The Flock

by James Robert Smith

  Staring, he waited while the information was brought up as a series of files. The little horizontal graph told him when each shot was ready. He had taken six photos before he’d seen the thing in the thicket, and now there were sixteen shots showing. Out of ten, he should have one that would be worth looking at. If he were lucky, he’d have at least a single shot that would prove to him that he had actually seen what he thought he’d seen, and had not merely been panicked.

  But there couldn’t be what he thought he’d seen. There couldn’t truly be such creatures still living. He waited, standing there like a speedfreak, impatient for the laptop to do what he’d commanded it to do. There was a beep: Download complete.

  Dodd unhooked the digital camera and tossed it on the bed. Slowly, now that he had it all there waiting on him, he sat and began to scroll down the files with the pointer. He knew that the first six shots were worthless stuff. He’d just been bored and had taken some pictures of the town, one of some kind of turtle plodding across the Salutations village green. He pointed to shot number seven and called it up.

  Band by band, the image began to appear on the laptop’s small, grainy screen. He stared at it. Nothing but brush, part of his shoe. This one was from before he’d fully raised the camera.

  He loaded the next.

  What was that?

  Through the obscuring screen of a thicket, he could clearly make out a clawed, scaly foot. Perfectly, he could see three toes. And those claws. The rest was just brush and palmetto.

  He scrolled to the next. A mishmash of vegetation.

  The next. Similar.

  And then the fifth. He stared. This couldn’t be. This was not possible.

  “A dinosaur,” he whispered. “Jurassic Park, for real.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The sun had set by the time Kate had gotten a truck with which to take Ron back to his own vehicle. Ron had walked with her back to a garage that held no less than a dozen trucks of various makes, each rigged for a particular task, it seemed. And there had been four-wheelers, all terrain vehicles. Ron had made mention of those.

  “What’s your boss doing with ATVs? I would have thought he’d hate those things, considering they’re responsible for tearing up all kinds of habitat.”

  “Oh, we don’t use them very often.”

  As he climbed into the cab of the pickup, he looked back and remarked once again. “I’m surprised he has them, at all.”

  “Everything in moderation,” she told him, climbing in on the driver’s side.

  “That doesn’t actually sound like your kind of philosophy, Kate.” He buckled himself in, admiring the interior of the vehicle. He immediately noticed that it was equipped with some pretty serious hardware.

  “Well, that’s Vance Holcomb speaking. Not I. And, anyway, he’s a man of contradictions. I’m sure you’ve heard the tales. Even his fellow environmentalists alternately love and hate him, depending on what’s cooking in that amazing brain of his.” She inserted a key into the ignition and the truck pulled soundlessly out of the garage, the door automatically shutting behind them.

  “I’ll be damned,” Ron said. “This truck has an electric motor?”

  “Dual systems.”

  “What?”

  “Electric and propane. We can switch to propane if we want to.”

  “You’re joking.” He looked the cab over again, checking out as many details as he could in the cool, green light from the dash. “I’ve never seen one of these.”

  “Hey. Vance is a wealthy man. He buys only the best.” Kate tooted the horn and Ron saw two fellows appear from the shadows to unlock the gates and let them out. She waved at them and muttered thanks, even though they couldn’t hear her through the raised windows. In a moment the compound was a couple of distant lights in the darkness, then gone. They were on a single lane road that was merely a couple of sandy tracks in the wiregrass, a narrow gap that led through the woods, meandering back and forth. “I like driving this little road,” she said. “We didn’t cut it through here, you know. We just cleared out a couple of loblolly pines and that was all the construction needed. The big trucks that brought in the building materials did most of the work for us, and the forest has even repaired most of that damage.”

  Ron nodded. “He seems sincere about saving this place. I have to say it’s an important site. But I don’t know if he’s going to get what he wants.”

  Kate glanced his way just as the dirt road met up with one of the paved roads that marked the current boundary of Salutations. “You might be right. But it would hurt my heart to see him fail. You’ve seen a little of it. This place deserves to be saved, despite shoddy impact statements from the government, high powered lawyers from an entertainment conglomerate, and the slippery good ol’ boy politics of a thinly veiled neo-Nazi.” There was an edge in her voice. The truck bounced as it climbed up from sand to asphalt.

  “I agree with you. It’s a big place. Lots of varied habitat.”

  “Ron, I don’t think you have a grasp on this place. Not really. You ought to take a look at it. I mean, a really good look. It’s one of the largest unprotected roadless areas in the eastern United States. It has to be preserved. As is.”

  In the dark of the cab Ron looked at Kate’s face outlined from the bluish glow from the lighted dash. He was finding himself more attracted to her the longer he was with her. “Sorry about what I said today. In Levin’s lab, I mean.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “That’s okay. Don’t mention it.”

  “I just wanted to apologize. The reason I said it, well, that guy Levin was getting on my nerves. He was baiting me. Maybe he’s jealous that I was out hiking around with you, or something.” He cleared his throat, feeling nervous again. “Are you two…attached?”

  “Attached? Me and Levin? Heavens, no.” She glanced his way. “What was he saying? Did he say something about me?”

  “Not in so many words, no. It’s hard to describe. He was just giving me a hard time. Making innuendoes. I’m not making any sense, am I?”

  “Sure you are. Look, I’ve known Adam for nine years, and I know exactly what you’re talking about. He can be quite irritating.” They were going through the center of Salutations. The lights were bright, the quaint mall bustling, people walking down the streets. The place looked very nice. She slowed the truck to a crawl, to avoid hitting any of the kids who might dart into the street. She’d seen kids do that here in the past.

  “Apology accepted, then?”

  “No need for one, but if you feel like giving one, then sure. Apology accepted.” Kate smiled at Ron and accelerated gradually through a green light.

  “Then how about going out with me this Friday? I know some nice places to eat. Some nice clubs. I was thinking about driving over to Melbourne. How about it?”

  Kate was quiet for several seconds. It seemed like minutes to Ron, and he was beginning to become uncomfortable. She reached over and flipped a switch, letting in cool air. Finally, she spoke. “Look. You don’t know me that well. There are some things happening for me right now that are keeping me very busy. But, I’d like to make the time to get to know you.”

  Ron pressed his lips together. Okay. A mystery woman. “I can’t imagine what I’d need to know before taking you out. But, okay. Let’s talk about it.”

  For the first time since he’d met her that morning, an expression of something like anger crossed her face. “Not now. This isn’t the time or the place. We’ll talk later. Maybe tomorrow, if you come by the compound. Hell, there’s three days before Friday.”

  Ron reached back and grunted, pulling his wallet free. He opened it, dug around until he found the small bundle of cards he carried there. “Here,” he said, handing one to her. “This is a business card. I have to have them for when I’m doing interpretive talks for schools, tourist groups. They have my home phone number. Give me a call and we can make some time. Just to talk.”

  Without looking at him, Kate reached out and took the ca
rd and stuffed it in the breast pocket of her shirt. “Okay.” Her eyes were on the road as they left the town center behind and faded into the darkness toward the residential neighborhoods. “Now. Where did you park your truck?”

  “North side of town,” he told her. “Phase Three, they call it. I parked right next to that substation.”

  “I know exactly where you’re talking about,” she said. “I’ll have you right there.”

  She made a couple of right turns, the headlights of the truck spotlighting freshly mown lawns and smart cars parked in pale, concrete driveways, waiting to pull into wide garages. “I hate this place,” she said. And then they were there, her bright beams illuminating Ron’s truck. “This the place, fella?”

  “This is the place,” he told her, smiling at her and offering his hand. She took it, gripped it, and released him. “Thanks for the ride, good lookin’.”

  “Anytime,” she said as he slid out. He smiled again, waved, and shut the door.

  While Ron walked to the truck and climbed in, she waited until he had started it and was pulling away. Once, when she was younger, she had dropped a friend at a vehicle, a situation similar to this one, and had driven away without waiting; the friend’s car had not started and a four-mile hike in the dark had been made to the nearest public phone. She had always felt some guilt over that, and never wanted to repeat that kind of error.

  Falling in behind his truck, she followed for a hundred yards or so. Then he turned south, and she had to bear to the right.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tim Dodd lay in the garden tub and soaked. Soaked, he thought. He was thinking of doing that to the Inquirer. Sure, he was on their dime, but he’d earned it. They were paying for this fourth floor room, an expensive room at that. They were footing the bill for this hot bath and for the room service, which he had abused for the past two weeks. But they had gotten some good articles from him. Roe Fox, his immediate editor, had admitted that they received a flood of calls and letters concerning his pieces on Salutations. He’d boosted sales considerably in the South, Fox had told him. But the story was starting to flicker out. People had seen enough photographs of trussed up alligators in the back of some gator hunter’s pickup truck. And the hospital bed photos he’d gotten of the fat jogger who’d been nailed by the cottonmouth were topflight, certainly. But the paper had run it twice and that kind of stuff was losing its punch.

  “Either build up this giant snake thing you’ve got going, or head on back. You can’t run up your expense account like this forever,” Fox had told him.

  “I’m not making this up, Roe. These people really are losing their pets to some silent predator coming out of the woods. For real.”

  “Save it for the funny papers, Tim. This is Roe Fox you’re talking to. Now, find your giant snake or get your ass back to home base. You’ve got a week, son.”

  And that had been four days ago. That’s why he had been desperate enough to follow that Riggs fellow into the forest. Riggs. He wondered how much Riggs knew. And Tatum. And that nut, Grisham. Damnation. Dodd stretched to his full length in the hot, steaming water, and still his toes could not touch the far end of the tub. He squinted his eyes in pleasure and watched tendrils of vapor steaming up from the soapy water, rising up to condense on the bonewhite tile above. He slid down until his head was submerged, then he surfaced, scrubbing shampoo into his scalp.

  “Ouch,” he said to himself, his nail coming in contact with a laceration on the top of his head. When he’d calmed down after downloading the contents of the digital camera, he had slowly realized the extent of the scratches and cuts all over his body. And his hair had been home to a couple of ticks that had buried their bloodthirsty little heads near his right ear. Shuddering, he recalled how he had pried one loose from his groin and another from his left armpit. Filthy place, those forests. He had stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, watching the blood and the dirt run down the drain before he had drawn this deep bath.

  Taking the bar of scented soap from its place in a clam-shaped tray, he swirled it in his small hands, examining the cuts thorns and grass had sliced there. Even now the soap was causing the wounds to sting, but the slight pains had ceased to bother him. A very small price to pay for what he was probably going to get out of all of this. He rubbed soap in his face, lathering his beard, then submerged his head yet again, rinsing himself.

  It was time for Tim Dodd to cash in his chips, enjoy a big payday. If he did this right, he could retire. He wasn’t really the kind of guy who enjoyed this game. Yes, there were worse ways to earn a living. God knew he’d had some lousy jobs in the past, and compared to them, this gig was a dream. But the fact was that he just didn’t care for work of any type. What he wanted to do was make enough to buy a nice condo on a beach somewhere and become a gentleman of leisure. Screw working. Screw being told what to do. For years, he had been searching for the big score, and this, it seemed, was it.

  He wondered how much The Globe might bid for the story, accompanied by photographs. But he had to plan it right. He couldn’t take any chances that some legal technicality might gum up the works. Dodd had to play his cards well, and if he did, then there was a best selling book in it for him, and movie rights, too. Jesus, this was like some throwback story to the early twenties. Nobody discovered things like this in this day and age.

  Nobody but Tim Dodd, it seemed.

  But he would need some confirmation. Pictures could be faked. They could do anything with a computer, now. They could make things come to life on the movie screen so convincingly that it was impossible to say where fantasy stopped and reality began. He’d need someone to back him up. He’d need someone to admit that there was, indeed, at least one dinosaur living in the wilderness around Berg Brothers Studios’ dream town.

  Or, if it wasn’t a dinosaur, then it was certainly something that looked like a dinosaur. If not a dinosaur, then what? What else was ten feet tall and walked around on its hind legs and had small, clawed arms and talons on its scaled feet bigger than butcher knives? Dodd had stared for ten minutes at the best image he’d coaxed out of the laptop. Part of the shot had been of the thing’s head; a staring black eye focused intently on the viewer.

  Thinking of his race with it, he wondered why it had not caught up with him. It had been just behind him toward the end, just before he’d stumbled upon Grisham. Dodd had felt the pounding of its feet; it couldn’t have been more than forty or fifty feet behind him, then. Why had it run? Was it scared of men? If it had been, then it wouldn’t have chased him.

  Maybe Grisham knew about it. But no. Dodd even shook his head, convincing himself of the old soldier’s ignorance. If the Colonel had known about the thing, had suspected Dodd had seen it, then at the very least there would have been a much more unpleasant exchange between them. The guy obviously hated the crowds of people he was afraid Salutations was going to bring to his island of right wing paradise. And once word of such a creature got out, then the attention this area had gotten so far was going to be nothing in comparison. No, Grisham was not the place he would have to go to for confirmation.

  Rising from the tub, he pushed the chrome lever and let it drain. Water, cloudy with soap and with dirt began to swirl quickly away, vanishing soundlessly. Soon he was gingerly rubbing himself down with a cream white towel, careful not to rub the fabric too hard upon any of the crisscross of scratches that patterned his arms and legs. He hissed as he drew the towel along the back of his left thigh. Dodd suspected that there might be a thorn or some other foreign object still lodged in the flesh there. He’d have to go to a doctor and have it examined. The thought of someone probing the wound with a needle or some other surgical tool made him shudder. He’d give it a day or two.

  There was Holcomb and his bunch out at that ridiculous compound. The more Dodd thought about it, the more sense it made that the billionaire probably knew something about the animal he’d seen. The guy had ruined his own reputation among environmental groups for chasing aft
er nonexistent creatures like the Loch Ness monster and Big Foot. And there had been that episode a few years back when he’d claimed to have discovered a population of mastodons, or some other such extinct elephant. Actually, Dodd had to admit the guy had almost hit the nail on the head with that one. But what he’d thought was some kind of mammoth had turned out to be a mutant form of regular elephants. Someone at the Inquirer had gotten a story with legs out of it.

  However, the chances of Dodd getting through to Holcomb, to back him up on this, were probably slim and none. First of all, it was obvious to Dodd that the guy was trying to buy up all of this land and stop the studio from getting it so that Holcomb could take the credit for discovering these things. And, having “discovered” them, he would have that entire wilderness wrapped up as his private dinosaur habitat. It wasn’t a bad idea, and he’d probably try something like that himself if he had the dough and the resources to do it. Nope. He wasn’t going to get any help from Holcomb. If there was one thing he’d learned about extremely wealthy men, it was that they were very ambitious and were never happy with what money they had. He suspected guys like that were always trying to figure out how to get it all.

  And that left Dodd with your friendly neighborhood wildlife officer: Mr. Ron Riggs. It couldn’t be coincidence that he had been following Riggs right before he’d encountered the dinosaur. Of course Tim could argue that it couldn’t be chance that he had stumbled into a meeting with Colonel Winston Grisham. But he was convinced that the meeting with Grisham had been a fluke, and a lucky one if what he saw in that thing’s big eye had been hunger.

  Tim finished dabbing himself dry and went out of the bath and into the bedroom. He’d laid his clothes out, a pair of jeans and a dark blue long-sleeved shirt. Room service was going to be bringing up his supper within half an hour, and he didn’t want anyone else seeing his arms and legs covered in scratches. Maybe they wouldn’t mention it, but word would get around. And right now he didn’t want anyone passing along any kind of gossip. The other glory rags had given up on Salutations as a story, and it had been all Tim’s for the past few weeks, but one never knew. A rumor or two and he’d have competitors snooping around, trying to scoop him. He couldn’t have that, and certainly wanted to do everything in his power to prevent it.