Peril in Pangea, Book One: Trapped in the Triassic

By K.G. McAbee

Three teenagers attempt the most drastic rescue in history: traveling through time to the Age of Dinosaurs!

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.G. McAbee
• Release date: Jun 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311114501

K.G. McAbee

K.G. McAbee has had several books and nearly a hundred short stories published, and some of them are honestly quite readable. She writes steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, horror, pulp, westerns and, most recently, comics. She’s a member of Horror Writers Association and International Thriller Writers and is an Artist in Residence with the South Carolina Arts Commission. Her steampunk/zombie novella recently received an honorable mention in the 3rd quarter Writers of the Future contest.

Book preview

Peril in Pangea: Book One

Trapped in the Triassic

by K.G. McAbee

All rights reserved.

Copyright © K.G. McAbee 2015

Cover art: Baryonyx Suchisaurus. Dino-Wiki, public domain image.

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Peril in Pangea

Book One:

Trapped in the Triassic

Chapter One

News No One Should Hear on a Monday Afternoon

This is the story of how my friends and I rescued a bunch of people who were trapped in the Triassic Period, including my mom and dad. Yeah, Triassic: dinosaurs and time travel and all that kind of stuff, though we ran into some things along the way that were a little bit more…unexpected. We had lots of unanticipated help and lots of predictable interference, but isn't that the way it always is? I feel like I'd better warn you up front, though, in case you're the squeamish type: not everyone came back alive. I don't lose any sleep over most of the ones who didn't, but I sure would have liked it if we'd have been able to bring everyone involved back home with us, good guys, bad guys and indifferent guys. I learned a lot, not just about myself, but how some people can surprise you and how some people can disappoint you in the strangest ways.

So hang on and buckle up. This is how it all started…

It was a Monday afternoon, and it was gorgeous outside, and everyone in class, including the teacher, knew it, since all the windows were wide open. Sweet spring air flowed in like it knew we'd all give anything to be outside and it felt its job was to remind us of that fact.

But we were stuck in our seats because it wasn't the end of the school day, not quite, and each and every one of us wanted it to be—we wanted it to be bad.

Have you ever looked back at the time right before the feces hit the rotating blades and examined those moments as if they were precious jewels caught forever in the palm of your hand? Probably not, huh? Maybe it's just me.

But that Monday afternoon, so late in the school day that we were all counting down the nano-seconds until the bell, I had the tip of my tongue tight between my teeth in an effort to keep from yawning. I'm here to tell you it wasn't doing me much good. The yawn kept struggling to escape, trying to expand to fill the room, let alone my mouth.

All the while I was fighting this epic battle, Ms. Madison droned on and on and on and, for a change, on. I tried wiggling in my seat. I grabbed a pen and drew a fern leaf littered with spores on a blank half-page in my notebook. I sketched in a chunky thrinaxodon underneath it, with a bubble coming out of its mouth saying, Help! I'm being bored to extinction! I was kind of proud of this, since my artwork isn't usually very good, so I slid it over to my lab partner and best friend, Freddie Harker. She always sat at the desk beside me in all our classes. I glanced over to get her reaction. She grinned, her white teeth dazzling against her cocoa skin, then she thumped me with one finger, right beside my ear. It hurt. I grinned back at her and looked around for something, anything, to take my mind off my incipient death by lack of interest.

Ms. Madison, our Pre-History instructor, continued in her late-afternoon-almost-end-of-the-school-day-thank-goodness voice: "As I'm sure we already know, at the beginning of the Triassic Period, the world's land