“Okay, this is very bad news,” Elsie said, backing away from the barricade.
“Let’s get out of here!” Mendel yelled. Tossing pen and paper over his shoulder, he broke into a dead run down the sidewalk, heading for the nearest corner. After a split second of indecision, we all decided he had the right idea and took off in several directions at once. I bolted out into the open, planning on cutting across the nearest corner of the park to a set of buildings. Only then did I realize something important about the geography of Madison Square—there is absolutely no place to hide. And the titanic lizard coming up behind me was moving much faster than I had anticipated. Once again I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Luckily, there was a life-size bronze statue of one of America’s founding fathers—the great James Madison. I ducked behind the tall cube of granite on which President Madison stood and hoped the monster wouldn’t step on me.
As we had feared, he moved directly to the communications post, probably attracted by the lights on the instrument panels and the squawking of the radios. He swiped at it with one of his muscular forepaws, sending everything—crates, computer equipment, and sandbag barricade—flying through the air with such force that the whole mess smashed into the third story of a building half a block away. Explosive shells continued to zip through the air despite the fact that there were now humans in the crossfire. Another Sidewinder missile came sizzling through the air and struck the creature in the back, exploding against his thick armor without causing any visible damage.
As I cowered at the base of the statue, a division of tanks rolled up and swung their turrets around, training them on the enraged beast. Realizing I was directly in the line of fire, I scampered around to the far side of the statue. But this put me in plain sight of the lizard, who charged in my direction. In a blind panic I looked around for an escape route, but it was too late. With astonishing speed, the huge body rushed past me on a collision course with the tanks. As they fired, the monster leaped into the air and jumped directly over them. At the same time, the tip of his tail spanked the statue of President Madison hard across the backside. The mortar shells shot past me overhead and plowed into the front of a building. As I followed their trajectory across the sky, I noticed the heavy statue above me teetering off its base, about to fall on me. I tried to run, but my feet slipped out from under me on the rain-slick pavement and I belly flopped to the ground. A second later—boom—the statue crashed to the ground, President Madison’s head resting on my chest! His outstretched arms had punctured the asphalt on either side of me. I was pinned to the ground but lucky to be alive.
Craning my neck to the side, I caught a glimpse of the powerful beast galloping away. He headed up Sixth Avenue on all fours, moving with the grace of an overweight gazelle. Within seconds, military vehicles were racing after him in hot pursuit. I tried to get their attention, but they sped away uptown. Realizing I would have to wait for someone to find me, I lay back and let myself get soaked by the rain. During the melee, someone had dropped a walkie-talkie on the ground not far from me. It was resting face up in a puddle of rainwater only a few feet away, just beyond my reach. I could hear Hicks shouting through the static.
“Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on over there?”
For the next several minutes I listened to the walkie-talkie, following the drama that was unfolding a few blocks uptown. I suppose I could have attracted the attention of some of the soldiers in the square, but as I lay there listening to the pursuit unfold over the radio, I forgot my own predicament. I wish I could have watched the chase with my own eyes.
The pursuit vehicles raced in a tight pack up Sixth Avenue at about a hundred miles per hour. At that speed, they were approximately three times slower than their prey. (After analyzing all the relevant evidence, Dr. Chapman puts the creature’s top speed at between three and five hundred miles per hour!) They would have had absolutely no chance of catching up to the rapid reptile except for the fact that it seemed indecisive at certain points. It slowed down and stopped a few times, looking around for the best escape route. Or was it taking time to study its new surroundings? In any case, the pursuit vehicles announced over the radio that the creature had veered off to the west. With shouts of “Faster, faster,” they watched the enormous brown tail disappearing around a corner several blocks ahead.
“It’s turning left around … maybe Thirty-fourth Street,” a soldier in the lead vehicle reported. “We need backup!” The drivers accelerated, weaving back and forth across the boulevard to avoid the giant potholes the lizard had torn into the street. When they came to Thirty-fourth and began turning left, they found a nasty little surprise waiting for them.
The lizard was crouched down lying in wait. Its fleshy snout was resting on the ground a few yards behind the crosswalk, like a battleship stopped at a traffic light. It was too late for the Jeeps to do anything but skid out of control toward the beast’s great maw. A sudden sideways flick of his head allowed him to point one of his steely eyes down at them. The radio filled with inarticulate shouting as the vehicles fishtailed and crashed into one another. “Back up! Back the hell up!” the commanding officer yelled at his men. Gunfire erupted. But before the drivers could shift into reverse and get out of the intersection, the beast did it for them.
According to the survivors, the animal did something unprecedented in the annals of saurian behavior. He inhaled deeply, causing a dramatic expansion of his own rib cage. Then he forced the air out of his mighty lungs, generating a gale-force wind. This phenomenon, which I would later be unlucky enough to observe firsthand, has come to be called “the power breath.” And, however shocking this behavior might be to herpetologists, it should be noted that there are very good anatomical reasons for its being possible. Aquatic reptiles, as is well known, have extremely well-developed lungs and are capable of spending long periods of time submerged in water. Owners of iguanas and various “dragon”-like reptiles report their pets sometimes heave great hissing sighs, but never had they seen this great breathing ability used as a defensive mechanism.
The power breath was strong enough to blow everything—and everyone—clean out of the intersection. The foul-smelling wind picked up the Jeeps and the soldiers and sent them all tumbling far down the next block like so many children’s toys caught up in a sudden tornado. All radio transmission ceased for several seconds, and the creature was able to escape to another part of the city without being directly observed.
It took a couple of minutes until he was spotted again. A second convoy of Jeeps found him standing at the mother of all intersections, the so-called crossroads of the world: Broadway and Forty-second Street, Times Square. Even with the city deserted, the lights of the intersection were bright enough to illuminate the two-hundred-foot-tall brute as though he were starring in a Broadway show. Standing out in the open, he seemed to be confused by the bright lights. His head whipped this way and that, seemingly in search of an escape route or a place to hide from his bite-sized tormentors. Before he could decide, his dilemma got a whole lot worse. A group of Apache helicopters lifted over the rooftops of some nearby buildings. These lethal flying machines swooped down on him like a pack of ancient pterodactyls. But they packed considerably more of a punch.
“We’ve got a good look at him now,” one of the pilots said calmly into his microphone. “He’s out in the open and we are locked on.”
Hicks shouted furiously, “Then fire, damn it. Take him down!” He waited through five seconds of silence before demanding an update. “Is it dead yet?”
“He’s making a run for it,” the lead pilot reported, “heading east. We are in pursuit … maintaining visual. Okay, now he’s turning onto … I think it’s Lexington. Got him in our sights.”
“Lock him in and fire!” Hicks repeated.
The Apaches let loose a barrage of guided, heat-seeking missiles—at least a dozen of them, which screamed down at their moving target. With a quick glance over his shoulder, the creature s
aw what was coming. Lightning fast, he darted into another street before the projectiles could reach him. Instead of following him around the corner, as they should have done, the bombs continued in a straight line and smashed into the Chrysler Building. The ensuing explosion ripped into the world-famous landmark, effectively chopping off the top ten stories. A moment later, as the command center watched via live video feed, the gleaming art deco spire went plummeting to the ground, where it crashed and splintered into ten billion pieces.
“I thought you were locked on,” Hicks said to the pilot. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, sir. The heat-seekers aren’t functioning properly. They won’t lock on. And the target isn’t showing up on thermoscan.”
Duh! If I hadn’t been locked in an embrace with one of our founding fathers, I would have grabbed the walkie-talkie and reminded them of the obvious fact that lizards, no matter how large, are cold-blooded animals. He wouldn’t be any warmer than the exterior surfaces of the buildings he was moving past. In fact, given the heating systems and incidental energy consumption inside the structures, they must have been slightly warmer than his leathery skin.
Again the helicopters lost visual contact and searched the area for several minutes before finding a likely hiding place—a hollowed-out skyscraper. As the lead pilot described it, the structure looked as if the creature had crashed through one wall of the building and was cowering behind the drapery of collapsed walls and twisted iron bars. The dark, heavily armed birds dropped straight down and hovered in front of the building, which had been gutted up to the fifteenth floor. Then they pumped it full of explosive shells, approximately sixty missiles in four seconds. The forty-story building was quickly torn to shreds and collapsed into a smoking pile of rubble. Their goal accomplished, the gunners ceased fire and waited for the dust to clear so they could inspect the demolished building for signs of the dead animal.
“Okay, it looks good,” came the report. “It looks good from this angle. Appears to be a kill.”
Think again. There was another forty-plus-story building standing right behind them, just across the street. Without any advance warning, the beast suddenly erupted from within. Exploding out through the chaos of flying glass and broken marble, the screeching leviathan appeared once more. It pounced at the hovering helicopters, lifting its jaws skyward and snapping up two of the huge flying machines in one powerful bite!
Before the two remaining copters had time to pull up, one of the reptile’s enormous fore claws slashed through the night and batted one of them out of the air. It burst into flame even before it shattered like a glass egg on the ground.
That left one pilot still hovering within the beast’s striking range. Most people would have turned tail and gotten the hell out of there. But this guy had ice water in his veins. His voice remained calm as he explained what had happened, then reported that he was circling around to make another attack on the animal.
By the time he looped once around and swooped in for the kill, the beast had disappeared again. The pilot dipped down into the canyon formed by the walls of the midtown skyscrapers and patrolled for the animal. As the chopper hunted, Hicks was yelling at the pilot not to let the creature escape. “Echo Four, don’t lose that lizard. Where the hell is he?”
“I don’t know, Colonel. He was right here a second ago, but now he’s gone.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know, sir, but he’s vanished.”
That was almost correct. Masked would have been closer to the truth. As the helicopter cruised between the tall buildings, the pilot reported seeing something, an indistinct shape of some sort, ahead of him. The creature hadn’t vanished, but he had become nearly invisible. Taking advantage of his gray-brown skin tone, he had pressed himself against the side of a stone-gray building. Keeping perfectly still, he was able to hide himself—even though he was out in the open.
“Oh, Jesus!” the pilot yelled when he realized what the strange shape was. He was skimming through the air even with the tenth story of the buildings around him when he recognized the indistinct shape for what it was. He lowered the nose of the Apache and gunned the engine, shooting forward at top speed (almost two hundred miles per hour). Suddenly the hunter had become the hunted.
The helicopter was too low in the canyon to climb, which would have slowed his forward momentum. Instead, he raced into the first intersection at breakneck speed and banked wildly to the left. The twenty-story-tall lizard was right behind him, like a Doberman chasing a dragonfly. Jaws snapping at the tail of his prey, the creature charged furiously through the streets, keeping pace. At the next intersection the pilot banked right, almost clipping his rotor blades on the corner building. Buildings behind him exploded as the lizard plowed through them. The helicopter swerved wildly through the obstacle course of the city, staying a heartbeat ahead of extinction.
After two hard turns without catching sight of the creature behind him, the pilot allowed himself to take a breath and began climbing toward the rooftops. With audible relief in his voice, he said, “Wow! That boy is quick!” The sky ahead of him suddenly turned bright pink. “He’s real quick, but I think I outra—”
Too late, the pilot understood that the pink color of the sky was the wide-open mouth of the lizard. He had outguessed the pilot and was waiting for him around that last corner, his great jaws unhinged. He simply waited for the Apache to fly into his mouth before snapping down and crushing it utterly. Witnesses on the ground say the animal chewed the big machine once or twice before spitting it out and moving on.
“Dr. Nick, are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, “but I’m stuck.”
Sergeant O’Neal and a few of his men hoisted the statue up high enough off the ground for me to shimmy my way out to freedom. All of us were pretty stunned by what had happened. For a minute we stood around surveying the scene. It was a mess. The street was torn up, and half of the buildings in the square were either decimated or badly damaged. The historic Flatiron Building was a total loss. And there was still a huge amount of fish lying in the street.
O’Neal stood there muttering and shaking his head. I don’t blame him for not wanting to face Hicks after the Flatiron fiasco. Even though we had no way of anticipating how impossibly fast and powerful the animal was, or how well his thick scales would protect him from the weapons, somebody was going to get an earful. Somebody—we all knew it was going to be O’Neal—was going to get blamed and bawled out for things having gone so horribly wrong.
I noticed something on the ground. It was a puddle but didn’t look like rainwater. I knelt down and dipped my fingers into it. To my surprise, it had the metallic smell and taste of blood. From my vantage point, I didn’t think the army had put a scratch on the reptilian mutant, but there it was—blood on the street. Fumbling through the pockets of my coat, I found a glass sample tube and scooped up some of the viscous, red-brown liquid.
“Damn!” O’Neal kicked a stray fish toward a squashed truck. “I can’t believe it! He did all this damage and we did nothing to him.”
“That’s not true,” I observed, looking up as I put the blood sample in my pocket. “We fed him.”
The trip from New Jersey to the Flatiron Building had taken less than fifteen minutes. The journey back took an hour and a half. While O’Neal’s troops combed the square for evidence and salvaged pieces of equipment, I climbed into one of the personnel carriers and fell asleep.
When I woke up, we were back in New Jersey near the front gates of the command center. It must have been two-thirty in the morning, but the place was swarming with people. There were scores of reporters, dozens of nervous city officials, and hundreds of evacuated Manhattanites gathered around the perimeter of the brightly lit military compound, all of them waiting for news. It was a real circus.
Our convoy slowed to about one mile per hour as the crowd reluctantly parted to let us pass. Television camera crews, taking advantage of our prese
nce, started filming immediately, broadcasting live and using our return as a background for their stand-up reports. I rolled down my window and listened, catching snatches of what the reporters were saying as we rolled past.
One said, “… but at this point that is only a rumor. It may be some time before we can confirm that this havoc-wreaking animal is indeed a lost dinosaur …”
Another said, “The president today declared a state of emergency and has issued disaster relief funds to New York City. Mayor Ebert claimed it was his get-tough policy with …”
A third, rather puny reporter in his fifties stepped onto a stack of phone books before he spoke into the camera with avuncular concern. His face looked familiar to me, but at the time I didn’t recognize him as Charles “Let’s Have Dinner” Caiman. “Maintaining a total media blackout, officials here remain silent this evening about their progress—or lack of it—in bringing this bloodthirsty monster under control. As you can see in this live shot, reporters from around the globe have descended on …”
As we inched past him, a blinking red light on a nearby building caught my eye: RX NEVER CLOSES. RX NEVER CLOSES.
It was a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, one of those oft-overlooked miracles of convenience. It reminded me that, less than a week earlier, I’d been in the Ukraine, where such things simply do not exist. For some unconscious reason, I reached into my pocket and began twirling the beaker of blood I’d collected between my fingers. Then I got an idea. It started out small, nothing more than a personal joke, really, but it quickly blossomed into a full-blown theory. I had to get out of the truck. I leaned forward and spoke to the soldier behind the wheel as if he were a cabbie.
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