Dark Lightning

The low-lying river delta fills the horizon, reflecting the blue-green sky in its waters. Herds of massive animals move across the landscape; ferns seven feet tall tower over the smaller creatures as they dart in and out from under their cover. Dipping and flitting beneath the clouds fly creatures that look almost like birds. The buzzing of insects gently vibrates the air, overlapping white noise almost too quiet to hear.

Twisting, the air above a grassy knoll folds over itself, distorting everything around it. The plants around this singularity speed up, moving faster than the wind and almost doubling in length. A moment later, the air unfolds and reveals four humans, each of their hands on a small device held between them that looks almost like a satellite dish mixed with a handheld GPS.

Instantly they start to sweat. Humidity pulls the moisture from their skin, and the air sits heavy and still around them. The sky stretches out above their heads as the sun beats down through dotted clouds.

“Holy shit is that a compsognathus?!” squawks Ann, already crouching in the prickly grass. Her fellow travelers jump at the sound of her voice. Following her line of sight, her four colleagues see small bipedal creatures darting in and out of the nearby ferns, their pointed ears twitching and bushy tails flicking.

“I always said they’re furrier than we give them credit for!” She lays down fully on the ground and starts to army-crawl towards them. “Just wait until I tell Gerald about this, he’ll be livid.” A pair of combat boots enters her periphery as she pulls out a camera from her bag and snaps a photo.

“What. Did I say. About approaching the wildlife?” The gravelly voice falls staccato on her ears, and she winces at the admonishment.

Sitting up, she protests, “What? I’m still like, fifteen feet away.”

“And that is still five feet too close. Remember: everything gets at least a twenty-foot berth,” Lennon reminds everybody, raising his voice.

Back where they materialized, Genni sets down her pack and crouches down with a sample kit in one hand, pulling blades of grass from the ground and categorizing them into ziploc bags. Les spins his pack to his front, pulls out a barometer and atmospheric gas sensor, and starts taking readings. Beside them, Tiger double-checks the data from their temporal transporter.

“Okay guys, slight hiccup: this thing is gonna take longer to charge than I thought.”

“How much longer?” Lennon steps past Ann, still on the ground, and walks back to the rest of the group.

“Given the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere—”

Hearing him pause, Les fills in, “Nearly 30 kPa.”

“—I’d say an extra day or so.”

Lennon nods. “That shouldn’t be too bad. We have enough rations for—” His voice chokes. “Bloody hell,” he breathes, eyes fixed on something behind his friends.

Ann stands up and runs past him and stops ten feet ahead of the group. “Wow.” Her mouth drops open.

Walking along the river tower six pelorosauruses. Where the bank curves, they turn and start to follow the fern line; their heads bob and pulse with every step they take, like elephantine giraffes. Everybody just stands, stunned.

“Oh. Oh, they’re coming this way. We should move,” Ann realizes too late. The gentle giants stride over and through their group, the soles of their feet the size of tents and their long necks stretching just past the tops the ferns.

“Nobody. Move,” mutters Lennon. Even he can’t tear his eyes away.

“I’ve never seen something this big before.”

“Les, I don’t think any of us have.” Awe drips from Ann’s voice. “I never knew they moved in herds.”

“Hey guys?” Genni is looking not at the dinosaurs but at a patch of clovers at her feet. “We might have another problem.”

“What do you mean, another problem?” barks Lennon.

“Well, I think we got the math wrong.”

“How wrong?” Tiger chimes in.

She squats down and picks a few samples, raising them above her head for the others to look at. “See these?” She points at small buds on the ends of their stalks. “These shouldn’t exist yet. Flowering plants didn’t evolve until the Cretaceous Period.”

“But we just saw compsognathuses, and we always thought that they went extinct at the end of the Jurassic, didn’t they?” rebuts Ann.

“Doc, she might be onto something,” Tiger says over the sound of faint whirring as he checks the transporter log.

Lennon glares at him. “This is why I don’t time travel. How did you fuck it up this time?”

“First of all, you’re out of line. Second, you knew something like this might happen when you signed up. Nobody’s ever gone back this far, we knew the math could be wrong.”

Shaking his head, Lennon scoffs, “Nothing like this ever happened on any of the other research trips I’ve been on.” Then he sighs, “How wrong are we talking?”

“Maybe a few million years?” Genni puts the flowering clovers into a sample bag.

“I think it might be a bit more than that,” suggests Ann, pointing. “That’s a rhabdodon. They didn’t exist until the end of the Cretaceous.”

The group turns to see a flat-headed dinosaur with almost-smooth scales wading through the river, skimming algae from the surface.

“How close to the end?” asks Les. The pause before he spoke echoes in their ears.

“Very.” She locks eyes with Tiger. “We need to get our transporter charged ASAP.”

“I need at least four days to charge this thing up, unless we find some other source of gamma rays,” he suggests incredulously, half-laughing. It quickly dies. “How long do you think we have, Les?”

“Honestly, anywhere between a thousand years and tomorrow.”

“This is worse than the acid pits in Tunisia. At least I knew what I was walking into. Are you telling me we have no intel?” Lennon demands.

“Not none, but definitely not much. Thankfully we’re in Eurasia so we don’t need to worry about the immediate impact. Our main concern is gonna be—”

“The ash.” Tiger cuts Les off. “Without access to sunlight, we’re stuck. No solar rays mean no temporal transporter.”

“We’re going to have at least four days here no matter what, so let’s do what we came here to: study!” bubbles Ann, her excitement in no way diminished.

“I mean, I can’t really argue with that,” Genni agrees, already collecting her third sample.

“Before we do anything, here’s how it’s gonna go.” Lennon forces their attention back to him and starts counting on his fingers. “Rule number one: no wandering off.” He looks pointedly at Ann. “Rule number two: we work in groups, and nobody is ever left on their own. We can’t rely on what we think we know, clearly.” He gestures to the compsognathuses and their furry feathers. “Rule number three: take every precaution.” He glares at Genni again crouching to collect a sample, still without gloves on. “And finally rule number four: we all go home.” He pauses and waits for everybody to nod in agreement. “Okay, good. It looks like it’s midmorning, so we have the day ahead of us. What are our goals while we’re here?”

“Well,” starts Ann. “We want to determine how accurate present depictions of dinosaurs are, figure out whether there are any significant physiological traits that can’t be seen in the fossil record, and establish their behavioral patterns.”

“And Genni, how about you?”

“I am taking samples from as many kinds of plant as I can for comparison against lab specimens back home.”

“And Tiger, what do you need from us to get that transporter up and running?”

“Nothing, I just need time.”

“If that’s ev—” Lennon starts.

“Oh, actually, higher elevations and open areas during the day would be great,” Tiger interrupts. “And don’t forget, we have to get back here when we’re going home.”

“Now, if that’s everything, let’s head to higher ground.” He looks around the group at the mostly-flat plains surrounding them. “Which might be easier said than done. For now, let’s go towards the river so we can test if it’s drinkable. Do we need to mark the area?”

They all look at the ground around their feet and the markedly longer grass in a near-perfect circle.

“We should be fine,” Lennon snorts. Without waiting for a response, he starts walking.

---

Dawn breaks and red ignites the sky.

“It looks like Christmas,” Genni yawns. Her samples are neatly stacked in the corner of camp; the electric barrier surrounding the tents hums quietly in the morning haze.

“Wake up, wake up,” barks Lennon. “Time for morning check-in. Tiger, how are we looking?”

“Charging faster than I thought, but not by much. I’m still gonna need another day or so to get it up and running.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” He claps Tiger on the back.

Rubbing where Lennon congratulated him, “Let’s just hope this weather holds. We can’t afford cloud cover.”

“How’s that looking?” Lennon turns to Les.

“If we’d landed in the Jurassic, I’d say to worry. But with these readings,” he gestures to his notebook, “I think we should be fine.”

“So what’s the plan for today?” Ann, seemingly caffeinated despite there being no coffee in any of their packs, is already disabling the perimeter wire and taking down camp.

“Slow down, Doc. It’s, like, six in the morning.”

“Come on, Tiger. You can’t tell me this isn’t the coolest thing you’ve ever done.”

“Yeah, it’s cool. It’s also dangerous. And hazardous. And unknown. I’m a scientist. A technological scientist. I do computers and coding,” he emphasizes.

“Live a little! You can’t avoid unknowns forever,” she teases.

Sighing, he sets down the temporal transporter atop a nearby boulder. “Fine. Just this once. You’d better make it worth it.”

Ann squeals, grabs his hand and Genni’s, and pulls them both towards the edge of the ridge beside their camp.

“Where are we—,” starts Genni.

“Shh, shh. Stealth, you guys. Stealth,” cuts off Ann. “Now,” she lies down in the grass, pulling them both with her, “look at that.”

“Are we looking at…their dispersal? Their behavior? Their—”

Ann covers his mouth. “Tiger, just look. Look, and appreciate.”

In the river delta stretching out before them is a scene straight from an encyclopedia. Feathered dinosaurs flit between the long necks of herbivores, their feet sinking and squelching in the mud; bipedal dinosaurs like oversized ostriches pull mollusks from the rocks and dragonflies the size of finches skim smaller insects from the water’s surface.

“See that one there?” Ann points to a small group of armored dinosaurs standing just at the edge of the delta marshland. “That’s called a strutheosaurus. It has these plates, like massive scales, all over its body.”

“Like an armadillo,” offers Les from behind the trio.

Craning her neck, “Exactly!” Ann agrees. “They’re herbivores, and that flat head you can sorta see is perfect for knocking down big ferns and defending territory.”

“What about that one?” Genni’s voice trembles slightly.

“Which do you mean?”

Genni grabs Ann’s chin and points her to their left. Approaching from between the ferns is a single dinosaur. A triceratops-like frill wraps around the back of its head, turning into back-facing horns by its cheeks. A single horn, like a rhinoceros, protrudes from the top of its beak-like nose and mouth. Long feathers grow from the backs of its arms; shorter, furrier ones cover its face and grow up its toes and ankles.

Ann melts. “It’s a stenopelix,” she coos.

“A what?”

“Tiger honey, chill. It’s another herbivore. Besides,” she sits up to crouch, “we’re so much bigger than she is. Come here darling, it’s okay.”

“Doc, it’s not a cat. Don’t pss-pss at it,” he cautions.

“Come on, not a single dinosaur has hurt us since we arrived. Right?” Without waiting for somebody to answer, she continues. “Exactly. We would’ve had to worry about carnivores if we’d actually landed in the Jurassic, but now it’s mostly herbivores. Yes, aren’t you adorable?” She reaches out her hand to it. “It’s all right, it’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Genni and Tiger sit up and move behind Les, still standing beside them all at the ridge.

“Hey, what are you—”

Les raises one hand to shut Lennon up and points at Ann and the dinosaur. As she scooches closer and the stenopelix creeps nearer in parallel, it reaches out its nose and sniffs the tips of Ann’s fingers. She gasps and a smile erupts across her face.

“This is why I came on this trip,” she breathes. Still just outside of arm’s reach, her fingers brush against its horn and over its scaley beak. With one final scooch, she sets her hand on its forehead and strokes the furry feathers carpeting its cheeks.

“Look at you. You’re gorgeous.” She pets it again. “And look at that counter-shading, and your little speckles.”

A firm hand on her shoulder makes her jump and the sudden motion startles the dinosaur back into the brush.

“Holy,” she whispers. “Shit!” she shouts. “That was first contact! It’s like with aliens but better because it’s dinosaurs!” She dances around her colleagues, babbling about the experience she just had.

“Ann.” Lennon’s tone stops her. “What did we say—”

“About approaching the animals, yes, yes I know. We have to stay twenty feet away,” she imitates. “And blah blah blah, I know. But did you see that?!” She starts to bounce and prance. “I am the only person in the world to have ever touched an actual dinosaur! How cool is that?”

He sighs. “Let’s just be glad nothing happened. If you’d been bit, we’d have to invent the dinosaur version of a tetanus shot for you. Come on, let’s finish clearing up camp.”

Genni squeezes Ann tightly on her way back to her samples. “That. Was so cool,” she whispers.

“Hey Les,” calls Tiger from over by the packs. “Have you seen my…” He trails off. When he speaks again, his voice is hoarse, almost choking. “Houston, we have a problem.”

“What do you— shit.” Lennon spits out the last word like it tasted foul.

Still by the edge of the ridge, Les stands frozen in place with his head cocked back and eyes trained on the fiery streak in the sky.

---

“We need to move. Now.” Lennon claps his hands, shattering the silence. “Now means now. Go. Move. Les, what’s our timeline?”

Les doesn’t move.

Lennon grabs him by the shoulder and spins him around. “Les. What’s our timeline?”

Shaking his head jerkily, “Uhmm, I think…” He looks back up at the meteor and the lines on his face darken. “I think we have a couple of hours. Maybe less. Probably less. Let’s actually go with an hour.”

“One hour, okay. Ann, what happened when the meteor struck?”

“Ash covered the sky for almost two years and—”

“No, I don’t mean in two years. I mean right now. What’s about to happen? What’s gonna happen as soon as this rock hits?”

“Fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, you name it. We need to find shelter, like, now.”

“Okay, shelter in a basically empty landscape. That shouldn’t be too hard,” Lennon scoffs.

“The ferns, down by the river,” Genni chimes in. “The moisture should give us some protection from the heat.”

“She’s right,” agrees Ann, her earlier excitement extinguished. “And we’re far enough away that we shouldn’t get hit by the initial impact shockwave.”

“Okay, okay. This is good, this is good.” Lennon turns and sees Tiger ineffectively stuffing his tent into a pack. “Leave it, we gotta go. How much longer on the transporter?”

“With how much sunlight we’re gonna have left, forever. It won’t be enou—” He stops.

“What?”

Tiger shushes Lennon, frozen with the tent still between his fingers. “That’s it,” he whispers. Jumping up, he lunges over to Ann. “Storms!” He grabs her by the shoulders as a smile splits across his face. “We can still do this!” As he celebrates, the meteor disappears below the far horizon and out of view.

“That’s our cue to go,” shouts Lennon.

Heads down, the travelers run through the sharp grass and down the ridge, and it pricks their ankles. Dinosaurs the size of house cats scurry out of their way as the sound of rushing air gets steadily louder. Finally in the ferns, the four colleagues crouch under the oversized plants, their shoes squelching in the marsh, and catch their breath.

“You said something about a storm?” inquires Ann.

“Yeah, Doc. Solar rays aren’t the only way for us to get gamma, they’re just the easiest. Lightning is a natural source of gamma radiation if we can harness it. Somehow.”

“How do we do that?” Lennon’s eyes scan their makeshift perimeter.

“I…hadn’t thought that far ahead yet,” Tiger admits.

Amidst Lennon’s grumbling, a high-pitched scream starts to grow. Without warning, the scream reaches a fever pitch and forces the scientists’ hands over their ears.

“The hell is that?” His gravelly voice is muffled in the cottony silence behind their hands.

“That’ll be—” starts Ann, but then the ground beneath their feet jolts. She finishes, “—the impact.”

“Watch your heads.” Les’s voice sounds loud in their ears. “There’s gonna be debris falling all around us real soon. And then will come the storms.”

“We need a workable solution five minutes ago,” pushes Lennon.

“Okay, okay. Let me think. I just need—” He trails off, already in thought.

These moments of silence stretch out as not one of them knows how to process the gravity of what’s happening around them. Not one of them has been trained for this.

“I’m gonna need—” He pauses as an ember lands on his shoulder, bouncing once and falling to the ground beside him before sizzling out. Then another, this time by Les. And another, again by Tiger. They shuffle closer under the ferns, desperate for some semblance of cover.

“I’m gonna need,” he restarts, “to get as close as I can to a terrestrial gamma ray flash. Dark lightning almost always precedes a lightning strike, so either we need to induce or attract some lightning, or we get me and the transporter into the cloud layer. The former is—”

“Our only viable option,” interrupts Lennon. “You get that device ready, and we’ll get you some lightning.” His words are drowned out by a sonic boom ripping the sky.

Clouds and ash darken the sky and rain falls all around them. They pull their sleeves down long and their hoods up over their heads against the stinging, burning drops and still-raining embers. The riverbank is barren and empty, its dinosaur residents running and hiding as the sky erupts above them. Thunder booms, reverberating through their bones, and the longest night settles in, a blanket over the globe.

“Find anything?” Ann has to almost shout to be heard over the thrashing rain.

Lennon shakes his head and gestures to the area around them, some branches in his hand. “Everything’s so low to the ground.”

From behind them, Genni shouts, “We’ll just have to build it up.” She has a pile of fern fronds clasped against her chest. “Let’s go back to Tiger and Les, see if they’re ready.”

They nod and start to jog. Sliding on the wet grass and water-logged earth, all three are splattered with mud by the time they get back to the rest of the group still huddled under ferns. They drop their finds, crouch down, and start to braid the fronds together. Using Lennon’s magnolia branches as support, they build a makeshift lightning rod almost nine feet long. Rocks, still hot from impact, rain down and burn through the fronds leaving holes that glow and smoke around the edges.

“How much longer?”

“Almost done, Doc. And the lightning should be here soon.”

The end of his phrase is punctuated with a crash of thunder and a nearly-simultaneous flash of lightning across the sky. Their retinas pulse with its afterimage for a moment.

“It’s time.” Lennon and Les drag the lightning rod from beneath the ferns and raise it high above their heads before stabbing it into the soft ground, twisting it like they’re drilling in a giant screw. Once they’re confident it’s secure, they both step back into the ferns.

“And now we wait,” Tiger narrates, setting the temporal transporter slightly beyond the ferns, its gamma panels aimed at the sky above their heads.

They don’t have to wait long. Within minutes, bolts of lightning pattern the sky with atmospheric veins, flashing across the ash and striking down, leaving scorch marks on the ground.

Lightning strikes their makeshift rod, electric current coursing through the fern fronds and into the ground. In the afterglow, Les thinks he sees a blueish-purple residue fade into the warm-grey ash of the sky.

“Tiger, check the transporter.”

“What? Why? That was only one strike, there’s no way it worked first time.”

“Just, just check it. I think we got one,” he insists.

Tiger, prone against the marshy grass, army crawls towards the temporal transporter and reads its charge: only seven percent left to fill.

“Hell yeah,” he celebrates as he scooches back to relative safety. “Good call. One or two more strikes should—”

He’s interrupted by a snap of lightning hitting beside their lightning rod, just inches from the transporter. Again, Les sees a blueish-purple afterglow.

“One more time,” he whispers, almost as a chant, a prayer.

The minutes tick by; nothing. Ever darker, the sky feels claustrophobic as ash crushes down above and rain makes walls around them. Finally, a third strike.

“Let’s go!” Tiger darts out from under the ferns, grabs the transporter—now fully charged—and runs back to the others. Before he reaches them, another bolt of lightning stops him in his tracks. The transporter falls from his hands, now limp, as electricity wreaks havoc on his nervous system. He drops, knees buckling from beneath him.

“Jones!” yells Lennon, crawling towards him. “Everybody stay low. Genni, I need that first aid kit.”

A burn, already bubbling through the first layer of skin, sits between his neck and shoulder where his clothes have been eaten away; a second burn reeks of plastic where the bolt melted his shoe on its way out. Before anybody else can get to him, Lennon is already checking for vital signs.

He starts CPR, counting aloud. “One, two, three, four, five, six—Genni, hand me the epi—ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—Ann, trade with me—eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and switch.” He throws himself back and out of the way as Ann takes his place.

“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three,” she continues.

“Front inside pocket, Genni. Bloody hell, have you never used a survival aid pack before?” He yanks it from her trembling, fumbling hands and grabs a syringe, throwing the rest of the pack to the ground beside them. Rolling up one of Tiger’s sleeves, Lennon pushes the needle into his bicep and presses down on the syringe. “Ann, keep going until something changes.”

She nods. “Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—”

Tiger gasps, spluttering, and coughs, rolling onto his side and pulling his knees closer to his chest.

“We need to go. Now.” Lennon points at the transporter still on the ground, now muddy. “Let’s go home.” He holds out one hand.

Les tosses him the device and Ann looks around one last time as they all grab hold of each other.

“Sayonara,” chokes Tiger breathlessly as Lennon activates the temporal transporter and electrical energy surrounds them.