Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  Yariko knelt beside him. “We have to get him out,” she whispered, looking up at Julian as he leaned in the doorway. “Before it explodes again. It’s still sensitive to vibrations—to noise.”

  Julian climbed in, squinting against the smoke, trying to ignore the nauseating feeling in his stomach. They put their hands under Dr. Shanker’s elbows and heaved.

  Then a voice bellowed, “Don’t move him if he’s hurt!” A man’s head was thrust into the vault: one of the security guards, Julian realized; a big, meaty fellow with a marine style crew cut and a no-nonsense air. He frowned at Julian and said, “Who are you? Who let you in?”

  “There’s no time,” Yariko snapped, although still speaking quietly. “We have to get out of here now. And keep your voice down.” To Julian she said, “Lift him up.” They tugged again at Dr. Shanker’s arms, without much result, as he weighed over two hundred pounds.

  The guard eyed Yariko suspiciously. He climbed inside and knelt in front of Dr. Shanker. “Show us the injury,” he said, and his voice, although calm, reverberated in the metal chamber. He firmly pulled aside Dr. Shanker’s hands, revealing bloody pulp where his face should have been.

  The guard winced. “Christ,” he muttered. “All right, let’s lift him out.” Then he shouted, “Ron! Hurry up! Ron! I need help!” His voice echoed and boomed in the vault, and Julian heard Dr. Shanker whispering through his clutched hands and his labored breathing, “Shut up. Shut up.”

  Yariko stood and grabbed the man’s arm. “You’ll set it off again,” she hissed. He stared at her as she went back to Dr. Shanker and tried to lift him again. “Help me. Julian. Frank. Just get him out of here.”

  The second guard leaned into the portal.

  “Jesus Christ, Frank, what happened?” he said, his voice also sounding overloud in the confined space. “Electrical fire? I just called 911 . . . that was some explosion.”

  But then the world heaved and disappeared in blackness and noise, sparks and confusion, and a total numbness that was more frightening than any pain.

  Julian struck something solid on his hands and knees; a tilted slab of concrete, he thought. But he could not get to his feet. He struggled a moment and then sank down again, cheek against the cool pebbly cement, and lost consciousness.

  THREE

  Once you have found a bed of fossils, how do you determine its age? Radiometric dating is not always possible, but there are a number of other methods. Ammonites are the fabulous chronometers of the dinosaur era. They lived in shallow, warm seas, and have left us the fossilized impressions of their shells in uncountable thousands. We know so much about Ammonites and how they evolved over time that merely by glancing at a few shell patterns we can date the fossil bed to within a million years.

  —Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  1 September

  11:27 AM Local Time

  “There should be three.”

  “Clearly there aren’t. Unless they’re hiding in a secret compartment, there’s only one here, or rather one-half.” Chief of Police Sharon Earles stood and carefully removed her gloves.

  “That graduate student, Mark Reng, said the two physicists were in here when the explosion happened.” Sergeant Charlie Hann shook his head, not for the first time that morning.

  Half a body, where there should have been three. Half of a human body. The lower half: from the waist down, blood-soaked trousers, belt intact with radio and keys, a pack of cigarettes in the back pocket. And then there were the arms, again the lower halves, lying neatly and exactly in place beside the face-down—knees-down?—body; and everything sliced cleanly as if with a giant cleaver.

  But who ever heard of a giant cleaver in a physics lab?

  Hann turned away from the vault. “Well, let’s get the experts in.” He was sickened by the burnt plastic fumes, the sharp smell of blood, and the grotesque, almost obscene partial corpse. In this small town such things were not often seen, and he heartily wished he was still at the station with his coffee and doughnut on this Monday morning.

  Earles watched him leave with a mixed look annoyance at his quick departure and relief at being left alone to explore her thoughts.

  Outside the lab, in the dim hallway with flickering fluorescent bulbs, Hann ducked under the orange police tape and nearly collided with a young woman.

  “The area is closed,” he said, before the woman could ask. “We want the hallway cleared.”

  “I’m here for Hilda,” she said. She was a student, Hann decided; maybe a senior, but still young, shocked to see thick orange tape and a police officer in a lab corridor reeking of burnt electronics. “We’re going for a walk. We always do, at this time,” she added, as if those were the magic words that would open the tape line. “She’s in the lab. Is—is everything OK in there?”

  Hann swore, and not under his breath. Make that one half where there should be four, he thought.

  Sharon Earles had been heading the Creekbend police force two years. Forty-two, tough, and the town’s champion pool player, she had been on her own since the age of sixteen. As the first woman on the local police force she’d had to develop a thick skin and a decisive manner that discouraged questions. Life did not give her many breaks; what success she achieved was by sheer determination and refusal to back down. Sharon was used to being on her own, and in charge.

  When Hann left the physics lab, looking green about the gills, Earles took out her cell phone and called the forensic office that covered Creekbend. She knew the body was one of two young security guards, police hopefuls, assigned to this classified project; she had helped train them, and could picture his face clearly. Hann said his name was Ron McKenzie. She dispatched someone to track down the second guard, who was probably on his lunch break, and the two senior scientists, who should have been present at the time of the accident as the only two people authorized to open the vault.

  The boy might turn out to be an impediment rather than an asset in this case, she thought, her mind going back to Hann. His sense of horror was only natural, but she’d expected a twenty-eight-year-old cop to be more professional. It wasn’t as if she enjoyed looking at mutilated bodies either.

  She stepped around the body to the small round door of the vault. It was open now; but ten minutes ago it had been shut so tightly that it had to be forcibly pried open. As if the inside of the vault had been a giant vacuum, she thought.

  For the second time that morning she stooped carefully over the corpse and studied the inside of the door. The outside, of course, was sprayed with blood, still wet. The inside, though, was clean. With her hands behind her to be sure of touching nothing, Earles leaned into the vault. The sill was clean, too. On the floor of the small, cubical chamber, near some shattered dials on a low table, there was more blood. She crawled through the doorway and went to look.

  It wasn’t enough. A small spattering on the cracked face of a dial, some smears on the table, several thick drops on the floor. Not enough.

  It made no sense.

  It meant that the other half of the body was never inside the vault.

  Sharon pocketed her cell phone and stepped out, being careful not to brush up against anything, to wait for the forensics team.

  Julian woke up in sunlight.

  For a long time he lay on his back without moving, staring into a cloudless blue sky, listening to the crying of the gulls. There was a good brine smell to the air, and now and then a breeze fluttered his hair. He lay still for some time, relaxed, almost dreaming.

  Finally he sat up; the world rushed in with a sudden sharpness, and he looked around, taking it all in without comprehension. He was high up on the rocky slope of a beach. At his back was a ragged line of what looked like palm trees, their great frond-like leaves absolutely still. He blinked at them and shook his head, but they remained unchanged. Before him the high sun burned over the water, hurting his eyes. On either side were tumbled rocks choked up with sand, littered with shells and decaying seaweed. A few b
irds, plovers they looked like, skittered over the sand at the edge of the water and snapped up bits of food. A seagull stood on a rock nearby and looked at him, cried out, pecked a few times at a crab shell, and then suddenly flew away.

  At first Julian thought he was alone. When he finally glanced down at the ground he was startled—not horrified, just innocently startled. In the sand and rocks twenty feet away lay the upper fragment of a human body. It had been severed just above the waist and the arms were only stumps, exactly as if a piece of machinery had sliced through the man while he stood. The pebbles beneath him were drenched with blood, drying now to a brown crust. It was one of the security guards: Ron. His eyes were still open, staring at nothing, curiously expressionless.

  Three more bodies lay in the sand: Yariko, Dr. Shanker, and Frank, the second security guard. They lay deathly still. Peaceful. The guard had an unnatural twist to his leg. Yariko’s T-shirt stirred briefly in the wind.

  For a moment more Julian sat hugging his knees, squinting in the intense sunlight at the vast lonely beach all around, too stunned to move. He was able to remember the details of what had happened in the lab, but at first he could not convince himself that any of it had been real. The lab seemed remote from the brightness and the warmth on the beach, like a black-and-white movie without sound, seen once long ago.

  “Whitney.”

  Julian turned, startled. Dr. Shanker was sitting up and looking around him. One side of his face was black with dried blood, the eye swollen shut; he was grimacing as if in pain. Then Julian realized that the grimace was part smile. “Just look at it!” Shanker said. “I didn’t entirely believe, but now. . . .” He got slowly to his feet, breathing heavily. When he spotted the fragment of Ron’s body the smile disappeared, and the bristly bearded corners of his mouth turned downward. “One of the guards,” he said in a raspy voice. “Well.” His face twitched, and the mask of dried blood cracked and flaked.

  Julian stared at him and then, the reality finally hitting him, got to his feet and staggered over to Yariko. When he touched her shoulder she moaned and sat up, clutching her head and squeezing her eyes shut as if she were dizzy. When she opened her eyes she gazed out over the beach, and then turned to Shanker with a bewildered look.

  “What—where are we? I was in the lab,” she said, getting slowly to her feet with Julian’s help.

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Shanker said. “But whatever the settings were aligned to . . . Maybe now we can solve the myster y.” He glanced again at the half-body and looked quickly away.

  “What mystery? What alignment? How did we get here?” Julian felt dazed by the drastic change in his environment, by the heat and color and openness, by the urgent immediacy of what couldn’t possibly be real. “This isn’t Creekbend, is it.”

  “We started in the lab,” Dr. Shanker said. “In the vault. Remember what we talked about yesterday? Bi-directionality.”

  Yariko shook her head and pulled herself free from Julian’s hand, turning to look around her. Then she saw the mutilated body and her eyes went very wide.

  “He was leaning into the vault,” Dr. Shanker said. “Half of him came, and half. . . . Too late now. Let’s worry about ourselves first.” He did not look back at the body.

  “He’s dead,” Yariko cried.

  “Quite,” Dr. Shanker said, amicably. “The rest of us aren’t.”

  Before anyone could reply he knelt beside the guard, who was just beginning to wake up. The man tried to sit but gave a gasp of pain and fell back again.

  “Frank, is it?” Dr. Shanker said. The man nodded, sweating from the pain and breathing hard. “Bad luck, Frank. Broke your leg. Your calf has a pretty good kink in it.”

  Shanker and Yariko linked their arms around Frank and lifted him, with Julian gently supporting the broken leg. He raised his hand to block the sun from his eyes and managed not to cry out as they moved him. They carried him up the rocky slope of the beach to the fringes of the woods, and tried to lay him flat in the shade of the palm trees; but he insisted on sitting upright.

  “We need splints,” Dr. Shanker said, kneeling and expertly touching the injured leg. “Two good straight pieces of hardwood. This is what they teach you in summer camp; emergency first aid, in a jungle.” He looked up at the others and winked his good eye. “Didn’t your Daddy ever send you to camp?”

  Julian found a straight piece of driftwood nearby that he broke over his knee into two lengths. He himself was beginning to wake up more and shake off the strange lassitude; although in the damp, clinging heat, he selfishly longed to collapse in the shade and sleep.

  They unbelted the guard’s holster and lay it aside. Using a pen-knife, they cut open the pant leg and exposed the purple and swollen flesh. Julian sighed in relief: the bone had not broken through the skin; it was a simple fracture. The splint was quickly accomplished with strips of fabric and driftwood. The guard moaned a few times as the ties were pulled tight, but the proper set to his leg seemed to reduce the pain. His eyes began to dart about, for the first time taking in the trees and the brown parchment-like palm leaves scattered on the sand about him.

  “Where are we? Why did you bring me here? What’s going on?” he hitched himself up straighter and glared around at the beach, and then at his companions. His face was alternately red and pale, and he was dripping with sweat.

  Yariko and Dr. Shanker looked at each other. Finally Yariko said, “There’s been an accident. . . .”

  When she didn’t elaborate, Julian said, “So, you think we’ve been sent somewhere by your vault.” Suddenly he remembered the strange beetle on the computer screen, in all its garish color. “Maybe we’ve gone to wherever those beetles came from? Is that what you’re saying? But is that possible?”

  Yariko shrugged. “It’s as possible as what we were seeing in the lab. That’s my guess, anyway. I don’t see any sign of the lab here, and like you said, we’re not in Creekbend anymore.”

  Julian glanced again at the shining beach and the calm, bright water, at the line of palm trees at their backs, and, now that he was more alert, at the thick growth of what looked like laurel under the palms. Tropical vegetation, like that he’d seen once on a trip to Honduras. They must be very far from South Dakota.

  “Where’s Ron?” the guard said, breaking in on Julian’s thoughts.

  Nobody spoke.

  Finally Yariko said, quietly, “I’ll stay here with Frank. You two bring the body out of the sunlight, or cover it with sand. We can at least bury it.”

  Frank stared at her, and then cursed.

  Julian would have liked to stay in the cool of the woods sitting with Yariko, as far as possible from the horrible corpse, but he sighed and followed Dr. Shanker. The curious detachment still had not left him. It was as if he was observing someone from a distance. It didn’t matter what they did; none of it could possibly be real.

  They came out of the woods into the bright glare and stepped over the stones to the site where they’d first woken up.

  The body was gone.

  The rocks and sand were stained with blood, marking the exact location, but the body was gone.

  Between where it had lain and the water a sinuous track had been left in the sand.

  “It’s been dragged away,” Dr. Shanker said. “Toward the water.” He stooped to look closer. “Whitney. How on earth?”

  Julian shook his head. His first thought was that a boat crew might have picked up the body and then left without searching for survivors. He gazed over the water, shading his eyes against the late morning sun, but the flat sheet of the sea was empty. A few birds, gull-like but with strangely long beaks, swooped to catch fish far out over the surface. The sky was clear, a saturated blue, and aside from the restless glinting of the sunlight on the waves, the visibility was perfect. They would have spotted a boat, even a small one. And why would a boat crew drag the body through the sand? “Let’s follow the trail,” he said, straightening up.

  It led down the rocky slope and
then meandered along the beach before finally disappearing into the water. To either side of the furrow were marks like footprints, but the sand was fine and dry, allowing no clear impression. Julian thought there must have been two things, one on either side, pulling the body along.

  At the very edge of the water he saw the first clear marks. Huge footprints were pressed into the wet sand, and Julian realized with a shock that they all belonged to one animal, a four-footed one, obviously straddling the corpse. But there were no returning footprints. “I know that spoor,” he muttered.

  Dr. Shanker looked at him, waiting.

  “Crocodile,” Julian said. “It must have been sunning nearby, and we didn’t see it against the fallen palm leaves. As soon as we left, it ran in and snatched what it wanted.”

  “We won’t have to deal with the body, anyway,” Dr. Shanker said.

  Julian ignored the crude comment. Despite his pat explanation, he was still confused. The size of the tracks was astonishing. If this were one animal, based on the separation between the left and right prints it was about six feet wide and therefore more than thirty feet in length. But something else bothered him, although he could not quite place it. Something was subtly wrong.

  Julian crouched to inspect a seashell pressed into one of the footprints. The spiral shape of it was so familiar that for a moment he did not even realize the terrible strangeness of finding it tossed up here on a beach. He picked it out of the sand, brushed it off, and turned it a few times in his hand.

  As the truth struggled into his head, he reached out against the sand to steady himself. Faintly through a ringing in his ears he heard Dr. Shanker saying, “What is it? Whitney, what do you see?”