No wonder the little guy was trying to get under Andy’s arm, as the spider might have been stalking him for a while.
“Okay, okay, everyone just stay calm.”
While keeping his eyes on the spider, he quickly set to packing up and once done, to unblocking their tree root cave. The spider rotated on the roof so it could continue to track them, and without even being asked, Gluck climbed inside Andy’s bag.
“Good thinking — out of sight, out of stomach.”
He kept one hand on the bag top to keep it closed and then carefully peeked out through the last logs he’d set up. He had to stay that way for many minutes, just letting his eyes run over the jungle floor, then in and around the fronds, stems, and branches. And finally, up above them.
He’d found that morning was a good time to move around — many of the larger daytime predators hadn’t yet roused, and the night shift of carnivores had clocked off.
“All clear… I hope.”
Andy pulled the last of the logs out of the way. He lifted them and placed them to the side, gently, quietly, trying to use all his senses to detect whether anything had taken an interest in his tiny corner of the jungle.
So far, he heard something small in the tree canopy overhead and the patter of morning dew as it dropped from the large pad like leaves to the detritus on the jungle floor.
He took one last look at the spider, which had now crept down from the ceiling to where he and Gluck had slept, perhaps hoping to find traces of the pterosaur.
“Thanks for letting us stay.” Andy saluted it. “Just glad you guys never made it to our time.”
Then he was out, with his life’s belongings packed up, as well as the only friend he had in the world safe inside his bag.
He set off, away from the sun to the west where he knew the inland sea would be, and also following his nose. Andy was excited, curious as all hell, and working hard to slow his impatience. He smiled, thinking that when he was a paleontology student, if anyone had said to him that one day he’d actually see living, breathing Cretaceous Period dinosaurs, he’d have told them to kick the drugs.
Now, he wasn’t just seeing them, he was living among them, and about to cross off one of his ultimate bucket list objectives. He sniffed again, inhaling the brine. His excitement started to peak.
Andy eased through the jungle, darted forward, and then hid. He watched for movement, and when he felt safe, he repeated the entire process over again, and then all over again, and again. It took him two full hours to move through only a thousand feet of jungle, but by then, he began to hear the sound of water against rocks.
Andy got down on his belly. He flipped his bag over onto his back and crawled. In another few minutes, he came to the very edge of the vegetation line and saw the sparkling blue before him. He stood, easing upright beside a tree trunk, and stared out over the vast expanse of water.
“Yes. Oh yes.”
He slowly slid down the trunk to sit cross-legged and partially hidden under some strappy fronds. He felt a little discombobulated knowing that he was the first, and only, human being to ever see this place. And no one ever would again, because by the time man evolved, this vast sea would be long, long gone.
Andy sighed. “At the very edge of the world, I beheld where time began.” He peeked down into his bag. “Do you know who said that?” He looked back out at the sea. “I did, Andy Wilson, just then.”
It was hard to picture, but one day if there even was a cliff top here and he stood on its edge, he would be looking out over an Alabama or maybe Mississippi landscape.
Gazing out over the endless expanse of sparkling water, he noticed it seemed to be in lanes. Perhaps depending on depth? he wondered. In close to the shore, it was a lighter blue, and a little further out, it became a darker blue lane, and then a few hundred feet out further again, it looked to be the blue-black of significant deepness. He frowned, perplexed, as he looked along the different hues, knowing that this inland sea wasn’t all that deep.
“Maybe it’s some sort of tidal or continental current movement,” he guessed.
Andy peered over the edge. The cliff was a few hundred feet high and where he was ended at deep water. The sound he heard was the surf crashing against its face. It was clear, clean, and he knew it would be warm. While he watched, a surge wave came about a thousand feet out from him. Something big had sped forward and attacked something else below the surface.
He waited for another moment and saw the huge back of the beast lump the water and then dive deeper. As it vanished, he saw there was no scythe or flipper tail, but instead a long, flattened oar with distinctive scutes along its top that were like teeth but were actually bony external plates overlaid with horn. It immediately told him it was one of the mighty sea reptiles, like the massive Tylosaurus that grew to 50 feet in length. But this one had looked even bigger, and around this area lived the T-rex of the ocean, the monstrous Hainosaurus.
Andy stared, willing it back to the surface, and it didn’t disappoint him. It surged back up, shaking its head like a dog just below the surface. The creatures had a distinctive long snake-like body, and in fact, they were thought to be related to real snakes. And with their expanding jaws, they ate other animals whole, including other mosasaurs.
As it sank, the sea surface was stained red — whatever it had charged at, it had caught.
Andy exhaled; he’d seen a few of the giant sea reptiles on his sea voyage, but luckily, they didn’t think he was interesting enough to investigate, or worse, eat.
He got down and crawled along the cliff edge for a few hundred feet to an area below that wasn’t under water, and once again went all the way to the very edge of the cliff to lean over. First thing he noticed was the discoloration marks against the cliff’s rocky surface at about 50 feet up from the current waterline.
“Ha, the sea level was once higher,” he said softly. “So it’s already in retreat.”
Down below him now was a plain of exposed mud, and he could see what looked like some sort of crustaceans making foot-wide tracks in the silt as they came out of the water, fossicked in a random pattern, and then headed back into the sea. They looked like some sort of king crab with their rounded bodies, like flattened helmets and long stiff tails sticking out the back.
Andy looked back and forth, trying to find a way down; other than being curious to investigate a few caves at the cliff base, those crabs would make an easy-to-catch meal. He crawled along the lip a little more.
As he shuffled along, he thought he heard a cracking sound like an old board being bent back. He froze and listened for several moments, but it wasn’t repeated so he continued to worm along, looking for a pathway down.
Puffs of dust blew up around him, and the creaking was back, louder than before.
“Oh crap.” He froze again as the entire cliff edge began to crumble. Right in front of him, clods of earth and then rocks began to fall off and tumble in space for a while before smacking into the glistening mud hundreds of feet below.
Popping and more puffs of dust were now coming from behind him as well. Andy tried to edge back but it seemed just the additional pressure from using his hands on the cliff edge was enough to destabilize the lip.
There was a crack like a gunshot and then a table-sized chunk of rock and soil began to slide free — with Andy on it.
“Shi-iit!” he screamed and threw his arms out wide to try and hang on as the entire section he was laying on fell away. His bag was up-ended, and he threw a hand down to slap it shut, just catching it before Gluck fell out, but not in time to save his heavier calendar stone that fell away into space.