Bones of the Earth

8. Hell Creek

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.

They tumbled out of a hole in time into a bright, blue-skyed day, whooping with excitement. The team had been deposited on a gentle rise above a small, meandering stream, which the students inevitably decided to name Hell Creek, after the famous fossil-bearing formation.

Leyster consulted with Lydia Pell, and they agreed to let the group skylark for a bit before putting them to work. It was their first time in the Maastrichtian, after all. It was their first time in the field and on their own. They needed to gape and stare, to point wonderingly at the distant herd of titanosaurs that was browsing its way across the valley, to breathe deep of the fragrant air and do handstands and peer under logs and flip over rocks just to see what was underneath.

Then, when Pell judged they’d let off enough steam, Leyster said, “Okay, let’s get these things unpacked and sorted out.” He waved an arm toward a stony bluff above Hell Creek. “We’ll pitch our tents over there.”

Everybody leapt to work. Jamal pulled the Ptolemy rocket launcher from the first pallet. “When do we send up the surveyor satellite?”

“No time like the present,” Leyster said. He ran a thumb down his mental list of who’d had what training. “You and Lai-tsz take it off a safe distance. Nils can carry the tripod.”

“Who gets to push the button?”

Leyster grinned. “Paper-scissors-rock works best for that kind of decision.”

Twenty minutes later, the surveyor went up. Everybody stopped whatever they were doing to gawk as the dazzling pinprick of light curved up into the sky, tracing a thin line of smoke behind it.

“You have just launched the missile,” a priggish voice said, a little too loudly. “Its electromagnetic signature has been picked up by a detector wired to this recording.”

Leyster turned, puzzled. “What?”

“In sixty seconds, an explosive charge will destroy the time beacon. Please stand clear so you won’t be hurt.”

It was Robo Boy’s voice.

The surreal intrusion of someone he knew to be millions of years distant bewildered Leyster for an instant. He watched, uncomprehending, as Lydia Pell tore at one of the pallets like a terrier, wildly throwing packs and boxes aside. She emerged with the time beacon.

“You have fifty seconds.”

The voice came from the beacon itself.

There was a Swiss Army knife in Pell’s hand. She shoved a blade into the seam of the beacon’s casing and twisted, breaking it open.

“You have forty seconds.”

The top half of the beacon went flying away. She reached down into the bottom half.

To Leyster’s eye, there was nothing to differentiate one part of the beacon’s innards from another. It was all chips, transistors, and multicolored wiring. But Lydia Pell clearly knew what she was looking for. She’d been an officer in the U.S. Navy before going for her postgraduate degree, he knew. Hadn’t somebody said something about her having been in demolitions?

“You have thirty seconds. Please take this warning seriously.”

She wrenched something free. The bottom half of the beacon fell to the ground.

Lydia Pell turned away from the others, and shouted over her shoulder, “Everybody get down! I’m going to throw—”

“You have twenty seconds,” the device said.

Then it went off in her hands.

Gillian was saying something, but Leyster couldn’t tell what. His ears rang terribly from the explosion. He couldn’t hear a thing.

He was the first to reach Lydia Pell’s body.

The terrible thing was that she wasn’t dead. Her face was gray and streaked with blood. One hand had been almost blown away, and the other was hanging by a shred of flesh. What remained of her blouse was darkening to crimson. But she wasn’t dead.

Leyster whipped off his belt and wrapped it around Lydia’s wrist, above the exposed bone. I’m going to have nightmares about this, he thought as he pulled it tight. I’ll never be able to get these images out of my mind. To the far side of the body, Gillian was making a tourniquet for the other arm.

Small fragments of the bomb specked Lydia Pell’s face. One larger shard had torn quite a gouge in her cheek. A little higher and she would have lost an eye. Daljit knelt by her head and, bending low, began daintily extracting the fragments with a pair of tweezers.

Keep calm, Leyster thought. There would be trauma. There might be concussion. There was always shock. Keep her warm. Elevate the feet. Check for other wounds. Don’t panic.

It took a while to stop the bleeding. But they did. Then they cushioned her head, and elevated her feet. They cleaned and bandaged her wounds. They made up a cot, and eased her onto it. Twelve willing hands gently carried the cot into a tent.

By the time Leyster could hear again, there was nothing more to do for her.

A light drizzle was falling.

Leyster slogged uphill, following what he sincerely hoped was an abandoned dromaeosaur trail. Lai-tsz trudged along behind him. At first they had talked about the paucity of local fauna, and why, in the week since the titanosaurs had left, they had not seen any dinosaurs. Then, as Smoke Hollow fell behind them, and they were confident they would not be overheard, their talk turned to more serious matters.

“Can the time beacon be repaired?” Leyster asked.

“God only knows.”

“You’re the only one here with any substantive knowledge of electronics.”

“Substantive! I’ve torn apart a few computers, patched together a couple of motherboards, hyper-configged a new device or two. There’s a big distance between that and repairing something that was probably built a thousand years in the future. In our home future, I mean. Sometime after the Third Millennium.”

“So you’re saying… what? Tell me you’re not saying that you can’t fix it.”

“I’m saying I don’t know. I’ll do my best. But Pell ripped the hell out of the innards, getting that bomb out. Even if I can fix it, it’ll take time.”

“Listen,” Leyster said. “If anybody asks, tell them you’ve got a handle on it. Say it’ll take you a week or two, a month at the outside. I don’t want the crew fixating on the possibility that we might be stranded here permanently. Morale is bad enough as it is.”

Lai-tsz made a short, sharp sound midway between a laugh and a snort. “I’ll say! Everybody’s at each other’s throats. Nils and Chuck almost got into a fight this morning over whose turn it was to take the dishes down to the stream and wash them. Gillian isn’t speaking to Tamara, Matthew isn’t speaking to Katie, and Daljit isn’t speaking to anyone. And of course Jamal is being a real jerk. About the only stable ones left are thee and me, and sometimes I have my doubts about thee.” She waited a beat, then said in a small voice, “Hey, come on. That was a joke. You were supposed to laugh.”

“It’s Lydia Pell,” Leyster said seriously. “If only she wouldn’t make those noises. If only she wouldn’t scream. She’s using up our morphine fast, and that’s not good either. Sometimes I think it would be best for all of us if she just…”

They walked on in silence for a while. Then Lai-tsz said, “So tell me something, Richard. Are we stranded here for the rest of our lives?”

Leyster blew out his cheeks, said, “Well, unless you can fix that beacon or somebody comes to rescue us… yeah, we are.”

“What are the chances of somebody coming to rescue us?”

“If they were going to rescue us, they’d‘ve done it already. They would’ve popped up while the smoke was still in the air. Lydia Pell would be in a hospital now, with one hand reattached, and doctors working to grow a new hand to replace the other.”

“Ah,” Lai-tsz said, and nothing more.

They came to a branching in the path.

“This is where we part ways,” Lai-tsz said. “There’s a gingko grove to the east that’s shedding fruit. I’ll have a knapsack full of pits when you get back. You can help me shell them.”

“Watch out for dromies.”

“Hey, no problem. You should see me climb a tree.”

“Um… dromaeosaurs can climb too. Rather well, in fact.”

She dismissed his worries with a wave of her hand. “Say hello to the Purgatory shrews for me.”

Leyster distractedly climbed the rest of the way up to Barren Ridge alone. He’d brought another day’s worth of samples to place before the Purgatorius colony there. He called them Purgatory shrews, though of course they weren’t shrews but ancestral primates. Still, they sure looked like shrews. And considering their insectivorous teeth, they had surprisingly catholic tastes. They liked almost everything he offered them.

He made the long trek from Smoke Hollow to Barren Ridge every other day to set out a new selection of roots, barks, and funguses at the foot of their favored tree. Purgatory shrews had the closest thing to human metabolisms of anything in the Mesozoic, and he figured that anything they ate would be safe enough for him to try.

Meat wasn’t a problem. The team gigged frogs, snagged turtles, dug freshwater clams, caught fish, and even trapped a few large lizards; there was no shortage of edible flesh. What they would need most when their supplies ran out were fruits and greens.

The red bark was gone, and so were four of the tubers. A fifth, greenish one hadn’t been touched at all. Leyster made a mental note to avoid it in the future.

He laid out his new samples, then turned and looked out over the valley.

Hell Creek was a steely glint visible only intermittently through the rain as it flowed down to the River Styx. The bottom lands to this side of the river, which had been browsed flat by the titanosaurs, were already lush with ferns and flowering plants. In this heat, things came up overnight. You could push a stone into the soil, and come morning you’d find a pebble bush.

Even in the rain, and partially obscured by mists, the valley was beautiful. Even with the sky low and gray, something in him thrilled to it.

Leyster didn’t need a lot of company. It occurred to him that if it weren’t for the others, he could be perfectly happy here. Or, rather, if he weren’t responsible for their well-being, he could be happy.

He rued the argument he’d had with Jamal three days ago.

Jamal had taken it upon himself to start building a log-frame house, as they’d been taught in survival training. Without consulting anybody, he’d begun chopping down trees for its frame.

“Those are a little large for firewood,” Leyster had said to him.

Jamal looked impatient. “They’re for a long house. We’re going to be here for a while. We need it.”

“Yes, but we don’t need it right away. What we need now are a better latrine, some storage baskets, a little investigation into plants that might be spun into cloth. I really think you ought to—”

Jamal flung down his axe in exasperation.

“What gives you the right to order us around?” he said. “This isn’t an expedition anymore, this is about survival. Why the fuck should we take orders from you? Just because you’re a couple of years older?”

“It’s not a matter of giving orders. It’s a matter of common sense.”

“Whose sense? Huh? Your sense? Well, it’s not my sense. I happen to think we need the house, and I’m going to build it.”

“All by yourself? I really doubt it. You can cut the beams, but you can’t assemble them without help,” Leyster said. “Face it, we’re all in this together. All this grandstanding and ego-tripping is perfectly useless.”

“You think I’m grandstanding?”

“I know you are.”

At which point Chuck had wandered up and said, “Hey. What’s up?”

“Chuck!” Jamal said. “You’ll help build the long house, won’t you?”

“Uh… sure. Why not?”

“Because we have more important things to do,” Leyster said testily. “Because we—” He stopped. Chuck was looking at him as if he weren’t making any sense.

And then, out of weariness and frustration, he had flung up his hands and said, “Fine! Do it your way! What the hell do I care?” and stomped angrily off.

Even as he did it, he knew it was a big mistake.

So now the team was split into two factions—three, if you counted Daljit and Matthew, who’d gotten stuck with watching over Lydia Pell while she died, and consequently had little energy for anything else. Jamal, Katie, Gillian, Patrick, and Chuck made up the house-building faction. Leyster, Tamara, Lai-tsz, and Nils were the food-gatherers.

It worried Leyster that this split had occurred. But since he was perceived as being the head of one of the factions—and the smaller of the two, at that—he didn’t have the credibility needed to patch up the rupture. It was a damn-fool situation to be in. It was completely counter-productive. But he couldn’t begin to see how to undo this mess.

He sighed, and stared out unseeing into the distance.

It was then, as he was thinking no particular thought and experiencing no particular emotion, that a most extraordinary sensation came over Leyster. It was a feeling very much like awe. He felt the way he had on occasion felt as a child sitting in the pew in church on Sunday morning, a profound and oceanic inward shiver, as if suddenly made aware that God were peering over his shoulder.

Slowly, Leyster turned.

He froze.

At the very top of the ridge—it must have been there all along—stood a tyrannosaur.

It dominated the sky.

The beast’s skin was forest green with streaks of gold, like sunlight streaming down through the leaves. This, combined with its height, its immobility, and Leyster’s distracted state, had rendered it invisible to him. He had simply failed to notice it.

Oh shit, Leyster said silently.

As if it had heard his thought, the tyrannosaur slowly swung its massive head about. Small, fierce eyes locked onto him. For an agonizing slice of eternity it studied Leyster with every grain of attention it had.

Then, with disdainful hauteur, it turned its head away, and resumed staring out across the valley.

Leyster was too terrified to move.

He’d stood beneath tyrannosaur skeletons in museums a hundred times imagining what it would be like to be the prey of such a monster. He’d pictured its ferocious attack, seen that devil skull dipping downward to munch him up in two crisp bites, felt his bones shatter under those brutally efficient teeth. This was far more terrifying than his most vivid imaginings.

His gaze went up to the many-toothed head so high above him. Then down to those taloned feet. All the world fell away from the creature. It was the crown and pinnacle of creation. Everything existed for its convenience. The valley held its face upward for its inspection.

It held the world fast in its claws.

He hadn’t had the exposure to tyrannosaurs to know what sex this one was. It was absolutely unscientific, then, to assign it a gender. But Leyster lovingly remembered Stan, the first Tyrannosaurus skeleton he’d ever gotten to examine closely, and decided on the spot that this, his first living tyrannosaur, was also male.

The brute’s calm was uncanny. He was still with the perfect stillness of an assassin at rest with his conscience. No doubts, no mercy, no hesitation sullied his thought. He was all Zen and murder, Death’s favored child. He stood here because it pleased him.

His was a timeless universe. He did not permit change to enter it. Now and forever, he was king of Eden.

As quietly as he could, Leyster edged away. If the tyrannosaur noticed, he did not deign to show it. His eyes remained slitted, his head motionless. Only his throat moved, pulsing gently.

Trees rose up to obscure the animal. The trail twisted and the top of the ridge disappeared as well. Leyster turned and, with frequent glances over his shoulder, crept furtively downslope. A hundred yards down the trail, he was able at last to draw in a deep breath.

He had seen Tyrannosaurus rex!

And he was still alive!

Had the animal been hungry, of course, it would have been an entirely different story. Nevertheless, Leyster was filled with a strange and savage joy. He was so happy he wanted to sing, though the wiser side of him cautioned that he should put a few miles between himself and his new playmate before doing any such thing.

Would he now have to avoid Barren Ridge?

It was a tough call. Dinosaur skin wasn’t anywhere as glandular as that of mammals. Still, theropods had a distinctive smell, dry and pungent, like a mixture of cinnamon and toad. So, had the ridge been a regular stop on the tyrannosaur’s rounds, Leyster would have known. He was a newcomer, then.

Even so, the overlook was a convenient spot. The Lord of the Valley might well decide to make it his regular perch. Before he dared find out if this were the case, Leyster would need to find a different approach. One where he could tell if the tyrannosaur were present long before putting himself within chomping distance.

In any event, best he avoid Barren Ridge for the next week or two. By then, the scent would tell the story one way or the other.

He hurried homeward to tell the others the news. They’d all have to take precautions. They’d all want to see.

It occurred to him that he would have to find a new Purgatorius colony now.

When Leyster strode into camp, humming the “Ode to Joy” to himself, there was no one about. The twin lines of tents were still and silent. A solitary dragonfly flew swiftly past him and was gone.

Somewhere in the distance the crazed-monkey laughter of a whooping loon rose up and then suddenly cut off, making the silence absolute. To one side of the camp was a stand of protomagnolias. The scent of their flowers hung heavy on the air.

“Hello?” he called.

A tent flap exploded open.

All in a rush, Daljit burst from Lydia Pell’s tent. She was crying. She seized Leyster and buried her face in his shoulder. “Oh, Richard,” she said. “Liddie’s dead!”

Clumsily, he put his arms around her. He stroked her hair as if she were a sorrowing child. “We did everything we could,” he said.

“She was a h-hero. She saved us all. W-when I heard the tape, I just stood there! I didn’t d-do a thing!”

“There, there,” he said awkwardly. “None of us did. Maybe it’s just a form of pride to imagine we should have, rather than just accepting how extraordinary it was what she did.” He was acutely aware of how pompous he sounded.

“You know what the w-worst part is? If Robo Boy had been a competent terrorist, she’d b-be alive now! That asshole! If she’d only had another t-twenty seconds…”

“There, now.”

“I haven’t felt like this since my m-mother died,” Daljit said. “I suppose I’ll be crying off and on for days this time too.”

She pulled back from him. Her face was round and red. The tears had abruptly shut off, but there were circles under her eyes and she looked worn and weary. These days had been hardest on her and on Matthew. They’d been the only two with any medical experience, but it belatedly occurred to Leyster that this chore should have been shared out more fairly.

“I’ll go wake up Matthew,” she said. “He’s resting in his tent. Will you tell the others?”

“Of course I will. Where are they?”

“Those who aren’t out looking for food are up the hollow, working on Jamal’s long house,” she said. Then, with absolutely no transition at all, “This bickering can’t go on.”

“I know.”

“It’s stupid.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Well, don’t just fucking agree with me. Do something about it! You’ve got to put an end to… I’m going to start crying again. Go on! Scoot!”

Weeping and hunched, she scuttled to Matthew’s tent and disappeared within.

Leyster hesitated, then ducked into the tent she had just vacated. It was hot inside, and dark. He waited for his eyes to adjust, then approached Lydia Pell’s cot.

Two flies were buzzing around her head. One tried to land, and he shooed it away.

In death, Lydia Pell had regained the face she had spent a lifetime creating. It was a serious, no-nonsense face, plain and round-cheeked. But one who knew her could see how amenable it would be to a smile or a wry twist of her features. He could see her now, looking up from her knitting with that one particular expression that said would you believe it? Followed by another that meant well, people are funny.

“Shoo,” Leyster said absently. “Shoo, fly.”

That face had been lost in pain in the ten days since the explosion. He was glad to see it back. He was doubly glad that Daljit had closed the eyes, so he didn’t have to see them staring back at him from the far side of death.

“Good-bye, Liddie,” he said softly. “I wish to God we had you with us now. You’d do so much better a job wrangling this bunch than I can. I miss you already. But I’m glad you’re at peace now.”

One fly landed, and began walking back and forth across the tender strip of flesh between her lips and nostrils. He raised a hand to shoo it away yet again, then thought the better of it. She was dead. Her body was no longer of any use to her.

“I’ll get everybody together again. Somehow. I promise.”

He could think of nothing more to say. He dried his eyes and left.

So Leyster walked, alone, up Smoke Hollow to the new campsite. The way darkened as the proto-magnolias gave way first to cedars and then to redwoods. The redwoods were still young and grew close together enough to serve as a barrier to the larger dinosaurs. Still, it might make sense to sharpen and lash together triads of logs into a line of cheveaux-de-frise to discourage any medium-size predators that might happen along. Or maybe they could plant thorn bushes. He sighed. There was so much to do! Chances that were worth taking for a month’s stay just weren’t tolerable over the span of a lifetime.

He stepped into the clearing around the long house. A thin curl of smoke rose up from the fire they kept banked to preserve the wood and their limited supply of matches.

“Hello!” Leyster called. “Anybody here?”

Jamal was standing on the ridgepole of the long house, shirt tied around his waist and a kerchief around his head. He waved jubilantly when he saw Leyster coming, and shouted, “We’ve finished thatching the roof! I’m putting up the satellite dish now. Come up and take a look. The others have gone out for more leaves.”

Jamal, for all his faults, had extraordinary powers of organization and persuasion. He’d worked his faction hard and well. The long house frame was complete, and the palm-frond roof looked convincingly rainproof. Gazing up at it, Leyster for the first time actually believed in his heart of hearts that they were here for good. That they were never going home to the Cenozoic. That, for good or ill, this was their home now.

Leyster took his glasses off, ran a hand over his face, and put them back on. “Come on down!” he shouted. “I have something important to tell you!”

Jamal went to the edge of the roof and looked down at him. “What?”

“It’s better said face-to-face,” Leyster said. “Really.”

With a puzzled scowl, Jamal squatted down and reached over to grab the frame.

At that moment, the rain began to pelt down harder. Leyster quickly stepped under the shelter of the half-built long house. The sky opened then, and the rain came down torrentially. It was dry in here, though. Jamal’s gang had built a good roof.

With a rattle of dried fronds, Jamal jumped down from a crosspiece of the frame. He landed with a thump. The momentary elation he had displayed on the rooftop was gone. His features were sullen and flooded with shadow. “Well?” he said challengingly. “What is it?”