A Dawn of Mammals Collection
Page 57
Or she could follow Laina now. She had a few more seconds to decide. If she had any paper left, she could scribble a note, leave it here, and go after Laina, and then the others could follow next month. She threw off her pack and began to dig through it.
It was a terrible decision to have to make. Alone, could Laina survive a month? In another month, would they even pop out to the same time as Laina, exactly? Would half a second’s difference put them 10,000 years away from her? Was she consigning Laina to death, alone, in the long-ago world of monstrous animals?
She hesitated, knowing that every second she took to decide was one less second the timegate could be open. She could not step through and push Laina back. It wasn’t a two-way gate. Laina had sworn that was so, and there was no reason to doubt her. She’d been right about everything so far.
If Bob was healthy, she might follow Laina right now. But he wasn’t. Without him, there wasn’t a healthy adult to oversee the kids. They might survive alone—they had a lot of skills now—but they might not. She worried that Dixie would be uncontrollable without an adult present, that Jodi and Zach would certainly have sex, and that one of them would die.
She hadn’t found any paper in her pack. Her gear and supplies were scattered around her now. She unzipped the outer compartment, still looking for paper, still unsure if she was going to step through the gate at the last minute or not, and she saw the commercial pemmican packet that she’d never used. There was still a rock in her pocket. She tied the two together, and she threw them through the timegate. She hoped Laina had packed food, but if not, at least she had one meal.
That’s all she could do for the girl. She had to stay here. It was purely a matter of numbers. Save one of them? Or stay with the majority? She had to let Laina go.
She sat on the ground and stared at the timegate, feeling hopeless, hating her decision, even knowing it was the only one she could make. Could Laina survive alone?
When the timegate flickered and disappeared, it felt like watching the door of a crypt close. Hannah grabbed her head and moaned. She thought she’d dissolve into tears, but apparently she had no more tears left.
Either that, or she was too much in shock to cry.
“Laina,” she said, “what were you thinking?”
A few minutes later, she shook herself out of her shock. Gathering all her scattered belongings, she systematically repacked them. She went and picked up her watch from the grass, where Laina had tossed it.
Fourteen minutes and thirteen seconds.
She chanted it to herself as she walked back to join the rest of them. It was the first thing she said aloud to them. “Remember that,” she said. And then, as they all looked at her with the question in their eyes, she told them. “I lost Laina. She went through the timegate.”
The End
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Science notes
I had the opportunity to work for a year in paleontology, collecting and cleaning fossils and helping to manage a fossil collection, and I’m grateful for that experience. I’ve made the process of fossil hunting true to the standards and technology of that recent time. All of the animals and families of extinct mammals referred to here have pages on Wikipedia, and many Kindles allow you to look these up as you are reading. Dinosaurs get all the press, but extinct mammals are really cool too.
The gastornis, or terror crane, has no fossil specimen of the size I describe, so I took some artistic license with that. There is still debate as to whether the bird was a meat-eater, vegetarian, or scavenger, and if it hunted alone or hunted in packs. I felt able to choose what I liked of the competing claims, but if someone is reading this book twelve years from now, and more evidence has accumulated, they may discover I guessed wrong.
The animal they called “crocogator” could be one of a number of extinct reptiles like champosaurus. This family was robustly populated during the Paleocene and Eocene.
Although our characters seem to be unaware of it, there were a few large mammal predators in the Paleocene world they visited, but luckily for them, they never encountered any. What they call “horses” are something like the Tetraclaenodon, a sort of pre-horse with toes. Hooves didn’t evolve on horses until about 15 million years ago.
They have a brief discussion about honey bees. As it happens, those are a relatively new species. There were tiny bee-like creatures in the Paleocene, but honey-making is a very recent adaptation. As it seems now that honey bees may be doomed to extinction, they will have had a very short chapter in the history of life on earth.
The world our time travelers are in the third novel is in the Eocene, to be precise in the Duchesnean North American Land Mammal Stage. (Yes, that’s a mouthful!) There was a rich diversity of mammals, from impressively large animals to tiny rodents. The Gollum-faced creature was an Oxygenid. The primates in the trees would go extinct by the end of the Eocene, evidence suggests, and no primates would exist again in North America until the first humans arrived (in geological time, a mere eye blink ago). I found it fascinating in my researches that Vitamin C does have an evolutionary history, and it’s connected to primate evolution.
There are two more books in this series that finish Hannah’s story line. Perhaps one day there will be more that follow the other characters.
Thanks to my cover artists: Deranged Doctor Design and the artist Igor Krstic, who did such a gorgeous job on these covers. Hvala vam. Thanks to my volunteer proofreading team for catching most of the errors the first time around and to my pro proofreader, Nick Bowman.
Thank you so much for reading.
Also by Lou Cadle
Gray, a post-apocalyptic disaster series:
Gray, Part I
Gray, Part II
Gray, Part III
Gray, The Complete Collection
Stand-alone natural disaster novels:
Erupt
Quake
Storm
Crow Vector: Pandemic
41 Days
Dawn of Mammals series, time-travel adventure:
Saber Tooth
Terror Crane
Hell Pig
Killer Pack
Mammoth
Oil Apocalypse series, post-oil near-future survival adventure
Slashed
Bleeding
Bled Dry
Parched
Desolated
Code Name Beatrix: A World War II Spy Thriller
Lou Cadle also writes as Rosellyn Sparks and LC Bard.
www.loucadle.com