The Ark Plan

by Laura Martin

  “We can’t hang around here,” Todd said a moment later, sealing his bloody prize inside two different drawstring sacks before putting it into his pack. “We need to get moving.”

  “Moving?” Shawn asked. “What happened to lunch?” As if on cue, his stomach snarled.

  “That guy’s still on today’s menu.” Todd jerked his head at the still-bleeding carcass behind him. I averted my eyes as my stomach roiled sickeningly again. “But we can’t eat here. Hurry up and get your packs on. I’ll explain once we have some distance between us and all that blood.”

  “You shouldn’t have mentioned food if you weren’t going to follow through,” Shawn grouched, readjusting his pack.

  “You’ll get fed,” Todd snapped. “Just hurry.” I glanced at him, surprised by his tone, and realized he was on high alert, his head turning this way and that, taking in the woods around us as though he expected another attack.

  I took a drink of water from my canteen, swished, and spat. It improved the taste in my mouth, but not by much. Before I could put it back in my pack, Todd had snatched it from my hands to pour over his own blood-soaked ones.

  “That seems like a waste of water,” Shawn protested.

  “Trust me,” Todd said, his face grim. “It’s not.” He glanced around nervously. “Grab your stuff, Sky.” Still feeling too dizzy and disoriented to argue, I limped over to my pack and eased its weight onto my throbbing shoulders. I staggered a bit, light-headed from the fall, and Shawn steadied me, frowning.

  “Sky needs to rest,” he insisted.

  “No,” Todd said. “Sky needs to survive. And that means she has to move.” He glanced at me. “Sorry.” Without another word, he took off at a fast jog, and we followed. We ran, crossing and recrossing two streams along the way. Todd made us run right down the middle of the last stream, our boots getting soaked in the icy water. Thirty minutes later, Todd finally stopped and set down his packs. I sank down next to them, putting my head between my knees and blinking the black spots in my vision away.

  “Now we have lunch,” Todd said.

  “Thank goodness,” Shawn said, plopping down next to me.

  Ten minutes later, I watched the meat drip fat into the fire Todd had built. I’d never sat by open fire before. I decided I liked it. Every movement sent a wave of pain through my muscles, and I was pretty sure every inch of my body was bruised. Shawn was pretty sure I had a concussion.

  When I was handed a large piece of steaming dinosaur perched on a flat leaf, I almost didn’t accept it. The thought of eating the creature that had almost devoured me made my newly empty stomach queasy. But it did smell good, a smoky, thick smell I was beginning to associate with the strange foods of the topside world. I watched as Todd dug in with gusto. Shawn shot me an apologetic look before biting into his own steaming piece. My belly felt hollow, and with a resigned sigh, I nibbled at the corner. It was amazing. Ignoring Todd’s smug grin of approval, I tore off a larger hunk and chewed, my eyes squeezed shut as it practically melted on my tongue.

  “So why couldn’t we have done this at that cave?” Shawn asked. “Why’d we run away from a dead dinosaur?”

  “Scavengers,” Todd explained around a mouthful of meat. “I made a silent kill so it may take them awhile to find it, but when they do, we’ll be glad we’re well away. If dinosaurs have the option, they always go for the easy meal. Why do you think they find us so appealing?”

  “Scavengers?” Shawn asked.

  Todd nodded. “Odds are that man-eater you called an allosaurous will be found within the hour and be nothing but bones by sundown. And when they finish with him, they would have gone after us.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to have a fire like this?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that attract dinosaurs?”

  “Nope.” Todd shook his head. “We don’t know why, but we think it has something to do with their instinct to flee from fire.” I nodded and took another bite. Wiping my greasy hands off on my pants, I grabbed my journal out of my pack and flipped to a new page. At the top, I wrote TODD’S TOPSIDE TIPS. Underneath I jotted down what he’d just said about fire, and a few of the other bits of information he’d thrown our way throughout the day.

  “What are you doing?” Todd asked. I jumped and glanced up to find him looking over my shoulder at the list.

  “I just don’t want to forget,” I said sheepishly, shutting the journal and sliding it back in my bag.

  “No one’s ever written down what I said before,” Todd said, sitting back. “Todd’s topside tips.” He nodded. “It has a certain ring to it.” Grabbing another piece of meat, he dug in, letting the grease drip off his chin into the dirt.

  “I wouldn’t flatter yourself,” Shawn said around a mouthful. “She has a head injury.”

  “Watch it,” I laughed, and threw what was left of my piece of meat at Shawn’s head. He caught it, inspected it, and then popped it in his mouth. I shook my head. He’d come a long way for a guy who’d gagged the night before when he’d been told he was eating dinosaur.

  The last of the meat eaten, Todd licked his fingers clean and stood to kick dirt over the remaining flames. Reshouldering his pack, he grabbed his bow and motioned for us to do the same.

  I got gingerly to my aching feet. “What are we doing?”

  “I’m going to give you both a quick lesson,” Todd said. “I was wrong not to train you at least a little bit. Next time it might be me being chased, and I don’t want you two attempting to club a dinosaur to death.” He turned and went over to a nearby tree. Pulling the knife from the sheath on his arm, he carved a rough target into the bark. I followed him.

  “This should be interesting,” Shawn muttered, but he picked up his bow and walked over.

  “Okay,” Todd said, sounding resigned. “I don’t want to spend too much time on this, so we are just going to stick to the basics. Both of you stand where I am and try to hit that target,” he said, motioning toward the tree, twenty feet away. Shawn and I both got into position.

  “Wow, that’s horrible,” Todd groaned, walking over before either of us had a chance to shoot. “Sky, pull your arrow back again, then freeze.” I did what he asked, my arm muscles shaking at the effort of pulling the bowstring. I was using three fingers like he’d shown me when he first made us carry our bows around that morning, but he still looked exasperated. “You need to stand parallel to your target,” he said, turning me roughly so my shoulder pointed at the target instead of my hips. “And don’t have this arm stick straight.” He adjusted the arm that was holding the arc of the bow. “If you do that, your string is going to snap you right in the arm, and it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. And you’ll miss. Now give it a try.”

  I released the bowstring and my arrow shot wide, missing the tree by a good five feet. My face flushed in embarrassment.

  “Not as bad as it could have been,” Todd said. “You drew the bowstring back to your eye to aim, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Was that wrong too?”

  Todd shrugged. “I’m an under-the-chin shooter myself, but eye’s fine. Just always do it the same way. Consistency is important.” He turned to Shawn, and only had to make a few minor adjustments to his stance and arm positioning. I felt a bit better when Shawn’s arrow went even wider than mine.

  “It’s a start.” Todd glanced up at the sun. “I don’t want to lose too much time, but I think we can spare about ten minutes for some practice.” So Shawn and I shot arrow after arrow at the tree. By the end of the ten minutes, I had gotten one of my arrows to hit the target, and Shawn hadn’t gotten any. I would have been smug, but the one that had actually hit had only hit because I’d decided to aim at a tree three feet to the left of the one with a target. Not that I was going to admit that anytime soon.

  “We need to get moving,” Todd finally said. “Grab your arrows and let’s go.”

  This time the bow felt slightly more familiar in my hands as I carried it through the woods. All three of our bows were made of the carved
rib of a dinosaur and were surprisingly light considering their size. I couldn’t get over the idea of hollow dinosaur bones. I’d known that a lot of the dinosaurs the old-world scientists had resurrected had shocked everyone by turning out to have feathers, but the dinosaurs were still way more birdlike than I’d expected.

  The next few hours of hiking through the forest were blessedly uneventful. The only thing we spotted were a few smaller dinosaurs that peered at us nervously before moving away. Every time we came to a clearing in the trees, we went around it. I caught glimpses of massive scaled bodies lumbering through the meadows, but Todd never let us get close enough to really see much. Watching Todd maneuver the woods with such ease gave me hope that someday I might be that comfortable aboveground too. No sooner had I thought this than a distant screech made me jump about a foot. When Todd didn’t even flinch, I tried to cover up the jump by pretending to trip, and then felt even more embarrassed when Todd rolled his eyes at me. I sighed, remembering that in order to get comfortable with the topside world, I needed to survive. And at the rate I was going, my odds didn’t look good.

  “You need to shoot dinner, or we’re going to be eating dinosaur jerky tonight,” Todd said as the light around us started to turn into the orangey-red tones that I now associated with sunset. I shuddered as I thought about the brown strips of hard meat Todd had made each of us pack when we swapped supplies at Adler’s.

  “Why can’t you shoot it?” Shawn asked as his stomach rumbled audibly.

  “Because I don’t need the practice,” Todd said. He had a point, so Shawn and I both started looking for something we could shoot. But I felt a little ill at the idea of killing any of the squirrels or foxes we’d seen scampering about the underbrush. They were all so beautiful and vibrant that I couldn’t picture eating one. The problem was that as the tree cover thinned out, so did the animals. The woods had an almost eerie silence to them. Apparently the animals knew something we didn’t and made their homes elsewhere.

  The terrain had changed as we entered an area that had been more inhabited. It had been easy to forget that the ground we walked over used to be populated with hundreds and thousands of people when we were surrounded by thick trees. Now the ghosts of the past were not so easily ignored. I stopped to inspect a crumbling brick wall. It had been decorative once, but time and passing dinosaurs had collapsed huge sections of it. A metal plaque had fallen off the front and now lay half buried in the dirt. Curious, I bent and pulled it out. White Oak Estates was etched elegantly into its surface. A piece of the sign crumbled in my hand, leaving orange flecks of rust all over the arm of my tunic. I dropped it and stood, brushing myself off.

  “I’m pretty sure this area used to be called the suburbs,” Todd said, and then frowned. “Or was it the urbsubs?” He shook his head. “I can’t remember. But the point is that lots of people used to live close together.”

  Shawn walked up to stand beside Todd, looking around himself with interest. “How can you tell?”

  “Look at the trees.” Todd pointed. “See how the big ones all seem to grow in rows? They planted them to border the streets.” I walked up beside him and saw that he was right: straight lines of trees mapped out the memory of roads, creating a green tunnel of leaves and branches for us to pass through. As we walked, I noticed that every thirty feet or so there was a perfectly square or rectangular space where small weeds and bushes grew out of the crumbling remains of concrete. That’s where the houses used to be, I realized. I sucked in a breath as I looked out at the seemingly endless miles of trees and patches of ruined foundations. It was one thing to read about the billions of people who had died; it was another thing entirely to see the aftereffects in person.

  I followed Todd and Shawn down what used to be the suburb’s streets. Every now and then we’d come across a house that wasn’t completely destroyed. These were creepier than the ruined foundations, and I shivered as their empty, windowless eyes watched us pass. I couldn’t imagine what this place had looked like right after the takeover. It must have been a nightmare of dead bodies and ruined buildings. Nature had reclaimed most of it now, turning the remaining buildings into crumbling memorials for a civilization foolish enough to bring its own downfall out of extinction.

  After another thirty minutes of walking, we stopped to refill our water supply in a stream that ran past an abandoned barn. The hulking relic had faded red paint and one of its walls had caved in, giving it a lopsided and forlorn appearance. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine what it had looked like a hundred and fifty years ago. Back when its paint had been a bright red, its roof whole, and its surrounding field filled with cows and sheep. I opened my eyes when I realized that I didn’t really remember what a cow looked like. Were they the ones with the long mane and tail, or was that the horse? Or maybe I was thinking of a goat? I’d spent all my time researching the dinosaurs and hadn’t spent much time on the extinct animals that used to populate the earth.

  Just then, a loud chirping squawk emanated from the barn. Todd whirled, drawing his bow in one fluid motion. Shawn and I pulled our own bowstrings back, much less gracefully. I noticed with a twinge of smugness that I’d been a hair faster than Shawn on the draw. The squawk came again as a herd of armored dinosaurs came snuffling out of the crumbling remains. Their black eyes roved over the clearing and over us; their blue-green scales winked and glimmered, iridescent in the sunlight.

  “Don’t shoot,” Todd breathed. “No sudden movements.”

  “Why?” I asked, my arm quivering with the strain of the drawn bow.

  “See those armored plates covering every square inch of them? Our arrows don’t have a prayer of penetrating them,” Todd growled through gritted teeth. He lowered his bow, and I did the same. Shawn still had his drawn. “You’ll just tick them off, and they’ll trample us,” Todd explained.

  “What if they attack?” Shawn whispered.

  Todd glanced at Shawn’s tense form and cocked an amused eyebrow. “Run.”

  Shawn scowled.

  Todd rolled his eyes. “They’re plant eaters, not meat eaters. They won’t mess with us if we don’t mess with them. Just don’t spook them.” Shawn finally lowered his bow.

  A few were babies, small by dinosaur standards, just a little shorter than me, as they trotted along in a tight bundle behind their mother. She was more concerned about us than the rest of the herd, and she raised her head, sniffing the air. I wondered if she could smell our fear; after all that hiking, I knew we certainly smelled bad. She hesitated as the rest of the herd ambled off into the trees, watching us with her intelligent eyes. Like the rest of the pack, she had a large armored ball on the end of her tail, and every inch of her was covered in sharp edges and angles. After a few tense moments, she seemed satisfied that we weren’t a threat and gave a derisive snort.

  I watched her walk away toward the rapidly setting sun. Would I always be enamored with the outside world, I wondered, or would my wide-eyed wonder eventually wear off? The mama dinosaur looked so at home here as the pinks and oranges glinted off the armored plates running down her back. She belonged here—maybe as much, if not more, than we did. Nature had erased the world that humans had built, and this was her world now. I wondered if that thought made me a traitor to the human race. I hoped not.

  “Sky?” Todd said, and I realized that he’d been talking to me for a while. I shook my head to clear it.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I asked if you wanted me to get dinner, or if you were going to shoot it yourself?”

  “Dinner?” I asked stupidly. “I thought we couldn’t shoot those things?” He rolled his eyes in exasperation and pointed up at a tree branch thirty feet above our heads. I looked up and spotted what I originally thought was a bird, glaring down at us. But as I peered up at it in the fading light, I realized that it was no bird.

  “What is it?” I asked Todd.

  “A Four-Wing Glider,” Todd said. “They hunt at night by gliding down and grabbing lizards and other s
mall dinosaurs.”

  “Four wings?” Shawn asked.

  “And four massive claws,” Todd said. “They can’t actually fly. They use those claws to climb up the trees and then glide down onto prey.”

  I studied the strange creature. “It must be a microraptor.”

  “Oh good, a flying lizard,” Shawn said drily, “just what I was hoping to have for dinner.”

  “Whatever,” Todd said. “They taste really good. So will one of you shoot it?”

  I carefully raised my bow, took aim, and froze. The microraptor cocked its head at us, and ruffled its green-and-black feathers. I dropped my bow.

  “I can’t do it,” I said quietly. “I don’t want to kill it.”

  “Lucky for us, I don’t have that problem,” Shawn said, and he raised his bow, took aim, and missed by about two feet. The raptor raised its four massive wings, but before it could escape, Todd had whipped his bow up and shot. His arrow buried itself with a thunk in its feathered side.

  The birdlike reptile squawked and pinwheeled down to the ground, where it flapped awkwardly until Todd wrung its neck in one deft movement. The sight of the limp body made me feel nauseous.

  “We’ll set up camp here,” Todd said, dropping his pack next to the base of a gigantic tree at the edge of the clearing.

  “Aren’t we a bit exposed?” I asked, glancing around at the shadowed forest nervously.

  “We are,” Todd admitted. “But the closer we get to the lake, the more exposed we are going to be. We should be fine if we get up a tree before full dark hits.” He glanced over at Shawn. “Do you want to start the fire or dress the glider?”

  “Dress the glider?” Shawn asked, looking uncomfortable. “Like in clothes?” Todd gave him an odd look, and then sighed. “Let me guess. You have no clue how to do either of those things?” Shawn looked like he was debating hitting Todd, so I quickly stepped between the two.