The Dream Keeper

W H   E N Morning finally came, Jack had laid at the dead fire and tried to keep the scent of the ashes on his mind and not the scent of the black-heads. It was still there, thought they weren’t. They were nocturnal animals and they wouldn’t come back until tonight. “Would they?” He asked himself. If nobody was around to hear him, he might as well talk to himself. It would either keep him sane, or drive him crazy. But these were both the least of his problems. “Were they thinking animals?” He asked nobody. “Because it seemed like it. Distracting, whooping…” He was reading too much into it. Jurassic Park had been re-run too many times in his childhood. No, they were not giant super-intelligent ground-eagles, they were just giant ground-eagles. Still, not good, but not quite as bad as JP’s exaggerated problem-solvers. Only as bad as very well-equipped lions, he decided. He walked out into the Sunlight. In this totally foreign world, the sun was the only familiar f...

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. ...

The Guards, searching the premises, wondered what was upsetting the animals so much. They’d never before been this vocal; forget about loud enough to be heard outside the buildings. The first group to figure out what was happening, sadly, wasn’t the one that had any of Shuker’s lethal weaponry. It was a trio of guards, all with tranquilizer guns, who came across the tribe of Sasquatches, marching down a trail out of the woods. One of the guards, stupid enough to assume he could successfully hit a moving target’s head in barely any early-morning light, fired and hit a tree. Alerted, the alpha male – a towering, gargantuan monster of dark, black color and very poor disposition, lunged for them. One of the guards was seized, his arm still connected but the bone wrenched from the socket. He was lifted up and hurled into a nearby tree, where his vertebrae shattered and one of his shoulders dislodged. When he fell eight feet to the ground, both of the female Wood Apes de...