"Hello," boomed a feminine voice. "Just in time for orientation. Down the steps, please, and we'll have drinks ready in a moment."
A short staircase led off the platform. At the bottom waited an attractive Asian woman in livery, with the scarlet bloom of what could only be a prehistoric flower pinned over one ear. As the group descended, Kyler noticed a net of fine mesh surrounding them, supported by barely-visible struts. In the failing light it looked flimsy as gauze.
"Red or white, Mr. Sharps?" said the be-flowered woman, by way of greeting. The plaque clipped to her uniform read AGNES.
"Red, please."
She poured from a sweating pitcher of sangria. Kyler, still woozy after two stiff martinis, opted to sip.
"Follow me, everyone." Agnes led them along a walkway, enclosed just as the deck had been. Ice clinked in glasses. Winged insects the size of a hand buzzed just outside the mesh. Another few feet and the walkway opened onto a clearing lined with modular houses. In keeping with current trends these were cubical, though built from polished wood and glass brick instead of reclaimed plastic, and stacked two to three units high. Simple, unadorned signs nailed to a wooden post read: TO LINKS, TO POOL, TO TENNIS, and TO CLUBHOUSE, with accompanying arrows.
"It's positively … rustic," Janet said.
Agnes smiled, and opened her mouth to comment. At the same moment a screeching carried from the pine forest to their left. Heads whirled; a feathered shape big as an ostrich came barreling toward them. Six-inch talons gleamed at the end of its powerful legs.
"Everyone remain calm," Agnes said, still smiling.
A chip-voice blurted: "Please clear the fence! Please clear the fence!"
The oversized raptor leapt, claws outstretched. A shower of blue-white sparks erupted when its talons came in contact with the netting. A sharp smell of ozone, burnt feathers, and the theropod's own muscles threw it back ten feet. After half a minute the creature rose and wobbled away.
Agnes beamed. "The subdivision is protected at all times by a nanowire barrier. Also, we employ—well, here they come, now."
Four men in white polo shirts came jogging up, auto shotguns at port arms. Kyler had to force back a grin when he recognized the leadmost. It was Uncle Damon, minus his usual short beard. The name KETCHUM had been stenciled across his polo's breast pocket. Damon's face remained impassive as he inspected the newly-arrived party, but Kyler could've sworn his eyes widened when he saw his nephew in a purple serge suit, drink in hand.
"As you can see," Agnes said, "the subdivision maintains twenty-four hour security, in addition to surveillance drones. Everything to keep you safe, but not isolated from the spectacle of life and death."
The crowd seemed to appreciate this perspective. Eyes gleamed. Collagen-thick lips drew back over perfect teeth. The knowledge of being inches from prehistoric savagery acted as a stimulant.
That, Kyler figured, or all the free booze.
"Dinner will be at eight o'clock in the clubhouse. Since your timepieces are off by several millennia—" Agnes paused for polite laughter "—we'll let you know when that is. In the meantime, feel free to take a look around. Vacant units are unlocked; you'll see a blue light glowing above the biometric plate. The links are closed after dark, but if there's enough interest we can take a party out for a quick game tomorrow, before you return to the present."
"Guess we're spending the night," Janet said, eyeing the musclebound man in the tuxedo. He returned her interest with a leer.
* * *
At eight sharp chimes summoned everyone to the clubhouse, a ranch-style building constructed around an atrium. Kyler had spent the past couple hours trying to track down Damon, with no luck. Hungry, he resigned himself to standing in the buffet line. A white-hatted chef was expertly carving from an enormous haunch, while both guests and homeowners alike helped themselves to daiquiris garnished with local flowers.
"That's Allosaurus steak," said a woman's voice at his shoulder. "We bagged it ourselves, this morning."
He turned to a brunette with low-cut bangs. Gray eyes regarded him from a round, freckled face that seemed to have achieved attractiveness without surgery. Kyler hadn't seen her on the catamaran.
"I'm Anne Baxley," she said, shaking his hand with the grip of a professional fencer. "My net worth's 3.2 trillion SMU."
"Russell Sharps. Ah, 8.6. Million, that is."
"Don't be ashamed of it. We all have to start somewhere. What's your line?"
"I'm an arms dealer."
"Excellent." Anne nodded approval. "Finally, someone in a racket that takes guts. I've dabbled in surface-to-air missiles, myself."
"Are you …?"
"I live here, yes. Bought up several units. Absolutely love this world, this era."
"And you were hunting dinosaurs this morning?"
"Well, no." Anne laughed. "We went out for some golf. The links aren't enclosed, you see. Security comes along, but it's still a dicey proposition. You have to sign a waiver before they'll let you go."
"Ah." Kyler regarded the haunch with new appreciation.
"Listen, I like your style." Anne took a card out of her tennis dress and slid it into Kyler's hand. "A number of us are forming an HOA. Naturally, I want to be president."
"HOA?"
"Homeowner's association. It gives us more clout with the management. Are you thinking of buying here?"
"Well …"
"If you are, I'd like you in our organization. I'd also like your vote. Think about it." She tapped Kyler's shoulder with her knuckles. "Ciao."
He watched her work her way down the buffet line, sizing up people before approaching them. Out came the business card. She glad-handed like a natural politician, and Kyler, not for the first time, wondered why the hell he couldn't be more confident like that.
When it was his turn in line he accepted several generous chunks of Allosaurus, plus a heap of mango chutney and roasted new potatoes. He chose an empty table, and after pausing for sips of banana daiquiri, attacked the meat. It had a mild gaminess somewhere between venison and free-range fowl, but after a couple bites he decided he liked it.
The mood in the clubhouse grew more raucous as the frozen liquor flowed. He got up for seconds and felt someone bump into him.
"Excuse me," Damon said, his face unreadable. "I was just heading outside for a smoke."
"No damage done."
Kyler watched his uncle exit through a side-door leading to the atrium. After a few minutes he followed, and found Damon smoking beneath the shadow of a giant fern. There was no one else in sight.
"You seemed to be enjoying yourself back there." Damon said. "This is supposed to be a mission, not a working vacation."
"It's part of my cover."
"Well, it's good to see you, anyway. This one's shaping up to be complicated."
"What have you found out?"
"I'm getting as much info on personnel as possible, to track the real estate company when we get back to the present. Did you get a good look at the Zygma projector that brought us here?"
"Not really."
"One of ours. Before Continuity Inc. got downsized, that is. They were supposed to have been dismantled, but at least one made it onto the black market."
"We had dozens …"
Damon gave a grim nod. "But there are more immediate concerns. This whole compound's unsafe. The developers really skimped on security. Either they just flat-out don't care, or they're ignorant of all the dangers in this era. Just this morning I had to blow the hell out of an Allosaurus."
"Anne Baxley told me about that."
"You watch that woman. She's a human shark. But yeah, some 'bots hauled the carcass to the subdivision, and the cooks didn't want all that meat going to waste. How was it?"
"Not bad. I'm thinking about another helping."
A grin curled Damon's mouth. "You'll want to hold off on that, nephew. I saw them cleaning the parasites out of the carcass. Hookworms a yard long …"
Kyler's stomach did a
slow roll.
"Steady, now. What I'd like to do is evacuate this place. There's a recall beacon hidden in the deck you materialized on. A couple trips, and we can get all this high-end trash back to safety."
"What's stopping you?"
"The other three security guards. They're mercenaries, bought and paid for, and they'd just as soon shoot me if the staff here thinks I'm causing trouble. Having you along improves the odds. Tomorrow we can come up with a plan to get around them."
"In the meantime?"
"Get some sleep. I'll contact you in the morning."
Kyler turned to leave.
"Nephew?" Damon said.
"Yeah?"
"You're looking more like an Agent and less a Dreamer with every mission."
* * *
Rainclouds obscured what must've been a brilliant night sky. Kyler left the clubhouse, his stomach still lurching from the smell of roast Allosaurus. Damn you Damon, he thought. Now I can't get the image of three-foot hookworms out of my head. He passed an Olympic sized swimming pool, nestled among the ferns. Most of the dinner party had already congregated there. They'd shucked out of their expensive clothes and splashed in the water, displaying their far more expensive bodies. Kyler saw Janet swimming alongside the muscle-graft moron.
He lingered for a moment. Maybe Anne Baxley was among the swimmers … he wouldn't mind a glimpse of her au natural form. But what if she asked him to join her?
A light rain came pattering down. He took it as his cue to leave. Thunderclouds flashed in the distance; primeval monsters, stalking above the pines on jagged legs. He broke into a jog as the drops came fatter and faster. Agnes hadn't said anything about formal accommodations, so he guessed people could just pick a vacant house to sleep in. He headed toward the nearest stack of wooden cubes. The windows were dark on the ground unit, and the biometrics panel next to the door glowed blue. He thumbed the lock out of habit. The homey smell of fresh linen came wafting out when the door slid open.
Lights winked on. He stepped inside, returning the house AI's formal greeting before answering questions about temperature preferences. There were four whole rooms, which came as a shock. What did people do with all the extra space?
Ah, the indolent rich. He peeled out of his wet serge, took a hot shower, and waited for the kitchen to brew him a cup of chamomile.
* * *
Suspended in the sky: a sphere wreathed in orange flames. Almost like a miniature sun, but this was the dead of night, and the sphere grew larger with each moment. Sparks trailed behind. In the ancient forests, the jungles, dull reptilian eyes looked up without comprehension at what was coming.
Genocide.
The meteor struck with a splitting boom, a sound to end the Ages. Fire and dust rose in an all-encompassing cloud …
Kyler's eyes snapped open. A dream, of course. A powerful one.
But the noise hadn't ceased on waking. Rumbles shook through the walls of the house. Screams. He smelled wood smoke before he saw the white haze curling over his bed. The AI bleated warnings about external temperatures, and then cut out completely as the power wavered.
He found a robe in the bathroom and pulled it on. Outside, clouds of pearl-white smoke roiled in morning sunlight. The surrounding pines crackled with fire. Through the murk, he could see the outlines of darkened shapes moving just beyond the mesh perimeter. Dinosaurs. A whole herd of them.
With a bellow, a thirty-foot behemoth hurled itself at the barrier. Sheet-lightning pulsed. Instead of being thrown back, the brontosaurus's lumbering inertia carried it forward. Nanowire mesh bulged to its limits, snapped. A three-stack of houses disappeared under an avalanche of frying flesh.
The rest of the herd came pouring through.
"Kyler!"
Damon stepped from the smoke, shotgun in one hand and a spare slung over his shoulder. His worried face lit with relief.
"What the hell's going on?" Kyler said.
Damon handed him a gun. "Thunderstorm last night touched off a fire. Big. The dinos are panicking, trying to reach the river—but this subdivision's blocking them."
"Not anymore. Look."
A dozen green-feathered velociraptors came loping forward. Some were no bigger than chickens, others the size of large dogs. The door to a nearby housing unit opened, and out bolted a naked Janet, followed by her musclebound companion.
"Don't move!" Damon shouted.
But the pair went scrambling directly into the raptors' path. Caught between competing instincts—fight or flight—the predators reverted to form. A big one leapt atop Janet, clamping its jaws across her forehead while the sickle blades in its heels dug a frantic tattoo. Her abdomen ripped open. Designer guts spilled in a red rush, and the raptor, worrying its head back and forth, tore most of Janet's face off. It spat out her cerebral prosthetic. Meanwhile, the smaller raptors were making a meal of the boyfriend, tearing strips of pink flesh from his quivering biceps and deltoids.
Kyler and Damon opened fire. The big raptor slewed sideways, its narrow head now a crater. A housecat-sized beast exploded in a shower of pulp. The rest of the pack scattered, more startled by the guns' boom than the carnage. Damon put a mercy round into Muscle Guy's head, when he saw he was still alive.
"What in Christ's name do these things fire?" Kyler said, ears ringing.
"Ten gauge solid slug, with expanding tungsten core. Even the apex dinos can't shrug it off."
They reloaded as a triceratops, its flanks seared black by the encroaching fire, charged some twenty yards past. It went careening through a block house in a shower of wood and glass.
"Now what do we do?" Kyler said.
"The mercs have already taken off. I say we step up our evacuation plans. Get as many people as we can to the recall platform."
"Right."
Damon called out for survivors while Kyler knocked on doors. No luck. Either everyone had split, or people were refusing to leave their cubes. The smoke, meanwhile, rolled in ever-thicker waves.
"Let's try the clubhouse," Damon said.
They found a pair of raptors fighting over Agnes's remains, near the front entrance. She still had the flower in her hair. Kyler shot them both on general principles.
"Power's out," he said, when the clubhouse doors refused to slide open. He wrenched the valves back by hand.
"That bronto probably shorted the grid."
"Will the beacon …?"
"It's got its own source. Don't worry."
They followed the sounds of screams and shattering glass to the dining room. Anne Baxley came sprinting up the hall in the opposite direction, her tennis dress covered with gore. For a second Kyler thought she'd been mortally wounded, but the fresh blood didn't seem to be her own.
"About goddamned time you showed," she said to Damon. "What kind of substandard operation are you people running? I've had to—"
"Never mind all that." Damon gestured behind her with the shotgun. "Who's back there?"
"It's just Teel. He's useless."
Damon shouldered her aside. The dining room was in chaos; three partially-chewed bodies lay sprawled among the tables, while the apparent chewer, a black-crested dinosaur with a ropy neck, thrust its head through a shattered window and rooted around. The screams were coming from a man huddled behind an overturned table.
Damon fired from the hip. Slugs tore a wound in the dinosaur's shoulder, prompting it to withdraw. But moments later it reappeared and tried to plunge its whole body through the window frame.
"Give me that." Anne wrenched the shotgun from Kyler's grasp. She sighted down the barrel and pulled the trigger, twice. Two smoking holes appeared dead center in the dino's head. The long neck went limp while the rest of the body did a spastic dance, caving in the wall.
"Intramurals skeet champion," Anne said, by way of explanation. Kyler snatched his gun back.
The man named Teel stopped screaming when he realized he'd been rescued. "Is there anyone else here?" Kyler asked him.
"I'm not su
re. I thought maybe …"
Anne shook her head. "There isn't anyone, okay? Let's just go."
But Kyler insisted. They checked every room, including the hall closets. In a section marked STAFF ONLY, Damon found a weapon's locker with a spare shotgun and a box of shells. He gave them to Anne. As they searched, the smoke continued to thicken.
"Come on, come on," Anne said. "We're going to suffocate before you're done."
She was nearly right. By the time they left the clubhouse, the smoke had settled in like fog, and Kyler's throat was hoarse from coughing. A bleary-eyed Damon shrugged. "Alright. We're close enough now to secure the beacon, at least."
An ear-splitting roar echoed from the smoke. Kyler thought he could see the dim outline of the observation deck in the near distance. "This way," he said, seizing Damon by the shoulder.
Pain laced from deep in his skull. He had a vision: glaring eyes and teeth. "Wait. Get back."
A titan's silhouette reared through the smoke ahead. The ground shook with its footfalls.
"Another Allosaurus," Damon whispered. "And it's right in front of the recall platform."
"So let's shoot it," Anne said.
"Lady, I had an RPG round last time. With this smoke, it's hard to see where you're aiming. Let's wait for it to pass."
"Screw waiting. What we need is bait." She grabbed Teel and jammed the shotgun against his spine. Flesh muffled the boom. Teel pitched forward, blood pouring from a fist-sized exit wound in his chest. Anne pushed him into the smoke. He went staggering, moving by muscle reflex alone. The big silhouette loomed up. Lunged. Half of Teel disappeared under a flash of teeth.
"Now," Anne said.
They bolted for the platform. Bones crunched somewhere to Kyler's left. He scrambled up the steps to the polished wood of the observation deck. Damon ran his hands over the railing, found a concealed catch and threw it back. A button pulsed with red light.
His finger arched to press it, but he hesitated. Voices came rising out of the murk.
Carnosaur Weekend (Kyler Knightly and Damon Cole Book 1) Page 2