God's Junk Drawer, page 12
“So they’re stupid,” said Kyle.
Barnes shook his head. “Not stupid. More like really, really set in their ways. Think of anyone you know who says, ‘We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.’ Now imagine them taking that attitude with everything. Food, clothes, tools, relationships, all of it.”
Olivia nodded. “I’ve known some folks like that.”
“Well, imagine a whole species like that. You do everything the way your parents did it and your grandparents and your great-grandparents. That’s what Neanderthals are like. The Pakka had never dealt with anything like us before, so most of them just didn’t want to deal with us.”
“Sounds a little limiting,” said Parker.
“It could be, sometimes.”
“Also, they’re matriarchal,” added Sam. “There’s a woman who led, who leads the tribe here. Scarnose.”
“Yep. Although we were never sure if it was because she was a woman or because she was the most vicious one.”
“Cool either way,” said Olivia, picturing herself decked out in a fur bikini and cloak. Maybe with a big bone club. Something she could hit Parker over the head with.
“Cavewoman,” said Kyle with a nod. “Is she hot?”
Olivia’s vision of barbarian power vanished. “Seriously? That’s where your mind goes?”
“Half her nose had been ripped off,” Barnes said. “Most of her left cheek, too. Some kind of animal attack. Almost half her face was just a mess of scar tissue. First time I saw a Freddy Krueger movie, it made me think of her. My dad said it’d probably been one of the bigger raptors. Beau tried calling her Scarface but I changed it to Scarnose. Dumb little-kid name for something I was scared of.” He reached up and brushed his temples. “She had white stripes, too. I considered dyeing mine when they went gray. It was weird to see in the mirror every morning.”
“One of the bigger raptors?” said Josh.
“How’d she survive an injury like that?” This from Logan, walking half a step behind them. “I’m guessing Neanderthal medicine didn’t involve a lot of sutures or blood transfusions.”
“Same way Parker recovered from hitting her head last night. Like I said, people heal faster here. You can still die or be killed, but a lot of wounds that should be dangerous just . . . aren’t.”
Barnes looked over at Parker. So did Olivia and Logan. She flinched a bit from the attention, then reached up to scratch at the scab on her brow.
“You healed from a broken arm once in fifteen days, right?”
He sighed. “Sam, there’s a lot in those books, but there’s a lot that’s not in them too. And a lot they got wrong.”
“Can we get back to the part about bigger raptors?” asked Josh. “Like, Jurassic Park–sized?”
“A couple of them,” Barnes said. “They’re not quite as scary as the movies make them out to be.”
“Not exactly reassuring.”
“Holy fuck,” said Kyle. He took a few running steps ahead. Ferns rustled around his knees and thighs. “Holy fuck!”
Logan took off after him, jogging a few yards and then pausing to stare up into the trees. Olivia followed them. She didn’t have to go far to see what Kyle had found.
“Is it another dinosaur?” Josh called out.
Olivia put the robot at fifteen feet tall. What she could see of it, at least. The section of it above ground was roughly human-shaped, which implied another fifteen or twenty feet beneath the surface. It was buried at an angle, one arm disappearing into the ground, while the other stretched out across the forest floor like a fallen tree. With all the moss, she probably would’ve mistaken it for a tree if Kyle hadn’t seen it.
“What the hell?” said Barnes.
Sam let out a little squeak of air that wasn’t quite a whistle.
A cluster of recessed lenses made up the face, ranging from baseball-sized to one bigger than a bowling ball with a Y-shaped crack running through it, like Logan’s glasses. Two of the antennas on top were bent, and a third was broken off, leaving a stubby pole with a frayed tip. More tubes pointed from the sides of the head that could’ve been . . . guns? Sensors? Fire extinguishers?
Broad shoulders, and the higher one had what looked like a rack of missiles mounted on it. Orange and yellow cones stuck out from maybe a third of the miniature silos, while the others were visibly empty. Olivia followed the shoulder down to the overgrown arm and realized one of the thick speed-bump mounds along the forest floor was a half-buried cannon mounted to the robot’s forearm. A scaly palm trees had grown up between the arm and torso, reaching up to the forest canopy, swelling to fill every space it could.
Large yellow and brown triangles covered most of it. Camouflage meant to confuse rather than conceal. Olivia remembered seeing an article about similar patterns on battleships to hide their outlines at sea. She wondered where the machine had been that it needed these colors. Mountains? Deserts?
Kyle reached up and ran a hand across the angular chest. He rapped it twice with his knuckles. “It’s not metal. I don’t think so, anyway. Maybe some kind of ceramic plating? Or maybe a plastic composite?”
“Is it a robot?” Josh asked.
Olivia snorted out a chuckle. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a dinosaur.”
“No, I mean is it a robot as opposed to, like, a mobile suit?”
“A what?”
“A mechsuit. Battlemech. You know. Is it a big, self-controlled android or is it a walking tank somebody’s piloting? Or was piloting, I guess.”
Kyle looked up at the mechanical frame and jumped. His fingers grabbed an edge and he pulled himself up onto the robot’s shoulder. He tilted his head and stared down at the top of the machine’s chest. “I think this is a hatch,” he said. He thumped his hand on a panel.
Olivia took a few steps forward. Glanced back in time to see Sam lean toward Barnes. “Is this one of the things that’s not in the—”
“I’ve never seen this before.”
“Really?”
“I’m sure he’d remember it,” said Parker.
“Okay,” said Sam, “so maybe it’s new.”
Barnes glanced from the robot to Sam. “What?”
“Well, it’s been a couple years. Maybe this thing fell into the wormhole too.”
Olivia moved closer to the half-buried giant. Logan, half listening to the conversation, pointed at the ground. “This has been here for a while,” he said. “The ground’s all gone flat and there’s stuff growing in it.”
“How long does that take?”
Logan shrugged and batted a tall fern with his hand. “I don’t know. I had an undergrad roommate who had a fern—”
Olivia snickered. “A fern.”
“—and it didn’t get anywhere near this big in one semester. Maybe a couple years?
“Still fits,” said Sam.
“Except it doesn’t answer where it came from,” Parker pointed out.
“Japan,” said Josh. “They love Jaegers and mobile suits in Japan. There’s a life-sized Gundam in Tokyo.”
“None of those words mean anything,” Kyle called out. He’d found a lever, and his arms strained with effort as he pulled at it.
Olivia looked at the lower shoulder. Saw some markings behind some of the moss and vines. Black and red lines running in different directions. And a stenciled letter E? She scraped at the moss with her fingers.
“It makes sense,” Barnes said with a nod. “The wormhole throws things back in time to the valley, and in the future it’s still throwing things back in time. That’s how we ended up with Ross.”
“Ross?” Parker asked.
“Their robot butler,” explained Sam.
“Right.”
“The point is,” said Barnes, “this could’ve fallen into the wormhole two or three hundred years from now and arrived the same day I left. It could’ve been sitting here for over a decade.”
Olivia swept her hand back and forth over the lower shoulder, knocking away the last of the moss and breaking a few of the thinner vines. “Check this out,” she called to the others.
An American flag decorated the shoulder, like the patch on a soldier’s uniform. Below it, 042 was printed in blocky black numerals. She tapped the blue corner of the flag. “It’s got fifty-four stars. Six by nine.”
“Future America,” said Sam.
“At least there’s still a future America,” said Parker.
Olivia pulled some more overgrowth away from the massive block of the shoulder, revealing smaller letters and numbers. “It’s a Cerberus-16, whatever that is.”
“Maybe it’s the pilot’s call sign,” said Logan. “Like Maverick or Goose.”
“Or Avenger,” Josh added.
Olivia shot him a thumbs-up.
"We should probably get going,” Barnes told them. “We want to get to the cave before dark.”
“You don’t want to check this out?” asked Logan.
“It isn’t going anywhere and I—”
Something hissed loud, almost a whistle, and Kyle shouted in triumph. “Got it!”
The lever folded back, and the top half of the metal figure’s torso swung forward. The dappled sunlight hit two chrome pistons. Olivia watched Logan grab the edge and pull himself up and oh yeah she was going to miss those arms. Sam waded through the ferns, moving in closer.
“Definitely a cockpit,” said Kyle, peering down into the machine. “Don’t recognize half this tech, but I’m pretty sure that’s a pilot’s chair.”
“Looks more like a saddle,” Logan said, looking over the edge of the torso hatch. “What are those?”
Kyle turned his head. “Arm braces? Controllers, maybe?
“Very Pacific Rim,” said Josh.
“Is there a pilot?” asked Olivia.
“Nothing,” said Kyle. “Looks like a lot of stuff’s been stripped out. Lots of loose wires.”
Logan let go of the hatch, pushed off the giant arm, and landed on the ground near Olivia with a soft thump. He grinned at her. A random thought passed through her head—what happens in the prehistoric valley stays in the prehistoric valley—but she didn’t want to deal with any of it right now. She turned back to the robot’s shoulder and wiped off some more moss, determined to find more words.
She felt a second thump in the ground, and a smell hit her nostrils. Dusty and oily at the same time, with a sour meat undertone. And then she heard a third thump and, wait a minute, who else jumped down from the robot?
Olivia turned. Saw Logan and Kyle looking around. Felt the fourth thump in the soles of her feet.
Parker touched Barnes on the arm. “What’s wrong?”
Another impact. Something big hitting the ground. Josh turned. “Did anyone else feel that?”
“I did,” said Olivia. And then she saw Barnes staring past them. His face unnaturally still. Trying hard not to react.
“Hide,” he whispered. “Hide now.”
9
LOGAN
Logan sighed, looked casually in the other direction as Olivia turned back to the big robot, and watched Noah’s eyes go wide. He glanced up at Kyle, halfway into the robot’s cockpit, then over at Josh standing on the half-buried arm. Everything looked fine.
“Hide,” Noah stage-whispered. “Hide now.” He trembled, and Logan’s first thought was to comfort the professor the way you’d talk to a little kid who’d woken up from a nightmare and needed to be convinced a monster wasn’t real.
As the thought went through his mind, Logan felt the pulse in the ground. A wave of pressure.
Noah took three eerily calm steps to the side. He had an iron grip on Parker’s wrist and dragged her with him. He wedged them between two scaly palms that’d grown close enough together they might’ve been a single plant with two trunks. Then he crouched, tugging Parker down with him, letting the ferns and tall grass surround them.
The whole time his gaze stayed locked on the forest behind the giant robot.
“What’s going on?” asked Josh.
Another low thump echoed up through Logan’s boots. And another. Getting stronger.
Getting closer.
Another heavy impact paired with the noise of breaking wood. The horror movie twig breaking in the forest, but to Logan it sounded like a full tree branch. Maybe a thin trunk.
Something brushed his arm and he flinched. Olivia. Their eyes met and he saw the same fear and worry sparking there, waiting for the kindling that’d create a full fire.
She looked back over her shoulder. He followed her gaze and saw the nook beneath the robot’s shoulder, right where it connected to the torso. It wasn’t deep, but it was shelter. Hopefully concealment. He nodded and they slipped back into the small space, wrapped their arms around each other, sank in another few inches.
He could barely see Noah and Parker. Just the tops of their heads from this angle. At the edge of his vision, he thought he could see Sam pressed tight against a tree.
No, not against. Behind. Sam shuffled a few inches to the side, keeping the swollen palm tree between him and something else.
Then the something stepped into view and the ground trembled again.
When Logan was little, his parents had taken him to a zoo while on some family trip to upstate New York or maybe Canada. He’d looked out at the crocodile pen from the safety of the walkway and seen the big lizards sunning themselves in the man-made swamp. He’d been staring at one as it drifted along through the water when he noticed the people next to him gleefully pointing straight down at the big log inside of the fence.
A moment later little Logan had shrieked—half joy, half terror—when he realized the log was another crocodile, maybe the biggest in the whole pen. Its sheer size had hidden it from him, his brain unable to process something so large it stretched out of his field of vision in two directions. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off it until his parents picked him up and carried him away.
The dinosaur was like that. So big it didn’t seem possible. Too real to look away from.
It loomed over them as it moved into view, coming out from behind the robot, out from behind them. At least as tall as the half-buried machine, maybe taller if it wasn’t bent low. As it was, some of the lower palm fronds scraped and scratched against a head the size of a small couch.
Its glossy black eyes took in everything. Triangular ridges—or maybe horns—sat above the eye sockets, like the angry eyebrows on a cartoon villain. Its jaw hung open and the warm stink of its breath rolled out. Bad teeth and meat and blood. Sunburn-red splashes spread across its gray-blue jaws and shoulders and down its sides. So many jokes about little arms, but those arms were longer and thicker than Logan’s legs.
Someone started to scream, just the squeak at the start of it, and Olivia pressed her hand over his mouth. Hot air rolled off her palm. He’d been screaming. Him. Oh Jesus it was so fucking big.
It marched between the palms and the robot, and each taloned foot hit the ground like a falling tree. It slowed, sniffed the air with wet, glistening nostrils bigger than its eyes. Moved that giant head side to side. Never stopped. Another big sniff and it lumbered past, its sheer size making it eerily fast. Logan’s whirling, chaotic mind threw out the image of a hockey-masked killer that always walked but couldn’t be outrun.
It was only in sight for fifteen, maybe twenty, seconds and then its tail vanished. Logan took two more frantic breaths through his nose, two calmer ones, then reached up and moved Olivia’s hand away from his mouth. He took a deep breath. Tasted urine in the air. One of them had pissed themselves, and he was pretty sure it hadn’t been Olivia.
Logan started counting to ten—no, make it twenty—to give the dinosaur as much time as possible to move on. On eight he stopped squeezing Olivia. At fifteen he leaned slightly forward out from under the robot’s arm. He could see Noah and Parker, still crouched between the two palms a few yards away, watching him through the ferns. Probably doing a count of their own.
A beat later he heard a thud, two clunks, and Kyle landed on the ground in front of the robot. He turned to them in their little nook. Smiled nervously. “Holy fuck,” he said. “Holy. Fuck. Did you see the teeth on that thing?”
Parker’s eyes were huge. Noah made small, desperate gestures. The ground pulsed again. Faster.
They felt the roar more than heard it. The armor plates of the robot buzzed with it. Logan screamed. Olivia screamed in his ear. Kyle screamed and kicked up loose dirt as he launched into a run.
The other dinosaur stomped after him, its massive legs jackhammering into the ground. Logan had half a second to think how it ran like a chicken, almost wobbling side to side, and to register the white streaks on its big haunches. Then its head darted down like it’d grabbed a worm but the worm was Kyle and he screamed as it tossed him up into the air and slammed its jaws shut on his body again. Blood sprayed out of his mouth and out of his chest and thighs and then he was gone as the dinosaur’s momentum carried it another dozen yards into the forest. Kyle fell to the ground, still screaming. The dinosaur’s foot came down on his flailing body, pinning him in a patch of ferns. Its head dipped again and yanked up and Logan heard a ripping sound and Kyle stopped screaming.
Kyle had . . . Why had he stopped screaming? What . . . what had . . .
The dinosaur bent down again, yanked its head back up, moved its jaws back and forth. It ate four, maybe five bites, prodded at the ground with its snout, and then wandered off into the trees. The first dinosaur, the bright red sunburned one, joined it. They huffed at each other as they stalked away.
The urine smell was much stronger now.
The dinosaurs lost their shape and became motion in the distance, and then the motion blurred into the forest.
Kyle still hadn’t moved from where the dinosaur had dropped him. Probably . . . probably not moving to confuse it. Like in the movies. Its vision was based on movement, right?
Something shifted behind Logan and he tried to throw himself away from it. Olivia whispered to him to calm down. Just Olivia. She had her hand over his mouth again. When had she done that? Why had she done that? Had he been screaming again?
