by Paula Guran
I don't know.
Something came over me, she thought.
"You could have gotten the man killed."
Wind rustled the conifer needles. The cries of unknown creatures rose up to her. Gwyneth thought about the thousand battles for survival unfolding in the darkness below, marveling that someday millions of years hence, that eternal struggle would give rise to men, and that not long after that as the earth measured its days, men too would reach their apogee and subside into the muck.
Sighing, Peter said, "Come on, it's late, Gwen."
And this time, with a wistful glance back at the glowing fire pits and the looming globe of the enormous moon, she consented. As they climbed the plush stairs to their room, Peter put his hand to the small of her back and drew her to him. Their lips brushed in a cool, dry kiss. Gwyneth turned away. A veil of dark hair fell between them. When Gwyneth hooked it over her ear, she could not bear to look him in the face.
"Gwen—"
"Not here," she whispered.
Yet later still, in the moon-splashed room, as they lay together in their gauzy eggshell bower, Gwyneth drew away once more. Peter turned his back to her. She watched the rigid line of his shoulders. When at last he spoke, Peter's voice was tense with fury.
"The hell with it then."
"Peter," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry," she said.
But it wasn't enough.
Gwyneth turned away, tears welling in her eyes. They lay still then, back to back, like slow continents adrift. After a time, Peter's breathing deepened into sleep, but Gwyneth lay awake for hours, staring out the moonlit square of window into the shadowy forest beyond. As she hovered at the edge of sleep, there came a faraway cough in the darkness. She tossed restlessly.
Something ponderous moved in her dreams.
She woke at seven to find Peter staring across the bed at her.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing."
But his voice was cool and he didn't seem to be in any hurry to get up. He lounged in a nest of sheets and watched her dress, scratching his chest and tossing out an occasional desultory comment like a bomb. And when he finally joined her for breakfast, he sprawled unshaven in his chair, ordered pancakes, and leveled his gaze over the table at her. "So what's on the agenda for today, Gwen?"
She sipped her coffee. "Yet to be seen."
"A Stegosaurus? A Brontosaurus? A fucking woolly mammoth?"
"Not tennis, you can be sure of that."
"Tennis might do us good. At least we'd be spending some time together."
She threw her napkin to the table. "Jesus, Peter! Why can't you be reasona—"
"Why can't you, Gwen? Why can't you—"
Robert Wilson pulled out a chair and sat between them.
"You've got your eras confused, Mr. Braunmiller."
Gwen slumped in embarrassment. How much had he overhead?
When Wilson spoke again, he leaned forward. "Today it's the biggest game of all, my friends. The one animal everyone comes here to see, the one most of them never do—"
"A T-Rex," Gwen breathed, embarrassment forgotten.
"Did you hear it in the night?"
"I thought I dreamed it."
"It was no dream. I woke at five. It was far away, but moving closer."
Peter kicked out the fourth chair and propped up his feet.
"And how would you know this?"
"I'm a professional, Mr. Braunmiller. I'm very good at what I do. I forget what it is you do exactly—"
"I'm a financial analyst."
"That's right. And I'm betting you would spot a trend in the markets long before I would, wouldn't you?" He didn't wait for Peter to answer. "Look, I've been hunting these animals for the last twenty-five years, and I've only seen fourteen of them—one of them nearly killed me, I was telling Mrs. Braunmiller about it last night. These creatures are the apex predators of their era. They're rare as hell and they can pick up the scent of blood thirty miles away or more."
"The triceratops," Gwyneth said.
"You're a natural, Mrs. Braunmiller." He propped his elbows on the table. "The way I figure it, this bastard got upwind of that wounded triceratops, and has been following the scent down out of the mountains all night. We'll be hard-pressed to catch up to it—but if we do—" He shook his head. "Six-and-a half-tons of pure carnivorous aggression. Forty-two feet, nose to tail. Thirteen feet at the hip. Olfactory bulbs the size of grapefruit. A fucking monster is what I'm saying—and I apologize for the language, but there's really no other way I can say it. You'll never forget it."
He put his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet.
"West gate in fifteen minutes. See you there."
"Along with all the other excursion groups, I'd imagine," Peter said.
"You underestimate my expertise, Mr. Braunmiller," Wilson said without rancor. "And overestimate that of my colleagues. Besides, we know something they don't: we'll be tracking the bloody triceratops."
He didn't wait for a response.
Peter's pancakes arrived. He buttered them in silence.
Gwyneth finished her coffee and stood. "I'll go to the room and get our things together."
"You needn't bother with mine."
She turned in disbelief.
"What did you say?"
He cut a bite of pancake, taking his time about it. When he was done, he said, "I said, you needn't bother about mine."
"You have to be kidding me."
"No."
"Don't sulk, Peter. It's not attractive."
"You don't seem to find me attractive, anyway."
People at surrounding tables had begun to sneak glances at them.
Gwyneth sat down, pushing her plate away. She leaned forward.
"Look," she said quietly. "The only way we're going to solve anything is if we spend time together."
"But we're not, are we?"
He speared another deliberate forkful of pancake.
"We're spending time with a dozen other people—not to mention your friend Wilson—chasing down giant lizards—"
"Jesus, Peter, did you read anything I sent you? They're not lizards. They're—"
"Warm blooded. I know. That's not the point. The point is that you care more about that than you do about trying to fix things. They've been dead sixty-five million years or more. And staring in awe at them isn't working on our marriage. Isn't that what we spent all this money to do? Isn't that what we both wanted?"
"Yes, but—"
"But what? We could have had gone to the Caymans for a twentieth of the expense and actually spent some time together—"
"We've been to the Caymans. We've been to Paris, for God's sake. None of it helped, Peter. None of it—"
And then he said something that stopped her cold in her tracks. "The problem isn't in Paris, Gwen. The problem isn't in the goddamn Cretaceous. The problem is in us."
"Then come with me and help me fix it, Peter. Please."
"Help me," he said. "For God's sake, help me."
She stared at him for a long moment, and then, like Wilson, she put her hands flat against the table and pushed herself to her feet.
"I'm going to get my things," she said.
Peter was right: when the west gate swung open, a mass of excursion groups was sorting themselves out. Most of them chose the more difficult route, clambering up the steep ridge in fifteen minute intervals. Wilson's alone struck out in the direction of the clearing where the raptors had taken down the yearling.
Later, two memories from the journey stuck in Gwyneth's mind:
Robert Wilson's cool competence.
And the beast.
The rest was but hazy recollection. The march triple time through the looming woodland. The sweat that poured down her face till it stung her eyes. The tiny theropods that scattered before them. Even the charnel house stench of the clearing itself.
The yearling's carcass lay on its side in a bed of thrashed and flattened grass, the great r
ibcage nearly stripped of flesh. Its horns lanced from a face that had been gashed and half devoured. Scavengers had descended upon what remained: opalescent maggots the size of a man's thumb, chittering insects that were larger still, a clutch of knee-high dinosaurs, ruddy and yellow, that screeched at them in fury, feathered ruffs billowing out to either side of their narrow-beaked maws.
Wilson ignored them.
"Photos, anyone?" he asked, and several of the men shuffled forward.
Great white hunters, Gwyneth thought, as if they'd personally felled the thing. She and Angela and Frank Stafford stood to the side, sipping cool spring water from canteens, and watched.
"Peter not well?" Stafford asked.
"No," Gwyneth said, and she felt Angela give her a knowing look.
Then they were on the move again, following the path trampled by the fleeing triceratops. Waist-high grass swayed to either side. On the far side of the clearing, the forest enveloped them once again: colonnades of towering conifers and angiosperms, damp soil underfoot. Late morning now, cool shadows under the trees, motes adrift in green air.
Gwyneth watched Wilson, lanky and tall, his neck dusky from wind and sun, slip among the trees like he'd been born of the landscape himself. Deep into the forest, the trail split.
Wilson paused, studying the sign.
"The cows went left, working their way down toward the plain," he said, pointing. "The bull climbed the ridge-line, looking for a place to hole up."
"Why?" someone asked.
"Who knows? Instinct, maybe. To protect the cows. He knows the carnivores will be coming for him."
Something coughed in the distance.
Gwyneth shivered.
"We're close now," Wilson said.
He set a faster pace after that. Winded, they trudged after him, still climbing. Wilson moved with unswerving grace, almost invisible as he cut through shadows and the golden blades of sunlight that knifed through the forest canopy.
Perspiration slid down the channel of Gwyneth's spine.
They followed some spoor that Wilson alone could see, continuing to climb—hard climbing, too, upon occasion, clutching-at-tree-branch climbing, scree sliding loose underfoot. A thin, bearded man slipped and fell, bloodying his forearm. They paused while Wilson disinfected the cut—it must have been three inches long—and applied a pressure bandage with deft, sure hands. "That'll hold it for now," he said, gripping the man's shoulder, and Gwyneth couldn't help noticing the grace of those long fingers, the blunt crescents of his nails. "You'll want to get it looked at back at the hotel," he was saying. "A couple of stitches might be in order."
They found the wounded triceratops forty minutes' hike beyond that. The ridge towered above them here, a rocky cliff face that stood sharp against the azure sky. A thick stand of conifers screened a wide ravine. Maybe a hundred-and-fifty yards from side to side, the chasm narrowed as it deepened. The triceratops lay inside, far back in an angle of stone.
"Can we get closer?" someone asked.
"I wouldn't advise it," Wilson said.
The binoculars made the rounds. Gwyneth studied the triceratops. The great bellows of its lungs heaved irregularly. Dirt caked the exposed wound. Insects buzzed around the glistening bulge of viscera. She could smell the thing from here, a stench of rot and shit and death. It moaned when it saw them, that long rusty sound, like a nail being wrenched from ancient wood. Wilson drew them into a blind of towering angiosperms, admonishing them to silence.
"Soon now," he said, and they hunkered down to wait.
The fronds of the angiosperms waved above them in the midday heat. Then, like God himself flipping a switch, the air went abruptly still. Gwyneth lifted her head, listening. It was more than the lack of birds. The tiny mammals in the treetops had fallen silent; the insects that moments ago had whickered in the air around them disappeared. The forest held its breath. Something big—something dangerous—was on the move. She could sense it: a charged stillness in the air, a tension in the blood.
Something snorted beyond the trees that screened the mouth of the ravine.
Gwyneth could see it in her mind, lifting its vast head to taste of the unmoving air.
Her heart quickened.
Twenty-five years, and Wilson had seen fourteen of them. Fourteen of them. And fucking Peter back at the hotel.
A callused hand touched her elbow.
"This is a time for courage, Mrs. Braunmiller. Not stupidity."
Indeed not, she thought. She could feel his breath tickle erect the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, and for a moment she was aware of nothing else, not the desperate gasping of the felled triceratops, not the expedition group arrayed in the greenery around her, not even the vast creature that shifted its weight beyond the curtain of trees—
Wilson touched her elbow again.
"There you go," he breathed, and then she saw the thing: monstrous, the beast of the apocalypse itself, like some foregone doom from the age of Revelation. It did not emerge from the trees, it simply appeared among them, ghost-like and huge and utterly silent, bigger even than the creature that had run in her dreams, invisible one moment, visible the next, like a long lens pulling focus.
And silent. So silent.
Someone moaned in terror—this wasn't what they'd bargained for, not at all—and the monster swung its vast head toward the grove of angiosperms. Another moan—Wilson hissed, "Shut up, you fool!"—and the tyrannosaur moved, shedding the camouflage of the trees like water, one step, then two, its great taloned feet tearing at the dark soil, its tiny, ridiculous arms— evolution's prank—folded at its breast. One slow step, then another, and a third. And did the earth shake beneath its feet? Surely not, yet Gwyneth felt it all the same, felt the earth rumble as the monster lunged toward them, gathering speed, fast, oh fast, and sweet Jesus who could have imagined the thing, death rampant and alive and more beautiful than she could have dreamed; she marveled at its sunshot hide, golden streaked and green, its bullet head weaving hollow-cheeked upon its cobra neck, its nostrils flaring, its eyes ravening and aflame.
It closed fast, forty yards, thirty, twenty-five. Someone broke and ran, she didn't see who, and then the monster—this impossible beast from an era out of time—at last gave vent to the fury that burned in its furnace heart. It roared, its jaws unhinging to reveal a shark's hoard of yellow teeth the size of railroad spikes. A gust of carrion stench blasted over Gwyneth. Her yoke seized her and she found herself careening once again toward the gravity well of the future, trying to hang on for a moment longer just to stare in wonder at the thing—
Her stomach twisted—
And then a rusty-hinge screech of agony reminded the tyrannosaur that other prey—bigger prey, and easy—was to be had. It wheeled to face the triceratops, its tail lashing, and loped the length of the ravine, its feet hammering tracks six inches into the soil. The triceratops somehow staggered to its feet, the bloody rent in its side disgorged fresh loops of tangled viscera.
And then the beast was upon it.
The triceratops lowered its head to meet the titan. Tearing at the soil with legs sheathed in swelling ropes of muscle, the tyrannosaur wheeled around the swinging horns. The wounded triceratops was too slow. One of the T-Rex's taloned feet ripped open its hindquarters. The next moment— Gwyneth looking on, choked with terror and some other strong emotion, she couldn't quite say what—the tyrannosaur closed its massive jaws just behind the triceratops's frill.
The killing blow.
The triceratops went down, feet spasming as the tyrannosaur tore lose a giant chunk of flesh and swallowed. It lifted its monstrous head to the sky and bellowed in triumph.
After that it was awful.
The party that night—there were parties every night—hummed with excitement.
Three of the excursion groups had caught sight of the T-Rex, but only one of them, Wilson's, had seen the kill. You lucky bastard, his colleagues said, shaking their heads, but Gwyneth knew that it was more than luck, that it wa
s skill and knowledge; she recalled the swift precision of his lean hands applying the pressure bandage, she recalled his words in her ear: This is the time for courage, not stupidity.
She was done with stupidity, Gwyneth thought. She felt that she had opened a new angle of vision upon the world; she understood now that pain was sometimes necessary, that it ruined some things to speak of them too much, that truth could equal beauty. Her fellow guests seemed faintly diminished, their conversation—
—snapped its neck like a pretzel stick—
—magnificent creature—
—empty of any genuine comprehension of what they had seen.
Maybe the change—if there was a change—showed in her face, for as they sat down to dinner Angela said, "You look flushed, darling. Maybe this afternoon was too much for you."
"Looks like you got a fever is what it looks like," Frank opined, ordering the duckbill steak. ("Appropriate, eh?" he joked.)
Appropriate enough, Gwyneth supposed.
The truth was, she didn't feel quite herself. Frank had been right: fever was the word for it. Fever—ever since she had seen that monster for herself, and felt the blast of its carrion breath. She had read about it, she had seen it on video, but not until this afternoon had she really known such things existed in the world. Fever. The fever called living, she thought, another fragment of old poetry rattling around inside her head like a piece of angry candy.
She only wished Peter had been with her.
"Where is Peter, anyway?" Frank said, as if he'd sensed the run of her thoughts.
"I think he is coming down with something," she said. "Maybe we both are."
"Up to the room with you, the minute you're finished eating," Angela said.
Frank grunted.
But it wasn't up to the room that Angela dragged her when Frank had finished his steak and wandered off to hold court at the party. It was to the little bar overlooking the plain, where a fire-pit burned and a pair of lovers whispered in the shadows.
"Something warm," she told the bartender, and afterwards, cupping Irish coffee as they stood by the fire pit, "Peter's not sick and you know it."
"How do you know?"
