Nate dived again, struck his head against something, and recoiled. Surfacing, he coughed water.
Brady popped up beside him, holding his forehead. “Watch where you’re going.”
Brady dived back down, while Nate took off his gym shoes and tossed them onto the bow of the boat. Then he dived again too, holding his glasses in place with one hand. The water was still too murky to see anything beyond a few feet. Reaching out, he felt for the trailer but didn’t find anything before he needed air.
Brady popped to the surface beside him. “Nothing!”
That’s when Nate felt something slip by him in the water, nudging his leg. And then another. And another. They were about ten feet long and kind of sinewy, like big lizards. And when the creatures broke the surface to breathe, Nate could make out long, huge mouths filled with many, many sharp teeth. “Sea serpents! Get out of the water!”
Brady pulled himself up onto the bow of the boat first. As something enormous breached the surface of the water, Nate grabbed on to Brady’s outstretched arm and practically leaped upward right as another something latched on to his right leg, just above the knee. Nate screamed.
“Hang on!” Brady yelled as Nate felt his grip slipping. He looked down—his leg was caught in the creature’s mouth. Frantically, he kicked with his free foot against the sea serpent’s hard skull. Then he felt his heel hit something soft and the animal released him.
With a yank, Brady pulled Nate onto the front deck of the boat.
Breathing heavily, and shivering despite the heat, Nate looked over the side of the boat. The creatures were swimming off toward a large channel bracketed by trees and ferns.
“Mosasaurs,” Brady said. “But they shouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah, well, neither should we,” Nate told his brother, then tried to stand. Wincing at the pain in his leg, eyes watering, he sat on the fishing chair, rolled up his pant leg, and looked at the wound.
It was bleeding from five or six punctures, blood oozing over the knee and then down his calf. His leg really hurt.
As his brother rifled through a glove compartment in the cockpit, Nate asked, like he’d asked him many times before just to give him grief, “Why do you even know that? And, oh, by the way: Where and when are we?”
Everyone in the family had gone through a dinosaur phase, in part because of the fossil dinosaur tracks on the ranch down by Little Buddy Creek. Nate had never been all that into it, but Ernie had gobbled up every book and videotape on dinosaurs she could find, and Brady did too. He’d even gone to a lecture in Austin by a paleontologist named Bakker who said that dinosaurs might be warm-blooded and some could even have had feathers. And that birds were their descendants.
Brady snorted and handed Nate a red first-aid kit from a shelf in the boat’s cockpit. “There should be some antiseptic in here.”
Using the scissors from the kit, Nate cut the legs of his jeans off just above the knees. With a gauze pad, he applied hydrogen peroxide to the wounds. Then he taped the pads over the bite marks, using up the entire supply. To take his mind off the sting, he asked, “What do you mean, they shouldn’t be here? And what’s a mosasaur?”
Shielding his eyes from the sun, Brady peered out over the lake. “They’re sort of like aquatic Komodo dragons, but bigger. I’m sure you already figured out that part. But they’re not known from freshwater environments.”
“Wonderful,” Nate replied. He stood and limped toward the cockpit and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. Then he saw the look on his brother’s face. “And?”
Brady hesitated. “And the bite of the Komodo dragon might be dangerous, so it’s possible the bites of mosasaurs are too. If they’re anything like Komodo dragons, they probably aren’t going to have poison of their own, but their teeth might collect all kinds of funky bacteria, which can cause really bad infections in their prey.”
“So you’re saying I probably need an antivenin or something,” Nate said, frowning and trying to restrain the need to pummel something. Or someone.
“An antibiotic,” Brady replied. “I think infection is probably the biggest risk.”
“Terrific,” Nate muttered. “And the only way we have to get back home is the Recall Device, which is now at the bottom of a moat guarded by the same poisonous sea serpents.”
Brady was silent a moment. “There’s some kind of primitive cathode ray tube video screen on the Chronal Engine. I think it can be used to track Recall Devices. Maybe Dad will notice we’re gone and check it out.”
“Dad?” Nate asked. “Notice we’re gone? Really?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“And if he does notice and can track us, then shouldn’t he appear, like, right now?” Nate gestured like he was a magician. Nothing happened. “Or assuming we do get back, what’s to stop us from sending someone here now to bring us back earlier?”
Again, nothing happened.
“We’re on our own, then,” Brady said.
Chapter
IV
Max
WE MATERIALIZED IN FAMILIAR TERRITORY. OR AT LEAST, familiar to me. Mad Jack Pierson had built himself a Cretaceous getaway—a traditional Texas dogtrot on an island on a picturesque lake—which I’d visited once before. Basically consisting of a pair of two-room cottages with a shared roof and separated by the dogtrot breezeway, it had most of the hallmarks of an early-twentieth-century home, including electricity, but not, unfortunately, air conditioning or indoor plumbing.
We landed on the small wooden pier where Mad Jack Pierson used to tie up his boat. It was hot and humid, just like I’d remembered. And there were deadly things in the forest.
“Why did Mad Jack build this?” Petra asked, glancing around.
I shrugged my shoulders. He had liked dinosaurs. Almost everyone in the family did. “So far as I know, he just wanted to get away from it all.”
“No,” she said. “I get that. What I want to know is, why here? And how?” She gestured at the island, the lake, and the forest on the shore a hundred yards away.
“Safety?” I answered, and it sounded more like a question than I’d intended.
“Dinosaurs don’t swim?”
“They do,” I said. “Probably, but I doubt they’d come out here without a good reason. There’s at least one study saying sauropods would have been too top-heavy and would have sort of tipped over. But there’s not really anything they would want to eat here, anyway. And where there’s no prey, there are no predators.” I sighed. “As to how, I think he must’ve used the steamboat, or the Recall Device built into it, to bring all the materials.”
I led the way onto the island and up the stairs going to the cottages. They looked identical to the way I’d seen them last.
“Hmm,” Petra said, looking around more. “I guess that sort of makes sense. But isn’t Nate supposed to be here?”
Cupping my hands to my mouth, I shouted, “Hello! Anyone there?”
As we walked up to the breezeway, Petra suddenly stopped beside me and pointed. “What are those?”
Between the island and the shoreline, not far from where the lake emptied into a river, a pair of pterosaurs had landed. Big ones. Standing upright on all four legs, they were tall, almost as tall as giraffes. They waded through the water, then peered down and suddenly snatched their heads back up, fish wriggling in their five-foot-long mouths.
“Quetzalcoatlus,” I said. “I saw some last time.” They were amazing, like real-life dragons. I liked them better now that they were farther away.
We made our way into the breezeway. It needed sweeping, but there was no other evidence of disuse or lack of habitation.
Four doors opened onto the passageway. On one side was a workshop and kitchen. On the other was a pair of bedrooms.
“What’s the setting on the Recall Device?” Petra asked.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. It got us to where we’re supposed to be.”
The workshop was as I remembered it. Tools were displayed on a
pegboard along one wall. A ceiling fan wasn’t moving. When I pulled the chain, the lights didn’t go on.
I set the Recall Device down on the workbench, dumped my backpack beside it, and opened the fuse box. None of the fuses looked like they’d blown.
“There’s a generator outside,” I said, peering through a window to a shed out back, next to an outhouse. “Maybe it ran out of gas.”
I followed Petra into the kitchen. A wood stove occupied one corner, with a cast-iron teakettle resting on top. A farmhouse sink sat under a window, and a butcher-block prep table occupied the center of the room. A table with two chairs sat next to it. Petra placed her bow on top of it and began opening cabinet doors.
Cans of food were stored in a cupboard along the wall opposite the sink. Peas. Corn. Beans. Campbell’s soup.
“Flour and sugar here too,” Petra observed, peering into a pair of canisters. Aki hopped from her shoulder and looked in, sneezing as a cloud of flour rose from the larger of the two.
“He lived here for a while,” I said. “Mad Jack, I mean.”
“Why did he leave?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe someone found him. Or he ran away so no one would.”
I stared out the window over the sink. Across the channel, a group of ostrich-like ornithomimosaurs approached the water and began to drink. Farther away, the Quetzalcoatlus ignored them.
As I turned to speak to Petra, a loud rumble came from the next room and the entire cottage shook. A moment later, there was another rumble.
“What was that?” Petra asked, holding out a hand to comfort a now-cowering Aki.
I raced to the door and into the workshop. The two windows had been blown out and the ceiling fan was spinning slowly.
“Oh no.” The Recall Device wasn’t on the workbench. I crouched, checking to see if it had rolled onto the floor. It hadn’t.
“What are you . . . oh,” Petra said.
“Someone took it,” I mumbled. “Someone was here, watching us . . .”
“You put it down?” she said, eyes growing wider. “Why?”
My face went red. “I was looking for Nate and anything that could help us find him!” I exclaimed.
She rubbed the cut over her eye. “Did your uncle know this was going to happen?” Petra asked. “And who took it?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “That’s the problem. It could be anyone.”
“But who knew we were going to be here?” Petra persisted. “Your uncle. Your brother and sister. No one else.”
“Unless we make it back and tell someone,” I replied. “Unless they told someone we were going to be here when they went back in time.”
“So it really could be anyone,” she said.
“Yes,” I told her. “But, then, someone should have come for us, you know, when we don’t show up on time. Didn’t. Whatever.”
“Unless they don’t know we didn’t make it back because—”
“Because they don’t make it back either.”
Chapter
V
Nate
NATE POPPED A COUPLE OF ASPIRIN FROM THE FIRST-AID KIT. How long, he wondered, did it take to die of blood poisoning or gangrene?
He was not, he decided, going to wait and find out.
“Drop the anchor,” he told his brother, and stood, pulling off his T-shirt. “I’m going to find the Recall Device.”
“Are you dense?” Brady exclaimed. “The mosasaurs are still out there! Look!” He pointed in the direction the creatures had gone. At first, Nate saw nothing, but then one of the mosasaurs surfaced for air, then another. “I’m pretty sure they can smell blood, too!”
“Then what do we do?” Nate asked, grinding his teeth in frustration.
Brady used his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and pointed to a channel, away from the mosasaurs and flanked by clusters of cypresses and ferns. “First, let’s get off the open water. Maybe there’ll be more shade.”
Nate turned the ignition key and said a silent prayer of thanks that the engine hadn’t been damaged by its drop into the lagoon. Then he adjusted the throttle lever, steering toward the channel mouth. The sun beat down from a nearly cloudless sky. To Nate it felt and smelled sort of like Houston in the summer—fetid and humid, with the occasional whiff of dead fish. In the distance, he could hear birds and insects screeching.
A shadow passed over, and Nate flinched while his twin looked up and whistled.
“This is incredible!” Brady said, staring. “Do you know how incredible this is?”
“I get it,” Nate told him. But his brother wasn’t the one sitting here with holes in his leg. “What kind of dinosaur is it, and is it going to eat us?”
“Quetzalcoatlus, I’d guess, judging from the size and proportion of the wings. And pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs.” He watched as the pterosaur soared overhead, circled twice, then flew off. “They’re archosaurs, like crocodiles.”
Nate had no idea what that meant, so he decided to change the subject. “Is there another way we could signal to Dad?”
“What do you think?”
Nate nodded. He hadn’t really had much hope. He felt like throwing up.
When he was six, when his mom was still alive, they’d taken a really long road trip out to see the McDonald Observatory in far west Texas.
The landscape was barren as far as the eye could see. His family hadn’t seen another car in hours, and Nate remembered thinking that they were the most alone people in the world. They drove late into the night, and when he got out of the station wagon at the campsite, he fell on his face, dizzy with vertigo because the stars and the moon were so very much there, right on top of them. He’d felt really, really small.
This was orders of magnitude worse. Nate’s face suddenly felt unimaginably warm, and everything in front of him went bright.
The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back and his face was wet.
“You okay?” Brady asked, leaning over him, shielding the sun.
Nate squinted and sat up. “Yeah. It just felt as if we were at the bottom of a hole that was, like, light-years deep.”
“Try not to fall overboard next time.”
“What?”
“Kidding,” Brady said, helping Nate back up into the driver’s seat.
“I could use some water.”
Brady handed Nate a canteen and shook it. “It’s warm but clean. I found some water purification tablets.”
Nate took a sip and nearly gagged. It was more than just a little warm. Then he noticed a compartment open at the front of the boat. “What’s there?”
“Take a look.”
Nate stood, a little wobbly, leg throbbing, and stepped forward. The compartment housed fishing gear, including a pair of rods and reels, a tackle box, and a bait bucket. When he opened the tackle box, he found a filet knife, extra line, and fishhooks and sinkers. “Just normal fishing stuff.”
“I guess it’s here if we have to use it,” Brady said. “To fish, I mean. Assuming we even should.”
“What?”
“What if by fishing we change the time stream? Like in Back to the Future, only worse?”
Nate hesitated, crouching by the next compartment. “That can’t be right. Because the time machine exists and it’s been used, and the future hasn’t been changed.”
“But it could be that we wouldn’t know because we’d be changed with it,” Brady said.
Nate nodded. That’s what their dad had said way back at the Pegasus Theatre.
“But if we don’t know, would it matter?” Nate asked, swatting at a swarm of gnats.
Brady had a point. They didn’t know, really. But Nate did know that he was not going to sit around and do nothing on the off chance that doing something could affect the time stream. Just sitting around doing nothing could affect the time stream in an even worse way, for all they knew.
“All right, then, if I wake up tomorrow and you’re gone, it’s not my fault.” Brady held up a machete and
a hunting knife, both in leather scabbards. “I also found these.”
Nate grinned despite himself. He attached the hunting knife to his belt and sat, crossing his good leg under himself on the boat’s deck next to the front fishing seat. “Do you know where we are, exactly?”
“Late Cretaceous Texas,” Brady replied, “judging from the Quetzalcoatlus and the mosasaur. I haven’t seen enough of the rest of the flora and fauna to know for sure.”
To Nate, his brother may as well have been speaking in Farsi. “Does that mean we’re going to see a Brontosaurus or a Tyrannosaurus rex anytime soon?”
“Apatosaurus,” he replied. “Brontosaurus is . . . never mind. And they didn’t coexist. T. rex is closer in time to us than to Apatosaurus. And if we’re in the latest Cretaceous, then yes, we might see a T. rex.”
“Really?” Nate exclaimed. “That’s so cool!”
His brother gave him a wry look. “Except that they have teeth the size of bananas and are big enough to swallow you whole.”
When he put it that way, it didn’t sound nearly as much fun.
With that, Brady took his turn behind the boat’s steering wheel and guided them toward the channel. Nate glanced down into the water. Although it was still on the murky side, he could now see fish. Big fish—like, a couple of feet long. Silver, with red flecks along their sides. They were all going in the opposite direction the boat was heading. The really distinctive thing about them, though, was the three-inch fangs.
“Huh,” Nate said.
“What?” Brady asked, peering down.
“Fish. Like vampire trout.”
“Saber-toothed herrings,” Brady answered. “Enchodus. They’re not really herrings. They’re actually more closely related to salmon.”
“Why do they need three-inch fangs?” Nate asked.
“To suck your blood.”
The air was oppressively thick, and it seemed to get even worse as the channel grew narrower and the ferns and cycads grew closer. The sky was growing cloudy too, but if the times Nate had gone to present-day Galveston were any indication, rain wouldn’t help with the humidity.
Borrowed Time Page 3