'He said, 'It's for her. . . Robbie. Give it to her. . . No one else. . . No one, especially not the police. . . You must. . . promise me. 'And then he said, 'Tell her I love her.
'He really said that?'
'Yes.' He didn't add that he hadn't managed to say the last word-death had come too quickly.
'And then?'
'Those were his last words. His heart stopped and he died.'
She nodded, bowing her head.
Torn pulled the notebook from his pocket and offered it to her. She raised her head, wiped away her eyes, and took it.
'Thank you.'
She turned to the back, flipped through the blank pages, stopped at the two exclamation points, smiled through her tears.
'I do know this: from the time he found that dinosaur to when he was murdered, he was certainly the happiest man on earth.'
She slowly closed the book and looked out the window into the sun-drenched South Texas landscape, and spoke slowly. 'Mom left us when I was four. Who could blame her, married to a guy who dragged us all over the West, from Montana to Texas and every state in between? He was always looking for the big one. When I got older he wanted me to go with him, for us to be a team but... I didn't want any part of it. I didn't want to go camping in the desert and hunting around for fossils. All I wanted was to stay in one place and have a friend that would last me more than six months. I blamed the dinosaurs. I hated dinosaurs.'
She took out a handkerchief, wiped her eyes again, folded it up in her lap.
'I couldn't wait to get away to college. Had to work my way through-Dad never had two nickels to rub together. We had a falling out. And then he called a year ago, saying he was on the trail of the big one, the dinosaur to end all dinosaurs, and that he would find it for me. I'd heard that one before. I got mad. I said some things to him I shouldn't have, and now I'll never have the chance to take them back.'
The room filled with light and afternoon silence.
'I wish like hell he were still here,' she added softly, and fell silent.
'He wrote you something,' said Tom, removing the packet. 'We found them buried in a tin can in the sand near the dinosaur.'
She took them with trembling hands. 'Thank you.'
Sally said, 'The Smithsonian's having an unveiling of the dinosaur in a new lab custom-built for it out in New Mexico. They're going to christen it. Would you like to come? Tom and I are going.'
'Well... I'm not sure.'
'I think you should . . . They're naming it after you.'
Robbie looked up sharply. 'What?'
'That's right,' said Sally. 'The Smithsonian wanted to name it after your father but Tom persuaded them that your dad intended to name it 'Robbie,' after you. And besides, it's a female T. Rex-they say the females were bigger and more ferocious than the males.'
Robbie smiled. 'He would have named it after me, whether I liked it or not.'
'Well?' Tom asked. 'Do you like it?'
There was a silence and then Robbie finally smiled. 'Yeah. I guess I do.”
EPILOGUE
JORNADA DEL MUERTO
In four hours, the darkness was complete. She crouched in her wallow, eyes half-closed. The only light came from ribbons of fire burning here and there in the cypresses. The swamp had filled with dinosaurs and small mammals, swimming, thrashing, floating, crazed with fear, many dying and drowning.
She awoke, fed easily and well.
The air became hotter. When she breathed it hurt her lungs, and she coughed in pain. She rose from the water to fight the tormenting heat, ripping and tearing at the air with her jaws.
The heat increased. The darkness increased.
She moved to deeper, cooler water. Dead and dying meat floated around her, but she ignored it.
A black, sooty rain began to fall, coating her back with a tarlike sludge. The air became thick with haze. She saw a red light through the trees. A huge wildfire was sweeping the highlands. She watched it move, exploding through the crowns of the great trees, sending down showers of sparks and burning branches.
The fire passed, missing the swampy enclave where she had taken refuge. The superheated air cooled slightly. She remained in the water, surrounded by bloated, rotting death. Days passed. The darkness became absolute. She weakened and began to die.
Death was a new feeling for her, unlike any she had experienced before. She could feel it working inside her. She could feel its insidious, silent assault on her organs. The fine, downy coat of small feathers that covered her body sloughed off. She could barely move. She panted harder now and yet could not satisfy her hunger for oxygen. Her eyes had been scorched by the heat and they clouded and swelled shut.
Dying took days. Her instincts fought it, resisted every moment of it. Day after day, the pain grew. She bit and kicked at her sides, tearing her own flesh, trying to reach the enemy within. As the pain rose, her fury increased. She struggled blindly toward land, heavy on her feet. Freed of the buoying force of water, she staggered and fell in the shallows. There she bellowed, thrashed, kicking and biting the mud, tearing in a fury at the earth itself. Her lungs began to fill with fluid as her heart strained to pump the blood through her body.
The hot, black rain fell.
The biological program that had carried her through forty years of life faltered. The dying neurons fired in one last orgiastic blaze of futile activity. There were no more answers, no programming, no solution for the ultimate crisis. Her fruitless bellowing strangled itself in a shudder of wet, groaning flesh. The left hemisphere of her brain crashed in a storm of electrical impulses, her right leg jerking a dozen savage epileptic kicks before falling into a rigid clonus, the claws flexing open, the tendons popping from the bones. Her jaws opened and snapped shut, opened wide and locked in that position, fiercely agape.
A shudder traveled the length of her tail, vibrating it against the ground until only the tip trembled-and then all neural activity ceased.
The program had run its last line. The black rain continued to fall. Gradually, she became coated with slurry. The water rose, pushed by great storms in the mountains, and within a day she had been buried in thick, sterile mud.
Her sixty-five-million-year entombment had begun.
