by Perrin Briar
“Where does Clint get you?” Aaron said.
“Through him I get to meet all the rich people in school,” Cassie said. “Or, at least, their parents. Dad says half the battle in life is knowing the right people. Know lots of people and opportunities are easier to come by.”
“Don’t you want to be successful by yourself?” Aaron said.
“I will be,” Cassie said. “But it doesn’t hurt to make the right connections to make the journey easier. I’m going to work hard either way. I might as well meet people and call in favors when I need them.”
Aaron shook his head.
“You don’t agree with what I’m saying?” Cassie said.
“No,” Aaron said. “Life is about more than just using people.”
“Using people is what life is all about,” Cassie said. “Friends, teachers, family.”
She said the last word with a slight tremor in her voice.
“Your mother didn’t use you,” Aaron said.
“Yes, she did,” Cassie said. “I was a whinging, whining kid. I held her back. That was why she kept going on trips. She must have hated having to return home to me. That’s why it’s better to use people, and then toss them. Trim away the fat.”
“Is that what I am?” Aaron said. “Fat?”
He looked genuinely hurt.
“Aaron…” Cassie said.
“No, I’m glad I know,” Aaron said. “I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of thinking I was someone important to you. I’m disposable. I get it.”
They were silent a long moment.
“That’s no reason to use people,” Aaron said. “Or pick on them at school.”
“You were weird,” Cassie said.
“So?” Aaron said. “Aren’t we all a bit weird?”
“I’m not,” Cassie said.
“You are,” Aaron said. “You’re the caricature cheerleader who dates quarterbacks and says catchphrases.”
“I so am not!” Cassie said.
She caught her catchphrase and screwed up her face.
“My point is, why me?” Aaron said. “Of all the people, why did you have to pick on me? I never did anything to you.”
“It’s the way things are,” Cassie said. “The way things will always be. The strong pick on the weak because they are weak.”
“But we’re all the same,” Aaron said. “Our weaknesses only exist at school. After we graduate everything will change. Don’t you ever think about the things your friends say to people and how they affect them?”
Cassie shrugged.
“I thought you’d be used to it,” she said.
“I suppose I am,” Aaron said. “But not at the beginning. You can’t know what it’s like to have to go into a building or a room every day and know there’s going to be someone in there who might say something about you – the way you dress, or speak or smell or whatever. I used to love math, now I don’t even want to think about it. Because of your friends.”
“I’m sorry,” Cassie said. “I didn’t know I was having such a big impact on your life.”
“Well, you did,” Aaron said.
There was a pause.
“But you know, you’re not as weird as I thought,” Cassie said.
“No?” Aaron said.
“I mean, you are strange,” Cassie said. “You’re into things I don’t understand at all but… I don’t know. I guess you’re not a freak.”
“Thanks,” Aaron said. “I think. So, if I told your friends that we kissed…”
Cassie glared at him. Aaron held up his hands.
“I’m joking! I’m joking!” he said.
47
BRYAN DIDN’T SLEEP well that night. He dreamed of falling down a rabbit hole, deeper and deeper and deeper, heading toward a pinprick of light in the distance, but never quite getting there. When he woke up, he initially thought it had just been that: a dream. With his green surroundings and his aching back from a poor night of sleep, it was easy to believe he was still in the woods camping.
But then he spotted a lemur with blood-red eyes, hanging from the branch above, staring at him. It bent its head to one side in a caricature of curiosity.
They were up at first light, as the glow bugs coalesced, bunching up to form a tight ball of light on one side of the domed ceiling. The night soundtrack quietened but did not disappear, and remained there in the background.
They ate vegetables Zoe carefully selected from the foliage, and washed it down with some clean water from a flowing stream. They ate a lot, but were still hungry afterwards. It took the edge off their cravings. They put on their backpacks, now free of heavy rocks, and headed into the jungle.
“How much farther do you think we’ve got to go?” Cassie said.
“We did maybe half a day yesterday, so we’ve probably got a couple of days left yet,” Bryan said.
Cassie groaned. Aaron did too, but his was more of a yelp as he fell face-first to the ground. Zoe helped him to his feet.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“I’m fine,” Aaron said, dusting off his knees. “I just tripped on something.”
Zoe looked at the offending item. A horn protruded from beneath a bush. No doubt just a wayward branch. But Zoe knelt down and put her hand to it. She must have noticed something about it because next she lifted the bush up.
“Guys,” she said. “Come take a look at this.”
Bryan and Cassie exchanged a look and rolled their eyes. What was it this time? Endangered dirt? A rare rock? But they said nothing.
Zoe pulled the foliage back further. It caught on whatever was underneath, and when she finally managed to pull it back completely, they found themselves gawping at a giant skeleton.
“Is that a skull?” Bryan said.
“Yes,” Zoe said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Bryan could think of many words to describe it, but beautiful wasn’t one of them. Creepy, maybe. The yellowed bone had two large eye sockets, a pair of rounded humps on its forehead, and two long tusks jutting from the base of its skull.
“Is that an elephant?” Bryan said.
“It’s a mammuthus,” Zoe said. “A woolly mammoth.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before,” Bryan said.
“I’m sure you have,” Zoe said. “In various natural history museums around the world. Strange that it should be here.”
“It’s strange we’re here,” Bryan said.
“No, I mean it’s not the right environment for them,” Zoe said. “The vegetation here, and the creatures we have seen, are all from a world long before these mammuthus were around.”
“What are you saying?” Bryan said.
“I think this place we’re in right now, this ecosystem, was formed shortly after the Earth was,” Zoe said. “Maybe even at the same time. Judging by the unusual plant vegetation, and the primordial soup we saw yesterday. Other creatures obviously came here much later. It was luck of the draw whether this ecosystem would be favored by them or not. Like this poor mammuthus. These creatures would not have stood a chance at survival. I mean, look at them. It’s hot and balmy in here, and these mammoths would have been covered in thick fur. They’re big and clumsy, and couldn’t go into the denser forest, losing out on a lot of food they might have otherwise have benefitted from. They’re more suited to the open plains. They didn’t stand a chance.”
“You think that’s how it died?” Bryan said. “It starved to death?”
“Probably,” Zoe said. “It couldn’t have been due to lack of breeding partners. Look, there are more here.”
Hidden amongst the foliage, wrapped and half-buried beneath the thick veins of vines, were half a dozen skeletons. Undergrowth grew out through the skulls and giant ribcages. A graveyard swallowed by the jungle.
Bryan noticed something about one of the ribcage bones. It’d snapped off and lay haphazard. He picked it up and placed it next to the ribcage bone it had snapped from. He held it the wrong way round. When he turned it ove
r, it revealed a series of large holes on one side. Indentations, caused by a series of sharp objects. If Bryan didn’t know any better, he would have thought they were bite marks. But bite marks from a pair of jaws unimaginably large.
There was a honking noise, causing Bryan to start and drop the bone on the ground. The sound came again, first deep, and then higher pitched, like a band was warming up.
“What was that?” Aaron said.
“I have no idea,” Zoe said.
Zoe continued on through the jungle, heading toward the strange trumpeting sounds. The others followed in her wake, apprehensive, but intrigued. There was crashing and snapping, crunching like trees were being uprooted and thrown down. The ground shook beneath their feet. They slowed, crouching to keep their heads below the foliage’s crown.
Bryan’s mouth was dry. He couldn’t swallow. After what he had seen at the side of the watering hole he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was causing the sounds.
“How about we just keep moving?” he said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.
“We should know what we’re up against while we’re here,” Zoe said. “You can never know too much about your environment. Right, Aaron?”
“Right,” Aaron said, though he didn’t look excited about knowing either.
“Uh, guys…” Cassie said. “I think you should step back a minute.”
“Why?” Zoe said.
They followed Cassie’s eye line. She was looking at their feet. They were standing in a meter-wide recess. Bryan jumped out of it like it was about to bite him.
“Oh my God,” Zoe said, realizing what it was. “Guys, do you know what we’re standing in?”
She couldn’t hide her childish glee.
“A puddle?” Aaron said.
“We’re standing in a dinosaur footprint!” Zoe said.
When Aaron and Bryan looked at it more closely they could make out the round curves of the toes.
“Dinosaurs?” Bryan said, disbelieving. “I thought they were long gone.”
“From the surface,” Zoe said. “But evidently not down here.”
Bryan peered at the jungle with new-found awareness.
“Listen, I saw Jurassic Park,” he said. “And all the sequels. I don’t much like the idea of being stuck in this jungle with them.”
“It’s all right,” Zoe said. “This footprint is of a plant eater. They’re harmless.”
Zoe looked at the kids and frowned.
“You don’t seem very surprised,” she said.
Cassie shrugged.
“There’s old plants here, so why not old animals?” she said.
“Leave it out,” Aaron said. “What is it with you and always wanting to keep secrets? The reason we’re not surprised is because we saw a small dinosaur yesterday at the waterhole.”
“You saw one?” Zoe said. “And you didn’t tell us?”
“We thought you had enough to worry about already,” Aaron said.
Zoe frowned, unable to hide her annoyance.
The branches above them shook. Leaves drifted down like snow. Bryan looked up and caught the long thick neck of a creature high up in the trees, munching away. The glow bugs in the sky were directly above him, blinding him. The shape was just a silhouette.
Zoe lifted up a giant fir leaf and looked out at what lay before her. Her shoulders fell and she became still. The others drew up beside her and peered out at a great plain through the narrow slit of their foliage window, out onto another world. A true lost world.
48
THE CREATURES’ SKIN was as green as the vegetation surrounding them, their heads small compared to their body size, flat and arrow-shaped, ending in a rounded beak. A darker green pattern ran over the top of their heads and down the back of their spines to the tip of their tails like a port wine stain. They bent down to nip at the shoots of a wide-brimmed plant with their grazing teeth. Others stood up on their hind legs to get at the juicy leaves at the top of the trees, revealing their gargantuan size.
“Wow,” Aaron said.
None of them could think of a better word to describe the scene. The creatures looked CGI, they were so unreal.
Bryan worked some saliva into his mouth.
“What are these things?” he said.
“These are what they call iguanodons,” Zoe said. “The first dinosaur to be discovered and recorded, in fact.”
There was movement behind the great creatures, and more varieties of dinosaur than Zoe and Aaron could name emerged. There were parasaurolophus with the tall pipe-like protrusion on the top of their heads, and a small group of pachycephalosaurus with their thick domed craniums, and even an ankylosaurus with its clubbed tail. Bryan’s heart swelled, amazed at the variety of life that could exist below the Earth’s crust.
“I need to get closer and take some pictures,” Zoe said. “Here, hold my bag.”
“Zoe, wait,” Bryan said. “It could be dangerous.”
But she was already heading toward the giant creatures. The herd grazed silently, stripping the bushes clean of their leaves. A male iguanodon rose up onto his back legs and pushed against a tall tree with his front feet. The tree bent and snapped, crashing to the jungle floor. The iguanodon and his babies feasted on the juicy leaves.
A creature like that ought to be avoided at all costs, and there was Zoe, creeping up under a bush with her camera. She lay on the ground and snapped photographs through a small hole. He could imagine the words on her lips now: “This is amazing.”
He agreed with her – it was amazing – but he’d prefer to be in a safari jeep surrounded by highly-trained hunters armed with the latest in technology should anything kick off. Instead, they were exposed.
One of the creatures came close to Zoe’s location and sniffed at her with its nostrils – large enough for a man to put his fist inside. Zoe slowly raised her hand toward the great beast. She must have felt the hot air from its nostrils as she turned away from it. Zoe had a look of amazement on her face, like a child sat on the knee of Santa Claus at the local shopping center.
Then the animals stopped in their tracks. They all turned, necks arching toward the far side of the plain. The huge male iguanodon went up onto his hind legs and peered around at the vegetation around them, his senses heightened.
The hair on the back of Bryan’s neck stood up on end. He peered around at the foliage. It looked calm, but that only made Bryan all the more wary.
The giant male became completely still, and then lowered his head to the food again. Bryan too relaxed. A beast of that size presumably had senses far beyond what Bryan possessed. If he was relaxed, so should Bryan be. But he wasn’t, and just then, the edge of the foliage erupted, spilling forth a huge beast.
Bryan didn’t get a good look at it. All he saw was a mouthful of sharp teeth, small yellow eyes, and black claws on the end of powerful legs.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Bryan shouted.
The iguanodons were up on their feet in an instant, the babies mehing pathetically as the adults wrapped their bodies around them and ushered them away. Bryan did the same with Aaron and Cassie, pulling them away. Zoe got to her feet and ran, racing behind Bryan.
The foliage behind them exploded beneath the weight of the huge beasts as they ran, panicked.
The T-Rex was a dirty brown color with a distinctive purple crest down its back, shaped like a flower in bloom. It took a step, and the whole world shook.
“Go, go, go, go, go!” Bryan shouted.
They ran, and the foliage broke and snapped behind them. Huge dinosaurs ran alongside them, bustling past. The ground shook as the trees hit the earth, and the family lost their footing and almost fell over. Birds hovered over the treetops, hissing and cawing at the dinosaurs trampling over their nests.
The iguanodons rushed past them, their bulky muscles slamming into the ground beside them. Zoe skidded to a halt and grabbed Cassie’s hand, leading her underneath the iguanodon’s legs.
> The T-Rex leapt at the iguanodon and tore into its neck with its powerful jaws. The iguanodon honked in pain, stopped, and turned. But it wasn’t beaten yet. It folded its front fingers into fists, and extended the long blade-like bone protruding from its thumbs like a mugger with a knife. It held its arms in tight and leaned back on its tail like a boxing kangaroo. The T-Rex was hesitant, moving left to right, looking for an opening.
Meh!
A baby iguanodon cried from one side. At some point it had lost contact with its mother. The T-Rex looked from the baby to the fully-grown adult. It turned and ran after the baby iguanodon. The adult relaxed, turned, and took off into the jungle. She did not try to rescue the baby. It was too risky.
A triceratops squawked behind Bryan. It was coming straight for him. Bryan smacked into Zoe with his shoulder, knocking her into Cassie, sending them rolling down a sharp incline strewn with leaves. Then Bryan grabbed Aaron and pulled him aside.
The triceratops whined again, and smashed through a slim tree with its horns. It attempted to skid to a halt, but was going too fast, and ran straight into a swamp. It was only up to its knees, but was sticky, and despite the dinosaur’s huge muscles, it couldn’t pull itself free. It wailed. Bryan felt sorry for it. Each movement seemed to pull the dinosaur deeper into its clutches. The triceratops emitted a haunted groan. As it sank it took its last breath, and a large bubble popped on the surface, like the swamp had digested the young dinosaur and burped with relish.
The other dinosaurs were gone, no doubt to safer climes. The jungle was silent once more.
“Are you all right?” Bryan said to Aaron.
“I’m okay,” Aaron said, shaking with shock. “But where’s Mom? And Cassie?”
“Hopefully somewhere safe,” Bryan said. “Come on. Let’s go find them.”
49
WHY BRYAN HAD slammed into Zoe and Cassie, knocking them down the side of the sharp incline, Zoe couldn’t fathom. He must have seen a danger she hadn’t. Or maybe he just thought it was funny. She wrapped her arms around Cassie.
“We need to find your father and Aaron,” Zoe said.