answer?’
‘With a constant particle attrition rate, my calculation is that we are located sixty-two million, seven hundred and thirty-nine thousand, four hundred and six years into the past.’ She smiled proudly. ‘Accurate to five hundred years either side of that date.’
‘Well done, Becks.’ He watched the others slowly staggering across the shifting, clattering pebbles. ‘So we have a date we can put in the message. And we can encode the message with your Harry Potter book code?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘And of course the date and location of the field office.’ He drew in breath through his teeth. ‘Jay-zus, this does really feel like we’re meddling with time in a big way.’
‘We are,’ she replied.
‘We’ve just got to figure out the best way to ensure our get me out of here note lasts… sixty million whatever years.’
‘Sixty-two million, seven hundred and thirty-’
He raised a hand to shush her. ‘To ensure it lasts a long, long time.’ He picked out Whitmore and Franklyn walking side by side comparing some of the shells they’d collected. ‘I just hope those two fossil geniuses know where best to leave our message.’
In the distance, four or five miles down the beach, he saw several long necks hastily emerging from a cluster of jungle and out on to the beach, a small herd of those alamosauruses hurrying out into the open.
Something just spooked them over there. Didn’t it?
He watched as they thundered along the beach, kicking up a trail of dust in their wake.
His gaze rested on Edward and Jasmine supporting a limping Leonard up the shingle. They finally caught up with the rest of them gathered at the foot of the steep slope of jungle.
‘We’ve just got to hike over that, ladies and gents,’ said Liam, ‘and we’re there.’
Franklyn was exhausted, out of breath and dripping with sweat. He was pretty sure the climb up this steep slope of jungle was one or two degrees short of full-on vertical rock climbing. He wondered how the huge canopy trees with their mushroom-like roof of leaves were managing to keep a purchase on the craggy rock sides.
The others seemed to be faring better than him, even that poor kid, Leonard, who was hopping and clattering up awkwardly, his bad leg dangling behind him. But then Franklyn was carrying twenty more pounds in weight than them, most of it round his middle. ‘Puppy fat’ he preferred to call it, in a vain hope that come college it was all going to magically disappear and the trim athletic body of sports jock was going to emerge. He’d still be a geek on the inside, though. But a cool jock on the outside.
A smart sports jock.
Now there’s something you don’t see every day.
He was so pleased with that observation that he misplaced his step and stumbled to the ground, barking his shin on a rock. ‘Ow!’ he hissed.
‘You OK, man?’ asked Juan, six yards ahead and above.
‘Yeah, I’m f-’ His rucksack slid off his shoulder as he picked himself up and started sliding down the slope. ‘Oh no!’ he muttered, watching it bounce off a tree trunk and continue its rolling, bouncing, tumbling descent. ‘Just great,’ he sighed. ‘Now I gotta go down, get it and climb this bit all over again.’
‘I’ll tell the others to hold up while you get your bag, ’kay?’
Franklyn nodded a thanks and began his descent. He could see his yellow rucksack down there, swinging from a low branch. Good, it wasn’t going any further, then.
Several minutes later he was nearly there, pushing his way through the large fronds of a fern on to a small level clearing of dried cones and needles and soft soil. Across the clearing — on little more than a wide ledge — was his bag, still swinging from a shoulder strap tangled round the broken stump of a branch. If it hadn’t caught there, it would have rolled over the edge and he’d be backtracking another tiresome ten minutes’ worth of climbing all the way to the bottom.
He stepped across, unwound it from the stump and put the straps over both shoulders this time, determined not to lose it again. He turned round to begin his ascent once more when his eyes picked out something on the ground: the familiar shape of a human footprint in the dry soil. One of theirs, but either side of it he saw three small dents — the distinctive marks of a three-toed creature. He stooped a little lower to get a closer look.
My God. It looked just like the tracks he’d seen all around that carcass they’d discovered a while back. The dawning realization came suddenly and his mouth all of a sudden felt tacky and dry.
We’ve been followed.
He knelt down and traced another three-pronged footprint in the ground with his finger. And another. And another.
We’ve been followed… all the way from the camp.
It was then that he heard the soft rustle of dislodged leaves, something emerging from the foliage on to the ledge behind him.
‘Oh boy,’ he whispered.
CHAPTER 44
65 million years BC, jungle
Broken Claw could sense the new creature knew they were there; his nasal cavity picked out the faint smell of fear coming from it, a chemical cocktail of sweat and adrenaline, not so different from the large plant-eaters. The new creature had cleverly spotted their tracks. The new creature had finally realized it was being stalked.
Maybe now was the time to know a little more about these strange pale beasts. His soft bark ordered the others to remain where they were for now, out of sight. The new creature was holding one of those sticks-that- catch in one of its puffy pale hands. He’d watched one of these creatures fend off a giant sea-dweller yesterday with one of those sticks. So he eyed it warily as he stepped low under the sweeping fronds of a fern, under the branch from which the new creature had moments ago retrieved something bright and colourful and emerged over the rocky lip of ground to the small level clearing. That salty smell of fear grew suddenly much more powerful as the new creature turned slowly round to face him. Broken Claw rose from his crouching posture on all fours, up on to his hind legs, to stand fully erect.
It fears.
So close now, he could see the new creature more clearly: the eyes, curiously large, behind rounded shiny transparent discs. Its face, all loose pale flesh, unsculpted by muscle or sinew or bone carapace. It made noises with its mouth, noises that sounded so unlike all the other beasts in the river valley they called home. Noises, in fact, that didn’t sound too unlike the simple language of coughs, grunts and barks Broken Claw’s pack used.
Franklyn in turn studied the creature that had just emerged. It had a body shape he could best describe as halfway between one of the smaller therapod species, and… well, and a human. But incredibly thin, almost birdlike in its agility. A pair of long thin legs hinged backwards like a dog’s legs, meeting at a bony, very feminine-looking pelvis thrust acutely forward. A tiny waist beneath a protruding rib cage, a curved, knobbly spine that hunched over and ended with a delicate tapering neck supporting an elongated skull. Apart from the distinctive head, seen from a distance, and if one squinted a little, it could almost pass as a hominid — human-like.
‘Oh my… m-my God,’ he whispered.
It cocked its head, a head that fleetingly reminded Franklyn of a hot-dog sausage, long and bone-smooth, at one end a lipless mouth full of rows of lethal-looking teeth. Above the mouth were two holes that suggested a nasal cavity around which flesh puckered and pulled as it silently breathed, and above that two reptilian yellow eyes that seemed to sparkle with a keen intelligence. The thing’s skin was a dark olive green, that seemed to pale to an almost human pink colour around the vulnerable belly and pelvis.
The creature’s jaws snapped shut and opened again, and it made a whining noise that reminded him vaguely of the contented murmuring a baby made after a feed. It sounded almost human. And those curious, intelligent, eyes, studying him as intently as he was studying it.
It made another noise, grating, slightly deeper this time. Beyond the teeth, he could see a black tongue twitching and fluttering and curling, like a restless animal in a cage, experimenting with different shapes to produce
