In the Time of Dinosaurs Read online

  like torpedoes.

  The rescue vehicle was a quarter mile ahead of us. I lost sight of it when we shot to the surface to breathe. Up, suck in air, down and swim, and up, suck in air, down and swim. It

  was slower going on the surface, but we needed to breathe because we

  were straining every muscle in our bodies. «This is probably stupid,» Rachel said. «I mean, what do we think is going to -»

  Flash! A light so bright it seemed to burn right through me. Page 7

  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs WHAAAAAAM! The shock wave hit us.

  I tumbled through a world that was being torn apart at the seams. And then that world went black.

  Rachel

  I don't know how long I was unconscious. But when I came to I was on the surface of the water. I was lolling there like some kind of dead fish. First thought: Where are the others? Second thought: How long have I been in morphl «Cassie! Tobias! Jake!» I yelled in thought-speak. No answer. I moved my tail and flippers. Okay, at least I wasn't

  injured. I dove below the surface and looked around. The water was clearer than it had been. Strange, given the fact that a nuclear warhead had just exploded.

  «Marco! Ax!» «I was wondering when you'd get around to calling me,» Marco answered. He glided up beside me. «Have you seen any of the others?» «No. But I was knocked out.» I fired an echolocation burst. Fish. A pair of distant whales. No

  dolphins. Although if they were floating on the surface they might not

  show up. «I have an idea,» Marco said. «We dive down, then look up. They should be silhouetted against the sun.»

  «Good idea. Only it's raining. There's no . . .» I'd been about to say there was no sun. But the golden rays were piercing the water around me. «Must have cleared up. Man, we may have been out a long time.»

  We dove down deep. We looked up. And there, outlined against the sun, were four tapered shapes.

  «Come on,» I said and shot toward them. I bonked one of them with my nose. «Hey! What? What?» Tobias yelped. «Jeez! You scared me to death. Good grief, I thought you were one of those lousy wildcats.»

  «Tobias, only you would wake up suddenly and worry about wildcats,»

  Marco said. «Try sleeping in a tree in the woods,» he grumbled. «You'll worry about them, too.»

  We nudged each of the others. Ax and Jake revived. Cassie revived, too. But she woke up screaming in pain. «Ahhh! Ahhh!» That's when we noticed the blood leaking from her eyes and blowhole. Page 8

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  «Oh, oh, it hurts!» «Demorph!» Jake yelled. «Trying . . . trying ... oh, oh!» Gradually the gray rubbery flesh melted away and a human girl emerged.

  As she demorphed, the dolphin's pain was left behind. I nuzzled in

  close, giving her a dorsal fin to hang onto. "Wow, that really hurt," she said calmly, once her human mouth was back in place. She looked around. "Why is the water so calm? Why is it sunny?" She lifted herself up a foot out of the water, using Jake and me as support.

  Then she settled back. "Urn ... am I awake?" «Of course.» "And this isn't a dream?" «Can't be a dream,» Marco said. «There's not a single Baywatch girl

  around. Carmen is always there when I dream.» "You're sure this is reality?" Cassie asked before I could make a

  crushing remark to Marco about the total impossibility of Carmen Electra ever even looking at him. «Cassie, it's not a dream,» Jake said. "Okay. Then why is there a volcano over there?" No one said anything for a few seconds. Then all at once we dove down

  under, leaving Cassie floundering and yelling, "Hey!" I dove down twenty feet, turned and powered my way straight up. I

  exploded from the water, smooth and sleek as a missile. I shot up into the air, up where I could see beyond the tops of the short, choppy waves. I took a look. Then, too stunned to line up for a dive, I belly flopped.

  The first dolphin in history to belly flop. «There's a volcano over there! There's an actual volcano! We don't have a volcano. I would have noticed that.»

  «That was a definite volcano,» Tobias agreed.

  «Is it some weird effect from the explosion?» Jake asked. «Like maybe setting off that bomb in the fissure caused some kind of sudden erup-tion?» "We have to get back! People could be hurt!" «Something is way wrong here,» I said. Volcanoes don't just suddenly

  erupt. Besides, look how high that thing was. That takes hundreds of

  years of lava and ash building up.» «How do you know anything about volca-noes?» Jake demanded. «Did we do volcanoes in school?»

  «No it was . . . some other place,» I mumbled. But they all just waited. Waited to hear how I knew about volcanoes. «Oh, all right. It was the Magic School Bus, okay? They went into a volcano^

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  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs «Excuse me,» Ax said politely. «But something very large is coming toward us. A pair of creatures of some sort. I just echolocated them.»

  «A pair of whales,» I said, dismissing it. «I saw them earlier. I think we need to haul back to land and see what -»

  «Not whales,» Ax said. «Who cares? Maybe you missed it, Ax, but we have a volcano -a volcano!-right about where all our houses should be! Let's get going. Cassie, you need to -»

  "Uh . . . what is that?" Cassie asked. She was staring hard, but she started to morph back into dolphin. «What?» "That!"

  I turned to follow the direction of her stare. We all turned. It rose ten feet from the water. A very long neck. Like a gray-green giraffe. On the end of that neck was a sculpted, streamlined head about two feet long. And coming up, right behind it, was another tall neck and head.

  «No way,» Tobias whispered. «What is that, the Loch Ness monster?!» Marco cried. «It's Visser Three in morph!» I said. «No, wait, can't be. There are two

  of them.» «No way!» Tobias said again. «They're coming after us!» Cassie said. «As I said,» Ax said smugly, «not whales.»

  Tobias I knew what it was. Or at least I knew what it looked like. But I wasn't

  about to say anything. If I was wrong, Marco would tease me about it till the day I died. Besides, it was impossible. Totally impossible. So I didn't say anything. But oh, man, I hauled my dolphin tail out of there. «They're too fast,» Jake said. «Man, they're fast!» We were plowing up the now-placid water. We were going flat out. But the

  creatures were gaining on us. And the whole time in my head I was going,

  No way, no way. And yet with each glance at those long necks, with each flash of those snake heads, I became more convinced.

  The creatures were no more than a hundred feet back. «We can't outrun them,» Jake said grimly. «We either have to split up or fight.» Page 10

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  «Fight!» Rachel said. «They're just some kind of big squid or something probably. Let's get them!» I liked Rachel even before I became a hawk. But now I really like her.

  She could be a bird of prey. She'd be a natural. But she was wrong this time. «Split up,» I said. «I don't think we can beat them.» «We haven't tried yet,» she said. «You don't understand. Look, I know this will sound crazy, but -» SHWOOOOSH! Coming up from below. Like some weird, massively oversized dolphin.

  Forty . . . fifty feet long! An impossibly huge jaw open wide.

  We'd been watching the creatures chasing us. All I had time to see of this new threat was the flash of teeth. «Aaaahhhh!» It had me. No time to move. Up, up, up I went! High into the

  air, trapped in those massive jaws as it broke the surface.

  It tossed me up. Just like I'd seen seabirds do with a fish. Tossed me up, opened its massive jaws, and swallowed me whole. I was being swallowed! I was unconscious, then conscious again, then unconscious. I hit water. No, not water! Too warm. Hot. Burning! My skin was burning! I was blind. Deaf, except for the sound of churning. And the steady bass


  drum of a heart beating.

  Then, something else beside me. My dolphin sense knew. It was another dolphin. «Who is that?» «It's me!» an enraged voice cried. «Rachel!» «Who did you expect? Jonah? We have to get out of this thing. Ahhhh! My

  skin is itching and burning.» «Stomach acid,» I said. «It's digesting us.» «It's not digesting me!» Rachel said. «I'm gonna morph! I'm tearing a

  hole out of here.» «You have to pass through human to morph,» I said. «The stomach acid!» «No choice.» I could already feel her changing. I felt human fingers pressed against

  me in the gnashing, enclosed space. She was right. No other choice. And

  I wasn't going to let her do it alone. I had very few morphs available to me. And only one that would help here. But first I had to revert to bird form.

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  Something like a rock was in the stomach. It was grinding against me with the movements of the stomach wall. And as I lost the tough hide of a dolphin and regained the fragile hollow bones of my own hawk body, the beating became deadly.

  Even Rachel's body was crushing me, as her elbows and fists and knees were shoved against me, time and again.

  But all that was nothing compared to one simple fact: I couldn't breathe.

  Suffocating!

  «Air!» I moaned.

  Rachel couldn't answer. She was human again. But I knew she must be suffocating, too.

  My left wing was broken. My tail was a mess. I was wracked with pain. But none of that mattered because I was going down now. Sinking and swirling down a long, black well.

  Too late to morph again. I knew it. I was done.

  And my last conscious thought was a flash of myself, years earlier, back when I was still completely human. I saw myself playing with the little plastic figurine -a plastic toy model of the animal whose belly I was in. A booklet had come with the figurine. I'd memorized all the facts in that booklet.

  «They were wrong,» I thought as my mind shut down. «It's bigger than they said.»

  Jake

  «It has Rachel and Tobias!» Cassie screamed.

  I knew. I'd been on the surface when the monster had snatched them up and tossed them down its throat. But I couldn't think about that. I still had three people with me. I had to save them.

  The long-necked creatures were behind us, the larger one in front. Which would eat us?

  «Everyone dive!» I said.

  «What about -?» Marco began.

  «Do it!» I roared.

  Down we went. Down fifty, sixty, seventy feet. The monsters were like ships overhead. The two long-necked ones started to dive after us. Then they hesitated. The larger creature, the one that had gotten Rachel and Tobias, was closing in.

  «Now! While they're arguing over who gets to eat us,» I said. «Let's get out of here!»

  «We can't leave Rachel and Tobias,» Cassie said.

  «Can you beat that thing, Cassie?» I demanded. «You want to stay here and try? Sooner or later those creatures will decide who we belong to.

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  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs We have to run while they're fighting over us.» «Rachel!» Cassie cried in thought-speak. «Rachel! Can you hear me? Rachel!» «Now, Cassie! Marco, Ax, get her!» Marco and Ax each bit down on a flipper and dragged Cassie away.

  «Let me go! Rachel! Rachel! RACHEL!» I felt sick inside. Mad at Cassie, scared, beaten, and for some reason even mad at Rachel and Tobias. But mostly I felt sick. What was happening?

  We swam away as fast as we could move. I heard a screeching roar of rage reverberating through the water. The monsters were fighting.

  We swam toward shore. And after a while Cassie swam on her own. The sea floor beneath us sloped up and up, rising to meet us. When we were in no more than five feet of water, we began to demorph. I hoped we could do it. I didn't know how long we'd been in morph.

  I gratefully resumed my own body. I lifted myself sluggishly out of the

  water and staggered up the beach. I flopped facedown, then rolled over. Cassie and Marco came seconds later. Ax took a few extra minutes and appeared in human morph.

  "Something is very wrong, Prince Jake," he said.

  I didn't answer. Of course something was wrong. Rachel and Tobias were probably dead. So something would always be wrong now. Forever. "Jake, Ax is right," Marco said. "Get up. Look at this!" I stood up. Marco, Ax, and Cassie were all staring, openmouthed, across

  the beach toward the boardwalk. There was no boardwalk. No hot dog stands, no Ferris wheel, no video arcades. No buildings at

  all. No people. Nothing but a line of trees pressing right up against the sand. And off above the trees, the cone of the volcano with a tall plume of smoke.

  "This isn't home," Marco said. "What is going on here?" I wondered. I slogged up the beach toward the trees. I expected to see something behind the trees. But behind the front row of trees were just more trees. Far off, through

  gaps in the tree trunks, I caught glimpses of an open space. But I was seeing grass and flowers there, not a city. Marco and Cassie came up behind me. "Listen," Marco said. "Listen to what?" "The quiet. Just the breeze in the trees." Cassie said, "No seagulls. There are always gulls."

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  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs I had noticed something else. "There's no trash. No old soda cans. No candy wrappers. Nothing. I mean, nothing."

  "So, what happened?" Marco asked. "That explosion blew us halfway around the planet to some desert island somewhere in the middle of nowhere?"

  I shrugged. Most of my brain was still focused on Rachel and Tobias. I wasn't tracking. And yet I felt a nagging sense of urgency. A little voice telling me to get it together. A little warning voice telling me we were not safe.

  I turned around. "Ax! What are you doing?"

  He was about a hundred yards down the beach. "I'm trying to understand something, Prince Jake."

  I headed toward him. The sand was darker and rougher than I remembered. But then, who knew where we were? The tracks I saw in the sand seemed to have been made by large birds. I got this sudden, illogical rush, thinking maybe they'd been left by Tobias. They looked like they'd been made by talons.

  But of course that was impossible. I had gotten Tobias and Rachel killed. If only I'd been watching ahead instead of looking behind, I could have seen the threat coming. I should have had everyone morph to shark. Then we could have fought.

  Should have, should have.

  "No footprints," Cassie said. "No human footprints, anyway."

  We reached Ax. He was staring toward the trees. I followed the direction of his look. There was a sort of alleyway through the trees. Some were bent aside. Some had the branches on one side broken, hanging limp with dying leaves. Other trees were simply snapped. Broken.

  And all along this "alleyway" the top third of the trees seemed to have been stripped of leaves.

  Marco stared, too. He bumped into me and shoved me into a hole in the sand. I was going to shove him back, but this was no time to be playing around.

  "I am still unfamiliar with some Earth creatures," Ax said. "Cuh-ree-chers. Tell me, what sort of creature can do that?"

  "Probably a tornado or something," I said vaguely. "I've seen things like that on TV when there's been a tornado."

  "Ah," Ax said. "Does a tornado have feet?"

  I almost smiled. "No. A tornado is a wind storm."

  "I see. Then this was not caused by a tornado. Whatever did this has feet."

  "How do you know?" Cassie asked.

  "Because Prince Jake is standing in one of the footprints."

  I looked down. It could have been the footprint of an elephant. Except that the toes were more like claws.

  Plus, the print sank at least six inches into the sand. Page 14

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And oh, yes: It was about four feet across

  Cassie

  Jake jumped up out of that footprint like it was filled with rattlesnakes.

  We stared at the footprint.

  Then we looked up and stared at the alleyway that something had made through the trees.

  Then we stared at the way the leaves had been stripped from a lot of the highest branches of the trees.

  "Jake, something ate those leaves," I pointed out.

  "Those trees are like thirty feet tall," Jake said.

  "There are a cluster of these same footprints over there." Ax pointed about ten feet away.

  "And all across there it's as if the sand has been swept. Swe-put. Swep-tuh."

  Jake looked at me. "Cassie, do you know anything that could possibly have this footprint?"

  Jake thinks I'm some kind of animal expert. I shook my head. "What it looks like is some very, very large animal came through those woods. It was munching the top leaves of the trees. Like a giraffe would do. Then it hit the water here. It turned around. That's the cluster of prints there. And it has an insanely long tail. That's the swept area. Once it was turned around, it went back the way it came."