by Rick Chesler
“What the hell is that?” they both asked almost in unison.
“No idea,” Alex whispered. “Except… I’ve got a bad feeling.”
Veronica stared back at the bag of splints for a moment. “Okay, let’s move, and listen…I can't tell you exactly who I work for, but you're right. I'm not a doctor. I was placed on this ship by the people I work for—powerful people—who are investigating DeKirk for some serious criminal activity.”
Alex digested that for a moment. “My father was just fired unexpectedly for no reason. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure having me around wasn't exactly a plus for him after the stunt I pulled, but it wasn't that. He said DeKirk wants everyone who knows anything about the dinosaurs, taken from Antarctica.” He lowered his voice and leaned toward her. “We saw soldiers down there deliberately killed for no apparent reason! That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that he’ll be happy with a simple non-disclosure agreement.”
“That would be a concern of mine too,” Veronica admitted. “Watch your back, always.”
Alex shook his head. “What's he really up to with all this dinosaur shit?”
Veronica shrugged. “I don't know, not exactly, but I've been following him for a long time—many years—and believe me, whatever it is, he never does anything small-time. DeKirk is involved in all sorts of illegitimate business practices and shady dealings. Rich as hell, though, so he can throw up a lot of walls and red tape. Hard to get to. This is the closest I've been to him in a long time and I'm still not even sure where he is, physically, right now.”
“On this island you're going to after he drops me and my Dad off in Chile, what do you—”
At that moment, Veronica's radio blared with an urgent voice. Alex recognized it as Xander's.
“Cargo hold to physician, cargo hold to physician. Please acknowledge!” The shouts of several other men were heard in the background of Xander's transmission.
Veronica brought the radio to her mouth and keyed the transmitter. “Physician here.”
“We need you down here in the cargo hold lab immediately! Bring tranquilizers, sedatives, and a trauma kit. Hurry!”
“I was just on my way to the work deck injury.”
“That can wait. This is worse!”
“On my way.” Veronica returned the radio to her belt and looked at Alex, then around the infirmary. “Tranquilizers?”
Alex gave a brief expression of exasperation before dropping the stretcher and springing over to a locked cabinet. “The good drugs will be in here. You have the key?”
She fumbled around in her pockets.
“Hurry!”
She blanched, looking flustered, but came up with a ring of keys. She sorted through them, held a couple together and handed them off to Alex. “I think it's one of these two.”
He tried the first one without success and then inserted the second key into the cabinet lock and turned it. The door opened and he was looking at racks of syringes, ampoules, and pill bottles.
“Bring your bag over here.”
Veronica ran over to Alex and held her open doctor's bag beneath him as he dumped in various drugs. When the bag was full, he spotted a stack of larger red plastic cases and handed two of them to Veronica. “Trauma kits.”
While she tucked them under an arm, Alex grabbed a couple of bottles of pills, quickly eyeballing the labels. With a shrug, he put them in his pocket. “These might come in handy, too. Let's go.”
He picked up the stretcher again and they exited the infirmary, running down the hall out to the walkway.
“I can't be in two places at once,” Veronica huffed as they flew down the narrow staircase toward the deck. “What about the guy on the work deck?”
Alex negotiated the stretcher around a stair landing. “We'll just drop off the stretcher and the splints. They can stabilize him and get him to a bed. Then we go to the hold lab.”
After jogging across the ship, they emerged on the aft work deck. The group of men was still huddled around the man with the devastated knee, who still moaned in excruciating pain. Alex ran up and set the stretcher down next to the man.
“What the hell took y'all so long?” one of them asked in a southern drawl, looking at Veronica.
“There's a situation in another part of the ship,” she explained.
“So? Tell that asshole to get in line!” somebody said.
Veronica was just standing there, preparing to argue, so Alex grabbed the bag of splints from her and held it up. “It’s called triage. Look it up. Here, you guys get him onto the stretcher and splint him up? Get him to a bed inside, and the doctor will be back to see him as soon as she can.”
One of the men nodded, taking the bag from Alex.
“Take the trauma kit,” Veronica offered, handing off one of the red plastic cases she carried.
Alex reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the pill bottles. “Give him two of these every couple hours for the pain. No alcohol with ‘em, though, unless he wants a really good time.”
To everyone's surprise, the injured man on deck opened his eyes and said, “Thanks, kid.”
Alex looked at him for a second, nodded, and turned to leave.
Free of the stretcher, he could run fast now, and Veronica struggled to keep up as they made their way toward the cargo hold. As they got closer they heard the noise again—the screeching that they'd heard only faintly up in the infirmary. Now it was much louder, a repetitive grating sound that reminded Alex of dragging fingernails across a chalkboard.
The big double-doors to the hold were closed now. He ran up to them and pulled on the handles, but to his surprise, they were locked. Xander keeping out prying eyes? He remembered someone mentioning a ladder entrance. They climbed up one flight of stairs and found a circular opening that dropped into the hold with a ladder.
Alex slid down the ladder that led into the hold the way he'd seen some of the crew do, not using the rungs but just wrapping his hands and feet around the outer poles and letting himself drop. Veronica used the rungs, but was quick about it, and they followed the sounds of chaos into the cargo hold. Alex looked over to the right to see the dividers marking off his father's quarters, but didn't see anyone over there. To the left, though, was pandemonium.
So ethereal was the scene before him that he stopped in his tracks despite the urgency of the situation. He simply stared, attempting to process what was unfolding in their midst. Veronica did the same, the medical bag slipping from her fingers and hitting the floor as she stared agape at the ungodly spectacle.
The T. rex lay on the steel platform, most of the straps that had been holding it in place broken and swaying in the air, but it was...moving!...thrashing its gargantuan head back and forth while pedaling its tiny forelegs uselessly in the air. Alex noted it had what looked like a serious injury to the chest region and wondered if Xander's men had somehow done that to the beast in the process of trying to contain it after it woke up, or if it had happened in that fight he saw down in the excavation pit.
As he stood there frozen, one of the dinosaur's thrashing movements brought its head around, jaws snapping, and a large protruding tooth just nicked one of the crew, gouging into his shoulder, and clean through. The man screamed and whirled around, clutching the wound and then backing into a wall. He looked at all the blood and the total shock, and fear sent him toppling forward into unconsciousness.
“Come on!” Alex yelled, hoping to galvanize Veronica into action. She scooped up the medical bag and they ran to the fallen man. The bodies of the two crewmen rendering aid blocked his view, and at first, all Alex could see was a bloody arm with no hand on the end of it. Jesus. One of the men was cinching a belt around the forearm as a tourniquet, but still blood erupted from the open wrist.
He sprinted over to the T. rex, which was writhing now, slower, grumbling lethargically after the third tranq dart thudded into its thigh.
“Go down!” Xander hissed, loading up another dart. “Shit, that’s enough to drop a wha
le and it’s still moving!”
Two men struggled to avoid the still-snapping jaws and loop a cargo tie-down strap over the animal's neck, and that was when Alex got his first look at the face of the man with the missing hand.
His father.
Alex slid onto the floor next to Marcus. “Dad! What happened?”
The face of the crewman administering aid assumed a softer look when he recognized Alex. “That thing came to life while your Dad was standing over its mouth, looking at it, and the next thing anybody knew, it snapped his hand clean off!”
The man then looked down at the wound, which was ragged-looking with a couple of long skin flaps hanging off, and the skin a sickly gray hue with disturbing yellow streaks. “Well, not all that clean, really. We need to get this fixed up. First priority to stop the bleeding, so…”
“Hey! About goddamn time you got here, Doc!” Xander's voice pierced the conversation as he finally lowered the gun, satisfied that the beast was stilled for now.
“What about his arm?” Alex wanted to know, looking around as if it might be lying on the deck somewhere. He'd heard they could sometimes be reattached if they were kept on ice. The man applying the tourniquet shook his head slowly and pointed to the dinosaur, now lying still as the crew cinched another tie-down strap around its snout for good measure.
“Listen up!” Xander bellowed. “I need everyone out of here right now except for the physician. Including you.” He pointed at Alex.
“This is my Dad!”
Xander widened his eyes at his crewman, cocking his head at Alex, a silent command. “Let the trained professionals handle it, kid. The doctor here will take great care of your father.”
“But—”
“Doc,” Xander continued as Veronica walked up to the carnage, holding her medical kit in a daze, “It looks like the tourniquet’s fine for now. What I need is for you to draw a blood sample from this man, stat, and then return it to my lab on the main deck, is that clear?”
Veronica knelt by Marcus. “I heard you, but, his hand… that’s the first priority. Why a blood sample?”
“Just do it,” Xander repeated, with more authority.
Veronica set the bag down on the deck and opened it next to the paleontologist's unconscious form. She opened her bag and removed a syringe along with a bottle of pain pills and sedatives.
Xander wheeled around and headed for the T. rex, calling out over his shoulder. “Everybody else besides me and the doc, out now!” He looked to the body of the crewman who had been kicked and gouged in the process by the great beast. “Get that dead man out of here, now! Secure the area!”
Alex dug in his heels, determined not to leave his father's side, but a crewman grabbed him by the shoulders. “Kid, move it, now. Don't make me have to drag you outta here, I don't wanna do that. There's enough crazy shit going on as it is.”
Reluctantly, Alex stood up. He made eye contact with Veronica just before he turned around. “Smelling salts and adrenaline shots are in the trauma kit—they might wake him up,” he said, and began walking toward the exit. “Only if you have to.” He looked at his dad’s peaceful face. Maybe let him sleep, might be his last peaceful dream for a while.
“I'm sure the doc knows what she's doing.” The crewman smiled at Veronica. “Everybody's an expert, right?” he said with a small laugh after Alex was out of earshot.
She looked down at Marcus' bloody stump, and then the syringe in her other hand, as Xander folded his arms, watching impatiently. “Uh, yeah. Right.”
15.
Aboard Oil Tanker Hammond-1, En route to Chile
Veronica watched Xander usher the last of his personnel out of the lab area, leaving only himself, Veronica, and the unconscious Marcus, and the unconscious T. rex, which Xander had shot full of enough sedatives to kill a herd of elephants. He walked over to Veronica, who had so far done little more for Marcus than to don latex gloves and clean the blood off his wrist and arm with antiseptic wipes.
“Blood sample?” Xander squinted his eyes at Marcus' handless arm and looked away quickly, scanning the shadows against the hull as if to make certain no one else remained.
Veronica looked down at the syringe she hadn't used yet. “One track mind. Just hang on.” She made a couple of more swipes with the antiseptic and then tossed the blood-soaked wipe on the deck.
“We're in a hurry, here! In case you haven't noticed, Rex Van Winkle over there just woke up after a sixty-five million year slumber and bit this man, and we kind of need to know how it affected him.”
“It doesn't take a genius to see how it affected him. He's missing his left fucking hand! He could bleed to death or die of infection if you don't allow me to get to work on him.”
Veronica's indignant response was surprisingly genuine. She didn't know crap about medicine, but she did know one thing, Xander was a grade A asshole. The only thing he cared about was his own agenda. She started to flash on her ex-lover's untimely death at the hands of this arrogant...stop it, you'll blow your cover. The M.D.s she'd been around did have pretty big egos, though, so she figured her little outburst probably put her in character—a doctor who wouldn’t take any shit and would always put the interests of her patients first. Still, she would need to take it down a notch or risk being kicked off the ship when they got to Chile, before she learned where DeKirk was.
Xander's voice helped to bring her back to the moment. “Now that you mention it that wound does look like it could be infected,” he said, gazing with intent curiosity at the jagged aperture where Marcus's hand should be. The skin nearest the bite had a sickly pallor about it. Veronica held up the arm so that he could get a better look, and then quickly brought it down again. As she watched, a partially clotted blood globule dumped out of his wrist, despite the tourniquet, and splashed apart on the deck, causing her to flinch and Xander to back up a step. He made the same expression one might have if they discovered maggots on leftover food when they opened the trashcan. He acted the same way, too, wanting only to close the lid on it.
“Okay, leave me with one good sample and then you can take him to the infirmary. I'll test the dinosaur myself.”
Veronica hadn't even considered that she would be asked to draw blood from the extinct reptile. Or extant, as the case may be. Whatever. The fact that Xander would rather deal with that smelly, knocked-out beast by himself, knowing that there was no such thing as an expert in Tyrannosaur anesthesiology and that it could awaken at any moment, was telling. Veronica gazed down at Marcus' face. Eyes still shut. Still breathing shallowly.
“Okay. I'll need you to get me two men and a stretcher to get him up to the infirmary.”
Xander picked up his radio and snarled into it. “Peterson? Get a stretcher and two men into the cargo lab, ASAP. Two men only!” They heard a clipped reply of “Yes, sir.”
Xander gave Veronica a what-are-you-waiting-for look. She picked up the syringe and Xander trotted back over to the T. rex. Veronica had never taken blood before, but she'd had it done to her enough. Taking a deep breath and gritting her teeth, she waited until she was sure Xander wasn't about to look her way and then jammed the needle hard into Marcus' good arm, her best guess at fitting into a vein. She winced while she looked at his face to see if he felt it. No reaction. She pulled the plunger back, watching the syringe turn dark red as it filled with the paleontologist's blood, and then withdrew the needle.
“I've got it!” she called to Xander, who stood near the base of the T. rex's tail with a hypodermic of his own, only his was substantially longer and thicker. He held the hypo up to the light and then jogged over to meet Veronica. He handed her the syringe filled with the Tyrannosaur's blood, which had sort of a brownish hue to it with small particles floating around. It reminded Veronica of looking into a backed up toilet.
“Get both of these blood samples to the lab—actually scratch that. Leave me the samples, I’ll analyze them myself. You just go straight to the infirmary and get ready for your patient.” Without w
aiting for her reply, he turned and strode back toward the T. rex.
“Okay.” Then, under her breath, “Yes, sir, right away Sir Asshole, Sir!”
Then her brain pulsed with the idea that she could take this guy out right here—walk up behind him, put him in a choke hold, and rake his miserable throat across that monster's huge teeth. Then just leave and let everybody connect the dots. T. rex ate Marcus' hand. T. rex tried to eat Xander's head. Or—she could slam the T. rex hypo into Xander’s neck and inject one monster with another monster’s blood.
She opened her medical bag, withdrew a multi-tool, and opened its three-inch folding knife. She hid it up the sleeve of her sweater and began walking toward Xander, who was now facing away from her, punching keys on a laptop.
She concentrated on silencing her footfalls. As she closed to within ten feet, she let the knife slip down into her hand. It's just you and me, now, you sick sonofa—
She saw the Skype window pop up on the screen just in time and spun around on a heel as Melvin DeKirk's face filled the monitor window. Can’t let him see me, who knows how much he knows or how good his intel is about who’s after him?
She slid the knife back up her sleeve and walked toward the medical bag.
“Are you still here?” she heard Xander heckling. “Get to the lab now, Doctor!”
Veronica reached the bag, scooped it up, and then headed for the ladder exit at the end of the cargo hold. “On my way,” she called out, trotting off.
#
Xander turned and watched her legs—shapely even through the layers she wore—disappear up the ladder, before turning around to resume his video chat with DeKirk. His boss sat in front of a wall that was plain white, save for the painting that Xander knew to be an original Picasso.
“So,” DeKirk began, “how's my prize? Let me get a look at him. Or is it a her?” He laughed as if that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. Xander's expression remained dire.
“We haven't been able to sex it yet.” Xander turned the laptop around so that DeKirk could see the T. rex, now unconscious and strapped to the platform.
