Chupacabra (21 page)

Grace was not smiling, nor was Butch. They were standing outside the orangutan exhibit.

“So where is he?” Butch asked for the fiftieth time.

“I’m sure he’s hiding here somewhere,” Grace answered for the fiftieth time. “He’s just afraid.”

“I don’t have all night,” Butch said.

Neither did Grace. She had to get below, but there was no way to do it with Butch hanging around. She squatted down and crawled under a bush. “It’s okay, Marty,” she said, feeling ridiculous. “Butch isn’t going to hurt you. All he wants to do is let you out of here. Luther has already left the park. It’s on video. He’s safe.”

She crawled back out and brushed off her clothes.

“It might be helpful if you called for him, too,” she said.

“He thinks I tried to throw him into the ocean. Why would he believe me?”

“I’m getting cold,” Grace said.

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Butch took off his jacket and gave it to her; then he did an odd thing. He untucked his shirt.

The jacket, which had hung just below his waist, hung down below her knees.

Why did he untuck his shirt?

“Just try talking to him,” she begged. “What can it hurt?”

“Okay, okay,” Butch said. “Marty … look man, I know you don’t like me much. And you don’t trust me, but I’m being honest here. All I want to do is unlock the gate and let you out….”

He continued talking, but Grace was no longer listening to what he was saying. Butch’s key card opened just about everything in the Ark, including the front gate. She looked at him. He wasn’t wearing a lanyard with the key dangling around his neck like the other staff members.

“Your cousin is getting cold out here,” Butch continued. “I’m getting cold….”

She reached into the pockets of his jacket like she was trying to warm up. She felt a set of car keys, a wallet, and a piece of plastic the size of a credit card. She squatted down like she was looking under the bushes again, hoping the jacket would hide what she was about to do next. She clipped his key card onto her lanyard, and put the elevator card into his jacket. The cards all looked the same. He wouldn’t know what she had done until he got below and discovered that his card didn’t open anything but the main elevator.

Now what?

She stood and turned around.

Butch had his back to her. “I want to go to sleep, Marty,” he was saying. “I’m sure you want to get home and go to sleep, too….”

He bent over and his shirt rode up to his waist. He had a pistol tucked into the back of his pants.

“Come on, Marty, give us a break.” Butch turned and looked at her. “How was that?”

Grace shrugged. “It didn’t work.”

“Are you sure this is where you left him?”

“Right where you’re standing, actually,” Grace said.

“You know what else didn’t work?” Butch asked.

Grace shook her head. Butch’s hand struck like a cobra, ripping the lanyard from her neck and knocking her to the ground. “Your little card trick,” he said.

Grace sat on the ground, looking up at him in utter shock.

He reached back, pulled out his pistol, and pointed it at her. “And yes, this is a gun. You think I’m stupid?”

He pulled the trigger. The muzzle flash lit the night. The sound was deafening. An elephant trumpeted, and the lions began to roar.

“They’re the only ones that heard that,” Butch said. “We had to put up a special soundproof wall around the Ark to keep the neighborhood happy. What happens in the Ark stays in the Ark. Last chance. Where’s Marty?”

Marty stepped out of the pig lab, listening to Luther gripe, which he was happy about because it meant that Luther was alive.

“As if the rat and mouse pellets weren’t bad enough, now I’m smeared with pork poop,” Luther said.

“It’s a good look on you,” Dylan said.

“You have a clump of it in your hair,” Luther said. “That’s attractive.”

“At least I have hair.”

“I hate to interrupt this,” Marty said. “But we’re looking for dinosaurs.”

“I’m on it,” Luther said, skipping ahead and sniffing every doorjamb he encountered.

“Wow,” Dylan said. “I can honestly say that’s something I never thought I’d see.”

“Stick with us and you’ll see a lot of things you never thought you’d see,” Marty said with one eye on Luther and the other on the Gizmo.

“Seriously, Marty, what
is
the plan?”

“Seriously, Dylan, we don’t have a plan, which is why we’re joking around. That’s what we usually do when we’re scared
out of our wits and have run out of options. Without Grace and the key, we have no way out of here. I’m worried about her. Very worried. But there’s nothing I can do about it, so we might as well find the hatchlings and see what’s going on with them. The alternative is to find someplace to hide, or circle the ship.”

“Circle the ship?”

“You ever been on a cruise?”

“No.”

“These circular corridors down here are like the promenade decks on cruise ships. I used to drive my parents out of their minds by doing a thing I called deck ditching. I’d walk ahead of them in the same direction they were walking, but at a faster pace. After a couple of laps, I’d lose them …”

“What if one went clockwise and the other counterclockwise?” Dylan asked.

Marty felt his heart squeeze. “My parents were inseparable,” he said quietly. “They always traveled in the same direction.”

The squeeze must have shown on his face because Dylan put a dusty hand on Marty’s shoulder and said, “Wolfe will find your parents. I’m sure of it.”

Marty wished he was as certain as Dylan. His parents had been missing for a long time.

And the longer they’re missing, the less likely they’ll …

He shook off the squeeze. There was no time for that now. He needed to stay focused on the current horror.

“Back to deck ditching,” he said. “It looks like Luther knocked out all of their cameras down here.” He showed Dylan the live feed from the dragonspy. “We’ll see the bad guys when they come out of the elevator. We’ll be able to track them, but
they won’t be able to see us as long as we stay a curve ahead of them.”

“What about the pig?” Dylan asked.

Marty gave him a grin. “I’m not sure why I did that. I guess I just wanted to mess with their heads. To let them know that the big bad chupacabra they sent after us didn’t scare us.”

“Is that true?”

“No,” Marty admitted. “I nearly wet my pants when it dropped from the ceiling.”

“So you really think they saw you before the chupacabra camera shut down?”

“If they were watching, they saw me. It was pointed right at … ” Marty stopped walking.

“What?”

“Stupid!” Marty said. “I was having so much fun watching you and Luther with the pig, I forgot to turn the camera and GPS back on. I should go back and —”

“Bingo!” Luther shouted. He had stopped in front of a door marked 251. He turned to look at Marty. “Think they’ll recognize me?”

The way Luther looked now, Marty doubted Luther’s own mother would have recognized him. He swiped the key card through the lock. Luther yanked the door open and they were hit with a blast of dino gas.

Dylan staggered backward, gagging.

Marty’s stomach lurched, and for a second he thought he might be sick.

Luther didn’t seem affected in the least by the smell. If anything, he seemed to like it.

“Told you I could sniff them out,” he said, smiling.

“There is something seriously wrong with your olfactory senses,” Dylan said, trying to catch his breath.

“It’s not that bad,” Luther said, stepping inside.

Reluctantly, Marty and Dylan followed.

“Food prep!” Luther said.

“It looks like a butcher shop,” Dylan said.

The room they’d stepped into had a long stainless steel table in the center of it strewn with chunks of red meat. Hanging on a hook above the table was a side of beef with a bloody meat cleaver buried in the muscle. Blood ran down the center of the table to a drain. Sitting on a wheeled cart beneath the drain was a five-gallon bucket filled with blood that needed to be dumped. Next to it were a half-dozen other buckets filled with animal entrails.

“Ghoulish,” Marty said.

“You’d think they’d have a better setup at a zoo,” Luther said. “We had a much better food prep system aboard the
Coelacanth
.”

“Maybe Noah will hire you when this is all over,” Marty said.

“He could do worse,” Luther said.

“It looks like somebody left in a hurry,” Dylan said. He pointed to a heavy door in the wall behind the table. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s a cooler. They should have at least wheeled this stuff in there so it didn’t go bad.”

Marty thought back to the Mokélé-mbembé nest in the Congo. There certainly wasn’t a cooler there, but Dylan had a good point. Why hadn’t they cleaned up here before they left?

“Maybe the butcher’s coming back soon,” Luther said.

“Grace told me that the only people allowed in here are her, Yvonne, and Butch,” Marty said.

“Maybe Butch is the Butcher,” Luther said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” Marty stared at the meat and gore. There was something niggling at the back of his brain. Somehow all of this was important, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Let’s check the hatchlings,” Luther said.

There was another door to the right of the cooler. It was locked. The first key didn’t work. Marty swiped the second key. The lock clicked. He opened the door and they were hit by another blast of choking stink, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first cloud.

“Guess we’re getting used to it,” he said.

“Getting used to what?” Luther asked.

Marty shook his head and stepped back, letting Luther go through first, then waved Dylan in behind him. He took another look at the food prep area before following them in, wondering what it was about the butchery that bothered him.

“They’re asleep,” Luther whispered.

Marty joined them. The hatchlings were half buried under a pile of straw with their long necks, tails, and feet entangled. It was difficult to tell where one stopped and the other started, but it was clear they were dinosaurs, and more specifically, babies. Their skin was the color of green olives, dappled with purple splotches. Their tails were as long as their bodies, thick at the base, tapering down to a fist-sized nodule at the tip. Their legs were the size and shape of a baby elephant’s, but on each foot, instead of toenails, the hatchlings had three large claws. Their necks were nearly as long as their tails, topped by a large skull with two rows of sharp teeth.

The hatchlings were snoring, and farting, and they were a lot bigger than they had been when Marty had last seen them.

He looked at Dylan and nearly laughed. His mouth was hanging open in mute shock, and his eyes were as big as pancakes. He looked like he might faint from shock.

“You weren’t lying,” he managed to whisper.

“Duh
du jour
,” Luther said. “Getting them out of here isn’t going to be easy. When Blackwood nabbed them, they fit into pillowcases. They’re at least twice as big now. Guess they have better meat here than we had aboard the ship. Maybe we can walk them out. We’ll need harnesses like the one you had us put on that pig, but bigger. Why did you have us put that harness on that pig anyway?”

Up until that very second, Marty didn’t know. Now he did. He looked at the Gizmo. The elevator was still closed. He hoped he had enough time.

Butch fired another round into the bushes.

“Stop it!” Grace screamed.

“Tell me where Marty is.”

“I don’t know where Marty is!”

Butch fired a third round, closer this time.

“You’re going to hurt one of the animals!”

“We can always get more animals.” He fired a fourth shot. Grace felt it zing past her head.

“Close one,” Butch said. “If you’ve lost count, that was four. The clip holds eighteen, and I have another clip in my jacket. In fact, hand over the jacket. The way this is going, I might need that clip.” He laughed at his own joke.

The laugh triggered a fundamental shift inside of Grace. She saw herself cowering on the ground with the fog swirling all around her, and she did not like the picture. That was the old Grace. The Grace who was afraid of everything. She felt the fog of terror burning away as if the hot sun were rising inside of her. Butch was a thug and bully, but he wouldn’t possibly be so reckless, so stupid, as to actually shoot his boss’s granddaughter. And he wouldn’t get any information out of her about Marty if she were dead!

“Give me the jacket,” Butch ordered again.

Grace got to her feet and shrugged out of Butch’s giant jacket, not in obedience, but because she didn’t want it to get in her way. As the jacket dropped to the ground, she palmed the elevator card. Butch squatted down to pick up the jacket. That’s when Grace kicked him in the face and ran.

 • • • 

“If you spill blood or gore in the corridor, you need to clean it up,” Marty said. “It needs to look like we were never in the corridor.” He shoved a pile of towels into Dylan’s arms and ran from the dino nursery.

Dylan looked at Luther. “And I thought you were crazy.”

 • • • 

Another shot rang out behind Grace, but she didn’t look back. She knew the worst her kick had done to Butch was to startle him, but she allowed herself a small smile at the memory of his shocked expression. She sprinted all the way through Southeast Asia and didn’t slow down until she reached Australia, stopping in the underground duck-billed platypus exhibit to catch her breath. Gasping, with her hands on her knees, she thought about her next move. She had to get back down to Level Two; she had the elevator key card in her back pocket. But how was she going to get below without leading Butch to Marty, Dylan, and Luther? Butch obviously didn’t know Marty was down there, or he wouldn’t be up top searching for him. And he hadn’t mentioned Dylan, so there was a good chance he didn’t know that Marty had brought a friend.

She started out of the platypus exhibit, then stopped. She knew the Ark well, but not as well as Butch, and not in the
dark, although it was getting lighter and the fog seemed to be lifting. She wondered if Butch was stalking her …

Or circling around to ambush me?

She took a deep breath and told herself it didn’t matter. She had to get below, and she wasn’t going to let Butch, or anyone else, stop her.

 • • • 

Luther cautiously opened the door, just in case the chupacabra had broken out of the cabinet. It hadn’t, but it was trying to. It was slamming its body into the door, and its claws were frantically slashing at the stainless steel. Dylan checked the wire he had tied around the handles.

“It’ll hold,” he said.

“Let’s hurry anyway,” Luther said, wheeling the cart into the center of the room. “That thing freaks me out.”

When they finished their grim work, they stepped back out into the corridor and waited for Marty, as he had requested. It wasn’t long before he appeared, sprinting down the corridor chasing a potbellied pig that was snorting and running with surprising speed.

“Stop him!” Marty shouted breathlessly.

The two pig wranglers sprang into action. Dylan dove and managed to snag the pig’s hind leg. Luther wrapped his arms around its squealing head. Marty ran up and dropped to his knees and opened Luther’s multi-tool.

“Nice grab.” He unscrewed the panel on the harness. “Turn him around with the camera facing away from us, toward the lab door.”

They swung the pig around.

“Hope that chupacabra doesn’t get out while he’s in there,” Luther said. “This pig will be bacon.”

Marty frowned.

“The chupacabra’s not going anywhere,” Dylan said. “He’s locked in that cabinet until someone lets him out.”

“Good,” Marty said. “As soon as I turn on the GPS and the camera, shove Mr. Pig into the room and slam the door. I won’t have time to replace the panel. Ready?”

Luther and Dylan nodded. Marty flipped the switches. They shoved the pig through the door.

 • • • 

“We’re back online!” Yvonne said. “Oh my God!”

Noah hurried around the desk to look at the monitor. It wasn’t a pretty sight, and he couldn’t be happier. The lab looked like a slaughterhouse. Nine was rooting around in pools of blood and guts. He watched the carnage for a full minute, relishing the wave of relief washing over him, savoring the terrible end to Marty O’Hara and, judging by the immense amount of gore in the lab, Luther Smyth as well.

He gave Yvonne a smile. She didn’t know it, but she had just dodged a bullet.

“Get up there and take care of the mess,” he said. “Then get the hatchlings ready to be transported.”

“They’re due to wake up any minute now,” she said. “I’ll have to feed them before we go. Then I’ll have to get Nine back to Strand’s lab.”

“And your point is?” Noah asked, knowing exactly what her point was, and not caring in the least.

“I thought maybe Butch could clean the lab,” Yvonne said.

“Are you squeamish?”

“Not particularly. I just thought —”

“Butch didn’t make this mess. You did. Now get to it. We have a flight to catch.”

“Yes, sir.”

Noah left her. As soon as he found Butch he
would
send him down to help, not as a reward to Yvonne, but as a punishment for Butch. It was a toss-up as to which one of them he was more angry with. The situation had been resolved in spite of their incompetence.

As he strolled down the corridor, he almost felt like whistling. It had turned out to be a good night.

Release and Catch still in place. Marty and Luther out of the way. Travis Wolfe will come looking for them, but he’ll find nothing.

He smiled.