Fall 2013 Final(ish) Draft Story 3

Chairodactyl

“How do you know it’s a time portal?” Begonia took her face out of the lake and looked at me out of little kid goggles decorated with plastic pink fish.

“I told you,” I rolled my eyes at my cousin. “That’s why the water is colder when you swim down deep. The portal takes all of the warmth out of the water as fuel. They didn’t have batteries and things in dinosaur times. The only reason it’s warmer up here is because it’s sunny.”

Begonia dunked another suspicious glance at the white plastic lawn chair on the bottom of the lake. “Okay. So we just gotta swim down and touch it?”

“Together, yeah,” Rick said. “And when we swim back up, we’ll have gone back in time.”

“Everybody ready?” I asked.

We all dove and swam straight down. The chair got brighter and whiter as we swam closer. It seemed to glow in the watery sunlight.

We touched the chair.

Was the water warmer?

Begonia immediately started kicking for the surface while Rick and I reached into our pockets for our lizard masks. We broke the surface together and gulped in a breath of warm air before roaring at her.

Begonia screamed; we laughed. “I hate you, Jack!” she said.

“Just me?” I asked. “Oh, harsh.”

“Ummmm, Jack?” Rick sounded uneasy.

“What?”

Rick pointed at the shore. “Where are all of the cottages?”

I looked. There weren’t any. The trees looked funny somehow. The chair rested right where we left it, but the huge spiky clam next to it didn’t seem right.

“I dunno.”

When we got to the shore, Begonia seemed to shrink a bit, which said something for a girl wearing a My Little Pony one piece that was a bit too big. “The forest looks different,” she said.

The aspens and birches we were used to were gone and the pine trees looked wrong. The ground was too flat and too soft under our bare feet and ferns scratched at our legs as we walked. What the heck?

The sound of a roar echoed through the sparse forest.

We all froze.

“But,” Rick’s jaw hung open. “It can’t-”

“I know,” I said.

Another roar. Crud. That couldn’t be real.

We started sprinting just as a huge dinosaur ambled out of the tall ferns. It was as tall as a school bus and almost as long. The spikes on either side of its front feet were as long as my forearm.

Glancing back, Rick stammered, “But it was a joke. A prank!”

“I know,” I repeated. “Run!”

I stopped at the base of a tree. “Okay, guys,” I said, “Start climbing.” Rick immediately scrambled into the lower branches.

“But what about your cast?” Begonia asked.

“I’ll manage,” I heaved her onto the first branch. “Keep going. I’ll catch up.” The branch was too thick to grip with one hand, but the dinosaur was only fifty feet away. I sighed and tugged the wet rubber sleeve off of my casted arm and slung it over the first branch.

The dinosaur got closer.

I gripped the ends of the sleeve tight and walked my feet up the trunk until I could swing a leg over the branch. After beating the Olympic tree climbing time record, I found myself seated between my cousins trying not to listen to the munching noises of a huge dinosaur menacingly eating ferns.

The silence lasted like a millennium. “Um, Everyone okay?” I said and flung my arms in front of my face to block Rick’s punch. A thudding vibration made the skin under my cast get all tickly itchy.

“OW!” Rick moaned, biting his lip.

I winced. “Sorry.”

“But- but that’s a dinosaur!” Rick’s freckles seemed to fade as his face reddened.

“You think I didn’t notice?” I snapped. Was my voice normally that high?

“This is YOUR fault.”

“What?” I said. “I didn’t know this was gonna happen. You’re not the only one who’s scared of getting eaten here.”

Begonia was being weirdly quiet. Her eyes were staring and dripping. I’d seen someone on TV say that loud annoying kids only cried silently when they couldn’t stop. I shivered and looked down. The dinosaur was still munching on its salad. “Wait a sec. I’ve got a plan.”

Rick frowned. “Why should we listen to you, Jack? It’s your fault we’re here.”

“Good question,” I crossed my arms. “What’s your plan then?”

“Ummmm.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Anyway, that thing is eating plants. I say we wait until it goes away and go back to the portal as fast as we can.”

“How do you know the chair’s still there?” Rick asked. “Plastic isn’t even invented yet.”

“Nothing’s invented yet,” Begonia added.

“Well, it was still there when we were in the lake,” I said. “I saw it.”

“Then why don’t any dinosaurs accidentally come to our time?” Begonia asked, watching the dinosaur’s big jaws noisily grinding its salad.

I raised an eyebrow and tried not to stare at a spider the size of a softball that was lazily descending toward us. “I dunno. Maybe they can. Who do I look like- Google?”

Rick shrugged.

“Anyway,” I turned to Begonia. “Don’t panic, but there’s a spider on your head.”

Begonia screamed like a strangled piccolo. Her arms flailed around in the vicinity of her head so violently that she punched herself in the eye. Her head slammed back into the tree trunk, squashing the spider flat with a disgusting crunch.

“Ewww,” Rick said.

“Turn around a bit.” Gritting my teeth, I gripped what was left of the spider’s body with my cast glove and dropped it.

Unfortunately, it landed on the dinosaur’s head. It flicked its head to rid itself of the spider and looked up into the tree. It’s head rose and kept on rising as its front feet lifted off the ground. Standing on its hind legs, the dinosaur grabbed a branch just a few feet below us and pulled it towards its mouth.

“Herbivore,” Rick said. “Right. What do we do?”

“I got an idea,” I said. I clambered down to the branch that the dinosaur was snacking on and swung my casted arm like a baseball bat. Plaster struck scaly skin and dense bone with a thud as my cast smacked the dinosaur in the face. It stopped to glance at me for a moment.

Oh Crud. “Well that didn’t work.”

There was a sound like a sputtering foghorn. It was worse than when the rhino at the zoo farted, and that chased away a crowd of a hundred people. I grabbed my nose and focused on not throwing up.

“Nowwut?” My voice sounded all cartoony and my vision swam.

“The masks!” Rick said. “They’re raptory.”

I stared at him blankly.

“Worth a try,” Rick shrugged.

I guess he was right about that. “As Ray Arnold would say, ‘hold onto your butts!’”

We lowered our heads to look at the dinosaur and yelled. It released the branch and turned to dash away. I almost fell.

Climbing out of the tree was horrible. I’d wear rhino fart deodorant before doing that again.

Bushes crackled under enormous footsteps.

The source of the noise walked out of the trees on two enormous legs with viciously clawed toes. Scythe-like talons decorated the ends of stubby arms. Golden yellow eyes stared forward out of a huge face, and a tall ridge ran from the top of its head to the tip of its tail. Its lower jaw appeared to be as big as the rest of its head, and its entire gaping mouth was lined with sharp teeth longer than my hands.

“Is that what I think it is?” I coughed.

Rick stared at the beast without moving. “Nope. I think that last one was an Iguanadon, which would make it too early. Acrocanthosaurus. Bigger than T-Rex.”

“Okay,” I said, glad that at least one of us remembered something useful from all the time we’d spent reading dinosaur picture books in second grade. “That’s nice. What do we do?”

“Well,” Rick said. “We could hang tight and hope it doesn’t notice us, but I bet we smell new and tasty.” Sure enough, the Acrocanthosaurus stopped walking and sniffed the air, looking left and right. The fading Iguanadon fart wouldn’t hide us for long.

“And plan B?” I whispered.

“Zig-zag.”

The Acrocanthosaurus roared again. I imagined that I could smell the old meat on its breath. A glob of drool dripped out of its mouth as it spotted them.

“Now! Run!” I yelled.

We dashed through the forest, the Acrocanthosaurus making the ground shake right behind us. When I could feel hot breath on my back, I grabbed a tree trunk without slowing down, letting my momentum catapult me through a hairpin turn. My cousins copied me, but the Acrocanthosaurus kept on thundering forward before lumbering to a halt to turn around.

We could hear ferns and bushes crackling as the dinosaur fought to get turned around, but we kept running. Within seconds, a huge fallen tree blocked our path. We scrambled over while the Acrocanthosaurus sped toward us.

We were almost to the beach! I started to run, but Begonia grabbed my good hand and flopped to the ground, dragging Rick and me with her. I threw my arms over my head, expecting the worst.

There was a thud, a shriek and a horrible crash.

And silence.

I cautiously opened my eyes and there was the Acrocanthosaurus lying still with its head bleeding all over the boulder it had hit. A boulder next to a big, bristly pine tree.

The forest was completely still. Not even a breeze dared to move.

Tick-tick-pop-snap-pop-CRRRACK!

The tree started to fall as if in slow motion, and then tumbled onto the fallen dinosaur. Its top branches landed only a few feet away from us, wafting us with a burst of piney freshness.

Begonia stood there blinking and I smiled at her. Not my usual smirk, but the same smile I give my friends. She shakily grinned back.

I looked around and plucked a big pink and purple flower from a nearby bush. Tucking the stem behind Begonia’s ear and I said, “Here. A flower so special that you’re the only girl to ever wear it.”

Begonia’s hugged me tight. “Let’s go home.”