19

We have spent six hours lost in this jungle, slamming into tree trunks, tree branches, tripping over stumps, over roots, frightening small woodland creatures, and if it takes another six, I’m more than willing to collect whatever bumps and bruises may occur. The other side of the island and the fence blocking access to that off-limits area is around here somewhere.

We’ve got to break into that building.

Ernie and I snuck away from the amphitheater with little fanfare. Don’t even know if they noticed our exit; they’d have a big enough job calming down hundreds of rioting dinosaurs, and two little infidels cannot have been significant enough to worry themselves over. We don’t have maps, but no matter. We don’t have a compass—no matter. We don’t have the vaguest clue as to where we’re going or what we’ll find when—if—we get there. No matter.

What we do have is a furious anger, a sense that we’ve been played for chumps, and a burning desire to get to the heart of the beast, ferret out the weasel, or weasels, responsible, and exact justice. The only problem is that we’re naked, and we’re lost.

“You been dropping those pine cones?” Ernie asks me.

“Fat lot of good that’ll do. Look for the freaky trees, that’s the key.”

We proceed deeper into the jungle, the moon and stars completely obscured by the canopy overhead, and by the time I’m starting to believe that we’re irretrievably, irrevocably lost, that they’ll find our bodies in three thousand years, clean up our skeletons, and place us in museums so that schoolkids can marvel at the advanced stage of lizards back in our time and write misspelled thank-you notes to the curator, Ernie’s picked up on a scent.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s . . . it’s me,” he says, a little abashed.

Great, he’s smelling himself again. I thought we’d gotten that habit taken care of back in ’89. “I don’t get it.”

Ernie’s moving quickly now, his legs moving independently of the rest of his body, torso coming along for the ride. “When we were out by the fence with Buzz and Wendell earlier on—when Samuel found us—I took the liberty of relieving myself on a few bushes. I think I’ve caught the scent.”

A deep breath, soaking up the jungle air. I’ve got urine smells coming in, all right, and when you work in the city—especially if you’re running a job in downtown Santa Monica—you can’t be squeamish when it comes to matters of the bladder. Still, I’m unable to distinguish Ernie’s urine from a raccoon’s from a blue jay’s—at least, not at this distance. But I’m sure Ernie’s been tracking it for miles. Even though humans have a rough time detecting their own body odor—the ones with bad body odor have an especially hard time at it, natch—and dinos are unable to smell their own pheromones, we’ve each got a keen sense of our own waste products. Sure, call it disgusting, but anything that’ll get me oriented in this jungle is worthy of some respect.

I follow my partner, who is now working a beeline through the forest, and it’s not another ten minutes before the trees begin to take on that Brothers Grimm look. Knotholes elongate, forming great, gaping maws, branches reaching out like arthritic fingers ready to pluck me up and finish me off. Of course, Ernie’s walking through it all like it’s downtown Brentwood at high noon, but then the old fart never did have much of an imagination.

“There’s the bush,” says Ernie, pointing to the small urine-soaked hedge. I applaud, he bows, and we stare up at the fence looming before us, thirty feet high, completely unscalable by anyone older than ten.

“Now what?” I sit on a stump, my chin falling into my hands.

“How about getting that gate open?”

I shake my head. “No good. I think it’s remote control. Remember when we got picked up in the Hummer that first night? Samuel clicked some box near the dashboard, and I heard creaking—”

At which point my partner opens his hand, green side up, to reveal the most beautiful six-inch box of plastic I’ve ever seen. The white push button on the side glistens in the moonlight.

“I snatched it from the truck before we got out,” says my partner, his grin stretching across those wide-set teeth.

“But you’ve got no pockets.”

“Correct.”

“Do I want to know where you hid it?”

“No, you do not.”

A click, a whirr, and the gate squeaks open, the hinges bitching about it all the way. “The path works in from here,” I tell Ernie. “Should be just along the way.”

My partner agrees, and after a few minutes of searching in the darkness, we stumble onto a four-foot-wide area of jungle that looks to have been cleared out a little more than the rest. The mutation is even more evident here, the ground slick beneath our feet, buckling up and out from the monstrous roots beneath its surface. A pair of tire tracks still set in the mud clinches the deal—this is the way in, no doubt, and our pace turns quicker as we slog through the mud, a stroll giving way to a spirited walk giving way to a jog giving way to a run.

We’re eating up the land, mud churning beneath our feet, and over the smells of the jungle, our sweat, our excitement, I get a whiff of something else. Something familiar and yet slightly foreign. Can’t place it yet, but as I concentrate on the path ahead, I’m collecting samples and letting the forensic scientist in my brain sort through the evidence.

New sounds, too. High-pitched squeaking, a gerbil in distress. Only I don’t think gerbils are native to Hawaii. Animal calls, echoing off the trees, howls dying in the stillness of the night. And like the prior absence of sounds, these new noises are not soothing.

“Do you smell . . . others?” I ask Ernie.

“Other what?”

“Other dinosaurs. The pine, the dew . . .”

Mid-run, Ernie takes a deep whiff of the surrounding air, pivoting his head in all directions, nearly whacking into a koa tree on the way. “They may be following us,” he says, and as one, we pick up the pace.

Almost before we get a chance to slam on the brakes, Ernie and I burst into a clearing, the moon showing its mocking little face once again, and wind up in front of our very own Holy Grail: the redbrick building. The tire tracks we’ve been following lead right up to the front door and then stop, and we slow to a quick walk and circle the structure, hoping that an easy way in will materialize if we stare hard enough at it.

No such luck. The only entrance remains a steel door set into the brick wall, and the only lock is an infernal finger-hole next to it, an exact replica of the one Circe used on the fossil-making barn. “Can’t hurt to try,” I suggest. “No other way in.”

“Be my guest.”

“Oh. I thought maybe you’d want to. . . .”

“Go ahead,” insists Ernie.

Good luck, finger. Closing my eyes, I tuck my claw back into its slot—remembering the lesson from Bob, our first Progressive contact back on Hollywood Boulevard—and shove my pointer into the hole, gritting my teeth in expectation of some type of searing pain. If it matters, I prefer amputation to electrocution, but I doubt the door will take requests.

No pain. No miniature guillotine, no shock pads. The door doesn’t open, but at least I’ve still got all eight digits intact. “Your turn,” I cheerfully say to Ernie, removing my finger from the hole. But his grubbies don’t do the job either, and so we’re stuck out here staring at the door, twiddling our claws and scratching ourselves.

The animal calls have intensified. And that smell—pine, perhaps, though not herb-infused. It’s not Circe, and even if it were, I wouldn’t be worried about getting caught in off-limits territory; they’ve already killed our friends for a seemingly minor infraction, and I don’t doubt but that our next interaction with the Progressives, whatever the situation, will be decidedly violent. But Circe’s working on a different plane from the rest of them, and I wonder how well she knows and trusts her right-hand dinos.

Ernie runs his hand across the door, looking for any flaw to exploit. There is none.

“We’re stuck.”

“Still not natural enough,” I sigh.

“Not by ourselves, at least.”

“Not by ourselves.”

I don’t know who thinks of it first, me or Ernie, but soon we’re both scrambling for the aperture, trying to shove both our fingers in at once. “Move—move to the left,” Ernie complains. “Further. Further.”

The fit is tight, but we’re eventually able to force both of our fingers into the slot at the same time. There’s the familiar cooling sensation as some hidden device sucks the pheromones out of our pores, and a whirr as a different mechanism checks our scent level against whatever percentage “dinosaur natural” it has been designed to grant access to.

I doubt this will work. The contraption has got to be able to discern Ernie’s pheromones from mine; it can’t be this easy to fool such delicate machinery.

The door swings wide.

After we get our fingers unstuck, we tentatively step inside the building, being careful not to set off any alarms. But it seems that the one steel door is the only barrier to the place, and soon we find ourselves in a small, round antechamber, stone floor and low ceiling, the walls plastered with old, yellowed maps. The entire world is duly represented, with small red and green pins stuck into various islands and peninsulas in nearly every country. Whatever they’re tracking, it’s done a great job of spreading itself all over the globe.

Ernie calls me to the far side of the room—he’s pointing to a large crimson pin smack-dab in the middle of the ocean just off Hawaii, and I pluck it out of the map. Nearly eradicated by the pinhole itself is the outline of a very small, very isolated island.

“You are here,” says Ernie. “But I can’t figure out the rest of these. The red ones, the green ones . . .”

“Other Progressive camps, maybe?” I take a quick trip around the room, trying to locate a chart with Southern California on it. Sure enough, there’s a red pin stuck into Los Angeles, up in the Hollywood Hills specifically, and I’m willing to make a leap of logic and agree that each pin represents a different stronghold for the group.

“You’re right about the maps,” I say. “Check it out.”

No answer from Ernie. I turn, but the room is empty. “Ern?” I call out. “Ern?”

The reply, coming from down a long hallway, is hard to hear: “. . . might want . . . see this . . .”

“What? I can’t hear you,” I call back.

Ernie’s voice is stronger this time, warbling slightly—fear, anger, or just the echo from the chamber walls?—”I said, you might want to see this.”

Leaving the map room, I quickly make my way through the cold, tight corridor. Ernie’s silhouette is sharp against the glare of a single uncovered hundred-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling, his shadow harsh against the brick walls. His shoulders are shaking, but I don’t think he’s laughing.

“What’d ya find—” I begin, and the words stop halfway up my throat.

Guns. Boxes of guns. Racks of boxes of guns. Guns in piles, guns on the wall, guns strewn haphazardly about the floor. Rifles, revolvers, semiautomatics, fully automatics, large caliber, small caliber, every make of every ballistic weapon I’ve ever seen is stuffed to bursting inside this twenty-by-twenty room, a weapons stash that would warm the cockles of Charlton Heston’s cold mammalian heart.

“These don’t shoot horse tranquilizers, do they?”

Ernie and I make our way into the room, stumbling over steel, picking our way through the morass of firearms. Ernie hasn’t said a word since stepping inside—he simply walks in a circle, eyes downcast, some silent fury building up within him with every passing second.

Beneath me is a large cylindrical weapon with a grip like a video-game joystick. I lift the thing to get a better look at it—heavy little bastard—and stare down the barrel.

“Grenade launcher,” Ernie says, his voice even, dead of emotion.

Ah. I carefully place it back atop the pile, just in case I hit the wrong button and become the latest Darwin Award recipient. “The hell do they need this for?”

“The hell do they need any of it for?” My partner lashes out at a pile of the firearms, kicking them with a bare foot. “This is the sickest fucking thing I’ve seen since we got here. All this talk about Progress and nature and understanding our true ancestors, and meanwhile they’ve got a weapons stock that would make NATO jealous.”

I can’t argue with the guy; these Progressives clearly have their heads screwed on backward, and I can’t imagine what would make them want to amass this much firepower in one location. “We’ll get back to LA,” I suggest, “call the Council down on their ass. See how they take to a bunch of dinos hogging mammal weapons.”

Ernie’s hide has flared into a bright green hue along with his anger, the sudden rush of blood drawing out his best skin tone. He should definitely wear more fall colors. I doubt he’d appreciate the fashion advice right now, though, so I leave it alone. “That’s right,” he growls. “Confiscate the island, that house, throw ’em all in the clink.”

Without realizing it, we’ve backed our way out of the gun room, as if our bodies knew more than our minds and forced us to retreat from such an unnatural location. By the time we’re back in the hallway and heading toward the map antechamber—I’d really love to show Ernie those dates above the maps, maybe figure out what the hell they signify—I catch a whiff of the smell again, this time much stronger than before. Definitely pine, definitely swamp gas, and we are definitely not the only dinosaurs in the vicinity.

“Shhh,” I tell Ernie, who’s clomping his way noisily toward the exit.

“Why?”

“Sniff.” Ernie takes a whiff, and instantly silences his movements.

Rustling, outside the building. The trees, shifting in the still air, leaves crackling under someone’s feet. Huddling in the doorway, Ernie and I try to get a bead on the new intruder, but it’s hard to localize.

“From the left,” whispers Ernie. “I think they followed us.”

“No,” I whisper back. “This is something else.”

And then another sound from the right. And another in front of us. The jungle has come alive, trees rustling in every direction, and the smell has only gotten stronger. It’s the scent of a roadkill, of towering ferns, of a newborn baby dino, of steaming swamp pits.

Coming in tandem now—a shake of the trees, a burst of smell—and a new addition to the fun, a distinct howl, an animal call of This way, boys, I found somethin’ to munch on—and I’m hoping that it’s just the Hummer again, I’m hoping that it’s Samuel come to lecture us and drive us on out of here—but something in me knows that’s not the way it’s gonna go down.

“Go,” I say, my voice lower than I expected, as if my vocal cords know more than I do about the upcoming events.

“What?”

“Go,” I repeat, louder this time, rising on panic. “Go!”

Sprinting from the get-go, we burst out of the building and into the jungle, clambering onto the path and letting loose. It’s hard to concentrate on anything other than the road ahead, but I try to keep an ear and a nostril open, just in case.

Now the howls have intensified, deep calls of pain and rage, and it spurs me on to greater speeds. And there’s another smell separating itself from the rest of them, riding high on the pine. Leather. New, though a part of me recognizes it. No time to think—time to run. But Ernie’s lagging behind, panting hard, and I can’t leave my partner in the dust. I fight back against the panic and slow my legs down a notch.

It gives our pursuer all the opportunity he needs. With a sudden piercing screech that nearly bursts my eardrums, a Stegosaur bursts out of the underbrush on all fours and slams into Ernie, a headbutt to the midsection tossing him to the ground. My partner goes down hard—rolling over a foothill of roots and landing against a thick tree trunk—but he’s up again in an instant, claws sliding out of his fingers and locking into place.

“Wait a second—” I shout, hoping to stop the Stegosaur with some rational conversation.

But the look in its eye is pure animal; it doesn’t even have the common courtesy to try and understand what I’m saying. Lunging forward again, its own claws extended, the Stegosaur stumbles toward Ernie, catching its front foot on an outcropping of rock and going down with a thud.

I take the opportunity to let loose—if we’re gonna play this way, let’s get it on—and leap feetfirst at the beast, my own sharp underclaw aimed for the throat. But a swinging tail catches me off guard, and it takes a midair pretzel twist to avoid winding up with a back full of spikes. Gotta watch all five limbs when dealing with a creature like this one. Adjusting my position, I slide to the left, narrowly avoiding a one-way trip to eternity.

Ernie’s got his jaws set around the Stego’s neck, his arms tight around the head, gnawing for all he’s worth. I’m jumping around to the other side, sliding onto my back, trying to aim for the beast’s soft, unprotected stomach, but it’s tough going, as this thing insists on fighting on all fours. The multitude of sparring matches Ernie and I have engaged in, combined with the few real-world skirmishes I’ve gotten myself into, haven’t prepared me a whiff for this kind of down-and-dirty battle.

Coming underneath, I’m just about to make a good stab at the stomach when the scent hits me again, snaking its way out of the back of this creature’s neck, down and around its bulging belly, curving up my nose, and slamming directly into the recognition center of my brain: leather and lime Jell-O.

It’s Thomas. We’re fighting the Progressive who made his bones in the Ring the other night, the one who beat back a mountain lion with nothing other than his claws, his tail, and his wits. I understand the whole post-traumatic stress disorder concept—I ate a Pop-Tart with a cockroach on it once and couldn’t look at another breakfast treat for months afterward—but this is beyond modern psychology. What the hell happened to this guy?

But my pause to indulge in conscious thought has given this natural dino a chance to escape my attack, and soon I’m forced to roll to my right as the Stegosaur leaps into the air and comes down hard, attempting to squash me beneath his stubby legs. An unfortunate woodchuck takes my place in rodent heaven. Fair trade.

Tucking into a somersault and popping to my feet at the end—those prepubescent Romanian gymnasts have nothing on a Raptor with his dander up—I spin and prepare to renew my assault on Ernie’s attacker. But there’s another rustle in the trees behind me, and I turn to investigate the new noise—

Just in time to avoid a claw slashing at my throat. I backpedal, throwing my arms up and out, batting away the matchstick arms reaching for my vital organs. Filling my field of vision now, a gaping jaw, mouth dripping with saliva, two sharpened rows of teeth; Jaws has sprung legs and crawled his way onto land for a jaunt in the jungle.

Close enough. It’s a T-Rex—I don’t recognize this one on a personal level, but I’m sure he was a busboy or ophthalmologist once upon a more rational time—and, like the Stegosaur, it pays no heed to any of my protestations to cut out the nonsense and start acting like an adult. Fortunately, he’s inherited his race’s propensity for inefficient forelimbs, so I’m able to keep his claws away from the rest of my body while I defend my snout against those snapping jaws. While guised up as a mammal, of course, this beast would have arm prostheses to help him blend into human society, but unassisted like this, he’s at a distinct disadvantage. Then again, he does have quite the set of chompers at his disposal. They crack the air with each vicious bite, and I know from one look in his eyes that wherever the Stegosaur’s mind has gone, this T-Rex’s brain is riding sidecar on the journey.

Can’t even see Ernie—no idea how he’s holding up—but the space between my ears is filled with howls and shrieks and wails and bellows, a full cat’s-night-out cacophony, and I don’t know how much of it is coming from my partner, from the Stegosaur, from the T-Rex, or even from myself.

A tail whips out, tripping me from behind, and I flop to the ground, landing squarely on my back, crushing a pile of twigs and leaves beneath me. For a moment I can’t even think about the dinosaur reaching down to finish me off; all I know is that oxygen and I have parted ways, and there’s little else that currently matters.

Nearby teeth convince me otherwise. As the T-Rex lowers his head, jaw gaping wide in anticipation of victory, I kick out with my leg—still unable to breathe, mind you, so put this on your list of impressive feats—slide my underclaw to its fully extended position, and slam it up and clean through the roof of the Tyrannosaur’s mouth.

Now he’s flailing backward, a wail of pain curdling the air, flapping his runty arms against my leg, trying to dislodge my claw. I’m going along for the ride; my limb is still stuck inside his mouth, but I don’t want to leave it there for long. Soon enough, he’s going to get the idea to chomp me off at the knee, and I still have many years of plans left for that appendage. I quickly withdraw the hooked claw back into my body and snatch myself away from the bloody-mouthed dino.

“Little help?” I hear Ernie cry over the din.

“Little busy,” I reply, fending off a new, feeble blow from the T-Rex.

He doesn’t need my assistance, anyway—Ernie’s got this Stego outsmarted and outfought. The larger animal is already beginning to tire, his charging attacks coming slower, coming clumsier. Four large wounds crisscross his back, crimson streaks forming new lines to add to the barely healed scars left there yesterday by the mountain lion.

Working our way into a defensive position, Ernie and I wind up back to back, fending off attacks from either side, keeping ourselves in check and lending a claw when necessary. My T-Rex, though certainly vicious, is on the smallish side, but what he lacks in natural ability he makes up for in pure insanity. Every charge is a kamikaze rush, a lunge for my throat, my belly—there’s no defensive strategy in sight.

Which gives me an opportunity to work my own brand of pugilistic magic. I’m ducking and weaving, bobbing and hopping, Muhammad Rubio with a vengeance, and soon the Tyrannosaur is covered with bloody marks of his own, that gone to lunch, be back at two look still in his eyes. Ladies and gentlemen, the undercard looks like it’s about to come to a close, Watson and Rubio the victors.

Until there’s another rustle in the bushes, to my left. And another to my right. And another directly in front.

Until one dinosaur pops into view. And another to my left. And another to my right. And two more directly in front. Raptors. Brontos. Carnotaurs. Hadrosaurs. Ankies. It’s the zodiac of dinos, a pantheon of prehistoric pugnacity, and they’ve come to teach the interlopers a lesson in manners. Taking a quick glance around, I assess the situation and realize that we’re completely, hopelessly surrounded. Within a matter of seconds, Ernie and I have gone from Spanish conquistadores to bow-and-arrow targets at Custer’s last stand, and I don’t like the odds.

The howls drop to low, panting growls as the pack closes in on us. I can almost hear the digestive juices churning. Even the Stegosaur and the T-Rex I was fighting back off and sink into the relative anonymity of the crowd, content to be a small, yet important, part of our upcoming demise. Step by deliberate step, tails wagging in expectation of a kill, the dinos advance, tugging the noose tighter and tighter around me and my partner.

“Suggestions?” I ask Ernie.

He mulls it over for a very quick second. I can almost feel the saliva dripping on my feet, and I take this time to lament the fact that I have to die in so humid a location. I always figured I’d bite the big one in Los Angeles, where at least there aren’t any bugs to feed off your corpse. That is, of course, unless you count the agents.

“Run,” says Ernie. And we do.

Using my tail as an extra propellant, I leap over the shortest dino in the bunch—a Compy, whose look of genuine confusion as I soar over his head is so comical I nearly break down laughing upon landing—and begin my sprint into the jungle. I hope to hell I’m going the right way.

Ernie’s next to me, kicking up leaves as he throws that husky body of his into Carnotaur overdrive. Behind us, I can hear new cries of frustration, drool being slurped back into waiting mouths, and the combined sounds of half a ton of angry dinosaur crashing through the underbrush. It’s the kind of incentive that inspires world-record times, and I’m aiming to bring home the gold.

I don’t know if that running class did me any good, but I’m hoping some of the lessons sunk into my subconscious enough to keep me zooming along faster than the others. Forget humanity, forget humanity . . . I feel the panting of my partner, his cardiovascular system pushed way beyond the acceptable limits for one of his age, body type, and previous exercise habits (read: none). “You think”—pant, pant—“we’re going”—pant, pant—“the right way?”

“Better be,” I shout back. “I’m not turning around.”

And it’s a good thing, too, because the pack is right on our heels. Taking a cue from our earlier experience with the crocodiles, I flash back to a nature special I caught a few months back on the boob tube. Some Australian fellow who got his kicks out of wrapping cobras around his head and getting his wife to give enemas to rabid gorillas was adamant about one fact: if you’re ever being chased by a crocodile, run in a zigzag pattern. Or maybe it was an alligator. No matter; I figure these Progressives have already flipped back to a distant era when alligators, crocodiles, and dinosaurs were just about equal on the great wall chart of evolution, so I resolve to give this evasive tactic a try.

Grabbing Ernie by the arm, I veer sharply to the left, dragging my partner along with me. For a moment, it seems like the trick may have worked, and I resolve to do a lot more televisionwatching should I make it out of this alive. But then there’s a sharp pain shooting down and across my back, a trickle of fluid dripping to my feet, and I realize I’ve just been sliced by a nearby claw.

Time to run straight again.

The fence looms ahead, and with it, the prospect of having to get to the other side. Ernie’s frantically slamming his claw into the remote-control button, but we’re so far off the beaten trail that the gate might be miles away. There’s no time to sit back and pick out the best tree to scurry up; any stalling will give our assailants the chance they need to tear us into tiny bite-sized pieces, and I refuse to be an appetizer. So even as we continue, full speed, directly toward the fence, I’m letting my eyes scan the trees, in hopes that they’ll find a means of egress before it’s too late.

“Sausage tree,” Ernie calls out.

“What?” Has my partner snapped?

“Sausage tree,” he repeats, and points to a spot fifty yards ahead, at one of the most bizarre examples of plant life I’ve ever come across. A good fifty, sixty feet tall, this sizable tree is draped with hundreds of vines dangling down from its wide branches, but that’s not the strange part. At the end of each of these vines, hanging there like an embryo from an umbilical cord, is what looks to be a giant kielbasa. Two, three feet long at least. I blink—still in mid-run—and open my eyes again, and the tree remains. This is not a hallucination. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, radiation or not; evolution, after all, has made some weird, seemingly drug-induced decisions along the way. Who would have guessed, for example, that the apes would learn how to use tools or balance their checkbooks? They still can’t program VCRs, but they should get that worked out in another million years or so.

Adjusting course slightly, we head straight for the vines, leading the pack over an unbeaten trail. Speeds not as great now—trees in the way, fallen branches to contend with—and the snarling behind us grows closer. We’re Frankenstein’s monster, they’re the mob, and hope for a happy ending is dwindling fast.

Sausage tree in front of us, the vines hanging just above our heads, and I take the mightiest leap these exhausted legs can manage, grabbing on to one of the weiner-shaped fruits and hauling myself heavenward. Ernie’s right next to me on a nearby vine, and we shinny up the tree in tandem. My junior-high gym teacher would be proud.

By the time we’re twenty feet into the air, Ernie takes a look down. “Hey,” he says, a little awestruck and a lot relieved, “they’re not following us.”

Indeed, the pack of dinos has remained on the ground, staring up at us with famished eyes and slavering lips. They take turns hopping into the air, trying to claw us on a single jump, but they’re a good fifteen feet short of the mark every time.

“Why aren’t they climbing?” asks Ernie. “Not that I’m complaining . . .”

“Maybe they can’t,” I say. “Think about it—climbing is ape behavior; we just learned it as kids.”

“And they unlearned it as part of Progress.”

So they’re down there and we’re up here, safe for the moment, but it doesn’t help the fact that we still don’t have any easy way onto the other side of the fence. The only choice is to exercise some more human traits; it doesn’t make me happy, but it keeps me alive.

We swing from vine to vine, carefully grasping each thick strand before gingerly building up momentum to get the next one moving again. Tarzan I am not. But after a few minutes of this, we’re over the fence and climbing back down to the ground.

Sunlight is beginning to make its way into the jungle, and in the early morning mist, I can make out the gaggle of shadowy figures behind that fence, defeated and shuffling back into their protected compound. Mumbled growls stream into the air and dissipate, and Ernie and I are back on the path to civilization.

“They weren’t . . . thinking,” Ernie says as we pick our way out of the jungle.

“Agreed. Whatever they’ve become, Progress has done it to them. And Rupert . . .”

“We got to him just before he went into the Ring,” I say. “And probably just before he became one of the pack.”

“And they got to him right afterward.”

“Exactly.”

“But why?” asks Ernie. “What’s the point of all the cover-ups, the secrecy? The guns, that building, those maps—”

I can’t help but shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure out the whys and hows of this place since we took on the case. But I think I know a way to find out.”

It’s time to confront Circe.