The Ark Plan

by Laura Martin

  “What dinosaur dung?” I prompted.

  “The dung about humans only being safe in underground bomb shelters,” Ivan said. “Last I checked, there hasn’t been any bomb. The dinosaurs haven’t made our planet uninhabitable; people panicked after the pandemic when they realized they were outnumbered and chose not to inhabit it.”

  “Not all the humans,” I pointed out with a glance at Todd.

  “Correct,” Ivan said. “There are thirty-five villages spread across North America that I know of, at least. I’d venture to say there are more than that, but the majority of humanity is still cowering under concrete. My daughter met others who believed that humans and dinosaurs can share this massive planet of ours. Of course,” he said, turning to me, his eyes softening, “your mother knew that it was possible. I’d raised her to hunt and trap with the best of them.” Ivan cleared his throat, and I saw a flash of pain in his eyes. I hated to admit it, but that look made me jealous. I would have given anything to have a memory of my mother.

  Ivan cleared his throat and went on. “Once she felt like she could trust them, she told them about me, about life in the sunshine, about the villages in the trees. Your father named their little group the Colombe.”

  “I still don’t get the dove reference,” I frowned.

  “Why does the Noah call himself the Noah?” Ivan prompted. “Why do they call the compound-living system his Ark Plan?”

  “It’s based off an ancient biblical story,” Shawn said. “About a guy named Noah who brought a bunch of animals into a big boat called an ark to save them from a flood. So a hundred and fifty years ago, when William Brown saved the human race by bringing them underground, he called himself the Noah.”

  “Good to know they taught you something in that school,” Ivan said begrudgingly. “But what about the rest of the story?”

  “What do you mean?” Shawn asked. “That’s it.”

  “No.” Ivan shook his head. “The story didn’t end with that Noah man stuck on the boat forever with all those animals. After forty days and nights, Noah sent out a dove to look for land. That dove came back with an olive branch, so Noah knew it was safe to come off the ark. So he parked that huge behemoth of a boat and let everybody out. Taking them into the boat didn’t save them; it was letting them back off that did that.”

  “I get it,” I said. “The dove symbolizes that it’s time to go topside again.”

  “Very good.” Ivan nodded approvingly. “I was beginning to worry that you didn’t have much in the way of brains. That is exactly right. The group consisted of your mother and father, and a few other scientists and biologists that attended the university with them. I even snuck into East Compound to meet with them a few times to discuss their ideas. Your mother was so happy,” he said. “She believed that she was changing the world.”

  “Wasn’t she?” I asked.

  Ivan shook his head sadly. “She never got the chance. Shortly after she had you, the Noah caught wind of the group. We aren’t sure how, but I have my suspicions that one of the group members got nervous and turned on them.”

  “I bet that didn’t go well,” Todd said.

  “It did not,” Ivan agreed. “The Noah was unsure who exactly was involved. This created a problem, as he couldn’t very well execute every student in the university. So he came up with another solution. He scattered the entire university population to the four compounds, cutting off any opportunity they had to communicate. Your father was sent to North Compound. A few, including your mother, tried to escape into the wild before the transfer.” Ivan’s face clouded over. “Some got away, but your mother was killed.”

  “Killed?” I repeated, stunned.

  “But the Noah values human life too much to kill anyone,” Shawn spluttered.

  “Were you not at my village yesterday?” Todd asked.

  “I just don’t understand,” Shawn said, putting his head in his hands. “How can everything we learned be a lie?”

  “It wasn’t all a lie,” Ivan said gently. “The man we are talking about believes wholeheartedly in what he preached to you. He believes that what he does, he does to save the human race. History has shown us over and over again that there is nothing more dangerous than a man who believes so completely in his own convictions that he can’t see the truth, even when it’s right in front of him.”

  “Lies,” I repeated, feeling numb. “My dad always said my mom died giving birth to me. That was a lie too?”

  “It was.” Ivan nodded. “I can’t think of anything more dangerous than telling his young daughter a secret that could get them both killed.” I shut my eyes, trying to make myself understand what Ivan was telling me. My mom had been murdered? I waited to feel pain, sorrow, or horror, but instead I felt betrayed. I thought back to those fuzzy years when my dad and I lived in our little apartment. How much of our life had been a lie? There was nothing solid I could hold on to, nothing true to keep me balanced in all of this. Willing myself not to cry, I opened my eyes to find Ivan watching me. I swallowed. He wasn’t just Ivan, though, was he? If what he said was true, he was my grandfather. I couldn’t think about that right now, though. It was too much on top of everything else.

  “Why didn’t she take me with her?” I asked him, feeling the sting of abandonment. What kind of mother left her baby behind?

  “I can only assume it was because she thought you’d be safer underground,” Ivan said.

  “You still haven’t explained the whatcha, um, compass things,” Todd corrected himself, his face flushing red.

  Ivan waved his hand dismissively. “I provided those. I’d found a box of the things during one of my trapping trips, buried in the rubble. Clara wanted the group to have some kind of unifying symbol, and I liked to make Clara happy.”

  “You loved her,” I said, knowing it was true. He had the same warm gleam in his eyes my dad used to have. I’d forgotten what that look was like until just now.

  “She was my sun, moon, and stars,” Ivan said. “And if I’d known her daughter, my granddaughter, was living as an orphan in one of those horrid compounds, you better believe I would have come for you.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute as I studied him. It was obvious in his tanned and wrinkled face that he felt guilty for leaving me in the compound. I looked away and out the window as tears threatened again. I swallowed hard and blinked them away. No one except Shawn had cared about what happened to me ever since my dad left. I glanced back at those level blue eyes and nodded. “Thank you,” I said. I knew it wasn’t much, but it was all I had at the moment.

  “So mission accomplished, right?” Shawn asked, clapping his hands together, his voice forcefully cheerful. “You brought the plug to Ivan. You succeeded!”

  I looked at Ivan. “Do you know what’s on the plug? What my dad found out?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” Ivan said.

  “Do you have a port screen?” Shawn asked. “One that will fit the plug?”

  “I did have one of those infernal contraptions,” Ivan said. “Your dad gave it to me, but it was ruined when my pack fell into a pond about two years ago.”

  “So this isn’t over,” I breathed. “We still need to get to Lake Michigan.”

  Shawn groaned and flopped his head down on the wooden table dramatically.

  “Sure looks that way,” Ivan agreed. “And we need to get there fast.”

  I’d gotten answers, but somehow they’d left me with even more questions than I’d had before. All of the new information swirled around in my head, and I tried to think through each fact, rationalize it, and categorize it just like I had in my dinosaur research.

  Fact one: my mom and dad had been part of a secret society. Okay, I could imagine that. I thought back to my memories of my dad, seeing them in a new light. My dad had never spoken against the Noah, but he’d never praised the Noah like everyone else in the compound had.

  Fact two: my mom had been murdered. This one was harder to wrap my head around, and I
pushed the whole matter aside to think about later.

  Fact three: Ivan was my grandfather. That last bit was the hardest piece of information to believe. Was I happy about it? I decided I was. It was nice to have a relative who cared about me. It made me feel like a kid, something I hadn’t really felt like in a long time. He definitely wasn’t the warm and fuzzy grandfather type, but that was okay too. His prickly demeanor seemed to hide a kind heart, at least when it came to my mother. Maybe, given time, he’d feel that way about me too.

  Our meal finished, Ivan pulled a lantern off its bracket on the wall and gave us each a hard look. “Do you want a tour?” he asked reluctantly. Shawn cocked an eyebrow at me, and I shrugged. I had too much on my mind to care about touring the abandoned guts of an old skyscraper. Todd, on the other hand, bounded to his feet like his chair had been set on fire, a look of eager anticipation on his face. Ivan chuckled as he slung his leather bag back over his shoulder and motioned with his stump arm for us to follow him.

  As Ivan lit the wall-mounted lanterns, the warm golden light flooded into the dark corners of the enormous room, and I gasped in wonder. Pile after pile of gigantic dinosaur hides lay on every available surface. They were stacked three feet high and stretched on large metal frames to dry. Barrels of claws and teeth stood in neat rows against the back wall next to orderly stacks of bones taller than me. A few dinosaur heads were even stuffed and hung on the wall. Their shiny glass eyes winked at me as I stood in the middle of the space and spun around slowly.

  “This is ten times the inventory you used to have,” Todd said in awe as he flipped the corner of a huge scaly pelt over to inspect the underside.

  “Did you kill all of these?” I asked. Ivan grunted as he watched Todd hold up claws to the light and inspect teeth with a small magnifying lens he’d picked up off Ivan’s worktable.

  “Some I killed,” Ivan clarified as he took a seat at the large wooden worktable and spread out the gory claws and teeth that he had collected earlier, “others died naturally, and I just showed up to pull off the pelt before the scavengers arrived. A few made the mistake of trying to kill me and didn’t live to regret it.” Ivan unscrewed a fat glass jar and poured clear liquid into a large dented metal bowl. He dropped the teeth and claws in one by one, and the contents fizzed. When the fizzing stopped, he removed the teeth and claws using thin metal tongs and laid them out in a neat row on his table. All traces of blood and flesh were gone, leaving them gleaming and clean. He then poured the contents of the bowl back into the jar, setting the liquid aside. The process was fascinating, to say the least.

  “But what do you do with it all?” I asked, my head spinning.

  “Sell it. Trade it. Eat it.”

  We all turned to watch Todd crow happily as he discovered an entire dinosaur skull hidden under a tarp.

  “That boy is his father reincarnated,” Ivan said. “I’ve never seen anyone get so excited over old bones. He’ll make a good trader if he can live long enough to grow up. Most traders don’t.” I was surprised to hear a warm affection in his voice as he talked about Todd. From the way he’d treated him earlier, I’d thought Ivan didn’t like him. I’d been wrong.

  “You don’t look retired!” Todd exclaimed with a grin as he bounded up to us. He gestured to the two large claws he was holding in each hand. “You have enough stock here to keep the outlying villages supplied for years.”

  “Hobby.” Ivan shrugged.

  “I wish I knew how to kill this efficiently,” Shawn said. “I’d wipe the dinosaurs off the planet. One monster at a time.”

  “Not so fast,” Ivan cautioned. “It’s too late for that. The dinosaurs have embedded themselves in our world, and we must adapt and evolve accordingly or risk going extinct ourselves.”

  “Really?” Shawn asked, disbelief etched in every line of his face.

  “But wouldn’t things just go back to the way they were before if all the dinosaurs were killed?” I asked, feeling just as confused as Shawn.

  Ivan shook his head gravely. “Too much has changed since they arrived. The creatures of the past have disappeared to make way for the dinosaurs’ hierarchy of prey and predators.”

  “But if they all died, we’d be able to live topside again.” Shawn said.

  “Evolution doesn’t work in reverse, compound boy,” Ivan said sharply. He looked around, as though searching for inspiration. He stood up from his worktable and pointed to one of its legs. Only then did I notice that while three of the legs were made of solid wood, the remaining leg seemed to be supported by a thick dinosaur bone.

  “That table leg started to rot some years back,” Ivan said. “I used that bone to prop it up, and over time the original leg has become weaker and weaker. Now, young Shawn, picture that bone to be the dinosaur population, and the table is the rest of the world we live in, the animals, the plants, the people.” Ivan gave the dinosaur bone a swift kick, and as it fell, the entire table collapsed in on itself, the piles of dinosaur teeth and claws that had been perched on it skittering across the floor. “Get it now?” he asked

  Shawn frowned down at the table. Ivan didn’t realize it, but he couldn’t have used a better metaphor to describe the problem if he’d tried. Shawn understood how things were put together, how points and counterpoints needed to balance, and I could see his brain churning as he thought over what Ivan had said.

  Without another word, Ivan stood and blew out the nearest lantern. Our tour was officially over.

  The next morning I woke up with a stiff neck, sore muscles, and Todd drooling on my shoulder. Gross. The bright morning sun was streaming in, and the mounted head of a T. rex leered at me from across the room. All three of us had bunked down on Ivan’s floor the night before. It hadn’t exactly been comfortable. Shawn’s blanket was crumpled in a forgotten lump, and he was nowhere in sight. I glanced over at the metal panel still bolted in the floor, and let out a sigh of relief. He hadn’t left, so he had to be around here somewhere. Easing out of my blankets, I padded quietly over to the wall of windows. The forest below us seemed to go on forever, and in the distance I could just make out Lake Michigan.

  “It’s hard to believe it’s crawling with scaled beasties from up here, isn’t it,” said a gruff voice behind me. I jumped and turned to find Ivan already dressed in his rough brown tunic, two bows and a gun slung over one shoulder.

  “Good morning,” I mumbled, brushing my tangle of curls back from my face. I glanced nervously at his gun. It was huge and black; a long rifle style rather than a pistol like the marines carried. I wondered where in the world he’d gotten it.

  Seeing my gaze, Ivan glanced down. “I prefer the bow,” he explained. “But I believe in always having a plan B.”

  “Where did you get it?” I asked, awed and a little frightened at the sight of the lethal-looking weapon.

  “I found it years ago. It was a corroded and rusted mess, but I managed to rebuild it with the help of a man in the Maples.”

  I glanced up. “The Maples?”

  “A village about fifty miles south of the Oaks,” Ivan explained. “There is a collector there who specializes in old-world weapons parts and ammunition.”

  I nodded, feeling a tug of guilt as I thought about the only collector I’d ever met, Roderick. Because of me, he was dead.

  “Your friend Shawn has been busy this morning,” Ivan said, interrupting my train of thought.

  “Where is he?”

  Ivan jerked his head to the left, and I looked over to see Shawn on his hands and knees, reconstructing the table that Ivan had knocked over the night before. He’d used bits of the dinosaur bone and teeth to cleverly support the weathered wood. I smiled as he checked to see if the table was level with a small round bone.

  “He’s always been good at fixing things,” I said, feeling proud. Shawn brushed off his hands and looked up to see us watching him. He smiled sheepishly.

  “Good.” Ivan nodded. “Wake up, you lazy bum,” he roared in Todd’s direction, causing
him to sit up with a start as he looked around in bleary-eyed confusion. “Breakfast is in five, and I don’t eat with people who smell like a stegosaurus’s bum. The washbasin is over there.” Ivan motioned with his good arm, and Todd stumbled in that direction, still half asleep. Shawn and I joined him, splashing our faces and rubbing our arms with the ice-cold water.

  “The table looks good,” I said to Shawn as we walked back toward Ivan’s kitchen. He shrugged in response. Ivan sliced up some coarse brown bread and handed us each a slice. He plunked a jar of something bright red on the table and sat down, smearing the stuff liberally on his bread. Todd followed suit, but Ivan noticed Shawn’s hesitation.

  “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever had jelly before?” he asked.

  “No,” Shawn said, “what is it?”

  “What do you mean what is it? What kind of question is that? It’s a fruit preserve. This one’s raspberry,” Ivan said. “I can it myself.” I took the knife Ivan offered me and coated my own piece of bread and took a bite. I grinned, the flavor exploding in my mouth, sweet and just the slightest bit tart. I imagined it was what sunshine tasted like.

  “That’s better,” Ivan said, and I could tell he was pleased. “Eat it all; you have a big day ahead of you.”

  “We do?” Shawn asked.

  “Are we going to Lake Michigan?” I asked.

  “Are we going to go save my mom?” Todd asked.

  “I will be accompanying you to the lake,” Ivan said. “A lot of the bigger beasts roam the area around the lake, and I don’t fancy my granddaughter stomping through the woods with you two as her protectors.” Hearing him say the word granddaughter had me pausing midbite. The term still felt so foreign, but despite its strangeness, it sent a warm happiness flooding through me. Then I registered what Ivan had actually said.

  “Wait a minute.” I sat up straight, feeling that warm feeling fizzle a little. “They aren’t my protectors. I can take care of myself.” Ivan didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw a slight smile cross his face as he cut himself another slice of bread.