Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall

by Thomas P Hopp

CHAPTER 5

  Things were happening a bit too fast for Kit Daniels today. Strange happenings in the sky, a great paleontological discovery, angry words with her father, and an interesting young man—too many events all mixed up in one short morning.

  It was nice to be alone for a while, astride Lucky’s gently swaying back as the mare picked her way down the game trail beside Eggshell Creek. That was the name Kit had given the little stream when she was in grade school and found some bits of dinosaur eggshell along its banks. The shell fragments, blackened with age, had sparked Kit’s interest in dinosaurs and brought Professor Ogilvey to the ranch. She and Lucky had been up and down this path a hundred times visiting Dr. O’s digs but this morning the trail seemed different. There was an electric quality to the air. As Lucky poked through thickets of short willow trees lining the trail another thunderous noise rumbled along the canyon, sending a tingle up Kit’s spine.

  The air along the stream banks was eerily still. The twitter of small birds among the willows had stopped. Lucky’s ears pivoted nervously to and fro. Kit breathed easier when Lucky pushed out of the last willow thicket and the house came into view. Given her head, Lucky trotted the last hundred yards to the barn, holding her ears back as if something were following them out of the gully.

  Kit absorbed some of Lucky’s edginess and looked around carefully as she stopped the mare at the white equestrian fence in front of the barn. The pasture beyond the fence was all but deserted with the herd up at its summer graze. Nelda the milk cow lay inside one of the loafing sheds, keeping out of the sun and chewing her cud. Buck, her father’s dun horse, was grazing at the far end of the pasture. Chickens pecked in the dust at the barn’s open front door. They didn’t seem nervous but chickens had so little sense you couldn’t read much from their behavior. The odd quiet still made Kit uneasy. Beyond an occasional cluck, the only sound was a thin repetitive squeak from the windmill in the pasture. A light breeze turned it slowly atop its metal gantry, bringing up water for the house and trickling the excess into the cattle-watering trough. Nothing was out of place in the heavy equipment shed next to the barn. The John Deere tractor and cultivator were parked side by side, as usual. The next building was the garage, with its door perennially left open. Inside were her red Volkswagen Beetle and the space where her father’s jeep normally sat. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary except the stillness of the air. Maybe there wasn’t anything too surprising about that. The animals were just reacting to the noises and the eerie lights in the sky.

  Slipping from the saddle, Kit patted the horse’s graying withers with a gloved hand. “What is it, Lucky? Those lights got you spooked? Well, don’t worry, I won’t let them get you.” Kit led the horse inside the barn and put her in her stall, wishing there were someone around to reassure her. She pulled Lucky’s saddle off and slung it over a rail, undid her bridle and put some fresh hay in the feed trough at the head of the stall. When she closed the stall gate, the old mare nervously bobbed her head and ignored the hay. That wasn’t like Lucky.

  Kit hung the reins on the tack post and then spotted something else that was odd. Her border collie, Zippy, sat on his dog-bed of old blankets in a dim corner of the barn with a worried look tenting up his white eyebrows.

  “What’s up, Zippy?” she asked, walking over to have a closer look. “I figured you’d still be up there helping Daddy turn out the new bull.” She knelt and gave him a chuck under his graying black muzzle. “What is it, boy? You’re trembling. Why’d you come back without Daddy?” She didn’t expect an answer but she would have liked one. If her father wasn’t finished moving the bull, why would he let Zippy wander off? A Border collie was better than an extra mounted horseman when it came to chasing cattle and Zippy was the reason her father had let her go to see Dr. Ogilvey this morning. Unless the bull was already loose and chased away from the stock pond, Zippy shouldn’t be home yet. She thumped him reassuringly on the side and he let out a throaty, worried whine.

  She left Zippy and Lucky in the barn and crossed the hundred feet of graveled driveway to the back of the house, jogged up the back steps, walked through the pantry hallway and into the kitchen, where she flipped on the light switch—and nothing happened. Sensing another unpleasant mystery, she hurried through the first floor of the house, flipping switches and confirming that it wasn’t just the kitchen light that was out. The living room, the dining room and office on the main floor, and the bedrooms and bath upstairs were all out. That put a wrench in her plans to turn on the TV and find out what was going on with the moon and to use the CB radio in the office to contact her father. Neither was possible without electricity, but fortunately Kit knew how to get that. She jogged back out to the side of the barn where her father kept a gas-powered generator. Given that it was thirty miles to Red Lodge as the crow flies and a good fifty over the winding county road that dead-ended here, you didn’t want to be without power, especially in the winter when the county power lines were not always reliable.

  Kit’s father had insisted she become familiar with every piece of equipment that kept the ranch operating. Today she was glad for her father’s survivalist tendencies. She soon had the generator on and humming.

  Inside, she tried the TV again but got nothing but static on any of the satellite channels. She tried the CB radio but found no one to talk with. The local sheriff was usually at the other end of channel one, but not today. The occasional trucker or neighboring rancher might be expected, but again no luck. And much more alarmingly, her father was not at the other end of channel three like he ought to be. Maybe he was away from his jeep, busy with a rotted fencepost or any of a dozen things that could keep a rancher busy longer than he planned.

  Frustrated in her attempts to get in touch with the world, Kit plunked down at the table in the kitchen nook, where the breakfast dishes had been left when she’d hurried out to load the bull this morning. She picked a leftover biscuit off the serving plate and spread some jam on it. Nibbling the biscuit to satisfy her grumbling stomach, she felt the sunlight streaking in across her shoulders. Its warmth soon made her feel a little more relaxed. Things would be okay when her father got back.