Dinosaur Thunder (20 page)

“They’ll never believe you did this,” Elizabeth said, falling in line.

“As long as they’re men, they’ll believe me,” Jeanette said.

Jeanette called Les first, giving him a head start, and then the ambulance. Then Jeanette called the chicks from the barn, and she and Sally herded them into the back of Elizabeth’s SUV. They parked the SUV behind the house.

Les made it to the ranch first, lights flashing and siren blaring, his white patrol car bouncing recklessly down the unpaved road. Les pulled to a stop a few yards from where the men lay. Jeanette had never seen Les in his patrol uniform, and he looked impressive. The uniform included a black shirt with a patch on his shoulder, his gold badge on his left chest, his name tag over that, and gray pants. A wide black belt held his radio, cuffs, Mace, and gun.

“Are you all right?” Les asked, pulling his weapon and holding it on the prostrate men.

“They’re unconscious,” Jeanette said. “I cut them pretty bad.” Jeanette held up the hunting knife from Amigo’s belt.

Les looked from the knife to the two bleeding men. “You’re kidding?” Les said, looking at Jeanette in a whole new way.

“They were high,” Jeanette said. “And Sally helped.”

“Me too,” Elizabeth injected, holding up a kitchen knife.

“Wow,” Les said, struggling for words. “They picked on the wrong damn chicks,” he said, trying to be funny.

Jeanette and Elizabeth exchanged looks, and then smiled at Les, accepting the praise. Les cuffed Amigo and then used a cable tie to secure the bat man. Les took both wallets.

“Yeah, this is them,” Les said, wiping blood from both faces and comparing driver’s license photos. “The big guy is Rodney Dalton. That pile of hamburger is Sean McCord.”

The ambulance arrived with two more patrol cars. The sheriff followed shortly, taking charge. Strapped to gurneys, Dalton and McCord were whisked away, bags of fluid feeding into their arms. Jeanette and Elizabeth spent hours repeating the story over and over, careful to stay together so they kept their stories straight. Like Les, the sheriff and his deputies were astonished by the number of cuts on Dalton and McCord, but all the questions were designed to make the case against the meth dealers. The only awkward moment was when the sheriff squatted inside the barn, looking at footprints.

“You have chickens?” the sheriff asked.

“Yes,” Jeanette said. “They scattered all over.”

The sheriff looked at the footprints, measuring the size with his fingers.

“A couple of turkeys too,” Jeanette added.

Satisfied, the sheriff stood, looked at the gun, hammer, and bloody screwdriver now secured in ziplock bags, and announced they were done. Les lingered, and it was after midnight when Jeanette finally convinced him not to spend the night. A hug and a kiss on the cheek finally satisfied him, and the deputy left reluctantly, making Jeanette promise to call him in the morning.

Jeanette brought the chicks back to the barn, feeding them, petting and praising each one individually. Elizabeth stood to one side with Sally, watching Jeanette with her chicks. Elizabeth was wary, like she feared they would turn on her at any moment.

“We have to go before Dalton and McCord wake up,” Jeanette said. “The sheriff will be back when he hears their story. The Mills Ranch isn’t far from here. We can be there in an hour.”

They agreed to sleep until near dawn, timing their arrival at the Mills Ranch for sunup. Before they slept, Elizabeth followed Jeanette around while she gathered supplies, including two rifles, the revolver from the office file box, ammunition, water, granola bars, fruit snacks, flashlights, spare batteries, and walkie-talkies. Jeanette stuffed the supplies in two packs. Most of the space in the packs was reserved for ziplock bags filled with either Alpo or Purina Dog Chow.

“We’re just going to take a look,” Elizabeth said, looking at the packs full of supplies.

“I bet those were Carson’s last words,” Jeanette said.

Elizabeth slept on the couch until Jeanette woke her. While sleep-drunk, Elizabeth made coffee, and Jeanette and Sally woke the chicks and loaded them in the back of the SUV. Elizabeth drove, she and Jeanette sipping coffee out of insulated mugs with Dinosaur Wrangler logos. Everything Jeanette brought had Dinosaur Wrangler logos—the two packs had patches, Jeanette’s shirt was embroidered with the logo, and her shorts had the logo on the back right pocket. Sally slept in the back with the chicks, the juvenile velociraptors snuggled against the golden retriever. Amazingly quiet, the chicks took turns looking out the windows, or over the seats at Jeanette and Elizabeth. Elizabeth flinched each time a velociraptor snout appeared by her shoulder.

“They won’t hurt you,” Jeanette reassured Elizabeth.

“They hurt Dalton and McCord,” Elizabeth said.

“Only because they were going to hurt me,” Jeanette said. “They don’t like people who don’t like me.”

“We’re friends, right?” Elizabeth asked, smiling.

Jeanette laughed.

They pulled off the road just past the entrance to the Mills Ranch. A Hummer parked in a field was the only obvious military presence. Nothing had happened at the site since Dr. Paulson and Carson disappeared, so there was nothing to guard. They unloaded Sally and the chicks, the velociraptors taking their cues from Jeanette, moving stealthily.

“Carson found the velociraptors in an old barn,” Jeanette said as they climbed a fence and then crept through a pasture.

The sun was coming up, giving just enough light to see. Two tents were pitched in a corral. Jeanette could see a soldier sitting in the driver’s seat of the Hummer, white earbuds in his ears. Jeanette led the way, Elizabeth, Sally and the chicks following in a line. After climbing through a wooden fence, they stayed away from the modern house at one end of the property, keeping close to a small boarded-up house at the far end. Behind the old house they found a barn that was partially collapsed. Interior lights made cracks in the barn walls glow.

“In there,” Elizabeth whispered.

They followed cables through an opening in the wall and inside. Lights hung from wires, although the only lights turned on were work lights aimed at the collapsed wall. Devices hung from the ceiling and sat around the opening. Poles were buried in the ground with wires running down hollow centers. The chicks sniffed the equipment and then spread out, sniffing everything else in the barn. Sally limped to the center of the barn and then lay down so she could watch every creature, in every corner of the barn.

“It’s like they know they’re home,” Jeanette whispered, watching the chicks poke around.

“Look at the way the lights are pointed,” Elizabeth said.

The work lights stood on stands, and all were pointed at the same spot. Mounted on a tripod between the lights was a video camera. Jeanette squatted, looking into the mess at that end of the barn.

“I don’t see anything,” Jeanette said.

“How can it be so dark with all of these lights?” Elizabeth asked.

“Do?” Jeanette called in her deepest voice.

Do came trotting from under the stairs. Jeanette looked at the crusted wound in his side. It looked superficial and did not seem to bother Do.

“What’s in there?” Jeanette asked, leaning forward, pointing and staring.

Do followed the point, bent low, and hissed softly. Then he trotted forward, disappearing into the dark. Jeanette waited. Do did not return.

“Do?” Jeanette called after a few minutes.

They waited ten more minutes, but Do did not return. Re and La came and squatted next to Jeanette and Elizabeth, staring into the dark space. Elizabeth inched away from La.

“That may be the place,” Elizabeth said after a while. “Would … Do come back if he could?”

“I think so,” Jeanette said. “We’re his family.”

“Then it may be a one-way trip,” Elizabeth said. “If we go in, we can’t come back.”

Then Do trotted out of the hole,
awk
ed at Jeanette, and bobbed his head.

“Well?” Elizabeth said. “What does that mean?”

“It means it is time for the chicks to go home,” Jeanette said.

“Time to find Nick,” Elizabeth said, taking out her cell phone. After punching in numbers, she waited and then said, “John, it’s Elizabeth. I’m going to look for Nick.” Elizabeth put her phone in her pack, put the pack on, and said, “Let’s go bail our men out of whatever jam they’ve gotten themselves into.”

“Do, Re, Me, Fa, So, La, Ti,” Jeanette sang. “Sally.”

Do led the way into the opening. Jeanette came next, and then Elizabeth, the chicks crowded around, pushing up against the women. Sally came last, whimpering into the unknown.

24

Quasi-Time

The Egyptians understood that orgonic energy negates the laws of entropy; therefore, they built tombs in the shape of orgone collectors, and used that energy to preserve the bodies of their pharaohs. The Egyptians saw the ability of orgonic energy to inhibit decay as proof that orgone is a living energy.

—Nick Paulson, Ph.D., “Executive Summary: Form and Energy Relationships” (Classified Top Secret: NOFORN, Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals)

Present Time
Washington, D.C.

John met regularly with Nick’s staff and continued to search Nick’s records, looking for anything useful. The Office of Strategic Science was decentralized, using a network of scientists connected through the PresNet, a proprietary ultra-high-quality Internet. Primarily a data-gathering and -sifting organization, the staff in the OSS were mostly young Ph.D.’s or graduate interns who spent their days collating information, searching for patterns and anomalies, and then feeding summaries to Nick—now John. Too monotonous for the best minds in the country, Nick kept cutting-edge scientists involved through the PresNet, special grants, and access to bleeding-edge technology. More intriguing to the science and technology movers and shakers, and what really kept them working for the OSS, was being the first to know about anomalies like the moon tyrannosaur. Two decades of scientific surprises had made membership in PresNet prestigious and competitive.

John sent a PresNet alert out on the network shortly after Nick disappeared. Dozens of messages came back, asking for more information and suggesting tests to be done. John complied with all requests, sending staff to the Mills Ranch to take radiation readings, including gamma ray spectral readings, to search with ground-penetrating radar, and to gather soil samples from the Mills Ranch based on a grid pattern designed by physicists in Louisiana. Others requested access to Landsat photos from the U.S. Geological Survey, bringing in cameras that could record images outside the human range, including infrared and ultraviolet, and getting access to navy data on LFA (Low-Frequency Active Sonar) in use at the time of Nick’s disappearance. None of the tests or observations had generated helpful information.

There were so many questions about physical details of the site, most asking if the collapsed portion of the barn formed a pyramid, that John posted photographs of the barn and ranch from every conceivable angle and then had an intern create three-dimensional models of the barn that could be accessed online. When a sharp-eyed scientist noticed that one of the photos of the ranch house included Fanny Mills in a bikini on her deck, requests poured in for more photos of Fanny.

At the site, John installed a dozen different kinds of instruments to measure everything requested, including electrical resistance of the soil, gamma radiation, humidity, infrared radiation, and geological tremors. Instrument data was periodically downloaded to a database and accessible by anyone on the PresNet. Finally, John set up a high-definition camera that could be remotely operated by PresNet members for real-time inspection.

Increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress, John sifted through the PresNet traffic, looking for anything helpful. The e-mail had a dozen threads, some of it seemingly unrelated, the scientists bogged down in minutiae. One thread concerned the lack of sodium-24 and manganese-56 radioisotopes in the soil samples, another discussed the proportions of sodium and manganese atoms present in the soil around the Mills barn. There was an exchange of mathematical models too, which were impenetrable to John. If any of these could help to find Nick, John could not see how.

One thread dealt with the moon tyrannosaur, and most of it was mathematical modeling. John had traveled through a time tunnel from a Yucatán pyramid to the moon and back, so he knew it was possible that there was a connection between the moon tyrannosaur and what had happened to Nick, but what the connection was, he could not see. Eight years ago, ecoterrorists had used the orgonic energy collected by pyramids to manipulate time waves, and create tunnels through time and space. However, the orgonic-energy-collecting pyramids had been destroyed. Besides, the tunnels the pyramids had created had been two-way. Through the mazes in the pyramids, you could travel to and from sites distant in both geography and chronometry, although the passages were complex. If Nick had crawled into a time tunnel on the Mills ranch, the tunnel was unlike what was created by the pyramids. This tunnel was either selective in who or what could travel through it, or it was a variable phenomenon, coming and going. Also, Nick and the people with him had not returned, suggesting that they either could not return, or that they were dead or injured. The dinosaurs that appeared in Orlando were able to return to wherever they had come from, and to take a policewoman and a horse with them, suggesting that it might be a different phenomenon than the one on the Mills Ranch. Since then, no one else had managed to pass through the storeroom in the Orlando theater. After three months and no problems, John had allowed the theater to repair and rebuild.

John skipped the equations, and did not bother downloading models he could never understand. Scanning the commentaries that came with the models, John picked up repeated references to “quasi-time,” which he took to refer to the conditions that held the moon dinosaur. Since the dinosaur did not age, exhaust, or suffer from the moon vacuum, it could not exist in time, as we know it. Since it moved and seemed to have some perception of its surroundings, including the astronauts who found it, it experienced some form of time. The fact that it was impervious to the vacuum conditions on the moon meant it was likely that it was not actually on the moon, but instead somewhere on Earth, in some time period other than the present. All modern tyrannosaurs were accounted for, thus ruling out a present-day source. Therefore, the scientists in that track referred to the “time state” of the moon tyrannosaur as “quasi-time,” speculating it would help explain VSL (variable speed of light). Until reading this post, John did not know that the speed of light varied, having learned in school that it was a constant. Remembering his experience after crawling into the opening on the Mills Ranch made John think the quasi-time idea had merit. There was something different about the time flow in that opening.