by B. C. CHASE
Doctor Ming-Zhen thought for a moment. “So we are here to prepare for a billion people? How could you possibly have expected to bring that many people with five submarines?”
“We never planned to bring them here. We’re not saving humans. We’re saving the human race.”
Soldiers led the way through misty forest. Vegetation was not thick enough to impede progress, and the ground was soft and spongey. Doctor Ming-Zhen found that walking was in one way easy, but that it was almost as if he had to learn how to do it all over again. His strides were like slow bounds, and he found it difficult to control his gait, especially when the footing was dramatically firmer. Although the air was cool, it was thick with humidity, and he found that his clothes were soaked in a matter of minutes. Despite the humidity breathing was easy, and he thought the air must by richly oxygenated because he found his body required altogether less breathing.
Jia Ling commented, “It’s going to be very hot when the sun comes up, isn’t it?”
Zhang said, “There is no day, here.”
“No day? But what about the plants?”
“You mean photosynthesis?”
“Yes. They don’t look dormant.”
The conversation was interrupted by a number of hooting calls that came from ahead.
Doctor Ming-Zhen was spellbound when he spotted a two-foot-tall animal walking on two legs take a step out from foliage into a clearing ahead. It had a beak much like a parrot, large eyes, and a hard frill on the back of its head. The mottled green skin was pebbled with a combination of larger ovals and much smaller ones. One of its two little arms pushed aside a branch as it moved fully into view. Its tail was thick and looked somewhat out of place as compared to the small size of its body. It sported a long sail near the end that it raised and lowered intermittently. On the whole, it looked rather like a little bipedal triceratops dinosaur without horns. Walking gracefully like a bird, it tilted its head to carefully survey the clearing with large, soft eyes. A number of juveniles joined it, hopping out from the ferns like little ducklings. They pecked at the ground with their tiny beaks.
Doctor Ming-Zhen whispered, “Jia Ling!” while ushering her forward.
“Graciliceratops mongoliensis,” she uttered under her breath, in amazement, “Right?”
“I think so,” he replied, gazing in awe. “Definitely ceratopsian.”
Zhang asked, “Are they dangerous?”
“I wouldn’t think so. But we should observe them to be sure.”
The animal was raising its snout, apparently sniffing the air. Then it lowered its head to look directly at them. It had smelled them. This would be consistent with findings that its relative, Psittacosaurus mongoliensis, had a large olfactory cavity, Doctor Ming-Zhen thought. The infants had already started hopping toward them with curious excitement. Hooting a warning to its brood, the adult walked past the little ones and straight toward Doctor Ming-Zhen and Jia Ling. With a gracefully lopping gate, it reached them quickly and inquisitively stared up at them, cocking its head. It chirped. Its face was bird-like, and yet also reminded Doctor Ming-Zhen of a sea turtle’s, with the eyes bulging out slightly. He was surprised by the emotive reaction he was having as he stared into its eyes. It was cute, and he was sure that if he had said anything to it, he would have used a baby voice. He felt a nearly irresistible urge to pet it, but remained cautious.
Jia Ling apparently had no such inhibition. She reached for its head and, before he could stop her, was stroking its nose while it busily smelled her. She patted its forehead, then wrapped her fingers around the edge of the hard frill. It didn’t welcome this, and snorted its displeasure, backing away. With a stamp of one foot, it loped back to its brood. It moved with remarkable agility and speed. Leading the little ones farther into the clearing, it was met by another, slightly larger Graciliceratops that had inexplicably escaped Doctor Ming-Zhen’s notice. This one had feathers that formed a colorful, stiff fan off its frill. It lowered the feathers to cover its neck as it exchanged an amorous greeting with the other dinosaur. Doctor Ming-Zhen forgot to breathe as the creatures lowered their heads and reach out their hands to softly strum each other’s cheeks. It looked like they were genuinely affectionate, though his scientific mind attributed the behavior to survivalist instincts—many bird species mated for life and continuous courtship was common in order to maintain the relationship and, ultimately, propagate each individual’s genes. When they finished their greeting, they proceeded to peck their way across the clearing, picking up what appeared to be little stones and raising their heads to swallow them.
“Seeing this,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “makes me wonder if I should have been studying living biology all this time.”
“I know what you mean,” Jia Ling said, still staring at the spectacle.
Before long, other Graciliceratops had entered the clearing one after another until a sizeable herd of perhaps a hundred animals of all ages was present.
Herd, or flock—or bale? Doctor Ming-Zhen thought to himself. Seeing their turtle-like appearance made him think bale was most appropriate. A bale of Graciliceratops.
A fast-moving shape caught his eye from high above the clearing. At first glance he thought it was an eagle. But as it lighted on the ground, raising to its two-foot height, a visceral chill ran down his spine. It had red and white rings on its feathered tail, yellow rings around its eyes, brown wings, and a gray body. The Graciliceratopses rushed away from it in alarm, hooting and bumping into one another in a quickly developing chaos. Eagerly leaning forward with three-clawed hands extended from beautifully feathered arms, the new arrival confidently stared at the Graciliceratopses with fiery red eyes darting from one to the next, as if to choose. It opened its mouth to hiss, revealing rows of razor sharp teeth, and began to run.
Sinornithosaurus, Doctor Ming-Zhen’s paleontological mind told him. A deadly predator from the same family as velociraptor; Dromaeosauridae.
With lightning speed, it ran across the clearing to the fleeing herd. Leaping onto one of the adults, it clung to the animal’s back with the claws of its feet and arms while lacerating the Graciliceratops’ neck with its teeth.
Jia Ling jumped up from where they were crouched and ran across the clearing, screaming and clapping her hands. “Get away! Stop it!”
“NO JIA LING!” Doctor Ming-Zhen screamed.
She wasn’t listening, and the Sinornithosaurus raised its bloodied snout to eye her confidently, as if to evaluate her. It looked at her entirely without fear, not as a threat or even as a rival. The cool, calculating gleam in its eye made it clear how it viewed her: as prey.
Before she could possibly react, it struck. Sprinting across the ground with its arms tucked closely in front of its breast, it squawked ferociously. The creature fastened itself to her torso and bit her neck, tearing a series of long gashes. Jia Ling tried to fight it, and it apparently had second thoughts about its attack, launching itself into the air and up to a branch overlooking the clearing.
Doctor Ming-Zhen rushed to Jia Ling. “That was very foolish!” he reprimanded, examining her wound.
“Why, because it could be venomous?” she said.
He was dumbfounded. That was of course his fear: one study had pointed to sinornithosaurus’s grooved, fang-like teeth and possible venom gland cavities in the skull as evidence that they were venomous. But why would she have run out there like that if she knew that?
As if she was reading his mind, she explained, “I just couldn’t stop myself. I had to help that Graciliceratops.”
“Well, that study was questioned by another, so hopefully the second study was right. At least these cuts don’t look too deep,” he said encouragingly. The cuts definitely weren’t deep enough to be life-threatening—not remotely. But each tooth had left one, and he knew the dinosaur had about sixty of them. Blood was freely seeping. Donte ran over and handed Doctor Ming-Zhen a first aid kit from the back pack he carried.
“Thank you,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said, opening the kit. He
took a compress and pressed it to her neck. She pointed to punctures through her clothes where the claws had gripped her, on her shoulders and chest. They didn’t appear to be more than an inch deep. “You’ll be fine,” Doctor Ming-Zhen assured her.
He looked for the Graciliceratops that had been bitten, but the members of the herd were hectically jockeying for position as they entered the forest and he couldn’t pick it out. He looked back up for the Sinornithosaurus. It was perched on the branch on two toes with huge talons, one on each foot, which far outclassed the other four toes in terms of size. It was idly cleaning its talons, staring down at Jia Ling as it did so. Then it raised its head to the sky and made a screeching cry that ended in a crackle.
When Doctor Ming-Zhen looked down again, he saw that blood had leached through the compress and was trailing down Jia Ling’s neck. He was alarmed. That didn’t seem right. She had only surface cuts. They shouldn’t be bleeding that much, he thought. He called to Zhang, “We need a doctor.”
The medic worked quickly, disinfecting the wound and applying a powder labeled TraumaDex. He patched the site with gauze and tape. It covered half her neck.
The Sinornithosaurus had followed them into the forest where they had been met by the doctor, and was now patiently watching from above. It was soon joined by a second. The new arrival seemed a little agitated, impatiently peeping down at them and hopping back and forth on the tree limb.
Jia Ling looked pale. Blood had stained her shirt. Doctor Ming-Zhen tried to say something encouraging, but couldn’t think of anything.
As the party moved away from the area, the dinosaurs followed them, flying from tree to tree. Others joined those two, and before long a group of seven Sinornithosauruses were shadowing the expedition. They were all making the shrieking cry, calling to others.
Stepping in line with Zhang, Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “We need to get rid of those things.”
“You mean shoot them?” Zhang said.
“Yes.”
“I’m not wasting ammunition to kill harmless vultures.”
Lowering his voice, Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “These are not vultures. They are fanged and could possibly be venomous.”
“Venomous?” Zhang scoffed. “Jia Ling looks fine.”
“Did you notice the red-and-white tails? Those colors are a warning sign in nature. Maybe she looks fine now, but she bled way too much. Something isn’t right. Those cuts were not that deep. And venom can take hours or even days to take a serious effect.”
“So you’re saying that she is probably dying, but that it will take a while?”
“I hope it isn’t true. Look, if you’re that concerned about ammunition, shoot only one of them. It will take a single shot and the others—”
“I’m not going to waste a shot on that. If she has been poisoned, then there isn’t much we can do to help her, is there?”
Zhou raised his voice, and uttered through clenched teeth, “I’m talking about one, single bullet.”
“You can have your bullet, Zhou. If she gets too sick to go on, I will allow you to finish her before those vultures do.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen shook his head in disbelief. Behind him, Jia Ling said, “What is he talking about?”
Without answering her, Doctor Ming-Zhen grabbed a sizeable stick off the ground and faced Zhang.
Anxiously, Zhang said, “What are you doing?”
With a furious shout, Doctor Ming-Zhen threw the stick up at the sinornithosaurs. One of them calmly stepped aside as the stick sailed by. But its blood-red eyes didn’t shift their gaze from Jia Ling for even an instant.
They began their trek once again and soon came upon a swamp with ferns sprouting out of brackish water and cypress and pine trees for cover. Moss and lichens of green and beige tones grew on the trunks and hung from the branches.
Zhang said, “It’s very unfortunate we lost our supplies. Otherwise we might have had some wet boots. Watch your skin for leeches.”
The water was cool and flowing. The depth quickly increased from ankle-high to the height of Doctor Ming-Zhen’s knees. He found himself worried less about leeches than he was about snakes.
“What are those?” Jia Ling asked, pointing up to the darkness of the forest canopy where pairs of blinking lights seemed to stare down at them.
“I don’t—” Doctor Ming-Zhen started say, but then stopped. They were eery. Some of them moved. Like ghost eyes. “When the people of Madagascar saw reflective eyes like these looking down on them at night, they found them so frightening that they decided they must be ghosts or spirits. But they were lemurs. What we’re seeing here must be prosimians of some kind—primitive primates.”
“Primates, you say? Like the ones you talked about finding in Hell Creek.”
“Yes, like that.” Doctor Ming-Zhen tried to get a better look, but in the darkness the most he could see was a fleeting silhouette darting between branches, a long tail sticking upright and curled at the end. Interrupting his observance were some hulking, shifting shapes that caught his attention from ahead. They were gracefully wading through the water, with large humps and orange crests elegantly arching back off their heads. Charonosauruts jiayinensis. The group contained animals of various sizes, including infants which swam through the water like little ducklings, but the largest were fifteen feet tall and over thirty feet long. Doctor Ming-Zhen marveled at how effortlessly high they raised each foot as they walked on two legs, taking a moment to tuck their foot under their massive bodies before stepping back in the water with barely a ripple. They abandoned their bipedal gate occasionally to lower their bills to the water and feed. Though their skin was scaly like lizard skin, colored brown and mottled green, they moved more like birds. Their eyes were alert and friendly-looking.
Doctor Ming-Zhen held his breath, hoping one of them would call and he could hear just what kind of sound they made. It was thought that the crests had been used to amplify their calls, and if so it was sure to be a remarkable sound. The only sound they now made were little mumbling noises as they gobbled up greenery. He couldn’t tell if they did this in response to one another or if it was an expression of satisfaction with their food.
The animals stood on their hind legs in unison, looking in one direction. The water rippled, as if some wind was rushing over it. The blades of grass that stood out of the marsh were trembling. But there was no wind. He felt a strange sensation in his chest, like tremors. He looked at the dinosaurs and noticed that they were raising their heads slightly upward, their bills open. And he realized with wonder that they were calling. It was so low he couldn’t hear it. But he could feel it.
He was awestruck.
Then, echoing from the distance were answering calls, and these he could hear. They were low and long and otherworldly.
The animals lowered back to feed and then gradually stepped out of the water onto a raised mound. They began to snort and huff about. They stamped the ground with their giant feet, swinging their tails around and inadvertently smacking their neighbors and bumping their tremendous heft against one another. It was a very clumsy affair and Doctor Ming-Zhen struggled to make sense of it. Was it some kind of courtship ritual? No, the juveniles were participants. Then the whole display quickly came to an end and the purpose of the fuss became apparent as they lay down in the depressions they had made, carefully leaning their heads back to rest their crests in a groove in their backs. In this posture, they looked a bit like nesting ducks, ducks the size of buses.
Zhang pushed everyone on. The swamp seemed to be endless and Doctor Ming-Zhen tired of the ceaseless water around his legs and the dampness of the air. He noticed that Jia Ling was breathing heavily as she walked. “Zhang,” he said. “Jia Ling needs to rest.”
“That isn’t possible.”
Before he could protest, a scream erupted from ahead.
United Nations
Doctor Matthew Manley Martin sat next to his fiancé in the front row of the Security Council Chamber. For the umpteenth time, s
omeone had tried to take her seat. “Can’t you see it’s taken!” he protested.
Abael Fiedler was, remarkably for his condition, standing, and saying with vehemence, “We have heard from enough witnesses. We have seen enough evidence. You have all listened and learned for days and yet it seems you know less than you did before!” He slammed his hand on the table, a disquieting crack resounding from his arm, “I say enough! I am exhausted from hiding who I am. The time has come to reveal the truth.” He flinched and clenched his jaw. “The whole world longs for absolution. The world is ready. Abael seemed to look up at the ceiling as he said, “You are here! Reveal yourselves to them! They want to see you!”
He couldn’t help himself. He was on his feet, clapping. One loud, echoing clap after another. Slowly, others began to join him. Before long the whole room was on their feet. Applauding. He had fought, dreamed for a moment like this for so long. When he would not be thought fringe. When science would begin to publicly accept his propositions. He found himself overwhelmed with emotion, tears streaming down his cheeks.
And suddenly, it was over. There were a series of cracks, and Abael's head erupted in blood, his body toppling onto the table.
There were screams, people ducking for cover. Doctor Martin found himself on the balls of his feet, squatting like a child. He looked for his fiancée beside him, but to his amazement, she was still standing, staring straight ahead at Abael. Her face was cool, indifferent. The chaos of people running, shouting, and the movements of armed officers had no effect on her. He reached up for her, "Dearest!"
But when she turned her face to him, he recoiled. She was transforming before his eyes into a vile, wasp-faced figure. Her neck thinned, her eyes were wide apart and black. Her clothes were gone, and her body was spindly, gray, and androgynous. She gazed upon him with an almost severe annoyance. Then she turned and strode toward the front of the chamber. The screams began to ebb, the movement stopped, and everyone stared at the figure as it gracefully walked forward. It was joined by a second that had moved up from the back of the room. Together, without making a sound, they placed their long-fingered hands on his head. Then they pulled their hands away and his body seemed to drift through the table and rest on the floor. The figures turned and stared at the audience before disappearing without a trace.