Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

tears from her cheeks, feeling somewhat better. Tissues. She reaches for a package of paper tissues in her bag.

Suddenly, she’s aware of a hand holding a neatly folded, perfectly clean handkerchief.

The young woman lifts her tear-filled gaze. A gentleman in what looks to be his 60s stands before her, his gray hair parted at the center, his mustache neatly trimmed. He’s dressed in an impeccable, sand-colored suit, appropriate for early autumn, with a scarf around his neck and a walking-stick in his other hand.

“Thanks.” Vesna takes the handkerchief, wipes her tears and blows her nose. She returns the handkerchief with an embarrassed smile, as if apologizing for making a fool of herself. How long has he been standing there? she wonders. “I’m afraid —”

“It’s perfectly all right, Miss,” the man replies with a slight bow. Vesna smiles once more and sighs. It’s getting late; it’s time to go. She picks up her bag and portfolio. Laurels and oleanders and pines sink into the dark, night creeps into recessed corners of the shrubbery, and dinosaurs that are birds settle down and turn quiet. Lights come on along the promenade covered with gravel. Time to return to her cheap motel room, where she’ll probably cry some more.

“Excuse me, Miss.” Vesna feels a trace of urgency, almost a plea, in the man’s voice. She pauses. “It looks to me — correct me, if I’m wrong — that you’ve had a strenuous day. If you’ll allow me … Perhaps I could take you out for dinner somewhere?”

His offer takes Vesna by surprise. She doesn’t know what to answer: The man before her could easily be her grandfather. A dinosaur, she thinks wickedly, and is at once ashamed. Somehow, she feels that, like the dinosaurs, he doesn’t belong to this world and time, and maybe that’s exactly the reason why she suddenly finds herself attracted to him. And why the hell not, she asks herself after a brief consideration.

“Vesna.” She smiles as she introduces herself, offering the man her hand. He takes it in his and kisses it lightly, like a true gentleman. Vesna raises an eyebrow, surprised and amused by the man’s old-fashioned manners. She tries to remember if anybody else ever kissed her hand like that. No, nobody ever did.

“Šaric. Professor Šaric.” The man introduces himself with a slight bow. Something in that bow fills Vesna with confidence, and she allows him to take her arm under his and lead her down the path, some ten minutes’ walk to a restaurant with a cozy terrace. As soon as he’d suggested it, Vesna realized how hungry she was. Somewhere above them, in the dense pine crown, a small nocturnal dinosaur, brown-feathered, thickset, with large yellow eyes and a sharp beak — a little owl — calls at them from its roost before going out to hunt.

~~~

She reached the seashore on the fifth morning, following the stream She discovered the day after the megalosaurs attacked Her herd. The stream murmured through the forest, merging with other streams, widening after two days into a slow river. Clear water quenched Her thirst; clear water guided Her through strange, unknown country.

The sea spread before Her. For the first time in Her life, She saw plesiosaurs, their distant, small heads on long grayish necks high above the waves, bodies and fins paddling beneath them. Silhouetted against the clouds, large pterosaurs soared in circles, carried by rising thermals, their long wings motionless. Several smaller pterosaurs — with folded wings and long tails, bare red heads and yellow jaws filled with needle-like teeth — feasted on a dead fish on the beach.

She walked across the soft sand, pausing to sniff a large spiral ammonite shell washed ashore. The smell of decay from inside the shell was unfamiliar to Her. Curious, She nudged at the shell with Her nose, but nothing came from inside. Lifting Her gaze, She noticed a line of footprints going down the beach and then turning and disappearing among the cycads and araucarias. She looked more closely, only now seeing there were more footprints. Tiny ones, made by the swift-running feet of small dinosaurs. And large circular ones, impressed by a sauropod, a herd animal like herself She had once seen, with trunk-like legs supporting a massive body, long neck and a whip-like tail.

She looked back: She, too, impressed footprints. And then She saw another line of prints. Her nostrils flared as She inhaled their feeble, old scent, recognized the stench, and froze. A megalosaur had prowled here some time ago. Perhaps it was scavenging for carrion before it returned into the dark forest. Or maybe it was hunting. Teeth. Danger lurked here, too, She realized. She’d have to be cautious. Still, She was relatively safe as long as She was on the beach itself. It would be difficult for a carnivore to stalk Her and jump Her while She was in the open.

Then, a deep hooting call resounded across the beach, and the pterosaurs feeding on the fish raised their bare heads in alarm.

~~~

Vesna presses the green button and looks at the illuminated screen of her cellular. No new messages. She knows her hopes are vain; Slaven will not call back. He doesn’t have the guts for that. He doesn’t even care. Vesna makes a solemn promise never again to enter a relationship with the kind of guy who breaks up by cell phone.

She leans back on the bench, letting the breeze from the sea cool her. White dinosaurs glide across the sky, jubilant in the freedom they enjoy high up. On a nearby rock, a brown juvenile gull quarrels with an adult over a morsel, a piece of bread. The adult wins, and the juvenile spreads his wings, takes off and flies low above the waves to look for his fortune elsewhere down the coast.

Vesna spreads her portfolio open. She leafs absently through the drawings of petrified footprint impressions. A grid of squares is drawn neatly across them. On the dig, the same grid is laid