
title
:
Only, the Last Dinosaur
author
:
Dunlap, Jim.
publisher
:
Republic of Texas Press
isbn10 | asin
:
155622382X
print isbn13
:
9781556223822
ebook isbn13
:
9780585270869
language
:
English
subject
Dinosaurs--Fiction.
publication date
:
1995
lcc
:
PS3554.U46O59 1995eb
ddc
:
813/.54
subject
:
Dinosaurs--Fiction.
Page i
Only the Last Dinosaur
Jim Dunlap
Illustrations by Tom Seibert
Republic of Texas Pressan imprint ofWordware Publishing, Inc.
an imprint of
Wordware Publishing, Inc.
Page ii
Copyright © 1995, Jim Dunlap
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from Wordware Publishing, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 1-55622-382-X
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
9411
All inquiries for volume purchases of this book should be addressed to Wordware Publishing,Inc., at 1506 Capital Avenue, Plano, Texas 75074. Telephone inquiries may be made by calling:(214) 423-0090
Inc., at 1506 Capital Avenue, Plano, Texas 75074. Telephone inquiries may be made by calling:
(214) 423-0090
Page iii
for Peggy
Page 1
Chapter One
THE COMET was in orbit along with millions of others as it streaked around the sun. A small star passed nearby. Just the hint of gravitational pull caused the huge ball of stone and ice to be moved ever so slightly from its path. The big rock began to drift slowly toward the inner solar system.
TIME TO IMPACT: 300,000 years.
The giant rock slowly gained speed, seven miles per second, twenty-two miles per second. It crossed the orbit of Mars and began to glow, leaving a long luminous tail. It could now be seen from the earth's surface. Life on Earth noticed nothing.
TIME TO IMPACT: six hours.
As it crossed the orbit of the moon, it appeared to be a second moon in the sky. The animals on this side of the earth looked up, not understanding.
The morning fog lay on the marsh like gray cotton candy. Everything was wet. There was no falling moisture, but the air was saturated. It connected and clung to the lush growth. The giant bald cypress tree trunks were dripping water that seemed to ooze from the cracked bark. The drops slid silently into the stagnant water. The huge
Page 2
grazing animals were making the only sounds that were to be heard, "Crunch, smack." The area gurgled as they moved slowly through the knee-deep water and the six inches of black gook.
The animals had been uneasy since first light. They were instinctively sensitive to the possible presence of the Predator. This morning it was different. With each bite taken from the huge, tree-like ferns, they lifted their heads almost in unison and to stare at the sky. It was hot and still. The eastern sky was bright with anticipation of the arrival of the sun. The moon was slowly beginning to hide at the brink of the horizon to wait its turn for another day.
The eggs lay in a tight pocket, and the ten-inch opening was plugged with dense clay. It was day fifty-seven of the sixty-day incubation period. The life inside began to move more often. A mysterious force was directing the head to rub against the eggshell. It produced a gentle scraping sound. Close by, the mother-to-be stood quietly and fixed her stare at the upper edge of a nearby hill. There was danger approaching.
The Predator ate meat. She ate a lot of meat. This was no ordinary animal. She was a horrible-looking, 7,000-pound monster that could run and fight and kill, hour after hour without tiring. Her teeth were not sharp, but more like spikes for ramming into muscle, ligament, and bone. She crunched into vertebrae and killed with one crushing bite.
This young predator female had babies to feed. She slowly approached the grazing herd of big plant eaters looking for one to single out. Her babies scrambled around her feet and made high-pitched chirping noises as if begging for food. There were six of them, miniature versions of their mother. Each measured about eighteen inches in height.
Page 3
Page 4
Suddenly, one of the giant plant eaters that had been standing some distance from the herd bounded forward and faced the Predator. Her nest of eggs was in danger and she must act. She bellowed loudly and pawed the earth. The baby predators were frightened and dashed under the nearest rock ledge.
With two great leaps the giant plant eater charged the Predator. She thrust her huge horns toward her enemy's chest. She missed and rolled down a steep, sandy hill. The Predator sprang in an instant, and before the protective mother could regain her feet, she was on her side and pinned down. There was a loud crunch. A huge, bloody tooth flew through the air. The meat eater had bitten into the vegetarian's hard bony frill just behind her head. The Predator released and quickly bit again. The huge mother-to-be convulsed once. A great rear leg lifted quickly into the air and then slowly relaxed. In one great sucking, squashing pull, the Predator removed a chunk of flesh the size of a fifty-five-gallon garbage can.
It was quiet. The giant plant eater was dead.
The Predator began to chew and swallow at the same time. Blood dripped to the ground, splattering on the rocks and on the six baby predators that had left their hiding place to join their mother. They fed.
A new sound could be heard in the swamp. The animals stopped eating. All heads were stretched toward the heavens. The faint whistling sound came from a great distance. The light began to fade. The whistle was slowly becoming a low roar. As it grew into a muffled thunder, the light changed as if it was suddenly becoming dusk. The frilled necks began to wave. The huge horned heads turned, not looking at their company, but trying to establish a direction from which the sound came. It came from everywhere.
The herd began to move slowly toward the near shore. The only difference between shore and marsh was that the
Page 5
shore was not covered with standing water. The mud was the same depth for miles. The sound made by huge feet sucking out of the mud became noisier as the huge animals moved more quickly. The mud got darker as it churned beneath their feet. The herd of more than one hundred adult animals began to form a shoulder-to-shoulder ring, with the juveniles gathered in the center. The adults pointed their six-foot nose horns toward the outside of the circle. Ordinarily this action would protect them from every danger. But this was not an ordinary danger.
The ball of light gathered speed as it raced toward the horizon. The air began to vibrate. The animals panicked and began moving quickly in all directions. Small animals and babies were stomped and crushed in the mass movement of animals going nowhere.
IMPACT!
The comet slammed into the earth at a speed of over 50,000 miles per hour. The chunk sank its six-square-mile bulk completely under the earth's surface in less than one second. The comet and the surrounding earth melted, vaporized, and then spewed hot particles, gas, and fragments into the sky which then rained back all over the earth as billions and trillions of fiery bits of debris. It was like an oven on broil and it lasted for over an hour. The plants and trees shriveled and caught on fire.
The explosive force of the impact killed quickly and completely. Hundreds of the creatures were destroyed, not by falling rocks, but from rocks suddenly being catapulted from the earth's surface upwards and then horizontally. Then came the heat, and the remaining animals were cooked where they had fallen.
The eggs lay near the surface, entombed in an iron ore capsule. The impact and resulting heat caused an instant vacuum in the cocoon as the opening fused shut. There was
Page 6
no air, no moisture, and the eggs were instantly and completely dried out. The life inside was put on hold.
The heat slowly gave way to cooler temperatures. The dense dark cloud of gas and debris completely enveloped the earth. It became as dark as a moonless night. The charred remains of plants and animals gave the landscape the appearance of a graveyard that had been turned over. The overheated rocks made popping and cracking noises as they cooled.
Then things got real quiet and stayed that way for a long time.
Page 7
Chapter Two
Spring 1994, 65,000,000 years later.
''Deke! Pull the quilt down! You're lettin' out all the light!" Mark said. The two boys squatted on the floor Indian-style with their heads bent down to almost touching. The quilt being used for cover was a homemade antique that Deke had brought along. His mother would ground him for the rest of his life if she found out. His dad would just smack him. The boys were surrounded by a top-of-the-line, North Face, two-man mountain tent. They were enjoying the faint, pulsating light being given off from a Coke bottle that contained about a hundred lightning bugs.
Mark soon found that the bug light was not sufficient to illuminate the pages of the National Geographic. The cobra photo he had located earlier with the flashlight could barely be seen.
Mark was a skinny kid. It was amazing that his jeans stayed up. The waistband always remained at least one inch from his skin, all the way around! He was skinny and tall for his age. His freckles and sandy red hair had always been the topic of conversation among the grandparents. They just loved those freckles. Those freckles had caused a lot of fights. Mark learned self-preservation through taking up for himself after cracks like, "Do those spots hurt?" "Did
Page 8
you get a tan through a screen door?" "Can you wash those off?"
Deke was unusually quiet and still. Suddenly he began making low wailing noises. "Oooooooooooo! Ooooooooooh!" Deke looked up at Mark. His face had tiny specks of light shining from various locations. "You're gross!" Mark said. Deke had squashed a few lightning bugs while they were mid-flash and then torn off the lighted abdomens and stuck them to his face. His eerie grin showed a mouth that seemed to stretch from ear to ear along with seemingly hundreds of teeth.
Deke was a typical eleven-year-old. Any parent, teacher, or children's doctor would say that. If you asked his dad, he might say something like, "That kid is missing some of the cheese off his nacho!" Deke sat there in the tent wearing only cut-offs and tube socks. His belt could not be seen because of the roll of fat that circled his body. The overabundance of skin looked like dark leather. His dark, straight hair hung to one side down past his ear. Deke's family had moved here to Arizona from Seattle, where it was cloudy and raining most of the time. Deke was usually the first one to go shoeless when school was out. Shorts were the preferred summer dress, and the sun had made him look like a fat piece of beef jerky. There was a diamond stud in his left earlobe. Both stone and stud were fake and worn only when he had no anticipation of running into his father.
Mark was also eleven years old and only two months older than Deke. He reminded his friend of that fact at times when a decision had to be made about who would be first to do something. Mark was a foot taller than Deke and a lot thinner. He was one of those kids who could consume vast amounts of any food and never gain an ounce of fat.
The tent was set up in Mark's backyard. It was a clear, cool spring night in a suburb north of Phoenix. Just outside the tent flap door there lay a great mound of fur-covered
Page 9
flesh. He was not standing guard, he was just too big to fit through the door. Obie was really a stupid mutt of a dog. He wasn't much of a watchdognot because he was a coward but because he had a tendency to bark at thin air. The closest anyone could guess about his ancestry was a Russian wolfhound mix with some St. Bernard thrown in for size and ugliness. Because of his immense size, one hundred and seventy pounds, he scared the other dogs into instant flight. He could shake any dog on the block just as a cat shakes a rat. Obie would never start a fight, but if pressed he would turn his ugly face and direct a sorry look toward the pesky pooch. He then would grab the problem by the back of the neck and toss him aside like an old shoe.
It was already about two o'clock in the morning, and the boys were just finishing up plans for the next day's adventure: they would watch the new highway construction a mile or so from town. Work had come to a screeching halt because of some very large rocks that sat directly in the path of the road cut. Those rocks would have to be blasted with dynamite. The boys' plan was to get as close as possible but just far enough away to avoid death.
After he stretched out on the quilt, Mark watched the headlights bouncing around the ceiling of the tent every time a car drove down the street. He glanced over at Deke, who was an instant sleeper. He had been known to snore in mid-sentence when sleep overtook him.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
As the boys slept, a minor miracle was about to occur. Faint vibrations from the road work had begun three days before. Each explosion set off by the construction crew was closer, and the chunk of ore shook noticeably. The rusting process had weakened the crust of the structure. There was not much moisture in the area, even over the millions of years, so the process had been slow. The last detonation had seemed only a few hundred feet away. As the dirt surround-
Page 10
ing the chunk fell away. it seemed as if the shell of dense metal was in for a great change.
It happened.
The next charge, set just two feet above and to the right, split the earth from the surface straight through and past the rock. The sealed, molten plug cracked, and there was just the slightest hint of a hiss. First the air sucked through the crack and enveloped the eggs. Then came the life-giving moisture. Two of the three eggs turned to powder. Then there was one. Twenty-four hours passed and there was breathing and movement in that one.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The boys slept until Deke let out a big belch about mid-morning.
It was already hot that afternoon when Mark and Obie started up Hanover Street toward Muller Drive where the houses stopped and the desert began. Though it was only May, the temperature was at least 100 degrees and Mark thought of how visitors described the heat. He had heard enough about how it was not so noticeable because of the low humidity. To him, it was just plain hot. Toward the north, all the way to the foothills of the Santa Marie mountains, lay miles of large gritdecomposed granitecovered with creosote bushes that spotted the hills. The tallest structures in sight were the giant saguaro cacti that stood like ghostly, multiarmed monsters. The palo verde trees all looked starved for moisture, and they were few and far between.
Mark pedaled slowly because Obie wasn't much on traveling at high speeds. They turned down Muller past Brinlin Cemetery, where the desert heat shimmered up from each tombstone.
The street came to a dead end and the desert started at the curb. Ahead lay a network of trenches and gullies that formed a maze of hideouts and secret places. Mark had
Page 11
spent many hours in these hills, running, playing, exploring, and sometimes just sitting to watch the sun rise or set.
Deke's mother was a soft-spoken, gentle woman of Irish descent. About the only thing that got her dander up was Deke's father. Herman Johnson was not raised by his parents, he was dragged. He made people think he had an accent, but if the truth be known, he just talked funny. He was a five-foot-tall, overweight chunk of temper looking for a fight. Mark had never heard him say a kind word to anyone. Deke was very much afraid of him and lived in fear of a beating for the slightest disobeying of any rule. There were always plenty of rules.
Mrs. Johnson was a good cook, and she made the best Toll House cookies that ever existed. She seemed to enjoy stuffing Mark with food at every opportunity. She really liked Mark, and he knew that part of it was because his mother had died only last year. She was especially sweet to him, and he figured that was most of the reason.
There were not a lot of people concerned about the hours Mark kept. He had always been a self-sufficient kind of kid, and since his mother died his father had pretty much allowed him to live his own life. Mark could keep as many pets as he liked, and he had a few. He was partial to reptiles, and he had a small shed in the backyard housing his minizoo. He had made a deal with his dad. He could keep anything as a pet as long as it was not poisonous and it never entered the house. When visitors came, they were always invited to come out to the shed to see the critters.
The house became a bachelor pad of sorts. Mark and his dad cleaned and cooked as was needed. John Phillips was moderately successful in the commercial real estate business. During the short periods of time that he was not traveling, he liked to invent things. There were scale models of water-driven cars, strange-looking buildings, aircraft, and unidentifiable structures sitting all over the
Page 12
library. They all cried out for an explanation but most people just did not ask.
Deke saw Mark pass in front of his house. For three years he and Mark had been constant companions.
"I'm headed for the road cut," Mark told Deke. "We may be there for a while, so don't forget to ask your mother for some food. We'll need munchies."
Deke disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bulging nylon backpack. It must have weighed twenty pounds judging by the strain on the straps.
"Your dad will kick your rear end if you swiped any of his RC Colas."
"I'm faster than he is!" Deke countered. He was grinning from ear to ear, but he knew that if he ever ran from his father, even 911 couldn't help him.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The surviving egg was still. It was a complete sphere that contained an ancient legacy. Almost as if the struggle to escape the confines of the egg had never ceased, the little animal renewed his nose-to-shell movements almost immediately. He had only taken a 65-million-year nap.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The boys crossed the curb at the end of the street, and the granite sand made light crunching noises beneath their tennis shoes. They had walked only about two hundred yards when the hills gave way to a man-made expanse of flattened terrain. There were machines roaring in every direction. Men in silver hard hats looked like ants scurrying over the sand. Six or seven were standing in the middle of the road cut near a gigantic rock. A big burly man dressed in a white shirt, blue jeans, and a tie was directing a worker's placement of a drill bit into the base of the boulder. As he pointed, the drill operator pulled the trigger and the roaring drill sent rock dust in all directions.
"If they catch us in this restricted area, we might get shot!" Deke said.
Page 13
"If that rock gets blasted into the air and comes down here, we'll be road kill and it won't matter," Mark replied. He scanned the horizon for a safer lookout point and spotted a low cliff overhang a few hundred feet away. He pointed. Deke agreed and said, "Grab that dumb dog or he'll walk right up to the blast, and we'll eat hot dogs for a month!"
A siren sounded, and a sudden blast from an air horn caused Deke to crack his head on the overhang. He let out a yowl and the dog passed gas.
"Mark, are you sure we want to be in this tight place if the blast scares the poop out of that dog?"
"Oh shut up and watch." The men all hurried to waiting vehicles and disappeared behind the dunes. It was very quiet. All of a sudden there came a loud pop, followed by total sound. The deafening explosion seemed to make the ground drop a couple of inches as the huge rock just vanished in a cloud of sand. Mark and Deke clapped their hands. "Most excellent!" screamed Mark.
Deke chimed in with a slow, meaningful, "Cool!"
Page 14
All the men in hard hats gathered around the four-foot-deep crater where the stone had been. The task complete, they seemed pleased and began bidding each other goodbye.
Mark, Deke, and Obie sat quietly until all of the construction vehicles were out of sight. Then they shuffled slowly toward the hole. Three sets of eyes peered over the edge of the pit. "Hot dog!" Deke exclaimed, "Whatta hole!"
Suddenly, Mark let out a yell and jumped into the crater. A gray face vanished into the crevice. Mark dived. He came up with a handful of sand. Deke and Obie landed with a thud, and Obie immediately stuck his nose into the hole. Deke leaned over slowly and goosed the dog in the tail. Obie sucked in his hindquarters and jumped around and glared at Deke. One day Obie might grab this little pest and give him a shake. Today he was more interested in the contents of that hole. He sniffed the hole and whined to indicate that whatever it was had not gone far into the earth.
"Dig 'im out Obie!" Mark shouted.
"He won't dig," stated Deke. "He's too stupid and lazy."
Mark replied, "Just watch," but he would not make any bets. Suddenly the sand was flying, and in the excitement Mark and Deke were on their hands and knees helping out. They scooped sand as fast as they could.
"I'll bet it was a ground squirrel," Mark panted.
"It was more likely your bad eyesight," Deke said.
They could not have been more surprised when the sand exploded from the hole and a really weird-looking lizard sprang into sight. Obie made a frantic motion to exit the crater. Deke just said, "Oh shozbot!" Deke had learned quickly to curb his cussing. His dad would smack him across the teeth or his mother would bop him in the arm every time he let out anything that even sounded like a cuss word. It took a great effort.
It could have been a Komodo dragon, a Gila monster, or an escaped iguana, but for now the boys only knew it was a
Page 15
very odd-looking creature. Tail tip to nose it was about as long as a house cat. There were three little pointy bumps on its head and a flap of skin just behind its horns that looked like some sort of shield. The short elephant-like legs went straight down to the ground from the chubby body.
"Good old Obie," Mark said as he sat back on his heels and stared at the little beast.
"Yeah. He might be good at the hunt, but he would never hurt anything even if he caught it. You'd better help him up the side of this hole or he might die of a heart attack," Deke said.
The big dog was frantically digging trenches in the coarse, loose sand of the crater wall. He wanted out. Something seemed to be giving the dog a message that things were not right. "We'll take the lizard home and try to identify him. You get his attention and I'll grab him," Mark instructed.
Page 16
"What's this 'we' business! You got a rat in your pocket? I think I hear my mother calling. You know I don't do your slinky, slimy stuff."
"Reptiles are not slimy, and you're chicken."
"Squawk! Squawk! And I'm proud of it!"
"Are you going to help or not?"
"OK, but sometimes I think your elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor!"
The lizard squared off, waiting for some kind of an attack. A slimy drool dripped from its lower jaw. It leaned back on its stubby tail and looked straight at Deke. "That da-darned thing is actin' like he wants to fight!" Deke exclaimed. Mark lunged forward and grabbed the animal behind the head. He was not expecting such a small creature to have that much strength. It felt like he had grabbed a garden tiller that was running.
The lizard opened its mouth and let out a high, shrill squeal. Then it seemed to be over. The noise stopped. All movement ceased, and the little creature just looked at Mark with beady, sad little eyes and appeared to give up. "Quick, we need something to put him in. Unload your backpack!"
Deke, who had backed up a few yards, said, "You want me to dump very valuable Twinkies and RC's for a slobbering lizard?"
"Yes, and hurry. He may just be taking a break!" Deke uttered a few syllables under his breath and unpacked his food and beverages. He laid them carefully on a flat rock and silently promised them he would return soon. He walked toward Mark and the soon-to-be captive while holding the bag open near the ground. "All this spit is making him slick. Put the pack over his head." Deke moved slowly forward, thinking his friend was not quite right in the head for going to so much trouble. "I'm going to let go and you close the bag quick!"
"Yeah. Right!" Deke replied.
Page 17
Obie had lost interest in the whole show and was sniffing around the crack in the rock. Deke moved off toward his snack pile and Mark held the pack. He was feeling a familiar pride of ownership and was a little embarrassed that he had not recognized the species right away. Obie, romping beside the boys, sniffed the pack and gave it a big wet lick.
''He's yours," Deke said with relief.
Mark said, "Oh don't feel bad, you can come and visit him."
"Sure, I'll make a point of that. I ought to take him and stick him in my dad's tackle box. I can see him now, whipping out his twenty-two and blowing a hole in everything but the lizard!"
They walked in silence for a distance. Mark was thinking about the desert getting smaller and smaller. It would not be long before there wouldn't be any left.
"The last lizard I saw that was that big was squashed on the road. We were at a campground in New Mexico, and somebody who was standing around said it was an iguana. It must have been somebody's escaped pet."
Far to the east there were flashes of lightning and a low rumbling of thunder. It had rained here in the desert more this week than it usually did in a whole year. It reminded them of the constant background noise in horror movies. Ironically enough they had been discussing all the dinosaur movies and how the common lizards were blown up and really looked phony.
Deke began to worry a little about his father being at home and mad about something. When they reached his front yard, Deke spotted his father coming out of the garage. He jumped behind the privet hedge and waited to see what might happen.
Mark saw the man near the garage and looked around quickly to find himself standing all alone. Herman Johnson came storming out looking mean and mad. Mark backed up instinctively.
Page 18
"Where's Deke?"
"It wasn't Deke's fault," Mark said. "I asked him to come with me and . . ."
"Where is he now?"
"Well," Mark said.
"Well, well, well! What do you mean, well?"
"We found a real strange looking-lizard out by the road cut," Mark said sheepishly, "and here it is in this pack."
"Lizards!" shouted Johnson, "more pests!"
Mark stood waiting for Mr. Johnson to flush Deke out of the bushes, but at that moment Mrs. Johnson came out on the front porch. She looked even older and more exhausted than when he last saw her earlier in the day. "Why don't you go watch television, Herman," she said quietly. "I will take care of this. Deke, you're going to get bugs in your pants if you don't come out of those shrubs."
To Mark's surprise, Deke's father just mumbled and went into the house. The porch light cast his shadow on the door and made him look like the Frankenstein monster; only shorter. Deke's mother had saved dinner and microwaved it. She asked about the lizard, and Mark just guessed that it must be some kind of iguana. Mrs. Johnson chopped up some kale and put it on a paper plate. Mark put the backpack on the floor and opened the zipper slightly. The little gray head peeked out and bit into the salad. Mark watched, fascinated, as his new pet quickly munched up his first meal. "I'll give you my recipe," said Mrs. Johnson.
Page 19
Chapter Three
It was a great weekend. The desert was getting hotter, and shorts and tank tops were the fashion of the day. There was all day Saturday and most of Sunday to get out and look for the next adventure. Mark was not one to spend the entire day having water-rifle fights in the desert, although he did enjoy the occasional challenge. He complained a lot about having to do his bit with cleaning up the house and mowing the yard. He did not have a real summer job other than watering Mrs. Falson's yard every other day and mowing one yard across the alley for Professor Willis. This gave him more time to spend with his cold-blooded critters in his animal house. He could spend hours feeding his snakes, cleaning cages, planning new cages and habitats. His desert king snake was soon to have a twenty-gallon aquarium complete with sand, cactus trunks, rocks, a pool, and his own private cave. Most satisfying was the time he could spend watching his new captive, which he named "Only." Mark had never seen another lizard like this one. The grown-ups who knew him well might say that he had adopted the animals to replace a family he was missing. He had a well-educated, affectionate father, but his mother was dead and father was always away on business trips. Very often, the only person in his ten-room house was an eleven-year-old boy who played with snakes and really enjoyed being alone.
Page 20
Mark worried a lot about the environment. Scientists, knowing the effects of the destruction of habitat and wildlife, still did not seem to have any impact on those people who had the power to do something. He couldn't understand and it seemed very unfair that his mother had died at the early age of forty-five. She would have loved to have seen the animals he was studying, especially Only. Her first impulse would have been to hit the reference books to identify the animal. She would have steered Mark in the right direction and helped him solve some of the problems he was now facing as a result of his hobby.
The neighbors knew he was keeping snakes on the property. There were a number of venomous rattlesnakes in this part of Arizona, and these people had a real fear for their lives. Mark was used to joining conversations when visitors came for dinner or just talking to friendly neighbors as he played in the area. The subject usually turned to his hobby. There was always a little danger involved in having those sneaky, slick-looking lizards and snakes so close at hand. There were always lots of snake stories, most of them untrue or at least stretched a bit, about snakes.
There was one Monday morning when a troop of neighbors appeared at the front door with a dead rattlesnake in a bucket. The question was, "Is this one of yours?" Mark's dad assured them that his son would never keep a venomous reptile for a pet. He then led the reluctant group on a tour of Mark's minizoo. He made a great effort to explain the escape-proof cages. he also made it a point to show them that the animal shed was sealed from the inside to prevent an escapee from getting out. There was an uneasy truce and they left with subtle warnings of, "Just keep a close eye on things."
Only was living in a tall, thirty-five-gallon aquarium. Mark had tried to make a copy of the wild habitat right down to the crack in the rocks. He had tried to remove the part of the boulder that the lizard had emerged from in the
Page 21
desert, but it was too big and heavy. He never saw his pet except at feeding time. Mark, still assuming he had found some sort of iguana, had prepared the greatest mixed salad of all time. He chopped kale, carrots, apple, banana, and celery. To this he added canned whole kernel corn, crushed, and boiled egg yolk. All that was topped off with a spoon of fruit cocktail, the kind that was packed in heavy syrup. Mark always ate what was left in the can. He fed the little animal about a cup every day and it was consumed with great gusto.
Mark was haunted with what he thought was a really dumb idea. From the first moment Only came on the scene he thought very simply, "That looks like a baby dinosaur!" It would have been a wasted effort to mention that to Deke. He thought that every lizard looked like a dinosaur. He was just interested in those prehistoric monsters that were capable of ripping and tearing flesh.
When Mark was busy cleaning and feeding his animals, Obie would lie on the floor across the doorway and ignore everything except an occasional fly. Today, as Mark had just finished dropping a dead mouse into the rat snake's cage, Obie raised his head and snarled. His back was straight, his tail was raised and stiffened, he had his paw off the floor. He was pointing like a bird dog right at Only's aquarium. There were little squeaking sounds coming from the minicave, and a reptilian tail appeared in the opening. Only backed out slowly and was squeaking and hissing as he progressed. The drool was coming in globs from his mouth, and Mark bent down for a closer look. There was a large, black, hairy wolf spider crawling up the side of the cave entrance. Only was panicking! Mark knew he must move Only in order to remove the spider, so he grasped Only by his sides and gently lifted him from the aquarium. The instant the animal cleared the edge he gave a quick jerk and fell free of Mark's hands, landing on the floor and moving quickly in Obie's direction. The dog stood up and froze in
Page 22
place. Only stopped between the huge dog's legs, turned, and faced Mark and the spider. He was hissing, squeaking, drooling, and standing there like a rhinoceros!
A few minutes passed and nobody moved. Then Only stopped and began to snuggle against Obie's leg. He was treating Obie like his mother! Mark knew the dog would not move, so he got a stick and let the spider crawl onto the end. He then quickly deposited the animal into the nearest potted plant. Obie was petrified as Mark slowly picked up Only and put him back in the aquarium. "Hey boy," Mark grinned at Obie. "How does it feel to be a mother to a lizard?" Obie relaxed and began wagging his tail. His tail hit the potted plant containing the spider, tipping it over, sending dirt and plant across the floor. Do not ever make a giant dog happy in a small place.
Mark sat down on a stool and watched as Only began munching his salad. This was becoming more mysterious. Only ran to the dog for protection. Mark knew that crocodiles protect their young but he did not know of any other reptile that behaved in that way. The two or three times he had held Only he noticed that the animal felt almost hot. He remembered the evening in the desert when he first touched the animal. The air temperature was going down but still the reptile was warm. Also, three days before, when Only sprang from the rock crevice, he was lying on his stomach much the same way as almost all lizards. Today, he was standing with his legs directly under his body. He even looked like a little rhinoceros.
Mark looked down at his hands. He felt them tingling. They had turned a light red, and a warm, flushed feeling was moving through his fingertips. He remembered that this had happened twice before, right after he had touched the lizard. The effect only lasted a few minutes.
He would be at the library first thing in the morning when the doors opened.
Page 23
Chapter Four
"Whatcha doin'?" Mark asked into the phone.
"I'm bein' real quiet so I won't wake up my dad. He got to bed real late last night and it would't be wise to wake him up!" Deke whispered.
"Meet me at the corner. I'm going to the library."
"Oh goody. Once again I am visiting my favorite place to watch nerds." Deke was speaking even more softly this time.
Big brass letters spelled WESTWOOD BRANCH LIBRARY across the front of the building. Mark and Deke parked their bikes in the rack. Mark always locked his with a heavy chain. Deke wasn't that careful. It was just before lunchtime and the bike rack was full. The library always had guest speakers on Saturdays. The kids looking for things to do usually migrated here. It was always cool and quiet. Once inside, Mark went straight to the first computer monitor.
Press CLEAR, then press ENTER to begin:SUBJ: D I N O S A U R.
SUBJ: D I N O S A U R.
The green letters and numbers came up on the computer. The screen filled with the titles of dinosaur books, and all the numbers began with 596.0. "See if you can call up the Mario Brothers," Deke laughed. Mark had not told
Page 24
his friend that he was pretty sure of what they had. He walked back to the stacks and chose three big books, all of which had grand color photos of a tyrannosaurus rex on the cover. Deke wandered off to the magazine shelves.
Mark began flipping through the pages looking for something familiar. Dinosaur after dinosaur went by. Deke was sitting at the end of the table flipping absentmindedly through Sports Illustrated. He was looking for gold in his left nostril with his little finger. Mark looked up and noticed him remove his finger. He closed his eyes expecting the worst. He opened them just as Deke flipped his found gold into the air. "Yuck!" Mark whispered.
He had scanned pictures in at least fifteen books, and the only things even near any resemblance to his lizard were the ceratopsids. Only just did not have the big bony neck frill. There were two bumps on his head, but those really looked like the horn stubs one might find in a newly hatched horned toad or one of those chameleons with eyes that went in all directions and a tongue that was longer than the lizard. He had just about decided to put a severe check on his imagination when a group of dark silhouette pictures caught his eye. There were ten drawings. Each represented a recognized species of "Short-frilled" Triceratops. Number ten: Triceratops hatcheri, juvenile. There were two horn bumps and the beginnings of a neck frill! There was a picture of Only in that book!
Mark made some sort of noise that got the attention of everyone within a four-table range. Deke fell back in his chair and hit the floor with a loud crash. His Sports Illustrated flew across the room. Mark grabbed the open book and rushed to Deke's side.
"Look at this!" Mark was yelling.
Deke raised up on his elbows.
"Shhh, I've been asked to leave here before! What?"
"Do you see what I see?" Mark said in a loud whisper.
Page 25
"Yea, I see a cheap book that can't afford color pictures!" Deke laughed.
"Look at the last one and think Only!"
"Holy bat stuff!" Deke yelled. "You mean that lizard is really a" Mark clamped his hand over Deke's mouth"dinmufm, nuffmn?"
Page 26
Chapter Five
Only peered from the little cave in his cage. He was slow moving and very careful. Mark held out a hand and the little dinosaur sniffed gently. Mark noticed that even his little eyes were certainly not those of a lizard. The white cornea, the light gray iris, and the round black pupil could be the eyes of any mammal. Those eyes reminded Mark of Ms. Grogan's eyes. Pat Grogan was Mark's favorite teacher. He had a full-blown love for her that was far and above any that had ever been known to man.
The dinosaur emerged slowly from the rocks, and Mark began to stroke his back. Mark was not aware that his eyes were bulging and that he had sucked so much air into his lungs that he might explode with excitement. The little animal began to react like a dog that was being scratched. He bent and leaned and seemed to really enjoy the attention. Mark picked Only up and gently placed him on the floor. Obie, who had been watching closely from his spot near the door, became very much disturbed and began to whine. He looked at Mark as if asking what he should do at this point. "Don't worry about it. Just sit and watch." Mark whispered to Obie.
Only walked slowly across the linoleum floor. He seemed most interested in the potted plants, and his nose twitched and made little snorting sounds. He drooled. Only was surveying the room very thoroughly and started toward a
Page 27
shallow pan at the base of a plant. The pan was half full of water. Without a moment's hesitation he stepped over the rim and waded into the murky liquid. He put his nose down all the way to the bottom. His eyes seemed to focus on a distant object as though his eyes and nose were in no way connected.
As he moved around the pan, Mark marveled that this young dinosaur, with no mother to teach him, knew instinctively how to search for the plant food he might find. This animal was somewhere around 65,000,000 years old! The ancient wisdom stored in his brain would still make his search successful. Only found a leaf on the bottom of the pan and picked it up in his beak-like mouth. He held it high and seemed proud of the fact that he had found it all by himself. A quick thought and Mark lunged forward and grabbed the leaf. Only squeaked and jumped.
''Sorry little fellow. You can't eat anything that I don't eat myself!" Mark was not an expert, but he could not remember any mention of gardenia bushes in the prehistoric swamp. Only relaxed quickly and resumed his exploration of the room, sniffing and nosing around. There were interesting odors to be classifiedodors of snake, lizard, and big ugly dog. He spotted a cockroach. About the same time, a five-and-a-half-foot, mostly tail, green iguana climbed up the side of a wire cage for a better look. For a passing moment, Only froze in place as a cotton rat will freeze in the shadow of a hawk. Just as quickly he decided that the green lizard would cause him no harm. He continued his investigations.
Obie seemed to have accepted the fact that this little animal really liked him. He began nudging Only around as if to direct him out into the middle of the floor. Only responded mildly to this discipline. After a few more minutes of examining his surroundings, he walked over to the seated dog and wiggled in between his legs.
Page 28
From outside there was a rough sliding sound, and a spray of loose gravel hit the side of the little building. Deke opened the door.
"How's the star dinosaur today?"
Mark almost without thinking said, "Shhh! We gotta talk about that."
Deke pulled up the stool and sat down. Mark gently picked up Only and put him near his feeding bowl in the aquarium. Obie whined and followed, then took up his guard post at the end of the tank. Mark perched on an overturned five-gallon bucket. They were staring into the aquarium watching Only eat his salad. Above the hum of the little window air conditioner you could almost hear brains clicking and whirring. These boys had a wonderful problem. The first and foremost question was, "Now what do we do?"
"PT, the movie, will gross $78,000,000 the first weekend!" Deke whispered.
"Wha'd you say?" Mark asked.
"I was just thinkin' about the movie we'll make and we can call it PT, Prehistoric Terrestrial."
"Listen, Deke, I've been thinkin' about this a lot. We've got to keep this a secret for a while."
Deke said, "My dad is always sayin' that three men can keep a secret . . . if two of 'em are dead!"
"Very funny," Mark answered, "but this is serious. Think about it. If we tell our parents or teachers or the people down at the museum, the first thing that would happen is that someone would take him away from us. Only would end up in Washington in a big laboratory. They'd poke, prod, stick needles, and might even kill him so they could dissect his body. Oh, we would be famous all right, but Only would be dead and we would be left with some newspaper clippings and a street named after us!"
Page 29
"Why couldn't we just call Steven Spielberg? He would give us a few million, then we could be rich and Only would be famous." Deke had dollar signs stamped all over him.
"Well, another reason to wait is that we're not sure this is a real dinosaur. He just looks a lot like a picture in a book. And, how in the heck did he get out there in the desert? Is his mother alive? We gotta decide what to do next. I'm makin' a list. I think the first thing is to take pictures of him."
"Oh great!" Deke screeched, "You turn in the film at the Photomat and the jerk clerk notices you have pictures of a dinosaur. He turns us in and gets a big finder's fee. We lose the dinosaur and get zip! You wanna discuss idea number two?"
"Have you ever heard of an instant camera, nitwit?" Mark could sense that he was going to have trouble right away and decided not to discuss all of his plans with his friend.
"OK, what then, Einstein?"
"I think we should just keep him quiet for a while and learn everything there is to know about him. Then we can think about tellin' somebody. It really has to be someone we can trust."
Deke's mind was still somewhere out on the edge, and he said, "I can just hear my daddy when he finds out. He'll say something stupid like 'Let's shoot it! I hear them's good eatin'.' He says that about all animals except dogs and cats."
It was almost time for dinner, so Mark made Deke promise with everything he could muster about loyalty and friendship. Deke left thinking that if he squealed he would be struck by lightning and go straight to the opposite of heaven.
It had been almost two weeks since they found Only. The first thing Mark noticed was that he grew very fast.
Page 30
Mark was faced with the care and feeding of a dinosaur. He knew that all his efforts would be the first of their kind. There was no place to go for answers to all the questions. He made several trips to the library and began reading everything he could find about dinosaurs. Scientists think this and that. The only obvious fact he could rely on was that the animal was a vegetarian. Triceratop teeth were well documented and there was no doubt about his food preference. Mark worried that modern vegetables would cause all sorts of tummyaches.
Mark's father would be out of town until the weekend, so he decided to bring Only into the house for a little exercise. It was time to take some pictures, weigh, and measure. Realizing that all that stuff about scientific procedure he had learned in school might actually have some real uses, Mark had borrowed an instant camera and bought a packet of film. He weighed Only by putting him in a laundry basket on the bathroom scale. He decided he would do that at least once a week. The information he recorded in a little pocket spiral notebook he kept in his secret place under a loose board in the floor of his shed. The instant camera photos were also stored there, gooey brown negatives and all. This was one of the things he did not discuss with Deke.
He could now pick up the animal, and the squeaks of fright had become squeals of pleasure. Mark sat him on the kitchen counter and began to pull out the vegetables. Only had established a favorite food item; he went for the chunks of Idaho potato first. There must have been some sort of prehistoric plant that he and his relatives naturally ate that tasted or looked like a potato. Mark put a quarter of potato on the counter and Only went for it. As he tried to bite, the potato slid across the counter, and he pushed it off into the sink. He looked up at Mark and whined. Mark put the chunk back on the countertop. This time Only looked at the potato as if to ponder the problem. Then, instead of biting
Page 31
from the side, he held his head directly over the potato and bit it from the top. Lesson learned.
His intelligence would eventually cause problems. In this case, Only had seen where the potatoes were kept. They were stored in the lower cabinet below the sink. Mark had been able to confine him to the countertop near the sink. But now, each time he finished his potato, he walked to the counter's edge and threatened to jump. From then on Mark gave him his treat on the floor.
Another lesson he learned was to open the cabinet door. He would simply turn his head to the side and with one of his little horns quickly pop the door open. Mark moved the potatoes to an upper cabinet. Only watched and never again tried to open the bottom cabinet.
When Only had tired of shuffling around the living room, he would usually curl up in Obie's mountain of fur and go to sleep. Mark was delighted when Only lifted his front feet on the couch and begged to be allowed up to snuggle. Mark had to be careful to keep a towel handy because Only slobbered constantly. He would have a tough time explaining those stains to his father. The couch became Only's favorite place to sleep.
Another surprise was that Only was as clean as any cat. He would bump his head on the door when he needed to "go." Mark put down a cat litter box and Only immediately used it. Mark could hardly wait to clear up some of what scientists thought about dinosaurs. But not yet.
The afternoon was hot and dry. Mark decided he wanted to return to the road cut to poke around in the hole for anything else that might prove interesting. He suspected that the road construction had already covered the site. It had rained most of the week, so he hoped for a work delay.
This would be a solo journey, because Deke had to go to the doctor. He had developed a rash of some sort. Mark decided to take Only along as company. He fit nicely in the "Bike-Pac" on the handlebars. He was now about the size of
Page 32
a full-grown armadillo and was very heavy for his size. This strange-looking creature was really brave. He would stick his head out of the zippered top of the pack and place his two front feet over the edge, his little beaked nose pointing to the wind. The only part of the trip that worried him was when Mark had to work hard to get up some speed, pumping wildly with the front wheel wobbling from side to side to keep the bicycle upright. All that motion made him feel as if he would be thrown out. When they were up to speed and coasting, his head would reappear. Then he looked like a dog enjoying the ride. Mark had to be careful to dodge the occasional blob of slobber that flew back from Only's mouth.
Obie didn't make this trip. He was still asleep and Mark did not want to wake him. Obie was getting old and it became more difficult for him to go on long trips.
They rode down Mueller Street and by Brinlin Cemetery. Mark would not look and tried not to think about the fact that his mother was only about two hundred feet from the road. One more block and the street would dead-end at the curb and then desert. Mark removed the pack from the handlebars and put it across his shoulder. Only wanted out, but Mark just held a hand on top of his head and he settled down.
As they rode by Deke's house, Mark was surprised to see Deke out on the parkway standing next to a telephone pole. There was a small group of kids around him, and he was bent over with his ear against the pole.
One of the kids asked, "Watcha doin'?"
Deke backed away from the pole. "Listen to that." The kid put his ear to the pole then backed away and looked at Deke.
"I don't hear anything." Deke stepped back to the pole, put his ear down, listened, and then backed away again.
Page 33
"No, listen real carefully." With that, all the kids found a space to put their ears next to the pole. They all backed away.
"I don't hear anything."
"I don't either," said a second kid.
The third asked, "What did you hear?"
Dake straightened up and smiled, "Oh I can't hear a thing, and it's been that way all day!"
There were groans, name calling, words like "dufus" and "nerd," and grass kicking. Deke was laughing loudly and just walked away toward Mark. "Little kids are such dweebs! Hey, what's up?"
Mark said, "I thought you had to go to the doctor?"
"Well I did and my mom was gonna take me. My dad asked her why. When she told him about my rash, he said it was just heat rash. He wasn't gonna pay good money to some quack so he could prescribe some powder. Dad said he could buy that stuff at the grocery store. So, I didn't have to go." Deke turned his arm to one side and showed Mark a dark bump near his elbow. Deke had another on his shoulder and one on his collarbone.
"Looks like skin rot to me, are you catchy?" asked Mark.
"Darned if I know. Where you goin'?"
Now Mark had a traveling companion whether he wanted one or not. "I'm takin' Only out to where we found him for a little exercise. I want to look around in case there's somethin' else."
Two boys on two bicycles with one small dinosaur in a backpack started off down the street.
Page 34
Page 35
Chapter Six
CHADSWORTH P. LONGSTREET, B.S., M.S., T.A. The name was chiseled "Flintstone" style into a hunk of rock that sat on the edge of his table. At twenty-seven he had landed this teaching assistant's job at Arizona State, and he was dreaming of staying on to become a full professor.
His office, actually a converted storeroom, was lost in the basement of the old chemistry building. The cracked concrete floor was covered with carpet squares. There was a phony Navajo rug covering one wall because the plaster had broken and the bare bricks were exposed. His table was covered with "Indiana Jones" type things. There was a plastic produce bag on top of the "in-out" box that contained the upper leg bone of a black bear. A citizen had brought it in believing he had found a dinosaur bone. The golf putter leaning against the wall between the metal shelves did not indicate a love for the game. He just took it along with him to the field to remove snakes from his dig sites. A host of unidentifiable rocks and bones were scattered around on just about every flat surface. He sat there, leaning back in a secondhand office chair, his feet up on the table. He was talking on the phone. "Why don't you call Max at the museum and tell him we may have a real one this time. The man who called it in said he got the information from a friend who is working at a road construction site north of town. His story is a bit strange.
Page 36
This friend told his boss and the boss threatened to fire him if he told anybody. It seems the foreman had reported bone finds in the past and lost work because some agency with the government came and declared the place a national park."
"Yeah . . . uh-huh." Chad's conversation became a series of grunts.
"Well, tell him we may want to go after hours so we won't run into that foreman. The caller gave some pretty good directions."
He put his feet on the floor and the grunts wound down. "OK, have him give me a call and we'll meet here about seven and all go in one car. Goodbye."
Chad got these dinosaur bone calls all the time, and he always tried to talk the caller into bringing a piece of the material to the school for identification. This one was described as a bone end as big as a man's leg sticking out of solid rock. He was convinced that there was certainly something sticking out, but he was skeptical about it being a bone.
Chad thought the prospect of being sneaky and having a little suspense attached might be fun. It was not very often that a budding bone hunter got the opportunity to act like Indiana Jones when looking for bones. He called Max Barid of the Grable Museum of Natural History in Phoenix, whom he had known for years and was the best bone man around. Albert Finis worked for the public works department in the Street Planning Division. He would help out in any way he could because he really liked fossils. He would love to come along.
Page 37
Chapter Seven
The construction crew was gone. It was a quiet evening in the desert. Beyond the road cut, the saguaro cactus cast weird shadows across the scrub brush. The big cranes, graders, and Caterpillar tractors were parked end to end and looked like monsters settled down to sleep. Mark, with Only inside the backpack, and Deke waded through the sand toward Only's birthplace. The huge earth-moving machines certainly had changed the scenery. There were dunes missing, and new hills had been built by the huge bulldozers. The hills that were too solid or too big to blow up were sliced like an apple. The road cut was a neat, precisely laid out blanket of big wire squares. This wire would keep the cement from breaking apart. The wire framework stopped just over where the explosion hole had been. Mark and Deke squatted on a dune and studied the terrain.
''Well, if there were more eggs or a nest or brothers and sisters, we'll never know," Mark said. "By tomorrow it'll all be concrete."
Deke shook his head, "You worry too much. Let the critter out to play." Mark unzipped the pack and set it on the sand. Only's little beak appeared, and the neck, followed by the small, rhinoceros-looking body. He grunted, drooled, and began to slowly sniff the sand. He started off
Page 38
in a straight line and shuffled his feet as if to taste the earth.
"Somebody's comin'!" Deke said. They instinctively ducked their heads and spun around. There were voices in the direction of the road, and they were getting louder.
"He said to walk straight out from where the street dead-ended to the edge of the road cut."
Another voice said, "Did he mention a distance? I hope it wasn't in miles."
A third and different man said, "If you quit working for the city sitting in that pickup all day, you might get some exercise and lose some of that flab!" They all laughed.
The boys began to edge toward a small gully to their left, sneaking along like a police swat team. Mark stopped abruptly and Deke bumped into him. "We forgot Only!" They crab-walked back to the dune and looked around frantically. No dinosaur! They were looking everywhere and watching for strangers to top the hill. "They'll see us, find Only, and all heck will break loose!" Mark gasped.
Deke whispered, "Duck!" Just then three men rounded the edge of a dune. Mark and Deke were out of sight, so they kept one eye on the men while they continued the search for Only. They were flat on the sand now and heard everything the men were saying.
The voice of the one who seemed to be the leader of the group said, "The guy said to walk about one hundred yards west of where the grid stopped and then look at the rock face on the right." The three men ambled down the flat roadbed. Chad led the way. He had on his best "Jungle Jim" khaki. He had purchased his hat at a garage sale. It was straw and worn only as a sun shield.
Chad was followed by a very tan, slim-built man in his late forties. He walked like he had been born on sand. His eyes seemed to scan every inch of the ground. Max Baird was the Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Grable Museum. He was one of the few "bone men" who could
Page 39
identify remains that looked like so much skeleton to most people. He had been in deserts, swamps, underwater, and just about any other habitat one could imagine looking for dinosaur bones.
Max had been referred to as the "dinosaur cowboy" because of the way he dressed and the fact that he owned a horse. He had on his cowboy boots and hat. The name "MAX" was tooled into the back of his leather belt. He did not have the expected manner of speaking. He grew up as a rich kid in a rich neighborhood in Los Angeles and got his college degree at Harvard. He just liked cowboys.
Bringing up the rear was Albert Finis. His gimme cap was hiding his bald head. He was short, overweight, foul tempered, and had a strange-looking tuft of hair smack in the middle of his forehead. He was waddling along trying to keep up. The sweat was rolling down his chubby cheeks and soaking into the collar of his blue work shirt.
They walked within ten yards of where Mark and Deke, still lying flat on the sand, were hiding.
"You guys look real close. It has to be along this rock edge." Albert hummed, "Bone in the desert, needle in a haystack, dum-de-dum."
"Eureka!" screamed Max, "We've hit bone city!" The three men gathered and kneeled at the base of a short stone wall. There was a rounded chunk of rock sticking out from the wall. ''What do you think it is?" asked Albert.
"From the shape and size I would guess some species of triceratops, and I may be dreaming along with guessing," said Chad.
"Looks like the upper ball of the femur," Max added. "I am guessing also, but I think the animal may have been a fossil when triceratops were walking all over him!" he laughed.
Mark punched Deke and signaled him to stay. He craw-fished back on his stomach and behind a dune. He quickly did a commando move around the men to get another angle
Page 40
to the area where Only disappeared. He belly flopped on the sand and scanned the site. There! His eyes caught movement about fifteen yards past the gathered men. It was Only! He was just sniffing around like business as usual, sticking his nose into every bush.
"Max, I can have a student crew out here in about two days or whenever you are ready."
Max replied, "That's what I like about working with you college people. You have all those young strong bodies that don't mind the work or the heat to do the dirty work. Then us museum types get to preserve and record in the cool of the museum basement. Great."
"Albert, can you get us a survey permit and a temporary halt to construction?" Chad asked.
"I'll get on it first thing in the morning; for now let's go. It's getting dark."
The shadows had faded and the desert dusk was setting in. Mark was watching Only, and the men were starting to walk in his direction. He had to create a diversion. At the edge of the road cut, about twenty yards from where Mark was hiding, was a small cement mixer. The open end of the machine was facing his way. He picked up a rock and threw it at the hole. He missed and the rock bounced silently in the sand. One more rock and one more try. The rock entered the hole and hit the inside. The sound was amplified, and a loud bang rang through the desert. All three men jumped in unison.
Only took off running and disappeared into a hole just beneath a dead saguaro. "Did you see that?" Chad asked the group.
"No, but I heard it. What do you think it was?" Albert asked.
Chad said, "I thought I saw an armadillo run across the hill!"
Page 41
Page 42
Max replied, "There are no armadillos in Arizona. It had to be something else, and maybe he knocked over something that made a noise."
Albert whined, "It's gonna be dark in a few minutes, and we have a walk ahead of us, so I suggest we get out of here. Have either of you ever run into one of these saguaros in the dark?"
Chad wanted to investigate but thought better of it, so he turned and the three men walked back toward the road. They began muttering among themselves about the importance of their potential discovery.
Deke met Mark at the hole. They lay on their bellies and stared inside. First the beak, followed by the rest of him, and Only wandered out. Mark silently vowed he would never take that chance again. With Only safely tucked away in the backpack, the boys headed back to their bicycles. Mark's hands tingled.
Page 43
Chapter Eight
Mark always left his bedroom window open when he slept at night. He loved to watch the stars and the moon until he went to sleep. The window faced the east, so the first break of the sun would wake him for school. He did not need an alarm clock because he was a light sleeper anyway. This was just another school morning except for the fact that he had a dinosaur in his backyard. This morning the sun had not even peeped over the windowsill when he sprang from bed, dressed quickly, and moved through the house to check on Only. He stopped at the back door because his left foot felt a bit strange. He looked down and noticed he had no sock on his left foot! Oh well.
He flipped on the light of his shed and all of the animals began to move around in their cages. Only was in his little cave and did not seem to notice. Mark knocked on the top, and a little nose appeared at the opening. The nose moved like that of a rabbit. The little dinosaur slowly emerged and was soon standing just outside the cave entrance. He stretched, yawned, and with rapidly blinking morning eyes he surveyed his new world. Mr. Phillips was, as usual, out of town, so Mark and Only had been having breakfast together in the kitchen.
Mark gathered up his little 65,000,000-year-old friend and made his way toward the kitchen. The morning was cool and the streaks of sunlight bounced off the buildings at
Page 44
weird angles. It was going to be a great day. Mark put Only on the kitchen floor and opened the refrigerator door. He removed some celery, carrots, an apple, some carrot topsone of Only's favoritesand a peach. Only was bumping the cabinet where his food dishes were kept.
Mark chopped and cut on the counter while Only, having given up his attack on the cabinet, was roaming and sniffing. Mark tapped on the side of Only's food pan, and the dinosaur slipped and slid on the slick kitchen floor trying to get to Mark's feet. He almost climbed into the pan even before it got to the floor. Mark squatted and just watched. Only never seemed to stop chewing, and the food was disappearing very quickly. Mark paused for a moment, almost as if he had just been struck with a great thought. Well, he had. Up to this point everybody who knew of Only's existence had referred to him as "he." No one had even taken the time to look. He could be a she.
Mark began to pet the creature. He scratched his head, over his back, down to the tail, out to the end of his tail, and then he gently lifted. Somewhere in the middle of looking for something that would determine the sex, Mark felt he was being watched. He turned his head slowly and was startled to see Deke at the screen door. Deke had his hands cupped around his face so he could see through the wire. Mark was embarrassed.
"Da dump, da dump! Now I know what you do when you are alone! Did you lose something?" Deke backed away from the door and slapped his leg and cackled.
"Come on in, dorf. I wasn't doin' anything!"
"Yeah right! What were you doin'?"
"You know, ever since we found Only we have been callin' him 'him.' We don't really know."
"Ok. You've looked, so what did you see?"
Mark lifted Only's tail again. "Nothin'. But even if he is a warm-blooded reptile, he would still not have any outside
Page 45
sex organs. Reptiles do number one and two potty stuff out of the same hole."
Deke grinned. "Let me see," as he put his finger to his temple. "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Or was it, Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu." He looked thoughtful. "It was definitely the higher squeal. It's a girl!" Both laughed.
Mark said, "We're gonna be late. You put Only back in his cage and I'll go get ready."
"OK, if I can catch him." Deke began to follow Only around the kitchen.
When Mark came down the stairs to the kitchen, Deke was sitting at the table with backpack in hand. They went out the back door and got on their bicycles. Deke very
Page 46
carefully attached his pack to the handlebars and very stiffly pedaled out of the driveway.
The Arizona sky was as blue as Pac-Man, the early version. There was a slight breeze and the air was a real delight. Mark was thinking about how wasted this day would be in school. He should be out frolicking in the dunes. Deke had his mind on something entirely different.
Mark and Deke had lockers side by side. Mark removed paper and pencil from his pack and stuffed the pack in his locker. Deke carefully positioned his pack in the locker. He was not known for arriving in class with any working materials. First period was reading. It was a quiet time because most of the fifth-graders had not totally waked up.
The bell rang and the boys strolled down the hall toward the reading room. The hallway was buzzing because there were only seven minutes until class started. One little boy had stopped at Deke's locker and had his ear to the door.
"Hey, guys, come here. Listen to this!" The first group stopped.
"Forget it, smurf. We ain't fallin' for that trick anymore. Everybody knows the gag."
The student became agitated, "No really, there's somethin' in here!" Just then a loud kicking noise came from within the metal locker. There was a struggle as ten students tried to put their ears to the locker at the same time.
Mark suddenly remembered a book he had promised his teacher. He and Deke parted company and he hurried back up the hall. Mark rounded the corner and noticed all the hubbub near his locker. He rushed forward about the same time Coach Stewart came around the corner. Coach had an ever-present dumb look on his face as he lumbered along. He had red hair, always dressed in sweat clothes, weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds, and scared the daylights out of a large percentage of the student population. Mark looked at Deke's locker. His mind whirled with racing
Page 47
thoughts. "Deke! Only! He handled his pack funny. He rode his bike funny. He didn't talk much on the way to school and that's really funny! Deke brought Only to school in his backpack!"
Mark shoved in front of the crowd about the same time Coach Stewart approached. "OK. What's going on here? You all have two minutes to be in class. Now move it!" The crowd scattered and Mark began opening his own locker. "Phillips!" the coach growled, "Get your rear end to class!"
Mark looked pale and weak. "OK, coach, I'm on my way." The coach sneered and walked on down the hall.
Mark quickly turned the combination on Deke's locker and opened the door. Only almost fell to the floor. Mark put the dinosaur back in Deke's pack and zipped the top. What to do now! He pulled the pack out and hurried down the long hall toward his class. He would have to come up with a plan real soon, or he would have to explain a lot more than he knew.
The class was seated and Mark hurried to his desk. Deke sat behind him and went white when he noticed that Mark was carrying his pack. The teacher started talking. Mark turned to Deke. "You double-dumb, stupid dufus!" Deke began talking very excitedly and very fast. Mark was so mad he just ignored him.
"Deke," the teacher said very loud. "You know the deal. Now move to that desk by the globe stand." Deke was still whispering as he changed desks.
"Hey, dude! I just wanted to show him to somebody. Mom's comin' to get me at lunch for a dentist thing. I was gonna take him home then!" His voice trailed off as he moved away.
Mark sat with his mouth in a peculiar snarl. He was trying to figure out a plan.
"Grunt, grunt!" the noise came up from the pack. Then there was a low squeal.
"Who's making that noise?" the teacher asked.
Page 48
Six or seven students replied almost at the same time, "Not me! I didn't do it! No way!" The teacher left the board and started in Mark's direction.
"Uruk! Yukka ork!" Mark appeared to cough into his desktop. A second later Mark sprayed breakfast across the desk. In the blink of an eye, there were no students within ten feet of Mark. The teacher quickened her step. "Mark, you need to go to the nurse. Can you make it alone?"
Mark replied weakly, "Yes ma'am, I think I can." Most of the other students just covered their mouths to say, "Gross!" and "Yuk!" and to stifle a laugh.
Mark hurried down the hall with a slight grin on his face. He knew that the ability to throw up at will would come in handy again one day. He had used the trick in fourth grade when he had forgotten to do a very important class project.
The office called his neighbor to come and get him. Mark carefully held the backpack all the way home. He thought over and over, "That dumb Deke!"
Page 49
Chapter Nine
August 1, 1993
TO: Allen GreenwayProject Construction SupervisorJackson CountyPhoenix, Arizona
Project Construction Supervisor
Jackson County
Phoenix, Arizona
FROM: Halton C. SteinfeldCEODesert Airs Construction
CEO
Desert Airs Construction
Mr. Greenway,
I regret to inform you that the construction in Section 432-B of the East-West Highway 289 must be discontinued until further notice. I have been notified that pursuant to the State of Arizona, Statute C-23-L, the area one mile each side of the right of way and two miles west of the now complete Section 432-A has been declared an important paleontological site.
Page 50
You will be notified of such time when work may proceed or must be detoured.
Signed:
Halton C. Steinfeld
cc. Chadsworth P. LongstreetMax BairdAlbert Finis
Max Baird
Albert Finis
''Those rotten scumbags! They're gonna do it again!" Al wadded the memo and bounced it off the wall. He stomped one direction, then turned and stomped the other direction. The little construction trailer rattled and shook. He was mumbling to the walls. This same thing had halted a project in Utah two years ago. These bone people had delayed the work so long that the contract played out, and he was transferred to a site in West Texas. He hated Texas.
The trailer door opened, and a big head with lots of hair stuck through. "Hey boss. You all right? Sounded like you were in here wrestling with somebody!"
"Naw Shots, come on in." Al sat down in his chair with a thump.
Bearded, mustachioed, long-haired Shots McCarthy. He smelled of black powder, and sulphur from struck matches. His clothes looked as if he had just survived an explosion. He got that nickname from his habit of setting off single sticks of dynamite with a .22 caliber rifle. He was in charge of explosives and he was good at it. He could blow rocks away from a nest full of hen eggs and never scratch a one. Most people were pretty sure he was not in complete control of reality, and they were close.
Page 51
Page 52
"Shots, there's gonna be a lot of strangers around here tomorrow in borrowed hard hats. Sounds like they plan to stop construction because of some fossils somebody squealed about."
"I guess there's nothin' we can do about it, huh boss?"
"Yes there is, but I'll wait a day to see what they decide."
Al had already formulated plans. He would not want a witness, so he said nothing to Shots. He silently vowed that he would not be sent back to Texas.
Page 53
Chapter Ten
Only was attracted by shiny objects. This is common of some modern mammals and birds. Who had reason to suspect it in a dinosaur? He was fascinated by brass doorknobs, glass marbles, ball bearings, and coins of a silver color. Mark gave him a glass hen egg that his mother had purchased at a garage sale years ago. He considered it a safe plaything because the dinosaur could not swallow it. Only nudged it carefully with his beak. He smelled, tasted, and pushed the egg around with his front feet. One day when Mark had Only outside the shed for some sunshine, he was nudging the egg around in the sand when a very upset blue jay lighted in a nearby tree and began screaming as if Only were a cat. The little dinosaur immediately took a stand over the egg as if to guard it from a thief. He lifted his eyes to the trees and hissed and drooled.
Mark feared that the encounter might be too upsetting for the little beast, so he moved in to take the egg. Only was prepared to take on all comers. He turned and butted Mark's hand as he tried to retrieve the egg. Mark laid down on the sand and faced Only. He began to talk to him in soothing tones. Only paused as if to think about the situation and then relaxed. He whined a very peculiar whine and waddled over to allow himself to be picked up.
Only had grown noticeably in these three weeks. The thirty-five-gallon aquarium was too small. Mark began to
Page 54
look for larger quarters. It just happened that old Professor Willis, whose yard always seemed to need weeding, had just had his patio enclosed, and there were two glass doors out in the alley to be removed by the garbage man.
With Deke's reluctant help, Mark moved them both into his critter shed. The eight-foot-long, three-foot-wide doors made the perfect sides for a great cage. Mark's dad was a lumber saver from way back, so there were sheets upon sheets of half-inch plywood in the garage. It was a simple matter to screw the plywood sheets to the door frames. The giant terrarium was completed and decorated in just a couple of hours. Mark did most of the construction; Deke did most of the watching.
Only investigated the new habitat with great thoroughness. He liked his new and bigger cave, but he really delighted in tearing up the potted plants that had been so carefully buried around the rocks. Mark replaced them at least twice but finally just gave up.
Deke had watched all he was going to and made his exit saying that he had to help his mother with something. Mark was standing in the now cramped room admiring his handiwork when a big Mercedes pulled into the driveway. Out stepped Mark's seldom-heard-from, but always welcome, Aunt Minerva Anderson. She was accompanied by one of her maids. She had a look of certain determination on her prematurely wrinkled face. Her tall hairstyle just missed being rearranged by the car roof.
"Aunt Min!" Mark shouted happily as he ran to greet her.
"Hello, sonny boy. My, my, you're all sweaty!"
"Well, I've been out in my shed building cages."
"That's nice, but I don't really want to know what for."
Mark knew from day one of his hobby that Aunt Min had no use for animals. She didn't even care for dogs or cats. Obie had already taken the clue and had scooted for the backyard.
Page 55
Page 56
"Now, help Jeanne take the luggage to the downstairs bedroom."
Mark knew she was coming, but he was not sure when. Aunt Min was not known for announcing her visits. She always liked to surprise people because she really enjoyed trying to catch someone doing something they shouldn't. She had been kind to Mark after his mother died and had taken care of him for a while. Aunt Min could really be a pain in the back, though, because she expected everybody around her to be perfect. She was into really dumb things like manners, dress, housekeeping, and knowing everybody's business. She had tried to dress Mark in the finest preppie clothes, and it took several fist fights to convince a few friends that he was still one of them.
Aunt Min took one look around the living room and threw up her hands in disgust.
"I've never seen such a mess in my life!" she said.
"I pick things up every day."
"Yes, I see most of those things piled on the couch."
"Dad and I do a good job of bachin' it," Mark said in defense.
"Yes, and that's just the trouble. Now you pick up all that stuff and put it in its proper place."
Mark had dealt with his aunt before, and he knew to stand his ground. He told her that they were living exactly like they wanted, and he would not wear the suits, ties, and vests ever again.
"You're not too big to spend some time in your room, young man," she said with eyes flashing.
"I brought Jeanne to clean up this place, and I'll cook some decent food. We'll hire a full-time maid and get this place shipshape."
Even though Mark did not have to worry about her nosing around in the animal room, he didn't like the idea of confining Only to quarters for an entire week. He would
Page 57
have to try a little exercise trek while his aunt was out shopping. He had a close call on the second day of her visit when she announced that she and Jeanne were off to the grocery store and would return before lunch. Mark and Obie were sitting on the floor watching television, and Only was huddled beneath Obie's front feet. Suddenly, the back and front doors opened at the same time. Jeanne came in the kitchen carrying groceries; Aunt Min came in the front door with the mail and the newspaper. Obie jumped up; Only squealed and dashed for another room. Mark just froze.
"What in the world was that?"
"That's Only, my pet armadillo."
"Where did you get an armadillo, and why is he loose in the house?"
"Dad brought him home from a road trip through Oklahoma, and he only comes in sometimes."
"Does he bite?"
"No, his mouth is too small and he has little bitty teeth."
"Well, get that thing out of here, Mark!"
"Oh all right," Mark said with great relief. He most likely could try to tell Aunt Min the truth about Only, but she would just chalk it off as an animal fantasy.
The next day Mark had planned to visit the road cut and investigate the fossil find. He remembered the men and their conversation. Mark needed to talk to someone who knew dinosaurs, and this guy named Chad sounded good. He locked the shed door and put butcher paper over the windows to prevent peeping Toms from any unwanted snooping.
He met Deke at the usual place on the corner. Deke did not sound as chipper as usual. He forced a grin and said, "Hey, Mark. I want you to know that I shopped all day yesterday for a cap like yours. I really like that cap."
Page 58
Mark looked puzzled. "This is just another gimme cap. I've got lots of 'em."
Deke grinned again, "Yeah, but it's hard to find one with the bill on the back of the head!" Mark groaned and Deke giggled.
"You look a little less leathery than usual. You doin' all your wanderin' at night lately?" Mark asked.
"Naw, I just haven't been feelin' all that good. My mom made an appointment for the doctor on Friday. My dad raised heck but she told him where to go and he just shut up. How's the rat?"
"What rat?"
"You know, the dinosaur rat. You told me not to say it too loud."
"He's OK. I still have to figure out what I'm gonna do about him. I have to get some more information, but I don't know where to start."
Deke had the answer: "Just wait a couple of months, and his tail will be hanging out of your shed because he'll be bigger than a house, and the questions will answer themselves!"
They wound their way to the dead end and parked their bikes in the usual place. Mark's dad went out of his way to buy the best and "most cool" bike on the market. It was a Cobra, Mach II mountain bike with knobby tires and extra cross struts. Mark felt a little guilty when he rode with Deke. His friend rode a third-hand, unknown brand bike with bald tires, that had been painted silver with a spray can. Whoever had done it was a bad shot or in a big hurry because there were big splotches of paint on the tires.
They crunched through the desert the hundred yards to the road cut. There were lots of young people wandering all over the place. There were even more young people squatted on the sand, bent over close and seemingly very interested in what they were doing. They were all within a rectangle about thirty yards square marked off by a wide
Page 59
yellow ribbon. Printed on the ribbon about every foot or so the word "CAUTION" appeared in black and stuck out like a sore thumb.
Mark and Deke stood quietly and watched and listened.
"Don't let that plaster sit too long or you won't be able to use it!" a man dressed in khaki brown with a funny hat hollered across the area. Mark recognized the voice as the one he had heard in the desert a few nights before. "Hey guys," the man smiled.
"Hello. Whatcha doin'?" Deke asked and already knew the answer.
The man sat on a nearby rock. "Well, someone reported some fossils here, and we came over to check it out. We found 'em, and now we want to take them out for study."
A thousand questions flooded Mark's mind. He put it all aside so as not to spill too many beans. He and Deke squatted and Mark asked, "Do you know what the bones are from?"
"We can't make a positive ID until we get them into the lab. I'm guessing it may be a protoceratops that was known to be in this area about 100,000,000 years ago. That would be exciting." He might have gone on, but Mark blurted out, "Would there have been any triceratops around here?"
"Actually the triceratops was very common here about 65,000,000 years ago. That's about when they all disappeared at the same time. Are you guys interested in dinosaurs?"
Deke trailed off, "No, not until recently."
Mark cut in, "I have always liked reptiles, and I like the triceratops best of all among the dinosaurs. They've got neat heads."
"Mr. Longstreet, we might have to dig another pit to get to one of the casts," one of the students said.
"'Scuse me, guys, gotta run." Mark made a mental note that here was a man who might help.
Page 60
There was a pickup truck parked across the way, and Al Greenway sat inside looking sternly at the ribbon, the students from the univesity, and Mark and Deke. His crews were busy as beavers just west of the bone dig. He was not a happy man, and he was growing even more unhappy as time passed.
Page 61
Chapter Eleven
Aunt Min had softened with time. Mark had gone to great lengths to show her he could survive nicely while his dad was out of town. She postponed the decision to hire a maid. She fed Mark some great meals and, with Jeanne's help, left the house shining clean right up to and including new curtains on the windows. With a goodbye kiss and a wave of a hand she was off again. Mark's father would be home tonight, and Mark had missed him.
Only had one neat quality which is common in dogs, suspected in cats, and rarely found in human beings. That was gratitude. Feed him his favorite food, and he was your friend for life. On this particular Saturday morning Mark had prepared the usual vegetation and fruit. His father sat at the table and looked up from his newspaper to watch all the chopping. ''What have you got out there that eats so much salad?"
Mark knew that he would have to tell eventuallybut not yet. "I traded a rat snake for a big iguana. He's a vegetarian lizard from South America, and he loves shrubbery."
That seemed to satisfy his dad but then he added, "Come over here and let me see something." Mark walked over and his dad picked up Mark's hand and turned it over. "You've had two warts on this hand for the last three or so years, and now they are gone. Did you notice?"
Page 62
Mark looked at his hand, "Uh, that's weird."
"Did you scratch or pull them off?" Mark would have certainly remembered if he had whacked off a wart. His grandmother had convinced him that he got them from handling toads. He knew they were caused by a virus, but he had no clue as to what happened.
"That's really strange," his dad said.
Mark gathered up the bowl of salad and went out to the shed. It was instant camera time, and he had not weighed Only lately. He was getting bigger all the time. The neck frill was becoming more pronounced, and the horns were getting longer. He really looked like a little triceratops.
Mark used his usual announcement that brought Only out for breakfast. "Soup's on!" he said in a loud voice. Nothing.
"Hey Only, time for breakfast!" he said a little louder. There was no sound or movement. Mark leaned back the top of the habitat and looked directly into the little cave. He could see part of Only's body through the hole. Mark patted the sand and called again. Only did not move. In a slight panic Mark lifted the roof rock and looked down at the little dinosaur. His breath was fast and not very deep. His eyes were open and his mouth was open, but there was no drool. He was laying on his side in a puddle of very liquid, and very smelly, poop.
"Oh no!" Mark was now in a genuine panic. Something he thought about constantly was what would happen if Only got sick. Where would he find a dinosaur veterinarian who could keep from talking about a very unusual patient? Mark lifted him gently and held him in his lap. Only was real sick. His body was even hotter than usual, and he was trembling slightly.
"Think, darnit!" Mark was totally lost and the tears were welling up in his eyes. His father! Could he explain just enough to his father to get help. No, because his father got excited very easily and might not be able to keep such a
Page 63
remarkable secret. He was never real fond of having Obie in the house. He put up with him just because Mark loved the big mutt. Obie and Mr. Phillips had a mutual understanding. They ignored each other completely.
Mr. Longstreet! This story would make his life stop and change directions. He knows enough about dinosaurs to have some advice. Mark could only hope that he would not turn everything over to the governmental or scientific communities and lose his very important pet forever.
Mark rushed into the house and found the phone book and began to flip through the pages.
Arizona State University
General Information
762-9999
Admissions-
762-9991
Undergraduate only-
762-9922
Graduate School-
762-9831
There were two pages of numbers! Mark had heard him say his office was in the old chemistry building.
Chemistry
762-9923
Great! "Hello, could I please speak to Mr. Longstreet?"
"What department please?" came the reply.
"I'm not sure, but he studies dinosaurs," Mark was in full panic now. "Please hurry!"
"I don't find him listed in the Chemistry Department. I'll connect you with the Geology Department."
"Only will be dead by the time I get off the phone!" Mark thought out loud.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Longstreet is on site and will not return until late this evening. Would you like to leave a message?"
"No thanks."
Mark ran out the back door and into the shed. He knew he would have to take Only with him to the road cut. It
Page 64
would be hard enough to get across that he had a sick dinosaur much less that he had a dinosaur in the first place.
Mark put Only in his backpack and strapped it across his chest. He could feel the hot little animal breathing quickly in short deep gasps. Out the door and to his bicycle with a hop, skip, and a jump. He didn't have time to notice before, but it was cloudy and smelled like rain. What if it rained before he got there and everybody left! He hurried.
He peddled fast and furiously but was careful not to take any unreasonable chances. It would not do if he wrecked out now.
He raced down Hanover Street and turned onto Muller Drive. He came to a screeching halt at the curb and dropped his bicycle where it landed. He walked as quickly as possible without bouncing the backpack all over the place.
He was somewhat relieved to see the yellow ribbon come into view and let out a real sigh when he saw Mr. Longstreet sitting on a rock guzzling water from a canteen. He was out of breath when he hurried right up in front of the seated scientist.
"Well hello. You're back." Mark knew he could waste no time. Mark said, "Could you please come over here. I have something I need to show you." As they walked, Chad suspected a bone had been found and Mark wanted him to say it belonged to a dinosaur. He always expected that from kids.
"Mr. Longstreet," Mark mumbled.
"It's Chad, and what's your name?"
"My name is Mark and this is an emergency!"
Chad could not think of an emergency identification of any bone, so he listened. Mark got out his story quickly and in only, what seemed to be, two breaths. Chad just sat there moving his eyes from the backpack to Mark's face. He wanted to smile or mildly crack up, but the kid was serious. He could not wait to see the animal of mistaken identity in the backpack.
Page 65
Mark swung the pack to the sand and unzipped the top. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching and gently removed Only.
Chad froze in place. His mouth dropped open and he could suddenly hear his heart beating. His mouth began to move, but nothing was coming out. This kid had a live baby dinosaur!
Page 66
Chapter Twelve
"Wh! Who! How!" Chad's mouth was moving but the words were not coming. "And you say he's sick?"
Mark was shaking now because he could not guess what this scientific type might do. "I can explain more, but I've got to get him to a doctor. I hope you can keep a secret. I have my reasons."
Chad babbled, "I can't think right now, but I'll call a veterinarian I know nearby. He used to believe just about anything I told him when we were in college. We need to get to a phone!"
Mark carefully zipped up the backpack and got up, holding the bag as if it were an expensive piece of pottery. Chad grabbed his elbow and started for the ugly white school van parked where the concrete highway stopped. They quickly climbed inside and drove away.
Al Greenway got up from his hiding place beside some oil barrels that were located about ten feet from where Chad and Mark had been sitting. He could only whisper, "Man oh man, a dinosaur! That was a real dinosaur! Geez, the money I could make with a dinosaur!" His mind raced. He instantly began to scheme. He had to have that dinosaur. He would be rich and famous. He needed to find Shots.
"Hello, this is Doctor Clark. Could I help you?"
Page 67
Dr. Bertram A. Clark, D.V.M., the wooden letters on his desk plaque stated. The office was cluttered with magazines. They were all at least two years old. He wanted to be a people doctor, but he did not really care that much for people. His dad let him know right away that he would only pay for a degree in some sort of medicine. His too rich, too spoiled son loved dogs, and he decided he might like to take care of them and get paid at the same time.
Page 68
Dr. Clark never hired a receptionist because his business was never all that busy, and he could do his own bookkeeping. The reception desk had a phone and a big appointment calender, "Compliments of Kibbles and Bits." The only two picture frames in the room were directly across from the front door. One was his degree from Michigan State University, "Doctor of Veterinary Medicine." The other was an eight-by-ten photocopy of a cartoon. The picture was an animal hospital waiting room. There were three people with pets in their laps and a third lady holding a barstool. The caption read, ''I don't really know, but the doctor said to bring it along." He had to explain to most people that stool samples are required in most cases with animals as a way of finding out what was wrong. After all that explanation, the joke was not even that interesting.
"Hey, Bert, I'm glad I caught you, this is Chad Longstreet."
"Hey, long time no see. What's up?"
"I've got kind of an animal emergency here, and I need to bring him right away."
The traffic noise at the 7-eleven store was heavy and made it hard to hear. "Whatcha got?" Bert asked.
Chad paused, thought for a moment, and said, "It's a kind of lizard and he is barely breathing."
"If it doesn't bark or purr, I don't know much about it!"
Mark sat in the truck holding Only and just staring out the window. The rain was starting and putting more and more drops on the windshield. Only was lying very still and making a slight hissing noise as he labored to breathe.
"I just need to get him some first aid. I don't think he has time to wait for a specialist."
Bert knew he had no more appointments for the day, and he was a little bored anyway. He had not seen Chad since his cat got sick the month before. "Well, bring him on over and I'll look."
Page 69
Bert's clinic was only about three miles from the construction site and Chad closed that distance very quickly. Mark realized that he could not keep this little dinosaur to himself much longer and he had to trust somebody. He told Chad Longstreet the whole story. It was pouring down rain, and the little lakes at the edge of the road splashed like fountains in the park as the tires played through. It had not rained this much and this often in twenty years. The clinic was in a little shopping center along with a drugstore, cleaners, and a Chinese fast-food place. Chad and Mark hurried inside as Bert opened the door.
"Bring him into the examining room" Bert instructed. Mark laid the backpack gently on the table and unzipped the top. He folded back the edges. "Take him out of the pack and put him on these towels." Bert could sense that these guys were more than just concerned about the health of a pet lizard. He noticed the screwed up grimace on Mark's face, and Chad was wide-eyed and excited. Bert gasped and caught his breath. "What did you say this is?"
Chad went on to say that this was some unknown kind of lizard that got shipped in to a pet shop and was bought by Mark when it was much smaller. He was making up his lies as he went. He was trying not to give too much information and hoping that Bert only knew his dogs and cats.
Dr. Bertram Clark was about to do the examination of his life. Unknown to Mark and Chad, he knew it!
He went right to work as Mark backed away from the table. He took Only's temperature. He wanted to do a test for worms and he did not have the necessary microscope slide handy. This was his chance to go to his office in the back of the building where he had a private phone. "Hold this thermometer here and I will be right back," Bert said as he slipped out the door. His office was not much bigger than the tiny examining room. He sat down at his desk. Dr. Clark was biting his lip. His thoughts were doing flip flops. "That's a baby dinosaur in there! I wonder if they know
Page 70
that? Yes, they know, and if they keep it a secret any longer, it will be a miracle." His thoughts became a loud whisper. "That's the discovery of a lifetime. There's a fortune in there on that table!"
He quickly returned to the animal in the examining room. He removed the thermometer. It read 103 degrees F. Knowing that the normal body temperature for a small mammal was around 102 degrees F, then there was only a slight fever. If this were a reptile his temperature would be about the same as the air. He again thought to himself, "This is a lizard that is warm-blooded! My God! Dinosaurs were warm-blooded! These guys must think they are dealing with a complete fool!"
Dr. Clark then tied a piece of rubber tube around Only's front right foot. He was now treating the animal as a mammal. The needle went straight into a leg vein, just like in a dog! He then hooked up a needle and tube to a bag of water containing sugar. He turned a little knob until the drip was at a steady flow. He excused himself again and went off to a small lab area next door for a white blood cell count. The count was normal. It looked like a case of diarrhea caused by who knows what. The dinosaur was suffering from a bad case of stomach virus and water loss. He did not want to send them away until he investigated this creature. He had an idea. Maybe they were as ignorant as they thought he was.
Mark whispered loudly, "Mr. Longstreet. Look!"
Only's eyes rolled down into the correct position. He began to open and close his mouth. An elephant-like foot began to kick slightly. Dr. Clark re-entered the room. "Well I can see he is responding to treatment." Dr. Clark made an attempt to look extra serious. "He shows evidence of a massive infection of a viral nature." Mark loved the way doctors talked. He could never understand a thing they said. "He will require monitoring and daily injections of
Page 71
antibiotics. I'd like to keep him here for at least twenty-four hours."
Mark looked at Chad and he returned the look. "Uh, well," Chad stammered for some time to think. "I can't give you any details, but this animal may be in the country illegally and has not gone through quarantine. We have to take him home, but I hope you will give us the instructions for care, and I will keep you posted by phone."
Dr. Clark did not want to seem pushy. "Well, he will need this needle in his leg for at least another hour. Can you wait?"
Again the Mark-to-Chad-to-Mark glance. "OK, we'll wait."
Bert excused himself and left the room. He went straight to his office and picked up the phone. Who would he call?
"Mark, I've known Bert since college days, and I never thought much of him. I think we had better get out of here."
Mark did not need to hear that twice. He put Only in the backpack and unhooked the bag of sugar water solution from the rack. They would leave, treatment and all. "Aren't we stealing?"
Chad reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. He put it on the counter and said, "Now we're not." They quietly slipped out the front door.
Page 72
Chapter Thirteen
The rain had stopped. As is always the case after a rain, the desert had taken on instant new life. The cactus seemed greener and the dusty brown colors had darkened. The air smelled fresh and felt a little cooler. Mark requested that Chad return him to the dig site for two reasons. One, he told Chad, was to get his bicycle. The other, which he kept to himself, was that he was not quite ready to tell anybody the location of Only's home base. Chad agreed to go directly to the site because he needed to check on his students.
As the white school van came to a halt at the edge of the yellow ribboned rectangle, a lone figure sat up in the seat of a giant earth mover about one hundred yards away. Shots focused his gaze on that van. Mr. Greenway had a special job for him and he would pay him overtime. He was to follow that kid and find out where he lived. He didn't get a reason, but he suspected that Mr. Greenway had found something broken or missing on the construction site. Most likely Shots would be tracking down some kid and trying to find a parent. Greenway was not fond of kids, and he tried to get one in trouble if he could.
Mark explained to Chad that he was aware of the importance of his find. He wanted to move slowly so as not to make any big mistakes like what happened to E.T. Mark was a very level-headed eleven-year-old. Chad did not want to lose the boy's confidence. He vowed to keep Only a top
Page 73
secret. Chad gave Mark three telephone numbers where he could be contacted day or night. He would work toward locating some trusted people to find out how to proceed in informing scientists, the community, and the entire world of the remarkable find. Now there were four people who knew about a baby dinosaur. That seemed like more than enough for right now.
Only was making a remarkable recovery and had begun to move around in the backpack. Mark spoke to him to keep him calm because he still had the needle and tube to his leg. "Mark, can you get home and still keep that needle in place?"
"I think so. Let's see."
Mark hung the plastic bag containing the liquid that just looked like water on the top button of his shirt and tucked the bag on the inside and buttoned it up. "How's that?" Mark grinned. "Do I look like I'm attached to a dinosaur?"
When the rain started, the students had covered the bone site with weighted plastic sheets. Chad got out of the van to make sure all the equipment had been locked away. Mark, with backpack in hand, had said his goodbyes and walked slowly and cautiously through the dunes toward his bicycle. Shots McCarthy, noticing that Mark was walking toward the residential street that bordered the south side of the site, sprang from his seat and sprinted to his car.
Shots was certainly no James Bond nor would he even come close while driving a 1979 Ford Pinto. Most of the car was an off-white while the left front fender was a deep red. He started it up, and a puff of smoke shot out of the rear. It was just yesterday that he replaced the old used muffler with a newer used muffler that was much quieter. The car would not go fast enough to be in a hurry, but he drove around the construction site and onto the access road. He circled the block and parked about two blocks from where he thought Mark would exit the desert.
Page 74
Mark did not realize the mistake, but he emerged from the desert pushing his bicycle over the curb about ten feet in front of the parked Pinto. Shots did a melting action into the seat.
Mark did not expect to see a car at the curb and was even more surprised to see someone duck down in the seat. He pretended not to notice. He got on his bicycle and pedaled up the street. He was going the opposite direction of where he lived. Shots, with a greasy baseball cap on his shaggy head of hair, peered over the dash and under the steering wheel. He waited until Mark rounded a corner, then started up the Ford and slowly chugged in that direction.
Mark began to look over his shoulder as Only started making a move to stick his head out of the backpack. The little dinosaur would just have to miss the scenery because his owner had other things to think about. Mark turned into the first alley and pedaled faster. At the end of the block he turned back toward the spot from where he had just left.
"Dogonit! Darn! Ding! Dang!" Shots muttered under his breath, "Where'd that kid go?" Shots took a left to circle the block and stopped at the sign two blocks up. Mark stopped in an alley at the edge of the street and peeked around a big bush. He saw Shots just sitting in the car picking his nose. He waited.
Shots thought to himself, "The boss is really gonna be mad. I'll tell him the kid took a quick turn and I lost 'im but he never seen me. I'll git 'im next time."
The ratty Pinto took off, and Mark stayed in the alleys all the way home. Now he had something else to think about. Somebody had discovered Only, and it looked like he was not a friendly type.
Page 75
Chapter Fourteen
Mark decided that the shed did not offer enough security for Only, so he would sneak him into his bedroom. His dad hardly ever even opened his bedroom door. He almost never came inside. He said he wanted to respect Mark's privacy, but if the truth be known, he was afraid of the mess he might find.
Mark had lived in this house since he was born. There had always been a neatly manicured yard with lots of well-placed stones, many different varieties of cactus, and some beautiful oleander bushes. His mother had gardened as a hobby. Her flowers were always the prettiest and her flower garden in the backyard had been a real showcase. The only time he had ever seen her raise her hand to strike at anything was at Obie when the big dog decided that the short bladed plants would make a good bed. She'd whacked him with a leaf rake. Obie had never shown much intellect, but he never went near that garden again.
Mark pedaled up the driveway and was a little saddened by the sight. He and his father were never much on yard work so the flowers were gone. The garden was now mostly sand and rocks along with the rest of the yard. His dad was home, and he parked his bike at the back door. He peeked in the kitchen window and saw his dad sitting on the couch in the living room. He sneaked up the back stairs.
Page 76
Only would have a new home in the closet. It was large and cluttered, but Mark could soon fix that. The stuff in the closet got moved to other places like under the bed. Mark learned right away that Only went to the bathroom about ten times a day! His dad did not have to enter the room to smell the stink. Mark was very careful to clean very often. Only not only resembled a pygmy rhinoceros, but he went to the bathroom like one.
Mark had carefully removed the tube and needle from Only's leg as soon as the little dinosaur began struggling to get up. Only was up and walking around the bedroom now almost as if nothing had happened. He was poking his little beaked snout into every corner and bulldozing a soccer ball. He tired of that game and then moved on to a catcher's mitt that he pushed around. He finally settled on a yellow tennis ball that he had pinned in a corner. He was drooling all over everything and having a great time.
"Hey! Deke here. Where you been all day?" The answering machine crackled and beeped. "Call me when you get home. I got a good-news bad-news thing to tell ya." Click. Deke always seemed to have news of some sort. Mark dialed his number.
Deke answered. "Hey, Mark. I tried to call lots of times, whatcha doin'?"
Mark told him to come on over and he would fill him in on the story. He asked him about the news. They had not talked since Deke had been to the doctor. Deke said, "Well you know I went to the doctor on Friday for some tests on these warts I got on my shoulder. Well, the good news is that all of a sudden everybody is being real nice to me. My dad even talked to me without hollerin'. The bad news is that they have to do a biotopsy or binopsey or somethin' like that because it may be a kinda skin cancer. I gotta go back on Monday. I'll be over in a little while."
Mark looked down at his hand where for years he'd had two ugly warts; now they had completely vanished. It made
Page 77
him think of another strange occurrence. Every summer he was attacked by fleas. He suspected they lived on Obie and just visited Mark's legs at dinnertime. The ugly bites covered his legs. It sometimes got so bad that he would have to get a note from his father when he wanted to swim in the city park pool. The guards thought he had some sort of contagious skin disease and would not let him near the water.
Mark looked down at his legs. Two weeks ago they were covered with big red bites. Now he counted just four. It seemed that after each bite he would scratch it one time, and the next thing he knew it was gone!
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Chad Longstreet sat cross-legged on the hot sand. The rains the day before had turned the desert into a steam cabinet. As he absentmindedly brushed the sand from the outline of a small bone fragment, the sweat rolled to the front edge of his hat. It dropped and quickly disappeared into the sand. All around him was a hubbub of activity. On Sundays he not only had his students help at the site, but there were more volunteers than he could command. These "weekend paleontologists" were really just people who wanted to spend some time outdoors in the desert. Some just came out to trade theories and share discoveries. Some of the younger ones just wanted to work side by side with members of the opposite sex.
Chad sat there silently having his entire life pass before his eyes. He was so excited he was having a hard time sitting still. There was a dinosaur alive and well and living with an eleven-year-old kid in Phoenix, Arizona! The questions came into his thoughts fast and furiously. The triceratops obviously hatched from an egg; surely there was not an undiscovered adult in the area? How could he get time to study the animal before the news broke loose about
Page 78
the discovery? The basic question just dawned on him: would he ever see the kid again?
He realized he was not making any progress just sitting there, so he ambled over to the field lab and went inside. He worked out of a small construction trailer that had been donated to the school a few years back. It had all the conveniences of home except that none of them worked. Any trip to the potty had to be taken in the field because the commode in the place had not functioned in years. It was now a storage closet for excavation rods with the little orange flags on top. All the windows were open, but the breeze seemed to refuse entrance across the sills. He sat down at the little desk and pulled out several reference books. He opened each one to the title ''Ceretopsids" and began to scan.
"SHORT-FRILLED CERATOPSIDS, Triceratops ("three-horned face") was one of the last and largest ceratopsids." Chad wondered what would happen if they somehow kept the secret until the dino weighed six tons and was thirty feet long. He would really be a big hit at a party! The text listed fifteen different species. Chad, along with most scientists, believed that some of these might be different ages of the same species. He might now be able to find out for sure. The descriptions below the drawings brought a weak smile to his face. "The reconstructed skeleton has led to different ideas about what this dinosaur actually looked like." Well, Chad knew for a fact! "It may have resembled illustration (B)." Pretty close. "Some experts show the tail outstretched. Some think that Triceratops had projecting toes, while others picture stumpy feet like those of an elephant or rhinoceros." Bingo! "Illustration (C) shows a recent reconstruction in which Triceratops' frill is covered by muscles to work the jaws and head." Right on!
Chad had already cleared up at least three theories, and he had only looked at the animal. The foods they ate were listed as "Probably" and included things like fronds of the
Page 79
palm-like cycads and spiky fronds of the true palm trees. One of the things he would have to investigate was finding palm tree leaves for food.
But, would he ever see Mark again? His heart skipped a beat, and he stared into space. As luck would have it he looked out the open window toward the dig site, and there were three young boys standing beside their bicycles watching the volunteers work. As bad luck would have it, Allen Greenway was looking out the window of his construction trailer window and was seeing the same thing.
Chad strolled up to the young spectators and gazed along with them. "You guys like dinosaurs?" he asked. Almost in unison they said yes. "We have located a species of duckbilled dinosaurs that were common in this area about seventy million years ago. That big bone sticking out of the rock is the femur, the upper leg bone of an adult duckbill." The boys faces were wide-eyed and openmouthed. Chad had never been one to dillydally. "Do you know a kid named Mark who lives around here? He's kinda tall and skinny, about your age?" There was a quick answer. "Yeah, he goes to our school. He lives right over there." The youngest, smallest of the three, the sun-browned kid with the baseball cap, cut-offs, and a sucker in his mouth, pointed to the south as if there were only one kid who lived in that direction. Chad got careful and he wasn't sure why. ''He was here the other day, and I was supposed to call him about some dinosaur information, but I lost the number. Do you know how I can find him?" The parental rule suddenly kicked in across the faces of each kid. They had learned not to talk to strangers and never to go with them or accept anything from them. Chad noticed the faces but pushed his luck. "Can you tell what street he lives on?" The youngest spoke up, "He lives in the only house on Hanover with an upstairs." The kid to his right punched him in the ribs.
Chad thanked the kids and walked to his van almost at a trot.
Page 80
Allen Greenway was on his feet. He was thinking quickly. "That bone jockey is headed for the dinosaur! Shots couldn't find his backside with both hands and a flashlight. I'll do it." With that he walked swiftly out to his pickup and waited. The white van pulled out and down the sand. The pickup was somewhere behind.
Chad followed the kid's instructions and drove slowly down Hanover Street. He had driven only three blocks when a small two-story, adobe-colored, frame house appeared. Chad slowed and made a note of the address then continued down the street. He did not want to contact the kid just yet. He would give him a little more time.
Greenway made the same notes, and he planned to visit the boy much sooner.
Page 81
Chapter Fifteen
Dr. Hiram D. Loftcut leaned back in his overstuffed leather office chair, unbuttoned two buttons on his vest, and peered at a piece of paper through his thick glasses. His office looked like what you would expect of an experienced doctor. Books lined the shelves. Most of them were as thick as telephone books and had titles that meant something only to a doctor. There were six eight-by-ten picture frames on his desk. His wife and five kids were all there smiling at him through glare-proof glass. His coffee cup sat there half empty. He drank somewhere around ten cups a day. Of course he knew that it might eventually kill him; after all he was a doctor. He always figured that coffee was the only substance he took into his body that would hurt him, and he would enjoy it anyway. He was a strict vegetarian. He didn't smoke or drink or stay out late. Coffee was it!
There were three stacks of case reports. He knew all of them by heart. You treat cancer patients for a lifetime. He had way too many patients to get personally acquainted; he really knew his reports. He was looking at a new one. He really disliked new reports because it always meant that another young person had cancer. As he scanned the page, he played a little game with his sanity. He remembered this little kid. His heart was sad because he was pretty sure he had identified his problem. NAME: Deke Johnson,
Page 82
DOB: 7-27-82, and then on down to the heartbreak, DIAG: Malignant melanoma.
The scene was always the same. He would leave the youngster in his examining room and have the parents seated in his office. The parents would be sitting at the very edges of their chairs. Faces would look as if they were filled with water and the dam was going to break at the sound of a word. Dr. Loftcut hated this part.
Deke sat on a little two-person couch in the waiting room of Southwest Children's Hospital. He shared his father's dislike for doctors but for different reasons. His dad believed that time heals just about everything. He did not want to pay a doctor to tell him that. Deke did not like to be poked and prodded by a friend, much less a strange person. He had only been to a doctor twice that he could remember. When he started school, he had to get what seemed like five hundred shots. Then there was the time he broke his arm when he jumped off the storage shed holding a sheet over his head. He vowed at the time never to trust parachutes.
His eyes were trained on a small aquarium on a cabinet by the couch. There were three live fish in the tank and one dead one. The live ones were taking turns taking bites out of the dead fish. If one fish approached the feast in the wrong order, the others would chase him away. The somewhat overweight nurse sat at the desk behind a sliding glass window. She looked like a giant third-grade kid. Her face was much too small for her bulk, and her short cropped blond hair hung straight down almost over her eyes. She seemed very busy.
He had been sitting there for what seemed like all morning, but it had only been a few minutes. The door opened and the nurse wiggled a finger for him to come. She was all smiles and seemed to be too happy. He was led into the doctor's office and to a waiting chair. His parents were smiling, the doctor was smiling, and Deke felt like they were up to no good. His dad never smiled at anything, but
Page 83
he was grinning from ear to ear. The doctor spoke in low soft tones, and suddenly all the smiles changed to looks of worry.
Deke listened as the doctor explained his test results and how he had the first stages of a type of skin cancer. He had always heard the word discussed among the grown-ups, and he had heard about it in class. Up to now it had just been one of those things that he ignored along with a lot of other things that he ignored! The doctor's face changed to more and more serious furrows and wrinkles as he spoke of the treatment. It would be in regular stages, and Deke started paying attention when the doctor mentioned side effects. He sat up much straighter when the doctor said "The chemotherapy will cause most of your hair to fall out." Deke raced the idea of baldness through his mind. He had always wondered why Michael Jordan didn't have hair. He knew why swimmers shaved their heads. He wanted to giggle, but the seriousness of the room held him at bay.
He would check into the hospital soon for some more tests and the first of the treatments. The doctor explained the food, television, and some of the activities that would be available. Deke thought about the idea of watching television until he went to sleep and being able to order any kind of food he wanted. So far all this did not sound all that bad.
Page 84
Chapter Sixteen
United States Office of Phenomenon InvestigationLester Miller
Lester Miller
All the doors in the hallway of the government building looked alike. The hallway seemed to be a block long and had doors about every twenty feet.
"INTERVIEW, INTERVIEW, SEARCH, SEARCH, INTERVIEW, LAB" It was a slow docket this week. There were only fourteen suspected nut cases that had gotten this far. Les flipped through the pages of forms and statements. He pulled one out. "My wife has been impregnated by an alien. The President of the United States believes me!"
"Let the President do all the paper-and legwork to find out you are a nut!" Les thought out loud. He moved through his daily workload with experienced hands. The traffic on Capitol Avenue was as noisy as usual and hummed through the window. The foot traffic was a bit slower because the temperature was in the upper nineties. The humidity seemed to be about twice that number. Cars and people were not moving very quickly. Les tried to open the window one time and hurt his wrist. These windows had not been opened since 1934.
When a report came to his desk, it meant that two other people he simply referred to as "they" had decided that the claim merited further investigation. It was not based on
Page 85
believability but more on "If we don't quiet this person, he is going to cause a big stink!" Les had been at this job six and a half years. He had heard the strangest claims of monsters, ghosts, and aliens. He had been on countless trips to investigate some of the most elaborate frauds one can imagine. Most of them were just well-meaning people who needed a little enlightenment.
Les had quickly narrowed the latest batch of reports down to three. He was only required to do a minimum of three trips a week. Even that seemed excessive to a man who really hated to fly. There was a geology lab in El Paso, Texas, that wanted to show him a glowing rock. There was a veterinarian in Phoenix, Arizona, reporting that a local resident was harboring a live baby dinosaur. The third was about a woman who claimed her yet-to-be-born baby's father was an alien. That one was in Denver, Colorado, and he kinda liked the mountains. He shuffled these reports into a folder and carried them out to Marg. She would make the reservations and contact those parties involved to set up appointments.
Marg, a grandmotherly type who had been working on writing a science fiction novel for the entire six years she had been at that desk, sat there smiling as usual. "Well Les, are you ready for your 'monster busting' trips for this week?"
"Not really, but there is one that you would like. There's a dog doctor in Phoenix who says there is a kid in town that has a live baby dinosaur. The kid is sneaking around trying to keep it a secret. If it were true, the kid would be holding out for the movie rights or a gazillion-dollar advance from a publisher. The last one I looked at turned out to be a guy in Florida who found an iguana without a tail out in the Everglades and swore it was a dinosaur."
"If it is a real dinosaur, be sure to call me. I'll wait up nights until I hear from you!" she laughed, and her cotton candy hair never wiggled.
Page 86
Chapter Seventeen
Mark sat on the edge of his bed and watched Only rooting around in a pile of dirty clothes in the corner. The animal was making soft grunting noises that reminded Mark of the pigs he had watched so many times at a pet shop a few blocks away. Obie sat quietly in the corner of the room and watched Only investigate. Mark smiled as Obie turned his head to one side and then the other as if to wonder and really consider the little prehistoric critter he saw in front of him. Mark knew there was nothing new here because Obie did the same thing when he was watching a cricket cross the floor.
His young mind was already wrestling with the importance of his discovery of a live dinosaur, and now there had been a new twist. He suddenly put two and two together. Each time he handled Only he got something on his hands that made them tingle. It seemed like only a few hours later that the warts had disappeared from his hands and all the flea bites he scratched went away. It was not enough that he had a live 65,000,000-year-old dinosaur, but he had a quick cure for skin conditions! He would have to call Chad and tell him about this.
He got down on his knees and crawled over to where Only was wrapped up in the leg of a pair of jeans. His tail was sticking out of the cuff and his nose had found the always present hole in the knee. Mark picked him up and
Page 87
put him on the bed. He wiped some of the drool on his hands and then rubbed a couple of the insect bites down near his ankles. He did not expect anything right away, but his hands were tingling as usual. His mind wandered to thoughts of Deke. The cancer had shown itself as dark moles on his collarbone, shoulder, and elbow. Would the drool work on cancer?
Just then the front door opened with a bang. "Hey, Mark, you home?" his father yelled. Mark decided at that very moment to let his dad in on the big secret. His memory faded back to his favorite movie, ET, and he realized that grown-ups could and would take anything they wanted from a kid. He would get no reasons and certainly no recognition. He decided he would explain first and then show his dad the proof.
Mark got up and walked quickly out the door and down the stairs. His mind was racing with doubt, fear, excitement, and just about all the things that make an eleven-year-old boy's heart pump. His, by the way, was up in his throat and trying desperately to exit by that route.
"Hey Dad! We need to talk."
John Phillips had had a good day and things had gone exceptionally well in the real estate business. The economic slump was hurting, but in his class of commercial real estate there was always some budding businessman wanting to spend someone else's money to make an attempt at success. The tone of Mark's voice started him guessing. Did he get chosen for something? Did he find a twenty-dollar bill? Had he discovered girls?
Mark literally bounced down the stairs and into the kitchen where his father was standing in front of the refrigerator and studying the contents looking for a snack. Mark sat down in a chair at the breakfast nook table, and with his elbows planted firmly on the formica he waited for his father to finish his food search. His father hohummed and approached Mark.
Page 88
"What's up?" His father sounded cheery and ready for just about anything.
"Good!" Mark thought. Mark was sitting quietly but body and mind were doing one hundred miles an hour. What if his father suddenly changed into a money hungry exploiter? What if his loving father suddenly decided to seize the creature and go public? Too many what-ifs were clouding his mind.
"You better sit down. I've got something important to tell you." Mark could almost hear his father's mind saying "Uh oh!" Mark took a deep breath and began right at the trip he and Deke had taken to the highway construction site. As he spoke he realized that he was talking faster and faster. His father noticed it too. "Slow down, son, you've got lots of time."
Mr. Phillips listened carefully as his facial expressions changed with each bit of further information. His first thought was that his son and friend had found some sort of exotic lizard that had escaped from the zoo, or it was somebody's pet. Mark then told his dad about the library research. Right at that point Mark suddenly stood up from the chair and claimed loudly, "It's a baby dinosaur!"
Mr. Phillips remained calm and asked simply, "Where is Only right now?" Mark grabbed his father's hand and started the run up the stairs. The sudden pull startled his father and he pulled his hand back. "Slow down! You're dealing with an old man here!"
Not knowing what to expect and thinking his son had made a recognizable mistake, he followed Mark up the stairs.
Obie, the furry doorstop, stood up suddenly as Mark and his father topped the stairs. The dog knew something was in the air, and the excitement caused him to start barking with great gusto. Mark slowly opened the bedroom door and peeked inside. There was a big ball of shredded newspaper
Page 89
in the corner that had not been there when Mark left the room. Another first. Triceratops made nests!
Obie stopped barking and went immediately to the pile of shredded paper and thrust in his nose. The pile jumped and suddenly there was a tiny horn sticking through the mass of paper. Mr. Phillips thought, ''The kid has found a baby rhinoceros." Mark knelt down and carefully began spreading the paper to either side. Mr. Phillips bent for a closer look. Only stuck out his head. Mark's father let out a low gasp. "Oh, smorgasbord" He caught himself. He was not one to cuss in front of anybody, especially his son.
Mr. Phillips sat down abruptly on the floor and stared. His mouth was open but there weren't any sounds coming out. Only looked at him with little beady eyes that seemed to sparkle. The little animal cautiously moved forward and sniffed Mr. Phillips' knee. For a moment, nothing moved.
Both the boy and the man began talking at once. Mark was babbling about what Only would eat and the fact that the drool had some kind of healing power for skin conditions. Mr. Phillips was firing questions about how many people knew about this animal and did he bite and a few more questions. When Obie started barking again there was a sudden silence as if someone had suddenly yelled for quiet.
Mark looked at his dad and his dad grinned back. "Mark, we have a lot to do!" Mark waited for the next response from his father. To his relief his father agreed with him about secrecy. The world would know about Only, but all in good time.
Page 90
Chapter Eighteen
The car sat at curbside on this very warm Arizona night. The man inside was crunched down in the seat so that only the top of his head was showing. He was watching the house on Hanover Street and waiting. He knew about the treasure inside, and he had become desperate to get it. The air was so dry and still that the man could hear himself breathe. There was no moon, and it was the darkest night that he could remember. Just then the front door opened and a man came out, followed by a boy. They seemed excited and were talking to each other and making quick exaggerated movements with their hands. They got into the car, backed out, then headed slowly down the street.
He would move fast because he either had the rest of the evening or just a few minutes to get what he wanted. He left his car and sauntered carefully down the sidewalk. It was about 9:30 p.m., and most of the neighbors were on their living room couches watching television. He casually strolled up the driveway and onto the front porch. He rang the doorbell. He had his story ready just in case there was an answer. His car had quit on him, and he would ask that someone call a wrecker. He had been watching the house for days, and he pretty well knew the pattern of when people came in or went out. He also knew about the seemingly dumb and always friendly dog.
Page 91
No response. He walked quickly to the backyard while staying in the shadows. The front of the house was well lighted but the backyard was dark as pitch. He had seen most of the activity of the two boys in and out of the small outbuilding at the back corner of the house. The little building was attached to the house by electrical wires. He was convinced that the dinosaur was in that little building. He quickly removed a large screwdriver from his hip pocket and inserted it between the doorjamb and the lock. One quick thrust and the door was open. He glanced around quickly and slipped inside.
The room was partially lighted by the reflector heat lamps that shown on some of the cages. He removed a small penlight from his pocket and began inspecting the dark aquariums. He got a tinge of fear when he discovered that all the tanks without lights contained snakes! He saw the large enclosure on the floor with its little rock cave. That must be it. He cautiously flashed the light into the cavern. Empty! Doggone it! The animal must be in the house.
As he turned to leave, he put his hand down on the counter, and a piece of paper stuck to it. He started to sling it away when an image on the brown paper caught his eye. He looked more carefully with his flashlight. It was an instant photo negative, and the image was that of a funny-looking lizard. This was a faint, dark negative of the dinosaur. The burglar took one step back and collided with a mass of electrical wires that all seemed to be plugged into one socket. Sparks flew and it looked a lot like a Fourth of July celebration. A glowing glob of fire that once was a plastic three-way plug fell into a stack of old newspapers. Mark used newspapers to line all his cages to catch creature waste.
The man picked up an old towel and instinctively began beating at the flames. He soon realized that he wasn't doing any good. Then he remembered that this was a burglary, and he really didn't care about a fire. It was time to leave!
Page 92
He dashed out the door still holding the photo negative and ran into the backyard. He jumped the fence and raced down the alley.
Professor Willis was sitting on his back patio enjoying a tall, cold glass of iced tea and the warm night air. The running man got his attention, and he walked briskly to the fence. He smelled smoke, and at that same instant he saw flame and smoke at the back of the Phillips' house. He rushed into his kitchen and called 911.
The flames quickly moved through the wooden building and to the eaves of the house. The wood shingles flared like flashbulbs. The fire entered the house near the kitchen and moved into the hall. At the top of the stairs Obie already knew that something was wrong and began his usual frenzied barking. The smoke filled the stairwell and moved quickly to the ceiling. Obie began scratching at the door. To his surprise the door came open. Only was just standing there sniffing and looking out the door and at the dog. This supposedly dumb dog began pushing the little dinosaur toward the open door. Something in his canine mind told him that they had to get out of there. Only was reluctant at first, but then he decided that Obie was wanting to play, so he dashed out into the hallway.
Just then a body moved up the stairs, and the person began whacking away at a closed door at the end of the hall. The firefighters were in the house. Obie ignored the man and herded Only to the top of the stairs. Only had been up and down these stairs a number of times when Mark had let him out for exercise. He did not hesitate to start down. Obie was close behind and was bumping Only's little grey rear end with every step. There was a flurry of activity in the kitchen with firefighters shouting and running everywhere. The smoke was thick and the only light came from the huge headlamps that the firefighters wore. The animal team hustled unnoticed toward the open back door. Once outside they moved quietly down the side of the house and stopped
Page 93
behind a big oleander bush. Obie was panting and coughing. Only just squatted in the dirt and began digging.
"Dad! It's our house!" Mark screamed as the car rounded the corner. Mr. Phillips drove up to the police barricade and was suddenly confronted by a uniformed officer who began yelling to back away.
"That's my house!" Mr. Phillips yelled.
"There's nothing you can do. You'll have to stay here!" The uniformed officer held out his arms so as to form a human barricade.
Mark screamed, "There are animals upstairs in the bedroom!"
The officer screamed back that the firefighters were in the house, and they would search for anything alive. Mark and his dad just stood there in stunned silence. The thoughts of a greater loss than anyone could imagine invaded their minds.
The professor returned to his back fence after he had made the call. He absentmindedly looked at his watch as if to time the arrival of the fire equipment. He thought about the reasons he paid taxes and whether or not he got his money's worth. He watched as the first truck arrived and the men bailed out to begin their task. He watched as each man performed a well-rehearsed set of procedures with all the precision of a drill team. He had a ringside seat as the firefighters hacked at the back door to gain entry. He almost missed the activity at the back door when what looked like a small dog appeared and was being pushed along by a bigger dog. He saw them scoot into the bushes and disappear. He saw Mark and his father arrive and confront the policeman. He could tell that they were yelling about the animals they thought to be in the house. Professor Willis had some information that they would want to hear.
Page 94
Chapter Nineteen
Mark and Mr. Phillips stood at the yellow ribbon barricade in absolute horror and frustration. The television people had arrived in great numbers. Before Mark and his dad could move, there were camera lights glaring and a very ugly black microphone stuck in both their faces. The neatly dressed newsperson was holding a headset to his ear and repeating numbers to himself. His hair was too perfect, and Mark could see some flesh-colored makeup that had rubbed onto his white shirt collar. "We go live in forty seconds, and I have a couple of quick questions. Your names?" Mark looked at his dad, who just nodded his head and shrugged his shoulders. The reporter quickly jotted the names on a card. "Is or was this your home?" Mark and Mr. Phillips nodded in unison.
"This is Art Woodward with the News 9 on the spot. We are here tonight coming to you live from the home of Mark and John Phillips. A real tragedy has taken place here. Fire has all but destroyed this home in this quiet Phoenix suburb. Mr. Phillips, was anybody hurt in the fire?"
"No," he replied just after he had made a silent decision not to elaborate on the topic. He had always disliked the way reporters jumped on a story with total disregard for the emotions of the people involved.
"Were you in the house when the fire started?"
Page 95
"No," again came the short answer. The reporter sensed he had a nontalker here so he trailed off with his own account of the event.
Chad was slouched on the couch staring at the space between his nose and the television. Suddenly he sat up and pressed the volume control of the remote. "It's that kid!" He startled himself with his exclamation. He reached into his pocket and fished a slip of paper out and stared. "The kid's house burned down! The dinosaur!" Chad put on his shoes and rushed out the door. Mark lived only a few miles from his apartment.
Chad Longstreet arrived at the scene, and he soon spotted Mark and hurried that way. Mark saw Chad coming and tried to tell his dad who it was and why he was so interested. Just then Professor Willis walked up.
"Mark, I thought you would want to know that I saw Obie and another dog come out the back door right after the firemen chopped it down. Both dogs walked into the hedge just as the firemen entered the house. They were OK but I did not see them when I looked into those bushes." Mark looked at his dad and then at Chad.
"Which bushes?" asked Mr. Phillips.
"Come on, I'll show you," replied Professor Willis. The troop walked slowly around the perimeter of the police yellow tape to the hedge by the fence at the side of the house.
A policeman yelled, "Sorry, you can't go around there. It's not safe."
"Officer, I think my dog may be hiding in those bushes," said Mark.
Just then there was a rustle beneath the bushes. First a big black nose followed by a panting red tongue, and Obie stuck out his head. "Come on, boy," Mark called. Old man Willis didn't notice, but Mark, Mr. Phillips, and Chad looked past the dog into the bushes. Mark was wondering
Page 96
what would happen if Only suddenly appeared. He would have some fast talking to do.
"Well, thanks for telling us about our dog. We sure do appreciate it."
Professor Willis scratched his head. "But I thought I saw two dogs come out the back door."
Chad suggested, "Maybe in the confusion it just looked like two animals."
Mark and Mr. Phillips continued to look around the bushes. Mark nudged the professor's elbow in an effort to guide him away. "Thanks again for your help. We had better get Obie back to the car. He looks pretty nervous."
The professor wandered back toward the front of the house. The smoke had cleared and the firefighters were pulling down chunks of roofing and drowning everything with water. Hisses and steam filled the night air. Mark, Chad, and Mr. Phillips were digging through the bushes frantically. Their burned home seemed to matter very little at the time. Obie was whining and running up and down the hedge row. He stopped suddenly at an open patch of flower bed and began barking wildly. The three hunters converged on the spot. There was some freshly turned earth, and a gray ridge of thick skin protruded from the surface. Only had dug in and was waiting for further developments. "He's acting like an armadillo on the defense," Chad proclaimed.
"I thought it was more like an ostrich. He got scared and buried his head!" Mark gently scraped the loose dirt from both sides of the animal. A beaked snout appeared through the dirt. Only wiggled out of the soil and seemed to be glad to see everybody. Obie began digging in the hole as if to look for another dinosaur.
"We need to get out of here before someone comes around," Chad said as he picked Only up and covered him with his jacket. He then looked at his tingling hands. "Agreed," said Mr. Phillips. "Let's get to the car."
Page 97
They looked around. The policeman had walked off and no one was watching. Chad walked along and was acting like an overprotective mother.
Mr. Phillips said, "Well, I guess we will head for the nearest motel. If they ask about pets, Mark, keep your mouth shut!" They all laughed. Mark mumbled something about how he was glad Deke was not here because he would certainly have had something to say.
Mark thought about the snakes and lizards that died in the animal shed and hoped they hadn't suffered. Obie and Only were his only pets now, and her wasn't about to tell anyone else about the dinosaur. Mark, Chad, and Obie hurried toward the car while Mr. Phillips stopped to talk to the fire captain to find out when it would be safe to enter the area and check for anything that may have survived the fire. Only was safe for now. Or was he?
The pickup truck was still parked in the next block and the occupant was slouched in the seat watching with great interest. He lost sight of the boy and the men when they disappeared around the back of the house. He noticed when three of them returned that one of them had something concealed under his coat. He suspected what it was. He would follow and watch. The instant camera negative was lying on the dashboard. A lab could get a print from the dark, gooey image on the paper. He had a bit of proof.
Page 98
Chapter Twenty
"We are sorry. The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please consult. . . . ."
Deke had tried Mark's number three times and had gotten that recording. He thought maybe you had to dial nine or something to call out of the hospital, but the operator told him to just dial direct. Deke had checked into Southwestern Children's Hospital this morning, and this was the first time he had been alone. His mother had stepped out for something to eat, and his dad had to return to work. Herman Johnson was real happy to go to work today because he just could not stand hospitals.
Deke had been poked and prodded all morning. Both arms were sore, and he had a tough time lying on his backside. The other bed in his room was empty, but the nurse said he might have company by the end of the day. He was told he would be in the hospital for at least three days for tests and to begin his therapy. So far it had not been all that bad. He got to order his lunch, and he just checked everything on the menu. To his surprise most of it showed up. He had a lot of fun with all the buttons on the bed. One button raised the head. Another raised the feet and the third made the center of the bed rise up like the birth of a new mountain. The third time the nurse came in to ask what he wanted, she was a little miffed and told him not to press the CALL button unless he really needed something.
Page 99
He listened to her dumb story about a kid and a wolf, but it was a groaner. He was looking forward to dinner.
Mark sat on the floor of the motel room and dialed again. Again it just continued to ring. Deke's mother was always at home. Mark knew she grocery shopped on Tuesdays but this was Wednesday. Mr. Phillips had been on the phone since they had arrived at the motel. He was trying to call insurance companies and utilities about the fire. This was all new and he was finding out quickly that people just did not grasp the situation when the conversation started with ''It was all destroyed in a fire."
Chad was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch. He had a death grip on his camera and was aiming it at Only. The little dinosaur was having a great time sniffing around the furniture and gathering dust balls on the end of his little nose horn. Chad had finished one thirty-six-exposure roll and had started another.
Mark was scanning the phone book because he remembered Deke's neighbor's last name was Weimer. There were only three Weimers in the Greater Phoenix directory. He got the right one on the first call. Mrs. Weimer knew Deke had gone to the hospital because Mrs. Johnson had asked her to turn off the water sprinkler at mid-morning. Mark called the hospital.
"I found you! Boy have I got a lot of news!" Mark spoke faster and got more excited as he talked. He stopped to take a breath when Deke told him to slow down.
"You act like you are in a house fire!" Deke told Mark. Mark had not even gotten to that part, and now he really talked fast. After he had completed the whole story, he went back to the most important part, the possible cure for Deke's cancer. Mark was as serious as he had ever been about anything. Deke was just being Deke.
"You're telling me that you think dinosaur spit will cure skin cancer?" Deke put his hand over his mouth to stifle a giggle.
Page 100
"I'm not saying anything like that, but what would it hurt to try it?" Mark knew even over the phone that Deke was laughing. With Deke finally saying what the heck, might as well, it was decided that they would try an experiment with the dinosaur drool as soon as possible.
The hospital was a bicycle trip away, and Mark said he would come just as soon as things settled down. Mark and his dad had to take Obie to the veterinary clinic to be boarded for a while. They returned and Mr. Phillips had to go to his office to handle some business that could not wait, fire or no fire. Chad had used all the film he had, and it was class time. Everybody had gone, and Mark settled Only into a big cardboard box he had pilfered from the alley behind the motel. He tore the morning newspaper into strips and made a little nest in one corner. He walked next door to the grocery store and bought some lettuce, carrots, apples, and some cereal for Only's breakfast. He cut it into small chunks and put it in a paper plate. He had already made the mistake of putting Only's food in a used Styrofoam Chinese food package. Only disregarded the vegetables and began to eat the styrofoam. That could not be instinct but only ignorance. Mark watched bathroom material for a week waiting for the plastic to work its way through, but it never came. That bothered him.
Mark had rescued his bicycle from the house because it was parked out by the hedge. His father was always on him for not putting the bike in the garage. This was one time he was glad he had forgotten. He walked it out the motel room door and into the warm Arizona morning. Across the street sat an old pickup truck. There were two men inside. Al Greenway and Shots McCarthy watched as the young boy straddled his bicycle and pedaled down the street. There had been three people in last night and three out this morning. It was time to move.
The sun was well up in the clear sky. The rush-hour traffic had thinned and the streets were not crowded. The
Page 101
hospital was about eight blocks from the motel, and Mark arrived in about twenty minutes. He had stayed pretty much on the sidewalks because he had never trusted traffic. His dad had always said that people should not play with their toys in the street, and he meant bicycles.
Mark had settled into a big overstuffed chair in the lobby of the hospital. He was fingering a small plastic prescription bottle through the pocket of his shirt. He thought how funny it was that every time his dad wanted to open one of these child-proof bottles he would hand it to him to open. He grinned when he thought of what he would say if someone asked, "What ya got in the bottle, kid?" Mark thought he might just say, "Oh, it's just some dinosaur spit!" He was pretty sure that would end the conversation.
The hospital was busy for a Monday morning. Mark had not been inside a hospital since his mother died. He watched as the elevator doors opened and a nurse wheeled a young girl out the door. She was immediately surrounded by three small children who were jumping up and down and saying "Sis! Sis!"
He was too old at the time to jump up and down, but he did remember that the hospital was the last time he saw his mother alive. He remembered that she came down in a wheeled chair being pushed by his very sad-faced father. She was thin and frail and connected to all sorts of tubes and wires. All the medical stuff was on a little cart that rolled along behind the wheelchair. That seemed so long ago.
He had no way of knowing that he was being very sneaky for no real reason. He figured he could get by the nurses' station if he wandered in with a family. He went in and out of the elevator waiting for a group of three or more going to the fourth floor. He got his family on the third try. There was mom, dad, son, and two daughters. He tagged along just behind the slowest sister and right past the nurse sitting at the desk.
Page 102
The family turned left down the hall, and Mark hooked a right. "Rooms 401-423" the little sign on the wall said. Mark used his best commando techniques to move from door to door. A dodge here and there seemed appropriate, although any nurse who might be watching might have thought he was out of his mind. One quick dash behind a food tray cart and he moved into room 407. Deke was lying on his stomach fast asleep, and fortunately he was alone. The place looked like the game room at the toy store. There were puzzles, comic books, Legos, and Tinker-toy pieces everywhere.
"Hey Deke!"
The body on the bed didn't move. "Deke, wake up, it's me."
The body moaned. "Huh, what?" Deke opened his eyes.
"Wake up!" Mark whispered very loud. "You look like death warmed over."
Deke replied, "Well you wouldn't win any beauty contest, and you're not even sick!"
After Deke cleared his head and started the conversation, he would not stop talking. He had to tell Mark about everything that had happened to him since he checked into the room. Mark listened patiently and then cut in while Deke was taking a breath. "Let me see the sores," Mark asked. Deke pulled down the little blue gown and exposed a shoulder. There were about six or eight bumps that looked like very red moles. Deke's skin was so tan that the moles had to hit the light just right to be seen.
"Did you bring the dino spit?" Deke laughed. Mark took the medicine bottle out of his pocket and handed it to Deke. "OK, how do I do this? If you say just a little pinch between the cheek and gum, I'm going to tell you where you can put this stuff," Deke laughed again. He stuck his finger into the goo and dabbed a little on the first mole. "How do you know this stuff is good? It may get old and won't work after a little while."
Page 103
Mark looked at Deke's finger. "Does your finger tingle?"
Deke looked at his finger and then at the mole. "I've got a finger that tingles and the bump is jumping!" Mark knew it was working and he told Deke to put some on all the moles he could find. Deke said, "I've got one on my rear end that I can't reach. You want to do that one?"
Mark grinned, "If that's the one that determines if you live or die, it's been nice knowing you!"
They were both laughing when a nurse walked in the door. Deke put the bottle under the cover. Mark looked out the window like he had been in the room since day one. The nurse just smiled and said hi and checked one of the dangling bottles that was attached to Deke by a tube. She left.
"How long before we know if this stuff did anything?"
"I'm not sure, but it seemed like it was only a couple of hours before the bites on my legs were gone."
"I guess all I can do is wait. What are you doing today?"
Page 104
"I've got to get back to the motel. My dad doesn't know I came down here. If he knew what I was doing, he would have stopped me. You know how he likes everything to be just so-so. He doesn't like experiments. He would rather wait for a sure thing."
Mark said his goodbyes and did his commando thing down the corridor to the elevators. He was soon on his bicycle and pedaling back to the motel.
Page 105
Chapter Twenty-One
All Chad could think about was the dinosaur in the motel room. He parked in the faculty lot in the wrong place. He had an ongoing battle with the campus police about the parking situation. He threatened to buy the lot if he ever won the lottery. Then he would just have it named after himself, and the campus police would not be allowed beyond the gate.
In his office at his desk, he picked up a pile of little pink telephone slips and flipped through them as he hurried down the hall toward his classroom. He had five minutes before all those eager faces would look to him for the volume of notes and assignments. He walked in and sat down just in time for the student aide to open the door and catch his attention. "Professor Longstreet, there's a guy in the Dean's office who's been waiting for you since nine o'clock. His name is Lester Miller. He is from the United States phenomenon of something."
Chad certainly wasn't expecting anyone. "Ask him to come down here."
One student after another came in the door as the time for class was at hand. Les Miller stopped at the door and knocked. "Yes, can I help you?" Chad looked him up and down, and a little chill ran down his back. The dark suit, the power tie, the short hair, thin buildoh yes, he looked very much like a government man. Les introduced himself and
Page 106
told Chad that he needed to talk to him about a matter in private. Chad was still in the dark, but asked if he could wait for the fifty-minute class and he would meet him in the Dean's office.
Chad walked into the conference room, and Les was sitting at the head of the table thumbing through a stack of papers. Chad sat down two chairs away. "I'll get right to the point. I have found over the years that most of my work can be accomplished in the first five minutes of an interview." Les explained what he did for a living. He told Chad that he had to investigate reports of strange and unusual happenings. His duties covered just about everything that was not classified as a UFO. Chad listened and began getting more and more nervous. This guy had heard about Only. He knew he could not lie to a government official, but he also knew that Only was not yet ready to meet the world. Les went on to explain the report received by his office. The laws would not permit him to give the name of the reporter. One of the reasons he got so many reports was the fact that these misguided people did not have to identify themselves. Chad was wishing at that moment that he could become unknown.
"My report says that you have a baby dinosaur. To be more specific, the information I have says it is a baby triceratops. Now let me tell you, I'm expecting to hear about some exotic lizard that has only been seen by a few people, and you are about to tell the scientific world of your discovery. They'll name it after you. Right?"
Here was an easy way out. "You're good at your job. True, it is a yet-to-be-identified form of reptile." No lies so far Chad thought. "We're subjecting it to further study before we go public." Still the truth. Les listened and had a matter-of-fact look on his face. Chad began to take regular breaths.
Les continued, "I'll need to see the creature and take photographs in order to complete my report. May we do
Page 107
that real soon? I'd love to spend this weekend at home." Uh oh! Chad had to think fast.
"Well, we have found that the animal is extremely nervous. Even the mere sight of a human being sends him into a near faint. Perhaps I could take the photos at the first opportunity and send them to you. We could do that as soon as the animal calms down and he begins to eat. We do not want to jeopardize his health by frightening him so that he won't eat."
"I wish it were that easy, Professor, but I must personally view and record everything contained in my report. I'm sure that we could set up a situation where I could photograph the animal without scaring him." Chad asked himself how he could stall, but there was no answer coming.
"It's late now and I'm tied up in meetings after class, and I must attend an award banquet tonight. Could you meet me here first thing in the morning, and we can work from there?" Les raised an eyebrow. This guy was suddenly trying to avoid any further contact. There was something up, because this professor was not any good at hiding information. Les had seen the best.
They exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to meet in the Dean's office at nine o'clock the next morning. Les noticed as they shook hands that Chad was very nervous, and his hand was sweating. His instincts told him to hide, wait, and watch because, as his grandaddy always said, "There's somethin' rotten in Denmark!" That really did not mean anything to him as a child, and he had never taken time to investigate the phrase as an adult. He would get no sleep on this night.
Page 108
Chapter Twenty-Two
There was a big card hanging on the outside of the motel room door. "CAUTION, This area is guarded by an attack snake!" That little bit of information was just enough to keep a housekeeper from nosing around.
At that very moment, Only's world consisted of three solid walls, one folding room divider, and about ten square feet of linoleum tile. He was closed off in the bathroom-dressing room area of the motel room. There was a pile of shredded newspaper in the corner by the bathtub which his human caretaker had provided. He used the mess for burrowing and when he made a nest for taking a nap. He had added an entire roll of toilet paper, one little sheet at a time, and all the Kleenex tissues that he dug out of a low mounted box by the dressing counter. He had been pacing the floor and had established a path that circled the room. Near the commode there was a water dish and what was left of the meal that was placed there first thing this morning. He had enjoyed two big bunches of fresh kale, one half of a cantaloupe, two carrots, six buns of shredded wheat, and three slices of wheat bread. He also had eaten about three-fourths of the paper plate.
He had to move, and he made hundreds of circles, always the same direction, always with no sense of accomplishment. His big toenailed feet made a rhythmic tapping
Page 109
noise on the tile. He resembled a very animated wind-up toy as he made his mindless rounds.
A soft, low, crackling noise caught his attention and he stopped in his tracks. He lifted his horned, hooded head and cautiously sniffed the air. His ears perked up and he listened.
Two men quietly approached the door. One of them read the sign and backed up. The other just grinned and began to work on the door with a plastic credit card. ''Shots, you said this would be a snap. What's takin' you so long?"
Page 110
Shots backed away from the door and looked in his hands. "Your credit card broke off, boss. You got another one?" Al Greenway fumbled in his back pocket for his billfold and opened it to pull out another piece of expensive plastic which he handed to Shots McCarthy.
"Hurry up!" Al looked nervously around watching for the inevitable maid and cart that could be coming around the corner at any moment. Shots put the credit card between the door and the jamb and pushed. The door swung open and the two slipped quickly inside. Only squealed. He expected that his friends had returned and he would get some attention. He was not too crazy about being alone. He would naturally be with his mother, brothers, and sisters at this point in his little life, and his instincts made him yearn for protective company.
"Bring the bag and find the lizard!" Al whispered loudly at Shots. Shots pulled the folding room divider back about a foot, and a long gray nose with a spiked horn on top stuck through the opening.
Shots hollered, "Hey, does this thing bite?"
"Shhh!" came loudly from Al's mouth. A small spray of spit hit Shots right in the face. "He can't bite through that tow sack. Get him in it!"
Shots opened the bag right at Only's face and backed him into the corner near the sink counter. Only had no choice but to enter the burlap sack. Shots quickly closed the mouth of the bag and tied it shut with a piece of shoestring.
"OK, boss. I got 'im." Al stuck his head slightly out the door and looked both ways. The path was clear, and they walked briskly out the door and down the sidewalk.
Page 111
Chapter Twenty-Three
Shots McCarthy lived in a trailer house that was situated at the edge of an auto graveyard seven miles north of the city limits. He lived alone and could afford better, but he smoked, ate, and gambled way too much. The property was fenced and was guarded by a dog. The animal really deserves a better description: He was a mistreated, muscular, vicious, snapping, snarling, sixty-pound hunk of flesh cruncher.
Al and Shots arrived with their captive and parked the truck at the side of the trailer away from the road. It was late afternoon, and the sun was bearing down on everything, making it too hot to touch. The devil dog rushed the fence in a growling, frothing burst of speed. Shots unlocked the gate. He pulled out a baseball bat that had been sawed in two so that the big end was missing, and with one quick snap of his wrist he smacked the snarling dog right between his ears. The dog did not flinch. Instead he stopped his noisy fury and meekly trotted over to the wood shingle skirt that surrounded the base of the trailer. He disappeared through a hole. The dog and Shots had obviously been through this ritual before. He always told witnesses that this did not hurt the dog. It took a smack to get the dog's attention!
Al did not get out of the truck. He rolled down the window and spoke to Shots, who was holding the sack
Page 112
containing Only. Shots held the sack as if it contained a poisonous snake.
"Hide 'im someplace and I'll call you later."
"What does he eat?" Shots asked.
"He's a lizard, so I guess he eats bugs. You got bugs don't you?" Shots just mumbled to himself. "And don't forget to set that charge like I told you." Al drove away in a cloud of sand. He was in a big hurry to get to a phone. He had the idea that the tabloids would pay big bucks for the story. His mind was filled with dollar signs, and he was already working on his story of how he found the dinosaur in the desert. He had even planned for any effort by the authorities to take the animal by force. The booby-trapped van was his ace in the hole. He would ransom the little creature for millions!
Shots walked toward the front yard mumbling under his breath. "Yea. Right. Bugs, he says. Where am I gonna git bugs. I don't like bugs. I squash bugs!" He walked to a raised hump in the yard that was covered by a square piece of flat metal.
The trailer was old and totally run down, but it was new to this site. There used to be an old house here, but it simply fell down. There were piles of boards and asphalt shingles around the fence line. The previous residents were really afraid of tornadoes or nuclear fallout. They had buried an old Ford Econoline van under the sand. There had been canned fruits and vegetables lining the wooden shelves at one time. There were still a few musty, rusty cans left. The roof above the cab had been cut away and the piece used as a hinged door. Wooden stairs made of two-by-fours led straight down from the door to the floor. It was a six-by-ten, tomb-like cellar.
Shots slipped down the stairs and placed Only in the bag on the sand-covered floor. The van was empty, and Shots shined his flashlight around because he sensed something moving. He thought right away that his lizard food problem
Page 113
was solved. There were big black crickets all over the place. Shots put a coffee can on the floor and then dumped water in it from a plastic milk jug. The bottom of the can was rusted out so the water just went straight into the sand.
Shots climbed out of the hole and picked up a small wooden box that he had placed near the door. He carefully
Page 114
removed the lid and took out two wound sticks of dynamite. There was a little black plastic box taped to the sticks with a wire running from it to the explosive. He took it back through the door and down the ladder. He placed the charge on a small shelf above one of the van windows. "Why would he want a bomb in the hole with the lizard?" he asked himself. Greenway made it a point not to tell Shots much of anything. "This all sounds like trouble is on its way, and I'm gonna be right smack dab in the middle! I don't like it a bit. Not one bit!"
Shots did not like this whole idea. He was a lot of things, but he was no burglar. He certainly knew how to blow things up, but he was always careful not to hurt anybody. He was not real sure why this little lizard that looked like a baby rhinoceros was so important, but he really did not want it in a hole a few feet from his house. Shots had been in trouble with the police before, and this thing he was doing almost guaranteed he would deal with them again.
Page 115
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mark parked his bike at the motel room door and used his key in the lock.
He just knew that his trip to the hospital would do something to help Deke. He was convinced that Only's spit would save the day.
He noticed immediately that the folding room divider was open! His heart jumped up in his throat, and he glanced frantically around. Under the bed, under the couch, under the dressing counter, all through the shredded paper: No Only! The door was locked. Where could he be? He looked again and again, and there was no sign of Only. He had to call his dad. Mr. Phillips was out of the office, so he left a message. He called Chad. He was in class so Mark left a message.
He called Deke. "Only is gone!" he screeched into the phone.
Doctor Loftcut was at that moment standing at the foot of the bed in Deke's hospital room. He was flipping through test results from that morning, scratching his chin, shaking his head, and making other movements of a confused and bewildered man. He had known that all types of cancer could go into complete remission. He had never seen or heard of malignant melanoma that was this advanced to
Page 116
just completely disappear! He was a witness to a miracle that simply could not happen.
Doctor Loftcut left and was still scratching his head as he called Deke's parents to inform them that Deke could check out as soon as they could come and get him.
"Mark, I'll be able to blow this joint about lunch time, and I'll meet you at your apartment. That dinosaur can cure cancer!"
Page 117
Chapter Twenty-Five
Only had been in this hole for a couple of hours, and he was already getting thirsty. He rooted around in the damp sand trying to get some moisture. He stuck his head in an empty coffee can looking for water. The can got stuck, and it was panic time! His first burst of forward movement ran him straight into the van wall. That hurt. He staggered back and dashed off in another direction just to hit the wooden stairway with a bang. He got lucky when the can caught on the edge of a step. He pulled back and the can slid off. Lesson learned: keep your head out of things. As Only paced around and around his rectangular cell, the crickets moved in unison from one side to the other to avoid being stepped on. Only gave them an occasional glance. He seemed to be totally disinterested. He stopped at the base of the steps and gazed upward. The sun was beginning to set, and the fading light cast an eerie beam from the crack around the door onto the sandy floor. Only was not an animal that instinctively cared what was going on above. His mother would have protected him from any airborne predator. As an adult his major enemy would be at ground level. It was the light that got his attention.
He gingerly lifted his elephant-like foot and placed it on the bottom step. That was followed by the other foot and he stretched his head upward. He began climbing the steps. One, two, three, slip, plop! He hit the sandy floor with a
Page 118
bump. Somehow in his little prehistoric set of instincts, he sensed that he was trapped and there was a real danger present. His pacing action was getting him nowhere. His actions then changed to a focus on climbing those stairs and getting out of that hole.
He started up again. There was no thinking, planning, or strategy involved on his part. But Only attacked those steps twenty-three times, and each time he made it up four steps then plopped back into the sand. On the twenty-fourth try he was stretched onto the fifth step. He was two steps away from the door.
He stopped almost as if to think about his situation. Actually he was simply trying to move from the darkness to the light. He was not too far beyond the same prehistoric drive that causes a moth to flutter around the back porch light. He lifted a front foot onto the sixth step. Slowly he lifted the other foot and at the same time one hind leg moved up and caught the two-by-four board.
Now his head was against the edge of the metal door. His footing was firm, and he pressed with all he could muster. He turned his head sideways and stuck his beak and nose horn out through the ever-widening crack.
The evening air was cool and dry. The aroma seemed to give him an extra burst of energy. He hit the door with all his might. The door went up and then came down on his lip! He squealed in pain and fell down the steps and onto the dirt floor. He lay there licking his wounded lip. That hurt!
Page 119
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shots mumbled quietly as he stuffed clothes into a pillowcase. ''I been in jail enough. I ain't goin' back because of some dumb lizard!" He had already made a few trips to the car with his belongings. There was not a lot of his stuff to pack because all his life he had been traveling light. "Bro will hire me. He pays good. He won't all the time be tellin' me what to do." Shots' brother was a production supervisor for a small company in Ohio that manufactured freight pallets. He could build pallets from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, eat and drink until he fell asleep on a couch, and then get up and go back to work. It would be the good life.
All finished. He still had two phone calls to make. He called animal control to report an abandoned dog. He mentioned that the dog was vicious. He then called Mark's motel and asked to connect with room 127.
Mark was sitting on the couch wringing his hands and shooting quick glances at the phone. Deke was stalking a fly with his thumb and forefinger in a make-believe pistol. The fly would eventually land, and Deke would dispatch him with a flick of the finger.
Obie was sprawled on one end of the couch with his massive head slouched on a towel. Mr. Phillips had to retrieve him from the kennel. It was at their request. It seems that from day one Obie had not been a suitable
Page 120
tenant. He tried to attack anyone who approached him at the kennel. He refused to eat. He barked constantly and scratched continuously. He had worn his toenails down to the foot pads. The kennel personnel were worried that he was going to kill himself if he had to stay any longer.
Chad and Mr. Phillips had gotten their messages about the same time and had rushed to the motel. Chad, Mr. Phillips, Mark, and Deke sat around the room and waited. The television was blaring, but nobody was paying any attention.
Les began to nod off. He had been sitting in his car across the street from the motel all morning. He had been watching Chad Longstreet for the last three days. The interest in the little "lizard" had taken on a new meaning. At the flip of a radio switch he would summon a team of United States Office of Phenomenon Investigation personnel armed with capture equipment, isolation trailer, and enough legal paperwork to seize a whole herd of phenomenons. He still waited for some clue that the animal was actually being kept in the motel room. He watched and he waited.
The telephone rang. Mark answered. Everyone in the room sat up and paid attention. The television was clicked off. "Hello," Mark said nervously.
"Listen and don't ask questions. The lizard is in a hole under a metal door at the north end of an old house trailer on the left side of the desert Auto Dump. There is a dynamite charge in the hole and it can be set off by remote control. You will want to ask Al Greenway of C.C. and Son Construction about that." Click! Mark had been repeating the words as they were spoken and Chad was scribbling on the back of a paper towel as fast as he could. Mark hung up the phone, and everybody started for the door except Chad. "Wait!" Chad raised his hand in a halt position. "We can't charge out of here without some sort of plan." Mark, Deke,
Page 121
and Mr. Phillips pulled chairs over to the table where Chad sat.
Everybody seemed to have a different idea. "Let's get weapons and go to Only's rescue!" Deke exclaimed.
"We could go straight to the hole and take Only out before this Greenway guy even knows we were there," Mark added.
Chad chimed in, "If Greenway lives in this trailer, there might be a problem. Even if he doesn't, he would have somebody watching it."
Mr. Phillips said, "If he has the place booby-trapped, he must have some sort of ransom in mind."
"I think we should just go to the place and watch it for a while," Mark suggested. "If there isn't a sign of life, we can go in and look for the hole."
Agreed. They all got up at the same time and headed for the door. "Shotgun," Deke yelled. If he could not be the driver, he at least wanted to sit in the front seat. Everybody made a face at him. He seemed oblivious to the seriousness of the moment.
Obie was doing his doggie dance at the door. Instinctively, he knew that the chase was on. Mark and his father knew that he could not be left behind because he would destroy the motel room. When the door opened he bounded to the car.
They piled into Chad's car and started off down the road and toward the Arizona sunset. The sound of the engine woke Les, and in his haste to start his car he fumbled with the ignition switch. He followed. As he drove, he dialed a number on his car phone. He would put his team on the alert because this could be the time.
The light was just disappearing on the horizon when the car stopped at the iron gate to the wrecking yard. They could see hundreds of automobile skeletons through the broken plastic that was wound through the eight-foot-high cyclone fence. This fence was supposed to hide the eyesore
Page 122
from public view. Cheap material and shoddy construction had long since produced a see-through, ratty-looking structure.
They sat quietly and focused on a junky-looking trailer house just north of the plastic and wire fence. There were no lights and all the windows were covered with cardboard. The night air was still and there was no sign of life. Obie began to whine and scratch at the window. "Let's go in," Deke whispered.
"There may be dogs or booby traps or people with guns or something," replied Mark.
"We'll wait until it gets dark and then go up. There is a full moon tonight, and we will be able to see even without the flashlights," said Mr. Phillips. Chad agreed and began to pet Obie in an effort to calm him down and keep him quiet. Obie squatted nervously in the floor of the back seat. His huge muzzle rested on the window frame. The drool dripped down the door onto the armrest.
The group never looked behind. If they had, they would have noticed a car approaching and stopping in the middle of the block. Les held his mobile telephone to his ear. "I want you guys to gather at least two blocks north of my location. Sam, you and Ted circle from the south and park at the corner there by that mailbox. All of you stay out of sight until you hear from me." Les could see the trailer, the fence, and Chad's car from his vantage point. He would wait until it appeared that somebody had a dinosaur in hand before he and his men moved in.
In Chad's car there was at least one hand on each car door handle. The waiting was becoming agonizing. "OK. Move slowly, be quiet, watch where you are stepping, and let's go!" This exclamation from Mr. Phillips made everybody jump. "Put the leash on Obie and hold on. I'd rather leave him in the car, but if he starts barking, it will wake up the dead. Mark, can you hold onto him?"
Deke chimed in, "I can!"
Page 123
Mr. Phillips continued, "OK, but if he gets loose, we will lose our element of surprise and anything could happen." Deke was pleased with the fact that he had volunteered for some responsibility. His father would have made a big deal about all the mistakes he had ever made. He never got a chance to act responsibly.
All four doors opened at the same time, and they stepped out together. Deke tensed on the leash, expecting Obie to launch himself into the air. To his and everybody's surprise, Obie did just the opposite. He began to move slowly and cautiously as if he were a wolf stalking prey. They all noticed.
Les jumped when he noticed Chad's car doors opening. The moon was high, and he could see all four people and a gigantic dog emerge from the car. He began to punch numbers on his flip phone. "Sam, Ted, tell your people to stand by. We are about to move."
Page 124
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Al Greenway hung up the phone. He then jumped straight up and hollered, "Hallelujah!" There would be no ransom, no fear of the police, and no small amount of money. He didn't expect to get much money out of a salesman anyway. So he had just agreed to a deal with a magazine publisher for all rights if he produced one verified, live, water-drinking, food-eating dinosaur. Cash on delivery, one million dollars, no questions asked!
He grabbed his shirt, and the one clear thought in his mind was that he had to go get his dinosaur as soon as possible. He was in his truck and had sped away in a heartbeat. He usually drove too fast, but now he was squealing tires and taking corners on the slide.
There was a very ominous-looking remote control box lying on the truck seat. It was no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.
The total silence of the moonlit Arizona night was suddenly broken by the distant hum of an engine. All eyes turned and all ears tuned to the road toward the east. The faint glow of headlights became obvious in the distance. They all instinctively squatted in their tracks. Les crunched down in his car seat and peered over the door through the open window of his car.
Page 125
Al Greenway was unaware of anything amiss as he cruised down the street headed toward his economic bonanza. He pulled up and stopped right in front of the plastic-laced fence gate that surrounded the trailer. He knew he would have to honk his horn until Shots came out to whack that dumb watchdog. He honked once. He honked twice. No Shots. No dog.
Al had laid his shirt on the truck seat and right on top of the little black box. He usually did not wear a shirt in the heat and carried one along just in case he had to stop somewhere. He had forgotten the little black box even existed. He could not see Shots' old car anywhere, so he decided to get out and investigate. He grabbed the truck door handle and his shirt at the same time. Unknowingly, he picked up the little black box along with the shirt.
He stepped out of the truck and closed the door. As he passed his shirt from one hand to the other in preparation for slipping it on, the little black detonator box flew through the air, bounced once on the asphalt, and flopped into the loose gravel. It landed button-side-down. The clinking sound caused Al to look down. The horror in his face had not reached a maximum expression before another loud click came from below the ground just to the right of the trailer house.
The still night air instantaneously carried the sound to Les, Mark, Deke, Chad, and Mr. Phillips. Obie had already jumped.
All heads turned as the quiet air suddenly erupted into an earsplitting, ground-shaking explosion. Everybody ducked and the dirt, sticks, rocks, pieces of van, cactus parts, and a lot of other stuff began to rain down from the sky.
"Only!" Mark whispered in pain. Just as suddenly as things came apart, it was again silent. The little group stood and stared at the sight. Les sat up and then scrambled from his car. Al Greenway was lying on the ground at least ten
Page 126
feet from where he had been standing a few short seconds before. He was flat on his back and out like a light.
Nobody noticed that Obie had slipped his leash from Deke's hand. Deke was standing frozen in place and had not noticed that he no longer held the leash. Obie bounded toward the hole left by the exploding dynamite. Even before he reached the hole that had once held the buried van prison, he had his nose to the ground and his tail held high and rigid. He circled, he backtracked. He sniffed the air, the ground, and looked in all directions. He circled a second time a little further from the perimeter of the hole. He stopped. His head, his ears, his eyes were instantly trained toward that vast desert that stretched forever beyond the fence of the wrecking yard and the trailer house.
He smelled Only! It was not pieces of Only. It was Only on the move. He barked once. He put his nose to the ground and trotted off into the quiet darkness.
The bark got the attention of Mark and Deke first. "Where's Obie?" Mark asked.
Deke looked at his empty hand, "He's gone!"
"So's everything else!" Mark screeched.
Les called his men and told them to move in. Mr. Phillips rushed to the side of the fallen Al Greenway. He checked for a pulse. Deke and Mark ran to the hole. Suddenly there were lights everywhere. No less than six vans moved into the scene, all with headlights and door-mounted spotlights trained on the same hole.
Although the nearest neighbors were at least a mile from the site, someone had called the police. The squad cars began to arrive. The fire trucks were close behind. There seemed to be a lot of government agents dressed in suits showing identification and trying to convince the uniformed personnel that they had jurisdiction. As if there was not enough commotion, suddenly the whole place was flooded with light from a helicopter that seemed to just drop down from the heavens.
Page 127
Obie continued his tracking with great gusto and a purpose. The scent was strong, and he moved along putting more and more distance between him and the explosion site.
Page 128
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The activity around the explosion site had increased by the minute. Firefighters, police, neighbors, and a few hundred spectators had crowded the scene. An ambulance had arrived, and Al Greenway was on his way to the local hospital. Nobody had even guessed about his part in this disaster. The government investigators were trying to get information from Mark and Deke. The boys wouldn't answer questions. The police were trying to find out why all these people were here in the first place. The USOPI people would not answer questions. The firefighters were trying to rope off the entire area, and all the other agencies were fighting for their right to be there.
Obie was still nose-to-ground, and he was closing distance between himself and the owner of this strange scent.
Mark sat on a rock with his head in his hands and trying not to cry. Deke was nearby sitting on another rock just watching all the hubbub. Deke spoke. "Should we tell them anything about Only?"
Mark did not raise his head. "Unless they find some pieces, they won't even know what to ask. That guy named Les was talking to my father, saying he knew about Only and was sorry this all happened. He said that even without the actual animal, just the information they had gained so far would be very useful to the scientific community. My father just told him to wait awhile."
Page 129
''I wish I knew where Obie went," Deke said.
Mark replied, "He'll show up. He always does."
The sun had already sunk below the horizon, and the shadows formed by the giant saguaros had vanished. Only was hungry and thirsty and his lip hurt. He had finally won the encounter with the heavy door. He moved swiftly with his nose to the ground. He could smell the faint odor of water, and he was moving quickly toward it.
Bonk! Only's head bumped an iron pipe sticking out of the ground. There was a wet spot in the sand beneath the pipe. He began to dig in the spot with his beak. The small hole he dug began to fill with water. He sucked it up in one gulp. Now he was hungry. He wandered off a few yards and sniffed a bush. He nibbled a leaf. It tasted terrible! Creosote bush escapes being eaten by simply tasting bad. Bush after bush smelled the same. He sniffed and walked on. There was another plant with a different smell. He nibbled and it tasted pretty good. Suddenly he felt something stick his tongue and he tried to spit, but the plant stuck him again. He backed, turned, moved forward, and spit. Finally the pain went away, and he was again on the prowl. Lesson learned: Don't bite cactus!
BOOM! The loud noise came from behind him. He jumped and turned quickly. In the distance he could see a dust cloud rising above the cactus on a high dune. He sniffed the air and noticed a harsh, foul smelling scent. Only was still hungry but he was afraid of the dark. Darkness meant the nighttime predators would be out. He must find shelter.
The sand was littered with small rocks. The farther he walked, the bigger the rocks got. He found a small cave beneath a rock outcropping. The cave smelled like very old, stale sand. He slowly stuck his head inside. The cave was not much bigger than Only. He walked in and turned around. Perfect fit. He would sleep.
Page 130
Only felt a slight touch. His eyes opened, but he did not move. Something had joined him in his snug hole. It had moved right in and settled between the rock wall of the hole and his back right leg.
The visitor was attracted by the warmth given off by Only's body. The visitor was a three-and-one-half-foot-long Mojave rattlesnake. It was not enough that Only was joined by a venomous rattlesnake, but it had to be one of the most dangerous rattlesnakes found in the United States.
The Mojave rattlesnake has a combination of poisons. He has the type you would find in a cobra that attacks the nervous system. It causes nerve damage that results in muscle paralysis and death from suffocation. The other part of the poison is that of the pit vipers. It destroys tissue, and its combination of proteins attacks the blood cells, causing them to explode. The result is massive tissue damage.
Only's surprise turned to instant curiosity. He pulled his leg up and away. The surprised snake reacted instinctively to the motion and bit hard. The muscular pulls and jerks were obvious in his jaws as he injected the venom deep into Only's leg. His fangs had done their job in a split second. Only felt a sharp sting in his upper leg. He reacted with a crushing kick. The snake was between the crashing leg and the rock wall of the den. The elephant-like foot was fired by the small but strong leg of a baby triceratops. The snake had just barely removed his fangs after the terrible bite when he was instantly crushed against the rock.
Only scrambled from the hole and sat down near the entrance. The bite was burning terribly, and he was jumping and twisting around while trying to bite at the wound. The pain was unbearable, and Only began to whimper and cry. It was similar to the sounds a dog might make during a bout with pain.
Obie stopped. He raised his head and his ears pointed to the sky. It had always taken a lot of concern for Obie to raise those glove-sized ears. He heard the whimpering sound.
Page 131
With head held high as if to see over the sand dunes, he began moving quickly toward the sound. He was trampling creosote bushes and cactus. One cactus stopped him when a spine stuck him in his upper leg. He stopped, scratched, and continued with a little more attention being paid to where he was going. He topped a dune and stopped in his tracks. At the bottom of the slope sat Only. He was still trying desperately to get to the source of his pain. Obie began wagging his tail and loping toward the beast that was in great pain. He was really happy to see Only. He ran right up and pushed his nose into Only's side. Only hissed, whirled around, and bit Obie on the nose. Obie was not hurt but surprised. Why would his friend suddenly turn on him?
Obie retreated a few feet and sat down quietly near a big saguaro. The swelling had increased in Only's leg, and the pain was getting worse. He whimpered and cried even louder. Things were getting fuzzy and out of focus for Only. He was getting weaker, and his stomach was heaving. The constant activity was sapping his remaining strength. He was moving slower as each minute passed. He began to lie still for short periods of time. After a few minutes he lay down, and his breathing was rapid and shallow.
Obie noticed the inactivity and stood up. He walked ever so cautiously toward the now still Only. Obie had his tail between his legs and his ears drooped. The big drops of slobber fell from his huge jowls and left a trail from his previous post to where he was almost nose to nose with Only.
Obie nudged tenderly and jumped back. He did not want to be nipped on the nose a second time. Only was breathing more slowly and did not move.
Page 132
Page 133
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Obie might not be very bright, but something in his brain told him that there should be humans present. He raised his massive head and sniffed the air. There was a faint lingering odor of the dynamite explosion of a few hours ago. That is where he had left the humans. With a short bark he turned and moved in the direction he had come. His bulky body began to move with remarkable swiftness as he wound his way through the bushes and dunes.
The sun was about to make an appearance on the horizon. Mark looked up at all the goings-on. He felt as if he were on the set while the movie ET was being filmed. There was all this space-age equipment sitting around, men in white contamination suits scurrying around, but there was no alien. Deke was standing very still. His eyes were as open as human eyes could be. "I thought this stuff only happened in the movies!" he said excitedly. Mark just looked up at him like a lost puppy. They had been friends long enough to almost think alike.
Mark stood. "Let's look around for Obie. We need to get out of here. These people all want to ask questions, and I'm not sure which ones we should answer."
Together they walked along the huge circle formed by the yellow police tape. They were taking turns calling for Obie when Mr. Phillips and Chad joined them.
Page 134
"The OPI has control over this deal. That investigator said the area would be secured and their men would begin sifting through the debris at first light. It's gross to think about, but they will be looking for pieces. I told Les Miller he could contact me later, and I would fill him in on the details. I don't see any harm in giving him the story. This is most likely another one of those events that will be hushed and hidden by all agencies from the federal government right down to the county sheriff. Les made sense when he cautioned me about talking too much. We could cause the destruction of vast amounts of desert if it got out that a real dinosaur was found out here. The place would soon look like a strip mine."
"Dad, we can't find Obie. He barked a lot and jumped out of Deke's hands. We haven't seen him since."
Mr. Phillips looked at his watch. "The sun will be up soon. I guess we can spread out and look for him. I kinda want to stick around and see what these guys do to this site."
Deke spoke up, "I have always heard that these g-men have a giant vacuum cleaner that they take to crime scenes. They just turn it on and suck up all the evidence! Anybody seen a giant Hoover?"
The four of them wandered over to a big rock that would give them a good view of the activity around the old trailer. They all sat and stared at the scurrying people.
There was a bark. A huge blob of dark brown fur rounded a corner that was formed by a rotting palo verde tree stump and a big rock. Obie ran up to Mark and began barking like a cat was standing on his head. He was turning his body first one direction and then the other.
"I always said that dog didn't know up from down. Now he has lost all sense of direction!" Deke said. Mark was glad to see Obie and bent to give him a big hug. Obie moved quickly to just beyond his reach. Mark took a step forward and Obie moved another step back.
Page 135
"I know he doesn't do much, but I have never seen him act like this." Mark said.
Obie began making short dashes to the rock and stump he had just charged in from a moment before. "If I thought that dog had any brains, I would think he was trying to get us to follow him. Come here, you dumb dog." Deke started toward him. Obie charged off through the dunes. All four of them moved that direction. Their speed was determined by their age. Mark dashed ahead, followed closely by Deke. Chad trotted next, followed by Mr. Phillips, who was just walking very fast.
Mark tried to keep Obie in sight. Mr. Phillips was just trying to keep up. The dog was not moving at any great speed. His frantic bark made one think he was running fifty miles an hour.
The injured Only was just about a half mile from the trailer. Obie did not have enough brain power to travel in a straight line. They did a lot of zig-zagging. Obie rounded the last dune and ran to Only's side. He started his twirling and barking act again. First one there was Mark, and he was not even breathing hard. Deke arrived wheezing, gasping, and making little groaning sounds. He was pooped! He put his hands on his knees and coughed.
Mark knelt at Only's side. He put his face almost nose to nose with the little dinosaur. "We have got to get him to a doctor. He's still breathing. I don't see any blood, but I think his back leg may be broken. It's all big and puffy."
Mark took off his jacket and spread it on the ground. He gently lifted Only onto the edge and then wrapped the rest around his body. He had just lifted him when Chad and Mr. Phillips arrived. "Dad, he's just barely breathing and he feels real cold."
Mr. Phillips just said "Let's go!" They moved quickly back toward the auto yard.
They dodged around dunes and creosote bushes to get to the car. The USOPI people were very busy in their task and
Page 136
did not notice. They were soon on their way to a veterinarian. It was agreed that they would just have to take a chance with old Doctor Bridges who had been Obie's vet since he was a puppy. He had also helped Mark with his menagerie's health problems. The good doctor learned a lot about reptiles by just having to care for Mark's collection. He was about to learn a lot more. This was no reptile. It was a mammal like this civilization had never seen before.
Mr. Phillips and Chad discussed the situation as Chad drove. Mark and Deke sat in the back seat with Obie in the middle. Each of them took turns dodging large glops of drool every time the big dog swung his head. If Only survived, they would need a good lawyer. They wanted to do the best thing for Only, and it would be a fight to keep him safe. Mark listened to the conversation and decided to tell them about the spit and Deke's cancer. Chad almost ran off the road when he heard the story. This little animal could change the course of human history.
Page 137
Chapter Thirty
The doctor was in.
Dr. Anthony Jefferson Bridges was in his late sixties, but he looked at least eighty. His bald head was rimmed with a band of long, thin white hair that hung down past the edge of his collar. He was bright-eyed, quick witted, and loved a challenge. Mark was sure he had been wearing the same old lab coat for his entire life. The coat covered a plaid vest that covered a green shirt. A red and black tie with a huge full Windsor knot was tied much too short and hung only halfway down his shirt. Once when he and Deke had Obie in for his shots, Deke actually asked him if he had more than one lab coat. He just laughed.
Mr. Phillips did not waste a lot of time with the story. He got right to the point. His fast talking was frequently interrupted by Doc Bridges saying "Oh my word!" He understood the necessity of speed, and secrecy. He could not call for advice because there would not be any available. He began work based on experience with strange animals that were not covered in vet school. He noticed right away that there was too much of a crowd in the little examining room. This room was not designed for five. He chased them out. Mr. Phillips noticed that there was no telephone in the treatment room. If Doc suddenly decided to report his find, he would have to use the phones out front.
Page 138
Doc folded back the jacket, and all he could say was "Oh, my word!"
The group adjourned to the small waiting room just outside the treatment area. Deke sat down near a large cage occupied by a single cockatiel. Deke took up the only conversation he knew to be carried on with a bird, "Polly want a cracker?" Chad stood and played with his own fingers. Mark just leaned against the counter and looked worried. Mr. Phillips sat down near a telephone on a small table in the corner. The note taped to the center of the dial just said USE ONLY IF NECESSARY. It was necessary. He called a lawyer friend. They were to meet at a McDonald's the next morning and the story would be told.
Doc immediately started a routine treatment for shock. He gave Only two injections, one of antibiotic and one of cortizoids. He propped the little animal up and took his temperature: it was 102 degrees. If this actually was a warm-blooded dinosaur, that might be his normal temperature. He began to go over the entire body with a practiced eye. He noticed a familiar sight on his swollen leg. There were two very distinct puncture wounds in the center of that leg.
About an hour later, Doc returned to the waiting room and sat wearily in an old wooden chair. He began his narrative with the same statement they heard from him last, "Oh my word." He hung his head and shook it side to side. Thin wisps of long white hair swung across his forehead. "I found two puncture wounds in the leg, so I gave him a cat dose of snakebite serum. I think he has been bitten by a rattlesnake. We'll wait a few hours and see what that does. Snake venom does not usually kill a mammal of any large size, and the snake might not have injected a full, killing dose. It will just be a matter of time and waiting." Mark spoke up, "Can we go in and see him?''
"Sure. Just don't touch or do anything to disturb him. He is asleep right now. I have him propped up. As he wakes
Page 139
up, the first thing that will happen is he will throw up. I don't want him to drown in his own vomit."
Mark, Deke, and Chad filed into the treatment room. Mr. Phillips stayed behind. Only was positioned in the middle of a very large operating table. It was a table for human patients. Doc had gotten a good deal on the secondhand table. Doc was always out for a good deal. Only was held upright in a sling. The canvas strap made a bag that held his stomach between his front and back legs. He had a plastic tube up his nose that led to a bag of liquid nourishment. The drool from his mouth formed a little puddle on
Page 140
the tabletop. There was a blood pressure cuff attached to his back leg. There was a tube taped to each front foot that led to two bags hanging on little stainless racks on a stand beside the table. Mark sat down on a stool near the table. He just stared and waited.
Mr. Phillips sat down in a chair across from Doc. "Doc, it is very important that we try to keep this a secret. I hope you understand the importance of this discovery." Doc pulled his glasses down and let them fall. They were attached to him by a piece of plastic tubing that made a necklace.
"John, I have spent my entire career trying to protect animal life from the invasion and disruption of mankind. If I can protect this animal in any way from what I know in my heart is going to happen anyway, I'll try my darndest."
Mr. Phillips looked deep into Doc's watery, very old and knowing eyes. He knew instinctively that the secret was safe with him. He wasn't worried for a second.
They all decided not to leave. Doc lived in the house that was connected to the clinic. There were chain link dog runs on either side of a covered sidewalk. He once had an office in one of the busiest parts of downtown Phoenix. He had decided once he became a widower and the kids had all moved to the far reaches of the continent, that it would be more practical to build a clinic nearer his home of thirty years. The lack of zoning ordinances in the area allowed him to build in his front yard. His clients did not seem to care about the move. They liked the lack of congested shopping centers, and there was always plenty of free parking.
It was late in the morning, and Doc asked if they wanted a beverage. Doc had first heard that term used in normal conversation on a late night talk show. He liked it and had used it ever since. Mark wanted to stay with Only, and the others followed Doc across the breezeway to the house.
The Arizona day was warm, clear, and bright. The rays of the sun made funny patterns on the walkway. There were
Page 141
about ten dogs, one in each fenced area. Each pen had a door that opened to the walkway. As they left the house, all ten dogs jumped up and began barking as if there was a cat strolling by. Obie jumped up from his resting place as the group came out the door. His bark came through the noise of the other dogs very loud and very recognizable. The dog was in such a frantic state that Mr. Phillips asked if Obie could come in the house. Doc opened the gate, and the big dog happily trotted along behind.
Doc was a gourmet tea drinker. He offered a choice of at least ten different brews. The men all had tea. Deke asked for a cola but there was none. He drank some milk.
Page 142
Chapter Thirty-One
It was late evening, and dinner had been consumed without enthusiasm. The group had moved to the den where the television was on and the news was blaring. Doc was a bit hard of hearing. The top story was about an explosion north of town. All eyes and ears perked up when it was reported that one person was in critical condition at the Ridgewood Memorial Hospital. The group would eventually know the connection between Al Greenway and the explosion.
Mark had not wanted to eat. He was satisfied with keeping an eye on the little dinosaur. Deke tired of watching the news. He did not like to watch television unless it was an interesting VCR tape or a computer game. It bored him. He picked up a fried apple pie in the kitchen and joined Mark in the treatment room.
"Hey, what's whoopin"? Deke was still trying to talk over the loud television back in the house, so he was still hollering. Suddenly, Only jumped. The oxygen mask popped off, and he made a loud squealing noise. Deke jumped. Mark stood up quickly and they both looked at the table. Only opened his eyes and began to struggle against the canvas straps.
"Go get Doc. Hurry!" Deke shot out the door, and in a matter of minutes he was back leading three other guys and one big dog. Doc whipped out his stethoscope and listened
Page 143
to a lot of different parts on the little dinosaur. He then began to remove tape, pull out needles, and disconnect straps. Only stood up and shook his head.
"It's alive!" Deke exclaimed.
Page 144
Chapter Thirty-Two
It had been almost three weeks since Only woke up. His existence and location were still cloaked in secrecy for the most part. It was decided that the safest place for him would be at Doc's. He had a hastily remodeled examining room built just for the little dinosaur. There had not been any press conferences or media shows. At the advice of a whole group of lawyers, Mr. Phillips was taking his time. The best offer so far was from the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. Just for the research privileges to the saliva Only produced, they would invest a fortune. The list of benefits was very long. There would be trust funds for the boys, college paid, careers, guarantees of sole ownership of Only, and all rights to his future.
Chad was placed in charge of all scientific studies. Doc would be the primary veterinary caregiver. Mr. Phillips rented a big house just up the street from Doc's place and invited Aunt Min to come and live with them for a while. Mark really did not mind having her around. She really took good care of him. She and Only had been introduced and she thought he was just "Toooooo cute!"
Mark sat cross-legged on the linoleum floor of the small examining room. Doc was perched on a stool that squeaked when he shifted his weight. They were watching Only rooting around in a large, shallow, stainless steel pan full of sterilized play sand. Great care had been taken to protect
Table of Contents

