Borrowed Time

by Greg Leitich Smith

  Max and Mildred were gone.

  Chapter

  XVI

  Max

  I SURFACED, BLINKING WATER OUT OF MY EYES, and thrashed my head from side to side to get my bearings. For the moment, I was surrounded by hadrosaurs and carcasses. There didn’t seem to be any of the giant alligators close by. I spotted my backpack about ten feet away, bobbing with the current. In a few strokes, I reached it, looping one strap over my arm. Then I treaded water, trying to avoid being swum over by the herbivores. The current was stronger than I’d expected, propelling me downriver next to the bloody carcass of a Kritosaurus. To my left, beyond the body, I could see the boat. I raised my hand, waving and yelling, and then realized that I needed to get out of the river and away from the dead hadrosaur as fast as I could before another Deinosuchus appeared.

  I grabbed at the neck ridge of a swimming Kritosaurus, letting it pull me toward the riverbank, about twenty yards away.

  The creature touched bottom before I did. As it surged to its feet, I rolled away, put my head down, and swam hard. Finally, when I could touch bottom, I high-stepped toward the bank and hauled myself onto dry land. As I glanced back, I saw the Kritosaurus’s body bob as it was grabbed from underneath by a Deinosuchus.

  I spotted a few of the Kritosaurus climbing out onto the bank upriver, shaking off the water, and then re-forming the herd. Steadying myself by grabbing on to a cypress branch, I turned and saw the bass boat about a hundred yards ahead, heading downriver. Sideways.

  “Nate!” I yelled. “Petra! Brady!”

  Silence. Except for the thrashing of predators and the cries and grunts of the kritosaurs.

  “Mildred!” I called, just because.

  Then I ran along the riverbank to try to catch up to the boat.

  As I dodged a cycad, I tripped over something lying in my path. I went sprawling, half into the river, the wind knocked out of me. Praying that it wasn’t a Deinosuchus, I rolled over and saw it was Mildred.

  She coughed, then sat up, her hand on her side where I’d kicked her when I fell. Her hat was missing and her khaki safari outfit was now soaked and streaked with mud.

  I stepped back, holding my hands up, ready for her to shove me back into the alligator-infested water. “Don’t.”

  She stood, without any help from me. “I’m not going to. I need you to get me out of here.”

  I hesitated, not sure if I could trust her. On the other hand, I wasn’t going to push her into the river. I was just going to have to be careful. And make sure I kept her in sight at all times.

  “Come on,” I said. “If we hurry, we can catch up to the boat.”

  Mildred stared. “The boat has a motor, does it not? Surely they’ll just come back for us?”

  “If they can,” I replied, beginning to walk. “But they’re going to need to know where we are to come back to, don’t you think?”

  Behind us, in the water, a pair of Deinosuchus fought over the carcass of one of the hadrosaurs. Farther upriver, the last of the herd seemed to have entered the water. At different spots along the bank, dead hadrosaurs floated, some being pulled apart by the gators.

  We followed the curve of the river as the boat floated ahead of us. Then it disappeared from view.

  We continued on for about half an hour after we lost sight of the bass boat, dodging trees and ferns, following the riverbank. As we poked through a thick stand of cycads, Mildred stopped abruptly.

  Ahead of us, drinking water from a creek that ran into the river, was a T. rex.

  Chapter

  XVII

  Nate

  “WHERE ARE THEY?” PETRA SHOUTED.

  The boat continued sideways, still perched on the giant gator’s back, the propeller on the motor spinning uselessly in the air. They were surrounded by gators and hadrosaur bodies, and Nate couldn’t see Max or Mildred anywhere.

  Finally, they came to a drifting carcass and the Deinosuchus dived, pulling the dead hadrosaur under.

  The propeller caught the water again and the boat surged forward. Nate cut the wheel to the right to avoid another of the gators and headed back upriver to find Max and Mildred.

  As the boat turned, it was struck again from the rear. The outboard motor screeched, and they lurched to a stop.

  “Turn it off!” Brady yelled. “Let me see.”

  Nate killed the ignition and hit the control to lift the motor.

  “Where are they?” Petra asked again, peering upriver and steadying herself with a hand on the windshield.

  “I don’t know,” Brady said. “But the propeller’s bent.”

  Which meant the motor was useless. They weren’t going to be able to get the missing two.

  “Bend it back!” Petra snapped.

  “You got a wrench?” Brady asked. “Or a sledgehammer?”

  Nate lowered the motor back into the water so they could at least steer. But they didn’t have any forward control. They were stuck with where the river was taking them.

  “Are they still in the water?” Brady asked, staring back over the corpse-littered river.

  “I don’t see them,” Petra said, gnawing her lip.

  “If they are . . .” Nate began.

  “They can swim,” Petra interrupted. “At least Max can. I think. His sister’s on the swim team . . .”

  As her voice trailed off, Nate did not point out that that didn’t really mean anything. And that Max could’ve hit his head on a rock. “They’ll try to make it ashore.”

  “Which side?” Petra asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nate replied. “I don’t even know if we’re ahead of them.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Brady said. “Nate, take us to the shore and we’ll wait a bit. If they made it out of the water, they’ll see us, whatever side of the river they’re on.”

  “Unless they’ve already passed us,” Nate told him.

  “In that case, we’ll just push off again and catch up,” Petra said. “Even without the motor, we’ll still be faster than they would be on foot.”

  “What if they’re still in the water?” Nate asked.

  Brady gestured as a Deinosuchus swam by. “Then they won’t be for long.”

  Chapter

  XVIII

  Max

  I’VE ALWAYS LIKED TYRANNOSAURUS REX. THEY’RE AWESOME, with six-foot skulls and ridiculously tiny arms and teeth the size of hunting knives. They’ve got a great one at the Field Museum in Chicago. It’s my favorite. It’s big. It’s dead.

  This one wasn’t.

  The forty-foot-long theropod was looking away from us, at a slight angle, head down as it scooped water into its mouth.

  “Back. Away. Very. Very. Slowly.” I glanced behind us, to make sure of my route. We retreated, keeping a close eye on the huge animal.

  Then, for some reason, the T. rex swung its giant head toward the water. I was puzzled at first, but then I saw the head of a Deinosuchus slowly swimming downriver. Toward the T. rex.

  I’d seen too many pictures and articles speculating on just this: the two biggest predators of the time going head to head. The alligator and the dinosaur were oblivious to us. For a moment, I paused.

  “Are you addled?” Mildred said in a loud whisper. “We have to get past that thing! Now’s our chance!”

  I suppressed a sigh and we continued edging away, then turned and walked into the woods, away from the river and away from the T. rex. We stayed under the cover of the trees, hoping that we’d be safer there than in open ground.

  After about fifteen minutes, we climbed up an embankment next to a waterfall and crossed the creek.

  “We have to return to the river,” Mildred said.

  I nodded, resisting the temptation to tell her she was only stating the obvious. I was more concerned that we had no way of knowing if Petra and my uncles had stopped upriver or whether we were farther along than they were. At least we all knew where we were heading—to Mad Jack’s steamboat with the Recall Device, which hopefully still worked.


  If they were smart, though, they would head downriver a ways and then wait for us, knowing that they were a lot faster on the water than we were on land.

  And we needed to find them. I had the backpack Kyle had given me, with a hunting knife and a canteen and the fire-starting kit, but that was about it for our supplies.

  Also, there was the fact that I was traveling with a girl who would be just as happy to see me dead and might even be willing to clock me over the head with a rock.

  “I’m not going to kill you now,” Mildred interrupted my thoughts, seemingly reading them, as we trudged along toward the river.

  “What?”

  “As I told you before, I’m not going to kill you now,” she said. “Insofar as you’re the only one who can get us out of here and back home, so you’re safe until then.”

  “You’re not making me feel any better,” I told her, because she was obviously thinking about it. On the other hand, if she was telling the truth, I wouldn’t have to watch out for tyrannosaurs and psychopaths at the same time.

  Before long, the ground grew wetter and muddier. Soon, our shoes were sinking into the muck, and our progress slowed. The low-lying marshy area was teeming with life, but not the cute cuddly kind. Mosquitoes and dragonflies buzzed around my face and the water. Even more insects scrambled on the surface tension of slow-moving stagnant areas. I walked into a spider web strung across a pair of fern trees in front of me.

  Overhead, something chittered in the trees. I looked up but didn’t see anything other than a lizard clinging to a cypress trunk.

  My stomach grumbled and my back felt damp with sweat. We continued on, and I said a prayer of thanks that I’d grown up in an era with air conditioning.

  As I glanced underneath a cycad frond, something caught my eye. Concealed with a camouflage of brown markings was a tiny little dinosaur. A hypsilophodont of some kind, I figured. Small, about four feet long, relatively harmless. The deer of the Cretaceous.

  I knelt and looked closer. It stared at me with unblinking eyes. It looked almost like a hawk, but with no feathers and a beak-like snout filled with teeth. I grabbed a stick and thrust it at the creature. It jumped up and sped past me before I could react. It had been sitting on a nest, all right, just as I had figured, but there were no eggs.

  I got off my knees and took another look around. The clicking and chirping of insects and birds were the only sounds. The air was still and full of moisture. I peered into the narrow channel separating us from another piece of land. Underneath a fallen branch, I could make out a shape moving against the weak current. An alligator, about two feet long.

  I crouched low, trying to make as little noise as possible, while the alligator swam past. Then I jumped in the water, hands in front of me, and reached to snatch it. I couldn’t quite get hold of it with my hands, but my momentum trapped it against a patch of ferns. The animal thrashed a couple times and bit me on the arm once before I was able to get it under control—that is, stun it—and slip it into my backpack.

  “Dinner,” I told Mildred.

  “Poetic justice,” she replied.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  At least we wouldn’t go hungry, although I had no idea how to cook the reptile. I looked at the blood running down my arm. After uncorking my canteen, I poured a little water onto the wound to clean it out. I decided then I didn’t like swamps. And my fingers and probably my toes were pruney.

  Not long after that, we finally made it back to the main body of the river.

  We stood at a curve with a good view in both directions. A Kritosaurus carcass floated past, but there was no sign of the bass boat.

  “Climb a tree, maybe?” Mildred said.

  I went up a cypress that stood at the edge of the river. But I saw nothing.

  Chapter

  XIX

  Nate

  THE BOAT RESTED AT ANCHOR ALONG THE RIVERBANK, tied up next to a small island formed by a pair of cypresses growing from the water. Branches and other detritus had built up and collected enough sand and dirt for ferns and small shrubs to have grown up around them.

  Every now and then, a bloody limb from one of the hadrosaurs drifted by. Smaller alligators would grab the limbs and pull their meal under.

  On the bank, about three feet above where they’d anchored the boat, Petra stood and watched, holding on to her bow with one hand, arrow loosely nocked. “Just in case,” she said. Aki lay beside her on a rock, drying his feathers in the hot sun.

  Nate wasn’t sure whether Petra was watching the water for a chance to rescue the others, or looking for their bodies. At that point, he didn’t think it was likely that they’d see them alive. The gators seemed to be pretty thorough. On the other hand, there were a lot of the Kritosaurus parts floating downriver, so it was possible that Max and Mildred had escaped just by virtue of numbers. There were a lot of other things to eat besides them.

  When Nate mentioned this to his brother, Brady just murmured, “Yes. That’s the whole point of herds.”

  Nate’s leg felt warm and clammy, and throbbed when he moved it. And he still felt too warm.

  While they waited, Brady peered over the side of the boat, into the ferns and undergrowth.

  “What are you looking at?” Nate asked.

  His brother jumped overboard and landed in ankle-deep water, then bent over and pulled up a length of hadrosaur leg. It was about three feet long, including the hoof.

  “Beef for dinner!” he said, handing it to Nate. Then he grabbed Nate’s hand to pull himself back aboard.

  Nate sniffed it. “Will it keep?”

  Brady looked at him like he was an idiot, then pointed to the live well at the rear of the boat. “This is insulated like a thermos.”

  Nate didn’t point out their lack of ice, but placed the leg into the well as Brady took off his shoes and socks to dry. “Do you really think we’re going to find them?” Nate asked.

  Brady hesitated. “I think so. I mean, Max came here to find us, right? He wants to find us as much as we want to find him. Plus there’s Petra. And he knows the only way back. So eventually we’re going to find each other again. Maybe not until we reach the sea.” At his last words, he glanced up at Petra on the riverbank.

  “Unless there’s another way back,” Nate said. “In which case, he might be superfluous to the time stream.”

  “Don’t tell Petra that,” Brady warned.

  After that, the brothers were quiet, occasionally splashing water on their faces to cool down. In the distance, they heard the chirping of insects and calls of birds and who knew what else.

  While they waited, Brady grabbed the machete and climbed up the riverbank. Nate didn’t hear what he said to Petra, but together they disappeared for a moment. When they returned, each was carrying a ten-foot pole. Nate did not make the obvious joke.

  “We don’t have any oars or paddles, so I thought we could use these,” Brady said, laying them down along the sides of the boat.

  Finally, after another hour or so had elapsed, Petra jumped back down into the boat. “It’ll be dark soon. Let’s find a place where we can build a bonfire.”

  They used the poles to push off from the island and got underway, traveling with the current. Nate steered the boat as best he could, trying to keep close to the riverbank.

  They let the river carry them for a while, spotting birds along the bank, an occasional feathered thing wading in the shallows. Every now and then, a creek opened into the river.

  As the shadows got longer, Nate steered the boat around a bend, the sun reflecting off a large object wedged between a tree and the riverbank. An object that was green and shiny and metallic and had no business being in the Cretaceous. It looked a little strange and appeared to be lying on its side, but Nate could’ve sworn it was a VW Beetle.

  “What is that?” Brady asked, standing.

  “It’s a VW Beetle,” Petra said. “We brought it last time we were here.”

&n
bsp; Nate steered the boat closer. “Is it, like, a concept-car version of a VW Beetle?” It looked to be the same shape as a standard Beetle to Nate, but it seemed bigger, smoother, more aero­dynamic. And less solid, somehow.

  Petra shook her head. “No, it’s a regular production model. A nice one too, with a Bose sound system and—” Her eyes widened. “We have to find Max!”

  “Yeah . . .” Brady said, as he and Nate exchanged a look.

  “No—I mean, the car has an accessory port for plugging a USB drive into! That’s why the drive was in the first-aid kit! There’s got to be a message of some kind on it!”

  “You mean there’s a computer in it?” Brady interrupted. “Like Knight Rider?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Petra answered, frowning at the reference.

  “TV show,” Nate told her. “The car has a talking computer. Artificial intelligence.”

  As they passed by, they could see shattered windows and dents on the sides and front.

  “What happened?” Brady asked.

  “We got caught in a Parasaurolophus herd,” Petra said, staring not at the car but at the ten-foot bank above it. “Knocked us over the edge. We barely got out alive.”

  For the next half hour, Brady peppered her with questions about future computers and cars, which Petra refused to answer. Finally, Petra pointed. “There.” On the bank was a spot that seemed high enough to be suitable for a bonfire.

  The only problem was, there was a sauropod dinosaur on top of it.

  Chapter

  XX

  Max

  WE HIKED ALONG THE RIVERBANK FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS BEFORE we decided we needed to stop and make some kind of campsite for the night. Along the way, we hadn’t seen any more of the T. rex, just small theropods and an ornithopod or two. I even spotted this thing that looked like a possum that I thought might be an Alphadon. I didn’t spend too much time rubbernecking, though, because I still didn’t really trust Mildred, no matter what she said.