Dinosaur Lake 3: Infestation (11 page)

“Sure, entertain me with one of your fictional yarns,
buddy. I love them. It’ll help pass the time.”

They were driving through another town, a larger
one than the last, bright in the sunshine. Modern. Shiny windows and steel
plated buildings. Lots of people and polluting cars. The traffic was terrible.
It made Steven remember why he lived out in the country.

“All right. This old fellow said when he was a young
man he spent many years wandering around doing odd jobs. You know, looking to
find himself as many of us do. Anyway, for some years he’d worked as a
companion/nurse to this elderly, retired gentleman name of Russell Graham. Now
this old man he’d worked for had come from a sizeable, loving family and he’d
outlived them all. There’d been three or four brothers and brother-in-laws he’d
cared deeply for and dearly missed. And all of them, for many years, used to
camp out in this wilderness spot. On one of his brother-in-law’s land. They’d
kiss their womenfolk goodbye for a long weekend once a year or more and all
camp out at this place by the river. Under a huge Willow tree. They’d sit
around a stone fire ring they’d built out in the woods the first year and when
they came home they’d bring a large rock with the year’s date and all their
names scratched on it. They started out as nine of them.

“It was a treasured ritual. The nine of them
traveling to that spot. Deep in the forest. Every year. Building and sitting
around the fire ring beneath the tree, spinning tales and talking about how
they would change the world, when they were young, and then as the years went
by, speaking instead of their treasured memories and their hopes for their
golden years. They were family, they were friends of the best sort. Always
there for one another.”

Justin was listening, his eyes on the road. They
came to a stop and then speeded up.

“The years went by. Life went on for the family.
Good things happened and bad. They grew old, retired from the working world, all
had their medical issues now and again. Still the men all went on the annual
camping trip every year and remained close. Twenty, thirty years. Now they had
a fine collection of the signed rocks. All of the brothers and brother-in-laws,
one by one, got sick, had heart attacks or something as deadly, and passed
away, except for this old gentleman my friend on the bar stool was taking care
of in the winter of the man’s life and the spring of his.

“By the time the old codger I met in the bar that
night came on the scene, all but the old gentleman had died. His client was the
last one left. Feeling poorly, too. Age and chronic illness having finally
caught up to him. The old gentleman would regale him with grand stories of
their camping trips and mourn over their loss.

“Then the time of the annual camping trip came
around. A crisp fall afternoon with the promise of winter in the air.

“The last remaining old gentleman wanted to travel
to their special spot in the woods beneath the Willow and toast all his dead
comrades one last time, even though the weather was forecasted to turn frigid later
that night and a storm was coming in. So he asked his companion/nurse, a much younger
version of the man on the stool beside me, to take him. Oh, not for the whole
weekend. Just for the evening. Let him sit around the fire ring, build a fire.
Remember those friends of his now gone. One last time.”

When Steven paused too long, Justin asked, “Well,
did he do it? Take the old man to the woods to sit around the fire ring one
last time?”

“Yes,” his voice had fallen to a whisper, “he did.
He bundled up the old gentleman in heavy clothes, his special camping cap that
had seen better days, and took him out there, found the tree, the cold fire
ring and plunked him on a lawn chair before it. He even built him a small fire
because it had gotten so cold. Poured them glasses of whiskey and they toasted
the ones no longer there. It started to rain and the wind to howl through the
leaves. They knew they couldn’t stay long. The old gentleman wasn’t well.

“He began to shiver and cough, so the companion
decided enough was enough and was about ready to take him home. First he had to
run out among the trees and take care of some bodily business, if you know what
I mean. When he returned he was shocked to see what he saw.”

“What did he see?”

Still whispering, Steven finished. “As he came up
on where he’d left his charge, he saw a blazing fire with a group of men around
it laughing, drinking and talking. One had a guitar and was singing a haunting
song he’d never heard before. But it was as if they were all in a smoky dream.
He could see and hear them, but they were pale and see-through, as if they
weren’t really there. Just apparitions from another time. They were young,
vibrant. Men he’d only seen in dog-eared pictures his employer had showed him
many times. The brothers and brother-in-laws. His old gentleman was there, but real
young. He recognized him by his beard, the shape of his face, the camping cap
he always wore, and his silly grin. He even waved at him and smiled.

“And as he stared at the eerie gathering the men
and their voices, the music, began to drift away on the wind, their forms
dissolved, and suddenly there was no one there but his old gentleman, unmoving,
in his lawn chair before a dying fire. Dead as stone. He’d gone to join his
lifelong friends.”

“Whoa…they’d all been ghosts, huh?” Justin’s voice
was restrained. “And they’d come to fetch him?”

“Well, yes I guess they did, if you believe in such
things. Maybe the elderly gentleman’s companion had had too much of that
whiskey to drink and hallucinated the whole thing. Who knows.

“The old codger on the bar stool ended his story,
winked at me, got up and left the bar. I never saw him again. It makes you
wonder, though, doesn’t it? If there are such things as spirits and if they
come back for the right reasons?”

“Uh, huh, it makes you wonder. Interesting tale.”

The rest of the drive they conversed about less spooky
subjects such as their lives, their families and jobs. Catching up. Steven never
getting tired of asking questions now and then about Justin’s experiences with
the earlier dinosaurs. He thought perhaps somehow he could use the stories in
his book. He took lots of notes on his iPad.

“As strange as it sounds, because Oregon is so near
to the coast, but I’ve never seen the Redwood trees either,” Justin remarked as
they were passing over the border into California. “I heard they’re
spectacular. Towering giants. I imagine I’ll be seeing them now. You know some
of them are over two thousand years old? They’re some of the oldest trees in
the world.”

“Some of the oldest but not the oldest. I read
about this one tree,” Steven said, “I think it’s called The Hatch Tree. It’s a
Great Basin bristlecone pine that grows in the California White Mountains. That
tree they estimate is at least five thousand and sixty-three years old; which
makes it the oldest tree in the world. Single tree, I mean. I think there are cluster
groups of trees, clonal colonies they call them, that are probably older. One
of them is almost nine thousand years old. And a colony of
Huon pine
trees
covering two and a half acres on
Mount Read
,
Tasmania
,
is estimated to be around, ooh, ten thousand years old, though there are even
older tree colonies other places in the world, I just can’t recollect them now.”

“How do you know these things?” Justin slowed the
car down for a stop sign and then increased his speed. “You’re like a walking Wikipedia.”

“I read…a lot. When you’re on the road from one
motel to another, singing for your supper, you have to do something to pass the
down time and there’s a great deal of that. I surf the web a lot, as well. I
like knowing things other people don’t. It makes for good over or after dinner
talk.”

“I bet. Okay, where’s the biggest mountain in the
world? The largest lake?”

Steven laughed. “Mount Everest, if you count total
elevation above sea level. The largest lake is the Caspian Sea which is
completely
enclosed by Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan
and Azerbaijan. And…the world's deepest lake, I believe, is Lake Baikal in
Siberia, Russia, at around one thousand six hundred and thirty-eight meters
deep.”

“Photographic memory, huh?” With
his right hand Justin opened the glove compartment and fished around until he
came out with a bag of chips. Tore it open with his teeth, offered some to
Steven who declined, and dug in.

“Most of the time. The older I
get, though, the more faded the photograph.”

“I guess that comes in mighty handy
with memorizing all those song lyrics, right?”

“You know it. I have this older
musician friend of mine, Colin Anders, in his seventies now. He began playing
with bands in the nineteen sixties, what now is considered classic rock, and
his memory is shot. Poor sod. He can’t remember song lyrics for nothing any longer.
Guitar playing is still real sharp, but not words. He had to stop playing
because of it. Shame, he had such an amazing voice and could he pick that
guitar. Hope that doesn’t happen to me.”

“I don’t think it happens to every
musician. How about The Rolling Stones, The Eagles and Paul McCartney? Countless
others? They’re still out there doing their thing well into their seventies or
further. And doing it well, too.”

Steven threw his friend a cynical
look. “Those are the rare exceptions. Most traveling troubadours like me just grow
old and fade away. End up broke and eating dog food in a rat-infested motel
room. Die alone.”

“Whoa, aren’t you a pessimist. I
guess you could say the same about most of us humans. None of us know how our
old age will be,” Justin concluded.

Then, as if he wanted to get off
the gloomy subject, he offered, “Hey, there are Three Musketeers and Milky Ways
in the glove compartment, too, if you want some.”

“Thanks. You know the way to my
heart. Chocolate and more chocolate.”

“You and Ann have that in common, too,
you know. She’s also a terrible chocoholic.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Steven was
unwrapping a Milky Way. “Chocolate is one of the purest joys of life, for me,
along with a well-played song. I eat it, I’m instantly happy. You can’t say
that about most other things in life.”

Justin chuckled. “I wholly agree.”

Steven blurted out in the carefree
spirit of the moment, “Give me chocolate every day or give me death!”

The two friends exchanged an uncomfortable
look. Under the circumstances, it was a silly thing for Steven to have said.
But, as he was discovering, it was difficult to be frightened every minute of
the day or to remember that the world might now become more dangerous than it had
been a few days ago. For him anyway. But he was more than aware that Justin had
been dealing with the dinosaur problem far longer than he had, and had lost
friends to the monsters, so he decided to go easier on the dying stuff from
then on.

They made it to the motel long before six o’clock
and Justin telephoned Chief Ranger Witter and arranged for them to meet at a
local Applebee’s where they could discuss everything over steaks. Besides, he
and Justin really liked steaks. Rare. With heaps of onions on top. Yummy.

***

“No, I didn’t want you to come down here and tell
me what I already know. What I don’t want to know, if you expect me to be
truthful about it, Dr. Maltin. I’d really like to just forget what’s happened
and go back to the way things used to be. Normal. But I can’t. The evidence
won’t allow me. Yet in many ways I still can’t believe I’ve seen what I’ve seen.
Don’t want to believe it.” Witter shook his head as he regarded Justin. Once
and a while he glanced at Steven, to acknowledge there was a third person at
the table, but most of his attention since the conversation had begun was on
the paleontologist.

“You say there’s been a couple of bad earthquakes
in the park in the last five or six years?” Justin pressed, digging for more
information. He had to pry it out of the ranger as the man wasn’t at all forth
coming with it.

“We always have a lot of earthquakes here in
California,” the ranger said with a somber expression. “So many that there are
signs all over the park warning the visitors if we have one, especially if it
originates out along the Pacific Ocean coast beneath the water, to be aware
there could be a following tsunami close behind it…and to get to higher ground
immediately.”

“Have many of them lately?” Steven, suddenly
uneasy, couldn’t help but jump in and ask. “Earthquakes and tsunamis, I mean?
Bad ones?”

“Seven or eight, maybe nine, in the last three
years. But we’ve been very fortunate not to have had any tsunamis from them.”

“What magnitude on the Richter scale, and where,
were the earthquakes?” Justin asked.

“One we had in the park, oh, I’d say, about five
years ago was a high six pointer. Another one two years later was almost seven.
That one did a lot of damage. We’re still finding destruction in the
backcountry from it. Places we don’t usually get into.”