Dinosaur: 65 Million: Book 2 Change Them, Survive Them

by catt dahman

  Bray added, “Do you understand now why once here, no one leaves? What they do here is very private.” He shook a little.

  “How does that tell us where Rick is?” Theo asked.

  Josef led them into another area; the room featured a huge window covered by a grey curtain. “Please keep an open mind. My father has continued his work.”

  Audrina tightened her grip on Tony’s hand, reminding him that the guards were armed. Two SSDD guards silently appeared.

  Josef drew back the curtain, and for a while, everyone just tried to make sense of what they saw. The creature’s back was to them, and it was naked, covered in thick, hard scales that were a few shades darker than a light tan might make human flesh.

  Josef explained, “His skin is thickened and has formed a scaled texture, but it isn’t reptilian. As you can see, the spine has become nubby, and the vertebrae are more prominent. A tail is very natural, and human embryos have them as you undoubtedly are aware, and while we hoped that latent trait would appear, only a nub is evident.”

  “The creature’s legs were human-like but more heavily muscled and stronger. Longer toenails made the toes seem prehensile, but it was only an illusion,” Josef explained. Through technology, their chemical and nanobot additives caused skin and nail changes and for the bones to grow and alter themselves. Josef said that those changes, made quickly, were simple. “The human body is very malleable, actually. It takes very little to reshape it as it remembers being an embryo and the days before evolution. Genetic memory is very strong.”

  As the odd being turned, Audrina sank into a chair, her legs going to jelly as she recognized the eyes. His hair had fallen out, and his nose and jaws were reshaped as cartilage and bones moved, but it was Rick Parker.

  “Unfortunately, there has been quite a bit of pain as the bones have changed shape, but we are most kind, and there is no reason to subject him to painful tests anyway. We have kept him dosed with liberal amounts of a wondrous pain reliever that keeps him very comfortable.”

  “You think he’s comfortable?” Audrina asked in a whisper.

  “Oh, he is, I assure you. He was depressed and not doing well mentally, Audrina. Doping him with drugs and keeping him locked away seems useless, doesn’t it?”

  Like we are? Tony thought.

  “How cruel that would be! Dr. Parker met my father and became fully unhinged, upset, and hysterical after my father showed him some work with the troodons that he had not seen. Father was quite proud and didn’t realize how unstable Dr. Parker was.”

  “The troodons?” Audrina asked.

  “Well, yes. Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you see the species trademarks? The hands and the eyes? We need to unite the troodon DNA properly with human DNA so we can have mating pairs and solve the problem of how to make them give birth to live young and increase their intelligence. It’s so simple. Did you not figure it out yourselves?” Josef asked.

  “My mind isn’t that crazy,” Audrina said, “Dr. Parker….”

  “He literally lost his mind, and this was the only way. This is what my father does. It’s kinder really. Much more humane, and he is really playing a vital role now.”

  One of the SSDD men aimed his gun as Tony whirled. They looked at one another for a few seconds, and Tony backed down, sitting down so he could soothe Audrina who still sobbed.

  Shimei returned. Sick, he had rushed out with Bright. After he finished vomiting, he came back, not caring in the least he had thrown up in the clean hallway on the floor. “Is he aware?”

  “Sometimes. The pain medication does prevent anxiety as well, and he is far less upset than he was before, actually. His mind is at peace, and he will be okay.”

  “What. What is he?” Shimei asked.

  “He’s Dr. Parker, and he is better and stronger. My father has a theory that perhaps man evolved from, not chimps, but dinosaurs.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Corrine spoke, “I know it seems so, Shi, but in the lab, I have seen some of the bones and teeth discovered. How do you think the technicians here did this? Magic? There had to be a DNA plan, and they used those bones and teeth found that do look like a combination of man and dinosaur, and you can deny it all if you wish, but you can see the bones and teeth yourselves. It’s fact.”

  “Maybe so, but that doesn’t excuse using Rick as a lab rat,” Tony almost yelled, “put him back to normal.”

  Rick’s nose was flatter now, and the bones of his jaw jutted into what was a flat snout. When the observers noticed he was without teeth, Josef explained, almost excitedly, that his teeth had fallen out and that new teeth were appearing in his gums, which were much sharper and prominent.

  “He is better suited for the future even if it offends you. More than anything else, you must understand that global economics are failing and that your world is failing. It’s a hard concept to accept, but this bunker may be all that is left in time. And out there are more concerns; in time, well there is always the fear a meteor will come and crash and wipe us out, yes? This way, the new species might survive. Man is failing, my friends.”

  “We are not friends,” Shimei muttered.

  Josef ignored that, “Man must evolve or die out, just as the creatures did, long ago. The only answer is evolution.”

  Part Three: Present Time

  Chapter One: In the Cave of Pain

  Jack blinked, “Ummm.”

  “I know. You have doubts, and I promise everything is true. We can show you, but you’ve seen the dinosaurs, and we aren’t totally cut off down here. We know who you are, at least who you were before you removed all the cameras. The show said you died, but no one believed that fully, and we saw the other teams when they found you. We watch television.”

  “They died. The other teams, I mean,” Jack said.

  “We saw,” Shimei said, “it was gruesome and horrible, but ratings soared. That’s pretty sickening. They aren’t planning the new season. They really aren’t planning many shows at all, reruns maybe.”

  “Kind of funny to hear anyone call the show sickening when you and a German war criminal hung out down here,” Jack said.

  Shimei looked tired, “I can see that. Things down here may not be ethical, but you did sign up. That’s not the issue. Doctor Elliot Wasserman took over the SSDD big facility you entered through. That’s his way of showing off, but he can’t explain how the dinosaurs came back because he doesn’t even understand, and he can’t show off Herr Doktor.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me,” Trevor said.

  “I’m not defending what the Mengele men did, but that’s where they stopped. SSDD is military, and they do what they want. This is just a bunker. The show was SSDD controlled. Do you see? Mengele provided the dinosaurs, but SSDD controls them now. They took them. Look, I was once seated where you are now, hearing just parts of this, and then we found out the rest of it later. The difference is that men disguised as monsters met us. We are not monsters.”

  “We got in fairly easily. Did you not know about the crack in the wall?” Ruby asked, bored of the defense that Shimei continued.

  Shimei laughed, “We knew. Three people left here, actually.”

  “Those would be the three skeletons we found in that cave,” Trevor said, “and one wasn’t a people.”

  “Yes. We didn’t take the skeletons; we weren’t allowed. The doctors were upset with them. We thought the military outside would take care of them, but they had no chance,” the other man said; he was Tony. “We know what happened. We left them there.”

  “There was no military out there. You’ve been mice that are scared of cats who aren’t outside the hole,” Trevor said.

  Shimei nodded, “That was always possible. You think I have changed a lot since I told you our story? I have some, but for reasons that are difficult to express. We were horrified by what we saw. It was a shock and nauseating, but we remained, fearful of trying to escape, and I guess you might call it Stockholm syndrome, what we went through. We
had seen our friends devoured and the results of experiments down here, but we were tired, and here we stayed. This is the first time we have been off whatever drugs the doctors gave us, claiming they were vitamins. It was hidden in the food we ate.”

  But Shimei filled in with more information.

  A few weeks later after they arrived, Tate and Ann seemingly vanished, but before anyone could nose around and in between various boring lectures from the elder Mengele, the hikers found news reports stressful as the economy began to backslide towards a full collapse. Cutting spending to fix the national deficit and stopping the funding to arts and sciences, farming, and more.

  That was when the war in the Middle East went hot.

  “Time seemed like something unreal, as if it were something flittering and ethereal; then, one day we all grasped and found that the next day was weeks past. I can’t explain except to say we were given drugs for our moods, to calm us, and that contributed to our loss of time. The drugs were put in the food. The elements Herr Doktor described did cause a magnetic homing, something that caused us not to stray, and with the drugs, we just didn’t try to escape. We noticed the world was falling apart, and to us, it was days after we arrived, but don’t you see? It was years!” Shimei raised his voice and shook with emotion.

  “Shimei, that was horrible that you were drugged and lost years,” Ruby said, “and we’ll pass on eating anything here.”

  “We aren’t going to drug you,” Tony said, “there’s a purpose for our telling you everything, and it isn’t to drug you or harm you in anyway. It’s the opposite, actually.”

  “I know it’s odd, but the drugs were sublime, and the elements did cause that. Magnetite forms crystals in the brain in time, actually, but that’s not important. You can read about it if you want. I am just saying that we stayed, and we were not aware of time passing except at certain times,” Shimei said.

  Shimei explained that they watched the economy decline and were glad not to be out in that misery, but that was years later, time they had lost and couldn’t really recall. “It sounds bad, and at the time, it was. The US changed, as you know, but we never were cold or hungry.”

  “You were prisoners here,” Jack said.

  “It’s no different than your deciding to stay here and not go back…all about semantics. But yes, we would have run away given the chance. We were prisoners. Mentally tortured.”

  Ruby asked about the people in the cave and the skeletons that Adrian and Mike found.

  Shimei said that was a terrible ordeal.

  Doctor Mengele, the elder, was known for his work with eugenics which was directed at building a better race by encouraging positive traits and eliminating less desired traits. This was studied by Francis Galton and Charles Darwin but was embraced by Adolf Hitler and Josef Mengele.

  “Fine in theory that we raise the best traits and eliminate the bad ones until ya realize you happen to be the one with six fingers and are thrown out to be eaten by wolves. Yay, Sparta.”

  Shimei nodded.

  Dr. Mengele had a doctorate in anthropology, a study of man, and a doctorate in medicine. During World War II, he helped decide who would be forced into labor, who would go to the laboratories, and who would be sent to the gas chambers. He had a fondness for selecting twins for his eugenics research. With the twins, he tried to change their eye color with injections to the eye, and he tried to alter their common traits.

  Forced abortion, sterilization, birth control, infanticide, segregation, and genetic screening were used to perfect traits; homosexuals, those disabled, mentally ill, or deemed unattractive were euthanized. He wanted perfection, but he found most humans imperfect and tried to repair anything he found lacking.

  “That’s insane. I hope you don’t think that is the right thing to do,” Ruby said, “That was horrifying; I can’t imagine how those poor people suffered. He was a war criminal for a damned good reason.”

  “I can’t argue that. I don’t know what is right or wrong. I know that there is truly survival of the fittest, and I know that on my own. You have been out there; you know it. I do know what Herr Doktor did was worse than sick. He was a nightmare. A monster with no moral compass. Evil.”

  The man seemed a little tired. Shimei talked more, telling his story.

  Luke fell in love with a woman who worked in the labs. They spent time together, and it seemed perfect, despite their being prisoners and knowing what was going on, but Luke was a little mollified when he had a woman. Shimei, Theo, Tony, and Audrina became the major holdouts.

  Unfortunately, as the SSDD went to Elliot Wasserman, test subjects were not sent. Mengele had to look at what he had; there weren’t two thousand twins to experiment on as there had been at Auschwitz. The doctor looked at one of the lab technicians, the one Luke fell in love with. She was flawless, according to Mengele, and he decided that Joana had a place much better and more critical mission than washing Petri dishes and setting up lab equipment. She was one of the plane survivors and was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and mentally stable.

  Mengele took her, and through manipulation and careful work, he began to change her as he had changed Dr. Parker. Luke was wild, looking and searching for Joana, and his medication had to be reinstated to calm him. But Mengele was far more brilliant and monstrous than anyone really knew, and to get the cross breed he wanted since he couldn’t make all the changes needed, he impregnated her with Dr. Parker’s sperm to give her special twins. Twins were his specialty, after all, and he was so close to his troodon/human mix.

  Nothing worked, and the pairs Mengele created hadn’t reproduced. He tried troodon sperm and troodon eggs with no success. He tried changed pairs and had no success. He decided it had to be someone more saturated with magnetite. Joana had been exposed since the 1950s.

  “One day, she escaped. Joana was smart, and one of the female guards turned traitor and ran with her. They didn’t get far. Unfortunately, the soldier underestimated Joana’s nature and was ripped apart before Joana realized what she was doing. Joana allowed the inhuman side of herself to take over for a few crucial moments. Luke was my friend; in fact, we were cops back in the old days. Luke ran outside to find Joana who was crazed and trying to escape. He followed them and found Joana,” Tony said.

  “And?”

  Tony glanced at Ruby, “He found her and saw what she was; I think his heart was bad, and no one knew. Evidently, when she turned around, he suffered a heart attack and died right there. Of all things, a heart attack killed him.”

  “He was the man we found dead in the cave,” Adrian said.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “And Joana?” Jack asked.

  “What he saw was not only that she was changing, but also, she was big- pregnant with twins. Herr Doktor used sperm from a half human. The twins would have been almost another species, but with human intelligence. Imagine that.”

  “Impossible,” Trevor said.

  “It’s sick. It’s all an abomination,” Ruby said.

  “I know. Do you think we don’t know how sick it is? But we were kept docile, and it was all we knew. We were changed: not aging correctly. We couldn’t go home. Home fell apart; you knew what’s out there. People are starving and freezing to death, there is no medical care and no food, and crime is everywhere; it’s pure chaos out there. That’s why you didn’t go back,” Tony blurted.

  Shimei went on, “SSDD guards aren’t here anymore, but this is all we can do. We can see the television. We know the misery and what the living conditions are out there. We know why you refused to go back there and why you stayed here in the area, but can you survive long term? Can you survive the very beasts Herr Doktor designed and were so beloved by our government that they were set free in two states? Can you survive them? No. They are masters of the world now, and soon, they will be a ruling species.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked, “we figured the government would hide in the middle with the dinosaurs like guards and the rest of the world would never
get in. That’s our theory.”

  Shimei laughed bitterly, “Oh, that would have been grand, but you are thinking so small, so tiny. They breed. SSDD asks for more all the time. How can anyone keep up with developing the many, many types of dinos from only teeth and bones. Once again, the United States will be covered by the giants. Dr. Wasserman is greedy.”

  Ruby and the rest were confused, wondering how this man could think that dinosaurs were going to take over the entire country. Ruby just wanted to go back to their cave and live simply.

  Wodanaz, who once was Jeremy and had evolved into a perfect killer, listened closely, taking in everything that was said and thinking it over carefully. “Who is left? What are you doing?” He was tired of hearing all the details and thought about Susan and how, if she were there, even as kind and quiet as she was, she would have already gone for these men’s throats. He refused to think about it at the moment and focused on the present.

  “They have their own area: Ann and Tate and Dr. Parker, too. Theo, he’s different. He’s, oh, God, he’s changed. Audrina…Baby Girl…she’s different now. They all changed.” Shimei couldn’t help but allow tears to fill his eyes. Baby Girl, Audrina, was like a sister to him. He cried openly.

  “My, God, your own girl friend?” Ruby exploded at Tony. She was furious and couldn’t decide what was going on. Shimei told them everything, but it sounded as if he and the rest had accepted everything and gone along with insane, sadistic, and cruel scientists, and he had yet to explain why.

  Tony looked at the newcomers with tears streaking his face and said, “Don’t judge me. You have no idea the hell we’ve been through. When they change, a few physical attributes are involved. The doctor perfected his methods, and they are far from extreme. The subject keeps his or her memories mostly and can think and feel, but there is an improved body. They get a body that can survive a world like this.”