by Greig Beck
PRIMORDIA III
The Lost World—Re-Evolution
www.severedpress.com
Copyright Greig Beck 2019
“Time is like a road with infinite intersections and our travels along it are influenced by events, choice and luck. Some of these roads run parallel and others diverge greatly, and if we were to go back and choose another, then our lives, and perhaps millions of others, would be changed forever.”
Greig Beck, Primordia III
PROLOGUE
Re-Evolution: 001
The changes were so small at first that most people didn’t even notice.
The brilliant red northern cardinal was quite common and could be found from southern Canada, through the eastern United States from Maine to Texas, and all the way down south through Mexico. With the male’s brilliant red plumage, head crest, and black mask, plus its distinctive song, it was no wonder it once made such a prized pet.
And then one morning there was a blackout, only for the blink of an eye, like something had briefly moved across the sun. Then afterward, the cardinals were gone. All of them.
It wasn’t like the ground was littered with dead birds, or they’d all migrated to somewhere more interesting. It was more like they never existed.
Books made no mention of them. No pictures existed. And they didn’t just fade from memories; they were erased. All that remained was a nagging sense of…wrongness.
That was the first occurrence. And there was more, and worse, to come.
PART 1—Laramidia and Appalachia—the lands before time
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle
CHAPTER 01
Southeastern tip of North America, 100 Million Years Ago
Andy carefully lowered the sail, an inch at a time. He had to be careful and quiet—several times his boat was investigated by creatures that glided beneath him in the warm, soupy water, rolling to look up from the depths with one large eye and regard him with interest or disdain, but thankfully, not hunger.
It had taken him months to hop up along the coastline, trying to stay far enough out to avoid the big crocs, but also not so far that he went over the edge of the shelf into the deep blue-black water, and ended up in mosasaur territory.
Luckiest man in the world, he had thought. Only man in the world, he corrected.
At a long spit extending out into the sea, Andy allowed the small boat to drift in toward the marshy shoreline, and felt the bow slide in on the bank’s mud and stick fast. He lowered himself down below the gunwale, just letting his eyes rise to the top edge and moving them over the landscape.
The heat beat down on his neck and shoulders and he sniffed, smelling the warming silt, bringing with it the odors of brine, sulfur, rotting vegetation, and also something sweet that might have been animal decomposition.
“Gluck.”
“Shush.” Andy grabbed the small pterosaur’s beak with a hand missing the two small fingers and held it for a moment. He gave it a stern look for a few seconds, and then released it.
The tiny creature cocked its head, and briefly turned one ruby eye on him, before hopping closer.
Andy shook his hand and flexed the remaining fingers; it still hurt even though it had been over a year since he lost the digits. He opened the hand to look at it. That’s what happens when you doze in a boat while leaving one hand dangling over the side, he thought. He was lucky that whatever creature had traveled up from the depths and grabbed his hand was small, and its teeth razor sharp—otherwise, he might have lost more than his pride and a few fingers.
He sighed and turned back to the bank. The ground looked muddy but not bog-like, and he had pulled up in the mouth of an estuary. There was a river further in, and huge tree limbs grew over its top, making it look like a giant, mysterious green cave. Either side of the jungle was thick, and though it didn’t look impenetrable, it would be harder going than trying to navigate the waterway.
But, he’d have to keep the sail drawn in. It didn’t matter much as there didn’t look to be a breath of wind in there, and for sure he’d get snagged on the lower branches.
“Anyone home?” he whispered, and then chuckled. He was impatient to jump out and stretch his legs. But if the years had taught him one thing, it was that the creatures that lived in this time were masters of camouflage and ambush. Caution and patience had kept him alive so far, and that’s how he wanted to keep it.
The scream that pierced the air made him cringe down low for a moment. Even the small reptile flattened itself to the bottom of the boat. Andy looked up, and then higher. There was a solitary tree close to the waterline that stood about 70 feet tall and had all the branches on one side wind-blasted off. In its few remaining spiny-looking branches, medium-sized pterosaurs jostled and argued amongst themselves for a moment before settling down again. And then they turned to watch Andy with gimlet eyes and pointed, toothed beaks.
“Friends of yours?” he asked, but his little buddy said nothing, probably spooked by the bad language used by his bigger cousins.
Andy also desperately wanted to see his country, long, long before it actually became a country. He wanted to stand on hills, or in valleys, or on raw coastlines, seeing them in their infancy, and then picture what they would be like in the future.
He wanted to visit fossil bone beds, and other places where he had found prehistoric remains, with the hope of perhaps seeing those very beasts when they were alive. How cool would that be? Impossibly cool, he thought.
His determination was proving a challenge to logic and reality, but he was still alive, and had only had to pay with a few fingers so far—a small price.
“Are we there yet?”
“Huh?” Andy turned to look down at the small creature that just cocked its head staring up at him. He shook it away. He knew it was his imagination wanting to fill the void of loneliness with an imaginary friend. I’m not insane yet, he thought, and then he grinned. Not fully anyway.
The small bird-like reptile climbed on his leg, and he gently stroked its leathery skin. “Yeah, we’re here.”
Andy smiled down at his tiny friend. He had found the baby creature when it had been abandoned after its hatching. One wing was permanently stunted, and at first, he thought he’d simply eat it.
But then he wondered about the studies that queried dinosaur intelligence—were they smart? Could they ever be trained? He wanted to find out, so he kept it, and it had quickly bonded to him. And, ridiculously, he to it.
What started as a scientific experiment had yielded his only friend in the world. And a few years back, he began talking to it, and then one day, it talked back.
No, it didn’t, he reminded himself. He was a scientist and knew enough about people being alone to recognize a psychosis. Deep down, he knew that the words were really coming from somewhere in his own mind. The problem was, he didn’t really care that much.
And though he might not have admitted it, talking to someone, or some thing, was important to maintain his motivation, and remaining sanity. He thought he wouldn’t mind being alone. But he did. So it was kinda nice to be able to share his thoughts about this place with another being.
Gluck rested its long, beaked head on his thigh as it nestled on his sun-warmed leg. He guessed the tiny pterosaur wanted to be off the boat as much as he did.
Many times, Andy had pulled in at the coast on his voyage, but for the most part, he’d slept in the boat and dropped a homemade anchor of a rock tied to a length of vine to keep him in place. He’d just covered himself over in the sail and prayed he got to see the next morning.
He
knew that the ocean was fraught with danger, but sleeping in the jungle meant finding shelter, like a cave, and then barricading himself in, or up a tall tree, or burying himself in mud, as he had heard Ben Cartwright had done. None of the options were as easy, or any lower risk, than just lying down in a gently rocking boat, and hoping for the best.
Andy was a paleontologist, and one thing he knew from his fossil bed excavations was that at river mouths and broad estuaries like this one, where fresh and salt water mixed and where the environment was warm, calm, and teeming with life, big things lived.
The beasts came here to lay eggs, rear young, and to hunt. If he stayed in the center of the river, he’d probably be safe, or at least safer, from attack from the shore. But in the river center was where it was deepest, and here there were also aquatic creatures that hunted. Big creatures.
Andy continued to wait and watch. Impatience got you dead, real quick. His food had run out, and his drinking water was down to about a single tepid inch in a gourd. He desperately needed more supplies.
Andy’s tools comprised of a spear, a slingshot, and something that looked like a deformed tennis racket that he used as a net. It was amazing how many small sea creatures came all the way up to the boat to investigate—close enough for him to simply scoop them out.
“Hello there.” Andy saw a small herd, or maybe flock, of a dozen or so bipedal creatures tentatively come down to the water. They were bird-like in their movements and slate grey with black-banded tails held out stiffly behind them. He bet they were lightning fast, and he marveled at the way they took turns darting down, drinking quickly, and then darting back, while a few stayed with heads high in the air, looking one way then the other.
But speed and lookouts didn’t help when you can’t see below the water. And he was right—the attack came fast. The torpedo launched itself from the river with blinding speed and brutal power.
“Yep.” Andy watched, transfixed. “Someone is home.”
The creature was about 10 feet in length, and looked like a cross between an alligator and a seal. He rattled off some suspects. “Uberasuchus, definitely a mosasauroid, and maybe even a form of Pannoniasaurus—bloody beautiful.”
The tiny pterosaur climbed higher on his leg and looked over the gunwale.
“Gluck.”
“Yeah, sure, but are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Andy grinned. “I think for us, that was a good thing.”
Andy knew that the upside of seeing the attack was though the predator might have been big enough to attack Andy if it had the chance, it wasn’t big enough to take on his boat. Added to that, it had just fed.
“We can do this.”
He lifted the paddle and gently stroked in toward the mouth of the estuary. The water depth shallowed quickly as they passed over a sandbar, and looking over the side, he saw silver bony fish darting back and forth in the lukewarm water.
On the bottom, a five-foot, leathery-looking disc glided over the sand. The primitive stingray was mottled like a parlor rug, and had more of a shark-like tail, not the whip-like ones of modern times. Andy knew they were another ancient species of cartilaginous fish that’d been around for 200 million years, or rather, 100 million more than now.
Once over the sandbar, the water deepened again, and Andy moved away from the river mouth center where the water was becoming a dark green. The estuary was over 100 feet across and quickly narrowed to about 50 further in where the river began.
He gently paddled to within 10 feet of the bank where he could see the bottom—far enough away from the shore to hopefully dissuade larger land-based predators from lumbering after him, and close enough that if he did get attacked by an aquatic carnivore, he had a chance of making it off the water.
Looking over the side, he saw that the silt was striped with mollusk tracks, some of them quite wide. If he got the opportunity, he’d grab some as they’d be a couple of mouthfuls of great protein.
There were also a few nautiloids hovering mid-water for a moment or two, before they all turned in the same direction to zoom away when he approached. He’d tried eating them before but found they exuded something cloyingly sweet that tainted their flesh.
Ripples ahead made him stroke a little harder, and just below the surface, several foot-long fish were heading toward the bank. Andy gave the boat one more powerful stroke, letting them glide, and then grabbed his net. He lunged, scooping back toward him.
“Yes.” He netted one, bringing it into the boat where its muscular body flipped and shivered, making a sound like drumming against the wood. Andy put his foot on it to quiet it, and Gluck immediately set upon it.
“Hey, wait up there, little buddy.” He pushed the pterosaur away, and it glared and opened its bony-looking wings in annoyance but then stayed close so it could keep its beady eyes on the fish.
Andy took his foot off it and tipped it out of the vine net where it flopped to the boat bottom.
“Whoa, weird. What are you?”
The thing was grey, but without scales, sort of like a catfish, and had what could have been bristles all along its streamlined body. No obvious gills, and a flattened head. But the weirdest thing was that its flippers appeared strong, and they ended in tiny-clawed toes.
“Rudimentary limbs? Synapsid? Therapsid?” It was the name given to the earliest of creatures that began to transition to mammals. “Don’t remember you from the fossil record.” He knew though that thousands upon thousands of species just never became fossilized due to being in the wrong place, were the wrong composition, or were just too damn rare to begin with.
It flipped one last time, and he put a foot back on it to keep it still. “I wonder what you’ll become in another 100 million years?” He chuckled. “I mean, what would you have become?”
Gluck waddled forward and pecked at it again.
“I know, right, it’s amazing, but formally out of the evolutionary gene pool. Because today, it’s dinner.”
“Hungry.” Gluck pecked harder.
“I know you didn’t just say that.” Andy pushed the small pterosaur back a step, but it bustled forward. “Okay, okay.” Andy set to cutting up the strange creature, some for his companion, some for himself, and some left to dry in the sun.
CHAPTER 02
Sam Houston National Forest, Montgomery, Texas—present time
Re-Evolution: 002
Montgomery wasn’t a big town by anyone’s standards; in fact, only 621 people at last count. It was sparse, friendly, and close to the National Park and beautiful Lake Conroe. Summers were hot and humid, the winters mild. Many say it’s more subtropical than true Texan weather.
No one could really remember when the first cats and dogs went missing. But it might have been around the time of the blackout. It only occurred for a few seconds, and not everyone even saw it, but straight after, everyone learned that any pet left outside at night never came home in the morning. Bears and mountain lions were suspected, action demanded, and hunters were dispatched.
Then, they caught something.
The three hunters stood around their kill. It was laid out in front of them, and though a few people held phone cameras loosely in their hands, no one took pictures as they all simply stared in silence, brows drawn together in confusion.
It was a bird, sort of, stretching 10 feet from beak to claw. It was a little like an ostrich, except the head was two feet in length, ferocious-looking, and with a huge trap-like serrated beak. The claws on the end of its powerful legs would have been more at home on some prehistoric creature as they were fearsome-looking scaly talons.
The plumage was red and brown, and flightless wings were tucked tight in against a barrel body.
Mitch Connors, the local MD, and the closest thing they had to a science type, leaned in closer, and then grunted.
“Terror Turkey.”
The crowd turned to him.
He nodded. “Yep, now I remember, called a Phorusrhacid. Rare, but they come out of the forest this time of year.�
�� He looked up at the crowd. “Dontcha remember?”
Billy Douglas began to slowly nod. “Oh, yeah, I do. Now I remember.”
Then they all did.
CHAPTER 03
Waste Knot Cliff Face, South Dakota—1,200 feet up.
Re-Evolution: 003
Ben Cartwright hung on the cliff face, resting and sucking in deep breaths. He turned and looked out over the landscape. The cliff face he and Emma were on was of medium difficulty, but it was high, and afforded a view for miles over the forested landscape.
Elm, spruce, ash, and other tree varieties all competed for sunlight and created a multi-hued mosaic as they crowded together over the breathtaking landscape. Ben grinned; it looked inviting, safe, and felt like home.
He couldn’t help his mind going back to a similar vista where he looked out over another forest from upon high—that one, the Cretaceous jungle of 100 million years ago. Back then, there were more dangers in a single square mile than this place where there was the occasional bear, mountain lion, or skinny wolf. In that time and place, there were things that were monstrously huge, cunning, and hunted with senses well beyond those of the soft, pink, hairless apes called mankind.
When he was trapped there, he’d had to hide buried in mud, in caves, and on treetops. He’d eaten carrion, insects, grass, and anything he could find to stay alive. His body became crisscrossed with more scars in a few months than his entire time with Special Forces operations.
He was about to turn away, when an odd tingling feeling washed through his body. And then everything blacked out.
“What the…?”
It was over as quickly as it started and Ben looked up to see if something had passed over the sun, but the sky was as cloudless and azure as ever. Looking down again, his eyes narrowed as he gazed out over the trees—something about them now. Different. He hung on the rope and tried to tease it out, but it wouldn’t come.