by Jack Geurts
Footsteps all around him like the raining of meteors.
A distant scream.
A silence.
A wet crunching sound, and chewing.
A loud sniffing low to the ground, then the footsteps receded.
Jasper didn’t open his eyes or take his hands off his ears, even when he was sure his parents were dead and the creature was gone. He felt the hot tears running down his face and mingling with the diesel fuel that threw off his scent. He felt his body trembling with grief and rage and helplessness. He wanted to cry out loud, but he bit his lip and sobbed soundlessly to himself, rocking back and forth in the refuge his parents had made for him.
Only when he heard the howling wind again did he take his hands away and open his eyes. The same wind as before – the one that brought the monster into being. He listened as it billowed nearby, as it ruffled the fallen plastic sheet above. Raging like the storms of his youth, when he was tucked safely into bed and the wind screamed outside, shaking the windows, rattling doors. He was terrified of those storms as he was now, but on those nights his mother would crawl into bed beside him and gently stroke his hair, his face. She would sing softly to him as he drifted off to sleep.
He heard that same melody now, echoing through the chambers of his memory. It consoled him. It let him know that whatever was out there would not hurt him. It let him know that he was safe, and warm, and loved.
He wanted to sleep. His body weary, his soul. He wanted to sleep and never wake. He wanted to stay right there in that makeshift grave and let it become his eternal one.
And then, as before, the wind stopped in the beat of a heart.
Silence returned.
Jasper heard himself breathing. The sand trickling down ever so gently around him. He waited to make sure he was truly alone before he pressed his palms to the table and slid it across, terrified of what he might see...
Light streamed in through the marquee roof held up only by the legs of the table – the whole tent collapsed around him and painted with blood. The air thick with the smell of scoured metal. He could taste it on his tongue. Aluminium foil or a twenty cent coin.
Jasper clawed his way out of the pit like some reanimated corpse. He dragged himself through the gore-splattered sheet and the sand before emerging into the harsh light of day. He squinted as he took in the new and broken world around him. The marquees were toppled and strewn about in the sand, tangled up with the guy ropes like some great circus tent waiting to be erected. The tent poles jutted up beneath them at gruesome angles, like skin draped over a bony skeleton. All about were the smears and splatterings of blood. The pieces of people.
But the dinosaur was gone.
And so was the rider.
Jasper staggered forth amid the wreckage. He pulled away the crumpled sheets to expose the veiled and mutilated bodies, recoiling each time in horror at the sight of his brothers and sisters. The closest thing he had to a family.
He ventured further out, toward the cars. He saw the bloody stump of an arm staunched with dirt where a shoulder ought to be. He saw a young man literally torn in two above the hip, his entrails unspooled like streamers to be cleaned up after a party. He saw the door of one of the cars wide open and the front bonnet deeply dented where the dinosaur had landed. The windshield was a spiderweb of cracks, and blood ran through them like water through a gully. He imagined someone fumbling to open the door, only to have the creature’s jaws close around them from its perch on the bonnet.
Everywhere, the three-toed footprints went this way, then that. Zig-zagging and changing direction, leaping and sliding to a stop, accompanied every step by crimson droplets drying in the sand or hunks of flesh.
Jasper crouched down to pick up a cap blown off in the wind and turned it over to read “Dinosaurs are Cool” printed on the dome. He looked out away from the site and saw a body lying motionless in the sand – further afield than he might have guessed. After the initial flood of sadness, Jasper couldn’t help but be impressed at how far Troy got, how fast he must’ve run.
He found his own hat not long after, caught up in a shrub, but saw no sign of his father’s. That, it seemed, had been taken by the wind and was gone forever. He gave up looking after a while and returned to the marquee he was buried under, but could not bring himself to pull away the sheet, to see what lay beneath. It was enough just to know. To imagine.
Instead, Jasper turned to the pit, remembering the wind, the howling storm. The first one which brought the monster, the second one which took it away. He faltered before peering in, but saw the bones of the Australovenator right where they were found, right where they had lain for a hundred million years before their resurrection.
Or maybe he had dreamt the whole thing. Maybe he was still dreaming. Maybe he would wake soon and go out to join his mother and father by the dig site. Maybe he would get to spend today as he had spent the previous week, watching the tedious process of uncovering the past – but this time, he would be thankful for it. He would relish in the boredom, because it would mean his mother and father were still alive. It would mean they would get to go home together. To stay a family.
The dream must have begun with him going down into the pit, chipping away at the rock, finding the saddle. It must have been a dream, because the saddle was not there now. The bones were exactly as they had laid when he went down the previous night, but there was a hollow in the rock where the saddle had been.
He couldn’t be dreaming, he told himself. It was all too real, too visceral. The sounds, the sights, the smells. But wasn’t it always that way in a dream? Would he know if he were dreaming now?
As Jasper tried to understand, to come to terms with it, he saw within the ribcage of the dinosaur a gathering of smaller bones that were not there before. Bones as old as the ribs around them. Bones that had been in the creature’s stomach when it died a hundred million years ago and were now fossilised in the rock as the rest of it was.
Jasper climbed down into the pit for a closer look. He saw there a thigh bone, a hip. The lower part of a jaw with some teeth still attached and a scalloped fragment of skull. All roughly hewn at one or more sides with the marks of crushing teeth. All washed clean of flesh and blood by the digestive tract of the beast and the earth itself.
He saw there his mother, his father. His siblings that weren’t really siblings. Jonathan, Zoe, Troy, Lucy. Them, or at least parts of them. The rest lay fresh and bleeding in the land above. Those that died so he could live. The cheque written for his life.
CHAPTER FIVE
Arrival
Come night, the orphan sat alone amidst the ruins of the camp, beneath a wheel of stars. He sat on the edge of the mass grave and shivered uncontrollably, but maybe not from the cold alone. The tears had dried in wet trails on his dusty face, and as he looked up to the heavens, his eyes glistened in the moonlight.
Jasper knew how to drive a car, and all save one were fit to be driven, but he hadn’t fled yet and didn’t look like doing so any time soon. That’s not to say he hadn’t thought about it. The keys were in the ignitions, the tanks were full enough to get him back to civilisation, but something kept him there, stopped him from leaving. There was a satellite phone around somewhere, but he didn’t bother looking for it. There was nothing he could do now, anyway – no one to save, no one to call, nowhere to go.
He just sat there, paralysed with grief, his legs dangling over the edge of the pit. Up above, he thought he saw a shooting star – an arc of cosmic light streaking through the heavens. Those he had seen before lasted only a second or two as they passed through earth’s atmosphere, but this one didn’t stop. It kept glowing, kept moving. It turned, changed course.
Jasper stood, watching the thing. He wondered if it might be a plane crash landing, or a satellite falling out of the sky. Whatever it was, it was heading straight for him now, as though sensing movement out there in the desert, picking up the only human heat signature for a hundred miles.
He took a s
tep back, then a couple more. The glowing orb grew larger as it thundered toward him, blinding white like a fast-approaching sun. He squinted, and lifted a hand to shade his eyes. It took a few seconds for Jasper to realise that the thing was not going to stop. He turned and ran as fast as he could.
The flying object bore down on him, bathing the land an otherworldly white and giving it the look of the moon. At first, Jasper’s shadow was hazy and long, running all the way to the horizon. But the closer the ball of light got, the shorter and more sharply defined his shadow became.
Jasper ran, kicking up sand, breathing hard – part of him thinking he could outrun this thing, part of him knowing he couldn’t. As it closed the gap between them, Jasper dove into the sand and covered his head with his hands, tensing up for impact...
But nothing happened.
No earthquake, no explosion.
Jasper lifted his head, panting. The world was dark again, by comparison. The only light came from the stars high above. The only sound was the wind in the grass.
Jasper rolled over onto his back and saw nothing. He sat up. The only thing distinguishing itself from the sand and the thin grass was the dig site. The cars and machines. The crumpled tents. Nothing to the left, nothing right. Nothing above, except the sky which looked as it always had. Ever since the first human walked out on two legs from the trees to gaze upon it and wonder about his place in the universe.
But no glowing orb anywhere in sight. No sign there had ever been one. No crater, no smoking stone. Again, the thought entered his mind that he was dreaming.
Jasper picked himself up and brushed the sand from his jacket. He started off back the way he came, and wondered why of all things his madness would take the shape of a meteor.
About halfway to the dig site, Jasper saw the cowboy hat that had blown off his head as he ran, and he leaned down to retrieve it. But as he stood and set the hat back atop his crown, something materialised between him and his destination.
A shiny metal orb coalescing from the darkness. Appearing out of nowhere. Something invisible suddenly becoming visible.
Jasper froze, fully assured now of his diminished or entirely-absent sanity. He stared at the thing in disbelief.
The orb was large, bigger than a car, held aloft by three poles jutting out at angles from its midsection into the sand. It was entirely made of some polished metal that gleamed in the moonlight. A futuristic thing in an ancient landscape.
Jasper watched, waited for something.
A door in the underbelly of the orb opened with a depressurising hiss and began to lower slowly. The rear end was hinged to the orb, the front end touched gently in the sand, forming a ramp into the cabin.
As she descended from within, the first thing Jasper noticed were her scales. Smooth scales, like a lizard might have – scales that were every shade of green, all swirled and blended like the dinosaur’s were, but a jungle palette instead of a desert one. Like the rider, she had a glove on her left hand with the same heavy-duty tablet computer strapped to her wrist. Unlike the rider, she did not wear a hooded robe, but rather a sleeveless tunic belted at the waist. And where the rider had no eyes, hers were very much like Jasper’s own, though yellow instead of white, with slitted pupils.
A mane of iridescent blue feathers cascaded down like the long hair of a woman, tumbling over a metal diadem inlaid with elaborate markings. Some of her feathers were bound up with rows of coloured beads, and the back of her arms and legs were lightly feathered also.
Impossible as it was, the immediate impression Jasper got was of a half-human, half-dinosaur hybrid. Even still, she looked more person than beast – without her saurian features, she might have appeared a normal girl he would admire from afar. And even with them, he admired her. He couldn’t quite explain it, even to himself, but Jasper sensed some genetic link between them in their basic humanoid shape, their features – however far removed it might be.
Though she reminded him of the rider, Jasper did not run. He sensed in her no desire to hurt him. She looked to be about his age, however age was measured where she was from, and had a confident, almost regal way of carrying herself.
She looked back at the wreckage of the dig site, then turned to him.
“He was here?” she said, in perfect, well-pronounced English.
Jasper took a moment to find his tongue – the strangeness of everything almost too much to process. The alien spaceship. The dinosaur girl. The English words coming from her lips.
And just in case that wasn’t enough, a creature suddenly appeared at her side. A small, red, birdlike creature with wings and a long, feathered tail. It was about the size of a raven, but in place of a beak it had a snout lined with sharp teeth and three long, clawed fingers on either wing. It gave Jasper the impression of some hideous cross between bird and dinosaur, caught mid-way through the process of evolution – arms that were forming into wings, snout into beak.
He had seen it before – or something like it – in a book his parents had given him for his sixth birthday. The book had contained illustrations of what specific dinosaurs might have looked like when they were alive. This particular creature was known as an Archaeopteryx, and right now it hissed at Jasper and eyed him warily.
Shaking off his amazement, Jasper addressed the girl.
“Who are you?” he said.
“My name is Io.”
She pronounced it ee-o, and Jasper recalled one of the moons of Jupiter. He didn’t know if she was named for the moon or the moon for her, and at this point, neither would surprise him.
“And this...” she said, laughing a little as the Archaeopteryx clambered up her body and perched atop her shoulder, “...is Dia.”
Jasper looked at the thing again. It was still glaring at him, as if trying to decide whether or not he was a threat.
“Are you...an alien?”
She gave him a curious look. “I could ask you the same thing.”
Jasper had too many thoughts racing through his mind to come up with an intelligent answer, so in the end, he said nothing. Io asked him what had happened here and Jasper swallowed as the incident returned to him in violent flashes of blood and claws and teeth.
“We were...digging up a fossil,” he said. “Then it just...came alive. The dinosaur.”
He anticipated some kind of response – surprise, or shock, or at the very least, a mild interest. But she just waited for him to continue the story, like the resurrection of a hundred-million-year-old fossil was an everyday event.
“It...killed everyone,” he went on, feeling a surge of emotion in his chest. “Everyone except me.”
Io saw the pain in his eyes – she felt for him.
“There was a man here?” she said. “A rider?”
Jasper nodded, wondering how she knew. “Yeah. How’d you...?”
“But the saddle...” she said. “The saddle was gone.”
Now, Jasper was really losing it. “How did you know there was a saddle?”
“You said there was a rider. A rider needs a saddle. Besides, the saddle was what drew him here in the first place.”
“Drew who here?”
“The rider. Janus.”
She pronounced it jay-nus, and Jasper was again reminded of a moon. Not one of Jupiter this time, but one of Saturn. He was also reminded of a Roman deity with the same name. The two-faced god of transitions, of beginnings and endings. The doors of his temple in Rome were kept open in times of war, and closed in times of peace. Rarely were those doors shut, and when they were, it wasn’t for long.
The moment she uttered the name, Dia hissed even more viciously, suggesting to Jasper that not only could this creature understand Io, but that it recognised the name and knew who it belonged to.
Io continued. “He would not allow the Progeny to find any trace of his people.” She paused, then added, with shame, “Our people.”
“Your people?” said Jasper, getting frustrated. “The Progeny? What are you...?”
“I will explain on the way,” she said, and turned to ascend the ramp again.
“On the way to where?”
She stopped, turned back. “I will explain that also. But please, we must hurry.”
Jasper ignored her urgency, remained where he was. “Why? Where are you going?”
Io sighed, a little annoyed at the time being wasted. “The rider, Janus...you and your parents found something he did not want you to find. He has broken the highest of our laws by interfering in matters on earth, and so I have been sent here to put it right. Now, will you come with me or not?”
“Why would I go anywhere with you?”
Io frowned, as if it was a strange question. “Why would you stay?”
That, Jasper couldn’t answer. Looking around, all he saw were the remnants of a massacre, the pieces of people he once knew. In that moment, he made his decision. If she was bent on finding the man who did this to him as he suspected she was, then Jasper would follow her to whatever end.
“Can you find him?” he said. “The rider.”
Io studied him a moment, trying to read his intentions – knowing the vengeance in his heart. She hesitated, then nodded, and he followed her up into the spaceship.
Jasper found himself inside a domed cockpit with two high-backed, metal seats facing a large window. The window curved around the front half of the dome, offering a 180-degree view straight ahead and to the sides. Behind the seats was an empty space where the middle of the floor fell away into the access ramp, and on either side were walkways. Interior light-strips ran along the walls, crossing at the high point of the ceiling in an X shape and giving the cockpit a muted, bluish glow. There didn’t seem to be a control panel or any kind of display showing gauges or meters. Jasper wasn’t sure what he was expecting – maybe something like a car’s dashboard, but it certainly wasn’t that.
Dia leapt off Io’s shoulder as she took her seat before the window, strapping herself in with dual seatbelts that crossed over at her chest and clipped in on either side of her waist. At least that was the same, Jasper thought.
