The Dinosaur Four (33 page)

The building shuddered from another attack and shifted a few inches toward the river.

It’s right there,
Tim thought. The time device was only a few feet away from them, inside the creature.

The tyrannosaur noticed
Tim again, raising its head to peer onto the second floor. Its nostrils flared. A trash bag full of ticks sat just a few feet from the tip of the dinosaur’s nose.

What the hell am I supposed to do now
?
Tim thought. He had been foolish to think they could catch, much less kill, such an enormous creature. Their only source of shelter was about to be demolished. It was growing dark. How far could they flee into the woods in the dark? And what about Helen? Tim reached for the bag of ticks. Maybe he could throw it over the side and buy them a few minutes.

Before he had a chance, the tyrannosaur lifted its chin and brought it down on the edge of the building. A
larger section of the wall collapsed, taking down the floor around it.

Almost playfully, the dinosaur raised its foot again, grasping the edge of the hole it had created. It pulled outward. The floor under Tim bent downward, no longer supported by anything. He grasped fruitlessly for something to hold onto as he slid into the coffee shop.
A wooden table broke his fall and collapsed under his weight. Dust and darkness filled the room.

Despite herself,
Lisa screamed as Tim fell through the ceiling. She stood with Callie and Helen in the back, next to the counter. “What’s happening? Where is Al?”

“Still up there
, I think.”

“What’s the T
yrannosaurus doing? Did you snare it?”

“The snare is worthless.”

“Well what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Tim shouted.

Lisa looked at the new opening on the side of the room. The wall of bookshelves was gone. The snout of the tyrannosaur appeared in the hole, sniffing. It backed out, rooted around in the rubble below, and came up with the bag of ticks. It crunched and blood poured from between its teeth.

T
he shovel lay on the floor just below the missing wall. Tim darted forward, grabbed it, and backed away quickly. The dinosaur’s snout reappeared, its chin soaked with blood. Tim held the shovel up like a softball bat. He took a lunging step forward and swung for the fences.

The edge of the shovel
blade caught the tyrannosaur’s face, slicing the skin just above its nostril. The beast rumbled and withdrew.

Al lowered
himself down through a newly-formed hole in the ceiling. He landed on the pastry counter, cracking the glass in a spider-web pattern. “I told you this was a bad idea.” He jumped down off the counter.

Lisa
gave Callie a long hard look. Then she moved to wrap her arms around Al. “You were right. You were right all along.” Her voice hitched as she spoke.

“
You’re goddamn right I was.” He squeezed her tightly.
“It’s going to be ok, though. Just stay close.” Lisa nodded.

Holding the shovel before him, Tim turned. “Al, I need your help here!”

“Forget it.” Al looked at the women. “Any second now and that thing will be inside. We have to get out of here.”

Lisa nodded.
“Whatever you say. Lead the way, Al. I’ll do whatever you say.”

Al
pulled her across the room.

Tim’s mouth hung open
in disbelief. “Al? Lisa? What are you doing?”

The couple moved behind Tim, near the opening
over the river that Lisa had fallen through almost fifteen hours earlier.

The tyrannosaur
leaned into the building again. Its face filled the side of the room and it sniffed greedily.

Tim took another swing with the shovel, hitting the gash on the dinosaur’s nose. “I’m hurting it
, guys.”

Al
cheered him on. “Good job! You’ve almost got it!”

Lisa pulled at Al’s arm, getting his attention. She looked up at his face, eyes wide. “
You’ll keep me safe if I stay here with you, right?”

He looked down at her, his
face flush. “Yes.”

“I want that. Keep me safe and I will give you everything.” She waited a beat and then smiled. “I want that too. Don’t you?”

Al inhaled deeply. “You have no idea.”

The tyrannosaur backed out. The pile of collapsed rubble from upstairs blocked it from entering the café. It dug
methodically at the debris with its foot. Another chunk fell from what was left of the ceiling. Al and Lisa flinched, moving closer to the river.

“Tim, what are we going to do?” Callie called out. She held Buddy tightly as the dog barked itself hoarse.
Helen cowered next to her.

Tim lifted the shovel, ready to take another swing as soon as the snout reappeared.

Tick
. The sound came from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

Lisa
put her hands on Al’s arms. “I saw you earlier,” she said, still giving him the puppy-dog eyes. She had to be sure. Despite what Callie had told her and despite what she had seen with her own eyes, she had to be one hundred percent sure.

He looked at her
, clearly confused. “What are you talking about? What did you see?”

Tick Tick

“I saw you cut the lines, on the backside, where Tim wouldn’t find them.” She said this simply and pleasantly, as if they were discussing the weather.

TICK TICK TICK
TICK

Al looked confused.
“You were downstairs… How did you..?”

It was a question, not a denial. It
was the confirmation Lisa needed. “I was taking a piss on the sidewalk. I looked up and I saw you do it, you sick son-of-a-bitch.”

She gave him a hard shove high in the chest and Al Stevens fell backwards, arms flailing, into the river.

Tim grabbed Lisa and shoved her back behind the counter. He held the shovel up before him, ready to fend off the mouth of the monster.

TICK TICK TICK TICK
TICK TICK TICK TICK

The tyrannosaur
, having cleared away enough of the rubble, pushed into the café. The front sidewalk broke off from the building and dropped into the river.

Al surfaced a few feet out and shouted, “
You
cunt!
” The river swept him along. The first stars appeared overhead, but there was still enough light to see the tyrannosaur stand up inside the building. Two of the remaining walls fell away completely.

TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK

A loud pop filled the clearing as most of the building disappeared.

Because the
time machine was not in the exact same position it had been in fifteen hours earlier, the swap was imperfect. A hollowed shell of bricks and mortar remained behind, and new portions of the building arrived, swapped out from the future. They seemed to float in the air for a moment, but then collapsed into a pile of worthless blocks as the current pushed Al Stevens around the bend in the river.

At 8:05
a.m.
, Mountain Daylight Time, Carmen Madera walked her dog Buddy toward The Daily Edition Café at the edge of downtown Denver. Mixed into the normal cacophony of morning noises, she noticed a ticking sound that increased steadily in frequency. Buddy seemed to notice too. He pulled at his leash with a growl.

A young man walking ahead of her glanced back at the dog. “What the shit, lady? Control your pooch!”

The trainer had told her to stop walking when Buddy pulled. The trick, he explained, was to only move forward when the dog walked politely. It wasn’t easy. Carmen did not like to slow down. She liked to get where she was going. Still, she made herself stop and stood her ground, her arm outstretched. As the ticking grew louder, Buddy dug in and pulled harder. Carmen reached out with her free hand to hold onto a parking meter.

The arm holding the leash disappeared just below the elbow, as did Bu
ddy, the young man, and a large, hollowed-out portion of the building next to her. The ground was replaced with a mixture of mud and water, which sloshed out onto the street. Lights flickered and went out on the high ceiling of the second-floor room above. The café, like her hand, was gone.

Carmen
held her arm out in front of her. Blood squirted from the end like water from a hose. She realized that her hand was gone just as the pain from two thousand severed nerves reached her brain.

Carmen collapsed to the sidewalk.

The time device was
programmed to return at exactly the same moment it departed. However, over the course of sixty-seven million years, a tiny error crept in. For a little more than forty-one seconds, the space previously occupied by the café sat empty, save for the mud and water that had taken its place. A few loose cinder blocks fell from the walls above, but the top eight floors remained intact, supported by the copy center and mortgage company that also occupied the ground floor.

After forty-one seconds, most of the café returned. The football, inside the tyrannosaur’s stomach, was offset some thirty feet off from its original position within the lab. A slightly different chunk of building was displaced, and the chunk that returned from the late Cretaceous
did not align with the space it had originally occupied. As a result, what was left of the café fell apart in a pile of rubble, with a twenty-five foot tall dinosaur standing in the middle of it.

Breathing became difficult for
tyrannosaur. It inhaled and exhaled rapidly to compensate. The mile-high modern air contained half as much oxygen as the air in the late Cretaceous. It turned and poked its head out of the crumbling building and looked around the city streets of downtown Denver. In every direction, it saw blocky canyon walls and shiny, boxy shapes that stank and rumbled like thunder.

Cars screeched to a halt. Pedestrians froze in their tracks.

Tim, lying in the back of the café, rose and looked out the front of the building. The mudflats had been replaced by city street
s. Dusk had turned to daylight. He saw metal, concrete and glass in every direction. “Yes! We did it!”

H
is mobile device buzzed in his pocket.
That’s Julie, wondering where I am.
He began to reach for his phone. Then he saw her across the street.

Julie M
oss stood at the corner, her blond hair spilling onto the shoulders of a bright blue pea coat. She was every bit as radiant as he remembered. Despite everything, he had somehow made it home and
there she was
. A euphoric smile grew on his face. He realized he was just as excited to be home as he was to learn that she had actually shown up for their date.

Tim
grabbed the counter and pulled himself forward, ignoring the shouts from Callie and Lisa behind him. His phone continued to buzz, but he ignored that as well.

The tyrannosaur knew it had to find better air. It also knew that when things went bad, the best reaction was an aggressive reaction. It stepped into the intersection, snapping power lines with its neck. The stinging bite of electricity enraged it further.

Julie stared in disbelief as the din
osaur emerged from the hollowed-out café where she was supposed to meet her new boyfriend. In the back of her mind, she wondered if it was too early to think of him as a boyfriend. Maybe not. She had spent the last three days talking about him with the other flight attendants, after all.

The tyrannosaur stepped forward and Julie
started to think that Tim MacGregor really should not be the most immediate focus of her attention. Of course, that was silly because there could not possibly be a dinosaur standing in front of her. She tried pulling her hands out of her coat pockets. The material bunched up each time she pulled, causing her to flap her elbows like a bird. She wondered why she even cared about her arms. Why wasn’t she simply running? She looked toward the café, or rather, to the spot where the café had been two minutes earlier. It looked like a bomb had gone off. But that couldn’t be true either, because she saw Tim emerge from the side of the building.
Thank God.
He would explain what was going on. After her coffee. What she really wanted right now was an espresso. Maybe a triple.

T
he tyrannosaur bent down and snapped Julie up in its jaws, destroying her between its teeth. It shook its head violently. Pieces flew from the sides of its mouth as it tore the young woman apart.

Then i
t started up the street.

Tim
fell to his knees, unable to breath. His lungs constricted. He was trying to inhale and scream at the same time. His mouth hung open and his vision blurred with tears.