Chronal Engine Read online

  She sat, resting back against a tree, looking a lot like she was enjoying herself. “Have a seat. We’re going to be here awhile.” Then, as I was sitting, she looked at the pile of wood I’d brought. “Actually, come on, we’re going to need more than that.”

  For the next half hour, we gathered wood and brought it back to the campsite. And with each bundle of firewood, which Petra delivered with a cheerful whistle, Kyle’s face got redder and redder. His jaw was clenched as he worked at starting the fire. Of course, his ribs couldn’t have been feeling all that well, either.

  On one of our outings, I found a stick about an inch thick and about as long as I was tall. I trimmed off the smaller branches so I could use it as a quarterstaff.

  Friar Tuck vs. the Velociraptor. I decided I was more tired than I’d realized.

  “You know, we could just use the matches,” I finally whispered to Petra as we headed out one more time into the dark.

  At this point we had way more firewood than we needed. And I was worried about the books. I didn’t think their being wet a little longer would matter much, but I wasn’t sure we should risk it.

  “Maybe,” she replied, grinning, as we went off again. “Why don’t we give him a few more minutes?”

  We headed off into the darkness until I was thoroughly lost, even with a flashlight, but Petra seemed to know where we were going.

  “By the way,” she said, “what’s edible? If we have to be here awhile?”

  “You think we’re going to have to be here awhile?”

  “Not to get all Swiss Family Robinson,” she replied, “but pretend, for the moment.”

  I bent to pick up more sticks. “A lot of things. Some fir tree needles, but there probably won’t be anything like modern fruits and berries—I mean, there’ll be flowering plants, which means fruit, but I don’t think there’s anything like an apple or coconut yet. Maybe a fig or two.” I shrugged. “I could be wrong. There will be small dinosaurs and mammals, though, if we can hunt and trap. Also, there are fish and crayfish and bugs.”

  A second later we heard a shout from the campsite.

  “Fire!” Kyle cried.

  Petra flashed a grin and then said, “Let’s go.”

  She led the way back to the camp, which really wasn’t difficult because by now there was a huge, flickering glow.

  “Congratulations,” I called when we came in sight.

  “Yeah,” Petra began. “How long did it take?”

  I didn’t really listen to the reply and didn’t say anything further since tomorrow it would be my turn.

  Though we didn’t need the heat, the fire felt like home and safety.

  Kyle was soaked with sweat, so he took a dip in the creek while I laid out the lab notebooks in front of the fire.

  After a dinner of granola bars—Aki particularly liked the chocolate one—we decided to keep watch. At least, Petra suggested it, and Kyle and I agreed. It made sense, really. I mean, we were in a place where the predators could swallow you in one gulp and where small herbivores were bigger than hippos.

  And the hippo was the deadliest animal in modern-day Africa.

  Besides, there was a chance that we’d be able to spot that river launch if it headed back downriver.

  So, deep into the night, I sat up on the log, listening to forest noises. The sounds were familiar, almost surprisingly so. The gurgle of the stream was a white-noise background to the buzzing of insects and the occasional calls of birds, or other arboreal creatures high up in the trees. There was a kind of deep, hooting noise from the river, which I figured was the Deinosuchus.

  The moon was nearly full, but its light didn’t really penetrate the shadows.

  Once in a while, I heard something roaring from the forest that I hoped was farther away than it sounded, and every now and then, I had to brush away something crawling on my leg that I hoped even more wasn’t a scorpion.

  Occasionally, I heard a splash in the water, which I assumed was from fish or from something like a lizard going after the fish. Or it could have been from turtles or crayfish, since those predated the dinosaurs by millennia. At least, crayfish did.

  I was contemplating what kind of fish there might be in the stream (yes, I was bored, but I was trying to stay awake) and had decided that there might be gars or coelacanths or freshwater sharks, but probably no trout or salmon. I didn’t really know for sure because I’d never spent a lot of time reading up on freshwater Mesozoic fish because, well, fish are boring.

  That’s when I heard a low, throaty rumble from the edge of the clearing, off to my right. I slowly turned to look. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then I heard the crack of a large branch.

  I scrambled to my feet on the log to face whatever was there.

  I shined the flashlight in the direction of the sounds and then let out a piercing yell. It was a tyrannosaur.

  A miniature version of what we’d encountered earlier. It stood about six feet high at the hips and its snout was relatively smaller and slimmer. Its markings were different, too: more spotted than striped. But it still had razor-sharp claws and a mouth so big it could easily bite a person’s head off. And it was still bigger than a full-grown grizzly.

  Chapter VIII

  Night Watch

  THE LIGHT CAUGHT THE TYRANNOSAUR IN MIDSTRIDE, ITS LEFT foot upraised.

  The creature froze.

  “What is it?” Petra was instantly awake and on her feet, grabbing the bow.

  Kyle rolled over and came up standing, one hand holding on to the hatchet, the other on his ribs.

  I yelled again, shining the beam of the flashlight into the tyrannosaur’s eyes.

  With a hiss, the creature turned and rushed off.

  And then another mini-tyrannosaur emerged from the shadows and followed.

  “What are those?” Petra began.

  “Shhh!” I said, holding up my hand. I pointed the flashlight at the place in the tree line where the creatures had disappeared, and listened.

  When I felt sure they were gone, I lowered the light and clicked it off.

  I slid off the log and sat next to the fire.

  Aki curled up next to Petra’s bedding and went back to sleep.

  “What were they?” she asked again.

  “They looked like mini-tyrannosaurs. Nanotyrannus,” I answered. Probably, although they could’ve been just juveniles of a bigger species. Like T. rex. Or Daspletosaurus. Or Albertosaurus. I didn’t say anything more.

  Kyle yawned, setting the hatchet down beside him. “If they come back, wake me up.” With that, he rolled over, back to the fire.

  Petra snorted. “Some people.” She paced, her arms stretched out, then twisted her spine so that it made a cracking noise. “Is it my turn yet?”

  I looked at my watch. “Yeah.”

  Without another word, she took the flashlight and climbed atop the fallen redwood log, her back against a root.

  I was a little wired, so I thought I’d be awake for a long time, but ended up falling asleep almost immediately. When I awoke again, it was morning, the sky bright. I felt sore all over and had a sharp pain in my neck.

  I stood and stretched, trying to get the kinks out. Petra was nowhere around. The fire had nearly died out.

  And Kyle was sitting on the log in the same place I’d last seen Petra. His head rested on his arms, folded over his knees, his eyes closed.

  For a moment I was annoyed—there was a reason we’d decided to keep watch. There were a lot of reasons, and they involved many teeth and claws.

  I was trying to decide what to do when I heard Petra emerge from behind a tree by the stream. She was holding a T-shirt in a bundle while Aki trotted behind her. As she came closer, I saw that she was carrying something in the bundle. Several somethings. One of them moved. Crayfish. About a dozen.

  “Plenty more, too,” she whispered as I gave her a thumbs up.

  “Why are you whispering?” I asked, then realized I was whispering, too.

 
Petra gestured at my brother. “So we don’t wake . . .” She stopped, realizing what she was saying. “Hey!”

  She tiptoed over until she was right next to him.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Kyle said, his eyes still closed.

  Petra hit him in the arm. Hard.

  “Ow!” he said, eyes opening, as he rubbed where she’d struck him, although I kind of thought he was overdoing it.

  Then as Kyle started to swing his legs over to jump down, he slipped, toppled over sideways, and fell off to the far side of the log. His left hand slapped at the mossy bark, and he let out a yell as he went over.

  I bit back a laugh and rushed to check on him—it was kind of a long drop.

  When I leaned over the trunk, I saw that Kyle lay sprawled on his back, wincing, holding on to his side.

  “You okay?” I said, remembering his ribs.

  “Yeah—” Kyle began, then let out a cry and scrambled backwards.

  A pair of small, brown, furry, slim-bodied creatures had emerged from the ground under the log and were making high-pitched barking noises at Kyle.

  “They’re adorable!” Petra said, peering over, as she raised a hand to settle Aki, whose downy feathers stood on end.

  “They look kind of like rats,” Kyle said. “Probably one of your ancestors, Max.”

  There was silence. Then Petra spoke. “You do realize, umm . . .”

  I chuckled and didn’t really listen to what Kyle said next. I was focused more on the creatures themselves. They were about the size of rats, with ratlike tails, but longer and slimmer, like someone had taken a squirrel, stretched it out, and shaved its tail. “They’re probably multituberculates. Rodents didn’t evolve until the Paleocene.”

  “What are multituberculates?” Petra wanted to know.

  I hesitated. “They’re kind of like rats. But their teeth are different.”

  At this Kyle snorted. He brushed dirt off the seat of his cargo pants and backed away from the creatures. When they were about ten feet away, they calmed and returned to their burrow.

  “What’s for breakfast?” Kyle wanted to know.

  “Crayfish,” Petra replied.

  “We have crayfish?” he exclaimed.

  “The creek has crayfish,” Petra said with a grin. “Free range. Organic.”

  “All right!” Kyle clapped his hands, then rubbed them together. “Nothing quite like hunting crawdads in the morning to build me an appetite!”

  With that the three of us descended into the stream, searching the mud, pulling up rocks and logs. It wasn’t long before we managed to find several and tossed them into a pile on the creek bank. Not enough for a full, all-out boil, but enough that, with the granola bars, we wouldn’t starve. At least not for another day.

  As we regarded the pile of crayfish, Kyle looked thoughtful. “So, today we need to find the kidnapper’s base of operations, rescue Emma, and figure out how to get out of here.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Easy-peasy.” Petra nodded.

  “Good,” Kyle replied. His stomach rumbled. “Anyone have any idea how we’re going to cook these guys?”

  In the end, we used the pot from the cooking kit and boiled the crayfish. It took a while, and the meal wasn’t really as satisfying as back home, when you had a cast-iron cauldron, potatoes, carrots, corn on the cob, and a lot of cayenne pepper. But otherwise the meat tasted the same, which was something.

  While Kyle and I ate the tails, Petra broke open some of the bodies and fed them to Aki.

  The fuzzy hatchling studied each piece, batting it around and pouncing like a kitten, before finally eating it. I watched as the dromaeosaur stuffed himself.

  “What are you going to do with him?” I asked.

  Petra shrugged. “Train him. Maybe to hunt. You know, like a falcon.”

  “Just so long as he doesn’t hunt us,” my brother put in, then tossed the chick a crayfish head.

  Chapter IX

  On the Edge

  IT WASN’T THAT DIFFERENT HERE THAN AT THE RANCH. WALKING upriver, I mean. It was hot and humid, and we were being eaten alive one tiny mouthful at a time by insects. The smells weren’t that different either, and it was almost creepy how “normal” the plants looked. The ferns and cycads looked like the ones at the prehistoric garden in Zilker Park. Every now and then, we’d walk past a ginkgo.

  The conifers were bigger, but this was, after all, a redwood forest.

  It wasn’t until you heard the cry of something in the distance that you realized you were on a wholly unfamiliar earth. An ancient place with sounds no human ear had ever heard and that had been silenced millions of years ago . . . That was a little unnerving.

  So was the fact that the birds had teeth.

  “So, we’re here,” Kyle said, turning to look at Petra and me. “Basically, we’ve got these dinosaurs bigger than elephants that want to eat us, dinosaurs the size of horses that want to eat us, dinosaurs the size of wolves that want to eat us, and other dinosaurs the size of elephants that want to trample us?”

  “Pretty much,” I said. “There are also some the size of elephants that could impale us with their horns and others the size of rhinos that could bludgeon us to death with their tail clubs. And it’s possible there are giant pterosaurs that might be terrestrial hunter-scavengers that could also want to eat us. And if we go into the water, there are sharks and mosasaurs, as well as the big, giant alligators.”

  And almost all of the dinosaurian carnivores could take down any mammal with ease (other than maybe an Indricotherium, a rhino that was as big as a sauropod, but those wouldn’t be around for another twenty or thirty million years).

  Kyle grunted and led on.

  We were alone, with only the barest minimum of supplies. And Emma had even fewer. Unless the guy who kidnapped her had a well-stocked camp.

  We needed to find her and get home.

  Which was fine, as far as it went. But something didn’t fit. Why did the guy take Emma? If Grandpa had known about all this, why hadn’t he tried to save her? Was she involved somehow in something that had to happen? Or was she going to be involved somehow?

  Maybe some of the answers were in the lab books, but the pages were still sticking together. And I was still afraid to try booting my computer.

  I was just thinking that my next laptop should be one of those heavy-duty waterproof ones with the rivets that look like they’re carved out of a single piece of steel, when we reached an area where the redwoods thinned and the sky on the forest side began to open up. The sounds of the beasts and birds and insects gave way to a low, steady roar.

  Kyle began, “Sounds like a—”

  “Waterfall,” Petra finished.

  We stepped into a clearing and onto a bank looking down about three feet into another creek channel. Unlike the last one, the channel wasn’t full, but the creek that snaked its way across the bottom was still fast moving.

  A rocky sandbar sat in the river at the mouth of the channel, with about a half dozen Ichthyornis—like toothed gulls—wading and occasionally darting their heads to pluck up a fish. About fifty feet upstream, the creek water foamed from a twenty-foot waterfall flowing over a terraced, rocky drop-off. Cypresses grew at the creek’s edge, and rushes and horsetails grew on marshy soil to our right.

  A small monitor lizard slithered from between a pair of ferns into the water.

  “Very nice,” Petra murmured. We clambered down the creek bank, and she let Aki onto the ground. For a moment we paused at the edge of the creek, refilling our canteens and enjoying the feeling of coolness that came from the sound of the rushing water.

  With a small sigh, Petra dropped her pack and sat on a log that lay partially buried, a few feet from the water’s edge. She muttered something about blisters and then, with a cry, shot up, standing, brushing at her legs.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Scorpion!” She stepped away from the log, peering around it. Then, with one hand, she flipped the log up
and pushed it aside.

  The scorpion—about three inches long with a beige and black carapace—scurried out.

  I moved closer to get a better look and caught sight of a pair of centipedes trying to burrow into the mud. Aki leaped after one, jabbing his snout into the dirt.

  With a satisfied chirp, he came up with it, wriggling and flailing its legs.

  Then Aki gulped the centipede down and began sniffing at the ground again. I couldn’t see what he was looking for until he pounced and grabbed with his teeth. A thin, wet, rubbery shape stretched as it resisted his grip.

  Finally, Aki stood straight, triumphant, the prey dangling from his mouth.

  “Is that an earthworm?” Kyle asked.

  I knelt, but not so close as to spook the little dromaeosaur. “Looks like it.”

  Aki’s prey appeared to be a normal, ordinary, twenty-first-century, garden-style earthworm. About four inches long with a moist skin and segmented body.

  With a couple snaps of his jaws, Aki finished it off.

  Using my fingers like a rake, I ran a hand across the mud, pulling up another earthworm. It looked like every earthworm I’d ever found. They were edible and high in protein, my dad had told me once. Which was why people used them as bait for fish. “Lunch, anyone?”

  Petra made a face while Kyle held out his hand. She and I exchanged a glance as my brother washed the worm in the clear water of the stream.

  “You’re not actually . . .” Petra began.

  “I don’t think we can afford to be picky,” he murmured, as he held it by one end in front of him.“Hakuna matata.”

  He dropped the earthworm into his mouth like a strand of spaghetti. Then he grimaced as he swallowed.

  I laughed and raised my hand to high-five when, suddenly, Aki squawked and raised his arms, looking across the narrow creek toward the rushes and the forest on the other side, where the creek met the river.

  An instant later a trio of small feathered dinosaurs—only about a foot and a half long—burst from the reeds and ran straight at the first of the cypresses.

  Instead of running into it, though, they jumped onto the vertical trunk and, flapping their arms, proceeded to run straight up.