Fear Nothing

lizard feet stamping everything flat.”
        “The problem is getting the healthy genes into the patient. Mostly they use crippled viruses to carry the genes into the cells. Most of these are retroviruses.”
        “Crippled?” Bobby asked.
        “It means they can't reproduce. That way they're no threat to the body.
        Once they carry the human gene into the cell, they have the ability to neatly splice it into the cell's chromosomes.”
        “Delivery boys,” Bobby said.
        “And once they do their job,” Sasha said, “they're supposed to die?”
        “Sometimes they don't go easily,” I said. “They can cause inflammation or serious immune responses that destroy the viruses and the cells into which they delivered genes. So some researchers have been studying ways to modify retroviruses by making them more like retrotransposons, which are bits of the body's own DNA that can already copy and slot themselves into chromosomes.”
        “Here comes Godzilla,” Bobby told Sasha.
        She said, “Snowman, how do you know all this crap? You didn't get it by looking at those pages for two minutes.”
        “You tend to find the driest research papers interesting when you know they could save your life,” I said. “If anyone can find a way to replace my defective genes with working copies, my body will be able to produce the enzymes that repair the ultraviolet damage to my DNA.”
        Bobby said, “Then you wouldn't be the Nightcrawler anymore.”
        “Goodbye freakhood,” I agreed.
        Above the noisy drumming of the rain on the roof came the patter of something running across the back porch.
        We looked toward the sound in time to see a large rhesus leap up from the porch floor onto the windowsill over the kitchen sink. Its fur was wet and matted, which made it look scrawnier than it would have appeared when dry. It balanced adroitly on that narrow ledge and pinched a vertical mullion in one small hand. Peering at us with what appeared to be only ordinary monkey curiosity, the creature looked quite benign-except for its baleful eyes.
        “They'll probably get annoyed quicker if we pretty much ignore them,” Bobby said.
        “The more annoyed they are,” Sasha added, “the more careless they might get.”
        Biting into another slice of the sausage-and-onion pizza, tapping one finger against the stack of yellow pages on the table, I said, “Just scanning, I see this paragraph where my dad explains as much as he understood about this new theory of my mother's. For the project at Wyvern, she developed this revolutionary new approach to engineering retroviruses so they could more safely be used to ferry genes into the patient's cells.”
        “I definitely hear giant lizard feet,” Bobby said. “Boom, boom, boom, boom.”
        At the window, the monkey shrieked at us.
        I glanced at the nearer window, beside the table, but nothing was peering in there.
        Orson stood on his hind legs with his forepaws on the table and in more pizza, lavishing all his
        “You know how kids try to play one parent against the other,” I warned her.
        “I'm more like his sister-in-law,” she said. “Anyway, this could be his last meal. Ours, too.”
        I sighed. “All right. But if we aren't killed, then we're setting a lousy precedent.”
        A second monkey leaped onto the windowsill. They were both shrieking and baring their teeth at us.
        Sasha selected the narrowest of the remaining slices of pizza, cut it into pieces, and placed it on the dog's plate on the floor.
        Orson glanced worriedly at the goblins at the window, but even the primates of doom couldn't spoil his appetite. He turned his attention to his dinner.
        One of the monkeys began to slap a hand rhythmically against the windowpane, shrieking louder than ever.
        Its teeth looked larger and sharper than those of a rhesus ought to have been, plenty large enough and sharp enough to help it fulfill the demanding role of a predator. Maybe this was a physical trait engineered into it by the playful weapons-research boys at Wyvern. In my mind's eye, I saw Angela's torn throat.
        “This might be meant to distract us,” Sasha suggested.
        “They can't get into the house anywhere else without breaking glass,” Bobby said. “We'll hear them.”
        “Over this racket and the rain?” she wondered.
        “We'll hear