The lanky, black-jeans office worker, who usually orders a Tripleceratops latte, stares at the chalkboard above my head like he might get something different this time. He looks almost as tired as me, and I was tired before I even got to this island. “Why is ‘Stego’s Secret’ so expensive?”
I consider a snarky reply about profit margins to make him smile ‘cause he’s always been cool to us, but it’s, like, 9 a.m. “They feed the coffee beans to the ornithischians and then fish them out of the poo before roasting them. Gives it that Mesozoic aroma.” Look at me, using my polite words with the customers.
He grimaces, then nods. “Kind of like that civet coffee.”
“I guess.” I shrug. The white lady behind him is glaring at me. Three more customers walk in. “You wanna try it?”
“…Suuuuure.” He doesn’t sound sure but I’ll take it. I finally upsold someone. Woo.
“What’s your name again?” I ask, Sharpie poised to scrawl it on a paper cup.
“Dev. And you’re Hayden.”
“Yep.” That’s nice he remembered. I ring him up and add the cup to the row of them by Alejandro, who’s singing along to the ambient hip-hop and bobbing his head to the beat, black hair swinging over his shoulders while he steams the 2%.
Alejandro is from Costa Rica and likes to draw dickosaurs on the cups when the place slows down in the afternoon. He cranks up the music when there aren’t any customers and sings at the top of his lungs with dramatic flair until I can’t stop laughing. Sometimes we share a joint when our shift ends, on the way back to the employee housing complex. Not the nice one where Dev probably lives—no, Alejandro and I are in the one a quarter mile farther, with the peeling paint, where all the Loanadactyl workers have to stay until our helicopter tickets are paid off.
Behind Alejandro, through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Jurassic Perk, through the gap between the office buildings where they do the marketing and finance shit and brainstorm psychotic new combinations of genes, up in the distant hills between green swathes of jungle, I catch a glimpse of a titanosaur herd on the move.
They’re like walking skyscrapers. Necks like giant milk steamers, tails balanced out behind them like a fleet of sideways sailboats. Electric blue and pink because evolution loves a fuck it, why not almost as much as the gene editors upstairs do.
Someday I’ll get to the fun part of the island. See some dinosaurs up close. And pterosaurs. One close glimpse of a Quetzalcoatlus as it launches into the air and spreads its 20-foot-each wings, and it’ll all be worth it.
That’s what I’ve been telling myself.
Every. Day.
“Hellooooo! I’m late to an emergency meeting, can I order??”
I turn to the lady at the register. She raises a single discontented eyebrow over the purple rim of her glasses, like I was breaking some kind of rule by looking out the window for a second and a half. She works here too, upstairs in the corporate offices like most of our customers. She’s here every fucking morning and has never asked my name, or Alejandro’s name, or made any kind of small talk, and I get not having the energy for that, I do. I just hope her meeting is some fucking life or death shit. “Triple soy Velocimocha, no whip this time, please. I hate that stuff.”
At least there’s another dollar in the tip jar.
When the line clears, Alejandro changes the music in the back and cranks the steamers until clouds billow out of them across the air-conditioned gap behind the counter. He drops to the floor and sings along to the opening of “Bohemian Rhapsody” as he rises slowly through the steam. I cheer him on.
When the guy who ordered an iced Brontoccino curses at his phone and runs out, the only customer left is Dev, still sipping Stego’s Secret like he’s struggling with an internal sunk cost argument. We both watch Alejandro as he grabs a cup he drew a Tridickotops on earlier and holds it like a mic. I harmonize the Gallileos gleefully and Dev joins in. We both clap for Alejandro when the song ends, and he takes a bow, then grabs a wet towel with a swirl and shimmies around the end of the counter to wipe down the tables.
“How’s the Secret?” I ask Dev.
“Uhh. Let’s just say I wouldn’t sign the NDA.”
“Heh. Might be better iced?”
“Yeah…yeah let’s try that.”
I scoop out a cup of ice and ask him what he works on upstairs while I transfer the liquid like a science experiment.
He looks like he’s about to say something interesting, then stops himself. “Well, to be honest.” He takes a sip. “A fairly passive-aggressive email went out this morning. Something something, don’t fraternize with the baristas.”
Oh.
“But yeah…” He looks around. The place is still empty. “I’m not sure I know what they mean by that. Anyway it’s on my LinkedIn so not exactly forbidden knowledge. I design the interfaces for—”
BANG
The fuck? I turn around. There’s a dent in the back door of the stock room, the one that opens to the lot where we get deliveries.
“What just happened?” Alejandro asks from a half-damp table, clutching his towel.
BANG
A hinge comes loose. Light streams in through the edge of the door frame, across the jars of Stego’s Overpriced Poo Beans. Alejandro says, “Shit!” somewhere behind me, and for a brief second before the door comes crashing in, I think, It is. It is shit.
I back into the counter and try to scramble up over the gap next to the register but there’s a fucking nodosaur busting through the doorframe like a giant avocado Kool-Aid Man, spiked up like a Mustang in a Mad Max movie.
Dev pulls me over to his side of the counter, I scramble for the tip jar, and we hide behind the table Alejandro’s already flipped on its side. Breaking glass, coffee beans everywhere, the shelves in the back crashing on top of the dinosaur, who makes a kind of “oomph” noise and then just keeps on… whatever the hell she’s doing.
“That spikey fucker’s eating all the coffee beans,” Alejandro says, peeking over the table.
“Which ornithischians did you say they were feeding those poo beans to?” Dev asks me.
“I think we just found out.” I can’t look away—not just because the heavy-artillery herbivore could kill me on accident—because she’s magnificent. Even in my most deluded fever dreams I never thought I’d get this close to one.
“Should I go get help?” Dev asks. “I should go get help.”
Alejandro and I both nod vehemently. I notice Dev left his iced Stego’s Secret on the counter when he pulled me over it and I feel a pang of guilt. He makes a run for the main door that opens to Dilophosaurus Walkway. As soon as he’s outside, he fumbles for a cigarette, drops it, sees us watching him through the window, mouths words that might be, “I got you guys,” and runs off.
The nodosaur bellows in the back room. There’s blood on her beak. “You think she cut herself on the broken glass?” Alejandro asks.
I shrug.
“Poor girl.”
She swings her armored tail into the last standing shelves with the sound system on them, and they crash on top of her, ending the Queen album with a thunderous finale. I feel on some level the band would approve.
This is not how I wanted to get closer to the dinosaurs.
Nodo squeezes her twenty-inch-long shoulder spikes through the stock room doorway behind the cash register, stacks of paper cups and lids all sloughing off her back like water on a duck. That’s a lazy metaphor. Like labor laws on a privately owned corporate theme park island. There we go.
I ask, “Should we run?” My eyes are fixed on Nodo as she rears up into the pastry box and sniffs at the day-old almond croissants our manager told us to put back in the main display when we ran out of the fresh ones. The blood on her beak smears the glass shelf in a red squiggle.
Alejandro glances behind his shoulder. “Depends how fast you can run.”
I don’t know if I like where this is going but I look back through the windows out to Dilophosaurus Walkway. Dev runs past, yelling, with a T. rex close behind.
I’ve never been this close to one. Holy shit, she’s huge. Those teeth—
Those jaws—
Chest like a cement truck. Legs like a twelve-ton endurance cyclist. Tail wagging back and forth with every stride just slightly more than balance dictates, like she’s having the goddamned time of her life chasing the one customer I was starting to like.
The pastry case explodes in glass and powdered sugar and Cretaceous nonsense. Nodo rumbles and shakes a blueberry muffin off a shoulder spike. It flies into the window and leaves a crumbly blue smudge. It’s going to be a bitch to windex.
I turn to Alejandro. “Remember that time we went down to the docks and got super high and waved at the tourist helicopters?”
He places one hand gently on my forearm, right at the Quetzalcoatlus tattoo. “If this is an I-think-we’re-about-to-die-so-I-have-to-profess-my-undying-love-to-you talk we’re about to have, I don’t know if I’m really up for it.”
“No.”
“Thank god.”
“I have the tip jar. There’s sixty-two dollars in it. If we can get to the mainland—”
He squints. “Hayden. If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, I need you to know I was lying about being able to fly a helicopter, and I’m so, so terribly sorry for that.”
I slump.
Nodo gurgles and rams a chair with her head. It flies, shatters the window I saw the titanosaur herd through earlier. Glass clinks against the espresso machine and scatters across the tiled floor I just mopped like an hour ago.
We run.
The docks are just a stretch of jungle past the Loanadactyl housing. If we can get there maybe there’s evacuation boats or something, who the fuck knows, we just had to pick a direction and downhill was easier so here we are, out of breath, stumbling down the center of Ceratosaurus Boulevard with sixty-two dollars in tips and whatever’s left of our wits, cursing the ergonomic no-slip clogs they took $80 from our first paychecks for, and tossing our coffee-black Jurassic Perk aprons into the wind.
Other people are running the same direction, and when the raptors show up, I start to understand the safety-in-numbers thing the herd animals do. Screaming, yelling, horror. I don’t look back. I can’t look back. I just keep running until I think I’m going to have a heart attack. Jesus fuck I’m only twenty-two, how am I this out of shape?
The building I’ve been sleeping in since I started this summer job eight months ago is on fire.
“Ay chingao,” Alejandro curses, as we hide behind an upside-down Jeep to catch our breath and watch the flames. Black pterosaurs circle the pillar of smoke on triangle wings. The whole scene is honestly metal as fuck. I feel for Alejandro, though. “My sketchbook’s in there,” he says. “And the new socks my tía sent me.”
My room contains only the small bag of clothes I brought with me on the helicopter, three empty cans of Dakotaraptor Lite, and a stash of weed.
I feel a strange sense of relief.
The docks are smeared with blood and viscera. Microraptors pull the meat off severed limbs that something huge and predatory left behind. There’s one boat left, a green and yellow automated tourist ferry that needs a JurassiPass to start. A single headless corpse hangs off the edge.
“Did you ever get that discount employee pass?” Alejandro asks.
“Nope. You?”
“Nah. Been saving up to get the hell out of here.” He looks at me with a sudden wild grin. “Fuckin’ ironic, huh?”
I laugh.
He laughs.
We laugh together, hysterically, because how else could this have ended? The ten-page contract for a fucking barista job, the 30% interest rate on the loan for transportation and housing that we were both told would be a “cinch” to pay off in our first few weeks, the broken promise that we’d get to see the dinosaurs up close. The polite reminders of our remaining debt every time we tried to quit. How the fuck else was this all going to end except in maniacal, bending-over, tear-jerking laughter and the glistening red remnants of whoever didn’t make it on the last helicopter out?
The dock shakes.
THUMP
Our laughter wanes. We look at each other and in Alejandro’s brown eyes I see true fear for the first time.
THUMP
There’s nowhere to go from here but the sea.
THUMP
I don’t want Alejandro to die. Dammit, he deserves to get his dickosaurs in a fucking gallery someday.
THUMP
I turn and feel the cool glass of the tip jar still in my hand. I see teeth. Only teeth.
I throw. The jar spins through the air, into the most powerful jaws the world has ever known. Jaws strong enough to shatter a titanosaur femur. They snap shut with a gust of foul air that pushes my untended bangs behind my ears.
The T. rex stops, and shakes her head, and opens her mouth. Alejandro grabs my hand.
Inside the rex’s mouth is blood, and broken glass, and bills. Sixty-two dollars, stuck to her teeth and tongue and the roof of her mouth between the shards and red and drool.
She roars.
BANG
She turns to look behind her.
BANG
I see it. A tranquilizer dart to the neck. She sits, and blinks. Behind her, pantsuit torn, hair singed, purple glasses askew, is Soy Velocimocha lady, holding a rifle. I’ve never been glad to see her, even a little. This is the first time. I want to cheer but when the laugh-cry-choke finally coalesces in my throat, a shadow like a slow fighter jet passes over us.
It can only be one thing. I look up at the unmistakable silhouette of a Quetzalcoatlus, giant dagger beak leading pickaxe wings across the sun. Soy Velocimocha ducks and tries to shoot her, but slips in the blood, trips over Rexy’s tail, and falls off the side of the dock with a surprised “Crap!” and a splash. From somewhere under the docks I can hear her cursing the cheapskate who didn’t think we needed traction tape.
Boat. We can hide in the boat even if we can’t use it. Maybe there’s a radio or something we could call for help with. Alejandro’s thinking the same thing.
We give the headless corpse a wide berth and try to get into the cabin, but the door only opens with a JurassiPass. We knew it would, but, shit.
“Oh hey, it’s you guys!”
Dev. Beautiful fucking Dev from the office upstairs is standing on the dock, grinning at us like he just outran a T. rex, holding the fucking iced Stego’s Secret he left on the counter. It’s half empty and most of the ice has melted, leaving a layer of clear on the black that’s just going to taste like stale water soon. He hops onto the boat deck with us and says, “Do either of you have a JurassiPass?”
I shake my head.
Alejandro shakes his head.
“Rats,” Dev says. I’ve never heard so much chagrin expressed with such a gentle word.
“You seriously don’t have one either?” Alejandro asks. “I thought you salaried assholes up there made bank.”
Dev winces. “Eeeeehn. The benefits aren’t great.”
“Let me guess,” I spit out, “they told you they have a whole stack of resumes and if you didn’t like the offer they could just move on to someone else?”
“Something like that yeah,” he says, and squinches up his mouth.
All three of us look around, under the benches on the deck, behind the trash and recycling bins, in the trash and recycling bins. We converge on the headless body. Dev grimaces. Alejandro shakes his head and says, “I don’t wanna.”
I pat the dead guy down. His pants are all wet with urine and… yeah. It’s all over the pockets. God, why. I pull a sticky wallet from the stain and try not to breathe while I pull out credit cards and IDs looking for a green JurassiPass. The employee ones have a distressed pink stripe that says PART OF THE JURASSIC FAMILY on it, like a claw tore the card open and there was only Pepto Bismol and false promises inside.
Dev pokes at the ID I just tossed on the floor with his shoe. “I know this guy. Knew. Goddamn.”
“Sorry, man,” Alejandro says.
A shadow passes over us and we all duck. The Quetzalcoatlus lands on the back of the unconscious rex and starts pecking. Her beak is as long as a car. I can’t look away.
Blood squirts out of the rex and she groans, lifts her head, tries to stand, falls back down. Quetzo flaps her wings for balance, Rexy snaps her jaws and catches the tip of a wing. Quetzo screams, and it’s a fucking hideous sound, like my bank account would make if it could verbalize what’s been done to it since I started working here.
I find it. The stupid green JurassiPass with the Pepto Bismol rip.
“Yes!” Alejandro exclaims, arms shooting up in shared triumph.
“Alright, Hayden!” Dev holds up his palm for a high five, then thinks better of it, looks away sheepishly and finishes the last actual coffee of his iced Stego’s Secret with a loud straw slurp.
But he remembered my name again. That’s sweet.
“Let’s get inside this thing and get out of here,” I say. I pocket the cash from the wallet, tell myself I’ll wash it later, and head for the cabin door.
Once we’re inside, the automated system activates and a pre-recorded voice comes on: “Welcome aboard! We’ll be on our way faster than you can say Elasmosaurus!” Then it goes into a safety spiel.
“How long does it take to say Elasmosaurus?” Alejandro asks.
Dev pushes up his sleeves and says, “You know what. I got this, actually.” He sets the cup of faintly tinted water on one of the interactive informational panels, and makes a few swipes at one of the screens. “I designed the user interface for this.”
KLANG
I spin around. The cabin door is dented. Fuck, not again. I hope to god it’s not the fucking Quezto. I don’t want to be skewered on a fucking ten-foot death beak. Or swallowed whole. Or however the fuck they eat.
KLANG
A voice, faint, outside. “Hey open up!”
I cautiously open the cabin door. It’s Soy Velocimocha, with her rifle butt aimed at my face, ready to klang. She squints at me. She’s about to say something, something maybe even friendly for once, but just as she lowers her rifle, Quetzo lands on the deck of the boat, and in one ghastly motion, pecks her into non-existence. As the giant head tilts up to swallow, a single pale hand grasps the corner of the mouth before it’s pulled down with the rest of the squirming mass in Quetzo’s throat.
The void where there was a person a moment ago fills in with dread.
Quetzo stares down at me like a pissed-off streetlamp on a street to hell.
Behind me, the automated voice says, “And remember! Seagulls are dinosaurs, too! So don’t feed them!”
Quetzo cocks her head. A lump squirms in her gullet.
“The rifle! Grab the rifle!” Alejandro’s voice sounds so far away.
This is the animal I came here for. I saw a skeleton once in a museum and collected like fifteen toy models that I used to fly around like airplanes in the yard before my parents both got laid off and defaulted on the mortgage. Stuff went south from there. South all the fucking way to a tropical dinosaur island off the coast of Central America, where I thought I could save up for college while living a dream.
She’s stunning, actually. The Quetzo. Downy orange and yellow wings, a deadly curious glint in her eyes. Sunset colors all across her face and beak. Tall enough to hit her head on an overpass and impossible as resurrection, standing close enough to kill me, in the epicenter of her post-apocalypse.
The squirming in her gullet stops. She moves a front wingfoot—I grab the rifle at my feet and feel for the trigger and pull.
Nothing happens. I’ve never shot a gun before. What the fuck am I doing?
Quetzo aims for me. I can see it, the wild look in her eyes, like she doesn’t simply want a meal of me, she wants something I can never give her—revenge, justice, hope. The world that the asteroid took back. I don’t know what it is, no one will ever know, but I get her. I completely fucking get her, and in the moment she strikes I feel, too fast for words, like whatever happens next is something she fucking earned. Yanked into being against her will, only to be caged and cooed at. She was never even promised freedom.
Quetzalcoatlus. The most majestic beast to ever grace the clouds. Yes, you can have what’s left of me. All my stringy meat is yours.
Someone pulls hard on my shirt. I stumble back, and her beak hits the deck. The door closes in my face. Alejandro leans against it, eyes wide.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s OK.” He doesn’t look OK, though.
“Heck yeah! Got it!” Dev cheers from the interactive panels in the front. I turn. The cutesy dino illustrations and educational content are long gone, and the screens are filled with maps and buttons. “Where to?” Dev asks.
I don’t have an answer. Having nowhere to go was how I ended up here.
“Puntarenas,” Alejandro says. “My tía lives there.”
Dev nods somberly and punches in coordinates.
Maybe this little boat will get us there.
Maybe it won’t.
I sit on the floor and fumble through my pockets with a shaking hand.
“Here,” Alejandro says, and passes a blue glob of hand sanitizer from his palm to mine. There must be a dispenser by the door. Are there bathrooms on this thing? Water? Food?
I find the last joint I may ever smoke in my shirt pocket where I tucked it away this morning. I don’t have a lighter.
Dev pulls his from the front pocket of his jeans for me, joins us on the floor, and checks his phone. “Wow,” he says, staring at the little rectangle in disbelief. “I just got laid off.”
I exhale a long drag and pass him the joint with a shaking hand. “Sorry, man. That must have been a dream job.”
He takes it and sets down his phone between the bloody shoe prints of our corporate clogs. “It was. The sheer prestige of it. The camaraderie of crunch mode.” Something in his spine untenses and his posture straightens as he sighs. “Until crunch mode became every mode. I haven’t had a weekend off in months.”
“This,” I say, “is why they told you not to fraternize with the hourly workers. You might realize you had it almost as bad as us.”
Dev nods soberly. “Can you believe there’s actually an HR person holed up in an office right now, sending out these emails?” He passes the joint to Alejandro.
I believe it.
“I wonder if it’s just us,” Alejandro takes a drag, “or if the dinos are rampaging on the tourist side, too.”
“Fuckin better be,” I say. “If it’s just us, shit’ll never change.” Dev and Alejandro nod.
“I’m guessing this wasn’t a dream job for either of you,” Dev says.
“Nah it was,” Alejandro passes me the joint. “I’ve been drawing dinosaurs since I was little. Came here to work on a portfolio for art school. Never saw a single fuckin’ dino up close until today.”
“Think you’ll keep drawing them?” Dev asks.
Alejandro’s quiet for a minute. The boat starts to sway. The waves are getting bigger. “Ask me again after I get some therapy, man.” He laughs. We all laugh. The kind of laugh where there’s still blood everywhere.
“What about you, Hayden?” Dev asks.
I just shake my head. I give him the joint and stand up, walk to the window where Dev left his cup of poo-bean-coffee-flavored melted ice. It’s the only water we have, isn’t it?
I can see both ends of the island, bookending the horizon in black smoke and swarming pterosaurs.
It’s beautiful.
And this would be a good place to end a story, wouldn’t it? Like some kind of fucking movie, where we’re all just so relieved we made it out alive.
Let’s say we make it to Costa Rica. Let’s say I even make it home, to the futon I’ve been sleeping on in the living room since my parents lost the house I grew up in, to some other barista job, to community college and a transfer to state university if I’m lucky, and the $80,000 loan to do it. Then what? Some other job, maybe one like Dev’s, where I work sixty hours every week to pay off said loans, and then support my parents when they can’t work anymore.
And then what.
I’ve already seen a Quetzalcoatlus up close. It’ll haunt my nightmares until I die.
“I was saving up for college,” I turn away from the island, to my fellow survivors. They’re both still sitting on the floor, looking up at me. Dev nods. Alejandro knows what I’m going to say next. “But I didn’t save shit.”
“Me neither,” Alejandro explains to Dev, “They made it basically impossible. I was still hoping to get a scholarship, though. I had this whole series of Mesozoic ferns and shit from the little courtyards between the buildings, all in watercolors I made out of the decaf no one ever orders. Now I have nothing.”
There’s a moment of silence for the ashes of Alejandro’s sketchbook.
“Technically I have a 401k,” Dev says, “but they didn’t give me any kind of severance package so I’m probably going to have to cash it out. Assuming we get off this boat alive. But what kind of life am I going back to? Where do I go from a place like this? Apple? Disney? Please. Wake me up when they have a Spinosaurus.”
I catch the Stego-water as it slides across the dash. I set it carefully in the nearest cupholder and slump onto the fiberglass bench. Everything hurts. And I’m a whole new kind of tired now. “Maybe all jobs are shitty dreams.”
My friends and I consider this.
The Pacific Ocean rocks us with its microplastic waves.
Alejandro begins to sing.
|
T. K. Rex is a science fiction and fantasy author from the western states, whose stories can be read in more than forty publications, including their debut collection, The Wildcraft Drones, out this year from Stelliform Press. They attended Clarion in 2022, co-hosted the official podcast of the Writers Grotto for two years, and currently co-host Stir, a seasonal reading series in San Francisco. The Wildcraft Drones has been described as “a much-needed vision” by Kim Stanley Robinson and “gorgeous, hopeful, and strange” by Annalee Newitz. Their story “Haunting Beauty” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and their second book, The Cursed Blade of Wek, is a queer sword and sorcery novella slated for publication in 2027 with Neon Hemlock. T. K.’s newsletter, socials, and upcoming events can be found at tkrex.wtf. |