by Eddie Patin
He heard a light scrabbling sound on the tree near him, and turned with a gasp to watch a line of ants traveling up the pine tree from the ground. They were just like normal ants—deep brown with more reddish heads, following each other single file as they climbed the gnarly bark—but they were each the size of Jason’s pinky finger!
"Oh ... my ... God..." Jason muttered in disbelief, backing away from the tree. The line of ants paid him no mind, but he sure didn’t want to know what it felt like to be bitten by ants that big. Their pincers were probably big and powerful enough to cut through his skin like a paring knife.
Some of the bird-like dinosaurs climbed around on trees, hanging onto the bark just like squirrels. Jason saw one creature release the tree and glide down to pounce on something inside the thick underbrush.
And then a meaty thump coming from up ahead made Jason’s heart leap. There was a low grunt from there that made Jason imagine a big elk or ... maybe an elephant?
Getting a good grip on his cane, Jason crept forward through the thick woods, casting one last nervous glance at the line of ants that were passing right next to him. Fear bubbled within the man, waiting to burst inside him like a geyser, but he swallowed it down and tried to quiet his breathing. Jason took careful, quiet steps through the vivid forest, keeping thick tree trunks in between him and the sound up ahead, trying to move silently. The snaps and rustles of underbrush under and around his boots made him wince.
Just when Jason started to think that he’d imagined it, he noticed the colors of the woods up ahead move, and he realized that there was a large creature there standing still and blending into the brush. Clutching at a nearby tree, Jason peered at the huge dinosaur, trying to make out the lines until the beast moved again and revealed its form.
Twenty feet or so up ahead, Jason could suddenly see a large creature that was obviously a dinosaur. This one didn’t have feathers and its thick hide reminded Jason a little of an elephant’s skin, although green and brown and tan instead of grey.
Duckbill, Jason thought. The dinosaur walked on all fours, seeming like it could walk on its hind legs if it wanted to. The creature’s body was narrow for its massive size—maybe eight feet tall at the shoulder bent over like it was—but was broad in length and height, with a tall ridge of flesh covering what must have been a spine with long vertebra and a thick tail that tapered to a point. Its front legs ended in thick hands and its long head atop an elongated neck was colorful but devoid of horns or ridges or other bony shapes. The creature had dumb, black eyes that reminded Jason of a cow. Its long, gentle snout was shaped like a duck’s bill, chewing contently at the foliage in front of it. It was like a dinosaur version of some kind of herd animal.
Then Jason realized that the large dinosaur was surrounded by more of the same kind, all blending into the forest! They moved slowly from bush to bush eating like cows, keeping mostly still and hidden. Every once in a while, there was a low grunt, and even more rarely, a full bleating sound that made Jason’s insides vibrate.
"Wow!" he whispered to himself. Jason was a kid back when Jurassic Park came out in theaters; a movie that revived his long-dormant obsession with dinosaurs from his youth. Ever since then—other than a few weeks in high school when he'd impressed his science teacher with his dinosaur knowledge and managed to avoid normal classwork for a while by creating a poster for the classroom—Jason’s old childhood dream of becoming a Paleontologist and his penchant for Therapods had been dormant. He hadn’t even bothered to watch the movie’s sequels.
The man recognized this kind of dinosaur, although he didn’t know exactly what its name was. Watching the lumbering beast move on to more foliage and the several around it become dozens as he sighted more and more, Jason racked his brain for its actual dinosaur name. He dusted off all of the old species names he could remember. He could recall the name Iguanodon, but these weren’t that species—they didn’t have the big spike on their thumbs. He remembered the para ... para ... para-something. These were kind of like those ‘parasaurs’, but they didn’t have the same big, blunt sweeping skull. They were definitely some kind of duckbill, an herbivore, and amazingly, they were acting like herd animals! Coming across this big herd of duckbills clomping around in the forest grazing on the underbrush reminded Jason of stalking a herd of elk. They were camouflaged! Of course—why wouldn’t they be?
"Duckbills..." Jason said to himself, feeling a smile creep to his lips.
Just then, at his word, the nearest duckbill spooked, looking over at Jason—just like a deer would. It stared at him for a half-second with those beady, black eyes before bolting away down the hill, sprinting on all fours. It must have weighed over a ton, easy. When the first dinosaur dashed off, thumping heavily across the forest floor, there was a ripple of surprise through the herd and within a moment, they were all on the move, thundering away, shaking the ground under Jason’s feet.
For that moment, Jason forgot about the horror and grinned like a little boy, holding onto the tree as more of the large duckbilled dinosaurs than he could count rumbled away from him, revealing more and more with their movement, until they all disappeared and the earth stopped trembling.
"Where are they going?" Jason wondered aloud, breaking his gaze away to make sure that nothing was sneaking up behind him.
So far, Jason had seen the huge duckbills and lots of small, bird-like or raptor-like dinosaurs. And the dead ostrich dinosaur, he thought. And the wyvern. If there were big duckbill herbivores here, then there were probably all sorts of other dinosaurs here too.
"But a wyvern?" Jason whispered, slowly trailing after the herd. Switching his cane to his left hand for a moment, Jason reached back to where his Glock was holstered and touched the grip to make sure it was still there. It was. "And people? What about those cannibals?"
If he really went back in time somehow, what was a wyvern and primitive people doing here?! This didn't make any sense. There were no people living at the same time as dinosaurs—not even really unevolved ones! The apes that people evolved from didn't even appear until thousands—no, millions—of years after the end of the dinosaurs! And wyverns—they didn't exist at any time. They were impossible creatures. That thing was breathing fire!
And why did some of the dinosaurs have feathers?
Where was he?
Jason's mind crept with a sort of wonder-tinged dread. He paused to close his eyes then took a few deep breaths of the dense, humid air, trying to center his racing mind. He hadn't had a moment to calm down since landing in the bone-filled cave. Opening his eyes again, Jason wished to be back home, but found himself still standing in the thick, hot woods on a hill, surrounded by the trills and calls of birds and unknown critters.
He pulled his phone out of its pocket, unlocking it, and opened YouTube again. Jason didn't know why, but he really wanted to hear a video—any video with someone's voice telling him about passive income or how to organize his life. He really wanted to hear another human voice saying something normal.
A message popped up in the middle of the app, reading:
Connect to the Internet.
You're offline. Check your connection.
With a sigh, Jason put his phone away and walked slowly, bearing the pain of his knee and leaning on his cane, reaching out to grab tree after tree with his free hand. He looked up and saw tiny dinosaurs with wings in the trees. Some of them watched him with strange, alien eyes that reminded him of birds. Some went about their own business. Most of the creatures had feathers and they were varied wildly in color and form.
True, it had been a while since he'd studied dinosaurs at all. But Jason was damned sure that humans didn’t come around until long after the asteroid had killed everything on Earth except for certain things, and dinosaurs were not among the survivors. Hell—it had been small, rat-like mammals mostly that had survived the dino apocalypse. Humans would come much later—thousands and thousands of years later. And then, the ancestors of man had gone through multiple stage
s of evolution before they resembled anything even close to those cannibals...
The wyvern's presence didn’t make any damned sense. There weren’t any wyverns back in prehistoric times; nothing resembling wyverns in the slightest. That monster wasn't thin and light like a bird. It was a scaly, spiky predator made of muscle. How could it even fly? Real dragons couldn't exist—they'd be too heavy to fly. And that thing had a poisonous barb on its tail. There wasn't a single dinosaur with one of those, right...?
A sudden snap of a branch up ahead made Jason freeze.
He paused while passing a tree, then moved backwards to get behind it again...
There was something new up ahead crashing through the deadfall. Something large and heavy thumped around, snapping and breaking branches and fallen trees. The noises were rough and clumsy and Jason knew that it was something other than another one of those duckbills. Aside from the thundering the herd made when it ran away, those camouflaged herbivores were surprisingly graceful and fled the area without crashing through everything in their path.
Something heavy and massive was plowing through the woods up ahead, and it was coming right for him...
Jason realized that his heart was hammering, and he held his breath, listening with wide eyes, but he couldn’t move. He imagined a Tyrannosaurus Rex or something huge and dreadful crashing through the forest up there heading his way. But try as he might, he couldn’t make himself move. His feet were like concrete and his joints were rigid.
There was another huge thump, and a large piece of tree snapped like a gunshot.
Whatever it was, the beast was coming, and all Jason could do was watch...
Jason broke his terrified gaze long enough to check the trees around him. He wanted to find a tall tree with low branches; he thought about climbing to get out of danger. A T-Rex was what—about twenty feet tall? There was a massive pine tree fifteen feet away with low branches. Jason would have to move fast—the large creature continued his way, crashing through the woods—but Jason still couldn't budge!
A wide shape emerged from the trees, broad and brown with accents of beige.
With his heart leaping in his chest, Jason tried to pull himself further back around the tree trunk before whatever it was saw him, but he was transfixed; frozen in place...
The dinosaur wandered into view pushing through the bushes and stepping on a fallen branch as thick as Jason’s arm, which snapped and splintered under its heavy foot. As the creature paused to look around then stretched it neck to take a monstrous bite out of a bush, Jason felt the brilliant fear inside him melt away.
As large as a full-sized car with a tail as long as another, the beast moved forward, turning and veering off up the hill. Jason recognized it instantly as an Ankylosaurus—a huge quadruped plant-eater with a blunt, tortoise-like head, covered in armor plating and spikes as if it wore a natural helmet. The dinosaur’s back was protected by what slightly resembled a massive turtle’s shell, likewise covered in armored plates, with a rim of stout spikes around the bottom edge. The creature’s tail was thick and also armored, ending in a knobby club as broad as Jason’s shoulders. It wasn’t quite like a turtle—there was no separation between the legs and the shell-like armor—but the beast was covered in bony plates and blunt spikes coating its entire body from the shoulders up. The Ankylosaur moved slowly and confidently, pausing to take bites from the bushes and other plants here and there, its thick legs and stumpy feet a lot like an elephant’s.
There was no way Jason wouldn’t remember that dinosaur’s name. Everyone knew what an Ankylosaurus was.
And it was brown with a pattern of lighter brown camouflage on its thick hide.
More camouflage! Jason thought.
It made sense, but Jason never would have guessed that dinosaurs would have blended into their environment so well. The thought excited and chilled Jason at the same time. He realized that if the herbivores were well-camouflaged, then the predators probably were as well...
As if to punctuate the point, Jason heard a yip sound from behind the lumbering Ankylosaur, and one of those chicken-like dinosaurs appeared trotting along behind it. Unlike the chicken dinosaurs Jason had run into near the wyvern’s cave, however, this one was bigger. It was slightly taller than Jason’s waist with a longer head and snout, a bobbing neck, and a lengthy feathered tail ending in a swell of dark plumage that weaved and dipped as the creature moved. This bipedal dinosaur was almost entirely covered in feathers, colored in browns a lot like a hawk that ran on the ground. There were hawk-like feathers everywhere on its body except for the very bottoms of its legs, the hooked claws extending from the bend in its short wings, and the front of its face, where its long snout gleamed with sharp, little teeth.
Another hawk-like dinosaur appeared behind it, also circling the Ankylosaur, then Jason saw two more. Ultimately, Jason saw five of the little predators orbiting the lumbering tank-like beast, clustering together then ranging apart like hyenas harassing a water buffalo just out of its reach. When one of the little dinosaurs dashed through a beam of sunlight piercing through the trees, Jason saw the glint of a sickle-like claw on one lively foot.
Raptors.
They were raptors of some kind. Peering more closely, Jason could see it now—each of those waist-height raptors had a single large, sickle-shaped claw riding high on each high foot. In that moment, Jason figured that those other smaller knee-high chicken dinosaurs were probably raptors as well. It was hard to see those special sickle-claws now—the creatures were nimble and always on the move, running or hopping around. Their wicked feet were largely concealed by the underbrush as well.
So what kind of raptors are these? Jason thought. He remembered the velociraptors from the Jurassic Park, though he knew that in real life, actual velociraptors were a lot smaller—maybe even as small as the first raptors he encountered. These ones were bigger—as tall as Jason's waist. He thought back to his childhood and remembered one of his favorite dinosaurs: Deinonychus. Those were the raptors that they probably modeled the Jurassic Park raptors after. Deinonychus were bigger than these raptors though, he thought.
And why the feathers?
Jason never would have thought that raptors would have so many feathers—almost everywhere from head to toe. They looked more like big birds ... and they moved like birds, too. But they weren't totally like birds. The raptors' tails were different, and they had claws on their wings, and their mouths—
Jason stopped contemplating when one of the raptors suddenly peeled off from chasing the Ankylosaurus and regarded him with strange, unreadable eyes.
The small predator cocked its head and made a trilling sound. Its feathered tail whipped back and forth twice like a cat’s.
Two more stopped chasing the Ankylosaur, and joined the first.
One of them made a strange cawing sound, just once.
It sounded like a question.
"Oh shit," Jason said.
Then, as the man's body filled with adrenaline that made his mind feel cold and the pain in his knee a little number, Jason felt a very real sense of danger. These raptors were much bigger than the chicken-sized ones...
And they were running his way...
Chapter 11
The raptors rushed in on nimble legs, and Jason felt a little burst of fear. He put his back to the tree and extended his cane before him.
With their eyes and mannerisms like a bird's, Jason couldn’t read the creatures. It wasn’t the same as dealing with a dog or another mammal. As the raptors moved, they gawked and bobbed, moving with quick jerky actions, surrounding him with caution. They were small—much smaller than Jason was—but he still had an uneasy feeling that they were very dangerous...
And the feathers! he thought. What a sight! As the raptors carefully approached, unsure and curious, not quite crossing the line into bravely attacking, Jason marveled at their colors and how the quills and soft feathers that looked like down fluffed out and moved with their slinky forms. The long tails—lo
nger than the raptors' bodies and necks together—were thin and coated with down, ending in strange fans at the tip, as if they used the larger feathers at their tail-tips for balance ... or for mating, perhaps.
The raptors’ eyes were a coppery-gold, and they all gazed at Jason with darting glances, alternating between looking at him straight on with cocked heads and turning to view Jason clearly with one eye...
They acted like birds—big birds with claws and teeth and tails—and Jason felt a creeping dread rising in him staring into those eyes. There was no spirit in there; no sympathy. The eyes of the raptors were alien to Jason’s mammalian brain.
The man moved and shifted against the tree, watching all five of the curious and dangerous creatures as they rushed and hopped around him, hovering an uncomfortable distance away. Jason struggled to keep the tree trunk at his back—he had to keep them from going around behind him; he knew that much.
Letting out quick yips and trilling sounds, the raptors made curious noises. They asked him questions.
One of them suddenly darted in a little too close, and Jason reflexively lifted his cane to it. It immediately jumped back with a surprised, bird-like squawk.
Another hissed, chilling Jason to the bone.
These things were probable forty pounds at most, but he had no illusions about them being too small to hurt him. Jason's eyes kept glancing down to their feet in fear. He eyed the sickle-like claws; dark, hidden hooks as big as a small pocket knife’s blade. The killing claws of these creatures were literally as long as the blade of his own pocket knife that was in his pocket now. He watched them flutter and flap their strange, small wings, and he realized that under those feathers were arms with long, catching claws. The big feathers of their wings merely sprouted out from under their forearms and elbows.
One of the little monsters gnashed its teeth, giving an experimental snap.
Another darted in from the side, testing Jason, and he swung his cane with a mighty swish, making the raptor leap back with a squawk.
