Microsaurs--Follow that Tiny-Dactyl

by Dustin Hansen

  Lin and I ran side by side down the twisty path until we were both out of breath.

  “Are we,” she panted, “still going in the … right direction?”

  I checked the GPS tracker. “Yeah, we’re so close we could see it any second now,” I said.

  We tiptoed around another bend in the path and right there in the middle of nowhere was a big iron fence. The space between the bars was so wide you could just about ride a bike through them, but a fence like this meant one thing and one thing only. Stay OUT!

  “Dang,” Lin said. “That’s the oldest house I’ve ever seen.”

  The dark brick house stretched up above the trees. It was a cross between a haunted mansion and a friendly old grandpa’s house. Pterodactyl-shaped gargoyles snarled down from the corners of the pointed roof, and a statue of a velociraptor on the lawn made the house look even more dangerous. But the front door was painted the happiest shade of pink I’d ever seen, and there was a bright yellow porch swing with cushions so fluffy and white they reminded me of homemade marshmallows.

  “And I thought the tree-lined path was spooky,” I said.

  Lin tossed her skateboard through the iron bars, then squeezed in so fast I didn’t have time to stop her.

  “What are you doing now?” I asked.

  “I told you. I like spooky,” Lin said. Her entire face was grinning; even her nostrils and eyebrows and the tips of her hair looked happy. “Come on, Danny. You know you can’t let me go adventuring by myself.”

  I was about to suggest we go adventuring in a place without a velociraptor statue and an iron gate when I heard a little Eeep! I looked up and froze. There it was, the ketchup-colored GPS beacon thief. It was perched on the tip of the statue’s nose. I tilted my head and raised my shoulders at it, kind of asking what I should do, and I swear I saw the little critter wink right at me just before it flew away behind the house.

  Lin was right. Even if I was feeling all jitter-buggy in my stomach, there was no way I was going to miss out on this adventure. I dried my sweaty hands on my pants, then slipped my backpack off and pushed it through the iron bars.

  “I wouldn’t miss this for a year’s supply of Big Moe’s double bacon cheeseburgers,” I said, and then I grinned because it was true. I’d take adventure over double bacon cheeseburgers any day. Especially an adventure with a real-life dinosaur involved.

  Behind the iron fence, Lin and I found ourselves standing in grass up to our knees.

  “Do you think anyone lives here?” I whispered as I checked the GPS tracker.

  “Hello! Is there anybody here?” Lin shouted, and I cringed. Stealth wasn’t her thing.

  “Looks abandoned to me,” I said.

  The little critter was really close now, so I stopped Lin and we scanned the area for it. I was about to give up when I heard the Eeep! noise again.

  “There. On the tree branch,” I said as I pointed to the little orange creature. I know it sounds strange, but I had a feeling that it was waiting for us. Like it wanted to be found.

  “What is it?” Lin whispered. “It’s really cute.”

  “I think it’s a pterodactyl,” I said.

  “A terra-what-el?” Lin asked.

  “A pterodactyl. A flying dinosaur from the Jurassic period,” I explained.

  “Hey, little Jurassic buddy. Come here.” Lin whistled as she inched forward. She held out her hand and wiggled her fingers like she was petting an imaginary dog. “We won’t hurt you.”

  The tiny pterodactyl tilted its head and looked at us like we were the strange creatures that arrived from sixty-five million years ago, then it eeeped again, flapped its batlike wings, and zoomed out of sight as fast as buttered lightning.

  We didn’t need to discuss it—we both chased after it at a full run!

  The backyard was even more overgrown than the front. Patches of dry weeds stretched up to my belt loops, and an empty doghouse sat in the shadow of an old barn, twice as run-down as the spooky mansion.

  “The ptera-whoozle-whatcha-call-it went in through that crack in the door,” Lin said, pointing to a wide barn door that was about to fall right to the ground. Next to the door there was a rusted metal sign nailed to a post about a foot taller than me. Painted on the sign in big purple letters were the words:

  “Whoever lived here knew something about dinosaurs that we don’t know,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” Lin asked.

  “If you’re less than sixty-five million years old? Well, that’s just about everyone, except…” I started to explain before Lin finished my sentence.

  “Our flying Jurassic buddy.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  I pulled my smartphone out of my backpack and started videoing the place. I got a good shot of the old barn, and I was scanning the hand-painted sign, when I heard a big creeeeak! I panned the camera over just in time to see Lin sneaking in through the big barn door.

  I couldn’t believe she was barging in. “What are you doing now?” I asked while the camera was still recording.

  “I’m entering at my own risk,” she said, completely ignoring the sign. Then she disappeared into the dark, shadowy barn.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE SECRET BARN-LAB-LIBRARY THINGY

  The inside of the old, run-down barn was totally different from the outside. It didn’t look abandoned at all. There were a couple of lamps left on, and it smelled like someone had just gobbled down a bag of microwaved popcorn a few minutes earlier. Not to mention the outside of the barn was huge, but the inside was no bigger than my bedroom back home.

  “This place is so cool,” I said as I followed Lin into the barn. We were standing in a small room that couldn’t make up its mind if it was a forgotten library, a science lab, or a secret hideout.

  “I want to touch everything in this entire place,” Lin said as she started exploring with her eyes and fingers.

  I checked the GPS tracker. It looked like the tiny dinosaur was behind the wall at the back of the room, which didn’t make sense. There wasn’t even a door there.

  Being in the barn-lab-library-hideout was exciting, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being watched, or that any second now someone would catch us snooping and throw us in jail. Or worse, summer school!

  “Have you seen one of these before?” Lin said. She was studying a fish tank tucked into a bookshelf. I stopped digging through a box of old rocks and joined her.

  An odd creature that looked half swimming snail and half miniature squid swam around inside a glowing fish tank. “Nope, but it reminds me of a fossil I saw in a book once. And there are dinosaur bones all over the place, too.” I pointed around the room at the fossils on the shelves, stuffed in between glass specimen jars and books so big you’d need a forklift to carry them home. “It looks like the person who lived here was a scientist. A paleontologist, or something like that.”

  “What’s a paleontologist?” Lin asked.

  “A scientist who studies dinosaurs,” I explained as I looked around. There were microscopes and magnifying glasses on a cluttered workbench. I peeked through a large magnifying glass to get a closer look at what I thought was a small pile of dust. But under the magnifying glass the dust turned out to be a nest and three speckled eggshells.

  “Do you think I should feed it?” Lin asked from across the room. I turned around just in time to see her sprinkling a handful of dry Fruity Stars cereal into the top of the odd fish tank.

  “Too late now, I guess,” I said.

  “It likes it,” Lin said, and she clapped her hands. “Who knew that swimming snail-squids liked Fruity Stars?”

  “You’re probably the first person to discover that in the history of the world.” I rolled my eyes. “Come check this out.” I pointed to the magnifying glass with the little nest, then I slid over for her to look at it while I moved over to check out one of the microscopes.

  “Are those eggs?”

  I looked into the microscope, found the focus knob,
and twisted while I answered. “They were eggs. Now they’re eggshells. They’ve already hatched.”

  “Do you think they could be mini-pterodactyl eggs?” Lin asked.

  My heart did a flip-flop.“You might be right!” I said, but even thinking about what that meant made me dizzy. I still wasn’t 100 percent sure that the GPS beacon thief was a dinosaur, and now we were looking at a nest with three eggshells—which could mean only one thing. More tiny pterodactyls.

  “Hey, do you think we traveled back in time?” Lin asked as she picked up a jar filled with leaves soaking in some kind of blue jelly.

  “My dad says time travel is impossible. But I just found another clue.” I leaned back and offered the microscope to Lin. I couldn’t help but smile because I knew she was going to go nutso when she saw what was inside the microscope.

  Lin looked into the eyepiece. “It’s a note.”

  Lin looked up at me. “What’s a Penrod?”

  “I’ll bet Penrod is a who, not a what. I’m wondering what a Bruno is, though,” I said as I looked around the cluttered lab.

  “Bruno is a dog!” Lin said as she held up a framed photo of a wrinkly bulldog wearing a black helmet and a black cape. She started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “There’s a green sticker on the frame that says ‘Bruno as Arf Vader’ on it. Get it? Arf Vader?” She showed me the picture again and I totally got the joke.

  “Let’s find the Bruno as Bozo picture.”

  We looked around and found more framed photos of Bruno dressed as famous people like Bilbo Waggins, Sherlock Bones, Winnie the Poodle, and my favorite, Bruno as Hairy Pawter.

  But no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find Bruno as Bozo.

  “All right. We know Bruno is a dog, but who’s Bozo?” I asked.

  “I think he was a clown. Bozo the Clown, ya know?” she said, and something sparked in my mind.

  “Of course! I’ve seen it five times already. It’s right here.” I pointed to a framed picture of Bruno the slobbery bulldog wearing a bright rainbow-colored wig and a fake red nose. “It was hanging on the wall all along.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for? Give it a twist and let’s go save this Penrod guy,” Lin said.

  I reached up and took the picture in both hands, but it wouldn’t come off the wall. I gave the picture a twist and a clicking sound tink-tink-tinked behind the wooden wall at the back of the small room. Everything started to rumble and shake; even a bit of the water from the fish tank sloshed to the floor.

  “What’s going on?” Lin asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we better—” I started.

  Running, screaming, even hiding under the desk were all things that crossed my mind, but they were all drowned out by my curiosity as the back wall of the secret barn-lab-library room began to lower.

  A cloud of steam poured over the wall and filled the dry air of the small barn-lab-library-hideout, as a jungle was revealed behind the secret wall. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at: a real-life, honest-to-goodness, vines-hanging-from-bright-green-trees, ferns-and-mushrooms-on-the-soggy-soil jungle.

  “Holy pepperoni pizza,” I said.

  “With extra cheese,” Lin added for gooeyness’ sake.

  The wall thumped as it lowered all the way down, and Lin and I tiptoed forward.

  “Mr. Penrod. Are you in here?” I asked, but nobody answered.

  “Maybe he’s asleep,” Lin suggested.

  There was a metal step just inside the fresh-smelling jungle, and I stood on it to get a better look. Below the step it looked like someone had spilled a desk drawer of office supplies: staplers, pushpins, sticky notes, and stamp pads. A red-and-white drinking straw reached up from a pile of rubber bands and leaned against the metal step. I noticed someone had taped the straw to the side of the step. I was trying to imagine why someone would tape a straw to anything when Lin walked out onto the step with me. With the two of us on it, the step dropped an inch, and something clicked into place. A sound that reminded me of a cross between a video game spaceship and a vacuum cleaner whirled above our heads. I looked up just in time to see a bright blue light flash on. It all happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to think about moving out of the way.

  The blue light felt cool and sparkly. It was like being stuffed in a freezer full of glitter for a second, and then the cold feeling was gone.

  “Uh, Danny. I think the barn is growing. A lot.”

  “Either that, or we’re…”

  “SHRINKING!” we both yelled as we realized what was going on.

  In less than a second, I’d gone from being the fourth-tallest kid at Jefferson Elementary to the second-smallest kid on Earth. I couldn’t get my thoughts right. Nothing made sense. The tiny dinosaur, the living fossil in the fish tank, and now Lin and I were the size of a couple of raisins. And not plump, juicy raisins, either. More like dried-up raisins that had been dropped under the couch and forgotten about for a year and three months.

  Lin started running around on the metal step, which was about three times bigger than a soccer field. She was waving her hands above her head, flailing around and shouting like a crazy person. “I’m the size of a bug! Help me! I’ve been shrinkified and I AM THE SIZE OF A BUG!”

  I tried not to get caught up in her crazy, but it is next to impossible not to freak out when you realize that you are suddenly very squashable. I ran around for a while, too, waving my arms and shouting for help, then somehow I ran out of breath and found the whole situation hilarious at the same time.

  I started laughing so hard that I couldn’t run around and freak out anymore, which made Lin pause. She looked at me and started laughing, too. I fell to my knees, holding my sides because they were starting to ache, then I rolled onto my back and looked up toward the sky as I tried to catch my breath.

  The barn that we once stood in was so large that it faded away in the misty air around us. The metal step was cool against my back and I took a few deep breaths and started to think again because I had a feeling if we wanted to unshrink again someday, thinking was going to be important.

  “What just happened, Danny?” Lin asked. “Is this even possible?”

  “If you would have asked me that thirty seconds ago, I would have said no.” I pointed to the drinking straw taped to the metal stair. “But that red-and-white straw is bigger than the Ramp-O-Saurus, so I’d have to say it’s more than possible. I think it actually happened. The real question is, what do we do now?” I asked.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE MICROTERIUM

  Lin zipped down the straw like a pro, landing with a perfect dismount. I, however, tumbled all the way down, rolling head over heels, until the straw spit me out at the bottom in a big poof of dust, but that didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.

  “That was awesome!” I said. “If I could get back up there, I’d do it again.”

  “Let’s try,” Lin said as she started kicking around the office supplies from the spilled drawer, looking for something to help her climb back up the step.

  I stood up and dusted off my shorts. We were standing in the shadow of the step, and I looked up. It was at least ten times taller than me. AT LEAST! I wasn’t so sure I’d want to climb up there even if Lin found a way. “I think we better try to find this Penrod guy first. Maybe he knows a way to unshrink us.”

  “Is unshrink even a word?” Lin asked. She found a paper clip bigger than a surfboard and she was tying a piece of dental floss that looked like a big waxy rope to it.

  “I don’t know if unshrink is a word, but it’s what we need to do,” I said.

  “So, this is Microland, eh?”

  “Penrod called it the Microterium in the note. But no matter what you call it, it’s pretty strange.”

  “Ya think?” Lin said. She pulled on the dental-floss rope, lifting one end of the paper clip up as high as her knee, then letting it fall to the ground. It kicked up a little cloud of dust. “Boom!”
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br />   I guess in a way I should have been scared, or worried, but it was just the opposite. My mind buzzed with new ideas and thoughts about being small enough to ride an ant. I had a lot of questions about the place, but first I wanted to know if my technology worked after it had been zapped so small. The first thing I checked was the video camera on my smartphone, and it worked perfectly.

  I guess when you’re regular size you really miss the details, because now that I was the size of a garden pea, everything looked brand-new to me. The whole place was green and alive. What I thought was moss before was actually fields of leafy plants and knee-high grass. What would have looked like an ordinary rock to me a few minutes ago now looked like a boulder so big it would crush a house.

  But that wasn’t the half of it. The place was covered in plants I’d never seen before. Orange flowers with blossoms the size of a large pizza, long spiky plants with leaves that looked like a pirate’s sword, and mushrooms so big you could take a nap under one and never worry about getting a sunburn. I was videoing a group of plants that reminded me of a row of bright blue trumpets when I heard a snort.

  “Nice one, Danny,” Lin said with a little laugh.

  “Um, that wasn’t me,” I said. I turned to look back at Lin. She’d been playing with a stamp pad and her hands were dark blue.

  Just then, something HUGE rumbled in the grass behind Lin. It made a half-barking, half-snorting sound and I forgot every word in the dictionary except one.

  “RUN!”

  A creature nearly the size of a minivan burst through the tall grass behind Lin. It had three horns, big feet, and a crest of leather and bone behind its head.