Andy Gallagher’s hands were a blur over his keyboard. “All cameras online, and NASA, Alma, Arecibo, and just about every other observatory in a prime observational sphere are watching.” He looked up at his friend. “This is big.”
“Landfall impact?” Henson turned.
“Possible, but unlikely.” Gallagher watched his screen, but his hands fidgeted like a schoolboy before an exam.
Henson shook his head. “What happens when a baseball hits a bowling ball — when both are basically chunks of iron moving at hundreds of feet per second?”
“Sparks — celestial sparks.” Gallagher giggled. “But seriously, two outcomes are suggested: one, we have a pinball effect. Both are deflected and follow alternate paths. Two: one or both are destroyed.”
“And right in our solar system.” Henson grabbed his oversized cup of coke and sucked on the straw. He burped and went back to his computer. “Hang onto your hats, boys and girls, this is going to be the biggest show in town.”
CHAPTER 50
Ben and Drake threw caution to the wind and went hard after Andy. They leapt across fungi-laden logs, skirted weird, hairy tree trunks, and dodged a herd of small, grazing herbivore dinosaurs with barrel-like bodies and squashed beaks that made them look like flat-faced parrots.
“The guy’s a fucking gazelle,” Drake puffed as they pursued Andy deeper into the jungle.
Rain pelted down and Ben held up a hand, slowed, and then stopped. Drake came in beside him, and while Ben looked down at the mud, he kept his back to his friend so he could keep watch on the undergrowth.
Ben looked up and squinted into the downpour. “Still going fast; that way. Can’t let him get away now.” He took off again.
In another second, the pair broke out into a clearing.
“Ah, shit.” The first thing Drake saw was what looked like a bunch of kangaroos crossing the open space 100 yards further down from them. But then the pack swung toward them and immediately became excited by the pair of bipeds running across the clearing. Frills opened at their necks, tiny arms opened wide, showing rudimentary feathers hanging underneath, and then the six-foot-tall theropods opened jaws lined with needle teeth and hissed loudly enough to carry over the downpour. They charged.
“No fucking time for this.” Drake shouldered his Barrett M82 rifle. He’d already switched chambers to the high-explosive Raufoss rounds. They were well beyond worrying about noise now, and he pointed the barrel at the approaching pack and fired again and again.
Bodies literally exploded in orange and red bursts that were a mix of blood, bone, and incendiary pyrotechnics.
Some of the creatures were packed in so tight to each other, that as one was hit, the ones beside it were also mutilated and blown over from the blasts. In seconds, panic consumed the pack of predators and they scattered in the foliage.
“Fuck you too!” Drake yelled after them.
The pair entered the thick jungle, and once again, Ben paused to check the tracks. He shook his head.
“This guy must have the luck of the Irish. When I was stuck in this damn hellhole, I used to crawl around on my belly covered in mud.” He looked up. “But Andy just barrels along like he owns the place.”
Drake grunted. “The shitty thing about luck is, it eventually runs out.”
Ben nodded and hunkered down as the wind started to howl with hurricane intensity. He looked up briefly and grimaced.
“Time’s running out. He can’t be too far ahead now.” Ben got to his feet and sucked in a deep breath. “I’m getting too old for this.”
Drake looked over his shoulder for a moment. “Well, one way or the other, we’re on the last lap. So let’s make it count.”
“I heard that,” Ben said and began to run again.
Helen stayed standing under the foliage for many minutes as the rain pelted down, throwing up mud to her knees. She was alone; there were no people, and no bodies, as they had been consumed by a re-evolution timeline that was taking them all back one at a time.
Evolution seemed free now to try different things with its creations — take some back, replace others, and insert entire new lines of work. It might mean that old models got updated, upgraded, or in some cases, downgraded.
Just thinking about it scared the shit out of her because she knew it would take them too soon. Perhaps it would pause, stop, or maybe reverse if Andy was brought back with them. Or maybe it was all too late.
Helen walked carefully forward to look up at the huge body of the snake hanging in the tree. Even standing so close and looking directly at it, her mind found it hard to believe the thing had been real and alive.
She’d spent her career studying its fossil evidence, but seeing it animated was both as magnificent as it was horrible. Was Andy right? she wondered. Were they, Ben, Drake, Helen, and Emma, somehow responsible for taking a creature out of the evolutionary stream before its time?
Each year, in modern times, dozens of species went extinct, so this was just another. Just another taken out when it shouldn’t have been taken out; so maybe it was true. But we killed a legend, she thought.
She grabbed at her stomach. “Oh no,” she whispered as she felt the weird sensation wash through her as another distortion wave passed over her.
Everything went black and stayed black. She screamed but no sound came and when it was finally over, she held her hands out like a tightrope walker for a few moments to get her balance.
Helen moaned and then rubbed her face — it felt strange.
She pulled her hands away to look at them, and saw they were tiny, pudgy, and small, like a fat baby’s hands. She felt her face again, and noticed her chin felt smaller and weaker, and was now slightly receding.
What’s happening? she wondered and sank down in the drizzle, praying that Ben and Drake came back with Andy, or just that they came back at all.
“Don’t leave me here. Not like this,” she murmured as she sat, tiny and lonely, in the oily warm torrential rain.
CHAPTER 51
Emma sprinted back to where she had left her car, but then detoured up to Frank and Allie’s house — they had a spare shotgun and she knew where it was. If she got attacked, she wanted all the firepower she could get her hands on.
Bursting inside, she saw that the television set was still playing softly and as she went to pass by the living room, the first distortion wave washed over her. Emma went to her knees and tried to focus on the screen, and just before everything went dark, she saw images of a city, buildings, traffic, pedestrians, and other displays of normalcy that she tried to hang onto.
The blackout came and went, and when she blinked it away, she opened her eyes to see the images on the television had changed — it was the same cityscape, but it looked to be consumed by tangled vines, huge trees, with things like monstrous bats flying overhead.
“Oh God, no,” she panted. “It’s caught up to us… all of us.”
The next blackout forced her down onto all fours, and it seemed to last for an eternity. This time when she opened her eyes, she was ill, and finally when her vision cleared, she felt grass under her hands and knees. She wasn’t in Frank and Allie’s house anymore — because it wasn’t there.
“What the… ?”
She stared at the empty hilltop for a few seconds more and then got unsteadily to her feet. She looked around — perhaps she had somehow wandered around in a daze, like a sleepwalker, and was now on another hill.