by D. J. Gelner
The mighty feathered creature gained ground as the earth shook violently. I may or may not have needed another new pair of knickers at that moment. What punctuated my thought was the gleaming, ivory-like tusks for teeth that the thing had; it was a machine designed to process flesh, tear it from bone and turn it into nourishment, feeding so that it could kill more, and continue the cycle.
Then came the first roar. My God—that roar! If I hadn’t voided my bowels by then, that would most certainly have done the trick. I can say with great certainty that the reprehensible barrister in the Jurassic Park movie wouldn’t have bothered to have exited the vehicle, entered the W.C., and sat there with his pants around his ankles; how much time that would take when the terror was so present, so gnawing at one’s mind even from a distance that I thought it may drive me to utter madness!
“Get ready!” this time it was Alyson, who was perhaps twenty feet to my right. I glanced at her vehicle, and the difference was startling. She sat, steady as a rock, unwieldy laser gun propped on her shoulder, laser sight honed in on the target. Here I was, soiling myself in fear, and this tiny woman was a regular John Wayne.
I couldn’t possibly find a woman more irresistible!
“Open fire!” She yelled over the intercom. A torrent of laser bolts exploded at the T-Rex from the buggy next to me. Trees crashed down as the surrounding forest was singed and felled by the focused plasma.
I leveled the weapon and followed suit. The rifle kicked back like a bucking mule as I sprayed the sky with all manner of laser bolts. Alyson’s cover fire didn’t do anything except anger the great beast, which finally burst into the clearing, taking a number of trees with it.
The stegosaurii immediately lumbered into action. The larger ones formed ranks around their smaller counterparts and brayed and swung their tails wildly. I sat, mouth agape for what must’ve only been a split second, but felt like at least a minute.
“Fire!” Alyson screamed. I hammered the trigger once more and struggled to wrestle the gun toward the T-Rex. Instead, the rifle cast bolts wildly about above the stegosaurs, which directed their braying at me.
This gave the T-Rex an unfortunate opening; it snatched one of the smaller stegosaurii in its jaws and shook it about, like a dog roughhousing with a toy. A larger stego bleated as the smaller one’s cries reverberated around the clearing. The bigger one jumped into action; it swung its tail wildly and connected with the T-Rex’s midsection, which sent the predator reeling.
The T-Rex shuddered away in pain and flung the young stegosaur to the ground. We moved again in order to get a better shot at the T-Rex, which had a difficult time righting itself, since it couldn’t easily push off of the earth.
“Circle around back, Liam!” Alyson shrieked.
“Roger that. Templeton, fire that thing right up its [STATIC] hole.” The radio crackled, though I had a pretty good idea what Liam said.
“Uh…roger that!” I cried. I was relieved that the smaller stego had (possibly?) been saved, but terrified at just how close we were getting to the T-Rex. Its legs kicked up clouds of dark earth into the gunners’ seats of the buggies. Its head heaved and its tail snapped like a whip as it fumbled around on the ground.
My heart pumped increasingly quickly as its beat thumped in my head. Coincidentally, it was the only sound that I heard as time finally began to slow down. I leveled the rifle on my shoulder and squeezed the trigger.
A violent explosion rocked the animal in front of me. A shower of miniature lightning bolts ravaged the lizard’s body, and for a moment, I felt the slightest pang of remorse as its flesh seized and singed. I allowed myself a wild, primal scream as I continued to pump the poor thing’s body with an unending stream of laser bolts; each one elicited a low, glutteral roar from the fallen beast.
Then, it stopped. I released the trigger and surveyed the carnage that I had wrought. The lower half of the dinosaur was an utterly mangled mess of burned flesh and knotted tendons that clung to singed bone. Liam circled around to the front of the animal, and any second thoughts about killing it were expelled from my mind. Its eyes were wide not with fear, but with an eerie hunger. Its sharp teeth were still stained red with the smaller stegosaur’s blood and flesh. I looked around to see the “tiny” (though it was still about the size of the buggy), injured animal limp back toward one of the larger stegosaurs.
“Well ain’t that—hey Alyson, you ever see anything like that?” Liam asked.
“Sometimes, I love this job!” Alyson said. She punctuated the sentiment with a hearty sigh. Her buggy was positioned in front of mine, and she had a great view of the scene which, from my angle, was to the right of and behind the T-Rex. Dare I say it was the first time she had seemed human, other than the kind smile she had offered me when I first arrived on the hangar deck.
As I looked upon this rather touching scene, I didn’t notice the yellowed, bloodshot eye of the T-Rex blink twice. Nor did I notice its chest begin to rise and fall once more, forcing the oxygen-rich air through its lungs.
The T-Rex reaered back. Its powerful jaws clamped down on Alyson’s buggy and lifted it into the air as the killing machine attempted to shake the life out of its newest victim. Alyson and Jayden’s screams shook my helmet. My eyes went wide and the blood drained from my face. Wordlessly, instinctively, I leveled the rifle on the creature. I hesitated; I was aiming at its head, and just as likely to kill Alyson and/or Jayden as I was the terrible lizard. I re-calibrated and pointed the laser rifle’s barrel right at the middle of the giant, feathered beast’s torso and unleashed a flurry of shots, all of which missed their mark. They did succeed, however, in drawing the animal’s attention toward my buggy.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Liam screamed over the intercom. He jammed the pedal furiously, but one of the buggy’s wheels was caught on a tree trunk that had been felled by laser or dinosaur. The T-Rex dropped the other buggy to the ground and tilted its head to one side, curious about this new threat. It swung its head down until its eye was level with my own.
“Shut up—stop it! Don’t move!” I hissed over the microphone. The T-Rex’s head was right up on me as it struggled to move without any legs. Its large eye stared at me as I sat up, so still that I worried that I might begin shaking or screaming wildly any minute. I waited until I had a can’t miss shot, until the pupil in that giant, unblinking eye was but five feet from the barrel of my gun.
“Say goodnight, darling,” I smirked as I pulled the trigger.
Nothing came out of the barrel.
I yanked the trigger again, to no effect. I could’ve sworn I saw those same jaws that were eager to tear me to shreds smile, like a lion must grin at a gazelle before snapping it in twain.
The T-Rex seized up and spread its jaws. I wondered why my life wasn’t flashing in front of my eyes, or why I didn’t get that serene sense of peace that so many describe right before their own erstwhile demises. As the dinosaur’s tusk-teeth bore down on the buggy, I prepared for the worst and covered my head. The T-Rex’s roar shook the earth and I felt its warm breath soak my face even through the plastic of the gas mask.
I braced for the inevitable impact, the devilish pain and suffering that was in store for me all because I was damned fool enough to create a time machine in the first place…and felt nothing.
Instead, I heard a “WHOOSH” over the roll cage of the buggy, followed by the sensation of being covered by a quick, cool shadow. The tail of the largest stegosaurus struck the T-Rex squarely on the face; one of the protruding spikes landed right in the damned thing’s eye. This time, there was no doubting it; the T-Rex’s body went slack. The stego had hit its small target.
The stegosaur shook what remained of the T-Rex’s head from its spiky tail with what sounded like a satisfied “harumph,” and (perhaps most remarkably of all), without any further fanfare, returned to grazing lazily on the greenery at the base of some singed trees.
I was utterly befuddled, but then remembered Alyson and Jayden. I unfastened my r
estraints (which set off some sort of an alarm, but I didn’t care) and rushed over to their sides. As Liam was marginally faster than I, he arrived first.
Their buggy was a mess. The roll cage was twisted into an unrecognisable sculpture. Alyson sat, her body cast aside like a rag doll within the gunner’s seat. A rather large puncture wound in her midsection oozed blood. I rushed to her side.
“She needs a medic!” I exclaimed.
“No shit, pal!” Liam kneeled next to me. “Here, help me with—”
Someone groaned over the radio.
“Jayden!” Liam yelled. He hurried to the front of the vehicle and began flinging debris wildly about the clearing. Liam stopped, his eyes widened with fear and incredulity. He bent over and offered a hand to Jayden, or I should say what was left of him. Only Jayden’s original head and chest were intact, though that probably sounds more gruesome than it was. In reality, his right arm and leg, both clearly cybernetic implants, still whizzed and groaned with strain as he staggered to his feet…err…“foot.”
Jayden took deep breaths as he placed his arm over Liam’s shoulder and limped toward me.
“Take him—I’ll get her!” Liam barked. Before I could offer assent, Liam threw Jayden on me in a heap. I nearly collapsed under his weight; in hindsight I’m not exactly sure why I expected him to be lighter.
“Got him!” I did have the man, but just barely. Liam bent over and swung Alyson onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
“We have to hurry—that thing’s—”
The silence was punctuated by another roar. Though it was far off, it already shook the ground with more force than even the T-Rex’s death throes.
“That…thing’s…?” I heaved out the question between gasping limps.
“Mother!” Liam yelled without turning to look. I glanced over my shoulder at one of the long vertical paths and found a terrifying sight; another brightly-coloured, feathered T-Rex on the prowl, though this one made the first one look positively tiny. The earth vibrated in grand undulations as the creature gained ground even more quickly than the first one.
Fortunately, we were only several metres away from the buggy. I jumped in the gunner’s seat; to my credit, I grasped Jayden’s robotic hand before doing so and hauled him up into the seat on top of me with all of my strength. Jayden crashed down on me with a thud and an unintelligible groan.
I tried to buckle the restraints around us, but despite my sleight frame and Jayden’s missing limbs, I wasn’t able to secure the shoulder straps.
“Hang on!” I could barely hear Liam above the rapidly-approaching T-Rex. It appeared angrier than its predecessor…or son…or whatever the first one had been. Everything about it was as ferocious and fierce as the first one, but on a far grander scale; larger teeth the size of doric columns, larger, yellower eyes the size of serving platters, and even (in hindsight) humourously tiny arms that were the size of small tree trunks.
Liam jammed the pedal and churned the stuck wheel against the errant log, to the point that smoke billowed from beneath the vehicle. As the larger T-Rex reached the clearing (and I considered, ever so briefly, to pray to Trent Albertson to save us), the buggy jolted underneath us and took off. I hung onto the roll bar with one hand, and desperately tried to corral Jayden with the other.
“Gun…” Jayden muttered, seemingly drugged and obviously nonplussed by the buggy’s sudden (and dare I say erratic) movement.
I was glad to hear the badly-injured driver speak, though I shook my head.
“Out of ammo!” I cried.
“Gun!” he managed to yell. This startled me, and I hoisted the gun onto his right shoulder. “Safety!” his voice was beginning to regain some of its tenor. Sheepishly, I clicked off the safety, which had likely been the reason the gun had not previously fired. I cursed myself for having been so stupid as to make such a grave error that nearly cost us our lives.
I barely ducked my head to the left just before a flurry of laser fire blasted in the general direction of the terrible animal. It sidestepped the beams like they were of little more annoyance than firecrackers left carelessly in its path.
The chassis of the buggy shifted as Liam turned onto one of the circular portions of the path.
“Where are we going?” I screamed over the intercom.
“It’s blocking the way back to base!” Liam yelled, clearly annoyed by the question.
“Fucking…backseat…drivers…” It was good to see that Jayden hadn’t lost his sense of humour.
The T-Rex crashed around the corner and began to catch up; though the buggies were fast, I gathered that on a curve they likely couldn’t reach top speed as quickly. Jayden let loose another flurry of laser fire, and though some bolts hit their marks, they hardly carved flesh wounds in the creature’s leathery, feathered skin.
Liam made a sharp left, and then a sharp right as he took us to the second level of this maniacal roundabout. The T-Rex tore through the layer of jungle and emerged directly in front of us. It was all I could do to continue holding Jayden despite how violently the quick bursts of fire shook him.
The T-Rex snapped at the buggy, but Liam made a last-minute change of direction and spared us, though he nearly cast both Jayden and myself from the gunnery perch.
“Almost there—one more turn. Hang—”
Liam didn’t complete his thought as the buggy’s wheels tore through the soft earth. The chassis teetered at a forty-five degree angle for several moments; I thought for certain that we were about to meet our doom. I shifted my weight in the other direction and pulled Jayden that way with all of my might.
The buggy crashed back down, firmly on its wheels. The T-Rex snapped again, but Liam was quick on the throttle, and we jetted off down the straightaway. The base was finally in sight, as were the four large laser turrets that guarded the hangar bay.
“Mayday, mayday, this is Dino Alpha requesting emergency assistance. We have a broken lizard, over. Request backup!” Liam shouted into the mike.
Immediately, the barrels of the laser turrets began to glow and hum. Each one let out a sharp shriek as they unloaded on the terrifying creature. I cheered with glee as the first bolts of focused energy stopped the beast. The T-Rex staggered forward, but the gunners opened up on it and subdued it in a deadly hail of laser fire.
We headed toward the purplish energy shield of the bay door, and I fully expected Liam to slow down, but he kept his foot on the accelerator.
“Liam? Liam!” I shouted as we hit the energy barrier at full speed. Immediately the whine of the engines died down as several nets ripped over the top of the roll cage; each successive net slowed the craft more than the previous. After several of these nets had deployed, Liam slammed on the brakes. All I can say is that I feel fortunate that my loose-fitting helmet bore the brunt of the impact, both for myself and Jayden.
As we came to a halt, emergency lights flashed and klaxons whined throughout the bunker. A team of soldiers surrounded the craft with fire extinguishers and sprayed it with what I assume was fire-retardant foam. I removed my gas mask and noted that the smell was antiseptic and cold.
“Medic. Medic, goddamnit!” Liam screamed into my headset, over and over again. “Get me some fucking medigel!”
Chapter Ten
The next few hours were a blur. I assured the medics that I was fine, but they still confined me to a hospital bed for twelve hours. I pled desperately for some news as to Alyson and Jayden’s conditions, but each entreaty was met with suspicious eyes and blank stares. At some point, one of the staff members brought in a rather delectable-looking steak with large, unidentifiable vegetables.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Stegosaurus.” The attendant replied.
I initially cringed at the thought that perhaps they soldiered out and collected the poor, dying little stegosaurus that the smaller T-Rex had torn into. Then I realised that such thoughts were absurd; one stegosaurus likely could feed the entire base for a month, and, starving
as I was, I tore into the meal.
Not bad, I thought. Tastes like…bison? It most certainly did not taste like chicken.
The hours passed as I had little to entertain me other than the collection of movies that the holoprojector could play. I’ve previously mentioned my aversion to the technology, but depending on what era you’re from, what you may not realise is that a holoprojector can also create a “screen” in front of you, on which it can project a proper, two-dimensional film. Of course, they had all six Jurassic Park films, but I was in no mood to relive the activities of the previous day. I settled on Dumb and Dumber; crude as it may be, it is a true classic, and you know what they say about laughter being the best medicine and all that.
The LED lighting in the room was dimmable, yet no matter how “warm” it was designed to appear, I couldn’t shake the notion that the lights were sterile and cold, and gave the room the “sickly” feel of a hospital.
Finally, Commander Sanchez entered the room wearing a weak smile.
“Professor,” she nodded curtly. “How was your hunt?”
“How was my—? You know damned well how my hunt went, Commander! How are—”
She shook her head, “Jayden will be fine. The doctors have already fitted him with another pair of prostheses. Fortunately, any damage was contained to his limbs and not his…” she looked down toward her groin, which induced a wince.
“And Alyson?”
She turned away from me. “Alyson…didn’t make it. Her injuries were too severe to be repaired by medigel.”
I felt as if someone had sent a pick axe through my chest. Though I had known her for mere minutes before the hunt, she was dead as the result of my (and my Benefactor’s) actions. That sweet, bubbly, yet almost frighteningly capable and intense woman was snuffed out in an instant because of me.
Sanchez took a deep breath, “She knew the risks when she came back here. That’s why ChronoSaber pays so much—everyone knows it’s more than likely a one-way trip. Alyson’s family has a better life because of the sacrifices that she made.”