A Tyrannosaurus on my Doorstep, Chapter 29

By me, and with art by the great and mighty Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

I almost fell off the bench. Colander hit the egg again. It cracked open in a collapse of dust and pebbles. And she was right, there were no dinosaurs in there. Just rock and dirt and dust.

We sat looking at the mess on the picnic table as I scratched my stubble and Colander stuck out her tongue.

“That was fun,” she said, then blew the dust off of the hammer and slipped it into a loop on her coveralls as if it were a gun holster.

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “I was sure it was an egg.”

“Maybe it’s a fossil egg,” Colander replied. “There have been a number of fossils found in and around Final Pumpkin in the past, after all. Or maybe just somebody made some mud balls and it hardened like that.”

I rested my chin on my one arm and doodled in the dust left over from the mutilated mudball.

“What do you think of Warbell, Colander?” I asked.

“Warbell?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s the name I gave—”

“The dinosaur, gotcha,” Colander finished. “Seems like a pretty cool dude to me.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There is so much mystery around him. I don’t know really why he is here, why he wants my garage, if he is just going to eat everybody.”

“Probably not the last one,” she said.

I slammed my hand down on the table, which blew up a cloud of dust and made Colander jolt away. I immediately felt guilty, but I plowed ahead anyway, blushing furiously.

“But we don’t know!” I said. “He is apparently from some dinosaur kingdom! What if they invade? And he has that weird technology with his teeth. What if the dinosaurs have some kind of super weapon that they can use to destroy everybody in the world?”

“Warbell did a special activity on Thursday for the kiddies at the library,” Colander said. “He was telling stories about being a dinosaur cub. Biting his brother’s tail. Headbutting trees. He described the burbling stream as his version of the Internet. You could learn about the world from what comes floating by. Lots of branches and leaves might come down the stream, and that probably meant a storm or an earthquake. But it’s better than the Internet because you can reach in and catch your lunch, and then keep right on watching. You can use it as a toilet, too. You can’t do that with a computer screen. The kiddies were really laughing.”

I crossed my arms on the picnic table and plopped my head on top of them.

“Evil masterminds can be good with children,” I said. “Like in that movie with the babbling yellow pill people.”

Colander gazed up at the sky, and she let out her breath with a puff.

“There are no guarantees in this life, Walty old bean,” she said. “Maybe Warbell is in reality a secret ninja warrior beast waiting to assassinate the President with pizza-sized ninja stars or something. But usually I find kids are a pretty decent judge of a fellow’s character. Not always, but often enough. Get a bunch of kids together, and if you are a murder monster, they won’t laugh at your jokes.”

She reached out, and the index finger on her right hand lightly grazed my elbow.

“But you’re right, Walter,” she said. “Warbell is hiding something, and even if he has good intentions, it’s possible whatever it is could cause trouble. I think you are right to try to figure out what is going on.”

We chatted for a while longer, and then Colander got up to go. My elbow, where she had touched it, felt like it was glowing for the rest of the afternoon.