The Dinosaur Four (9 page)

At the upstream edge of the clearing
, William and Tim crouched and looked back at the chunk of building. William rose to his feet as the young barista clanged away. Each crash reverberated with a musical twang.

Callie and Hank held hands in the center of the clearing. Callie’s red hair gleamed in the sunlight, almost as bright as Hank’s
running shorts. Al and Lisa joined them. Lisa took Al’s hand and gave him a wink. He smiled at her like a kid in a toy store.

“Beth, that might not be a good idea,” Hank called out.

The rustling in the jungle grew louder and closer.
Al finally saw movement and realized he was looking too low. A shape grew in the shadows, towering over Beth. She stopped swinging her spoon.

A forty-five
foot long
Tyrannosaurus rex
shouldered through the last few rows of trees.

Beth dropped her instruments, turned on her heels
, and ran, all in one fluid motion. She made it ten feet before the platter and spoon hit the ground. The tyrannosaur stepped onto the mud flat and lowered its jaws toward the girl.

Beth continued to scream as she ran. Her blood-curdling cry pierced the jungle, louder than any of the ruckus they had made with the pots and pans. She
screamed like someone in pain, even though she had not been hurt yet. She did not realize she was screaming. She only knew that the monster coming out of the trees looked far more dangerous than the hadrosaurs and did not care one bit about her little clang-clanging.

As Beth ran, one thought went through her mind over and over:
Don’t slip, don’t slip, don’t slip.
The mud was thick, but she wore a decent pair of shoes. Her job required her to stand on her feet for hours, after all.

She felt t
he ground shake with each step of the giant dinosaur behind her. Beth pushed herself faster. The café was within reach, but she meant to run past it, around the back, and then leap into the river. The current would sweep her right behind the building and out of sight. She pictured her escape as a scene in a movie, both clever and thrilling. Hollywood producers would line up to buy her story once she got home. She wouldn’t need to save for film school. She wouldn’t need to work her way up the ladder.

Beth closed in on the building, only a few steps from the corner.

The tyrannosaur snaked its head forward. Beth felt pressure on the sides of her body. For a fraction of a second, she thought someone had grabbed her to shove her out of the way. Probably William. William had come to save her.

The pressure tightened and Beth knew she was wrong. The ground dropped away as the tyrannosaur lifted
her. She looked down on the café and the open floor above it. Then the jaws ground together, separating her hips from her body. Beth felt a horrible incontinence as organs slipped from her abdominal cavity. The tyrannosaur bit down again. Nine-inch teeth frayed Beth's spine in three places and she ceased to feel anything at all.

Hank grabbed Callie and Lisa by the shoulders and started backing away slowly. “Don’t run from a predator,” he hissed. “You’ll trigger a pursuit instinct.” They weren’t quite in the center of the clearing, but they were close enough. There was no cover nearby.

The tyrannosaur raised its head upward and pulled Beth’s mangled body deep into its mouth with its
pale tongue. Her legs, arms, and head all disappeared down its gullet at the same time.

Without pausing, the tyrannosaur turned
toward the two couples out in the open. It normally ate two thousand pounds before it felt full. Beth Caldecott barely broke one hundred.

Hank, Callie, Al and Lisa had been backing away steadily. Now Lisa froze,
hyperventilating. Hank gave Callie a firm shove toward the forest. Al began to run also, holding onto Lisa’s hand and yanking her along. The tyrannosaur took two steps in their direction, blood dripping from its lips.

Not my wife
, Hank thought, even though Callie was still only a fiancé. He stuck two filthy fingers in his mouth and whistled, a high-pitched screech that he used at parties and weddings to silence a noisy crowd.

The giant dinosaur stopped and tilted its head.
That’s it,
Hank thought. He dug in his heels and sprinted downstream along the riverbank.

The tyrannosaur raised its tail high in the air and kicked forward after Hank, ignoring
the others. Prey that ran in a group often scattered in different directions, causing it to lose focus. It preferred a single target.

Hank knew instinctively that he had no chance. He could feel the dinosaur gaining on him. He lowered his head and ran harder, pushing himself. His foot slipped in
a wet patch of hadrosaur shit and he tumbled forward, arms spinning. Miraculously, he somehow brought his leg up under him and caught his balance, banging his knee into his chest.

Closing the gap, the tyrannosaur turned its
enormous head to one side and started to swing it forward for an easy strike. As the motion began, it caught a strong whiff of the smell that had attracted it to the river in the first place, before it had heard the banging pots and pans.

Even more than a lone target, the tyrannosaur favored carrion. Dead prey didn’t fig
ht back. It circled to a stop next to the river.

Hank threw himself into a clump of tall fern-like bushes, gasping for air and wondering how he was still alive. A quick glance over his shoulder showed that the dinosaur was no longer directly behind him. H
e crawled forward through the foliage and deeper into the trees by the downstream shoreline.

Pawing at the ground near the bank, the
tyrannosaur bent over the mud and began pulling with its mouth and tongue.

Callie, Lisa, and Al had reached the forest as well, straight out from the river. They stopped to look back. On the right, Callie saw Hank flit through the trees by the shore, circling in their direction.

The tyrannosaur continued to bite at the ground.
The animal stood with its legs wide apart as it bent over. Short, matted tufts grew from its body, giving its skin a moldy appearance. Its naked head and legs looked pale and sickly.

“What’s it doing?” Calli
e asked, breathing heavily. “It’s eating the mud. Why is it eating the mud?”

“That isn’t mud,” Al said, holding Lisa tightly, trying to quiet her sobs against his chest.

With a small tug, the beast pulled a knotted strand of Patricia Hayman’s ruined torso out of the ground and gulped it down. Another bite followed, equal parts leg and mud.

“Let’s get out of here,” Al said. He took Lisa’s hand and began to pull her again as the dinosaur sniffed
the ground, looking for anything it might have missed.

They ran deeper into the woods, directly away from the river. Callie wanted to call out to Hank, so that he could find them, but she could not force herself to make a sound. The realization shamed her. He had lured that monster away with a whistle, yet she was too
afraid to shout out his name.

“Shit
shit shit,” Tim muttered. He stepped forward. He wanted to do something, but there was nothing to do. Beth no longer existed. “Shit.”

“Let’s go,” William
whispered. “We got to stay together, like that girl said.” William and Morgan walked quietly upstream. They entered the forest right where it crept down to river.

Tim looked back one last time.
Oh crap! Helen.
They had left a seventy-something year-old woman alone inside the café. He saw no sign of her.

The tyrannosaur wandered around the clearing, sniffing at everything
like a dog. It paused and lifted its nose as it walked around the back side of the structure. With its thick neck extended, its chin reached the top of the building. It sniffed and moved on.

As it passed, Tim saw a woman’s face
above the broken wall on the second floor, just above the dinosaur’s head. Tim wondered if Helen had somehow found a way upstairs.
It seemed impossible, but someone
was
up there.

The tyrannosaur grunted, snorted, and turned to look in Tim’s direction. Both eyes focused forward on him. It
snorted and lumbered directly toward him.

Oh, shit shit shit!
Tim turned and took off into the woods.

Somewhere ahead, he heard William shouting,
“
Stay
Close!
” and “
Stay together!
” Tim followed the sound. A thick layer of dead needles carpeted the ground and small boulders dotted the forest floor. The light grey rocks were easy enough to see in the morning light, but Tim felt a pervasive paranoia that he would slam into an unseen branch at any moment. As he ran, he searched for a boulder that might be big enough to hide behind or crawl under, but he saw only smooth low shapes. The feeling of exposure ran up his spine like nails on a chalk board.

The crash
ing sound of breaking tree trunks came from behind. The tyrannosaur was gaining.

Tim found himself planning his route carefully as the rocks grew more numerous. Ahead, through the trees, he saw William and Morgan catch up to Al and Lisa. Lisa stumbled to the ground with a shriek
. Al pulled her to her feet without stopping. She kept running, but favored one foot, the one without a shoe. The four of them moved to the right, where the ground rose slightly. Out in front, Tim caught a glimpse of Callie, farther ahead and alone.

A new shape came out of the woods next to Tim. His heart skipped and he flinched away
before he realized it was Hank. “It’s coming,” Hank said between breaths. They could hear branches crack as the tyrannosaur followed them through the woods.

Hank, twenty years Tim’s senior, pulled ahead and passed him by. Tim remembered the old joke about outrunning a bear in the woods.
You don’t need to outrun the dinosaur,
he thought.
You only need to outrun the slowest guy in the group.
Right now, Tim was the slowest guy.

Ahead, the forest grew brighter as the trees grew thinner, exposing another clearing. The ground sloped down and away to the left. As Tim
ran through the last few trees, he saw a rock wall on the right side of the clearing. Above the cliff, the forest sloped up and away.

Al shouted, “
Here, here!
” He wove around a jumble of boulders where the cliff first began. The whole clearing looked as if giant hands had grabbed the ground and pulled up on one side while pressing down on the other side at the same time. Al, Lisa, William, and Morgan raced up the slope on the right.

Below them,
Callie and Hank had already passed the split where the cliff began. They saw the others up above and veered toward the wall. It rose up only ten feet high where they met it. William stopped and reached down to help them scramble up. Using their hands to climb, they quickly reached the top and continued forward along the cliff’s edge.

If the Tyrannosaurus
takes the high path, then what?
Tim thought. There was ample room along the top of the cliff for the dinosaur. Tim stayed to the left, on the lower ground. He passed the spot where Callie and Hank climbed up, hoping the tyrannosaur would follow him. The wall grew taller and steeper next to him as he ran.

He looked back to see the dinosaur enter the clearing behind him. Tim tried to speed up, but couldn’t. His legs burned. He picked a spot
along the cliff about twenty feet high and ran up the scree of loose rocks at the base. He hit the wall and began to climb. In seconds he was halfway up.

“Tim! Hurry!
Hurry
!” William shouted from above. Tim found a diagonal ledge that allowed him to scramble a bit higher. “HURRY!”

The snorting of the dinosaur behind him grew louder. Tim’s lungs ached. The top was just out of reach and there was nothing he could grab, no way to get any leverage on the smooth rock surface.

William appeared above, reaching down. “I gotcha boy,
jump!
” He looked at Tim, glanced off beyond him, and then looked back. “JUMP NOW!”

It was a one shot deal. He could jump and he could easily reach William’s hand, but if the man
did not hold onto him, there was no way he could keep from sliding back down the wall.

He pushed off and reached, his right hand grabbing William’s wrist just as William clasped his own. Tim waited for the
Tyrannosaurus to bite his legs and pull him back down.

William held tight and hoisted him up over the top of the
cliff. Tim rolled away from the edge and lay on the ground.

Panting, Tim swung around and looked back, face to face with the largest predator to ever walk the
Earth.

Al
couldn’t stop smiling. They were safe. The tyrannosaur was only a few feet away, but it could not reach them. “Look at him!”