God's Junk Drawer, page 28
She shook her head again. “No. No woman here in the valley has ever been with child. There were two Neanderthal infants before my time here, but Qiang believed they had arrived here with their mothers, already born.”
Josh tried to do a bunch of guesstimates in his head. Considered his own experiences, those of a few friends who’d tried to conceive, and a few who hadn’t been trying at all. “Isn’t that . . . unlikely?”
A little laugh from her. “In this place? What can we truly say is unlikely?”
“Fair enough, I guess.”
“Would you like to know what I believe?”
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
She looked up at the sky, off above the houses. “I have learned many things here. Things men would not know until long after my death, had I remained in Rouen. I have been told of Dr. Darwin and his theories. The true age of the world. How this planet belonged to the dinosaurs so much longer than it did to mankind. I have come to the far past and seen the far future.”
“That’s . . . that’s kind of beautiful.”
“Thank you. I do still believe in the Lord, but I believe we have come back long before he set man down on this Earth. We are here before our own creation. As such, children cannot be conceived because there are no new souls for them.”
Josh bit his tongue.
She looked him in the eyes. “You wanted to know what I believe.”
“I did.”
“I know my thoughts may seem provincial, but it is who I am.”
“Well,” said Josh, “as a wise woman once said, in this place, what can we truly say is unlikely?”
She raised an accusing eyebrow, but another dazzling smile danced at the corners of her lips. “Thank you, Mr. Redd.”
“Josh.”
“Josh.” She stood up and brushed some wrinkles from her skirt. Swept her curly hair away from her face. “And now you must pardon me. It is time for Olivia’s next feeding. I must try to keep her strength up.”
“Right.” He stepped away, out into the wide dirt path. “Thank you for talking with a . . . a newcomer.”
“Thank you as well. For the conversation.”
He took another step back. “Let me know if there’s any change in her condition. Or, you know, if there’s anything I could do to help.”
She bowed her head. “Alas, as I’ve said, there is little else to do. Our resources here are limited. I have no access to proper instruments or even the most basic of drugs.”
Josh’s mental footing shifted again. “Oh. Well . . . what kind of drugs would you need?”
24
SAM
“Is this . . . is this a wildlife tag?” asked Noah. He leaned in closer over Sam’s shoulder, peering at the little red disk on the turtle-like dinosaur’s neck. He didn’t shove Sam into the big animal’s shoulder, but it was close.
The ankylosaurus ignored them both and kept eating. Its beaky mouth latched onto a cactus paddle the size and shape of a deflated football, tugged it free, and ate it up in three quick bites. It didn’t seem to notice the spines, and Sam wondered if the inside of its beak was hardened against them or if it was just indifferent to the pain.
“I don’t know.” Sam looked at the words again. “‘Property of’ sounds like somebody, well, owns it. This isn’t a wild, free-range dinosaur.”
Pyr stood behind them, not crowding in, for which Sam was thankful. “What’s the name again? The company name?”
He double-checked the tag. “JurassiCorp?”
Her fingers snapped with a hard crack. “It’s reassembled.”
Noah straightened up and looked at her. “It’s what?”
“It’s not a real dinosaur. I mean, it is, but it’s not prehistoric. It’s from the mid . . . twenty-second century, if I remember right.”
Sam stood up straight as well, realized he was crowded close to Noah again. “Reassembled?”
“It’s a genetics thing. Reassembled life-forms are extinct things they’ve brought back for research or zoos or whatever. Assembled life-forms are all new. Usually something bred for a specific purpose. Like Thate.”
“The blue guy?”
“Yes. He’s an assembled human. They built him to be a soldier.”
“That’s very—not creepy at all.”
The ankylosaurus let out a little cough, or maybe a grunt, and took two heavy steps forward. Its leathery shoulder bumped into Sam with all the gentleness and force of a slowly rolling car, pushing him into Noah, who finally took a few steps away. The dinosaur settled back down and began munching on a new cactus.
Noah shook his head. “No, I’ve seen dozens of dinosaurs here. I’ve never seen one of these tags before.”
Sam glanced back at the red disk. “They’re pretty small.”
“Believe me, I studied these dinosaurs. I would’ve seen them.”
Pyr held up a hand. “I’m not saying they’re all reassembled. Just this one.”
“But why is it here then?”
She shrugged. “Why is any of this here? It fell down a hole in time and here it is. Like everything else in the valley.”
“But it’s from the future,” said Noah.
“Two hundred years in the past, from my point of view.”
“I . . .” Noah stopped. Looked at the red tag again. “That makes sense. At least, it makes sense here.”
Pyr snort-laughed.
“Hang on.” Sam waved a hand, looked back at the ankylosaurus again. “So, in a hundred years someone’s actually going to make Jurassic World?”
“JurassiCorp,” she corrected.
“No, I mean . . . somebody makes a dinosaur theme park?”
“More like a zoo, if I remember right. Or maybe several zoos? It was long before my time. A meg of safety problems and animal cruelty issues. I think it got shut down after ten or fifteen years and all the dinosaurs went to zoos or collectors. Guess this one got away.”
Sam set a hand on one of the big bone plates spread across the broad turtle-like back. The hard oval was warm from the sun and glaze-slick beneath a layer of dust. The ankylosaurus didn’t seem to notice him. He imagined the dinosaur trapped in a cage, maybe one of those pit-like holding areas they had at a zoo, and suddenly finding itself outside in the expanse of the valley. “Lucky girl.”
The ankylosaurus blinked twice and shuffled forward again. Sam managed to step out of the way this time. It found a leafy shrub and munched with a lot more enthusiasm.
“Well, then,” said Noah. “We should get moving.”
Pyr rolled her shoulders. Tugged on the straps of her pack. “I agree.” She headed down the path. Noah was a step behind her.
Sam sighed. “Yeah, okay.” He patted the dinosaur one more time—the actual dinosaur right here, inches from him—and this time it rolled an eye back to stare at him curiously. They gazed at each other for a few heartbeats, and then the ankylosaurus decided the little-leafed shrub was more interesting than a would-be astrophysicist. It bit off a whole branch and chewed it to bits.
A few quick steps put him behind Noah and Pyr, and he glanced back over his shoulder. The ankylosaurus munched away, barely aware they’d left in the same way it had been barely aware of their presence. Sam had half hoped it’d follow them.
They trudged along the rough path as it wove through the sharp bushes and cacti, stretching from tree to tree. Sam watched across the wasteland, keeping an eye on the distant trees, hoping to catch sight of another dinosaur. He saw a few distant shapes glide near the Ice Castle, heard their faint screeches, but nothing close.
They stopped twice beneath twisted trees to enjoy a few sips of water in the broken shade. Under the second tree Sam noticed a swath of birdlike tracks in the dirt, as if a whole flock had run by on the ground. Each one was smaller than his hand, and here and there he could make out the dimple of tiny claws at the end of each toe. He pointed it out to Noah and Pyr, but neither of them seemed interested.
They stepped back out into the sun and Sam tried to guess how long they’d been hiking. The always-overhead sun didn’t seem as disorienting anymore—amazing how fast you could adapt to the impossible—but it still played hell with his sense of time. As an undergrad he’d taught himself to tell time off shadow lengths and now every single shadow told him it was quarter past twelve, no matter when he looked. Going off the way his feet and legs felt, he guessed it’d been . . . two and a half hours since they left Roanoke. He skimmed over the day’s high points and upped his estimate to three.
They approached the tree line. A dense area with the look of a tropical rainforest in the middle of a drought. A web of dry vines hung low from the canopy, and they rustled as Pyr pushed some of them aside.
“The border of the mushroom forest’s maybe another two hours from here. Another half hour from there to the cave.”
Sam paused to examine a rock at the tree line, a big flat thing half buried in the ground. Once again, a smooth, glassy side facing the trees. Cut off with laser precision. He wondered if there were dozens of equally smooth-sided stones scattered through Earth’s history, the leftovers of the ones that’d been swept up by the wormhole and dropped here into the valley.
As he stepped into the shade he wondered if there were bisected trees. Would they collapse? Shatter? How many mysterious “lightning strikes” in fields and deserts had been the wormhole snatching things up and leaving occasional destruction in its wake?
Long, thick tree roots stretched back and forth across the ground between the trees. They overlapped and stretched little loops above the forest floor. The random shafts of sunlight highlighted some of them like usable elements in an old video game.
Sam made it all of twenty feet before his boot snagged and sent him tumbling. He mostly caught himself, getting back up with only a small amount of wrist pain and one banged knee. Noah made it another three yards before tripping, stumbling, then tripping again. Pyr caught him before he faceplanted. Or maybe Noah grabbed at her arm and she took his weight.
Hopefully not an area they’d be required to run through.
They slowed their pace, all of them focusing on the ground ahead. Sam took a few steps, looked around, took a few more. Wondered if the roots would slow down a larger dinosaur at all. And then a few thoughts connected in his head.
“Morbid question,” he said aloud. “How often does something get cut in half when it ends up here?”
Pyr looked back at him. Noah didn’t. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, at a lot of the edges, when we enter different areas, there’s stones with sections cut off. I just wondered if it ever happened to a tree or a dinosaur or, y’know, a person. They weren’t entirely within the area of the wormhole? And so not all of them shifted to here. Now.”
Pyr started walking again. Stepped over a root thicker than her waist. “That is morbid,” she agreed.
Sam checked the ground. Started after them. “So?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever found half a dinosaur? Or a person?”
“Not that way, no. I mean, we’ve found people who didn’t survive long here. A human or a Neanderthal who arrived, wandered the wrong way, and got eaten by a raptor or an allosaurus or something else.”
“But nobody cut in half? Or a dinosaur with its tail clipped off or something.”
“Not that I’ve ever heard of.” She took a few quick steps over some tree roots, tapped Noah on the shoulder, and guided him slightly to the right around a tree so wide the three of them together would’ve strained their arms to reach around it.
“Never?”
“I’m not saying it couldn’t’ve happened. The valley’s a big place. But I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that.”
On her last word the air shifted and Sam felt a noise bump on the inside of his rib cage, like somebody else’s rapid heartbeat rumbling in his chest. He lurched to a halt. Pyr put up a silencing hand before they could say anything.
Far off to their left, a hundred yards away at least, something large moved between the trees.
Her arm slowly moved, slowly pointed to the nearby trees. She took three slow, cautious steps and put one of the thick trunks between herself and the dinosaur.
Another low rumble reached them. A faint tremor in the ground. A flash of red up in the branches. Something big moving behind the branches.
The allosaurus they called Burn.
Sam looked at the roots under his feet. At the dinosaur. Tried not to think about slipping and falling, of trying to move fast and tripping. Realized it was all he could think of. Took three excruciating steps to the closest tree. Got its thick trunk between him and Burn.
He heard a distant crack of tree branches. Another deep, low rumble. Jesus fucking Christ was that just its breathing? The scents of raw meat and dirty teeth wafted between the trees.
Pyr looked calm. Unworried. He tried to channel that calm.
The ground trembled with four . . . five . . . six slow, heavy footsteps. The air shivered with another impossibly deep breath. More branches snapped.
Another breath. This one wasn’t a tremor in the air. It was a breeze. Almost wind! So close. Was it right on the other side of the tree? Could it smell him?
Then the sounds retreated. He thought about looking and immediately remembered Kyle stepping out when the first monster wandered away, only for the second one to appear from nowhere. Such a stupid, hack B-movie gimmick, the giant monster that somehow sneaks up on someone without making a sound. But he’d seen it happen and now it lodged in his head and he couldn’t bring himself to peer around the tree.
“He’s gone,” said Pyr.
Sam exhaled. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Passing through, and he wasn’t close enough to catch our scent.”
“Aren’t there two of them?”
“There were two,” said Noah. “Didn’t you see the other one?”
“I was hiding behind the tree.”
“Smartest thing to do.” Pyr pointed ahead, away from the dinosaurs. “Let’s go.”
They started walking again as if nothing had happened. As if they hadn’t just been hiding from an allosaurus. From two allosauruses. His mind replayed the scenario of running across the web of roots, tripping and falling. He half turned, glanced over his shoulder. No sign of dinosaurs. No ultralow growls rolling through the trees.
While they hiked Sam’s brain scrolled back to what they’d been discussing before Gnash and Burn wandered by. “What about if . . . does anything ever appear halfway in a tree or boulder or anything like that?”
Pyr and Noah both glanced back at him this time. Noah wrinkled his brow. “What are you talking about?”
Sam shrugged. Gestured at the forest around them. “Well, things appear here, right? They vanish from the future and reappear here in the valley. Do they ever appear where something already is?”
Noah looked over at Pyr. “Again, not that I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Or heard of.”
“So no dinosaurs in boulders or people in trees or anything?”
She shook her head. “Sorry to disappoint you.” She took four quick steps, stretching her legs between a scattering of roots.
Sam hopped up onto the next big root and stepped to the next, never setting foot back on the ground. “What about falling?”
“What about it?” asked Noah.
“Does anything ever appear one or two hundred feet up in the air? Did you ever find anything that’d been dropped and smashed on impact? Or . . . burst, maybe? Splattered?”
Noah shook his head. “Not that I can remember.”
“Me, either,” said Pyr. “Don’t recall Ross ever telling a story about something like that either.”
“What about buried twenty feet underground or inside a cliff?”
Pyr laughed. “How would we even know if that happened?”
“Okay, what about underwater in the lake? Have any bodies ever showed up drowned?”
Noah put his leg up onto a fallen tree trunk. Kicked off. Balanced on top of it. “What’s with the morbid streak, Sam?”
He tossed the puzzle back and forth in his mind. “It’s—if I understand all of this correctly, things can appear anywhere, right? That’s why the layout of the valley keeps changing.”
Pyr nodded. Noah gave a reluctant shrug.
“So if things are getting dropped here at random, isn’t it odd that everything seems to end up intact and safe at ground level?”
Noah hopped off the tree trunk. Started walking across the roots again. “We didn’t. We all tumbled down the hill, remember?”
“We lost our balance because our footing changed. If anything, that proves my point. Back in the present, we were much higher up above sea level, but we appeared here on a smaller, lower hill.”
“We don’t know what our elevation is here.”
“You know what I mean.”
Up ahead, Pyr snapped her fingers again. “Geoff fell into the lake.”
Noah raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
“Geoff. He’s the cobbler.”
Sam knew the word from . . . fairy tales? A history class? “What’s a cobbler?”
Pyr pointed down at her dark blue plastic feet. “He makes shoes and boots for everyone. Good at it. He used to work for some company—insurance or something—in the early twenty-first century. Tried to kill himself. Threw himself off a bridge with a two-hundred-foot drop. Instead he fell thirty feet and landed in the lake. I’ve heard him tell the story four or five times.”
“So he had a degree of downward momentum, but he arrived in the one place in the valley where he could land without serious injury.”
“I suppose so. Never thought of it that way. Everyone just considered him lucky.”
Noah took that moment to catch his foot on a root and stumble, but he caught himself before falling. They all focused on the uneven ground and walked in silence for a bit. Sam took the time to toss the puzzle back and forth in his mind. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was looking at . . . something. But the assorted parts wouldn’t connect in his head, and every time he felt like he got close to lining up three or four pieces he realized he’d knocked two or three others far out of place.
