Chronal Engine Page 3

  I wanted to go down and take a closer look, but first I grabbed the map from my pocket and tried to orient myself.

  Emma pulled the camera out of its case and panned up and down the creek.

  “Over there, right?” I asked, and pointed to an area where vines and undergrowth formed a dense thicket.

  “Yeah,” Kyle said, after glancing at the map. He strode over to push through the scrubby growth.

  I followed right behind him, Petra in back of me, and Emma bringing up the rear with the camera.

  After a bit of a struggle, we were through and emerged above a small, two-foot-wide rocky stream, a tributary of the creek itself.

  “This is it?” Kyle asked, turning in a circle.

  Over the years, a trickle had carved its way through the rock, although now the water level looked higher than normal, thanks to the rain last night.

  I stepped down into the streambed, onto a rock that lay halfway between the banks. From there I spotted three-toed bipedal theropod dinosaur footprints, a little longer than my own foot.

  But there were also footprints of another biped that didn’t belong there.

  “Oh, wow,” I said.

  “So?” Kyle stepped into the water beside me. “They’re footprints. So what?”

  “They’re fossilized footprints,” I said, careful of my balance on the rock. “Of humans in hiking shoes. You can see the tread. In the same strata as the dinosaur tracks. Look, you can see some kind of theropod tracks just behind them . . .” I swallowed. “Which means, we know that someone, some human, was there in the time of the dinosaurs.”

  By now Emma had splashed across the stream, her camera pointed at the footprints. She put her right foot down next to a left shoe track, her boot lining up alongside. And then she stepped into it with her left boot.

  It was a perfect fit.

  “Emma,” Petra said, her voice hushed, “what does your tread look like?”

  My sister lifted up her foot so we could see.

  “It’s the same!” Kyle exclaimed.

  I was just about to say, “I told you the Chronal Engine works,” when there was a flash of light on the creek bank and a man appeared from nowhere next to Emma.

  He shoved Petra toward the rocks in the stream. She stumbled, but Kyle caught her before she fell.

  The man was wearing a tweed jacket with a vest and a straw hat that looked like something he’d stolen from a barbershop quartet. Or from another time.

  He was holding a Recall Device in one hand and a revolver in the other.

  Before any of us could react, he had his arm around Emma’s neck from behind.

  “Get away from her!” Kyle shouted.

  But the man gestured with the hand that held the Recall Device.

  “Emma!” I shouted, and launched myself toward her. “Kyle! Don’t let him—”

  It was too late.

  There was another flash of light and a booming sound, and then both my sister and the man were gone.

  Chapter IV

  Once Upon a Time . . .

  “WHERE’D SHE GO?” KYLE TURNED TOWARD ME, HIS FACE PALE. “Who was that? Was that Mad Jack Pierson?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” At least it didn’t look like the photos of him in the workshop. This guy was shorter and stockier, with darker hair.

  “I don’t care who he is,” Petra said. “I ever see him again, I’m going to gut him like a fish.”

  Kyle gripped my shoulders. “What is going on? Where’s Emma?”

  “I don’t know.” I swallowed. “She might be in the Cretaceous. Because of the footprints.” Which was completely terrifying. There was a reason the largest mammals back then were the size of house cats. And it wasn’t just carnivores like Tyrannosaurus rex or Utahraptor—it was the herds of giant herbivores, too, like Triceratops and the hadrosaurs that could trample any primate flat.

  But we knew Emma had been okay when she got there.

  At least she’d been okay enough to leave footprints.

  I just hoped she’d stayed that way.

  “Wait. You’re saying that guy, whoever he was, kidnapped her and took her back to the time of the dinosaurs?” Kyle stepped back. He glanced at the tracks and then back at me. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Look, Grandpa sent us here for a reason at this exact time . . . to see those footprints. Maybe he knows something about whoever took Emma.”

  “What do you know about Grandpa?” Kyle turned to Petra. “About any of this? Did he ever say anything unusual?”

  She’d been living here for at least a couple years now. She was the only person other than her mother and the ranch manager who’d spoken to him regularly.

  “He just seemed like a nice old man,” Petra said. “There wasn’t anything you don’t know yourselves.”

  “So unless someone’s got a cell phone, we need to go back to the house and see if we can call him,” I said. “Grandpa, I mean.”

  Petra shook her head, and I knew neither Kyle nor I had one.

  “Yeah, good,” Kyle said. He ran a hand through his hair. “Good, we’ll do that.”

  We raced back to the house, Kyle outdistancing both Petra and me.

  As my brother grabbed a phone in the parlor, I dashed to the basement. The lab books lay scattered on the desk, where Emma and I had left them last night.

  I took a look at the Chronal Engine itself, at the dim round screen in the center that now looked brighter somehow. Then I looked closer.

  A dot had appeared, with letters and numerals identifying it somehow. I copied them down on a scrap of paper.

  The dot had to have been the active Recall Device. The Chronal Engine was tracking it somehow. And if I was reading it right, that meant Emma was about seventy or eighty million years in the past.

  I wondered if there was a way to get the Chronal Engine to automatically bring the Recall Device back or if you had to activate the Recall Device manually.

  I couldn’t tell, though, and I wasn’t going to randomly press buttons. And I certainly couldn’t read the lab books that would tell me how.

  After spending a moment looking for a key in the desk, I grabbed a bookend and smashed the locked glass case holding the Recall Device. I was just looking at how to set the coordinates on it when Kyle and Petra came thundering down the stairs.

  “What was that?” he demanded, with a glance at the wreckage.

  “It broke,” I said. “How’s Grandpa?”

  Kyle shook his head. “Still unconscious.”

  I filled them in on the tracking lights.

  “If we can’t bring Emma back, then we have to go to her,” Kyle said.

  “Yes,” I replied, holding up the Recall Device.

  “Can you set it?” Kyle asked.

  “I think so,” I replied. “I was just trying.”

  “Good.” Kyle took a deep breath. “We’re going to need wheels. So what do we take with us to the land of the dinosaurs? An armored personnel carrier?”

  “Well,” Petra said, “there is a Hummer in the garage.” She shrugged. “A VW, too.”

  “What?” I asked with a quick glance at my brother. “You mean a Beetle? A Bug?”

  “A Bug,” Kyle repeated, and told Petra what Grandpa had said.

  She nodded. “Mr. Pierson had this all planned.” A glint in her eye gave me a chill. “Come on!”

  Kyle raced after her. Grabbing the Recall Device, I followed as she led the way out of the basement and across the lawn to the garage.

  Flinging the side door open, she turned on the lights.

  “We take the Bug,” she repeated, with a gesture.

  Sitting in the center of the garage, next to a black Hummer and a bass boat on a trailer, was a brand-new lime-green Volkswagen Beetle, with one of those after-market roof racks that are for bikes or surfboards or ordinary luggage.

  This one already had packs tied down with blue nylon rope.

  A sheet of paper was taped to the driver
’s-side window. It contained a typed inventory list of what had been packed on the roof and in the trunk.

  Also, handwritten, was a note that read, “Take whatever else you think you’ll need, but don’t take the Hummer.”

  “Why not take the Hummer?” Kyle asked. “It’s bigger.”

  “It’s bad for the prehistoric environment?” I guessed.

  Then I remembered some of the sketches in the lab books. On one of the French pages, there was a diagram that showed a field of some kind, centered around the Recall Device. “It’s too big, I think. The chronal field, or whatever it’s called, won’t go around the whole thing, so we need to take something smaller.”

  “Good,” Kyle said. “Let’s go.”

  “What? Now?” I asked. “We need to check out the equipment and figure out how the Recall Device works, and we’ve got all the time in the world on this end.”

  Kyle looked at me like I was an idiot. “You said the Chronal Engine tracks the Recall Device?”

  “Yeah, so we’re good—”

  “What if Emma and it aren’t in the same place?” Kyle said.

  He was right. The man could drop Emma off somewhere—anywhere in time—and then take off alone. Or, knowing Emma, she could’ve already gotten away from him. But she’d be lost with no way home. We needed to move quickly. “You guys check the supplies. I’ll set up the Recall Device.”

  Back in the workshop, I could still see the dot representing the kidnapper. The numbers were still the same as those I’d written. I hesitated over the books. Even if I could’ve read them, bringing them back in time with us seemed risky. But what if we needed them?

  There might be something we could decipher.

  The thing is, I don’t like instruction manuals. They’re usually badly written, even when they’re in English. In this case, though, it seemed a worse idea to leave them behind. I ran upstairs and grabbed my school backpack.

  After a moment’s consideration, I grabbed my laptop computer. After booting it, I went online and downloaded a couple freeware translation programs and copies of the Russian and Japanese alphabets.

  Back downstairs, I shoved the lab books into the backpack with the computer. I hoped that the microfiche reader next to the card catalog meant that Grandpa had made copies.

  I set the Recall Device, then ran out to see the VW parked right outside, Petra and Kyle standing next to it.

  “Grandpa packed us clothes,” Kyle said.

  “What?” It seemed like such a bizarre thing for him to say, and Emma was the one who usually was concerned about what to wear.

  “In our sizes,” Petra added.

  I looked into the pack Kyle held out. Two sets of clothes that were essentially identical to what I was wearing. T-shirts, socks, underwear, cargo shorts. There was also a rain poncho like the ones they give you at SeaWorld. I was already wearing hiking shoes.

  “Look over the list,” Petra said. “We couldn’t think of anything he’d missed.”

  A compound bow and a recurve bow and two sets of broad-head arrows (Petra could use one, and Kyle had learned to use one back in his Lord of the Rings phase a couple years ago before he made starting wide receiver and got cool and he didn’t really like to talk about it); four hunting knives; a multi-tool; a composite hatchet; a tent; granola bars; water purification tablets; matches; two flint and steel sets; three canteens; a first-aid kit including bandages and aspirin and antibiotic ointments; binoculars; flashlights; a small mirror; and cooking implements.

  Compared to my mother, Grandpa had packed light.

  “Camera?” I asked.

  “Broken,” Petra answered. “It fell on a rock.”

  Then the list looked okay to me.

  “So we’re ready?” I said.

  “I’m ready,” Kyle said. “Give me the Recall Device.”

  “What?” Petra and I demanded at the same time.

  “I’m going,” Kyle said. “Alone.”

  “Since when?” I put in.

  He ran a hand through his hair. “Since now. Look. I’ve been thinking about this. It’s too dangerous. I can’t help Emma if I have to take care of you two.”

  “You don’t have to ‘take care’ of me, city boy,” Petra said, her back stiff.

  “Me, neither,” I said. As his jaw was starting to set in his “I’m Kyle, I’m stubborn” look, I went on. “Quick. Pachycephalosaurus. Friend or foe?”

  “What’s a . . . a . . . pachy . . . ?” he asked.

  “Exactly,” I replied, but I could see he wasn’t convinced. “Look, I think we all have to come. Or else why would Grandpa have packed our clothes?”

  It was true I wanted to go. But more than that, I felt like I needed to go. The only way Kyle and I were going to rescue Emma was by sticking together.

  But part of me also wondered if we were being set up. What would happen if we didn’t take the path that had been neatly arranged for us? If only Kyle went, would we lose Emma? Did we really have a choice?

  Kyle was silent a long moment. “Fine.”

  But there was one more thing. Even if Grandpa had meant for Petra to go, it didn’t seem fair to drag her into this. Whatever “this” was.

  “Look,” I said. “Kyle’s kind of right. Emma’s our sister. You don’t have to come.”

  “Are you kidding? You were right the first time. Besides, I like Emma,” Petra said. “And it’s going to be a heck of an adventure.”

  “No wonder you two got along so well,” Kyle muttered.

  “Okay, then.” I shifted the strap on my backpack. “Who’s driving?”

  Kyle was still a year away from his learner’s permit.

  “I am.” He held up the keys. “It’s an automatic transmission. A monkey could drive it.”

  “Good thing we’ve got one,” I said.

  When he punched my shoulder, I didn’t even flinch. “I call shotgun.”

  Petra snorted. “Speaking of which, do y’all think it might be a good idea to bring firearms? I don’t suppose either of you knows how to use a shotgun? Or rifle?”

  At our startled glances, she sighed. “Oh, that’s right, y’all’re from Austin. Well, I don’t suppose there’s time to teach you enough to do any good. And we won’t be able to find any good buckshot a hundred million years ago, anyway.”

  We climbed into the car. I set the Recall Device in the cup holder and checked the setting. Then it occurred to me. “Wait. This is a time machine, right? Why don’t we just go back to earlier and stop her from going?”

  “Because we didn’t,” Kyle answered.

  “And your grandfather wouldn’t have prepared all this if that was going to work, would he?” Petra asked.

  It made sense. Still, I hesitated.

  “Do it, Max,” Kyle said.

  I pressed the activation button.

  We’ll be back in no time, was my last thought before the flash of light.

  Chapter V

  And the Rest Is Prehistory . . .

  AND THEN WE WERE FALLING. AFTER ABOUT HALF A SECOND, WE hit the ground. The car bounced once and then came to a halt, facing a tree, tilted nose downward.

  “Everyone okay?” Kyle asked, his voice shaky.

  “Are you kidding? It worked,” I answered. “The time machine worked!”

  The three of us whooped and high-fived.

  “Come on!” I said. I swung my door open and bolted out, promptly tripping down the small mound the car was perched atop. I climbed to my feet, aware of some slimy goo on my hands, and took a moment to look around.

  I was sweating. It was hot and steamy, like summer on the Gulf Coast, but there was a moist, peaty smell on top of it, as well as the smell of the ocean. I pulled at the neck of my T-shirt to fan myself while Petra got out of the car, an arrow loosely nocked to her bow.

  “Watch that, Robin Hood,” Kyle said as he came around the front of the car.

  The Beetle rested at an angle on a mound, nestled against a giant tree, at least a hundred feet tall, at
the edge of a forest of other giants—redwoods, I thought—some with trunks as much as ten feet in diameter. The undergrowth seemed to be mostly ferns, with occasional stands of stubby palms and cycads.

  Away from the forest was a sandy beach, about seventy-five, maybe a hundred feet wide, leading up to an endless expanse of glassy, still water.

  Offshore, in the distance, a pair of islands broke the sea’s surface, and sea birds soared overhead. I squinted, trying to make them out better, then heard the shrill cry of an animal from deep in the forest and became aware of the buzzing and chirping of insects. I slapped at a mosquito on my arm before it could draw blood.

  “This is amazing,” Petra said, staring up into the trees. “Like Endor, from Return of the Jedi.”

  “The Forest Moon,” I corrected, out of habit. “Endor was the gas giant.”

  “Emma!” Kyle shouted, startling us both.“Emma!”

  When we looked at him, he shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  There was no answering shout.

  I hoped we’d set down in a time and location near my sister, but there was no way to check, to be sure. I moved to wipe sweat off my face, then remembered the goo on my hand.

  I wiped it off on my pants and crouched near the VW’s right rear wheel, to see where it had come from, while Petra peered under the front.

  We’d landed on a nest or something, but I couldn’t see exactly what it belonged to. The car had completely crushed it. Whatever it was, it was feathered and about the size of a swan.

  As I was reaching for a stick to prod the creature with, I heard a cry from Petra.

  When I looked up, she was cradling a small, damp, feathered something in her hand. It cheeped.

  “You dropped a car on its nest,” Petra said, glaring from me to Kyle, “and killed its mother.”

  “Sorry.” Kyle shrugged and looked closer. “Umm . . . why does it have teeth?”

  I reached to grab one of its legs between thumb and forefinger to inspect its claws.

  “It has teeth,” I told him, releasing the chick, “because it’s a dromaeosaurid dinosaur and they all had teeth.”

  “A what kind of dinosaur?” Petra asked.