by David Boyle
“You do realize what that thing is worth, don’t you? Back home, where Charlie could still be confined to a hospital bed?”
“Millions at least.”
“More like billions, if you think about it. And tens of, if not hundreds.”
“Okay, so big bucks. But we gave our word that we wouldn’t let anyone get their hands on it. Maybe it would have made us rich, but the yaltok was never ours to begin with.” They surged past the crossing and into the clear water beyond. “We’re close now.”
“I take it the same goes for the brizva,” Ron said, his days of limitless spending apparently dashed.
“Yeah. Plan is to bury or destroy it when we get back, and tell the authorities Wheajo took it and the yaltok home with him.” Mark stroked ahead, thinking. “Guess we need to get you up to speed on the story. We talked a lot last night, and with you alive, we need to make some changes.”
“That’s generous.”
“Don’t give me that. Yesterday, you and Tony were dead, and Wheajo was alive. And to make sure none of us ended up charged with murder, we figured it’d be a good idea to have our stories straight. Now that you’re back, you need one too.
“We’ll talk more later. Right now I want you on board with the brizva. After everything Wheajo did for us, I would have thought it was a no brainer that you’d go along with ditching the thing when we get back.”
Ron tracked the Discovery as it vanished into the shoreline ahead. “You were saying why you guys are still here.”
“It’s a timeline thing. Best I understand is that with how god-awful far we are back, the closer we are to where we were when we got here, the better our chances of ending up where we started.” Mark paused. “Wheajo was very specific, about that and having the boats in physical contact with one another when we hit the ‘Go’ button.”
“So home could be…?”
“Pretty much anywhere. Or maybe I should say anytime. This time travel stuff drives me crazy.”
They were approaching the turn in what seemed no time at all, Ron searching for holes in the story line that Wheajo would never intentionally leave any of his equipment behind. Modify events to keep Wheajo alive, and the authorities would have no reason to search for either of his miraculous devices. Tell the story as it happened, and they’d have little choice but to produce the brizva as evidence, and in so doing break the vow they’d made to Wheajo. There’d be an inquest, of course, but refuse to turn the brizva over and the authorities would concoct whatever evidence was necessary to link them not only to Tony’s death, but eventually to his murder.
Keep it legal and provide the proof that would keep them out of jail and they would have an excellent chance of seeing not a dime of the fortune the brizva was worth. Ron was ashamed when he thought back to what they were thinking when they’d first captured Wheajo. How ready they all were to haul him back to civilization and essentially sell him to the highest bidder.
“I feel really bad that Wheajo didn’t make it,” Ron said, glancing at Mark as they made the turn.
Mark took a stroke. “And you’d feel lots worse if you saw what happened. Him and Tony…. The dying here is never pretty.”
The elevated bank was back to being a floodplain, and a good sign they were nearing their point of entry save the fact they also could no longer see Sabrefang. “Have you been watching?”
“No, why?” Mark twisted around. The distant carcasses could easily have been mistaken for oddly shaped rocks, one near the bank, the other bunched alongshore, the dinosaur’s horns certain to snag whatever floated past during the next storm. Two dead trics, and no Sabrefang. “She’s probably just bedded down.” The reeds cut the view as they continued around the curve. “We could go back and look if you want.”
Ron waved when he spotted the Discovery, stopped if not quite grounded in a patch of horsetails not far ahead. “And if we did, it wouldn’t be just to see where the bitch is bedded.”
“You fuckin’ made it, McClure!”
“Back from the dead, are we? Damn, it’s good to see you.” Even Mike was glad to see him, the dinosaur stretched out over the gunnel and thrashing Charlie with his tail.
Ron upped his stroke rate. “Next time we bring walkie-talkies. All this would have gone so much smoother if we could have talked.” Mike looked ready to jump out of the canoe. “Hi there, shithead! On your way to the twentieth century are you?” They cruised ahead, the dented Tripper soon bumping alongside the Discovery. “I hear you guys were making up stories about me.” Ron reached out and took Hayden’s hand.
“It’s good to see your ugly face again,” he said, slapping his hand over Ron’s. “And when it comes to you, nobody needs to make up stories.”
Charlie dragged the canoe alongside, then reached over and gave Ron a hug. “I knew in my gut these bastards couldn’t get to you.” Ron sucked in a breath when he let go. “You look like shit, but I’ll be damned if I can remember bein’ so glad to see somebody!”
“Thanks, Bull. And yeah, it did get a little hairy.” Ron held out an arm.
Charlie frowned. “Okay, so what am I lookin’ at?”
“Prentler makes it back to camp, and everybody goes: ‘Ooo, that must’a hurt.’ Me, I get: ‘What am I lookin’ at?” Ron pointed. “These aren’t just ordinary scratches. They’re from teeth, damn it! Don’t I deserve some Ooos too?”
The three of them looked at one another, then at Ron, chorusing, “Oooooo!”
“And you guys keep saying I’m the asshole.” Ron smiled, and shook his head. “So I didn’t end up dead. But I got damn close.”
“I noticed the scratches right off. Guess maybe I should have asked where you got them. Least now people will know how close the bastard got and why me and Wheajo took off.”
“With a mug like his, the thing would have spit him out anyway,” Hayden said. “Speaking of which…. You hungry?”
“No. I stopped and grabbed a burger along the way,” Ron said, staring down his nose. “Damn straight I’m hungry!”
Hayden laughed, then reached and tossed him the dump bag. “And go easy on the jerky. Those are our forensics samples.”
“Mark was mentioning,” Ron said, popping the buckle. “Hope I haven’t messed up the storyline too much.”
“Hey, we’re glad you did,” said Hayden. “Yesterday was… well, terrible. Hearing about you and Wheajo? And yet, here we are, less than 24 hours later, and the storyline is back in the toilet! Which is kind of fun to think about when the reason is your friend isn’t dead anymore.”
Ron chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that is kind of funny.” He noticed the canteen. “That one juiced up any?” Mike twisted around, sniffing.
“Sorry, McClure. The stuff you took with you yesterday was the last—”
Hissssss!
Charlie reached with a comforting hand, searching. “What is it, fella? You see somethin’?”
Hayden glanced at his partner, the shock on Mark's face the only answer he needed. “We gotta move!” he shouted, their watchful companion still hissing when paddles hit the water, canes thrashing to the beat of footfalls as the canoes fled the horsetail-riddled shallows.
Charlie checked their back trail at the end of each stroke, the canoes nearing mid-river when he spotted the distinctive crest bobbing above the bramble. “Fuck! It is her!”
The Tripper was catching up, if slowly. “Tell me we're close enough,” Hayden pleaded, hoping the answer was yes.
Mark stared past his exhausted partner, his focus on the port shoreline. “That's them! Those are the trees that were across from us! A few seconds more, Prentler, and we'll be at our exit point!” He did a double-take looking back. “Holy shit…! McClure, your fingers working yet?”
Ron glanced at the fast approaching predator. “Better than my arms.” He slipped around on his seat, shipped his paddle, and a second later snapped the rifle to his shoulder. “Watch your ears!” Mark turned, squinting, a hand clamped to the side of his face—Kablam!—then went
back to stroking. The cartridge hit the water. “Ready!” Mark turned. Kablam! The predator roared, Mark soon with a hand to his ear and the Tripper coasting again when Ron next called ‘ready’. Kablam! Sabrefang charged clear of the reeds, head low and an arm dangling, blood spurting from holes in her chest.
“Shoot!” Charlie yelled, frantic, carving divots in the river. “Shoot her again!”
Sabrefang splashed into the shallows, flecks of red showing when she snarled; Ron struggling with the rifle. “What’s wrong?” Mark asked in a near panic.
Ron yanked at the bolt. “I thought I cleaned it, but there’s got to be grit in the action!” Sabrefang was already calf deep in the river, her snarls verging on painful.
Mark pulled out the revolver. “Here!” he shouted, flipping the handgun when Ron dropped the rifle.
Hayden steered to intercept the Tripper. “Bull, get us out of here!” Charlie reached for the backpack—Pow!—flinched, and reached again.
Another click of the hammer. Pow!
Mark gasped when he realized how close she was. “Don’t stop! Hit her again!”
Charlie fingered the control panel. The lights blinked on, the brizva back to humming when the canoes thumped together. Hayden switched sides and grabbed the gunnel, Mark still turning when the Ruger's sights settled. Pow!
Sabrefang stumbled forward, drooling blood, the eyes yet defiant, and reaching with her good arm, snagged the Tripper as she fell. The bow arched upright, the brizva screeching toward a painful crescendo as the Tripper was driven into the sandy bottom, Mike bolting from the wave-tossed Discovery but seconds before the sky was enveloped in fog.
The siren blared on; Charlie clutched at his ears; a singular “Maaaark!” soon overwhelmed by the shrill of transport….
51
The fog had yet to clear when the Discovery slammed a rock, Hayden still trying to gather his thoughts when he reached with his paddle, then Charlie a moment later, the two working furiously to keep the boat pointed in the right direction as it splashed and thudded through the rocks. The sky was uniformly pale, and dark enough that it could have been midnight, the pines on the hillsides murky silhouettes against an inches-deep layer of snow. Where and whenever the brizva had sent them, not weeks had passed, but months and possibly years. Most stunning of all, they were alone….
The canoe thumped through the rock garden, the water splashing over the gunnels icy cold, patches of white spotting an otherwise oily black surface into the distance. “We lost them…!”
Charlie was shaking, the shock blurring his vision.
A chill gust curled through the canyon, smelling of pine.
Hayden scanned ahead. “River right, Charlie…! Head for that boulder. We get our wetsuits on, or we’re going to freeze out here.” He angled the boat and shifted slowly into reverse; Charlie’s paddle clattering along the rocks. The bow clipped a boulder, Charlie at once stabbing the eddy behind it, his arms straining while the Discovery's stern jolted around and across the rocks. The canoe settled in, bobbing briefly in the backflow before they ferried across the chute and to shore.
The Discovery grounded. Charlie slammed his paddle down. “Fuck...!” he screamed at the sky, his voice reverberating along the river. “We can’t have lost them! After all the crap we went through?! We can’t!” He turned on his seat. “Ron shot her a million times, and she kept right on comin’! How the fuck could she do that? Tell me, wouldja? How could she? And with all the shit Bennett went through gettin’ her on the island. We can’t have left them behind. We can’t…!”
Hayden sat staring, the icy cold waters of the Powderhorn rushing beside the boat. The cold came quickly, yet for long minutes they were too dumbfounded to think about moving, the gunshots and snarls still lingering.
*****
The sun was up, and had been for hours. Mark had been right about the take-out, the Discovery tied beside the landing with three big pines jutting from shore not fifty yards downstream. The Blazer was gone, towed hopefully, and not stolen. The clearing itself was invisible from the river, though by using the pines as a landmark they were already searching when they spotted the snowy slash of the turnoff through the trees. They’d gotten a fire going, a slew of branches piled beside it, the snow churned to gray slush over the long hours spent in conversation.
Forked sticks poked beside the fire, the saplings across them draped with the now steaming clothes and sneakers they’d been wearing. They were back to black and reasonably warm in their polypro and wetsuits, each grateful to have remembered to pack their hiking boots. They’d topped off the canteen, and around a few of the trees ringing the clearing had found tattered bits of yellow crime scene tape, the investigations long since completed.
Hayden pulled a lump wrapped in a very limp frond from the backpack. He flipped the leaf open. “We can’t, Charlie. The more of this we hang onto, the more tests they can run. Unless you’re starving, I’d rather we not eat any of this.”
“I’ll manage.” Charlie sat shivering with his hands extended to the fire. “Let’s hope we get lucky findin’ somebody along the damn way. What’d you say, twenty miles to the road?”
“Has to be close to that.” Hayden looked to the Discovery, the last of the canoes they’d started with. Four friends, including Wheajo, gone. “It was right out of a nightmare. I mean… she ripped the Tripper right out of my hand.”
“And it’s all my fault. Every bit of it. If I hadn’t thrown that rock….”
“It wasn’t all bad, Charlie. Not by a long shot. We made friends with a guy from a world light years from ours. We’ve seen and done things no human being ever did before, or ever will again.”
“Uh huh. And look what it cost. Tony, torn to pieces. Then Wheajo. Now Mark and Ron. They’re dead, Hayden. All of them…. And all because of me!”
“You can’t look at it like that. And okay, you threw the rock. But it was Sabrefang who killed Tony, and who took your leg off. And except for her, Mark and Ron and Wheajo wouldn’t have taken off to check on the dawzon when they did.
“Listen to me. You didn’t kill anybody, Sabrefang did.” Hayden checked around the clearing. “You ready?”
Charlie hiked himself onto his crutch. “I sure hope Lorraine is home when I make that phone call.”
“Don’t worry about it. We find a phone, we’ll keep calling until someone answers. If I’m nervous about anything, it’s being recognized. People figure out who we are, things can go downhill in a hurry. And after that, you and me might not get another chance to talk.”
“The worst part’s gonna be talkin’ to Marie. Tellin’ her Mark is dead, and lyin’ about how it happened. That’s gonna bother me. And I mean a lot.”
“I know how you feel. Just remember that while it was only hours ago that we were all talking, it wasn’t hours ago that they died. And I know this sounds cold, but we can’t let who died first get in our way. We got our story, and we have to stick with it no matter what. If anyone, and I mean anyone ever finds out that Wheajo died before we left, they’ll figure out it was you and me who last had their hands on the brizva. And after that, they’re going to want to know where it is. And we can’t let that happen. Ever. I mean it, Charlie, if the wrong people ever got their hands on that transporter… hell, the whole world could go up in smoke.”
Charlie nodded. “Sucks to think that way, but yeah, I see where you're comin' from. Just make sure it’s you and not me who talks to Marie first. Mark’s kids and mine aren’t all that far apart, and I just… I just don’t know that I can lie to ‘em like that.” Charlie stared at the river, dark water coursing over even darker rocks. “I don’t know how the fuck I’m gonna get through this. I mean, shit... Bennett and McClure were this friggen close to bein' here with us!”
“Don’t remind me.” A gust swirled through the pines. “And do you really think it’ll be easy telling Marie her husband was killed by a dinosaur?” Hayden said, waiting. “Well, do you?”
“No. And that’s not how I
meant it. I just… I don’t think I could do it is all.”
Hayden slipped the backpack over his shoulder. “Everything in here?”
“The stuff we need. The rest we’ll get when we come back for the canoe.”
There was a half-buried set of tire tracks in the snow, a sign that someone had been through recently. The pines crowding the road were in places fairly dense, Hayden or Charlie, and sometimes both, turning abruptly to stare at any rustling, the hiss filtering through the pines indistinguishable from the rapids they’d been living beside in their never-never world in the past.
A break in the clouds let the sun in, the snow covering the road almost glaring.
“It was just so fast,” Charlie said, hunching along on his crutch. “Whatdya think? Did she get ‘em?”
“Part of me wants to know, and the other part doesn’t. And like you said, it happened really fast. I’m not sure, Bull. How about you?”
Charlie stared along the road ahead. “Them an’ Mike. I’m hopin’ they all got away.”
Epilogue
The campsite was a shambles, the lean-to and the tents Mark had left standing torn almost literally to shreds. Ron was touched that his was okay, thanks to Mark. The Tripper was back where it belonged, the raft nearby, which they’d have caught up with regardless but had found pinned against a chunk of driftwood two miles upstream. The river had cleared well enough after the attack that locating the firearms had required but a short search, then diving to retrieve them. They’d expended the effort primarily on principle, as both had known the instant Sabrefang upset the canoe that they weren’t going anywhere.
There was no reason to take inventory. They had food, water, shelter, and most of their clothes in addition to whatever Hayden and Charlie had left behind. Not that any of it mattered. Since the moment they’d arrived there’d always been a goal. Something to strive for. Something to do and, more importantly, a reason to do it. That was gone. All of it. Now there was nothing. No hopes. No dreams. No long term prospects other than their own horrific deaths.
