Kingdom of Monsters

by John Lee Schneider

  The roving teenage male gangsters were the JV squad. The largest was Big Moose, although the leader seemed to be a smaller, but more aggressive individual Naomi called Rudy. Archie and Jughead rounded the group.

  But so far, it was just the lone rogue that made his way down the slope, where waited the massive, inviting feast.

  Naomi raised a pair of binoculars, focusing on the rogue, as he perched atop the giant carcass, and without ceremony, began to gorge, his massive jaws tearing out five-foot chunks like a Great White tearing blubber from a dead whale.

  And so the clock was set on the first living time-bomb.

  Naomi handed Jonah the binoculars, and he zoomed in on the feeding rex.

  Just as if lighting up a fuse, he could see the rogue's eyes, already glowing green.

  And waiting in the wings, Jonah now spotted Trix, along with Josie and the pussycats, ambling their way through the convenient space in the trees the giant had left in its passing.

  The flock paused on the crest, looking down to where the rogue assaulted the carcass, waiting until he worked that initial aggression out of his system.

  Doubtless, lingering somewhere, still out of sight, was the third-stringer JV squad, pulling up the rear.

  Already a few of the pussycats ventured down the slope, taking their first nibbles at the dead giant's tail, which by its sheer size stretched beyond the rogue's immediate comfort zone.

  Keeping a careful eye on the big alpha rex, a number of the female gang began wolfing down huge mouthfuls of meat.

  A single infected rex qualified as a regional threat, let alone a pack.

  And that was to say nothing of a sauropod. The largest titanosaurs that ever lived could look Godzilla in the eye before the Food of the Gods – an infected Argentinosaurus, in the final throes of madness, could knock the Kraken on its ass.

  And so the infection would bloom up again, like a slow-motion nuclear strike that spread like a virus.

  This time, however, someone was taking steps to arrest that pattern.

  From the direction the choppers had disappeared, now came the roar of jet engines.

  Fighters armed with ordinary missiles were ineffective against an infected giant.

  A napalm strike to burn a corpse, on the other hand...

  Jonah and Naomi watched helplessly as three jets came in low, each releasing a deluge of weaponized fire.

  In the echoing space of the surrounding peaks, came the screams of the rex pack gathered around the now-burning carcass. The forest around them burned as well – probably the only time of year that the perpetually damp Oregon rainforest would burn.

  Visibility from below was quickly reduced to near zero as the flames began to spread.

  The jets veered back the way they had come – mission accomplished.

  Jonah understood the strategic reasons for this burn – an effort to avoid the spread of the infection. Whether it was an effective method or not remained to be seen, but it definitely looked to successfully destroy a wide expanse of landscape.

  And looking down at the express-delivered, instant-inferno, Jonah realized the flame was going to overtake the cabin as well.

  That had been three weeks ago.

  They had fled the area via the river, with nothing but what they could load in a boat and carry in a pack.

  Remarkably, Jonah found that Naomi actually seemed to hold it against him – apparently for not stopping a forest fire, a napalm strike, or a two-hundred-foot Tyrannosaurus rex. He hadn't moved Heaven and Earth.

  Worse, she seemed to connect it as some kind of karmic retribution for their night before.

  Either way, she never mentioned being together again, and in the time since, her posture had reverted to what it had been at the beginning – firmly at arm's length.

  They were lucky just to escape the fire. The river had only taken them so far and, since then, they'd been on foot.

  The fire followed them for days, a towering cloud of ever-present smoke, always at their heels, advancing inexorably, like one of the infected beasts itself.

  Then, finally, on the fourth day, there was a heavy rain, which went a long way to extinguishing the bulk of the blaze. Having no better destination, Jonah and Naomi continued north – the direction the planes had gone after they'd destroyed their home.

  And just today, they had come out onto a ridge, right at the edge of the mountains, overlooking the greater valley.

  They could see what had once been the community below.

  As the elevation rapidly dropped, the main highway descended down through the rural farmlands into what must have been a bedroom town outside of Portland.

  Naomi had paused, looking down at the houses, all lined up in rows – what had once been families.

  Abruptly she stepped aside. As she turned away, Jonah realized she was crying.

  Naomi deliberately gave him her back, inviting no comfort. Jonah had learned not to bother her in those odd moments. He obligingly held off while she allowed the sting of tears to dry.

  She was just drying up when there came the first sudden blast of air as the helicopter flew past up above.

  It looked like a cargo chopper – bulky with dual rotors front and back. It seemed to be following the highway they had seen below.

  As Naomi raised her binoculars, peering down at the distant road, she saw several vehicles traveling under the chopper's escort – a caravan, half-a-dozen RVs deep.

  The chopper had pulled ahead of the procession, cresting the hill, leaving the caravan to follow the road all the way around.

  Once over the peak, the bird's altitude began to drop.

  “It's landing,” Naomi affirmed, and started up the hill at a lope.

  “Hold on a minute,” Jonah objected. “What if we're following them into a fight?”

  Naomi shrugged. “Would you rather wait for them to napalm us?”

  She turned, without waiting for him.

  Jonah gritted his teeth as he hurried along to follow.

  Chapter 2

  Just over the ridge was a communications outpost, and what looked like a freshly-built radio tower, set at the highest point that still allowed access to where the main road wound around the mountain on its way down into the valley.

  As the chopper circled in to land, Naomi pulled her binoculars and scouted them from their vantage above.

  Experience had engendered a modicum of caution. The world was dangerous, and encountering strangers of any stripe carried risk. In their time on the road, there had been at least one attempted robbery at gunpoint.

  There had also been filtered rumors about sideways-encounters with military.

  Some of these stories were scary, and all plausible enough, given conditions of desperation – but whether some, none, or all of them were true, it was also prudent not to just walk up on a bunch of armed soldiers, executing maneuvers in a combat zone.

  Especially now that the whole world was a combat zone.

  The caravan trailed about a mile behind, as measured by the windy mountain road, no portion of which could be trusted beyond sight of the next bend.

  Topography was not even reliable anymore. The Big One had purportedly left the new southwestern coastline a sheer, broken cliff a hundred miles south of the Oregon border.

  On a more localized level, the terrain had shifted and broken, splitting along tectonic cracks. Even minor rumblings could easily collapse tunnels and break apart paved roads.

  Adjusting her focus, Naomi followed the pilot climbing out of the chopper over to the outpost's single sentry coming out to meet him.

  Three more soldiers followed the pilot, hopping out of the chopper, performing a perfunctory sweep of the area, guns out and drawn – alert, but obviously routine, as they then began to offload supplies, carrying a procession of boxes and crates into the outpost storage bunker below the tower.

  One of the soldiers, with a medium-sized crate, stepped discreetly away from the others, and made his way to the edge of the c
learing, glancing over his shoulder as he went.

  Naomi frowned. “What's this guy doing?”

  The soldier unstrapped the crate and opened the front. There was scurrying movement from inside.

  “Oh no,” Naomi said aloud. “Check this out,”

  She handed the binocs to Jonah and he zoomed down into the clearing.

  Skittering out of the carrying crate were what looked like a troop of miniature plucked emus – short, gangly, little two-legged lizards, no more than two feet tall.

  “Oh no,” Jonah repeated.

  They had seen this little lizard before.

  There had been a lot of them running around after KT-day – seemingly a breed of small sickle-claw, although unique in that its birdlike chirps and screeches could shape their utterances into uncanny myna-birdlike imitations, repeating human phrases like a parrot.

  They were disgusting creatures – ghouls, who in the days after the fall, seemed to specifically scavenge human corpses.

  It called itself Otto – and they all did – in the same strange man's voice.

  “My name is Otto.”

  But they were a lot more than just a parrot.

  And the soldier releasing this small troop – it looked like at least three of them – apparently had no idea.

  But it was a lesson not long in coming.

  The first of the little lizards hopped nonchalantly to the edge of the brush.

  All the way up on the ridge, Jonah and Naomi could hear the screeching cry, as the little lizard bugled like a trumpet.

  The other soldiers looked up at the caterwauling, and the errant young man stepped away from the shrieking lizard as if startled.

  There was a brief pause as the screeching echoed to a stop.

  Then the bushes suddenly erupted with a warbling scream.

  “Oh my God,” Jonah breathed, setting down the scopes and reaching for his rifle. Naomi's pistol was already out and drawn.

  A pack of sickle-claws burst from the brush.

  Dromaeosaurs were a particularly nasty clade, and these were big ones – leopard-sized.

  The hapless soldier who had released the little lizards fell back, grabbing for his sidearm. To his credit, he got a shot into the first of his attackers before it landed on top of him and bore him to the ground.

  As the giant hooked claws dug into him, the man's scream echoed up to the ridge.

  The other soldiers had their weapons ready, and there was the blast of machine-gun fire, but the sickle-claws were already upon them.

  From the ridge, Jonah was trying to track the fast-moving beasts for a clear shot. He jumped as, beside him, there was a sharp retort from Naomi's pistol. Down below, one of the sickle-claws dropped.

  It didn't matter – there were half-a-dozen of the clawed devils, and they set upon the four remaining men like a pack of bounding kangaroos.

  The chopper pilot went first, his throat torn away by an eight-inch foot claw. The outpost sentry was next, disemboweled.

  The remaining two soldiers made a fight of it, taking out two more of their taloned attackers, even as Naomi caught another from the ridge – but the last two got through, piling into both troopers at once, their deadly sickles tearing and slashing.

  One man fell, trying to wrestle the clawed beast, even as its foot-sickle gutted him. Jonah managed to drop the beast with a rifle shot – a bit belatedly for the soldier's sake.

  The other man was already down, and the sound of ripping tissue carried all the way up the ridge. Naomi dropped the beast off his chest with a single shot, but it was clear the damage was already done.

  Jonah scoped the remaining beast, where it still lay over the body of the first soldier, but it appeared the one shot the young man had gotten off had done its work, and the creature was unmoving.

  The little group of Ottos perked, looking up as a troop towards the ridge.

  Naomi drew a bead and fired another shot, but the scaly rats scattered into the surrounding brush.

  That wasn't good. Any time those little bastards were around, things went south fast.

  The fact of the six-dead sickle-claws was also bad – not that they were dead, but now you knew they were in the area. And this troop must have been prowling within their scent range all morning.

  And as they made their way through the camouflaging bush, down to the clearing, Jonah and Naomi were both unhappily aware that likely meant there were more of them prowling about,

  The carnage was typical of a sickle-claw attack. The men who had been hit were hard to look at.

  But now there came a low moan.

  The first soldier, who had released the Ottos, still lying under the dead body of the dromaeosaur he'd shot, was alive.

  Jonah started to roll the lifeless beast away, only to see where both foot claws were buried in the young man's chest, the hand claws clasped onto his shoulders, locked-on for leverage, just beginning the convulsive slash downward – a strike that on a large prey animal would leave ten-inch deep, slashing divots over four feet long.

  But the bullet had caught the creature's heart, and it froze stiff, postured in death, in a perfect strike pose. Jonah remembered a fossil had been discovered just like that, – a Velociraptor and a small ceratopsian, with the predator's foot claw buried in its prey's throat.

  The young man was conscious, blinking up at them, his eyes full of pain.

  Naomi grabbed hold of the foot claws. She eyed the man, her face sympathetic.

  “This is going to hurt,” she said, and yanked the sickles free.

  The soldier shrieked, and blood spurted from the wound. Without waiting, Naomi pulled both hand claws loose, and Jonah pushed the dead sickle-claw away.

  “Ohhhh, Jesus,” the man moaned. “That hurts.”

  “He got you pretty good,” Naomi allowed, leaning over to inspect the wounds. Jonah began rooting through his pack. After a moment, he handed Naomi a first-aid kit.

  “So, soldier,” Naomi said as she pulled a vial of alcohol and begin daubing, “what's your name?”

  “Meyers,” the young man said, wincing at the sting. “Corporal Meyers.”

  Naomi nodded at the empty carrying crate.

  “And what the hell were you doing letting those scaly little bastards loose?”

  Meyers looked uncertain.

  “There was this girl,” he said. “One of the refugees back at the base. She said it was a lab animal and they were going to dissect it. She couldn't bear it. Said it reminded her of Wilbur the Pig.” Meyers shrugged. “It's a scaly little rat. What harm could it do?”

  Naomi held up a blood-soaked cloth.

  “How does your ass feel?” she said.

  “Not too good,” Meyers admitted.

  “Where are you headed?” Jonah asked, keeping his eye on the surrounding trees.

  “I can't give out that information,” Meyers said.

  Naomi didn't even look up, but her fingers dug where she had been doctoring.

  Meyers' face went tight.

  “We've got a base up on the mountain,” he said quickly. “We're a supply-chain. Delivering to outposts.” He caught Naomi's expectant eye. “My Commanding Officer is Major Travis,” he finished.

  At that moment, Meyers' radio barked static – the caravan calling in.

  “Hey, Meyers? Anyone there? This is Bob. Is our path clear? Repeat. All clear?”

  Meyers' radio was pinned under his hip, and it was ginger moving him, but even as Naomi started to pull it free, a response sounded – in 'Bob's' own voice.

  “All clear,” the voice said.

  There was a static bark from the tower, and they turned to see one of the little lizards in the window, standing at the microphone. Its parrot-like voice repeated, “All clear.”

  Naomi picked it off with a pistol shot, sending the little beast spinning.

  Meyers glanced at her, brows raised. “Are you military?”

  “My husband was,” Naomi replied.

  Meyers glanced at Jonah. �
�This guy isn't...?”

  “No,” Naomi said, before he could finish, emphatically slapping a new clip into her pistol.

  Meyers' radio barked again – Bob: “Okay, we're coming through.”

  And from the brush behind them, an exact repetition, with even the crack of static, “Okay, we're coming through.”

  They turned and the other two Ottos were back, perched right in a row at the edge of the forest, their heads all cocked, birdlike.

  “What harm could it do?” the first one said, with Meyers' voice this time, in that same apparently mindless, parrot-like mimic.

  And then they all screeched together.

  From the surrounding brush, more sickle-claws appeared – an entire pack of the wolf and panther-sized beasts that always seemed to accompany the scaly little bastards, like a prehistoric royal guard.

  Jonah guessed at least two-dozen animals. Naomi was a good shot, but in these close-quarters, she didn't have enough bullets in a clip. And Jonah might pick off one or two with his rifle before they tore him apart.

  But then there came the crunch of gravel from the unmaintained former highway that circled the ridge, and the first headlights of the convoy came into view.

  “We've got to warn them,” Naomi said, even as she eyed the surrounding sickle-claws.

  “Warn them?” Jonah retorted, watching for the first movement, “Warn us!”

  The sickle-claws seemed to hang on the moment – and that was another thing that was different whenever an Otto was around – dromaeosaurs were evil-tempered beasts on any given day, but mostly behaved like animals.

  But today, they hung like trained attack-dogs waiting on command.

  Jonah was frankly amazed there were so many of them. You didn't see sickle-claws much in the valley because the T. rex rooted them out, and there was no escaping that tyrannosaur nose. This lot must have been traveling the hills, just like Jonah and Naomi – a disconcerting thought.

  Still, this many of them? How much longer could their combined scent fail to attract one of the local rex packs?

  But even as he thought it, there came the first break in the heavy foliage, beyond the outpost – the sound of a large branch cracking under massive weight.