Dragon Dreams

by Chris A. Jackson

  "Damn! Why didn't I think of that?" Bob made a face as the waitress scratched a note and whirled away. "On a day like this, that would be perfect."

  "Because you're a herd animal, like the rest of us," John replied. "Hutch orders beer, so we all follow suit. Obviously, Alexi is the only one here with any originality at all."

  "Or she doesn't like beer." Lonnie flashed him a look that Aleksi couldn't interpret. "And it's Aleksi, not Alexi, right?"

  "Oh, it doesn't really matter." She unwrapped her napkin from her silverware and clenched it in her lap.

  "Sure, it matters," Lonnie said with another smile. "I wouldn't want people to call me Loony, though a few have on occasion."

  "And they're still alive?" John asked, sipping his beer.

  "I didn't say that, and yes, it was a bitch hiding the bodies!" The others laughed, and Aleksi found herself liking Lonnie's sense of humor.

  "I can't tell the difference." Bob knitted his eyebrows. "The two sound the same to me."

  "The difference is subtle," Dr. Hutchinson said, suddenly serious. "'A-lek-si' breaks the last syllable before the s sound, and is correct. 'A-lex-i' breaks it after, and isn't. Is that right, Aleksi?"

  "Um…yeah, that's right," she stammered, uncomfortable with the scrutiny of her name. "Thanks, Dr. Hutchinson."

  "Ooo, she broke rule number one!" Bob grinned and lifted his glass. "Shame, shame! Two demerits!"

  "I'm sorry, I—" The others were laughing, and Aleksi felt heat flush to her face.

  "Doesn't count." Dr. Hutchinson took a portion of the nachos and a quesadilla, motioning the others to dig in. "She doesn't know the rules."

  "Rules?" The waitress arrived with her coffee, and Aleksi took a sip. It was hot, strong, and sweet, the Irish whiskey biting her tongue. She vowed to only have one.

  "Rule number one," Lonnie held up a finger, "states that, outside of formal academic situations where potentially anal-retentive faculty members are present, Dr. Hutchinson will only be addressed by his official nick name, Hutch. Any violation of this edict will earn two demerits and invoke rule number two." She raised a second finger.

  "And what's rule number two?"

  "Violators of rule number one will buy the next round!" they all chimed in unison, loud enough to earn some glances from the surrounding tables.

  "But you didn't know the rules, so you get a freebie," John raised his glass with another devilish grin. "This time."

  "So, now that we're introduced and have everyone's name straight, let's go over this new project and see if we can get some work done."

  Dr. Hutchinson, Hutch, she reminded herself, outlined the Siberian bone bed project and what he hoped to accomplish. Aleksi listened, gauging everyone's moods. At the mention of work, they all shifted to more somber faces, though Lonnie seemed less attentive than the others. She finished her beer and flagged down the waitress for another. Aleksi sipped her coffee carefully and nibbled one of the quesadillas.

  "So, Lonnie's off the hook because she's defending her dissertation in March, and will be utterly insufferable after that," Hutch said when the summary was complete.

  "Damn right!" Lonnie grinned, accepted her beer from the waitress, and lifted it in toast.

  "But the rest of you are decidedly on the hook." Hutch looked at Bob who cringed like he knew what was coming. "Bob is our molecular guru, and will be isolating, PCRing, and sequencing DNA from the samples."

  "Which means piecing together about a million fragments." Bob made a face.

  "True. As well as full isolation precautions with the samples to avoid contamination. This project, he hopes, will provide enough secondary data for a dissertation proposal, but the primary Ursus analysis will be Aleksi's. We've got to get her proposal in before the end of the semester. John will handle some of the more esoteric statistical analyses, but that won't kick in for months. Aleksi will be handling the lion's share of the initial workload. That means working up the samples, imaging, categorizing everything by morphology, transcribing all the notes and, hopefully, finding enough tissue for the DNA isolation."

  "Better you than me," John said.

  "I'd rather scrape bone than do stats." Lonnie gave Aleksi a nudge.

  "Me, too," Aleksi agreed.

  As Hutch continued with the plan, she found herself smiling. She liked them, all of them; they were friendly and seemed competent. A team, working together instead of competing, and she was a part of it. She had to admit, it felt good.

  4

  Aleksi grasped the handle of the door to the Northwest Science building and pulled, but it was locked. Of course it's locked, idiot. It's the day after Christmas. The whole university's closed.

  Christmas… She'd spent the day alone in her apartment, reading and playing with Iggy. She'd given him some hot-house grown hibiscus for his present, and he had gorged until he could barely move. Her own Christmas dinner had been grilled ham and cheese and pretzels. She drank Irish coffee, read every word of Dr. Hutchinson's proposal until she knew it backward and forward, and fell asleep on the couch. It was the best Christmas she could remember, simply because she had spent it alone. Except for one phone call to her parents, a half an hour of guilt and ridicule, it had been perfect.

  She pulled one glove off with her teeth and fumbled her ring of keys from her coat pocket. They were so cold they stuck to her fingers. She found the right one and opened the door, careful to pull the metal handle with her gloved hand. They'd had another Arctic blast, and Cambridge was a solid block of ice.

  She pulled off her other glove and unbuttoned her coat as she climbed the stairs. The heat inside the buildings had been turned down, but it felt positively torrid compared to outside. She turned down the short hall to Hutch's office, and found his door closed. Immediately, she wondered if she'd made a mistake with the time. Was she late? Early? Was this the wrong day?

  Aleksi reached for her phone to check her schedule, but stopped when she heard laughter from behind the door. They were inside.

  Anxiety gripped her stomach. Were they talking about her? Should she listen through the door? What if they were and she overheard something bad? What if they opened the door and she was caught?

  Stop it! Near panic attacks like this were nothing new, but why now? She knew everyone in that room. They were working together, professionals, scientists; she was being an idiot again.

  Aleksi clenched her hands into fists and forced herself to knock. The door opened before her knuckles rapped a third time, and she found herself staring into the wizened features of the MCZ curator, Dr. Quinton Neilson.

  "Aleksi!" Quinton stepped back and waved her into the office.

  Inside, Bob Tomlin and Hutch stood from their chairs, both of them smiling. Had they been talking about her? A wall of heat and the scent of coffee buffeted her as she stepped inside, and she realized why the door had been closed. Hutch had a space heater running.

  "It's good to see you again." Quinton stepped aside and closed the door behind her.

  "And you, Dr. Neilson," she said, forcing a smile.

  "Now, stop that." He grinned to Hutch. "I told her the first time we met to call me Quinton, but it didn't take. Aleksi was doing undergraduate work study with the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and came up to tell us how to reorganize our archives." He laughed and Aleksi blushed, opening her mouth to protest. "Oh, don't. I'm just kidding. Well, it won't be long before I can call you Dr. Rychenkna, from what I hear."

  "It'll be a few years yet." She lowered her gaze and clenched her hands in her pockets. They had been talking about her.

  "Don't worry, Aleksi. We didn't talk about you much, and it was all good."

  She gaped at Hutch for a moment, then stammered, "I didn't…I mean I wasn't…"

  "It's true." Bob grinned and looked sheepish. "It was all good. You're like a Stepford student. Makes a poor lab geek like me feel inadequate."

  "I…" She stared at Bob. He was joking. He had to be.

  "Well, we're n
ot here to chat, but to get you your samples." Quinton gave her arm a squeeze and nodded to the door. "Let's get over to the MCZ and see what we can find, shall we?"

  Hutch finished his coffee and they all grabbed their coats. He unplugged the heater before they left and followed the curator down the stairs and out into the bitter cold.

  "I requisitioned us some muscle." Quinton keyed them into the museum and ushered them inside. "One of the assistants who wanted to earn some overtime."

  "Good." Hutch grinned at his two students. "I did tell you the samples were big, didn't I?"

  "Cave bear bones usually are, aren't they?" Bob chuckled.

  "It's not just the bone that's heavy. It's the rock bed." Aleksi had worked on some bone bed finds that weighed tons.

  "She's right." Quinton led the way down to the archives in the basement, the primary storage facility for the museum, four floors of nothing but storage. "These are merely huge, not truly gargantuan, so we should be able to manage."

  They kept descending until they were on the bottom level. Out of the stairwell, they stopped to divest their coats, gloves, scarves and hats. That musty, dusty, repository scent caressed Aleksi's senses, and she felt better.

  After her first high school field trip to the American Museum of Natural History, Aleksi had taken every chance to hop the train and spend her meager allowance on the entry fee. After the fifth time the night guards had to force her to leave at closing time, one of the curators had suggested that she should arrange a work study project with her school.

  The experience had changed her life.

  "I don't get down here often enough." Quinton said as they passed through a pair of double doors into the meticulously climate-controlled archives, row upon row of shelves, racks of drawers, a library of once living creatures waiting to be discovered. "You won't find this on the Internet, ay, Aleksi."

  "Exactly," was all she could say.

  "Impressive." Hutch squinted down the rows of cabinets and open racks that held larger specimens. "How many samples in the whole facility?"

  "Including those on display, about a quarter million." Quinton motioned them down the rows of racks toward the back. "Most are entomological and small vertebrates, of course. Space is a problem. There's some pressure to consolidate some of the larger samples, put them in long term, off-site, storage, but we're fighting it."

  "I wondered why my request for the bone bed samples was approved so quickly. You need the space." Aleksi thought Hutch might be trying for sardonic, but she knew he was right.

  "That's part of the reason," Quinton admitted. "The other is that the samples haven't been worked up properly." He smiled at Aleksi. "And now that I know Aleksi's going to do the work-up, I'm even more satisfied with the arrangement."

  Aleksi studied her boots as they walked.

  "Stepford student. What did I tell you?" Bob nudged her elbow, and gave her a wink, his whisper jovial and his smile genuine.

  "You may not think so, Aleksi, but you already have a good reputation with the work you've done at AMNH, so don't be modest." Quinton checked a sheet of paper and the numbers on the racks. "Ah, here we are. Right down here." He turned between two columns of steel shelving.

  A man stood half way down the row, his back to them, one hand resting on the shelf. A yellow trolley stood beside him, the kind Aleksi recognized for moving heavy samples through tight spaces. The man wore a lab coat and had meticulously trimmed short brown hair.

  "Ah. Derrick. Good of you to come." The man turned, and Aleksi recognized him. The same museum assistant she'd seen the other day when she left the archives, the one who seemed too friendly.

  "My pleasure, Dr. Neilson." His eyes flicked over them and he smiled, teeth perfectly white and straight. "I hadn't intended to go home for the holidays, and I'm happy to help."

  "You found the specimens, I see." Quinton peered at the labels on the rack.

  "Yes. This, these two, and the bottom one there." Derrick touched four wrapped crates. The last box he tapped was about six feet long, three wide, and occupied an entire section of shelving.

  "Those are big." Aleksi thought they would need a forklift just to get it down.

  "Holy crap." Bob sounded a little stunned. "I mean… that's a lot of stuff. Don't we need a forklift or something?"

  "Oh, don't worry about loading them," Quinton said, pulling a pair of latex gloves from a nearby dispenser. "We've got Derrick to do that. He'll get a lift later, but we can have a look at one of the smaller ones. Give me a hand, Derrick. We can lift this smaller one down."

  "Sure."

  Quinton and Derrick donned latex gloves, and Aleksi backed away. The crate they picked was only about three feet long, two deep and a foot high. It was on a waist high shelf, so the two men had no trouble lifting it down, though she noticed the strain in Quinton's face as they did so.

  "Well, that was heavier than I thought it would be," the older man said, straightening with a grin. "Nice to know that I can do a little of the heavy work. Now, let's see."

  He worked the crate's simple latch and opened it to reveal a fitted Ethafoam insert. He lifted the top layer with care. Inside, instead of the dark preserved bone that Aleksi expected, they found only a thick casing of plaster of Paris.

  "Not much to see, I'm afraid. Like I said, most of this wasn't worked up." Quinton grinned at Aleksi. "I'm afraid you've got your work cut out for you, dear."

  "Are they all like this?" She was surprised that they'd allowed this to sit so long without even removing the shipping matrix.

  "Oh, no. I think half of the entire shipment was at least cleaned up. I'll have to look at the records again. But these four are yours."

  There was also a large tag, yellowed with age, inside an acid-free plastic bag, and Aleksi recognized the Cyrillic letters. He lifted it out and showed her. "This one's for you, I think."

  She put on gloves and took the document. There were actually several pages in the bag, but she wasn't about to open it here. "Collection notes. Date, location, conditions, personnel…"

  "They should each have such a sheet, I think." Quinton peered at the page inquisitively. "We'll just put it all back and let you transcribe it under more controlled conditions. The pertinent information is in the database."

  "Of course." She put it back in the case.

  "Well, if even half of the samples are like this, you really do have some work ahead of you." Hutch cringed and shrugged. "Sorry, Aleksi. I didn't think they'd be this bad."

  "Don't be." She ran a gloved hand over the thick mass of plaster of Paris. It was almost as if she could feel the bone within asking her to free it from its long sleep. She stood and stepped back, and realized she was smiling. "It'll be fun."

  "Fun? Chipping through a foot-thick block of plaster?" Bob looked at her like she was insane. "Are you kidding me?"

  "I see that you really don't know Aleksi quite yet." Quinton patted her on the shoulder. "She isn't a digger, she's a finder. If there's something to be found in these old samples, she's the one who can."

  Aleksi blushed under his praise and studied her shoes, but she couldn't keep the smile from her face. "What can I say? It's what I like to do."

  "And it's exactly what I need, Aleksi." Hutch took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Well, we better get to it."

  "We'll load this first one onto the trolley, and Derrick will load the rest with a lift." Quinton started to move to help Derrick lift, but Hutch put a hand on his shoulder.

  "Let me help Derrick with that, Quinton."

  "Well, all right." The curator backed away with a chuckle. "The last thing I need is a herniated disc." Quinton patted Bob on the shoulder. "Don't ever get old, my boy."

  "I don't think age has as much to do with it as muscle." Bob grinned. "I'm a lab geek. I don't lift anything heavier than a pipettor most days."

  As the two men lifted the sample onto the cart, Derrick caught Alexi's eye and smiled again with those white-perfect teeth. She looked away, pretending to s
how interest in the paperwork Quinton was examining. Something about Derrick unnerved her even more than most men. Maybe it was his smile, those perfect teeth, or his perfect hair and smooth, chiseled features. He was too perfect. Way too perfect to be paying attention to her.

  "If you all can manage this one to your lab, I'll have the next one loaded by the time you get back, and I can follow you with the lift." Derrick cinched the straps around the case, unlocked the trolley's wheels, and pulled a handle that inclined the bed to near vertical. "That should make it easier to get around the corners."

  "Thank you, Derrick. We should be back shortly."

  While they left the archives, Aleksi glanced back to find Derrick smiling at her again, as if the expression was pasted on his face. She looked away, swallowing her unease. She had work to do.

  Last one, I promise." Quinton flipped a page on the form and pointed to the yellow sticky labeled, 'Sign Here.'

  Hutch scrawled his signature and clicked the pen closed. "What's this section about first-born male child? You sure this is legit?"

  "Don't suggest that. The powers that be might just put in a contingency clause." Quinton stuffed the sheaf of forms into a folder and stood from behind his desk. "So much paper in this digital age, but everyone needs their original. Take care of those specimens, Hutch, and don't let Aleksi get over her head. From what I understand, she's good at that."

  "No worries, Quinton. If anything, taking this project on has cut her workload. Oliver was overloading her."

  "That's what I heard, too." Quinton held out a hand, and Hutch shook it. "Take care, Hutch. I better get home before my wife divorces me for working on a university holiday."

  "Right." Quinton's comment reminded him of something he'd been putting off. "Will I see you at the faculty New Year party?"