Read Online Prehistoric Clock by Robert Appleton - Free Book Online

meal at the start of the rubble.
    A massive claw swung ahead of him and ripped the head off a screaming aeronaut. Cecil ducked, rolled away as the first dinosaur joined the hunt from the south. The combined roars of two leviathans assaulted his eardrums, blanked his mind to anything but imminent, horrific death. In the corner of his eye he glimpsed the silent cogwheels waiting like gloomy cobwebs either side of his miraculous brass machine. It had worked. He’d achieved that much, if nothing more. Edmond would forgive him, Lisa would be proud. Dying screams drowned the clacks of tumbling bricks. He closed his eyes and tucked the pistol muzzle up against his jowl. Better he take his own life than being eaten alive. No regrets to speak of…except one…
    “ Reardon, no!”
    A boy’s voice boomed through the night, wrenching Cecil back to life as though it was Edmond calling for him to stay his finger on the trigger. Again the voice climbed high, too high. “Reardon, wait.” The echo told him it had to be young Billy using a megaphone on the ship’s deck. He scanned the site of carnage around him and couldn’t believe what was happening.
    One of the dinosaurs scrabbled on its side against the hill of bricks, a harpoon cable wrapped around its rear leg. Insanely, someone was driving the tri-wheel car along the embankment. The cable was attached to it—it had dragged the monster off its feet. Cecil lowered the pistol in his trembling hand and gasped for air. The cable released. As the lizard struggled upright, the car skidded round for another run, revealing its door-less passenger side. Steam spat and columned from its boiler, shrouding the driver. But as the vehicle gathered speed, Cecil’s jaw dropped.
    The woman from the Empress, the redhead, cradled a harpoon launcher between her legs on the passenger seat. The dinosaur lunged. She fired the iron projectile at its torso, struck a glancing blow—enough for the beast to wheel sideways in agony. She lit a series of flares and tossed them at its feet, then at its monstrous partner’s. Slowly but surely, frightened by the flames, the leviathans retreated up the embankment. A last volley of gunfire from the Empress’s deck proved decisive. The beasts lumbered away toward the northern tree line, their steps shaking London less and less until only a slight quiver remained.
    He slumped with his head in his hands and felt, truly for the first time, the gravity of his blunder.

Chapter 7
The Heir and the Air Maiden
    Every so often during her six years in the British Air Corps stationed in West and Central Africa, Verity had found herself in a predicament of such rank absurdity, no halfpenny comic writer could have fashioned it. She cringed at the memories: airlifting a pregnant rhinoceros from a narrow gorge hours before an artificial lake burst its banks and flooded the region; singing “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” to Tangeni on his birthday, in the diving bell, while they suited up to retrieve gold bullion from a sunken Norwegian frigate; being maid of honour at Captain Naismith’s wedding to an exiled Congolese princess under the first heavy rainfall in eighteen months; fleeing downriver in a canoe, half-naked, from a tribe dressed up as leopards. And those were merely the ones she could remember. But tonight, she had put them all to shame. Tonight she had crossed over into the realm of the impossible.
    “ Eembu, Tangeni is right. English women crazier by far than English men.” Kibo shook his head. Her engine man, her brave and brilliant automobile driver.
    “You were no slouch yourself, Kibo.”
    He kissed her hand, nodded politely, then walked away chatting with his engine room pals, who had all come ashore to congratulate him. News of the “harpoon chase” had galvanized the camp for the time being. Tipsy Whitehall gentlemen conversed with salty, dark-skinned aeronauts perhaps for the first time in their lives, but she knew this fraternising would not