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“I don’t know how I could have been so wrong,” Helen said. She buried her face in her hands.
“It happens to the best of us,” Eric said. He eyed the television longingly.
A football game was about to start, and it seemed like they’d been
sitting at the table for hours, talking about the same things over and over
again. The dinosaur ghosts are eating republicans. Why are the dinosaur ghosts eating
republicans? How do we stop the dinosaur
ghosts from eating republicans? Blah
Blah Blah. He rolled his eyes.
Not three feet away, there was a perfectly good couch and a
perfectly good television set. Unfortunately, both were walled off by perfectly
good yellow police tape, put there not by police, but by Helen, to prevent her
from accidentally stumbling into her late boyfriend’s favorite spot in the
apartment and bringing back all those painful memories. Even worse, James’s second favorite spot in
the apartment, the bathroom, was also off limits, which meant Eric had to go
down the hall and use the bathroom of some guy named Tito whenever he needed to
drop a deuce.
“Somehow they’ve managed to penetrate that invisible membrane
between the third and fourth dimensions,” Helen continued. “If I could figure out
how, I bet I could find a way to stop them.”
Eric leaned in close. “Hey,
Baby. You wanna take this to the bedroom?”
He raised and lowered his eyebrows suggestively.
“Eric!”
“What’s the big deal? We’ve done it before.”
“A girl likes a little romance.
Besides, this isn’t the time.”
“It’s never the time,” Eric said angrily. He stood up from the table.
Helen looked at him incredulously.
“We just had the time last night.
And then we had the time again this morning.”
“Yes, Helen, but now is a different time. It’s game time, Helen, and I wanna watch the
football game.”
Tears flooded Helen’s eyes.
“I can’t have football on in the house,” she said. “It’s just too soon.”
“Aw, everything is too soon.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know!” Eric shouted.
Helen’s grief turned to anger.
“What is this, Eric? What are we
doing here? We’ve spent the last three
nights together. Where is this going?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Eric said, his anger turning to fear. “We’re just two people bonding over our
troubles and a paranormal phenomenon in which dinosaur spirits wreak havoc
on...”
“Is that all this is to you?” Helen interrupted, her anger turning
to outrage. “Just some fling?”
“Um, I don’t think, I mean, I didn’t mean...” Eric stuttered, his
fear turning to backpedaling. “It’s
just... Oh, Helen. I don’t think I can
do this anymore.”
Again the tears came rolling down her face. Her voice got all squeaky. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“I didn’t even know we were going out.”
“Get out!” Helen shouted, her sadness transforming into rage. She’d been on a serious emotional roller
coaster lately.
Eric started to say something, but decided against it. He turned
and quietly walked out of the front door, leaving Helen with her smoldering resentment, which would likely convert to depression at any moment.
“No,” she said, slamming her fist against the table. “Eric is just another silly little boy
obsessed with sports and afraid of commitment.
I’m sick of them all.”
From that moment on, she told herself, she had no time to waste on
the likes of him. She had dinosaur
ghosts to stop from eating any more republicans.
She stared at the arrangement of thingamabobs spread across the
table. One of these doohickeys was going
to help her blast those damned dirty dinosaur ghosts back to the Paleozoic
era. She picked up a screwdriver and
went to work.
Three days later, having made the short drive to Washington D.C.,
she popped her head in on a rather heated debate between different factions
over at the Heritage Foundation. There,
she sat through much screaming and accusatory innuendo, with the majority attributing
the recent spate of dinosaur ghost attacks to Obamacare, taxes, and a massive
governmental conspiracy to cover-up actions following the attack on the embassy
in Benghazi. After several minutes, it
became obvious to Helen that she’d come to the wrong place.
Across the street, she found another meeting already in progress, this time at a
liberal think tank, the Center for Progressive Progress. A young man was making a presentation to a
panel of distinguished experts chaired by none other than Harlington
University’s dean of paleontology, Dr. Brenda Bellingham, she who had once
blocked Helen from matriculating in her department way back in chapter
1.
“Darn it,” Helen said, taking a seat in the back row. “Not this bitch again.”
“Let me get this straight,” Mrs.
Bellingham was saying condescendingly to the young man standing before her.
“You maintain that the recent spate of dinosaur-related hallucinations are in
fact actions perpetrated by actual dinosaurs.”
“No, Professor, they are the
ghosts of real dinosaurs. My data shows conclusively that these dinosaur ghosts
are extremely pissed off about how their remains have been used to wreck the
environment.”
Professor Bellingham lowered her
head into her hands and sighed. “You’re referring to the burning of fossil
fuels?”
“Yes, you see over the course of
millions of years, buried organisms such as the dinosaurs were slowly converted
into fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.”
“I am aware of how fossil fuels
are created, Mr. Wilkinson. And what
evidence do you have to support the assertion that this has infuriated the
dinosaurs?”
“I’ve provided each member of the
panel with my report,” Stumpy said. “As you can see, starting on page 15, one
of the conservative journalists killed, Herman Bainbridge, had recently started
his own business based on wasting
fossil fuels.
Rock Benson, the cable news pundit, did a show deliberately obfuscating
the debate on climate change the day he was killed. Two days before the
Supreme Court was attacked, the conservative majority handed down a ruling that said that since
global climate change isn’t mentioned by any documents associated with the
founding fathers, then the government has no obligation to do anything about it.”
“And the gun
nuts?” One of the
other panelists asked.
“Those guys all drove gas
guzzlers.”
“I still don’t understand why
these so-called dinosaur ghosts would resort to such drastic measures,” Dr. Bellingham
said. “I mean, I know they’re natural
predators, but still.”
“Well, imagine if your dog died
and you buried him in your back yard.”
Professor Bellingham got a far-off
look in her eyes and her voice went all squeaky. “Fifi?” she said.
“Exactly. Now imagine if someone came along, dug up
Fifi, processed his remains and then poured them into the engine of an SUV.”
Dr. Bellingham struck her palm
with her fist. “Those dirty doggy-desecrating
dirt balls!”
“Well, that’s exactly how the
dinosaur ghosts feel. That’s why they’ve
come back from the dead to seek their revenge.”
“But everyone burns fossil fuels.”
“Yes,” but it’s the conservatives
who are hell-bent on keeping it that way.” Young Stumpy unfurled a map and
placed it on a waiting easel. “This map of the US shows every confirmed
dinosaur ghost attack to date. Each red
mark indicates an attack location. As
you can see, the heaviest concentration of red is here in D.C., but there are
also several spots in Detroit and many down in southern states where foreign
auto plants have set up shop. You’ll
also note that in recent days, even some southern democrats have been eaten,
all of whom, I might add have supported burning fossil fuels in one form or
another and blocked legislation limiting carbon emissions.”
“And what is your take-away from
all this?”
“We have to stop burning fossil
fuels as soon as possible,” Stumpy said.
The spectators stood and applauded.
“That’s not good enough,” yelled a
woman on the back row. “We have to do
something now!”
Stumpy shielded his eyes from the
floor lights as he tried to make out who was yelling at him. “Well, at this rate,” he said, “pretty soon
there won’t be any republicans left to block legislation.”
The spectators chuckled and
chortled in appreciation.
“That’s your solution?” Helen
said, stepping from the shadows.
“You’re going to sit back and allow innocent people to die.” She checked
herself. “Innocent-ish people.”
Dr. Bellingham registered the
identity of the new speaker. “Now Ms.
Fonzarelli. You know you aren’t allowed within fifty feet of me. I have a restraining
order in effect.”
“I promise not to come any
closer,” Helen said, “but I’ll be darned if I sit around and let people die
without doing something about it.”
“And just what do you propose we
do?” Dr. Bellingham asked.
Helen reached into her backpack
and pulled out one of her homemade devices.
The panel gasped.
“Now, Ms. Fonzarelli. There’s no need to get violent. Put the gun away.”
“Oh this isn’t a gun,” Helen
replied. “And it’s not capable of
hurting people.”
“Whew,” said Dr. Bellingham.
“I call it the Ethereal Specter
Disrupter, aka the Ghost Roaster, or the Ghost Toaster. I can’t decide which sounds better.”
“What does it do?”
“It whacks the shit out of dinosaur
ghosts.”
“And just how do you propose to
find these dinosaur ghosts?” Dr. Bellingham asked.
“I’ve got a plan for that too.”
Across the street at the Heritage
Foundation, members had finally come to a consensus. The final wording of the official report
stated that upon re-invading Iraq, the dinosaur ghosts would greet the
Americans as liberators and would, in all likelihood, help them build an oil
pipeline across the region.
They were all very pleased with
this handy piece of scholarship. What
they didn’t know was that two enormous shadows had just fallen over the
building, and that within a few moments, the entire structure would be no more.
Up next: chapter 10
Up next: chapter 10
