to listen, then moved on.
He came around to the side and saw just what he expected to see: fifty-gallon metal drums, ranged along the side wall. There were three of them, connected by a series of black hoses. That made sense. All the gasoline on the island would have had to come here in drums.
He tapped the drums softly with a knuckle. They were hollow. He lifted one, hoping to hear the slosh of liquid at the bottom. They needed only a gallon or two—
Nothing.
The drums were empty.
But surely, he thought, there must be more than three drums. He did a quick calculation in his head. A lab this large would have had a half-dozen support vehicles, maybe more. Even if they were fuel-efficient, they’d burn thirty or forty gallons a week. To be safe, the company would have stored at least two months’ supply, perhaps six months’ supply.
That meant ten to thirty drums. And steel drums were heavy, so they probably stored them close by. Probably just a few yards . . .
He turned slowly, looking. The moonlight was bright, and he could see well.
Beyond the store, there was an open space, and then clumps of tall rhododendron bushes which had overgrown the path leading to the tennis court. Above the bushes, the chain-link fence was laced with creeping vines. To the left was the first of the worker cottages. He could see only the dark roof. To the right of the court, nearer the store, there was thick foliage, although he saw a gap—
A path.
He moved forward, leaving the store behind. Approaching the dark gap in the bushes he saw a vertical line, and realized it was the edge of an open wooden door. There was a shed, back in the foliage. The other door was closed. As he came closer, he saw a rusted metal sign, with flaking red lettering. The letters were black in the moonlight.
PRECAUCION
NON FUMARE
INFLAMMABLE
He paused, listening. He heard the raptors snarling in the distance, but they seemed far away, back up on the hill. For some reason they still had not approached the village.
Thorne waited, heart pounding, staring forward at the dark entrance to the shed. At last he decided it wasn’t going to get any easier. They needed gas. He moved forward.
The path to the shed was wet from the night’s rain, but the shed was dry inside. His eyes adjusted. It was a small place, perhaps twelve by twelve. In the dim light he saw a dozen rusted drums, standing on end. Three or four more, on their sides. Thorne touched them all quickly, one after another. They were light: empty.
Every one, empty.
Feeling defeated, Thorne moved back toward the entrance to the shed. He paused for a moment, staring out at the moonlit night. And then, as he waited, he heard the unmistakable sound of breathing.
Inside the store, Levine moved from window to window, trying to follow Thorne’s progress. His body was jumpy with tension. What was Thorne doing? He had gone so far from the store. It was very unwise. Levine kept glancing at the front door, wishing he could lock it. He felt so unsafe with the door unlocked.
Now Thorne had gone off into the bushes, disappearing entirely from view. And he had been gone a long time. At least a minute or two.
Levine stared out the window, and bit his lip. He heard the distant snarl of the raptors, and realized that they had remained up at the entrance to the laboratory. They hadn’t followed the vehicles down, even now. Why not? he wondered. The question was welcome in his mind. Calming, almost soothing. A question to answer. Why had the raptors stayed up at the laboratory?
All kinds of explanations occurred to him. The raptors had an atavistic fear of the laboratory, the place of their birth. They remembered the cages and didn’t want to be captured again. But he suspected the most likely explanation was also the simplest—that the area around the laboratory was some other animal’s territory, it was scent-marked and demarcated and defended, and the raptors were reluctant to enter it. Even the tyrannosaur, he remembered now, had gone through the territory quickly, without stopping.
But whose territory?
Levine stared out the window impatiently, as he waited.
“What about the lights?” Sarah called, from across the room. “I need light here.”
“In a minute,” Levine said.
At the entrance to the shed, Thorne stood silently, listening.
He heard soft, snorting exhalations, like a quiet horse. A large animal, waiting. The sound was coming from somewhere to his right. Thorne looked over, slowly.
He saw nothing at all. Moonlight shone brightly over the worker village. He saw the store, the gas pumps, the dark shape of the Jeep. Looking to his right, he saw an open space, and clumps of rhododendron bushes. The tennis court beyond.
Nothing else.
He stared, listening hard.
The soft snorting continued. Hardly louder than a faint breeze. But there was no breeze: the trees and bushes were not moving.
Or were they?
Thorne had the sense that something was wrong. Something right before his eyes, something that he could see but couldn’t see. With the effort of staring, he began to think his eyes were playing tricks on him. He thought he detected a slight movement in the bushes to the right. The pattern of the leaves seemed to shift in the moonlight. Shift, and stabilize again.
But he wasn’t sure.
Thorne stared forward, straining. And as he looked he began to think that it wasn’t the bushes that had caught his eye, but rather the chain-link fence. For most of its length, the fence was overgrown with an irregular tangle of vines, but in a few places the regular diamond pattern of links was visible. And there was something strange about that pattern. The fence seemed to be moving, rippling.
Thorne watched carefully. Maybe it is moving, he thought. Maybe there’s an animal inside the fence, pushing against it, making it move. But that didn’t seem quite right.
It was something else. . . .
Suddenly, lights came on inside the store. They shone through the barred windows, casting a geometric pattern of dark shadows across the open clearing, and onto the bushes by the tennis court. And for a moment—just a moment—Thorne saw that the bushes beside the tennis court were oddly shaped, and that they were actually two dinosaurs, seven feet tall, standing side by side, staring right at him.
Their bodies seemed to be covered in a patchwork pattern of light and dark that made them blend in perfectly with leaves behind them, and even with the fence of the tennis court. Thorne was confused. Their concealment had been perfect—too perfect—until the lights from the store windows had shone out and caught them in the sudden bright glare.
Thorne watched, holding his breath. And then he realized that the leafy light-and-dark pattern went only partway up their bodies, to mid-thorax. Above that, the animals had a kind of diamond-shaped crisscross pattern that matched the fence.
And as Thorne stared, the complex patterns on their bodies faded, the animals turned a chalky white, and then a series of vertical striped shadows began to appear, which exactly matched the shadows cast by the windows.
And before his eyes, the two dinosaurs disappeared from view again. Squinting, with concentrated effort, he could just barely distinguish the outlines of their bodies. He would never have been able to see them at all, had he not already known they were there.
They were chameleons. But with a power of mimicry unlike any chameleon Thorne had ever seen.
Slowly, he backed away into the shed, moving deeper into darkness.
“My God!” Levine exclaimed, staring out the window.
“Sorry,” Harding said. “But I had to turn on the lights. That boy needs help. I can’t do it in the dark.”
Levine did not answer her. He was staring out the window, trying to comprehend what he had just seen. He now realized what he had glimpsed the day Diego was killed. That brief momentary sense that something was wrong. Levine now knew what it was. But it was quite beyond anything that was known among terrestrial animals and—
“What is it?” she said, standing alongs
ide him at the window. “Is it Thorne?”
“Look,” Levine said.
She stared out through the bars. “At the bushes? What? What am I supposed to—”
“Look,” he said.
She watched for a moment longer, then shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Start at the bottom of the bushes,” Levine told her. “Then let your eyes move up very slowly. . . . Just look . . . and you’ll see the outline.”
He heard her sigh. “I’m sorry.”
“Then turn out the lights again,” he said. “And you’ll see.”
She turned the lights out, and for a moment Levine saw the two animals in sharp relief, their bodies pale white with vertical stripes in the moonlight. Almost immediately, the pattern started to fade.
Harding came back, pushed in alongside him, and this time she saw the animals instantly. Just as Levine knew she would.
“No shit,” she said. “There are two of them?”
“Yes. Side by side.”
“And . . . is the pattern fading?”
“Yes. It’s fading.” As they watched, the striped pattern on their skins was replaced by the leafy pattern of the rhododendrons behind them. Once again, the two dinosaurs blended into invisibility. But such complex patterning implied that their epidermal layers were arranged in a manner similar to the chromatophores of marine invertebrates. The subtlety of shading, the rapidity of the changes all suggested—
Harding frowned. “What are they?” she asked.
“Chameleons of unparalleled skill, obviously. Although I’m not sure one is entirely justified in referring to them as chameleons, since technically chameleons have only the ability—”
“What are they?” Sarah said impatiently.
“Actually, I’d say they’re Carnotaurus sastrei. Type specimen’s from Patagonia. Three meters in height, with distinctive heads—you notice the short, bulldog snouts, and the pair of large horns above the eyes? Almost like wings—”