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Dino-Life C00 Prologue
By Mr. Camel
Dino-Life
Prologue
Hugh Pratt slowed his truck down as he approached Freeman River. A six-pack of Budweiser sat on the chair next to him. He turned to the wheel and stopped in the left lane, near Thorne Dock. Half a dozen cans lay by his feet, and he kicked them over to the passenger side before grabbing a can from the fresh six-pack beside him.
Hugh clumsily stepped out of his old Ford truck and squinted. Must be over eighty degrees, and its not even noon, yet, he thought. It was going to be a hot summer—bad news for Hugh. He hated the heat.
The river lay about twenty feet from the road. There were a few clusters of palm trees here and there, along with some desert bushes. It was one of the most densely foliated areas of Silver Valley. There was a small dock here; it was accompanied by a small, old shed. Shelves lined the inside of the shed, covered with various tools. Hugh was fascinated to use the fishing equipment as a boy, and still was. He didn’t know how old they were, but he’d always suspected that the rods and stuff been left there since about when the town was founded, in 1864. Hugh may have been surprised to hear that they’d been accidentally left there only five years before he was born by a man named Li Chang, in 1950. Li Chang’s grandson now ran the town’s convenience store.
Hugh sat his beer on the hood of the Ford and stumbled over to the shack and opened the door, which squeaked loudly. The floor would probably have made noises, too, but the wooden floor boards had either rotten away or been stolen years ago. He’d been meaning to fix up this shack for years now, but he had never gotten around to it.
Chirp!
Hugh jumped. He was quite certain “Chirp!” wasn’t the kind of noise a dilapidated shed would make. He forgot about the sound in a few seconds, however, and reached onto one of the shelves for the small box of hooks. A small green shape darted out from between two old coffee cans and struck his hand. Hugh looked dumbly at his hand as it began to bleed. He looked to the coffee cans and saw that the shape was gone.
Chirp!
He took a step backwards, and then felt something on his ankle.
Chirp!
He turned to see what was there, but it was already gone.
Chirp!
Now he felt something on his neck. At last he recognized that he was being bitten. More chirps echoed throughout the shack. Hugh reached for the shovel on the opposite side of the shed from the door, but grabbed a shelf instead. Everything on it fell to the floor, except for a green thing that looked a like a lizard. Hugh screamed and dropped the shelf. Glass shattered and he heard the things run back into the shadows, and then everything was silent.
Had he been in a more sensible state, he may have left the shed then, while he had a chance, but instead Hugh Pratt made another attempt for the shovel. He managed to get it this time.
“Come out!”
Chirp!
They did come out. To Hugh they seemed to be pouring out of the walls. His heart stopped and sank for a moment. He’d known there was more than one, but he thought he must be seeing twenty right now.
Then he became angry. Hugh swung the shovel around the shed, hoping he’d hit a few of the little monsters. He did hit a few, but not hard enough to inflict any real damage on the animals. He was far more successful at knocking things off of the shelves.
One of the animals jumped and clung to his leg. Hugh was too busy swinging the shovel at the animals to notice. The animal took a bite into his thigh. Hugh screamed and swung the shovel at the creature. Had it not moved before being struck, it could’ve been a fatal blow, but instead the shovel was intercepted by Hugh’s knee.
Hugh shrieked in agony as his kneecap shattered. He dropped the shovel to the floor and joined it there several seconds later. The animals were jumping all over him now, taking bites out of him.
Hugh Pratt’s pain gave way to rage, and he seized an animal in his hand and squeezed its small chest until it more or less imploded. He screamed and threw the dead creature at the wall. The other animals backed off and he began to crawl out of the shed.
He was half way out the door when they started attacking them. He tried flailing his legs, but this only induced a bolt of his pain from his left knee. Hugh screamed again and continued his crawl.
“Mr. Pratt! Mr. Pratt? Are you okay?”
Mr. Pratt was most definitely not okay, and he let the voice know by screaming again.
A gunshot rang through the sky, and the animals left. Hugh heard someone running towards him.
“Mr. Pratt—oh my gosh. What happened?”
“The g-green guys… they… they tried t-t-to eat me, I think,” Hugh managed to say. His entire body ached.
“I didn’t see them. Come on, I’m going to take you to the hospital in Dixie,” the voice said. Hugh finally recognized it as the voice of Joey Chang. He felt his body being dragged across the hot desert sand. And then he slipped into unconsciousness.
* * *
“Mr. Chang? May Dr. Lime ask you a few questions now?” Joey Chang snapped out of his daydream and saw a nurse standing before him.
“Yes, of course.” Joey stood and followed the pretty nurse out of the waiting room and over to Hugh Pratt’s room. She led him to the door and turned.
“This is it.” She smiled at him and walked away. His eyes followed her down the hall and then he opened the door and stepped inside.
“Oh, Mr. Chang. I’ve got some questions for you,” said Dr. Raymond Lime. He offered his hand, and Chang shook it. “You can sit in that chair there.”
Joey sat. “Will he be all right?”
“I have no idea. He’ll eventually recover from the shattered knee, but I have no idea what these… bites… are,” Dr. Lime said. “I was hoping you could help me a bit.”
Joey looked over at Hugh Pratt. He was surrounded by machines and lost in an entanglement of tubes and wires. Hugh was covered with his sheet and Joey couldn’t see his condition.
“I’m afraid I won’t be of much help. I got there and fired my gun and scared the things off before I could really see them well. But they were animals of some sort. They were green, Hugh said.”
“Yes, he woke up a for a minute or two this morning and told me there were green animals. I didn’t get much more information than that,” Lime frowned.
Joey tugged at his shirt collar. It was a hot summer already—even for New Mexico—and it was only the sixteenth of June. “Do you know anyone who might know?”
Dr. Lime’s face lit up. “Well, yes, actually. An old friend of my little brother’s from high school. He should be here in Dixie tonight.”
* * *
As it turned out, Dr. Vincent Mendoza didn’t arrive in Dixie until four in the morning. Vinny phoned the hospital, but Ray had left four and a half hours ago—apparently rather dejected. Vinny gave them the number for his hotel room, bid the receptionist farewell, and hung up.
He yawned and strolled over to the refrigerator. He found a watermelon and ate it. Vinny love watermelons. He finished it a few minutes later and made his way over to his bed, where he quickly drifted into sleep.
* * *
The phone in the hotel room rang over twenty times that morning before Vinny finally awakened at noon. His eyes defiantly tried to stay shut, but he managed to make his way to the bathroom and take a cold shower—the heat here was insane. He changed, left the bathroom and approached the answering machine wearily. Twenty-four missed calls. He pressed a button and the machine began to replay all of the messages it had taken that morning. He lost interest after message three and walked over to the refrigerator. By the time he had finished eating another watermelon the machine had reached message eleven. All of them were telling him to come to the hospital immediately. He found his shoes and began putting them on. He wanted to get this over with.
Vinny was a tall, bearded, twenty-four year old biologist. He’d won tickets to see Dream Theater in London this October, and had planned on spending the summer and fall in Europe. He had intended to justify this by going to a museum every week and studying hedgehogs. But he had been a good friend with Ray Lime’s brother and the rest of the Lime family in high school, and Ray had said this was important. Vinny wasn’t sure he would agree, but he had come anyway. If he hurried, he could probably be back in Europe this time tomorrow.
The machine was halfway through message seventeen when he left the hotel room.
* * *
The hospital wasn’t far from the hotel, and Vinny Mendoza walked there in twelve minutes. He wasn’t too surprised to see Ray standing in the lobby, waiting impatiently.
“Sorry, I’m late, Ray.”
Ray was already striding towards the elevator. “I wish you had come a bit earlier. My patient woke up and I got a little more information. I recorded it all, but you probably could’ve gotten more material you could use.”
“Well, we’ll see.” They stepped into the elevator. About three other people were in there. One man stood by the controls, and was about to push button three. Ray shoved him out of the way and quickly pressed the button for the sixth floor.
“Hey!” the man shouted. “My daughter is—”
“I’ve got a man wounded from bites of some unidentified animal,” Ray said.
“So?”
“I’m the doctor!” Ray said. “And there’s nothing you can do, anyway. We’re already on our way.” And they were. This must really be significant, Vinny thought. He had never seen Ray like this before.
* * *
They rode the elevator up to the sixth floor in silence. When Ray started to get off, the man tried to hit him. Vinny grabbed his wrist before the fist connected with Ray’s shoulder. Vinny pushed Ray through and exited the elevator himself before the man could do anything else.
“So… what do you think is wrong with him?” Vinny asked.
“Well, I don’t imagine he was very overjoyed from being shoved away from the buttons,” Ray said.
“No, I mean your patient. What is wrong with him? From your standpoint as a doctor?” Vinny asked. “You only told me that some unidentified animal bit him when you called me, and that it was urgent that I get there as soon as possible.”
“I’ll tell you when we get to the room.”
They entered room 623 several minutes later. A pretty nurse (the same one who led Joey Chang to the same room the previous afternoon) was finishing a routine check on the machines. She smiled at them and exited the room. Ray sat down in a nice chair, and motioned Vinny to sit down in an old, potentially moldy chair.
“Hugh Pratt encountered more than one animal, I think. He has bites all over. His kneecap is shattered, too, but I don’t think they—the animals—did that. Maybe he did it while defending himself.”
Vinny nodded. He was anxious to identify the animal and get back to Europe. It was wonderful over there. A nice change from the Americas.
Ray grabbed a folder from a nearby desk and flipped it open. He took one paper out and handed it to Vinny.
“I had him draw a picture of one animal earlier.”
Vinny studied the picture. As far as he could tell, it was a crude depiction of a gigantic green moose falling out of an exploding double-decker bus in a place that might have been Kenya. Or Alaska. He handed the picture back over.
“I also have a transcript of our earlier conversation,” Ray offered.
“I’ll pass. May I see one of the bites?”
Ray stood and walked over to the hospital bed. Vinny followed. Ray lifted the sheet enough to reveal Hugh’s left arm. There were two bites on it. Vinny looked at them closely. They were small, and unlike anything else he’d ever seen before. For the first time since getting the call from Ray he began to get excited at the possibilities of actually finding a new species.
He looked up at Ray. “Where did this happen?”
“Thorne Dock, in Silver Valley. Why? Is it not a native species or something?”
“Ray, I’ve never seen bites quite like these. I mean, I’m definitely not the most experienced biologist ever, and I’m not an expert on animal bites, but… I have a feeling this is something new,” Vinny said. “Could you get someone here to take me to this dock?”
* * *
Ray ended up calling Joey Chang and asking him to escort Vinny to the dock. He agreed and said he’d be over by two. While they waited, they discussed the fun they used to have when Vinny and Harry Lime were in high school. Both families had lived on the same street in Carter, Texas. Their parents still did. Once, when Vinny had been sixteen and Ray was almost twice his age, they’d gotten their friends together and played street hockey. Vinny and Harry were big hockey fans, and their team easily prevailed over Ray and his team, most of which was more interested in football.
Harry Lime was actually a professional hockey player, now. He played for the Lightning. Vinny wasn’t a big fan of them, but he went to see him a few times. On one occasion he’d gotten a seat near the bench. He roared Harry’s name at the top of his lungs after Harry had just left the bench. Harry had turned and looked. He ended up getting checked hard enough in open ice to cause a concussion. Fortunately for Vinny, Harry didn’t remember the moments leading up to his injury. To Vinny’s knowledge, Harry still didn’t know.
Joey Chang arrived ten minutes early. Ray Lime introduced them to each other, gave Vinny a notebook and pen, and they were on their way. During the ride to Thorne’s Dock, Joey explained how he had found Hugh. The Valley was large, and they didn’t reach the dock until a few minutes after three.
“Here we are,” Joey said. He had driven Hugh’s car back to his house after he dropped him off at the hospital.
“Thanks, Mr. Chang. I appreciate the ride.” Vinny opened the door and exited the vehicle, an old VW bus.
“No problem. And you can call me Joey. Call me up when you need a ride out, Dr. Mendoza.” Joey scribbled a series of numbers on the back of a receipt and handed it to Vinny.
“Call me Vinny. You can come along, if you like. I’m not sure how long this is going to take. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours. It depends.”
Joey opened his door and stepped out. “What does it depend on?”
“How long it takes me to find a specimen. If I find one at all, that is.” He made his way toward the shed. “Is this where you found him?”
“Yes. Right outside the door.” Joey was holding a revolver in his hand now.
Vinny hesitated in front of the door and took a deep breath. He looked back at Joey’s hand to make sure the revolver was still there. He grabbed the knob and swung the door open and jumped to the backwards.
“I don’t see anything,” Joey said.
Vinny stepped into the shed cautiously, Joey behind him. The place was in disarray; things were strewn everywhere across the floor. Joey pointed towards a gap of light near the floor on the wall of the shed opposite from the door. He knelt down and saw a hole under the wall.
“This is new, I haven’t seen this before. It looks like something burrowed under the wall,” Joey remarked. Vinny agreed; that was exactly what it looked like.
They searched through the rest of the shed for the animals or any clues of them. For a while they didn’t find anything, and they were about to give up when Vinny found something in the corner of the shed. He donned rubber gloves and picked it up. He was sure this was the animal.
The carcass was badly mutilated. The animal was about three feet long (Vinny’s scientific mind instantly converted this to about ninety centimeters). The body looked as though it had imploded. It looked like it had been eaten away at quite a bit, presumably by the other animals. It was some kind of new species of lizard.
New species.
It had always been ones of his dreams to discover a new species. He looked down at it again. This was incredible, he didn’t know of anything else like it at al—
“Dr. Mendoza—I mean Vinny! There are tracks! Out here!” Joey Chang called.
Vinny walked outside and looked to where Joey was pointing. There certainly were tracks… but they looked more like bird track than lizard tracks…
Joey was following alongside the tracks, now, careful not to kick sand over them. They led him about three hundred feet north before disappearing into some kind of tunnel about three feet from the edge of the river. Vinny caught up soon after.
“They appear to lead into this hole,” Joey stated.
“That they do,” Vinny said. He looked north along the river. About ten miles north was a large mesa. The river seemed to widen and go behind it. “What’s down that way?”
“Well, that mesa there is Silver Mesa. There’s some kind of lab built into it, or so I’ve been told. Beyond that the ground is kind of high on both side of the river, we call it Silver Canyon. I’m not sure if it really is a canyon, though. There’s a lot of geo… geographical? I think that’s the word. Anyway, there’re a lot of those kinds of things around here—mesas, plateaus, buttes, crevices, canyons, valleys, you know. I’m not really sure about the difference from one to another, but… you get the idea, I think. There’s a guy in town who knows it all really well, we could ask—”
“No, that’s all right.”
Vinny was standing right over the hole now. He crouched down next to it. It was very dark in there, and the hole was in such a position that only a few rays of light entered it. He began to put his face into the hole for a better look, and faraway he heard Joey frantically telling him that this was a bad idea—they could still be down there! But none of this registered in Vinny’s mind. He wanted to see the animals. His animals. What happened next would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look, and there was something reflecting the beam or two of light that got in around his head. He realized it was an eye, and he stared at it dumbly, paralyzed with fear. It was a yellowish sphere, with a black eclipse in the center. The eye was devoid of any emotion. And he felt as though the eye was tasting him. And then he heard a low hiss. He yanked his head out and fell back against the scorching sand.
He was incredibly dizzy, and he felt like passing out right there. His mind seemed to pulse inside his head, and his mouth was dry. He gazed up at Joey, who was looking at him with concern.
“W-what did y-you see?” he managed. Vinny noticed Joey’s hands were trembling. He then became aware that his were, too.
“I… I don’t know. I think… I think it was an eye. And I heard a hiss—I think I did, yeah, I think I heard a hiss, too.” Vinny realized he had dropped the carcass of the animal—his animal—next to the hole. He crawled over and quickly snatched it. He apprehensively cast a glance down the hole, keeping himself a safe distance away. He saw nothing.
“Was it… was it one of them?” Joey asked, motioning towards the body in Vinny’s hand. “Or was it… s-something else?”
“Something else, I think.”
* * *
Vinny was entering the hotel by eight that evening. The ride home had been mostly silent, although Joey had told him what little he knew of the Silver Mesa Research Facility. It had begun life in the early forties as a military base of some sort. The list of troops stationed there shrunk until 1970, when the government had forgotten about it. Apparently someone at the Pentagon finally remembered it nine years later, and it grew steadily after that until 1993, when control of the facility was given to a wealthy entrepreneur. At that point it exploded with success. When Vinny asked exactly how big the place was, Joey told him that it was big enough for them to have living quarters there. Beyond that, he had no idea.
Vinny opened the door of his hotel room, placed a brown grocery store bag down on the floor and flicked the light on. He grabbed some mangos from the refrigerator and sat down on his bed in the bedroom. He thought about the corpse of the animal he had found earlier. And the empty eye. And of Silver Mesa.
He decided that tomorrow morning he would call a friend of his who worked in the government. He had an idea that he knew where the animals came from.
* * *
Joshua Mortensen was walking down a hallway in Sector G Level 1, heading for the administration area. He passed a security guard in the hall—Barney, Josh thought his name was—and waved. Barney said hi and asked Josh how he was. Josh said he was fine, wonderful. And he was. The graphics team had finally got the logo completed for the park, and that was fine—wonderful—wasn’t it?
Josh Mortensen was the media director of a very special project at Silver Mesa. He loved this aspect of his job, but he also ran odd jobs for the Administrator every now and then. He didn’t like that so much, but he got a little bit of extra money for it, so he obeyed. He was a good dog.
Up ahead he saw some of the scientists trying to carry one of their colleagues out of a room, but they were having trouble keeping the door open. He went over and grabbed the handle on the door. One guy said thanks, and then they carried the man out. Josh saw something covering his head. It was white. And it was definitely not of this earth.
They were through, and he let go of the door. He saw which way they were heading with the body. It was along the same way he had been going. They were probably going to the nearest medical outpost, and that made sense. Whatever it was that the guy had on his head, it didn’t look natural.
One of the scientists almost dropped his end of the man, but Josh got in there and offered his support. One of the body-carriers looked at him disapprovingly, but he couldn’t be bothered shooing Josh.
The medical outpost wasn’t far off at all; the body was laying on a table three minutes later. The doctor looked at it and his eyes widened. A feeling of curious apprehension was shared among the five conscious men in the room—three scientists, the doctor, and Josh.
“Is this… um… is this related to that thing you guys were studying,” the doctor asked.
“Yes,” one of the scientists answered simply.
The doctor began looking over at the thing over the guy’s head. As he did, Josh noticed the man’s hands. The fingers were growing through the skin into long bony claws. The arms lengthened a bit and the skin stretched enough to break, and blood poured out. There was a cracking noise, and then the chest exploded open. Josh half expected to see a chestburster from the Alien movie fly out. Instead there was a mess of gore in the chest region. The thing bolted up and its head smashed against the doctor’s skull. The doctor fell to the ground, and blood began to seep out of the cracks in his shattered forehead. The thing swung its new claws about and crawled off of the bed.
They were all too paralyzed to do anything but watch as the monster limped over to them. It approached the closest scientist to it and drew its claws into the scientist’s abdomen, tearing away most of the skin. The scientist shrieked in pain as his internal organs began pouring out of his open abdominal region. The thing delicately stuck its elongated hand into the body and grabbed upwards. The hand emerged covered in blood and holding a pumping heart. The monster gave it a sharp twist and the arteries became severed from the heart. The hand brought the heart to the gory mess of its chest and inserted the heart into a small but growing pouch among the gore. Then Josh noticed the teeth along the outside of this pouch.
It was eating the heart.
The dying scientist collapsed into the pool of his intestines that lay on the floor. The other scientists were still frozen with horror, but Josh snapped out of his paralysis and looked around the room. He was not naturally courageous, and under normal circumstances he would have done nothing. But some outside force seized him, now.
Josh saw a small cubby in the wall behind him that held equipment to be used during a fire. He tore off the aluminum cover. There was a pane of glass, and behind it were a fire extinguisher, a fire blanket, and an axe. Josh kicked the glass and it smashed. One fragment ripped through his pant leg and buried itself into his shin. He didn’t notice. Josh grabbed the axe and ran towards the monster. By now it was raising its claws to take another scientist.
Josh raised the axe up as far as he could and swung it into the thing’s back. It froze and made a sort of gurgling sound. Josh thought he’d killed it, but then it abruptly turned and prepared to slash at him. Josh had kept a tight grip on the axe, and it was still in his hands. But he didn’t have time to do anything but fall to the floor. Had he tried anything else, the long claws would have killed him. Instead they hit the nearest scientist, who looked as though he had been preparing to tackle the thing. It hadn’t been an intended hit, but there was still enough force for the claws to get stuck in the man’s ribcage.
As the monster struggled to free its claws, Josh stood and raised the axe again, this time slamming it into the thing’s head. The axe buried far into its head, yielding both blood and a pale green fluid as well. Josh let go of the axe and stepped back. The thing twitched and fell to the floor with a hollow thud.
“I’ve called for assistance,” the remaining scientist said. Josh looked over and saw a small, trembling, bespectacled man.
“What—what was that thing?” Josh said. He’d back into a corner of the room, as far from the mess as he could get. Whatever force had gotten into him to spark such courage was gone now.
“What’s your security clearance?”
“Two-DW.”
“Well… I shouldn’t be telling you this, so keep your mouth shut. But I think that was a zombie.”
Thanks for reading! Comments and constructive criticism are welcome! =)
9/2/2006 11:15:38 PM
(Updated: 9/4/2006 4:44:55 PM)
(Updated: 9/4/2006 4:51:32 PM)
(Updated: 9/4/2006 5:37:48 PM)
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