Philip J. Covington, CEO of Global Petroleum Inc., smirked when he strutted out of his limousine and laid his eyes on the new museum. It amused him how literally his contractors and architects had taken the word “museum” when designing the place. The building’s Romanesque portico of marble columns, gleaming silver from the moonlight, seemed more evocative of a prestigious old museum nested deep in his native London than a solitary edifice erected in the central Texas heartland. They had even gone so far as to decorate the premises with trimmed hedges and topiaries to reinforce the illusion of prestigious aristocracy. Or perhaps those were meant to disguise the distant landscape of prairie and pipeline tracks.
Not that Covington truly had a problem with any of it. He would rather feel at home than be reminded that he was in the rustic middle of America.
There was one feature he noticed that contradicted the structure’s predominantly Neoclassical pretensions. Poking up from behind the museum’s main body was the dazzling summit of a glass dome. Covington did not remember arranging for anything like that when he first ordered the building’s construction.
“Mr. Covington! You’re even more on time than I expected.”
Elias Marshall hurried down the museum’s front steps and offered his plump hand for a shake. Except for his weathered suntanned complexion, the Texan local appeared as a figure of glossy white, from his three-piece suit to his cowboy’s hat and boots of faux snakeskin down to the holster for his revolver. Even his hair had turned white to match his fashion sensibilities. It was all in stark contrast to his pale-skinned, dark-haired, and black-suited superior.
“That would be Sir Covington to you, Mr. Marshall,” Covington said, placing special emphasis on his English accent for the American’s hearing pleasure. “But I must say I admire what you’ve assembled together so far, at least from the outside. A bit incongruous with its surroundings, but I suppose a place like this could use a bit more, shall we say, class?”
Marshall chuckled with a slight touch of nervousness. “Trust me, sir, you haven’t seen what we’ve got in store inside.”
Covington was about to shake Marshall’s hand when a faint, prolonged moan reverberated from somewhere, followed by the apparent rattle of window panes. The noise reminded him of a whale’s song, except it eventually trailed into a rumble more like an elephant’s. At least it was a more pleasant sound than the country music his limo’s chauffeur had been playing all night.
“What the bloody blazes was that?” Covington said. “Some sort of machinery?”
“No, that’s from the big greenhouse we have behind the museum.” Marshall pointed over to the peak of the glass dome. “A little surprise we planned for you. The kids should love it way more than any of our other exhibits, for reasons that shall become obvious. May I give you a sneak peek tonight after our little tour, Sir Covington?”
Covington nodded. “Why not take me there straight away? I’ll inspect the rest later.”
Together they went through the museum, following corridor after corridor that lit up automatically with their entrance. The exhibits they passed ranged from diagrams explaining how fossilized marine organisms became petroleum over millions of years, models depicting the process of extracting, refining, and transporting the oil, and then screens and walls of text explaining how the new pipeline nearby would be far safer and more environmentally friendly than those silly tree-huggers, social justice warriors, and restless “Native American” savages would have the public believe. Of course, the language the displays used was far more politically correct, but Covington had always wished he could throw far viler terminology at those troublemakers.
The last hallway he and Marshall went down ended with a closed doorway twice as high as the rest, framed by blocks of dark stone that tapered towards the top for an almost Egyptian-looking slant, unlike the straight Greco-Roman pillars that prevailed elsewhere in the establishment. Little braziers mounted on the sides flickered holographic flames while the entablature above had bold red letters impressed into it that read, “Welcome to the Fossil Age”.
Covington snickered. “What do you have in there, Godzilla?”
“Not quite, sir. Just wait and see.”
Marshall clapped his hands, and the doors opened with a grinding sound effect playing alongside a looping track of tribal drumbeats. Out wafted a gust of humid and balmy air that carried with it the fragrance of tropical flora together with the mustier odor of decaying leaves.
They passed through the open gate onto a wooden walkway held up on stilts over the ground, with pairs of tiki torches providing genuine firelight along the railing. Overhead arced the dome of glass that Covington had seen earlier, but only upon entering its interior could he appreciate its vast and towering scale. The space it enclosed would have easily dwarfed the rest of the museum! Speakers hanging interspersed between the glass panes played the unending chorus of a primordial wilderness, with bird-like squawks and screeches punctuating the chirping of nocturnal insects.
And then there returned the echoing moan Covington had heard earlier, but louder and deeper than before. His flesh trembled all the way down to the bone.
Beyond both sides of the walkway grew a verdant savanna of ferns with scattered cycad, tree-fern, and monkey-puzzle trees. Dragonflies fluttered around little ponds fenced with horsetail reeds while flies buzzed over balls of wet rock mottled with white fluid and shreds of leaves. At least Covington hoped those were only rocks. They had more than an uncanny resemblance to bird droppings and exuded a much more potent, pungent odor.
“You sure spared no expense on the scenic authenticity, Mr. Marshall,” he muttered. “I could’ve sworn those were real dung.”
“Oh, those are real, all right.” Marshall pointed up ahead, where the path ended in a circular plaza like a cul-de-sac. “Look over there.”
Covington squinted past the railing on the walkway’s end until he caught a glimpse of a broad and scaly surface rearing up from the other side, shimmering like a wall of pebbles from the torches’ light. As he traced the contours of the form before him with his eyes, he could hear the crackling of soil beneath heavy footsteps and the rustle of leaves attached to creaking trees.
His pace slowed to a stagger until he gave into the paralysis of incredulous shock. The only muscles Covington could move were his blinking eyelids.
He could confuse the hulking behemoth for nothing else. The long and tubular neck with a tiny head, the rotund torso supported by four legs like pillars, and the even longer tail that hovered over the ground with the tip twirling like a lasso. All in all, the beast must have surpassed all but the very largest whales in mass.
Covington would have taken it for an animatronic like one would find in countless museums and theme parks around the world. But then, with a smooth fluidity too flawless for any machine, the animal craned its neck up to browse from one of the monkey-puzzle trees.
“What the bloody hell is…that?” Covington forced himself to say at last. “Is that real?”
“Every bit of flesh, blood, and bone in him is real, I tell you,” Marshall replied. “Like you said, we spared no expense. Not even when it was more expensive than the museum itself.”
“I can easily imagine why…but why? Why would you bring a bloody dinosaur, of all things, into this?”
“Why not? We deal in fossil fuels after all. Of course, as you know, most oil comes from tiny sea critters rather than dinosaurs. But if you’re going to win hearts and minds over to your new pipeline, you might as well win them over with the kind of fossil they love. Most of all the kids.”
The dinosaur turned away from its meal and lowered its head right down to where Covington and Marshall stood, examining them with little coppery eyes while sniffing them like a curious dog. Covington froze still again when the creature’s snout brushed against his suit.
“At least it’s the plant-eating kind,” he said. “What do you call them, Apatosaurus?”
“Actually, mate, this one’s a Brontosaurus excelsus. Closely related, but the paleontologists now consider them different genera again.”
It was a woman who had addressed Covington. Her khaki shorts and top hugged her tall and slender, dark brown figure while wavy black hair streamed beside her face underneath her slouch hat. She marched down the walkway up to the Brontosaurus and gave the cracked scales on its muzzle a gentle stroke of her hand as if it were a horse, murmuring soft words into its earhole.
“Sir Covington, I’d like you to meet Charlotte Elanora, a tough Aboriginal gal from down under,” Marshall said. “She led the team to capture our big attraction back in the Jurassic, and now she’s its primary caretaker.”
“His primary caretaker,” Elanora corrected him. “I named him Big Ben, after my old man. Ain’t he a handsome bloke?”
“A Brontosaurus named Big Ben…it’s alliterative, at least,” Covington said. “How can you tell his gender though?”
“Easy. You can’t see it so well in this lighting, but the males tend to have brighter purple stripes than the females.” Elanora tapped the nape of the dinosaur’s neck behind its head. “Though if we’re going to keep him penned up here, I think we ought to get him a mate soon. Wouldn’t you want that, Big Ben? A nice and pretty sheila to keep you company?”
Benny rumbled and then let out another of his moaning bellows. The volume of the call almost burst through Covington’s eardrums now that had had gotten so close to the dinosaur.
“Truth be told, I think he’s homesick,” Elanora went on. “Though I suppose he’ll be safer in captivity. You can’t see it from this side, but on his left thigh he has some scratches from an Allosaurus attack. Allosaurus, by the way, is one of the big meat-eating dinosaurs, though they’re a bit smaller and nimbler than the Cretaceous T. rex.”
“Good thing we don’t have one of those in here, then,” Covington said. “Now this is all lovely and magnificent, but don’t you think it might be, well, a bit of a challenge to keep him in this place? We’ve all seen those movies, if you know what I mean. Not to mention, the sheer cost of maintaining a beast that big…”
Marshall wrapped an arm around Covington’s shoulder and laughed. “Like I said, it’ll be the biggest draw we can throw at them. The admission tickets alone should pay for everything. And besides, the Brontosaurus is a gentle plant-eater. What could go wrong with his kind?”
Continue reading “Breakout for Home”