Evolution

After months of dark the sun showed, at last, through the planet-girdling layers of dust and ash. But it was only a pinprick, shedding barely any heat on the frozen land; there would be no more than a murky twilight for another year.

The returning sun illuminated a skeletal landscape.

Tropical plants, if not burned, had been killed by the sudden cold. Any surviving dinosaurs were succumbing to hunger and cold, their bones quickly stripped of flesh by the surviving predators. But here and there living things moved in the ash: insects like ants and cockroaches and beetles, snails, frogs, salamanders, turtles, lizards, snakes, crocodiles — creatures that had been able to hide in mud or in deep water — and many, many mammals. Their furry bodies and habits of burrowing into the shelter of the ground were protecting them from the worst of the cold. Their indiscriminate eating habits helped as well.

It was as if the world ran with rats.

And even now the survivors were breeding. Even now, despite the cold and the shortage of food, in the absence of their ancient predators, their numbers were increasing. Even now the blind scalpels of evolution took raw material adapted for a vanished world and cut and shaped it for the conditions of the new.

Alone, the female euoplocephalus stumbled through the endless cold, seeking the rough forage she needed.

She was of a species of ankylosaur. Her body was ten meters long and, before her slow starvation had begun, she had weighed as much as six tons. Her armor was bone: plates of it set in the skin of her back, neck, tail, flanks, and head. Even her eyelids were plates of bone. The plates were woven into a layer of tough ligaments, making the great carapace flexible, if heavy. Her long tail terminated in a fused mass of bone. Once she had used this club to lame a young male tyra

Though geologically sudden, the great death unfolding across the planet was not instant in the consciousness of those who endured it. For days, weeks, months, many of the doomed clung to life — even dinosaurs.

Relatively speaking, the euoplos had been well-equipped to survive the end of the world. Their massive bulk, great strength, and heavy armor — together with a fortunate placing beneath a thick layer of cloud close to the bank of a river — had enabled a few of her kind to endure the first few horrific hours. She had survived droughts before; she ought to withstand this unexpected calamity. All she had to do was keep moving and fend off the predators.

And so, wandering the freezing Earth, she sought food. And found hardly any.

One by one her companions had fallen away, until the euoplo was alone.

But, in a final irony, she had endured one last mating, from a male now dead; and she found herself heavy with eggs.

In this new world, a land of ice and blackness and a lid of gray-black sky, the euoplo had been unable to find the ancestral rookeries. So she had constructed a nest of her own as best she could, from the bare, cinder-strewn floor of what used to be a rich forest. She had laid her eggs, lowing, setting them carefully in a neat spiral on the ground. Euoplos were not attentive mothers; six-ton tanks were not well equipped to deliver tender loving care. But the euoplo had stayed close to her nest, defending it from the predators.

Perhaps, despite the cold, the eggs might have hatched. Perhaps some of the young could have survived the great chill; of all the dinosaurs, perhaps it was an ankylosaur who might have endured best in the new, harsher world to come.

But the stinging rain had leached away the nutrients the euoplo’s body needed to manufacture successful eggs. Some of them had been laid with shells so thick no infant could ever break out, others were so thin they were broken as soon as she produced them. And then the rain began to damage the eggs directly, the grimy downpour etching away their protective surfaces.

None of the eggs had hatched. The euoplo, mournful, baffled on a deep cellular level, had moved away. Immediately after she was gone, a furry cloud of mammalian predators had descended on the eggs, in their squabbling reducing the nest to a muddy battlefield.

The last of her kind, the euoplo wandered the land, driven on by a final imperative: to survive. But the poison and the rain worked on her too. Creatures like Purga sheltered from the worst of the rain in her burrow, or under rocks — or even, once, under the scooped-out shell of a dead turtle. The euoplo was too big: There was nowhere for her to hide, and she could not burrow into the ground. So her back was ferociously scalded, and great bony plates of armor were stripped of flesh, the co

Unthinking, she staggered toward the sea.

Three months after the impact, Purga and Last stumbled across ground frozen as hard as rock.

They saw few animals: Sometimes a cautious frog would watch them go by, or a bird would flee at their approach, chirping with eerie loudness, abandoning some frozen bit of offal on the ground. The relics of the lush Cretaceous vegetation, the stumps of trees and patches of undergrowth, were now frozen as hard as blackened sculptures, and any attempt to gnaw them was rewarded only with a mouthful of ice, and more often than not a chipped tooth.

There were only two of them. Third had gone, lost to hypothermia.

Purga longed for security, to clamber into a tree or dig into the soft earth. But there were no trees — nothing but ash and stumps and bits of roots — and the ground was too hard to burrow into. When they needed to rest they could only grub in the looser debris, making loose nests of ash and burned leaves and bits of wood, where they would lie shivering, huddled to share body warmth.

After days of wandering, Purga and Last made their way slowly along the fringe of America’s inland ocean.

Even here the gritty beach was frozen, and the sea itself, as charcoal gray as the sky above it, was littered with ice floes. But the gentle swell still breathed salty water over the sand. And here at the fringe of the ocean the primates found food — seaweed, small crustaceans, even stranded fish.

The oceans, too, had been devastated by the impact. The loss of sunlight and the acid rain had massacred the photosynthetic plankton that had populated the ocean’s upper layers. With this key foundation of the ocean’s food chain gone, extinctions were following like tumbling dominoes. On wounded Earth, death stalked every realm, and the ice-littered waters of the darkened ocean hid a holocaust as horrific as that which was unfolding on the land. It would take a million years for the seas to recover.

Purga came across a stranded starfish. Still new to ocean foraging, she had never seen such a beast before. She poked it with her snout, trying to determine which of her world categories it most closely fit: a threat, or good to eat.

Her movements were listless. In fact she could barely see the starfish.

Purga was weakening. She was constantly thirsty, with a nagging pain that clung to her mouth and throat and sank deep into her belly. Since the impact she had lost weight steadily, from a scrap of a body that had little excess to start with. And she was a tropical creature suddenly stranded in arctic conditions. Though her layer of fur helped trap heat, her body form was long and lanky, lacking the spherical, enclosing shape of creatures adapted to the cold. So she burned up even more energy and body mass in shivering.

She was bony, enfeebled, continually exhausted, her thinking increasingly fuddled, her instincts dulled.

And she was getting old. Living as vermin, the primates’ principal survival tactic had been fast breeding: there had always been simply too many of them to be eliminated by the dinosaurs’ ferocious hunting. For such creatures, there was no premium on longevity. Already Purga was coming to the end of her short, explosive life.