Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall

by Thomas P Hopp

  ***

  Dr. Ogilvey bumped his old Land Rover up the switchbacked dirt road with Chase in the passenger seat and Kit in the back. Chase didn’t dislike the crusty old paleontologist but he distinctly disliked entrusting himself to the old bird’s judgment and that was what he was doing at the moment. Ogilvey was driving them up the hillside behind the ranch house to the high prairie beyond Sandstone Mountain in search of Kit’s father.

  It wasn’t like they were unprepared for trouble. Chase had his 30-06 slung across his lap, Kit had her own rifle, a Winchester 30-30, beside her on the back seat and Ogilvey had his Colt 45 pistol strapped on with its too-small gun belt constricting his plump midsection. Chase would rather not have relied on the bumbling old paleontologist’s driving but he’d had little say in the matter. His own truck was a heap of scrap. Nevertheless, Ogilvey’s chronic preoccupation with things other than driving worried him.

  “What we have here,” Ogilvey said, taking a hand off the wheel to raise an index finger and pontificate, “is a test of common sense. We’ve had more than ample evidence of danger: tyrannosaurus, pachyrhinosaurus, utahraptor, and ultimately pteronychus.”

  Chase grumbled, “Don’t forget the light from the moon and the flying machines.”

  “Yes, quite!” Ogilvey agreed. “But the urgency of our own situation makes Kit’s fears for her father seem all the more justified.”

  Kit sighed. “If something happened to him I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “On the other hand,” Ogilvey took his eyes off the road to glance around at her, “there may be little we can do if your father has come to harm at the hands of… or horns… or jaws…”

  Chase didn’t like how Kit’s eyes widened at each implication. “Just drive, Doc,” he chided.

  With the next switchback fast approaching, Ogilvey hit the brakes just in time to avoid going into the ditch. He steered the Land Rover around a tight turn that bounced it violently. As they continued uphill Chase stuck the barrel of his 30-06 out his open window so he could bring it to bear instantly if there were any unpleasant surprises. The road grew narrower at each switchback until it was just a brush-lined bulldozer track up the pine-covered hillside. His nerves tingled when they reached the notch where the second of Twin Creek’s streams trickled down from the high prairie behind Sandstone Mountain. Willows crowded the road on both sides, obstructing his view.

  “This is a bad idea,” he muttered under his breath. But Ogilvey, heedless of danger, launched into another dissertation.

  “To see dinosaurs,” he crooned, “especially my pteronychus in the flesh, why it’s a paleontologist’s dream come true!”

  The reverent tone irritated Chase. “It’s a nightmare to everybody else.”

  “Yes, of course,” Ogilvey allowed. “But see it from my perspective. Ideas I have propounded for years over my colleagues’ strenuous resistance are now quite emphatically borne out.”

  “Like?”

  “For years I have sought to refute the notion of dinosaurs as stupid overgrown lizards. Now my beleaguered theory proves correct. I call it behavioral maximization: the concept that extinct animals should be modeled, not on primitive creatures like lizards, but on the most advanced living examples. We should never assume extinct animals were less capable than their modern counterparts.”

  Chase kept a wary eye on the road as he said, “They look primitive. They’ve got lizard tails and crocodile teeth.”

  “And that’s where you make the classic mistake, my boy. Dinosaurs are built on an older body plan but don’t assume they haven’t optimized the use of that plan. Remember, dinosaurs had one-hundred-eighty million years of evolution to perfect their forms and behaviors while modern mammals have had only sixty-five million years. Therefore it’s best to assume a predator like T rex was at least as sophisticated as a modern lion. All that extra evolutionary time must count for something. Perhaps rex was even more sophisticated—”

  Ogilvey suddenly ceased his lecture, clutched the wheel with both hands and slammed on the brakes. The Land Rover skidded to a halt in view of a wide prairie stretching several miles in front of them. Chase followed Ogilvey’s goggling eyes and his own jaw dropped. Straddling the road in front of them was the very spaceship that had roared over his head the day before. It had plowed a furrow across the prairie and come to rest at the base of a low hill. Hundreds of feet long, made of glistening silver metal, it lay with its belly stretching across the road and one of its delta wings towering above the Land Rover. It was wrecked but not completely destroyed. To Chase’s relief, it looked deserted. He glanced around for the craft’s occupants but saw no trace. Looking at Ogilvey, who still ogled the spacecraft in wide-eyed wonder, he hissed, “What are you waiting for? Get us out of here.”

  “Yes, of course.” Ogilvey cranked the steering wheel but let the clutch out too quickly. The Land Rover lurched forward and stopped with its engine dead.

  “Great,” Chase muttered. “I knew I should have driven.”

  “Oh, dear,” Ogilvey sputtered, grinding the ignition ineffectually.

  Chase glanced at Kit. She was wide-eyed too but she wasn’t looking at the spacecraft. He followed her gaze to the side of the road where, just ahead of them, her father’s jeep was heeled over sideways in a muddy ditch. The livestock trailer was completely overturned behind it. Both were empty.

  Kit threw her door open and rushed to the driver’s window of the jeep. Chase followed her, taking his rifle along just to be safe. A glance into the jeep confirmed his expectation: no sign of her father.

  Kit cried, “Oh, my God!” and ran back along the trailer.

  Chase followed, immediately seeing what had drawn her attention. The rear end of the trailer was mangled. Its back doors had been physically ripped from their hinges and tossed twenty feet away, twisted and broken. Nearer the trailer, the grass on the ditch embankment was smeared with a blackish-red residue of dried blood. On the road surface was a single cow’s foot, shorn off in mid-shank and sitting in its own dark puddle. Chase noticed Kit wasn’t looking at the blood or the hoof. She was staring at a farther point, where her father’s hat lay upside down on the embankment crushed in the center of a giant three-toed track—a tyrannosaurus track.

  Kit choked, “Oh, Daddy,” and began to weep. Chase fetched the hat and brought it back to her. She took it slowly, tremblingly, and Chase instinctually put a comforting arm around her. She buried her face in his shoulder and began to cry out loud while Chase kept his head up, scanning the area for signs of the huge predator.

  Meanwhile Ogilvey’s efforts to restart his engine came to nothing.

  “You’ve flooded it,” Chase called to him. “I can smell the gas. Give it a rest.”

  Ogilvey got out of the car and for once was speechless, gawking at the wreckage of the trailer and the bloodstains.

  “Come on,” Chase whispered to Kit. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s get back to the car.” Keeping his arm wrapped around her he led her to the Land Rover and helped her into the back seat. She was stunned with grief but still had the presence of mind to pick up her rifle and lay it across her lap. “Just give me a minute,” she said.

  “I’ll take a look around,” he said quietly. “We might be stuck here a while until the engine clears.” He lifted the visor of his ball cap to get a wide field of view and scanned the spacecraft carefully. Off to the right atop the nose of the craft were several small cabin windows, which he was relieved to see were dark and empty. To the left between the twin tail fins an off-loading ramp reached down to the prairie.

  The right wing stretched over his head and clear across the road to where it had run up against the boulders of the hillside. It had crumpled with a jagged rock sticking through it.

  “It’s pretty busted up,” he said to Ogilvey. “It’ll never fly again.”

  “Probably doesn’t need to,” the paleontologist snuffled as he inspected the rumpled metal along the base of the craft. “It’s already mad
e its delivery.” He gestured toward the bottom of the spacecraft with a spread of his arms. “It looks like a boat hull to me. How do you figure that?”

  Chase shrugged. “I guess it was meant to land on water.”

  “Very good, young man.” The pedantic flourish had returned to Ogilvey’s voice. “I believe I can explain what it’s doing here on dry land. If you recall your paleogeography you’ll remember this was the shore of an inland sea sixty-five million years ago.”

  “If you say so. But there’s no sea here now.”

  “The best laid plans of mice and dinosaurs,” Ogilvey chortled. “Looks like they hadn’t planned on the sea drying up.”

  “But wait a minute,” said Chase. “There are oceans and lakes all over the world. Why risk a crash landing here?”

  Ogilvey nodded toward the crag looming beyond the ship. “I suspect it has something to do with what’s buried under Sandstone Mountain.”

  Chase tried to link it all together but too many pieces of the puzzle were missing. He looked from the mountain to the ship to the jeep to Kit, silent in the back of the Land Rover. He muttered, “Why do you think all this is happening, Doc?” Getting no answer, he looked around for Ogilvey and spotted him halfway up the ship’s unloading ramp. “Hey!” he called as loud as he dared. “Are you nuts?”

  When Ogilvey continued into the ship’s hold without slowing, Chase considered his question answered affirmatively. He hurried to the bottom of the ramp and looked up into the rear of the ship. An immense cargo bay yawned between the tail fins with an opening you could roll two semi trucks out of side by side. Ogilvey was already inside.

  “I don’t think that’s too smart,” Chase called after him. Heedless, Ogilvey vanished into the dark interior without a backward glance.

  Wondering how much worse things could get, Chase dashed up the gangway and caught up to the professor. Fortunately for them both, there were no signs of life inside the ship. Ogilvey stood in the center of the deck, marveling at what he saw. Both sides of the cargo bay were jammed with immense shining metal cages, all empty. Some could easily have held a parasaurolophus or a T rex. Some could have held even bigger animals. And interspersed between the large cages were many smaller ones of various sizes and shapes. There were hundreds of cages, maybe thousands, ranging in size from immense to tiny. Restraining straps that had held the occupants in place now hung empty. Whatever was in the cages had long since vanished down the unloading ramp.

  Chase followed Ogilvey toward the front of the ship. The paleontologist stopped to stare at a metal staircase leading to an upper-level doorway. “That’s got to be the crew cabin up there,” he suggested, his voice echoing among the cages.

  “Too bad nobody’s home,” Chase said sarcastically. “Maybe you could introduce yourself.”

  “Yes, yes,” Ogilvey agreed. “Too bad.”

  Chase detected a note of disappointment in his voice. “C’mon, Doc.” He took the old man by the elbow and gently but firmly persuaded him to return to the rear exit. “We’d better get lost before they come back.”

  Walking down the ramp, Ogilvey stopped and looked across the prairie, adjusting his glasses and letting out a cry of delight. “Oh, just look at that!”

  Not more than a mile away was another huge landing craft and beyond that another. These too had wrecked themselves, plowing across the rangeland, and had disembarked their cargo via rear gangways. Chase failed to see why Ogilvey was pleased until he spotted two large, amber-colored, four-legged creatures by the nearest ship. Perhaps twenty-five feet long, they looked like huge, squat armadillos.

  “Ankylosaurus!” Ogilvey declared. “Look at the bony plates on their backs, the spikes along their sides, the armored heads and the clubbed tails. Beautiful!”

  The animals capered in a mutual dance of some sort, displaying remarkable agility for such heavy-set creatures. They reared up ponderously on their hind legs and then went back to all fours and arched their backs playfully, although they must have weighed a few tons each. One raised its head and opened its mouth. After a momentary delay due to distance, its call echoed across the prairie—a deep bray, like a baritone jackass.

  “Ih-hee-hee!” Ogilvey chuckled. “A mating dance. That’s what they’re up to. They’re courting one another.”

  Chase rolled his eyes. “You’re saying there’ll be more of those things around here pretty soon?”

  Ogilvey’s spectacle-magnified eyes twinkled. “ ’Tis the season, Chase. Summertime, when a young dinosaur’s fancy turns to love.”

  Chase shook his head. He’d seen too much of what dinosaurs could do to be amused. “I’m glad you think it’s funny. Now come on, let’s get moving.”

  “They’re harmless,” Ogilvey protested but nevertheless allowed Chase to lead him down the gangway by an elbow. “They’re plant-eaters.”

  “Wasn’t it a plant-eater that totaled my truck yesterday?”

  “Oh yes,” Ogilvey admitted. “You’ve got a point there.”

  Chase hustled the paleontologist back to the Land Rover. Kit had regained her composure enough to smile at them bravely as they got in. Ogilvey cranked the ignition and the engine roared to life. As he turned the Land Rover to drive back the way they had come, Kit caught her breath.

  “Look!” She pointed toward the base of Sandstone Mountain.

  Just at the point where the slope met the plain was a tunnel entrance not far from the second spacecraft. Something metallic glinted at the opening: a walking machine.

  Chase clapped a hand on Ogilvey’s shoulder. “What are you gawking at, Doc? Get moving before they spot us!”

  Ogilvey floored the accelerator. As the Land Rover raced downhill, Chase turned to squint at the tunnel opening. Another walking machine had joined the first but neither had noticed them. “Better keep moving Professor, unless you want ’em breathing down our necks again.”

  Not until a switchback put a screen of willows between them and the prairie did Chase breathe easier. “Funny,” he murmured. “Everything we see makes matters worse.”

  Kit shook her head. “Not funny, really.”