The Dinosaur Four (24 page)

“What about crocodiles?”
asked Al. “Don’t you think we should search a little farther?”

William
walked over to the river. “This pool does look like the perfect home for a crocodile. A normal-sized one, anyway.”

“
Or maybe something else,” Al prompted.

William nodded. “When I was a kid, I had a friend who walked with a limp after losing his big toe to a
snapping turtle. It happened in a pool just like this one.”

Al
took a step upstream and looked back. “If we keep going, we’ll find a safer place to cross.”

Callie looked
at the others. Morgan shrugged. She turned to Tim, “What do you think?”

“I’m not
so comfortable in the water,” he answered, chewing on his lower lip. “But I’ll do whatever William says. If he thinks we should cross here, I’ll get across.”

Al blew out a breath of air. “
What a follower. If William told you to jump off of a bridge… no, wait. If William told you to jump into a crocodile-infested river, would you do it? Sure looks that way.”

Tim’s eyelids
narrowed. “William has gotten us this far. Fighting him over every single decision doesn’t help.” He turned to look at the river. Inside, he felt sick. He would be in over his head. Nevertheless, William had not steered them wrong yet. All that mattered was getting back to Julie. “I can cross that river.”

William raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

Tim smiled. “Hell no. But I’m sick of wandering and I’m sick of debating everything.” He turned to Al. “I want to get home.”

“What about the crocodiles
?” Morgan asked.

William stepped closer to the water.
“You know, there shouldn’t be any crocodiles above those falls. We haven’t seen any this whole time.” Since leaving the sea, they had not encountered any wildlife except for the small creatures Buddy had chased under the plants, and they had not actually seen those. “Tim’s offer settles it. The man can’t even swim, but he’s willing to cross here. Let’s do it.”

“I suppose you’
re an expert swimmer, William?” Al challenged.

“Sir, I was a
teenage lifeguard at the neighborhood pool. Best job I ever had. Girls love lifeguards. Girls in bikinis.” Al bristled at this but William did not seem to notice. “I taught both of my boys to swim as soon as they could walk.”

“
I want a lesson when we get back,” Tim said.

Al stepped
over to Morgan and gestured at the football resting on his knee. “Okay then. If we’re crossing, we’re crossing. Why don’t you let me take a turn with that?”

“No.” Tim
put his palm on the orange metal. “I need it.”

Al looked at him,
either threatened or confused. Tim wasn’t sure which.

“It floats,” Tim explained. “I need it to get across, unless you want to wait a couple of hours for me to run back to the beach and get my life jacket.”

“Personal floatation device,” Morgan corrected. He handed the football to Tim.

They took off their shoes and threw them across the river, along with their mobile devices. William lobbed the shovel across as well. It tumbled
end over end as it flew and landed upright with the blade impaled on the opposite bank.

William went first. He waded in
until the water was up to his hips and then kicked off, performing an expert breast stroke. The current pushed him along, but soon he pulled himself out on the opposite shore, only a few yards downstream.

Callie
moved further to her left around a clump of trees. “I don’t think I can quite match up to an expert lifeguard.” She pointed to the end of the pool, where the water disappeared in a straight edge. “And I want to keep clear of those falls.” The others followed her lead and moved further upstream as well.

William gave Callie
a big thumbs-up from the opposite side. “I gotcha.” He stood thigh-deep in the water, with one hand on a low branch.

Callie dog-paddled sloppily, making Tim feel a little less self-conscious. She reached the opposite bank right where William waited for her. He
helped her out of the water.

Morgan followed close behind, showing slightly better form. He climbed out on his own.

Al looked at Tim. “You gonna make it?”

Tim smiled
. “I think so.” He remembered attending a party in the second grade. A boy named Carl celebrated his ninth birthday at an elaborate indoor pool in the dead of winter while a blizzard howled outside. The other kids swam, rode the water slides, and jumped off the diving board. The rec center even had a zip line that carried them out over the pool for a six-foot drop into the water.

Each child was required to demonstrate that he could swim
one complete lap before performing the activities. Tim spent the entire party sitting on the side.

“
Come fish me out if I start to sink,” he said to Al.

Holding the football out in front of h
im, Tim stepped into the river. It felt cool and refreshing. He clenched his toes in the mud, hoping they didn’t look like little snacks for whatever primeval reptiles lived in the pool.

When he lowered the device,
it floated, but it also tugged downstream as the current caught it. The orange light blinked on and off, calling to all crocodiles in the vicinity. Tim rotated the device until the light was directly on top.

He thought
about Al calling him a “follower” and gave a strong kick out toward the middle of the river, hugging the device tightly. He imagined teeth clamping onto his toes. He kicked harder.

The foo
tball started to roll on him. Tim flailed with his feet. He overcompensated and the football rolled in the other direction. The current tugged it, almost tearing it from Tim’s hands. His face went under. He pictured a snapping turtle the size of a car, rising from the depths and latching onto his legs with a giant beak.

Tim kicked hard and broke the surface. He pulled himself up onto the football and rode it like a sled.
Somehow he managed to stay upright. He scissored his legs as fast as he could, with short powerful strokes.

Before he knew it, Tim bumped into the opposite shore, several feet upstream of William, who waded toward him, laughing. “I never seen anyone swim like that
.” He took the football under his arm and helped Tim out of the water.

Breathing heavily and nodding, Tim turned to look back at the river
.

Al emerged close behind.
“Good job, kid,” he said.

“Buddy!” Callie
called out. The dog appeared on the far bank and gave out a quiet yip. “Come on, boy!” Buddy cocked his head to one side and wagged his tail. “I’m not leaving him here,” she informed the group. “I’ll swim back across and get him if I have to.”

“Now just hold on,” William instructed. He stood
up straight, held perfectly still and spoke firmly. “Buddy, come!” He jabbed his finger down, pointing at the ground next to his foot.

The dog stopped wagging.
He gave another small yip and made one of his flying leaps, directly out over the water. Buddy landed with a splash but kept his head above the surface. William let out a quiet cheer. The dog crossed the pool, climbed out, and moved next to him, where he shook vigorously and then sat down.

“That’s a good boy,” he said, leaning over to rub
Buddy’s head. The dog’s tail wagged back and forth.

Tim
looked off into the jungle. “The café can’t be more than a couple of hours away, can it?”

William pointed back to the right. “Let’s angle off that way and
see if we can find the main river again.” He started into the woods and Buddy heeled next to him.

Tim
nodded. “We might actually make it back in time.” The Triceratops hillside changed his mind.

“
Fuck, that’s a lot of dinosaurs.” An open slope stretched out before them, covered by thousands of Triceratops. Blackened stumps and fallen tree trunks dotted the hill, showing evidence of a forest fire some years earlier. The Triceratops herd spread out as far as Al could see in either direction, grazing on the short green plants that had sprung up in the aftermath of the fire. It would take hours to go around. Al did not think they had any chance of getting back to the café before the device went off.

“Those are my favorite,” Morgan said as he looked at the
herd. Buddy clearly felt differently. His tail curled under his belly and one of his back legs trembled.

“What now?” Tim asked.

“We could make some noise,” Morgan said. “Drive them off
like we did with the duck-face ones.”

William shook his head. “Tha
t noise attracted the Tyrannosaurus. We don’t know if these guys frighten so easily. Also, there were about ten of those duckbills. There must be thousands of Triceratops.”

Buddy
emitted a high-pitched whimper. Callie knelt next to him. “You were here before, weren’t you boy?” She looked at the others. “That means we’re close. Buddy must have come here earlier from the top of the hill. One of these guys chased him back to the cliff.” She pointed to the right. “The river can’t be far in that direction.”

“We can’t go that way.” William said.

“Why the hell not?” asked Morgan.

“Because
this herd goes all the way down to the shore. This is the same hillside we saw from the raft.”

Morgan nodded slowly. “What the shit.”

“Well, if we can’t go forward up the hill and we can’t go right, that only leaves one choice,” Al said. “We head left, until we find a way around.” The hillside stretched for at least a mile, if not more. There was no way to see how far it really went.

Al thought that the
hillside would block them even more effectively than the tributary river, which had added an hour to their trip. The device would go off before they reached the café. It would still take them back, but it would return them someplace farther east. Maybe they would end up inside a hollowed-out chunk of a different building, and another group would be sent here. Of course, they would not have a time machine with them.

I will not go back,
Al thought. He had a woman waiting for him here. Al had never had that before.
If we go back, she’s history.

He had begun composing a short speech he would give when the time machine began
to tick. He would get clear of the device and then return to the café alone. All he had to do was step aside. The others would go home without him. They would understand. In fact, he would be a hero; both back home and when he returned to the café. Al Stevens, the man who stayed behind for his woman. Lisa would be his.

William looked
left. “Let’s get going.” He started off, skirting along the thin growth of trees at the bottom of the slope. The others filed along behind him.

“Do you know why
Triceratops is my favorite?”

“No, Morgan,” William said
.

“Because they’re so horny!”

“That’s nice, Morgan,” William said.

They moved in a
single-file line, weaving in and out of the trees that grew along the base of the barren hillside. Most of the Triceratops kept away from the forest’s edge. Al wondered if there was a good reason for that. Out in the open, they could not be ambushed.

After hiking for
fifteen minutes, they encountered a lone animal feeding on thick vegetation near the bottom of the hill. William led the group in a wide circle deeper into the woods to steer clear of the creature. After putting it safely behind them, William moved back to the bottom of the slope and gazed ahead, his hands on his hips. “This detour is costing us too much time.” There was still no end in sight.

Callie
pointed to a cleft in the hillside just a short distance ahead. “William, what about that gulch up there?” The group continued forward until they reached the bottom of the ravine, which ran straight up the hill. It looked like it had been carved by rainfall that washed down the barren slope, but now stood dry as a bone. The Triceratops herd kept its distance from the gulch on both sides.

At the base of the slope
, the gully flattened out in a wide fan of smaller crevices, but for most of its length, the sides of the gulch formed a trough with ten-foot walls. In three different spots, the gulch was worn down where game trails crossed it.

A large
blackened tree trunk stood next to the gulch at the top of the hillside, where the ground flattened out again. The ravine fanned out in a web of smaller cracks near the tree, just as it did at the bottom of the slope. Al thought the tree looked like it had been struck by lightning. He pictured the crown exploding and burning branches raining across the once-forested hillside Beyond the stump, the unburned forest began again.

William looked at his watch. “The device will go off in
less than four hours.”