by Laura Martin
“And Shawn …” I took a deep breath to go on, but my words seemed stuck in my throat.
“Shawn didn’t make it,” Todd finished for me, and I shot him a grateful look that he acknowledged with a nod.
“Hmmm,” Ivan said, considering, looking from Chaz to Todd to me and back again. “I think it’s high time you told me what’s been happening since I saw you last. But first, I think we need a spot of breakfast. I hate talking on an empty stomach.”
“That sounds amazing,” Todd agreed, and I realised for the first time that I was starving. We’d missed dinner the night before, and I was on my third near-death experience in twenty-four hours, which, apparently, worked up quite the appetite.
“We can’t start a fire here,” Ivan said. “The Noah and his muckety-mucks are swarming all over the beach about a quarter of a mile north.”
“I know.” I frowned.
“Follow me,” Ivan said, turning to march in the opposite direction of the Noah and his camp of helicopters. Ten minutes later, he stopped by a small rock outcropping. He climbed nimbly up the side and disappeared into a cave set in the rocks.
Chaz craned her head back to watch Ivan’s progress. “I’m not sure if I should be impressed at how well he climbed that with only one hand or depressed that I can’t climb that well with two,” she mused.
“Get used to it,” Todd muttered. “Ivan does everything better with one hand than we do with two.”
“Are you coming?” Ivan called, poking his head over the edge to peer down at us. “Or are you going to just stand down there gabbling? I thought you were hungry.”
“We are,” Todd said, not wasting any more time as he grabbed the rock above his head and clambered up almost as nimbly as Ivan.
“He’s impressive too.” Chaz whistled in appreciation.
I sighed and nodded. “We’re topside now. Just expect them to be good at everything.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” Chaz said.
I shrugged. “It’s frustrating, but we’ll get there. You should have seen Shawn and me our first day up here. We could barely stay upright.” Chaz laughed as she grabbed a rock and scrabbled up. I waited a second before following her, making sure my face was composed and the tears that had sprung up involuntarily at my mention of Shawn were wiped away. Once I was sure I had it together, or as together as I was going to get it, I climbed up after her. Inside the cave, which turned out to have been Ivan’s home base while he tracked up and down the lake, hung a collection of smoked fish of all different sizes. He used a knife to expertly cut one down and tossed it on an iron skillet. He already had a small fire near the mouth of the cave that he prodded with a stick to revive before putting the pan directly on the red embers.
Todd leant over the fire and inhaled deeply. “Ah.” He sighed, sitting back against the wall of the cave. “I’ve missed that smell.”
“Dead fish smell?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.
He barked a laugh. “No. The smell of a fire. Of fresh air. Of dirt and trees, and yes, maybe even dead fish. The only thing that lab smelled like was glass and dinosaur poop.”
“Hey!” Chaz said indignantly.
“Enough,” barked Ivan. “Tell me what’s been happening. Start with the moment you left me.”
Todd quirked a questioning eyebrow at me.
“You tell it,” I said, not sure I could get through the whole thing without losing it again.
So Todd began to fill him in. Wordlessly eating the fish Ivan handed me, I listened and thought back over the last few days. The herd of carnotaurs, Pretty Boy, the Lincoln Lab, my dad’s message to us, Boz’s plug, Dr Schwartz, the dinosaurs, the elevator, and my near run-in with the Noah. If I hadn’t lived it, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Ivan just listened, his face stern and serious. When Todd finished, Ivan turned to me. “Let me see this plug that is supposed to save the world.”
I dutifully unscrewed the back of my compass and handed it over to him. He held it gingerly between his calloused fingers before offering it back to me with a shake of his head. “It looks like rhamphorhynchus dung if you ask me.”
“Thank you!” Todd cried.
Ivan snorted, but then his face got serious again as he turned to me. “You’re sure the Noah said he was going back to East Compound.”
“Yes,” I said, surprised. I’d expected him to ask about the Noah’s plan, not his travel itinerary.
“Good, then we can kill two pterodactyls with one stone,” he said, nodding decisively.
“Um,” Chaz said, shooting me a confused look. “Are we supposed to know what that means? He wouldn’t actually shoot a pterodactyl, would he? They’re really rare.”
“Well,” I said evasively. “Let’s just say you and Ivan have different views on dinosaurs.” Chaz wrinkled her forehead in confusion.
I turned to Ivan. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is we get to East Compound, and we accomplish two things. The first is that we save Todd’s village before the Noah has a chance to ‘deal’ with them.” Todd let out a whoop of pure joy that echoed throughout the cave, scaring a few bats from the recesses so we had to duck as they whizzed over our heads and into the sunlight. I glanced nervously out of the cave entrance, even though I knew we were too far away for the Noah’s men to hear us.
“The second,” Ivan went on as though Todd hadn’t said anything, “is we stop this idiotic plan of the Noah’s. If you think Boz’s plug will do the trick, then it’s worth a try. If it fails, we’ll come up with a plan B.”
“Both of those sound great,” I said. “But how in the world are we going to get to East Compound? It’s hundreds of miles away, and we are running out of time.” I tried to do the calculations in my head of how long we had before the Noah started dropping his bombs, and failed. It could be days, weeks, or months.
“Well, we certainly can’t walk,” Ivan said. “That would take us well over a month, and I don’t fancy doing that again.”
“Again?” Chaz whispered to me. “He isn’t serious, is he?”
“He is,” I confirmed, thinking back to Ivan telling us about his time spent near East Compound. He’d moved there when my mom, his daughter, had wanted to attend the university. It was where she’d met my dad, and they’d started the Colombe. It was also where she’d died, murdered by the Noah as she tried to flee back to the wild and Ivan.
“But,” Todd stuttered, jumping to his feet. “How in the world are we going to get there?”
“We’re going to fly,” Ivan said, eyes narrowed as he used his foot to scoop dirt over the fire before moving briskly about the cave, packing up various bits of gear.
“Fly?” Todd repeated, looking to me for guidance. All I could do was shrug. I had no clue what my eccentric grandfather had in mind.
“You have a plane?” Chaz asked.
“No,” Ivan said. “But I plan on being aboard one of the Noah’s before he takes off.”
“What!” Todd yelped. “He’ll kill us!”
Ivan’s blue eyes flashed mischievously. “Only if he sees us.” Then he paused, taking in our bedraggled appearance and complete lack of weaponry.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Looks like we might need to outfit you a bit first.”
“How exactly are we going to do that?” I asked.
“One moment,” Ivan said, turning to stride into the dark recesses of the cave. His footsteps echoed through the chamber, and a few more disgruntled bats flew past our heads. Before long he was back, three bows over one arm and three quivers of arrows slung over his shoulder. Todd’s jaw dropped as Ivan dug through his pockets, producing knives and small stones I knew to be flint for starting fires.
“How did you know we wouldn’t have our bows?” Todd asked.
“Or knives?” I added, inspecting a rather impressive one he’d just handed me.
“I didn’t,” Ivan said, squinting at me with one eye as he adjusted the drawstring of a bow a quarter inch before handi
ng it to me. “This is one of my hunting huts. I have about twenty of them in a hundred-mile radius, and the rest are scattered to the east, south, and west. I keep them all well stocked and supplied. Survival depends on weapons. If I don’t survive, it won’t be because I wasn’t prepared.”
“Is that a pachycephalosaurus rib bone?” Chaz asked, cringing away from the bow Ivan was trying to pass to her as if it was going to bite.
“It is,” Ivan said, shooting me a “what’s her deal” look. “They have the most flexibility and workability of the dinosaur bones, although I’ll use any dinosaur rib in a pinch.” Chaz’s face went white.
“Ivan,” Todd said, shaking his head as he drew back the string of his own bow. “You’re my hero.”
“Enough talk,” Ivan said gruffly, but I could tell he was pleased. “We need to be on our way if we want to hitch a ride.”
I nodded, feeling hopeful for the first time since I’d surfaced from that elevator. Maybe, just maybe, with Ivan’s help, we had a shot.
“Explain to me again why this is a good idea?” Chaz hissed in my ear. I brushed a hand at her in irritation. It was bad enough that the clump of bushes we were hiding behind forced us to crouch practically on top of one another; I didn’t need her breathing down my neck too.
“She can’t, because it’s not,” Todd grumbled.
I frowned at my two friends. “You heard Ivan. We don’t have a lot of time, so we have to work with what we got.”
“And what we got is a herd of duck-face dinosaurs,” Todd scowled.
“Hadrosaurs,” Chaz corrected as she studied the herd fifty feet away. They stomped their large feet in the cool lake water, occasionally dunking their heads below the surface like the oversized ducks they so resembled.
“What’s with the weird bump on their heads?” I asked, inspecting the one closest to us. Although its nose was flat and almost bill-like, the back of its head extended into a bony spike that gave it a bizarre appearance.
“Most hadrosaurs have some sort of crest,” Chaz explained. “It acts as an echo chamber, so if a hadrosaur cries out, you can hear it for miles. It’s one of the easiest ways to tell them apart. Those, for example, are parasaurolophus. That backward-facing crest makes their heads measure almost a full six feet. And” – she frowned, biting her lip – “they are really flighty.”
“Flighty?” I asked.
“They don’t tend to stampede in a herd; they scatter,” she explained.
Todd swallowed hard. “So you’re saying they might just trample us?”
“That is a very real possibility,” Chaz admitted.
Wiping my sweaty palms on my shirt, I tried not to imagine what it would be like to be trampled to death.
“How much longer should we give Ivan?” Chaz asked, interrupting my gruesome train of thought.
Todd shrugged. “Five minutes?” Ivan had gone ahead of us to get the lay of the land and to find the best helicopter for us to stow away in. He’d insisted on going alone, muttering something about how we walked through the woods like a herd of water buffalo. I wasn’t sure what a water buffalo was, but I was fairly certain he hadn’t meant it as a compliment. Instead, we’d been put in charge of the distraction. Ivan had explained that we needed some sort of disturbance if we had any chance of getting on board one of the helicopters undetected. Some distraction, I thought sourly as a dinosaur at the edge of the group lifted its tail and dropped a big steaming glob of yuck right onto the beach.
Todd shook his head, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “This better work.”
Chaz nodded. “It should. A herd of dinosaurs charging through a camp causes some havoc. I should know. I was eleven when a herd of stampeding stegoceras almost took out our topside settlement. We were collecting samples from a nearby breeding group …”
“Chaz,” I interrupted. “Not really the time for stories.”
“Right.” She sighed. “Well, anyway, even if we can only get half the herd heading in the right direction, it should be enough. Trust me.”
Todd sighed. “If you say so.”
“I do, but stop poking me, will you,” Chaz said, her eyes glued to the beach.
“I’m not poking you,” Todd said, shooting me a confused look. I shrugged.
“You are too,” she snapped. “Stop it.”
That’s when I felt the hot breath on the back of my neck. My nerves sprang instantly to attention as adrenaline roared into my veins. A subtle sour smell of rot and decay wafted past me, and I vaguely registered that I’d smelled that particular odour before. I slowly craned my head to look behind me. Two large green eyes peered down at me from the angular face of a troodon, the dinosaur Todd had called a Nightmare when a herd of them tried to eat us back at the Oaks just a few days ago.
“Chaz,” I choked. “Todd.”
“Shhhh.” Chaz shushed me, clearly annoyed. “Hadrosaurs have excellent hearing. Unless you want to spook them early, you need to be quieter.”
Todd must have caught the terror in my voice, because he turned just as a second troodon nudged Chaz’s shoulder, its intelligent eyes sparking with interest. They don’t know what we are, I realised. Unlike the pack by Todd’s village, these had probably never seen a human before, and they were deciding if we were eatable. I’d read about their superior intelligence, but to see it calculating and studying us in that way was unnerving. The one behind Chaz lifted its nose in the air and opened its mouth as though tasting the air. And for all I knew, maybe it could.
“I told you to knock it off,” Chaz snapped. She turned, her arm already swinging to brush us away. Instead, she smacked the troodon right on the nose. It snorted, jerking its head back as Chaz let out a terrified squeak.
Todd grabbed her hand and yanked her out of the woods and towards the beach. As I threw myself after them, a series of excited yips came from behind me, and a moment later sand pelted against the backs of my arms and legs as the troodons launched themselves after us. There was nowhere to run but right through the pack of thirty-foot-tall hadrosaurs.
Their heads jerked up at our approach, and a moment later we were charging into the middle of the startled herd, their earthy, minty smell momentarily overshadowing the rancid one of our pursuers. Catching sight of the troodons, the hadrosaurs bellowed and took off. Chaz had been right: they didn’t all stampede together, they scattered, some flying back towards the woods while others headed off down the beach in either direction. I barely avoided being trampled, ducking a whirling tail and dodging a gigantic green hindquarter before my feet hit the icy water of the lake seconds behind Todd and Chaz. Together we ploughed into the oncoming waves, water splashing up around our knees and into our faces as we battled to run through ever-deepening water. A huge wave crested in front of me, and I dived beneath its surface. As the freezing water closed over my head, I realised that I had no idea if troodons could swim.
Even with my eyes open, I couldn’t see past my fingertips as I swam underneath the surface of the churning waves. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to think about the creatures that lived in this particular lake. Todd stayed beside me stroke for stroke while Chaz pulled ahead. I guess if you grew up at the bottom of a lake, your swimming skills were bound to be good. When my lungs felt like they were about to burst, I gave in and surfaced, whirling to face the beach. To my relief, the troodons weren’t chasing us. They’d apparently decided the hadrosaurs were a better bet and were sprinting after a pack of them, right towards the Noah’s camp.
“Well, that wasn’t exactly the plan,” Chaz said, huffing, already swimming back towards the beach. “But it’s close enough.”
I blinked water out of my eyes, breathing hard as I paddled after Chaz. “Do you think Ivan had enough time?”
“Only one way to find out,” Todd said.
I watched the dinosaurs disappear around a curve. The plan wasn’t going to be as simple as Ivan had hoped. We stumbled back onto the beach, and a few seconds later screams and gunshots rang out.
> “Come on!” I called, sprinting for the camouflage of the trees. We ran, jumping over fallen logs and tripping over hidden rocks and roots. The screaming and gunshots got louder, and every nerve of my body vibrated in terrified anticipation. We reached the edge of the camp and looked out on utter chaos.
A few of the hadrosaurs had got tangled in the ropes of the marines’ tents and stood bellowing in fear, while others dragged the tents behind them like makeshift nets, picking up debris and anyone unlucky enough to not get out of their way. The troodons were taking full advantage of the situation, attacking the trapped hadrosaurs in a reckless frenzy. A handful of marines stood their ground, firing shot after shot at troodon and hadrosaur alike, while others ran for the nearest helicopter, swearing and yelling out orders that no one followed. It was dinosaur death and carnage I’d helped orchestrate, and it made me feel ill.
Giving myself a firm shake, I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. Guilt could come later. Right now, I had a job to do. My eyes combed frantically among the fray, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ivan, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“How are we ever going to find him?” Chaz wailed in my ear. I didn’t say it, but the whole plan suddenly seemed hopeless. We hadn’t just created a distraction. We’d created a disaster. A disaster Ivan could have got caught up and killed in. Not him too, I thought desperately as I scanned the beach again. Shawn’s death was already heavy on my conscience, and if Ivan died I might just shatter. The helicopter closest to us suddenly whirred to life, lifting into the air even as marines threw themselves inside.
I was so busy watching it take off that I didn’t see what collided with my side, sending me flying into the trees. My breath whooshed out as I landed hard in the underbrush. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chaz and Todd flying right beside me. If they hadn’t shoved me, then who had?
“Cover your head!” Ivan yelled in my ear, pushing my face and Chaz’s towards the ground seconds before a wild-eyed hadrosaur thundered past, missing us by inches. A moment later a troodon, yipping in triumph, brought it down ten feet away from us.