The fire that scours

by Edward Bryant

They say no man ever died of an idea. Maybe not. But plenty have died for ideas, and I know from the family genealogy that my own ancestors helped contribute to that sorry state of affairs.

That wasn’t what I or any of us were thinking as we plummeted through the floor of the Cenozoic Era and crashed into Reptile City. Down through the time of great dying into the Cretaceous, down past the king of the tyrant lizards and straight toward the Jurassic. Whoever had rigged the chronometers on the central panel of the time machine hadn’t paid much attention to George Pal’s version of Wells. No Victorian elegance here. It was like watching a bunch of VCR clocks being reset after a power crunch. About as exciting, too. The digital readouts flickered backward. Only the bone-cracking vibration told us physically that the machine was out of control.

Rick Haugen turned toward the rest of us from the right-hand seat. “Captain! I canna hold her together!” He was such a wise-ass, even then. The Scottish brogue wasn’t even that good.

At the time, I wasn’t paying much attention to Rick’s humor or bravado or however the hell it should be defined. I just stared, fixed on the unspooling millennia, and wondered if it would hurt. Dying, that is.

This was like riding an elevator car uncontrolled and unbraked down an infinite elevator shaft. I knew something had to be at the bottom, but I wasn’t quite sure what. All I knew was that we weren’t going to stop at our floor, that floor being the time of the Permian extinction and the great Pangaean supercontinent.

But I didn’t count on Mary.

Mary Clarke was the senior scientist in charge, and she got to occupy the seat beside Rick. Mary was a great theoretical physicist, but I had to help her reset her digital watch after the spring time-change.

“Dear Jesus, oh God, please save us!” That was Lacey—she turned livid when I called her “the girl from the office”—in the seat beside me. She gripped my left wrist in her right hand, and I thought her fingers were beginning to fracture the small bones beneath my wristwatch.

On Lacey’s other side, Chuck Furtado abruptly screamed. It keened high and thin, much like, I imagined, a scurrying mammal caught under an allosaur’s claw.

Mary (“No finer theoretician”—New Scientist) played her fingers across the console like a virtuoso concert pianist. Nothing in our plunge changed. Out of frustration, she brought her hand up over her head, fingers convulsing, and slammed the fist down on the control panel. The crash echoed in our enclosed, bathroom-like space. There were no sparks—that’s only for science-fiction thrillers.

But something happened.

The rate of vibration changed. It was like deep dental drilling when the guy with the tools gets all the decay out and slacks off on the machine controls. I smelled something burning, even as, somewhere deep in my gut, I felt our collective reality change.

The chronometers didn’t seem to be reading out quite as fast. I saw a few green lights on the board, but couldn’t tell what they signified.

And then we crashed. It was the dentist’s drill again. Combined with shoving the head of your hard-drive straight into a disk rotating at high speed. Reeeeeoowww—the scream ripping at my insides began to scour the inner lining of my skull.

Rick kept yelling into the communicator mike plugged into his ear. “Mayday! Do you copy, HarriKon Base? Mayday! Mayday! We’re crashing somewhere in the Cretaceous!”

And then I blacked out.

But not before I heard Lacey, or maybe it was me, say, “I love you.”

I woke to the smell of sulfur, the sight of cascading sparks rolling down torn sheet metal, and the sound of frying circuit boards. If it wasn’t hell, it was close enough. I was still strapped into my seat, but the seat itself was canted forward so that I was looking down into something I couldn’t at first identify. It looked like a bowl of red meat. Then I realized it was the top of Rick Haugen’s head with a large circle of bone removed. I wanted to vomit, but also knew I didn’t want to throw up into my colleague’s skull cavity. I swallowed it all.

Sound returned and I realized I hadn’t registered its absence. “Robert? Robert, can you hear me?” Someone punched me in the arm and I jerked away irritably. “Robert, I think you’re in shock. Otherwise are you okay?”

I twisted my head to the side. My neck hurt. Lacey had gotten out of her seat and was standing balanced on a red-striped case of medical supplies. She hit me again.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Just stunned. Don’t slug me again.”

She grabbed me in a clumsy embrace and started to cry, her dark, curly hair crushing against my face. The familiar smell of shampoo and almond conditioner took away some of the sulfur stench.

“Hey, hold on,” I said. “Help me down from the seat. I can’t do anything trapped up here.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus, give me strength.” When I tripped the safety buckles, I slumped down against her and she helped break my fall toward the wreckage scattered below.

“Thanks,” I said, and got off her. I helped her up.

“Rick’s hurt bad,” Lacey said.

I glanced at the partial decapitation. “I think he’s dead.”

“No, I’m not.” It was Rick’s voice, like a message wafting up out of a grave.

“Mercy,” Lacey said, and something I thought might have been “Lazarus …”

“Hey, I got the rest of him.” The new voice was Chuck Furtado’s. The systems analyst held up something that looked like a toupee.

“I’m supposed to be Bones, not Captain Kirk,” said Rick’s funereal tone.

My own mind was spinning. “Who’s got the best medic training?”

“Me,” said Rick, “but I figure this is way beyond what I can handle.” His chuckle sounded like death. “I’m the rock star, remember? Geology’s my bag. Neurosurgery in a mirror isn’t my idea of a good time. I wouldn’t know my right hemisphere from my left.”

“It’s not going to be neurosurgery,” I said. “Just some sewing.”

Rick let out a ghastly groan. Lacey put one hand on his left shoulder, stretched her arm to reach his right shoulder. I could see she wasn’t looking at his ruined head. But her lips moved silently. Prayer, no doubt.

“Mary,” Hurtado said. “Mary’s the other medic. Where’d she go?”

I finally looked around us. We were all on a slight slope that steepened rapidly into a rugged lava wall. The time machine wasn’t in terrific shape, and mainly lay crumpled in ragged sections. It looked to me like we’d materialized about twenty feet in the air, and then just dropped to the rough rock surface. The image in my head was what would have happened had the Apollo lander run out of fuel about ten meters above Tranquility Base.

At least we had air, though the atmosphere wasn’t terrific.

On cue, a wind-bank of sulfurous fumes rolled through our crash site. My eyes burned and started to water. All my sinus cavities seemed to close off like waterproof doors on the Titanic. With about the same effect.

There was a yellowish halflight illuminating everything, but I couldn’t tell whether it was all the crap in the air, or it was just close to sundown. There wasn’t much to be seen of the sky. I heard rolling concussive sounds that sounded like distant detonations.

“I think my back’s broken, too,” said Rick. Chuck and I exchanged looks. Lacey put her hands together in an attitude of prayer.

“Yeah,” I said. “Where the hell’s Mary?” Then I realized that it wasn’t just the senior scientist who was missing. Her seat was gone too. Ragged holes in the floor of the control area showed where the bolts had torn loose.

The terrain dropped severely away on that side of the wreckage. Lacey stayed with Rick. Chuck Furtado and I stared gingerly over the side of what looked ever more like a real precipice.

“Don’t look good.”

I nodded agreement. “We ought to check downslope. Just in case.”

“I think we got some rope somewhere,” said Furtado. He turned back toward the time machine.

“Never mind,” I said. I had seen a glitter of aluminum along with a flash of blue jumpsuit about ten feet down. It was all obscured by the deepening shadows and the rough-edged juts of cooled black lava.

“You first?” said Furtado.

“Okay.” I started down the slope. I felt my fingers slip on the stone. When I looked, I saw the blood. Mine. The rock was so edged, I could have shaved with it.

The rough part was after we got to Mary. “Whoo-ee,” said Furtado, “she’s messed up pretty bad.” But she was alive. Air whistled in and out of the bubbling wound where her teeth had been. “We can’t just leave her.”

I wasn’t so sure about that, since it didn’t look to me like she was going to be alive more than a matter of minutes. I touched her throat below the relocated line of her jaw and wasn’t sure I could even feel a pulse.

Furtado crossed himself and his lips moved like he was uttering a prayer. I doubted it would work for him any better than for Lacey. Old man Harrison had presided over a prayer breakfast and a solemn ceremony to invoke God’s protection upon the time machine. I could hear the snap and pop of cooling wreckage above us. Obviously the metaphysical fix hadn’t been in. But then secular engineering had presumably failed us, too.

“Whatever you think’ll work,” I said. I sighed and made up my mind. “Okay, let’s get her back up the hill.” We decided to leave Mary in her chair since she was already strapped tight and the stressed aluminum made a perfectly good litter. Furtado and I wrestled the chair into place. Then I waited while the systems analyst scrambled back to the wreckage and found the rope. He tossed a loop down to me and I secured it around Mary’s headrest.

Then, with Furtado pulling from above and me shoving from below, we manhandled chair and dying woman back to level ground.

Lacey left Rick to come and hover over our leader. “What can we do?” she said, smoothing Mary’s blood-soaked hair back from her eyes.

“Not much,” I said.

“Pray,” said Furtado.

Lacey prayed, lips moving silently.

Mary said something. Her eyes flickered open, stared, and she spoke again, some of which I could make out as I bent close. “—they come?” she said.

“Who?” I said.

“From base,” said Mary. “Did they come right—” She coughed up bright red blood. “—right after we crashed?”

“Sorry,” I answered. “No one came.”

“Then they’re not …” Mary closed her eyes. “They can’t find us, or maybe—” She coughed harder, painful, wracking. “—they all died at the other end.”

“What do you mean?” said Lacey. “Won’t they come for us?”

Mary didn’t say anything. So far as I could tell, she was dead now. I couldn’t hear her breath bubbling through the thicker blood. “What she meant,” I said to Lacey, “is that any time-traveling rescue party would have shown up about ten seconds after we crashed. That’s the neat thing about time travel.”

“But they didn’t.”

I shook my head. “Chances are, they won’t.”

Chuck Furtado spoke up. “Whatever knocked us out of the time stream might have just been a bounce from some event up at HarriKon Base. Mary’s right. They might all be dead.”

“They can’t be,” said Lacey. She stared at me. “Nobody would know.”

Nobody would know. She was right. This whole mission had been clandestine. Old man Harrison—damn his Christian soul and his Libertarian head for commerce—hadn’t wanted a word of this leaked to the government. He remembered all too well the cold fusion flap. And if time travel turned out to be a viable process, he wanted to make damned sure the HarriKon Corporation had its hooks sunk firmly in long before the D.O.D. got wind of it.

So we were on our own. Nobody knows. All the permutations of Lacey’s somber words echoed in my head. At this point, I figured the four of us were about as lost as human beings ever had been. And maybe ever would be.

We unstrapped Mary Clarke’s body from the control chair and wrapped her in plastic sheeting that had protected some of the crated supplies. We set her on the downwind side of the crash site. Then we set about building shelter, since it was getting cold. Furtado and I constructed a minimal lean-to around Rick Haugen’s chair. He made it clear he didn’t want to be moved.

Then I held the battery lamp while Furtado took Rick’s hands—not that it would make any difference because of his paralysis—and Lacey sewed the top of his head back on. I don’t know why we did it. Probably it would have been just as practical to cover his cranium with plastic wrap, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

Rick didn’t feel much of it, but every once in a while, as Lacey drew a threaded knot tight, he would jerk from the shoulders up and cry out. Lacey echoed his cry with a little sob, then brought the needle around for another pass. It seemed to take forever, but eventually Rick again had a complete head. More or less.

Naturally it was only after the sewing session that I found the drug-case. I gave Rick a jolt of painkiller and he finally nodded off.

“Save some for us,” said Furtado, looking like he was trying to smile bravely.

“I expect we’ll need it soon enough.” I put the case down by some of the other stores.

“You want to know where we are?” I glanced back at Chuck Furtado. He hunched over what looked like one of our laptops. Battery power.

“I think I can guess,” I said. “Within a hundred million years or so.”

“You’re being a smart ass,” said Furtado. “Listen up. When I said where, I meant it.”

“Probably pretty close to where we left.”

“Allow for a little precessive drift, but you’re pretty much right.” Furtado tapped the keys a few more times and squinted at the screen. He rattled off some coordinates.

“Okay,” I said. “Wyoming. The southwestern desert. Rock Springs?”

“Thereabouts. We’re about in the middle of the Green—well, what’ll be the Green River Formation.”

True enough. A ways—a long ways—up the line in the Eocene, this would all be under water. The Green River Formation held one of the biggest deposits of fossil fish in the world. The layer was a half-mile thick and contained something like 12 billion fish. After Jurassic Park had rekindled public interest in the very distant past, entrepreneurs, with the blessing of the state, had started mining fossil fish for the collecting trade. It was a boom market. But beneath the vertebrate fish layers, other, older treasures waited.

At the rate things were going, we’d probably be among them.

“You two want some supper?” I said to Furtado and Lacey.

“Don’t forget me,” said the mostly inert Haugen. Already fossilizing, but still hungry.

At first it was almost completely black after darkness fell. I could see no stars because of the smoke and cloud cover. To the side—and I had no way of knowing what compass direction that was, just that it was neither up-nor downhill—I could see a dull orange glow at an indistinct distance. I guessed it was volcanic activity.

Before dusk, the smoky curtains had parted briefly and I thought I’d seen some greenery maybe a klick or two distant. If there were lurking carnosaurs, they weren’t making their presence obvious. I suspected they really wouldn’t spend a hell of a lot of time foraging too close to neighboring vulcanism.

Since there seemed to be no immediately apparent life apart from us, we finally decided to try to sleep without the need of a sentry. There weren’t even any insects in evidence. Smart bugs. We each had a lightweight thermal blanket and a rolled towel we could use as a pillow. Chuck Furtado curled up close to the feet of the nowsnoring Rick. Lacey and I prepared our bed a dozen feet away.

The corporation would never have allowed lovers to be assigned to this pioneer expedition, but then they never knew. Who would have expected a romantic liaison between one of Mr. Harrison’s most trusted aides and some scuzzy contract paleo jock? The romantic and the realist, the skeptic and the devout. Who would have thought it?

It had to be chemicals. Pheromones. I don’t know.

We’d spent weeks circling each other like wolves. It was clear we had nothing in common. She thought Amy Grant had sold out. I played Ministry discs in the lab and didn’t bother with headphones. We made a great deal of lighthearted—soon escalating to outright nasty—fun of each other.

She even said outright at one point that I was surely well on the way to exclusion from the ranks of the righteous and could count on spending my own great extinction in hell. Hell. She capped it in her memos. Like it was a Fodor destination.

The problem was, Lacey had soft, curly hair I wanted to feel tucked up under my chin while I touched the length of her firm little body with the rest of me. It was only a few minutes after first laying eyes on her at an orientation seminar that I knew I wanted a laying on of hands. And much more. I figured old man Harrison would look dimly on one of his recent scholarly acquisitions opting to follow his dick rather than tracing his favorite fossils back to the Permian. Probably I should have stuck with the fossils. But I didn’t.

And Lacey … Well, Lacey risked both summary firing and damnation for me.

The first time we made love, Lacey spent an hour in fervid prayer, begging absolution from God. After that, though, she loosened up quite a lot, though when we spent time together she tended to keep tight hold of the staurolite cross she wore around her neck. That cruciform Georgia stone, Lacey enjoyed pointing out, had been created by God. Dark brown, it looked like blood. I don’t think she ever took the silver necklace off. Lacey unconsciously polished the dull stone between thumb and index finger. It reminds me of home, she’d say when I reminded her of the mannerism. Home was Conyers, distant even among Atlanta’s more remote suburbs. Lacey told me about the old part of Conyers, and the railway station converted into a community theater; but the tracks were still active, and so the actors had to freeze in place during performances when the trains passed.

I don’t know why I loved her. It wasn’t just her body, though that always excited me mightily. There had to be something in the reality that she possessed things I never could have, and maybe the opposite was also true for her. I had no roots—not since I left home—no real sense of where I was, or had been, or was going. Lacey, on the other hand, had a plan, and a past. And even if my lips and my arms and my dick were a profound distraction, her life still had a solid structure of which I could only dream.

She’d told me about pine and kudzu, red clay and dogwood—Looks like a blizzard, come the spring. Once I had visited her at home. I felt the breeze. I saw all the yards full of dogs, pickups, refrigerators and junked cars.

Lacey ducked her head down below the edge of the thermal blanket and tucked up against my neck and upper chest. Her words were muffled as she shivered. “Robert, He’ll save us. I know He will. But in the meantime, I don’t mind admitting it, I’m scared to death.”

I could tell those capped letters in her voice and knew she wasn’t talking about our boss at HarriKon. I kissed the top of her head, flashing a quick image of Rick’s hair, and tried to forget it. I twisted my neck a little and kissed Lacey’s ear, her cheek. “It’ll work out,” I said, but I knew better. Where we were marooned, I didn’t give any of us any odds on living much beyond the week, maybe two.

“Tomorrow morning,” said Lacey. “We can fix up some sort of litter or travois. We can take turns carrying Rick.”

“Where are we going to go?” I said.

“We can walk out of here. There have to be people, there must be help.”

“There are no other people,” I said. “This is the beginning of the Cretaceous, maybe the end of the Jurassic. There’s just us.”

“There are people,” said Lacey insistently.

I tried to clamp down on it, but felt the flash of anger. “This isn’t 4004 B.C., kiddo. There are no people out there. Just dinosaurs, and that’s about it.”

Lacey was silent for a moment. Then she said, “God created man when He created dinosaurs. Both must exist out there. The people may be primitive, but I’m sure they will help us if we behave peaceably.”

“God damn it!” Lacey stiffened. I said, “Can the creationist tripe! There are no people. We’re them. We’re all there is on this baby Earth.”

“They were found,” said Lacey. “They found fossil evidence of people along with the dinosaurs.”

“No,” I said. “That was all a hoax. Or if it wasn’t, it was sloppy research and wishful thinking.”

“You’re wrong.” There was a profound sureness and strength in her voice.

“No, you are.” I don’t know what filled mine.

She looked up at me and I looked down at her. Sparks could have jumped the gap. I kissed her and her lips responded. There was no stopping after that. We both needed comfort and reassurance that something was still familiar. We both needed the warmth, the heat. Lacey was just wearing her long ORU teeshirt and I worked it up above her breasts. She moaned and put her small hands around me. And as I entered her, I thought I heard Lacey whisper again, “You’re wrong.”

The last thing I’d remembered before slamming down into a broken slumber was the small scream as Lacey came. The first thing I heard as I fell out of sleep was another scream. This one wailed with fear, not pleasure, fear and pain and the knowledge that death stalked close by.

I came awake blinking, trying to extricate myself from the tangle that was Lacey and the thermal blankets, and saw death was indeed standing above Chuck Furtado. Against a hellish light that presumably was an eastern sunrise, a saw-toothed silhouette bent down and nipped at the man on the ground. It was bipedal and quick, a head higher than man-sized, and then I saw the scythelike claw behind each muscular leg. For the barest moment I admired the sleek biological engineering of the deinonychus—remember, I had never before seen a dinosaur in the flesh—and then I tried to confront the predator that planned to breakfast on the systems analyst.

“Get away, you son of a bitch!” I screamed. I knew we had both a Remington pump-gun and a 30.06 hunting rifle packed somewhere in the supplies. I didn’t know where. There was a steel bracket that had come off the control panel down by my foot. I picked it up, whirled it around my head, and hurled it as hard as I could at the deinonychus. It was luck, not skill. The bracket slammed into the side of the reptile’s jaw, but it drew the creature’s attention for a few moments. Then, as though deliberately malign, ignoring me totally, the deinonychus turned back to Furtado, raised its right foot, and sliced down through the man’s abdomen. Chuck Furtado screamed one more time. The cry sank to a moan, then nothing.

The deinonychus snapped at the air and looked almost like it was grinning. Then it grabbed one of Furtado’s feet and began dragging his body out of our campsite. I threw something else—a disemboweled gauge, I think. The reptile hissed around Furtado’s foot, but didn’t relinquish its prey.

Furtado’s head bumped on stone as his body disappeared off toward the east. The panting of the deinonychus died away. I realized Lacey was holding onto me for dear life.

“Don’t go after it,” she said. “Chuck’s dead. There’s nothing we can do.”

“You can get me some breakfast.” It was Rick Haugen’s voice. He giggled from his upright chair. “Life’s gotta go on.”

But for Rick, life was obviously not going well. Lacey and I gave him some of the dry rations, washed down with water from the precious stocks. When he chewed, the pain made him stop. I shot him up with more of the chemical balm, but I could see the supply was running low.

I looked at the suture line around the top of his skull. Infection had set in fast. Angry colors and disgusting fluids flushed vividly every time he tried to move his jaw, and facial muscles tensed.

“I’ll look for the antibiotics,” said Lacy quietly. After a while she came back from crawling through the wreckage on hands and knees. She held a few white tablets in her left hand. “Things spilled during the crash,” she said. “I found these.”

“Are they antibiotics?” I said.

“Trust to His will,” she answered. “If they’re not, I don’t think they’ll hurt him.”

“Bullshit.” But I forced Rick to swallow two of the pills. I, too, figured it couldn’t hurt. Then I gave him the last of the painkiller.

He died before dusk.

We’d taken turns watching over him during the day. As it turned out, Lacey found a good graveyard while I was busily sorting and cataloging our expedition’s resources while still keeping an eye on Rick. I’d found the rifle and shotgun, but the ammunition remained among the missing. I discovered enough food and water to keep us going for a few more days. I even found an envelope full of inspirational literature for the businessman. Perhaps we’d need kindling.

About midday and against my advice, Lacey had gone over the hill the same direction taken by the deinonychus making off with Chuck Furtado’s body. By my watch, she was gone for less than hour. She returned excited.

“There’s water,” she cried. “There is a stream we can drink from.”

“Did you try it?”

“A little. Trouble is, the water was full of bodies.”

I must have looked startled.

She laughed. “No, Robert, not people. Small dinosaurs. A lot of dead ones, but I don’t know how or why. They probably came there to drink and something happened to them.”

“Must make for a pretty rank water-hole,” I said.

“I walked upstream for a ways. It gets better. I tried the water. There’s a lot of what tastes like mineral content, but I’m still alive.” She grinned. “What’s more, I’m not thirsty for the first time since we got here.”

I nodded. “We can hunt the dinos for food.”

“There’s dirt,” said Lacy.

I stared at her. “So?”

“We can bury Mary there. Chuck too. I found most of him on the way. The deinonychus must have gotten tired.”

I looked at my inventory sheet. “We’ve got a couple of shovels here. Is that really what you want us to do?”

“‘Dust to dust’,” she quoted. “It’s the right thing, I think.”

So we did it. She and I spent about twenty minutes lugging Mary Clarke’s body to the stream bank. Then, while Lacey dug shallow graves, I went back and picked up what I could of Furtado. There wasn’t a whole lot, and it didn’t fill a garbage bag. The deinonychus obviously hadn’t gone away totally hungry.

Once the bodies were under earth, I stood silent while Lacey recited Bible verses. I don’t remember which. I wasn’t concentrating.

We’d left Rick alone; he was awake and chipper and told us he’d yell if anything predatory happened into camp. Lacey looked dubious.

“Just stay perfectly still,” I said, realizing too late what I was saying.

“I can handle that.” Rick grinned.

But when we returned to camp after our burial detail, we found Rick Haugen with his eyes wide open—his mouth, too—but no life left in him.

“We’ll bury him in the morning,” I said. Lacey stared at me—accusatively, I thought. “What?”

“I try to understand you,” she said softly.

I didn’t feel like smarting off now, so I said nothing.

“Robert,” she said mournfully, “I researched you pretty heavily after we first made love. I’m not a dummy, you know.”

“So what did you find?” I said, already suspecting what I would hear.

Lacey stepped closer to me. “I used to watch your daddy,” she said. “Well, first I listened to him on the radio. Then I saw him when he preached on the cable. You know? He was about the strongest, fire-breathingest, most charismatic minister I ever saw. He had both that crazy power that gets folks to pay attention, and he had real conviction.” She paused and reached up, touched my face gently. “You and he, you’ve both got so much strength.”

I looked away. “I never saw him after I left home. I never talked to him before he died.”

“You even pretended you weren’t his son,” Lacey said. “It was wrong to deny him.”

Turning back to her, I said, “I was walking another road.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.” She spread her arms, taking in this whole, raw, prehuman world. “I think maybe you were just trying to find yourself a faith that you could match up against his. Maybe it was the same faith. Same hymn, different lyrics.”

“I don’t think so,” I said harshly. “We’re here. And there’s no god to help us. There’s no way out.”

“It’s just a matter of faith,” she said, “and finding the purpose in all this.”

We locked gazes. She dropped her gaze first. The truth to tell, it was about the same time I dropped mine.

Lacey and I went for a late walk, rough terrain notwithstanding. Some of the cloud cover seemed to blow off to the east and we were able to see by the light of a very large and beautifully bright moon. This time we didn’t go to the burying ground or the adjacent dinosaurs’ graveyard. We went the other direction, toward the eventual sunrise, toward the molten glow that tonight was more cherry than last night’s orange. It was the wrong direction to encounter plants. And we both hoped we wouldn’t encounter any other, larger organisms.

After a while, we came to a series of volcanic cones. “They’re not St. Helen’s, but I think they could do the job,” I mused.

Lacey looked at me questioningly.

“I was about an hour away from packing in toward St. Helen’s when she blew,” I said. “I was luckier than fifty or sixty others.”

“What were you thinking of?” said Lacey.

“I may be a paleo drone,” I said, “but I’ve always been fascinated by vulcanology.”

“You sound like Rick.” Lacey giggled. It was the first time she’d sounded like anything other than death since last night. “Is that a Star Trek joke?”

I shook my head. “The god Vulcan was the basis for the naming of volcanoes. I’ve always liked the innate drama of these direct pipelines between the surface and the core.”

“So why isn’t your personality like that?” said Lacey.

I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Sometimes I don’t think there’s any connection at all between your outer self and your core,” said my lover. “I’d like you to be more like one of those.” She gestured at the cones.

“That sounds pornographic,” I said.

Lacey laughed. “Have a litle faith.”

And then the ground shook. We held on to each other, but the temblor was brief. About a thousand feet above us, some of the dully glowing lava slopped out of the bowl and oozed down toward us.

“I think it’s time to get back to camp,” I said.

For a moment, Lacey resisted, staring up at the molten rock. “The fire that scours,” she said. “That’s Revelation.”

“Not in the version I read.” I grinned. “At least you taught me one thing. Now I don’t put an s on the end of that r word any more.”

“I’d like to teach you more.” She leaned up close. Her warmth seemed subsumed into that of the landscape.

“We’ll talk about it,” I said. The ground again shook.

Later that night, huddled in our thermal blankets around a container of canned heat, with shovels close to hand as potential weapons because the ammunition hadn’t turned up, we talked about many things.

And I don’t know how one subject led to another.

“Did I show you the Presbyterian Church when you visited?” said Lacey.

“You showed me lots of churches.”

“This one had the unicorn window.”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

“Used to have the window,” said Lacey. “It happened when I was a teenager. People in Conyers thought the unicorns were occult.” She shook her head. “Stupid. All the artist meant was to show a symbol of the Christ.” She snuggled against me. “Community made the church take the window out. When the glass was put back, the unicorns were still there, but with no horns. They’d been turned into plain old horses.”

“Cute.”

“I cried for a long time for those unicorns,” said Lacey.

“Didn’t that say something to you about religious zealots?”

“Just some of us,” she said, smiling gently. “Not all.”

I was quiet for a while. I thought about how a unicorn becomes a horse. “Why did you come on this fools’ expedition?” I finally said. “Did you think I needed to be babysat?”

She shook her head violently. “Old Mr. Harrison felt like he needed his personal and corporate interests safeguarded. He trusts me.” Lacey hesitated, and then smiled. “And yes, I guess I did think maybe you needed someone to take care of you.” The smile left. Silence lay there for a while. “There’s another thing. I guess it is important to me to find out if men lived with the dinosaurs.”

“This isn’t Alley Oop,” I said. “Never was.”

“It has to do with faith,” she said. “And I know we will pack out of here, and I still think we will find God’s children, both human and reptile.”

I snorted.

Lacey moved closer to me, her nipples touching my chest. She touched one index finger to my lips, drew it back when I started to bite it. “But even if I was wrong,” she said, “and I’m not. Even if I was …” She laughed and it was a completely happy, utterly sincere sound. “Now there exists what I was taught. Creationism is proved. Man does live with the dinosaurs.” She kissed me again and again and again.

I dreamed that night. I dreamed a nightmare and still remembered the scenario vividly when I awoke early in the Cretaceous dawn.

Then I crawled naked out of the tumbled blankets. For a while I hunkered there in the brownish halflight, as filthy and urge-driven as any paleolithic savage. I stared at Lacey sleeping. I looked with sorrow at the sweetness of her face.

I would miss her. And because I knew there was no other life than this one we both inhabited, I would miss her infinitely.

And then I killed her.

I killed her with the shovel, as quickly and mercifully as I could. I wished there were enough of the painkiller left to put her to sleep. But she made only a few sounds before she was quiet. Her breathing slowed, hesitated … stopped. When my lover was dead, I hurled the murder weapon as far from me as I could.

I howled at the alien, empty sky, at my world without Lacey. All this because of a dream? That nightmare now frayed when I concentrated on it. When I looked away with my mind, the images came back. I couldn’t bear to ignore them. If I did that, then I would not be able to live with the reality of what I had just done.

The dream:

The paleontologists, graduate students, day workers, all excavating the streambed. Skulls, femurs, ribs, all coming to light. The fossil remains; bone transmuted to stone by the alchemist’s minerals, jutting out of the clay. Here a corythosaurus, there a struthiomius. Plate-backs and typrant kings, three-horned faces and arm reptiles, all dead 140,000 millennia. Dinosaur footprints, filled in by time.

And then the other remains. The human bones, intermixed in the same stratum, indisputably dating to the Jurassic extinction.

It would not be solely the supermarket tabloids paying heed and dispatching photographers. The greater effect would be elsewhere.

And that I could not bear; not knowing there was something I could do to redress the situation.

I let my head tilt forward into my hands, my face feeling like the parchment of mummyskin. I cried. “Lacey,” I said over and over again, “I loved you. I still love you. I will always love you.”

I’m not sure how long it took. I know it was more days than I had food and water from the twentieth century. I started refilling containers from the stream, and scavenging meat from reptile carcasses. I ate and drank just enough to keep going, because I didn’t know how much I was simultaneously poisoning myself.

Most of my time was devoted to the endless treks to the volcanic cones. I rigged slings and sheets to carry as much as I could. I clambered up the side of the nearest cone, feeling the magma heat burning through my boot soles, fighting my way to the crater’s edge and looking down into the closest equivalent to total destruction I could find. Then I would shove my load, piece by chunk by bit, over into the fiery pit.

The bodies had gone first. Then the equipment. There might still be some of Chuck Furtado’s smaller bones in the belly of some anonymous deinonychus somewhere, but that would have to be the risk I’d take.

I disposed of everything I could find.

It was all gone, burned and melted back into the anonymity from which it had come.

And now it’s time for the final disposition. I throw the shovel into the crater. Then the journal I’ve kept—hopelessly, I know, but it was the concession I was willing to make to being a scientist. I see the pages flame into burning snowflakes before the book is halfway to the lava. I toss the canteen and the tarp I used to drag the odds and ends I discarded at the first.

Now there is only one matter left. I stand poised on the brink of this unnamed tunnel down to the heart of the world. I really cannot feel the heat. I am too numb.

The last picture in my mind is that of Lacey. And of the symbol she wore around her neck.

I think about her love, and mine. That’s all.

As I pitch forward and begin the long drop into the final fire that scours, into what I expect will be nothingness, it occurs to me that I am watching all I will know, or ever believe, of hell.

Table of Contents

Start