Carnival of Time

by Alan MacRaffen

  “Yes. We will show you. Do not waste time, we are hot and thirsty sitting in the dirt.”

  Caleb grinned and looked back at Tess and Krezahu.

  “Ok, who wants to try something really dangerous?”

  UNCLE BILL STOOD BALANCED ON THE end of a toppled length of steel beam that tilted up into the air at a low angle. He held his wind-tossed hair out of his face as he scanned the dark ruins of the city and the debris-filled waters of San Francisco Bay.

  The battered black skyline was speckled lightly with a number of small fires, as if a handful of fallen stars were caught in the broken towers. The wind whistled noisily through the steel and concrete canyons, mixing with the soft slapping of the waves on the scorched piers. In the distance, faint cracks and rumbles echoed up into the sky as the dino-soldiers continued to ravage the city with their crimson lightning. From the other direction, a large animal, perhaps the allosaurus, bellowed angrily. Nearby, the shattered form of the Golden Gate Bridge loomed up out of the rough waters. Bill stared at the chunks of scorched steel and shattered pavement that stuck out at odd angles from the waves. It looked as though the trilobite ships had picked up where the falling plane left off, blasting the rest of the roadway into the bay.

  From a hiding place down in the remains of a fallen building, Caleb called out in a thin voice.

  “Do you see anyone?” he asked. Bill stood still a moment longer, then turned and clambered back down the steel beam. Caleb waited expectantly, while the young girl, Theresa, sat silently beside him. Bill rubbed his face and blinked, either from tears or exhaustion.

  “Caleb,” he said quietly, “I don’t know if we’ll ever find them. They were on the other side of the bridge. They might be somewhere on the other side of the bay, or they might be...” Bill put his hand over his eyes and breathed deeply. “We have to think about getting ourselves out of here first,” he continued. “That’s what Carol would try to do. If she’s still... We might find her out there, somewhere.”

  “We might not,” Caleb said. Bill was silent, staring up at the dark, starlit sky overhead.

  “Is Carol your mom?” the girl asked. Caleb turned to look at her in the shadows. She hadn’t spoken more than a few sentences since the escape from the allosaurus. She stared at him with wide, green eyes. Her face and clothes were covered with dirt and soot stains, and her reddish-blonde hair stood out at wild angles.

  “She’s my aunt,” Caleb answered, fighting back a sniffle.

  “Oh,” the girl said, looking thoughtful. “Did a dinosaur eat your mom?”

  Caleb shook his head. “No.”

  Bill sat down on a smooth piece of concrete next to the kids. “Caleb lost his parents a long time ago,” he said. “His Aunt Carol and I have been raising him.”

  “Oh,” the girl answered, sounding sad.

  Caleb grimaced as his stomach rumbled loudly. Bill looked at him, then started rummaging through his jacket pockets.

  “What time is it?” Caleb asked, rubbing his belly as Bill pulled a snack bar from his pocket. Bill glanced at his watch, but the face had been smashed during one of their escapes.

  “Not sure,” Bill said, breaking the bar in half and handing the pieces to the two children. “It’s after midnight, though. We still have a few hours before it starts getting light again. We should probably try to find a safe place to hide out during the day so those dinosaur guys don’t find us.”

  “What about right here?” Theresa asked. Bill glanced up at the open sky above the broken building.

  “Not safe,” he said. “We aren’t concealed from the ships, and the soldiers might still be checking the buildings for people. We should see if we can find an entrance to the sewers or the subway. There’re a lot of tunnels to hide in down there. We can start looking after you guys finish eating and rest a little more.”

  Caleb nodded and chewed his small meal silently. Somewhere out in the city, Caleb heard another blast of the red lightning.

  The subway entrance was buried under a heap of crashed cars, fallen rubble, and toppled streetlamps. Caleb and Theresa crouched in the shadows of a dark alley while Uncle Bill climbed around the wreckage.

  After several minutes of scrabbling at broken brick and metal, Bill stood up and waved the kids over. Caleb ran quietly to his side and peered down at the small opening he had uncovered. Bill had loosened a pile of bricks pinned beneath one of the overturned cars. Caleb saw that if they could pull out more of the wedged bricks, there would be a large enough opening for them to slip through into the stairwell.

  Bill pulled another brick loose and handed it to Caleb, who set it quietly on the sidewalk. Theresa climbed up next to Bill and helped pull out more bricks. Soon there was an opening wide enough for Theresa or Caleb to squeeze through.

  Bill continued to dig at the crumbling bricks, while Theresa helped place them quietly on the ground. Neither of them noticed that Caleb was standing motionless on the sidewalk beside them. He turned away from the subway entrance and looked down the wide, dark street. Wind whipped through the intersections, blowing bits of paper and a bent license plate. Caleb stared intently out at the darkness. He cupped his hand behind one ear and closed his eyes as a faint sound carried through the night air.

  Bill and Theresa continued to tear at the pile of bricks, not noticing the strange vibration echoing down the empty streets. Caleb frowned and concentrated on the strange hum, ignoring the gentle clinking of the bricks. The sound was growing slowly but steadily. It sounded something like the hum of the trilobite ships’ engines, but deeper. The hairs on Caleb’s neck stood on end as he listened to the growing rumble. It was deeper even than the hum from the two hundred foot long ship that had carried the small army of dino-soldiers.

  The sound was now quite noticeable. Bill and Theresa stopped their digging and turned to listen. Caleb could feel the vibration in the pavement now, traveling through his legs up into his stomach. Down the street, the windblown license plate began to click and rattle on the vibrating asphalt. Far down at the end of the long street, a dim red glow began to shine out across the tops of the buildings. It flickered and flashed like the electrical auras of the other ships, but it cast more light than a hundred of the smaller vessels.

  Bill stared wide-eyed at the approaching glow. A brick slipped from Theresa’s quivering fingers to fall clinking onto the sidewalk. Caleb looked back at the pair, then scrambled up to the small hole. Before the others could ask him what he was doing, he climbed through into the stairwell.

  “Caleb, wait,” Bill cried out, “We need to stay together!” Caleb ignored his call and sat down on a piece of loose concrete. He braced his back against the inner wall of the stairwell and wedged his feet against the remaining pile of bricks.

  “Look out!” he cried, kicking against the bricks with all of his nine-year-old strength. The pile shifted slightly, sending a few bricks tumbling down. Bill dodged the falling bricks, then helped tug on the rest of the pile. In a few moments, the opening was just wide enough for an adult to squeeze through.

  Bill backed away from the opening, pushing Theresa through first, then bent down to crawl through after her. The rumbling hum changed pitch slightly, and Bill looked back over his shoulder to stare at the shape drifting into view over the tops of the buildings. Caleb craned his neck to gape at the machine from within the cramped stairway.

  The ship was a gargantuan construction. It glided into view like a huge, drifting zeppelin, underlit with an aura of crackling red lightning. It was roughly oval-shaped like the other ships, but wider at the front, tapering to a narrow point at the end. From what he could see of the ship while peeking out of the hole, Caleb thought it might be almost a quarter mile long. The far end of the vessel bore a strange, fish-like tail fin, and a pair of short fins ran along the sides. The front end had the same bulging red windows Caleb had seen on the smaller ships. These eye-like domes, however, were each about a hundred feet across, with shimmering lights and murky shadows flickering across their su
rfaces. Under the nose of the craft, a pair of immense metallic mandibles or tentacles projected toward the tail, looking like segmented, serrated tusks. Each massive, spiked tentacle was a hundred feet longer than the large craft that had carried the squads of dino-soldiers. Between the two tentacles was a huge, circular projection, something like a giant mechanical sucker mouth. The rest of the underside was dotted with ports and hatches, several of which were large enough to hold the small scout ships and fighters. Caleb recognized that this vessel was patterned not after a trilobite, but a prehistoric super predator known to paleontologists as “Anomalocaris”. The trilobite ships were bad, but Caleb suspected that this ship was capable of destruction on a far grander scale.

  As Bill stared dumbfounded at the looming monstrosity, Caleb’s gaze was drawn back to street-level by a soft, drumming sound. He looked down just in time to see a line of dino-soldiers march into view at the end of the long street. They poured out of several side streets and alleys, merging into a larger mass of neatly marching beasts. Their clawed footsteps fell in sync, clicking and pounding on the pavement like war drums.

  Caleb grabbed Bill’s arm and pointed at the oncoming army. Bill gasped and started scrambling on the loose bricks, trying to slip in through the narrow hole. Caleb grabbed his shoulders and pulled, the soldiers still visible over Bill’s shoulder. As Bill squirmed through the hole, Caleb saw one of the approaching creatures turn its head and blink curiously at Bill’s flailing legs.

  “Hurry!” Caleb whimpered. Bill was almost through, but he fumbled with one of his belt loops, which was snagged on a piece of jagged metal. Caleb tried to reach it, but Bill’s broad shoulders were in the way.

  The dino-soldier turned to the creature next to him and said something, then pointed at the subway entrance. The other creature looked, then clicked its teeth and raised its machine gun. A tiny point of red light gleamed on the creature’s gun, then Caleb saw a tiny red dot appear on Bill’s back.

  Caleb felt a strange surge of adrenaline rush through his body. It was as if a tingling wave of static electricity rose up out of the ground, through his feet, legs, and chest, and up into his head, making his hair stand on end. His face flushed red hot, and his mouth went numb.

  “No!” Caleb yelled, his tiny voice reverberating strangely in the small concrete space and sounding larger and louder than he would have thought possible.

  The red dot on Bill’s back wavered, then the dino-soldier started quivering. The other creature stared at its companion nervously. In just a few heartbeats, the creature went from slight quivering to heaving convulsions. It opened its mouth repeatedly, but no sound emerged. The other creature watched in horrified fascination as the shaking soldier fell to the ground, muscles contorting into twisted knots. The creature opened its mouth once again, this time letting loose an ear-splitting shriek of terror. The fallen creature’s companion jumped away as if its companion had caught fire, then looked around at the other amazed soldiers. Suddenly, one of the creatures cried out in English.

  “Psi! Call the Commander! Rogue psi!”

  Another creature came forward, staring with a hawk-like glare at the subway entrance. It quickly began barking orders at the other soldiers.

  “Acquire targets immediately! Live capture only! Go, go, go!” it rasped.

  Bill managed to tear off his snagged belt loop as the line of soldiers charged toward the subway. As Caleb clambered down the dark stairs, clinging to his uncle’s jacket for guidance, he could still hear the creature barking orders up above.

  “Alert the Commander! Call in the Clair-V’s! I want that psi!”

  Bill stumbled and shuffled rapidly down the steps. Caleb hung tightly to Uncle Bill, while Theresa clung to Caleb’s sleeve. The three of them were soon in absolute darkness.

  The wide stairs took a couple of turns, then leveled out at the station floor. The trio shuffled quietly through the thick darkness, pausing when Bill smacked his hip hard against the turnstile. The children ducked under the obstruction while Bill climbed over. Bill led them through the lightless space, holding each child firmly by the shoulder and feeling carefully with his feet, searching for the edge of the platform. Caleb heard the voices of the dino-soldiers shouting and growling as they struggled with the rubble-covered entrance.

  Bill stopped abruptly. Caleb thought that he had reached the edge of the platform and readied himself for the short jump down to the tracks. Instead, he heard Bill grunt as he slid sideways through the half-open doors of a stopped subway car. Caleb and Theresa slipped through after Bill.

  “Must’ve just stopped when the power went out,” Bill whispered, leading the children down the aisle. “We can move down to the end of the train and sneak out onto the tracks. Come on.”

  Bill and the kids froze in place for a moment as a deafening boom echoed down from the street level. The artificial thunderclap was followed by a rumbling of collapsing rubble.

  “Damn!” Bill hissed. “I think they just blasted through.” He hastened his pace, trailing the kids behind. As they passed through the divider between cars, they heard the echoing voice of one of the soldiers coming from the stairway.

  “You, there!” it growled. “You’ve got canisters, let’s gas them out.”

  “Ineffective, sir,” another creature answered. “The gas sinks poorly, so it won’t fill the tunnels right. It will also block our night-goggles.”

  “Yes...” the first creature hissed, sounding frustrated. “Well, we don’t want them to slip by. Stick with the goggles.” The creatures’ claws clicked loudly on the hard stairs, growing steadily louder.

  Caleb glanced frantically back and forth, seeing nothing, as they passed into the next car. As he turned his head to the left, he saw a distant pair of red pinpoints bobbing in the darkness, followed by another, and another. He tightened his grip on Bill’s arm.

  “I see ‘em,” Bill breathed.

  “They haven’t seen us yet,” Caleb whispered.

  “Shhh,” Bill answered. “Keep going.”

  They continued down the length of the car, then quietly opened the door at the end. Bill almost fell out of the train as he tried to step into the next car, not realizing that they had reached the end. Moving as slowly and silently as possible, Bill climbed down onto the tracks, then lifted the kids down from the doorway.

  “Be careful,” Bill whispered. “We don’t want to bump into the third rail. I think it was on the left side... Just stay right behind me.”

  Bill gradually led them down the tracks. They were going agonizingly slowly, their only guide being the feel of the track floor. Behind them, in the station, the dino-soldiers clicked their clawed feet and poked into corners and alcoves. Caleb saw the brilliant red beams of laser sights sweeping the dark interior of the train behind them.

  Caleb suddenly felt a strange tingling sensation in his fingers and toes. He could hear his heart pounding in his chest, and the sensation of being watched caused his skin to rise in goose bumps.

  “Uncle Bill,” he whispered, “I think...” Bill cut him off.

  “Shhh, Caleb. Just keep going.”

  A sharp cracking sound cut through the air close by, followed by a loud, fizzling hiss. The tunnel was suddenly filled with a brilliant, flickering light, temporarily blinding Caleb.

  He blinked furiously, trying to make out the source of the light. Beside him, Theresa screamed in terror. Caleb saw that there was a figure standing in their path. It was huge and heavily built, too big to be one of the dino-soldiers. The creature was at least eight feet tall, holding a brilliant emergency flare in one clawed hand and a mean-looking machine gun in the other. The shimmering light of the flare underlit the figure’s face in sharply contrasting light and shadow.

  Caleb gasped as he stared into the strange, orange-gold eyes with slit pupils. The beast had a hideous mixture of human and saurian traits. Bizarre, hybrid bone structures and musculature were overlaid with a tough, horny hide. Caleb recognized the anatomical features of sever
al different dinosaur species, distorted into quasi-human proportions. Velociraptor claw structure, tyrannosaur dentition and ceratopsid horn growths fought for dominance on the mutated human body frame. The dino-soldiers were terrifying enough, but even if they were animalistic and inhuman at least they looked like whole, healthy creatures. The warped, asymmetrical jumble of mutated features looming before Caleb horrified and sickened him. It was as if every part of the monster’s body were fighting with itself, twisted and tortured into unnatural forms.

  The crazy, dancing light glinted on the creature’s eyes, teeth, and claws. The hybrid monster stepped forward, and Caleb noticed for the first time that it wore a strange, hi-tech uniform, something like a police officer’s riot gear. The creature’s fang-filled jaw opened to speak, filling the still tunnel air with fetid breath.

  “I believe you’ve gone far enough tonight.”

  On the edges of the circle of light, Caleb saw the dino-soldiers circling and aiming their guns. The hybrid mutant spoke into an absurdly small-looking headset.

  “Destroyer Twenty-One, this is Commander Pollard. Targets acquired. Send my fighter down; I’ll bring them up myself. Pollard out.”

  He turned to look at one of the lurking dinosaur soldiers. “Contact Central Control when we return to the destroyer.” Caleb flinched as the monster grimaced at him and Theresa. “I believe The Reaver will be quite pleased with our latest catch.”

  THIN BRANCHES WHIPPED AND SLAPPED ACROSS Caleb’s face as he clung tightly to Chuck’s saddle straps. The thin, scrubby forest seemed to tilt and roll around him as Chuck dodged large trees and leaped over fallen logs. To his left, Caleb heard Krezahu scampering and chuckling to himself, while Tess rushed along on the right like a fierce wind. Caleb watched out of the corner of his eye as Tess bolted through the woods on her long, powerful toes, her downy-feathered thighs pumping like pistons and her stiff tail swinging sharply with each turn. Another thin branch smacked against Caleb’s forehead, forcing him to turn his gaze forward again. Somewhere up above the treetops, the low, whistling voice of Kchawr-Uou called out to the runners.