by Eddie Patin
Maybe it would stop on its own.
Or maybe he would just die.
Jason looked out over the lake, watching the sparkling blue waves move and shimmer. He watched the bright white and sometimes colorful shapes of reefs under the water, their visions distorted by the blue flowing above them. At times, Jason saw silvery shapes flashing through the depths, and he eyed the multiple black spots visible all over through the water.
"Must be urchin," he croaked. "At least I’ll die looking at something like the Caribbean..."
Eventually, boredom got the best of the man, and Jason took to checking his wounds and redressing them as best he could without the help of water. He replaced the bloody gloves with the sleeves of his jacket—which he cut up with his knife—and his belt with tightly-bound paracord. When he was finished, the compress felt a lot better and more secure and consistent. He put the rest of the Band-Aids over the new raptor claw-cuts in his left shoulder, bandaging the painful, hooked flesh wherever it wasn’t already too dirty.
"Too dirty," he muttered to himself. "What a freakin joke."
When the sun started going down, Jason crawled back to the middle of the sandy cave, lying down on his side with his torn backpack serving as a pillow.
A dark part of him inside wished that he would pass into numbness over the night—perhaps dead from blood loss, or dehydration. He liked the idea of things ending now instead of dealing with more pain tomorrow.
As the sky darkened outside, dimming the inside of the cave along with it, Jason fell asleep.
He drifted away thinking about drowning himself in the morning...
Chapter 35
The dawn found Jason still alive.
As the pale light grew inside the dry, sandy cave, Jason was dreaming of living back home without his leg. Instead of permanently injuring his right knee, he had actually lost a leg in the crash after a large piece of twisted metal shredded through his left thigh. The doctors in his dream had to amputate the leg below the hip, and as Jason hobbled around his quiet life of YouTube and console games, he felt the pain of that missing leg almost constantly—intense burning all of the time...
When Jason woke up, he groaned, realizing that he was still in the dinosaur world.
He lay still in the sand for a long time, staring at nothing, not feeling like getting up. His time in this cursed place had been nothing but running, hiding, fighting, surviving, and climbing trees. It was one crazy thing after another and Jason was constantly raw and alive with all sorts of emotions—mainly a near-constant sense of dread and occasional wild, panicking fear.
Now, he was smothered by a thick blanket of nothingness and dull pain everywhere.
He was so tired.
What was the point in getting up?
It takes three days to die from dehydration, right? Jason thought. Maybe he could die in just two days, since he’d already lost a good bit of blood. Perhaps his body would go into septic shock from all of the wounds and stress and lack of sanitation.
"God, please let death be easy..."
Jason didn’t really believe in God—he never had—but it seemed right to say.
You’re just being dramatic, he thought.
"Who cares?"
He listened to his body. Expecting signs of hunger from his stomach, he found it quiet. Jason silently observed the feelings in his arms and legs. They were all covered with cuts and scrapes—especially the long, open wound on his left leg from that nasty sickle-claw of the raptor that was as big as he was—but the pain was oddly muted.
Maybe his nerve endings were dying.
"That’d be nice," he said. "Die with no pain, please?"
After several minutes, Jason finally roused himself to move and cried out in agony, realizing that his nerve endings were still alive and well!
Well, you’re moving now, he thought. Keep going.
Finding his way to his hands and knees despite the intense pain, Jason threw his backpack on and crawled to the hole that led outside. He pulled himself through the sand toward the light...
When Jason appeared at the mouth of the little cave, he stared out over Lake Granby in utter wonder and amazement. Pterosaurs flew and circled in the sky above the water. Some were far above on thermals; some skimmed the lake, diving from time to time for fish. The water of the lake itself was brilliant—an undulating blend of mixed turquoise and sapphire blue. The silver and gold light of morning sparkled and reflected off of its waving surface.
The outside world was abuzz with sounds from all sorts of dinosaurs, mainly small ones trilling and chirping and cawing as they frolicked about the wild landscape.
The gentle lapping of the lake was like a soothing bath.
Jason still couldn’t get over how Lake Granby—landlocked in Colorado back home—was somehow a saltwater body in this world. Was there an ocean nearby that was inconsistent with the normal layout of Earth?
A huge, lumbering Triceratops walked past Jason’s cave, thumping along the shore, followed by two young ceratopsians that could have been its young. The little ones didn’t have any horns, were much thinner, and their shield crests were very small. The Triceratops was as big as the largest SUV and long—from the impressive three horns reaching forward from its head, to the tip of its thick, swaying tail. Its skin was similar in texture to an elephant’s, but colored with a mix of browns and greens in something like a natural camouflage pattern.
The two young ceratopsians lingered at the water’s edge—one of them splashing in the oncoming waves—and the adult Triceratops paused, looked back, and let out a dull, bellowing call, seizing the little ones’ attention. They came scampering after it—thumping like trotting horses—and the three of them continued down the shore toward the valley.
Jason could smell the salt of the sea and he sighed, looking out at the water again. Peering across the lake, he saw movement far on the other shore and watched (holding his breath) as huge, long-necked dinosaurs stood in the sunshine in front of the dark woods way out there. They reached high up into the pine trees to eat their lofty boughs. The huge sauropods moved slowly and gracefully, their legs long and column-like; their tails short but sweeping behind them, balancing their colossally-long necks.
The man heard a splash below, and looked down at the water several feet off shore to see a pterosaur with a beak like a pelican’s pull a fish out of the lake and fly away...
Jason had to admit—it was beautiful.
Goddamned lovely.
The darkness in him wanted to squish the awe Jason felt, to instead wallow in the pain and anguish and helplessness. There was no doubt that this world could be as beautiful as it was deadly.
Jason suddenly felt his stomach come alive again with a rumble, and he gasped as a group of massive ostrich dinosaurs—much bigger than the one he’d killed—went galloping past his cave along the shore. They turned into the valley and heading south toward the wyvern’s area. Their long, fluffy dark feathers bounced and ruffled as they ran. Hell—they could have been giant ostriches except for their long, tufted tails and beefier heads sporting snouts instead of the thin beaks of the big Earth birds. The creatures ran like the wind, graceful and as fast as horses. They would definitely be a difficult dinosaur for the Mini-rexes to catch, just like when Jason had watched the two species interact before...
This world was alive with all manner of creatures—not just vicious predators.
Yesterday, Jason had realized that he was totally out of control and that he had never tried to control more than a meager, wasteful life before he came here. Sure, this place was dangerous as hell and it was primitive and totally untamed. But there was one thing that Jason had control over as hard as things were: himself.
He recognized that a flabby Earth-man would most likely end up as dinner to raptors, or crocodiles, or terrifying Tyrannosaurs, or even the wyvern—or cannibals!
But Jason had controlled himself. He had controlled his actions, even though sometimes he'd failed.
; Looking at the sparkling sea and the abundant life all around him, Jason realized that all he could do—the best he could ever strive for to eventually, hopefully, find his way home—was to keep going. Keep breathing. Keep surviving.
Things were bleak.
He thought that his situation was bleak before, but back then, Jason had a nice cave, a good water supply, and was just getting the hang of getting food. But he also had other gear: fire, water storage, a light. He also had means to defend himself! Now, the man was all out of ammo. He had even lost his Glock at some point; back in the woods north of the wyvern’s cave when he threw it at an attacking cannibal.
This was like starting over but even worse.
All Jason really had to work with was a lot of cloth, his knife, paracord, cane, and a crude spear. All of the other stuff didn’t matter as much. His wallet, phone, and other small belongings wouldn’t help. His holster was empty now, too.
Looking out over the lake, the man thought about the salt water again. Familiar ponderings returned to him, and Jason wondered if he’d really gone back in time a prehistoric age, or if he’d actually traveled to another world; a place that was similar to Earth’s past in some ways, but very different in others...
Now, after dealing with distinctly-non-Earth things—not to mention the other worlds he’d visited through the portal in the wyvern’s cave—Jason was starting to feel like the answer was pretty obvious.
This was not Earth.
Not his Earth, anyway.
He’d been visiting parallel worlds—somehow—and this place was one of them: a planet where dinosaurs still ruled and humans didn’t exist; an untouched world that also had weird, un-Earthly things like a wyvern, reptile-men, and something closely resembling an Ettercap from DnD—not to mention the giant spiders! Jason was pretty sure that giant spiders didn’t exist in dinosaur times—at least not arachnids as big as dogs or larger.
When desperately trying to find his way home via the portal, Jason had tried using money to lead him to other places with more money like his ... just as the sparking piezoelectric crystal had led him here, to the cavern full of more of them. He'd seen other worlds a lot like his own. The one where his parents were still alive was the closest thing to actual home that Jason had seen. There was also that other really weird world with white boxes in the fridge and the Jason with the bizarre face...
There were also worlds that were practically beyond Jason’s comprehension—nightmarish places where everything was so different that he couldn’t even breathe the air.
"But why?" he croaked, his throat as dry as the sand around him.
Why had he suddenly been swept up into all of this? None of this crazy shit had ever happened before—
Jason reached into his pocket, hurting his leg, and pulled out the piezoelectric crystal.
He tapped on the stone, and could barely see the blue glow of the spark igniting in there, even though the glare of the sunshine made it hard to see.
"Where’d you come from?" he asked, slipping the crystal back into his pocket.
That crystal started it all.
No—that wasn’t totally true. The crystal wasn’t the beginning—not completely.
There was the Dreadwraith after all...
Somehow Jason had caught a vision of the Dreadwraith—perhaps a normal Tyrannosaurus Rex of this world—at some mysterious point ... back when he was a child! How did that happen? Was it still just a dream? Or did Jason actually wander through that portal behind his house one day back when he was just a little boy and somehow caught sight of a T-Rex in this wild, primordial world?!
The thought chilled him: little Jason wandering into a world full of raptors and dreadful predators that could have picked him off at any moment...
There was something creeping through Jason’s skull that felt a little like ... destiny.
But Jason didn’t believe in destiny, just like he didn’t believe in God.
He did, however, have control of himself.
He would keep going...
Back home, he’d wasted the last fifteen years of his life, refusing to grow; refusing to move on from the death of his parents. But here, he had to struggle to survive constantly. He didn’t have the luxury of distracting himself with video games, or dreaming of get-rich-quick ideas with YouTube gurus, or hanging out with friends pretending to be a real adventurer. Back home, Jason's moments of being comfortably numb let him stagnate without consequence. Here, if he stopped struggling, he’d die.
Back there, losing Amanda and Tom became a threat to his comfortable, coasting existence.
Here, the threats around him had claws and teeth and wanted to eat his flesh...
His stomach growled.
Maybe he could eat the sea urchins in the lake...
I won’t die hiding in this cave living on sea urchins, Jason thought.
"I have to get home," he said to himself.
What was his connection with that portal in the wyvern’s cave? Was it somehow ... his? After dabbling with the portal several times now, Jason felt totally confident that in time he’d be able to control it. He could feel his interactions with the portal being something like a weird, new muscle that he was building up from nothing.
But he had to kill the wyvern to get to the portal.
If the monster was out of the way, he could learn to control the thing. Why—he could do anything with a portal like that! Where could he go? If he could go to a dinosaur world like this and, say, pick up something valuable—maybe like those piezoelectric crystals—then couldn’t he do great things in other worlds, too? He’d already visited three others...
Ben had asked Jason what he wanted to do with his life and Jason didn’t know because he didn’t want to dig deep enough to find out. Despite where Jason was now—wounded and nearly defeated by the rigors of basic survival—there was something awakening within him; he could feel it! There was something about utilizing portals like the one in the wyvern's cave that felt heavy in his heart ... and good; something that bubbled under the surface of his soul with meaning.
Jason could accomplish great things by being able to travel to other worlds. Maybe there wasn't much to do in this one, but how many worlds could he find through there?
His mind raced with possibilities, mostly revolving around ways to get rich by accessing new technologies that were alien to Earth. Or perhaps he could harvest rare resources...
Then Jason's mind, flying along a racetrack of ideas, stopped dead at one notion...
He could connect with his parents again. His mom and dad were alive in that one world—could they be alive in others? They had to be! Jason could find a world where his parents would be healthy and alive, and maybe the Jason of that world wouldn’t be around anymore for some reason.
Jason could visit other worlds and see whatever the hell he wanted, if only he could figure out how. He could be an adventurer ... like his father...
With a sigh, Jason looked out to the water and swallowed dryly.
"None of that will happen if I kill myself," he muttered, his tongue feeling like a rolled-up sock.
But you have to kill the wyvern, he thought.
Feeling oddly renewed and even a little excited, Jason stood with great pain and—bringing his pack and cane along—he started the agonizing descent down to the ground.
He had to eat. And drink. Maybe it would do him good to get wet; to clean his wounds in the water. Jason figured that the salt water would burn, and he was right. After spending a little time at the water’s edge looking for crocodiles, Jason waded down into the lake, being careful to stay away from the coral and reefs that he could see. Their sharp surfaces would be dangerous if he slipped and fell.
The saltwater burned on his wounds—especially the bad cut on his leg—but it also refreshed him. Fluffing his clothes underwater to let the cool lake flow over his skin, Jason also dunked his head and ran his fingers through his hair, which was a matted mess now. His medium-long mop of dark blonde was
now full of pieces of bark, bits of pine needles, chunks of unidentifiable things and insect pieces, and sticky with sap. If Jason ever made it back to the world, he’d have to get a haircut.
For a moment, Jason regretted not bringing his spear—maybe he could spearfish—but he didn’t know how to do that anyway, so would probably suck at it.
Instead, his stomach rumbling, Jason eyed the shimmering black spots along the ocean floor that stuck to the reefs.
Sea urchins.
He’d eaten urchin before, less than a handful of times in sushi restaurants and—assuming that the urchins of this world weren’t poisonous or something—he figured that he could probably crack these open and figure out what to do...
Cleaning his bloody gloves, Jason was thankful that he'd taken them off of his leg. The jacket sleeves and paracord made a better compress, but now, the man could put the gloves to use.
He went to work approaching the little, spiky spheres with his hands barely protected by a layer of fleece. The urchins ranged in size from being similar to grapefruits up to bowling balls and Jason collected them one at a time, cupping his hands gently around their lower sides as he carefully pulled until dislodging them from where they were sitting. Then, he started lining them up one by one at the water’s edge until he’d collected seven.
At one point, a large, shadowy form in the deeper part of the lake up ahead gave Jason a fright. He stared in awe and horror as a gigantic shark passed by, its dorsal fin as tall as he was, slicing through the surface of the water just for a moment...
Too big to get into the shallows up here, he thought, hoping that he was right.
Once Jason trudged out of the lake, water pouring out of his sagging clothes, he carried the urchins closer to his cave and set them down on a big, flat rock. He could hang out and eat there on the ground—mostly out of sight and out of the way of dinosaurs passing by—and scramble up the wall to safety if need-be.
After moving the urchins, Jason scoured the tree line and dense woods at the tip of the ridge hoping to find a source of water—maybe something collecting rainwater. His hopes were answered when he found an upside-down turtle shell—much like what he had set up back at his cave—a third full of water.