“I think you have the wrong idea about me,” I said.
“Whatever,” Emta said. “You’ve got all the leverage, and I don’t want you to kill me like you keep threatening. I can heal quickly. That’s my power, and it isn’t that impressive.”
“That sounds impressive to me,” I said with a shrug. “It’s dangerous out there, so being able to heal quickly is good for survival.”
“Only if I live through the initial damage,” Emta said. “Your dinosaurs would tear me to pieces, and I wouldn’t be able to heal. You are still better than me.”
“I’m not trying to compare people like that,” I sighed. “You all have your team of people, and I have mine. Everyone helps in a team.”
“And now you’ve met our team, but we still haven’t met yours.” Emta crossed her arms and then nodded up to the cliff where I imagined they had caught glimpses of my tribe watching us talk. “Quwaru is willing to give you something, and now you know what we can do. Which of us are you going to take as a slave?”
“I’m not going to take any of you as a slave, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Emta blinked at me with surprise, and then she sighed, crossed her arms, and turned her nose up into the air away from me. “I have seen your type before.”
“No you haven’t,” I said, and then I turned back to Quwaru. “You said that you took out the Burners, but then this group I just fought was the remainder of the group. I’m a bit confused.”
“We thought the Burners were about thirty strong,” the red-skinned woman in the bikini said. “We encountered them a few times on the beach and ran from them. They hadn’t found our base yet, but we knew what they were capable of.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Will-Lack was able to fly to the pillars of light,” Youleena said as she ran her hands through her long white hair. “He brought us all here, and he saw the Burners capture others. The women were… not treated well. The men were forced to fight each other to the death. Winners were allowed to join them.”
“Fuck,” I said. “What a bunch of assholes.”
“Yep,” Emta said.
“Will-Lack was in the air for most of the day, and he would let us know if it was okay to come out and fish,” Quwaru continued. “He knew where their camp was, but it was in the thickest part of the jungle a few miles to our north, so he could never get a complete count of their numbers. We knew that it was just a matter of time until they found us, and then they did a few weeks ago. They sent a representative who told us to surrender. He claimed that we would be treated well, but we knew better.”
“So you attacked first,” I said.
“Yes,” Quwaru replied with a nod, and the rest of her tribe nodded along with her. “We had been preparing for a while.”
“But the eight-- sorry, nine of you killed thirty?” I looked down the line and recalled their powers.
“Yes,” the red-skinned woman said, and she smiled proudly. “We may not look like much, but we can fight and defend ourselves.”
“Hmmm,” I said as I glanced at the eight of them.
The numbers didn’t add up.
Nomi’s power to eliminate someone else’s ability was powerful, but the woman with black hair in front of her face wouldn’t have been able to do that to thirty Burners. Even if she had lied, and she could use her powers against everyone around her, the tribe seemed to be made of mostly men, and the group I had seen looked dangerous even without their abilities.
Keefay’s ability didn’t seem useful at all for combat. Turning water into wine was great for Jesus, but I couldn’t see how she might have used it to kill a bunch of Burner assholes. Unless they gave them the booze as trade and then the Burners got drunk. The golden-haired woman with the unicorn horn noticed me staring at her, and she gave me a coy smile and raised her eyebrow.
I looked at the short gnome woman with the four eyes. If Urka had been honest with me, she couldn’t have taken out thirty of the Burners. She would have shocked one or maybe two, but then the burners would have killed them all.
“You are trying to figure out how we did it,” Zoru said.
“Yeah,” I said as I looked at the purple furred creature.
“You can’t,” Adella sang. “How could eight take on thirty? It sounds impossible, yet we did.”
“I don’t think you are lying,” I said as I glanced down from the woman’s big beautiful eyes, to the bikini covering her pert breasts, to her toned stomach, to her scale wrapped legs. Maybe she had used her ability to drown the burners? That didn’t make a lot of sense either. Maybe she had distracted them with her good looks and a song? She certainly seemed like a siren that Odysseus’ crew might have encountered.
I turned my eyes to Youleena. The willowy woman with the long fingers didn’t seem like much of a warrior. She had said that it took her a bit of time to carve the stone with her ability, but how had it helped them kill the Burners?
Zoru was another one who had an interesting ability, but I didn’t see how teleporting to a spot where he already once was could be used in a large battle. It was pretty badass in small combat, but the scenario was still nine versus thirty.
Unless they were lying.
I glanced down the line again and tried to chew through the puzzle.
Quwaru looked like a succubus. She had a toned body and could probably fight, but her power was reading minds and emotions when she touched someone.
Zoru looked like a furry fox-monkey. He was tall and had lean muscle. He could totally fight, but not against thirty, and his teleport wouldn’t help much.
Youleena was tall, thin, and her white hair and skin gave her a delicate, ethereal quality. She may have been tougher than she looked, most people on Dinosaurland were, but I couldn’t imagine her in a fight, and I didn’t know how her ability to shape rocks could have helped that much.
Urka was less than five feet tall, and she was skinny. She must have weighed less than one of my troodons, and she had told me that her electrical powers didn’t do more than annoy others.
Adella was all sorts of mermaid beautiful, and her voice was amazing, but they had said that the Burner’s camp was in the forest, so I doubted that her water controlling ability would have helped much.
Keefay’s golden hair seemed to glow like a second sun, and I realized that she would have attracted attention even walking out on the beach, let alone trying to sneak through a jungle to sneak attack a bunch of assholes. Turning water into alcohol was an amazing power for parties, but unless she had somehow figured out how to get all the Burner’s drunk, I couldn’t see much use for it.
Nomi’s ability was very powerful, but it was strategically a lot like Zoru’s. It would be good for small battles, but making it so that one person out of thirty couldn’t use their abilities wouldn’t help too much.
Emta could heal, but it sounded like it wasn’t immortality. She couldn’t just wade into battle and survive. She was worried about getting killed.
Will-Lack was pretty strong, and he could fly, but I didn’t see how he could take out thirty fuckers.
The math didn’t make sense. Quwaru didn’t have enough people that looked like warriors, and their abilities didn’t seem powerful enough.
“I will tell you what we did,” Quwaru said.
“No,” Emta said. “Don’t tell him shit. He already knows too much about us.”
“I’ve figured it out,” I said with a laugh as I turned back to stare at Keefaye. “Or, I think I have.”
“Oh?” the golden woman asked as she raised a single eyebrow.
“There is no way you figured it out,” Emta scoffed.
“Maybe I got it wrong,” I said as I took a deep breath and looked down their line up one more time. “Keefaye made a shitload of alcohol. Probably hundreds of gallons of it. Then the group carefully moved it to the Burner’s camp. Adella made all the liquid splash down on the camp. Urka lit it on fire with her electrical powers, and then they all roasted.”
Their mouths opened with shock, and they stared at me for a few moments.
“Looks like I’m right,” I laughed.
“How the fuck did you know?” Emta asked. “There is no way you could have figured that out--”
“It was a bit of a guess,” I said as I nodded at Keefaye. “Her hair is really attention getting, so I figured that she must have stayed in the cave. That got me thinking about what she would be doing all day.”
“You are very smart,” Keefaye said as she bit her bottom lip.
“So I got it?”
“Yeah,” Quwaru laughed. “I’m astounded. It took us a few weeks to come up with that plan, and you figured it out after talking to us for a few minutes.”
“I’m good at that kind of stuff,” I said with a shrug.
“I spent many hours blessing water,” Keefaye said.
“Then Emta, Will-lack, Quwaru, and I moved them to the perimeter of the Burner camp,” Zoru said.
“Then I made the liquid fly up and coat every surface,” Adella sang.
“Then I zapped it!” Urka squeaked. “Boom! The Burners all burned.”
“Then you all came back here,” I said. “Things were quiet for a few days, so you thought you were safe.”
“Then you showed up,” Emta huffed.
“Victor did not cause the remainder of the Burners to find us,” Quwaru said. “They must have tracked us. Who knows what abilities their members have? At any rate, we are safe now, thanks to Victor, his tribe, and his dinosaurs. We have done our introductions, so now I will ask what we can do to pay you back.”
“Okay,” I said as I looked at Youleena, “I’m guessing that you can’t move the stones? You can just shape--”
“Victor!” a voice shouted above us, and we all turned to see Trel and Kacerie waving wildly at us.
As soon as they saw they had our attention, they pointed toward the jungle
“Ahh,” Quwaru said. “We thought we saw your friends up on top of the cliff, but when they didn’t come down, I--”
“Run!” Kacerie screamed, and I felt my blood chill.
But before I could move, a roar cut through the air and interrupted my voice like a strike of thunder would cover the sound of a bee buzzing. It actually sounded like someone had fired up a jet engine right next to us, and we all startled as my dinosaurs spun around to face the top of the grassy hill that lay between us, the jungle, and the beach.
Just over the top of the slope I could see the top part of a massive predator’s head.
It had to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I guessed that it had just stumbled through the jungle and cut off our exit from the small canyon.
Chapter 2
“Get in the cave!” I shouted at Quwaru’s tribe as I commanded the trikes to form a defensive line.
“What about you?” the succubus asked, but then the T-Rex let out another roar that made my brain rattle in my skull.
“Just go!” I screamed as I pointed to the small trail. They didn’t need me to tell them a second time, and I turned back around to face the massive predator as soon as it crested the top of the small hill.
And my stomach dropped down to my feet as terror numbed my entire body.
It was fucking huge.
The Tyrannosaurus Rex was probably the most popular dinosaur, and I had seen tons of pictures of it in my life. I’d even gone to the La Brea Tar Pits when I was a kid and stood next to the skeleton. It had seemed huge then, but the creature that stood on top of the hill wasn’t just huge, it was terrifying.
It could have been the angle of the hill, but it looked like it was thirty feet tall. I doubted I even came up to the dinosaur’s knee, and my trikes were probably only half as big. Hope wasn’t here, but I had no doubt that this monster could have swallowed the horse sized parasaurus in one bite, and I wouldn’t have even been an appetizer.
It was a good fifty percent larger than an allosaurus. I didn’t think that T-Rex’s could actually get that much bigger than the other predators, but a quick blink of my Eye-Q confirmed my earlier guess. This was a fucking male T-Rex, and my dinos were trapped in the canyon with it.
The king had paused at the top of the hill, and it shifted its massive red eyes to my three trikes, the three parasaurs, and the group of people running toward the ledge on the opposite side of the grassy field. It let out another roar which made every bone in my body vibrate, and my trio of trikes took a small step backward.
Then I saw movement on the crest behind the monster, and another T-rex moved up the hill.
Oh. Shit.
My Eye-Q said this one was a female. It wasn’t as big as the male, but that didn’t really matter. I didn’t know how I could beat one of these fuckers, so two was just making my situation even more hopeless.
Well, it wasn’t hopeless. My troodons and I could fit on the narrow ledge and escape around to Quwaru’s cave, but that would leave Bob, Sonny, Cher, Tom, Nicole, and Katie behind. I could control the dinos at range, but I didn’t know how far of a distance was my maximum, and the cliff loop would take me almost a whole two-hundred yards out before wrapping back around to the cave. I could sense my tamed dino’s terror, and it was causing my own muscles to go numb.
I wasn’t going to leave my pals behind, and I wasn’t going to let them get eaten.
“Sheela!” I screamed up to the top of the cliffs, and I saw the blonde cheetah-woman gesture for me to run, but I ignored her warning just like I ignored the ice pit in my stomach. “I’m going to bring them close to the wall! Throw shit at them!”
“Vic--” she tried to yell down at me, but the second T-Rex roared, and it felt like the ground shook under my boots.
Then the pair charged down the slope toward the three trikes.
“Shit, back up. Back up! Back up!” I commanded the trikes to fall back away from the edge of the cliff by the water so that we were all closer to the wall below Sheela, Trel, Kacerie, Liahpa, and Emerald.
The whole grassy plain was on a bit of a slope, but it was less steep the closer toward where the cliff trail began. The T-Rexs already had a significant height advantage over the trikes and parasaurses, so I didn’t want to fight them on the hill. We all backed up to the corner beside where the trail met the wall, but I made the three trikes halt a few dozen feet from the wall so that they would have some room to maneuver.
Then the pair of apex super predators reached us.
The big one moved along our flank away from the wall, and I commanded Tom to strafe that way so the tyrannosaurus didn’t have a path that wouldn’t be met with horns. The smaller predator was still twice as tall as Katie and Nicole, but I positioned the two female trikes in a line that kind of wedged the predator toward the face of the cliff where my friends stood.
The bigger T-rex snapped its jaws downward at Tom’s crest, but I was watching him out of the corner of my eye, and I commanded the trike to raise his face and shuffle forward at the last second. The T-rex missed with his jaws, but he was quicker than I would have guessed, and he jerked back before Tom could impale him.
The other T-rex let out another roar, as if it expected its voice to cause the trikes to run, but Katie and Nicole didn’t, so the smaller tyrannosaurus made a quick snap toward Nicole’s side. The predator’s angle of attack made sense because Katie was the one closest to the cliff face, so I predicted the movement and angled Nicole so that her horns were able to ram up and into the carnivore's face when it tried to bite.
This T-rex wasn’t as quick as the bigger one, and its face scraped along Nicole’s horns.
The predator let out a screech as it twisted its face away from the trikes, and then I saw an arrow plummet from the top of the cliff and hit the beast in its left eye.
It screamed again, and the larger one jerked its head away from Tom so that he could glance at his mate.
And he looked fucking pissed.
The male jerked his head around with a whipping motion and tried to take another bite at Tom. I had commande
d the trike to get his face up so that it could lance the tyrannosaurus, but we were a half a moment too late, and the predator’s jaws closed around the boney ridge at the top of Tom’s head. My trike let out a surprised bellow and tried to thrash his head, but the T-rex wasn’t letting go.
Then the male tyrannosaurus tried to shift around Tom’s side so he could slash his flank with the long claws that were at the end of his short stubby claws.
Sonny and Bob sprinted forward from the back lines as I tried to keep the female T-rex busy with the press of Katie and Nicole’s horns. The male predator was focused on thrashing Tom, so he didn’t see Sonny and Bob until the two parasaurs shoulder slammed the massive tyrannosaurs.
He still didn’t let go of Tom though, and my trike let out another bellow of fear that cut through my chest like an ice pick.
Then the T-rex twisted his neck, flexed his back, and Tom tipped over on his side.
“Shit!” I shouted as I commanded Nicole to peel away from the female tyrannosaurs. The red-crested trike followed my orders instantly and charged across the fifty feet of field while I also tried to position Katie so that she was forcing their opponent into the wall.
I shifted focus back to the male T-rex. He had twisted his giant body around Tom’s belly and was about to slash open my pal’s stomach with his claws, but then Nicole plowed into the tyrannosaurs’ right side, and the three of them turned into a tumbleweed of teeth, horns, scales, and roars.
I twisted my head back to the T-rex female who Katie was trying to corner. My trike was doing a good job of pushing her back into the wall, but the predator didn’t really seem to be fazed by the arrow jutting from her eye. As I watched, she darted toward Katie’s right side, lurched back as my trike turned her horns, and then shifted to try to take Katie’s left shoulder. It was a feint attack, and it would have worked if I hadn’t somehow guessed that the T-rex was going to try something crafty. I commanded Katie to jerk her head around instantly, and the female rex took another face full of horn.
Tamer- King of Dinosaurs 4 Page 3