Epilogue
Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine, but belong to Impossible Pictures.
1.
There was a general pause and then everybody just frankly stared at Lorraine. "A sail?" Jenny said sceptically. "Not a ridge, or a row of plates, or some sort of boney armour?"
"Yes!" Lorraine said firmly. "It's a sail, like on that dinosaur from the last Jurassic Park movie."
"Spinosaurus, then," Helen said flatly. "Does it look, incidentally, like the movie version?"
"Actually... no," Lorraine admitted, clearly flustered by this revelation. "It looks more like a crocodile, actually, especially in the head – but um, it's still very much a meat-eating dinosaur."
"A fish-eating, rather, if it has a head like a crocodile's – or a crocodile mimic's," Connor said, flanked by Abby who now looked better than when she returned after their impromptu bear-dog encounter. "Of course, crocodiles eat meat too, but the spinosaur side of the meat-eating family was at least partially specialized to eat primarily fish rather than meat-"
"Mr. Temple. The dinosaur appears to be 12 meters long – probably bigger than the G-Rex you fought in the airport. Can the field team go and do something, please?" Lorraine said in a somewhat – just a bit, really – firmer voice than she usually used, then caught herself, blushed, and sort of sidled into a corner; or at least looked like that what she wanted to do.
"Sure, we'll go, we'll go," Connor said in a somewhat placating tone. "Any words of wisdom, doctor?" he turned to Helen, his voice only partially sarcastic.
"No, you're the dinosaur expert, you tell us," Helen said back, without flinching. "And by the way, your boss wants to say hi."
"What do you mean-? Oh, hey Danny, hello Mr. Lester, you're finally back!"
"Yes, we are," James Lester shrugged, visibly struggling to retain his self-control. "What that I hear about you being a secondary department head or something?"
"Meh, a time anomaly has opened almost in our kitchen, so it was decided that me and Abby are the best people to take care of it; and since with your departure to France and Abby's sickness the PM had sort of proceeded to cut down on finances... well, Lorraine and Jenny figured out a way to fix that-"
"Right, well, I will look over what they have achieved, together with them, actually, while you take Mr. Quinn and others and deal with Godzilla's cousin that is rampaging our shores," Lester snapped. "Try and prevent him from reaching France's shores while you're at it, will you? The less we have to do with those goddamn frogs, the better!"
Danny opened his mouth, clearly not-quite-agreeing with the other man, but the official head of the ARC gave him such a look, that Danny opted to keep his mouth shut. "Now go!" Lester said tersely.
The ARC's field team went.
2.
It was a cold ride in the van, and not just because the October winds were blowing harshly through the streets: Danny was obviously giving Helen the cold shoulder, and the latter was blithely ignoring him, preferring to observe the clouds in the sky outside the vehicle – and then, at long last, Danny's patience broke.
"You!" he told loudly the anthropologist turned time traveller, "I still don't trust you; if you-"
"Hm? You were saying something, Danny?" Helen nonchalantly turned to face the irate man. "I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Can you repeat what you just said?"
Connor groaned. He'd seen this type of interaction before – on Naruto™ anime TV show, in which a passionate speech of one man was blithely ignored by the other; but while on the anime this sort of interaction was kind of fun, here it definitely was not, or at least Connor didn't think so.
And neither did Sarah Page, it seemed. "Why did we have to take her along?" she muttered to Abby. "She may have saved you from the sickness, and she may not be crazy, but-"
"Look," Abby muttered, "she may be hard to swallow but she's... she keeps her head on, and can be counted on preventing us from doing something stupid – like getting out of the car to save a chalicothere without taking a good look around and take a bear-dog headcount-"
"Can you explain more fully please?" Sarah asked. "What are bear-dogs, for a start?"
"Well, while you were returning from France, me and Connor took her to help us with a time anomaly," Abby explained slowly. "Considering that before it she pulled us out of the early Cretaceous when two meat-eating dinosaurs – not spinosaurs, some other ones – were going to eat us as well and after that she prevented Connor from doing something really stupid... right. The bear-dogs. Look both like bears and dogs, but are capable of smart hunting manoeuvres as well as raptors – or the terror birds. They chased a plant-eater from their time through the time anomaly, and I almost got in their way-"
"You couldn't fight them off?" Sarah asked incredulously – usually the younger woman was quite ready to fight.
"There were five of them, and I didn't spot all of them at once," Abby said slowly, "plus as I said before, they were smart, smart enough to work in a pack, almost like modern wild dogs or lions, and they were big, as big as some of the modern bears, too. If I got in their way...I would not have been able to take them on..."
"Oh," Sarah said quietly: she could see that the young woman wasn't lying but was clearly bothered by that realization, and frankly, Sarah herself wasn't too happy: usually Abby was a source of confidence or self-confidence at the ARC.
"So, what about you? How did Danny end up in Corsica of all places? Did he want to meet Napoleon or something?" Abby decided to change the discussion.
"Not exactly," Sarah blushed from discomfiture. "Remember how we picked you up from the Jurassic instead of the Cretaceous, straightaway? Well, in Danny's case he ended up on some futuristic island inhabited by giant weasels, some sort of small wild swine, lizards of some sort and insects – and then, when we tried to bring him back to the ARC the apparatus just died."
"Maybe it ran out of juice? Apparently all time-travelling technology is very energy-consuming," Abby suggested carefully. "Anyways, so that's how Danny ended up in Corsica?"
"Yeah, and so did the giant weasels and the small pigs that they preyed on," Sarah nodded, "only the pigs didn't get as much publicity as the weasels: being small and harmless they weren't as interesting to the public, I guess."
"So now the French know about the time anomalies as well?"
"Yes, and they're probably already working up some sort of a research center of their own," Sarah nodded. "It actually is a good thing that Jenny and Ms. Wickers began to bulk up the ARC already, so to speak-"
Before Abby could reply, though, their car stopped short with a jerk and they saw the dinosaur for the first time.
3.
"So, James, how was France?"
"As corrupt and stupid as always," Lester snapped as he sat down sharply at his seat. "Now, what's going on around here? How did you two arrive at this point – and how did you take me along for the ride?"
"Sir?"
"How did it all come to be?" James Lester elaborated, somewhat sharply.
"Well, I decided to seek Helen on my own to seek answers – I didn't know that Danny, Connor and Abby went out to kill her – and when I did... she actually had to rescue me twice from some sort of a marine reptile and the extinction event."
"The what?"
"You know, the giant rock from space that killed the dinosaurs? Anyways, once we settled-in at the Pleistocene and all I offered Helen a second chance – as far as only me went, of course," Jenny smiled ruefully, "and for a while I worked as her PR agent to get the release of her first book."
"I saw it. For something that holds little text but plenty of illustrations this is a rather good book," Lester said thoughtfully. "This can be a good publicity stunt for the ARC, yes..."
"Anyways, one night we ran into Connor and learned that Abby was dying, and Helen decided that it would suit her purposes better if Abby was to live, so she healed her using some sort of futuristic technology, and that's when we began to sort of get roped back into the ARC's service. Not that we had much field work to do other than handling a pair of escaped terror birds, but still... Then a time anomaly manifested itself in Connor and Abby's flat, and- oh, I believe it's all in the reports."
"Yes, yes it all is," Lester said thoughtfully. "Now can we count on Helen to remain loyal to us?"
"Well, I think we can – her misadventure with Leek had given her a reality check regarding her own limits...and I guess that she is patriotic enough, because otherwise she could've sold what she knows about time travel to French, or Russians, or Americans or whoever," Jenny shrugged.
"Uh, excuse me, but I think that you should turn on the TV," Lorraine shyly interrupted the others' discussion. "They're confronting the dinosaur – I think that you should see it."
They did.
4.
The dinosaur was huge, probably as big as the G-Rex that they had once encountered in the airport, though looking more low-slung due to the great crest on its' back. It was covered in scaleless skin the colour of sun-baked clay, and despite its' overall size, the dinosaur's limbs, tail and jaws appeared almost slender, almost like some sort of a wading bird's – that weighted around 6 tons! Plus, the look in the spinosaurus' yellow eyes was anything but birdlike – rather, it was the gaze of a crocodile, coupled with jaws that resembled those of a crocodile as well, unlike the shorter and taller jaws of the meat-eaters that had attacked Abby and Connor in the early Cretaceous some time ago.
"So? Do we have to do anything?" Becker asked Connor, looking rather intimidated by Godzilla's great-crested cousin, if just a little. "Because if it is cold-blooded, won't it just keel-over by itself under these weather conditions?"
"I'm not sure – are the dinosaurs cold-blooded, first of all?" Connor looked at Helen with a somewhat guilty expression. "'Cause if it is hot-blooded-"
Helen shrugged. "Some of the dinosaurs – like the raptors and segnosaurs – definitely were warm-blooded, just like birds, while others, namely the Cretaceous species of sauropods, developed some sort of inner heat source via their great bulk; at least they could endure the occasional bout of cold weather without any particular loss of their health. In this case, though, we're dealing with a sailback dinosaur: if its' sail is anything like the sail of the early Permian pelycosaurs, then as long as there's sun in the sky, it will warm the blood circulating in its' crest and combined with its' overall body heat it can last for a long time even here-"
"It's autumn, Helen, and it's already quite late afternoon with quite a bit of cloud cover," Danny snapped. "Night will fall within an hour, and then we'll be stuck with a giant dinosaur in the dark."
"Danny," Connor said slowly, "I'm guessing that this is an aquatic, or at least a water-dependant animal – it might take to the water at night to ambush land-dwellers who would come over for a drink."
"Only it's Thames. In the middle of autumn. At night. The animal will likely get too cold and sluggish and drown or catch hypothermia," Abby said urgently. Everybody looked at her. "What? It was a childish bet, I was eight and it wasn't in Thames. Are we to rescue the giant meat-eating dinosaur or what?"
"Why not?" Becker said suddenly. "I mean, we've handled the last giant meat-eating dinosaur as well, haven't we?"
"Yes, we had it chase Danny in a helicopter," Connor nodded. "I mean, Danny was in the helicopter, not the G-Rex-"
"We understand, except for Helen and Sarah we were all there," Abby said gently, trying to shake the image of a dinosaur pilot. "But we don't have a helicopter now-"
"I," Helen said slowly, listening attentively to the discussion, "have an ultralight aircraft."
"And you bought it a couple of centuries in the future, on E-Bay," Abby said wryly.
"No, it was actually several months ago, but yes, it was on E-Bay," Helen shrugged. "Some lesser celebrity had died under undisclosed circumstances and they were having a sale on his things, including that ultralight... what" she asked, seeing the winces on the faces of her new co-workers. "Did I say something wrong again?"
"No, no, just same bad memories," Connor said slowly. "Ah, can you go and get the ultralight plane – maybe with Danny?"
"I don't know – I never flown it with other people..." Helen said thoughtfully. "Now what?"
"You had flown it?" Becker said, unbelievingly. "Do you know how?"
"It's a glider with a motor in it," Helen said dismissively, "and when it came to gliding, I just followed the pterosaurs and used the motor only occasionally," she paused. "Still, it probably has only enough fuel and what-not for just one more flight, nothing more. I never claimed that it was in good condition," she finished on a somewhat defensive note.
"I think that we ought to fly it all the same, before it gets completely dark – hopefully the spinosaurus is omnivorous enough to take a shot at it anyways," Connor sighed.
"You don't reach 6 tons of live weight by being a picky eater," Abby rolled her eyes. "Helen, hop to it!"
"Right," Helen nodded and pulled out her spare time manifestation device, pressing a sequence of buttons on it and opening a time anomaly. "Danny, after you."
"...you kept the ultralight in the past?!" Danny goggled.
"Well, the ARC seems to be a bit skimpy on the hangar facilities, so yes," Helen shrugged. "Danny Quinn, are you coming? Because the battery may be running down."
"...yes, I am." The police officer turned dinosaur-wrangler still hadn't gotten over the fact that they were going to fly an ultralight that had been kept in a prehistoric cave, but he wasn't the type to back-down either. "Let's go."
Together they walked into the manifested time anomaly and disappeared.
5.
After the cool gloom of an English evening, the weather... was suspiciously similar to Danny's eye, save that it now seemed to be lighter in the east, not west, which meant sunrise, rather than sunset. Before that, still, Danny found his surroundings suspiciously the same – until the morning's fog began to lift.
"Helen," he said slowly, "when and where are we?"
"Judging from the pterosaurs, I'd say early Cretaceous – if Connor was here, he'd appreciate the joke-"
"Raptors."
"Where?" Helen whirled around – Danny noticed that she now had two blades, her original Bowie and a newer, thinner, bifacial blade – and stared into four pairs of eyes of giant raptors.
Well, compared to the spinosaurus, the raptors weren't particular giants, they were probably only half again as tall as the humans; however, considering that the last raptors that Danny had seen, when he, Connor and Abby were chasing Helen were barely higher than their waistlines, the descriptive word 'giant' seemed to be pretty accurate all the same.
Silence fell, as Danny and Helen stared at the slightly feathered dinosaurs, who stared down at them, in curiously bird-like expressions, chirping and squeaking quietly. This tense, and rather uneven stand-off went-on for several minutes, and then the raptors snapped their jaws and lashed-out their teeth.
"Into the cave, now," Helen barked and instinctively, Danny complied: now was one of the wrong places to argue. As they fled, the raptors began to slowly advance.
"What's going on?" Danny huffed as Helen began to hurriedly pull down the tarp from an ultralight. "We cannot feed all of them, do we?"
"I'm guessing that you haven't smelt the blood or heard the flies buzzing nearby," Helen snarled. "They have made a kill somewhere nearby and they're protecting it: they think that we're scavenger-thieves after their kill and that's not good. Get in and start flying."
The scanty light in the cave was abruptly cut-off by the shadows of the raptors as the latter entered the cave, somewhat carefully, their longish snouts sniffing the air and the odd smells that circulated in it.
Danny pushed forwards the main lever. The ultralight plane sprung forwards, its' propeller whirling and picking up speed as fast as it could...
6.
"Where – where are they?" Sarah nervously muttered to herself as Abby and Connor argued with Becker that now still wasn't the time to use shooting to attract the spinosaurus' attention and to get it out of the water.
As a matter of fact, Helen and Danny had gone for less than an hour, but already the sun had almost set and heavy cloud cover meant that the sky has gone completely black and it was getting quite cool, no more than 4 degrees Celsius.
On the other hand, however, the rather cold winds that had been blowing throughout the day had died down as well, so the spinosaurus hadn't grown cool enough to become uncomfortable, although it seemed to be thinking about going asleep on land.
Naturally, Becker was upset about this. If the spinosaurus went to sleep here in this weather – sure, the temperature was above zero for now but that didn't mean anything, tomorrow morning it could just as well rain or even snow – it would probably never wake up, and Becker would rather not have to transport 6 tons of dead dinosaur around London even before they would begin to smell, so he decided to use gunfire and similar sounds to lure the spinosaurus back through the time anomaly.
Naturally, Connor and Abby objected. They claimed that such sounds were more likely to arouse the carnivore's curiosity as well as its' hunger, and since its' night vision was much better than theirs, this wasn't a risk that they were willing to take unnecessarily, so let's wait for another half an hour before implementing it-
Another time anomaly briefly shimmered in the air, quickly vanishing, but not before out of it flew something relatively large and loud, something that moved with a buzzing sound in a straight line towards the spinosaurus' large sail, flying away in a sharp curve at the nick of time – but it was enough.
The giant dinosaur was on its' hind legs, instantly ready to pursue the new attacker – and more than a bit able. It charged after its' new foe across the Thames' shoreline, splintering and smashing everything in its' path, not unlike the way it could have done in the third movie, with people barely able to get from out of its' path or get trampled.
Snarling and roaring loudly, the spinosaurus followed the ultralight aircraft – if that what it was – into the time anomaly from which it came, and then it snapped shut. "Um, now what?" Becker turned to Connor and Abby. "Was anyone even piloting this thing?"
It was at the point that two dripping figures emerged from Thames' waters and began to move upwards. "Can someone help us down here, or are we just supposed to die from pneumonia or drown or whatever?" one of the figures called out in Danny Quinn's voice.
7.
"What- how- I don't know, is this how you've been handling time anomalies in our absence?" Lester gaped at Jenny and at Lorraine. "You know, the whole neo-technological angle?"
"No – so far the most advanced technology that we used had been a taser, which was used to hit the terror birds in their heads," Jenny admitted.
"Terror birds? What- oh, right, the ones in Abby's 'department', rather controversial fellows in my opinion," Lester said disdainfully. "So, how did it evolve into this?"
"I'm not sure – I'm guessing that there are too many people who just rub each other wrong-"
"Maybe it's just your new friend-"
"Maybe, although what had happened with Sarah and Danny? I thought that Connor told me that the two of them-"
"I don't know," Lester groaned. "I frankly feel that we've been caught in some sort of a cross between a soap opera and a sci-fi show – and the damn French aren't making it any easier!" he turned to his secretary. "Lorraine. Once they're done with the medical wing and what-not, get them to come to the conference room, would you?"
Wordlessly, Lorraine nodded.
8.
For once, the silence in the cars was just that – silence, as Danny Quinn – or Helen Cutter - for example, were too cold and wet to talk, and the others, obviously, had reasons for keeping silence of their own.
Abby, however, never found silence to be too endearing for her tastes, and so she turned to her next-seat neighbour, who was Sarah Page once more. "So, Sarah," Abby said with a desperate brightness, "what's with you and Danny? Before Connor and I got stuck in the Cretaceous the two of you seemed to go somewhere-"
"But because of all the time that we had spent apart we ended up nowhere," Sarah said bitterly. "I mean, long-distance relationships are fine, but when there are no communications between the couple, then there isn't a relationship anymore, per se."
"Not even being in Paris helped?"
"We weren't even in Paris – the island of Corsica is probably the furthest you can get from Paris and still end up in France," Sarah said bitterly. "The closest I was in a big French city was in Nice, which is actually a pretty amazing place – a mix of French and Italian culture with just a dash of Spanish; the architecture-" Sarah caught herself and sighed. "And I was there with the most unromantic people: Becker and his boys, Lester, and, apparently, Danny. He's a great guy, but his idea of romance-"
"Probably the same as Connor's, and Nick wasn't that far ahead, I suspect," Abby said, feeling a bit glum herself, and not because of the weather which was growing steadily colder. "The ARC creates a rather non-romantic working-place atmosphere, you know?.."
"Maybe," Sarah said slowly. "So, uh-"
"You know, the French have pretty much secured the time anomaly on Corsica, and are planning to explore at least that time zone," Becker spoke up suddenly. "It's a good thing that Lewis and Lorraine have begun at least some development of our center-"
"Shut up, Becker!" Sarah snapped. "I was talking!"
As Becker and Sarah began to animatedly argue about France, giant weasels and everything else in general, Abby frowned. Sarah may think that romance was dead, but sexual tension was definitely present – and with a wrong guy!..
A quick glimpse at Danny, who wasn't looking very thrilled at this development confirmed Abby's suspicion – but didn't give her any ideas about how to fix the situation...
9.
"People! You must be wondering why I have called you tonight after the harrowing time with the dinosaur-" Lester began; Abby, however, was in no mood for his theatrics and decided to strike first:
"Because the French have already established a stable time anomaly on Corsica and we need to quickly do something before we're outcompeted?" she suggested wryly.
"Yes, actually," Lester grimaced. "The PM and the rest of the government isn't happy about it, so he is pressuring me to do something about it, lest the French beat us – can the French beat us, doctor Hunter?"
"Please, Mr. Lester, you can call me Helen," the aforementioned 'doctor' just smiled, and then proceeded to look thoughtful. "From what I understood, you encountered giant weasels, really small wild pigs, and several new species of lizards and insects, correct?"
"Yes," Lester nodded warily.
"The weasels had almost sabre-like canines, yes?"
"Correct," Lester rolled his eyes.
"Then the Corsican time anomaly leads to a place in the future very similar to our Pliocene: namely a past-Ice Age world, fresh and undispoiled... I'm sure that Danny Quinn over there can explain it better than I."
Danny growled slightly in irritation, but the others just ignored him. "Past Ice Age world? What kind of nonsense is that, incidentally?" Lester asked instead.
"Lorraine? Can you please send me a memo to bring some sort of time chart of prehistoric climate changes to the office sometime next week?" Helen said calmly. "I bet that it would make life and work so simpler around here, alongside the impromptu time scale that we wrote up yesterday."
"Oh, doctor, that is so funny...yet potentially useful – kind of like yourself," Lester said flatly. "However, this will have to wait – starting tomorrow, the ARC will be doing a mild publicity stunt-"
"How mild?" Sarah immediately asked, noticing that Jenny – now, apparently, reinstalled as the head of the center's PR – didn't look particularly happy at this announcement.
"Oh, I think of making an appointment with a TV station – say, ITV – and showing our local prehistoric celebrities," Lester said airily. "I'm sure it'll all go smoothly, eh?"
Not even Helen could find any appropriate words of response to this question, so Lester adjourned the meeting, and... that was it.
10.
As soon as Lester leaves, everybody's attention focuses on Jenny. "Don't give me that!" the PR agent exhaled. "He actually wanted to through the time anomalies and record the giant lizards, and dinosaurs, and what-not that dwelt there in a natural habitat. Does anyone wants to meet another sail-backed dinosaur in its' natural habitat?"
There was a pause as everybody somehow ended up looking at Connor. "What?" the young man said, innocently. "I remember the whole G-Rex fiasco as well as everyone else present and I remember that dinosaurs and video cameras do not mix. Besides, we still have the terror birds – and they can be almost as good in regards to the whole prehistoric predator drama."
"Yeah – but will they behave?" Jenny asked sceptically. "They don't look very tame yet to me."
"As long as the mammoth is in there, they'll behave," Helen replies instead. "They may not be smart, but they will realize easily that the mammoth can kill them both with one lucky blow – as long as it is close at hand, they will not act too aggressively."
"So, first we have the mammoth and the terror birds, second we have Rex as well as Sid and Nancy and their pups," Jenny says slowly. "Connor, Abby, you're in charge."
"Thanks, Jenny," Abby said a trifle sourly. "We'll get onto it immediately." Then, upon sending Jenny's glare, she softened her attitude somewhat: "Jenny, look, we are grateful for you softening the situation and all, but, well, this has been a trying week and all..."
"So, let's start working on it tomorrow morning," Jenny said slowly. "Oh, and by the way? Lester assigned Christine to do all the secondary paperwork."
Abby twitched – so did Danny actually. "It really is her, then? Not a look-alike?"
Jenny merely nodded. Danny groaned.
"Civil workers returning from the dead and palaeontologists putting on circus acts? Life is never boring around here, is it?"
"No, it's not – that's why I love working here," Jenny agreed.
Outside, the clouds were obscuring the night-time sky. Inside, the ARC employees were figuring out the plans for tomorrow, to start working on them ASAP – in other words, it was life as usual at the Anomaly Research Center.
