which was how I eventually came to capture her, in a “mist net,” and sedate her, with the help of an FBI agent named Thomas Brennan, whom I knew better as Kit. We brought her to the animal hospital I operated, the Inn-Patient, where I examined her. I found very large pectoral muscles anchored to an oversize breastbone, anterior and posterior air sacs, a heart as large as a horse’s.
She had been “engineered” that way. A perfect design, actually. Totally brilliant.
But why? And by whom?
Her name was Max, short for Maximum, and it was incredibly hard to win her trust at first. But in her own good time she told me things that made me sick to my stomach and angrier than I’d ever been. She told me about a place called the School, where she’d been kept captive since the day she was born.
Everything you’re about to hear is already happening, by the way. It’s going on in outlaw labs across the United States and in other countries as well. In our lifetime! If it’s hard to take, all I can say is, buckle up the seat belts on your easy chair. This is what happened to Max and a few others like her.
Biologists, trying to break the barrier on human longevity, had melded bird DNA with human zygotes. It can be done. They had created Max and several other children. A flock. Unfortunately, the scientists couldn’t grow the babies in test tubes, so the genetically modified embryos had to be implanted in their mothers’ wombs.
When the mothers were close to term, labor was induced. The poor mothers were then told that their premature children had died. The preemies were shipped to an underground lab called the School. The School was, by any definition, a maximum-security prison. The children were kept in cages, and the rejects were “put to sleep,” a horrible euphemism for cold-blooded murder.