“The Hunter knows too much about us,” said Nathan. “If he has all of this he could have anything—he could have my parents’ address.”
“People have been sent to your friends and family,” Ostler repeated. “The Withered bodies the FBI picked up from the hospital were more … enlightening than my superiors expected. I think they’re finally taking our work seriously, and that includes this implied threat to your loved ones.”
“You still haven’t read my section,” said Potash.
“It’s the conclusion of the letter,” said Ostler:
“‘And of course Albert Potash, the Death that Walks. How many people has he killed? What noble justifications did he claim? Let this be the most damning evidence of all: I know everything, and I could find nothing on him. He is a man without a past. In the modern age, nobody loses their past unless someone has gone to very great lengths to bury it.
“‘There are antelopes, and there are lions. And then there is something more. Think carefully about the company you keep.’”
14
When I was a little boy I used to love dinosaurs. Who wouldn’t? They were huge, and everyone was afraid of them, and they could eat my parents. I didn’t necessarily want them to eat my parents, but I knew that they could; I knew that they had the power to do whatever they wanted, and no one could stop them because they were dinosaurs.
Clayton County didn’t have a zoo, but once when I was four we went on vacation to San Diego, and we visited the zoo there, and the lions and tigers and gorillas were great and all but what I really wanted to see were the dinosaurs. I’d been reading about them my whole life, and this was my big chance. Did the zoo have a T. rex? A stegosaurus? My favorite was always the triceratops, don’t ask me why. They just looked cool. Do they have a triceratops, Dad?
He laughed, and told me the dinosaurs were dead.
Imagine for a moment that you’ve gone to a zoo, excited to see your very favorite animal—let’s say elephants—only to learn that all the elephants have died, just before you got there. That’s what I thought at first: that the dinosaurs at the zoo had all gotten sick, or been poisoned by bad food, and had passed away in a sudden tragedy. How would you react? How would you react if you were a four-year-old boy? It destroyed me. I wanted to know what had happened to them, and if the zookeepers had tried to save them, and when they were going to get new ones. And of course my parents were both morticians, and I had a vague sense of what that meant, so I wondered if we were going to embalm the dinosaurs while we were there on our trip. I didn’t know what embalming was when I four, but I knew the word. I knew it was something you did to dead people, and that it was important. I figured that dinosaurs were important enough to warrant the same treatment.
I don’t know if my father understood the depths of my confusion—if he understood what it meant to me—but around this time he figured out why I was confused. No one had ever told me that dinosaurs were extinct—or if they had, they hadn’t explained what the word meant. My father laughed again, delighted by his four-year-old’s adorable misunderstanding, and told me that all the dinosaurs were dead, in the whole world. That they’d been dead for millions of years. No matter where I looked, or how long I lived, or how hard I wanted to, I would never see a dinosaur anywhere because they didn’t exist anymore. All we had were bones, and even those were too old to touch.
Roll that around in your mind a little. The sudden realization that every animal you wanted to see was suddenly and irrevocably killed—sure, it had happened millions of years ago, but for me it happened right then and there. In my head they were alive, billions of them, and then the meteors struck, and the world ended, and they all died in fire and agony. I was a personal witness to a mass extinction. How can a child endure such a thing?