Tyrannosaurus Wrecks

by Stuart Gibbs

  “I… I can’t believe this,” Mrs. Bonotto stammered. “It never occurred to me to confirm she was who she said she was. I mean… we called the university and then she called us! Are you saying the University of Texas is corrupt?”

  “No,” I said. “Except for the receptionist who took your call. He never passed the message on to the real Dr. Chen, who’s in Mongolia right now.” I assumed it was the same receptionist who I had talked to the day before. The one who had told me that Dr. Chen was in the field. That was probably what he told everyone who called, unless it was someone who knew Dr. Chen personally.

  “Mongolia?” Sage echoed. “That’s on the other side of the planet!”

  “Exactly.” I drove over a portion of the path so rutted, it was like a washboard, and my voice vibrated as I spoke. “The real Dr. Chen is in one of the most remote places imaginable, and she’s there for months. She’s the perfect person to impersonate, because there’s almost no chance that she’s going to show up back here all of a sudden.”

  Mom said, “Our guess is, the fake Dr. Chen paid off the receptionist at the university to feed her tips, waiting for an opportunity like this to present itself.”

  We emerged from the woods into a clearing, where another herd of deer was grazing in the morning cool, six females and an equal number of fawns, with one big buck. They had heard us coming and were all on the alert, ears erect, noses twitching, eyes locked on us. Then the buck bolted and the rest followed, bounding away across the grass and melting into the forest.

  “I can’t believe this,” Mrs. Bonotto repeated. “There’s no way… We talked to our Dr. Chen at length. She knew everything about dinosaurs, and how to run a dig…”

  “It’s still her area of expertise,” Dad explained. “The same as the real Dr. Chen. The fake one just does it illegally.”

  Sage asked, “So her whole team was in on it too?”

  “No,” I answered. “They were fooled like the rest of us. They had applied to be on another dig and were wait-listed. And Jeb Weems had recently called and asked if there were any digs he could be a part of. The receptionist at the university must have given the fake Dr. Chen their numbers. When she contacted them to help on the dig, they didn’t think to question her either. They were just excited to be involved.”

  Dad said, “They all showed up where and when the fake Dr. Chen told them to and went to work. It probably looked like a perfectly normal dig to them. And even if it didn’t, they were all first-time volunteers, so who would even know what a dig was supposed to be like?”

  “They were all sworn to secrecy about the site,” Mom added. “And they were camping out here, cut off from society. The person they thought was Dr. Chen was their authority figure. They were expecting her to tell them what to do. So they did what she asked and didn’t question anything.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Mrs. Bonotto said again. She had been saying it over and over, like she was in shock. “How could we have been so stupid?”

  “It wasn’t stupid,” Dad assured her. “You called the university and left a message for Dr. Chen. Someone claiming to be Dr. Chen called you back and sounded like the right person. I would never have thought she was a fake.”

  “No one would have,” Mom said supportively.

  “But how did she steal Minerva?” Sage asked. “Even if she was an impostor, it’s not like she had superpowers.”

  “She didn’t steal Minerva,” I replied. “Not yet, at least.”

  Sage looked back over his shoulder at me, like he was trying to tell if I had gone crazy. “If she didn’t steal the skull, then why is it missing?”

  “I’ll explain,” I said, although I had to hold off on that for a few moments, as a large herd of cattle was blocking our path. Unlike the deer, they didn’t feel threatened by us. Instead, they didn’t even seem to care that we were there. Sage’s mother had to shout to get them to move out of the way, and even then, we still had to find a meandering path through the stragglers.

  I described what had happened while we slalomed through the cattle. “Obviously, there were a lot of difficulties with stealing the skull. Not only was it big and heavy and miles from the road, but the dig team was camping nearby every night, so it was impossible to move without being seen. But if Dr. Chen could make everyone think the skull had been stolen, then that changed things.”

  “How do you make someone think a skull has been stolen without stealing it?” Sage asked.

  “The fake Dr. Chen waited for a night where a big storm was coming,” I said. “Then she shut down camp and sent everyone off-site to a motel while she stayed behind, claiming to be preparing the site for the rain. Once everyone was gone, she moved the skull. Not very far, because she didn’t have much time, but far enough to confuse everyone. That’s what that cut log we found two nights ago was for, Sage. It was a roller. And if you had about ten more of them, then you could roll the skull along on top of them. Exactly like the ancient Egyptians moved the blocks for the pyramids.”

  Mrs. Bonotto said, “Still, Dr. Chen couldn’t have done that by herself…”

  “No,” I admitted. “But she probably only needed two or three other people, and I’ll bet she’s had a whole team lying low around here for a while. The ones who helped that night were most likely waiting in the woods for the diggers to leave on the night of the storm. I’m sure they had already cut the logs for the rollers ahead of time. And when they were done with them, they chucked them into the river, figuring the evidence would sink or be carried way downstream.”

  “But even if they used rollers,” Mrs. Bonotto said, “they still would have left a track.”

  “The wooden plank!” Sage exclaimed suddenly. “The one we found with the holes in it that the rope had gone through! They made that ahead of time too, then dragged it over the ground to smooth over their tracks!”

  “Right,” I agreed. “The ground wasn’t muddy before the storm, so it wouldn’t have been too hard to erase a short set of tracks in the dirt. And then the rains would have washed away any remaining evidence. They only spent about an hour there. Then the fake Dr. Chen went to the motel and spent the night with everyone at Ruby’s, giving herself an alibi.”

  We finally made it through the cattle and were able to pick up speed again. We revved our engines and hauled through the forest, closing in on the dig site.

  “I suppose all that makes sense,” Sage’s mother said, “but where could they have possibly moved the skull in only an hour? We were all over the area and didn’t see any sign of it.”

  “That’s not quite true,” I told her. “We did see it. We just didn’t realize what it was. Because most of it was hidden.”

  “The river!” Sage cried out. “They rolled it into the river!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “They only moved Minerva about thirty feet, if that. And it was all downhill. Then the rains came along and raised the water so high, it almost completely covered the skull. It simply looked like a rock, poking out of the water.”

  “Summer even stood right on top of it!” Sage exclaimed. “That’s why fake Dr. Chen freaked out. She wasn’t worried about Summer’s safety! She was worried about Summer noticing what she was standing on!”

  “Right,” I agreed. “The plan was to make everyone think the skull had been stolen, but provide an alibi for the fake Dr. Chen. Then she could temporarily shut down the dig, claiming she was trying to figure out what to do, and come back later to remove Minerva—which is what she tried to do two nights ago. Only, she didn’t expect to find you, me, and the guys camping out there. So she took off before we could see it was her.”

  “We thwarted her evil scheme!” Sage crowed triumphantly.

  “For now,” Dad cautioned. “But it’s only a matter of time before she tries again. Which is why we thought we needed to get out here right away before—”

  He didn’t finish the thought, as we had just reached the dig site. The moment all of us saw it, we realized something was wrong.


  Since it was nearly two days since the last big rain, the height of the river had crested and was dropping to its normal, significantly lower level. We could clearly see the boulders that Summer had been jumping on a few days before. They were the size of school desks, and half of each poked above the waterline.

  There was no skull among them.

  We all parked at the top of the small bluff, looking down at the river, and cut our engines.

  The world instantly seemed incredibly quiet. The only sound was the soft burbling of the river, the chirp of birds, and the occasional distant moo.

  Mom looked at Dad and me, concerned. “We would see the skull if it was there, wouldn’t we?”

  Dad whipped out his phone and pulled up the photos he had taken of Summer on the rocks. “It was there the other day! Look! There are four boulders poking through the water in my photograph, but only three now.”

  All of us realized, to our horror, what that meant.

  “They came back last night!” Mrs. Bonotto wailed. “No one was here to scare them off then!”

  Sage jumped off his ATV, scrambled down the small bluff to the riverbank, and inspected the ground. “They left tracks this time! There are footprints here! Lots of them! And drag marks!” He pointed downriver, the way the people with the flashlights had fled two nights before. “Going that way!”

  “They’re heading toward the road,” Mom said. “But if they’re hauling a five-hundred-pound skull, they can’t be moving that quickly.”

  “Then maybe we can still catch them,” Dad said. He started his ATV again and looked to Sage’s mother. “Lorena, lead the way.”

  Mrs. Bonotto’s eyes steeled with determination. She wasn’t about to let anyone get away with her dinosaur that easily. “Follow me,” she announced, and then revved up her own ATV.

  Sage clambered back up the bluff and leaped onto his ATV, and we all took off across the ranch. We raced down the river to a spot where it was quite broad and the water level had now dropped to only a few inches. The tracks of the thieves indicated they had waded across there. The wheels of our ATVs were big enough to take us across without any trouble. We even stayed relatively dry.

  When we reached the other side, we gunned our engines and went as fast as possible. This time, we didn’t talk, as we were focused on following the faint trail the thieves had left—and saving our breath. Even though we were on motorized vehicles, driving them was still a lot more work than using a car. We were constantly wrenching the handlebars one way or another, or standing high in the saddle to keep from being thrown off, and the constant bouncing and juddering battered us. After a while, I felt as though my brain was going to vibrate right out of my skull.

  Fortunately, even though her ranch was enormous, Mrs. Bonotto knew the way to the road well, and we kept seeing evidence that the thieves had stuck to that route: fresh footprints in patches of mud, swaths of grass flattened by dragging the skull through, passages through the woods where small limbs had been recently snapped to make room for Minerva.

  Along the way, Mom was trying to call the local police, but between her trying to drive the ATV and our remote location, the call kept dropping. Mrs. Bonotto had better luck reaching her husband. She let him know where we were heading, and eventually, he fell in beside us, riding his trusty horse as fast as it could go. Mr. Bonotto looked straight out of a movie western, with a creased cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. The horse was breathing hard, its flanks heaving, after a long gallop to catch up to us.

  I was the first one to see the truck. It was a white U-Haul, midsize, the kind you’d rent to move a few rooms of furniture. It gleamed in the sun, providing a distinct contrast to the miles of cedar trees, grass, and dirt we had just ridden through.

  “They’re still here!” I yelled, pointing ahead through the woods. We emerged from the trees and the entire scene came into view:

  The truck was parked on the side of the road along with two other cars: a beat-up sedan and an even more beat-up minivan. The fake Dr. Chen and her team—eight big men in jeans and sweat-soaked T-shirts—had just finished loading the skull into the U-Haul after what had certainly been a long, hard slog across the ranch. They had heard us coming and were scrambling to escape before we could catch them, dropping the filthy tarp on which they had carried the skull and racing for their vehicles. Someone was already behind the wheel of the U-Haul, starting the engine. Dr. Chen yanked down the roll-up door at the rear of the U-Haul and ran for the passenger seat.

  She limped as she ran. Apparently, she was the one who had been hurt while fleeing through the woods two nights before.

  We all went after them as fast as we could. The last stretch to the roadside was open field, and we roared across it, Mr. Bonotto’s horse galloping beside us.

  As we got closer, I could see that instead of lifting the skull over the barbed wire, the thieves had simply cut the wires and flattened a section of the fence. We raced through the gap onto the shoulder of the road.

  It was too loud and hectic for all of us on ATVs to coordinate our efforts. We all shouted our plans at once, with the effect that no one could hear what anyone else intended to do. Everyone went different ways, resulting in chaos. Sage and his mother crashed into each other and spun out in the dirt. Mom and Dad veered away to cut off the car and the van, while Sage’s father and I went after the U-Haul.

  The U-Haul’s tires spun, kicking up a great spray of gravel that rained down on me, and then the truck lurched onto the road.

  The fake Dr. Chen might have known a lot about theropods, but she didn’t know much about U-Hauls. In her haste, she hadn’t locked the roll-up door, and when the truck jounced onto the road, the jolt sent the door flying back up again, leaving the rear of the truck wide open. Inside, the giant skull, swaddled in plaster, was lashed down with cords of rope.

  I swerved onto the road, right behind the U-Haul.

  Mr. Bonotto used the last of his horse’s strength to ride around to the front of the truck, trying to cut off the escape. The driver slammed on the brakes to avoid running him over, and the U-Haul skidded to a stop right in front of me.

  It occurred to me that the truck was certainly much faster than an ATV, and that if it drove off again, we would never catch up to it.

  In the cab of the U-Haul, I heard fake Dr. Chen yell, “Drive, you idiot! He’ll move!”

  In the moments before the driver could respond, I leaped from the ATV into the back of the truck.

  Then the tires squealed and the U-Haul lunged forward. I nearly pitched right back out onto the road, but caught the rope that controlled the roll-up door at the last second and held on tight.

  There was a frightened whinny and a clatter of hooves on asphalt as Sage’s father and his horse abandoned their standoff before they got run over, and then the U-Haul was speeding down the road.

  Behind me, my parents had managed to box in the sedan on their ATVs, preventing it from going anywhere, but the minivan got around them, swerving onto the road behind me.

  Which meant I was now all by myself with the bad guys.

  23 THE CHASE

  My first instinct was to yank the roll-up door back down and lock it into place, but I decided against that: My plan was to stay with the U-Haul and let my parents know where it was going, and to do that, I had to see where I was. Out there in the boonies, I wasn’t sure that I had enough cell service to load GPS and talk to my parents at the same time—and even if I did, I would need to see landmarks to help pinpoint my location. Since there were no windows in the back of the U-Haul, the only way I could see outside was through the open door. So, I cautiously made my way farther into the truck to ensure that I wouldn’t tumble out into the road.

  The U-Haul sped through the countryside with the minivan following closely behind.

  The skull was so big that there was barely room for me to get past it in the back of the truck. It had only been lashed down with two strands of rope so far. More was coiled on the floor, indicatin
g that the thieves had probably intended to tie the skull down more securely, but we had scared them off before they could. The two strands were pulled taut over the skull and vibrating like plucked guitar strings.

  My phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket and wasn’t surprised to see it was my mother calling. I yanked off my helmet so that I could speak to her. “Hi, Mom.”

  “What on earth were you thinking, getting into that truck?” she demanded. She sounded angry, but I knew it was because she was worried for my safety.

  “I figured if I was with the truck, then I could guide you to it,” I said. “Otherwise, the bad guys would get away!”

  “Your life isn’t worth risking over a dinosaur skull!” Mom told me.

  “Charlene,” I heard Dad say, “this is not the time for this.” Then he yelled, “We’ve commandeered the bad guy’s car!”

  “How?” I asked.

  “There were only three of them, and Joe Bonotto’s tougher than all of them put together,” Dad replied. “We’re trying the police again. Where are you?”

  The U-Haul careened through a fork in the road, nearly throwing me off my feet.

  The minivan stayed right behind us, running a stop sign.

  “We just made a left turn,” I reported, looking out the back of the truck for landmarks. “Although we’d been going straight until then. I can’t see any road signs, but there’s a big pond at the intersection with about forty cows around it.”

  “Keep us posted,” Dad told me. “We’re on our way.”

  “Will do.” I edged closer to the cab of the U-Haul. I couldn’t see into it, but through the wall, I could hear the driver and the fake Dr. Chen talking. They were raising their voices, sounding panicked and exasperated with each other.