Dinopocalypse: "Two Flowers"

Chapter Three

As Chad Whittaker sat on the back deck of his house, the voice of his instructor from the police academy, Sargant Pete Moore, played back through the back of his mind: You’ve gotten too attached to your work if you bring your cases home with you.

Chad leaned back, chuckling softly to himself, then glanced down at the stack of manila folders that he had slipped into his laptop bag on the way from the station that day. What would old Petey say? Chad wondered.

Of course, nobody--not even Mr. Moore--could have predicted the catastrophe which would cripple the country just fifteen years later. As the chief of police for Livingston County, sometimes Chad felt like it was his responsibility to protect what remained of humanity. With so much at stake, maybe nobody could afford to be detached.

The top manila folder on the stack contained a description of all of the evidence collected at a house in the Bullard subdivision where the owners had been killed. None of the doors or windows were damaged, so the officers on the scene had ruled out the possibility that it was a burglary. Chad thumbed through the report, pausing briefly on a photo of the couple who had lived there. Mark and Penny Marshall were both former Fowlerville teachers in their early sixties. They had survived their children, one of whom had been stricken by the dino virus, and the other had been killed in action while serving in the Army years before the virus had begun to spread.

Back in the old days when police had to worry about just one type of human, murder always seemed tragic. Now that one quarter of the population had been lost to the dino virus, and even more had been killed by dinosaur hybrids, this murder somehow like even more of a waste.

Chad had ended his shift, but he knew that while he waited for his wife to finish dinner police troopers were searching the area and setting up roadblocks all around the county. He felt confident that whoever did this would answer for their crime. There are so few of us left, he thought. Every life should matter. Everything had gone to hell, but still there were criminals. Petey might have called it job security, Chad thought. I just call it sad.

The next manila folder contained letters he had exchanged with Lolita Burns, the social worker assigned to the county by the state. As the “Dinosaur rehabilitation liaison,” she was in charge of assessing each dino hybrid they captured before it was relocated to a training facility in Mid-Michigan. Most of the correspondence was written a few months ago when she had come very close to shutting down a school in Livingston County which had been established for non-feral dino hybrids between the ages of 5-13. It had taken the combined efforts of the Whittaker, the parents, and even the school’s owner, Deborah VanNocker to persuade Burns and the state government to back off.

The thought of these letters sparked new thinking for Chad. He quickly thumbed through the pages until he found a letter which had been written by Deborah. The address on the envelope read 7523 N. Cherry Lane. He pulled out the folder for the Marshalls, and searched for the report. Their address had been 7523 N. Cherry Lane. Chad remembered, then, that VanNocker had recently moved to a house inside the Hartland Village in order to be closer to her school, and the Cromaine Library where she had set up an administrative office after her house was broken into.

Two break-ins at the same address. That can’t be a coincidence, Chad thought to himself as he pulled out the folder for the previous unsolved burglary. That time, the door had been forced open and the house had been ransacked. VanNocker never reported anything missing, other than her recycling bin.

If they returned for VanNocker, they would have come up empty, but killed the Marshalls to eliminate them as witnesses. The two break-ins seemed related other than the fact that they were at the same address, but Chad couldn’t quite explain why. But, if they hadn’t gotten what they wanted, they might stay in the area. If they weren’t hiding, the only other places they would go to would be the school or the library.