The Dinosaur Four (18 page)

Lisa grabbed the
man by his wrist and began to drag him.
At least he’s light
. Only a thin strip of his head remained, with an ear attached to a slice of skin. The side of the man’s torso folded together as she pulled, and a burgundy knot fell out. She would have to come back for it. She dragged the body around the domino shelves and over to the section of floor that sloped down to the river.

She
released the half-body and pushed it down the slope with the pole. It soon floated away in the river below.

“You gotta go back for the guts, Lisa.” She thought she might be able to spear the loose organs that had fallen from the bisected body. She did not want to have to pick them up.

As she returned around the shelves, Lisa saw that one
of the pterosaurs had beat her to it. It snatched the last two round globs. They filled a pelican-like pouch under its chin. Lisa raised the pole and the pterosaur departed to the trees.

“Thanks, partner,” she said,
giving a sarcastic thumbs-up as it flew away.

Lisa
moved on to Mister Slushy, ready to get the worst over with. She used the pole to push the ceiling tiles off of his body. His left foot had somehow escaped the charring or electrocution that had turned the rest of him into a soggy, blackened mess. She grabbed the foot and pulled. He was heavier, but he created his own slug-like trail as he she dragged him. He moved along easily on the slick fluid and black flakes. “Bye-bye, Mister Slushy,” Lisa said as he disappeared over the wall.

Finally she turned to the woman who had
told them about the time device. Lisa repositioned the metal pipe under the concrete slab. It took several tries, but she finally levered the concrete high enough to drag out the body. The woman’s legs bent unnaturally in multiple places, all the way down to her...
her shoes!
Lisa dropped the woman’s shoulders and stooped next to her feet, pulling off a pair of patent leather flats.
Size seven! Forget about moccasins.
She wondered if she should have stripped the other bodies, or at least looked for anything useful in their pockets.

Lisa
sat down and put on the shoes.
It’s not like these even matter,
she told herself.
The others will be back soon and we’ll all be heading home.
Her bedroom closet was full of shoes. Lisa flexed her toes. It felt good to have shoes on both feet again and it would be easier to climb back downstairs. She realized that if she had found the shoes earlier, she could have gone down the river with the others. With Al.

Lisa
rummaged through the woman’s pockets, but found only a parking stub. Her belongings must be in her purse, probably stashed in some other part of the building. Lisa pictured an employee break room just outside the radius of the device. She laughed.
Probably the same room where they kept the gun locker.
She took the woman by the arms and dragged her to the slope. Lisa felt something separate inside the woman’s shirt along the way, but the body held together long enough to make it to the slide.

After the woman disappeared under the muddy current,
Lisa inhaled deeply through her nose, testing the air. The first smell she noticed was her own stench, much worse after working in the heat. That was a good sign. She wiped her hands on her pants, determined to use an entire bottle of antibacterial lotion down in the café, and climbed downstairs.

Helen
wore a kind face. “That must have been unpleasant.”

Lisa smiled. “You don’t know the half of it,” she sa
id, exhausted. “There were bird dinosaurs picking at one of the bodies.” She was alone in the café now with Helen. If the others never came back, what then? Tears started to well in her eyes. She wondered if she had made a horrible mistake.

Helen wrapped her in a lavender-scented hug.
“Let’s get your mind off it, sweetie. Let’s see if we can do something with all that equipment they found upstairs.”

Four feet below the raft, the giant crocodile detected a new smell. It changed its trajectory at the last moment, descending back to the cooler depths. It
tasted blood in the water, faint but unmistakable. Blood almost always meant easy prey. The crocodile turned upstream to follow the scent, scattering a school of small silver fish.

The b
lood led straight to the split-faced body of Doctor Anderson. The crocodile felt satiated as it gulped the corpse into its gullet. The reptile would not need to eat for a month thanks to yesterday’s Ankylosaurus, but it might not find anything else for twice that long. A stuffed belly insured against lean times. The smell of blood continued to waft by, and so the crocodile swam further upstream, engorging on the buffet that wafted along on the currents.

As
the crocodile fed, the raft drifted farther away behind it, forgotten.

Beyond the junction, the river grew wider and the current slowed to a crawl. William paddled with the shovel to keep them moving. Callie pointed at his hand. “You mentioned a couple of boys, but I don’t see a ring.”

“Nope. Never married. You are looking at an honest-to-goodness
single black father.” He chuckled and continued, “Their mother was a lot of fun. Probably not too unlike the girls Tim used to go out with. She never quite grew up, though. So I raised the boys myself. Those boys helped
me
grow up.”

“How old are they?” Callie asked.

“Eleven and thirteen.”

“Oh, that must be fun.”

William sighed. “Yep. You can see why I need to get back to them. They are in that giant sorting machine called middle school. I got to make sure they get sorted onto the right path. The one that doesn’t mean working in fast food and living paycheck-to-paycheck for the rest of their lives. Or worse. I need to be back.”

“Julie has a nine-year-old son,” Tim said. “
I have no idea how to act around him.”

“Damn, son,” said
William, “You are serious about this woman.”

“Yeah, well getting stranded millions of years in the past puts things in perspective
.”

Al kept a blank face as he listened. They were supposed to be looking for a time machine, but the raft ride had turned into a fucking social hour. They should be discussing survival tactics. How do you navigate without GPS? How do you predict the weather without an app? The idea of
living without technology sounded glorious. He would never have to look at another screen. Al provided technical support for small companies that had no IT departments of their own. Most were too inept to look up simple solutions on the internet, especially the realtors.

Al had discovered that if he actually solved problems, he lost business. They didn’t need him any more. But if he fixed things
just enough
, he would get another call six months later. The customers didn’t mind. They saw him as the hero.

Now
he was a hero for real. If they made it home, would Lisa still see him that way? Or would they go back to café small talk? Hell, the café was totaled, so there wouldn’t even be that. She would be a celebrity. Everyone in the world would want to meet her. Here, there were exactly four other men on the planet to compete with. One of them was already paired up and one of them was Morgan. Al thought his odds seemed pretty good.

The secret was to find shelter. If they could find a
secure cave, they could live long happy lives here. Lives of freedom and adventure. Here, it didn’t matter if you never knew the right thing to say. All that mattered was that you could take care of things. Al had proven that to Lisa. He took a deep, invigorating breath. The air held more oxygen than in modern Denver. Al felt great. All he had to do was go along on this silly treasure hunt and hope they never found the time machine.

As they grew close to t
he sea, the raft began to scrape across the shallow bottom and even came to a complete stop several times. Hank and Al used their sticks to push the raft forward. The midday sun bore down on them and Callie’s pale skin began to redden. When they rounded the final bend and finally caught sight of the ocean, everyone cheered. Al forced himself to emit a hearty, “Yeah!”

After twenty minutes, though, they seemed no closer.
An onshore breeze held them in place, possibly aided by in incoming tide.
Tides in Colorado
, Al thought. This world was amazing.

“We aren’t getting anywhere,” Morgan complained.

“I think we should walk from here,” William said. There was no bank on the left hand side, only an endless maze of reedy marshes, so they poled over to the right, where they found a sandy shoreline.

Buddy bolted as soon as the raft was close enough, performing another epic leap across a three-foot gap.

“Buddy,
wait!
” Callie shouted. The dog zig-zagged away, disappearing into clumps of sea grasses.

Hank put a firm hand on her shoulder. “Easy with the shouting, babe. That might attract attention.”

“But he’s
gone.”
She glared unhappily.

“He’ll come back, I betcha,” William said.
Al thought he was just trying to make her feel better.

Al climbed off
of the raft and onto the sandy bank. He scanned the river ahead. There was no sign of the football. He wondered if they had missed it somewhere along the way? Did the thing even exist? They were relying on the delusional words of a dying stranger. A stranger who was responsible for their very situation.

The woman had claimed the device floated. Anything could have happened
to it though. Maybe it had been weighed down by rubble that had fallen on top of it. For all they knew, it was sitting on the bottom of the river right below the café, pinned under a pile of concrete, just like the woman herself had been. His heart pounded as a new possibility occurred to him.
What if the device is back at the café and Lisa finds it?
She and Helen might end up going home before the rest of them got back.

William unfastened one of the black nylon straps from the side of the raft and wrapped it around the trunk of a short shrub. Callie, Hank,
Tim, and Morgan all took off their personal floatation devices and tossed them into the raft. None of the vests had been inflated.

Mo
rgan watched William tie up their boat with a look of dismay. “You’re wasting your time, man. We can’t use it to go back upriver.” Just in case the condescending tone wasn’t clear enough, he added, “Duh.”

“We might
need it later,” William explained. “Maybe the machine is way out in the ocean and there are jellyfish everywhere. Or who knows what?”

“Jellyfish.” Morgan
cringed.

Yeah,
Al thought
. Or maybe we’re stuck here for the rest of our lives and we might wish we had a raft at some point along the way.
He appreciated William’s forethought.

William
finished hitching up the raft and collected the shovel. “Ya’ll know I’m from Florida,” he said, starting off toward the sea. “It’ll be good to see the beach again.”

Tim reached into the raft to retrieve his life jacket. Un
-inflated, it amounted to little more than a collection of straps. He put it back on, just in case.

The hike
to the coast took them another hour. The ground alternated between boggy and sandy and they were forced to backtrack several times around wide, stagnant marshes. William left the group more than once to hike back to the river, in case the device was stuck along the shore somewhere. Each time, he returned empty-handed.

Mosquitoes
attacked them in great clouds.

“Maybe one of these will get trapped in amber,” Callie said, smacking her neck and
cringing at the bloody splotch on her palm. “Someone will find it someday, extract the blood from its belly, and make a clone of me.” Hank laughed and put his arm around her. Al felt a jealous itch crawling up his back. Hank probably bent her over every single night.

Finally, they crested the last row of dunes. They stood at the top, looking down at a wide beach of dull brown sand. To their left, the mouth of the river widened to cover
a half mile.

The sea itsel
f was apparently quite shallow. Several hundred yards out, they saw dozens of the largest animals to ever walk the planet.

A herd of
four dozen seismosaurs grazed offshore in knee-deep water. They munched on seaweed, slowly reeling long strands into their mouths like children slurping spaghetti. Their necks stretched eighty feet out. As they lumbered along, they kicked up small waves which rolled back and forth between them.

Tim
looked in awe at the ocean spread out before him. All that water
.
He had never seen the ocean before. It looked like dull slate, not the brilliant blue-green he expected.

“They aren’t real,” Callie said.
“They can’t be. Someone put something in my drink and I’m hallucinating.” Hank put his arm around her.