Dragon Dawn (Dinosaurian Time Travel)

by Deborah O'Neill Cordes

  Yet, while snakes stared at the world with blank, cold-blooded eyes, the duckbills’ irises sparkled with animation. Here were flashing orbs of amber or orange, of apricot and copper red. Warm-blooded and gorgeously colored, these dinosaurs were not the dull reptilian creatures found in old textbooks. No, they were beautiful and alive!

  Moving like soldiers in formation, the duckbills marched onward. From head to tail, Dawn estimated they were five or six times as long as an average man, maybe twelve meters in length. Some were bigger than elephants and the earth trembled with their footfalls.

  The ground swell increased, and Dawn clung to the tree for dear life. The vibrations got even stronger, shaking with the force of thousands of hoof-tipped toes, which made distinctive, three-toed, cloverleaf tracks in the dirt. Scared – and enthralled – she watched the animals. Soon, the front lines of the herd gave way to the middle. There were juveniles there, smaller duckbills with big eyes and rounded heads, surrounded on all sides by their elders. One-third to one-half their parents’ size, the young dinosaurs bleated and chirped, marching on like little troopers.

  Dawn did a quick mental count. There had to be well over one hundred youngsters in the group. A thought suddenly struck her; the herd was moving in formation, like a flock of migratory birds.

  She turned and stared at the Sun, hanging in the southwestern sky. Were the dinosaurs going north for the summer? Was she actually watching a seasonal migration?

  Overwhelmed, she shut her eyes. “Where am I?” she whispered. Immediately, her inner voice called out, When am I? Just when is this happening?

  “Harry would give his right arm to see this,” she said, looking down at the dinosaurs again.

  She jumped when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Head whipping around, she gasped at a familiar face.

  Harry?

  “Da... Dawn,” he stammered, his gaze riveted on the herd. “What the hell is this?” He teetered on the tree limb, his face pale with shock.

  A firm hand reached from behind Dawn and took hold of Harry’s arm, steadying him.

  “What’re we doin’ up here like a bunch of monkeys?” a deep voice called out.

  I’m hallucinating – that’s it – I’ve freakin’ lost it. Dawn gaped. A pair of hazel eyes stared back at her, the gaze as true and brave as the man himself. Gus!

  Was he for real? She tried to smile, not knowing whether to laugh or scream, but instead she fell into his waiting arms and fainted dead away.

  ***

  “That was really dumb, fainting in a tree.”

  Hearing Gus’s voice, Dawn opened her eyes. He sat on the big tree limb, cradling her in his arms. The rest of the crew stood scattered in the other branches, studying the duck-billed dinosaurs; everyone, that is, except Gus, for his gaze was locked on hers.

  She cleared her throat. “Wh – what happened?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me. Tasha checked you out and said you’re going to be all right. Everyone is going crazy because our glasses are gone, all except for Kris – she still has hers. We have our communicators, but no can bring up anything but recorded data. And Tasha... she’s really upset, wondering if she’ll ever see her sons again.”

  Dawn caught sight of her. Face streaming with tears, Tasha held her heart-shaped locket with pictures of her boys. Lex was nearby, watching her, looking like he was lost, too.

  “You know,” Gus said, “we tried to hail Jean-Michel, but there’s only silence.” His gaze drifted toward the sky.

  “Maybe he’s still orbiting Mars,” Dawn said.

  “Can’t say until we hear from him. I think this is some kind of advanced VR, but Harry thinks it’s real. As soon as he calmed down, he told us about the hadrosaurids––”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the name he used for the duckbills. Harry said they were called...” Gus transferred his gaze to the paleontologist. “What’d you call ‘em?”

  “Edmontosaurus annectens,” Harry said, matter-of-factly. “From the look of it, we’re smack dab in the middle of the Cretaceous. The vegetation’s right, so are the animals. It could be seventy... eighty million years before our time, give or take a few million years.”

  Gus exchanged an incredulous look with Dawn. “What happened? How’d we get here?”

  Dawn told him everything that had transpired after her fall through the passageway in the tomb.

  “The Keeper? Silicon aliens?” Gus asked, looking skeptical. “You realize how crazy this all sounds?”

  “I know,” Dawn agreed. “But I think Harry’s right. Somehow the Keeper sent us back in time.”

  “We can try to verify something tonight,” Kris said. She stood on a nearby upper branch, hugging the tree trunk.

  “Verify what?” Dawn asked.

  “I want to check out the constellations. That should give a clue as to the time period––”

  “Snort!”

  Startled, Dawn looked out, fully expecting to see a horse. Instead, her eyes fixed on an especially beautiful hadrosaur, one with large, liquid, tangerine eyes. The beast snorted again, then his mouth yawned open, revealing row upon row of closely packed, ridged, diamond-shaped teeth.

  Gus snuffed the air in derision, echoing the sound of the duck-billed dinosaur. “I don’t care what the constellations look like. Time travel is fantasy. This has got to be VR. In order to travel back in time, you’d have to be able to go faster than the speed of light, or mess with black holes and space-time.”

  “I know,” Dawn said. She resumed her study of the beautiful duckbill. It was passing beneath her now.

  “Sure, I’m right,” Gus said.

  Dawn looked at the sky. But what if they had actually traveled through time? Did the Keeper have powers beyond anything imaginable?

  “The time travel aspect is compelling,” Kris said, “but I think we need to take this to a whole ‘nother level. Consider the monolith.”

  “What about it?” Gus asked.

  “Well,” Kris went on, “we thought it said six Martians had explored the Earth, but what if we were wrong? What if time actually looped around on itself? Maybe we were always meant to travel back in time.”

  Dawn shook her head in amazement. “You know what this could mean?”

  “Uh huh,” Kris said. “What it means is that the message on the monolith wasn’t about some Martian alien astronauts. It was about us.”

  Chapter 14

  Nature, red in tooth and claw.

  ~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

  The huge flock – yes, flock, for Dawn decided it was the only way to describe the migrating duckbills – finally passed through the clearing. Just a few stragglers, including several old, sick, or injured dinosaurs, struggled to keep up. One duckbill in particular tugged at Dawn’s heart; a young juvenile with an injured leg moved pitifully on all fours, dragging itself after the group.

  Dawn sadly watched this last creature disappear into the forest, then she felt Gus take a deep breath and relax against her.

  “Okay. Let’s get out of this tree,” he said, looking for a way down.

  “Not so fast,” Harry implored.

  “Why wait?” Gus eyed him impatiently as he and Dawn got up, inching around so they both had hold of the trunk.

  “Because of them.”

  No sooner were Harry’s words out than Dawn spotted something moving right below. She did a double take as several golden-brown, man-sized heads poked up from the bushes and sniffed the air. In a heartbeat, they lowered themselves, vanishing back into the underbrush.

  Dawn blinked, then caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. Gus had stepped onto a lower branch to begin his descent.

  “No,” she yelled, reaching for him. “Gus, no! Look down there. Don’t you see them? Dino––”

  She slipped, plummeted head over heels, and landed flat on her back in a bed of pine needles. Her chest seized with spasms, the wind knocked out of her, and she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe.

/>   “Dawn, stay put! Don’t you move! Dawn! Dawn!”

  From somewhere beyond the fog of agony, she heard Gus’s frantic shouts, but she couldn’t answer him. In a parody of a response, a sharp, raspy noise escaped from her mouth. And the ragged sound kept coming. She had no control over it; she felt she couldn’t control any part of her body.

  Dawn coughed and managed a slight, aching breath as her limbs came back to life. She could feel again, even wriggle her toes. Gus continued to shout, urging her to lie still. Then someone else joined in, telling her to play dead. Harry. It was Harry.

  Dawn’s mind instantly cleared as a birdlike face thrust toward her. The stench of hot, fetid breath assaulted her, and she gagged. Golden feathers covered the dinosaur’s head, while rows of large, loosely spaced, backward pointing teeth, the edges serrated like steak knives, flashed in the sunlight.

  Heart pounding, Dawn stared in horror. In turn, a pair of yellow eyes, the pupils slit up and down, catlike, took her in. Dawn choked back her screams. The dinosaur’s head rotated until only the left eye was visible. A transparent, nictating membrane, lying between the eyeball and eyelids, slowly rolled over the iris.

  With an unblinking stare, the bilious eye studied Dawn. Fury, strength, and brutality all mingled in the steady gaze.

  “God Almighty,” Dawn whispered to it.

  The creature responded with a tilt of its head and a parrotlike squawk.

  “Up here!” “Hey, you bastards, we’re up here!” “Dawn, don’t move! Play dead!”

  Dawn looked past the dinosaur’s form. She found herself lying a good fifteen paces from the tree trunk. Her fellow astronauts were shouting and jumping in the tree like a bunch of apes. She spotted Gus scrambling down to help her.

  With a delicate technique, like the kind her terriers used on a particularly interesting turd, the dinosaur sniffed her hair and face, then her armpit.

  Terrified, Dawn squeezed her eyes shut, not moving, not even daring to breathe.

  After a long moment, the thing gave another squawk. Dawn’s eyes flew open as it went back to sniffing. Now it smelled her crotch. Eeeww! Get away from me! She wanted to squirm, but she fought down the urge. She needed to do as Harry said and play dead.

  To Dawn’s surprise, the dinosaur fiddled with her left trekker, using its three-fingered hands to manipulate the fastener with its claws. She felt a tug and the boot came off. The creature stood there, sniffing the inside, seemingly oblivious to everything else.

  Can I escape? Without moving her head, Dawn looked around. Now the other members of the pack were coming for her, like sharks on wounded prey, circling in for the kill.

  Suddenly, the nearest dinosaur looked up from the boot. Its long, powerful legs tensed, the muscles rippling beneath its feathers. It hissed, then dropped the boot and bobbed its head.

  The other creatures halted in their tracks and bobbed back.

  Dawn trembled as the creature backtracked, and she found herself staring at its feet, which had three clawed, forward pointing toes, along with a lone, diminutive, backward pointing toe. But the second forward pointing toe was uniquely different from the others – curved, black, and long, it resembled a huge gutting knife.

  Oh, my God! Harry had once told her some predatory dinosaurs used killing claws to disembowel their prey––

  A roar split the air as the ground shook with the force of an earthquake. All the dinosaurs’ heads snapped up. Something huge now lumbered through the forest.

  Dawn fought her terror, scrambled to her feet, and set off. Glancing back, she screamed when she saw the lead dinosaur had its talons flipped out like switchblades, leaping into the air with both feet.

  This was it – her only chance. She tried to ignore her bare left foot, the stabbing sticks and sharp rocks beneath, when she heard a snarl, wheeled about, saw the creature’s extended hind feet. Instinctively, she lurched sideways and tumbled to the ground, barely avoiding the killing claws.

  “Dawn – get going! Run!”

  Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, nightmare-style. She started to rise, half-crawling away from the dinosaur, desperate to reach safety. At that moment, Gus dropped out of the tree and let out a roar of fury. He grabbed a rock and hurled it at the dinosaur, hitting it squarely in the center of the forehead.

  In a flurry of feathers, it crashed to the ground.

  “Come on!” Gus shouted as he raced to Dawn’s side, hauled her to her feet, and propelled her toward the pine. “Climb! Get up there. Don’t wait for me!”

  Giddy with fear, she started a furious ascent, hell-bent on reaching the safety of the higher branches. Once there, she sank down and tried to catch her breath. Sweat rolled down her forehead, dripping into her eyes. She brushed it aside and saw Gus was on his way up, scaling the tree limbs hand over hand.

  Numbly, she glanced at her crewmates. A sober Lex hugged Tasha, who wept with relief. Kris laughed, then gave Dawn an exaggerated thumb’s up. And Harry exchanged an empathetic nod with Dawn before his gaze flew back to the ground.

  Gus finally caught up to her. With a grunt, he hauled himself onto the branch.

  “Sonofabitch.” His voice, ragged with strain, died off with more cursing.

  Dawn leaned against Gus’s chest, holding him, listening to the rapid beating of his heart. He took her face in his hands and studied her, his lips gently brushing against hers. His kiss deepened, her numbness replaced by a sudden awareness of life, a longing for him.

  “Thank God you’re alive,” he finally said as he drew her closer still and stroked her hair. “What kind of hell have we ended up in? If I had lost you...”

  His arms tightened around her, protectively, like he would never let her go.

  ***

  Harry watched Dawn and Gus for a moment, then turned away and observantly studied the ground. He strained to see some movement in the underbrush, but all of the dinosaurs had disappeared into the forest. Even the one Gus had whacked on the head was gone. But he knew the memory of what just happened would stay forever etched in his mind.

  I’m here, and they’re alive, in the flesh. Theropods. Carnivores.

  Deinonychus. A pack of warm-blooded, sickle-clawed, one hundred and fifty pound meat-eaters, the distant relatives of modern birds. Man-sized, running with their feathered tails stretched behind them, their claws supremely dexterous. Capable of moving as fast as cheetahs. Dinosaur ninjas!

  The sight of feathers on Deinonychus especially pleased Harry. Since feathers were in reality only modified scales, this did not surprise him greatly, however.

  From fossil skeletal evidence, deinonychosaurs were also known to have other birdlike characteristics: a wishbone, an avian wrist configuration, with a half-moon shaped wrist bone, which allowed the hands to move at different angles in relation to the forearm, and also birdlike hips, including an elongated, backward-facing pubis bone. This confirmed birds and meat-eating, theropod dinosaurs had the same ancestors, and, conversely, that Deinonychus and its cousins, such as the smaller Asian velociraptors, were closely related to the forerunners of birds.

  Harry shook his head in amazement, realizing he would be able to observe traits in deinonychosaurs rare or absent in the fossil record. Here, in this time, things like soft tissue, skin texture, and color, even responses to stimuli, could be studied. And he could even ponder the depths of dinosaurian intelligence and the range of their sense perceptions.

  He recalled how the lead predator had sniffed Dawn. Did Deinonychus have an olfactory acuity that rivaled mammals? Could it smell as well as a wolf?

  And what about the other senses? CT scans of the fossilized skulls of deinonychosaurs had shown their brains had highly developed optic lobes, indicating superb eyesight, and, since the eyes faced forward, good depth perception. All birds were color-sighted and probably deinonychosaurs were, too. And their hearing appeared to be excellent. How would such keen senses affect the evolution of the brain? Were deinonychosaurs also on their way to becoming a more
intelligent species?

  And what about the Alpha female’s interest in Dawn’s boot? That moment alone was priceless, especially when he considered the agility of the animal’s claws. What else could it manipulate? Did it handle things in its environment as a matter of course? Even more incredible, was it on an evolutionary path that would someday, in the distant future, lead to tool making? And what had it thought as it examined Dawn? Having never seen a human before, did it wonder what she was?

  So many questions, so little time. But then again...

  Harry remembered Dawn’s story about the Keeper, and he wondered if he could be wrong. Perhaps, just perhaps, the alien had given them a gift: all the time in the world.

  He looked back at Gus. No, he decided as he searched the commander’s grave expression. This isn’t hell, far from it.

  Over the roars of what he assumed was an approaching Tyrannosaurus rex, Harry nodded to himself and then he thought, For me, this is paradise.

  Chapter 15

  Whose game was empires

  And whose stakes were thrones,

  Whose table earth whose dice were human bones.

  ~George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron, The Age of Bronze

  Much to Gus’s relief, they never saw the T. rex. They waited for about ten minutes, listening as its thunderous footfalls faded into the distance.

  Now, only flocks of small birds surrounded them, jewel-toned shapes darting through the trees and twittering like canaries. Archaic species, Harry said, explaining he wasn’t exactly sure of their names, since fossilization was extremely rare. Only one bone or leaf in a billion became petrified; the rest decomposed and were lost to history.

  “There have to be tens of thousands of new species out there,” Harry said, looking excited. “Things that never fossilized, a whole host of creatures unfamiliar to science, maybe even an unknown raptor. A cousin of Deinonychus, eh?”

  “Let’s hope we don’t run into anything else that fancies us for supper,” Gus said as he eyed their surroundings. “Come on. I figure we’ve got only a couple more hours of daylight. We’ve got to find a safe place to spend the night, maybe a cave.”