TWELVE
My eyes drift open and focus on a world that I’ve imagined since I was five. I’m walking through a dream, but I’m not sleeping. I’m wide awake. Somewhere off in the distance—I’m not sure how far away—I hear a cacophony of unfamiliar, freakish noises. Sounds I’ve never heard before, that are definitely not human, nor do they resemble anything animalistic that I’ve heard before.
My eyes are glued to the savage-looking trees. Then I remember that Estelle’s with me. I wheel around. “Oh my God … we did it! We really did it!” I shout.
I turn a full circle, absorbing the view, inhaling the deathly scent of the wild, and feeling the humid, feral air against my skin. The ground is covered in a gummy mud that sucks at my shoes every time I take a step. I grab for Estelle’s hand to help her manage, but she gently smacks it away.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “You make sure you have both hands free in case you fall.”
“I don’t need both hands. I need to make sure you’re okay,” I insist, and hold my hand out closer to her. She sighs, smiles, and gives in.
We plod through the heavy, gray mud along a narrow path between towering, wire-thin, trees armored with foot-long lethal-looking thorns. I snap my camera at nearly every step I take. The sky is veiled by the mass of branches above us that form an archway over our heads, converging like they’re holding hands. The branches are clothed in piles of dark, blood-red leaves that make it difficult for us to see through to the sky to determine whether it’s day or night.
Estelle tugs at my arms to stop me. “Gavin—look!” she whispers, pointing off to an area somewhere to the right of us.
I look over and follow the direction of her finger to the spot she’s pointing at. Three gigantic footprints, each one as long as I am tall are etched into the charcoal mud. Estelle tightens her grip around my hand, and without even thinking about it, I clasp hers as hard as I can, too.
I glance down around us and realize that we’re standing right in the center of another footprint. Whatever creature these prints belong to, it’s got to be scary as hell. The outline shows three toes spread wide apart that end in needle-sharp points. Claws and death quickly come to mind.
“We should keep moving,” I whisper to Estelle. “If that thing’s still around, I don’t want to have a run-in with it. I don’t want to have anything to do with anything that isn’t an herbivore.”
We walk for ten more minutes, moving in and out of patches of light that reach us through the canopy of moss-covered branches. We follow the trail of growing light, and when we reach the end, we’re peering over a cliff that opens onto a golden-tinted desert valley. Now we can definitely tell that it’s daytime. Or at least, I think it is, because although the sky is a peculiar, fiery red, I can see in front of me.
Hundreds of dinosaurs are scattered across the valley. Species I’ve never seen in any book, website, or museum. A trio of three fuming volcanoes stretches along the center of the valley, in a line as straight as the buttons on a shirt. A flock of pterodactyls swoop from the puffy, gray clouds and disappear into the crater of the volcano nearest to us.
Estelle shudders at the roars that reverberate off the valley’s walls. I don’t know whether to piss my pants in terror or shriek like a little girl from excitement. Maybe both?
“Where do you think the creek would be?” I ask. “Everything looks completely different from what Machu Picchu looks like now.”
Estelle scans the valley and points. “I’d say toward the volcanoes. I can only imagine that’s where the ruins will eventually be built on. Hold my hand and help me down. These legs aren’t what they used to be, but they’re not too bad.”
