Danny Skinner swore, and kicked the giant red crab at his feet. With a petulant grunt, it clicked its sharp claws faster at the tiny lesothosaurs inside the wheels of his palaeolithic Dodge Sabretooth. In response, they poured on the speed and Danny revved up into the mountains, a satisfying cloud of dust in his wake.
Behind and beneath him stretched the glittering vista of Quartz City, the afternoon sun turning the Crystal Tower into a blaze of shimmering white light. As the sun got lower, the cars and dinobusses would fill the streets, taking people home from the quarries and then out to shadowshows at the drive-in, or to dinner at Bronto Burgers. Danny didn't look back. He'd been here long enough to know the city of lights had a darker side, and the taste of it in the back of his mouth made the image less than inspiring.
He wasn't the only one who'd tasted the megatherium crap of the city; every day an avalanche of girls came rolling into Quartz, looking to live the life of a shadowstar, lighting up the deerskins across the whole valley. Some of them made it, and good for them. And some of them fell, and ended up turning tricks for a handful of pebbles and a mango down by the tarpits. Neither group concerned Danny - he dealt with girls in between, girls who got someways to the top, then stumbled.
Like Miss Lola Sandstone. Hair like amber in the midday sun and skin to match, she'd smoked up the deerskin in big titles like Pteradon Down, and The Piltdown Wives, then some cheap chiseller for StoneWeek had found out her father had been Cro-Magnon, and the calls stopped coming. Now, she turned tricks his boss' way, for a higher-paying clientele - mostly rich guys from the desert who wanted to go back to their caves and brag to their buddies about how they scored with an actress. When it was good, it kept her in opals and sabre-tooth furs, and mixing it up with the high-rockers along Saurian Boulevard. When it was bad, they called in Danny.
And it was bad this time - fatal, even. Some barely-walking-upright shell-phone wiz-kid from Silica Valley had fed her some bad powder, then panicked and called the cops when she'd crashed. Luckily, the boss had a contact on the force, and Danny'd arrived well in advance. He'd come out with a pair of packages - the blubbering kid on one arm, and the very dead body of Ms Lola Sandstone over the other.
Even in death, though, she wore it well, Danny thought. Still beautiful, graceful, understated, just a bit of blood under her nose and leaning on him like she was punch drunk. An award-winning performance, even the landlord bought it: Danny saw him fixing the kid with a look of peculiar disgust he reserved for those who beat their whores instead of just laying them. And in a short while, Ms Lola Sandstone would take a last walk off Lover's Leap, an old place up in the hills where more than one starlet had taken a drunken, remorseful plunge into shadowshow history. The cops and the slabs would all tell the same story - a tragic suicide, another faded superstar falling victim to the double-edged flint-axe of fame. Danny knew she wouldn't have wanted anything less.
They hadn't been friends of course, but they'd done enough chit-chat in various corridors and lobbies to become acquaintances; he'd told her he liked her movies, and she'd always smiled to still be seen like that. He would have asked for her autograph even, if it hadn't seemed such a tree-dwelling thing to do.
At the cliffside, Danny left the kid inside, grabbed his flint off the dash and went back to the trunk. He didn't need his flint, of course, but the weight of it against his belly made him feel safer. Most of his buddies used stonethrowers these days, assured him that they were the only way to go, that they could knock a pebble through a woolly mammoth these days, that some even fired tiny trilobites that could burrow into your target's flesh; he didn't give a damn. He liked the weight of the flint, solid in his hands. No tiny lizards inside coughing out pellets when you squeezed them, just pure stone and wood. Reliable, no matter what. Kept him chiselled even when pulling Ms Lola Sandstone's cold corpse out of his trunk and into his arms.
He carried her up to the top, over the tiny fence, right out to the very edge. Beneath them Quartz City still glittered, catching every last sparkle from the blood red sunset, blinding him so he could only stare down at her face, still perfect, even when bloody and sunken, skin like white marble against his black deerskin coat. Suddenly he leaned down and kissed her quickly on the cheek; when he pulled back he realised he was shaking, blushing, like he was back stealing kisses behind the school cave all over again. Shame hit his belly like a clawing beast, so he shut his eyes and dropped her into the wind, like he couldn't bear to touch her anymore.
He opened his eyes when he heard the hit, and thought, you're safe now, Miss Lola Sandstone. The world would only know you died a star, and only Danny Skinner knew any different.
And the kid. He was scared now, but it wouldn't last. Sooner or later, the guilt would rise up like bile and he'd want to cleanse himself, or boast about it, and somehow some chiseller would catch the rumour, or the slate-scratched confession would fall into the wrong hands, and every slab in the city would pay through the nose for the story of shadow-star turned pebble-whore and powder-freak, found ice-aged in a flophouse down the primitive end of town. It was just a matter of time.
He wouldn't have it. Not Miss Lola Sandstone, not her. He closed his eyes again, remembering the way her perfect face had filled his vision that last time, bigger than on even the colossal drive-in skins they had down by the beach. Then he ran back to the car, dragged the kid screaming into the backseat, and buried the flint in his brain.