Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

The drunk blinked. Then, with a roar, he ran at Jimmy, fist raised.

Jimmy stood and broke the cue stick over the man’s head.

He fell like an ox.

Griffin looked down at the man. He lay very still. There was a trickle of blood coming out of one ear. He didn’t seem to be breathing. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

Jimmy took out his wallet and laid several twenties down on the felt. He put his beer bottle atop them. “This should pay for the stick,” he said. There weren’t a lot of people in the bar, but every one of them was watching him.

Nobody said a word as they left the place.

Out on the road, they drove in silence for a while. Then Jimmy said, “You’re not going to like this.”

“What?”

“I left my driver’s license back in the bar. I had to leave it with the man to get the pool table.”

“Think there’s time to go back and get it?”

A police car, lights flashing, passed them, heading in the direction of the roadhouse.

“I don’t suppose there is.”

So they drove out to the airport and found a Cessna pilot who for two thousand dollars was willing to fly them back to D.C., no questions asked. There they ran out to the Pentagon, and looped back a day, so Jimmy could call the DMV to report his license had been stolen. After which, he and Griffin went out to a bar in Georgetown, where Jimmy broke a few things. They both spent the night in the drunk tank.

“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Griffin told Salley. “But when the police came, this fellow here got behind me and lifted me by the belt and shoved me right into them. We all fell over in a pile.” They were both laughing by then.

“I just thought that as long I was going to be in jail, I might as well have company.” Jimmy wiped the tears from his eyes. “In any event, it did give us a darling of an alibi.”

“The Old Man had us on the carpet for that one. He chewed us both out good.”

“Well, he had to, now didn’t he?”

“Yes, but here’s the thing.” He paused until the laughter had died down. “On the way out, I turned and winked at him. He didn’t wink back.” He let the silence sit for a moment. “You get older, you get more conservative. You know how that is. Well, the Old Man’s forgotten what it felt like to be young and wild. But not us. Not you, and not me. Yet.”

For a long moment, Jimmy said nothing. Then he nodded. “All right. One last run.”

He got up slowly, and left without so much as a word or a glance to Salley. As if she weren’t present.

When he was gone, Salley said, “Did he die?”

“Did who die?”

“The man in the bar. The drunk.”

He could see by her expression that she hadn’t thought the story was very funny. He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We never checked.”

A minute later, young Jimmy was back, wearing a different set of clothes. He dollied in a large wooden packing crate, and showed them how it opened up. “This is how you’ll be traveling,” he told Salley. “Nothing fancy. We went for simplicity here. Padded on the inside. This little shelf acts as a seat. Hand grips here and here. And this clip holds a flashlight, in case you want to bring a book.”

There was a bold orange-and-black sticker on the side reading THIS END UP, and another reading DANGER: OMNIVORE.

“I don’t understand,” Salley said. “Why would I have to go in a crate?”

“I’m afraid you won’t like the answer,” Griffin said uncomfortably.

“Don’t tell me what I will or won’t like.”

“You see,” Jimmy said, “we anticipated that something of this sort might come up and so we made preparations. There’s a rider on the Old Man’s clearance that allows me to be brought along as muscle. You, however, were not anticipated. There’s simply no way you could possibly accompany us as a member of the security team.”

Griffin wanted to tell Jimmy to moderate his manner. Salley had been simmering for a while now. She was ready to cause a scene. Griffin had enough experience with women to know this. But, though he mellowed in later life, Jimmy in his younger days was every bit as hard to handle as Salley herself.

“So?” Salley said.

That sharkish grin again. A jaunty nod toward the box. He was a sadistic little shit, was Jimmy, at this age. “So you’ll be traveling as a biological specimen.”

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.

The anatotitans were nesting on Egg Island. A mating pair of ankylosaurs was grumpily fossicking about in the shrubs along the river. And Her Ladyship was having a difficult time controlling her rambunctious young. They were at an age when they kept wandering away from the encampment, and she had to keep shooing them back.

Juvenile tyrannosaurs, unlike their aloof elders, were fiercely curious beings. They examined everything they saw, and attacked anything that moved. The mortality rate among juveniles was extremely high, but those who survived into adulthood were cagy and experienced creatures.

Jamal had built an observation platform high in the trees above Smoke Hollow, and another on Barren Ridge. Between them, it was possible to get a good overview of everything that happened in the valley. The Barren Ridge platform was the better of the two, however, because it afforded an excellent view of the tyrannosaur camp.

It was Leyster’s turn on the Barren Ridge watch that day. Branches of the tree shook and rattled as Katie swung her way up to him. She popped over the edge of the platform and handed him a fried fish wrapped in leaves.

“Morning, dear. I brought you lunch.” She gave him a peck on the cheek. “How are the children?”

“See for yourself.” He handed her the binoculars. “She’s lost another one. Scarface.”

There were sixteen tyrannosaur juveniles remaining out of the original twenty, and they were all ugly as gargoyles. They were only two meters tall, and still young enough that their molt wasn’t complete yet. Splotchy patches of hairy gray feathers clung here and there on all of them, looking for all the world like fungus infections.

“Here comes the breadwinner,” Katie said.

The Lord of the Valley clambered awkwardly over the log-and-brushwood barrier he and his mate had shoved into a ring around the encampment. A bloody edmontosaur haunch dangled from his mouth.

The juveniles came running up to him, squawking with excitement. Avidly, they jumped (jumping was one thing an adult, with all that weight, could not do) and snapped at the meat.

With a grunt, the Lord let it drop to the ground.

The juveniles swarmed over the haunch, tearing at it so savagely their snouts were spattered with blood. Slasher got in the way of Adolf, and got her tail bitten for doing so. She squealed like a pig, then scrambled back to the meat, roughly shoving Attila and Lizzy Borden out of her way.

“That is not an edifying sight,” Katie said. “How can you watch that and eat at the same time?”

Leyster dug into the fish with relish. Now that their supply of freeze-dried was gone, they were largely reliant on what they could catch or trap, and as a result there were times when they did not eat well at all. It made him appreciate the times when they did. “Hunger is an excellent sauce.”

Privately, though, the sight of those little horrors feeding always made him glad there was a ravine between him and them.

Without putting the binoculars down, Katie said, “You know what I’ve always wondered?”

“What?”

“Why don’t dinosaurs have external ears? Ears are ever so handy. It seems like they’d be much easier to evolve than, say, beaks. Or wings. So why don’t the kids down there have great big floppy elephant ears?”