Читать книгу Code Name Flood - Laura Martin, Laura Martin - Страница 9

“Home sweet home,” Chaz crowed later when Schwartz cut the motor down to a crawl. She stood up and stretched, a wide grin on her face. I glanced around in confusion. Surrounding us on all sides was a seemingly never-ending expanse of rolling waves with no land in sight. What was she talking about?

“Are you sure you should stop here?” Shawn asked, sitting up for the first time to peer nervously at the surrounding water. He hadn’t spoken since he’d thrown up, and his voice still sounded shaky. Not that I could blame him. The image of Pretty Boy swimming towards my best friend was one I wouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon. It had been too loud to do any talking on the trip, and we’d spent what felt like an eternity huddled together on the floor of the boat trying to stay warm as the wind sliced right through our wet clothes.

“Of course I’m sure,” Chaz said. “Get ready to duck.”

“Duck?” Todd asked, glancing up at the sky. “I thought those went extinct years ago.”

Chaz snorted. “They did. Sorry, I meant duck your head. I forgot how hard it is for people to spot the boat dock the first time. Look dead ahead. See where those waves are crashing sort of funny?” I followed her pointing finger and blinked in surprise. About ten feet in front of us the waves were behaving oddly, seeming to hit an invisible object before careening back in the opposite direction. I squinted and then jerked back in surprise when my eyes finally made sense of what they were seeing. Rising from the water was a gigantic mirrored bubble, ingeniously camouflaged with reflective glass so that it melded with the shifting waves of the lake. If I hadn’t known exactly where to look, I could have passed within a foot of it and missed it. Before I could marvel anymore, our boat slid into a small circular hole in the side of the bubble, and into a network of floating wooden docks that spiraled out from a circular centre deck like the spokes on a wheel. Tied to the docks were other small boats like our own, as well as a few larger ones, but the most prominent feature of the entire space was the large glass box on the centre deck. The sound of the water lapping against the walls of the bubble echoed around us as Chaz tied up the boat, and we all got out.

“What is this place?” Todd asked.

“Entrance C,” Schwartz said briskly, leading us towards the glass box, where he pushed a few buttons on a side panel. Moments later a glass elevator emerged, dripping. It seemed so out of place surrounded by the water and waves.

“So this lab?” Shawn said as the doors slid open. “It’s …?”

“At the bottom of the lake,” Chaz grinned. “The place was built as a top-secret testing facility pre-Jurassic domination.”

“Jurassic domi-what?” Todd asked.

“Jurassic domination is the term we use for when the power shift occurred after the pandemic that decimated the human race,” Schwartz said stiffly as he grabbed my upper arm and manoeuvered me roughly into the elevator. Todd and Shawn followed with Chaz right behind. The elevator was cramped, and I found myself pressed against the cool glass wall, my bound hands smashed awkwardly in front of me. My wrists ached, and I twisted them in an attempt to ease the pressure without much success. Still being tied up seemed redundant at this point. We had nowhere to run, and after what had happened to Shawn, none of us was going to attempt to escape by swimming. Although I wasn’t so sure I’d make a run for it even if I had the opportunity. Schwartz and Chaz were my only shot at getting some answers, and after coming this far, I wasn’t going to leave without them. The elevator doors slid shut, and with a soft hum we were sinking. The docking area disappeared and the dark blue of Lake Michigan enveloped the elevator shaft.

Schools of silver-and-blue fish swam in dizzying swirls around the elevator as we sank. Larger, darker shapes were also visible, but they were too far away to see distinctly.

“Are those what I think they are?” Shawn asked, pointing to the hazy blobs.

Chaz turned to squint where he was pointing. “Yup, those are Pretty Boy’s buddies.”

“You seriously named that thing that almost ate Shawn?” I asked. “Why?”

Chaz shrugged. “We’ve named the big ones. Pretty Boy is a kronosaurus; they are particularly nasty. They can eat you in one bite. But I think I’d actually prefer to be eaten by one of them. It would be better than having an elasmosaurus nibble on you a while.” She didn’t seem to notice the look of absolute gob-smacked astonishment on our faces because she went on as though this were all completely normal. “We have regular old plesiosaurs and pliosaurs too.” She began ticking them off on her fingers. “Let’s see, we have the nothosaurs, simolestes, and mosasaurs here. Oh, and a few dunkleosteus. Those suckers have jaws on them like you wouldn’t believe! Dr Schwartz gets the credit for all of them,” she said proudly. “If he hadn’t tweaked their genes, they couldn’t live in fresh water, or our climate for that matter. Most of them lived in the oceans originally.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, sure I hadn’t heard her right. “Do you mean you are still bringing dinosaurs back to life?”

“Well, yes. Sort of,” Chaz said with a worried look at Schwartz. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” All I could manage was to shake my head at Chaz. Were people really still resurrecting the creatures responsible for almost wiping out the human race? I swallowed the tirade of hot anger that bubbled inside me as I imagined them bringing back the very monster that had almost eaten my best friend just moments before.

“You made all those plesiosaurs? That’s just sick,” Shawn said, my own disgust reflected in his face.

“Swimming dinosaurs,” Todd sniffed. “I don’t care what fancy name you call them.”

“They aren’t technically dinosaurs. They’re swimming marine reptiles,” Chaz corrected.

“To savages, dinosaurs and plesiosaurs are nothing but something to eat. You are wasting your time with explanations, Chaz. So, yes, Todd was it? They are just swimming dinosaurs,” Schwartz sneered. Todd bristled.

“They protect this lab,” Chaz said with an apologetic shrug at Todd behind Schwartz’s back. “No one comes poking around plesiosaur-infested waters.”

We continued our steady descent in silence, and soon the sun no longer penetrated the water far enough for us to see the fish or the plesiosaurs. I shivered as the temperature in the elevator became markedly cooler.

Todd was starting to tremble too, but not from the cold. I noticed that his face was white and sweat was running down it. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he was the one who’d been thrown in the lake with Pretty Boy.

“Are you OK?” I asked, pulled momentarily from my thoughts about this mysterious lab and the monsters they’d created to protect it. “You look horrible.”

“I don’t like small spaces,” he said tersely, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Wonderful,” Schwartz drawled drily, “a claustrophobic savage.” He’d pulled a small port screen out of the duffel bag at his feet and studiously ignored us as he began typing something into it. I gave Todd’s shoulder an awkward pat with my bound hands. I wasn’t especially fond of the tiny space either. My ears were starting to ache and throb. Noticing my wince of pain, Chaz quickly explained how to clear our ears to relieve the pressure from our descent by holding our noses. A minute and one satisfying pop later and the stabbing pain in my head was gone. I made a mental note not to let that happen again. The elevator passed into the insides of a building, and I looked away from Todd to stare. The first floor we slid past was full of lab equipment.

“Whoa,” Todd said, letting out a low whistle of appreciation, and I nodded in mute agreement. This place was massive. Unlike North Compound’s confining walls of stone and concrete, these walls were made of glass, so you could see through all the rooms from one end to the other, making it hard to tell where one room stopped and another room started.

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it,” Chaz said proudly. “This is just the research floor; wait until you see the rest of it.” The next floor the elevator descended through was covered in wall-to-wall troughs of plants under grow lights, reminding me of the underground chambers in North Compound where we’d grown turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables. Like the floor above, this one too seemed ten times bigger than even the large meeting auditorium back at North.

“Are you seeing this?” I whispered to Shawn.

“I am,” Shawn breathed.

The elevator didn’t give us long to gawk before dropping down into the biggest room I’d ever seen. All comparisons to North Compound disappeared as I pressed my hands to the glass and stared in wonder at hundreds of dinosaurs, all housed in enormous glass cages. Arching above the dinosaur pens was a tangled network of glass walkways, bustling with blue jump-suited people.

“No way.” Todd gasped. Shawn made a disbelieving choking noise, and I pounded him on the back with my bound hands.

“You keep dinosaurs down here?” I gasped.

“Of course,” Schwartz replied. “We run one of the top breeding programs in the world.”

“We run the only breeding program in the world,” Chaz muttered.

Schwartz glared at her before turning his attention back to us. “We have also tamed and trained some of the brighter species. We’ve gathered invaluable data from living in such close proximity. They act as message carriers, test subjects, and pets. You may not kill any of them,” he said, giving us a hard look. “Everyone who lives down here does so because they believe in the beauty and continuation of the dinosaur. Remember that.”

“But why?” I asked, dumbstruck.

“What do you mean why?” Schwartz sniffed.

I shook my head in amazement as I took in the hundreds of cages. “Why would you breed them? After what happened with the pandemic?”

“The ecosystem,” Chaz said. “When people brought the dinosaurs out of extinction one hundred and fifty years ago, no one thought about the impact these guys would have on the ecosystem if they ran wild.” She jerked her head at one of the cages. “They were supposed to just stay in zoos and wildlife preserves, right? Well, obviously, they didn’t. After the pandemic, these guys took over and a lot of other animals went extinct. It threw everything out of whack. Our lab has been trying to correct that with selective breeding and repopulation.”

Her explanation sounded like a more scientific version of Ivan’s table demonstration when we had been back at his house the night before the marines found us again. He’d been trying to explain to Shawn that if you removed all the dinosaurs, the carefully balanced world of predator and prey that we lived in would collapse. And while Chaz wasn’t talking about removing the dinosaurs entirely, she seemed to be making the same general point. Had things changed so much in the last 150 years that we now needed dinosaurs to keep the topside world functional? And if that was true, then what Chaz was saying about balancing out the dinosaur population made a lot of sense. I shook my head as I tried to process this bizarre concept. I had grown up in a compound where everyone talked about the time before the dinosaurs like it was this ideal utopia that could be reclaimed. But what if Ivan and Chaz were right and the dinosaurs were here to stay?

Before I could respond, the elevator continued its steady descent, and I craned my head back to get one last look at the cage of what had to be Parasaurolophus before it disappeared from sight. We passed through a floor that looked like a school, glass desks lined up neatly in glass rooms. The place seemed to go on forever, and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that it was all underwater. If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of it, I never would have believed it.

“So much glass,” Shawn marveled next to me, and I realised he was right. Glass had been something we’d had to scavenge and reuse over and over again in North Compound, as we were unable to manufacture it.

Chaz leant forward. “I’m not sure if you noticed while running from that pack of carnotaurs, but we have a lot of sand around here.” When neither of us said anything, she cocked her head to the side. “That’s how you make glass. You heat sand to really high temperatures. Didn’t you know that?” All I could do was shake my head in wonder as we passed through another floor, this one made up of small apartments.

Our elevator finally bumped to a stop, and we spilled out into a gigantic lab lit with harsh fluorescents. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out into the dark murk of Lake Michigan. A few scientists glanced up from their large stationary port screens as we entered, eyeing us with interest before turning back to their work. Schwartz gave Chaz a meaningful look before striding away to meet three lab-coated men huddled around a port screen. A small yellow dinosaur that only came up to my knee scurried past us and clambered nimbly up Chaz’s leg and onto her shoulder. Chaz dug a large dead beetle out of her pocket and handed it up to the little creature. It cooed happily.

“This is Pip.” She grinned as she passed up another treat. “She’s kind of the mascot for this floor of the lab. She was supposed to get released back into the wild, but she was so darn cute they decided to let her stay.”

“What is she exactly?” Todd asked, slightly less green now that we weren’t in the tiny elevator.

“Compsognathus,” Chaz said. “It’s Greek for dainty jaw. Dr Schwartz’s team was able to extract her DNA from a bone found in Germany. He’s one of the most brilliant paleontologists we have here at the lab.” The little creature was more bird than dinosaur, and I had to admit that Chaz had a point; she was sort of cute. Vibrant yellow with blue eyes that took up most of her pointed face; she lashed her long, thin tail delicately from side to side for balance as she surveyed us from her perch on Chaz’s shoulder.

“Ecosystem or no ecosystem, I can’t believe you’re still actively bringing new species back to life,” Shawn said, his fists clenched. Oblivious to Shawn’s anger in her preoccupation with Pip, Chaz nodded happily.

“Ten new species just last year. We have an above-ground facility where we release them. It’s really amazing.”

“Amazing is not the word I would use,” Todd said sarcastically.

“Spoken like a true savage,” Schwartz said drily as he rejoined our group. He turned to Chaz. “Dr Robinson is sending a team out to tag the carnotaurs we stunned. Please accompany him. I’ll escort these three to see Boznic.”

Chaz nodded and was turning to go when one of the men in lab coats trotted up, a worried look on his face. He whispered something quietly in Schwartz’s ear, and Schwartz scowled and nodded. With a resigned sigh he turned to Chaz, who had stopped to watch this interaction. “Change of plans. Escort them to conference room B. I’ll alert Boznic and meet you there after I deal with this.” With a curt nod to the man in the lab coat, Schwartz turned and followed him at a jog.

“Looks like you’re with me,” Chaz said as Pip hopped from her shoulder and scampered away. “Which,” she said confidentially, “is kind of shocking. I’m not sure if you noticed, but Schwartz isn’t my biggest fan. He only tolerates me because he owes my dad a favour.” She stared after Schwartz’s retreating form, her forehead scrunched in thought. With a shrug, she motioned for us to climb back into the elevator. Todd’s face still had a sickly green colour to it, and I saw him give the tranquiliser gun hanging by Chaz’s side an assessing look. Not wanting him to pull anything stupid, I gave his shoulder a shove with my own, and he stumbled forward into the elevator. Shawn followed us inside, a preoccupied scowl on his face. Despite the disturbing revelation that these people were breeding dinosaurs, I couldn’t help but feel a tingle of excitement. This had to be what my dad had put on his map. It just had to be. As soon as the doors slid shut behind us, Chaz pushed a few buttons and took the tranquiliser gun off her shoulder with a grin.

“I’ll make you a deal. If you promise not to deck me, I’ll put this thing away. Makes me twitchy pointing it at people anyway.” She shuddered and slung the large black weapon onto her back. “Besides, it’s about out of battery anyway, and running away is impossible now that you’re down here.”

“What do you mean impossible?” Todd asked, eyeing the panel on the side of the elevator speculatively.

“Well, you saw how touchy Schwartz was about you guys finding out about this place. It’s because no one knows about us – not the Noah, not the compounds, not anybody,” Chaz explained. “We’re top secret.”

“I thought the Oaks was top secret too,” Todd muttered darkly, and I winced. His village had been captured when the Noah’s marines somehow tracked me and Shawn all the way from North Compound.

When I’d left the compound with nothing but my dad’s compass and a poorly drawn map, I’d never expected that the Noah would send General Kennedy and his marines after me. Why would the Noah, the man who controlled all four of the compounds, waste his time on a twelve-year-old girl? The whole idea was mind-boggling, but it was one I’d had to come to terms with.

In fact, there were a lot of things about the world that I’d had to adjust to after coming topside. For one, that people like Todd existed: people who lived outside the Noah’s control and the compound’s protection. For my entire life, I’d thought survival topside was impossible due to the dinosaurs. Now I was face-to-face with yet another example of that lie. Chaz and the rest of the people in the lab were obviously not descendants of the people the original Noah had shepherded underground over 150 years ago. Which meant that, like Todd, they’d never believed the Noah was the great saviour of the human race like Shawn and I had. It was simultaneously unnerving and exhilarating.

“What?” Todd cried, and I focussed back in on the conversion. Chaz had continued talking while I’d been lost in my own thoughts, and from the look of horror on Todd’s face, I’d missed something big.

“Like I said,” Chaz shrugged. “We’re always short-handed, and lab kids start working early. It’s not that great a job really. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a step up from mucking out stalls, but Dr Schwartz isn’t the most personable guy.”

“We noticed.” Shawn scowled. “About the time he tried to feed me to a sea monster.”

“Well, in his defence, you did hit him,” Chaz said. “I don’t think he really would have thrown you overboard.” Shawn shuddered and Chaz smiled apologetically. “Yeah, Pretty Boy’s a mean one all right. But pliosaurs and plesiosaurs are the only vicious creatures we help proliferate, and that’s only to protect the lab.”

“Proliferate?” Shawn asked.

“Help multiply,” Chaz supplied. “Our main focus is herbivores.”

“OK,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around this new information. “Then why didn’t you kill that carnotaurus herd on the beach? They were definitely not herbivores.”

“It’s a lab rule,” Chaz said. “It all goes back to the ecosystem balance I mentioned before. No one likes spiders either, but if we killed them all, the bug population would take over. If we kill off all the carnivores, we throw the entire ecosystem off balance.”

“Wait a minute,” Shawn said, his brow wrinkled in confusion. “Didn’t you say this lab had been here since before the pandemic?”

“It has.” Chaz nodded. “Originally it was a top-secret testing centre for the dinosaurs. Scientists back then were interested in discovering what else the dinosaurs might be useful for besides entertainment. This lab has discovered thousands of uses for everything from the oils in their skin to their dung. Medicines, tools, food, you name it, dinosaurs provide it way better than cows or chickens ever could. Which is good, considering all those domestic animals are extinct now. Plus dinosaurs are exceptionally trainable if you start them as hatchlings, and they make pretty fabulous pets.”

“But what about the pandemic?” I asked. The pandemic was one of the main reasons the human race had been struggling to make a comeback for the last 150 years. The small portion of the population that had survived it had done so because they’d been blessed with immunity to a disease that should have been extinct for millions of years. And while that immunity did seem to be passed down from generation to generation, it wasn’t foolproof.

“Oh, that,” Chaz said, waving her hand dismissively. “All the dinosaurs we breed are genetically modified so they help eliminate the bacterial strain that caused the pandemic. I’m not sure how well you know your history, but all attempts at a vaccine have failed. But if the genetic modifications work like Boz thinks they will, we might be able to eradicate it completely in the next thirty years. Pretty awesome, right?” When we didn’t say anything, she went on, unperturbed. “Anyway, after the pandemic, the scientists that survived realised that if they didn’t step in, the fragile balance of life topside might implode completely. Without us, there might not be a viable ecosystem topside.”

“The dinosaurs make it impossible for the human race to survive topside, so who cares about the viable eco-whatever?” Shawn asked

“It’s not impossible,” Todd said. “It’s just not real easy.”

“The word you’re looking for is deadly,” Shawn muttered.

“That’s the thing,” Chaz said excitedly. “Boz has a plan for us to live in harmony with the dinosaurs. We already have quite a few scientists living in our aboveground facility. Boz says that evolution has proven it isn’t just survival of the fittest, but survival of the adaptable!”

“Wait a second,” Todd said, “I think I heard about a place like that. Some of the traders mentioned a settlement of scientists near the lake.”

Chaz nodded happily. “That was probably us. We trade with some of the tree people from time to time.”

“I thought we were all savages,” Todd said, his face tight with anger.

Chaz cringed. “Not everyone is as biased at Schwartz,” she said apologetically.

“I still think you’re all nuts,” Shawn said.

“We’re not,” Chaz countered, sounding slightly insulted. “We do some really amazing stuff here.” When we still didn’t seem convinced, she huffed and punched a new button on the elevator.

“What are you doing?” Todd asked nervously.

“Proving to you just how awesome this place is,” Chaz said. “We have some time to kill before Schwartz gets to the conference room anyway. We’ll hit the hatchery first, and then the breeding pens. The dorms and school aren’t that exciting.”

The elevator dinged, and we stepped out into the gigantic laboratory and my jaw dropped. It was one thing to hear about people breeding dinosaurs; it was a whole other thing to actually see it. Scattered around the room were large metal contraptions with glass domes and heat lamps. I peered inside the closest one. It was filled with five eggs the size of footballs, and the silver plaque on the side let me know that these were apparently ankylosaurus eggs.

“Those are really cool,” Chaz said from behind me, making me jump. “They have this fused armour built into their skin. Makes them nearly impossible to tranquilise. Real sweethearts, though, so you almost never have to. We used to have a male named Bubba who would let the little kids climb all over him like he was a jungle gym. He would do just about anything for a cookie.”

“I’m not sure if this is impressive or disgusting,” Shawn admitted as he turned in a slow circle.

We passed through the enormous hatchery and walked up a massive set of glass stairs. I looked back and calculated roughly one hundred incubators, each with at least three or four eggs inside.

Chaz punched a code into a large glass door. It buzzed and clicked open, and the smell that wafted through was enough to make me gag. Shawn and Todd immediately covered their noses with their hands. Chaz didn’t seem to notice.

We walked into the massive room of dinosaurs we’d caught a glimpse of earlier. With the soaring ceilings and gigantic windows, it was hard to believe we were really underwater. Row after row of oversized glass and iron stalls stretched as far as I could see, each one containing a different breed of dinosaur. We followed Chaz up a ramp that led to a walkway over the top of the cages. We had to manoeuver around teenagers in dirty overalls who were busy wheeling wheelbarrows full of a coarse grain, obviously on their way to fill the enormous feed troughs below. A few of them shot us interested looks, but everyone else seemed much too busy to care about us.

I looked down into the first stall. A small family of triceratops was inside, the female bellowing at three tiny greenish adolescents who head-butted one another and rolled around the floor of the cage. My heart lurched when I saw a small girl in among them, a wheelbarrow and pitchfork in hand as she worked at clearing out a mound of dinosaur poop almost as tall as she was.

Chaz waved down. “Hey, Joyce! How are the three musketeers doing today?” Joyce set down her pitchfork as the three young dinosaurs raced around her in an impromptu game of tag.

“Driving their poor mother crazy. I think we’ll move them to their own pen tomorrow.”

Suddenly Shawn was gripping my shoulder. “Did you see what was outside those windows?” he whispered.

“What?” I asked, turning to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped around the entire enclosure. Outside, swimming in graceful arcs, were plesiosaurs. These had longer necks and smaller heads than Pretty Boy. Their bodies moved smoothly in the water, propelled by four muscular fins. They periodically opened their mouths in soundless calls, giving me a good view of their gleaming rows of teeth. I gulped, and hoped the glass was thicker than it looked.

Chaz turned back to us. “Oh, you spotted our audience. The elasmosaurs like the light the lab gives off. Did you know that some people believe that that particular breed was never actually extinct?” she asked, jerking her head at the long-necked plesiosaurs. “Before the pandemic hit, people claimed that there was a small family of them located in some lake in Scotland. The locals called them Loch Ness monsters or something. Can you believe it? Dr Schwartz said it’s really unlikely, but I would love to travel there someday to see for myself.”

Todd craned his head back, taking in the enormity of the space. “What I want to know is how you got all these dinosaurs down here. I know you didn’t squeeze them into that tiny glass elevator.”

Chaz laughed. She had a low chuckling laugh, and I thought that, under different circumstances, like ones where she wasn’t holding us prisoner, I might actually like her.

“We have gigantic freight elevators at entrances A and G,” she explained. Before she could go on, the crackle of a loudspeaker reverberated around the room. Everyone froze, looking up as though expecting the voice of God. However, it wasn’t the voice of God that came through the speaker. It was Schwartz. And he sounded furious.

“Chastity McGuire! Report to the conference room immediately!”

Chaz froze as everyone’s eyes turned to stare at us. It looked like our tour was over.