To Slay A Dinosaur: Part II

H E  awoke in the early morn as something thundered out with the long, mourning call of a foghorn. But it was evidently organic, clearly the noise of a monster animal and not a man-made machine. It warbled near the end, like a bird.

That brought to mind the previous night, and all its terrible memories.

He tried to shut it out. Tried not to focus on the sheer horror of his situation.

He must have fallen asleep after the big ones, the gigantic Falcons that had slain his mother, had drifted away. How stupid of him. He would need to find a safer place, today.

He sat up, brushing away upsettingly large insects. He saw a two-foot, black centipede crawl up a tree. Some other, hairy spiders had fled, too. As well as at least one kind of Silverfish-like thing that was as thick as his palm.

He looked around.

All the trees were cycads, or at least things like them. Some were almost a hundred feet high. There were the white trees, with which he was all too familiar. There were palms, thick ferns, and over near a river further ahead of him were horsetails and white fungus.

Rocky, red cliffs and outcroppings rose high above the ground in the distance.  A dull breeze didn’t help the humidity.

It struck him how harsh his throat felt. Dry, in spite of the wet air.

“Water,” he said, stunned to hear his own voice for the first time.

Down by the river were a group of big, leathery-skinned monsters. He decided to call them monsters, even though they posed him no threat, because he was in a miserable mood and everything was upsetting him.

All of them, except one, were eight feet high at the hip. The exception was twelve. Jack’s first thought was that it was their mother. All were dark grey with mottled yellow. Their bellies were white, and they all had duck-beaks and narrow, square crests. Their eyes blinked idiotically, like a chicken’s, and while the big one kept an eye on Jack for the most part they seemed not to notice he was there.

The Big One had a spike on the back of its head behind its crest, and Jack was able to notice this because after each drink it raised its head to look at him. The crest and spike were both an alarming yellow and black, likely some kind of symbol.

It either was keeping an eye on him or, after each sip of water, it forgot what he was and had to keep checking.

Jack just wrote it off, figuring it was protecting its young, up until one of the little ones (well, littler ones) rubbed its head up against the Big Guy, crossing their swan-necks together.

“Aw, how sweet”, he said to himself, and then went back to drinking the murky, green water. It tasted awful and wasn’t much cooler than the thick, wet air, but it was water nonetheless.

His head jerked up when one of the Crested Guys made a sound. The littler one.

The other one was trying to piggy-back ride it.

“Well, they must be really stupid. I understand parents giving their kids piggy-back rides, but not the other way around……”

It hit him that he was the stupid one, all at once. They started making a strange cacophony of noises while the others continued to drink.

‘Alpha male,’ he thought to himself. When he was done drinking, he walked away. Their sounds were ear-shattering and the sight was eye-shattering.

He followed the river, focusing on his feet. It was a stupid thing to do with –

Things like what killed his mother skulking around.

He tried not to think about it, and failed miserably. If his attempt not to think about it were an attempt to survive, it fared as well as his mom did.

How did he get here? It was real, that much was certain. He could feel the orange soil between his toes and feel the occasional breeze in the dense, thick air. He could look around and see the trees, all palms and conifers and cycads, he could see the ferns and creepers that littered the ground and he sure as Hell could feel the insects that kept buzzing around him. Bigger, more aggressive bugs. Of course – they’ve never felt pesticides or a can of raid in their lives. They have no instinctive fear of humans.

Though, if they continued to charge him, he’d give them one.

He saw some yellow and white flowers sprouting near the river. Some plants had weird, fan-shaped leaves almost as big as he was. Water dripped off them.

He’d try crushing some with whatever he found to eat, if he ever got the chance to eat something again. He wasn’t in the mood to do much but cry and walk down the river. In a world without humans, where would he go?

He occasionally scanned around for signs of movement. Though he passed by a group of cat-sized, black-and-white looking rat-things nibbling at a white mushroom, he didn’t stop to investigate. Best not to mess with one’s own ancestors, no matter how distant they are from you.

“Keep on, buddies,” he said to the rat-things as he walked by. “One day, you’ll give rise to the dominant species of life on earth.”

One of them looked his way, as if so say, ‘yeah, sure, kid. You ain’t seen the goddamn monster runnin’ around?’

“Give it time,” he said back. “A hundred million years, or so.”

He kept on until he came to the face of a small mountain. Maybe sixty feet high – wait, did that make it a mountain or a Hill? Didn’t matter. If he was semantic enough to debate the difference between a mountain, cliff or hill when he was being chased by giant bird-lizards then he probably deserved to die.

It was a harsh red color, possessing the layers he knew from one of his Geology textbooks. Of course, he loved Geology. Y’know, the subject about how dinosaurs become fossilized bones in the ground, and not paleontology. Which might actually be somewhat useful, right around now.

It was maybe a hundred feet in circumference. Some palms had take root around the edge, but if there were any dangerous climbing animals they wouldn’t be able to leap from tree-to-tree and get to the top.

It was a harsh cliff face. The lower layer, the one he’d have to start with, jutted out only about three feet. From there they stayed tall and narrow, up until about twenty-five feet up, where he could fall and break his leg or back, and then death would be certain. If he was lucky he would get a gash and bleed to death before something got a hold of him and ate him alive. God, how it would be awful to be eaten alive. It was the worst thing he could imagine. The single worst thing that could ever cross his mind, and plenty of awful things were crossing his mind about now.

But it could be scaled. It started fairly flat, and it would be agonizing, yes. For now he’d rest, try to regain some strength – if he was desperate enough he’d eat the next insect that tackled him. But if something unpleasant strolled along, he could get up there if the need arose.

And, shortly after his evaluation, the need did indeed arise.

Some of the trees were crashing down nearby him. Two had just fallen down, slammed by some massive and alarmingly red bulk thrashing about in the ferns. He saw all manner of birds, and if he had space for anything in his head other than panic and utter terror he’d be surprised that birds evolved yet – it would seem like the feathered Dinosaurs were on their way there, though apparently they only shared a recent common ancestor.

Some of the small mammals and lizards scurried away, though he saw one snapped up by a blackened beak.

As he clawed his way up the now seemingly-unsurmountable rock face the monster, which was now making a very pained, very low and heavy ‘awwwww’-sort of noise, spotted movement and decided to charge without thinking.

The nearest grip was eight feet up – he couldn’t reach.

He looked back, to judge how close it was. He saw it for the first time and made an idiotic face. Indeed, it seemed an absurd situation.

He mistakenly identified it as a Triceratops, though it wasn’t. It had a long, square frill with a pair of black horns at the top, and a pair of straight black horns jutting from above its yellow eyes. They were maybe two and half feet long, and its head was a full eight feet from parrot-beak to lizard-horns. It was seven feet high at the hip and maybe fifteen feet long. Its body was covered in hard, dry scales. Its hide was the most alarming, ‘STAY-THE-HELL-AWAY-FROM-ME’ red he’d ever seen, except for its head which was marked with tiger-like black stripes. Its low, booming ‘aaaaaaawwwww’ call reminded him of a warthog or a wild pig. But with more warble, almost like a bird’s mating call.

It thrashed around, slamming up to trees and tearing through dirt with its beak and snatching up and eating small animals that criss-crossed its path, trying to get away.

“Those things are supposed to be herbivores,” he hissed at himself, before sprinting around the hill/cliff to see if there was a more accessible section to climb up.

His sudden movement and long, thin limbs struck the raging beasts dull senses, and as it drooled they found the ‘rage’ button. Thin lumbs, swift movements; the thing resembled the raptors with which it was so familiar. Though they posed no threat now, there was still some left-over hatred and disgust in its brain from when it was a calf, when it was vulnerable.

Its madness accessed that instinct now, and after another spitting pig-noise it charged for the sprinting foreigner from another time.

After an infinity of hearing the monster’s trampling and mournful groaning, Jack found a flat-enough rock to jump to, and immediately proceeded to find his way up the sheer wall of rock.

He made it about fifteen feet before the inexplicably enraged creature slammed its horns right into the rock under him.

That was when he noticed it salivating, like it had just laid its eyes on the Marilyn Monroe of Lady Triceratops’.

He connected the dots in his head, as best as he could given the frayed circumstances he was in.

GREAT! He screamed in his head, slipping down onto another rock and clawing at it to hold on. A world full of the most lethal predators and I’m being attacked by the herbivore with prehistoric mad cow disease!

It made its noise and charged, scratching its horns – sharpening them? – on the rock wall.

He kept slipping, his nails under stress, digging into the stone.

The monster kept snapping its beak, sometimes gnawing the minerals, not cracking them but –

Wait.

When he was scrambling up, trying desperately not to fall, trying desperately to avoid the bone-crushing beak, trying to imagine what in God’s name he’d done to piss this creature off so immensely that it was trying to slaughter something it would never eat, his face slipped and smashed into the red, red rock.

Red, red rock.

“JESUS!” He shrieked. “Is that it? Is the rock pissing it off? Does it think it’s an opposing male or is this some kind of ‘bull-and-red-cape’ shit?”

He didn’t bother to find out, just now.

Maybe five or six feet above was a flat outcropping, wide enough for him to stand on.

‘UP THERE!’ his head screamed back at him. ‘UP THERE UP THERE UP THERE UPTHEREUPTHEREUPTHERE!’

He lunged, hoping to catch the side of the outcropping, with one finger at least. He screamed to a God that may or may not have existed to bring him up to the flat surface. If He had the indecency to drop him in the Late Cretaceous then he’d at least better have the decency to let him survive it!

He clenched his eyes shut, and in the blackness he saw and heard only the sounds of charging abomination of nature beneath him.

After what seemed like an eternity of Hellish assaults on all his senses, instinct snapped his eyes open, and he saw he’d made it.

He was hanging onto the ledge.

But not for long – the monster continued to ram, to groan its resentful groan and to try, with all its might, to slaughter the boy.

With what little strength he had left, he wrenched the whole of his bulk over the edge and fell face-first into the dirt there.

He lurched, drooled and got dizzy. His vision blurred. His stomach, almost totally void of contents, vomited them up anyways.

He felt the shocks going through the stone under him, driving him to shake uncontrollably.

After it left, panting and groaning, Jack looked at it trotting away. He could still smell its overpowering odor. Like wet gravel.  

He cried, and cried, and cried.