Paleo

by Yvonne Navarro

  “I can do without, thank you,” she said. She motioned him to stay put, then slipped inside the square of darkness. After a second she poked her head back out and waved at him to follow. “All clear.”

  He decided it wasn’t wise to remind her that they said that a lot in the movies, too, usually before some drooling monster leaped out and began slashing at the bubblebrained blond. Instead he stepped through the doorway and carefully drew it shut behind them, making sure it didn’t drift open again on its own. If the security force engaged the alarm system, would the broken lock show up on their computer? Nothing to be done about that now.

  Buffy had been right. This was some kind of maintenance area at the back of the museum, full of trash bins and boxes, piles of cardboard and papers stacked and tied for future recycling. Off to one side was a trash compactor and the room smelled of overripe fruit and vaguely rotten vegetables—the lingering scent of a thousand discarded meals from the small cafeteria Oz remembered was on the second floor. He followed Buffy as she hunted around the room until she found the way out. No lock here, he noted, but who wanted to break into the trash room, anyway?

  But the hallway outside was another matter. While it was dimly lit, they had to back up and push themselves against the wall when they realized it led directly to the main foyer and the front entrance beyond that—the same entrance that was being closed up, as they watched, by one of the museum’s security guards.

  “How many guards do you think they have?” Oz whispered.

  Buffy shook her head. “It’s a big place. They could be cheap and have one . . . or they could have as many as two per floor.”

  “So how are we going to find our way around here? We can’t exactly ask for information.”

  Buffy considered this, her gaze tracking the guard as he walked to a desk at the front left corner of the foyer, the one where tours and school field trips went to check in. “There,” she said, pointing.

  Oz nodded and they watched the uniformed man pick up a clipboard and make a couple of notations on it, check his watch, then drop the clipboard and head down the hallway. When he was out of sight, Oz crept forward and slipped behind the desk as Buffy kept watch at the juncture of the main foyer and the hall down which the security guard had vanished; half a minute later, Oz hurried back to meet her, a blue plastic notebook clutched in one hand.

  “Floor plans,” he announced with a grin.

  Buffy pointed to one of the restrooms a few feet away; they zipped over to it and ducked inside. “Let’s scan through this, see if we can figure out where Daniel Addison’s office or desk might be.”

  “I remember one of the cops outside mentioning a lab on the third floor,” Oz said. “Why else would they be talking about it if it’s not where Daniel was found?”

  Buffy nodded and flipped through the pages in the notebook until she found what she was hunting for. “All right,” she said, marking out her thoughts with a finger as she talked. “We duck out of here and go for the stairs right behind the guard’s desk. Watch out for him, because he might already be on his way back. Up to the third floor, and when we come out, go straight until about halfway down the hall, then turn left. That should lead us right into the lab area.” The lighting in the bathroom was low, down to little more than emergency night levels. She squinted at the page. “I can’t tell if it’s a locked area or not, but I’m betting it is. Whatever it is, we’ll deal. Let’s go.”

  Crouching behind her, Oz waited while she pushed open the door of the restroom just enough to make sure the guard wasn’t around, then they hustled out and hugged the wall. As they scurried along the hall and up the wide staircase, always on the lookout, Oz couldn’t decide if he felt like a convict trying to escape, a mouse avoiding a cat, or a spy in one of the James Bond movies that seemed to be so plentiful inside Xander’s brain nowadays. He wished he had something like that going on inside his own brain right now. The fantasy world of high-tech espionage seemed truly preferable to the words that kept running through his mind. . . .

  . . . I guess we’re the lucky ones who get to hunt down his next of kin before they find out on the tube that he got famous, uttered by the cop outside who at this very moment was likely delivering the horrible news to relatives of the late Daniel Addison. Who would that be—mother and father? A fiancée? This, of course, made another question scream inside his head: Where was Kevin Sanderson? Was he dead, too? If he was, it was solely because he’d followed someone who’d promised, among other things, to show him the way to something he wanted more than anything else in the world. While Oz knew nothing about the goals of budding paleontologists, it wasn’t hard to equate this with his own desires about Dingoes; from there, it was just a step over to the black and white signature block being pushed by the hard-nosed Alysa Bardrick.

  Despite the high stress level trying to distract his thoughts, the trek to the third floor was easy enough. Perhaps there really was only one guard for the entire museum or, at best, two. Two made more sense because it would give each man some cover to take needed breaks, plus split up the not inconsiderable job of inspecting all three floors, not to mention there was probably at least one level of basement storage running beneath the building. They’d have to be careful not to get tripped up and find themselves watching one guy walk away but not realizing another had just stepped in place behind them.

  “There,” Buffy said suddenly. They’d just come out of the stairway and, after checking, started down the hallway; even though her voice was barely above a whisper, the heavy silence of the building made it sound huge in his ears. “See the crime tape? That has to be it.”

  He nodded and they ducked between the strips of black and yellow plastic crisscrossing the open doorway. Crime scene or not, this wasn’t like on television; someone had already been dispatched to wipe away at least the worst of the blood and gore. It’d been a hurried job, though, and they could see splatters here and there, smeared circles where the rag hadn’t been rinsed enough, thick, unpleasant-looking droplets hanging off the edges of some of the metal lab tables. There was way too much stuff in here for a rush cleaning crew to tackle and do a decent job of it. Oz and Buffy steppedcarefully, avoiding still damp areas of the floor as Buffy inspected everything.

  “What are we looking for?” Oz asked in a low voice.

  Buffy shrugged. “Beats me. But I’ll know it when I see it.”

  He shot a glance over his shoulder, trying to estimate when the guard would make his next rounds. “Well, we need to— Hey, look,” he said suddenly. “The biggest piece of evidence and everyone missed it because they didn’t know what it was.”

  Buffy leaned forward. “What is it?”

  “Eggs,” Oz said softly. “Hatched eggs.” He paused for a second, and when he spoke again his voice was shaking slightly. “I think we could be in Big Trouble City here.”

  She still couldn’t quite see what Oz was indicating because of the shadows cast by the dim lighting. “Why?”

  He turned to face her, then stepped to the side. Finally she could see the ruins of a small cage behind him, metal bars that looked strong and sturdy bent aside and twisted like they’d been nothing tougher than picture wire. “ Because,” he whispered, “there are three of them!”

  For a few, overlong seconds, he could tell that Buffy wasn’t able to process this. Three eggs . . . b ut they’d killed one infant dinosaur in the alley by the Bronze, and they had one locked up at the library with Giles. That ought to leave just—the unidentified creature that had obviously killed Daniel Addison. They hadn’t expected it to be easy, but Oz was about to break worse news.

  “Look closer,” he said urgently. “These shells are all from the same kind of egg—they were overlapped in the fossil base. That means they’re all the same kind of dinosaur.” His eyes were wide. “Two more, Buff. Probably both like the one we fought outside the Bronze. Two more like the T. Rex.”

  She started to protest, then he saw by her face that she realized he was right. Th
e Timimus at the library was different, older than these other ones by several days. It must’ve been the first experiment by Kevin and Daniel, the prototype. When their efforts had succeeded and the creature had escaped, they’d gone for bigger and better results. Boy, had they ever.

  Oz cleared his throat as quietly as he could. “Now what?”

  But Buffy still looked as stunned as he felt. “I’m not . . . sure,” she admitted. “It can’t still be in here, can it? I mean, the place was infested with authority earlier. They probably searched it from roof to basement. It worries me that we don’t know where Kevin is, but maybe Daniel decided to do this experiment without him. For all we know, he could already be at home.” She bit her lower lip thoughtfully. “Let’s find a phone,” she said finally. “Maybe off in one of the lounges or something, and then try Giles again. See if he and the others have come up with anything since yesterday.”

  Oz nodded and they began to pick their way out of the laboratory area. They were only a few steps from the doorway when something caught Oz’s eye, a notebook set on top of a pile of others. The place was so full of binders, journals, and more notebooks that it wasn’t surprising the cops hadn’t noticed it. “Wait,” he said. He snatched it up and flipped through it to make sure. “This is Kevin’s,” he told Buffy. “I remember him writing in it in class.”

  “Is there anything useful in it?” she asked. “Like whatever gave him the oh-so-brilliant idea of bringing a dinosaur back from the extinct?”

  “Oh, I think it’s pretty clear where that idea came from,” Oz muttered.

  “Daniel Addison.”

  “Yeah.” He scanned the pages anyway, going for the last of the entries. “The question is, where did he get it?”

  Buffy opened her mouth to say something, then Oz saw her tense. “Guard!” she suddenly whispered.

  Oz shoved the notebook into the oversize pocket of his shirt, then darted between two of the lab tables, pushing himself as far back and down into the darkness as he could, hoping it was enough. Buffy went for an alcove at the side of a double line of shelves loaded with specimen jars and labeled bits of fossilized bone. He knew they mustn’t get caught here. It would raise too many questions they wouldn’t be able to answer, not to mention tie them up in endless hours of bureaucratic baloney. In the meantime, somewhere out there wasn’t one, but two dinosaurs, and if the evidence left behind in the mini-nest was to be believed, they were, as he had said, looking at two more T. Rex babies.

  Footsteps, growing in Oz’s hearing, the kiss of rubber soles against the tiled flooring, the step of a man with nothing to hide and very little to worry about— except as he neared the lab. A terrible crime had been discovered here earlier, and so of course he would check this area a little more closely. But would he cross the crime tape, violate the edict of the police to get a close-up fix for his curiosity?

  The footsteps stopped and Oz could hear the man’s breathing, little bellows of tense air just outside the doorway as the beam of a flashlight shone inside, then danced around the far reaches of the room. The guy outside sounded a little breathless and heavy, not at all in top shape, but did he see something interesting? Something irresistible? Was he willing to limbo himself through the barrier in front of the door?

  Another twenty, then thirty seconds, but . . . no. The footsteps picked up again and continued down the hallway, finally fading away altogether. If Oz was remembering Buffy’s description of the floor plan correctly, this meant the guard would turn right and go through the Director’s Gallery, then he could either examine the huge chunk of space dedicated to North American mammals and the smaller section covering marine life, or just turn right again and head down the stairs past those two areas. Unless he had to check the Chaparral first, in which case he’d end up going down the same staircase Oz and Buffy had climbed to get up to the lab. It was going to be tricky to get out of here.

  He still had the floor plan notebook and Oz glanced at it now to make sure he was pinpointing their position on the third floor. Got it. If they came out of the lab and turned left, the way that the guard had gone, they’d find the entrance to another restroom and lounge. Maybe Buffy was right and there would be a phone inside it, a public pay thing that wouldn’t set off a light somewhere on a guard’s console. He could keep a lookout while she was doing that, and he’d go through Kevin’s notebook some more to see if he could find the core thing that had started this entire Cretaceous mess.

  When they were absolutely sure the security guard had moved on, Buffy motioned at Oz to follow her and they scurried out of the laboratory and made for the lounge right next to it.

  When the telephone rang, Giles knew it couldn’t be anyone else but Buffy or one of her friends. Who else would dial in here on a Sunday? Still, the requirement for decorum remained. It would be just his luck to find Principal Snyder on the other end if he spoke with too much familiarity.

  “Library,” he said as pleasantly as he could into the receiver. “Mr. Giles speaking. May—”

  “Giles, it’s me. We’ve been calling for hours!”

  It was, indeed, Buffy, although her voice was hushed and her words were quick, as though she were hiding. While the idea wasn’t at all comforting, Giles was not surprised.

  “Sorry, I’ve been back in the stacks, but I’m glad you called. I was concerned. Where are you?”

  “Oz and I are at the museum,” she said in a hushed voice. “It’s closed for the day. Daniel Addison is dead.”

  Giles scowled. “Killed by a dinosaur?”

  “Well, we’ve got the usual ‘animal attack’ explanation, but that’s stretching it a bit when you consider the murder took place inside a building full of dead things—or supposedly dead things. I don’t guess you’ve come up with any great secrets of the universe, have you?”

  “It’s not particularly a revelation, but we have unearthed something that might be of interest,” he told her, dragging on the telephone cord until he could reach the pile of books he had left open on the table. On the top of the stack was the old one with the indigo leather cover that he’d found stashed beneath the counter, and he held it with one hand while he searched for the passage he remembered. “There’s a reference to a dragon demon called Ladon whose goal is to find hosts for each of the four parts of its spirit.”

  On the other end, Buffy was silent for a moment. “Ladon, huh? I guess that would fit,” she said. “Except . . . what’s the point? And how did this whole thing start to begin with? Wait. Oz wants to talk to you.”

  “All right.” Giles heard Buffy and Oz exchange a hasty, muffled sentence or two, then Oz was speaking. Giles could picture him leaning into the phone with that same sort of intelligent intensity he always displayed in person.

  “I think I found the why in the equation,” Oz told him. “In Kevin Sanderson’s notes, one of the last entries he wrote in here. It says Daniel Addison found a notebook when he was unpacking a museum storage crate. It doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but does the name Gibor Nuriel mean anything to you?”

  “Nothing at all,” Giles responded. Still, he hastily wrote the name on a piece of paper. “Should it?” He heard pages being turned for a second or two, then Oz continued.

  “Kevin didn’t list a date, but I get the impression Nuriel was a paleontologist who worked for the museum decades ago. It was his field notebook that Daniel found and according to Kevin, it had some kind of ritual in it that appeals to something called ‘Ladonithia.’ ”

  Giles started. “Ladonithia? Willow found a reference to that but it went nowhere. Perhaps that pathway isn’t such a dead end after all. What else do you have?”

  “Not much,” Oz noted. “The real jackpot would be to find the notebook Daniel Addison used, the one belonging to that Professor Nuriel. Of course, we haven’t found Kevin, either.”

  “And Daniel Addison is dead,” Giles said thoughtfully. “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not.” Oz paused. “Here’s Buffy.”

&nb
sp; Giles heard a note of desperation in Buffy’s voice when she was back on the line. “We found three eggs in the museum lab, Giles. Hatched eggs, all stuck in the same chunk of rock. That means there are two more dinosaur ‘babies’ somewhere just like the one we aced last night.” Her inhalation was clear. “And they’re a day older and who knows how much bigger. Get it?”

  “I’m afraid so. Willow, of course, is continuing to research but—”

  “Do I really need to remind you that we could at any time mutate into dino food?”

  “I am all too aware of that, I’m afraid.” The librarian glanced at the clock, saw that it was already past one in the afternoon, and tried not to dwell on his memories of how quickly the Timimus hidden in the back was growing. “I expect Willow will be here at any moment,” he said. “Perhaps you should come back to the library until we find out more?”

  “First I think we should go through the museum to make sure nothing is still hanging around,” Buffy said. “Obviously no one saw anything on the street, but the cops didn’t find anything inside either. It’s a big place.” She paused. “Pretty smart dinosaurs, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps,” Giles said softly, “it’s a smart demon.”

  “That too. It wouldn’t be the first time.” There was another pause as Oz said something in the background. “Okay, here’s Plan A. We run through all three floors of the museum and the basement, if we can find a way down there without the guards catching us. Then right before we leave, we’ll call you again—figure in an hour or so. By then you’ll have the answer to everything, right?”

  “Certainly,” Giles said dryly. “Uh, Buffy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s Plan B?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “Well, it’s not exactly all laid out, but it has a lot to do with running really fast and not getting eaten.”

  “Excellent idea.”

  * * *

  Giles was just about to break down and dial Willow’s home number when she hurried into the library with Xander. “Where have you been?” he admonished. “Buffy and Oz are inside the museum, and Daniel Addison is dead—found murdered there this morning.”