by Eddie Patin
A jolt of fear suddenly passed through Jason when he thought of his rifle—when he considered what beasts here were too big to shoot with a pistol; big enough that he might actually need the Rigby. Jason peered to the south past the large, lumbering forms of ceratopsians feeding in the waist-high grass; past the herd of large and gentle duckbills that reminded him in movement and behavior of a grazing herd of elk. He looked for the trio of mini-rexes that hunted this area—the two adults and the younger one. If those huge predators rushed in at the Reality Rifters, would the three of them be able to repel the carnivorous family with the guns they had? Probably, Jason thought, but truly, he didn’t know...
The mini-rexes were nowhere to be seen.
Jason sighed and looked ahead just as one of several watching cannibals built up enough courage to charge at him.
"Heh," Riley said simply as he threw his Marlin to his shoulder and snapped off a quick shot. The heavy boom of the .45-70 slammed Jason’s ears and echoed loudly across the valley. Hell—it echoed across the mountains. The charging cannibal’s chest exploded like a watermelon hit by a hammer and it collapsed into the underbrush, gone without a sound. Riley cycled the action. Click-click. "Dumb fruker..."
Something about Riley's callousness rubbed Jason the wrong way but he couldn’t deny the reality of their situation. This was another world and those creatures—as primitive as they were—were bloodthirsty monsters. They'd tried to kill Jason multiple times before. He'd also watched as they ate their own people—tearing into flesh and snatching up body parts—even in the midst of the T-Rex attack as the Dreadwraith was still thundering around and slaughtering those who didn’t flee...
Jason had no doubt that Riley had seen a lot of crazy shit traveling the Omniverse. The soldier was jaded for sure. Jason hoped that he’d never slip into such apathy himself...
"I guess the slab is okay," Jason said.
"Ironic," Riley replied.
Jason laughed. "Yeah, I guess it is." What he'd thought of as the ‘sacrificial slab’ was a big, flat rock formation covered in old blood where the cannibals used to offer food to the wyvern. All around the formation were haphazard piles of sticks that the cannibals had stacked. Those piles of sticks would never burn—at least not by the wyvern's fire-breath, anyway. Who knows how long the cannibals had lived this way near the wyvern, exchanging food for fire? Things had changed, but the savages still lingered; still went through their stacking rituals. Approaching the slab, Jason climbed up to the center of the wide, bloody stone and holstered his Glock. "Watch out for me, now."
As Jason worked on his OCS and set a new bookmark that he titled The Slab. Several cannibals howled and barked, watching from the trees and sprinting back and forth like crazy people; feet plunging quickly and noisily through the grasses, ferns, and other underbrush. Tiny, bird-like dinosaurs scampered around and glided through the tree-tops nearby. A bird-thing with seemingly four wings—glossy black like a crow—paused on a branch to watch Jason...
After noting the coordinates, the three Reality Rifters walked back to the cave and delved into the dark tunnel that smelled like mud, rotten bodies, and snake shit. They approached the skinned and partially-deboned minotaur bodies again.
Jason sat on a big dinosaur skull and got to work. He focused on the coordinates for the slab outside and tried to visualize passing through the multiverse; a point representing the cave in the Wilderlands reaching through the ninth dimension to another—the slab—with a blazing yellow line of light. His visualizations left Jason feeling confused as he imagined something like the parabolic arc of a spaceship leaving one spot of the planet, going way out into space, then arcing back down to another area on the same world. Shit—even that analogy wasn’t accurate, but the realization of ninth vs third was like a slap in the face to Jason. It felt obvious but he still felt confused.
Jason had been making a mistake whenever he tried to work with both the third and the ninth together...
"The third!" Jason muttered to himself, running a hand through his short, recently-clipped hair. "Not the ninth. Use the third!"
"What’s the matter?" Riley asked.
"I think I’ve been trying to use the ninth to go from one spot to another on the same world," Jason replied. Saying that out loud suddenly felt really stupid. "But the ninth is for ... universe to universe..."
"Multiverse to multiverse," Riley corrected.
"Shit—at any rate, it's not for place to place, right? Not in the same universe, at least..."
Riley sighed. "Yeah. You should be traveling through the third. I reckon you should imagine folding space between here and that rock-slab down there. You don’t have to go all the way through the ninth for that—although I guess maybe you could..."
"But then, shouldn’t it have worked?"
"Try the third."
Jason turned off the ninth on his OCS, double-checked everything else, then made sure that the third was the only dimension selected for travel.
He focused.
Jason imagined the world under their feet folding like a piece of paper and attaching the spot in front of him with the spot of the slab. He—
Wait, Jason thought. Am I making wormholes? Is that how this works? He visualized the space around them, then imagined a wormhole and tried to feel inside; tried to see it and flex...
Nothing happened.
Jason opened his eyes and sighed. He smashed the skull he was sitting on with one fist—hurting his hand more than the skull.
"Damn it!"
Riley crossed his arms and stared at him. Gliath did the same, but Jason didn’t feel any judgment coming from the leopardwere—not like how it was radiating off of Riley like ... heat.
"Do you...?" Riley began, grasping for words as he angrily looked up into the blackness of the cavern ceiling, scratching his beard. "Do you have any temporal dimensions selected?"
"No," Jason said, looking down at the OCS. "Just the third, like you said."
"Okay." Riley cocked his head and looked down at the OCS in Jason’s lap. "I’m just theorizing here, Jason, but you should put the fourth on, too..."
"Why? We don’t want to travel in time."
Riley smirked. "Jason, we’re always traveling in time; always moving forward along the fourth dimension. Do you know what a Planck frame is?"
The word seemed familiar from fifteen years ago...
"I’ve heard of it. I was a physics major for just a semester before I dropped out of college after the plane crash. But ... um ... remind me."
"It’s a unit of time," Riley said. "It's the absolute smallest unit of time possible. The third dimension is just a space—we’re in it only in like ... snapshots. Planck frames. Frame, frame, frame, frame—like an animated cartoon. You know what a cartoon is? You have them in u934?"
"Yeah. So what? If ... uh ... I try to move from one point to another on the third, can’t we do that in one Planck frame?"
Riley shrugged. "I dunno. It takes time to open the rift, time to walk through...? Just a theory."
Jason looked back down at the OCS, turned on the fourth, then focused on the coordinates again, trying to move through the third instead of the ninth...
He felt the flex.
With a flutter and a snap, a blooming, fiery rift lit up the black cavern full of bones, spinning and spitting orange sparks! Opening like a vertical whirlpool, the gateway cast brilliant heatless flames all around them. Jason grinned and saw that Riley was smirking, his dark eyes sparkling in the sputtering glow.
"I did it!" Jason exclaimed over the roar. "That did it—it was the fourth!"
"Good job."
As the fluid disc smoothed out, a vision of the slab cleared in front of them. Jason barely made out the shimmering shape of a cannibal running past in the distance.
"Hey! I can go through the third now!" Jason exclaimed with a broad smile.
"Yeah," Riley replied. "Now if only you could figure out how to change the orientation of your rifts. Then Gliath and
I wouldn’t have to carry these huge, fruking bodies!" Riley slung his rifle, then he and Gliath moved to lift the first. "Alright, Jason, you go through and make sure the other side is still secure with your pistol. Don’t release the rift while we’ve still moving bodies, okay?"
"Okay."
Jason put his flashlight away, took a drink from his bite valve, then grasped his Glock with both hands at low ready. He stepped through and emerged in the startling sunshine and heat of day.
Cannibals sprinting around the trees nearby immediately reacted in surprise and they dashed back and forth—darting in a few steps for a closer look, then rushing back out again—hooting and howling all the while. Jason watched them. He stepped back a from the roaring rift and felt his heart quicken.
A few seconds after Jason stepped through, Riley and Gliath followed into the sun, carrying the huge, meaty carcass of a minotaur that was largely processed. All of the good meat was gone, already packed into Jason’s fridge and freezer. They set the body down wetly onto the slab then went back for another corpse. Over a few minutes, the soldier and the leopardwere carried the other two bodies out then Gliath came through with the trashcan of viscera, dumping the sloppy mess onto the grass out of the way. The sight of the splashing mess almost made Jason puke.
After returning the trashcan to the cave, Gliath came back and pulled out his big kukri blade; its edge gleaming like shiny silver in the sunlight. Then he hacked off two of the three minotaurs' heads with powerful chops. Jason watched—keeping a nervous eye on the orbiting cannibals—as Gliath carried the two massive minotaur heads up the slope to the cave’s entrance. Those horns were almost four feet across, tip to tip, and each head was massive—even compared to Gliath's. Jason suddenly noticed that the yawning mouths of the dead beasts were different than a bull’s. Those heavy jaws were full of carnivorous teeth like a wolf’s.
"What are you doing?" Jason called, releasing the portal and walking up behind Gliath. He turned to face a cannibal that suddenly rushed him—Glock up and ready—but it quickly backed away again.
The leopardwere set each wide, horned head down onto the ground on either side of the cave entrance. "For the ants," Gliath said in his deep voice. "To clean the skulls for trophies."
Riley caught up behind them with a smirk. "Yeah! This world has big fruking ants! Have you seen them?"
Jason remembered seeing them, alright. Thankfully, the ants of the Wilderlands had never tried to bite him. They were huge—as big as his pinky finger.
"Oh yeah—big," Jason said. "Cleaning the skulls so we can sell em?"
"Either that, or we can hang one in the living room or something," Riley replied. "Believe me—if you’re like the other Jasons, you’ll have monster skulls all over your walls eventually."
"Huh," Jason said, staring down at the sagging, furry face of the nearest bloody head.
"Hey Jason, while we’re here," Riley said, pulling his rifle again, "you should check out the scanning feature on your OCS, remember? Scan some shet. See what comes up."
Jason smiled.
"Oh yeah!" He turned back to the valley and the slab, lifting his OCS, searching for the button to activate the scanner. It was like a range finder, right? he thought. "So I ... uh ... just point and hit the button..." he muttered, thinking back to what Riley had said before.
Jason aimed the laser at one of the little raptors crawling around the dead wyvern, but it quickly moved on and was gone. He aimed it at the T-Rex’s corpse instead and pressed the button.
The display came back almost immediately.
Tyrannosaurus rex, 98% match. Universe 312, the Wilderlands.
"Ninety-eight percent?" Jason asked.
"Remember—it’s attuned to universe 934," Riley said. "So it’s going to run whatever data it pulls against what it’s most likely to be on your world."
Jason pointed it at the dead wyvern.
Unknown. Lore: Wyvern, 93% match. Dragon, 65% match. Universe 312, the Wilderlands.
"It thinks this is mostly a wyvern and partially a dragon. From Lore. Interesting."
"That makes sense," Riley said. "It gave you a backup match."
Jason aimed it across the valley, carefully using the built-in sight to line the invisible laser onto the nearest massive ceratopsian grazing on tall grass in the distance. He already knew that they weren't Triceratops on account of their weird, forward-curving nose-horns. Jason pressed the button, wondering how far the scanner could reach...
Einiosaurus procurvicornis, 93% match. Universe 312, the Wilderlands.
"Only 93%?" Jason said to himself. "Jeez—what a name..."
"These dinosaurs might have evolved differently here and there, compared to your world," Riley said, walking up behind Jason and looking down at the screen. "I haven’t heard of that one..."
Jason turned around, looking for raptors. The only one he saw in the trees just behind the cave was one of those crow-looking mini-raptors with the appearance of four wings. He’d seen plenty of those. This one was watching him from a low tree branch. God—they really did look like birds with those feathers! He aimed and pressed the button.
Microraptor zhaoianus, 91% match. Universe 312, the Wilderlands.
"Microraptor," Jason said.
Peering across the valley again, he carefully aimed the OCS at the distant herd of duckbills partly hidden in the shadows of the tree line. Aiming as steadily as he could, he pressed the button.
Edmontosaurus annectens, 96% match. Universe 312, the Wilderlands.
"Holy shit, this thing is cool!" Jason exclaimed, smiling. Riley looked on, standing right next to him, and scratched his beard. "That’s an Edmontosaurus!" Jason said. "I know that name—I killed a baby one of those when I was trying to survive..."
"Killed one, really?" Riley asked, clapping Jason’s shoulder. "Okay, let’s get going, Jason." The soldier started walking up the slope.
Jason wanted to stay and scan more, but he knew that they still needed to get to the Market. But time is running slower back home! he thought. There was plenty of time!
He aimed the scanner at a running cannibal in the distance and pressed the button. Nothing happened—he must have missed. Aiming again, he tried a second time.
Homo sapiens, 93% match. Lore: Lizardman, 57% match. Goblin, 24% match. Universe 312, the Wilderlands.
Huh, Jason thought. Those were weird numbers. And it totaled up to over 100%. Jason didn’t understand it. Maybe the OCS didn’t know...
Casting one last, longing look out at the valley, Jason gasped when he saw something dreadfully interesting and terrifying at the same time. In the distance, he saw one of the horrific mini-rexes emerge from the eastern tree line, its massive head sweeping back and forth, scanning the southern valley—no doubt searching for food.
A rush of cold fear ran up Jason’s back. He knew from prior experience that the monster would surely be able to see him from there. Jason was standing in the sun, and their eyes were sharp.
He looked back and saw Riley and Gliath heading up the slope toward the cave entrance.
Shit.
Jason carefully aimed the OCS at the distant mini-rex, feeling another jolt of adrenaline when a second one stepped out from the trees next to it. Their dark feathers with light markings were bold in the sun—they looked like gigantic, grounded eagles with long tails and toothy snouts. Snouts big enough to bite you in half, Jason thought. He pressed the button, holding his breath...
Albertosaurus sarcophagus, 97% match. Universe 312, the Wilderlands.
"Albertosaurus?!" Jason said, peering back at the huge predators across the valley. The smaller third one emerged from the trees. The mini-rexes now had a proper name.
One of the beasts suddenly looked at Jason from all the way across the valley.
Yep. Eyes like eagles.
Jason’s guts turned to water.
He dropped the OCS to his side then unslung the Rigby Magnum Mauser from his back, hefting the heavy rifle and putting the front sigh
t on the monster. It had to be ... two hundred yards? Maybe three hundred?
Just like before, the mini-rex that watched him—the Albertosaurus—came loping his way, its huge body moving with surprising agility; its long, slender legs propelling it across the valley. Freezing dread boiled up inside Jason's body. He’d been through this too many times already...
He could just shoot it. He could shoot it right in the face, just like with the minotaurs. His 9mm rounds hadn’t hurt the bastards at all—not as far as he could tell—but the .416 Rigby might be able to take it down...
A second Albertosaurus joined in, following the first. Jason could faintly hear the thumps of their heavy feet plodding across the valley floor. Their deep-brown feathers ruffled in the wind. Jason saw the tips of their tails sway from side to side.
Jason realized how vulnerable he felt here before. Looking down at his father’s gun, he realized that sure, he was more prepared now, but he didn’t need to kill the carnivore. If he hurried back to the cave, he’d beat them to safety. Those monsters wouldn’t be able to fit through the cave mouth. The entrance was low—just enough for the wyvern to squeeze through on its slippery belly.
Jason lowered the rifle, turned, and ran. He realized that he’d been through this already. It was good to have equipment—bigger guns and all that—but if he was stuck here in the Wilderlands again, just like before, he knew now that he could survive.
As Jason scrambled up the slope, trying to ignore the thumping steps following from far behind him, Riley stepped out—probably to see what was taking him so long.
The soldier’s eyes widened and he pulled the lever-action rifle off of his shoulder like lightning.
"Holy shet, Jason!" Riley shouted. "Get in here!"
"They're Albertosaurs! Not mini-rexes. Albertosaurus ... um ... sarcophagus!"