Time Crunch Page 6

  That’s not thunder!

  Chase whipped around. A herd of apatosaurs had rounded a bend in the swath, more than a dozen animals thundering toward him. The weight of the enormous dinosaurs shook the earth, huge pounding feet throwing up thick clouds of dust and mashing everything in their way.

  “Quick!” Smith shouted. “Everyone back in the trees!”

  Chase looked back and forth. Smith and Treeck were charging forward as Bridger and Zadina raced back the way they’d come. Chase hesitated, caught in the middle, not knowing who to follow. He only hesitated a second, but before a herd of stampeding apatosaurs it was far too long.

  Chase turned to follow Smith and Treeck, but caught his boot and tripped in the dust. He pulled himself up by a broken limb, but his rubbery legs buckled and dropped him on his face. Frightened senseless, he wiggled to the side of the log and curled into a ball, wrapping his arms over his head.

  “Chase!”

  Chase heard someone yell—didn’t know who it was—and the next instant the dinosaurs were upon him. An enormous foot crashed into the ground, bouncing him into the air. He came down hard—

  “Oof!”

  —and was thrown back against the log, his shoulder slamming into the rotting wood. He’d recently broken the arm—had only had the cast off for a couple of weeks—and a jolt of agony shot through the bones like a hot knife. He gasped in pain, then choked on a mouthful of dust being thrown up by the stampeding dinosaurs.

  Another heavy foot crashed down—only a foot or two away—and Chase scuttled back against the log. He could feel the earth shaking, could actually feel the power of the massive dinosaurs pounding around him. An animal crashed into the log, jarring it off the ground. The next instant it fell back, directly on top of Chase, pinning him in the dirt. He tried to wrench himself free, knowing he’d be crushed if another animal smashed into it.

  “Aaaaagh!”

  He cried out, tried desperately to pull himself free, felt his skin tearing as the ragged bark held him tight.

  “Aaaaagh!”

  A heavy foot slammed into the dirt, just missing him, the dust so thick he could barely breathe. And still the animals stormed past. He was choking on the dust, coughing, gasping for breath. A heavy tail slapped the log, tons of bone and muscle slamming the wood and mashing Chase beneath it.

  He tried to cry out, but the cry caught in his throat and he choked, coughed, gagging on the dust. Heavy feet thundered all around him, rocking the ground and jarring the huge log. Chase knew it was only moments before one of the huge animals stepped on him, crushing him to jelly.

  But he was too far gone to worry. He tried to cough, couldn’t, the heavy log weighing down on him, keeping him from brea—

  And that’s all he knew.

  7 Monster Mash

  “CHASE?”

  He heard the voice; wondered who was talking.

  “C’mon, kiddo, wake up now.”

  Kiddo? Who calls me kiddo?

  Something wet and cold pressed against his forehead, his cheeks, and his neck.

  Feels good …

  “C’mon, Chase, talk to me, kid.”

  Chase hurt—hurt everywhere—but he coughed, then managed to open a single eyelid.

  Smith and Treeck were peering down at him, Bridger and Zadina behind them looking out toward the forest. Chase coughed again, then tried to sit up—

  “Whoa, hold it, cowboy,” Treeck said. He pushed gently on Chase’s shoulder. “Just hold still a second.”

  “No,” Chase said. He tried shaking his head, but his brain felt like it was slopping around inside his skull and he quit. “Easier to breathe … sitting up.”

  He coughed again, then tried a slow, deep breath: pain like fire burned through his chest and ribs. He tried again, then said, “Just … help me sit up a little.”

  The men hesitated, then eased him up against the rotting log.

  “Yeah,” he said, able to breathe a little easier. “That’s a lot better.”

  “Here,” Treeck said, holding out a plastic canteen. “Take a small mouthful. Swish it around, then spit it back out.”

  Chase did as he was told.

  “Okay, good. Now take a swallow. Just a little one.”

  Chase took a small sip of water that trickled down his throat like a delicious, icy dessert. He took a breath, then another swallow of water—a little larger one this time—and felt a little better.

  “Thanks,” he said. And then: “What happened?”

  “You came within a whisker of being trampled,” Treeck said. “Any closer and you’d be nothing but a squishy puddle of goo in the dirt.”

  Chase nodded, remembering the stampeding apatosaurs.

  “Took all four of us to move that log off the top of you,” Bridger said over his shoulder. He was still scanning the trees, weapon ready.

  “So, are you okay?” Treeck asked. “You hurt anywhere?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Where?”

  “Top of my head—”

  “Uh-huh …”

  “—and my feet—”

  “Okay …”

  “—and every single thing in between.”

  Smith and Treeck exchanged glances and what—for them—might have been grins. Treeck quickly ran his hands down Chase’s arms, pressed his chest—Chase winced when the man touched his ribs—and finally checked both legs.

  “Might’ve bruised a couple ribs,” the man reported to Smith. “But I don’t think they’re broken.” And then to Chase: “You’ve been bashed, battered, beaten, and bruised. You’re gonna be black, blue, and sore as the devil by morning. But that’s a hundred and two percent better than being mashed to jelly.”

  Chase: “And”—he coughed—“better than being eaten.”

  Treeck: “A lot better than being eaten.”

  Chase sucked in a shallow breath—pain burned through his chest like daggers when he tried filling his lungs—beginning to feel halfway normal again. He suddenly remembered something.

  “Hey, just before I got run over”—he sucked down another breath—“there was gunfire. What was that about?”

  The men exchanged somber glances, then Smith gestured into the distance. Chase looked and spotted a cloud of greasy black smoke rising over the trees.

  “Wha—what happened?”

  Treeck shrugged matter-of-factly. “We lost our ride home.”

  THE JET WAS blown completely apart.

  The fuel tanks had ruptured and exploded, blowing the aircraft to pieces. The resulting fire had eaten everything inside and blackened what was left of the shiny-white fuselage. The tires were all flattened—exploded by the heat—greasy black smoke still roiling into the sky.

  “Don’t know exactly what happened,” Captain King said somberly. His face and arms were blackened with soot, his white shirt torn and greasy from trying to save his aircraft. “One minute everything was fine. The next instant there were shrieks and roars and bellows, and all the wildlife went crazy. A herd of animals like gigantic buffalo came thundering past and the jet was … well, it was in the way.”

  “Think they were stegosaurs,” the copilot said: he seemed stricken, troubled that he’d been able to save the plane. “Tiny heads, spikes on the tails, big triangular plates on top. We tried turning the herd, but shouting and shooting didn’t make a lick of difference. Whatever frightened them was a heckuva lot scarier than we were.”

  Captain King nodded. “They were spreading around it at first, trying to avoid it. But there were too many. They began clipping the wings and tail, knocking it around, and finally just began plowing into it. One of the wing tanks eventually ruptured: there must have been a spark …”

  He shook his head.

  “I can’t believe how fast it went up. The wings were full of fuel, of course. But it was like someone was dumping gas on it.”

  “It’s this atmosphere,” Smith said.

  “Huh?”

  “Fifty percent more oxygen. Oxygen fuels fire�
�”

  “Which is why it went up so fast,” the copilot agreed. “Why it burned as hot as it did. We never had a chance.”

  “We tried to salvage what we could,” King went on. “But there wasn’t much.”

  Chase looked at Smith. He expected the man to be furious, but for all the emotion he showed, he might have been contemplating a cup of spilled coffee.

  Smith turned to Treeck. “Did we get the supplies unloaded?”

  Treeck nodded. “Yeah. So our ammo, food and water, and … well, everything else is safe in the campsite.”

  Smith nodded: he would have been surprised if it hadn’t been.

  “What are we gonna do?” Chase asked softly. He was still stiff, sore, bruised, and mildly nauseated from being trampled, but had been able to walk—well, limp—back to camp.

  “Don’t worry too much,” Treeck said. “When we don’t return home, they’ll send someone to check on us.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. We were scheduled to be here a week—less if we found Zach. So it’ll be at least that long before we’re missed.”

  Chase tried not to let on, but he wasn’t encouraged by the news. They’d only been here a few hours and two men were already hurt—three if they counted Chase—and two more … gone.

  And they’d lost the jet.

  He couldn’t imagine what was going to happen tomorrow.

  BACK IN THE campsite, Bridger and Criss began gathering wood, preparing to build three enormous bonfires to protect their perimeter. Rivers was helping, too, but because of his injuries was unable to do much.

  “I don’t mean to sound pessimistic,” Chase told Smith. “But I don’t think the fires will help a lot.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “I saw another camp once; they had three big fires in the middle of a clearing. But a bunch of pterodactyl-like things still came dropping out of the sky. And then a tyrannosaur stomped in like it wanted to roast marshmallows.”

  Smith wrinkled his nose. “You might be right: you’ve been right about everything else.” He thought it over, then said: “But fires might frighten off some things. And even if they don’t, they’ll give us a greater sense of security. And that counts a lot at times like this.”

  “Yeah, I understand that.”

  “You were right about something else, too,” Smith said.

  “What’s that?”

  “About the number of animals here. It’s late, so we’ll tough it out tonight, but we’ll pack up and move camp first thing in the morning.” He flicked a hand. “Move a little closer to those hills you were talking about.”

  “Oh, good idea. But what if the rescue party comes? How will they know where to find us?”

  Smith reached up and tapped his headset: they had radios.

  “Oh, yeah.” Chase hesitated, then asked: “Have you got any flares? Something we could signal with after it gets dark? You know, just in case Zach is able to see ’em?”

  Smith blew out his breath, then reached out a hand and placed it on Chase’s shoulder. “Yeah, we do. And we will. But son, I think you ought to prepare yourself for the fact that … well, that he didn’t make it.”

  He paused, then continued a little more gently.

  “I mean, look what’s happened to us, and we’ve only been here a few hours.”

  Chase nodded. Tears began welling up in his eyes, and he bit his lip to keep from crying in front of the man.

  AFTER SMITH WALKED off to check the campsite, Chase spotted Mr. Jaffa sitting on a rock, still hunched over his laptop. Chase walked over and waited politely for the man to look up from his computer.

  “Hey,” Chase said. “I wondered if I could ask you something.”

  Jaffa had been absorbed by whatever he was working on, and Chase thought he might not want to be disturbed. But the man smiled and nodded.

  “Sure.”

  “I understand the concept of alternate realities and parallel universes,” Chase began. “But I wondered how you can just go flying in and out and—you know—know where you’re going.”

  “That’s what everyone wants to know,” Jaffa said. And then in a low, confidential voice: “But if we let out the secret, everyone could do it, right?”

  Chase didn’t know what to say, but Jaffa laughed and began tapping keys on his laptop. After a moment he turned the screen so Chase could see it. He’d created three parallel arrows:

  a -------------->

  b --------->

  c ------------------->

  Each of these lines represents a different reality,” he said. “Alternate versions of the universe, each one existing parallel to, but separate of the others.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you see how the arrow tips have all reached the same right-hand position?”

  “Yeah …”

  “The arrow points represent now. The time at which each reality exists at this very moment. The key is the fact that the lines are not all the same length.” He tapped the screen. “Let’s suppose line a denotes our universe … representing everything that’s happened to our world and the space around it since the beginning of time.”

  “All right.”

  Jaffa tapped line b. “This second universe is following a path parallel to ours—experiencing the same external forces, events, wonders, miracles, catastrophes—”

  “Except that it’s shorter, which means that it hasn’t been around as long. So it hasn’t reached the same degree of evolution.”

  “Exactly! So if you could jump from line a to line b—”

  “It would be like going into the past.”

  “Exactly!” Jaffa lifted a finger. “It wouldn’t be our past, of course. But it would be remarkably similar.” He waved a hand. “And that’s essentially what we’ve done here. We’ve jumped onto a line 165 million years shorter than ours.”

  He tapped the computer screen. “And then if we jumped onto line c”—he pointed to the third arrow—“which is longer than ours—”

  “It would be like jumping into the future.”

  “Not our future, of course. But it would be similar enough that we could pop in, take a look around, and have a pretty good idea what our world will be like ten, fifty, or a million years from now.”

  “All right, I get that. But how do you jump from one line to another?”

  “Well, to explain that, forget the arrows and picture a bubble bath …”

  Chase grinned: he often used bubble baths himself to explain the idea of the multiverse.

  “Okay, I get it. Every bubble represents a different reality. Some are older, some newer, just like your parallel lines. But in a bubble bath, the bubbles are all touching other bubbles.”

  Jaffa’s grin broadened. “Exactly.” And then: “You know, I’ve explained this to men with suits and ties and multiple doctorates who didn’t catch on as quickly as you.”

  Chase shrugged modestly. “I have the benefit of experience.”

  He became more serious.

  “So if two realities—two bubbles—are touching one another, you can pop from one into the other?”

  “Yes”—Jaffa waved a hand—“which is how we came to be here.”

  “But how do you know where two bubbles are touching? And how do you know what’s going to be on the other side?”

  “Well, that’s where things get sticky. It involves rigorous mathematical calculations and a solid grasp of electromagnetics. The short version is that realities in contact with one another produce electromagnetic radiation. It’s like fierce static and is easily detectable.”

  He shrugged.

  “So we know how to find other realities. But the only way to know what’s on the other side is to actually pop in for a look. The day might come when we can predict what we’ll find. But for now, we have to actually visit the place. And once we do, we can visit whenever we wish.”

  “Wow.” He makes it all sound so simple! Chase thought. But: “How do you actually �
��pop’ in and out?”

  “More physics.” Jaffa pulled a pen from his pocket. “Imagine this is a nail …”

  “Okay.”

  “If I held it over a fire until it was red hot, and then pushed it against a piece of solid plastic—”

  “It would go right through.”

  “Exactly.” Jaffa gestured toward the ruined jet. “You already know, I believe, that the aircraft is—was—made of a material called trimerium—”

  “Ah,” Chase said. “Dr. Bream’s magic stuff.”

  “Exactly.”

  Chase nodded, much of Mr. Jaffa’s explanation beginning to make sense. Dr. Bream was an eccentric scientist who synthesized trimerium—a metal stronger than titanium yet lighter than aluminum—from the remnants of an ancient meteorite. Trimerium not only made light, incredibly strong airplanes, but it amplified energy. Boosted it. Magnified it to the point that a trimerium aircraft hit by lightning set off explosions brighter than Fourth of July fireworks.

  Jaffa smiled, seeing that Chase had figured it out. “The jet engines power several electrical generators. Once we reach an ‘entry’ point, we pump a fantastic amount of electrical current through the jet’s trimerium skin and the plane—”

  “Punches through like a hot knife through peanut butter.”

  Chase nodded, remembering the strange hum—and how the hair stood up on his head and arms—just before the jet flew through the barrier.

  Jaffa smiled warmly. “Exactly! I think I’ll take you the next time I need to explain this to the company’s board of directors. The fact you get this so easily will make them feel like the bunch of old duffs they really are.”

  Chase had more questions—he had a lot more questions—but knew he was interrupting the man’s work and decided it would be better not to overstay his welcome.

  He could corner the man another time.

  THE SUN WAS SETTING and Chase was about to head for his tent, but spotted Bridger waving at him. He walked over and the man held out a couple of MREs.

  “What do you feel like? Roast beast with au gratin potatoes, or spaghetti and meatslop?”

  Chase laughed. “Roast beast.”