by Laura Martin
“Dr Schwartz!” she yelled. “He’s testing us. Please get this thing moving, or we’re all dead.” Schwartz’s face went white, and he grabbed the cord of the motor, giving it a firm yank. The engine snarled and died. He pulled at it again, and it gave another hopeful rumble before sputtering out. The plesiosaur emerged beside us, and if I’d had the inclination to reach out a hand, I could have pricked a finger on one of the teeth that was roughly the length of my forearm. What had Chaz called it? Pretty Boy? What a stupid name for one of the ugliest creatures I’d ever seen. It sized us up before bumping its head into the boat again, making it tilt violently. Its message was clear. It was going to toy with us first, terrify us, before swallowing us whole.
“Dr Schwartz!” Chaz yelled, going for her tranquiliser gun.
“Saying my name isn’t helping,” Schwartz snapped. “And don’t shoot it. It’ll drown if we tranquilise it.”
“Good! Drown it!” Todd shouted, but Schwartz ignored him as he gave the cord another yank. This time the engine spluttered to life. He cranked the handle, and we shot off across the water, the shoreline shrinking behind us as we headed towards the middle of the lake. Pretty Boy submerged again, and I waited for it to reemerge and chase us. It didn’t.
I sank down beside my soaked and shivering friend. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. The words sounded pitiful. Shawn had almost just been shot, drowned, and fed to a monster. Sorry didn’t really cut it.
“What was that thing?” Shawn gasped, his eyes not leaving the spot where Pretty Boy had disappeared, and I realised that in the struggle to stay afloat Shawn hadn’t seen the monster approaching.
“I have no idea,” Todd said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s the reason my mom said to never swim in Lake Michigan.” Shawn’s face went green, but before I could ask him if he was OK, he’d crawled awkwardly to the edge of the boat and puked. Not wanting to lose him overboard again, I grabbed the back of his drenched tunic with my still-bound hands and held on until he finally flopped back onto the floor of the boat, his eyes shut.
I bent over him, worried. “Shawn?” I asked, not sure if I should ask if he was OK. Clearly he wasn’t. Not that I blamed him.
“He’ll be fine,” Todd said. “Just give him a minute.” I nodded, unconvinced. Just then my canteen rolled against my foot and I looked down to see the contents of my pack scattered across the floor of the boat. Every now and then the wind would catch a packet of dinosaur jerky or a pair of socks and send them flying into the lake. My journal lay in the corner by Schwartz’s foot, its pages damp and flayed open in the wind. Eyeing Schwartz to make sure he wasn’t looking, I grabbed it and slid it into Todd’s still-intact pack. Todd saw what I was doing, and when Schwartz’s back was turned, we collected what little supplies were left and tucked them all into Todd’s pack. Shawn continued to sprawl on the bottom of the boat, showing no intention of moving despite the bumping and jarring he was getting as the boat skipped across the choppy waves.
“We’ll interrogate them back at the lab,” Schwartz called to Chaz, shouting to be heard over the slap of the boat’s hull on the water.
Todd leaned in so only Shawn and I could hear him. “What lab is that Schwartz guy talking about?” he asked. “Lake Michigan is huge. I doubt this thing has enough gas to make it across the entire lake.”
“The lab is in the middle of the lake,” Chaz said, making us jump as she crouched down in front of us, her giant black tranquiliser gun slung casually over her shoulder.
I unconsciously clutched my compass. Maybe the lab was what my dad had wanted me to find? After all, he had marked the centre of the lake as the location of a member of the Colombe, and how many things could be in the middle of a lake? The Colombe was the secret organisation my dad and mom had founded in an attempt to bring people aboveground again. My grandfather, Ivan, had explained that after the Noah had discovered the organisation, a few had escaped. Was one of them hiding in this mysterious lab? Five years’ worth of questions burned hot inside my chest, but after what had just happened to Shawn, I was worried that I wasn’t going to like the answers I got.
“Home sweet home,” Chaz crowed later when Schwartz cut the motor down to a crawl. She stood up and stretched, a wide grin on her face. I glanced around in confusion. Surrounding us on all sides was a seemingly never-ending expanse of rolling waves with no land in sight. What was she talking about?
“Are you sure you should stop here?” Shawn asked, sitting up for the first time to peer nervously at the surrounding water. He hadn’t spoken since he’d thrown up, and his voice still sounded shaky. Not that I could blame him. The image of Pretty Boy swimming towards my best friend was one I wouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon. It had been too loud to do any talking on the trip, and we’d spent what felt like an eternity huddled together on the floor of the boat trying to stay warm as the wind sliced right through our wet clothes.
“Of course I’m sure,” Chaz said. “Get ready to duck.”
“Duck?” Todd asked, glancing up at the sky. “I thought those went extinct years ago.”
Chaz snorted. “They did. Sorry, I meant duck your head. I forgot how hard it is for people to spot the boat dock the first time. Look dead ahead. See where those waves are crashing sort of funny?” I followed her pointing finger and blinked in surprise. About ten feet in front of us the waves were behaving oddly, seeming to hit an invisible object before careening back in the opposite direction. I squinted and then jerked back in surprise when my eyes finally made sense of what they were seeing. Rising from the water was a gigantic mirrored bubble, ingeniously camouflaged with reflective glass so that it melded with the shifting waves of the lake. If I hadn’t known exactly where to look, I could have passed within a foot of it and missed it. Before I could marvel anymore, our boat slid into a small circular hole in the side of the bubble, and into a network of floating wooden docks that spiraled out from a circular centre deck like the spokes on a wheel. Tied to the docks were other small boats like our own, as well as a few larger ones, but the most prominent feature of the entire space was the large glass box on the centre deck. The sound of the water lapping against the walls of the bubble echoed around us as Chaz tied up the boat, and we all got out.
“What is this place?” Todd asked.
“Entrance C,” Schwartz said briskly, leading us towards the glass box, where he pushed a few buttons on a side panel. Moments later a glass elevator emerged, dripping. It seemed so out of place surrounded by the water and waves.
“So this lab?” Shawn said as the doors slid open. “It’s …?”
“At the bottom of the lake,” Chaz grinned. “The place was built as a top-secret testing facility pre-Jurassic domination.”
“Jurassic domi-what?” Todd asked.
“Jurassic domination is the term we use for when the power shift occurred after the pandemic that decimated the human race,” Schwartz said stiffly as he grabbed my upper arm and manoeuvered me roughly into the elevator. Todd and Shawn followed with Chaz right behind. The elevator was cramped, and I found myself pressed against the cool glass wall, my bound hands smashed awkwardly in front of me. My wrists ached, and I twisted them in an attempt to ease the pressure without much success. Still being tied up seemed redundant at this point. We had nowhere to run, and after what had happened to Shawn, none of us was going to attempt to escape by swimming. Although I wasn’t so sure I’d make a run for it even if I had the opportunity. Schwartz and Chaz were my only shot at getting some answers, and after coming this far, I wasn’t going to leave without them. The elevator doors slid shut, and with a soft hum we were sinking. The docking area disappeared and the dark blue of Lake Michigan enveloped the elevator shaft.
Schools of silver-and-blue fish swam in dizzying swirls around the elevator as we sank. Larger, darker shapes were also visible, but they were too far away to see distinctly.
“Are those what I think they are?” Shawn asked, pointing to the hazy blobs.
Chaz turned to squint
where he was pointing. “Yup, those are Pretty Boy’s buddies.”
“You seriously named that thing that almost ate Shawn?” I asked. “Why?”
Chaz shrugged. “We’ve named the big ones. Pretty Boy is a kronosaurus; they are particularly nasty. They can eat you in one bite. But I think I’d actually prefer to be eaten by one of them. It would be better than having an elasmosaurus nibble on you a while.” She didn’t seem to notice the look of absolute gob-smacked astonishment on our faces because she went on as though this were all completely normal. “We have regular old plesiosaurs and pliosaurs too.” She began ticking them off on her fingers. “Let’s see, we have the nothosaurs, simolestes, and mosasaurs here. Oh, and a few dunkleosteus. Those suckers have jaws on them like you wouldn’t believe! Dr Schwartz gets the credit for all of them,” she said proudly. “If he hadn’t tweaked their genes, they couldn’t live in fresh water, or our climate for that matter. Most of them lived in the oceans originally.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. “Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?”
“Well, yes. Sort of,” Chaz said with a worried look at Schwartz. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” All I could manage was to shake my head at Chaz. Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for almost wiping out the human race? I swallowed the tirade of hot anger that bubbled inside me as I imagined them bringing back the very monster that had almost eaten my best friend just moments before.
“You made all those plesiosaurs? That’s just sick,” Shawn said, my own disgust reflected in his face.
“Swimming dinosaurs,” Todd sniffed. “I don’t care what fancy name you call them.”
“They aren’t technically dinosaurs. They’re swimming marine reptiles,” Chaz corrected.
“To savages, dinosaurs and plesiosaurs are nothing but something to eat. You are wasting your time with explanations, Chaz. So, yes, Todd was it? They are just swimming dinosaurs,” Schwartz sneered. Todd bristled.
“They protect this lab,” Chaz said with an apologetic shrug at Todd behind Schwartz’s back. “No one comes poking around plesiosaur-infested waters.”
We continued our steady descent in silence, and soon the sun no longer penetrated the water far enough for us to see the fish or the plesiosaurs. I shivered as the temperature in the elevator became markedly cooler.
Todd was starting to tremble too, but not from the cold. I noticed that his face was white and sweat was running down it. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he was the one who’d been thrown in the lake with Pretty Boy.
“Are you OK?” I asked, pulled momentarily from my thoughts about this mysterious lab and the monsters they’d created to protect it. “You look horrible.”
“I don’t like small spaces,” he said tersely, clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Wonderful,” Schwartz drawled drily, “a claustrophobic savage.” He’d pulled a small port screen out of the duffel bag at his feet and studiously ignored us as he began typing something into it. I gave Todd’s shoulder an awkward pat with my bound hands. I wasn’t especially fond of the tiny space either. My ears were starting to ache and throb. Noticing my wince of pain, Chaz quickly explained how to clear our ears to relieve the pressure from our descent by holding our noses. A minute and one satisfying pop later and the stabbing pain in my head was gone. I made a mental note not to let that happen again. The elevator passed into the insides of a building, and I looked away from Todd to stare. The first floor we slid past was full of lab equipment.
“Whoa,” Todd said, letting out a low whistle of appreciation, and I nodded in mute agreement. This place was massive. Unlike North Compound’s confining walls of stone and concrete, these walls were made of glass, so you could see through all the rooms from one end to the other, making it hard to tell where one room stopped and another room started.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it,” Chaz said proudly. “This is just the research floor; wait until you see the rest of it.” The next floor the elevator descended through was covered in wall-to-wall troughs of plants under grow lights, reminding me of the underground chambers in North Compound where we’d grown turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables. Like the floor above, this one too seemed ten times bigger than even the large meeting auditorium back at North.
“Are you seeing this?” I whispered to Shawn.
“I am,” Shawn breathed.
The elevator didn’t give us long to gawk before dropping down into the biggest room I’d ever seen. All comparisons to North Compound disappeared as I pressed my hands to the glass and stared in wonder at hundreds of dinosaurs, all housed in enormous glass cages. Arching above the dinosaur pens was a tangled network of glass walkways, bustling with blue jump-suited people.
“No way.” Todd gasped. Shawn made a disbelieving choking noise, and I pounded him on the back with my bound hands.
“You keep dinosaurs down here?” I gasped.
“Of course,” Schwartz replied. “We run one of the top breeding programs in the world.”
“We run the only breeding program in the world,” Chaz muttered.
Schwartz glared at her before turning his attention back to us. “We have also tamed and trained some of the brighter species. We’ve gathered invaluable data from living in such close proximity. They act as message carriers, test subjects, and pets. You may not kill any of them,” he said, giving us a hard look. “Everyone who lives down here does so because they believe in the beauty and continuation of the dinosaur. Remember that.”
“But why?” I asked, dumbstruck.
“What do you mean why?” Schwartz sniffed.
I shook my head in amazement as I took in the hundreds of cages. “Why would you breed them? After what happened with the pandemic?”
“The ecosystem,” Chaz said. “When people brought the dinosaurs out of extinction one hundred and fifty years ago, no one thought about the impact these guys would have on the ecosystem if they ran wild.” She jerked her head at one of the cages. “They were supposed to just stay in zoos and wildlife preserves, right? Well, obviously, they didn’t. After the pandemic, these guys took over and a lot of other animals went extinct. It threw everything out of whack. Our lab has been trying to correct that with selective breeding and repopulation.”
Her explanation sounded like a more scientific version of Ivan’s table demonstration when we had been back at his house the night before the marines found us again. He’d been trying to explain to Shawn that if you removed all the dinosaurs, the carefully balanced world of predator and prey that we lived in would collapse. And while Chaz wasn’t talking about removing the dinosaurs entirely, she seemed to be making the same general point. Had things changed so much in the last 150 years that we now needed dinosaurs to keep the topside world functional? And if that was true, then what Chaz was saying about balancing out the dinosaur population made a lot of sense. I shook my head as I tried to process this bizarre concept. I had grown up in a compound where everyone talked about the time before the dinosaurs like it was this ideal utopia that could be reclaimed. But what if Ivan and Chaz were right and the dinosaurs were here to stay?
Before I could respond, the elevator continued its steady descent, and I craned my head back to get one last look at the cage of what had to be Parasaurolophus before it disappeared from sight. We passed through a floor that looked like a school, glass desks lined up neatly in glass rooms. The place seemed to go on forever, and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that it was all underwater. If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of it, I never would have believed it.
“So much glass,” Shawn marveled next to me, and I realised he was right. Glass had been something we’d had to scavenge and reuse over and over again in North Compound, as we were unable to manufacture it.
Chaz leant forward. “I’m not sure if you noticed while running from that pack of carnotaurs, but we have a lot of sand around here.” When neith
er of us said anything, she cocked her head to the side. “That’s how you make glass. You heat sand to really high temperatures. Didn’t you know that?” All I could do was shake my head in wonder as we passed through another floor, this one made up of small apartments.
Our elevator finally bumped to a stop, and we spilled out into a gigantic lab lit with harsh fluorescents. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out into the dark murk of Lake Michigan. A few scientists glanced up from their large stationary port screens as we entered, eyeing us with interest before turning back to their work. Schwartz gave Chaz a meaningful look before striding away to meet three lab-coated men huddled around a port screen. A small yellow dinosaur that only came up to my knee scurried past us and clambered nimbly up Chaz’s leg and onto her shoulder. Chaz dug a large dead beetle out of her pocket and handed it up to the little creature. It cooed happily.
“This is Pip.” She grinned as she passed up another treat. “She’s kind of the mascot for this floor of the lab. She was supposed to get released back into the wild, but she was so darn cute they decided to let her stay.”
“What is she exactly?” Todd asked, slightly less green now that we weren’t in the tiny elevator.
“Compsognathus,” Chaz said. “It’s Greek for dainty jaw. Dr Schwartz’s team was able to extract her DNA from a bone found in Germany. He’s one of the most brilliant paleontologists we have here at the lab.” The little creature was more bird than dinosaur, and I had to admit that Chaz had a point; she was sort of cute. Vibrant yellow with blue eyes that took up most of her pointed face; she lashed her long, thin tail delicately from side to side for balance as she surveyed us from her perch on Chaz’s shoulder.
“Ecosystem or no ecosystem, I can’t believe you’re still actively bringing new species back to life,” Shawn said, his fists clenched. Oblivious to Shawn’s anger in her preoccupation with Pip, Chaz nodded happily.