Dinosaur Thunder (26 page)

“But you’re not thriving, you’re just barely surviving, and there are fewer of you every year. This used to be a city with half a million people in it. Where have they gone?”

Looking genuinely sad, Reverend’s eyes moistened, and he cleared his throat before speaking. “Most of the buildings collapsed when we came here,” Reverend said, then cleared his throat again. “I can still hear the people inside begging for help. We helped those we could, but day by day we heard fewer cries for help, and then finally none. Then came the fires and plague and fighting—wars, really. Man’s sinful nature reared its ugly head, and the desperate killed the desperate, the strong the weak, the weak the weaker. Starvation took many, disease and exposure many more, and then there were the beasts. We had guns, but they are big and fast and hard to kill. I saved what people I could, and other men and women did God’s work too, but Satan was loose in the land and many fell to temptation. Then the demons came.”

“Demons?” Nick asked.

“Beasts in the guise of man,” Reverend said.

“What your people call Inhumans?”

“The same,” Reverend said. “They massacred the People of Martha who were farming a piece of land to the north. I took a hundred warriors to help them, but it was too late. The demons killed everyone: men, women, children. I even saw an infant dead in her mother’s arms.”

“Did you try talking to them?” Nick asked.

“Talk to animals? I’m not Doctor Doolittle,” Reverend said, finishing with a forced smile. “We wasted so much ammunition on the big beasts that we did not have enough for the demons. We killed many of them, yet they would not stop coming, them and their beasts.”

“Their beasts?” Nick said.

“Yes, the beasts have beasts,” Reverend said. “That is why I know they are demons, because they command the other beasts.”

“They’ve domesticated dinosaurs?” Nick asked.

Frowning, Reverend leaned forward again, spreading his hands on the desktop and then sighing. “Dr. Paulson, don’t go down that road. The Inhumans aren’t people, they aren’t cute, they aren’t like us in any way that you can imagine. God gave man dominion over the beasts, not them. The power they have over the great beasts must come from Satan because it does not come from God.”

Reverend stopped suddenly, eyes now bright, seeing something that Nick could not.

“Of course,” Reverend said, excited. “It makes sense now. That space rock that you think will destroy us was sent by God, but not to destroy God’s faithful, it was sent to destroy Satan’s minions.”

“Reverend, that asteroid is not going to discriminate,” Nick said, but he had lost the reverend.

Sitting tall now, his fixed smile back, confidence swelling, Reverend resumed his megalomaniacal persona. “Can’t you see the way your truth and my truth came together to give us God’s truth?” Reverend said, excited. “Some had speculated that the fire in the sky was an asteroid, but I knew God would not save us only to kill us. And I could not understand why God would tolerate the continued persecution of his people at the hands of demons. You brought me the answer, Dr. Paulson. God is coming to the aid of believers.”

Nick wanted to ask why God would not just sweep the Inhumans away, why God would use a blunt instrument like an asteroid, and why God would wait so long to destroy the Inhumans, but there was no chance. Reverend was a true believer. Retreating so deep into his worldview, there was no way to drag him back to reality.

“Reverend, we have little time. My friends and I need to find a way home. I’m willing to take any of your people who want to come with me.”

“Of course,” Reverend said, now brimming with confidence. “You can ask, but will they follow you?”

They found the Community celebrating, the horse and police officer the center of attention. Never having seen a real horse, children cautiously approached, touched Torino’s flank, and then scooted back, bragging to the others about their courage. Officer Conyers supervised, protecting her mount from rambunctious children and the children from any sudden moves Torino would make. The horse, however, munched happily on handfuls of grass, gathered by children.

Dr. Gah sat on the remains of a picnic table, leg stretched out, surrounded by middle-aged men and women and a few young adults, answering their questions about the world they had been ripped away from eighteen years ago. Carson Wills had his own worshippers: young women, mostly, with young men at the back of his circle, listening intently as Carson described his life in Florida. From the few snatches Nick heard, Carson’s life amounted to capturing rogue dinosaurs, driving fast cars, listening to rock music, drinking copious amounts of beer, and living with his hot girlfriend. Nick hoped Carson had the sense to stop talking as the reverend approached.

Ranger Wynooski stood in her own group, scolding the adults. “Look at these children,” Wynooski said. “They’re nothing but skin and bones. You folks aren’t looking much better. You need to put some meat on these kids.”

A big woman, and overweight, Wynooski was average in modern America, and the people of Reverend’s Community were thin, even emaciated, but tough from years of hard work. Every mouthful was hard earned, the calories it took to extract the food from the land little less than the food itself. Obesity was a luxury none could afford.

Jacob was holding his wife, Leah, their children bouncing around, hanging on the pant leg of their father, or trying to wedge between their parents. Seeing Jacob holding Leah, Nick thought of Elizabeth and punished himself for not spending enough time holding her.

“Listen, people,” Reverend said.

The crowd quieted quickly, even the children who knew not to interrupt the reverend.

“Dr. Paulson believes that the light in the sky that I have called God’s fire, is actually an asteroid—a big rock. He believes it will hit the planet and kill every one of us and almost everything else on the planet. He says our only hope is to follow him and he will take us back to where he came from.”

A hundred silent people listened attentively.

“Was that a fair representation of your message?” Reverend asked.

“Two things,” Nick said. “I know the asteroid will hit the Earth because it already has hit the Earth. You are living in Earth’s past and we have documented evidence that when that asteroid hits, it will kill every one of you. Second, I will try to get you back home, but there is no guarantee. The only thing I know for sure is that if you are here when that asteroid hits, you will die.”

“Thank you for your concern,” Reverend said. “What Dr. Paulson is not telling you is that while we were speaking I had a revelation. I came to understand the purpose of the coming of the asteroid. Dr. Paulson’s killer rock is not for us, but for the demons that command the great beasts. Let me assure you that we have been faithful and obedient ministers of the Word. God is not going to kill us; God is going to protect us. I believe Dr. Paulson when he says that the space rock will kill many creatures including the demons, but God is not going to kill us too. That would make no sense. Why kill what you have saved? God’s plan isn’t to kill us; it is to free us from the Inhumans. When the demons are gone, God will usher in a new age, and this will be a New Earth and we will be his New People.

“You are free to make your choice. You may go with Dr. Paulson and find your way back to the sinful world that God rescued us from, or stay here and build that New Earth and populate it with our children, not demons. Like Joshua, I say as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!”

Silent men and women bowed heads, avoiding eye contact with Reverend. He had saved them, and kept them alive through the tribulation, as many saw it. Abandoning Reverend would be hard, and given the conversations Nick had overheard, most of them wanted to get home for the creature comforts they missed, not remain for some spiritual purpose.

“Look!” a teenager shouted, pointing down the hill at the broken highway that curved out of sight.

Hurrying with the others, Nick kept close to the reverend, the flock parting like the Red Sea to make room for their leader. Men, women, and children pressed against a chain-link fence marking the back of the property line. Nick followed the reverend into a gap, then grabbed a piece of fence for himself. The hill dropped off sharply just beyond the fence, giving a view down the valley. Coming down the road were a dozen figures.

“Inhumans,” someone whispered, others picking up the fear, embellishing. “Must be fifty of them.”

“You wanted to talk to them,” Reverend said to Nick. “Here’s your chance.”

30

President

Time warps, time bubbles, variable speed of light, wormholes, time quilts, black ripples, black holes, quasi-time—when it comes to understanding the physics of time, we have just managed to put our toe in the ocean.

—Emmett Puglisi, Ph.D., e-mail to President Brown

Present Time
Washington, D.C.

Wilamina Brown never set out to become President of the United States, and even now she was ambivalent about the job, and it was a job to Willa, not a joy. When President Pearl finished his second term, the party turned to her to be the standard bearer. With the reconstruction and economic recovery from the Time Quilt, and the nuclear attacks in Alaska and near Los Angeles well under way, Willa knew it would be nearly impossible for her party to keep the presidency for a third term. Complacency was the curse of the public, and the opposition was promising a shiny new candidate with a gilded tongue and movie star wife. Two years out, polls showed Willa running only competitively with the California governor. Loath to see the progress of the Pearl administration undone, Willa entered the primaries, ate hundreds of chicken dinners, shook hands with thousands of people she did not know, and put up with yellow journalists administering pop quizzes masquerading as interviews. As a black female, Willa pulled from disparate groups, including some traditionally voting for her opponent, and eked out a victory.

While Willa held the presidency for her party, the Senate flipped, and once again government was divided. With liberal use of her veto power, and occasional filibusters, Willa managed to keep the country on an even economic keel, but the constant fight with the loyal opposition drained Willa. And now Dr. Paulson had disappeared, and dinosaurs were popping up in places where they should not be. Willa’s science adviser was not as much help as Willa wished, but then Willa was asking her adviser to explain the unexplainable. Willa missed her director of the Office of Security Science, and wasn’t sure where to turn. The economic progress would be all for naught if the planet came apart in another time-twisting catastrophe.

Sipping tea, President Brown sat in her private study, just off the Oval Office. Papers cluttered her desk, spread out and layered across the surface, an idiosyncratic horizontal filing system. Less system, and more memory cures, Willa forbade her executive assistant from touching the desktop, although she could scour the Oval Office to her heart’s content. Strictly ceremonial, Willa greeted important visitors in the Oval Office, or posed there for pictures, but worked in her study, the same space used for sexual trysts by an earlier administration.

Taking her cup, she walked through the Oval Office and looked out onto the Rose Garden. An overcast summer day, it was unusually cool for summer in Washington, and that worried her. Every unusual event worried her, since it was seemingly random events that presaged the Time Quilt catastrophe. For a century, odd events had been recorded, and ignored, since they did not fit into orthodox physics. Continuing into the modern age, the odd and unexplainable were relegated to the pages of supermarket tabloids and ignored by the mainstream press. Unexplainable events like fish falling from the sky, people bursting into flame, people drowning in the desert, people suddenly disappearing and appearing, and other oddities were finally recognized for what they were—harbingers of doom. Recognized too late to stop it, the disaster happened, civilization was shredded, and humanity met dinosaurs face-to-face. Unknown to the public was the extent of the damage to the time stream, and the mission of the OSS to monitor and, if possible, manage time itself.

Cool summers might not be a symptom of more trouble, but what of the odd pattern of earthquakes? What of the Visitor dinosaurs? And most troubling of all, Dr. Paulson’s disappearance. Something was going on, but what? Her chief of staff’s familiar tap interrupted her.

“A Dr. Puglisi from the OSS is calling. I think you should speak with him.”

Major Lund grew up in a military family, but was the only son not to serve. Instead, Lund drove himself through school, graduating from college a year early, then earning a Harvard MBA. A learned man, Lund loved books and all knowledge, but when Willa asked him why he never became a university professor, he said, “If you teach, you have to go where the jobs are. With an MBA, you can live anywhere you want.” A friend of Willa’s since working on Pearl’s Senate campaign, Lund rose in power, becoming a key player in the Pearl administration but remaining in the background. When Willa asked him to run her campaign, he surprised her by agreeing. They were even closer friends now.

“Put him on,” Willa said, afraid of what she would hear.

Lund punched a remote control, a hidden television rising out of a credenza. Willa took her usual chair, Lund on the couch to her left. Coming to life, the screen showed Dr. Puglisi looking around the Oval Office.

“What can I do for you?” Willa asked.

“John Roberts was here, and he said something that got me thinking,” Puglisi said, pausing to collect his thoughts. “He’s trying to follow Dr. Paulson now.”

“I know,” Willa said. “Mr. Roberts succeeded in going through the same passage as Dr. Paulson. At least as far as we know. What did Mr. Roberts say to you?”

“He believed the material recovered from the moon was the key to passing through the time passage like Dr. Paulson. I now believe he was right. The material, or at least contact with it, seems to be the key.”