“As cool as it would be to get close to one,” Laura said, “I think we need to find a path through down there that keeps us as far away from them as possible.”
“Yeah, even the ones that wouldn’t eat us could probably still stomp on us,” Henderson said.
“We can’t even go and touch just one of them?” Murky asked. “Not even one of the little ones?”
“Murky, don’t even think about it,” Laura said. “We don’t have the time to go rescuing one of us if that person’s about to get trampled.”
Murky pouted at her but nodded. “Fine. Be a spoil sport.”
They all went down the slope as quietly as possible, partly out of awe for their situation and partly for fear of triggering some kind of stampede from the creatures three and four times their size. The closer they got though, the more it seemed that the prehistoric creatures were completely unimpressed by the four of them. Several of them looked directly at the four kids descending the slope into their domain and then went right back to whatever important dino business they felt they needed to do. A lot of them, at least the ones that didn’t seem to be meat eaters, were munching away at the glowing fungus, as well as a large number of other mushroom-like things, some of which by themselves were six or seven feet high. Every once in a while they thought they could hear one of the more carnivorous types roar in the distance, but there were enough dinosaurs here that the plant-eaters didn’t actually seem to mind that a few of them might end up as snacks.
“This is so crazy,” Laura said once they were on the cavern floor. “How is this even possible?”
“We’re in an underground dimension trying to find the ant people that kidnapped our town,” Henderson said. “How is any of this possible?”
“But this is different than giant insect species that seem to have evolved differently,” Jesse said. “These are dinosaurs from millions of years ago that look more or less like they would have in our dimension back then. How did they get here? Why haven’t they changed with time to be something completely different that suits the environment? These are questions we need to ask.”
“We don’t need to ask anything science-y at all, nerd,” Henderson said. “We just need to get through it and out. We’ll let Larson and her eggheads try to figure out the why when we get out. If we get out.”
“Oh come on, man,” Jesse said. “You don’t wonder at all why there are dinosaurs in an underground sub-dimension?”
“Nope,” Henderson said.
“You’re no fun,” Jesse responded.
Despite the earlier admonition from her older sister that they couldn’t dawdle, Murky found herself frequently stopping to stare at the majestic creatures milling around in the cavern, and the other three did very little to keep her on track. Indeed, they often stopped right alongside her to stare in awe. Jesse would occasionally chime in with their names, and Murky did her best to remember each and every one – triceratops, brachiosaurus, tyrannosaurus rex, iguanodon, ankylosaurus, dimetrodon, pterodactyl. The words made little sense to her, but she didn’t need them to. She would probably never see animals like this ever again, and she wanted to appreciate every single moment she had with them. She even wondered if she would still have the same sense of wonder for things like bats and raccoons ever again.
“Watching them makes me feel so small,” Laura said in a hushed tone.
“I always feel small,” Murky said.
“I mean, not like physically,” Laura said. “I mean in the grand scheme of things. Here’s a giant cave full of creatures that were supposed to be dead millions of years ago. And to get to them, we had to go through a glowing blue portal to another dimension. Doesn’t that make anyone else feel insignificant?”
“You’re only insignificant if you let yourself be insignificant,” Henderson said. “And I’m anything but insignificant.” Despite his words, Murky couldn’t help but notice that his tone matched Laura’s. She didn’t think he was as unaffected by all this as he was trying to seem.
“They’re really just ignoring us, aren’t they?” Jesse said. “They don’t care that we’re walking among them at all. They’ve probably never seen anything like us before. They don’t seem to have any idea that maybe they should be scared of us, or that maybe we might be food.”
“Let’s not go and say that until we’re away from them,” Henderson said. “You might jinx us.”
Down on the cavern floor there were a large number of tunnels that could be seen branching among the walls, but most of them would have been too small for any of the dinosaurs to get through. If they needed to, they could run down any one of them to get to safety at any time, but most of them lacked the glowing fungus that they’d been using as their guide.
“I don’t know if using the fungus is going to be the best option to figure out where to go here,” Henderson said. “There’s too many different paths.”
“Most of the paths don’t have it, though,” Jesse said.
“But the number of paths that do have it are more than one,” Laura said. “Henderson may be right here. We might need to try a different way to track down the townspeople.”
They’d passed the largest portion of the dinosaur herds, but Murky stopped listening to her companions and instead concentrated on the noises of the various creatures. She’d thought she heard something behind them, but when she turned to look, all she saw was a number
