A Tyrannosaurus on my Doorstep, Chapter 20

by Nicholas Driscoll–that dork.

Art by Sam Messerly–that fine gentleman.

Click here to read from the beginning.

I had been knocking around the idea in my head for some time, really. The rocks I had found underneath my house were uniform in size and round and large. Each was about the size of a football. I had looked up dinosaur egg fossils on the Internet and found that they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and while none of the pictures I found on the Internet looked exactly like the ones I found, I figured eggs in the real shell would probably look a bit different than fossils anyway. Why wouldn’t they?

And if Warb was really here laying eggs underneath folks’ houses… Well, the implications were pretty scary. To me, it would explain why Warb wanted to live in my garage rather than anyone else’s, and also why he wanted to live in this city at all. And it could also mean that he or she was planning to feed something to his dinosaur babies after they hatched… such as, I don’t know.

Me.

So while I was impressed by Warb’s going out of his way to help that kid from Six Degrees of Bacon, at the same time I couldn’t help but wonder if something more sinister was going on. Maybe he was just saving the kid’s life so there would be more to feed the baby lizards once they hatched. Maybe Warb wasn’t a guy at all.

I mean, I can’t tell a tyrannosaurus’ sex.

Colander had listened to my theories, making her soft quips and jabs as she does. But she agreed with me that the rocks sounded pretty weird, and nodded and tut-tutted when I showed her pictures on my phone. She had been a bit of a rock-hound in her youth, and she agreed to meet with me the upcoming Saturday afternoon at two to investigate the rocks. That same day Warb had an appointment with an advertising company that wanted to feature the old lizard in some commercial selling the latest cell phone—apparently it had a particularly ergonomic structure so ‘even if you only have two fingers, you can use it.’ It was the one of three advertising companies that wanted to meet with Warb that week.

The rest of the morning was drilling holes, threading blue plastic tubing through them, hooking the tubes up to the light switch boxes, then pulling wire through the tubes to hook the switches to the lights. In order to do that, I had to grab the right number of wires, slip a wire net like contraption over their collected tips, slide a lead wire through the blue tube, hook that wire to the wired net that held the tips of the wires, then pull the whole shebang through the tube to their destination (sometimes with the help of lube to make the wires slip through easier). After I had pulled the wire through the tube, I could cut the wire and start splicing.

As I was working on those things, I started to notice something rather odd about the wooden planks. The wood wasn’t as even as it should have been. In fact, it wasn’t as even as it had been the last time I had been in the building. And it wasn’t just on small areas. I noticed a number of places where bits and pieces of the planks had been chipped out or eaten away or… something.

I looked closer. It didn’t look like insects had been chewing away at the wood. It wasn’t wormy holes. It also didn’t look like someone had chipped away at the wood. Instead, there were filmy bits where the wood was weakened, as if parts had suddenly just rotted away, but not in any regular pattern. Like somehow the wood had been reduced to a random web of pulp in places.

It wasn’t everywhere, but the spots were noticeable on most of the boards, and the longer I worked, the more of them I noticed. I was no carpenter, but I decided to recommend to Colander that she get the planks inspected and maybe replaced. This, unfortunately, was not the first time we had seen this sort of phenomenon, and it could cause huge problems.

I was just about to go talk with her when I turned around and nearly jumped out of my skin.

“It’s 2:30 and I’m hungry,” said Warbell, standing just outside the library expansion with a sour expression.

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