Chronal Engine Read online

  “Because he thought it was going to land in water?” Kyle speculated. “Do you think we can use this to get back?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. We need to find Emma first.”

  “Brilliant idea,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?” He gestured. “I don’t suppose you have some clue where she might be?”

  “No,” I had to admit.

  “Me, neither,” Petra interjected before Kyle could say something else snide. “But I bet they do.”

  We stared back at her, but she was looking out to sea. Suddenly, she crouched and pointed. “Duck!”

  “A boat!” Kyle said, dropping down so that he’d be hidden by the side of the launch.

  And then I saw. Out at sea, maybe a mile down the shoreline, in the direction we’d been heading, was a boat. A launch, like the one we were on, only this one was whole and belching black smoke from its smokestack as it cruised parallel to the shore.

  “Don’t let them see you,” Kyle said.

  “You think they’re the ones who took Emma?” I asked.

  “Either that,” Petra said, “or they can lead us to her.”

  I crouched beside her. From where the boat was, I figured the Beetle was hidden from their view. But there was a pair of binoculars in the trunk. Hoping I wouldn’t be seen, I made my way over the side.

  “Where are you going?” Kyle asked.

  I ran to the car, grabbed the hatch handle, and yanked. And nearly pulled my arm off. It was locked. Because oviraptorids were prehistory’s most notorious car thieves.

  “Kyle!” I shouted. “Unlock the door!”

  His face appeared above the side of the boat, looking startled. He pulled the keys from his pocket and pressed the button on the remote to release the hatch. I grabbed the binoculars.

  I ran back to the wreck, looking out to sea where I’d last seen the steamer. “Where’d it go?”

  Petra pointed. “Over there. It’s heading toward the shore. I bet there’s a river or inlet.”

  I peered through the binoculars and watched as the boat headed into shore and disappeared behind the trees and sand dunes that lay in front of us. The boat looked pretty much like the one we were standing on, but with fewer holes. The driver was obscured inside the cockpit, and I didn’t spot any sign of anyone else. “If Emma’s aboard, I don’t see her.”

  Kyle grunted. “Well, we know enough to head upriver. Let’s get a move on.”

  “Makes sense,” Petra said.

  “Hold on a sec.” I jumped down from the boat and grabbed a notepad and pen from the car.

  Then I scribbled a message on it, to Emma, if she ever made it here. That we were looking for her. Of course, knowing her, she was probably back already, feet up and relaxing.

  We sealed the metal box in the deck as best we could. Maybe Kyle was right and we could use it to get home. But if it worked, why had it been left here to rot?

  We climbed out of the boat and got into the car, Petra in the back as I took the shotgun seat again.

  The second volume of the lab books rested at my feet while I held the first one open against the dashboard and tried to read.

  “Drive,” I told Kyle. “Don’t get us lost. Oh, and try to find some fresh water.”

  Kyle looked at me like I was dense, but he drove. At least now we had kind of an idea where we were going, and there was a chance Emma was here.

  It was a bit easier reading in the car than it would’ve been outside, since we had the air conditioner going, although the motion was giving me a bit of a headache. Or maybe that was the dehydration.

  I took a swig from one of the canteens and directed the air vent at my face.

  I wasn’t really sure whether the a/c was a good use of the gas, but I wasn’t going to complain right now.

  Kyle drove us farther down the beach while I continued to read.

  After a while I gave up on trying to figure out the lab books. The first one didn’t seem to have anything helpful. The equations in all four were impossible, and for the foreign language stuff, I was going to have to break out the translation programs on the laptop.

  And, honestly, I was feeling kind of nauseated because of the hills that Kyle kept driving us over. Finally, though, he brought the Bug to a halt at the top of a sand dune, overlooking the mouth of a river. Sandbars dotted the entrance, but at least one channel in the middle looked deep enough for a boat.

  “Upriver,” Petra said from behind.

  Kyle nodded, then put the car back in gear and headed into the forest, trying to keep within view of the muddy brown water.

  As we moved deeper into the forest, we also began going slightly uphill. Farther on, the VW mowed down waist-high ferns, as Kyle drove between giant redwood trunks and swerved to avoid half-buried, ancient logs.

  Not long after we entered the forest, he reached down and turned on the radio. There was only static.

  “Are you trying for the Greatest Hits of Seventy Million B.C.?” I asked. “Because it might be better to open a window.”

  He gave me a dirty look and switched the band to AM.

  “The kidnapper could have an accomplice, and they could have radios,” he said.

  Which made a certain amount of sense, I guess.

  But the scan setting on the radio didn’t pick up anything.

  After a moment I turned it off.

  As we drove, I tried to keep a watch on the water, but didn’t have a good view from the passenger seat. The river wound, and Kyle didn’t exactly follow every twist and cutback, but we kept close enough that the muddy water was in sight most of the time.

  I occasionally got a peek of something flying through the trees, but I couldn’t tell if it was a bird, some new pterosaur, or maybe even a Microraptor. I wasn’t sure whether those ever lived in North America, though.

  Petra had scooted over, behind Kyle, so she could keep an eye out.

  Suddenly, we turned a corner around a tree into a sort of clearing. Kyle slammed on the brakes and took a hard right. The VW stopped at the brink, about three or four feet from the edge of the embankment.

  It wasn’t high enough to really be a cliff, just a sloping rise overlooking the bottom of a U in the river, about ten or so feet below.

  Trees grew, roots exposed, out of the water near the riverbank. Cypresses and maybe dawn redwoods. It felt a lot like the heights by MoPac Expressway, overlooking Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. At least that’s what it could’ve been except for the giant alligators basking on the opposite riverbank.

  As I pointed, one of the reptiles pushed itself up and slid into the water.

  “Maybe one of those put that hole in the boat back there,” Petra said.

  “Maybe,” I answered. These alligators were huge—thirty-five, maybe forty feet long. They had to have been Deinosuchus, one of the biggest alligators ever. Supposedly, they ate turtles, fish, and whatever else they felt like, including dinosaurs.

  Kyle released his seat belt and opened his door to step out.

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing his arm. “What’s that?”

  I heard strange hooting and a noise vaguely like thunder.

  The air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror began to shake, and not from the breeze.

  Petra looked back toward the redwood forest. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  I took a quick glance behind us and saw what I hadn’t noticed before: cutting across the twists in the river, we’d been driving for a while on what looked like a path, about three or four car widths wide.

  “What is it?” Kyle asked, but he closed the door and pulled his seat belt back on.

  “Something’s coming,” I replied. As a precaution, I grabbed the Recall Device out of the cup holder and stowed it in my backpack with the lab books and laptop. “Drive!”

  I’d just zipped the bag shut and Kyle had just put the key back into the ignition when the herd of dinosaurs plowed into us. The car lurched sideways, metal crumpling and glass shattering, as
a massive body broadsided us.

  Giant, hammer-headed hadrosaurs. Duck-bills. Brown and green bodies, but with five-foot-long, bright blue and red crests that stuck out from the backs of their heads. Parasaurolophus. They were as large as elephants, which made me realize just how tiny a VW Beetle actually was. “Hang on!”

  Kyle pressed the accelerator. I heard the engine rev, and we lurched forward. Then we were struck again. The right side caved in, and I felt my door, or maybe the entire frame of the car, press up against me.

  The next thing I knew, Kyle yelled something, and the car was going over the edge of the embankment. My stomach lurched as we fell and grazed the side of a tree. A moment later the car splashed into the water and came to a rest on the driver’s side, wedged between the roots of a cypress and the riverbank.

  Then I dropped into ice-cold water on top of Kyle, and Aki screamed.

  “Get off me!” Kyle managed to say through gritted teeth.

  I struggled to get upright and saw Petra in the back trying to do the same. At the same time, I tried to keep the lab books and computer out of the water.

  The water didn’t stop rising until it was about three feet deep, which was enough to submerge nearly half the car.

  My shoulder seemed a little bruised and my right ankle was throbbing, but other than that, I seemed healthy. “Everyone okay?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle replied, although his face looked white.

  “Me, too,” Petra said.

  I let out a breath. “Good.”

  In a few minutes, and with only a few more bruises, we managed to get ourselves upright and at least mostly out of the water.

  “Gator!” Petra shouted, as I was hoisting myself out of the shattered passenger-side window. I watched, motionless, as the Deinosuchus approached the tree the car was caught on. Only the six-foot-long head of the gator was visible above the water. Three or four other trees closely surrounded the one we were caught in, so probably the Deinosuchus couldn’t get right at us, but I still kept an eye on it.

  After too long a moment, the Deinosuchus flicked its tail, roiled the water, and was gone.

  “Stay on this side of the trees,” Petra warned.

  “Not a problem,” I muttered as I climbed up to stand on the car frame. From where I was, I could see up onto the riverbank, where the herd had attacked us.

  “Are they still there?” Kyle called.

  “No,” I said, and tossed my soaking backpack ahead of me.

  We’d gotten lucky. The car was totaled, but a bigger herd might’ve trampled us completely flat.

  I took another careful look around. I didn’t see any more hadrosaurs, though, so I gripped a root sticking out of the bank and hoisted myself up.

  Chapter VII

  In the Forests of the Night . . .

  “HAND ME THE PACKS,” I CALLED DOWN.

  As Kyle and Petra began to gather our baggage out of the trunk and off the roof, I took a look around. The Parasaurolophus had gone, but there were plenty of footprints, piles of dung, and trampled ferns.

  My backpack, with the journals and my computer, was soaked. We’d need to dry everything out, but now wasn’t the time. We had to get our stuff together and get out of there. I didn’t think the herd would be returning, but playing it safe was probably a good idea.

  While I was doing this, Petra hoisted herself onto the side of the car, balancing Aki on her shoulder. When she climbed up, the dromaeosaur spread his fuzzy arms like wings and then leaped off as I reached to give her a hand. Then Aki shook his feathers and lay down in the sun next to my backpack.

  “What now?” I called.

  Kyle emerged from the car and began tossing packs and bedrolls up at me. I let most of them fall to the ground.

  “We should get out of here,” Petra said, “as quickly as we can.”

  “I know. We can’t leave our supplies, though,” I said.

  “We can’t take it all.” She pulled a bandanna out of a pocket and wiped sweat off her forehead. “We’re going to have to leave something.”

  “How much did Grandpa know?” Kyle asked as he climbed up to the bank and stood, stiffly, off balance. At my raised eyebrow, he continued, “Because if he knew everything, then wouldn’t he have had us bring less junk?”

  “Maybe,” I answered. “Or maybe we have to choose. You okay?”

  He took a deep breath, wincing, but lifted up the bottom of his T-shirt. His left side was covered in a purple and black bruise. “I’ll live. What about the two of you?”

  Petra had a cut over her eye and a few bruises on her arms and legs, but otherwise seemed all right. I had a nasty gash on my ankle and a bruised shoulder blade, but didn’t think anything was broken.

  I was a little worried about my brother, though. He’d gotten beat up a couple times like this playing football, and it usually required a lot of ice and sitting still. But if he didn’t want to make a big deal about it, I wasn’t going to.

  We got off the game trail and quickly cleaned our cuts with the antiseptic from the first-aid kit and bandaged up the bigger ones. The gash on my ankle was about four inches long and deep enough that it would’ve freaked Mom into taking me in for stitches. The bleeding seemed to have mostly slowed to an ooze, though.

  In the end, we found that the tent was torn, so we left that, but we packed the spare clothes, sleeping bags, fire-starting tools, knives, the hatchet, canteens, granola bars, first-aid kit, water purification tablets, flashlights, multi-tool, mirror, Petra’s bow (the other one broke), and the arrows (some of which were bent). And my computer and the lab books. We tied the remaining supplies up a tree with rope.

  When we were done, I unzipped an inner pocket of my backpack and pulled out a Ziploc bag of yogurt-covered raisins. I grabbed a handful, then held out the bag to Petra.

  She took a few and I tossed the bag to Kyle, while she held a raisin out to Aki. The dromaeosaur sniffed at it, gingerly took it into his mouth, and gulped it down.

  “Should he be eating those?” I asked, as Petra fed him another.

  “Why not?” she replied, not looking up.

  I couldn’t think of a real reason—it just seemed bizarre that a dinosaur should eat a dairy product from the twenty-first century (were dinosaurs lactose intolerant?).

  I was still contemplating the digestive tract of the juvenile dromaeosaur when I heard a roar in the distance.

  “Maybe we should get moving,” I said. “We should also probably find some kind of shelter for the night.”

  After about a couple miles or so of hiking, we found ourselves above a creek that fed into the river. We followed it upstream, away from the river, where the water ran clean. And we’d still have a view of any boats moving upriver. We made camp there, where a six-foot-wide redwood had fallen out to bridge the creek. Another tree lay propped on top of it, more or less parallel to the stream. Yet another stood next to both. It seemed like as good a shelter (Petra called it a “stockade”) as we were going to get.

  “We should be all right tonight,” she said as we dropped our packs, “so long as the stream doesn’t rise, in which case we’ll be washed away and probably drown.”

  Kyle gave her a look. “We’re, what, a good three or four feet above the water?”

  “You ever seen a good old-fashioned central Texas flash flood?”

  Kyle grumbled something I couldn’t hear, so I decided not to bring up extreme possibilities like volcanic eruptions or the Chicxulub meteorite.

  I slapped at a mosquito. “Let’s get a fire going.” It would keep carnivores at bay and, hopefully, insects, too. Also, the fire would dry out the lab books. And then we’d be able to find our way home. Once we got Emma back, that is.

  The Recall Device should’ve put us down at the right time and place, but really, other than the brief blip on the tracker on the Chronal Engine, the only confirmatory evidence we had that she was here was those footprints back at the ranch.

  And the thing was, to make a fossil, you needed somethin
g to bury the tracks. Like a lot of muddy water or a volcano. I just hoped she hadn’t gotten caught in either.

  Then there was the whole survival issue. I had never—and I do mean never—gone camping, and I knew too much about dinosaurs to really feel comfortable out in the relative open without, say, an M1 Abrams tank or something.

  While Petra and Kyle prepared camp, I went off to look for firewood. The shadows were longer now, and the forest seemed filled with mysterious dark spaces. Although I couldn’t see the sun anymore, it was still hot.

  To be honest, at this point, I was kind of borderline terrified, but it was like there was so much to be scared about that all the individual frightening pieces seemed small.

  We’d already seen tyrannosaurs and titanosaurs and dromaeosaurs and oviraptorids and hadrosaurs. What else could be lurking in the night?

  At the same time, it was incredible that we were three of the only five human beings on the planet (that I knew of) and that it would be at least sixty-five and a half million years, and probably a whole bunch more, before any others appeared.

  It was getting darker, so I quickly gathered dead wood and returned to the camp, where the others had already prepped a place for the fire, clearing dried fern fronds and cycad branches. I dropped my bundle of branches, wiped sweat off my face, and swatted at mosquitoes, more out of habit than for hope of it doing any good.

  Kyle knelt, shaving away at one piece of metal with another. Every time, a spark flew off the end, onto a small pile of fuzz that lay in front of him, on top of a dried cycad branch. The fuzz didn’t ignite, though.

  “Flint and steel,” Petra said. “Either of you ever start a fire this way before?”

  “No,” Kyle said, “like I told you. But I’ve seen it done this way on TV.” A drop of sweat fell off his nose. He leaned back, wiping his face with the bottom of his shirt, then waved away a mosquito.

  “Tomorrow night’s your turn,” Petra told me.

  “Joy,” I replied.