"It's an acronym," I tell the duck sitting on the throw rug in front of the wall heater; the place is a studio apartment, so the little heater's fine for keeping it warm.

"A what?" the duck asks. She doesn't look at me like I'm crazy, but I'm pretty sure that's only because she isn't looking at me at all. Instead, she's got the latest Swiss Colony catalogue open on the floor to the pages that present their petit fours offerings.

"An acronym," I repeat. "In this case, it's an abbreviation taken from the first letters of the three words that make up your official designation, Trans-Baryonic Duck."

At this, she does look up. "Isn't that only two words?" Her voice is kind of nasally, exactly how you'd expect a duck to sound.

I shrug from my desk along the wall opposite the heater. This is the wall with the window in it, and I can see a little slice of the park down at the end of the alley and across the street without stretching my neck too far. "I guess, but there's a long history of three-letter abbreviations among U.S. military and government personnel. Of course, if you really want to get argumentative, you could point out that 'TBD' isn't really an acronym by some definitions since it can't be pronounced as a word like 'NASA' or 'CAT'."

Now she's looking at me like I'm crazy. "'CAT'? The animal?"

"The medical procedure." I shrug again. "Though a lot of professionals are referring to the test as 'a CT scan' now. So I guess that's why so many fewer felines are employed at hospitals these days."

That last? That was me trying to be funny. You can see why I don't do it very often, especially when I'm nervous. Like when, for instance, the duck I smuggled just over an hour ago out of the lab to keep it from falling prey to any further fiendish experiments starts talking to me.

The gray and brown feathers of her forehead wrinkle, so I quickly add, "And no, most hospitals don't, in fact, employ animals of any kind." I stutter to a stop at a couple technicalities. "Well, animals other than humans, I mean. And some hospitals keep, like, therapy animals—dogs and miniature horses and, yes, cats, too—but I was speaking in an entirely jocular fashion."

She opens her beak, closes it, blinks once or twice, then says, "Getting back to my first point, though, you say my name is Teebeedee?"

"You can change it," I assure her. "Since you're not legally a person, you wouldn't even have to fill out any paperwork. Just decide whatever name you'd like, and I'll start calling you that." I like to be accommodating whenever I can.

"Huh," she says. Her solid black eyes sort of lose focus for a heartbeat, then her gaze sharpens again. "Call me Tibbed. Like 'fibbed' but with a 't' at the beginning."

"Okay! Good! That's great!" I'm feeling really, really uncertain about this whole thing all of a sudden, but I don't want to be. So I try to pretend that I'm not. "Now we're getting somewhere!"

"Figuratively speaking," she says before I get a chance to, and if I was the kind of guy who fell in love, little hearts would've totally begun to pop and percolate around my head. As it is, though, all my doubts melt like so much strawberry ice cream splattered across a summertime sidewalk, and I take what's maybe my first full breath in two or three minutes.

I mean, yes, she's a talking duck. But at least she' a talking duck who understands how language is supposed to work.

"Okay," I say again, but this time I largely mean it. "Tibbed, I'm Larry. I'm a janitor at Grayson Research Development, and I...I thought maybe they were doing terrible, horrible things to you and the other animals in the Lab 15B. So I smuggled you out to see if I could manage it, and I was planning on getting the others out in the same way as soon as I could."

She's still looking at me like I'm crazy. "That's a very dangerous plan, Larry," she says, "and not very well thought out, either."

I hang my head. "I know."

I'm the first to admit that I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but that's mostly because everybody already knows it. Not a day goes by that I do something stupid, and when I do, I'll hear all about it. Just the other day at the lab, for instance, I stepped into my big plastic wheeled bucket instead of pushing it with my foot the way I'd wanted, and Dr. Grayson himself rubbed the little beard he has dangling off his chin before asking, "You're not the sharpest egg in the basket, are you, Larry?"

I answered, "I don't think eggs usually are sharp, sir."

He got a smirk on his face, and that's when I figured out that his weird little metaphor was trying to say that I was stupid. He's about my same age—not quite thirty but almost—but still, it seemed like a really rude thing to say.

Still, I need the job, so all I said then was, "Oh," and "Yes, sir," and got back to work.

Now, though, the duck I'd rescued using the plan I'd spent the last seven-and-a-half weeks working on was telling me I was stupid. I swallowed. "But if they're doing terrible, horrible things to you—"

"They are." The words are quiet, but they snap my head up and tighten my throat more thoroughly than if someone had slapped me and was strangling me. "They're twisting the very fabric of the universe to do what they're doing to us. And the threads of that fabric are getting more than a little tangled up and stretched." She shrugs her wings somehow. "I really wish I was being metaphorical about that, but I'm not."

"Then..." Part of me wants to stop there, afraid that I'll say something else stupid. But, I mean, if I worried about that, I'd never say anything. "Should I not try to rescue you all?"

"You shouldn't." She stretches out a wing, turns it in a way that I don't think duck wings turn, and moves it back and forth between the two of us. "We should."

---

"Ummm," I say as quietly as I can. We're moving through the darkened woods up the hills toward the eastern side of GRD, Tibbed padding between the trees as naturally as can be, my big black shoes seeming to find everything crunchable or snapable or crackable. "Do you have a plan?"

"Not as such," she says. "I was thinking of focusing my righteous rage into a beam of pure, incandescent power and light as a way of burning our enemies to cinders before us, but I haven't quite figured out how to do it."

I blink at her. "Can you do that?"

"I don't see why not." Hopping over a particularly lumpy tree root, she sort of fluffs her tail feathers. "That's something a trans-baryonic person should be able to do, don't you think?" She looks back and up at me.

As much as I don't want to be a complete 'Negative Nancy,' I still couldn't quite bring myself to agree. "You're the only trans-baryonic person I've ever met," I say, retreating to the shallow comfort of the literal truth. "But I've never even heard of someone focusing their rage like that."

"Hmmm." Before this very instant, I would've bet money that ducks couldn't hum. She stops, the moonlight coming through the leaves above us dappling over her and making her hard to see. "You know, I might very well be letting my incandescent rage overwhelm my judgment. Let's call that 'Plan B' and see if we can't come up with a better 'Plan A.'"

"Okay." More than a little relieved, I squat down in the dirt beside her. "Maybe we should go get my car." We'd left it in the parking lot of the Costco and cut through the woods from there for the past three or four miles. "Then I can drive us right to GDR's front gate. I'll tell Jaleel that I found you in my trunk when I got home and couldn't figure out where you came from if not there, so I brought you back."

Even though it's pretty dark, I can still see her blink at me. "Do you think this Jaleel person might just take me from you? Or do you think he might call one of the—" She shudders like she's shaking off the water of a cold pond she's just stepped out of. "One of the doctors to come get me?"

"He might." I can't lie to her. "But I don't think he will. This late at night"—I've left my cell phone in the car the way I usually do, I realize right then, so I only have a rough idea what time it might be: at least ten o'clock, and maybe even eleven, considering how far we've walked from the Costco—"there won't be anyone he can call except more guards. And I'm pretty sure they've all got stuff they're supposed to be doing. I can pretend I'm all scared, too, say that I'm afraid they'll blame me that you got out and fire me. Jaleel likes me, I think: I mean, he talks to me, which is more than most of the guards do. Maybe if I ask him to just let me in so I can return you, he'll do it."

It's hard to say when you're looking at a duck's face, but I'm pretty sure she's feeling skeptical. Still, she says, "All right. Unless—" She swivels her head, narrows her eyes at the tree, and sort of bunches up her muscles so nearly all her feathers bristle.

That's all that happens, though, and when that's all that keeps happening, she relaxes and sighs. "Still no righteous fire. So, yeah, I guess we'll have to do it your way."

She looks so downcast, I want to do something to help. So I say, "I can carry you back to the car. Maybe if you're not walking, it'll be easier for you to concentrate on finding the switch or whatever to get your fire going."

Tibbed does some more blinking at me. "Thank you, Larry," she says. "Let's give it a try."

Right up until this very moment, I haven't even thought about actually touching her. I mean, yes, I held our cat sometimes when I was a kid, but a duck? How do you even start? Especially when the duck can talk to you?

'Cause at first, I'm thinking the whole talking thing might make it easier. If I'm doing it wrong, ruffling her feathers or anything, she can tell me and we can shift around till she's comfortable. But, well, I haven't touched a woman since I hugged my sister when she moved away after my mom's funeral, and Tibbed, while she definitely isn't a human, is just as definitely a woman.

Still, she said it was okay, so I reach my arms out slowly toward her. She stands and waddles forward, gives a flap, and the next thing I know, he's pressing all warm and feathery against my chest. I don't even have to think about it: my arms just move to close underneath her, and I'm suddenly holding a duck.

It's the weirdest thing ever, even weirder than back in my apartment when this very same duck first talked to me. I can't imagine why...except maybe this somehow makes it even more real, the weight of her and the dry, salty smell of her.

I'm still staring down at her when she says, "Shall we get going, then?"

I swallow, nod—no way am I able to say anything—stand, and start us back in the direction we came.

---

It takes us another hour maybe to get back to the Costco lot, then twenty minutes or so to drive into the wooded hills and up the private road to the front gate. Fortunately, that gives us a lot of time to figure out what exactly we're going to do.

Or rather what I'm going to do. Tibbed is just going to sit there and be a duck.

And yes, she was a little grouchy when we finished the whole walk and she still hadn't harnessed the power of her righteous and incandescent rage. But she was really pragmatic about it. "Either it comes, or it doesn't," she said, nestling into the front seat of my old Civic. "So for now, we're going strictly with 'Plan A.'"

I nodded when she said it, but driving now, I'm coming to realize that 'Plan A' is me lying to Jaleel, something I've just plain never been very good at.

"Don't worry," Tibbed says for maybe the ninth time since we left the parking lot. "The biggest part of the plan is that you're scared you'll lose your job, right?"

I nod, my throat almost as tight as my grip on the steering wheel.

"Well, you really are scared, so that part won't be a lie at all." She gives a nod of her own through hers is a lot crisper and more decisive than mine. "You can also tell them if they want to take me away from you that you know the labs better than any of them since you're in there cleaning all the time. You know where I go, in other words, and can get me back into my cage quickly and easily without any of the doctors ever finding out that there's been this enormous security breach."

That sounds so reasonable, parts of me start relaxing. But then we come around a curve on the wooded mountain road, and there's GRD right there, the place looking way spookier at night than it does when I'm usually coming around this curve every other afternoon. Of course, it's a bunch of low, bland, beige buildings behind a big barb-wire fence out in the middle of what's mostly a national forest, so it always looks a little spooky. Or at least a little unsettling, like it isn't the sort of place anyone with any sense would be driving up to the front gate of.

Fortunately—in this case at least—as people always tell me, I don't have a lot of sense.

Something else occur to me, and I ask, "And then?"

She doesn't say anything. I look over, and she's doing that blinking thing again. "And then?" she repeats.

"Once we get you back inside." I jerked my head toward the approaching gate. "How do we set all the other trans-baryonic animals free?"

"Ah," she says, and she looks away.

It's just dawning on me that she doesn't have a plan for what to do once we get inside—except maybe to get her incandescent rage thing working—when the search lights from the gate snap on, all of them focused, it feels like, directly into my eyes. "Larry?" I hear Jaleel's voice ask through some sort of a loudspeaker. "Is that you?"

I flail around on the arm rest of the car's front door till my fingers flap against the button that makes the window come down. "Yeah, Jaleel!" I shout. "Hi! Can I come up there without you guys shooting me or anything?"

It's not what I want to say, but, well, it's what I do say. So there's no taking it back.

Jaleel doesn't answer. He hasn't told me to stop, though, so I keep moving forward—slowing down, of course, since the gate's right there and I don't want to crash my car into it. I get up to the line where I always have to stop so they can get a look at me before letting me in, and I stop there. "It's kind of a weird emergency," I say, still kind of loud and still with my mouth kind of sideways so I can aim it at the window without looking away from what's in front on me.

As soon as I say that, I know it's a mistake. "But not an emergency emergency!" I can't decide if talking is worse than shutting up at this point, but shutting up seems really unlikely. "It's just that when I got home, I found—"

The barrel of a rifle jabs through the window, and the end of it smacks straight into my forehead. "You fucking traitor," a voice growls from what I'm guessing is the other end of the gun.

It shuts me up pretty quickly. I almost think I've forgotten how to make noise, in fact. The lights are still blasting into my eyes, too, so I can't see anything other than the gun.

"Damn it, Carson!" Jaleel yells. "Will you just calm the Hell down?"

"Any fucker," the other voice continues to growl, "who's trying to sabotage the project gets bullets in the brain from me." Carson's one of the other guards, one I don't talk to 'cause he always looks like he wants to shoot me. "And I'm calmer'n you are, Taylor."

"Then think!" Jaleel's not quite yelling anymore, but he's still being what I'd consider too loud to be talking to a guy who's got a rifle pressed to my forehead. "If Larry was the one who stole that animal, why would he be back here?"

The round metal of the rifle pushes even harder against my forehead. "Fucking duck's right there in the passenger seat."

Things get quiet then. A little too quiet: I mean, I'd never given it any thought before, but I guess I have a preference as to the amount of noise going on around me when someone has a gun to my head. So— "I found it!" I say, trying not to squeak and failing pretty miserably. "In my car! When I got home! So I brought it back 'cause I didn't know what else to do!"

More quiet happens, but then the gun pulls away from my head. "Fucking typical," Carson growls, but it's a different sort of growl now, like he's broadened who he's mad at from just me to the rest of the whole world. "First excitement we've ever had around here, and it's a fucking mistake."

The lights are still filling into my eyes, so I don't move even a little in case more guns are maybe pointed at me. But then the lights snap off, and Jaleel is standing right beside my window, squatted down a little and peering pretty intently past me at.

I follow his gaze, too rattled to remember for an instant what he might be so interested in. But the duck's sitting there on the seat, and that brings everything back in a hurry. "See?" I say. "That's the TBD from Lab 15B, isn't it? 'Cause, I mean, what other duck would be in my car?"

"Damn," Jaleel mutters, then a little louder, he says, "Larry, you just sit right there, okay? Don't take your hands off the wheel, but relax as much as you can. Dr. Grayson's got the whole lab looking for that duck, and he's gonna be real glad you found it. So you sit right there, and I'll call him to let him know. Okay?"

This isn't like any of the plans Tibbed and I talked about on the drive up the hill, but I can't really do anything about that. I just nod like I'm terrified—which, like Tibbed said, is easy 'cause I actually am terrified. Then Jaleel steps back from the car, and I'm staring at the front gate, my eyes still blotchy from the searchlights no matter how much I've been blinking them.

"Tibbed?" I try to whisper without moving my lips. "What do we do now?"

She doesn't say anything. I glance toward her, and she's got her own eyes closed, her wings almost clenched along her sides. "Rage," she murmurs so quietly, I almost can't hear it. "Almost...found it..."

So I stop talking. I don't want to distract her, after all.

My mind's still spinning and flailing, though, like a flag in a wind storm, and the question I asked Tibbed just before we reached the gate suddenly goes sailing by: what are we supposed to do once we get her back inside?

It triggers more related questions. How do we rescue the other trans-baryonic animals? Can incandescent rage really help with something like that? And what does "trans-baryonic" mean, anyway? I looked it up a couple months ago when Dr. Grayson started the project and suddenly all these animals were in cages in Lab 15C, but all I could find was that baryons are regular atoms with protons and neutrons and electron and quarks and all that. So something that's trans-baryonic? What will that even—

"Well, hey, Larry," Dr. Grayson's smoother than smooth voice says in my left ear, and I snap my head over to see him standing there outside my car door. His little dribble of a beard looks even more dribbly than usual, and he's got a weird sour coffee smell to him that makes me want to sneeze. "Looks like you found our TBD, huh?"

I open my mouth to point out that she couldn't be "our" TBD since she doesn't belong to me even slightly—

But Tibbed herself speaks up, her eyes still closed and her body still as tight as a big feathery fist. "I'm not yours, Grayson, and you'd do well to remember that."

Dr. Grayson and I are looking at each other when Tibbed speaks, and his brow goes all wrinkled above his blinking eyes. Probably because he heard the words and couldn't figure out why my mouth didn't move. "Did...did you say something, Larry?" he asks after a couple empty seconds.

I shake my head, but the corner of my eye catches movement from the passenger seat: Tibbed slowing rising to stand on her webbed feet. "You've dabbled," she says with a little more volume and a lot more scariness, "with forces you ought not to have." Her eyes slide open, and they're not black anymore.

Instead, they look like two tiny fires burning in her feathered face.

"I," she says. spreading her wings like the Phantom of the Opera—or somebody like that—would spread his cloak, "am retribution." Her voice is getting louder now, too. "I am justice. I am the force that rebalances the dimensional scale you've knocked askew!"

Dr. Grayson's been standing there staring this whole time, but right then, with Tibbed's wings stretched above her head, he leaps to the side and shouts, "Blow it up! The whole car! Now! Before she kills us all!"

I open my mouth again to object, but then a number of things happen all at pretty much all the same time as far as I can tell: a couple spots over by the guard house give a flash and a whoosh; the fire burning in Tibbed's eyes blasts outward to surround me; and the whole world in my general vicinity explodes with light and heat and noise.

Before I can even start asking what's going on, it's over, the roaring flames everywhere bursting upward and apparently taking my Civic with them. Because I'm suddenly standing on the road in front of the gate with Tibbed floating a few feet away, her wings still spread but not flapping at all.

"Infidels!" she screams, and, I mean, you think it's be funny to hear a duck scream "Infidels!" like that. Instead, though?

It's the single more terrifying thing I've ever heard.

"You've tampered with matters beyond your comprehension!" she's shouting now, the fire crackling through her feathers. "And death is the only recompense for engaging in such trespasses!"

"What?" I say. "Tibbed?"

"Fear not, Larry!" she booms, and that's when other fiery figures start oozing through the walls of the building that houses Lab 15B. They swoop toward us, figures shaped vaguely like rabbits and mice and monkeys and cats and dogs. All the animals from the lab, in other words. "You have saved us, and so we shall save you. The rest of these foul humans, however—"

"Wait!" The last thing I want to do is argue with this thing that isn't Tibbed anymore. The fiery animal shapes are mooshing into her, changing her from a duck into...into I don't even know what: a big swirling mass of fire with wings and eyes and mouths. All the eyes and mouths were aimed at Dr. Grayson, gaping from the ground where he'd sprawled after jumping away from my car, but at my shout, they all turn and aim themselves at me.

"Larry?" something that's kind of Tibbed's voice asks from a couple of the mouths. It sounds like six or seven recordings of her being played at almost the same time.

I know it's crazy, but then I've never been one to do anything sensible. "Do you have to?" I ask.

The blinking of all those eyes makes her new fiery body ripple. "Do I have to what?"

"Kill them?" I wave from Dr. Grayson, still sprawled and staring, to the road leading down the hill, three or four guys in guards' uniforms running along it as fast, I'm guessing, as they can manage to go. "Can't you, I don't know, blow up the buildings and all the stuff so they can't do it again but not blow them up? Maybe?"

The fire of her stops swirling. "The things they did to me, Larry—"

"I know, I know." I hold up my hands between us. "But just because they're a bunch of jerks doesn't mean you have to turn into a bunch of jerks, does it?" Except that calling this trans-baryonic whatever-Tibbed-is-now-instead-of-a-duck a jerk really seems like a bad idea. "I mean, yes, they hurt you, but what good'll it do anyone or anything to hurt them back?"

Little bits of her start swirling again, and all the eyes partly close. "You're really harshing my incandescent rage here, Larry."

"I'm sorry." I hang my head, but I keep looking up through my eyebrows at her. "You've won, though. Wreck all their stuff and tell them that if they try it again, you'll wreck more than that." I shrug, raising my head. "I don't know, but it just seems to me—"

"Yes, yes, yes." The fiery shape of her squashes and stretches, flows until she's a woman about ten feet tall, beautiful and terrifying and hardly duck-like at all, wings arching up from her back. "You're a good guy, Larry." She bends down and touches molten lips to my cheek. "So I'll threaten them this time. But if they do it again..." She straightens again, all kinds of smiles all over her.

I nod, not sure I'll be able to speak. But— "Thank you," I manage to squeeze out.

She spins, and the fire of her washes over me again, pushes me backyard maybe half a step, but suddenly I'm standing on white concrete instead of the blacktop in front of the gate. A blink, and I see that I'm out in front of the Schneiders' house, one of the families who lives next door to the park at the end of my alley. I'm facing away from my building, though, facing the direction of the lab, and before I can wonder what's happening...

A ball of fire like a whole display of fireworks going off at once rises into the night beyond the Schneiders' house. I stare at it billowing upward, and maybe thirty seconds later, the low rumble of an explosion rushes past. I worry for an instant about the woods around the lab, but I know Tibbed won't let the fire spread any further than it needs to.

The glowing cloud stretches for the sky, and I blow out a breath. Guess I'll need to find myself a new job...