The Flock by James Robert Smith Page B

This is Roe Fox you’re talking to. Now, find your giant snake or get your ass back to home base. You’ve got a week, son.”
    And that had been four days ago. That’s why he had been desperate enough to follow that Riggs fellow into the forest. Riggs. He wondered how much Riggs knew. And Tatum. And that nut, Grisham. Damnation . Dodd stretched to his full length in the hot, steaming water, and still his toes could not touch the far end of the tub. He squinted his eyes in pleasure and watched tendrils of vapor steaming up from the soapy water, rising up to condense on the bonewhite tile above. He slid down until his head was submerged, then he surfaced, scrubbing shampoo into his scalp.
    â€œOuch,” he said to himself, his nail coming in contact with a laceration on the top of his head. When he’d calmed down after downloading the contents of the digital camera, he had slowly realized the extent of the scratches and cuts all over his body. And his hair had been home to a couple of ticks that had buried their bloodthirsty little heads near his right ear. Shuddering, he recalled how he had pried one loose from his groin and another from his left armpit. Filthy place, those forests. He had stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, watching the blood and the dirt run down the drain before he had drawn this deep bath.
    Taking the bar of scented soap from its place in a clam-shaped tray, he swirled it in his small hands, examining the cuts thorns and grass had sliced there. Even now the soap was causing the wounds to sting, but the slight pains had ceased to bother him. A very small price to pay for what he was probably going to get out of all of this. He rubbed soap in his face, lathering his beard, then submerged his head yet again, rinsing himself.
    It was time for Tim Dodd to cash in his chips, enjoy a big payday. If he did this right, he could retire. He wasn’t really the kind of guy who enjoyed this game. Yes, there were worse ways to earn a living. God knew he’d had some lousy jobs in the past, and compared to them, this gig was a dream. But the fact was that he just didn’t care for work of any type. What he wanted to do was make enough to buy a nice condo on a beach somewhere and become a gentleman of leisure. Screw working. Screw being told what to do. For years, he had been searching for the big score, and this, it seemed, was it.
    He wondered how much The Globe might bid for the story, accompanied by photographs. But he had to plan it right. He couldn’t take any chances that some legal technicality might gum up the works. Dodd had to play his cards well, and if he did, then there was a best selling book in it for him, and movie rights, too. Jesus, this was like some throwback story to the early twenties. Nobody discovered things like this in this day and age.
    Nobody but Tim Dodd, it seemed.
    But he would need some confirmation. Pictures could be faked. They could do anything with a computer, now. They could make things come to life on the movie screen so convincingly that it was impossible to say where fantasy stopped and reality began. He’d need someone to back him up. He’d need someone to admit that there was, indeed, at least one dinosaur living in the wilderness around Berg Brothers Studios’ dream town.
    Or, if it wasn’t a dinosaur, then it was certainly something that looked like a dinosaur. If not a dinosaur, then what? What else was ten feet tall and walked around on its hind legs and had small, clawed arms and talons on its scaled feet bigger than butcher knives? Dodd had stared for ten minutes at the best image he’d coaxed out of the laptop. Part of the shot had been of the thing’s head; a staring black eye focused intently on the viewer.
    Thinking of his race with it, he wondered why it had not caught up with him. It had been just behind him toward the end, just before he’d stumbled upon Grisham. Dodd had felt the pounding of its