Evolution (11 page)

To the south of the beach, the thin pillar of light had fanned outward. It became more diffuse, and changed color, becoming a deeper orange white. Tiny flecks of orange could be seen flying up around its base. And now a band of darkness spread over the southern horizon. Still, all this unfolded in silence. What was coming was still moving much more rapidly than sound. The dinosaur herds were oblivious; still the young pachycephalosaurs battled, locked into their Darwinian dance.

But the birds and the pterosaurs knew the sky. A group of pterosaurs had been working the ocean, skimming low over the surface seeking to scoop up fish in their hydrodynamically elegant beaks. Now they turned and headed inland, flapping to gain speed. A flock of small, gull-like birds followed, rising up on gray-white wings that seemed to pulse in the glowing rock light.

Of the thousands of dinosaurs, only the suchomimus reacted to the light show. She turned to the south, and her slit pupils narrowed at what she saw. Some instinct made her splash away from the water to run higher onto the shore. The warm sand was soft under her feet, slowing her down. But still the suchomimus ran.

Two young raptors, working playfully at the shell of a stranded sea turtle, lifted their heads with speculative interest as she passed. A corner of the suchomimus’s clever mind rippled with alarm signals. She was breaking many of her innate rules; she was making herself vulnerable. But a deeper instinct told her that the stain of darkness spreading over the horizon was more of a threat than any raptor.

She reached a bank of low dunes. A ball of fur squirmed indignantly out from beneath her feet and fled with blurring speed.

Over the coastal plain, the light began to fade.

At last the dinosaurs were disturbed. The great herbivore herds, the duckbills and ankylosaurs, lifted their heads from their browsing and turned to face the south.

The fan of ascending rock was invisible now, hidden by a wall of darkness that spanned the horizon. But it was a moving wall whose front bubbled and writhed. Lightning flickered over the moving surface, making it shine purple white.

Even now, in these last seconds, there was little sense of strangeness. It was like an eerie twilight. Some of the dinosaurs even felt drowsy, as their nervous systems reacted to the reduced level of light.

Then, from out of the south, the shock front exploded. From silence to bedlam in a heartbeat. The front smashed the animal herds. Duckbills were hurled into the air, huge adults writhing, their lowing lost in the sudden fury. The competition among the hard-skulled stegoceras was concluded without resolution, never to be resumed. Some of the great ankylosaurs stood their ground, turning into the wind, hunkering down like armored bunkers. But the very ground was torn up around them, the vegetation ripped out and scattered; even the lakes explosively emptied of their water. The shallow dune exploded over the suchomimus, instantly burying her in gritty darkness.

But as quickly as it had come, the shock wave passed.

When she felt the ground’s shuddering cease, the suchomimus began to scrabble at the earth. She sneezed the grit out of her nostrils, her great translucent eyelids working to clear her eyes, and clambered to her feet.

She stepped forward gingerly. The new ground was rubble strewn, uncertain, difficult to walk on.

The coastal plain was unrecognizable. The dune that had sheltered her was demolished, the wind’s patient, centuries-long work erased in seconds. The plain was littered with debris: bits of pulverized rock, sea-bottom mud, even a few strands of seaweed and smaller sea creatures. Above her, clouds boiled, streaming north.

Still the noise continued, great crackling shocks that rained out of the sky as sound waves folded over on themselves. But the suchomimus heard none of this. She had been deafened in the first instant of the shock’s passage, her delicate eardrums crushed.

Dinosaurs lay everywhere.

Even the largest duckbills had been smashed to the ground. They lay, broken and twisted, under scattered sand and mud. A group of raptors lay together, their lithe bodies tangled up. Everywhere the old lay with the young, parents alongside their children, predators with their prey, united in death. Most disasters, like floods and fires, selectively affected the weakest, the young and the old and the ill. Or else they targeted species— an epidemic, perhaps, carried by an unwitting host across a land bridge between the continents. But this time, none had been spared, none save the very fortunate, like the suchomimus.

The suchomimus saw a silver fish. It twitched, carried a dozen kilometers in seconds, still alive. The suchomimus’s gut rumbled gently. Even now, as the world ended, she was hungry.

But the wind’s work was not yet done. Already, over the ocean, the air was rushing back to fill the vacuum created at the impact site. It was like an immense inhalation.

The suchomimus, toying with her fish, saw the wall of darkness bear down once more. But this time it came from inland, and it was laden with debris, with dirt and rocks and uprooted trees and even a huge male tyrannosaur that writhed lifeless, high in the air.

Once more the suchomimus dived at the sand.

From the furies of the crater the shock front continued to spread out, like a ripple around a fallen stone. Further inland, where Giant had raided the tyrannosaur nest, the front had wrought devastation around a great circle big enough to have been wrapped around the Moon.

Tornadoes spun off the advancing front like willful, destructive children.

To Giant, the twister was a tube of darkness that connected sky to ground. At its feet, what looked like splinters rose up, whirled and fell back. The giganotosaurs’ ancestors had invaded a continent. Now Giant reared up and hissed, bobbing his head, eyes triangulating on the approaching menace.

But this was no saurian competitor. As the twister approached it grew ever larger, towering high above him.

At last something in Giant’s mind focused on those twigs scattered at the feet of this climatic monster. Those “twigs” were
trees,
redwoods and ginkgoes and tree ferns, scattered as easily as pine needles.

His brothers made the same calculation. The three of them turned and ran.

The base of the twister tore casually through the blanket forest, destroying trees, scattering rock. Animals weighing five tons or more were hurled into the air, great slow-moving herbivores suddenly flying. Many of them died of shock even before they hit the ground.

In her burrow, Purga was shaken awake by the rattling of the earth. She and her mate huddled closely around the two pups, and they listened to the howling of the wind, the clatter and crunch of trees being shattered, the scream of dying dinosaurs.

Purga closed her eyes, baffled, terrified, longing for the noise to stop.

And in the foothills of the Rockies, the mother azhdarchid sensed the approach of the mighty wind. Hastily she folded up her wings and waddled on wrists and knees toward her nest.

Her young clustered around, but she had no food to give them, and they pecked at her angrily. The chicks were still flightless, their wing membranes yet to develop. For now they had only loose, useless flaps of skin trailing between their flight fingers and hind legs. And yet they were already beautiful, in their way; the scales that clustered around their thin necks, a relic of their reptilian ancestry, caught the high sunlight, gleaming and glistening.

But now clouds raced across the sun. The twisters would not reach so high. But the shock front was still a broiling wall of turbulent air, still powerful even so far from the impact site.

A first gust buffeted the nest. The chicks screeched and stumbled.

Without thinking the mother flapped her wings, taking to the air. A primitive imperative had taken over. There would always be more broods, if she survived. The chicks, receding beneath her, squawked their anger and fear.

As the wall of wind approached, there was a moment of stillness.

The azhdarchid’s airspeed dropped. She turned and spread her wings, instinctive responses coming to play. She held out her long flight finger and her hind limb, and subtle twitches of thigh and knee adjusted the tension in her wings. She was an exquisite flying device, an apparatus of tendons, ligaments, muscle, skin and fur, shaped by tens of millions of years of evolution.

But the comet wind didn’t care about that, not at all.

The wind hit the nest first. The rock ledge was swept bare, the nest smashed to fragments. The bones of the pterosaurs’ victims— including those of Second— were sent whirling into the air with the rest of the debris. The chicks flew: if only briefly, if only once, if only to their deaths.

And then, for the mother azhdarchid, it was as if she had flown into a wall of dust and spray, and even bits of vegetation and wood and rock. She felt her fragile bones snap. She was tumbled over and over, helpless as a dead leaf.

Once more the suchomimus struggled to her feet. She ached in her legs, arms, back, tail, and head, where she had been struck by bits of flying debris, the wreckage of a world.

Again the beach had become an utterly unfamiliar place. The ground was now littered by debris from inland, bits of smashed trees and crushed animals, dead or dying pterosaurs and birds, even lake-bottom ooze. Nothing moved— nothing but dying creatures, and the suchomimus.

She remembered the fish she had been about to eat. The fish was gone.

Above her, dark banks of cloud whipped across the sky, like a curtain being drawn. The sun disappeared; it would not be seen again for a long time.

And to the south, the lid of sky began to glow an eerie orange. A breeze wafted a sharp, distinctive smell to her nose.
Ozone.
The smell of the sea. She thought of lapping water, the glittering fish of the shallows. She must get to the sea. She had always made her living from the sea; there she would be safe. With a mournful lowing even she couldn’t hear, she began to blunder in the direction of the scent, ignoring the grisly detritus under her feet.

The sea turtle had been fortunate. When the comet hit, she was cruising the sea bottom far from the impact zone.

Her kind was among the most primitive of the great reptile dynasties. But, primitive or not, this turtle was an effective hunter. Her body was undemanding, requiring only a twentieth as much food as a dinosaur of the same weight. Heavily protected by her powerfully reinforced shell, cautious even as a hunter, the only risks she ran in her life were the annual assaults she had to make on the beaches to lay her eggs, before hurrying back to the safety of the water.

Her brain was small, her consciousness dim. She lived alone, in a world of colorless monotony. She had no bonds with her parents or siblings, no real understanding that the eggs she laid would produce a new generation. But she was ancient, wary, enduring.

Now, though, something disturbed her blue, lonely world. A monstrous current began to drag the sea toward the south.

Grimly the turtle paddled at the water, heading downward. Her instincts, honed by millions of years of tropical storms, primed her with a simple instruction: dive deep, get to the bottom, find shelter.

But this was like no current she had ever experienced. Through the increasingly muddy and turbulent water she glimpsed much larger creatures, even giant pliosaurs, being dragged backward by this mighty tide. And as she descended she was battered by debris, helpless ammonites, clams, squid, even rocks torn from the floor.

At last she found soft mud. All her four fins working, she began to work her way into the dirt, ignoring the hail of objects that clattered off her shell. Eventually she would have to surface, for air and warmth; but she could last for a long time, perhaps until this monstrous storm had passed away.

But now the sea’s glimmering meniscus descended toward her— and the sea
drained away
— and she found herself in sunlight, with moist mud hissing all around her. Something like shock lit up her small mind. The world had turned upside down; this made no sense.

And now the sea bottom mud, exposed, began to shake.

By the shifting, strange light, at last the suchomimus saw the sea. With a hoarse cry of relief, she hurried forward.

But the sea ran away from her, exposing glistening mud. And as fast as she pursued it, the sea ran faster.

A fish flopped at her feet. She stopped and plucked it out of the dirty mud and popped it into her mouth. In the fish’s tiny awareness was a kind of relief; this death was quick compared to the grisly suffocation it had endured on the new beach.

The sea bottom, uncovered for the first time in millions of years, was a glistening floor of life. It was littered with clams, crustaceans, squid, fish, ammonites of all sizes, all of them drowning in the air.

Further south there were giant shapes. The suchomimus saw a giant plesiosaur, stranded like the rest. Eight meters long, it lay gasping on the mud with its four huge flippers splayed and broken around it. It struggled, tons of marine carnivore flipping this way and that, huge fins waving, savage teeth snapping in rage at the fate that had stranded it.

On any other day it would have been a remarkable sight. The suchomimus turned away, bewildered.

When she looked north to the land, she could see creatures creeping out of the devastated forests, the wind-scoured marshland. Many of them were ankylosaurs and other armored creatures, protected thus far by the heavy armor that had evolved to fend off the teeth and claws of tyrannosaurs. They crawled toward the exposed seabed, seeking sanctuary, to drink, to feed.

But now the ankylosaurs opened their mouths and began to retreat once more. The suchomimus watched them, baffled. They were bellowing, but she couldn’t hear them.

She turned back to face the sea. And then she saw what had frightened them.

As air, so water.

From the impact site, powered by the immense pulse of heat, a circular shock wave now marched outward through the body of the ocean. Its destructive power was limited because the impact had not occurred in deep ocean water. Still, as it neared the coastline of North America, the wave was already some thirty meters high. And as it reached the shallower water of the Texas coast, the tsunami gathered itself, rearing ten to twenty times its initial height.