Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “You’ve got to listen to me, Otto,” my grandfather was thundering. “There are things you don’t know—”

  “Fewer and fewer every day!” Dr. Marsh proclaimed.

  The closest thing to my bed was the emergency eyewash station. Right next to that, there was a fire extinguisher, an oxygen tank, a flame-retardant suit, and a giant red button that said PRESS ONLY IN EVENT OF MAJOR CHEMICAL SPILL.

  I had no idea what would happen if that button got pushed. But I was willing to bet it would be noisy, dramatic, and disruptive. Which all seemed like pretty good things right then.

  Unfortunately, the button was a good six feet away from my bed. Which was about five feet and ten inches farther than I was currently able to reach.

  My grandfather was still trying to get a word in edgewise with Dr. Marsh.

  “If you would just shut up for two seconds—”

  “You know what your problem is, Gavin? You’re too narrow-minded. You’re so focused on the minutiae that you never see the big picture—”

  I pulled on my stupid restraints again. My spikes would have cut through them in two seconds. The way my tail was tied down, my tennis balls were actually just barely within reach of my right hand. But the spikes themselves were too far away and tied down at too weird of an angle to cut anything.

  But I could reach the tennis balls, I thought. At least one of them. Possibly two.

  Moving very slowly, I stretched my right arm as far as I could. My fingers closed around the nearest ball. After a few seconds of fumbling, I was able to work it off the spike.

  It came off into my hand with a soft pop.

  I looked around worriedly. But no one had heard.

  The ball was losing air fast, so I quickly took aim and fired it toward the MAJOR CHEMICAL SPILL button.

  It hit the word SPILL, an inch below the button, and bounced harmlessly to the floor.

  I froze, certain everybody had seen that. After a second, I looked around.

  My grandfather and Dr. Marsh were still yelling at each other. Elliot and Mr. Juarez were watching them argue, and Venetio was still unconscious.

  But Sylvie had seen my throw. She nodded encouragingly at me and inched slightly closer to the spray bottle.

  “…no sense of genetic destiny…” Dr. Marsh was saying accusingly.

  I reached for the second tennis ball. It was farther away. My fingertips barely brushed the top of it. I strained with all of my might, so hard I was afraid I was going to rip my wrist out of joint. But I kept straining until I got all four fingers around the ball and was able to use my thumb to force it slowly upward.

  Pop.

  This time I aimed just slightly higher than I had before.

  Escape from the Death Star (Really)

  Red lights started flashing from the corners of the room. And a calm, robotic woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker:

  Attention. Hazardous chemical containment procedures have been activated. This area will be sealed off in sixty seconds.

  Then an alarm started blaring. It was so loud that I desperately wanted to cover my ears, but I was still tied down.

  Luckily, Sylvie wasn’t. In one smooth movement she lunged for the bottle of Good Riddance spray and let loose two quick blasts directly in Dr. Marsh’s face.

  The trihorned scientist had no idea what hit him. His eyes rolled back and his legs collapsed underneath him. When he fell to the ground, his head lolled strangely against the side of his frill.

  “Sylvie!” Mr. Juarez admonished, looking shocked.

  “Sylvie, undo our restraints,” my grandfather commanded. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Don’t even think about it, Sylvie,” Mr. Juarez said threateningly, putting himself between Sylvie and my grandfather. “You’re already in enough trouble as it is.”

  Sylvie looked back and forth between the two of them.

  “Sylvie,” my grandfather said calmly, “if we don’t get out of here before they seal this wing, we’ll never get out of this lab.”

  The alarm paused so that the robotic voice could be heard again:

  This area will be sealed off in forty-five seconds.

  Sylvie dodged her dad and leaped toward my grandfather. His arm restraints came off with a long riiiiiiip of Velcro. She left him to bend down and unstrap his own legs while she ripped off my arm restraints, then Elliot’s and Venetio’s.

  I unstrapped my legs and tail and nearly fell over, feeling light-headed as the blood suddenly rushed back into my tail.

  Venetio fell forward and landed on his face. Elliot bent to help him, and Venetio looked up at him, confused.

  “What happened?” he mumbled.

  “I’ll tell you later!” Elliot promised, pulling the Plutonian to his feet.

  This area will be sealed off in thirty seconds.

  “Sylvie—” Mr. Juarez said, wringing his hands.

  “No!” Sylvie put up a hand. “I don’t want anything to do with you!”

  My grandfather grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her toward the door.

  “Run!” he said urgently. “You too, Asaph! Let’s go!”

  “What about—” I gestured at unconscious Dr. Marsh.

  “He’ll be fine,” my grandfather said, and he grabbed our space suits with one hand as he shoved me toward the door with the other.

  We ran.

  The hallway outside was empty of people and bathed in red flashing lights. We sprinted back the way we had come. With his long legs, Elliot led the way, followed closely by Sylvie and her dad. My grandfather was next, looking anxiously over his shoulder at me. Venetio and I, with our short legs and jiggly dinosaur parts (respectively), brought up the rear.

  This area will be sealed off in fifteen seconds.

  “Look!” Elliot yelled, pointing.

  A wall was coming down in the hallway in front of us. A disturbingly solid, metal wall that was probably capable of keeping microscopically small chemical particles from getting into the rest of the lab. It would have no problem keeping us sealed in here. And it really didn’t look like the wall was going to take fifteen seconds to reach the floor.

  Elliot reached it first and ducked underneath. Sylvie and her dad dove after him. My grandfather went next, reaching an arm back underneath toward me. The wall was just a few feet above the floor now, just barely higher than my knees.

  “Come on, Sawyer!”

  I was never one of those kids who played baseball. But my sprint to the wall and my feet-first slide underneath were like a textbook slide into home plate. It was beautiful.

  Or, it would have been if I hadn’t had seventeen plates on my back to slow me down.

  Each plate killed my momentum just a tiny bit. I ran out of steam entirely when my chest was directly underneath the wall. I watched, frozen, as the bottom of the wall came down at me like a giant guillotine blade.

  Then Venetio slammed into me from behind, hitting me square in the shoulders with both of his feet and shoving me the rest of the way to the other side.

  I rolled over on my belly, grimacing at the pain in my squished plates. My grandfather and Elliot each grabbed one of Venetio’s feet and yanked him under the wall—which came crashing down to the floor, slicing at least an inch of blond hair from the top of the Plutonian’s head.

  Please proceed away from the sealed area.

  “Sure thing,” Sylvie muttered and reached down a hand to help me up.

  • • •

  “Ouch,” Sylvie said, looking at my plates.

  I couldn’t see them for myself, but I could tell that several of them had been bent at strange angles. Normally, jamming one of my plates felt like stubbing a toe. But my heart was beating too fast and my blood was pumping too hard for me to notice much at the moment.

  “We need to get back to
the surface,” my grandfather announced and looked us over with chagrin. All of us, except for Sylvie, had been divested of our lab coats when Dr. Marsh had tried to make us research subjects. We stuck out now like sore thumbs—tall, blue, dinosaur-shaped thumbs. Anyone who saw us would know instantly that we didn’t belong.

  And despite the fact that the mechanical voice was reminding us every fifteen seconds or so to stay clear of the contaminated area, it was only a matter of time before someone came to check out what had happened.

  “None of you are going anywhere,” Mr. Juarez snarled. And before anybody could move to stop him, he pressed a button on the wall.

  “Escaped prisoners! I have escaped prisoners here on level two, right next to the—”

  He trailed off as he noticed that my grandfather was pointing his six-shooter directly at his chest.

  • • •

  Mr. Juarez swallowed and looked nervously down the barrel of the gun.

  “You can go,” he said to my grandfather, pointing to him, Elliot, Venetio, and me, “but Sylvie is staying with me.”

  “Dad!” Sylvie exclaimed. “You were the one who told me not to come here in the first place!”

  “Yes, I did. And now I’m telling you that you can’t leave.”

  “I hear footsteps!” Venetio warned us. “Someone’s coming!”

  “Dad, you know this is wrong,” Sylvie said. “What the lab is doing—it’s wrong! I’m not staying here and neither should you. Come with us.”

  Mr. Juarez just shook his head.

  “They’re getting closer!” Venetio reported, bouncing up and down in agitation.

  My grandfather sighed and then looked at Sylvie.

  “We don’t have time for this. Sylvie, it’s your choice. Do you want to stay here with your father?”

  “No,” Sylvie said emphatically.

  My grandfather nodded, pulled the trigger, and shot Mr. Juarez square in the chest.

  • • •

  “Dad!” Sylvie screamed as her father slumped against the lab wall and flopped over onto the ground.

  She made as if to go to him, but my grandfather grabbed her arm.

  “He’s only stunned,” he assured her and held up his gun. “Retrofitted with stun capacity.”

  He let go of her and took two enormous strides down the hallway.

  Then he paused when he realized that the rest of us had not moved.

  “What? You didn’t think I’d kill him?” He shook his head, looking horrified at the notion. “Come on, let’s get out of here!”

  I looked over at Sylvie. She was standing perfectly still, just staring down at her father. A little bit like my grandfather had shot her with the stun gun instead.

  “Which way?” Elliot asked nervously.

  “I doubt it matters,” Venetio said gloomily. We were at a sort of crossroads of hallways, and footsteps were coming at us from at least three directions.

  Sylvie raised her eyes up from her father and fixed them on the wall in front of her.

  “Come on, Sylvie,” I said, reaching down and taking a tentative grip at her hand, a little bit afraid that she was about to explode. Or cry. Or just never stop staring at the wall.

  Instead, her head snapped up. She looked first at me, then down each of the hallways, then back to the wall in front of her. There was a large air vent there, right at knee level.

  She backed up two steps, lunged forward, and put her foot right through the vent.

  The rectangular screen, about the size of an oven door, crumpled beneath her foot. One more kick, and it disappeared entirely into the dark space of wall behind it.

  Sylvie waved us all toward the hole.

  “Into the air duct, boys.”

  Apparently, Sylvie was a little bit Leia after all.

  • • •

  I’m not even going to try and explain the difficulties of navigating an air vent shaft when you have plates, a tail, and four long spikes, only two of which are capped with tennis balls. The loose spikes got caught on everything in sight, which means it took me at least twice as long to crawl through the tiny, enclosed space as it would have for a normal person.

  I was relieved when we finally made it into some sort of boiler room where we were able to put our space suits back on.

  It was very lucky the rental Martian had given us the suits that had the built-in helmets. Otherwise, I don’t know what we would have done when we reached the unpressurized area, and even less of an idea what would have happened when we tumbled back out onto the surface of Mars.

  We came out of a small opening in the rock, just a few hundred meters from the hole where we had bribed our way inside.

  The armed guards were still there. So were quite a few scientists, all wearing lab coats and helmets. They saw us at pretty much the same time we saw them.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The surface of Mars was eerily silent on the other side of my helmet. But several of the scientists pointed in our direction, and the entire group turned as one and started running toward us like a herd of wildebeests in space helmets.

  “This way!” my grandfather yelled. “The ship’s not far!”

  He was right. The ship was only a few dunes away. But it was not alone. Another herd of white-coated, helmeted scientists swarmed around our tiny, rented shuttle. When they saw us, they started running toward us as well.

  “Now what?” Sylvie asked.

  “I—I don’t—” my grandfather stammered. He was holding his stun gun, but I knew it wouldn’t be much help against the gangs of scientists that were now coming at us from two directions.

  This was it. I was going to be held prisoner at a secret lab under the surface of Mars for the rest of my life. I was doomed to an eternity as a lab rat.

  I was just starting to feel the first surges of real, honest-to-goodness panic welling up inside me when the wind whipped up and a ship came down right in front of us.

  Once the enormous cloud of reddish Martian dust had cleared, I saw that the ship was even smaller than the one we had rented. When the roof popped open, only the driver’s seat was occupied. And the face looking out at us from the other side of the helmet shield was familiar, even if her eyes were slightly angrier than they usually were.

  “Mom?” Sylvie exclaimed.

  Busted Again

  As soon as we had taken off—leaving the two converging herds of angry scientists behind us—and the inside of the shuttle had pressurized itself, Mrs. Juarez whipped off her helmet.

  “Where is it?” she demanded.

  “What?” Sylvie asked, wearing a mask of wide-eyed innocence.

  I removed my helmet as well and hesitantly took a deep breath of stale, space shuttle air.

  Mrs. Juarez leaned over, keeping one hand on the controls and using the other to pat down the pockets on the sides of Sylvie’s space suit.

  The two of them were sitting in the front seats, while Elliot, my grandfather, Venetio, and I were squished into the tiny row of seats behind them.

  “Hey!” Sylvie exclaimed when her mother’s hand emerged, fingers triumphantly clenched around Sylvie’s phone. “That’s mine! You can’t—”

  “Quiet, corazón!” Mrs. Juarez snapped, dropping the cell phone into her purse and closing the clasp with an ominous snap. “When I gave you that phone, you made me a very specific promise. Do you remember what it was?”

  Instead of answering, Sylvie crossed her arms and looked out the spaceship window.

  “That you would always, without exception, answer my calls,” Mrs. Juarez reminded her. “Which you have failed to do for the last three days. Privilege revoked, Sylvia!”

  “Busted,” Elliot muttered under his breath.

  I put a hand over my mouth before a hysterical giggle could get out.

  “Fine!” Sylvie yelled
back. “I don’t want that stupid old phone anyway!”

  “Good, because you’re not getting it back until you prove to me that you’re old enough to handle the responsibility. And believe me, mi hija, leaving the planet without so much as a courtesy text is not what I mean by that! If I hadn’t installed that GPS chip, I never would have—”

  “What? You chipped me? That’s an invasion of privacy! I can’t believe you’d—”

  “You should be glad I did! If I hadn’t, I never would have found you! Let alone arrived in time to get you out of there!”

  “Gloria—” my grandfather ventured, sitting forward slightly.

  “And you!” Mrs. Juarez thundered. A pair of incensed brown eyes whirled around in his direction, and my grandfather sat backward so fast his head hit the back of the seat.

  “You! Bringing a bunch of children into that place? Children, Gavin! What were you thinking?” she demanded, then waved her hand in the air before he could answer. “Never mind. I’ll deal with you later.”

  My grandfather gulped.

  Mrs. Juarez turned back toward the front.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Sylvie asked quietly. “About Dad. Why didn’t you tell me—?”

  “That he had become someone I no longer wanted to be married to? Someone I didn’t want raising my daughter?”

  Sylvie nodded. Mrs. Juarez let out a long sigh.

  “Frankly, Sylvie, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you. Our divorce is final. It will stay that way, no matter what. I was hoping he would come to his senses about other things. But now I’m not sure that’s going to happen.”

  “It’s not,” Sylvie said dryly. “Mom, I hardly recognized him in there.”

  Mrs. Juarez put her hand on top of her daughter’s on the center console.

  “I’m taking you all back to Central,” she said. “Hopefully, once we get there, we’ll be able to sort things out.”

  “And then we can go home, right?” I asked. I felt bad saying it, but if Mr. Juarez really wasn’t kidnapped, then we didn’t need to be here anymore. I didn’t want to think about the lab and the Plutonians and all the things Dr. Marsh had threatened were going to happen. Maybe my grandfather was right—none of it was really our business anyway. I wanted to be back home. Back on Earth. Where my biggest problems were making sure the tennis balls stayed on my spikes and keeping clear of Orlando’s pranks.