D is for dinosaur, p.25
D is for Dinosaur, page 25
part #4 of Alphabet Anthologies Series
Pisos closed the gap before Lisa knew it. She threw herself off and to the ground, accidentally taking a tuft of feathers with her. He groaned but otherwise bowed his head low so Dana could scratch it.
“You brought me the best gift ever, Pisos,” Dana said.
Lisa stared between them. None of the reasons or explanations mattered. She jumped up and embraced her sister.
“I don’t know what we are,” Dana said later. “Maybe part of the Earth-spirit. Maybe we’re haunting the zoo.”
They sat in front of each other in the grass beside the mother Triceratops, while the wind made the grass shimmer in the sun.
“We can move through things like ghosts,” Lisa muttered.
“You can feel the connections to everything, can’t you?” Dana glanced down at the awakening baby Triceratops. It blinked its eyes, then turned toward her, one horn leaving an indent in her arm.
“A little,” Lisa said, noticing the Triceratops glowed with the same faint light that shone in Dana. She reached across and patted the baby’s belly, half expecting her hand to go through, or for the dream bubble to burst. Terrified that it would. Instead she felt soft wrinkled skin, the rise and fall of breathing. “They’re ghosts too, right?”
“Yeah. But it’s... more. I realized after a while... they’re part of us, and we are part of them.” Dana met Lisa’s gaze with glistening eyes. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“I was scared I’d never see you. That I’d be alone.”
“I was alone.”
A sharp pang stabbed Lisa. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m glad you had more time than I did,” Dana said. “I just... expected to see Mom or Dad, or anyone. But it was just the dinosaurs. They needed me to help them understand and protect them when EnBio came to develop this area. So far we’ve managed to keep it. Learning to be a deep part of them, of everything, has helped a lot.”
The wind blew tufts of grass through Lisa’s fingers, several blades at a time trickling out to the other side and away. They tingled as they went.
Though overjoyed at her reunion with Dana, Lisa couldn’t accept or wrap her mind around their new existence. What did Dana mean to be a deep part of the dinosaurs?
“There are more dinosaurs than I thought there ever were at the zoo,” Lisa mumbled. “Some I’ve never seen before.”
Dana nodded, mouth drawn in a line. “Not all of EnBio’s creations were made public.”
“Bastards.”
Dana nodded again.
“Are we cursed?”
“I don’t know.”
Lisa firmed her lip. “Maybe we can curse them.” That was something she could wrap her head around. That, at least, made sense.
Dana shook her head. “The best thing we can do is stick together, Lisa. They can’t fight us all at once. It’s worked so far.”
Lisa didn’t think so.
As though reading her mind, Dana got a far-eyed look and described what had happened before Lisa got there.
EnBio had begun expanding its development into the zoo, sending in equipment to start turning the abandoned zoo into a corporate campus.
When Dana described the pain she felt whenever an artificial construct cut into the zoo’s habitat, her face grew older, the years flitting by with every branch snapped along the path of destruction.
Dana had rounded up the dinosaurs and defended against the interlopers by smashing the soft soil near the river, and toppling the equipment into the river.
After that EnBio had started using electrified fences to delineate areas to clear-cut. Dana lost many dinosaurs in subsequent battles, and barely slowed EnBio down.
She and the dinosaurs had been moving farther into the hills, and they’d maintained a slim advantage from the fact EnBio never saw them coming.
But it was just a matter of time, Dana said, stroking the baby Triceratops. Lisa saw the creatures as Dana’s new family, and knew she would let nothing come between her and her children.
Lisa resolved then to sneak her way into the EnBio compound. She knew they’d need to fight eventually, and that by waiting they gave up a huge advantage. How could she force her sister into a conflict-ridden carnage? They’d both gone through so much, and now that Dana had some measure of peace, Lisa would do nothing to threaten that.
Lisa would need a bit of help, based on what Dana’d told her. If Pisos came along, she’d make it past the defences, and wouldn’t have to burden anyone else in order to tear down EnBio.
Lisa curled her fingers around Pisos’s feathers. They raced through the dilapidated gates of the zoo toward the EnBio complex.
Rolling hills stretched out below them, a criss-cross of paths and roads all-too-familiar to Lisa. Black glass obelisks of EnBio’s expanded complex jutted out of the rainforest at the edge of the man-made island.
Nothing moved. They’d made it past the electrified fences, and it was the perfect time to get in and disable EnBio’s technology. Lisa didn’t know how much influence she could exert once they got there, but the important thing was that she was doing something, and that she had a purpose she could wrap around herself like a cloak.
Pisos kicked up again and they surged through the parkways, along narrow strips of grass gilding a shallow stream winding its way through the zoo. Pisos leaped over the stream, landing in a whoosh of air. They wove back into the zoo’s maze. Lisa knew they approached the main complex by the appearance of concrete paths, which Pisos avoided like hot lava.
Pisos slowed as they neared the edge of the grass pathway, a parking lot filled with dozens of cars. The air reeked of engine oil. Dana had told her about a cold static that lit her body when she touched artificial materials, but Lisa reasoned she’d tolerate the ghostly pain for the right reasons.
Lisa dismounted. The grass welcomed her like a warm cushion. When she reached the boundary separating nature from the manufactured reality of EnBio’s domain, Pisos growled.
“It’s okay,” she said, stroking his feathers. “I’ll go the rest alone.” He twitched, his wide, wild eyes flitting about.
Lisa stepped onto the pavement. A chill snaked up her legs like a tundra and she lost all control. She slammed down, her head smacking the pavement. Electricity reignited pains from memory that wormed up her spine. She jerked and shuddered against the contact. Everything froze until it burned.
Dana had described nothing like this.
Lisa crawled, her limbs twitching and failing, breaths acid. Her left hand touched soil, and she felt tugging. Pisos. The word came through delirium.
Pisos pulled gently on her hand with his teeth. But the force that rooted her to the pavement gripped tighter and drew her closer. Pisos tugged harder and his teeth dug in, distant pinpricks compared to the consuming pain. Plasma’s electricity, white and blinding, made up for the lack of blood.
She wrenched her arm until it shook, but it remained glued to the pavement.
Footsteps approached. “Wow, I never thought it would work so well.”
Lisa stilled. She recognized that voice...
“Run Pisos. Get out of here. Now!”
Lisa shoved Pisos again and screamed at him. The raptor fled without a glance back.
A shadow snaked along her body. “The signal’s saturated. It should be right here. I told you the new measures would pay for themselves.”
Lisa craned her neck, and stared up at Rick Morter.
His suit blotted the sky. He beckoned some guards over. They had long rifles with electricity crackling at two-pronged ends.
The men fired their guns, and Lisa jerked upright. She twitched and shook as the lightning drove deeper.
“We only got one,” Morter said from somewhere far away. “But this is a great start. Good work, everyone.”
Lisa moaned. She thought Rick Morter had already taken everything from her, but even in death, he still held all the cards.
White tendrils snaked off Lisa’s body. Blue bindings strapped her to a chair rocking in the back of a van.
Her ineffable connection to the Earth had become a hot line driving up her spine. And somehow, Morter squeezed it.
Morter sat in front of a screen taking up an entire side of the van. Readouts and numbers bobbed in crisp lines and clean graphics scattered over the display. The one thing of any real meaning was the map, which showed the zoo and its outskirts. The air reeked of solder and electronics.
Lisa wanted to tear off the restraints and smash through the back doors, but she shuddered with the pain of each effort. It was just as bad as when she’d been alive. Eventually she sat as still as stone in the chair, determined to simply avoid further torment.
A grip squeezed her tether to the Earth. Vibrant colours popped into focus. Leaves rustled and the sun’s light blinded as branches parted to let the rays through. Lisa drew herself toward the light, a warm blanket sliding around her shoulders.
The wind quieted. The leaves reformed the canopy of shade. She stood amongst the herd of Titanosaurs, ankylosaurs, raptors and Triceratops. Lisa had never felt so relieved to see them. Some of the raptors nipped at the Titans’ heels, but mothers halted and stayed their childish wrath.
Dana marched with spiked shells covering her forearms, batting away and disciplining dinosaurs who didn’t exercise control for the common good.
Lisa wanted to wave at her sister, but the restraints...
Dana frowned, looking through Lisa as though they didn’t have a lifetime of shared experience together. Lisa knew with sudden clarity she wouldn’t get a chance to reach the zoo haven in front of her. Morter still had her in the van.
“Dana, get out of there!”
The grip on Lisa’s spine tightened, and all the colours drew toward her in star bursts. She cried out as the colour burned away into the grey of Morter’s van.
“We traced them,” he said, turning to the driver. “We know where they are. For once, we’ll get the jump on them.” He walked over to Lisa, where the white tendrils cascaded off her like tears.
“You’re the first one I’ve seen, you know that? Yet you seem familiar. I can’t count the times I’ve wanted to tell you how you were ruining my business. Can demon-spirits understand the bottom line? Millions of dollars wasted, all of the friends who thought me insane for thinking you real? I’m grateful you are real and alive—in some sense of the word. You know what’s the best part about you being real?”
Morter held up a fist clutching a remote. Lisa fell forward in the straps, pulled by invisible strings, hair dangling at his knees.
He leaned in until his lips tingled her ear. “Because you are part of reality, you can be ruined.”
A chill creeped up Lisa’s spine. She wanted to retreat, get as far away as possible, but she couldn’t move. She thought of her sister’s advice that they should stick together. She would give anything for someone to face this megalomaniac with her, but there was no one.
“Fascinating, your connection to the rest of them,” Morter said. “If I got some of our scientists involved, they’d be chewing this for years before we did anything. Years before we made progress. They can keep their data points and technobabble. I’ll keep the money.”
Lisa’s eyes burned. Tears would have helped, but she had none. Fighting against the restraints caused nothing but pain, and it seemed whenever she sank into the dream-vision of being with her sister, Morter honed in to the dinosaurs’ location, if he didn’t already have all the details.
Morter would seize her sister and all the dinosaurs, all because of Lisa doing what she’d always done: go in alone and try to take care of things herself. She’d done it during the protest, and she’d done it again by trying to outsmart EnBio. She should have known better. She should have listened to Dana rather than her stupid self. Her inward focus would leave her twice-dead and alone.
The only thing she could do now was avoid going into the dream-vision and making things worse. Lisa took in the details around her, trying to stay grounded in the horrible reality.
Framed pictures buffeted against the walls of the van. The family photos all showed two parents and two children, one boy, one girl. They bore the same poses, the father’s hands on the son’s shoulders, the mother’s on the daughter’s. The perfect-teethed smiles were all identical, pasted on from one to another. Lisa recognized them from the board room in EnBio.
The family pictures had slightly different facial structure, different hair colour, but in essence they were the same. A very narrow slice of what a family could be.
She’d thought they were propaganda, but this was Morter’s personal van...
Dana and her dinosaur family were all Lisa could think of. She prepared to throw herself into the fire to stave off Morter’s approach to the colony, where he would capture and hurt Dana, or worse.
The family images flashed in and out of focus. Fleeting memories pulsed with the pain, reminding Lisa of a time she had ignored her sister in favour of studying for exams, even when Dana had ended up in the hospital. She’d been determined to maintain her GPA, and things with Dana had never quite been the same for years afterward.
Lisa had to gamble on her assessment of Morter, but there was no other option.
“Where’s your sister to celebrate this victory with you?” she said.
Morter’s sky-blue eyes could have melted glass, but his face remained impassive. “What are you talking about?”
“Your sister. Your parents. They’re obviously important to you.”
A flinch betrayed the truth behind his cold expression. “EnBio seeks to bring out the best in families.”
“Good marketing line, but that’s not why those pictures are up.”
He stalked over to her, hand on the remote. The tendrils tugged and squeezed Lisa, burning white spots into view. She heaved, collapsing again in the restraints.
“Be quiet,” he said. “Your part’s done.”
Lisa dragged her gaze up off the floor. She smelled burning metal and the artificial sweetness of esters. “You can’t have them, can you?” she said. “You want them but everything you’ve done chased them away.”
Morter’s cheeks grew red. “I hold myself to a higher ideal,” he snapped. “I do what they can’t. I devote myself to bringing in a world, the right world, they deserve to have. A world they will have. Every step of progress of EnBio brings me closer to that world.”
“And you think it brings you closer to them.”
Morter’s jaw worked.
His psychology was a painful reminder of Lisa’s regrets, all the selfish things she’d done to push Dana away, including her ignoble quest to take down EnBio alone.
Morter pulled on the tendrils again. Lisa craned her back as lightning arced up her spine.
Flashes of family portraits alit. Whispers accused, said she was capable of becoming Morter should she continue along the path...
She tried to deny the accusations but knew the truth. A few whispers snaked up from the connection to the Earth—past the pain—and rebutted the self-loathing.
A whisper spoke of a release from the pain if only she would let go of her attachment to the ghostly facsimile of her body. If she would let go of the inward focus that had gotten her into this mess, the same need for self-definition that drove Morter into the depths of evil. Lisa drew toward the voice, then retreated back into herself. Letting go felt like jumping into an abyss, but the alternative was to be electrified until she felt nothing at all.
She twitched on the edge of a precipice, her feet dancing a rhythm of indecision. Through all the pain, all the transformations and changes beyond comprehension, she was the one constant. She had remained intact despite it all. No way was she going to lose that.
But as she clung, the ground turned into quicksand, and she sank, cold wet stickiness groping up her legs. Everything she clung to pulled under, and soon enough there be nothing worth holding onto.
She heaved to pull her legs out of the muck, but it bulged over her kneecaps. She screamed, desperate for an exit, and stared into the abyss.
Lights twinkled on the boundary of the void, and Lisa strained to discern what lay in wait.
Riding atop a Titan, Dana sat in the bottom of the darkness. The nearby lights glinted from other ghosts and dinosaurs, their details blurry.
Lisa might lose herself by casting into the abyss, but her network would catch the pieces and remind her who she was, wouldn’t it?
She owed it to Dana to get back and help, at any cost, even if they didn’t catch any pieces of her at all. Next to EnBio’s threat to her sister, Lisa’s self-preservation didn’t matter.
Lisa burst from the mud and cast down into the dark. Her body turned to smoke, the tendrils sizzling as she vanished into the connections, accepting her place as a linkage rather than separate from it. A linkage to her sister, her family of dinosaurs, and everything.
Far away, Morter shouted in surprise.
Lisa drifted through the spaces between, feeling nothing but intervening forces binding the community of dinosaurs and spirits together. She was nothing but a collection of emotions, tenderness and shared experience. Nothing could be a separate entity from anything else. Spirits floated in and out of the transient variances, rippling like pebbles dropped in a pond. Their translucent faces shimmered to be replaced by another’s. The palpable thing lay in between the figures.
Lisa was nothing, less than the fleeting glimpses of players doing their part in the stage play of the Earth Spirit’s drama.
And that was okay.
If Lisa never found herself again, she’d be content with that ineffable softness, that transient glint as part of an ebbing tide. For the first time in her life, she didn’t need to feel separate, different or special. The grandness of the web more than made up for that. She didn’t need a perfect image of herself distinct from the rest of the world. Strands of the web caressed, comforted, gave security. They coaxed the fragments she’d forgotten about back together, lightning converging into a single point of impact. Thunder shook the sky.
