Heffalump tugged on my scarf. "¿Por qué llevas eso? No hace frio."

I gestured to Cassie. "Ella dijo que se veía genial."

She rolled her eyes.

I frowned at the smoke billowing from the upper level. Still couldn't figure out what my new acquaintance was doing in this place. "So...Heff...¿Comó llegaste aquí? ¿Siempre hubo un agujero en la pared?"

The Chasmosaurus hybrid shook her head. "Peleé con Cthulu. Muy dolorosa. Habrían comido si alguno no hubiera distraído. Los rocas cayeron."

"What did she say?" Cassie asked me.

"She and Cthulhusaurus Rex had a big knock-down fight and smashed through the wall, I guess."

The girl frowned. "She is bleeding."

"She is?" I leaned around her big body and noticed the wounds. Guess I hadn't noticed, due to them being on her far side, and being busy talking about Tintin and stuff. "Oh. ¿Estás bien?"

"Uh...más o menos..."

I asked Heffalump if she needed maybe a bandage or something, but she said she healed quickly, "Como Wolverine de X-Men."

I grinned. So much to love!

Still...skeptical of the claim, I asked Cynthia for bandages.

"Albert, I don't think I have anything that'll stick to a body that size. It's just going to fall off. I don't even know about sutures. The stuff we got in the kit is human strength."

I gave Heffalump an apologetic smile. "Lo siento, señorita. No tenemos buenos suministros médicos."

"Soy un chico." Heffalump craned uh...his neck to the side, pointing a paw at his giant crustacean legs. "Tengo genitales ahí atrás en alguna parte..."

I couldn't tell the sex from the voice. Awkward. "Ummm...¿A divina qué? ¡Estoy casado!"

Heffalump rolled his eyes. "Felicadades. ¿Con quíen?"He pointed his trunk at Cynthia. "¿Su?"

Cynthia pantomimed gagging, shaking her head.

I told him about my lovely wife. I may have gotten a little long winded.

Cynthia put her hands on her hips. "Albert, Hefty needs medical attention. What say we find a way out of here, like now?"

I asked my new friend for directions.

"Por aquí." Heffalump shouldered a bunch of debris away from a section of wall, revealing a cafeteria.

Didn't...look like it had been used in awhile. Rust had set in parts, ceiling tiles sagged. I spotted cobwebs, only one fluorescent flickered above, the others burned out some time ago.

Not exactly a doorway. After all, the passage connected from a (presumably) secured vault of proprietary company property. Just as well, because Heffalump couldn't fit through an ordinary doorway. In fact, his attempts at entry reminded me of men trying to move a sofa through a small house. He had to angle his body at a diagonal, fold his legs and claws in just right, move sideways and scoot forward...The walls and stuff cracked and bent as he forced his way in.

None of us liked how feeble the opening looked when he got through, so we hurried into the room the moment we got a wide enough gap.

By the way, he initially tried to take the Tintin book with him...actually a stack of books, but...totally inconvenient. Cynthia resorted to stuffing them all in her bag. "Can we please go?"

The place smelled of dust, rotten grease, spoiled lettuce and old paint. Oh, and cigarettes. Someone had left cups of coffee with their wrinkled filters floating in them (one of these days I'll find out what you call that blue mold that floats in old coffee).

Cassie wrinkled her nose. "What is this place?"

Cynthia examined some dusty papers scattered on the tables. "Looks like...Sanitation, maybe dinosaur handlers..."

"Cool!" The girl flipped through the documents with interest.

Webbigail and Heffalump got along pretty well together. He'd put her on his head, and shook back and forth, which the Parasaurolophus enjoyed like a ride. She climbed on Heffalump's back, and he bounced her.

Cynthia examined his wound and frowned. She got out her first aid kit, splashed some alcohol on the wound. Heffalump flinched and nearly got more cuts when he broke a table in half.

She held a little tube of Neosporin up to the injured area, frowned and put it away. "Call me crazy, but...this...ain't gonna help."

Cassie sat down at a table, probably imagining herself as an employee.

Cynthia yanked her out of the chair. "This place still smells like smoke from that fire upstairs. I don't think we should hang out here longer than we have to. Hefty, ¿A donde vas?"

Heffalump trumpeted, pointing his trunk toward another collapsed wall.

Cassie glanced at him, frowned at his spiky back, and climbed up on mine instead.

"¿La dejaste montarte como un caballo?" Heffalump asked.

I nickered.

He rolled his eyes.

"¿No dejaste que Araceli te monte?"

"Le dejé pararse encima de mí una vez, fue incómodo."

I smirked as I imagined a little girl dancing on my friend's back like George Jefferson. "Si, definitivamente suena asi."

We entered another tunnel of Mesoamerican construction, the mountain of boulders and debris to my left explaining why we needed to cut through the cafeteria.

Cassie waved the book of El Dorado notes in Heffalump's face.

"Qué es eso?" he asked. "Es muy raro."

Cynthia stowed the book in her backpack. "He's not a mad Spanish explorer, Cassie. I don't think he can even write that small."

"How do you know Heffalump is a he?"

"He said it in Spanish."

"I think we should call him Snuffeupagus."

"I don't think Hefty has a TV, Cassie."

I leaned in close to Heffalump, asking if he'd seen any ghosts lately.

He only shivered. "Por favor, no me asustes. Está oscuro, y no me gusta la oscuridad."

"Lo siento..." I tried asking if he'd seen a dinosaur woman, but I only got: "Ese sería un fatasma muy mona. Mucho más mona que Casper."

Heffalump liked the fact we named our baby Webbigail. He liked those comic books, though he'd never seen the show.

He asked me more about Zelda. It interested him that I gave my own wife a name.

I asked, "¿Adán no nombró a Eva en el Génesis?"

"No, Dios la nombró."

"Bueno, tal vez Dios la nombró mujer o algo así, pero Adán estaba a cargo nombrar las cosas y por tabién le dio un nombre. ¿Verdad?"

We couldn't agree on who gave Eve her name, but it didn't change the fact that I named Zelda. He liked how I named her after Las Tortugas Ninjas (he'd seen comic books), but didn't know what Zelda was.

He'd never seen a Nintendo, "Was it like the crappy Tiger handheld karate game Araceli showed him?" He asked if Las Tortugas Ninjas had a Nintendo game. I explained it was very annoying, there was this impossible part where you had to swim around and defuse bombs.

I described Legend of Zelda, and he started telling me about this interesting thing Araceli discovered: Dungeons and Dragons. Apparently her older brother played the game a lot, they'd found a Spanish translation or a Spanish knock-off...

Cynthia interrupted by asking Heffalump if he wanted to stand around talking about `nerd shit' while he bleeds to death. Heffalump said he felt okay, but agreed to keep going.

Mummy room. That's what I'd call it. The builders hadn't used bandages like Egyptians - these guys actually looked pretty gross. I guess they just coated them with tree sap and wet gypsum or something and set them up like mannequins in loincloths and feathers, armed with shields and knives. They'd probably look better painted. A few had jade jaguar masks, but most didn't.

Cthulhusaurus appeared to have tasted a few of them, found the flavor disagreeable, and left a disgusting mush in the corner. A few others had been shattered out of carelessness.

"Nosotros bajamos a la mazorra ahora." Heffalump pointed his trunk...

And all the rest of us gaped in amazement.

A modern hydroelectric plant. I'd seen 1970's Viewmaster slides of Hoover Dam (incidentally, Hammond had gotten a big kick out of rigging one up to work with my unusual eye configuration - kinda ugly thing with mirrors).

This plant had a much more modern look too it, but it had a certain family resemblance. Loads of concrete, big chrome turbine things, and a bunch of transformers and electrical boxes with flashing lights. I don't know what the power connected to (aside from the cafeteria and store room - it seemed a little too far to power stuff on Isla Nubar) but everything seemed like business-as-usual.

The `dungeon' or `mazmorra' turned out to be a wide staircase leading down into a subterranean tunnel they probably used for transporting large pieces of equipment...probably not dinosaurs, though. Heffalump...sorta bent the safety railings and knocked a bunch of stuff over. Don't worry, it didn't interrupt the power or anything.

...Okay, maybe he did a little...I think he caused some computers to cease functioning and shifted too much power to the wrong portions of the grid, but...mostly business as usual.

Suddenly...bats.

Wasn't sure what breed they were at first. I haven't studied their nose patterns, colors or shapes very much. I only know they scared the crap out of us, and we scared the guano out of them.

Cassie shrieked in horror, covering her head. Cynthia tried to calm her down by pointing too a few...die fleder mauses (mausen?) and calling "Fruit bat, fruit bat..." But then she blurted, "Damn, that's actually a vampire."

I frowned as one nipped me. "How can you tell the difference?"

"Fruit bats have this cute orange—"

I stuffed a non-cute one into my mouth and chomped it.

"Dude, you're so going to get rabies."

"These things are teeny," I remarked with my mouth full. "You'd think they'd be scarier. Fruit bats look like they got more meat."

"Don't be eating the fruit bats!"

I munched another bat...of the non-cute variety.

Cynthia scoffed. "You know, if I didn't know you were a bible beater, I would have sworn they stuck Ozzy Osbourne's brain inside your skull."

I raised an eyebrow ridge. "Who's Ozzy Osbourne?"

"Uh...he sings Devil music. He's famous for biting the head off a bat."

"What, just the head? What about the rest of it?"

"It, uh...wasn't cooked."

I chomped a third vampire bat. "Sounds like a waste of protein...When you say `Devil music,' do you mean he sings in a cult, or did you mean songs about the Devil?"

"Just songs...I think."

"That's weird. Why would anyone listen to that?"

"He's kinda talented, and controversy sells records."

"Oh. Does Hammond have any of his music?"

"I...don't think so. I think the closest thing I found were some albums by The Rolling Stones."

Heffalump kept plowing forward, and I mean plowing, knocking chairs aside, upsetting carts full of tools and boxes of papers, open bottles of flat Coke, brimming cups of old coffee, generally making a mess...Of course, I saw a few signs that he'd made similar messes coming down the opposite way in the past...My feet stuck to the floor when we passed the electrical transformers.

We climbed another staircase. The aluminum steps seemed a little...bowed there. I guess the previous one looked about the same, but these seemed a little more pronounced.

About halfway up, a step broke off and clattered to the concrete below. I and my companions had to...awkwardly climb onto the next step.

This happened to us three or four times during the course of our climb. One time, Heffalump's foot dropped down with the step, and I thought he'd take the whole staircase with him, but he used his insect legs to push up and keep going.

I reached the top of the stairs. "You know, this place is a lot like the Zelda game...I mean, we found a mummy room, bats, and a Triceratops that...(Okay, so you're not technically a Triceratops...Didn't see a flute or a boomerang downstairs...)"

Heffalump stomped into a control room filled with dusty computers. "No entiendo. Español, por favor."

I frowned at the old monitors with yellowing plastic frames and ugly green displays, the refrigerator sized, outdated reel-to-reel magnetic tape system, the wall sized island maps with twinkling lights indicating power (mostly lack thereof). Totally not like a Zelda game. "Uh...no importa."

Cyntha scowled at the screens, hands on her hips, as if she knew how to run the whole power station herself.

She dug her radio out of her pack, fiddling with the knobs as she pushed the button in. "It ought to work now, we're out of the cavern...Hello? Hello? Mister Arnold?"

Mister Arnold's voice came in a whole minute later, with lots of static interference. "Hello? Cynthia? Where the (static) are you? You've been gone (static) hours! What (static) were you (static) down there?"

Cynthia blew a raspberry. "Long story. We went through some kind of Mayan tomb and an Ingen building. We're in a power station, and it's a mess, I'm wondering if we should—"

"What are (static) coordinates?"

"What, sir?"

"I said (static) coordinates? Where are you?"

I, Cynthia and Cassie just stared at each other in puzzlement. "Coordinates?"

Cassie pointed to a plaque on a control console. "Is that it?"

Cynthia gave a vigorous nod. "Way to go, Cassie! Go to the front of the class!" She read the numbers to Mister Arnold.

After a long pause..."Damn (static) way over there?...Just stay put, I'll (static) over there (static) awhile."

"Sir, we got an injured..." She glanced at Heffalump. "Thing with us. He needs medical—"

"I said stay put, Miss Yu. If you can't follow directions..." The static we got after that indicated he'd said his piece and the communication had ended.

Cynthia searched around the power monitoring stations until she found a big first aid kit. After she'd opened it up and checked its contents, she closed it again, glancing down the stairs.

She frowned at the broken steps. "No way."

For the next ten minutes, she messed around with the first aid kit, attempting various treatments on my big friend.

"I thought you said we didn't have good medical supplies."

Cynthia shrugged. "We don't. But now we got extra supplies to play around with. I keep thinking about the movie Playing God where David Duchovny does a tracheotomy with an ink pen."

A whole roll of gauze only wrapped around him once, and didn't cover much of anything. She tried the sutures, but the wound kept popping open, so she grabbed scissors and a stapler from a desk.

Heffalump's eyes bulged in horror. "Espera, ¿Que estás haciendo con eso?"

She was already clipping hair and stapling the wound.

"¡Ay!"

"Hold still! ¡Quedaté quieto!"

Complete chaos. I don't know how Cynthia got anything accomplished, in between chasing Heffalump in stampede mode, getting thrown against consoles (Permanently decommissioned. Oops. They must have cost a pretty penny back in 1979).

Somehow, after all the bumps and bruises, she got my friend's wound cleaned, hair free, and stapled up.

They both slumped on the floor opposite each other in battle fatigue.

"Wish I could have shot his ass up with tranquilizers," she muttered.

"Chupas como veterinaria," Heffalump grunted back.

"Oh gee thanks! Should have let your ungrateful ass bleed to death. You're such a pain in the butt."

She got an annoyed trumpeting in reply.

So...kind of a long time to be holding my bladder. I asked Heffalump about it, but he just told me he went wherever he felt like, and didn't know where they had restrooms.

I mentioned this to Cynthia. "I'm going to take a look around, okay?"

She rolled her eyes. "If you find one with working plumbing, let me know. I gotta go too...and clean up after yourself, please. I saw what you did to Hammond's bathroom."

I swallowed. "Yes, ma'am."

The security door at the end of the room would ordinarily pose a problem once you're outside, but it seemed Heffalump had knocked it off its hinges some time ago. I wandered out intoo a hallway lined with offices, pausing in front of a women's restroom.

I glanced at the men's, glanced back at the women's, scratched my head.

As I'm trying to decide which one to use, I keep hearing a low buzzing sound, annd something banging against glass.

Frowning, I padded up the hall a few feet to investigate.

The sound came from a security gate reminding me of something they'd use on the Starship Enterprise cargo bay.

Crack. I flinched as a football sized insect flew into its glass window, creating a nasty spiderweb crack. A second bug buzzed up beside it, cracking the glass further.

A swarm of others joined it. The window shattered, a pair of round green fly eyeballs dully fixed in my direction.

I lost control of my bladder.