The Wyvern in the Wilderlands: Planeswalking Monster Hunters for Hire (Sci-fi Multiverse Adventure Survival / Weird Fantasy) (Monster Hunting for Fun and ... Hunters and Mythical Monsters) Book 1)

by Eddie Patin

  The last beams of sunlight suddenly flashed in Jason's eyes from the west like a candle dying out. In that moment of brief illumination, Jason looked down to see the penetrating glare of a large raptor staring up at him as it struggled to pursue him up the tree. Its snout was dark grey and its teeth gleamed for an instant as it scrambled up the branches, leap by leap, clawing through twigs and bark, its feathers ruffling wildly and its long tail swaying behind it.

  Jason stopped, grabbed his cane, and smashed the raptor in the face again and again as the light faded from the world. A sudden crashing sound through the branches and a thump and squawk from below told Jason that the predator had fallen. At least—he hoped that it did.

  The man climbed blindly as the night fully settled in.

  When Jason finally stopped, dry and irritated from pushing his way through the scraggly tree and hurting all over, he sat on a branch and felt his left leg. He gasped when he felt that his thigh was wet with warm fluid that had to be his blood.

  A new wave of cold fear flooded through him...

  Jason ripped off his belt and scrounged for whatever he could find to stop the bleeding. He groaned in despair—his backpack was down on the ground! He pulled his fleece gloves out from one of his cargo pockets.

  Damn—if only he had his light!

  Swallowed by horror and dread, out of ammo and far from the safety of his cave, Jason set to stop the bleeding in the darkness of the night while raptors rushed around below him.

  Everything had gone to shit. His plan was dashed to pieces and the wyvern was still alive and well—better even, now that it had a T-Rex body to feed from outside its cave!

  Out of ammo, Jason thought with freezing fear. Out of ammo...

  The words repeated in his head.

  "Bleeding—fuck me..." he groaned to himself. Now he was badly injured, too. He longed for the comfort of his bed and couch. He wanted to watch some YouTube and play video games...

  He was bleeding. Oh God—he was bleeding so much...

  Chapter 34

  As the forest shifted from pitch black to a very dim blue, Jason clutched at the tree half in and out of sleep, dreaming of pain and fear and despair.

  When the sun finally peeked up on the eastern horizon, crawling over the top of the ridge, the first pale rays of morning light pierced the woods.

  Jason cracked open an exhausted eye and groaned.

  The sky began lightening and the cool humidity along the forest floor transformed into mist.

  The man was thirsty and felt like run-over shit. His skin was hot and irritated, scratched up all over by the tree’s bark and branches. His fingernails hurt and his throat was swollen. When he shifted on the branch he sat on—his muscles stiff and painful—Jason cried out in pain as his left thigh seemed to catch on fire. Ragged edges of a nasty wound from the big raptor flared like frayed anger, terribly painful even though he had done his best in the darkness to staunch the flow of blood and cover the wound. The next part of Jason's body to flare up in agony was his left shoulder where the little raptor had held on as it tore at his backpack last night...

  Backpack! he thought through a haze of pain.

  Jason looked down, his neck stiff and creaking with pain.

  Better to be dead, he thought with a grimace, then immediately felt a stab of guilt.

  Peering down through the branches, the man saw the forest floor twelve feet or so below him. Even though the morning was still dim and full of long shadows, he could see the bright orange stripes of his CamelBak backpack down there in the underbrush. Then he noticed the random colors and shapes of his stuff scattered all over the ground...

  A sense of dread welled up inside him.

  "Oh God," he croaked. Oh God, please don’t let those shitheads have messed up all of my gear...

  Jason wanted to climb down and see, but he was terrified of the pain that would surely blaze through his lacerated left thigh when he started to move—especially when he started to put weight on it. For several minutes, Jason stayed in the tree, stuck on the same branch and refusing to move. He didn’t want to deal with it. The T-Rex was supposed to kill the wyvern. He was supposed to go home!

  He could be home by now, waking up in his bed after melting in a hot shower the night before...

  You’ve got to keep going, he thought after a while.

  "But what's the point?" he said.

  There’s gotta be a way...

  In time, Jason hooked his cane to one arm and forced himself to start climbing down, crying out in agony the entire way. The pain was so extreme—so intense and raw and blazing—that he started crying, then sobbing. Each new branch under him was a curse, every tiny blade of bark scratching at his hands and arms and neck were vicious insults.

  He hated dinosaurs now.

  He hated this whole goddamned world.

  Nuke it from orbit, he thought. It's the only way to be sure...

  "Shut up!" he cried through a grimace.

  If he couldn’t get off of this damned world and get home, he’d fucking kill himself eventually. This is terrible, he thought. He just wanted to go home...

  With his mind alive with regret and helplessness, Jason was surprised when he suddenly reached the ground again, his torn leg delivering a constant, burning pain like he’d never known before. As the lazy, rising sun turned the sky brighter, Jason noticed that his filthy hands weren’t just muddy—they were covered in dried, caked blood. His blood. Looking down at his leg, he could see that his wound was bleeding again, seeping through his fleece gloves that he’d secured as a makeshift compress over the night with his belt.

  He hardly remembered sleeping at all—he mostly sat through the night in pain.

  Did I doze off at all? he thought, looking down to his pack on the ground.

  Jason’s heart sank, and he felt tears welling up in his eyes. The ground was a mess of his belongings strewn all around. Near him was the fallen body of the large raptor he killed with the spear, its body stripped to sheathing and bones over the night, sprawled in some dense underbrush. At Jason’s feet, his CamelBak had been pulled open—all of its pouches splayed out—and its fabric was torn in many places. He could see the bright blue color of the water bladder. He reached down to pick up the bladder, immediately realizing that something was wrong because of how light it felt...

  The water bladder had been punctured and torn in several places.

  "God damn it..." Jason muttered, feeling a tear tickle his cheek. A crushing cold sensation swallowed his heart and spread through his chest like a huge sandbag.

  The compartments might still be useable ... somewhat. The zippers were still okay—there were tears in the outer fabric here and there, but not too bad—but nearly everything that was in his pack was not inside anymore.

  The bladder was toast. Useless. Jason's main method of storing and carrying water was destroyed.

  Jason’s thoughts immediately flew back to his coffee cup, which he'd left back in the spider cave to the south on the other side of cannibal territory. When he looked up at the ridge and started thinking of ways to climb it—it was the only way back without going through the cannibals’ woods or past the wyvern’s cave again—a steady and oppressive dread grew in Jason’s guts as he contemplated climbing up, across, and down the ridge with his badly wounded leg.

  "Fuck!" he shouted, violently throw his backpack to the ground.

  He leaned painfully against a tree and sobbed.

  Finally looking up at the sky through bleary, tear-filled eyes, Jason forced himself to take a few deep breaths, then he picked up his ruined pack again.

  Looking around the immediate area, Jason began collecting what was left of his things. He found his long underwear—previously wrapped around the meat he'd brought with him—strewn and shredded around a nearby bush. Thankfully, his big coil of paracord was still there, pulled out and scattered all over the underbrush near the dead raptor. It looked like his cigarette lighter was gone, as was his compass—rippe
d right off of the D-ring on his pack’s strap. Those little shits must have made off with those things because they were shiny. What was left of Jason's Band-Aids were scattered around in some wet grass. He found his smartphone face down in some mud. The man's jacket—previously rolled up and lashed into the pack’s external straps—was draped over a fern nearby. His sunglasses were nowhere to be seen. The crude, stone axe was still there, forgotten and engulfed in ferns.

  Feeling a deep sense of sadness and grief for his pack—it had been such a good piece of kit; he probably wouldn’t have survived without it—Jason grimaced against the intense pain in his leg and shoulder and started fixing his coil of paracord. He cast the line out into the woods and rolled it up, loop by loop.

  That CamelBak backpack was probably Jason's most important belonging from his old world, his best defense protecting him from having to live like an outright primitive...

  Thankfully, Jason had kept his pocket knife on him, in his pants.

  "No fire, no water," he muttered, glaring at the loops of paracord as he reigned it in. "Fuck. Shit. Worse than ever now..."

  A chirp appeared from nearby, and Jason looked across some grasses and ferns to see a small raptor standing there—as tall as his knees and decorated with a variety of brown, tan, and grey colors—watching him with its head cocked to one side. The little dinosaur chirped again, jerking its face to one side to get a good look with a bright, coppery eye at the miserable human...

  "What the hell do you want?!" Jason snapped.

  The thing let out a curious trill, and Jason saw its long tail swish once, showing the long tuft of feathers at its tip.

  Jason’s sadness and despair were suddenly replaced by a flood of anger. It was like a vast, empty hole suddenly was engulfed with quickly-flowing lava, setting everything inside him on fire! The man dropped the coil of paracord, gripped the hook of his cane, and growled at the creature, charging at it with fury in his ears and heart, raising his cane! Jason wanted to smash the thing into the ground, to break and crunch every wispy bone in its body. He wanted to pull its legs off and squish its skull until its eyes squelched out of its head—

  The intense pain in his left leg stopped him cold, searing the vision from his mind and giving him nothing but fiery agony.

  When Jason finally looked up from his clenching grimace, the little raptor was gone.

  Jason stood, holding his weight on his cane, and cried.

  After a while, he went back, gathered up his rope, jacket, grimy long johns stained with roast dinosaur meat and chewed on by little raptors in the dark, his Band-Aids, and whatever other pieces of stuff he could collect and stash into his damaged pack. He felt a swell of helplessness and fear when he found his flashlight, dropped last night when he was attacked and left on. The batteries were dead.

  "Of course," Jason spat, putting the light back into his pack even though it wouldn’t do him any good.

  His spear was still on the ground, its tip bathed in dried blood, so he picked that up, too. Putting all of his gear back on, Jason’s mind reeled, thinking of what the hell he was going to do...

  There was no way back to his spider cave shelter—not in his wounded condition.

  Jason remembered the cave near the coast. Looking through the woods to the north, he saw the blue water of Lake Granby sparking through the trees. Maybe—if he could survive long enough—he could re-dress his wounds there. Perhaps he could find some fresh water somewhere; maybe the rain water was clear of bacteria after all. He had never tested that idea—there was no need since he could boil water without a problem—but Jason was pretty sure that rainwater was safe to drink in the wild...

  This place is wilder than most, he thought.

  Was the rainwater here even normal water like back on his home world? Or was some weird, distorted horror waiting in there—way down on the molecular scale—incompatible with the man's digestion system? Maybe it would kill him to drink un-boiled water no matter what the source...

  "Doesn’t matter," Jason said to himself. "I’ll die without it. I can die with it. I can die before I reach the cave..."

  Jason had spent his whole life—ever since the plane crash that killed his mom and dad and crippled him—drifting by. He'd always felt in control of his little, simple life of video games and what Ben called dead end jobs. Jason had never reached for anything because he was alone and scared and wanted to stay in control, even though his meager control was only over a stupid little world of meaningless distraction.

  He’d wasted his life.

  In that moment, standing in the woods, searing with pain, thirsty but with no water, surrounded by beasts that waited in the darkness to eat him if they had the chance, Jason realized that he didn’t have any control—not anymore. He was weak, and wounded, and practically defenseless.

  Maybe he was never in control back home either. And now, in this hellish world of fangs and claws, he was just seeing it more clearly.

  He would die here—he could feel it. The dread of the idea was cold, and it was as clear as a frozen, snowy morning with a crisp, blue sky.

  "Well if I’m gonna die," he said, "it won’t be in something’s belly."

  Jason knew that he had to make it to that cave he saw near the lake. He’d climb up into that hole and die of his wounds, or of thirst, or maybe of hunger. Hell—he’d probably die of infection. If he didn’t have infection spreading through his body by the myriad of scrapes and little cuts from all of the dinosaurs and cannibals and spider things he’d fought along the way already, he would surely get infected now. That nasty cut sweeping across his left leg from the big raptor was deep and still bleeding. It would need stitches for sure, and there was no way that Jason would be able to close the wound...

  With that, Jason set off to the north, walking with his spear in one hand and his cane in the other, wading through a fiery ocean of pain. It wasn’t far to the lake from here—he was already so far north of the wyvern’s cave...

  After what might have been a couple of hours—or an eternity judging by the pain he battled the whole way—Jason reached the shore.

  The last time he was here, standing on gravel and sand near the gently lapping waves of Lake Granby—which was salt water for some crazy reason—he was running from the Dreadwraith.

  But the Dreadwraith was dead now.

  Jason turned west and followed the shore, knowing that he would reach the cave just near the corner that would lead into the wyvern's valley.

  There was a loud, low grunt behind him, and Jason felt the earth move as heavy feet thumped on the shoreline, but he felt no fear. If the mini-rexes were coming for him, there would be nothing he could do about it now...

  But when Jason turned to look, he saw that it was a great Ankylosaurus walking near the water, pausing to stare at Jason menacingly from twenty feet away. The creature’s dark eyes bored into him as if trying to determine whether or not the wounded ape-man would be a threat. The armored behemoth stamped at the sand every once in a while, swinging its thick, club-ended tail with deep whooshing sounds. Its scales and armor-plating were beautiful, full of rich browns, reds, and oranges.

  The creature’s vitality offended Jason.

  He ignored the lumbering, tank-like creature, turning away and continuing west.

  When he finally reached the section of sheer ridge-stone where the cave was inset about ten feet off of the ground, Jason heard more dinosaur sounds from further up ahead. Looking on along the shore, he saw two bipedal dinosaurs running together near the water, grunting and making low noises. Their tails were long and flat, their arms much longer than those of a Tyrannosaur-type. When Jason could finally see through the glare of the waves behind them, he noted that their heads were topped with smooth domes surrounded by a halo of small spikes. There was something similar to the gigantic duckbill dinosaurs about the pair, but they were significantly smaller. Though they were long, built to lean horizontally like so many other dinosaurs Jason had seen, their highest points—the arc
h of their backs—were no taller than the top of the man's head.

  The two dome-headed dinosaurs stopped suddenly, staring at Jason from a hundred feet or so away. They stood still for a few seconds then both turned, running off together in the opposite direction.

  Pachy... pachy-something, Jason thought. It was a crazy, weird name, and he couldn’t remember it.

  Jason sighed. It didn’t matter anyway.

  He faced the cliff leading to the cave, steeled himself against the intense pain that was sure to follow, and the next few minutes became a blinding storm of pain and fire and sob-inducing agony as he climbed.

  In time, Jason finally pulled himself up over the edge into the cave, relieved to see that the small cavern was empty and full of sand.

  He promptly collapsed onto the middle of the cave floor, welcoming the blackness.

  Maybe he would die...

  When Jason woke—face pressed into the sand and his mouth dry—he crawled through a feverish haze until he was sitting near the rock-edged hole leading back to the outside world.

  He was protected from the sun there, but figured that it was late afternoon by where the light seemed to be coming from: low in the sky above the western horizon, unseen from his position.

  Jason didn’t feel hungry. In fact, his stomach merely felt dead.

  A lot of him felt dead, but the pain reminded him that he was badly damaged, and he would hurt viciously until he eventually dropped dead. Stretching his searing left leg out in front of him, he saw that his raptor laceration was slowly seeping bloody goop through the fleece gloves he had pressed into service as makeshift gauze, held tight over his thigh by his belt. The gloves were dark red and brown now, coated with pressed sand. Jason felt that he’d be hard-pressed to stop the bleeding.