Black Leather Required Page 5

  To wit: DINOSAURS AND HUMAN BEINGS DID NOT LIVE AT THE SAME TIME. Despite all those great movies on Channel 11, the ones broken up by all the Cal Worthington commercials.

  He recalled being saddened because it meant poor old humankind had missed the chance to know what thunder lizards really looked like. And that had turned out to be wrong, too.

  Case would never forget the day he had found differently. It was one of those calendar junctures people commonly stored, like the JFK shooting or the Apollo moon touchdown or that time the space shuttle blew all to hell.

  He remembered, without a smile, and when he remembered there was no need to ask whether Whitman Case believed in God, friend.

  "It took folks about twenty-four hours to learn how to stay out of their way," said the Major, meaning dinosaurs that materialized spontaneously. "Some say that the air ripples, just before. But once they got on the news, when they weren't knocking over buildings or eating people anymore, they were a huge hit. Some guy found out they'll eat dog food.

  He got corporate endorsements. They'll eat garbage, hell, they'll eat crap we wouldn't touch for landfill. They shit all over everything. If they have enough time before they wink out, they build nests and lay eggs. Sometimes they eat each other, which is pretty funny when your lunch vanishes into thin air right when you bite." The Major chuckled self-consciously. "Nobody cares where they came from. They're famous."

  "They're ghosts," said Seward. He did not look over from his bed. The quiet utterance made the Major's statistical monologue seem trivial. His unbandaged eye swiveled to. "Say again?"

  "Ghosts." Seward watched the television, not seeing its ceaseless silliness.

  He was reasonably sure the Major might ring for the nurse. Boy's finally tipped over, he'd say. Concussion has scattered his dice.

  "How do you figure that?" The Major was honestly curious, not placating.

  "They're actual ghosts. Shades. They emanate from places of the dead. Their dead, their graveyards. Remember all the dinosaurs headed north, up Fairfax? They were coming out of Hancock Park. They were materializing at the La Brea Tar Pits."

  "Ain't no dinosaurs in the La Brea Tar Pits." The major was a local, and had toured the Paige Museum. "Just mammals. Mastodons. Sloths. Dire wolves. No dinosaurs."

  "The fossil deposits and museum exhibits originated deep within the alluvial layers we now plumb for fossil fuel. Not from the pits, my good Major; they're coming out of the tar itself, which means they're also coming out of the oil wells and petroleum refineries, which also means they're coming from the plastics factories and whiskey distilleries and any plant that presses vinyl." His voice hitched down to a murmur in the extremely clean room, while logic forged links. "Even the air is full of petrochemicals, hydrocarbons. Supernaturally, it makes good sense spirits are literally coalescing out of thin air. Ghosts have been known to appear from thin air, you know."

  Given that the dinosaurs were real, no foolin', then Seward's mind was magnetized toward the only sensible explanation . . . even though it was polarized against his life's calling.

  And if they came out of plastic, that meant they were coming out of compact discs and cappuccino makers and toy stores and Gucci shoppes, and even that machine at the Griffith Observatory that injection-molded you a souvenir rocketship for fifty cents.

  "Real, live ghosts." The Major pretended to chew it over. His mind naturally sought a logistical panacea. "So. . .how many dinosaurs would that be, then? Total."

  "How many centuries did the dinosaurs run the planet?" Seward asked back. "How long was the Mesozoic Era alone, ninety million years? Don't ask me what the lifespan of the average thunder lizard was, even given the bad living conditions and all. How many dinosaurs do you suppose could have been born in ninety million years? The human race has barely topped off its first million, and just look at us. All those dead dinosaurs, all back at the same time. All our smog is just calling back to its roots. Just think what it must be like in the OPEC countries right now."

  The Major grinned. Patriotically.

  Seward tried to find sleep; his mind, rest. He had a dream, not a nightmare, of ghost dinosaurs randomly popping up in Disneyland, where there were mechanical dinosaurs. His dreaming mind wondered if they would fight, already knowing which side would win.

  All those dinosaurs. Where would we put them?

  More than the end of the world, Americans dislike inconvenience. Accommodations would have to be made. Seward slept on it.

  In the 1980s the theory was advanced that dinosaurs had demonstrated herding behavior, and a pile of paintings were done depicting that which had never been considered before. The paleontologist who had posited this theory was among the stampede of idea guys seeking the government's ear. Grants and endowments awaited those whose unsolicited assistance proved useful in a time of crisis. Once it was realized that the ghost dinosaurs were easily herded, and would follow each other straight out of whatever American metropolis they were clogging up, Whitman Case found himself a new job: Ramrodding herds of ghost dinosaurs out to the open desert. They couldn't starve there because they were already dead.

  Case, Aguilar and their fellow drovers rapidly became the experts who observed all the twists first. if a 'dine laid down a mound of shit, it remained real after the ghost phased out, having eliminated the remnants of digested intake millions of years old at long last. Academics were eager to dive into the dinosaur poop and analyze. If the 'dines laid eggs while corporeal, and those eggs got fertilized by other corporeated 'dines, the hatchlings did not fade out, ever. That wrinkle didn't seem to worry the companies that budgeted the drives too much just yet. It had only happened once or twice. Case had seen baby carnivores try to attack ghosts. Plant eaters munched on ocatilla stalks and prickly pear. The dinosaur equivalent of hoof and mouth, or rabies, could not lumber ghosts. The drovers guided them out past the dunes, where they congregated in broad valleys.

  Or would, Case thought, if Shack the mojo would undent his buns and give them the blessing to press on with the drive for two more days of travel time. Then they could dump this herd in with the other 'dines and buzz home for the usual kinds of relief, another thing that had not changed much for anyone of a droving bent.

  It had been that Seward fella, way back when, who had come up with the idea of having psychics predict fair or foul for the drives, since ghosts were involved. To put it simply, these dinosaurs were part-time ghosts, and the psychics started out as part-timers, too. Since Seward had suggested the idea to the government, he was appointed to sift applicants and weed out the phonies, in accordance with his former profession. He remained an occult debunker until his death, but after the dinosaur thing his heart just was not in his work so deeply.

  Another Camel kissed Case's bootheel; Aguilar declined his offer of a smoke. Night was on in the desert and Jonas had a huge mesquite blaze crackling in a pit full of yesterday's embers. The drovers chowed down and tried to talk of things other than 'dines–lovers, the past, derring-do. Cars.

  Ernesto Cocoberra trundled forth from his camper, a rotund, pasha-shaped man, small of stature, bright of eye, aware that his metaphysical dictates were preventing the drive from moving on, but good-natured enough that the drovers resented only the news, and not the Shack. He spoke their language without talking down or bullshitting them. It was inevitable that someone at dinner ask The Question, and tonight it looked like it was Case's turn.

  Before Case could get whole words past his lips, though, Shack held up an oracle-like finger and said, "We're there already, Whit."

  Aguilar made an arrgh noise, having none of this. "Aw, shit, Shack, we ain't moved nearly three weeks now. We ain't anywhere already. We're nowhere, is where we are."

  You had to ask the question, Case knew. It was like a game. "Okay, Shack. But where are we?"

  "Sedalia."

  "Oh, great. What the fuck's that mean?"

  "Quiet," Case said to Aguilar, who was pretty impatient for a guy who waxed so mystical a hal
f hour previously. "What's Sedalia, Shack?"

  "Crow, Whit–didn't you never watch no Rawhide on TV?"

  Blank looks all around. Maybe the triple negative had them reeling. "Oh, yeah." Jonas scraped his dish over the fire. "Clint Eastwood. Some other actor who died."

  "Man versus cow," said Shack. "A whole series about a cattle drive." Somebody sang rollin' rollin' rollin' sotto voce until Shack continued.

  "Sedalia was the town they were driving the cattle to. Show was on the air seven years . . . and that goldanged cattle drive just went on and on, all seven years, and it never got to Sedalia." He folded his arms, a buddha in his certitude, making pronouncements in the firelight.

  "That's TV for you," Jonas grumped. "Makes its own timeframe."

  "Wait–are you saying we're never going to get clear of this drive?" It was Bridges, the one who had been singing a second before. He was the youngest guy on the drive, full of sperm and not the right age to hear absolutes. "You're not saying that, man." He pitched a crumpled cigarette pack over his shoulder and Jonas glared at him.

  "Aguilar had himself a vision up there on the Stirrup today," said Shack. "Why don't you share it with us?"

  Aguilar hemmed and hawed and scuffed and blushed and finally cut the crap and told what he knew.

  "I suggest y'all keep an eye peeled for that green and black Brontosaurus," concluded Shack. "It has to be an omen. If one of us spots it, then perhaps I could make an intelligent forecast for the drive . . . since I don't enjoy warming my ass out here for days on end any more than you guys do. I want to get back to Reno so I can do some serious gambling, goddammit."

  The air displacement of a materializing 'dine nearly blew down the campfire. It was a big guy, a full-grown Trachedon, mud-colored with bright orange speckles like Day-Glo paint and a smell that reminded Case of the blowback from a sewage treatment plant. Most of the drovers hit the deck. Bridges did not. Bridges had not been on the June drive, the one where a Stegosaurus had untethered a volcanic fart into the campfire and nearly flash-fried them all in a flaming cloud of primeval methane.

  The Trachedon saw them and made distance.

  "You're right," Aguilar said to Case, looking up with dirt in his teeth. "I wish they wouldn't come in so close, either."

  All through the night the dinosaurs came and went. Incoming, they sizzled with the sound of ripping cloth or the tearing of dry jerky. They roared and hooted and keened in the darkness of the valley, as prowls begun eons ago were resumed in the residual heat that leached toward the stars from desert dirt. Then they de-rezzed with a carbonated, fizzy noise, blurring, breaking up and fading out.

  Near dawn, just as the snaggletoothed horizon grew bloodshot, Case shucked his sleeping bag and ambled over to his terrain bike to catch a smoke and work the sleepy seeds out of his eyes. When it came to the reasons men and a few women chose to embark on dinosaur drives, you usually never winnowed talk down to details. In that respect, the job was like Foreign Legion service. Case was able to keep most of his personal narrative tight to the vest. Each drover thought their reasons the most tragic or romantic–by god, it could be like one endless, over-dumb country & western ballad–except that everyone was too chicken to actually match for best.

  Case held the draughts of good gray smoke deep. It perked his nerves and glands, and gradually, restored his definition of humanity.

  The silhouetted dinosaur head interrupted the stripe of horizon light, stalking, a gargoyle marionette. The outline read Tyrannosaurus, and that was enough for Case to kick-start his bike and investigate.

  The beast was one big trainfucker indeed.

  Its architecture and fluidity sustained no comparison to the lumpen elephants or whales of modern times. Its musculature was woven tight as the braids on a bullwhip, girder tendons and cable ligaments tautly tuned beneath the stout mail of leather. Chatoyant eyes glinted in the predawn as it jerked its head around to fix the sound of Case's bike, speedy and alert, spoiling for trouble or some wet, carnivorous fun.

  When something the size of a double-decker bus sneezed, a drover might become dino toe-jam in an instant. Case did not hit it with the bike's hot spot and make it bolt, all those crookedly-meshed six-inch teeth rushing down to macerate him. He checked it out, as he had checked all of them out for two years now.

  An oilslick smell hung about it, like the rich clots of grimy black that vehicles excreted onto parking lots and driveways. The Rex whiffed Case but did not seem peckish or feisty. Case imagined the thermal pits on its snout processing the air itself. What did its ancient brain tell it about the morning? Was it chilly, warm? Just right? Did it aspire to any goals beyond the prowl, and food for the day? Did it apply any sort of personal style to its killing technique? The fixed grin on the sardonic reptile mask was certainly the visage of a hunter, and most hunters, thought Case, were driven by pride.

  Over the bike's phones, he picked up an Arizona radio station kicking off a weekend celebration of the Beatles. That was safe and innocuous enough, yeah; happiness was a warm gun. Case's saddlebags included a .457 packed with heavy-grain slugs, but he rarely used it on drives and had not even taken it out once this trip. What for?

  In an emergency, in case a 'dine got uppity or just plain needed to die in a hurry, the drovers had customized ordnance, usually sleeved in a special holster to the right of the terrain bike's gas teardrop. They were commonly called ass-kickers–two feet of scaled-down bazooka pipe with a pistol grip that discharged a canister of Plastique similar to the power-heads used by divers against sharks. The idea was to provide an immediate one-shot stop in a crisis; the only effective way to prevent a contrary shark from gobbling you on the spot was to blow its jaw completely off. The concept had been handily adapted to land use against recorporeated dinosaurs, and a balance of power had been swiftly inaugurated.

  Case saw its violet eyes. I know you, oh yes I do.

  He yanked the choke ring on the ass-kicker and flipped off the safety. Then he nailed the big Rex with his spotlight.

  It was bright purple. One of its flanks was scorched and puckered from a burn–an earthly injury taken with it into the astral and brought back just now. In sum, that was enough for Case.

  He shouted, and when the beast turned on him, he sighted through the red plastic grid.

  Whitman Case's Corvette had been a thing of beauty to behold, a dream realized and a desire long coveted. It had been something in which he had invested the patience of a Russian consumer. Waiting for something gave you plenty of time to fantasize. Eleven coats of mirror-gloss canary yellow double-dipped in lacquer; chrome like the eye of a flame. A deadly serious 307 four-barrel carb and a police-chaser block. A wheel sleeve of buttery leather that matched the buckets. A total boner of a driving machine, new radials not even dusty yet and it had become history. . .because some numbnuts Tyrannosaurus Rex had waited a couple million years and an epoch or two just to step on it.

  The fireball born of Lloyd Lamed's vaporizing Texaco station in Riverside had drawn Whitman Case to his front window just in time to see a purple dinosaur squash his 'Vette with no more effort than a hiccup required. Then the shockwave shattered the window and Case had other things to worry about.

  He let out his breath; let the Rex eat a technological meteor. The explosion woke up the whole camp as thirty tons of Tyranno-casserole clouded the air with the reek of stale blood from another time, the dawn of time itself.

  Two hours after breakfast, Aguilar spotted his own 'dine, the green and black one. The saddle markings on the Brontosaurus, he insisted, were unmistakable. It turned out to be a female.

  Nobody spoke to Case. They figured him for drive jitters after he fragged the Rex. Shack got swamped once Aguilar reported the Brontosaurus. Pardone señor, we go no place today neether.

  They watched the dinosaur all day. It got really boring really fast. By dinnertime most of the drovers had forgotten their noisy wake-up call and were mildly torqued at Aguilar.

  "Big fuckin' deal!" snarled
Bridges, throwing food and wasting it. He used fluorocarbon deodorant and owned a huge Jeep he used to modify the trails in national parks. Bridges had always been a litterbug; he didn't believe in much else. "Big revelation! Big mystical owlshit! Really pro, Aguilar, you asshole!'

  Aguilar likened young Bridges to a behemoth phallus, and the other drovers had to wrestle them apart. The dust they'd kicked up hung around in the firelight, stubbornly. Shack shook his head sadly. Dumb mortals.

  "You guys are so anxious to wrap the drive you can't hear the music for all the noise the orchestra is making," said Case. He'd been trying to use logic, like that Seward fella, whom he admired.

  "See what?" Bridges was still aching for mayhem. He obviously hadn't had his butt kicked enough by living yet. "That fuckin' green and black 'dine? It's right over there, so what?"

  "When did you spot it this morning?" Case said to Aguilar. It wouldn't do to tell Bridges to watch his language.

  "About ten or so." Aguilar had coded a marker onto his digital watch to log the sighting. He was that bored.

  "And our boy Bridges, with his keen eyesight, can still see it from here."

  Jonas didn't get it. "And I hope it stays over there. Geez, don't you guys remember the farting Stego?"

  Shack began to smile privately.

  "Okay, Bridges." Case focused on the boy. "Maybe you can tell the class what time it is right now. You can tell time, right?"