Anonymous Rex (15 page)

The sirens grow louder, coming closer. We were not seen; I am sure of that. But I am amazed that someone in this seedy part of town cared enough about their fellow man—or so they thought—to dial up 911 and report the sounds of a
Wild Kingdom
episode emanating from a nearby alley.

So much to do, so little time. Story of my day so far. There is no way to eradicate all traces of the scene; that would take at least twenty minutes, and by my most conservative estimates, I have about four. I’ll have to go the quick route, then, a precautionary measure at best. I hope it will do.

I hobble over to my garment bag, the initial burst of adrenaline wearing off, the 12:12 pain train finally arriving at the station. Inside a compartment, hidden beneath a flap, concealed within a pocket obscured by a strip of cloth, I find the small pouch I am searching for. Grasping it as daintily as possible between my teeth, I limp back to the fallen dinosaur and wrap my arms around its torso. I pull.

And nearly give myself a hernia. This thing is heavy, heavier even than its incredible size should allow. The sirens dopple closer, accompanied
by the quack of an approaching ambulance. I tug at the creature again, this time throwing my weight into it, and the carcass budges an inch or two. Straining against dead weight, I work my way over to a nearby Dumpster, every foot a Herculean struggle.

There’s no way I’ll be able to get this thing inside the Dumpster, though it may be the right thing to do. Even if I were somehow able to clean and jerk it over my head—impossible for my frame, even when out of guise—odds are it would come crashing down on me, flattening me into a Wile E. Coyote pancake. Perhaps if I had an hour—or a winch—but I have neither time nor equipment on my side. I can hear brakes screeching, cruiser doors slamming.

My civic duty as a member of our hidden society requires that I move all deceased unguised dinosaurs out of sight, into a safe area where they can be collected by the proper authorities. It does not require that I kill myself trying to carry it out. Into the Dumpster, then, is simply not going to happen. But behind the Dumpster … aha! I drag away.

It’s a provisional measure at best, as tomorrow’s daylight will illuminate the dinosaur’s remains for anyone who cares to take a peek around the alley, but the cleanup crew should have arrived by then, erasing any evidence of its existence. I snatch the pouch from between my teeth and tear off its outer layer.

An incredible foulness—rotting carcasses, long-dead citrus fruits—hits me point-blank like a frying pan, slamming my head back into the warm night air. No wonder the cleanup crews have been known to smell this stuff from over twenty miles away—untrained, I could probably pick it up at ten. Holding my breath as best I can, shielding my sensitive snout, I sprinkle the granules inside the pouch onto the dinosaur’s carcass.

Its flesh begins to dissolve away.

I would like to stick around and watch my opponent slowly disappear over the next hour or so, muscle and tissue evaporating, steaming into the air, until only a skeletal frame—suitable for display in any of your finer museums—is left. Maybe I’d be able to figure out what the hell it was that had attacked me in the first place, and why a nightclub songbird named Sarah Archer had business inside a dilapidated health clinic that is clearly anything but. But I can hear police-band
squawkers and the conversation of officers, and it has come time to take my leave of the scene. I cover the dinosaur’s body with a nearby heap of trash, making sure to spread it around, fixing it to look like the rest of the refuse that naturally occurs in the wilds of the city.

Remembering to grab my clamps and girdles, not to mention my garment bag—poor luggage, ripped and torn, used and abused as it has been—I flex my powerful legs and leap atop the Dumpster, tottering on the edge as I regain my balance. Another hop, this time getting my bruised tail in on the action, and I make it to the roof of a low building. With no idea where I am, and no knowledge of NYC landmarks, I take off across the rooftops of the city, not caring where I end up so long as it is far away from the battle scene.

Sometime within the next two minutes, the police will stumble into the alleyway. Perhaps they will not see the remnants of the fight, considerable though they are. Perhaps the shadows will obscure the evidence we have left behind. But the odds are good that they will find the blood, the bits of organ meat, and the odds are good that they will investigate further.

But they will not find anyone or anything to match up with that blood and that organ meat. They’ll chat it out, they’ll argue theories—cops and their theories, oh my—and then, once they exhaust their verbal energies, they’ll run a spot check of the area. It will turn up nothing. Even if an officer should be bright enough to peek behind the Dumpster, he will find only a pile of refuse, a pack of litter that didn’t hit the mark. The odor beneath it, so powerful that I can still smell it eighteen rooftops away, will not affect his worn-out snout; humans are unable to detect those tiny microorganisms that so love our decaying flesh.

And maybe there is a dinosaur among those police officers. If this is the case, he’ll be unable to escape the smell of that pouch, will understand immediately what it means, and will attempt to wrap things up in the area in as timely a fashion as possible. His job as an officer of the law is important, yes, but all must come in second in the face of duty to the species. Later, once he’s alone, he’ll call it in to the proper authorities, and they’ll go to work.

And if there is no dino cop working this beat tonight? Then we’ll just have to hope that a roving cleanup crew, one of the three-dino
bands that prowl the streets of the city—twenty-four hours a day, three shifts of eight hours each, no breaks, no holidays, crappy job but somebody’s gotta do it—comes across the beast’s skeletal remains before a human accidentally stumbles upon them and goes running to the paleontology department at NYU. We cannot afford any more modern fossil finds.

I leap, and I leap, and I leap, giving a workout to whatever frog DNA might have seeped into my genetic code way back when in the primordial ooze. Soon enough, the rooftop quality changes from rotting wood to merely disgusting, yet structurally sound, wood, and I know I’m well on my way to safety. Eventually, I find myself hopping around without having to worry whether or not my landing pad is going to crumble beneath me, and I figure I’m far enough away from that alley to take a break. There’s a large road, possibly a highway, maybe ten blocks away. Time to change.

My last jump lands me on a rooftop that is bordered on all sides by a small support wall. Perfect. First job is to dress these wounds. Tossing my garment bag to the ground, I rifle through my clothing and pick out those outfits for which I care the least. I am full on Claiborne for Men, short on Armani—just two shirts, sigh—so Claiborne it is. Wiping the bloodstains from my claws onto the cement underfoot, I tear a few of my cotton button-downs into long, thin bandages and carefully dress my wounds. I leave my linen Henley unmolested, for it is my favorite shirt, and I can’t bear parting with it despite the fact that I am in need of an extra tourniquet for my tail. It is the only piece of linen I own, and I refuse to destroy it. Linen breathes, I have been told, and I find this an alluring aspect to any fabric.

Wrapped up like a sarcophagus, the bleeding having slowed to a light dribble, I unzip the inner lining to my garment bag and pull out my spare guise, laying the polysuit on the ground before stepping inside. As has been the rule since our species first decided to permanently camouflage ourselves over three million years ago, no one dino is permitted to change his or her human appearance without express consent from the local and national councils. Everyone is allowed a spare guise or two, emergency pairs for when the first line of visual defense is ruptured, but they must be ordered through one of the major guise corporations using an ID number specific to each dino
and kept on file in classified record books. Mine is 41392268561, and you can bet I’ve had it tattooed on my brain since day one.

Still, small changes are permitted, individual quirks that the end user can decide to add or subtract from the guise depending on his or her mood. The guise I am now pulling over my torn, bruised body, for example, is an exact replica of my day-to-day costume in every way but one: This one sports a mustache.

It’s a charming bit of facial hair, really, a thin wisp of fur that proclaims my machismo without overstating the point. I purchased it from the Nanjutsu Corporation—Guise Attachment 408, David Niven Mustache
#
3, $26.95—and attached it permanently to my spare guise as soon as the UPS truck drove away. I was like a kid on Christmas morning, and I wanted to try out my new toy as soon as possible. Slap it on and watch those dates pour in. At least, that’s what the advertisement said.

Unfortunately, as Ernie had a habit of erupting into laughter as if he’d spent the day sucking ether whenever he looked at it, I stopped wearing the entire costume after two days of continual embarrassment. But I’ve kept the guise around as a spare, a you-never-know pair, and I’m sure glad I’ve got it now. I toss on one of my few remaining shirts, throw on a pair of pants, and mourn the loss of my hat and trench coat, items I carelessly left behind during my frenzied escape.

I climb off the roof and shimmy down a fire-escape ladder, and as I have no urge to waste another hour trying to hail a cab, it takes me little time to seek out the closest pay phone. It’s broken. I walk a block, find another one, also broken. We’re gonna play it this way, are we, New York? Eventually I locate a working pay phone, call in my location—street signs, finally, and it seems I’ve wound up in the Bronx—to the first cab company I can find in the decimated Yellow Pages attached to the booth and wait for my ride. It is nearly one o’clock in the morning now, almost an hour since that spiked tail nearly decapitated me, and I can only hope that the taxi will arrive soon. I am tired.

I stagger into the Plaza Hotel thirty minutes later, my casualty-of-war garment bag draped across my body, and stumble to the reservations
desk. All thoughts of the case—of Sarah Archer, of Mrs. McBride, of Donovan Burke and his Evolution Club, and even of Ernie have compressed themselves into the subbasement of my consciousness. There is nothing left of me; I am a husk, a shell, my faculties having long since taken the A train.

“My name is Vincent Rubio,” I whisper to the desk clerk, a kid so young he could be here on a work-study program from grade school, “and I want a room.”

The clerk, surprised perhaps at my luggage, my weary eyes, my brusque manner, begins a stuttering reply. “Do—do—do you have—”

I know what’s coming, head it off. “If you say you don’t have a room,” I tell him, my brain already sleeping, dreaming, letting the body do all the work, “if you say I need a reservation, if you even think about uttering the words
I am sorry, sir
—I will leap behind that counter and bite your ears off. I will tear out your eyes and feed them to you. I will rip out your nostrils and plug them up your anus, and what’s more—what is more—I will make sure you will never, ever, father a child, and I will do so in the most horrible, evil, mind-numbing way that your little mind can imagine. So unless you enjoy hearing yourself shriek in agonizing, blood-curdling, down-on-your-knees pain, I suggest you take my credit card, give me a key, and tell me which elevator to take.”

My accommodations in the presidential suite are just lovely.

I
f the New York Plaza Hotel is not currently considered one of the finest lodging establishments in the world, I hereby nominate it as such. If it is already on that exclusive list, I suggest that a new category be created called Most Comfortable Berth, and that the king-sized bed—the emperor-sized bed—the dictator-for-life-sized bed—in which I had the great fortune to sleep last night take its rightful place at the very top.

Despite numerous wounds to various parts of my body, I tossed not an inch. Despite a full-tail bruise, the night-sky blues contrasting horribly with my natural green, I turned not a smidgen. Despite a host of images overcrowding my brain like passengers on a stuffed subway train, mental pictures that will provide fodder for years of psychoanalysis, I experienced not one nightmare. There were no unsettling dreams of any kind, let alone of mutant dinosaurs on the prowl, and I ascribe it all to that bed, that wonderful bed, not too firm, not too soft, accepting the contours of my wracked body and mind, cushioning in all the right places. Now I know why mammals are so keen to get back into the womb.

I order room service because I feel I am owed it after last night’s fiasco. Vincent’s Rules clearly state that once you have been attacked in an alleyway by a creature that cannot exist according to the laws of nature, the case you are working on triples its budget automatically.

Breakfast—three fried eggs; two strips of bacon; two sausage patties; side of hash browns; side of grits; six buttermilk pancakes; four waffles; a loaf of French toast; three Southern-style biscuits; one chicken-fried steak; bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios; low-fat, nonfat, whole milk; and orange juice—is placed on my nightstand by a room service steward named Miguel, and though I consider asking him to bring up a few garnishes from the kitchen, something in me curdles at the thought of sucking on a sprig of basil this early in the morning. Odd. This, too, shall pass.