The Flipside

by Jake Bible

“Eyes on the prize, people,” Amanda said.

  All three operators sighted through their scopes and waited.

  A full minute went by before Ivy called out, “Now!”

  There was no hesitation. The line of charges outside the base exploded almost simultaneously as the T-rex pack barreled toward it. The roars of the giant dinosaurs could easily be heard as several of them immediately fell into the long, deep ditch that the charges created. The creatures that could react in time leaped over their fallen pack mates and kept on running straight for the base.

  “Eight down!” Olivia yelled from behind the fallback line.

  “Thanks!” Ivy replied as she opened fire on the ten teeth coming straight at them.

  A T-rex stumbled, but didn’t fall. Ivy fired again and the beast spun about then landed on the ground with a heavy thud and skidded for a good few yards before coming to a dead stop. Ivy fired again and again and another T-rex fell to the same fate.

  Beside her, Cash was firing his .338 at a much slower rate, but with similar results. In his scope, he could see the forehead of one of the T-rexes turn to mush as a .338 round pierced flesh and shattered bone. There was a reason that the only live ammunition rifles the operators used shot either .300, .338, or .50 caliber rounds. Nothing else was worth firing.

  “Four still incoming,” Amanda yelled and smacked Cash on the shoulder as she spun about to retreat to the fallback line.

  “Look out!” Olivia screamed.

  A pterosaur with a wingspan of at least twenty feet swooped down and grabbed Amanda up in its claws. Everything from Amanda’s chest up was pierced by massive talons and nearly torn apart as the pterosaur lifted back up into the sky. Amanda barely made a sound except for a shocked grunt and then a wet, deep gurgling sound as blood exploded from her mouth.

  “Mandy!” Cash shouted as he turned and put two rounds into the winger’s head.

  The beast fell to the ground, covering Amanda’s body. Cash slung his rifle, raced to her, and reached out to shove one of the wings up so he could see her, but Ivy was yanking on his arm and pulling him toward the fallback line. He tried to fight her off, but she slammed the palm of her hand against his ear and he cried out.

  The pain snapped him back and he let Ivy lead him to where Olivia stood, her mouth wide open in horror.

  “We’ll get her as soon as we’re done with this shit!” Ivy yelled, taking a knee as she sighted through her scope again. “Four more teeth, Trevon!”

  Cash took a knee as well and got one of the four T-rexes between his crosshairs. He squeezed the trigger and the beast’s right shoulder became a mangled mess. The shot wasn’t mortal, but it was enough to throw the T-rex off course and send it crashing into the one next to it. The two creatures fell in a tangle of huge limbs and roaring mouths.

  Ivy fired until her rifle clicked empty then she ejected the magazine, slapped in a fresh one, and fired again until that magazine was empty. Then she stood up and strode toward the creatures, rifle still to her shoulder as she ejected the second spent magazine and inserted another fresh one. The T-rex Cash had wounded ended up with half a head while the one not wounded, but still tangled up in its friend’s body, roared with enough force to push Ivy back a step.

  “Fuck you too,” Ivy said and emptied her third magazine into the dinosaur’s head.

  “Mandy!” Cash yelled as he sprinted to the pterosaur corpse.

  He shoved at the thing, but it wouldn’t budge. Cash grabbed a knife from his belt and sliced through one of the dead creature’s wings, taking it off at the shoulder joint. He pulled hard and the wing ripped away, revealing Amanda’s face. Her gaze was wide and fixed.

  “No…” Cash whispered as he knelt down next to her, his hands hovering around her head. He was afraid to touch her because then what he knew had happened would be confirmed and real. “No, Mandy, come on now.”

  “God dammit,” Ivy mumbled as she approached Cash. “I got comfortable. You guys showed up and I forgot where I was.”

  “Guys.”

  “Not your fault, Ivy,” Cash said as snot and tears dripped from his face. He wiped at everything and only made a bigger mess as the dirt that he was covered in smeared into snot mud. “It’s this place. This fucking place.”

  “Guys.”

  “Can you get her out from under there?” Ivy asked. “I’ll cover our asses while you carry her.”

  “This thing is too heavy,” Cash said, pounding a fist on the dead pterosaur.

  “GUYS!”

  “What?” Cash snapped as he stood and whipped around to face Olivia who was hurrying up to them.

  She showed them the scanner screen. “This is what!”

  They looked at the reading then looked out at the dark landscape.

  “Fuck,” Ivy said.

  Twelve

  “Now you pull the triggers and throw the thumpers out of the crawler,” Mike ordered over the radio.

  Barbara and Zach glanced back through the small hatch at the cargo hold. The tips of combot legs appeared at the edge of the cargo hold’s broken hatch.

  “They’re here,” Barbara said into the radio handset. “They’re on the crawler.”

  “Okay…” Mike’s voice trailed off.

  “Mike!” Barbara shouted. “What do we do?”

  “You pull the triggers and throw the stun thumpers at the combots,” Mike said. “Then you tuck yourselves into tight little balls and cover your heads with your arms.”

  “Will that help?” Barbara asked.

  “Physically? No. You are going to get very sick and your heads will feel like they want to explode,” Mike said. “With some luck, that won’t happen. But psychologically, there is a lot to be said about being curled up into tight balls. You’ll want every advantage because this is going to suck.”

  “I’m going to throw up,” Zach said. Barbara fixed him with a death stare. “Later. I’ll throw up later.”

  “The radio is going to cut out as soon as the first EMP goes off,” Mike said. “We won’t know if this worked until we come check on you. Stay put! The noise will bring the pterosaurs back. Stay in the crawler’s cockpit.”

  “Okay,” Barbara replied. “See you guys soon.”

  She set the handset down and picked up one of the stun thumpers. After a moment’s hesitation, Zach did the same. They locked eyes, nodded, and pulled the triggers. Then they threw the stun thumpers through the small hatch and watched as one bounced its way across the cargo hold then bonked into the head of a combot that had just crested the edge of the hatch. The other stun thumper became lodged in a pile of wires and bent metal.

  Neither of them hesitated as they repeated the steps with two more stun thumpers. Barbara slammed the hatch closed then threw herself into the upside-down footwell of the passenger’s side of the crawler. She tucked into a tight ball, wrapped her arms around her head, and wept freely and openly. Zach copied her move for move on the other side, including the open weeping.

  The thumpers went off and Barbara screamed as pain ripped through her head. Her muscles tensed and she began to throw up almost immediately. The puke splattered everywhere around her, washing up over her like a tidal wave as it bounced off the sides of the footwell.

  The crawler shook hard from the detonations as well as from the sudden falling of the combots. Two had made it into the cargo hold and they dropped dead right there, adding a considerable amount of weight to the precariously positioned vehicle. Two other combots had almost crawled up into the cargo hold, but fell off as soon as the EMPs shut them down. Only problem was their front legs had hooked into the cargo hold’s hatch edge and they were now dangling from the back of the crawler, the torn-apart hatch edge the only thing that kept them from plummeting back to the ground.

  The remaining combots were piled in a dead heap at the base of the radio tower.

  Barbara slowly pulled her arms away from her head and scrambled up out of the footwell. The side window was completely gone from the crash, but the breeze from
the night air did not help the situation at all; it only swirled the stink around the cockpit.

  “Zach? You alright?” Barbara gasped as she tried to figure out a way to clean herself up. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. “Zach?”

  “Unnnnngh,” Zach grunted as he extricated himself from his own fetal position. He pulled himself up into the driver’s seat and took a deep breath. Then he gagged and retched and his head swiveled to look at Barbara.

  “Yeah,” Barbara said. She hooked a hand in the small hatch and shoved it aside. “What’s it look like?”

  Zach glanced through the hatch and nodded then relayed what he saw.

  “Good,” Barbara said. “Now we wait for them to come get us.”

  Zach frowned. “We wait…?”

  “You’re welcome to get out and try to climb down,” Barbara said, waving her hands over her vomit-covered body. “I don’t want to hang with this either, but you heard what Mike said. Wingers will probably pick you off before you even touch the ground.”

  Barbara laughed at the look on Zach’s face.

  “You’re actually debating doing it,” she said.

  “It smells really bad in here,” he replied.

  Barbara shrugged. Then her eyes went wide as the crawler began to shake violently. It dropped a couple feet, steadied, shook hard again, then fell another couple of feet.

  “Is it done?” Zach asked.

  It wasn’t. The crawler came loose from the radio tower and plummeted straight for the pile of dead combots.

  ***

  “Other than the cellar and the armory, where else is safe?” Cash asked Ivy while Olivia studied the scanner’s screen.

  Olivia and Ivy shared a look.

  “What?” Cash asked.

  “There are pockets,” Ivy said. “The safety shelters we show all the tourists. Four of those are still intact, but the rest are useless.”

  “Flood,” Olivia said. “Huge rainstorm ripped through here a little over a month ago and the whole base was under a foot of water for two days.”

  “You don’t want to know what starts swimming in water like that Flipside,” Ivy said.

  “I’ve done my year-long Flipside tours, thank you very fucking much,” Cash said. “I know what shit happens.”

  “Not when mitigation procedures aren’t in place,” Ivy said. “So, to really answer your question, either the cellar or the armory is our best option. None are great, which is why we were going to be leaving soon and try to catch up with Raff and Lakshmi. But now we have this shit to get through.”

  She indicated the scanner screen and the twenty objects that were still a good mile away.

  “Mike?” Cash called as he pressed the button on the radio handset clipped to his shoulder. “Mike? You read me?”

  “I read you,” Mike said. “You guys alright?”

  Cash glanced at Amanda’s body.

  “No,” he said. “Mandy didn’t make it.”

  Silence.

  “What…?”

  “Mandy didn’t make it,” Cash repeated. “Winger got her as we were finishing off the teeth. It came in fast and hard and we didn’t see it until it was too late.”

  “Oh, Jesus, dude…”

  “What’s the status of Barbara and Zach?” Cash asked.

  “You need to tell them about the fucking combots headed our way,” Ivy snarled.

  Cash held up his hand in a hold-on gesture as Mike spoke.

  “They set off the stun thumpers before their radio went dead,” Mike replied. “We were waiting for you to report in for the next move.”

  “We’ll go get them,” Cash said.

  “Tell him!” Ivy shouted.

  “Jesus Christ, Ivy, I am,” Cash said and closed his eyes as he depressed the handset button again. “Mike? We’ve got an issue heading our way. A big issue. Well, more like twenty issues.”

  “Can you define issue?” Mike asked.

  “Twenty combots a mile out,” Ivy said, interrupting by depressing the button on her own handset. “They’re moving slow, so we have maybe an hour until they reach us if they don’t pick up the pace.”

  “Twenty more combots?” Mike asked. “Shit, dude. Not good at all.”

  “We’ll go get fetch Barbara and Zach then return to the armory,” Cash said, punching Ivy in the shoulder, making her let go of her handset. “Then we need to come up with a plan fast. We keep setting off EMPs all over the place and we won’t be able to salvage any of the tech on this base. We’re going to need working tech to get to Raff and Lakshmi, if that is our end goal. We have to have at least one working crawler or speed roller.”

  The sound of wrenching metal and screams came from across the base. Then a massive crash and more wrenching metal followed by a heavy thud.

  “Shit,” Cash said. “Got to go.”

  He let go of his handset and pointed in the direction of the noise. Ivy was already running that way, with Olivia right behind. Cash took off after them and caught up in no time.

  “When the combots first came, what did they do?” Cash asked as they sprinted around a mound of brick and concrete that had once been a snack shop. “Full assault or did some hang back and come in waves?”

  “Full assault,” Ivy said. “They hit so fast and hard that most people were dead before we knew what was happening.”

  “These will probably do the same thing,” Cash said.

  They all three skidded to a stop as a winger landed in front of them, its six-foot-long beak open wide. It shrieked then its beak slammed shut as it swallowed something Olivia tossed inside.

  “Get down!” Olivia yelled.

  They hit the dirt and covered their heads as the grenade went off. Winger guts exploded everywhere, coating them from head to toe in blood and gunk.

  “Quick thinking,” Cash said as he got to his feet and slid his way through what was left of the pterosaur.

  “That’s the only way to survive around here,” Olivia said.

  They continued running once they were no longer slipping and sliding on winger guts.

  “Eleven o’clock!” Ivy yelled as she ducked past a broken strut that was sticking out from a collapsed building. “Three wingers!”

  “Got ‘em!” Cash shouted back as he took aim.

  He fired twice then kept running for a few yards, stopped again, adjusted his aim, and fired three more times. All three of the wingers spiraled to the ground, dead.

  A pack of small raptors shot out from a stack of concrete blocks and Ivy almost opened fire. But, despite being carnivores with very sharp teeth, the little raptors were each only a foot high and way more scared of the humans than the humans were of the tiny dinosaurs.

  “At least we have the scavengers around to clean up,” Olivia said offhandedly.

  “The circle of life, prehistoric version,” Cash said, catching back up to the two women.

  “We get the TV people and then go back to the armory for more RPGs,” Ivy said. “I think that should be the next plan of attack.”

  “Blow the machines away from distance?” Cash asked. “There’re twenty, Ivy. We’ll take out maybe three or four, but then the rest will adjust to the assault and focus on avoiding the incoming RPGs. They can adjust on the fly faster than we can.”

  “I’ll take three or four being blown to shit,” Ivy said. “That’s three or four less that make it to the base.”

  “You think the teeth pack was running from the combots?” Olivia asked. “One o’clock!”

  Ivy barely broke stride as she brought up her rifle and took down the winger that was swooping toward them.

  “Probably,” Cash replied, answering Olivia’s question. “Tech and flesh never get along.”

  A collapsed Quonset hut was directly in their path. Cash clambered up over it since it had been almost squashed flat and it was faster to go over than try to go around its wide perimeter. Ivy and Olivia followed and they hurried as fast as they could up and down the dips in the fallen structure.

>   Once they reached the other side, they could easily see the listing radio tower and the broken crawler that lay beneath it. There was no sign of life, no sign of movement, no sign of any survivors whether man or machine.

  “The combots have picked up the pace,” Olivia said. “They’re doing what we didn’t want them to do.”

  “Less than a mile off?” Ivy said. “They’ve spotted the base and are moving in.”

  “Shit,” Cash said as he slowly moved toward the wreckage of the crawler. The only reason he wasn’t rushing to the downed vehicle was because of the pieces of combots that stuck out from underneath it. His eyes were locked onto several broken and twisted legs, waiting for the big surprise as one of them began to twitch.

  But nothing twitched as he got within a couple feet of the crawler. The vehicle had fallen onto its rear and half the cargo hold was accordioned in upon itself. The cockpit stood on end, angled at about eighty degrees.

  “Here,” Cash said as he handed Olivia his rifle. Then he stripped the RPGs and launcher from his back, set those down, and started to climb the crawler.

  It rocked and groaned under his weight and he paused, taking the climb a little more slowly. Cash managed to get almost to the passenger-side window when he heard a groan come from inside. He slapped at his hip, but realized he never strapped a pistol on. It was normal procedure once you reached Flipside, but nothing had been normal when they reached Flipside.

  “Barbara?” he called out. “You two alive in there?”

  “Sort of,” Barbara muttered. “Cash? That you?”

  “It’s me,” Cash said with relief. “Zach okay?”

  “Yeah,” Zach moaned.

  Cash finished the climb and leaned in through the open window. Then he leaned out. Fast.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he said. “Who did that and what did you eat today?”

  “Fuck off,” Barbara said.

  “Get clear of the passenger-side door,” Cash said. “I’m going to open it so you can climb out.”

  That was easier said than done and Cash gave up after a few tugs at the handle. The door was too warped to open.

  “New plan,” he said. “Climb out the window.”