Emerald and I flattened our bodies into the dunes more, and I held my breath while I watched them turn and talk to each other. I couldn’t hear what they said, but after half a minute, the one with the blue hair motioned up and down the beach, and then the other two nodded before they walked back into the jungle.
“Those guys look strong,” I said as I crawled backward. “Emerald, did they kill your clone?”
The green-scaled woman nodded her head and then made a motion with her fingers that looked like running.
“You tried to run, and they got you?”
She nodded, and I felt myself get angry, even though I knew that Emerald was still alive.
“What did you see?” I asked.
The rest of the women got off their dinos, and we stood around the green scaled woman as she squatted. With her finger, she began to draw a map in the sand, and she nodded when I began to label the beach, jungle, cliff walls, and fort. Then she tapped the center area that was right before the rope bridge and pointed back in the direction of the jungle.
“The men are there?” I asked, and she nodded.
“They haven’t made it into the fort?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“How many are there?” I asked, and Emerald flashed her five fingers three times.
“Fifteen?” I asked, and she nodded again.
“What kind of weapons are they holding?” Sheela asked, and Emerald made a motion as if she was pulling a bow, thrusting a spear, or throwing what looked like a baseball.
“Bow, spear, and… I don’t know what the last one is,” Kacerie said.
Emerald nodded and then made a motion with her hands as if she was using a drill to start a fire.
“They are throwing fire?” I asked, and Emerald gave me a big smile as she clapped her hands.
“They throw fire? That sounds dangerous,” Kacerie said.
“Will-Lack called them the Burners,” I said. “But I know someone who shoots beams of light out of her hands, so I’m not worried.”
“Ha,” Kacerie let out a laugh, but she still looked a bit concerned.
“Fifteen seems like too many,” Liahpa said. “We are only six.”
“You are forgetting about Victor’s dinosaurs,” Trel groaned. “They will trample over fifteen idiots like nothing. Let’s go destroy them.”
“Not even an hour ago you didn’t want to come,” Liahpa pointed out.
“But now we are here, so let’s just do what we came to do and then go home. My strategy is reasonable. We have dinosaurs, they do not so we will win. Victor?” Trel looked at me with her eyebrows raised, and they all turned to me.
“We can’t fit the trikes through the trail, it is too narrow. If they forced their way through, we’d make a ton of noise.” I looked down at the map and then tried to recall everything I could about the canyon. Then an idea flooded my brain like the rain had flooded Dinosaurland.
“This is a cul-de-sac,” I said as I pointed to the map Emerald drew. “The east side ends in a loop.”
Emerald nodded, but the other women looked confused.
“I have a plan,” I said. “Well, half a plan, the other half we are going to figure out after we climb up the canyon wall, loop to the other side, and then look down on these fifteen Burners.”
Chapter 16
Fifteen minutes later we were crawling in a northeast direction through the dense jungle. I had positioned the parasaurs and trikes closer to the trail that would lead to Quwaru’s fort, but the troodons were escorting the five women and me through the jungle just in case something raptor-like decided to attack us. Even though we were far away from where the Burners were, I didn’t want to make too much noise, so we moved as quickly and quietly as we could through the dense jungle, and finally ended up at the bottom of a sixty-foot wall of rock, moss, and hanging vines. I knew that it was the backside of the cliff where Quwaru’s tribe lived, but the sight of it made my stomach drop a bit. I’d never been a big fan of heights, but I’d been rock climbing a few times at the gym, so I wasn’t exactly terrified.
Okay, so I was a little terrified of making the climb.
It had been close to an hour since Will-Lack died in our camp though, so I knew that Quwaru’s people didn’t have a lot of time. They might already be dead for all I knew, so the idea of climbing up the top of the canyon so that we could get a better assessment of the situation was what we needed to do.
“Uhhh,” Kacerie said as she exhaled. “I’m not sure I can climb up there by myself.”
“You will not need to,” Trel scoffed.
“I won’t?” the pink-haired woman asked.
“No,” Trel said, and then she walked to the cliff wall on her high-arched human feet as she looked up at the top of the cliff. Then her spider-legs moved against the wall, and she raced up twenty feet as if she was walking across horizontal ground. About midway up, she stopped, grabbed a hanging vine, and then looped it free of a rock with her axe, and then she moved up another ten feet to do the same with a second vine. Before I could say “Holy shit, Trel, that was amazing,” she had reached the top of the cliff and was knotting the vines together. Then she threw the bottom down and waved for us to follow her.
“I’ll go first,” I said as I eyed the vine rope. It looked way safer than free climbing, but my stomach still wasn’t happy about the idea. “Kacerie next, then Sheela, then Emerald, and then Liahpa. Wait till I’m about halfway up before you start.”
They nodded at my orders, and then I wiped my hands on my khakis before I grabbed the rope.
The vine was surprisingly strong, and I focused on passing my hands over each other while I pushed my heels into the cliff. After half a minute, I felt tension at the bottom of the rope, and I looked down to see Kacerie begin her climb. The sight gave me a bit of vertigo, and I quickly looked up to where I was going and saw Trel’s upside down face not even an inch from mine.
“Hello,” she whispered as she leaned toward me. I kissed her quickly, and then I realized that she was hanging inverted from the side on her spider legs. The sight made me laugh a bit, and then I stepped up the next few feet and pulled myself to the top of the cliff.
I helped pull Kacerie up a few moments later, and the pink-haired woman gave me a hug that pushed almost all of the air out of my lungs. After she let go, I helped Sheela, Emerald, and Liahpa up. The silver woman didn’t even think twice about taking my hand, and she flashed me a wide smile when she began to float in the air again.
I looked around the top of the rock formation after everyone was up and saw a few large vine trees, clusters of boulders, and a long stretch of ferns. The top was flat and in the shape of a backward “C” with the ends pointing to the beach. I noticed that the east side rolled into the hills and then continued to climb until it was part of the volcanic mountain range.
“We are above their fort,” I said. “The Burners will be looking in this direction, so we need to wrap around the other side so we’ll have less chance of being seen. I’m going to have the troodons move around the base of the rock wall and then try to get to the grass hill where Emerald pointed to them.” I gestured for the five women to follow me, and we jogged around from the south part of the “C” to the northern curve. Once we got there, we dropped down to our stomachs and crawled to the edge of the cliff face.
Emerald had been right in her count. There were fifteen figures down in the grassy field at the base of the hill where the rope bridge was tied off. The bridge had been cut from the fortress side, and the stone cut wall was covered with scorch marks, as if someone had thrown a bunch of fireballs at it.
Then, as we watched, one of the figures down below raised his hands and began to chant slowly. The other figures, who I now realized were all male, raised their hands in the air a second after, and the palms of their hands filled with a glowing red light. Then the man stopped his chanting, and the fourteen other men lowered their hands. They now carried what looked like flaming baseballs, and one of the men chucked it a
cross the chasm toward the fort.
The tossed fire crashed into one of the stones near the door and exploded like a small grenade. Fire, ash, and smoke went everywhere, and the group of men began to laugh.
“We can do this all day and all night!” The man with the long blue hair and white skin called out across the gorge, but there was no answer from the fort, and another man threw his flaming baseball across. This one went right into the open door of the fort, and the men all let out a cheer as it exploded.
“Did we get one of you?” cried a man who had green skin and four arms. As with all the men I had seen so far on Dinosaurland, these assholes were all shredded with muscles, and a few even looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger during his Hercules movie days.
One of the men moved like a gorilla and was almost the size. His fur was green though, and he had a single horn on the back of his head.
Another man had green skin and spikes on his knees, elbows, and wrists. His laugh was the highest pitched of the group, and he kind of hunched over when he walked.
Another man looked almost human, but his hair dropped down to his feet, and it was weighed down with short fat spikes at the end. As he moved to throw his fireball, I realized that his mouth was actually sitting on his face above his eyes, and his nose was where my chin was. The sight freaked me out more than all the other males in the group, and his fireballs actually seemed to blow a chunk of rock out of one of the stone cubes at the gate.
“You should all come out now!” the man with wings yelled. “The longer you make us wait, the worse it will be when you finally surrender.”
“Ha! You think we are going to surrender? What a bunch of fucking idiots!” a voice called out from inside the fort. I thought it sounded like Emta, and the men all threw their fireballs across the canyon in one angry volley.
“I wonder why they aren’t taking that side walkway,” Liahpa said as pointed to the narrow ledge that traveled the wall of the canyon to the left around the inside of the “C” curve and then came around to the fort.
“There is a blood spot on the wall,” I said as my eyes focused on the spot. “I bet they have an archer inside who can get a good angle on anyone trying to get around on the ledge.”
“Ahh,” she whispered. “So, it looks like the Burners might not be able to get in anytime soon.”
“Maybe they will get bored and leave,” Trel hissed. “They are idiot men, after all.”
I watched the man in the center raise his hands again, and the other men quickly followed his example so that they got more fireballs. He had tusks coming out his cheeks that looked like sheep’s horns, and hooves on his feet. Maybe he looked a bit like a tiny demon since he seemed to be the shortest one in the group. He was still ripped though, and even though he hadn’t spoken yet, I started to notice the other men glanced over at him often. Especially after they yelled across the gap at the fort.
“The one raising his hands up to the sky for fireballs is their leader,” I said. “He has to die first, but we’ll wait until the perfect moment.”
“You want me to Lance him?” Kacerie asked.
“Maybe,” I said as I looked at the grassy space on both sides of the hill. Then I backed up from the ledge a bit and turned around to look at the top of the rock where we lay.
“I have a plan,” I said as I gestured for the women to move away from the edge.
“What is it, Victor?” Sheela said after I took a few more steps away and then turned around again to look at the boulders.
“We are going to hit them a bunch of different ways in two waves,” I said. “First, we are going to roll either one of those big-ass boulders down on top of them.” I pointed to the twin boulders that were over by one of the trees. Each was about six feet long and maybe four feet wide. They probably weighed a quarter as much as the table we had moved a few hours ago, but they would be devastating if they landed on someone.
“How will we get it over to the ledge?” Kacerie asked.
“We are going to use Trel’s pivot method,” I said as I gestured to my lover.
“Hmmm,” Trel said as she tapped her lip. “Yes. It will work. That one closest to us looks like it already leans a bit. We can probably lever it over easily with one of the fallen tree branches.”
“What if the boulder misses them?” Kacerie asked.
“That’s fine. I almost don’t need it to hit, see these big stones?” I gestured to the ones that must have weighed a few hundred pounds, and the women nodded. “We are going to move those to the edge, too. We’ll push over the boulder, and then Liahpa and Sheela will start throwing stones. They will be distracted by us here, and then the trikes and parasaurs will plow through the jungle to charge into them. That is the second wave, and while that is happening, the troodons will have snuck around behind. The Burners will be looking up to try to see where the boulders are, they will see the trikes, then the troodons will tear into them. I’ll lean over the side of the canyon over about twenty feet this way.” I pointed to our left. “That way I can control the battle.”
“When do you want me to use my Lance?” Kacerie asked.
“Right before we tip the boulder over,” I said. “We are going to get it in position, then wait for them all to toss their fireballs. Before he can do his magic thing to give them more, you’ll blast him, then we’ll throw the rocks. As soon as the dinosaurs are engaged, I’ll want you to stop tossing rocks down so our troodons don’t get hit on accident.”
“What if the men fight back?” Sheela asked.
“They are going to,” I replied with a shrug, “but we’ll get them confused, and then the dinos will hit them hard. Kacerie will be our insurance. She’ll have one more Lance to use, so if one of these guys ends up being really powerful, she can take him out. Anyone have any questions?”
“This is crazy,” Kacerie said as she smiled at me. Her blue eyes twinkled a bit in the sun, and I matched her smile.
“It isn’t crazy,” Trel scoffed. “It is Victor. This will work.”
“Trel, you are in charge of getting the rocks over to the ledge. You all need to move quickly and as quietly as possible. I’m going to go over to this side and study their group until you are ready. I need to try and figure out what their abilities are, and who is the most dangerous so I can have the troodons try and take them out first.”
“We will get it done, Victor,” Trel said, and then the women jogged over toward the boulders.
I moved down to the ledge again and then lay on my belly so I could watch the fifteen men. They had seemed confident and relaxed at first, but as I continued to watch them, I noticed that three of the men seemed to make the rest of the twelve a bit uneasy, and they were often glanced at for approval when one of the group yelled something or threw a fireball.
The horned demon-man got most of the respect, and I was still confident that he was the leader, or maybe second in command.
The one with the long blue hair and white skin also seemed sought after for approval, and he once knocked the man with the spikes on his knees and shoulders down when they accidentally bumped into each other while they were throwing fireballs. The third man was the one with the long hair with spikes tied into it. It could have been that he was a bad ass, or it could have been that his face was arranged upside down. Either way, the other men tended to avoid him, and I guessed he was extremely dangerous.
This was a bit more challenging than sizing up motherfuckers on my own world. There, I could just look at how strong a guy looked, what kind of clothes he wore, and how hard his eyes were. On Dinosaurland, each of these men had abilities and might have been the strongest of their entire species. One of these guys could possess a power like Kacerie’s Lance or he could have had something even more devastating. I was hoping I could get a hint by watching them long enough, but when one of the fireballs actually blew a hole out of the rock gate of Quwarus’ fort, I realized that they really didn’t have a lot of time left.
The fifteen men seemed to realize
this also, and they began to hoot and holler with excitement.
Then the demon-man raised his hands to the sky, and my troodons slithered through the grass close to the cliff face so they could sneak behind them.
I turned to my friends and saw Trel, Sheela, and Liahpa shifting the big-ass boulder over to the edge. Kacerie and Emerald were using a branch and a smaller brick-size rock to push one of the two hundred-pound boulders over toward the edge, and I saw that they had already put six small boulders close enough to the edge for Sheela and Liahpa to lift and toss over easily.
It was going to be raining rocks in a few minutes.
Trel, Liahpa, and Sheela turned to me, and then Kacerie and Emerald pushed another stone in place by the edge. They both pivoted to get another boulder, but we had seven now right by the lip, and a few more within ten feet, so I gestured for Kacerie to come over to where I was.
“Ready?” I whispered as she slid on her belly next to me.
“Yeah,” she whispered, and I mouthed “On my signal” to Trel, Liahpa, and Sheela.
I commanded my larger dinos to begin to push through the jungle, and I fixed my eyes down on the group of men below. There were two more with fireballs left in their hands, but one of the missiles took another brick out of the fort wall, and the group let out a shout of victory.
Then the last one pitched his fire across the chasm, and I told Kacerie to do it.
The demon-man was about to raise his arms up, but then the pink-haired woman pushed her left hand down the side of the cliff and a brilliant beam of light shot from her palm. The man’s upper body disintegrated in a flash, and I pulled Kacerie back away from the edge so that the men down below didn’t have enough time to make out her bright hair.
“Now!” I hissed over to the wrecking crew, and Sheela, Trel, and Liahpa swung the boulder out over the side of the cliff. The thing teetered for half a moment before tipping over, and I heard a chorus of screams down below.
I slid back down on my belly in time to see the boulder flip over like a matchstick, strike the edge of the cliff, bounce off, and then cartwheel across the grass like a drunken sorority sister. The massive rock flattened three of the men as soon as it landed and then knocked the shit out of two more before they could get out of the way. It continued its tumble, and then bounced off the side of the ledge that led to the lake below the rope bridge, hit the other side of the canyon near where the salt pools were, and then tumbled into the water.
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