In the Time of Dinosaurs Page 4

  pieces, it had just snapped. But it was agonizing. No matter how she

  tried, she couldn't keep from bending the bone slightly. She grabbed the two sticks with her left hand and managed to line them up against the bone. She transferred the pressure to her left hand and there came a new wave of pain, so severe it made me sick inside.

  She quickly wound one strip around my wing. «Tighter,» I said. "It'll hurt you." «It'll hurt worse if my wing doesn't heal.» She tightened and I tried not to scream. The other two strips went on easier. She checked the knots, then sat

  back and wiped her face with the back of her hand. She was sweating and pale. "I don't know how Cassie does things like that," she said.

  «You did great. No training, no experience. Come on, you did great.» She stood up, and for the first time with decent eyes, looked across the river at the small hadrosaur herd. "Oh, my God. What is this, Jurassic Park!"

  «Probably more like Cretaceous Park. I think hadrosaurs were more

  common in the Cretaceous Period.» Rachel glared at me. "I've known you a long time, Tobias. I don't remember you ever talking about dinosaurs."

  «I was so into dinosaurs when I was little,» I said. «I was staying with my uncle at that point. He liked to drink. He'd sit in his La-Z-Boy and start yelling at the TV and cursing, and then yelling at me if I made any noise. I used to go into my room and sit there, playing dinosaur.»

  We started to climb up the bank of the river. Or to be more accurate, Rachel started to climb, and I perched like so much dead, useless weight on her shoulder.

  It was a struggle to hold on without digging my talons into her skin.

  I'm sure I hurt her. But Rachel, being Rachel, said nothing. We reached the top of the bank. We were in a sea of grass that extended alongside the river-bank. Beyond the grass was a line of dark, forbidding trees. Here and there I saw flashes of color: flowers. And then there was the volcano.

  «Flowers,» I said. «Cretaceous Period.» "So what's the difference between Jurassic and Cretaceous?" Page 23

  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs

  «Well, a lot of things. Cretaceous was the last age of dinosaurs. They died out very suddenly at the end of the age, about sixty-five million years ago. I mean, well ... sixty-five million years before our own time.»

  "So in the Cretaceous Age there's probably just the leftover dinosaurs. Not like the ones in Jurassic Park."

  «Not exactly,» I said. «See, Jurassic Park was slightly inaccurate. I mean, some of the dinosaurs they showed were actually from this time, from the Cretaceous.»

  She looked hard at me. "You're not going to tell me what I hope you're not going to tell me, are you?"

  «Afraid so. If I'm right and we are in the Cretaceous Period, well then, this is the age of the most relentless, powerful, dangerous, ruthless predator in all of history. This is the age of Tyrannosaurus rex.»

  Marco

  CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

  The ground shook!

  "HrrrrRRROOOOAAAARRR-unh!"

  It was so loud it had to be right behind me! I was screaming. I was crying as I ran. It was panic. Pure panic. Leaves slapped my face. Twigs whipped my bare arms.

  I glanced back. Through my blurring tears I saw it bounding, leaping, running after us.

  Forty feet long, from head to tail. Twelve thousand pounds. Seven-inch, serrated-edged teeth.

  But it was the eyes that were the worst. They were intelligent, eager eyes. Hungry eyes. Eyes that seemed almost to laugh at me, helpless creature that I was.

  Could I morph? Morph what? Morph what? There was nothing that could stand against a Tyrannosaurus rex. Nothing! My gorilla morph? The Tyrannosaurus would eat it in two bites.

  I saw flashes of the others, all in flat-out panic run. It would have us all. None of us could fight it. Not even Ax, who was pulling ahead of the stumbling humans.

  No! Wait! There was a way!

  "Get small!" I screamed. "Morph small!" The words tore my throat as I yelled.

  Wham!

  The root seemed to reach up out of the ground to grab my foot. I hit hard. I sucked air but nothing came. My lungs were emptied. Heart pounding. The others kept running. Didn't realize I'd fallen. Roll!

  I rolled over just as the impossibly big talon came raking down. Page 24

  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs

  WHAMMM! The tyrannosaur's foot hit like a dropped safe. I bounced from the impact.

  Down came the head, teeth flashing, eyes greedy for my flesh.

  I sucked in a breath. Rolled, scrambled, tripped, kicked forward and landed in a fern at the base of a tree. The tree trunk was no more than a foot in diameter.

  I pulled myself behind it. No way to hide.

  The dinosaur kicked at me with one foot. I dodged.

  "Morph, you idiot!" someone yelled at me. I recognized my own voice, but I couldn't imagine speaking the words.

  What? What could I morph? What was small enough?

  SCRRRRRAACK! WHAAAMMM! A talon came down and scraped the bark off the tree before it hit. I yanked my leg out a split second before it would have been crushed.

  Talon? Yes, huge bird feet. Bird, that was the trick. See if the big, evil creep could fly!

  I focused some part of my mind on the image of an osprey. Small, too small for the T-rex to care about. And it could fly.

  I felt the changes begin, but the Tyranno-saurus hadn't gotten to be the biggest flesh-eater in history by being stupid. It came around the tree for me. And now my body was growing clumsy as my hands shrank and my legs thinned.

  You have no concept of how powerful that Tyrannosaurus was. You cannot possibly even begin to understand till you've cowered beneath it, peeing in your pants, and wanting to dig a hole in the dirt.

  I scrambled around the tree. Jaws opened four feet wide and snapped shut an inch from my head.

  "Aaaahhhh!" I screamed in sheer terror.

  The big lizard dodged the other way and it roared in frustration. He was so close I felt the sound waves. I saw his pebbly-skinned throat vibrate. And worse, I saw into his mouth. A mouth glittering with teeth like butchers' knives and stained with the blood of his last kill.

  I scrambled away again, stiff, barely able to move.

  CRUNCH!

  The Tyrannosaurus chomped its jaws shut on the tree itself. He began to twist and rip the tree, like a dog with a bone. Rending, tearing, bark flying, white wood pulp chewed to chips.

  In a few seconds the tree would no longer be between us. And already I was too far morphed to run to another tree.

  "Grrr-UNCH! Grrr-UNCH! Scree-EEEE-EEEE-crrUNCH! RrrrOOOAAAARRR!"

  The Tyrannosaurus had gone mad with frustration. It was screaming in rage, ripping, grinding, throwing its huge weight back and forth.

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  Shaking the ground. Bruising the air with its insane roar. Just a few

  seconds more and . . .

  Crrr-SNAP!

  The tree fell slowly away, crashing down through layers of vines and ferns.

  The Tyrannosaurus lunged, mouth open, red tongue lolling, teeth wet with

  drool. I tried to leap back. I fell. Rolled. Thrashed, out of control. Wings! I had wings! Too late! The mouth came down over me like some kind of earthmover, like a diesel

  shovel. A prison of teeth all round me. The jaw bit into the dirt

  itself. A root! Teeth snagged by a root. I flapped, ran, beat, rolled,

  scrambled.

  Out between the jaws!

  Running on osprey talons, running, wings open, flapping.

  SNAP! Jaws an inch behind my tail.

  Fly, fly, fly you idiot!

  Bonk.

  I never saw the tree trunk. I hit it head-on. I was stunned, senseless,

  helpless. The Tyrannosaurus roared in triumph. It towered above me, huge, irresistible. Pure destruction. Why had
it

  chased me? I wondered. Why? I was too small, wasn't I? But of course. I'd been in predator morph before. I knew why. Because

  killing was what it did. Killing was what it was. It had gone beyond food or hunger now. It simply wanted to do what it did best. I flapped weakly, too dazed to move. Down came the head. Down from so far above. Down it came. A swift movement to my right. What was it? Fwapp! Fwapp! Fwapp! An Andalite tail, too fast to be seen, struck three times. The dinosaur swung its head hard. Ax went flying and rolled twice as he

  hit the ground. The T-rex sagged. Tried to roar. And fell. Human hands snatched me up as six tons of malevolence fell to the ground.

  I wiped my tail blade on some large leaves. Unfortunately, more than my

  tail was stained. Page 26

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  My human friends were all looking at the big creature. Marco was becoming human again. I was busy trembling.

  "Nice work, Ax," Prince Jake said. He slapped his hand on my shoulder. It is a thing humans do to indicate friendship or congratulations. Sometimes they do it to kill small insects called mosquitoes.

  «I was toast,» Marco said, still more osprey than human. «You saved my life, man.»

  «I was fortunate,» I said.

  "I can't believe you took that monster down," Prince Jake said.

  «Prince Jake, please don't think I can fight and defeat these creatures. This animal was busy chasing Marco. It was distracted. It is not accustomed to being attacked.»

  "You're just being modest," Cassie said.

  «No!» I said, more sharply than I'd intended. «Listen to me: I know my capabilities. In face-to-face, one-on-one combat, that creature would have destroyed me. One-against-one I will lose ninety percent of the time.»

  "Oh," Prince Jake said.

  "Yeah, well, you came through big time on this go-round," Marco said. He held his hands out straight. They were trembling. "I can't stop shaking."

  "This is insane," Cassie said. She looked around carefully. Peering cautiously, looking, no doubt, for others of the big creatures. "What is going on? Why are there dinosaurs here? Where is here?"

  «Is there not some place on your planet where this creature lives?»

  She shook her head violently. "No. Not in millions of years, anyway. Tens of millions, probably. No, there is no place on Earth where tyrannosaurs just run around in the woods."

  "Yeah, I think we'd have heard about it in school," Marco said. I believe his tone of voice indicated something the humans call "dry hu- mor." I have not heard any wet humor, so it is difficult for me to tell the difference.

  My immediate terror was fading. A deeper pessimism was setting in. It was easy to see that humans -or Andalites -deprived of the power of civilization were pathetically weak in this environment.

  "Some kind of real-life Jurassic Park." Prince Jake speculated. "Maybe someone actually did it. You know, cloned DNA from old dinosaur bones."

  «That is scientifically possible,» I said. «But I have been feeling a strange distortion in my time-keeping sense. This planet is no longer rotating at the same speed as before. I think the likely explanation is that we have traveled a very, very long way in time.»

  Prince Jake raised one eyebrow and looked at me. "Millions of years?"

  «Once a Sario Rip -a time-rift -is created, there is no difference between a year and a million years. The energy required is the same. I think I remember the equations ... in an equation where t is time, z is Zero-space, w inversely cubed represents the nexus of -»

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  "Uh-uh," Marco said, raising his hand. "You saved my life. Don't undo it by killing me with algebra."

  «I'm not an expert, of course. We studied the Sario effect in school. But I may not have been paying very close attention. Who knew I'd ever need to understand time-rifts?»

  "How do we get back?" Cassie asked.

  «I don't know. There is no way of duplicating the event that created the Sario Rip. That explosion in the submarine.»

  "What? You can't just whip up a fusion bomb?" Marco said.

  «Fusion bomb?» I asked. Then I laughed. I knew I shouldn't, but you have to admit, it was funny. «A fusion explosive? That's what it was? I assumed it was a small proton-shift weapon, at least. Fusion is only used in children's toys. You know, to make the little dolls speak and so on.»

  My human friends stared at me.

  "So the Andalite Toys 'R' Us must be a wild place, huh?" Marco said.

  "Let's focus here," Prince Jake said impatiently. "Rachel and Tobias may have been killed. In any case, there's nothing we can do about it. We are millions of years in our own past, and there's nothing we can do about that. We're in the age of dinosaurs, and none of our morphs can even begin to fight things like ..." He jerked his thumb at the massive corpse. ". . . like that. So the question is: What do we do?"

  Prince Jake had summed up the situation very well. We were trapped in an exceedingly dangerous world where we could do almost nothing to defend ourselves.

  I turned my stalk eyes toward the Tyran-nosaurus's head. The mouth was partly open. The sight of those teeth made my insides watery all over again. I could see the serration on the back side of the teeth. Like shark teeth, only much, much bigger.

  I had a clear mental picture of what would have happened if the creature had turned a little faster to confront me. The jaws closing over the upper half of my body ... a violent shake of the head to rip me into easy-to-swallow pieces . . .

  "We adapt," Cassie said grimly. "That's what animals have to do in order to survive. Our environment is massively different. No civilization to rely on, surrounded by brutal predators. So we adapt. Or we get eaten."

  "Great. Robinson Crusoe meets Jurassic Park. Look at us. We have nothing," Marco said. "No homes. No food. No tools. No weapons. We don't even have shoes!"

  "Well, we're going to have to make all those things," Prince Jake said. "And we do have one big weapon: We can still morph. Maybe we can't fight a T-rex, but we can fly, and we can escape."

  "We have food and shoes right here," Cassie said. She was looking at the dead Tyrannosaurus. "Ax has his tail. We can use the hide to make sandals. Skin from the lower leg there looks pretty tough and thick. We cut out some skin, remove the meat and eat it. Then we use ligaments and tendons to lace up the sandals."

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  I believe Prince Jake and Marco were shocked. Humans are strangely squeamish at times. I can never predict when.

  "Wow," Marco said. "Wow. You're kind of getting into this, aren't you, Cassie?"

  Cassie walked up to the dinosaur and placed one hand on its leg. She tested the skin with her fingertips. "Look, Marco, my best friend is gone. Tobias is gone. I don't want any more names added to that list. We need food. There's no Burger King anywhere nearby, okay? We're not big or mean enough to be predators in this environment. We've moved way down on the food chain. The best we can be is scavengers. Here's thousands of pounds of protein. We eat some now, and we smoke some for jerky so we can eat later."

  If anything, Prince Jake and Marco appeared even more shocked. And I felt the same. This was an aspect of Cassie I'd never seen. But then, Cassie is more involved than the others in the facts of environment. She had sized up the situation and realized that in this new world she and her fellow humans were no longer masters.

  I began to feel a little better about our chances. Humans may be technologically primitive, not to mention physically weak, what with tottering around on two spindly legs. But if you're in a situation that requires instant adaptability to change, you should always have a couple of humans along with you.

  Cassie looked at me, making eye contact with my main eyes. "Ax, are you okay doing this? Your tail is all we have."

  «Yes. I will do all I can.»

 
"Okay, then. Jake, maybe you and Marco could gather up any dry sticks and dry grass you can find nearby. We have to work fast. We aren't the only animals who'll be after this much meat. Ax? I need you to slice this area of leg into squares, each about one foot square."

  I glanced at Prince Jake.

  Prince Jake smiled and shrugged. "Cassie's the boss on this," he said. "She has a clue. I don't. And we all know Marco doesn't."

  "You got that right," Marco agreed.

  I turned all my eyes on the haunch of the dead creature. I took careful aim and began the work.

  Rachel

  My feet were torn bloody. I was leaving traces of red on the razor-edged saw grass. The legs of my leotard were torn and tattered. It was not a good look. The bare midriff thing, maybe. The fringe look? No.

  I was carrying Tobias in my arms. He couldn't fly. He was too slow at walking. And if I carried him perched on my shoulder, no matter how careful he was, the jerking and wobbling would force him to dig his talons into my skin.

  Not fun. Especially not fun because the whole time I was expecting some murderous dinosaur to come ripping out of the woods to our left.

  Page 29

  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs «You doing okay?» Tobias asked.

  "Sure. No problem," I said, trying to sound cheerful. "I could stand a little less humidity, maybe."

  «Yes, it is ... unh . . . damp.»

  His groan of pain made me feel guilty for thinking about my own problems. "Tobias, maybe you should morph to human for a while."

  «I'm sorry. You must be getting tired of carrying me.»

  "No, no, it's not that. It's just that your wing is hurting you. If you were in human morph, there wouldn't be any pain."

  «I can only stay in morph for two hours, Rachel. Then I have to demorph and I'm right back where I started. Plus I won't continue healing during that time. Not to mention the fact you'd have to redo my splint. And that wasn't fun for either of us,»