incomprehensible rain of meteors.
She could not stay here. But where to go?
With much of the obstructing forest already demolished by the winds she could see the shoulders of the Rockies with their clouds of volcanic smoke lingering at their summits. And where the comet winds had pushed warm, moist air up the flanks of the rising ground, thick cumulus clouds clung to the mountain’s upper slopes.
Shade. Darkness. Perhaps there would even be rain.
She took a step further into the open, whiskers twitching. She moved in rapid jerks, pausing every few paces, flattening herself against the ground.
She looked back. Beyond the fallen head of the troodon, she could see her mate and pups, three sets of wide eyes peering after her. Instincts honed across a hundred million years urged her to return to the cool earth, or to clamber into the trees where she would find safety, for otherwise the terrible claws and teeth and feet of this giant world would surely claim her. But the trees were smashed and broken, her burrow no longer a sanctuary.
She scurried away, toward the cloud-draped mountains.
Her mate followed, more cautiously. One of the pups followed him. The second, terrified, bewildered, bolted back into the recesses of the burrow. There was nothing Purga could do for the second pup. She would never see him again.
So the three tiny, shrewlike creatures — carrying all the potential of mankind within them — made their way slowly across the battered, smoldering plain while meteors rained around them.
The fire fed on itself. The scattered pockets of fire were beginning to link up. As the temperature of the air rose even the damp undergrowth was starting to burn. A wind began to gather, the smoke to spiral overhead. Here, and all over North and South America, the fires began to exert a logic of their own, becoming self-feeding, self-perpetuating systems.
Thus the firestorms began. Everything that could burn did so: every scrap of vegetation, even lake plants still soaked from their immersion. Animals simply burst into flame: Raptors burned like saplings and great armored herbivores cooked in their own monstrous shells.
The three giganotosaurs burst at last from the forest. They had come to a clearing centered on a large lake. They were overheated, their great mouths gaping, their heads filled with the stink of the smoke.
The open sky was extraordinary. A lid of blackness was rushing up from the southeast, as if a great curtain were closing. That eerie orange glow was spreading too, growing brighter and ascending to yellow. And still the meteors hammered into the muddy ground.
Near the lake itself a desolate scene greeted the giganotosaurs.
Dinosaurs stampeded. Great herds of rival duckbill species mingled, armored beasts like ceratops and ankylosaurs jostled for room, herbivores ran alongside giant predators. There were even mammals, blinking in the light, running amidst giant feet. All the animals charged in panic, their feet burned by the smoldering ground, clattering into each other blindly. This would have been unimaginable just a couple of hours ago. The intricate ecological relationships of herbivores and carnivores, of predators and prey, built up over a hundred and fifty million years, had utterly collapsed.
Giant pushed forward, barging his way through the panicking mob, driven to the water by a deep instinct. He plunged into the lake, ignoring the smoldering debris that floated on the surface. The deeper layers were still blessedly cool. But even with his head submerged he could see more meteors hitting the lake, creating bubble trails in the water like bullets.
And now a missile shape rose before him, a great mouth gaped white, and through the murky water he could see rows of conical teeth. He flailed back.
The crocodile had lain at the bottom of her lake, silent, patient.
A distant cousin of the seagoing deinonychus, so far the events of this tumultuous day had meant little to her. She had felt the shuddering of the Earth and the responding ripple of the water, noticed the peculiar lights in the sky. But she expected to ride out this storm, as she had ridden out many before. She could stay underwater for an hour at a time, as her metabolism was capable of shutting down almost completely when necessary. Her thinking was slow, patient. She knew that all she had to do was lie here in the mud, and the storm would pass, and once more her food would come to her.
But now a dinosaur came blundering clumsily into the water — not just skimming the fringe to drink and browse, like the stupid duckbills, but immersing itself, actually
She attacked, of course.
Giant thrashed, evading the crocodile’s reaching jaws, and in his blundering he managed to land a kick on the crocodile’s snout. The crocodile backed away briefly. But soon she was returning to the attack. Giant might have withdrawn. But a crowd of animals was pushing into the water behind him. The crocodile fought and snapped at the invaders; and the animals warred amongst themselves.
But now there was a mighty surge, as an aftershock of the comet’s seismic jolt shuddered through the basement rock. The ground was uplifted, cracked — and the water drained suddenly away, leaving Giant stranded amid drying vegetation and writhing animals.
The crocodile, suddenly exposed to hot, dry air, could not understand what had happened. She tried to burrow into the mud, instructed by instincts that had guided her as a baby from her shell to her first swim. But the mud was hardening, drying fast; she could not even dig into the ooze.
Still the meteors fell, lancing through the clouds of smoke like pillars of light.
The winds and the tsunami had already wiped out most of the living things, from insects to dinosaurs, in North and South America. Around the world, the gathering fires were now killing most of those who had survived.
But the worst was yet to come.
The coarser ejecta at the periphery of the comet impact had fallen back quickly, much of it pounding the disturbed ground within one or two diameters of the central crater, the rest falling as forest-igniting meteors. But the great central plume of rock vapor had continued to rise, propelled by its own heat energy. In the vacuum of space, solid particles condensed out of this glowing cloud, and, still white-hot, began to fall back to Earth. But where they had risen through a tunnel of vacuum, now they fell back into atmosphere, and they dumped their energy into the air. It was a lethal hail of fire, a planetwide blanket of uncounted billions of tiny, white-hot meteors.
All over the planet, the air began to glow.
Purga had reached a foothill. Her mate, Third, and her one surviving pup were at her side. They could go no further toward the true Rockies, for even here the land had been broken and jumbled by the ground waves, littered with boulders that were many times Purga’s height.
This would have to do. She began to dig into the loose dirt, seeking to build a burrow.
She glanced back the way she had come. Under banks of billowing smoke the whole of the land glowed bright orange; it was an extraordinary sight. Even here, on this rocky rise, she could feel the heat; even here she could smell the stink of smoke and burning flesh.
She could see the clouds that had drawn her here. They were ragged, but still clustered around the upper slopes of the mountains. Against a sky as black as night the clouds glowed orange white, reflecting the glow of the burning land. But now, beyond the clouds, that orange light from the south crept overhead. The sky itself began to glow, like a dawn erupting all over the sky, all at the same time. The color quickly escalated to orange, then yellow, then a dazzling white, sun-bright.
The heat’s first breath reached them.
The primates scrabbled desperately at the ground.
On the cracked pond floor Giant was somehow on his feet, surrounded by the dead. He couldn’t breathe; his chest strained at air that was dense with smoke and bits of glowing, charred vegetation. It was like being in a gray fog. He saw nothing but smoke, dust, swirling ash.
Heat pulsed, hot as an oven. There was a stink of burning meat.
He felt a sharp pain in his hand. He lifted it in dim curiosity. His fingers were burning, like candles.
His last thought was of his brothers.
His death came in a moment of fulminant shock. He knew nothing about it: His vital organs were destroyed too quickly for his brain to process a conscious reaction. Then his muscles cooked and coagulated. They contracted his arms and legs, but his spine was extended, so that in this moment of death he adopted a posture oddly like a boxer’s, head back, hands up, legs flexed. His flesh was seared away, and the enamel on his teeth began to shatter.
All this before Giant had time to fall to the ground.
And then the very rocks began to crack.
Jewel-like, its sudden brilliance reflecting from the ancient seas of its companion Moon, Earth was beautiful. But it was the beauty of a dying world.
Half of all the heat energy released by the burning air was injected into the deeper atmosphere and the ground. All over the planet, the sky was as hot and bright as the sun. Plants and animals burned where they stood. The trees of the mighty Cretaceous forests were consumed like pine needles. Any birds in the air disappeared in a puff of flame, and the pterosaurs vanished into the maw of extinction. The burrows of mammals and insects and amphibians turned into tiny coffins. Purga’s second pup, whimpering and alone, was quickly baked.
Purga was spared. The last clouds, shadowed black, became ragged, dispersing quickly, soon vaporized into steam — but for the crucial minutes of the great heat pulse they served to shield the ground beneath them from a sky as bright as the sun.
It was just an hour after the impact.
III
After the first few days the Earth’s shuddering died away, and the daily stamping of the great mountain-reptiles was gone.
Purga was used to darkness. But not to
For countless generations the dinosaurs had framed the lives of Purga’s kind. Even after this cataclysmic shock, she had vague visions of arrays of dinosaurs waiting in silent rows to trap any mammal unwise enough to poke her snout out of her burrow.
But she could not stay here, in this hasty burrow. For one thing there was nothing to eat; the family had quickly excavated and consumed any burrowing worms or beetles they could reach. They didn’t even know when it was day and when it was night. Their sleep cycles had been thrown off by their flight during the day of the impact, and they found themselves waking at different hours, their hunger conflicting with their fear of the strange, cold silence above. They bickered among themselves, snapping and biting.
And as time wore on the temperature plunged, from the intense heat of the hours of the burning sky to a bitter cold. The primates were sheltered by the thick layer of earth above them, but even that would not protect them forever.
Finally Third turned on the pup —
