A cluster of dirty white chickens scattered before the Range Rover, then regrouped, clucking in indignation, as Varla jumped down and stretched her cramped legs. The handler turned out to be a lanky woman in overalls and a EuroDisney T-shirt, with curly red hair and an infectious grin. “Jill Thompson,” she said as she stuck out her hand, obviously bemused by having to look up. “God, I thought I was tall.”
Varla smiled at that. “Varla Satana,” she said as she shook Jill’s hand. “And these are my guys, Tim, Dariush, and Tasha.”
Tim and Dariush grinned and nodded, and Varla could tell they thought Jill was cute. So did Tasha, from the cold look in her big Walter Keene eyes. Tasha and Varla were intermittent lovers, and Tasha tended to pout in the presence of women she thought Varla might find attractive. Varla wished she’d get over herself. She was already pissed at Tasha for demanding they stop three times on the way to collect sun-bleached cow skulls.
Jill shook Tim’s big hand and Dariush’s small one, and didn’t seem to notice that Tasha had not extended hers.
“Pleased to meet you all,” she said as if she really meant it. “Let’s get inside the barn where it’s cool.”
Inside were bales of hay, various tools, a Honda autotractor, an ancient refrigerator and four Emery Express crates containing armored Ninja Turtles costumes. Tim and Dariush scowled at the last items, but Tasha, for some perverse reason, smiled impishly. “It’ll be like dressing up for Halloween,” she said, idly kicking one of the crates with the toe of her scuffed red cowboy boot.
“Not today,” said Jill. “I know the last thing you want to do is to climb into those costumes after a long drive. Besides, you won’t start the real work with Bernie until tomorrow.” She strode over to the fridge. “Today, all each of you need is a dead chicken.”
Not sure she’d heard correctly, Varla walked over to see. Sure enough, the fridge was stuffed full of whole chickens, complete with feathers. “What are those for?”
Jill handed out rubber gloves, then chickens. “The way to Bernie’s heart is through his stomach. Come with me out back and you’ll see for yourself.” Giving the last carcass to Varla, she strapped on a holstered dart pistol.
The back door of the barn opened into a large, electric-fenced enclosure. In the distance was a stand of post oaks and a small pond. Four men were waiting outside of the door. They were Mexican or Indian, in their mid-thirties to early fifties, all in jeans and work shirts. None of them was more than four and a half feet tall. They carried long metal and rubber poles with copper electrodes at the end, like extended cattle prods.
Tasha, never big on social graces, barely repressed a giggle, while Dariush and Tim exchanged a puzzled glance. Varla cocked an eyebrow at Jill.
Jill was clearly trying not to smile at their reaction. “Yeah, we hire a lot of little people to work with Bernie. Have you ever seen how a dog or cat that’s grown up in a household without children reacts to kids when seeing them for the first time? Usually, it’s with hostility or terror. They aren’t used to people being that small. Child labor laws won’t let us have kids working here, but having little people as ranch hands discourages him from thinking humans this size are potential prey.”
“Where is the big lizard, anyway,” said Varla. Standing there with a dead chicken in her hand, smiling at midgets, she wondered if this job could get any more surreal.
“He’s not a lizard,” said Jill with the tone of one who’d explained this many times. “He’s a theropod dinosaur, as much like a bird as a reptile.”
“Sorry,” said Varla, used to a specialist’s pedantry. “So where is the big rooster?”
Jill put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. Moments later, Bernie whistled back as he came trotting out of the trees.
Big, taciturn Tim let out what might have been a gasp, while Dariush gave his own low whistle. Tasha clapped her hands. “He’s beautiful,” she said.
Jill grinned. “Isn’t he, though?”
Varla had to admit she was right. Bernie was surprisingly graceful as he loped toward them, his long muscular tail stuck out rigidly behind him, his narrow head held erect, his large amber eyes as coldly intelligent as an owl’s. His coloration, a neon, almost fluorescent green, with broad maroon strips on his sides and narrower orange ones crisscrossing his belly, should have been garish, but somehow wasn’t. Seen like this, without the white gloves and purple vest and shoes he wore on TV, everything was perfectly in balance, a work of nature’s art that couldn’t be improved on.
Varla estimated his overall length at just under four meters, which meant that his eye ridges came up to the level of her chin, and he looked like he weighed one-eighty, maybe two-hundred pounds. Certainly not big, as dinosaurs went, but plenty formidable for all that. His forelimbs were long, much more so than those of his distant cousin Tyrannosaurus Rex, and armed with three huge claws. His feet were also three-clawed, the middle being a six-inch bladelike talon that was raised off the ground. In his natural state, she had read, he would stand on one leg, balanced by the stiff tail, and grip his prey with his foreclaws while using his lifted hind foot to rip open its belly.
The midget ranch hands flanked them on either side, their poles ready, but Jill waved them back. “It’s okay, Pablo,” she said to one of them. “These people are professionals. They’re paid to take the risk.” She walked forward. “How’s my pretty boy today?”
Bernie closed the space between himself and her with a fifteen foot leap. Dipping his head, he butted her gently in the thigh, and she scratched him behind the exposed membranes that were his ears. “Caring is sharing,” he said in a high, reedy voice.
“He really does talk,” said Varla softly.
Jill nodded. “Not only is he about as smart as an African Grey parrot, but he has the same mimicking ability. I just wish the stuff I have to teach him to say wasn’t so fucking inane.”
“What about the singing?” asked Dariush. “My sisters’ kids always sing along with him on TV. I never heard a bird sing that well.”
Jill scratched under Bernie’s chin. “Most of what you see on TV is computer simulation, but he sings during live appearances, too.” Her expression grew pained. “That’s done with a surgically implanted speaker. I hated that they did that to him, believe me. But what’s a girl to do? If I protest too much, they’ll fire me and hire someone else to babysit him. I try to give his corporate owners what they want while taking the best care of him I can.”
Bernie looked up, fixing his glittering eye on Varla. “Friends are forever!” he said as he hopped forward.
“Better give him the chicken, Varla,” said Jill. “Toss it, don’t hand it.”
Varla didn’t need to be told. Bernie snapped it out of the air and began to chew on it. His rubber teeth might not have been much use, but his mouth was hard as a turtle’s, and the chicken was pretty much pulped before it went down. Cocking his head to one side, he drooled bloody feathers and looked expectantly at Dariush, Tim, and Tasha.
Three chickens sailed through the air almost simultaneously. Bernie caught one and gulped it down without chewing while the other two bounced off him. He kicked one back into the air like a kid playing hackey sack, swallowed it, then dipped his head to snap up the other.
Jill casually ran her hand along his muscular neck. “You can pet him now. His favorite spot is right behind the ears.”
Gingerly, they gathered round. Bernie cocked his head from side to side, his large eyes blinking, the curve of his heavily muscled jaw giving him a crocodile’s fixed smile. Varla was fascinated by the elegant geometry of his scales, their intricate patterns as regular as a digitized image. His skin felt like supple, carefully worked leather, and was warmer to the touch than any of the snakes and iguanas she’d owned as a child. The muscles under it could have been carved from marble, except when they flowed like water.
Bernie snuffled at Varla’s leather jacket and Tasha’s beaded purse. “Oh, shit,” said Tasha, “he’s tasting me,” as a ton
gue the color and texture of a slab of calves’ liver flicked out the end of his snout.
“Not really,” said Jill. “What he’s actually tasting are the scent particles in the air. His olfactory senses are better than the literature led me to expect.”
“How many of these reconstructed dinosaurs are there now?” asked Dariush.
Jill frowned. “I’m not really sure. There’s the deinonychus pack in Orlando that produced Bernie, and they’re developing an apatasaurus herd in California. Disney’s had less luck overseas; the Hokkaido Park has yet to see any results from their seismosaurus project, and after the tyrannosaur debacle the French are sticking to Pleistocene mammals. Maybe a half-dozen zoos have adult specimens; I’d say there’s about two hundred reconstructed dinosaurs worldwide. Less than there were last year, before that Macaw virus destroyed the Honduras preserve.”
Tasha giggled as Bernie sniffed at her head, fascinated by the metallic sheen of the dye in her buzz-cut hair. “How’d you get this job?” she asked, her initial hostility toward Jill evidently dissipated.
Jill grabbed hold of Bernie’s dewlap and tugged him away from Tasha’s reflective scalp. “Sorry, he’s like a parrot, fascinated by shiny things.” When she rubbed the wrinkled throat pouch between her palms, he tilted his head up and closed his eyes, looking for all the world like he was trying to purr. “I was Jacob Abrams’s graduate assistant at UCLA, and I went with him when he took over the deinonychus project.” Her face clouded over. “Jake died during the Manhattan quarantine. Bernie was little more than a hatchling. When it turned out he responded better to me than anyone else, Disney put me under contract as his permanent keeper. It’s not a bad life, considering. We tape footage for the shows and videos and VR disks right out here, all the reference material for the computer guys who put Bernie’s image through its paces. Two or three months a year we go on tour. At least I don’t have to work at one of the damn parks. You guys are freelance, right? Outside security hired for the tour?”
Varla nodded.
“Be glad the Mouse is not your master. The perks are good, but the corporate culture sucks.”
Tim stuck out a tentative hand and stroked the bony ridge on the back of Bernie’s neck. “Disney seems to be buying up everything these days. At least, everything the Japanese and Koreans don’t already own.”
Jill shrugged. “Well, if they hadn’t bought up the Bernie franchise, he might still be some guy in a baggy suit, and I’d never have gotten this job. Hey, watch it!”
Bernie had noticed Tim’s earring. He nibbled at it causing Tim to cover his ears with his hands and step quickly back. Jill rapped Bernie’s plated snout. “Stop that, you oaf!”
Bernie cocked his head and blinked, his mouth frozen in that disconcerting smile. Pablo had come up with his stun pole, but Jill shook her head. “It’s okay. If he’s going to be a bad boy, he can play by himself for a while.”
Bernie suddenly hissed like an air brake and swiveled his head around. Something had moved a hundred feet away, halfway between them and the stand of trees. Squinting in the harsh sunlight, Varla shaded her eyes and saw a rangy jackrabbit, sitting up on its haunches to look at them, its nose quivering in the air.
There was no obvious transition. One instant Bernie was still, his head doubled back, looking down his own spine at the rabbit; the next, he’d spun completely around and was bounding through the air like a kangaroo that had been shot out of a cannon, his charge kicking up a cloud of orange dust and showering Varla’s team with a hailstorm of clods. He was almost halfway to the rabbit before it had even moved.
Jill stepped forward and took Varla’s forearm. “Back inside,” she said quietly. Looking over their shoulders as they were hustled back to the barn, they saw the chase was short, with Bernie catching the rabbit after two zig-zags. One taloned foot stamped it screaming into the dust, impaling it on the big raised claw. Standing on one leg like a stork, he picked it daintily off his foot and wolfed it down.
Pablo and the other hands followed them back inside. “Sorry,” said Pablo to Jill, “those damn rabbits keep burrowing in.”
“No big deal,” said Jill. “We were done with him for the day.” She turned back to Varla. “I’m sorry about that. Did you ever own a pet snake when you were a kid?”
Varla frowned at the apparent non-sequitur. “I look like the type, huh? Yeah, I had lots of snakes.”
Jill walked toward the fridge. “Any of them ever eat anything other than live food?”
Varla remembered Stanley, six and a half shimmering feet of blue-black Florida Indigo snake. “One. I bought him turkey necks at Kroger’s when I couldn’t afford rats. He’d take them right out of my hand.”
“But you didn’t try giving him live rats by hand, did you?”
Varla shook her head vigorously. “God, no. I didn’t dare stick my hand into his cage for at least thirty minutes after dropping in a rat.”
Jill opened the fridge, tugged a twelve-pack of Kirin out from under the mass of dead chickens, and handed everyone a beer. “Bernie’s the same way. It’s like he’s got two separate buttons in his head, an ‘eat’ button and a ‘kill’ button. Showing him a dead chicken, or any kind of non-living food, that pushes the ‘eat’ button; he gets greedy, but basically he’s fine. But if he sees potential prey scurrying about, that presses the ‘kill’ button. Believe me, you don’t want to be around him then.”
Varla remembered how Stanley, normally about as active and vicious as a scaly kielbasa, was transformed into a lightning-fast hunter at the sight of a quivering rodent. “No, I imagine not.” She used her sleeve to wipe damp feathers off the beer can and pulled the tab.
###
A month later, Varla was on a loading dock outside Four Seasons Mall in Greensboro, North Carolina, finishing the chicken samosa and frozen lasie she’d bought at the McDonald’s inside. Pulling off the sweaty T-shirt she wore over her green tights, she used it to wipe samosa crumbs from her face, then began strapping on her body armor. Beneath the outer kevlar and molded ceramic chest plate were bubble cells of liquid chloro-fluorocarbon. Having the cold, fluid-filled plastic near her skin felt like wearing a vest made from half-frozen Chillee Willies, not an unpleasant sensation in the sweltering July heat. Over the armor went the painted plastic shell, her holstered Astra A-85 accessible beneath its lower lip. Sitting on the steps to the dock, she pulled on the stupid two-toed boots. They’d drawn the line at gloves, so she rubbed green makeup over the backs of her hands. Last would be the helmet and wide-angle goggles and the stiff plastic mask that fit over them, but she was leaving all that off until it was time to go inside. God, but she wanted a cigarette.
Tim emerged from the van in full getup. Not for the first time, Varla thought that his long, biker-style beard and hair must be damned uncomfortable under all the stuff on his head, but with typical stubbornness, he’d refused to trim them. The domino “mask” painted around the eye-slits of his turtle headpiece was red, but she’d forgotten which one that meant he was. None of the kids expressed much interest in them, anyway. They knew that, unlike Bernie, the turtles were just people in costumes.
“All ready?”
He cocked a big green-smeared thumb toward the trailer. “I don’t know what’s up with Jill and Bernie, but Tasha says everything’s cool inside the building.” Filtered through the electronics in his mask, his normal baritone went up an octave.
Sighing, Varla finished her lasie and donned her own headgear for confirmation. “Lots of screaming kids and stressed-out parents waiting,” buzzed Tasha’s voice in her helmet, “but no sign-waving Christians.” That was good. North Carolina was hardly the buckle of the Bible Belt, but a small contingent of fundamentalists had picketed them last week in Charlotte.
Everything seemed ready, so she tucked her seven-foot plastic and steel imitation of a Japanese bo stick under her arm and knocked on the side of the trailer, giving Jill the all-clear sign. There was no response. Tim shrugged. “I don’t know why they�
�re taking so long. Maybe there was some trouble with his dosage.”
Opening the door on the back of the trailer, Varla stuck her head inside. The smell immediately explained the delay. Jill was kneeling behind Bernie, wiping beneath the base of his tail with a handful of paper towels. “Sorry,” she said through clenched teeth, “but he just took a nasty dump and I have to clean off his cloaca. I hope he’s okay; his plumbing is usually more regular than this.” Fortunately, she hadn’t gotten any green and white dinosaur shit on the nice black slacks and gold blouse she habitually wore for live appearances.
Ignoring Jill, Bernie turned his fixed grin on Varla. “I love you,” he trilled, his big eyes more glassy than usual from the tranquilizers Jill had given him. Climbing inside the trailer, Varla stooped beside him and tied his left shoelace, which had come undone. She’d begun to hate seeing him laced into the big, clunky shoes and cartoonish gloves, although she understood the necessity of sheathing those damn talons. Bernie, for his part, didn’t seem to mind. All in all, he was a remarkably well-tempered animal, even when not tranked to the gills.
Jill slipped his purple vest on him, and snapped the thin wire that served as Bernie’s leash into its catch right behind his shoulder blades. It was actually more than a leash, for it was connected to a buttoned hand grip Jill could activate with her thumb. Should she do so, Bernie would receive a theoretically incapacitating electric shock. Varla wondered if Jill would have the heart to push that button if Bernie became unmanageable or took a snap at a kid. So far, the question had not been put to the test.
Varla held the door open as Jill urged Bernie out of the trailer. The foam heels of his shoes slapped clumsily against the concrete and corrugated steel of the loading dock, and when Tim punched in the security code, the service door opened with a grinding squeal. Fortunately, Bernie seemed used to such sounds by now. “Friends are better than ice cream,” he said, as they entered the blessedly cool service corridor.
Dinosaurs II Page 12
