Good Girl
by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Jordan, MT
July 5, 2071
“They’re using your feelings about the animals against you,” Cecile said around a mouthful of breakfast sandwich. “Every time you cave to Deirdre, you’re weakening our negotiating position.”
Lara, sitting on the edge of the pullout couch’s sagging mattress in her boxers and a sweat-stained undershirt she couldn’t summon the energy to take off, fought to keep from grinding her teeth. She’d been up since three in the morning assisting with a sedation and tooth extraction for Hell Creek’s carnotaurus hen, Sunny. A red-hot migraine had been building behind her right eye for the last few hours. Her head felt like it was made of superheated glass.
“Can we please not do this right now?” Lara said. “I’m so fucking tired.”
It was early July and their shoebox of an apartment was stifling even with the curtains drawn and the window unit on full blast. Cecile sounded frustrated. That was getting more and more common these days. The more involved Cecile got with the unionization effort, the tenser things got at home. Lara wished they could just stop talking about it.
“At least come to the meeting tonight,” Cecile said, taking her plate to the sink and dumping it in with a clatter of enamel and silverware that sent needles into Lara’s skull.
“Okay,” Lara said, too tired to keep arguing. She lay back on the tangled sheets. “Just text me the address. I’ll come once I’m out. I’m covering for Pasquale tonight.”
Cecile closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay.”
Cecile bent down, smoothed Lara’s sweaty hair back from her forehead, and kissed her. “I love you. I’ll see you later.”
“You too,” Lara whispered. She was asleep before the front door closed.
***
Lara woke just after noon, her migraine faded to a dull gray throbbing at the base of her skull. She’d had a dream that she was in her mother’s trailer again, crawling on hands and knees through the litter of old magazines and broken glass, looking for something important. The thermostat outside the kitchen window said it was 91° when Lara twitched the curtain aside for a peek. On the sidewalk below, a pair of homeless women smoked in the shade of the old dead pear tree. Lara left them to it. She sat down to a cup of instant coffee and a bowl of Frosted Flakes, half-watching an old episode of Salvage Crew where each team had to try to loot the closest to 22,000 CNY worth of materials from an abandoned Boston suburb.
Afterward she got dressed, pocketed her clearance card, sprayed on some sunblock, and caught the 12:23PM bus on the corner, wriggling in through the excited Chinese tourists packing the center aisle. Cheek pressed to the dirty window, she checked her phone as the bus wheezed and rattled through downtown Jordan. Her phone vibrated. A text from Cecile:
Bibliophilia, 7:30, please remember to eat something! xx
Lara turned her phone off. She switched buses at the Grant Street stop and rode the 12:31PM across the Dry Creek Bridge past Chinatown and the old Garfield County Museum. She got off, thinking of the cold, dry winter day she’d met Cecile four years ago.
They’d been hired at Hell Creek in the same month, Lara as a junior vet tech, Cecile in habitat design. Lara could still remember the heat of her blush when she first saw Cecile bent over the railing of the moat around the ankylosaurus exhibit, totally unselfconscious with her big, round ass in the air as she snapped pictures of the moat’s crumbling inner wall with her phone. Things had been so much easier then, both of them caught up in the excitement of the big city, the thrill of being part of Hell Creek, the heady rush of chemistry at the tail end of their twenties. Cecile had lost that, somewhere along the way.
Lara went in through the staff entrance on the north side of the park, scanning her badge at the ID kiosk and leaving her wallet and phone in the locker room. The air smelled of mildew and stagnant water, but the relief of being out of the sun was almost overwhelming. She touched up her deodorant, wrinkling her nose at the minute tear in the stained armpit of her new khaki shirt, and went out through the break room and into the park, emerging near the micro-pteradon aviary where guests watched from cylindrical glass walkways as nemicolopterus and scaphognathus flitted through the air among tropical foliage.
Lara’s first stop was the cavern behind the carnotaurus exhibit, to look in on Sunny, who was curled up asleep in her Uka, a gigantic wool-lined cat bed manufactured for abelisaurids by some Norwegian company. The staff had muzzled Sunny to keep her from biting herself while the anaesthetic wore off. Bloody saliva hung in strings from her massive jaws, fluttering whenever she snored.
Next the raptors, where Danny was starting the afternoon’s first show for a crowd of shrieking third graders, tossing meal worms into the air for the raptors to leap up and snatch. Lara had seen guests disappointed by the raptor exhibit before. A full-grown velociraptor was about the size of a border collie, four feet from snout to tail feathers and no more than thirty pounds, but any vet who’d ever tried to get bloodwork from a house cat could tell you an animal didn’t need to be big to be dangerous. Lara had seen an old half-blind raptor hen named Marmalade open a keeper’s forearm right down to the bone with one swipe of her dewclaw when he tried to bundle her up for a tooth cleaning. Marmalade would have killed him if Lara and another keeper hadn’t been there to net her.
The zoo had a pair of austroraptors in the Wetlands Dome, too, but they were gentle, skittish giants who ate only fish and fruit and hid in the reeds whenever it stormed, their sleek black feathers and white banding making them look like living light and shadow. Her first day off at Hell Creek, Lara had watched for an hour through the fiberglass observation window as they dove and sported in the water at the front of their exhibit.
Finally, as she pushed through the crowd of children and followed the roughened concrete path southwest to the Jurassic exhibits, Lara turned her thoughts to Morning Glory. Of all the zoo’s animals, it was Morning Glory Lara loved best. The dilophosaurus had hatched at the start of Lara’s fourth week on staff at Hell Creek, back before she’d finished her degree in saurian veterinary medicine, one of four live chicks from a clutch of six. Half her siblings’ weight at hatching time, she’d been separated from the rest of the clutch and hand-fed with a puppet made to resemble an adult female of the species, to prevent her nest-mates or mother cannibalizing her. Lara had manned that puppet for weeks, watching through the slit in the blind box behind it as Morning Glory slowly grew.
Night after night, once the rest of the day shift had gone home, Lara had come out from behind the blind and let the little dinosaur curl up in her lap, scratching Morning Glory’s crested snout and brushing out her short, silvery coat. Lara knew it was wrong, that she was endangering her job and possibly warping the hatchling’s development, but her desire to hold that warm, fragile body against hers was too strong to resist. She still had a video on her phone, never shared with anyone else, of the cat-sized Morning Glory, four or five months old, sleeping cradled like a baby in her arms.
Lara paused for a moment to watch the zoo’s two adult female dilophosaurs sunning themselves on the flat sandstone promontory in their exhibit, then circled around to the back-of-house complex: the dilophosaurs’ den, the freezers for feed storage, and the squeeze. The squeeze was a deep, narrow concrete channel set into the floor of an enclosed observation room and designed to prevent theropods from leaping or climbing to get at park staff. The walls of the channel were twelve feet high and inclined slightly inward, forming a leaning slope. Lured in with food, the dinosaurs could be shut in with a remote-controlled gate for examination, training, or tagging. At nearly five years old, Morning Glory was half-grown now, twelve feet long and over four hundred pounds, but she still came running out of the den at the sound of Lara’s whistle, a slender blur of blue and black and silver.
“Who’s my girl?” Lara cooed, tossing a handful of frozen mice over the guardrail as the dilophosaur chirped and sang up at her. Morning Glory snatched a few out of the air, gulping them down, and pecked at the ones she’d missed. “Who’s my pretty girl? How are you feeling, Glory? Your cold all better?”
The dilophosaur bobbed her head and made a low chittering sound, an eerie imitation of the camptosaurus hatchlings in the exhibit next to hers. For a moment she held Lara’s gaze, her hourglass pupil dilating. She made that hatchling sound again.
Dilophosaurs were talented mimics. On the big preserves in Texas and Argentina, they’d been observed luring lone sauropods away from their herds by imitating the distress cries of their species’ young, like coyotes drawing domestic dogs out of backyards. Lara knelt down and tossed a few more mice into the squeeze. Someone, she noticed, had left a toolbox, a soldering gun, and other contracting equipment laid out on a drop cloth past the meat freezer. Suddenly, Morning Glory let out a long, drawn out hiss of warning.
“Hey, you’re not supposed to be back here.” A heavyset guy in coveralls stood in the doorway to the outside, his face flushed and sweating, lengths of metal tubing under his arm. “I’m replacing all the rails and cladding, you gotta get that animal out. The fumes.”
Reluctantly, Lara stood and tossed her last mouse underhand into the tunnel connecting the exhibit’s den to the squeeze. Morning Glory shot after it, and Lara hit the button to seal the den entrance. The door came down.
“Sorry,” she said sullenly. “Didn’t know anyone else was working in here.”
“No problem,” the man said.
He was about her father’s age, craggy and graying. His knees popped when he bent to deposit his load of tubing. He glanced at her.
“You mind my asking,” he said, “how do you stand being around those things? They scare the shit outta me.”
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do,” Lara laughed. “They’re a miracle, you know?”
The man shook his head. “Water into wine, that’s a miracle.”
***
Lara thought about miracles as she mucked out the olorotitan exhibit. There were two youth volunteers from Lone Trail Ranch on detail with her, excitable teenage girls from the suburbs to whom shoveling hadrosaur shit was the thrill of a lifetime. And why shouldn’t it be? Scientists had reached across time and torn the most incredible animals ever to have lived out of the fossilized claws of death, had summoned back the ghostly trumpet of the parasaurolophus, the earthshaking thunder of a herd of brachiosaurs on the move, the flashing iridescent colors of male citipati dancing for prospective mates. Working at Hell Creek, the second-largest paleozoological garden in the hemisphere, was like sweeping the steps of Hades.
So what if Lara’s back ached, or if she had arthritis in her elbow? Who cared if she rolled an ankle spraying ivermectin on a flyblown deinocheirus’s flushed wounds. Even her migraine, reawakening in the heat and noise so that colorful auras shimmered around people and animals and buildings, felt special somehow. Divine.
As the sun sank in the cloudless sky, Lara scrubbed out of the clinic and headed for the break room. She preferred to work through, grabbing a power bar or an energy drink at the cantina, but Cecile had been on her about slowing down, and she felt a guilty obligation to at least try to listen. The break room was empty except for Deirdre, who was sipping coffee at the little formica kitchen table as she thumbed through a folder full of printouts. She looked up as Lara entered.
Deirdre Green had been the Hell Creek Zoological Garden’s curator for close to two decades, since just after the initial breakthrough at the University of Kurdistan and the establishment of the first few dozen bloodlines. She’d been one of the first women to earn her degree in saurian husbandry and ecology. She ran six miles every morning, ate a mug of her wife’s homemade granola standing up at her desk every day at eleven thirty sharp, and could name every one of the hundred and seventy-six species held in the zoo’s collection from memory. At age fifty-one, with her graying bob and slender, muscled silhouette she looked a full decade younger, though the scars on her throat and shoulder where a broody gallimimus had kicked her gave her the feel of a grizzled veteran.
“Lara,” Deirdre said, smiling warmly. “Sorry, I know I shouldn’t be in here, but Stu Randolph from the board is in town and he’s using my office. I got tired of listening to him shout at his wife over the phone.”
“Oh, no worries,” Lara said. She’d met Mr. Randolph before, a big red-faced man who stormed into rooms like he was planning on tackling someone. “Mi casa, su casa.”
“You know, we’re overdue for that dinner at ours.” Deirdre’s pale gray eyes followed Lara across the room to the refrigerator. “You and Celine.”
“We’d love that,” Lara said. She popped the tab on her Fresca and drank, luxuriating in the air-conditioning.
Deirdre smiled, then made a face and rubbed at her shoulder. “God, I pulled a muscle at the gym last week and it just won’t quit.”
Lara set her drink on the counter and circled around the table. They’d done this dance before. It never quite went anywhere, but there was a magnetism to it, a pull that kept Lara coming back. Slowly, she laid her hands on Deidre’s shoulders and began to work her thumbs into the knots in her muscles. Tan skin yielded under her touch. Deirdre let out a sigh of relief.
“God, you’re a lifesaver,” Deirdre breathed. Lara kept at it, saying nothing, digging her elbows into Deirdre’s back, pounding gently with closed fists, until at last Deidre reached back and squeezed her hand, signaling the end of their little impropriety.
“We’ll do that dinner soon,” said Deirdre as Lara retrieved her Fresca, lukewarm now. “Could you possibly come in tomorrow? We’ve got the oryctodromeus coming in by truck, and I want them all inoculated and examined before they get into that burrow complex.”
“Of course,” Lara said.
Deirdre’s eyes twinkled. “I knew I could count on you.”
***
It was almost nine by the time Lara made it across town to Bibliophilia, the little feminist bookstore near the Hotel Erasmus and the local Ruyi Theater. She’d fallen asleep on the bus and missed her stop, forcing her to backtrack down Horner Court and fight against the crowds of tourists heading to dinner at Gillardi’s and Rice Violet and Royal’s Steakhouse. As soon as Lara walked into the store, let in past the CLOSED sign by a rugged older butch, she could feel the tension in the air. Twenty-odd Hell Creek staffers sat in a cramped circle of chairs behind the thriller shelves, knees knocking together, listening to Cecile.
“We don’t even know what the owners and the board make yearly,” Cecile said as Lara wriggled into the circle a few seats away. She gave no sign of having seen Lara arrive. “They’re pleading poverty, meanwhile the park is overflowing and we’re working with a skeleton crew at two-thirds standard market wage.”
Jacob, a few months away from completing his rotation as a saurian vet, leaned forward, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“Am I the only one here who’s going to talk about animal welfare?” he said. “Some of us are healthcare professionals. A strike is irresponsible, and unethical.”
“Letting current conditions continue unchallenged is irresponsible,” Cecile snapped back. “We can’t keep up with the animals as it is. If we let things keep going this way it’s only a matter of time before we have a serious accident. Shit, that’s not even counting the injuries this year alone. Debbie’s leg, Marshall’s scalp, or Kayleigh, that thing with the stygimoloch, your ribs and the pancreatic rupture. And remember last June, the veldt exhibit opening, we had three gallimimus with heat exhaustion. Tell me that wasn’t preventable.”
Kayleigh snapped her fingers. “Word.”
“My leg’s okay,” said Debbie, an older keeper. “They said I might need surgery again. The pins are migrating or something.”
Cecile composed herself with a visible effort. “I think we’re getting off the subject, which is what a union can do for our rights as workers. Right now we have no leverage, and in an at will employment state—”
“I’m sorry but this is not a distraction,” Jacob said. “I take my responsibilities seriously. I am not going to jeopardize the health of the animals under my care for the sake of getting you three more vacation days.”
“Oh that’s fucking outrageous,” shouted Kendra, one of Cecile’s friends. “We’re understaffed. Everyone here knows we’re understaffed. You go to La Perla, they’ve got two hundred people just in veterinary! Beyond that, we’ve got erratic payroll, workers putting in unpaid overtime—”
Jacob sneered. “Then leave, if it’s so horrible.”
Kendra was on her feet now. “You fucking trust fund jag, I swear to God—”
***
Cecile and Lara left together, splitting off from the other still-bickering staff. It was full dark. The temperature was dropping. The moon was just a sliver, and a few stars shone through the smog.
Cecile greeted Lara’s statement that she wanted to stop by the park and check on Morning Glory with frosty silence. There were no more buses. They walked, not speaking, through the city as restaurants turned out their last patrons and delivery drivers whizzed past on mopeds and scooters. Finally Lara broke the silence.
“Why were you holding hands with Kendra?”
“Kendra’s my friend,” Cecile said. “She was being supportive.”
They crossed Marsh Street and turned onto Cope, passing the big refrigerated warehouse where the park stored meat, and went in through the staff entrance. The exhibits were dark, the informational screens turned off for the night. Rows of plush dinosaur toys grinned guilelessly from the shelves of souvenir kiosks stocked with hats embroidered with the zoo’s logo, a procession of dinosaurs of all different sizes, all in silhouette, above the words 65 Million Years, One Magical Day.
“I feel like you’re choosing this place over me,” Cecile said as they neared the dilophosaur exhibit. “I love you, Lara. I want to spend my life with you, and you keep saying you want the same thing, but you’re spending yourself somewhere else. It makes me feel like I don’t mean anything to you.”
“That’s not true,” Lara said, though she knew it was.
The whole day she’d felt like a clogged drain out of which someone was slowly pulling a plug of hair and slime and rotten bits of food, a nasty clot of forgotten and neglected things all fused together by decay. Now it felt like that plug had reached the mouth of the drain, its compacted shape collapsing without external pressure.
“I have to check on Morning Glory,” Lara said. “She’s still getting over her cold.”
There were tears in Cecile’s eyes.
“Can you please be fucking honest with me?” Cecile said. “Can you just say you’re done so I can stop wasting my time trying to make this work?”
Lara turned and headed up the steps into the observation room.
“I’m talking to you!” Cecile shouted after her.
Inside, the guardrail was still half-disassembled, tools strewn over the contractor’s drop cloth, spots of solder shining on the concrete floor. The overhead lights came on. Cecile grabbed Lara’s shoulder as she went toward the meat freezer, pulling her around. Cecile’s face was flushed and blotchy.
“If I came back,” Cecile said, “if I put myself into this place the way I used to, would that give us a chance?”
Lara felt something shift inside her. She smiled, thinking of their nights in the hatchery monitoring egg temperature, of Cecile drafting designs at her easel while Lara read the latest Journal of Saurian Medicine, of kisses stolen in broom closets and behind exhibits. Cecile holding the phone to capture their video of Lara singing to a drowsy Morning Glory.
“I’d try,” Lara said, and she felt it, warm and tender in her chest. “If that’s what you want, I’d try.”
“Do you hear how insane you sound right now?”
Lara’s smile curdled.
“They’re beautiful,” Cecile said, “and they’re special, but they’re not people, Lara! Jesus.”
Cecile was practically begging, hands together, lecturing Lara like a teacher who’d lost her patience with a willful kindergarten student.
“You can’t let this place keep tricking you into breaking your back for a bunch of fucking lizards,” Cecile said.
“Yes I can,” Lara said. Her pulse thundered in her temples. “It’s my dream.”
Cecile was crying now, but it was the look of pity in her eyes that stabbed at Lara’s heart. She took a step back. The squeeze yawned behind her.
“I’ll show them the videos,” Cecile choked out. “For your own good, to get you away from this—”
Lara darted forward and drove her palm as hard as she could into Cecile’s chest. She watched shock bloom across her girlfriend’s face as Cecile lost her balance, arms windmilling, snatching frantically at Lara’s sleeve, and pitched backward over the ledge.
For a moment, Lara couldn’t breathe. She moved to the lip of the squeeze, staring down at where Cecile lay on her side, one leg twisted at a horrible angle, her golden hair across her face. Lara reached for the den gate opener on its stand, took a deep breath, and pressed it. The door to the den slid open with a hiss of hydraulics.
“Who’s my girl?” Lara called, her voice hoarse.
A pair of eyes opened in the dark, shining flat and silver. Slow and deliberate, Morning Glory prowled out of the shadows of the tunnel.
The caged overhead lighting washed over her black and silver plumage in diamonds of sodium white. The dilophosaur cocked her head to one side, birdlike. She let out a high, musical trill and darted across the expanse of concrete to sniff at Cecile. She hopped back, light on her feet for all her size, and shook herself, the shocking electric blue of her crests deepening to the color of the ocean. She dipped her head and hissed furiously. Lara’s heart was in her throat. She couldn’t feel her fingertips.
“Please,” Cecile said, raising a hand as if to defend herself. Her voice came out thick and garbled through her broken nose and her mouthful of blood. Bleeeeease.
Morning Glory pounced. Lara heard bones break under the dinosaur’s weight. Cecile screamed, but only until Morning Glory’s jaws, gaping purplish-pink for a single terrible instant, strings of saliva drooling between inward-curving fangs, clamped shut on the back of her neck.
The dilophosaurus pulled Cecile’s head back, stripping skin and muscle off the spine like a child pulling string cheese. Blood spurted. Morning Glory bent down close to Cecile, gripping her tight with her hooked foreclaws, and raked Cecile’s side with her back talons, ripping her open without apparent effort. Gore sluiced out onto the concrete floor. Lara turned away, unable to catch her breath. For a moment she thought she might faint.
Morning Glory made that low, airy chittering sound again. The hair on the back of Lara’s neck stood on end.
“Good girl,” the dilophosaurus chirped, and the mimicked words seemed to Lara suddenly horrible, devoid of feeling or meaning. “My good girl.”
Lara lurched toward the door. She burst out into the night, vomited on the stairs, and nearly slipped in it. Her boots skidded on the concrete steps. She thought of Cecile brushing her hair back from her forehead, of Morning Glory curled up sleeping in her arms. She listened to the sounds of Hell Creek at night and let them soothe her as she sobbed.
Good girl.
She spent the night in the break room, curled up sleepless in the old broken recliner. In the morning, by the time the screaming started, she was already in the hadrosaur exhibit, shoveling shit.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a Massachusetts-based bestselling horror author and film critic. Her debut novel, Manhunt, was named the #1 Best Book of 2022 by Vulture, and was one of the Best Horror Novels of 2022 by Esquire, Library Journal, and Paste. Her novels, Cuckoo and Black Flame, debuted on the USA Today bestseller list. You can read her fiction and film criticism on Patreon and in TIME, The Outline, Nylon, and more.
Picture Credit: Human Battery (2026) by Line Lizard
Line Lizard is actually a person (artist) pretending to be a lizard (also an artist). He enjoys drawing anime girls, beautiful men with swords, horrors beyond human comprehension and nothing else. Stay tuned for his webcomic coming soon to a computer near you. Instagram: @line_lizard_art
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