Paleo

by Yvonne Navarro

  Skipping back until she was out of tooth range, she whirled. “What are you shooting at me for, you moron! Shoot the dinosaur!”

  “Nice try,” the guard snapped. “Just put your hands in the air and back away from the exhibit.” His voice shook as he jerked his head at Oz. “You, too, kid. Jimmy, find the volume on the speakers and turn that crap off.”

  Turn the volume off—who cared? Buffy started to retort, then realized that from where the two guards were standing, on the other side of the walled mutated tiger exhibit, they literally couldn’t see the T. Rex on the floor. To make things worse, the creature had stopped its movement; now it was just lying there quietly, eyes glowing with hate while its chest rose and fell with plenty of life still left in it. Oh yeah, the demon controlling the animal was cunning, enough so that it would keep the T. Rex down and quiet and make Buffy and Oz the only thing on which the guards would focus. Very tricky . . . and dangerously intelligent.

  Suddenly the sound effects disappeared and everything went silent. From where she and Oz stood, the T. Rex’s head was pointed toward them and Buffy could see the dinosaur’s carefully regulated breathing, slow and even, virtually soundless. “I got it, Scott,” the second guard said as he hurried back to his partner. “Damn, these kids sure made a mess. Hey, you think they’re the ones who killed that guy up in the labs?” He sounded absolutely thrilled at the idea. Hey, boss, look at us! We caught the mur derers!

  “Maybe,” said the first guard, his eyes narrowing. “You go around the other side, see what kind of damage they’ve done and make sure they don’t have any more weapons.”

  “Don’t do that!” Buffy said in alarm.

  “You just keep your mouth shut, missy,” the second guard, Jimmy, grunted. “You’re in enough trouble already.”

  “But it’s not safe,” Oz put in. “There’s a—”

  “Shut up,” Scott barked as Jimmy took off in another direction. “I don’t want to hear another sound from either of you until the cops get here. I mean it. And you can just put that knife and whatever it is in your belt there on the floor right now.”

  Buffy saw movement between the greenery lining the walkway and her heart beat faster. “Wait—”

  Jimmy’s words cut her off as he stepped into view and strolled toward her, Oz, and the downed baby T. Rex. His .38 was drawn and leveled. “Aw, Scott, you oughta see what these kids have done. There’s goop and red paint all over everything and—” He frowned as he spotted the small dinosaur sprawled across the pathway. “Hey, I didn’t know we had an exhibit with something like this in it.”

  “Don’t come any closer!” Oz warned. Buffy saw her friend take a step backward, knew he was trying to force the T. Rex’s attention to stay on him. At the same time that Scott threatened them again—

  “I thought I told you to keep quiet!”

  —their demon-infested dino lurched up on its good leg and with a throaty bellow, launched itself at Jimmy.

  The result was damned near chaos.

  Jimmy got off only one shot as Buffy and Oz threw themselves down. There was no way either of them could have gotten to the guard in time to help him anyway. Half of his face and skull disappeared in a burst of blood, bone and gray matter as the dinosaur’s teethstudded jaws snapped shut around it, then pulled back. For a second Jimmy’s body twitched, then it collapsed at the same time that Scott scrambled forward and began firing wildly.

  Jimmy’s first and only shot had to have hit pay dirt—there was no chance it couldn’t have—but there just wasn’t any way to tell if Scott’s trigger-happiness was actually helping any. Bang bang bang bang —one after another, with him screaming as loudly as he could and the dinosaur roaring at the same time, until Buffy thought her eardrums were going to burst. And more noise—was it her own shouting, and maybe Oz’s, too? She couldn’t tell.

  And suddenly, the worst of it stopped.

  There was still some yelling, a bit, perhaps, from everyone there. Yet the thing that stood out above all of it was a terribly . . . empty clicking sound.

  Still hugging the floor, she twisted until she could see Scott. The guard was standing there, mouth half slack and eyes glazed as he stared at the T. Rex baby and squeezed the trigger of his now spent .38, again and again and again.

  “Uh-oh,” Buffy said.

  She catapulted herself off the floor and tackled the guard just as the dinosaur, bleeding from at least a halfdozen bullet wounds, reeled toward him. Her body slam took him sideways and out of munching range, but she knew instantly that it wasn’t going to do any good. He’d come out of his shock trance, but for some reason the fool was fighting her, trying to get back toward the dinosaur and face down the thing with his bare hands like someone had given him a shot of Rambo-itis.

  Her knife was gone, as was her tomahawk—lost somewhere between first bite and the ensuing spray of gunfire. Buffy couldn’t see Oz, but she was betting he’d done the smart thing and beat tracks within the dense greenery at the base of an exhibit housing a couple of huge dinosaurs that looked like hairless, thirtyfoot ducks with dumb expressions and ridges on top of their heads and backs. She got up and managed to drag the guard back a couple more feet, but it was the dinosaur blood that ultimately cinched it; she was covered in the stuff and before she could do anything about it, her hold on Scott slipped from his waist all the way down to nothing more secure than one ankle.

  “No!” she shrieked as he kicked away from her. “Don’t—”

  Too late.

  Scott was a big guy, definitely on the side of chunky. Maybe he was a wannabe weightlifter and that—or maybe it was steroids—was what made him think he could take down the creature snarling at him. Buffy tried to save him a second time, but she failed. She just couldn’t get up enough speed to close the distance before the T. Rex closed on Scott. The guard stood before the dinosaur with an insane grin on his face and his hands bunched in fists in front of him, and all he got in return was a third of his torso ripped out from under him before he could aim a single swing at the unimaginable thing that caused his death.

  For a second all Buffy wanted to do was squeeze her eyes shut and block out the horrid sight. If she lived beyond this afternoon, would she forever remember the sight of this man’s intestines slipping to the floor while his body tottered upright for far too long?

  Time—again, if she lived that long—would tell. Right now the odds had dropped out of their favor and once again it was two weaponless humans against one nearly unstoppable demon-possessed monstrosity. So far the score, dinosaur: two and humans: zero, wasn’t good.

  But it had to be hurting, had to be getting weaker. The blood that covered its green and gold hide wasn’t all the guards’. So far it’d been stabbed, hacked, and shot. At first Buffy had thought that the knife she’d left inside its mouth had probably only broken in the soft tissue and pissed it off, but every time it roared another pulse of scarlet gushed from between its back teeth. The question was did it come from the shallow but painful slash inside its mouth, or from some deeper, unseen damage done by Scott’s bullets? Either way, the T. Rex was still upright, and still on the attack. But all of the dangerous beauty had been stripped away from it, and while the creature that staggered in front of them now was undeniably deadly and vicious, in some ways it was also pathetic, like a miserable, dying animal that desperately needed to be put out of i t s misery.

  And that was exactly what Buffy planned on doing.

  It didn’t matter that she was defenseless as well as weaponless; at an angle behind the T. Rex was a towering stash of dozens of sharp implements in the form of the dinosaur that Oz had described as having “stupid little horns”—a Carnotaurus. It was big and butt-ugly, doing as much justice to evil-looking as a tyrannosaur did. What made this exhibit a lot more helpful, however, was the way that the creature’s head, while fully molded out and painted, began to morph at neck and shoulder level until it slipped into bare skeleton. And hey, hey—weren’t those nice sharp ribs over there
going to come in handy?

  She feinted to the right, yelling the entire time. “Oz, get its attention! Make it look at you!”

  Ever cooperative, her friend popped up out of the fake bushes and waved his arms wildly at the small T. Rex, reminding her absurdly of one of those flip-up targets at a carnival game. “Hey, ugly!” Oz shouted at it. “Over here!”

  With her start to the right, then Oz’s sudden appearance, the undersize dinosaur pitched awkwardly in that direction, its small, mean gaze now focused on Oz. As he hastily backed away, keeping an eye on what was behind him to avoid a trap, Buffy darted around the T. Rex’s other side and ran over to the Carnotaurus skeleton. The thing loomed over her, nearly thirty feet long and easily four times the size of the creature she and Oz were battling, but at least this one was conveniently dead.

  Knowing she was probably going to bring the entire exhibit down and hoping it wouldn’t crush her when it fell, Buffy reached up and yanked on one of the rib bones. It was surprisingly—and thankfully—heavy, but it was also sturdily stuck in place. She heard the Tyrannosaurus toddler roar as it tried to drag itself after Oz, then heard him yell at it in return as he ran between the overlong legs of the exhibit’s spotlighted animal and a waist-high sign labeling it as an Hypacrosaurus.

  Teeth grinding with effort, Buffy yanked on the rib bone again and heard the metal supports comprising the skeleton groan. She was getting there. All it would take was one good inside kick, right—

  — there, at the brace by the outside back leg, and this sucker was coming down.

  She kept hold of her chosen rib as the Carnotaurus skeleton crashed to the floor, trying to guide most of it away from her and causing another mad cacophony of sound to add to the noise that had, it seemed, been going on around her and Oz for hours. Bone-shaped pieces dropped in every direction, a strange parody of a rainstorm. Still fighting with its injured leg, the T. Rex had pulled itself after Oz until her friend had the wall behind him. If Buffy didn’t do something quick, he’d be forced to retreat toward the back exit and risk being followed by the tyrannosaur.

  But the noise that the Carnotaurus exhibit made when it hit bottom was enough to turn the demonized dinosaur’s head back toward Buffy and instantly change its direction. “Just can’t make up your mind, can you?” she said, then grunted and yanked once more on the rib in her hand. Stuck in a chunk of spine, it resisted at first, then finally came free not a second too soon. Hobbled or not, the T. Rex was almost on top of her head before she was able to swing the fake rib bone around in a powerful two-handed arc. The end of the pseudo-bone was ragged and sharp from where she’d broken it loose from the heavy base; it caught the snapping dinosaur across the upper chest and penetrated, leaving a gaping, gushing wound as Buffy dragged it hard all the way across.

  It was undoubtedly a mortal wound, even if the dinosaur wasn’t yet ready to give up its quest for the death of these two troublesome humans. This time its scream was oddly high-pitched—either it knew it was running out of time or the pain was just too much for it to deal with. Crimson blood sheeted the entire front of the animal until it coated the floor and made it look like the T. Rex was flailing for purchase in the most gruesome lake imaginable. Without warning it tried to bite at her and Buffy swayed backward, overbalancing on the treacherously slick floor. She slipped and went down and the motion actually helped her, getting her head out of the same spot where Baby Dino’s bloodflecked teeth crashed neatly together a millisecond later. When Buffy got a firm enough footing, she came up again, hard, swinging her bone-weapon in a neat semicircle across the area directly under the Tyrannosaurus’s jaw line.

  There was no roar of pain.

  This time, there wasn’t any sound at all.

  With its airway and main artery severed, the creature wobbled soundlessly where it stood for an overlong ten seconds, opening and closing its mouth as if it couldn’t believe what had just happened. More blood—Buffy had never seen anything bleed this much—fountained from the upper part of the wound, spraying everything in its way. Buffy felt a line of it cross her face, warm, wet and utterly disgusting—and hey, wasn’t that going to be the final doom for her nice yellow top? Speaking of yellow, all the pizzazz had left their demon-dino’s eyes, fading right in front of her as she watched from a cautious two yards away and Oz crept up from the other side.

  Finally the thing lay lifeless in front of them.

  “Piece of cake,” Buffy said, but she sure didn’t mean it.

  Oz, covered in grit and with a bruise along one pale cheekbone, raised an eyebrow. “I’m glad you think so,” he said gently. “But . . . where’s the other one?”

  Chapter 13

  WILLOW THOUGHT HER HEART WAS GOING TO EXPLODE when they suddenly ran into Buffy and Oz in front of the Stegosaurus exhibit inside the museum. Everyone sucked in air and for a moment, no one said anything. She and Xander could only stare at their friends, trying to comprehend how Buffy could have so much blood dripping off her, Oz’s dirty and bruised face, the fear etched in both their expressions.

  Xander was the first one able to speak. “Are you guys all right?” he demanded. There was a strident edge to his voice as he stepped forward. “What happened? Where are the big scary extinct things with bigger, scarier teeth?” His gaze raked Buffy, and Willow knew she and Oz were wondering the same thing: Whose blood was it?

  “Buffy?” Willow knew she sounded desperate, but that was okay. It wasn’t a crime to be petrified for your best buddy.

  Buffy blinked. “Oh . . . sorry . . . dinosaurs. Yeah.” She glanced wearily at Oz, and his nervous look back into the shadows of the dinosaur exhibit room confirmed Willow’s worst fears. “One down, one to go. I don’t think it’s in the museum, though.”

  Willow thought that was a gutsy thing to say, considering the grimaces on both their faces. “How can you be so sure?”

  “We’re not,” Buffy admitted. “But with the racket we just made, I think the other one would’ve come to join in the fight, tried to finish us off.” She looked a little sick. “There were two museum guards and it . . . killed them both.”

  Willow’s mouth twisted. “Oh.”

  Oz’s eyes suddenly sharpened. “Hey, how did you guys get in here and find us?”

  “A back door,” Xander answered. “Wide open to some kind of trash area.”

  Buffy’s brows drew together. “You say the door was open?”

  “Totally,” Willow said. “Anyone could’ve walked in . . . or out.”

  Oz folded his arms. “I definitely shut that.”

  Buffy started to say something else, then Willow saw her tilt her head, as if she were listening to sounds they couldn’t hear.

  “Sirens,” Buffy said a moment later. “One of the guards said something about the police coming. We need to get out of here pronto.”

  The rest of them nodded and turned to follow her out, then Willow stumbled. The toe of her shoe had tangled in a small pile of items shoved beneath a clot of the imitation flora that had been sloppily dragged over a portion of the fake stone wall in an obvious attempt to hide something. “Wait a sec,” she said. “What’s this?”

  Oz slipped up next to her, then knelt and pushed aside the semi-crushed silk leaves. “School junk. I think someone dumped their backpack.” He frowned as he flipped open one of the notebooks and found a page covered in algebra. “This is Kevin Sanderson’s stuff. I recognize the handwriting.”

  Buffy leaned in. “You know, we never did find the owner of the bloody pen.”

  “Sounds like the name of a mystery novel,” Xander said. “The Owner of the Bloody Pen. A novel of mystery and suspe—”

  “Xander, be quiet,” Willow said. “Bloody pen?”

  Oz nodded, then poked through the jumble of things on the floor again, pointing at a couple of items—a gray plastic calculator, a bottle of white correction fluid—that were smudged with dried red. “I’m thinking it was Kevin’s.”

  “So he’s hurt,” Willow said.
<
br />   “It can’t be too bad,” Buffy said. “We didn’t find his body, and we’ve seen what these things can do to the puny human form when they get serious about it.”

  “I don’t get it. Why would he dump everything out here?” Xander asked. “If he didn’t want it anymore, why not just drop the whole thing?”

  No one said anything for a few moments while they considered this, then Willow’s gaze focused on something a few feet inside the exhibit. Dismay settled over her. “Because,” she said slowly, “he needed the backpack to carry something.”

  Buffy frowned. “Like what?”

  Willow lifted her finger and pointed to a section along the floor of the exhibit that had been broken out of a Stegosaurus nest. “Eggs.”

  * * *

  Kevin felt like he was moving on fast forward through dense fog.

  What had happened here? He thought that, given enough time, he might be able to piece the events together, lay them all out in a sort of flow chart that would chronicle, if not actually explain, the ruin of his life that had started with Daniel Addison walking into Mr. Regis’s classroom. There was so much that needed to be recorded, but he had lost his notebook somewhere . . . maybe he could get a new one and start fresh. Yeah, that would be good. Because other people needed to know about this, and all it would take for him to get it down was a few sheets of paper, a pen, and . . .

  Silence.

  Now that was key, because he simply didn’t have that luxury anymore. In the course of his life, during difficult school projects, complex calculations or the heavy duty problem-solving and speculation that sometimes turned up in the higher levels of the studies to which he’d become exposed, Kevin had always pictured a sort of private, empty . . . space inside his brain. Nothing big, no idiotic airhead concept; it was more like an available file drawer, a little quiet area free of clutter and reserved for clearheaded thinking, the kind of deliberation that an intelligent person sometimes needed to get, or perhaps keep, themselves out of a jam.