Before too long, we found a rise overlooking the river, about twenty feet up. A lot of sickly-looking ferns formed a meadow that gave way to a bunch of trees, evergreens mixed with trees with leaves. A couple were magnolias, and there were also a few ginkgoes.
We gathered wood and I started a fire. As it blazed comfortably, I pulled the alligator out of my backpack.
Mildred watched, then asked blandly, “I don’t suppose you know how to dress it, do you?”
“You do?” I asked. Despite the fact that she could throw a knife and use a Colt revolver, she seemed sort of prim and not really the type who would’ve learned things like how to gut an alligator. Of course, I had no clue myself.
“My father hunted. When he brought home a kill, it was my job, and my mother’s, to prepare it.”
“Even alligator?” I asked.
“If it has four limbs, it’s basically all the same.”
I hesitated. It wasn’t that I didn’t think she would do a good job. It’s that gutting the thing would require a knife and I wasn’t sure I trusted her with one. She could throw them, after all. Not all that accurately, really, but we weren’t that far apart right now.
“If you’re afraid to give me the knife, I could give directions,” she said.
“That would be lovely,” I told her, in the same tone. She didn’t react.
The creature was torpid but still alive. I dispatched it by thrusting the knife through the back of its neck.
“Turn it over,” Mildred said, “and make one long cut, from the neck to the belly.” As I did so, she continued. “Really, we should probably eat the liver, but I would wager you’re the sort of city boy who’s a bit squeamish about such things.”
I was, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. I opened up the gator and pulled out some of the innards, proffering something red and squishy to her.
“That would be a lung,” Mildred said.
When she didn’t say anything else, I cut out the rest of the guts and tossed them far into the river. I didn’t want them attracting anything that might decide we looked good to eat too.
Then, at Mildred’s direction, I rinsed the gator off with water from the canteen and placed it in the embers of the fire.
“Give it about an hour.”
By then, I was starving and the sun had gone down. In the distance, I could hear cries of creatures in the night. The glow of the fire and the smoke from damp branches kept the insects away, though. At least, I kept telling myself that.
I cleaned my hands and the knife in the river and filled the canteen. When I returned, I made sure Mildred was across the fire from me. In sight and out of arm’s reach.
For a moment, I said nothing, just trying to figure her out. From a certain point of view, her trying to avenge her father’s death wasn’t all that unreasonable. When I found out my dad had been killed in Afghanistan, I’d been mad for weeks. Of course, my dad wasn’t a psycho kidnapper and would-be murderer like hers was.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I told her. “I know what it’s like to lose your dad. But what happened was—”
“I’m not going to kill you tonight,” she said.
“That’s . . . reasonable,” I said. The fact that she kept telling me she wasn’t going to kill me was sort of unnerving. I stared at her across the fire for a moment and decided I believed her. And that it was safe to dry my shoes. Being here without footwear could be fatal. I opened up the laces and set my shoes close to the fire. “Don’t steal my stuff, either.”
She looked offended. “I’m not a petty thief.”
“Look,” I said, getting angry now myself. “I get that you’re mad and grieving and whatever, and I’m sorry your dad is dead, but he was trying to kill me and Mad Jack, and he kidnapped my sister!”
Mildred held up her hand. “Whatever you believe about my father’s motivations is manifestly incorrect. But I’m willing to put my feelings aside for the moment. As long as we can be helpful to each other. Do we have a deal?”
“Sure,” I replied after a moment. “We have a deal.” Whatever.
We were silent for a while. I wondered where Petra and Brady and Nate were, hoped that they were all on the boat and that it was okay. There had been a lot of Deinosuchus around when we’d last spotted the boat, and one of them could’ve mistaken it for dinner. Or maybe not mistaken.
And that led me to wondering what Emma and Kyle were doing with Uncle Nate. My brother and sister could take care of themselves, mostly, but I was beginning to realize I didn’t know Uncle Nate as well as I thought.
I prayed they were all safe.
I hadn’t realized that that much time had gone by when Mildred used a stick to pull the gator from the fire. A succulent aroma rose from the carcass. She gestured. “Bon appétit.”
The gator needed salt or maybe cayenne pepper, but it was hot and good.
As I gnawed on a piece of the tail, I stared at Mildred for a moment across the fire.
“Do you have a question?”
“What do you know about all this?” I asked. “I mean, really know?”
“I know,” she answered, “that time travel is not to be trifled with. And that I wish to return home.” She nibbled delicately on a chunk of a leg, chewed, and swallowed. “Are you going to slit my throat in the night?”
I coughed. My first impulse was to say no, but I choked it back. “Probably not.”
“What happened with your father?” she asked after a moment. “How did he die?”
“He was in the military,” I answered slowly, not just because I didn’t really like to talk about it. “And I’m not sure I should say anything more. Because of that whole space-time-continuum issue.”
Which sounded sort of ridiculous when I said it aloud.
“Fair enough. You take the first watch, then,” she said. “Good night.”
With that, she took a couple of steps from the fire and lay down, her back to me, on a pile of fern fronds she’d arranged earlier.
I finished off my portion of the gator, then tossed the rest of the remains into the river and sat, my back to a tree, near the fire. I took a sip of water and attempted to relax, listening to the forest noises, trying to stay awake, thoughts drifting.
And they kept circling. My first thought was that I didn’t really want to die here and that it really was kind of easy to kill a person if you didn’t care about the mess. You could do it with a gun, a knife, a rock, a loaf of bread, a bowl of sugar, or a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Which led me back to the same thing: Brady was going to die. Unless I told him. But maybe I had told him and he went anyway, and what if I wrecked the entire space-time continuum? Okay, that last worry didn’t seem all that likely, but it wasn’t irrelevant. Yes, Mildred was right. Time travel was, or could be, dangerous. We didn’t really know.
I didn’t know why it was bugging me so much. Samuel was dead and it hadn’t weirded me out to know him. But at least in our time, he’d lived a full life.
Brady hadn’t. Assuming he made it back, at age thirty he would be in a building outside Houston constructed so people could take time off and have fun, and instead it killed them. Dozens of people were going to live because of him, but he’d be dead.
It wasn’t just a space-time-continuum issue, though. If I were in Brady’s position, I didn’t know if I’d want someone to tell me the day I was going to die.
I stared at the fire long into the night.
Chapter
XXI
Nate
“THAT’S, LIKE, A BRONTOSAURUS, RIGHT?” NATE ASKED, adjusting his glasses. “Or one of those things we’re not supposed to call a Brontosaurus anymore? That Fred Flintstone used as a crane at the quarry?”
Despite its long neck and long tail, it was small, no more than about twenty feet long from nose to tail and maybe six feet tall at the shoulder. It had a grayish-green lizard-like hide and it was grazing on ferns.
“No, it’s not Apatosaurus. Alamosaurus, maybe,” Brady ans
wered, staring up at the long-necked creature. “Juvenile.”
“And you want us to go up there?” Nate said to Petra. “How much does this dinosaur weigh? A couple tons?”
“Probably,” she answered. She pulled an arrow from her quiver and nocked it.
“Hold on,” Brady said. Reaching over, he turned the ignition key. The outboard motor roared to life, startling the Alamosaurus. When Brady revved the engine, the creature glanced our way and then trundled off, back into the forest of redwoods beyond.
“Nice,” Petra murmured.
Brady wrapped the anchor line around a cypress tree and the trio climbed up the riverbank, Nate nearly passing out as his leg banged a tree root on the way. From where they stood, a good fifteen feet up from the water level and maybe ten feet or so higher than the surrounding bank, the bonfire would be in clear view from the river and the other bank.
Nate rested while Petra and Brady spent the next couple of hours gathering wood for the signal fire. They thought that it would also keep predators at bay and, possibly, help with the mosquitoes. The problem with all those nature documentaries, Nate decided, was that they never covered the insect problem.
Finally, they had enough wood for the bonfire and used it to form a tepee shape about six feet high. They also set up the hibachi off to the side, where Petra told the boys she would cook the hadrosaur.
Nate wasn’t sure when she’d decided she was in charge, but since neither he nor Brady had ever cooked a dinosaur before, they went with it.
“It’ll be dark in about an hour,” Petra said. “Let’s get dinner ready first, and then we can light the bonfire.”
Using a flint and steel, Petra got the cook fire going a lot quicker than Brady or Nate would’ve. Once it burned down, she used one of the hunting knives to slice the hadrosaur leg into a couple of pieces vaguely resembling brisket and placed them on the rack. The rest of the leg she tossed into the river. The meat was a dark pink, not quite as red as beef, but more red than pork.
Then she cut off a couple of dime-size pieces and set them down in front of Aki. The little dromaeosaur took one sniff and then scurried over underneath a fern and began digging in the dirt. He dislodged some kind of beetle and pounced, crunching it down with dinosaurian glee.
Not long after that, as the trees became shadows, the group lit the bonfire.
In its light, they pulled out the hadrosaur meat.
“Not bad,” Brady said as he gnawed.
“Could use some salt, though,” Nate replied.
“Oh, here,” Petra told them, pulling salt and pepper shakers from her pocket.
“Where’d you get these?” Nate asked, just as he drew the obvious conclusion.
She shrugged. “Mad Jack’s cottage. He had an entire spice rack in one cabinet. I didn’t bring any others, though.”
The seasonings helped. A lot. The texture and flavor of the Kritosaurus was kind of halfway between beef and pork, just like the color. And salt was always good.
“How did you learn to do this sort of thing?” Nate asked. “Fires. Shooting dinosaurs. Cooking dinosaurs. Most girls . . . don’t.”
Brady kicked his brother. “Are you going to tell Ernie that, or should I?”
Nate turned red. Brady was right. Ernie camped and fished and hunted as much as he and Brady did. Not as well as Petra, though.
Petra laughed. “You live in the country. I’m betting most girls there . . . do.”
Nate turned even redder.
That’s when he remembered—not that he’d ever really forgotten—that she lived on the ranch. Their ranch. That she knew their father.
“What’s he like?” Nate asked. He nodded at Brady. “Our father, I mean. Is he still crazy obsessed about time travel? And a reclusive lunatic?”
Brady went rigid at his brother’s last remark but didn’t dispute what he said.
Petra’s expression didn’t change. She held out her hand to Aki, who came over and took a piece of meat from her. “I like your dad.” Then she sighed. “But, yeah, sometimes he drives my mom crazy. And I hope he makes it.”
Brady held up a hand. “Wait. What?”
Petra grimaced but continued. “My mom’s his nurse, housekeeper, and pretty much takes care of him. And I probably shouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“No,” Nate said. “That wasn’t what I was asking about.”
“I know. For the last few years, my mom and I have been just about the only people he’s seen.” Petra hesitated, then crossed her legs underneath herself. “Just after Kyle, Emma, and Max arrived for the summer, and just before we came here, your father had a heart attack.”
Nate stared. “Are you saying that in thirty years or whatever, he’s still going to be the same crazy-obsessed whackjob?”
Petra didn’t answer. She just picked at the leaves of a fern frond.
Nate jumped up and took two steps into the forest before deciding that anger and outrage weren’t an excuse to go blundering into a Tyrannosaurus rex. He turned, ignoring Brady’s snort, and clambered, half falling, down the cliff to the bass boat.
It rocked in the water as he stepped over and threw himself sideways into a seat. He just sat there and, well, sulked.
A few minutes later, his brother came down the bank and stood in front of him.
Before Brady could speak, Nate started to vent. “What is wrong with him? He doesn’t take care of himself, he does stupid things, and he’s never, ever there . . .”
“Petra says . . .” Brady began. “Petra says he closed off the ranch because they—we—found some fossil footprints.”
“So?” Nate said. “There are all kinds of dinosaur tracks on the ranch.”
“But these were from a human girl.”
Nate’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Emma, Max’s sister, left them. It’s how they knew how to find her.”
Nate frowned. “But that still doesn’t explain why Dad’s so obsessed about the Chronal Engine in our time. He doesn’t know about the footprints yet, does he?”
Brady just shrugged. “Maybe he has a reason for what he’s doing now, the same way he’ll have a reason for closing off the ranch then.”
Nate gave up. He adjusted his glasses and sat up straight, feet on the floor of the boat.
“Oh.” He adjusted his legs. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Brady answered. “I told you.”
“No,” Nate said. “Why are my feet wet?” When he’d put them down, they’d splashed into water. Sure, there’d been a little of it from when the Deinosuchus had nearly capsized them, but this was deep. Several inches deep.
Nate jumped up and perched on the back of the seat. “We’re sinking!”
Chapter
XXII
Max
IN THE MORNING, I AWOKE NOT DEAD. IT FELT KIND OF good to realize I hadn’t been knifed in my sleep by Mildred or disemboweled by a stray dromaeosaur. On the other hand, I really hadn’t slept all that well because I’d been afraid of being knifed in my sleep by Mildred or disemboweled by a stray dromaeosaur. It did mean, though, that Mildred kept her word. Unless she was trying to lull me into a false sense of complacency.
The fire had burned down to embers, and Mildred was asleep beside it, even though it was her watch. I let her lie while I stood and walked over to the riverbank. We hadn’t seen the others or heard the bass boat during the night. At least I hadn’t. I’d doubted they’d have traveled in the dark, anyway. In all probability, they were downriver on their way to the launch, hoping for us to catch up.
But that meant we had another problem, which I hadn’t mentioned yet to Mildred: we were on the wrong side of the river.
But I had had an idea last night.
I sat on the edge of the riverbank next to a pair of palmettos, my legs dangling over the side. Birds called in the trees in the meadow behind me. Below, I saw piles of driftwood that had ended up on the bank in the bow of the river. The dry ones would be useful for what I had in mind.
Along the edge of the river, a pair of alvarezsaurs—two-legged feathered theropods, about two feet tall—waded, occasionally darting their heads into the water to pick up a fish or maybe a mollusk of some kind. They had tiny, stubby arms that ended in hands with a single finger and claw. Paleontologists had debated for years whether they were dinosaurs or birds and what they used those weird claws for. And now, seeing the alvarezsaurs in person, I still didn’t have a clue. “Ahh, science.”
“What about science?” Mildred asked. As I turned, she sat up, brushed the dirt and leaves off her safari garb, and stood.
“Nothing,” I replied. She came over to stand beside me. “Have you ever built a raft?”
Her expression didn’t change. “Why?”
“The steamboat will be on the other side of the river,” I told her. I paused. “And I haven’t seen a Deinosuchus since yesterday, but I don’t really think I want to try swimming across.”
Not that going by raft would be that much safer, but . . .
Mildred was silent a moment. “If we continue farther downriver, we’ll eventually reach the sea, and crossing at the mouth could expose us to dangerous currents and antediluvian sea creatures.”
“Exactly,” I told her.
It took most of the morning. We used eight or so logs about six inches in diameter for the main body of the raft, lashed together with vines we cut down from the trees along the meadow. I used another log as an outrigger, attaching it with poles to the main part of the raft.
The vessel ended up being about eight feet long and four feet wide, not counting the outrigger.
“Do you see any of the alligators?” Mildred asked as we prepared to launch.
“No,” I replied. “But look.” A ways upriver, on the far side, was a hadrosaur carcass. A trio of small feathered dromaeosaurs was atop it, squeaking and tearing out tiny chunks of flesh. “If there are any Deinosuchus, hopefully they’ll go there.”
We launched, shoving the raft into the water. Mildred climbed up front and knelt, holding a driftwood paddle to pull us forward. I climbed aboard behind her, hoping we had enough momentum to get us quickly to the other side. The raft sank under our weight, so that our knees were under water by a couple of inches, but we stayed afloat.
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