The Dinosaur Four (34 page)

He stared at a small clump in the middle of the street. A clump that had fallen from the tyrannosaur’s mouth as it shook Julie apart. A piece of her. He had brought this monster here.
His breath hitched and he vomited into the gutter. It was his fault. He wanted to go back. He would go back and stay in the past forever if he could. He would get the time machine and use it to –

“
The fail-safe.”

Tim
struggled to his feet, dizzy. A hand grabbed his shoulder. “Tim, the fail-safe!” It sounded like Callie.

His
breath returned in quick hitches. The fail-safe was inside that fucking dinosaur, walking down the street.

Callie
thrust the shovel into his hand. “
Tim,
go get the fail-safe now!”
Callie sounded commanding. She sounded like Hank.

Tim
started moving. Across the street, an oversized white pickup truck sat half on the curb. It was exactly the sort of truck driven by the crews at Tim’s construction jobs. He had owned one himself for a few years. The driver of the pickup craned his head out the window, watching the tyrannosaur stomp away. Tim ran to the truck, forcing himself to not look at the clumps he passed in the street.

The driver
was more than six feet tall and covered with tattoos. The ends of his mustache drooped below his chin.

Tim ran toward the pickup, a Dodge Ram, holding the shovel low to his side. He ripped open the door and shouted, “
Get out of that truck!
” Hank would have been proud.

Two gashes ran down Tim’s face. His clothes were filthy and ragged. Dark blood covered the shovel in his hands.
The driver scrambled across the cab and flung himself out the passenger door.

Tim tossed the shovel onto the seat next to him, slammed the truck into gear and fishtailed around a hundred and eighty degrees. He ignored the flapping passenger door and scanned the dashboard for a clock. 8:08
a.m.

How much time did he have? The time machine would only take him back twenty minutes. If
he didn’t use the fail-safe before twenty minutes passed it would not do any good. It would take him back to a point in time
after
the café returned. After the tyrannosaur killed Julie.

In order to stop all of this from happening, he had to get the device, trigger it, and get everyone out of the café before they went back in time. He
really only had seventeen or eighteen minutes. Two or three had already gone by.

Tim swerved to avoid a pedestrian coming out of an alley and accelerated
after the dinosaur.

On a parallel street to the north, Lieutenant Harold Daniels of the Denver Police Department received a report of an explosion at the corner of Chestnut and 15th. Lieutenant Daniels, a mounted patrol officer, guided his chestnut mare Hadley away from the 16th Street pedestrian mall to investigate. He expected to find a blown transformer or possibly a backfiring car.

As he approached
15th Street, still several blocks east of Chestnut, the forty-five foot long tyrannosaur passed by. Lieutenant Daniels saw the blood-stained teeth of the beast and determined immediately that the creature was both real and dangerous. He dug into Hadley’s flanks. The brown horse galloped forward alongside the dinosaur.

In one continuous move, Lieutenant Daniels unclipped his holster, drew his pistol, flipped off the safety, and fired ten rounds into
the tyrannosaur’s left shoulder, close to where he thought its heart should be. Hadley continued to gallop, neither slowing nor swerving. She had trained for many hours with Daniels, including live fire exercises, and she performed masterfully.

The bullet stings annoyed the beast. It lurched to a stop, clenching into the asp
halt with its claws. It twisted around and roared, mouth wide. None of Hadley’s training had included anything like this. She reared up and whinnied, but Lieutenant Daniels held on. He decided to get clear and call for backup. Hadley’s front hooves hit the ground and Daniels spurred her like a jockey, hunkering down as low in the saddle as he could get. The tyrannosaur took one step and grabbed the horse and rider between its jaws. It bit down until the neck and flanks of the horse fell away to either side. It swallowed the rest, including most of Lieutenant Daniels.

The tyrannosaur ignored the pieces that dropped and pressed forward. Its heart pumped with adrenaline as it looked left and right, trying to find a way out of th
is foul, rocky ravine it had somehow ended up in.

Suddenly it felt a new stinging across its chest. It had wandered into the power lines over one of
Denver’s light rail train tracks. The stinging persisted and the dinosaur backed away, enraged. The street behind it was nearly empty, so it started back in that direction.

Tim drove straight toward it, only a block away now. He pulled on his seatbelt. He would slam into it, breaking both of its legs. Tim floored the gas pedal.

A
head, the tyrannosaur entered an intersection and looked down the side street, where it saw something friendly and familiar in this world of concrete and asphalt. It spotted the Cherry Creek greenway, a canal-like chasm which ran along the edge of the downtown district. A small creek bordered by grass on both sides ran down the middle, one story below street level. The greenway was a lush oasis in a desert of concrete and asphalt.

The tyrannosaur turned the corner seconds before
the white pickup reached it.

Tim screeched through the intersection, locking the brakes and frantically spin
ning the steering wheel to turn the truck around. He looped back and started down the street in time to see the tyrannosaur stop at the edge of the canal. It roared and stepped down onto the grass below.

Tim sped up again
. The dinosaur’s head stuck up out of the canal at the end of the block. He grabbed the shovel and crammed its blade deep into the crevice at the back of the passenger seat. Again, he pressed the gas pedal against the floor. The eight-cylinder engine roared forward.

The truck crashed t
hrough a short iron railing at the edge of the greenway, ripping it from its concrete footings. The impact barely slowed the vehicle, but it was enough to trigger the airbags. White balloons exploded in Tim’s face, blocking his view and saving his life.

The Dodge Ram sailed through the air and collided with the tyrannosaur’s shoulder. Five thousand pounds of
Detroit steel shoved the animal into the opposite wall of the canal.

The tyrannosaur’s body crumpled under the impact. Eleven ribs broke clean through. Three
of them punctured one of the dinosaur’s lungs, causing it to collapse. The truck held in the air for an instant before falling backwards. Its rear wheels splashed in the creek. Tim waved the white nylon airbag free from his face and tugged the shovel out of the passenger seat. As he jumped down from the cab, his right shin screamed at him. His tibia had sustained a hairline fracture in the crash.

Tim hurried around the front of the vehicle as the stunned dinosaur
started to regain its senses. Its head lay before him, one eye looking up. Fresh blood oozed from the gash in its nose where Tim had struck it inside the café, sixty-seven million years earlier.

The tyrannosaur pulled a leg underneath its body and shifted its weight. The
dinosaur grunted and pulled the second leg under its body. The truck rolled a few feet away as the tyrannosaur lifted its torso from the ground.

It now focused on Tim. Its head, still low, ratcheted back. The
thick muscles in its neck coiled. One quick snap would eliminate this annoyance that had just brought so much pain. It opened its mouth and inhaled.

Tim lifted the shovel overhead and
used all of his strength to plunge it directly into the dinosaur’s left eye. The blade split the three-inch eyeball like a water balloon. He pushed deeper and felt the snap of the thin bones surrounding the eye socket.

T
he head of the shovel disappeared into the dinosaur’s skull. The tip of the steel blade penetrated the tyrannosaur’s brain. The beast reared up, pulling Tim three feet off the ground, and then collapsed in a heap.

Still holding on to
the shovel, Tim put one foot on the dinosaur’s cheek, just below the eye socket. Time was running out. He yanked the shovel free, splattering his shirt with white bits of sclera from the eyeball. He turned to the monster’s belly.

A bicyclist approached on one of the pathways running alongside the creek. “What the hell? Do you need
some-?”

“Get away from here!” Tim growled. He didn’t have time to explain and he sure didn’t want anyone close by.

He heaved the shovel into the dinosaur’s underbelly. It felt like striking solid rock. The blade bounced off of its thick hide. “
Shit!”
He didn’t have time for this.

Tim reared back, ready to try another strike, and noticed scabbed blood around one of the holes created b
y the Triceratops’ horn in the battle by the cliff. He shifted his stance and rammed the shovel at the hole. It penetrated the wound, widening it. After four more heaves, Tim knew he had found the stomach. Blood, mixed with an oily yellow fluid, burst from the opening and onto his hands. The acrid stench of stomach acid, bile, and decomposition poured over him as he dug into the dinosaur’s gut. Every passing second felt like an eternity.

Foul, partly digested hunks of meat spilled out onto the bike path. Tim tried to ignore them, to avoid noticing which were
Triceratops and which were human.
Dear God, don’t let me find Julie.
He rammed the shovel deep into the body cavity, testing different areas. Finally, the head of the shovel clanged against something metal.

“Ah Ha HA!” Tim shouted. He threw down the shovel and reached into the hole with both hands, covering himself in gore. Out came the football. Its light blinked
on and off through a sheen of blood.

Cradling the
blood-slicked time device in two hands, Tim spun around. He would run to the café and trigger the fail-safe. He would clear everyone out. He would stop it all from happening.

No, wait
.

This was the perfect spot. If he triggered
the device near the café, it might swap out someone standing nearby. It might cut someone in half. The path on the Cherry Creek greenway was deserted, though Tim noticed a crowd beginning to gather on the street above.

He dropped to his knees and rolled the device over in front of him. The LED screen had gone blank. Tim
lifted the plastic lid from the fail-safe button.

“
Please work.”

He slid his finger under the lid and
pressed the button. The ticking began immediately.

Tick. Tick
-Tick. Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick TICK TICK TICK TICKTICKTICK-

The dead tyrannosaur and the Dodge pickup disappeared, but everything else looked the same. Of course. He had only traveled back in time twenty minutes.
He glanced around for body parts, to see if anyone had been split in half at the edge. Thankfully, there were none.

He looked down at the device. The LED
now read 0:00:09:54 and counting down.
That answers that.
The device had gone twenty minutes into the past and would stay here for half that time. Then it would automatically jump back forward, returning to the moment he had just left.

The timer was now down to 0:00:09:42.
He had less than ten minutes to get back to the café.

Tim ran up the pedestrian ramp.
Next question- How long before the café disappears?
He held the football tightly as he ran, each step sending pain up his leg. Had he been fast enough? He tried to remember how much time had passed since the café had returned. The chase to the creek had taken at least five minutes. Maybe more. Probably more. It had felt like an eternity digging the stupid machine out of the tyrannosaur’s guts.

Tim reached street level and ran down the sidewalk, drenched in blood and cradling the metallic ball in his arms. The morning crowd, that slow-moving sea of suits, parted around him.

Rounding the corner, he saw the café, two blocks away and still intact. It had not gone back yet. He still had a chance to save everyone. Tim sped up, ignoring the pain in his leg.

A
woman approached the café from the opposite direction, pulled along by a brown mutt that looked familiar. Morgan Jackson walked a few steps ahead of her.

Buddy! Morgan!
Recognition, followed by realization. “
NO!”

Tim was still a block and a half away when the café disappeared. The
pop echoed down the street. Cinderblocks fell from the walls above. Prehistoric river water splashed onto the street. The woman on the sidewalk, Buddy’s owner, held up her handless arm.

He
was too late.
William. Hank. Patricia. Beth. Morgan.
They were all on their way to their deaths, and there was nothing he could do to save them.