The Dinosaur Four (23 page)

Callie looked up at this. More than twenty minutes had passed since Hank died.
Could we have used that on the beach?
If they had tried, Hank might still be alive.

William gave Al his best smile. “I don’t have any idea, but I’ll tell you one thing
. We are not going to find out. We are going to stick to the plan.”

Callie put her hand on William’s arm.
“So when we go back to the café, we can get
everyone
out of there, right?”

William nodded. “That’s what I’m hoping, Callie. That’s what I’m hoping.
” He picked up the football. “We just have to survive another five hours here. Let’s get going again.” He led the group onward, setting a faster pace than before their break.

About a half hour after
their rest in the clearing, they encountered a river cutting directly across their path. They followed it to the right until it joined the larger river, the one that led back to the café. They looked out at the swirling junction that had spun them around on their raft ride a few hours earlier.

William wiped sweat from the back of his neck. “Normally I’d suggest we swim across. It would feel pretty good, I reckon.”

“But we don’t know if our friend the crocodile or one of his little brothers is around,” observed Al.

“Yep.” William turned and headed left. “We’ll have to follow this river upstream until we can find a fallen tree or some other way to cross.” He looked at his watch and shook his head.
“Damn. This is going to take us out of our way.” They started off again, keeping close to the smaller river.

A few minutes later, a raucous call stopped them in their
tracks. It seemed like a series of vowels strung together and shouted at top volume. It was answered by another shout in the distance, somewhere behind them.

“What the hell was that?” Callie whispered. Even Buddy froze in his tracks.

“Probably something small,” William answered quietly. “Something way up in the treetops. It wouldn’t make that much noise unless it was safe up there, right?” He sounded as if he was attempting to convince himself. As the forest grew silent, they slowly started forward again.

Have you thought everything through, Calista?
Hank asked.
That fail-safe only works one time. Don’t fuck it up.

She did not want to think about it. She wanted to curl up and sleep. It was only mid-afternoon here, but it felt much later.
Of course it does.
They had gone back millions of years
and
a handful of hours.
I’m time-lagged
, she thought, inventing a new term.

That’s cute, babe,
Head Hank said.
I love it.
Callie allowed herself a small smile, her first since the beach. She had always liked it when he called her “babe.” Tears welled in her eyes and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.

“What will happen to us
if we succeed?” she asked the group. “Help me think it through. What will be going on when we arrive back in Denver?”

William described the scene. “They’ll have a police perimeter, with news vans all around. Maybe they haven’t figured out that we went
back in time yet, but sooner or later they will. They’ll analyze the dirt and river water that got swapped out where the café was. I bet my boys are worried sick.”

Callie shook her head. “Tha
t’s not right, though, is it?” She had insisted on a turn carrying the device and held it awkwardly against her stomach with both arms. The scientists upstairs were smart enough to build a time machine, but apparently they weren’t smart enough to put handles on the damn thing. “No time will have passed. When this machine goes off again, it will return us to the moment we left.”

“What makes you think that?” Tim asked.

“The fail-safe. The fail-safe button is a twenty-minute jump back. That’s what the woman said. We’re here for fifteen hours, right? The fail-safe is meant to help you in case…” She paused while Hank finished the thought for her.
In case your fiancé gets his fucking head lopped off.
“In case something goes wrong. Twenty minutes won’t help if fifteen hours have also passed by in modern Denver. So for the fail-safe to actually do any good, this thing must be rigged to take us back to the exact moment when we left.”

“You’re assuming a lot on the part of the inventors,” Al said as he maneuvered around a cluster of boulders. “They obviously got a few things wrong, considering how
all this went down. I’m not sure how smart those people really were.”

William gave him a patronizing look. “They invented an honest-to-God time machine
, Al. I think they were smart enough.”

Callie went on, “Let’s keep going. We arrive back in the café right at the moment we left. Then what?”

William answered, “We get outside and push the button to go back twenty minutes. This all started at about eight a.m. When we use the failsafe, it’ll take us back to around 7:40. We run into the café and tell ourselves to get of the building.”

“Why do we have to go outside
first?” Tim asked.

Callie answered for William. “Because most of us were already in the café at 7:40. We don’t want to swap them
forward; we want to get them out of the building.

William
nodded. “She’s right. We can find an empty parking lot or something, hit the button there, and then go inside and tell ourselves to clear out.”

“This is
crazy,” Morgan said. “I hope you all understand what you are talking about.”

Hank’s voice urged Callie to keep going. “So then what?” she
asked.

“Then we’re good to go,” William answered. “None of us will ever go back in time. No one has to die.”

Callie shook her head. “There’s more. We can’t just stay there. The seven of us have to return to our empty parking lot and jump back forward twenty minutes. Or else there will be duplicates of us. Two of us, living in the same time.”

“Hell yeah!” Morgan said. “I want to party with another me.”

The hike grew steeper. The small river flowed down a slope next to them in a series of small rapids. William broke away from the group to look for a section where the boulders were close enough to rock hop across. He returned shaking his head. “The river is still impassable.”

Al let his shoulders sag
. Callie thought the movement seemed forced, theatrical.

“Do you think we will remember this?” Tim asked the others as they continued on. “
When we jump forward twenty minutes again, what will we remember? I mean, if we successfully convince our other selves to get out of the building,
they
will never go back in time. So what will
we
remember?”

Morgan laughed. “This is so fucking nuts.”

“I guess we’ll find out when we find out,” William said. “Here’s another question: When we trigger the fail-safe and go back twenty minutes, how much time will we have there? Here, it’s set to last fifteen hours. When it goes back twenty minutes, how long will we have before it goes forward again?”

The
two-legged Struthiomimus took a step closer. Helen squeezed Lisa’s arm so hard she cried out in pain.

The dinosaur cocked its head and
held open its long beak. It tasted the air with a pointed pink tongue.

“It’s got no teeth,” Helen said.

Lisa pulled a kitchen knife from her belt. She pointed the blade toward the animal. “Yeah, but look at its hands and feet.” Dirty black claws protruded from its scaly fingers and toes.

The dinosaur took a step
closer. Lisa waved her knife. “Shoo!” The dinosaur curled its long neck and snapped at the shiny blade. Lisa jerked it back, out of reach.

“Don’t leave me,” Helen said.

The Struthiomimus took two quick steps forward, pecked Lisa’s forehead with its beak, and stepped back.

Stars swirled in
Lisa’s vision. They looked like the small sparks that sometimes erupted at the end of a fireworks explosion.
I got pecked.
She wanted to laugh, but
she couldn’t find the air to make the noise. She teetered backwards and landed in the mud on her ass. Everything went blurry.

Helen
dumped the trash-can holding their last fish and threw it at the dinosaur. It bounced off the creature’s chest and landed in the mud. The dinosaur lowered its long neck and studied the black plastic. It reached down and brought both hands together to pick it up. The dinosaur held the trash can and sniffed it from all angles.

“Holy shit,” Helen said.

It looked up at her, dropped the trash can, and stepped forward. With another quick snap of its neck, it pecked Helen, grazing the side of her temple. It arched back for a second strike but Helen had already fallen out of the way. The animal leaned over her and reached down with its claws.

The
fog slowly began to wear off. Lisa saw the dinosaur grabbing at Helen’s sweater with three sharp fingers. It shredded the fabric as it tried to find something to grip.

The kitchen
knife stuck from the mud a few inches from Lisa’s hand. Just beyond it, the dinosaur finally found purchase on Helen’s arm and began to pull her up.

Lisa grabbed the
handle and rose in one smooth motion. She felt dizzy but made herself keep going. She swung the knife up, striking the dinosaur’s neck halfway between its head and its body. The blade bit into flesh, struck bone, and slid free.

The
Struthiomimus screamed.
CAAAAHHHH! CAAAAHHHH! CAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!
It released Helen and rose. It lifted its head into the air, but its neck flopped at an obtuse angle. Blood geysered from the sliced opening in cadence with its screams. The head flopped back into place, pinching the cut closed. Blood misted straight outwards, covering Lisa in a cloud of wet red vapor.

CAAAAHHHH! CAAAAHHHH!

Lisa took a step toward it, brandishing the blade. The animal ran in a circle, flapping its winged arms. Its neck teetered back and forth, like a bent reed in the wind. Several times, it looked like its head would snap clean off, but it always bowed back in the other direction at the last minute.

That
dinosaur is food for a week
, Lisa thought. She needed to finish it off before it got away. The Struthiomimus began to zigzag across the mud flat.

Helen moaned.
Lisa looked back at the old woman, who lay motionless on the ground near her unfinished snare.

Before she could decide what to do, the dinosaur reached the opposite side of the mudflat. Its
screams grew louder as it disappeared into the jungle.

Lisa turned and knelt over Helen. Blood shone through her silver hair
.

“I’m okay,” Helen said.
She pulled back her sleeve to reveal purple and brown bruises where the dinosaur had grabbed her. Lisa hefted her to her feet. They could still hear the shrieks of the Struthiomimus in the woods.

“We’ve got to get inside, quick.”

“Why? It’s gone
now. I’m okay.”

“The noise.” Lisa’s ears still rang from the dinosaur’s scr
eams. “That’s what brought the T-rex last time.” Helen stumbled and Lisa pulled the woman’s arm over her shoulder.

“Come on, Helen, help me out.” They trekked slowly across the mud.

Tim
used the trunk of a small tree to pull himself up the incline. A fast moving cascade flowed by on his right. Lush green moss covered the rocks close to the falls and dappled sunlight filtered through the treetops. A pure, earthy smell filled his nose. It did not feel like Colorado. It felt like some exotic location. Hawaii, maybe, or New Zealand.

William stopped to catch his breath at the top
. The ground flattened out as far ahead as they could see. Above the cascade, the river pooled lazily. “This is getting us nowhere. We’re only moving farther and farther from the café.”

“At least we’ve got the device,”
Morgan said. He placed one foot on a boulder and rested the football on his thigh.

William
shook his head. “We can’t let it go off here. We’re still way more than twenty minutes from the café. We aren’t close enough to go warn ourselves.”

“I’ll give you another reason,” said Al. “Lisa and the old lady ain’t here.”

William smiled. “You’ve got a thing for Lisa, don’t you?”

“I
s there a problem with that?”

“Of course
not. I think she likes you, too.”

Al
circled past William, glaring at him. Tim thought that Al was the sort of guy who would punch you for looking at his girlfriend the wrong way. Lisa wasn’t even his girlfriend though, as far as Tim could tell.

“
The clock is ticking,
”
Callie said. “All this yammering is a waste of time. Guys, we should swim across.” The opposite shore was a little less than thirty feet away and the water had flattened out above the falls. “The current here doesn’t look too strong.”