“It’s Lydia Pell,” Leyster said seriously. “If only she wouldn’t make those noises. If only she wouldn’t scream. She’s using up our morphine fast, and that’s not good either. Sometimes I think it would be best for all of us if she just…”
They walked on in silence for a while. Then Lai-tsz said, “So tell me something, Richard. Are we stranded here for the rest of our lives?”
Leyster blew out his cheeks, said, “Well, unless you can fix that beacon or somebody comes to rescue us… yeah, we are.”
“What are the chances of somebody coming to rescue us?”
“If they were going to rescue us, they’d‘ve done it already. They would’ve popped up while the smoke was still in the air. Lydia Pell would be in a hospital now, with one hand reattached, and doctors working to grow a new hand to replace the other.”
“Ah,” Lai-tsz said, and nothing more.
They came to a branching in the path.
“This is where we part ways,” Lai-tsz said. “There’s a gingko grove to the east that’s shedding fruit. I’ll have a knapsack full of pits when you get back. You can help me shell them.”
“Watch out for dromies.”
“Hey, no problem. You should see me climb a tree.”
“Um… dromaeosaurs can climb too. Rather well, in fact.”
She dismissed his worries with a wave of her hand. “Say hello to the Purgatory shrews for me.”
Leyster distractedly climbed the rest of the way up to Barren Ridge alone. He’d brought another day’s worth of samples to place before the Purgatorius colony there. He called them Purgatory shrews, though of course they weren’t shrews but ancestral primates. Still, they sure looked like shrews. And considering their insectivorous teeth, they had surprisingly catholic tastes. They liked almost everything he offered them.
He made the long trek from Smoke Hollow to Barren Ridge every other day to set out a new selection of roots, barks, and funguses at the foot of their favored tree. Purgatory shrews had the closest thing to human metabolisms of anything in the Mesozoic, and he figured that anything they ate would be safe enough for him to try.
Meat wasn’t a problem. The team gigged frogs, snagged turtles, dug freshwater clams, caught fish, and even trapped a few large lizards; there was no shortage of edible flesh. What they would need most when their supplies ran out were fruits and greens.
The red bark was gone, and so were four of the tubers. A fifth, greenish one hadn’t been touched at all. Leyster made a mental note to avoid it in the future.
He laid out his new samples, then turned and looked out over the valley.
Hell Creek was a steely glint visible only intermittently through the rain as it flowed down to the River Styx. The bottom lands to this side of the river, which had been browsed flat by the titanosaurs, were already lush with ferns and flowering plants. In this heat, things came up overnight. You could push a stone into the soil, and come morning you’d find a pebble bush.
Even in the rain, and partially obscured by mists, the valley was beautiful. Even with the sky low and gray, something in him thrilled to it.
Leyster didn’t need a lot of company. It occurred to him that if it weren’t for the others, he could be perfectly happy here. Or, rather, if he weren’t responsible for their well-being, he could be happy.
He rued the argument he’d had with Jamal three days ago.
Jamal had taken it upon himself to start building a log-frame house, as they’d been taught in survival training. Without consulting anybody, he’d begun chopping down trees for its frame.
“Those are a little large for firewood,” Leyster had said to him.
Jamal looked impatient. “They’re for a long house. We’re going to be here for a while. We need it.”
“Yes, but we don’t need it right away. What we need now are a better latrine, some storage baskets, a little investigation into plants that might be spun into cloth. I really think you ought to—”
Jamal flung down his axe in exasperation.
“What gives you the right to order us around?” he said. “This isn’t an expedition anymore, this is about survival. Why the fuck should we take orders from you? Just because you’re a couple of years older?”
“It’s not a matter of giving orders. It’s a matter of common sense.”
“Whose sense? Huh? Your sense? Well, it’s not my sense. I happen to think we need the house, and I’m going to build it.”
“All by yourself? I really doubt it. You can cut the beams, but you can’t assemble them without help,” Leyster said. “Face it, we’re all in this together. All this grandstanding and ego-tripping is perfectly useless.”
“You think I’m grandstanding?”
“I know you are.”
At which point Chuck had wandered up and said, “Hey. What’s up?”
“Chuck!” Jamal said. “You’ll help build the long house, won’t you?”
“Uh… sure. Why not?”
“Because we have more important things to do,” Leyster said testily. “Because we—” He stopped. Chuck was looking at him as if he weren’t making any sense.
And then, out of weariness and frustration, he had flung up his hands and said, “Fine! Do it your way! What the hell do I care?” and stomped angrily off.
Even as he did it, he knew it was a big mistake.
So now the team was split into two factions—three, if you counted Daljit and Matthew, who’d gotten stuck with watching over Lydia Pell while she died, and consequently had little energy for anything else. Jamal, Katie, Gillian, Patrick, and Chuck made up the house-building faction. Leyster, Tamara, Lai-tsz, and Nils were the food- gatherers.
It worried Leyster that this split had occurred. But since he was perceived as being the head of one of the factions—and the smaller of the two, at that—he didn’t have the credibility needed to patch up the rupture. It was a damn-fool situation to be in. It was completely counter-productive. But he couldn’t begin to see how to undo this mess.
He sighed, and stared out unseeing into the distance.
It was then, as he was thinking no particular thought and experiencing no particular emotion, that a most extraordinary sensation came over Leyster. It was a feeling very much like awe. He felt the way he had on occasion felt as a child sitting in the pew in church on Sunday morning, a profound and oceanic inward shiver, as if suddenly made aware that God were peering over his shoulder.
Slowly, Leyster turned.
He froze.
At the very top of the ridge—it must have been there all along—stood a tyrannosaur.
It dominated the sky.
The beast’s skin was forest green with streaks of gold, like sunlight streaming down through the leaves. This, combined with its height, its immobility, and Leyster’s distracted state, had rendered it invisible to him. He had simply failed to notice it.
Oh shit, Leyster said silently.
As if it had heard his thought, the tyrannosaur slowly swung its massive head about. Small, fierce eyes locked onto him. For an agonizing slice of eternity it studied Leyster with every grain of attention it had.
Then, with disdainful hauteur, it turned its head away, and resumed staring out across the valley.
Leyster was too terrified to move.
He’d stood beneath tyrannosaur skeletons in museums a hundred times imagining what it would be like to be the prey of such a monster. He’d pictured its ferocious attack, seen that devil skull dipping downward to munch
