16

Did I say hut? The Raptor was mistaken. Whatever funds were not being spent on the overall adornment of the Progressive compound were obviously rerouted to the construction and interior decoration of Circe’s pleasure palace here in the center of the island. The walls sparkle with some unidentifiable substance that is not quite diamond and not quite pearl, but I have a feeling that a square foot of it would buy my condo, my car, and all of the basil I could eat for a decade.

Not that there’s a shortage of the evil herb. From the moment we make our way into the main house via the twelve-foot double doors, my arm interlocked with Circe’s, our mood already jovial from the refreshing half-mile jaunt up the private walkway, we are surrounded by sycophants bearing all manner of earthly delights. Platters piled with parsley, trays towering with thyme—it’s available, it’s fresh, and, best of all, it’s free.

I am not a mooch, but I play one while undercover.

“Help yourself, Vincent,” Circe tells me. She’s already downed a quarter-pound of marjoram, and she’s onto the fenugreek without stopping to take a breath. “The cumin is quite good.”

I’d like to have a taste of it all, actually, to romp through this spectacular buffet of mind-benders, but part of my reason for allowing Circe to take me back to her place is to do some serious probing—questions, probing questions—and I’ll need a comparatively clear head if I’m going to pull it off. Still, a lick or two of cumin can’t hurt . . .

And some saffron for good luck.

And some fennel, because I haven’t tried it in years.

And a few handfuls of basil to take back to Ernie, because that’s the kind of guy I am.

Before I realize it, my bloodstream is full to bursting with sprigs and leaves, and Circe and I are out of the foyer and walking down a long, ornate hallway. Through a far door, I can make out row after row of dry-cleaning racks and a host of drooping human guises hanging to the ground. This must be where my costume is being kept; I hope they’ve got it smelling piney-fresh.

Soon, before my body has had a chance to dart a memo up to my mind, Circe and I are seated in a large leather loveseat, the high back and wide arms encompassing our bodies, cradling us as one. Circe’s long legs dangle over mine, her left underclaw scraping lightly against my knee. We’re in a study of some sort, the walls lined with old portraits of austere dinosaurs unfamiliar to me.

“I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself,” she says.

I play it coy. “You’ve got a nice little island. Nice little group. How long has this Progress thing been around, anyway?”

“Has the time come when we ask each other questions?”

Her initial reluctance to answer my offhand remark reminds me why I’m here in the first place. Yet all of this chitchat, the easy access to herbs, and, yes, the close proximity of a perfect dinosaur specimen of my own race and opposite gender has indeed lulled me into forgetting the task at hand. But now you’re back on track, Vincent—full speed ahead and no tugging at the brake.

Grunting with the effort—both physical and mental—I remove Circe’s legs from my own, stand, and stroll as steadily as possible across the study. “We can play footsie anytime. I’m here to learn, remember?”

“And so you are. And so you shall.”

“You get off talking that way?” I ask her.

“It’s better than the other way.”

“What’s that?”

“Grunting.”

Strange lady. Strange place. “You’ve got a nice island.”

She nods, smiling. “Thank you. We try.”

“Big. Lots of forest. You only seem to be using a small part of it, though.”

“The jungle is beautiful,” Circe admits, “though we rarely go in. The other side of the island is . . . different.”

I nod, pacing slightly. One step forward, one step back, cha cha cha. “Different how?”

“Changed. Mutated. This island was one of the original sites used for early atomic testing.”

Instantly, my skin begins to crawl with a thousand radioactive particles, my entire body sending out a furious, massive itch signal to my frantic brain. Isn’t this how Godzilla was born?

But Circe can read me well enough to understand my concern, and she’s quickly shaking her head, caressing my arm to assuage my fears. “We’re fine over here,” she insists. “This side of the island is free of radiation; we have bimonthly Geiger counter sweeps.”

“So what’s over there?” I ask, ever the curious kitten. “On the other side?”

“I don’t know. We’ve declared it off-limits, for everyone’s safety.”

We stare at each other. She’s lovely.

Time to break the silence, if only to hear myself talk, make sure she hasn’t pulled an herb trick and charmed me into a mute. “So, you go through a test like that?” I ask. “The Ring?”

“At some point, we all have to ‘go through’ our little tests. Some are different from others.”

I scratch my chin, making a big show of it. This is my attentive look. “So you’re saying you’ve never been in the Ring.”

“Very perceptive, Mr. Rubio.” I think she may be mocking me, but the herbs have made it difficult for me to distinguish sarcasm from sincerity. “Suffice it to say that the Ring would not be a substantial challenge for me, but if I were to test myself in that arena, I would no longer be fit to lead the group down their path to Progress.”

“Would you like to elaborate on that?”

“No.”

A polished mahogany desk with brass handles has become my new seat; I place my butt on its surface, the cool wood providing a nice counterpoint to the steamy climate. Haven’t these people heard of air conditioning? At least the ancestors were bright enough to manufacture a fan or two, I’d imagine.

“Kind of messy back there, that Raptor getting gored by the bull,” I say.

“Sadly, it happens.”

“Often?”

“No,” she says, “but even once is more than I like to see. Our members are eager to reclaim their true identities, and sometimes their enthusiasm gets in the way of good judgment.”

“It was a big bull.”

“And he was a strong Raptor. When the combatant is ready, I assure you, there are no unfair battles in the Ring. He’ll be taken care of by the doctors, and I doubt he will make such an error again. The next time, he will let Progress take its course.” Circe slides over on the chair. “Are you ready to take a seat again? There’s room.”

I ignore the come-on and stay put. “You have Ring competitions every night?”

“Only when they’re called for.”

“What if some Diplodod wants to go head-to-head with Simba but you’re not in Hawaii?”

“We have other Rings,” says Circe, “in other locations.”

“Where?”

“Some things are better to find out as time passes. Stay with us and you will know in time.”

I jump off the desk and start to wander the room, staring up at the oak-framed oil paintings hung on the maroon walls. All manner of dinosaurs have been captured in delicate portraiture, each one a study in wrinkles and creases and worn hides. These dudes are old.

“The ancestors?” I ask.

“Hardly. That one to your left was a university president back in the late nineteenth century; the Coelo next to him is J. Edgar Hoover. Other than that, I don’t know who most of them are, to be honest. This was Raal’s study.”

“Was.”

“Yes, was.”

“So he’s dead?”

A lick of those lips, focusing on the corner of her mouth. “So they say.”

Odd how this little duckling keeps changing her story. Earlier, she was quite adamant that he was alive and kicking, just unavailable for comment. “Did you know him?”

“Yes.”

“How long did you know him?”

Circe stands and turns away from me, heading to a wet bar jutting out from the far wall. A steady waterfall streams out from a tap there, and Circe reaches out with that long tongue and laps up some of the elixir. Even from here, I can smell the herb infusion. “I invited you up here for a nightcap—”

“—and I’m staying for the company,” I finish. “If you want me to stop with the questions . . .”

“Fifteen years. After that, he was gone.”

“And you presume he’s dead.”

“I presume nothing. Raal was nearly one hundred percent dinosaur natural, and he could accomplish quite a great deal more with one flick of his tail than we could do in a lifetime of struggle.”

I suggest, “You were his protégée.”

“If you want to call it that. He led me into Progress.”

“How?”

Seemingly a simple question, I think, but that one syllable sends Circe back to the waterfall to slurp up another gallon of happy juice. Strangely enough, she’s not getting drunk off her beautiful behind; if she is, I am unable to notice the least change in her demeanor. I’d be knocking into walls and excusing myself to doorknobs by this point, but maybe she’s worked up a tolerance to the stuff.

“Stay here,” she says, and then slinks out a side door, leaving me to my lonesome in this boring study; she could have at least left me alone in a game room. A high-backed leather recliner stands behind the desk, a classic power chair if ever I’ve seen one, brass buttons dotting the extra-thick cowhide, the leather burnished to a high gloss, the fabric nearly as slippery as Mr. Levitt’s slipcover formula back in Thousand Oaks. This thing’s a lawsuit waiting to happen—I bet if I sit on it right, I can fall off at just the angle to split my head open and let the punitive judgments come pouring in.

But my greed muscle isn’t flexing as strong as my snoop muscle today, and so as soon as I take a seat at what must have been Raal’s desk, I can’t stop my fingers from grabbing a paper clip out of the desk organizer and bending it into a makeshift lock-pick. This is not a matter of choice; it’s a reflex that simply takes over at various times, and there is little I can do to halt the action. There are five drawers in this desk—two to either side, one directly in the middle—and all are practically pleading with me to unlock and uncover their hidden treasures. I’m like Geraldo, only without the TV cameras to provide that extra level of embarrassment.

After a few moments of twisting the small bit of metal in the lock, I realize that the damned thing isn’t even closed all the way; whoever used it last was negligent in locking it back up tight, and I’m not one to finish others’ work. I open it wide.

Accounting sheets. Red ink, black ink, red ink, black ink, it’s a mess of gains and losses, income and expenditures, and I can’t figure out a lick of it. The last math class I ever took ended with a protractor stuck halfway up my nose—don’t ask, don’t ask—and since then I’ve steered clear of the world of numbers.

But there are certain subheadings under which even I can recognize some massive outflows of cash. Something on the order of six and a half million dollars left the coffers of the Progressives no more than a month ago, and though it doesn’t say where this money went, there are very few herb dealers who charge more than a few bucks per kilo of basil.

It’s not just good old American sawbucks, either. There’s lira and deutschmarks and kroner and a number of other types of currency I don’t even recognize. Whatever it is they’re buying, they’re buying it in more countries than just this one; I only wish I knew what the Progressives were paying so much for. But one thing’s for sure—no matter the breed, this puppy is global.

I’m about to look further when I hear familiar footsteps making their approach. I quickly shove the papers back into the desk drawer—crumpling them in the process, I am sure—and toss the paper clip in the direction of a nearby trash bin. It misses. My three-point shot needs a lot of work.

When Circe enters the room, she’s holding a thin photo album, the cover blank, the spine unwritten upon. Retaking her place on the loveseat, Circe beckons to me. “I haven’t shown this to anyone in years,” she says softly, “and if you’re going to look at it, you might as well sit by me.”

Fair enough. Not that it’s such a chore, mind you, but I was hoping to keep this professional.

Ah, who am I kidding? No I wasn’t.

The scrapbook opens up with a modest three-bedroom house somewhere in the suburbs. Lawn jockey, pink flamingo, station wagon in the driveway, the works. On the front porch, man and wife, smiling at the camera, picture of domestic bliss. “This was my house,” says Circe. “These were my parents.”

I’m surprised, mainly because the broad in the photos is all made up good and proper, like she’s going out for dinner and a show. Dinosaurs are usually frustrated enough with the morning routine of buckling in and strapping on that the females rarely have the time or patience to apply an extra layer of face paint to a face that’s not even theirs in the first place. In fact, the more granola a female, the more likely she’s a lizard in ape’s clothing. We go for simplification as often as possible; it’s no coincidence, for example, that the bra burning movement was started by a Bronto who had dealt with one strap too many.

“They look nice.”

She smiles wistfully. “I’m sure they were. They died when I was one.”

“I’m sorry. You were an orphan?”

“Not until then.” She turns the page. A baby, pink and gurgling—well, mid-gurgle, anyhow—lying in a bassinet, reaching up for the photographer, chubby little fists stretching to the air.

“You?”

“Before my parents . . . went away. The guise was a Blaupunkt—it’s the one thing I have from my childhood. At least, it’s the one thing I want to keep.”

The next series of pictures are not quite so rosy. Rows of girls ranging from toddlers to teens lined up in precise formations, smiling robotically at the camera, shabby uniforms and shiny shoes, eyes dead and defeated.

“St. Helena’s Home for Wayward Girls,” says Circe. “They didn’t like me much,” she explains. “I got picked on, but that wasn’t the worst of it. An orphanage isn’t the best place for a young girl—”

“I know,” I interrupt, eager to console. “I saw Annie.”

Laughter—unexpected, but welcome—as Circe shuts the book and turns toward me. “Annie might be the representation of a human orphanage, Vincent—though I doubt it—but the facilities for dinosaurs were even worse than your theatrical version would have you believe.”

“That’s not—I didn’t mean—”

“The sisters who ran the place had decided that since the world was mostly human anyway, they would teach us to be more mammal than mammals. Horrible creatures, every one of them, shrieking at us every time they smelled an iota of scent coming from our bodies. We were forced to wrap our necks in heavy cloths in order to soak up the pheromones, then spray ourselves with Lysol to cover up the remainder. Hot baths were next, steel wool raked against our hides—anything to get rid of the scent.

“All they wanted to do was drill the dino out of us. They wouldn’t be satisfied until we were indistinguishable from the apes. I spent every single morning in that place staring at myself in the mirror, at that hideously pointed snout, those terrible claws, that horrendous tail, hating every last vestige of my reptilian heritage.

“My best friend even went so far as to cut off her tail—went into the machine shop one morning, turned on the buzzsaw, and just sliced it right off—and even though she died, even though her desire to be human was stronger than her desire for life, I remember at the time not horror, not revulsion, but thinking Janine’s so cool, why can’t I do that?”

Can’t help but swallow, a big throat-clearing gulp. “Why didn’t you?” I ask.

“Raal found me before I worked up the nerve. He came to the home, interviewed a few of the girls, and when he found me, he said he was done. He said he’d been searching for ten years for the one who could lead our people out of bondage. He didn’t even wait for the adoption papers to come through—he came for me that night, snuck me out of my room, out of the orphanage, and we took off.”

“You believed him, then?”

“Not a bit. But he had food, he had herbs, he had freedom, and for a girl about to hit her teens inside an orphanage, he was Moses and Jesus and Keith Partridge all wrapped up in one.”

“And then?”

“And then my training began. Years of patience and understanding, of Raal trying to show me who I was—more importantly, what I was. Teaching me to use my natural gifts, and teaching me to love myself again.”

I can’t help myself; maybe it’s the story, the late night, or the last remaining herbs in my system, but this thought jumps out of my lips before I can close the drawbridge—“He taught you the scent trick.”

“He taught me the scent trick,” she repeats, taking my hand in hers, and a fiery tingle shoots up my arm and straight into my chest. “Which is not so much a trick as it is a natural function, like breathing or walking. It’s integral.”

“How?”

“The scent allows us access to our true selves. Anything is possible—connection, extension, even hibernation. When you are sure of yourself, it fades into the background, becomes part of your system. It’s all natural.

“But each dinosaur is different,” she tells me. “We all have many things in common, but we’re like humans in the sense that we all have varying degrees of talent.”

And as she speaks, I can feel her talent beginning to come on strong. Not a quick jab like the other times she knocked me out, but a slow, steady massage, rolling over me in waves of sugar and spice and everything nice. The room begins to waver, the walls shimmying in and out, waving to me as if to say Goodnight, Vincent, y’all come back real soon . . .

But I’m continuing with these questions, damn it, and I use whatever strength I’ve got left to fight past the smells and form the proper words. “And that’s why he picked you,” I manage to say. “You had it in spades. . . .”

Circe nods, and from my vantage point, it looks like her whole body is nodding along. The walls are losing their opacity, becoming more and more transparent. “I left the world,” she is saying, “and learned from Raal. He said I had a gift he hadn’t seen before. He said that together we would free our species from their shackles. He said that the only path to understanding ourselves was tooiagh greaarlar, and by doing so, laareeeeach orrarelearghhh in the wrolaaergh—”

A babble of nonsense yelps and groans pours from her mouth, mixing some foreign tongue with the only language I know. But she goes right on speaking—growling, grunting—as if it’s the plainest English in the world.

As the last remaining walls give way, I reach out and try to grab hold of the loveseat—something to keep me rooted in place. My hands encounter fabric, a good sign, but it’s not long before it changes to bark. I look down to find my fingers grasping tight to an ancient tree stump, and by the time I look up again, the study is gone.

I’m in the forest again.

You’d think by now I’d know my way around this darn jungle, but it’s got a different feel to it this time. In the previous experiments with Circe and her magical scent, the forest was almost as translucent as reality, a not-quite-here slice of un-life, but this tree trunk is real enough to be scratching my butt something fierce, and should the Pterodactyl hovering above me—a creature that should be long extinct—decide to do its business over my head, you can bet I’m not going to sit tight and hope it’s all a mirage.

I stand, and the leaves beneath my feet crinkle against my toes, tickling them, caressing them. Unfamiliar sounds—songs, calls, the joyous shout of all this nature—bounce from tree to tree and back to my ears, delighting me every bit along the way. A thick layer of air blankets everything in sight, and I find myself laboring to breathe, relearning the very act itself. I touch another tree, and it, too, is solid. Right here. Right now.

A caress across my chest, a light finger tracing down, down, the motion coming from behind. Hot breath on my ear. “Do you like it?”

It’s Circe. “How—”

“Shh. Do you like it?”

“Yesss,” I sigh, hissing the last in a long, sharp exhale. This is not the way my relationships usually start out—I am the seductor, not the seductee—but as long as I’m already standing in a world that can’t possibly exist, I might as well let nature take its course, no matter how twisted it may seem.

“Let go,” she whispers. “The end of days.”

Arms grasping me tighter, encircling my body, and I turn to face my new lover, our tongues already seeking out each other, snaking in and out and around, licking sweat, saliva, scent. My arms, rising of their own accord, holding Circe tighter, lifting her off the ground, fingers clenched around the base of her tail, stroking her back, placing her where she needs to be—where I need her to be—

And we’re moving now, our feet stationary but the ground beneath rippling by, churning ahead as we begin to make love, rocking back and forth as I plunge myself into her, rolling over in a bed of air, the trees streaming past, leaves whacking past our naked bodies, her legs tight around my body, mouth open, calling out—

Speed rising, growing faster, Circe’s claws snapping into place, raking down my back, the pain exhilarating, my snout pulling wide, teeth biting down hard on her shoulder, pelvis thrusting into hers, hard as I’ve ever been, sweat pouring off our bodies, dripping down our tails, onto the ground below, disappearing in that brown-and-yellow blur, head spinning, sky overhead cartwheeling around and about our bodies—

My own smells rising, mixing with hers, our pheromones making their own sort of love as a howl rises up from my chest, matching Circe’s own scream of craving, both of us slamming against each other, no simple sex but a furious animal assault of carnal lust—every tree disappearing now, the world going with it, the leaves, the dirt, the ground, the sky, circling, cycling, nothing holding us up as we tuck into each other, claws imbedded, teeth imbedded, my entire body wrapped up in hers and hers in mine—

Mind shutting down, body left on autopilot, thrusting, feeling—

Never-ending—always like this—

Pain, pleasure, pain—

Then a light, streaming from above—a shriek, not animal, not living—the sky, burning, a hole torn in the clouds—heat, fiery heat as I begin to blast my seed inside her, as I grunt and let loose, a sizzling stream, burning me, needling me—Circe pulling me down, pulling me in, mouth open wide, a low moan of horror and of ecstasy—we are together—we are one—and still from above, louder now, that terrible noise, that ferocious noise, that apocalyptic noise—growing closer, the burning larger, larger, encompassing the sky, everything on the verge of everything else, and—and—

Darkness.