Work Text:
T-Rex was hungry.
He hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday, and the cow he’d picked out of a field had been mostly fat to begin with. Then the angry metal birds had come, whirring and pelting him with stinging things, so he had tried to eat one of those but it hadn’t gone down well at all.
He’d left the mangled, gnawed-on hunk of metal in the field, shooting sparks and leaking stinky liquids.
He didn’t even look back when it exploded.
(Cool dinosaurs never look back at explosions)
***
Hephzibah Higgenbottom was having a really marvellous day. Her family’s home school group had arranged to go on a trip to the Creation Museum, and since Hephzibah wasn’t often allowed out of the house, she’d been especially excited to board the large, uninsured (because insurance was a plot by Big Government to keep track of your movements) forty-year-old van (built back when everything was made American, the way God intended, and not in Heathen Red China) with her thirteen younger brothers and sisters.
They’d sat in perfect, harmonious silence the whole way to the museum, and filed out of the van in an orderly fashion. Mr. and Mrs. Higgenbottom counted heads and lined their children up alongside the van until the two other families arrived. Then all six adults and thirty-eight children filed into the Creation Museum, and proceeded through the exhibits in a beautifully orderly fashion.
The first exhibit was a collection of finches. Mrs. Higgenbottom didn’t like it because she was a little strange about birds, but she tried to hide that, because God had commanded those with fearful hearts to fear not, and He hadn’t given them an out clause, so Mrs. Higgenbottom had to make do.
As the home school tour ringed around another informational plaque, Hephzibah noticed one man in particular, not a member of their group but reading the same plaque, who seemed to think he was looking at something awfully funny.
“Hey, Dr. Grant,” he called over his shoulder, “Dr. Grant, here’s one for you: they want to know if you can guess how old this fossil is.” He leaned in, smirking at the plaque. “Gonna give you a hint, it’s younger than you think.”
A man further away from the exhibits, who seemed to be waiting to attract the attention of a security guard rather than examine the displays themselves, shook his head impatiently.
“Ian, not now. He was seen heading this way. We need to convince them—”
“Shh,” said the woman at his side. “We want an evacuation, not a riot.”
She was wearing pants. Hephzibah blushed, and looked away.
“Come along, Hephzibah,” said Mrs. Higgenbottom.
Hephzibah went along.
***
T-Rex was in Kentucky, although he didn’t know it. He hadn’t brought a map, and if he had, he probably would have tried to eat it by now, anyway.
He turned off the main highway without the help of a map, and stomped toward a building ringed with shining, large colourful beetle-type things.
“Welcome to the Creation Museum: Prepare to Believe” proclaimed the sign at the entrance, but T-Rex didn’t read it, because he didn’t know how. He tasted it though, to see if it was any good.
It wasn’t.
He walked into the building.
(He broke the doors on his way in)
***
Hephzibah Higgenbottom was taking notes.
She had to write an essay when she got home about the things she’d learned at the Creation Museum, and she thought taking notes was the best way to make sure she made a thorough report.
She had the bits down about godless secular scientists trusting only in the evidence of their own eyes, while God-fearing creationists understood you had to interpret facts through the lens of God’s Word. She had made a charming sketch of a dinosaur wearing a saddle, but that was only for fun. She thought she might like to ride a Triceratops; it was only too bad that they hadn’t been able to fit on the Ark, or maybe she still could have.
Hephzibah was in the process of carefully documenting the God-ordained vegetarianism of Tyrannosaurus Rex when the sound of shattering glass and twisting steel interrupted her scribbles.
Then came a lot of screaming.
Hephzibah looked up, frowning. A Tyrannosaurus Rex (except not an animatronic one, like the exhibits; this one was very much alive, breathing and farting and making terrible noises) came stomping through the wall. He swung his head around, considering the crowd, and bent his head to pluck Mr. Higgenbottom up from the ground.
He swallowed him in two gulps.
Hephzibah considered this scene, then bent her head over her schoolbook and made a neat, bold strike through the last two lines of notes.
Then, being a prudent kind of girl overall, Hephzibah tucked her schoolbook in the pocket of her skirt, took the hands of her two youngest siblings, and hauled them under the nearest animatronic dinosaur to hide.
***
T-Rex was having a pretty good day, after all. Walking through the shiny wall hadn’t been fun, he’d cut his head a little near his eye and it made him grumpy, but almost as soon as he came in the door he found a nice fat person to eat, a man with a clipboard who’d been squeaking at him until he got eaten, and didn’t squeak any more.
The man made him gassy, though, so T-Rex stomped off down the hallways and almost-accidentally crashed through another wall. He saw a nice, skinny man on the other side, and skinny men were (T-Rex had learned) often very good chasers for fat ones, so he swallowed that one, and it settled his stomach nicely.
He was looking around and trying to decide who he wanted for dessert when a lot of shouting behind him made him turn around.
He wasn’t as grumpy as he’d been when he walked in, but the blast of stinky foamy white spray that hit him in the face changed his mind.
“Come on, come on!” shouted a man who held a funny red thing, which was making the stinky foamy spray. He pushed a hat back on his head, and fired off another blast. “Come on, over here, no good eating in those folks. Come on, big guy.”
It was actually the soundest and most well-reasoned argument ever presented within the walls of the Creation Museum.
T-Rex growled, then roared, and stomped after the man with the stinky white spray.
The man ran.
(They always did)
***
From her hiding place beneath the animatronic dinosaur, Hephzibah Higgenbottom saw everything. She saw the man with the hat run down the hall holding a fire extinguisher. She saw him hit the dinosaur in the face with a blast of chemicals, and she saw him lead the dinosaur away from all the people who were running and screaming and only sometimes remembering to take their many children with them when they ran.
Hephzibah, on thinking it over, decided that this was probably the finest thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. She warned Eli and Caleb to stay perfectly still. Then she crawled out from under the pretend dinosaur to follow something real.
***
When T-Rex chased the stinky foaming man into the room he’d first come from, stinky foaming man ran out of stinky foam. He looked at his red tube, growled, and threw it at T-Rex.
It hit T-Rex right on the nose. Very rude.
T-Rex roared, and a yellow-headed lady ran out from a small room, shouting, “Alan! Alan, a raptor!”
The stinky not-foaming man said “what?” and the yellow lady said “in the gift shop!”
“What’s it doing there?” asked another man, kind of dark and smelling of dead cow. He was fiddling with something small that T-Rex couldn’t see.
“It ate a man,” said the yellow lady. “And a stack of souvenir T-shirts.”
“It ate T-shirts?”
“They were kind of an accident, I think. The man was buying them . . . it was awful. Have you got it loaded yet, Ian?”
“Almost . . . now!” The dead cow man raised his little arms (not that T-Rex was judgemental about little arms. Glass houses, stones, and suchlike, you know) and a small ping sounded from his hands. Then a bright stinging thing happened in T-Rex’s chest, and he got very sleepy.
He didn’t remember much, after that.
(But then, that’s what you get for running away from home)
***
Hephzibah Higgenbottom reached the nearly-deserted atrium just in time to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex hit the floor. She watched, wide-eyed and close-mouthed, as a much smaller dinosaur sprang out of the gift shop and landed like a cat on the slippery tile.
“Ian, reload!” shouted the man in the hat.
“Trying, trying!” answered the man in black leather. He’d been the one laughing at the fossil exhibit. Now he was swearing and wrestling with a gun.
There was a sharp little ping and a red tufted dart popped up like a flag on the smaller dinosaur’s neck. It twisted and arched and tried to claw at the tranq. Then it, too, dropped.
The blonde lady in pants lowered her own gun, and shook her head.
“Nobody said anything about a raptor,” she said, and looked almost too angry to be scared.
“Must’ve happened after we left. We should call them both in,” said the man with the hat. Then he nodded at the smaller dinosaur. “Nice shot, Ellie.”
The woman, Ellie, shrugged. “I figured it was a skill I should pick up, you know? Working holidays with you two are hell.”
Then she looked over and saw Hephzibah.
“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”
Hephzibah looked at the two dinosaurs, then back to the three people.
“Um. Hello.”
“Are you—uh,” said the man in the hat, “um, here with anybody?”
“My family,” said Hephzibah. She considered the fallen Tyrannosaur. “That one ate my dad.”
“Oh, God,” said Ellie, and pressed her hands to her mouth. “I’m sorry.”
Hephzibah hadn’t really made up her mind how she felt about her father getting eaten yet, but she said a polite “thank you” to the lady all the same. Then she considered the dinosaurs again.
“Why are they here?” she asked.
“They escaped,” said the man in the leather coat.
“We were asked to catalogue some species that turned up at a rogue breeding facility not far from here," Ellie explained, “and these two broke out.” She sighed. “They always break out.”
Hephzibah shook her head, frowning, and clarified: “I mean, why are they alive?”
“Why are you alive?” shrugged the man in the coat. “Kinda existential for a fundamentalist kid, arentcha?”
Hephzibah had often been told that stubbornness was her besetting sin. She proved it now.
“Why,” she said, “are they . . . existing? Now? They should be extinct. My father told us dinosaurs perished because they couldn’t fit on the Ark.”
“Your father is digesting in the belly of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I think he’s changed his mind.”
“Ian!” scolded Ellie. She looked genuinely appalled. Hephzibah, who had resolved to miss her father a little bit, decided she liked this lady—even if she did flaunt her immodesty by wearing that which pertained to a man.
“Well,” said Hephzibah, “I’m going to go, now.”
She turned to do so, but was stopped by the concern of the man in the hat.
“Kid, look, are . . . are you okay? I mean, do you need to ask any more questions?” He shrugged; looked uncertain. “Most kids your age would, uh, wonder. Need to be told things. Wouldn’t they?”
Wondering leads to doubts. Doubting is a sin.
That was what she’d been taught. But she’d also been taught dinosaurs hadn’t survived the Flood.
Hephzibah Higgenbottom took a step forward. She tucked her hands in her pockets, and touched her schoolbook. She wondered how many more neat, dark strikes she’d have to make through everything she’d written, by the time the day was done.
Maybe lots.
It was a little scary, thinking of undoing all of that, but even so . . . Hephzibah took a deep breath.
“Why?" she said. "What else can you tell me?”
(As it turned out, a lot)