The Dinosaur Four

by Geoff Jones

  “Oh, that must be fun.”

  William sighed. “Yep. You can see why I need to get back to them. They are in that giant sorting machine called middle school. I got to make sure they get sorted onto the right path. The one that doesn’t mean working in fast food and living paycheck-to-paycheck for the rest of their lives. Or worse. I need to be back.”

  “Julie has a nine-year-old son,” Tim said. “I have no idea how to act around him.”

  “Damn, son,” said William, “You are serious about this woman.”

  “Yeah, well getting stranded millions of years in the past puts things in perspective.”

  Al kept a blank face as he listened. They were supposed to be looking for a time machine, but the raft ride had turned into a fucking social hour. They should be discussing survival tactics. How do you navigate without GPS? How do you predict the weather without an app? The idea of living without technology sounded glorious. He would never have to look at another screen. Al provided technical support for small companies that had no IT departments of their own. Most were too inept to look up simple solutions on the internet, especially the realtors.

  Al had discovered that if he actually solved problems, he lost business. They didn’t need him any more. But if he fixed things just enough, he would get another call six months later. The customers didn’t mind. They saw him as the hero.

  Now he was a hero for real. If they made it home, would Lisa still see him that way? Or would they go back to café small talk? Hell, the café was totaled, so there wouldn’t even be that. She would be a celebrity. Everyone in the world would want to meet her. Here, there were exactly four other men on the planet to compete with. One of them was already paired up and one of them was Morgan. Al thought his odds seemed pretty good.

  The secret was to find shelter. If they could find a secure cave, they could live long happy lives here. Lives of freedom and adventure. Here, it didn’t matter if you never knew the right thing to say. All that mattered was that you could take care of things. Al had proven that to Lisa. He took a deep, invigorating breath. The air held more oxygen than in modern Denver. Al felt great. All he had to do was go along on this silly treasure hunt and hope they never found the time machine.

  As they grew close to the sea, the raft began to scrape across the shallow bottom and even came to a complete stop several times. Hank and Al used their sticks to push the raft forward. The midday sun bore down on them and Callie’s pale skin began to redden. When they rounded the final bend and finally caught sight of the ocean, everyone cheered. Al forced himself to emit a hearty, “Yeah!”

  After twenty minutes, though, they seemed no closer. An onshore breeze held them in place, possibly aided by in incoming tide. Tides in Colorado, Al thought. This world was amazing.

  “We aren’t getting anywhere,” Morgan complained.

  “I think we should walk from here,” William said. There was no bank on the left hand side, only an endless maze of reedy marshes, so they poled over to the right, where they found a sandy shoreline.

  Buddy bolted as soon as the raft was close enough, performing another epic leap across a three-foot gap.

  “Buddy, wait!” Callie shouted. The dog zig-zagged away, disappearing into clumps of sea grasses.

  Hank put a firm hand on her shoulder. “Easy with the shouting, babe. That might attract attention.”

  “But he’s gone.” She glared unhappily.

  “He’ll come back, I betcha,” William said. Al thought he was just trying to make her feel better.

  Al climbed off of the raft and onto the sandy bank. He scanned the river ahead. There was no sign of the football. He wondered if they had missed it somewhere along the way? Did the thing even exist? They were relying on the delusional words of a dying stranger. A stranger who was responsible for their very situation.

  The woman had claimed the device floated. Anything could have happened to it though. Maybe it had been weighed down by rubble that had fallen on top of it. For all they knew, it was sitting on the bottom of the river right below the café, pinned under a pile of concrete, just like the woman herself had been. His heart pounded as a new possibility occurred to him. What if the device is back at the café and Lisa finds it? She and Helen might end up going home before the rest of them got back.

  William unfastened one of the black nylon straps from the side of the raft and wrapped it around the trunk of a short shrub. Callie, Hank, Tim, and Morgan all took off their personal floatation devices and tossed them into the raft. None of the vests had been inflated.

  Morgan watched William tie up their boat with a look of dismay. “You’re wasting your time, man. We can’t use it to go back upriver.” Just in case the condescending tone wasn’t clear enough, he added, “Duh.”

  “We might need it later,” William explained. “Maybe the machine is way out in the ocean and there are jellyfish everywhere. Or who knows what?”

  “Jellyfish.” Morgan cringed.

  Yeah, Al thought. Or maybe we’re stuck here for the rest of our lives and we might wish we had a raft at some point along the way. He appreciated William’s forethought.

  William finished hitching up the raft and collected the shovel. “Ya’ll know I’m from Florida,” he said, starting off toward the sea. “It’ll be good to see the beach again.”

  Tim reached into the raft to retrieve his life jacket. Un-inflated, it amounted to little more than a collection of straps. He put it back on, just in case.

  The hike to the coast took them another hour. The ground alternated between boggy and sandy and they were forced to backtrack several times around wide, stagnant marshes. William left the group more than once to hike back to the river, in case the device was stuck along the shore somewhere. Each time, he returned empty-handed.

  Mosquitoes attacked them in great clouds.

  “Maybe one of these will get trapped in amber,” Callie said, smacking her neck and cringing at the bloody splotch on her palm. “Someone will find it someday, extract the blood from its belly, and make a clone of me.” Hank laughed and put his arm around her. Al felt a jealous itch crawling up his back. Hank probably bent her over every single night.

  Finally, they crested the last row of dunes. They stood at the top, looking down at a wide beach of dull brown sand. To their left, the mouth of the river widened to cover a half mile.

  The sea itself was apparently quite shallow. Several hundred yards out, they saw dozens of the largest animals to ever walk the planet.

  [ 32 ]

  A herd of four dozen seismosaurs grazed offshore in knee-deep water. They munched on seaweed, slowly reeling long strands into their mouths like children slurping spaghetti. Their necks stretched eighty feet out. As they lumbered along, they kicked up small waves which rolled back and forth between them.

  Tim looked in awe at the ocean spread out before him. All that water. He had never seen the ocean before. It looked like dull slate, not the brilliant blue-green he expected.

  “They aren’t real,” Callie said. “They can’t be. Someone put something in my drink and I’m hallucinating.” Hank put his arm around her.

  Morgan snapped his fingers. “I know those. Those are Brontosauruses.”

  William shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’re in the sauropod family, but these are bigger. And besides, they don’t use the name ‘brontosaurus’ any more. It’s ‘Apatosaurus’ now.”

  “Pat o’saurus?” Morgan snickered. “What are they, fucking Irish?”

  William squinted at the offshore giants. “These look more like diplodocus. See how long their tails are?”

  Morgan clapped William on the back. “I am so glad I got stuck in the land of the lost with the world’s only black dinosaur nerd.”

  William smiled. “Someday, Morgan, you will have children of your own and you will become an expert on dinosaurs, or insects, or Japanese fighting robots, or something.”

  “I’m already an expert on Japanese fighting robots, bro.”

&n
bsp; Callie looked over. “Maybe he’ll have a little girl and become an expert on princesses.”

  William chuckled and studied the great beasts in the distance. “Diplodocus wasn’t so big though. Those look enormous.”

  “Hey!” Callie pointed. “Forget about the damn dinosaurs. Look what I see!” Off to the left, about a quarter mile out from the surf, an orange light blinked, like a buoy marking the mouth of the river. “That’s got to be it!”

  They all gazed at the object bobbing in the water.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Morgan said. “I’m going to get so wasted when we get home.” He lit his second-to-last cigarette.

  Tim focused on the device. It glinted in the sunlight. I have got to take swimming lessons. He had a few thousand dollars saved up in the bank. Maybe I could take Julie on a vacation to Hawaii. He wondered if it was too early to invite her on a vacation. “How far out do you think that is?” he asked.

  “Less than two thousand feet,” Hank said. "You all stay here. Build a sandcastle or something. I’ll go get it.”

  “We gotta be careful now,” Al cautioned. “So far, the plant eaters have been just as bad as the meat eaters. Maybe we should wait until they clear out.”

  Hank looked across the water at the wading giants. “Those things are so big, how can they even notice us? We’re like ants.” Most of the herd grazed beyond the time machine and nearly a hundred feet separated the device from the closest dinosaur. They moved slowly to the right, following the coast southward. “Besides, it doesn’t look very deep.” The water appeared to be three or four feet high where it met the dinosaurs’ legs, even the ones farthest out. Hank turned to Al. “I’m going to just walk out there and get that damn thing.”

  “Wait,” Callie began. “I’ve been thinking. Remember what Beth said about horror movies? Don’t split up.” She paused. “Let’s all wade out there as a group. Let’s stick together.”

  William nodded. “It sounds like a good idea to me. If something happens, we can help each other out.”

  Hank stared at his fiancé and gave a shrug. “Alright, but I’m not waiting on anyone.” He started down the dune, sliding on loose sand.

  Tim considered offering to stay behind and watch their backs. The water did look shallow enough to walk in. He decided he could handle it and started after the others.

  “Hey, look who’s here,” said William, pointing up the beach. Buddy walked toward them dragging the dried remains of a three-foot fish.

  Callie smacked her lips. “Mmmm, that looks delicious.” The dog dropped to the sand and stripped bits of flesh from the bones, holding the fish between his front paws.

  William let out a chuckle. "Let’s do this.” He followed Hank down to the high tide line. Bits of shells littered the beach, along with an uneven band of withered seaweed. William jammed the shovel into the sand and knelt to remove his shoes. The others followed suit. They all dropped their mobile devices into their shoes. Even though most were sealed up in baggies, they didn’t want to risk carrying them out into the ocean. They contained the pictures they had taken, pictures that could be worth thousands. Hank snapped a few shots of the herd at the last minute.

  Buddy watched Hank lead the group down to the surf and then returned his attention to his seafood snack.

  As they drew close to the water, they picked up the smell of the dinosaurs lumbering offshore. “That’s um, that’s something.” Callie commented. The seismosaurs smelled far worse than the hadrosaurs, even at this distance.

  Tim’s stomach already felt queasy at the thought of going out into the water. The smell of goat cheese vomit added to his nausea. He opened his mouth to breathe.

  The water felt warm, almost spa-like, and the surf amounted to little more than a ripple. Tiny minnows scattered about their feet as they sloshed along. Hank led the way, setting a steady pace.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Callie remarked. “A walk on the beach.” Hank smiled and took her hand.

  At twenty yards out, they encountered the seaweed which had attracted the seismosaurs to the area. Thick, ropey strands tangled and tugged at their feet as they walked, slowing their progress. “Ok, I take it back,” Callie said. “This is bad. I hope nothing is living in this stuff.”

  “You got that right,” Tim agreed. He imagined tentacles wrapping around his bare feet and eels slithering along his ankles.

  “I doubt there is anything too big nearby,” Hank offered. “Not with those things lumbering around.”

  Tim wasn’t so sure. He positioned himself in the middle of the group and shuffled his feet along the sandy bottom as he walked, hoping to scare off any prehistoric stingrays or crabs that might be sheltering under the seaweed.

  Morgan stumbled and he fell forward into the water. He came up soaked and sputtering. “What the shit!” The others laughed.

  “What does that mean, exactly?” William asked.

  Morgan flapped his arms, trying to shake them dry. “It’s like ‘what the fuck’,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  Callie pressed him. “Yeah, but everyone else says ‘what the fuck.’ Why do you say ‘what the shit’?”

  Morgan pulled a strand of seaweed from his hair. “Because a fuck is a good thing. People always say ‘what the fuck’ when they are upset about something. Why would you take such a wonderful thing as a fuck and use it to talk about something bad?”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, haven’t you?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  As they moved past the steady whisper of small waves breaking on the shore, they heard a brittle screeching sound from the direction of the herd.

  “That’s a weird noise,” Morgan said. “You’d think creatures that big would sound a little more bad-ass.”

  “It isn’t the dinosaurs making the noise,” William said. “It’s the creatures flying around them.” A cloud of pterosaurs buzzed around each giant seismosaur. The flying reptiles flitted about, landed on the sides of the sauropods, squawked at each other and then flew off again, only to reposition themselves somewhere else. “They must feed on parasites living on the dinosaurs’ skin.”

  Methodically, each seismosaur lowered its head and swung it sideways through the water. When it rose back to the sky, it pulled up strands of seaweed and then chewed the mass into its mouth. They never seemed to drop any.

  Their tails extended straight out behind them, ending in impossibly thin wisps that rotated in tight spirals, like little flagellate propellers slowly pushing the giants forward. Every so often, Tim thought he heard the sound of a tail slicing the air, like the swish made by swinging a thin branch.

  Hank and Callie led the group by a good ten yards. They seemed to have an easier time wading in their running shorts than the others in their long pants. Hank released Callie’s hand and forged ahead. Tim thought that he seemed determined to reach the device first, almost as if it was a race. Tim did not object. There was no reason for everyone to come all the way out and the sooner they got the time machine, the sooner they could head back.

  The football-shaped object bobbed gently in the water, its yellow-orange light blinking on and off every few seconds. It looked alien and out of place in this otherwise natural world.

  When he finally reached it, Hank spoke out loud. “Gotcha!” He took it into his hands. The device was more than three times as large as a real football and encased in shiny metal. Hank lifted it triumphantly over his head and turned to face the others following behind. Water dripped onto his hair and a smile broke out on his face. The object was covered by eight panels, four on each hemisphere, alternating between orange paint and polished aluminum.

  Enough, Tim thought. He turned to look back at the shore. A few yards behind the group, he saw the forty-foot crocodile. Its upper jaw and snout broke the surface, creating a low wake as it swam silently toward them.

  [ 33 ]

  “Fishing is all about patience,” Helen said, watching the bobber dance in the current. Four lines extend
ed off the sidewalk pier. Two lines ended with lures from the tackle box and two others ended with hooks holding small white worms Lisa found under a log near the tree line.

  “That’s why I never fished,” Lisa told her. “No patience.”

  “You got this store up and running. That must have taken some patience.” Helen had never worked outside the home. Lawrence Davies believed a family needed a wife and a mother. Helen believed it too, when it came down to it. She couldn’t imagine what it would take to run a business by herself.

  “I think my lack of patience helped me,” Lisa said. “I never sat still. I always had to find an improvement.”

  “You did the right thing, dumping them in the river,” Helen said. She didn’t actually believe that, but she thought Lisa needed to hear it. Helen thought that bodies should be buried. She didn’t believe in cremation and she certainly did not believe in river dumping.

  The first body had startled her. She had been sorting through the fishing supplies when it landed in the water. A few drops from the splash hit her. She had watched in horror as the remaining three corpses fell from above and then floated away. That’s going to be you, Helen Davies, if you aren’t careful now.

  Still, what’s done is done. Chastising the woman wouldn’t help and it wasn’t as if the two of them could dig four graves by themselves.

  “It was starting to get pretty nasty up there.” Lisa had washed her hands three times with antibiotic soap after climbing back down.

  “I suppose there wasn’t any other choice,” Helen admitted. “Still, sweetie, when my turn comes, I’d really prefer to be buried.”

  “I promise not to dump you in the river.”

  Helen wasn’t sure if she was being patronized, but it did not matter. She had made her wishes known. “Look! There was a nibble.” She pointed a bony finger at one of the white and red bobbers.

  Helen had seen nibbles about every five minutes, and she pointed out each and every one, hoping to keep Lisa distracted now that she had run out of things to do. The remaining “Daily Edition” canvas bags were all stuffed with supplies. Everything that they might need had been carefully packed. She had divided up all of the camping and survival gear from the cabinet upstairs, along with what remained of their food. If they found themselves needing to depart, they could grab at least two bags each on the way out. Of course, if they needed to leave, there might not be time to grab anything. Helen was not sure she would leave the building at all, no matter what happened.