by Rick Chesler
“What is it?” She asked, looking past him.
“Oh, just taking a walk.” Great, that’s a brilliant opener. “Oh, but hey—I was just down on the work deck and there is somebody hurt bad down there. Not that I'm a doctor or anything.” Real smooth, dumbass.
Veronica looked at her phone again and then back up at Alex and gave him a chilly response. “Yes, I’ve been alerted. Listen, would you mind…”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Alex bowed his head and stepped aside.
“No,” she said, her tone softening, “I mean would you mind taking me there? I'm still new to the ship and time is of the essence with these kinds of injuries.”
Alex looked up, a slight smile tugging at his lips. “Okay, sure. It's this way.” He led her back out the hallway through the door he came in and then along the platform outside. “My ex-girlfriend is pre-med,” Alex said, making conversation as they descended a series of ladder-like stairs. “Got into U.C. San Francisco and left me.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Oh, no worries. I'm way over it by now. Where'd you go to med school?”
A pause, then: “UCLA.”
“Oh, wow! I used to live in Westwood, right there. I didn't go to the school, but I grew up there, so I totally know the area. What street did you live on?”
She didn't respond, and for a few seconds, he heard only the pounding of boots on metal stairs. They reached a landing and made the turn down the last flight of stairs that would lead to the main deck.
“I don't remember the name, sorry. All I did was study. It was, you know, pretty typical for student housing kind of thing.”
“Isn't med school like six years?”
“Eight, actually, counting the residency. I had a few different apartments while I was there.”
Alex frowned. Shut up, stop making her uncomfortable. The wiseass in him couldn’t resist. “So you don't remember the name of a single street where you lived for eight years? That must have been some—”
Veronica's phone chimed and she held it to her ear. Alex could hear a frantic voice emanating from the other end and then heard her say, “On my way. Almost there.” She pantomimed which way to Alex when they reached the lower deck walkway. He pointed to the left and waved an arm for her to follow as he took off at a jog toward the work deck.
When they ran up, the crew parted for the doctor like the Red Sea for Moses.
“Right here, Doc,” one of them called out. “A davit motor busted off the rail under heavy load. Too damn cold probably, and landed square on his right knee. Crushed it pretty bad. We tied a tourniquet on his thigh to stem the bleeding.”
The injured crewman was in bad shape. Someone had given him a piece of wood to bite down on, but his anguished cries still filled the air. His knee had been severely crushed. Alex noted that even the doctor seemed to be squeamish around it. He saw her face wrinkle in revulsion as she moved in for a close look at the wound. A few seconds passed and she still had said nothing.
“Doc?” one of the crewmen pressed.
She shook her head back and forth, as if snapping out of it. “Good work with the tourniquet. Seems like most of the bleeding has stopped. We can't do anything else for him here. I need to get him to the infirmary. You two, can you lift him?” She pointed to two beefy crewman standing nearby. They looked at their wounded associate's crumpled knee and then exchanged confused glances.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” Alex said. As a long-time adrenaline junkie and X-games sports enthusiast, he'd been treated by emergency responders and ER doctors for more than his fair share of various impact injuries. “Doesn't he need splints and a stretcher to move him?”
Veronica looked confused. One of the crew gave Alex an angry stare. “This the kid who should be in fuckin’ jail? Why the hell should we listen to you?”
“He's right, though,” another said. A murmur of agreement could be heard in the huddle of men surrounding their fallen colleague.
“Okay,” Veronica said, somehow mustering an air of authority behind the word, “who can get me the splints and a stretcher?”
The victim continued to moan in agony on the deck.
“Doctor, don't you have splints in the infirmary? You didn't bring them? I thought they messaged you a crush injury notice?”
Veronica gave the man a stern look. “I wasn't coming from the infirmary. I thought perhaps there might be a trauma station closer by than the infirmary.”
“Ask the patient if he cares,” somebody said, pointing to the man writing in pain, clutching his ruined knee.
Another man quickly waved him down. “Not now, man. He needs her help.”
Veronica stood up from the victim and threw her hands up. “You—” she pointed at Alex— “Can you come to the infirmary with me to get the stretcher?”
“Sure.”
“Let's go, and you gentlemen, keep that tourniquet tight.”
They watched her leave, many shaking their heads.
“I don't know where the infirmary is,” Alex said, realizing he was leading Veronica.
“This way,” she said, breezing past him. They passed by the staircase they'd used earlier, remaining on the main deck. After what seemed to Alex like a long walk, they made a right turn through a door into a small structure. A door on the right had a large red cross painted on it. Veronica pushed it open and they walked into the ship's infirmary.
The room was packed with shelves, drawers and cabinets full of medical supplies and equipment. Alex spotted a pair of stretchers hanging from a rack against a wall and quickly picked one of them up. He hefted the stretcher, ready to start moving, but when he looked over at Veronica, she was looking around, not moving.
“What's up?” he inquired.
“Just looking for the splints...” Her gaze shifted around the room.
Alex gave her a look and rolled his eyes. “You sure it only took you eight years for your degree?” He quickly scanned the labels on the cabinets, searching for recognizable groupings. “First aid in that one there,” he said, pointing to a cabinet with his free hand. “Splints got to be near the bandages.”
Veronica went to the cabinet and opened it. He saw her arm reach out and then withdraw from the cabinet clutching a bag of splints. She tucked them under an arm, ready to go.
“This is it, now for the stretcher.” She moved toward the exit.
Alex remained standing. “Hold on.”
She looked at him expectantly, her hand on the door handle. Alex looked her directly in the eyes. He lowered his voice.
“You're not an M.D., are you?”
Her mouth dropped open and hung there for a moment, as though she was going to say something, but then she closed it without having spoken.
Alex thought of the real doctors he'd been treated by as well as known personally, as friends of his family. The air about her just wasn't right. He shook his head, not even saying anything. He didn't need to.
She let go of the door, then moved in closer, staring him down. “You don’t want to press this issue. You're just some troublemaker kid, the son of the paleontologist who just got fired. Yes, I overheard all that, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t take too kindly to your inquisition here.”
Alex raised his eyebrows. “If you knew half as much about treating injuries as you do about what's going on with DeKirk's personnel, you would have been fine with your…disguise, or whatever game you’re playing here.”
“Listen, you little—”
“No, you listen!” His tone came out sharper than he'd expected, and he was surprised to see her shut her mouth. He continued. “The guys down there are already suspicious, I'm sure. It wouldn't take much,” he threatened, but then softened his tone. “Just…listen, please. Even if you’re not a real doctor, I’m sensing your heart is in the right place, and what’s more…we might be on the same side.”
“And what side is that?”
Alex shrugged. “Not that Xander guy’s, and not Melvin DeKirk’s. If that’s
a safe bet, then I’m willing to help you, and my guess is that right about now, the way things are going, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”
Veronica sighed heavily, staring back at his eyes, gauging his sincerity. “You win. You’re right, you’re going to have to help me, or we’re both in deep shit.”
13.
Aboard Oil Tanker Hammond-1, En route to Chile
The last thing Marcus wanted to do was stand in the same area of the ship as Xander Dyson, but the allure of the dinosaur was too strong. A flesh-and-bones T. rex! If he wasn't seeing it for himself right now with his own eyes, he’d never accept it. After a career full of teasing glimpses of this mighty prehistoric beast, in books, in computer simulations, and movies of course, or if he was lucky in actual bones or teeth—now he had the chance to see a whole one close-up and in the flesh. He pushed his way past a couple of drilling technicians gawking at the dead beast from another era.
The air was still frigid, and his breath spooled out in clouds. He walked up to the wheeled, stainless steel platform that the once mighty beast was strapped to so that it wouldn't slide off due to the ship's motion and be damaged. It was about forty feet long and twenty wide. The dinosaur's long hind legs nearly protruded over the edge of the platform, one of its sharp, black toenails curling over the side. Marcus stood in front of the creature's chest, near the two upper arms that appeared almost comically small in proportion to the body of the mega-beast. He was drawn to this part of the body that was most heavily damaged. There were gouges, cuts, and bullet holes riddling the rest of its flesh, its sides and back, legs and torso, but this area… At first, he thought it might be from the drilling operation to exhume it, but then he doubted that notion. When he bent his knees so that he could peer up into the gaping wound, it was clear that, although it looked okay externally, the body wasn't whole. He stood up straight and addressed a worker standing next to him.
“Did our crew do this?”
The man shook his head emphatically. “No, sir, it was there already. We were as careful as a doctor pulling out a splinter with a pair of tweezers.”
“Not our doctor, though,” another member of the crew joked.
Someone cleared his throat. Xander came over, appearing as if he’d been lurking in the shadows, waiting. At first, Marcus was afraid he was going to ask him to leave in front of all these people, but instead he said, “I’ve been assured that this is the precise state in which the animal was brought up. Not too bad for fifty million years, right, boys?”
A chorus of affirmations went up from the crew around them. When it died down, Marcus spoke.
“Sixty-five,” Marcus corrected with some satisfaction, “and did you happen to notice the obvious?”
“What’s that?”
“It's missing the heart?” He bent down again to look back into the body. “And most of one of the lungs.”
He stuck his head farther into the ragged cavity, wishing he had a flashlight. The smell inside was beyond awful but surprisingly, he recognized it while forcing himself not to retch. Xander would like that way too much. One time in a college chemistry lab, Marcus was looking for supplies and came across a bottle of a chemical called putrescence, and sniffed its contents out of curiosity. It was a lab-quality perfect distillation of the exact organic compound produced by decaying flesh. This was that smell, he was absolutely certain of it. Only a thousand times more powerful than what he'd experienced in the little bottle.
“Why don't you keep crawling until you plop yourself out of its ass?” Xander suggested. “Maybe you could write a paper about it in all your spare time now.”
A round of raucous laughter ensued. Marcus was offended but at least Xander wasn't ordering him to leave. He could put up with the indignity—and the smell—in order to get a look at this magnificent specimen. He slid out from the animal's putrefied insides, ignoring Xander as he walked toward the T. rex's head.
Marcus' eyes drank in the details of the reptilian skin, its intricate scales, how they overlapped...It didn't look right, though, if a dinosaur's skin was supposed to look like the skin of today's reptiles that is. A layer of slimy, yellowish mucous oozed from between the scales. Here and there an actual bubble of the stuff cropped up like a thin membrane and popped. He supposed it must be due to the moisture still there from thawing and the sudden change in environment after so much time in the lake. The skin in general, when viewed up close, was riddled with tears, slashes, gouges, and the occasional bullet hole—although the hide was so tough in several places, he could still see the flattened bullet lodged only an inch or so down.
He gave the entire body another look. In short, though, this was a messy, smelly corpse, not the pristine specimen he'd dreamed about finding one day. Still, a T. rex was a T. rex.
Now he continued the visual inspection, concerned that at any moment, Xander would enforce the full terms of his recent deal and banish him from this area altogether, maybe even confine him to his quarters until they hit shore. He needed to make the most of this, and wished he had the freedom to take his time—and take pictures. He reached the partially open mouth, where two other drill-team men stood, marveling at the sheer immensity of the jaws and the impressive rows of five-inch long curved teeth that were bone white, not the dark or black color of the fossilized ones Marcus was used to working with.
He sucked in a breath and held it as he stared into the mouth, his eyes agog with trance-like wonder while the specimen’s were closed.
Hello, Tyrannosaurus rex!
Marcus tentatively reached over and laid his hand on the snout, just behind the nostrils.
I'm touching…hell, petting… a T. rex! He flashed on his life with the extinct reptiles up to now—receiving a pop-up book of dinosaurs as a five-year-old boy for Christmas, watching the movie Jurassic Park as a teen, digging up his first T. rex fossil in North Dakota as an undergraduate biology major, earning his PhD in Paleontology with a thesis entitled, Reflections on the Obligate Scavenging Hypothesis for Tyrannosaurus rex...
Moreover, here he was feeling the actual skin of a remarkably preserved T. rex.
“Dr. Ramirez,” Xander called, “kindly keep your fucking hands off the merchandise.”
“Just think of this sexy beast like a stripper,” one of the crewmen added, “look but don't touch!”
“Unless you spring for the VIP room…” Another began.
Marcus could not hide the look of irritation that took over his features. Keeping his hand on the dinosaur snout, he turned his head toward Xander, about to lay into him for whatever that would be worth, knowing it would lead to repercussions for him and his son, but he didn’t care. He still burned with the indignation and the injustice. This was his find, his glory, his moment. His whole entire life, in fact, came down to this monumental discovery. He had given up so much—his family, his wife’s health, his own for that matter. It had all been for this and the hell with it all, he wasn’t going to let this asshole, or any other, take it from him.
The action that happened next was so unexpected, so otherworldly that it caught everyone by surprise, especially Marcus. The T. rex's eye opened, revealing a black, moist orb with angry red streaks beneath its surface.
It raised its head, and a guttural, groaning-creaking sound emanated from its esophagus.
“Look out!” one of the crewman called, but it was too late.
Marcus, still directing his fury and full attention at Xander, suddenly felt his hand drop off the dinosaur's skin and into an open space. He thought someone had wheeled the platform away from him so that he couldn't touch the specimen anymore. He opened his mouth to yell back at them, the first words meant to be, What the fuck—?
Instead, what came out was a blood curdling scream that he was sure came from someone else, not him. No way such a primal sound could come from his throat.
He felt a terrible crushing sensation—more like his wrist was in a vice than being sliced by sharp objects—and was dragged toward the table
for a second. Then, as quickly as it started, the sensation stopped. He no longer felt the pain. He felt nothing.
Marcus turned back to look at the dinosaur in time to see its head flopping over to the other side. His mind registered the open, red and black eye, and then he noticed that he was missing his left hand.
A stream of blood geysered from his open wrist.
Then the giant lizard's head swung back in his direction again, jaws snapping (and was that his chewed up arm lodged back in its throat?), and he felt hands on him pulling him roughly backwards. He toppled to the floor as all hell broke loose, the men leaving him while they went to tighten the straps on the Tyrannosaur's body. Those restraints weren't meant to contain a live animal, though, just to hold the corpse in place, and one of the ones on the upper body snapped as the T. rex whipped its head to and fro, faster now.
Alex was right, Marcus thought, as he dimly heard Xander shouting in an absolute frenzy, “Tranquilizer!”
The paleontologist forced himself to tip his head up while his vision faded around the corners. He didn't have the energy to maintain the position and he slumped back to the deck, but not before seeing, between the weird spots dancing across his retinas, Xander loading giant syringe-like ammo into what looked like a spear-gun and grinning like a Cheshire cat.
The last thing he heard before passing out was a sound not heard on Earth for millions of years—the vocalization of a Tyrannosaurus rex, like a wailing banshee, piercing the night.
14.
Aboard Oil Tanker Hammond-1, En route to Chile
In the infirmary, Veronica and Alex both looked up at the sound. Some kind of screeching noise from another part of the ship.
