Page 23 of Lagoon

The door opened.

He whirled.

Nancy stepped into the lab. She was carrying a baseball bat.

Where had she gotten that? It wasn’t as if there were sporting equipment stores handy, nor was it as if they were all organizing friendly bouts of baseball.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to be here.”

“What are you doing here?” he said.

She sighed heavily, stepping into the lab. “I want to go home, Dr. Greyson.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Anderson Scott won’t let me go home,” she said.

“Well, quit,” he said, spreading his hands.

She shook her head. “Can’t quit.”

“Sure, you can,” he said.

“No, no, he knows things about me,” she said with a little shrug. “He won’t let me come back, and I know that. If this all went away, he’d come up with something else for me. But at least it wouldn’t be this hot or remote or horrible.”

“What do you mean, he knows things about you?”

“Oh, sure, I’m just going to tell you,” she said with a laugh. She moved around the room, looking up at all the tanks. “What are these?”

“Those are, um, eggs,” he said. “Experiments.”

“You’re trying to make more of them?”

“What did you think we were doing here?”

She let out a noise of dismay. “So, then, there will be a family of them we’re raising out here, generations of them, no doubt. He’ll keep me here until I die.”

He wanted to say that he was going to stop trying to breed them, but he still hadn’t come up with an answer of what they would do next, so he only spread his hands, jaw moving helplessly, no words.

“Fuck that,” Nancy suddenly growled, and she turned and smashed her baseball bat into one of the tanks.

The glass cracked.

“Hey!” Jonathan ran towards her and tried to grab the baseball bat from her.

But she used it like a weapon, and he had to duck the swing instead.

She marched over to Bub’s tank and brought the baseball bat down on that glass. A splinter of a crack appeared in the tank. “I’ll let him out, and you’ll be too busy trying to catch him again—”

“He’ll try to mate you,” he growled, running for her.

She turned, brandishing the bat. “What?”

“Well, it’s only a theory, but you’ve noticed he captures women? Only the women?”

She swallowed hard, backing away from the tank. “That’s your plan, isn’t it, Dr. Greyson? Use us, the women here, to make more of your lizardmen!”

“No, it’s not, I swear it’s not,” he said. “I would never do that. That’shorrifying.”

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