Azombie. That was it. Carl Marchant had been trying to work out what living at home was like these days, and he’d finally got it. It was like living with a zombie. As Mum leant against the breakfast table, her head flopped from side to side as though her neck wasn’t strong enough to hold it upright. Her eyes were red and sunk back in her skull. Her skin looked grey, and her hair stuck out on one side and fell limply across her face on the other.
Tiredness was half of it. She had to do everything herself now, and after two months the strain of pretending things were just fine had begun to tell.
Things were not fine. In fact, they were far from it. And it was time for Carl to deal with the other half of the problem. It was time to take on the dinosaur and bring Dad back.
He swiped the screen of his phone and tapped it to bring up the bus route. It was an easy enough journey, although he’d never made it alone before. He looked up. Mum was staring into the distance with a living-dead blankness in her eyes.
‘I’m going to the park with Gerry after school,’ he said, as casually as he could. He watched for her response, hoping she didn’t ask too many questions.
‘Mmm…’ Mum grunted. ‘What?’
‘Is that OK?’
‘Um… yes. Yes, fine.’ She hadn’t even listened to what he’d said. Carl thought this was how teenagers were supposed to behave, not parents. He grabbed his bag and left, holding a piece of toast.
The school day seemed long, and Carl spent most of it thinking about Mum and Dad. The teachers had started smiling randomly at him, so obviously they all knew. Mum’s behaviour was difficult, but completely understandable. She was trying to hold everything together, but it wasn’t working. It was as simple as that.
As for Dad… This time, it was too much.
Dad had always been a bit flaky, albeit in a precise sort of way. He could be distant sometimes, drifting off into his own little world, or getting caught up in things that didn’t seem to matter to anyone else. Other adults tended to get a bit fidgety around him if he talked to them for too long, but that was because they didn’t really get him.
There was another side to Dad, which most people never saw. If you got him interested in what you were doing, then he was right there with you. He would follow it, whatever it was, to its natural, fantastic, impossible conclusion, and be as excited by it and into it as you were.
Carl remembered reading a story once with Dad about people living on Mars, and wondering why nobody had built a base there. Pretty soon, they’d started talking about how far away it was and how difficult it would be to make a self-supporting base that didn’t need constant supplies of food and oxygen from Earth.
Within a couple of weeks, they’d taken a big bottle of water and worked out what kind of bacteria they’d need. They’d ordered them through the lab and put in some plants to create oxygen. Finally, they’d added their colonists – a pair of freshwater shrimps – and sealed up the bottle.
Everything in the bottle was designed to create a self-sustaining ecosystem. The plants created oxygen, the shrimp ate the plants, and the bacteria recycled the waste. All it needed was sunlight.
Now, a year later, the bottle still sat on Carl’s windowsill. The two shrimp astronauts were still thriving. In fact, Carl had noticed, they’d just laid tiny eggs that stuck to the plants’ leaves. He wanted to tell Dad. But Dad was gone.
When the bell rang, Carl was on his feet and out of the school gates in under a minute. He got to the bus stop just in time, took the short ride to the station and reached the platform just as a tube was pulling in.
From the Underground, it was a short jog to the museum. The place was like a cathedral, grand and imposing, but instead of carvings of saints and crosses, the exterior alcoves were carved with the images of animals, living and extinct, in soft, rounded stone. Carl walked up the wide stone steps and under the arch. The head of the diplodocus skeleton in the main hall hung in the air above his head, impossibly small compared to its enormous body.
He ignored it, walking through the main hall and along one of the side galleries to a small door with a combination lock. He’d been here often enough with Dad and he couldn’t be expected to look away every time someone entered a security code. He keyed in the number and stepped through.
The offices of the museum were a stark contrast to the cavernous galleries. They were a maze of corridors, tiny labs, offices and storerooms. Most of the museum’s enormous collection was not on display, but was stored in rows and rows of huge, grey cabinets. Carl’s dad had told him that there were so many fossils here that many weren’t even catalogued or named.
He walked on past them, deeper into the warren of corridors until he came to a grey door. He quietly pushed it open and stepped inside.
The room was part office, part lab. At the front sat a desk with an open laptop on it. Ordinarily, anyone sitting at the desk would have been able to look directly out of the window and down over London. Right now, however, their view would be obscured by a huge skull with curved, serrated teeth. Whoever sat at the desk now would be met, each time they glanced up from their work, by the gaping jaws of a megalosaurus, poised as if about to strike, empty eye sockets glaring straight down at them.
Along one wall was an arrangement of lab equipment, some bottles of liquid and a centrifuge. Next to it sat a large, powerful microscope and a figure in a crumpled blue suit, completely oblivious to Carl’s presence.
‘Hello, Dad,’ said Carl. Dad looked up. He was grey and drawn. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten for a week. Carl sighed. The living dead again. Dad managed a smile. It looked real, but forced at the same time. As though the intention to smile was there, but the muscles needed to produce one were out of condition.
‘Hello.’
‘I just thought I’d come to see you…’ Carl wasn’t really sure what to say.
‘Yes?’ Dad replied. There was a long pause.
To break the silence, Carl said, ‘So this is the skull?’
Dad brightened noticeably and seized on the chance to talk about something easy. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she? I say she just because of the size, of course. Can’t be sure.’ He looked up at the skull. ‘Look at the way the eyes face forwards – typical predator, you see, so she can judge distance when she’s hunting.’ He started to describe the teeth and the muscles that attached the jaw, even going so far as to explain how the creature’s brain would have been arranged within the skull.
Carl interrupted him. ‘Mum wants you to come back home,’ he said. ‘We both do.’
‘Of course,’ Dad continued, ignoring Carl’s interjection, ‘what I’m interested in is inside the bones.’ He dragged his eyes away from the skull and walked back to the microscope.
‘I know you get caught up in your work,’ Carl pressed on, ‘but this – this is more than that. This is serious now. You can see that, can’t you?’
Dad had got wrapped up in work before. Sometimes he’d been distant and hard to reach, but there had always been a way to get through to him. To bring him back. This time was different. He’d never let it go this far before. He’d never moved out before.
‘You see,’ his father continued, a far-off look on his face, ‘what I’ve done is taken a shaving of bone, and used a fairly standard sort of test but with a bit of a twist, and – ’
‘A test for what?’ snapped Carl, caving in to his father’s obsession.
‘DNA.’
‘Dinosaur DNA?’ Carl looked incredulous. Everyone knew fossils were just stone. There was no DNA in stone.
‘Take a look at this.’ Dad gestured to the microscope. ‘She’s more alive than you think!’
In spite of himself, Carl moved over to the microscope and peered into it. Blurry yellow shapes drifted in front of the lens. They shifted and changed as he scanned the slide and changed the focus the way Dad had taught him. Carl had seen DNA through a microscope before. In fact, they’d extracted it at home using strawberries, a bottle of vodka and some washing-up liquid. He’d seen its long, ghostly strands scattered over the slides they’d prepared together, and if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that what he was looking at here wasn’t DNA.
He stood away from the eyepiece. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he said. ‘It’s just bits of stone.’
Dad grabbed the eyepiece and stooped to stare down into it. He clenched his teeth in disappointment. ‘It was there!’ He scanned the slide quickly from one side to the other. ‘You’ve lost it!’
No, thought Carl. You’re the one who’s lost it.
Instead he said, ‘I’ll come back later, shall I?’ Dad just waved him away without looking up from the slide.