“I’m checking it out,” Dr. Boneid said, grabbing his rifle. His regular gun was a 308 Winchester, but he had borrowed a Magnum 460 for the hunt. He got into the turret elevator and pressed the button for the penstock level. The door closed, and the elevator moved slowly down the two hundred feet. When the doors opened, he saw Zack and Picasso on a platform peering into one of the penstock pipes. “Hey,” he yelled. “What’re you doing down here?”
Zack turned to face Boneid. Picasso growled as Boneid stepped out of the elevator holding his rifle ready.
“Point that gun away, please,” Zack said, coming down the steps from the platform.
Boneid looked past Zack. Now he saw the Indian girl down by a second pipe. He knew who she was, and he remembered Zack all too well. Then he spotted Honker, and his hand began to shake. He knew that one way or another, he was going to get proof that he’d seen a living dinosaur! He aimed the rifle at Honker.
“No!” Zack yelled.
Uta moved in front of Honker. “You don’t have to shoot him!” she shouted. “He won’t run anywhere.” Honker hissed at Boneid. Dr. Boneid glanced over to the electronic door. “How’d you two open that? How’d you get in here?”
Now there were new sounds coming from behind the door—sounds from the mine tunnel beyond. Boneid turned back to Uta and Zack. They were backing Honker farther away from him. He aimed again. “You stop where you are, or I’ll shoot!” Boneid said. “None of you move! None of you!” He yanked the radio up from his belt to his lips and began shouting into it. “Manny! Bring the Kinskis ASAP! I need a cage down here at the penstock gates!”
The racket from behind the door was earsplitting, and the ground began to shake. There were shrieks and junglelike screams—a pounding that sounded like thunder. The cries of raptors reverberated in the tunnel. There was impact after impact on the door.
THUD. THUD.
Boneid was confused. The door buckled. He stepped away and dropped to one knee to hold his rifle steady. He checked a spare clip of Magnum shells as the door gave way.
CRAAAAASSH.
The door burst off its track, smashing onto the tile floor. The flame-scarred mother raptor with a pair of large adult raptors shrieked as they thundered across the crushed corrugated sheeting.
“They survived the gasoline!” Zack yelled. Uta and Picasso turned and ran with Honker for the door at the other end of the gate room. Boneid fired at the raptors as they charged straight at him. Another hatchling scurried through the ruptured doorway, skirting along the wall. Boneid fired shot after shot at the adult raptors.
BAM. BAM.
Boneid trembled with exhilaration now. He missed the charging adults, scrambled to one side, and lowered his aim trying to get the slower hatchling into his rifle sight.
“No!” Zack yelled, rushing Boneid and knocking the rifle out of his hands. “Leave them alone! This is their only way out of here! Let them go!” Boneid brought his hand back and slapped Zack to the ground. He crawled on his hands and knees to his rifle, grabbed it, and stood trying to take aim again. The raptors were past him. He spun around and fired several shots at their backs, emptying the Magnum clip. They shrieked in pain as slabs of their flesh were torn open. Blood and lymph gushed from their wounds—but still they managed to flee.
Uta reached the far end of the penstock level ahead of the panicked dinosaurs. She punched the code into the lock and the east door lifted. Boneid shoved a second clip into his rifle and fired again. He was so intent on the slaughtering he didn’t notice the pounding of the massive form racing through the tunnel. Zack saw the shadow bounding through the doorway.
“Watch out!” Zack cried out.
ROAR.
The sound shook Boneid’s teeth. He spun around and fired high. For a moment he saw the blistered mutant blackback with its rotting, twisted teeth—the great yellow spirals that circled up through shards of bone and dried flesh to pierce the raptor’s own skull. Fluids gushed from its mouth. The blackback shot its jaws down at Boneid, closing them on his head.
“EEEEEEH. EHHHHH.”
Boneid screamed as his whole body was airborne. The raptor shook his bulk right, then left. Zack heard the cracking neck bone, and one of the raptor’s hind claws flew up and shredded Boneid’s chest. The blackback snapped violently, throwing its head back as blood and shards of skull poured down. The raptor tossed what was left of Boneid into the gaping mouth of the pipe. Zack heard the body falling, slapping against the metal sides as it fell down to the turbines.
Zack started slowly backing toward the open door, but the blackback turned and saw him. Zack spun around and ran for his life. He heard the raptor charging after him, its feet pounding the tile and cement floor. The humongous beast was right behind him and closing fast with each of its huge leaps.
“Faster!” Uta screamed to Zack from the far doorway.
“I can’t!” Zack cried, gasping as he dove right and crawled under a metal staircase. The beast stopped and started thrusting its forearms into the shadows beneath the stairs. The claws on its powerful hind limbs struck the stanchions and support pipes with brutal ferocity.
“Leave him alone!” Uta shouted as she rushed forward, trying to lure the blackback away from Zack. Picasso ran ahead of her, barking. The blackback saw them and started to charge. Zack jumped out from beneath the staircase and started screaming at the blackback. “Over here! I’m over here, you idiot!”
The blackback stopped, confused. Picasso ran right up to it, yapping wildly. The mutant raptor ignored him and slammed the staircase again, bending it. It saw Zack behind it now, and swung out at him as Picasso leaped forward and sunk his teeth into the raptor’s hind leg. The giant raptor roared with outrage. It turned and with a flick of its thick tail slapped Picasso and sent him flying into a concrete wall with a sickening thud.
“No!” Zack cried out as Picasso fell into a maze of repair lights, paint cans, and tarps. The dog lay motionless, and Zack tried to get to him—but the blackback charged again. Its hind foot pounded the floor like a raging bull’s, and the raptor roared with earthshaking power. The sight of the mammoth dinosaur with its slabs of muscles, colossal claws, and jagged teeth paralyzed Zack.
A siren started to wail, and a yellow light spun above the first penstock tube on the upper level. Zack broke out from the spell of terror and ran up the stairway with the blackback stalking him. Zack saw Uta was safe. She ran to Picasso and picked up his limp body. He could see she was crying as she carried Picasso toward the far gate.
“I don’t know what to do!” Uta screamed to Zack.
“Save yourself!” Zack called down from the platform. As the blackback closed on him again, Zack’s thoughts skipped from his father lying in a hospital bed to the dread on Uta’s face and lifeless form of Picasso. The color of rage began to rush into Zack’s face. His eyes became cold and hard, and he stood to face the monster. “YOU WANT ME? COME AND GET ME!” he shouted at the blackback. “COME AND GET ME!”
The raptor followed Zack onto the upper level, where the catwalks were cantilevered over the gaping mouths of the huge water pipes. He was past the first of the five penstock tubes. Its light still flashed and a chain was pulled taut. The thick metal gate started to rise. There were five seconds of clanging, a sound as if there were some imminent nuclear armageddon.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
And the gate was wide open. A great torrent of water burst forth, arced into the mouth of the pipe, and plunged three hundred feet down to the screaming turbine blades.
The blackback leaped onto the metal lace of the catwalk and continued to chase its prey. Zack ran past the second penstock tube as its light automatically began to flash and the siren shrieked. Through the catwalk grating he could see the turbines below, like the blades of a giant blender. He felt the catwalk shake from the sheer tonnage of the blackback treading after him.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The gate on the second penstock gate lifted quickly.
Uta had l
aid Picasso’s body down behind a massive tool chest. She stepped over the heavy electrical cables that led to the temporary work lights. She heard the commotion from the upper level, looked up, and her face turned pale. Great torrents of water were cascading out of the gates into the first two giant pipes, and she saw the blackback closing on Zack.
“Run, Zack! It’s right behind you!” Uta screamed.
He couldn’t hear her. The third and forth penstock lights were spinning and their sirens were deafening. He felt the catwalk shaking violently and the breath of impending death on his neck. He made it to the catwalk over the fifth penstock pipe. The blackback was almost on him, and he was forced out onto a narrow walkway over the very center of the pipe. The blackback halted on the main catwalk. It seemed to know Zack was trapped, that there was nowhere else he could run.
Zack held on to the railing as the blackback made a first lunge to slash him with the claws of his forearms. The walkway shook under the creature’s weight, and Zack fell down on the grating and hit his head on the railing. For a moment he was dizzy and stared down at the waiting steel blades in the pit of the abyss.
As if grinning, the blackback stepped out onto the walkway and hovered over Zack. Its spittle dripped down onto Zack’s heaving chest, as it leaned down and stuck its claw into his shoulder and twisted until blood poured out. Zack screamed in agony. He felt faint as the raptor lifted him up toward its jaws. At the sight of the jagged teeth, Zack shrieked and punched at the blackback’s snout. Suddenly, everything went white. Stark, burning white. For a moment, Zack was puzzled by the blackback’s roaring, its tottering and flailing wildly as if it had gone blind. The raptor dropped him onto the walkway.
“Run, Zack!” he heard Uta’s voice.
Zack scrambled to his feet and saw her manning a giant spotlight she’d rolled out from the work area. Its beam was slammed painfully onto the blackback’s face.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
The light and siren of the fifth penstock turned on, a stroboscopic madness breaking loose over its reservoir gate. The raptor swung a forelimb at him. Zack felt the walkway buckling. He knew there was only a second before high-pressure water would sweep over them and they’d be washed into the pipe. The gate started to lift, and Zack ran to the end of the walkway and leaped at the gate. It lifted higher and higher, as he grabbed onto its bands and rivets and chains—flattening himself against the gate as the wall of water arced out beneath his feet. The blackback roared and tried to retreat, but the torrent crashed down on it. The walkway shook violently now, collapsing and tumbling the monstrous raptor down, down toward the whirling blades.
“Zack! Thank God!” Uta cried as she reached a side catwalk. She reached out, and Zack inched along the gate until he could grab her hand and jump to safety. He tried to smile, and he wrapped his arm over Uta’s shoulder as they came down from the platform. They walked to the clump of white fur lying near the east door. Zack saw the happiness and relief leave Uta’s eyes.
Zack dropped to his knees and petted Picasso’s head. There was no movement.
“Let me,” Uta said, kneeling beside him. “I’ve seen dogs get knocked silly by a bear. You’re supposed to hold them and rub them—get the blood to flow to their heads.” She took Picasso up, cradling him as she stroked his head and neck.
“Picasso,” she whispered. “Picasso.”
The dog slowly opened his eyes.
A wide smile crept across Zack’s face. He took Picasso from Uta and followed her out of the dam and into the night. There was a break in the fog, and they could see the vast badlands that seemed to stretch on forever. They looked out past the jagged sandstone cliffs and split rock ledges that made up the maze of canyon lands. Fingers of the night fog crept down from the north cove of the reservoir.
“Honker’s mother—she made it through?” Zack asked Uta.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Zack set Picasso down. The dog walked a few steps and then sat down, groggily staring off into the canyons. Uta took Zack’s hand and they turned back to climb up the slope toward the top of the dam.
“Come on, Picasso!” Zack said.
The dog didn’t move. Uta and Zack went back to him. He turned with puzzlement in his eyes to look at Zack. Zack picked him up. They had climbed halfway up to the highway before they saw the silhouettes of Spider Grandma and Larry Ghost Coyote coming down the slope from the dam road.
“Uta! Zack!” she called to them. “Come on. It’s time to go home. Come. Yes, we’ll go home.”
They saw that Spider Grandma held blankets and a sheepskin draped over her arms, bright moving images of painted cougars and glittering bears in the moonlight.
12
RETURN
It was three weeks before Zack’s parents were due to arrive back at the Dry Lakes airstrip aboard the twin-engine medical plane. Zack and Uta had fixed up the ranch house as best they could, but there were many deep scratches in the furniture and walls. Zack’s father would easily figure out what made them.
Zack waited for Uta outside with Picasso. He could have picked her up in his parents’ old Volvo station wagon that was in the garage, but she had insisted on coming for him. The staff from the dig had planned a big welcome back to greet Professor Norak at the airport. They’d thrown the event together once they’d heard the news that divers had found several of Boneid’s teeth in the spillway and that the university had selected Norak as their new boss on the dig. The only other strange thing found was Gonzales’s skull in an eel trap. It was said that fat black eels had shot out of the eye sockets, and that they had been feasting on the brains.
Zack and Uta were glad that outsiders had found no proof to Boneid’s claims about seeing living dinosaurs. The part that puzzled Zack most was that his father couldn’t remember anything about his accident. The rockslide. The doctors at Mormon Hospital had said it was normal for the mind to block things out, to repress anything that was too painful. Professor Norak remembered nothing about the cave or his mule. Nothing. They told him it was a type of post-traumatic memory loss, that it was perfectly normal, and in time he might remember everything.
And the medicines he’d received didn’t help his memory either. They’d given him his own morphine drip machine and he found the painkillers worse than the pain. There had been more nightmares and a relentless depression settling into his mind, as though the medicines had literally wrapped his brain in cellophane. It had taken the last several days to get his electrolytes back in balance, but by now he was ready to face anything.
Picasso followed Zack out to the storage shed. Zack missed his Yamaha and had already started saving for a new one from his earnings at the Chile Cafe. He’d explain to his father about destroying half his spelunking equipment. He’d explain everything when his father was ready to hear it.
There was a slab of broken mirror set up on the worktable and he caught sight of himself. He wore a headband Uta had made for him the week before on a pike-fishing trip with Spider Grandma and Larry Ghost Coyote—and he really liked it. Uta had woven it with yucca strands and beads, with a row of stick-figure flute players and yellow ropes painted across the front. Zack and Uta had done a lot of things together during the last week. Swimming at Disaster Falls. Collecting malachite geodes south of Vernal.
He leaned closer to the mirror to check the scar beneath his chin. He was aware that his own memory of what had happened was fading, too. The fluids from the raptor were affecting his brain, just as they had his father. An amnesia. But Uta remembered everything, and he had her tell him the story each day so it wouldn’t disappear on him completely.
There had been a few nightmares, but there were dreams and hopes, too. He had had one dream about Honker. He dreamed that he and Uta had decided to search the canyon lands. It was winter. There was a lot of snow. They had wandered into an ice cave, and Honker was there with his mother. He looked happy, bigger. He began to come toward Zack, but that was when Zack woke up.
RO
AR.
Zack came out of the shed to see Uta racing toward the ranch house on one of her brother’s motorcycles. It was a full-sized Harley, painted yellow with black strips and a rusted headlight in the shape of a tiger. Her hair mixed with the long, gaudy leather fringe that snapped from the handlebars. She pulled up next to Zack. They laughed and shouted hello over the racket from the bike’s broken muffler.
Picasso barked—afraid he was going to be left behind—but Zack picked him up and cradled him in his shirt. He swung up behind Uta on the wide Harley seat and slipped his hands around her waist. Zack didn’t think about malls or movies or pepperoni pizzas. He held on tight as Uta opened the throttle and they roared down the dirt road toward the Drive Through the Ages.
A preview of what’s next in
if you dare…
1
THE FESTERING
His first day back from the Fourth of July vacation, Leroy Sabiesiak knew he’d get some good target practice with the rats in Area 17. “Garbage Siberia,” he muttered to himself as he mounted his bulldozer. He checked the stubble on his leathery face, made certain his flask of vodka was tucked into the hip pocket of his overalls, and left the main sanitation depot at 7:05 A.M. He headed the bulldozer out past the asphalt cover of the dump to what was left of the open garbage.
He was glad the dump was nearly sealed. He’d been working there from the beginning, before it had the fancy name of the Staten Island Landfill. Two decades of breathing the reeking garbage was enough. In a few weeks he’d be retired, start collecting on a fat pension with health and dental, and it’d be time to dream.
He kept his eye out for rats as he edged the bulldozer along the south rim of the asphalt. The mall was across the highway. On his right was one of the new black mountains of tar. “I’m gonna miss ya,” he yelled at the smothered dump. “Yeah, I’ll miss ya.”