The Dinosaur Four (21 page)

Lisa exhaled.
“They really better find that device.”

Helen
lowered the tiny fish into the trash can, where it knocked against the plastic walls.

Within
a half hour, the trash can held eight fish. The largest was just over five inches long. All eight put together would barely feed one person. Lisa had filled the trash can with river water and left it in the shade on the front sidewalk to keep them fresh.

Helen
had changed out all the fishhooks for larger ones and they had not caught anything since. The two women sat at a table near the front of the café. Helen knitted, but she had trouble concentrating. The plastic needles clacked slowly together and she stopped frequently to make corrections.

She felt discouraged. Larry always caught a big fat walleye or trout on their camping trips. What she had caught didn’t even qualify as fish. They were minnows. She began to doubt that she
and Lisa could survive here alone.

Helen had also begun to worry about her pills. Her purse held a plastic container with little compartments for each day of the week.
Today was Wednesday, so the first three compartments were already empty. The remaining four compartments each contained eight pills. She thought she could live without the diuretic and anti-depressant, but she was not so sure what would happened when she stopped taking medication for her thyroid, blood pressure, potassium, osteoporosis, and glaucoma. Worst of all, she could not remember what the eighth pill was supposed to treat.
Maybe it’s for my memory
.

Helen put down her knitting needles. “
Sweetie, would you explain to me again how the machine is supposed to work.” Their only chance, she thought, was for William and the others to come back and save them.

“It
goes off automatically fifteen hours after it brought us here.”

“And how much time do we have left?”

Lisa pulled out her phone and checked the clock. “A little less than seven hours, I think. That’s assuming William’s estimate was right. And assuming the machine actually works. And assuming they find the damn thing.”

A pterosaur landed on one of the parking meters outside.

“Look,” whispered Lisa.

The pterosaur held its pale bat-wings wide and turned
its head from side to side, surveying the scene. Perched upright, the creature stood about two feet tall. It cocked its head as if asking a question. Lisa cocked her own head in response. “What do you want, little guy?”

The reptile hopped off the meter and landed on the sidewalk next to the trash can. It held its head perfectly motionless as it stared into the water. In a flash, it stabbed, jack-hammering into the bucket with its beak.

Lisa jumped up, knocking over her chair, and ran out the front window.

The pterosaur turned, leapt off of the sidewalk, and flapped away.

“Great.”

“How many are left?”

“Two.” Lisa picked up the bucket and moved it inside.

Helen
sucked air, making a hissing sound. They still had plenty of muffins and scones, but at some point they would run out. Two tiny fish would not sustain them. They needed something bigger. “That flying fella had some real meat on him,” Helen commented. “If we could catch one of those, we would have a meal.”

“I was okay with the
idea of eating prehistoric fish.” Lisa scrunched up her nose. “I’m not so sure about bird dinosaurs.”

“Sweetie, if we’re stuck here, you might need to move outs
ide your culinary comfort zone. If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat it.”

“How
do we even know it’s safe to eat? Could it be poisonous?”

“I’m sure it’s fine. Probably tastes like squirrel.”

“Yuck. What the hell does squirrel taste like?”

“Chicken.”

“Well, why didn’t you say it probably tastes like chicken?”

Helen
smiled and resumed knitting. “So what happens if the others find the machine and it goes off before they get back here?”

Lisa gave a small shrug. “Well, I guess they will go back to some other part of
Denver. Someplace east of the city, since that’s the direction they went.” She dropped her hands on the table. “If that happens, we might find out eventually, because whatever was
there
will show up
here
.”

Helen stared. “I don’t understand.”

“You swap places. Whenever the machine goes through time, it swaps out whatever is there. If the machine goes off in the jungle three miles east of here, they will arrive… I dunno, maybe in the Denver Zoo, because that’s three miles east of my café. And then the lions or zebras or whatever would be transferred here.”

“Ok, I get it,” Helen nodded. “Whatever is in the same spot in
Denver will get swapped here.” She made a clucking laugh. “Imagine being trapped in dinosaur times and getting eaten by a lion.”

“
Beth would have loved the irony,” Lisa said, staring into space. She patted the table repeatedly. “But they really need to get back here before time runs out in order to do anything with the fail-safe.”

“
Explain that part again. What does the fail-safe do?”

Lisa took one of Helen’s knitting needles and placed it in the middle of the table. “
This is time. The needle’s point is where we were when we left Denver, ok?” She took a scrap of yarn and laid it on the table so that one end touched the point. “This is the path we took, back to here.” She traced the yarn along the needle and touched it to the knob at the other end.

“That’s where we are now,” Helen said.
“Dinosaur time.”

Helen realized that
Lisa was explaining it to herself as much as to her. “After fifteen hours, the machine follows the same path back.” She traced the yarn again.

Helen
nodded for her to go on.

Lisa placed a much shorter piece of yarn at the point and
curved it to touch the shaft of the needle an inch back. “This is what the fail-safe does. It takes us back twenty minutes. When we get back to Denver, we’re supposed to go back in time twenty minutes and stop the experiment from ever happening. We go to the café and tell ourselves to get out of there, so that we never go back in time at all.” She removed the longer piece of yarn. “If we succeed, this never happens.”

“Why would they make the
time machine do something like that?”

“Beth…” Lisa took a deep breath. “Beth
was always telling stories when business was slow. Some that she read, some that she saw at the movies, and some that she made up. She loved to make up stories about the customers. Anyway, she told me a couple of time travel stories where people went back in time and accidentally erased themselves or made some change to human evolution. Everyone had gills or green skin when they came home. I think maybe the researchers upstairs were afraid of something like that happening.”

Helen thought it all sounded
insane. “How could you possibly use the fail-safe if you got erased?”

Lisa crossed her arms. “
I don’t know, Helen. I don’t know if any of this will work. I’ll be surprised if they make it back here with the device, much less figure out how to use the failsafe.”

“You think we’re stuck here?”

Lisa nodded. “I want you to teach me how to catch one of those bird-dinosaurs.”

Callie sat on the beach, cold and clammy and still sobbing.
Someone sitting next to her picked bits of seaweed from the tangles in her hair. She wasn’t even sure who it was. She didn’t care. Occasionally, he rubbed her arms. A distant part of her realized that she was shivering and he was trying to warm her up. It did not work.

Callie stared at the sand in front of her, hating herself. Somehow, beyond comprehension, she was not thinking of Hank. She thought instead of Andrew. Andrew, the guy she had slept with just two weeks before Hank proposed to her.
No. You didn’t sleep with him, did you Callie? You fucked him.
This brought a fresh round of wracking sobs.

It wasn’t really cheating, was it? She and Hank were only dating at the time. Of course, they had been
only dating
for a year and a half. Fucking Andrew had been the best sex ever. She had not regretted it for a moment, because somehow it had brought her closer to Hank and then sure enough, two weeks later he had proposed. Down on one knee and everything. It was more than she deserved.

The tears flowed and the sobs came with each breath.
She wanted to take it back. She never should have let Andrew buy her that drink.

She looked up as
William, Morgan, and Tim walked out of the surf. Tim stopped at the high tide line and took off his personal floatation device, still uninflated. He threw it down on the ground. Morgan held something in his hands and Callie wondered for a moment if it was Hank’s head. Callie made herself look and saw that it was the time device. She saw a few shallow dents from the crocodile’s teeth, but it seemed otherwise undamaged. The orange light blinked on and off.

Callie remembered standing in the ocean
, unable to move and screaming hysterically with her hands splayed and shaking at the side of her face. William had splashed over to her, shouting her name. Hank’s head bobbed into his knee.

She had wanted
William to bring Hank’s body ashore, but she couldn’t form the words to tell him. It would have meant picking up the head. How do you tell someone to pick up a head? William had dragged Callie, quite literally kicking and screaming, back to the beach.

William
walked up to her.
This will be good,
she thought, still crying.
William has never had any training in grief counseling. He won’t know what to say.
It didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything he could say.

He
crouched and put a hand on her knee. “Callie, we got to move on now, girl,” William told her. “We got the device. It will go off soon. We have to get back, and you’ve got to come with us.”

He
brushed the sand off of her feet and put on her socks, slowly rolling them up and adjusting the toes so that the stitch ran across the top. “My boys used to make me fix them this way,” he explained. Then he put on her running shoes and tied them tight with double knots. When he finished, William took her hand.

Callie looked
at him.
Go with you?
She looked out to the sea. The herd had moved south, where they were slowly disappearing into the haze. Many of the pterosaurs remained behind, splashing and playing out in the water. They screeched as they dropped to the surface and then climbed back up to circle overhead, like buzzards.
That’s where we were
, she realized. The pterosaurs were fighting over Hank’s remains.

She couldn’t stop crying and she didn’t know what she wanted to do. She wanted it to be over. She turned and noticed Al, sitting beside her with his arm on her shoulder. How long had he been holding her? She suddenly knew one thing she wanted
. She wanted to be away from Al. She shrugged free and allowed William to pull her to her feet.

Al glared.
He walked away and yanked the shovel out of the sand.

William squeezed her hand.
“That’s it, girl. We got to get back now.”

Forcing herself to not look out to sea again, Callie turned toward the dunes and started walking, not sure exactly which way to go, but wanting to get as far from t
his horrible beach as possible.

She
walked alone in front of the group with her arms folded across her chest, hugging herself tightly. She forced herself to stop crying. Her throat was raw and her eyes had dried out. As she wandered around the dunes, she focused on a single question:
What am I supposed to do now?

That’s a stupid thing to ask
, came a response, surprising her.

She didn’t look around. It was clearly Hank’s voice, and since Hank had been beheaded, it was clearly in her mind. Callie gave a small nod.
Okay. I get it.
She was a psychiatrist after all. This was obviously her mind’s way of coping with the fact that she was in shock. As soon as she got back home, she would write herself a prescription for Lorazepam and try to sleep for a year.

You’re supposed to keep going. You’re supposed to get back home
, said the Hank-in-her-head.
You know that’s what you need to do.

Callie gave another almost imperceptible nod.

A few moments later, William walked over and took Callie’s hand again. They walked hand-in-hand without saying anything.

Tim walked behind Callie and William and tried to picture how he would react
if something happened to Julie. Even though he had only known her for a few weeks, the thought unnerved him and he had been unnerved enough already today. The crocodile had swum right by him when it turned to flee. Tim had frozen as it approached, crouched with his legs bent, ready to propel himself away at the last minute and knowing damn well that it wouldn’t work.