Stuff, With Things In It

“Richard Attenborough is doing the interview?”

“I wish.” The man operating the camera chuckled. “It’s David Attenborough. Richard died before they began capturing celebrity personalities, but he’d be perfect, right?”

The woman blinked into the camera.

“‘Spared no expense,’ remember?”

More blinking. The creature on her shoulder fluffed its feathers, as if it had gotten the joke and was annoyed on her behalf. Maybe it was a classic film buff. It certainly seemed more comfortable with the big black eye of his camera drone than the scientist was. When the drone had first appeared, the little dinosaur had climbed up onto her head and given the machine a thorough sniffing before dismissing it as both inedible and uninteresting.

The cameraman sighed. “Forget it. Just have a conversation with me. The personality capture program will dub in Attenborough. When you see the final product, it’ll look like he was right here with you.”

“Okay, okay.” She was flustered, probably talking too quickly to be of any real value. It didn’t matter. The documentary was just an excuse to film the big showstopping carnivores, so this footage was sure to be cut. It was a shame--her dinosaur was stunning, with pure white feathers and bright pink eyes, and long feathers along its spine that rose and fell with its mood. The cameraman thought it looked like a four-legged cockatoo with a lizard's tail, except for those teeth.

When it yawned, it was nothing but teeth.

Okay,” she said again, as she reached up and stroked the creature beneath its chin. It preened and sank its front limbs into her hair. “This is Henry. He’s an Incisivosaurus. We’re not sure he’s a male, by the way. He hasn’t let us do a medical inspection. But he stays close to Bink, and she’s definitely got the coloration we associate with females.”

“There’s another one?” The drone swung around in a silent circle. The cameraman, sitting seventy-five kilometers away in a comfortable chair, couldn’t spot the second dinosaur until the scientist pointed it out.

The second animal--Bink?--was standing on a nearby tree limb. She was slightly larger than Henry, her feathers a dozen distinct shades of muted browns and golds. As the drone moved towards her, a crest of bright blue feathers erected along her head and neck. The little dinosaur hissed at the drone and dropped to all fours, as if preparing to run.

No, wait--all threes. Bink was missing a front leg.

“Careful,” the woman said, very quietly. “If Bink goes to ground, you’ll scare off Henry, too.”

He piloted the drone away from the female dinosaur. As it pulled back, Bink’s crest dropped, and she settled onto her branch. Henry made a burbling call like a teakettle full of crickets, and Bink returned it. The winglike feathers along her only front leg folded themselves flat as she sat, watching the camera drone with yellow eyes.

The scientist eased back into a shy smile. “We're almost positive they're from the Cretaceous Period,” she said. “We try to keep them from crossing over, but it definitely happens. The security teams are focused on keeping the big ones away from the portal, so little ones like Henry and Bink sometimes slip past.

“As for her foreleg? We think she survived an attack when she was young,” she added. “It’s probably why she stays with Henry. As far as we can tell, Incisivosaurus are a flock species. Strength in numbers, right? We think the two of them were driven from the flock, as albinism and physical impairments can be liabilities.”

The cameraman grinned. Maybe this interview wasn’t a waste of time. Get these scientists talking about their animals, and the words started flowing. “How can you tell they’re...what is it? Incisivosaurus?” he asked. “You’re the first scientist I’ve interviewed who’ll go on record with an actual name for the animals. Except for...you know.”

“The Utahraptors.”

He shivered theatrically before he remembered she couldn’t see him, and grumbled aloud about bright red raptors the size of monster trucks.

She ignored him. “It’s hard for us,” she said, as she tickled the little white dinosaur under its chin. “We spend hundreds of years studying these animals without their skin and flesh, and when we find them alive, we learn they’re also covered in rainbow duckling fluff. Makes it hard to put a proper name to them without dissection.

“I got lucky,” she said, as she held out her hand. “Here, watch. Henry? Scritchies? You want scritchies?”

The little dinosaur opened its mouth as wide as it could--oh God, those teeth!--and the scientist stuck her finger inside and began to scratch its tongue.

“Okay, that’s...that’s not good,” the cameraman muttered to himself. He toggled the joystick and the drone dropped half a meter to focus on the inside of the dinosaur’s mouth.

Teeth.

Teeth.

Nothing but teeth!

Except...

“Oh that’s adorable,” the cameraman said quietly.

“I know, right? He’s got buckteeth!” the scientist said. “Those are a dead giveaway for an Incisivosaurus. They’re easier to see on Bink, since she’s not pure white.”

He turned the camera towards Bink, and zoomed in on the female dinosaur’s face. Sure enough, a set of tiny white fangs drooped over her upper lip.

“You’ve found derpasaurs,” he said. “Everybody’s going to want one of these.”

“They might get them, too.” The scientist removed her finger from Henry’s mouth. The dinosaur reached out and grabbed her hand with a long-fingered forefoot, gently, like a cat telling its owner that it wasn’t finished getting an ear rub. She chucked him under his chin, and he let out a whistling sigh. “If Henry and Bink are a breeding pair, we’ll see if Henry’s tameness can be taught to the next generation.”

“You’re domesticating them?”

“Taming, and no, Henry’s taming himself. I’m just giving him some cues to follow.” She held out her hand, palm up. “Henry? Hop down.”

The little white dinosaur chirped once, twice, then leapt onto her open palm. It was an odd sight; he was large enough to overflow her hand, but he seemed to weigh nothing more than a bundle of feathers. The scientist lowered him to the ground.

“Good boy, Henry,” she said, reaching into her jacket pocket.

Henry tracked the motion and sat up on his hind legs, his white crest unfurling in excitement. He began to hop around her feet, chirping.

“Beef jerky,” she explained to the cameraman. “Fossil evidence was used to suggest that Incisivosaurus was an herbivore, but it turns out they’re omnivorous. They love jerky. Can’t get enough of it. They’ll eat chicken and turkey, but they’ll knock you down for beef.

“And mutton,” she added as an afterthought. “Pork, too.”

The cameraman piloted the drone in a low arc around the white dinosaur. Henry ignored the camera, dancing and peeping in eagerness.

“Henry?” The scientist removed a small plastic box from another pocket. “Henry, calm.”

The dinosaur settled itself, watching the hand with the beef jerky, its feathers shivering in eagerness.

“Clicker training?” the cameraman asked. “You’re treating him like a dog?”

“It’s Jacques’ law of canine domestication,” she replied. “Dogs are just scavengers that learned how to be cute. My hypothesis is that it can apply to dinosaurs.

“Some dinosaurs,” she clarified, as she hid the hand with the jerky behind her back. “Henry? Eyes.”

With effort, Henry looked away from her hand to meet her eyes.

“Good!”

A sharp click from the black box.

A large chunk of jerky in the air.

A streak of white, up, then down and into the underbrush.

The cameraman panned the drone around in a slow circle, but both dinosaurs were--

#

--gone.

They shouldn’t be here. The air was wrong.

The air was always wrong.

It was too thick, or too thin, or stunk of harsh fluids or cloyingly sweet flowers or a hundred different scents which toppled over themselves, spiraling into clustered pockets of floating wrong which lingered until disturbed, and then they crashed into Bink’s nose with the force of a lightning strike.

The air was wrong and her head ached.

Her head hadn’t stopped hurting since the humans appeared. They hadn’t always been “humans” to her, no, the portal had appeared before, and it had been open long enough that Bink’s family had attached their own name to those too-long, too-tall creatures: Delicious Ones. Sweet and savory at the same time, a taste unlike anything from home.

Her brother wouldn’t let them use that name anymore. They were now “humans,” and her head wouldn’t stop hurting.

***eat!***

Henry was there, pressing the meat he had taken from his favorite human into her hand. Ah! This, at least, was worth the pain and the smell and the wrongness of the air. She tore into the meat, and this, at least, was made of new smells that were pleasing instead of painful. Wood and smoke and blood burned into a twist of meat which fell apart between her teeth.

***good?***

Bink pushed her nose against her brother and let his scent soothe the pain in her head.

***good*** she replied.

Henry sighed and trilled in happiness.

She loved her brother so, so much! He was kind and gentle and oh! so smart! It had been his idea to go through the portal, his idea that there might be more humans on the other side of that glowing hole. Humans tasted better than anything and were the easiest prey, with the meat right there beneath their too-thin hides. He believed there might be a better life for them on the other side.

Who thought like that? Not their mother or their father or any of their family. Oh, they were clever in the way of creatures who depended on their minds instead of their mass, but Henry was brilliant. The day their family had died? He had taken her down to the stream to hunt. He would limp along, his bright white feathers shining in the sun, right at the edge of the stream bank. When a fish leapt at him, Bink was there, her incisors snapping through its spine so it would die, gasping, on the shore.

They killed more fish than they could carry, so they had returned to the nest to get their siblings.

They found blood.

So much blood.

They had mourned, and had fended for themselves for several seasons. They had been cold, and after the fish learned that white meant danger, they had been hungry. Henry had thought it was a blessing when the Delicious Ones had returned through the portal. They had come with their wood (which smelled wrong, but was a familiar kind of wrong) and their metal (which smelled wrong, but at least they had a word for the scent of cold too-hard earth), or their plastic (which smelled so wrong it had required Bink to scratch and chew on a piece of the stuff until the new word came to her).

But they had also come with food.

Meats wrapped in plastic. Soft, spongy stuff discarded when the Delicious Ones broke camp. Even their feces, full of half-digested grains, tasted sweet and oh! so good!

And that one day? That perfect day? That day when the Others came and did what they did best, greeting the Delicious Ones with tooth and claw? The Others had fed, and when they were done, they left behind pieces of the Delicious Ones. Warm, rich pieces, marbled in white fat, and, in a special case, still moving.

Yes, Bink understood why her brother had wanted to follow the Delicious Ones. He had probably been right. And now that they were here? Now that Henry had discovered that humans always had their own food, that they would just give him this food, that they gave him enough food for the both of them once he figured out how to ask for it? He was probably right to insist that the humans themselves should never be thought of as food again.

But oh! how her head hurt.

#

The next day, Bink was hungry again. Henry left her in the warm nest they had made from an old plastic tarp they had dragged into the hollow of a tall tree, and returned to the humans’ camp.

“Hey, little buddy!”

Many of the humans had become accustomed to him. He knew them by scent and voice; some of them, like this woman with the scrap of food dangling between finger and thumb, were safe. He fluffed himself up and chirped a greeting, and the food flew towards him.

So did a heavy foot.

“Fuckin’ rat!”

Henry was gone, the food abandoned. The man swung around, searching...

Nothing.

From his perch high in the trees, Henry watched the man turn on the woman, his large hands not quite wrapped into fists. “Stop feedin’ that thing!”

“What’s your problem? He’s just a big chicken.”

“What’s my problem? They eat us!”

Below, the man stomped and shouted.

Henry crawled down the far side of the tree, and disappeared into the underbrush.

There were burrows all over the island. These were small, rounded paths through the thorns and thickets, or holes which tunneled down beneath the ground. He didn’t know what had made them. By the time he and Bink had come through the portal, the Others had eaten everything that was native to the island. The burrows were beginning to grow over from disuse: the Others were too large, and Bink didn’t like to leave the safety of the trees. The burrows belonged to Henry. Sometimes he caught a thin thread of an alien scent, old and fading but still strong enough to conjure the image of fast-running meat, and he wondered if it belonged to what had come this way before him.

Henry paused at the gap between the end of his burrow and a metal barrier. The barrier sang to him, a high-pitched keening which never changed its tune. He refused to listen; he had seen the bodies of the Others who had touched it. But there were holes in the barrier, holes no bigger around than one of his burrows, and he was through and on the other side without as much as mussing his feathers.

He loved the humans’ camp. They had built dens for themselves of wood and metal and plastic, and other strange things which still lacked proper names. When he climbed to the top of these dens, he could go anywhere he wanted in the camp. He could explore...taste...learn! There were parts of the camp which shone in the night, and parts that were always dark, no matter how high the sun was in the sky. Food, yes, food was everywhere, he didn’t understand why they left food lying around where anything with a nose could smell it. There was also that high-pitched singing, different layers of shrill and whining, all around, all around. The whole place sang!

It was not an especially nice song, true, but at least the humans were trying.

Across the tops--one, two, three, four--and then down a clinging vine which had grown up the side of one of their dens. There was an opening in a wall, and Henry darted through this, trilling a greeting to his human.

#

“Is Henry ready?”

The scientist grinned, and shook the package of beef jerky. “Henry’s always ready to eat.”

The cameraman had been wrong. Truly, stunningly wrong. The producers had seen the footage of the little white Incisivosaurus and had lost their damned minds. He had been ordered to prioritize the scientist and her pet project. Someone back at headquarters had no doubt had a chuckle over that line, but whatever: there was talk of making the segments with Henry into a full episode, and that would mean a nice finder’s fee for him when the filming wrapped.

And, maybe, a nice dinner with the scientist to thank her for being so generous with her time, maybe? They could meet in person, maybe?

She had smiled at that, and said maybe.

“One of my coworkers back in Toronto? She’s an animal behaviorist.” The scientist held up a golf ball and a rubber dog toy. “I’ve been sending her vids of Henry. She thinks he’s at least as intelligent as a border collie. He might be as smart as a corvid...uh...as smart as a crow.”

“Crows are intelligent?”

“Just watch.” She placed the dog toy and golf ball on the ground in front of Henry. “Henry? Golf ball. Squeaker,” she said, pointing at the objects in turn. Then: “Henry? Squeaker.”

Without hesitation, the dinosaur scooped up the dog toy.

A click from the black plastic box, a chunk of beef jerky. Praise and tongue scritchies for the little white dinosaur.

The next hour was spent teaching Henry the names of different objects. At the end of it, the scientist’s office looked like a toybox had been upended on the floor, and the dinosaur had gone to sleep within the folds of a discarded sweatshirt.

The cameraman piloted the drone as close to the animal as he dared. The audio system picked up tiny pitiful squeaks: Henry was snoring.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “You’re going to make a billion dollars.”

“Henry’s not a pet,” she reminded him, and turned herself into a liar by stroking the dinosaur’s downy feathers. Henry’s snoring took on a singsong tune, and he pillowed his head on her hand. “He’s tame, not domesticated. This little guy would eat me in a heartbeat if he could.”

The cameraman laughed.

“Seriously! Dogs and cats have been living with us for thousands of years, and they’ll still consider humans to be a food source if conditions are right. Henry would--”

Henry leapt up. Bink was at the window, chirping and hissing all at once, her crest high and the skin around her eyes a bright red. They were gone before the scientist could react.

“Ow! Henry, you turd.” The scientist pressed her hand against her chest and began to rummage around in a drawer.

“What was that?” The cameraman piloted the drone towards the window. There was no sign of either dinosaur.

“Oh, just animals being animals.” She opened a first-aid kit and pulled out a bottle of antiseptic, and began to douse the shallow scratches along her arm. “I’m going to contract some hellacious Cretaceous-era pathogen, I just know it--”

Screams.

Screaming everywhere!

The building began to tremble.

“Shit shit shit!” The scientist began to toss her own desk, hurling paper and electronics to the floor. Buried beneath the layers of productivity was a bright red button under a plastic cover; she flipped up the cover and hit the button, then dove beneath the metal desk.

The cameraman steered the drone to join her. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. She had managed to unhook a thick steel shield on the underside of the desk; he realized that the desk was built like a tank and was bolted to the concrete floor. “Nothing good.”

The shield came down like the door on a breadbox, shutting her away.

The cameraman took a breath, and then another, and then returned to his controls. He piloted the drone through the window, very slowly, expecting...

“Oh,” he whispered.

Huge. Red. And so, so many teeth.

The scientists might not have been able to identify each species that had come through the portals, but there was an exception: Utahraptors. Two meters tall, three meters long, and covered in bright fuck-all red feathers.

Red as a firetruck.

No, red as blood.

A Utahraptor was loose in the camp--the drone went up, high, higher--no, make that four Utahraptors.

Oh, look, they had brought their babies. Make that twelve Utahraptors, eight of them slightly smaller than a pony.

There was a breach in the electric fence, and blood and red feathers everywhere, and so so many bodies. There were buildings crushed to pieces, but how...? Ah, the raptors had been hunting, and had chased a herd of dinocephalians into the camp. The cameraman didn’t have a proper name for the stocky lizard-shaped dinosaurs, but if he had to guess, each of the Cephs weighed as much as a hippo. Maybe an elephant. There were dozens of them running loose in the camp. They must have hit the fence hard enough to short it out, and the survivors had torn a hole--

--there were screams, and blood, and--

Oh God, they were all just so big!

Nothing was left on the south side of the camp except rubble. The Cephs were looking for a way out, and their panic had turned into an accidental massacre of both humans and their own kind.

The raptors? They had already learned to ignore the Cephs in favor of the small, slow two-legged animals all around them.

He turned the drone in time to see a Ceph crash into the scientist’s office.

More screaming.

He heard himself saying, “...no, oh no, oh God no...” over and over again, and the drone swooped back to the earth below. The Ceph had torn apart the reinforced concrete structure as if it had been made of paper. Half of the heavy metal desk had been trampled flat. The shield had bent up along one side so he could see the scientist’s face; she was too pale, a pool of blood spreading from where her legs should be.

“Be quiet,” he whispered. “There’re raptors outside!”

The scientist pressed her hands against her mouth, and wept in silence.

“We’re coming,” he assured the scientist, even though he knew no such thing. What happened during a dinosaur stampede? Were soldiers on their way with guns? Or was it like a tornado and they had to wait for the crisis to end before they could rescue the survivors?

Whatever the case, it had been the right thing to say. She nodded, tears still streaming down her face.

Gradually, the screaming began to die down.

The earth stopped shaking.

“I’m going to go look around,” the cameraman whispered.

The scientist nodded. Her eyes were closed; she seemed to be having a hard time staying awake.

He took the drone up, and spun it around in a slow circle. Only now did he realize that this had been the kind of disaster that could make his career, and he had spent it trying to comfort the scientist. He wasn’t sure if he should be angry or proud.

Whatever. There were cameras all over the place. There’d be a hundred different pieces of footage to capture these last doomed moments.

It seemed quiet enough. There were no more Cephs to be seen, and the raptors were dispersing now that their easy meals were in hiding.

He returned to the scientist.

She wasn’t alone: Henry and Bink were there. Henry was sitting on her shoulder, while Bink was sniffing the bloodied edges of the desk.

Henry pressed his face against the scientist’s hair, crooning softly. Then--