Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (24 page)

All the surrounding eyes vanished when a dinosaur grunted.

It could have been a smaller creature, even a herbivore; but that would not have made it harmless. In the event, it was precisely what they feared it was when the savage noise filled the forest: the tyrannosaur hunting them and very close.

The fire was of branches and four-foot lengths of sapling they had broken after notching with the knife. Vickers’ face lost all expression. He grabbed the unburned end of a billet and turned toward the sound. “No!” Adrienne cried. “Spread the fire in a line—it won’t follow us through a fire again!”

It was the difference between no good chance and no chance at all. Vickers scuffed a bootload of coals out into the heaped pine needles and ran into the night with his brand. The lowest branches of the pines were dead and dry, light-starved by the foliage nearer the sky. The resin-sizzling torch caught them and they flared up behind the guide. Half-burned twigs that fell to the forest floor flickered among the matted needles. Vickers already was twenty yards from their original campfire when he remembered that Don Washman still lay helpless beside it.

The dozen little fires Vickers had set, and the similar line Adrienne Salmes had ignited on the other side of the campfire, were already beginning to grow and merge. The guide turned and saw the flames nearing Washman’s feet, though not—thank God—his head. That was when the tyrannosaur stepped into view. In the firelight it was hard to tell the mottled camouflage natural to its hide from the cracked and blistered areas left by the earlier blaze. Vickers cursed and hurled his torch. It spun end over end, falling short of its intended target.

The tyrannosaur had been advancing with its head hung low. It was still fifteen feet high at the hips. In the flickering light, it bulked even larger than the ten tons it objectively weighed. Adrienne looked absurd and tiny as she leaped forward to meet the creature with a pine torch. Behind her the flames were spreading, but they were unlikely to form a barrier to the beast until they formed a continuous line. That was seconds or a minute away, despite the fact that the fuel was either dry or soaking with pitch.

Adrienne slashed her brand in a figure eight like a child with a sparkler. Confused by the glare and stench of the resinous flames, the carnosaur reared back and took only a half-step forward—onto the torch Vickers had thrown.

The guide grabbed up the poles at Washman’s head. He dragged the pilot away from the fire like a pony hauling a travois. When the tyrannosaur screeched, Vickers dropped the stretcher again and turned, certain he would see the beast striding easily through the curtain of fire. Instead it was backing away, its great head slashing out to either side as if expecting to find a tangible opponent there. The blonde woman threw her torch at the dinosaur. Then, with her arms shielding her face, she leaped across the fire. She would have run into the bole of a tree had Vickers not caught her as she blundered past. “It’s all right!” he shouted. “It’s turned! Get the other end of the stretcher.”

Spattering pitch had pocked but not fully ignited Adrienne’s garments. The tears furrowing the soot on her cheeks were partly the result of irritants in the flames. “It’ll be back,” she said. “You know it will.”

“I’ll have a rifle in my hands the next time I see it,” the guide said. “This is one dino that won’t be a matter of business to shoot.”

The alarm awakened the camp. Then muzzle flashes lit the white faces of the clients when the first dinosaur trotted down the trail. Even the grenade launcher could not divert the monsters. After a long time, the gunfire slackened. Then Miss McPherson returned with additional ammunition.

Somewhat later, the shooting stopped for good.

If he had not been moving in a stupor, the noise of the scavengers would have warned Vickers. As it was, he pushed out of the trees and into a slaughter yard teeming with vermin on a scale with the carcasses they gorged on. Only when Mears cried out did the guide realize they were back in the camp. The four clients were squeezed together on top of the machine gun tower.

Vickers was too shocked to curse. He set down his end of the stretcher abruptly. The other end was already on the ground. “Henry, do you want the knife?” Adrienne asked. He shook his head without turning around.

There were at least a dozen torosaurs sprawled on the northern quadrant of the camp, along the trail. They were more like hills than anything that had been alive, but explosive bullets from the 12.7mm machine gun had opened them up like chainsaws. The clients were shouting and waving rifles in the air from the low tower. Vickers, only fifty feet away, could not hear them because of the clatter of the scavengers. There were well over one hundred tons of carrion in the clearing. Literally thousands of lesser creatures had swarmed out of the skies and the forest to take advantage.

“Lesser” did not mean “little” in the Cretaceous.

Vickers swallowed. “Can you carry Don alone if I lead the way?” he asked. “We’ve got to get to the others to find out what happened.”

“I’ll manage,” the woman said. Then, “You know, they must have fired off all their ammunition. That’s why they’re huddled there beside—”

“I know what they goddamn did!” the guide snarled. “I also know that if there’s one goddamn round left, we’ve got a chance to sort things out!” Neither of them voiced the corollary. They had heard the tyrannosaur challenge the dawn an hour earlier. Just before they burst into the clearing, they had heard a second call, and it was much closer.

Adrienne knelt, locking one of the pilot’s arms over her shoulders. She straightened at the knees, lifting her burden with her. Washman’s muscles were slack. “That’s something I owe my husband for,” Adrienne gasped. “Practice moving drunks. When I was young and a fool.”

Vickers held one of the stretcher poles like a quarterstaff. He knew how he must look in his underwear. That bothered him obscurely almost as much as the coming gauntlet of carrion-eaters did.

A white-furred pterosaur with folded, twenty-foot wings struck at the humans as they maneuvered between two looming carcasses. Vickers slapped away the red, chisel-like beak with his staff. Then he prodded the great carrion-eater again for good measure as Adrienne staggered around it. The guide began to laugh.

“What the hell’s so funny?” she demanded.

“If there’s an intrusion vehicle back there,” Vickers said, “which there probably isn’t or these sheep wouldn’t be here now, maybe I’ll send everybody home without me. That way I don’t have to explain to Stern what went wrong.”

“That’s a hell of a joke!” Adrienne snapped.

“Who’s joking?”

Because of the huge quantity of food, the scavengers were feeding without much squabbling. The three humans slipped through the mass, challenged only by the long-necked pterosaur. Fragile despite its size, the great gliding creature defended its personal space with an intensity that was its only road to survival. Met with equal force, it backed away of necessity.

Dieter Jost lay under the gun tower, slightly protected by the legs and crossbraces. He was mumbling in German and his eyes did not focus. Vickers took the pilot’s weight to set him by the ladder. Mears hopped down and began shrieking at Adrienne Salmes, “Goddamn you, your crazy husband took the time machine back without us, you bitch!”

Vickers straightened and slapped the contractor with a blow that released all the frustrations that had been building. Mears stumbled against the tower, turned back with his fists bunched, and stopped. The blonde woman’s knife was almost touching his ribs.

“Where’s Steve?” the guide asked loudly. He was massaging his right palm with his left as if working a piece of clay between them.

Miss McPherson jumped to the ground. In the darkness, the tower had drawn them. Since both boxes of 12.7mm ammunition had been sluiced out into the night, it was obviously irrational to stay on a platform that would not reach a tyrannosaur’s knee . . . but human reason is in short supply in a darkened forest. “One of the dinosaurs killed him,” the older woman blurted. “We, we tried to keep Mr. Jost safe with us, but we ran out of bullets and, and, the last hour has been—”

Brewer had a cut above his right eyebrow. He looked shell-shocked but not on the edge of hysteria as his three companions were. “When it was light enough to search,” he said, “I got your ammo out. I thought it might work in his”—he gestured toward Dieter beneath him—“rifle. Close but no cigar.” The meat packer’s fingers traced the line which a piece of bursting cartridge case had drawn across his scalp.

“Well, we put the fear of God into ’em,” Mears asserted sullenly. “They’ve been afraid to come close even though we’re out of ammo now. But how’d we get
out
of here, I want to know!”

“We don’t,” Vickers said flatly. “If the intrusion vehicle’s gone, we are well and truly screwed. Because there’s never yet been an insertion within a hundred years of another insertion. But we’ve got a closer problem than that, because—”

The tyrannosaur drowned all other sounds with its roar.

Vickers stepped into the nearer of the ponies without changing expression. The engine caught when he pushed the starter. “Adrienne,” he said, “get the rest of them down to the slough—Don and Dieter in the pony. Fast. If I don’t come back, you’re on your own.”

Adrienne jumped in front of the vehicle. “We’ll both go.”

“Goddamn it,
move!”
the guide shouted. “We don’t have time!”

“We don’t know which of us it’s tracking!” the woman shouted back. “I’ve got to come along!”

Vickers nodded curtly. “Brewer,” he called over his shoulder, “get everybody else out of here before a pack of carnosaurs arrives and you’re in the middle of it.” He engaged the pony’s torque converter while the blonde woman was barely over the side. As they spun out southward from the camp, the guide shouted, “Don’t leave Don and Dieter behind, or so help me—”

“How fast can it charge?” Adrienne asked as they bounced over a root to avoid a tangle of berry bushes.

“Fast,” Vickers said bluntly. “I figure if we can reach the sauropods we killed the other day, we’ve got a chance, though.”

They were jouncing too badly for Adrienne to stay in a seat. She squatted behind Vickers and hung onto the sides. “If you think the meat’s going to draw it off, won’t it stop in the camp?” she asked.

“Not that,” said the guide, slamming over the tiller to skirt a ravine jeweled with flecks of quartz. “I’m betting there’ll be gorgosaurs there by now, feeding. That’s how we’d have gotten carnosaur heads for the other gunners, you see. The best chance I can see is half a dozen gorgosaurs’ll take care of even
our
problem.”

“They’ll take care of us too, won’t they?” the woman objected.

“Got a better idea?”

The smell of the rotting corpses would have guided them the last quarter-mile even without the marker. The tyrannosaur’s own kill had been several days riper, but the sheer mass of the five titanosaurs together more than equaled the effect. The nearest of the bodies lay with its spine toward the approaching pony in a shaft of sunlight through the browsed-away top cover. Vickers throttled back with a curse. “If there’s nothing here,” he said, “then we may as well bend over and kiss our asses goo—”

A carnosaur raised its gory head over the carrion. It had been buried to its withers in the sauropod’s chest, bolting bucketloads of lung tissue. Its original color would have been in doubt had not a second killer stalked into sight. The gorgosaurs wore black stripes over fields of dirty sand color, and their tongues were as red as their bloody teeth. Each of the pair was as heavy as a large automobile, and they were as viciously lethal as leopards, pound for pound.

“All right,” Vickers said quietly. He steered to the side of the waiting pair, giving the diesel a little more fuel. Three more gorgosaurs strode watchfully out of the forest. They were in an arc facing the pony. The nearest of them was only thirty feet away. Their breath rasped like leather pistons. The guide slowed again, almost to a stop. He swung the tiller away.

One of the gorgosaurs snarled and charged. Both humans shouted, but the killer’s target was the tyrannosaur that burst out of the forest behind the pony. Vickers rolled the throttle wide open, sending the vehicle between two of the lesser carnivores. Instead of snapping or bluffing, the tyrannosaur strode through the gorgosaur that had tried to meet it. The striped carnosaur spun to the ground with its legs flailing. Pine straw sprayed as it hit.

“It’s still coming!” Adrienne warned. Vickers hunched as if that could coax more speed out of the little engine. The four gorgosaurs still able to run had scattered to either side. The fifth thrashed on the ground, its back broken by an impact the tyrannosaur had scarcely noted. At another time, the pack might have faced down their single opponent. Now, the wounded tyrannosaur was infuriated beyond questions of challenge and territory.

“Henry, the river,” the woman said. Vickers did not change direction, running parallel to the unseen bank. “Henry,” she said again, trying to steady herself close to his ear because she did not want to shout, not for this, “we’ve done everything else we could. We have to try this.”

A branch lashed Vickers across the face. His tears streamed across the red brand it left on his cheek. He turned as abruptly as the pony’s narrow axles allowed. They plunged to the right, over the ridgeline and into the thick-set younger trees that bordered the water. Then they were through that belt, both of them bleeding from the whipping branches. Reeds and mud were roostering up from all four wheels. The pony’s aluminum belly began to lift. Their speed dropped as the treads started to act as paddles automatically.

“Oh dear God, he’s stopping, he’s stopping,” Adrienne whimpered. Vickers looked over his shoulder. There was nothing to dodge now that they were afloat, only the mile of haze and water that they would never manage to cross. The tyrannosaur had paused where the pines gave way to reeds, laterite soil to mud. It stood splay-legged, turning first one eye, then the other, to the escaping humans. The bloody Sun jeweled its pupils.