“Vernon?” I say. He turns around, face sweating and chemically thin. We shake hands and begin walking through the museum, passing an animatronic sabre tooth cat that jerkily nudges a sort of bear.
We enter the restroom. Vernon checks beneath the stalls and once sure nobody else is there he puts his briefcase on the side of the sink.
“You got the money?” he asks. I put my own briefcase on the side. “Let me check.” I pop open the lid and show him sixty thousand dollars in unmarked bills.
“Now you show me.” I say. He checks the door before opening the clasps on his case. Inside the aubergine coloured interior are three jars of wasps.
“Impressive. Most impressive.” I say. He takes my briefcase and I stand in the bathroom, watching the wasps waiting in each jar. I take out a pair of ear defenders from my pocket and put them on.
I pass an enormous puppet built by the Jim Henson's creature workshop, Smilodon Fatalis, It is accompanied by a smaller puppet, Nibbles. An old man plays a harmonica. A girl lets go of a balloon. A young couple kiss each other. Faces flash by. I crouch down onto the cold floor and open up the suitcase, taking out each jar carefully. Some movement catches my eye, I look up to see a security guard wearing a khaki shirt running towards me, although I am unable to hear his shouts. People are beginning to move away. I take one of the large jars and open the lid, pouring the wasps out. They begin to fly away before hitting the floor. I do the same with the other two jars and then begin to make my way through the crowd of people around me. The wasps meanwhile begin to search for food genetically installed into insect brains. For those wasps each ear is like a flower for a bee, a fruitful canal for them was a valuable source of protein. They flew from ear to ear, their thumb-sized bodies clinging onto the earlobe as they carefully fed on the people around them. Panic gripped the entire museum, people clutching at their heads as they ran full pelt through the corridors, others were caught in the swarm of wasps and crouched close to the ground, faces contorted into strange grimaces. In the confusion I made my way towards the Research and Collections area.
There are thousands of boxes, each containing a fossil pulled from the tar pit. I make my way quickly past the bones of rodents, dogs, giant birds and lizards, the preserved shells of the invertebrates and into the flora section. It takes me a few minutes but I have quickly filled my pockets with the preserved seeds of almost fifty species of prehistoric plants. I would need to send them to Korea to be processed properly. I make my way back into the museum, it's corridors empty now save for the constant flight of wasps.
