Paleo

by Yvonne Navarro

  “What?” Buffy asked. “C’mon, share.”

  Willow scrolled up and down a few times, then sat back. “Well, there are a lot of comments by the museum administration, but the gist of it seems to be that he’d prefer to get other people to do stuff he’s supposed to be doing himself. He starts out strong, makes a good impression, then tries to get someone else to carry the load.”

  “Someone else as in Kevin?” Buffy suggested.

  One side of Willow’s mouth turned down. “Exactly.”

  Oz sat back and considered this. So much for the good thing Kevin’s mother had been hoping for. There was a good chance her son had stumbled into a parasite pit. Oz would be the first to admit that while this was kind of Hellmouth style to begin with, Kevin seemed to have found an all-new version of the express elevator. For Kevin’s sake, Oz just hoped there was an EMERGENCY STOP button.

  “So what’s our contingency plan?” Xander demanded. “Let’s find this Daniel guy and shake him down!”

  “I can give you his address,” Willow said. “And there’s the museum. He might be there.”

  “Yeah,” Oz said. He looked to Buffy and she nodded. “I’m thinking Alysa isn’t the person to be showing Kevin around.” They all stared at him, then Oz realized what he’d said. “Freudian slip,” he amended. Alysa, he realized, was still high in his thoughts, and now she was getting all twisted up with this Daniel–Kevin thing. “I meant Daniel.” But Willow looked at him knowingly— amazing how she could tune into him like that—then turned back and read a residential address off the screen.

  “Let’s try there first,” Buffy said, standing and picking up her bag. “It’s closer than the museum. In all things be efficient.”

  “I’m with you guys,” Xander said.

  “What’s the matter, Xander?” Willow asked, keeping her face carefully expressionless. “Do the books here scare you?”

  “Actually it’s the combination of books and dino-Timmy over there,” Xander said. “The way he just keeps going back and forth is making me nervous. I feel outgunned no matter which way I turn.”

  “Let’s go,” Oz said. He bent and gave Willow a quick kiss. “We’ll check in later.” They hurried out, but Oz, his hearing so much more attuned even on the most moonless of nights, still heard Giles murmur to himself when no one else in the room even heard him breathe . . .

  “Freudian, indeed.”

  “Well, this is great,” Buffy said. “Is the feeling that we’re getting absolutely nowhere a lonesome thing, or do you guys feel it, too?” Disgusted, she put her hands on her hips and backed up to look at the building, not that it would help anything. The miniest of complexes, there were only six small apartments, but the place was looking pretty shabby around the edges. The once-nice stucco was now covered in peeling paint the color of dirty desert sand, and chunks of the stucco had cracked away at the corners. The sad remains of a small front lawn was littered with trash and rocks, and the adjacent buildings weren’t much better. One lone and sickly palm tree still struggled for life, leaning away from the building as if it wanted to pull itself up and run.

  According to the info from Willow, Daniel Addison’s apartment was on the third floor in the front. Easy enough. In fact, from here Buffy could see the triple length of dirty windows that belonged to his apartment on the left side of the three-story building. And every one of them was dark. “Ring it again.” Probably useless, but she had to try.

  At the entrance to the small apartment building, Xander leaned on the buzzer. Somewhere overhead came the faint but unmistakable sound of a bell.

  “I don’t think he’d be ignoring that,” said Oz.

  “Yeah—” Buffy forgot what she was about to say as a window overhead grated upward and a woman’s nasal voice shouted down at them from the second floor apartment directly below Daniel’s, its owner just out of sight beyond limp-looking curtains.

  “Stop ringing already, wouldja? Are you stupid? He’s not home!”

  “Xander!” Buffy said sharply. At the doorway, he glanced up at the crabby woman defiantly, but finally removed his finger from the bell.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” Buffy called before Daniel’s neighbor could close the window again. “Do you know where he is? Or when he might be home? It’s important—”

  “I’m not his mother!” the woman snapped. There was a crash as the window slammed shut and Buffy scowled, wishing it would break just to teach the old bat a lesson. No such luck.

  “The museum?” Xander asked as he ambled toward them.

  “This late on a Saturday evening?” Oz shrugged. “Statistically, it’s closed.”

  “We could try anyway,” Buffy suggested. “Maybe we can find a back way in or something.”

  Xander folded his arms. “And if we do go the breaking and entering route—which I’m definitely up for— we’re going to immediately know just where to find Paleo-Dude in that building? Fabulous place, by the way, which is about the size of a city block.”

  “The logical place to start would be around the dinosaurs, although we have to get past a doubled private security force. Courtesy of that whole Incan mummy thing,” Oz added. “Still, I think what works against us most is the time. I’m betting our two boys are long gone.”

  “You’re probably right,” Buffy said, frustrated. “Could we bang into any more brick walls?”

  “Come on,” Xander said. “Let’s go get something to drink and figure out what our next move is. Espresso Pump, anyone?”

  Buffy nodded in defeat, but she was still irritated at their lack of progress. What if Daniel Addison and Kevin Sanderson were involved in this together, and somewhere out there they were working on taking their next dino project live? She couldn’t shake the image of Mutzoid howling with pain and bleeding from where the Timimus had ripped chunks out of him. Already the Timimus was so much larger. What if there was another one like it, a brother or sister, running around Sunnydale right now, working its way across the food web as it grew? Not good.

  As they expected, The Espresso Pump was crowded. It was well past eight o’clock by the time they got their coffees, Xander had his snack—didn’t he ever stop eating junk food?—and they snagged a place by the wall where they could stand together. In the full onset of night, the temperature had dropped and Buffy found herself wishing for summer and wrapping her fingers around her mug to warm her hands.

  “So we head back to Kevin Sanderson’s house?” Oz suggested. “Addison might be able to stay out and play all night, but Kevin’s parents are going to expect him back.”

  “Yeah, they do look like they remember he’s alive,” Xander said. He stared glumly into his coffee and Buffy couldn’t help feeling bad for him. Suddenly, he brightened. “Hey, Buffster, did you hear that Oz’s band manager says she can find a place for all of us?”

  Buffy raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, ‘all’ of us?”

  “Potential band manager. We haven’t hired her yet,” Oz reminded him.

  Xander clearly chose to completely ignore that part. “Even me. She said I could help do stuff like setup and takedown of the equipment, run errands. Stuff like that.”

  Buffy set her mug down and folded her arms. “Where does that fall under the ‘all of us’ realm?”

  This time it was Oz who answered. “According to her, she’s got connections we could all use, one way or another. She even wants to put Willow to work making web sites and running promo on the Internet.”

  “Yeah,” Xander put in. “She even has a place for your vamp-boy, but he won’t take it.”

  “Angel?” Buffy asked in surprise. “What would he do?”

  “Security for the band,” Oz told her. “He already turned her down.”

  “Wow,” Buffy marveled. “Seems like she’s got something for everyone.”

  Xander started to agree, then he must have realized that wasn’t quite true, was it? Oz, Willow if she wanted it, Xander, Devon and the other band members . . . even Angel was covered here, b
ut there was no place in the whole scenario for Buffy. He flushed. “Buffy—”

  She waved him off. “No biggie.” She started to say something else when a loud voice at a table about ten feet away momentarily drowned out everyone around it. Buffy and the guys looked over curiously.

  “Dude, go ahead and razz me, but I am telling you,” said a skinny teenager with long hair. He punctuated his story with sharp little jabs at the tabletop with his forefinger. “I saw it running down the alley next to the Bronze.”

  “Did you follow it?” asked his table mate with a crooked and obviously disbelieving grin. “I would have. Just like in the movies or—”

  “My ass, you would’ve,” said the first guy crudely. “You should’ve seen the size of the thing. It was like somebody’s pet iguana on steroids.”

  Buffy, Xander and Oz were out the door before their coffees ever had time to cool.

  Chapter 9

  “SO,”GILES SAID.“BUFFY BRIEFLY MENTIONED OZ’S new band manager. Allison . . . Beadrack?” Willow looked up from the computer with a puzzled frown, and Giles wasn’t sure if it was because he’d interrupted her or because she didn’t know how to answer his question. Then her expression cleared. “Bardrick,” she told him, then smiled a little. “Alysa Bardrick. And . . . I’m not sure what he knows. Oz being the master of conversation that he is.”

  Giles pulled a chair out across from her and sat. Sometimes it was so difficult to ask these teenagers the simplest question. Is this what parents go through? he wondered. A day-by-day effort at trying to drag information out of their children while constantly being wary of offending them? “Well, I suppose I’m curious because of Oz’s odd slip of the tongue.”

  Instead of answering, Willow returned to scanning the computer monitor. “Ladonithia,” she said before Giles could pursue the topic further.

  “What’s that?” Giles squinted over at her, more than happy to go back to familiar demonic, hellish, and historical territory. “Ladon? I believe that was a dragon in classical Greek mythology. If memory serves correctly, the creature supposedly had a hundred heads and guarded the golden apples of the tree given by Gaea to Zeus and Hera at their wedding.”

  “Not Ladon,” Willow said as Giles stood, then came around to her side. “Ladonithia.”

  Now Giles was completely puzzled. “Some kind of derivative?”

  “Looks that way.” The young redhead’s hands hesitated over the keyboard, and finally she folded them on her lap. “But I can’t find anything more on it except for a reference to this one web page, and it dead-ends as a ‘not found.’ The rest of the search engines are coming up blank.”

  “All right,” Giles said firmly. “Then we’ll have to do it the tried and true way: hit the books.”

  She’d investigated the alley beside the Bronze hundreds of times and dusted dozens of bloodsuckers in there besides. But moving into it now, when she suspected there was something hiding in its dark length that literally wanted to eat her, gave Buffy a whole new level of creeposity. The shadows were longer and darker, as though stretched by an unseen hand to accommodate a creature so much larger than a vampire and which Buffy really didn’t have a clue how to fight. If it was like the Timimus imprisoned at the library, it would bleed and feel pain like any other living creature, but what about its size? Its weight? How would she bring down something that might have two hundred or more pounds on her?

  And what about its teeth?

  “There,” Xander said, making her and Oz jump. “Way in the back by the chain link fence.”

  “At least it’s trapped,” Oz said. “We—oh, so not good.”

  “What?” Buffy asked as she literally heard Oz swallow, then she turned her head back to the alley and saw what he saw.

  Xander inhaled sharply. “Can we say run?”

  “No,” Buffy said automatically. “We can’t.” Still, they didn’t move forward either, and luckily the beast hadn’t seen them yet. “Oz,” Buffy said under her breath. “What the hell is that?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, and Buffy wondered if that was because he couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, or because he’d known the instant he saw it. Finally, his reply came in a strained whisper.

  “Tyrannosaurus Rex.”

  Xander made a strangled sound in his throat, for once all out of wisecracks. Buffy stared down the gloomy alley, too terrified to take her eyes off the dinosaur. “Guess our boys have branched out,” she said at last.

  “Buffy, we can’t fight that thing,” Xander said a little-desperately. “I mean, look at it—we’re talking the size of an Oldsmobile here. Or maybe a Lincoln.”

  “We can fight it, and we will,” she told him. She slipped off to the side and quietly pulled something she’d spied earlier, a nice two-plus-foot length of metal pipe, from its spot on the ground. “We just have to improvise.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Oz asked dubiously.

  Buffy hefted the pipe experimentally. “No.”

  “At least its forelegs are too short for it to grab at us,” Oz offered.

  “Somehow I’m just not comforted,” Xander said in a ragged voice. “Look at those teeth—can’t we get a bazooka?”

  “No time,” Buffy said. “And no time like the present.” She took a deep breath to try and squeeze out her fear, then marched down the alleyway.

  The T. Rex turned and saw them.

  It was green and gold and, if it hadn’t been equipped with all those teeth and a big dose of murderous intent, Buffy would have thought it was quite beautiful in a grand, special-effects movie sort of way. Its skin reminded her of a snake’s but was more shimmery, like glitter beneath the glowing streetlights. She could only imagine what it would look like in the sunlight, perhaps as it moved through a jungle that hadn’t existed for millions of years.

  But all the pretty went out of the creature when there were no zoo bars or electric fences between it and them. The baby dinosaur was easily as tall as she was, and she wasn’t going to even try to estimate its length. Its movements were fluid and sure; if there had ever been a resemblance to an awkwardly moving infant, it was long gone.

  The eyes beneath the protruding ridges of bone on its skull were also gold and unnaturally bright, and Buffy thought they were shining with cunning and hunger as it swayed its head first one way then another. Long lines of drool seeped from beneath a row of bright white teeth— baby teeth, she realized—that hung over the heavy bottom jaw, and when she took a tentative step forward, the dinosaur snapped at the air. It might have been a warning, but Buffy thought it was much more likely the forerunner to an attack from the so far eerily silent monster. Whatever the demonic thing Giles had said was inside it—pure evil forces or an actual demon spirit—it was smart enough to keep the volume down.

  Beside her Xander and Oz spread out, each hunting for weapons of their own but unable to come up with much beyond a couple of weak-looking two-by-fours. This was not going to be fun.

  A tilt of its head, as if there were an abnormal decisionmaking thing going on inside that small, prehistoric brain—

  And it leapt.

  Buffy literally felt the ground tremble beneath her. Infant or not, the dinosaur was heavy, powerful, and fast, much more so than she’d expected. The flight instinct that welled up inside her was also much stronger than she’d ever faced, way beyond anything she’d ever felt while confronting a demon or a vampire.

  “We can’t let it get out of the alley!” she yelled, as much to reinforce herself as to remind Oz and Xander that while running might suddenly seem the best course of action, it was not an option. “I’ll go for the head. You guys aim for the legs!”

  “I’d settle for not letting it eat us!” Xander squeaked as it closed the distance in a frighteningly short flash of time.

  Then it was right in front of them, lunging forward and growling, low and viciously. Xander and Oz went in opposite directions, each swinging as hard as he could at its meaty back legs while Buffy ducked under
a bite that filled the air above her scalp with the dinosaurs ’ foul-smelling breath and a spray of saliva.

  “Might as well be trying to slap a cow’s butt with a twig!” Xander exclaimed.

  “Look out!” Oz yelled. “It’s coming back around! Watch out for the tail—”

  “Wha—” Smack! The ground fell away from Buffy, then came back with a dismaying return to reality as she landed hard on her left shoulder. Her upper right arm instantly began to throb nastily and a three-inch welt raised where the tip of the T. Rex’s tail had cracked across it.

  “Buffy, move it!” Xander yelled, his voice full of terror. She started to jump in response, but someone else was suddenly there— Angel! —grabbing her by the forearm and yanking her sideways so hard that her teeth clicked. A good thing, too; she felt the creature’s snout brush her and got a triple dose of adrenaline that catapulted her sideways and fully out of range before its mouth shut where she’d just been. And still—not a sound other than that low, eerie grumble, as if the creature understood that, at least for right now, it had to be quiet in order to ensure its own safety. But that was impossible, wasn’t it?

  There was no time to ponder the thought. The dinosaur careened to the other side of the wide alley and rebounded off the wall there, leaving a shower of bricks and exposed mortar as it scrambled to keep its balance. Buffy pulled away from Angel and was after it in a heartbeat, but she still wasn’t fast enough. Horrified, she realized it was going to reach the nearly defenseless Oz long before either she or Angel could get there and stop it. The T. Rex went into a sort of crouch and she saw Oz raise his two-by-four in a defiant fighting stance—

  Desperate, Buffy swung her pipe as hard as she could against the side of a steel Dumpster next to her.

  The noise was horrendous, like a cannonball landing on the roof of a metal building, piercing enough to make Buffy’s teeth vibrate and the infant dinosaur instinctively cower like a startled dog. It spun and bared its teeth defensively, then took a lumbering step toward her, the prelude to another charge. She braced, then forced herself to keep her eye on the creature when a door to her left abruptly pushed open, spilling a neat square of cool fluorescent light between her and the T. Rex.