Dragon Dawn (Dinosaurian Time Travel) (26 page)

“Until Kris found the feather it seemed like a crazy dream. But now, I think the Keeper hypnotized me somehow.”

Kris nodded. “Talk about crazy! What I’m intrigued with is the part about time paradox, where the Keeper has his body now. If I’m getting this right, he speculated his future preserved mind had communicated with Dawn. Also, I’m interested in what he said about Dawn being the creature outside. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“We will speak about that later,” Tasha said. “I should examine Dawn immediately. There could be traces of semen––”

“This is bull!” Gus’s gaze veered from face to face until he zeroed in on Dawn. “Did you tell her?” he asked. “Did you tell Tasha about us? Well, did you?”

“Gus, I...”  Dawn didn’t have the guts to tell him she couldn’t recall anything about him. Only, perhaps, her time with the Keeper.

She closed her eyes against his heated stare, wishing she could remember what had happened between her and Gus.

And only Gus.

***

Gus had rarely felt such blind hatred. If what Dawn said was true, if that alien bastard had actually raped her.

No, it had to be a nightmare.

He fought his feelings as he studied the pale cast of Dawn’s skin. “Go on,” he told her more evenly, “tell them we slept together last night. My semen must still be in you.”

There was dead silence in the room. 

“Let me speak to Dawn and Gus alone,” Tasha told Harry and Kris.

They rose. Harry gave Gus a small nod, then followed Kris outside.

Once they were gone, Tasha sighed. “We should discuss everything that happened, but I believe I can prove whether incident occurred with alien Keeper. It will be like rape exam.”

Fucking unbelievable!
Gus’s anger surged again and he looked out the window. He needed to get the hell out of here.

Tasha was still jabbering, “... human sperm is different in appearance from sperm of other species. I would assume similar situation happens with aliens, so if I do get sample of unusual-looking sperm––”

“E
nough,
” Gus cut in. “Just do what you have to do.”

“I beg your pardon?” Tasha asked.

The cold knot of fury in Gus’s guts threatened to interfere with his judgment. When he realized this, he made an effort to calm himself. “Sorry,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Gus, it’s okay. Go outside and cool down.” Dawn gave him a pleading look as she reached for his hand.

He grabbed a shotgun off the rack and stormed through the hatch. 

The comet blazed in the southeastern sky. He raised his gun and aimed, wishing it was the Keeper’s head.

In the next moment, he lowered his weapon. Waste of ammo. He spit on the ground, then started walking away from the lander. 

What should have been the best day of his life had just turned into a pile of crap.

***

“What
is
his problem?” Tasha asked. 

Dawn ignored her. “It couldn’t be true, could it? I mean... how could the Keeper come here?”

Tasha patted Dawn’s hand, her Russian accent soft and soothing to her ears. “There, there, my dear. I am sure we will find nothing sinister. It was dream, only terrible dream.”

Dawn followed Tasha to the infirmary. The examination was thorough, yet efficient – Tasha’s usual style – and the results were clear in a matter of minutes. 

“Only traces of human sperm,” Tasha said as she reexamined the results under the microscope. “I was not even sure if alien would have sperm, but I do not see anything unusual here.”

Despite the reassurances, Dawn still felt spooked about not recalling anything about Gus. She wondered if she should tell Tasha.

No, she decided. Tasha was right. It was the meds. She’d taken too many last night. 

But I do need to see Gus, to try to explain.

A few minutes later, Dawn came down the steps of the
Valiant
, gaze fixed on Gus’s back. “Hey,” she called out.

He turned. Dawn didn’t like the look in his eyes. She hesitated. What could she say to him? “We need to talk,” she managed.

He nodded, his lips a tight, grim line, obviously bracing himself for some bad news.

“Let’s go inside,” Dawn said, tilting her head toward the lander.

“No, you tell me out here.” He looked off into the distance.

She came over to his side and grabbed his hand. Her gaze followed his stare. Dark gray clouds had formed over the Rockies. It was raining somewhere on the mountains.

“The test was negative,” she said. “There’s no evidence of an alien. So, it must’ve been a dream or hallucination, probably from too many painkillers.”

“I see.”

She squeezed his hand. 

“Then what about the feather?” he asked impassively.

“I have no idea. Maybe it’s one of the feathers you guys found the other day outside the lander. Somehow, it got into my room.” Smiling, she indicated the
Valiant
with a tilt of her head. “You know how messy things can get in that tin can.”

He didn’t smile back.

Okay, okay. Gus has a right to feel the way he does
. Again, Dawn regarded him, saw the determined cut of his jaw, sensed his tough, yet down-to-earth and at times vulnerable, nature. He’d always be there for her. She had no doubt about that. And there’d be other times between them, times she
would
remember.

“Gus, about last night...”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then dropped her hand and walked away.

She stood there without moving, dazed by his seeming rejection.

As he neared the bushes, he turned and said, “I’ll be back, but there’s somethin’ I’ve got to do first.” 

“Oh, Gus, don’t leave me.” She looked up at the sky. “We’ve got to get out of here soon. Jean-Michel said it’s less than two days ‘til the comet strikes.”

“I’ll be back in plenty of time. I’m not leavin’ you, darlin’. No way. But you stay put. Stay with Tasha and the others now. Remember what I told you last night. I meant every word.” 

Before she could react, he gave her a big smile, then slipped into the brush.

What did you tell me?
Dawn stared after him, wild with frustration.
What in God’s name did you say?

***

Head down, Gus ran alongside the trail. Because he had hunted for most of his youth, he was a good tracker. The two sets of three-toed prints – one man-sized and the other half again as large – were clear and easy to follow. He’d spotted the tracks just before Dawn started to talk about last night. And he had no doubt the bigger prints were made by the Keeper, no doubt at all.

But Gus was not so sure about the second, more ill-defined, set of footprints. Could they belong to the strange creature Dawn spotted the night before? Did that mean the Keeper was doing some tracking of his own?

Suddenly, Gus heard a rumbling sound. He looked up and almost stumbled straight into the rump of a squat, armored, butt-ugly dinosaur, which he compared to a giant armadillo. On second glance, he realized it wasn’t much like an armadillo, after all; the creature had thick, bony plates and a few spikes on its back and another bony plate covering the top of its skull. 

Gus caught a whiff of something bad and realized he’d just heard the biggest fart of his life. He took a closer look and recognized the four-legged beast as an ankylosaur from one of Harry’s endless lectures. He also recalled Harry saying it was probably one of the dumber dinosaurs, a lumbering herbivore that often traveled alone in search of plants. 

Gus watched the beast for a moment, hoping it would move on, but it didn’t budge. It was methodically eating its way through a huge patch of ferns. 

Damn
!
He gagged as the ankylosaur’s stench enveloped him. He held his breath as he eyed the animal’s tail, which had a nasty-looking bony club at its tip. Stepping aside, he waded waist-deep through the ferns, while keeping an eye on the lethal posterior. One hit with the tail-club, he realized, and he’d be dead meat for sure.

The ankylosaur continued to browse on the ferns, seemingly oblivious to Gus’s presence.

Without looking back, Gus exhaled loudly. The three-toed tracks were still distinct.
Demon footprints
, he thought with venomous certainty.
It’s like I’m tracking Lucifer himself
.

He raced on toward the hills. But he wasn’t scared. No way. Oh, his guts churned with outrage, especially when he considered what the Keeper had done to Dawn, but there was logic in his actions, too. If the Keeper had arrived here in the flesh, it meant he had a plan. Was he heading toward something? 

Again, Gus remembered Dawn’s description of the weird dinosaur-humanoid. Could the Keeper be trying to prevent that creature from leaving Earth? Were both of them going to the same place, toward a time portal located somewhere in the distance? 

He realized he might have stumbled on a way to get back to the future. He smiled to himself. And if he did happen to find the Keeper before he left Cretaceous Earth, what then?

I’ll kill him
, Gus thought icily.
Screw the consequences
. Blind hatred surged inside of him. All he wanted now was one shot. That’s all it’d take. Just one clean shot, and he’d take care of him once and for all.

Gus ran on. After another half hour or so, he reached an area surrounded by tall, limestone bluffs. A noisy, bubbling creek flowed past the rocks. On the shore stood copses of trees that looked like cottonwoods. He stopped and stared. The area reminded him of the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas.

Puffing hard, he studied the opposite shore. Both creatures had gone straight through the water, for the tracks came out on the other stream bank and then ascended a passageway formed by a cleft in the cliff-face. At the base of the wide, limestone escarpment, a terraced slope rolled down to the water. Even from this angle, Gus could tell it was covered with broken rock, soil, and clumps of flowering bushes.

Gus knelt down, took a long drink out of the creek, then got to his feet and pressed on. After splashing through the water, he reached the bank and stopped briefly, looking for any signs of life. There were scattered
dinosaurs tracks here and there, but the only living things around were some dragonflies and a few weird turtles with long tails, sunning themselves on a log near the water. 

Nothing, however, looked otherworldly.

“Gusss!”

He blinked.

“Gusss!” Both times, the name was hissed out, snakelike.

Gus turned and spotted the Keeper. The alien stood about twenty meters away, beneath the limestone rock shelter. He was tall and muscular and bronze as a statue, with a hawklike face that looked tough and arrogant, and a big whip of a tail. 

A huge, reptilian-humanoid motherfucker.

“You cannot ssstop me,” the Keeper shouted, flicking his tail sideways like an annoyed tomcat.

“Wanna bet?” Gus felt deadly calm. He raised his gun, aimed for the alien’s head, and fired.

As quick as a thought, the Keeper leapt backward toward the bluff and disappeared. A cloud of dust burst from the cliff-face, indicating the ammo had missed him, hitting the rocks instead. 

Where the hell was he? Gus lowered his weapon and cautiously moved forward. When he reached the spot where the Keeper had stood, he looked at the ground. Loose rubble hid any sign of tracks. Just where had he gone? 

After Gus started poking around, he caught sight of a shadowy spot beneath the cliff overhang. He moved closer and saw it was a cave entrance. It looked like it was big enough for something man-sized to fit through. 

He walked forward until he could feel a draught of cool air streaming from the pitch-black depths.
So
, he thought,
the Keeper didn’t vanish. He’s down there somewhere
.

Gus stopped, considering his options. He’d been in only one cave in his entire life. When he was around seven years old, his parents had taken him down to Kickapoo Caverns in Texas. He remembered being scared to death in a place called Green Cave, especially when he saw the bat flights at dusk. His daddy had held onto his hand then, telling him that big boys didn’t cry at little ol’ pesky bats.

Gus looked around, painfully aware of the differences now. There were no bats around here – they hadn’t evolved yet – and his father wouldn’t be born for eons.

Shaking his head, he regarded the cave entrance. If he did go in, would
the Keeper be waiting for him? The alien would have the advantage. Since Gus had no flashlight, he’d be fumbling around in the dark. 

Suddenly, he felt the silent-mode vibration of his communicator. He had ignored several buzzes he’d felt while tracking the Keeper – he assumed Dawn had been trying to reach him – but he needed to talk to someone now. He reached into his pocket. “What is it?” he bluntly asked.

“Gus!” Dawn said. Her worried face stared back at him on the screen. “Gus, are you all right? Jean-Michel’s got you on J-Stars. Harry and Kris are coming in the Rover. They’ll be at your position soon.”