Still screaming, Dodgson felt himself carried back into the jungle. High branches of trees lashed his face. The hot breath of the animal whooshed in snorts over his body. Saliva dripped onto his torso. He thought he would pass out from terror.
But the jaws never closed.
Inside the store, they stared at the tiny monitor as Dodgson was carried away in the jaws of the tyrannosaur. Over the radio, they heard his tinny distant screams.
“You see?” Malcolm said. “There is a God.”
Levine was frowning. “The rex didn’t kill him.” He pointed to the screen. “Look, there, you can see his arms are still moving. Why didn’t it kill him?”
Sarah Harding waited until the screams faded. She crawled out from beneath the car, standing up in the morning light. She opened the door and got behind the wheel. The key was in the ignition; she gripped it with muddy fingers. She twisted it.
There was a chugging sound, and then a soft whine. All the dashboard lights came on. Then silence. Was the car working? She turned the wheel and it moved easily. So the power steering was on.
“Doc.”
“Yes, Sarah.”
“The car’s working. I’m coming back.”
“Okay,” he said. “Hurry.”
She put it in drive, and felt the transmission engage. The car was unusually quiet, almost silent. Which was why she was able to hear the faint thumping of a distant helicopter.
Daylight
She was driving beneath a thick canopy of trees, back toward the village. She heard the sound of the helicopter build in intensity. Then it roared overhead, unseen through the foliage above. She had the window down, and was listening. It seemed to move off to her right, toward the south.
The radio clicked. “Sarah.”
“Yes, Doc.”
“Listen: we can’t communicate with the helicopter.”
“Okay,” she said. She understood what had to be done. “Where’s the landing site?”
“South. About a mile. There’s a clearing. Take the ridge road.”
She was coming up to the fork. She saw the ridge road going off to the right. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going.”
“Tell them to wait for us,” Thorne said. “Then come back and get us.”
“Everybody okay?” she said.
“Everybody’s fine,” Thorne said.
She followed the road, hearing a change in the sound of the helicopter. She realized it must be landing. The rotors continued, a low whirr, which meant the pilot wasn’t going to shut down.
The road curved off to the left. The sound of the helicopter was now a muted thumping. She accelerated, driving fast, careening around the corner. The road was still wet from the rains the night before. She wasn’t raising a cloud of dust behind her. There was nothing to tell anyone that she was here.
“Doc. How long will they wait?”
“I don’t know,” Thorne said, over the radio. “Can you see it?”
“Not yet,” she said.
Levine stared out the window. He looked at the lightening sky, through the trees. The streaks of red were gone. It was now a bright even blue. Daylight was definitely coming.
Daylight . . .
And then he put it together. He shivered as he realized. He went to the window on the opposite side, looked out toward the tennis court. He stared at the spot where the carnotauruses had been the night before. They were gone now.
Just as he feared.
“This is bad,” he said.
“It’s only just now eight,” Thorne said, glancing at his watch.
“How long will it take her?” Levine said.
“I don’t know. Three or four minutes.”
“And then to get back?” Levine said.
“Another five minutes.”
“I hope we make it that long.” He was frowning unhappily.
“Why?” Thorne said. “We’re okay.”
“In a few minutes,” Levine said, “we’ll have direct sun shining down outside.”
“So what?” Thorne said.
The radio clicked. “Doc,” Sarah said. “I see it. I see the helicopter.”
Sarah came around a final curve and saw the landing site off to her left. The helicopter was there, blades spinning. She saw another junction in the road, with a narrow road leading left down a hill, into jungle, and then out to the clearing. She drove down it, descending a series of switchbacks, forcing her to go slow. She was now back in the jungle, beneath the canopy of trees. The ground leveled out, she splashed across a narrow stream, and accelerated forward.
Directly ahead there was a gap in the tree canopy, and sunlight on the clearing beyond. She saw the helicopter. Its rotors were beginning to spin faster—it was leaving! She saw the pilot behind the bubble, wearing dark glasses. The pilot checked his watch, shook his head to the copilot, and then began to lift off.
Sarah honked her horn, and drove madly forward. But she knew they could not hear her. Her car bounced and jolted. Thorne was saying, “What is it? Sarah! What’s happening?”
She drove forward, leaning out the window, yelling “Wait! Wait!” But the helicopter was already rising into the air, lifting up out of her view. The sound began to fade. By the time her car burst out of the jungle into the clearing, she saw the helicopter heading away, disappearing over the rocky rim of the island.
And then it was gone.
“Let’s stay calm,” Levine said, pacing the little store. “Tell her to get back right away. And let’s stay calm.” He seemed to be talking to himself. He walked from one wall to the next, pounding the wooden planks with his fist. He shook his head unhappily. “Just tell her to hurry. You think she can be back in five minutes?”
“Yes,” Thorne said. “Why? What is it, Richard?”
Levine pointed out the window. “Daylight,” he said. “We’re trapped here in daylight.”
“We were trapped here all night, too,” Thorne said. “We made it okay.”
“But daylight is different,” Levine said.
“Why?”
“Because at night,” he said, “this is carnotaurus territory. Other animals don’t come in. We saw no other animals at all around here, last night. But once daylight comes, the carnotaurus can’t hide any more. Not in open spaces, in direct sunlight. So they’ll leave. And then this won’t be their territory any more.”
“Which means?”
Levine glanced at Kelly, over by the computer. He hesitated, then said, “Just take my word for it. We have to get out of here right away.”
“And go where?”
Sitting at the computer, Kelly listened to Thorne talking to Dr. Levine. She fingered the piece of paper with Arby’s password on it. She felt very nervous. The way Dr. Levine was talking was making her nervous. She wished Sarah was back by now. She would feel better when Sarah was here.
Kelly didn’t like to think about their situation. She had been holding herself together, keeping up her spirits, until the helicopter came. But now the helicopter had come and gone. And she noticed neither of the men was talking about when it would come back. Maybe they knew something. Like it wasn’t coming back.
Dr. Levine was saying they had to get out of the store. Thorne was asking Dr. Levine where he wanted to go. Levine said, “I’d prefer to get off this island, but I don’t see how we can. So I suppose we should make our way back to the trailer. It’s the safest place now.”
Back to the trailer, she thought. Where she and Sarah had gone to get Malcolm. Kelly didn’t want to go back to the trailer.
She wanted to go home.
Tensely, Kelly smoothed out the piece of damp paper, pressing it flat on the table beside her. Dr. Levine came over. “Stop fooling around,” he said. “See if you can find Sarah.”
“I want to go home,” Kelly said.
Levine sighed. “I know, Kelly,” he said. “We all want to go home.” And he walked away again, moving quickly, tensely.
Kelly pushed the paper away, turning it over, and s
liding it under the keyboard, in case she should need the password again. As she did so, her eye was caught by some writing on the other side.
She pulled the paper out again.
She saw:
She realized at once what it was: a screen shot from Levine’s apartment. From the night when Arby had been recovering files from the computer. It seemed like a million years ago, another lifetime. But it had really been only . . . what? Two days ago.
She remembered how proud Arby had been when he had recovered the data. She remembered how they had all tried to make sense of this list. Now, of course, all these names had meaning. They were all real places: the laboratory, the worker village, the convenience store, the gas station. . . .
She stared at the list.
You’re kidding, she thought.
“Dr. Thorne,” she said. “I think you better look at this.”
Thorne stared as she pointed at the list. “You think so?” he said.
“That’s what it says: a boathouse.”
“Can you find it, Kelly?”