THE ICE AGE COMETH
Day Four
It was all over the news. The sheets of ice in the North were moving, like giant rivers, carving their way down towards the supercontinent's midsection. Cities like Chicagorock and Detroitstone had already been evacuated and everyone knew that Bedrock would be next. It was just a question of when…
"Fred, what are you doing?" Wilma stuck her head in through the garage doorway. "I thought you were done packing."
"I am, Wilma. I was just looking at some of these old family pictures…hey, here's Pebbles and Bam-Bam playing on their toy musical instruments."
"Oh, my, they were still just babies then." Overcome by nostalgia, Wilma looked at the photo carvings. "Here's one of Barney trying to teach Bam-Bam how to play baseball."
Fred chuckled at the image of his old pal sitting on the grass rubbing his head while Bam-Bam watched him with an amused expression while he held an oversized bat. "That kid didn't know his own strength." Pebbles and Bam-Bam were safe-they'd left town a week earlier, headed for Uncle Tex's ranch. It was supposed to be warmer down there…
Day Seven
"And, with weather reports coming in almost daily, the government has urged all citizens still within the evacuation zone to leave now before…"
"Now they tell us." Fred scowled at the long line of cars ahead of them. They'd tried getting a flight out, but they'd all been cancelled or grounded-something was wrong with the pterodactyls; none of them were feeling well and so the planes they carried couldn't get off the ground. Fred had seen the same thing happen to the brontosauruses at the quarry before Mr. Slate closed it down. Even Dino was sick, as he lay in the back seat of the car with a blanket over him.
"Oh, Fred, I don't like this traffic. Maybe we should have followed Barney and Betty." Wilma sat beside him, shivering in spite of the fact that the heater was on. Fred couldn't blame her; the snow the weather service had predicted for next week had instead come a week early, which had prompted the mass evacuation.
"Don't worry, honey…once we get past the city limits, we can take the Interstate all the way to Texarock." Fred looked up at the snowflakes as they drifted down. He'd only seen snow a couple of times in his life, and that had been on the tops of mountain peaks.
Fred remembered a conversation that he'd had with Barney, who had always been more book-read than him, who'd been telling him about early prehistory, and how the first generation of dinosaurs and Neanderthals had died out from changes in the weather. Fred had heard the theories as kid-volcanoes, an asteroid, and so forth. Was it happening to them, now? "It's all part of a cycle," Barney had said, in that cheerful tone of his. That had been three weeks ago.
"Just try to relax, honey," Fred said. He reached in the back seat to get an extra blanket and put it around her shoulders, and checked on Dino, who had stopped whimpering and was now finally snoring peacefully; the medicine the vet had given him seemed to be working. He looked up at the gray, foreboding sky. "We'll be at the ranch before you know it…"
Day Twelve
The area that had once been Bedrock was silent, adrift in snow. The streets and homes were abandoned; the interstate now a frozen river. Snow continued to come down, faster and heavier now, until it covered the city in a blanket of white.
The Stone Age was over. The Ice Age had come at last.
THE END