The Dinosaur Four (14 page)

Lisa and Al moved to the area she indicated. The floor sloped downward toward the river just like the
section of floor directly below, in the café. Al peered over the edge into the water. “Whatever was here slid down into that river. It’s gone.”

“Nice,” said Morgan. “Good job lady.”

William thought for a moment, his eyes bright. “We can get it. We can dam the river, or divert it. Even if it takes us months.” He regretted the words as they left his mouth. The woman lying in front of him clearly did not have months. Nevertheless, he would not stop until he found it.

She shook her head slightly. The action triggered a
coughing sputter. Blood welled in her mouth, changing the outline on her teeth from black to crimson. “You don’t have time. It will go off automatically after… fifteen hours.” She opened her eyes. “But it didn’t sink. It floats. We made it float because there was an inland sea back then. Back
now
. We didn’t want it to show up… here and sink straight to the bottom.”

“The sea,
” exclaimed Callie. “We saw the sea from the cliff. If that thing fell into the river, it must have floated down to the sea. It’s probably washed up on the beach or something.”

“Fifteen hours,”
repeated William, looking at his watch. He guessed that three hours had passed already.

“That isn’t much time to find it,” Lisa said. “For all we know, it’s stuck against a rock
somewhere along the river. Or if it reached the sea, it could be halfway to Africa by now.”

“We’ve got to try,” William said. “We’ve got time, and we’ve got a chance to get home now.” He
wanted to hug his sons. They never hugged him anymore, not since they became teenagers, but they sure as hell were going to give him a hug when he got back. If he could survive fifteen hours in the Cretaceous, he could make his sons hug him. He leaned over the wounded woman. “Assuming we can find your machine, how close do we have to be to it?”

She
closed her eyes again, but kept talking. “Not sure.” She gave a ghastly grin full of blood-outlined teeth. “Our test was only supposed to have… a four-foot radius. It wasn’t supposed to take the whole room.”

“What the shit,
” Morgan spat. “You took the whole room, the room downstairs, and some of the sidewalk out front too!”

If the woman heard him, she gave no sign of it. “Tell me about the T-rex.”

“It killed a Triceratops in the jungle,” William answered. “A short hike from here. We’re hoping it fills up and leaves us alone.”

Morgan was unable to remain seated. “I’ll tell you about the T-rex, Doctor Dumbass. The
t-rex ate a girl. A cool girl who was nice as fuck.”

William turned and looked at him but didn’t say anything.

“He’s
got a point,” Al said.

Tim waved his hand. “Everybody shut up for a minute. We’re talking about a time machine here.” He crouched close. “
Listen, ma’am, we lost two people. One got trampled and the T-rex killed the other. Can we reuse this thing, this football? The time machine?”

William’s
mind raced as he considered the possibilities. “That’s right. We can set it to take us back earlier, before everything happened. We could save the people who died, and even stop you from... from even being here.”

The woman lay quiet for a moment. “
Maybe.”

“Tell us
what to do.”

“
You can’t reset it. It has to be recharged in the lab.” She gestured weakly at the ruined machinery in the corner. “But it has a power reserve. A fail-safe. It will take you back twenty minutes.” She began another fit of hitching coughs. Fresh blood leaked from the gash on her side.

“Twenty minutes,” Morgan
said. “What the hell good will that do?”

The coughing ended on a wet note and the woman explained slowly. “
We added the fail-safe in case we… screwed up the past. If we got home and things were not right.”

“This is insane,”
Al said.

The woman went on. “
Use it after you get home. Go back twenty minutes and get everyone out of the building. Get
me
out of the building.” She turned her head to one side and let thick blood pour from her mouth.

“Jesus, give her more aspirin,” Al said.
He lowered his voice. “Give her all
the aspirin and put her out of her misery.”

William put one hand on
the woman’s shoulder and gave it the slightest squeeze. He wanted to be sure he understood everything. “So we go find the machine, wait fifteen hours, and it will take us back to Denver? Then we use the fail-safe, go back twenty minutes earlier and clear out the building. That’s it? Nothing else?”

“You need to be here,” she said. A bubble of blood formed
at her lips. It popped as she talked. “Bring it here. It’s a swap. If you’re here, it will take you back to our building. If you’re ten miles away, you’ll show up ten miles away.”

“A swap,” said
Callie. “Does that mean there’s a chunk of dinosaur land back in Denver right now?”

“Sounds like it,” Hank answered.

Morgan’s mouth dropped. “What the shit! There could be dinosaurs loose, running around.”

Hank dismissed him
with the wave of a hand. “Only if they were right here, in this exact spot. The chances of that are pretty slim. William, ask her how to trigger the fail-safe.”

William nodded and looked back down at the woman.
Her lips pulled away from her bloody teeth in a wide grimace. “Do you want more aspirin? It might help with the pain.”

“No.” She roll
ed her head back and forth in a slow, wide arc. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.” Her head stopped rolling and she fell silent. Everyone stared at her.

“Is she dead?” asked Morgan.

William put his hand on the woman’s chest, just below her neck. He held it there for a long time. Her skin
was warm and he felt movement under his fingers, but after a moment he realized that it was his own pulse. “Yeah. I think she is.”

He stood, stretch
ed his tall frame, and looked around the rubble, double-checking that they had not missed the device.
Fifteen hours.
He corrected himself,
Twelve.
Still, there was hope. “We’ve got about twelve hours to find that device and get back here. We should leave immediately.”

“Are we sure?” asked
Al. “That machine killed three people.” He looked at the woman. “Make that four. It clearly did not work how they wanted it to. What if it takes us back another hundred million years instead of forward? What if it blows us up? Are we positive we even want to mess with it?”

William said, “We don’t have a choice. My kids need me and I’m going to do everything I can to get back to them. Even if I die trying.”

Al looked around the group. Everyone else nodded. “Well then, we better get going.”

Lisa stood behind her counter, packing pastries into
a canvas shopping bag. It would take hours to find the device and they would need something to eat along the way. “The Daily Edition” was printed on one side of the bag in old-fashioned newsy typeface. For reasons she never understood, people happily paid her twelve dollars for the bags. They liked her café. It had been a newsstand once and people still felt nostalgic about newsstands. But twelve dollars for a
bag?

She wondered if she should stay at the store while the others went to look for the device. Her foot still throbbed where the rock had pierced it and she
did not want to be in a situation where she had to run from something. Her café was the only place on the planet that felt safe. Also, it felt wrong to leave Helen alone again.

Helen
had listened patiently as everyone explained what they learned upstairs. “So this machine creates a bubble around it when it goes off?”

“Yeah,” Morgan
said. “A big invisible bubble that makes a ticking noise.”

“And
everything inside the bubble goes back to Denver?”

William nodded.
“That’s right. It goes off automatically in about twelve hours.”

“And
you think the machine got washed down the river?” Another nod. Helen had clammed up after that. Lisa thought she knew why. Helen could not go searching through the jungle with the rest of them, even if she wanted to. She would hold the group back. She was terrified of being left behind.

Lisa
understood. If the others failed to return before the device went off, anyone who was not with them would be stuck forever. Of course, there was still the small matter of actually finding the thing.

Al came around the counter and collected an armful of water bottles, also
printed with The Daily Edition logo on the side. It felt strange having customers behind the counter, especially Al. For three years, he had come into her café almost every day. Of course, so had a lot of customers. She realized early on that repeat business went up if she opened an extra button on her blouse and took the time to get her makeup right. It meant getting hassled and flirted with, but most of her customers were well-meaning. Most were professionals.

Al
gave her an awkward smile as he filled the water bottles from the cooler next to the sugar counter.

Al
normally had trouble making eye contact and fidgeted during small talk. She usually smiled politely, served him his drink, always a large black coffee, and moved on to the next customer. Recently, Lisa had read a book called
Tech Lords
, about seven of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Most of them didn’t have very good social skills either. Al wasn’t a multi-millionaire, but he did run his own business, just like her. Besides, her ex-husband had been slick, cool, and popular. And a total jerk. Their marriage had lasted a whopping thirteen months.

The water
cooler ran dry and Al swapped out the bottle for a full one. Lisa hated changing the heavy blue bottles and usually had to get Beth to help her. Al lifted the five-gallon container effortlessly from the ground by its neck.

Maybe he wasn’t slick, cool, and popular, but
Al had been there when she needed him. If not for Al, she would have washed right down the river, just like the time device. Lisa stopped what she was doing and called out to the room. “Hey. We should make a raft.”

William
looked up from his seat at one of the tables, where he had been poring over papers from upstairs, hoping to find some clue about the device. “You are brilliant.”

Lisa blushed. She knew she was determined and she knew that she was
a hard worker. But she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called her brilliant.

Al screwed the cap on the last water bottle
. “Do we have time to build a raft? And what if there are waterfalls or rapids along the way?”

Lisa
drooped, deflated. “Thanks for the support.”

Al
froze, holding his face perfectly still and emotionless. He looked guilty. Lisa almost felt sorry for him. He didn’t seem to know how to navigate around women.

Hank walked over.
“We can’t afford
not
to take the time. Rafting down the river will be much faster than walking through the jungle.”

“Hold on,”
Tim said. “I thought I saw something this morning when I pulled Lisa and Al out of the water. It looked like an alligator. A big one.”

Hank whipped around.
“You
thought
you saw something? Because I
know
I saw a Tyrannosaurus-fucking-rex out there in the jungle. I’ll take my chances on the water.”

“At least on land, we can run,” Tim said. “I can’t swim.
And even if I could, I couldn’t out-swim an alligator.”

Hank shook his head. “I’d still take my chances with a raft. I
f we hike all the way to the ocean and that time machine is snagged on a branch halfway down the river, we’re screwed.”

“And how do you propose
we build a raft?” Al asked. “Should we push the whole café into the water and see if it floats?”

Hank walked to one of the small wooden tables in the middle of the room. He lifted it up and set it on its side. “We use the wood from these tables. We empty out those plastic water jugs and use them for pontoons.”

“Those jugs are our only source of fresh water.” Al’s voice rose an octave. He sounded desperate. “Are you out of your mind?”

Buddy let out a low growl under one of the
remaining tables. Lisa empathized. She didn’t like the arguing either.

Hank slowed his own voice and spoke deliberately, enunciating and projecting. “I believe that if we work together, we can build a solid raft out of the materials at hand in thirty minutes.” He looked from face to face. “We will not need the water in those jugs if we return home in twelve hours. And if somehow we fail, I’d like to point out that we are standing next to a river.”