The Wyvern in the Wilderlands: Planeswalking Monster Hunters for Hire (Sci-fi Multiverse Adventure Survival / Weird Fantasy) (Monster Hunting for Fun and ... Hunters and Mythical Monsters) Book 1)

by Eddie Patin

  Shit.

  They were closing in.

  Jason was suddenly reminded of geese. And seagulls. He remembered the way that geese would gather around him at the lake whenever he threw them bits of bread. Geese are aggressive and would bite if they became too excited or defensive. A large group of geese swarming around someone throwing bread would get pushier and pushier, growing in boldness as they fought for the bread chunks dropped in the mud. Jason remembered the time that one goose at the lake became brave enough to try to pull the entire loaf of bread right out of his hand! Seagulls were even worse, circling and diving around to get food. Once while on the beach in Oregon, a seagull swooped in out of the blue and roughly pulled a small bag of potato chips directly out of Jason’s grip. Birds were mean, competitive, and aggressive. And these raptors were a little bigger than geese, but with longer legs and claws and teeth...

  These raptors were acting just like geese did, crowding in to get at a loaf of bread.

  But these bird-like creatures weren’t after Jason’s food. They were after him.

  One brave raptor ran in again, and Jason cried out in surprise when he felt a little nip on his left leg! He spun, inviting a stabbing pain in his right knee, and swung his cane but missed the dinosaur. It darted back out of reach with blinding speed. Another suddenly came in too close on the man's right side and he swung his cane again, feeling the tip of it graze the creature. The raptor hissed in response to the glancing blow and jumped back, whipping its tail from side to side...

  "Shit," Jason muttered. "Shit, shit..."

  The five of them were closing in on him, tighter in now. One lowered its head, just like a damned goose, and hissed at Jason, stretching its front claws out wide.

  Switching his cane to his left side, Jason reached back with his shaking right hand and found his Glock in its holster. The swell of the weapon’s grip in his palm comforted him, and he steadied his hand. The man drew the pistol, aiming the barrel low in front of him.

  Jason felt his heartbeat quicken. Blood pounded lightly in his ears. These raptors were going to try to eat him.

  He could shoot them, of course. He was fairly certain that he could kill them all.

  But Jason didn’t know why he was here, or even where here was. Aside from the presence of the wyvern and the cannibals, he could have assumed that he was somehow back in time, stuck in the Cretaceous Period or something. But for all Jason knew, he could be anywhere—who knows? He could be on another planet with wyverns and inhuman primitives for some reason...

  How long would it be before he found his way home? Could he even find his way home?

  Jason stood with his back to the tree, heart hammering, cane and pistol extended at the waist-high raptors that were colored like hawks and closing in around him. He wondered, How long will it be before I can get more ammo? If he was stuck here forever—God forbid—he would have to make these rounds last and use them just for emergencies.

  "This is a damned emergency, don’t you think?!" he exclaimed aloud to himself, then realized that he was going to hyperventilate if he didn’t do something soon.

  A raptor rushed in again.

  Jason swung his cane. He waved his arms and roared loudly at the creatures, making them each take a gawking step back. But then they seemed to strengthen their resolve and closed in again...

  "Shit!" he exclaimed as another raptor lunged in.

  He swung the cane, and felt it connect solidly with the thing’s head.

  "Yeah!" Jason shouted. "Get the hell back, shithead!"

  The dinosaur faltered then shook its slender skull, ruffled its feathers, and hissed at him.

  Just then, one of the raptors on the man's left side leapt up at him! It pounced through the air just like Jason had seen the smaller, bird-like dinosaurs do to the bugs in the forest, leading with an open mouth and all of its claws spread wide. Jason felt the weight of the creature hit him in the side and shoulder and he swung his arm and cane at it, suddenly blinded with an intense fear that one of those sickle-claws would slash through his belly in the next instant...

  The slicing claw attack never came. With a swing of his cane that made his knee twinge, Jason managed to throw the small creature off of him. Just as the little bastard fell away, Jason noticed another darting in from his right side and he felt a sharp pain on his right thigh. Looking down, he saw the raptor with its jaws wide and biting his leg. The little needle-like teeth were mostly caught up on his cargo pocket.

  Jason suddenly gave up on discretion.

  He put his Glock's muzzle to the thing’s little, feathered cranium as it jumped to bring its claws into play and shot it in the head.

  The loud pop of the firearm was startling, and the dinosaur immediately let go of Jason's leg and fell away, its small skull burst and its face smashed. The man turned to face down the other raptors and saw all four of them hopping and sprinting away into the woods. Birds and other creatures all around in the forest exploded into motion, flapping and fleeing and flying away in a flurry of hoots and small noises. The last Jason saw of the four surviving raptors were the feathery tufts of their tails disappearing into the bush.

  Suddenly, the wooded hillside around him was quiet again.

  Jason froze, looking around and slowly taking his finger off of the trigger. His heart pounded and his breath was fast and fearful.

  He looked down and stared at the dead raptor. It lay still on the forest floor at his feet. Holy hell—even though it was somewhere between three and four feet tall, its tail was as long as a man...

  Calming down, Jason holstered his weapon after making sure that no more raptors were sneaking up on him. He had an unbearable urge to crouch down—despite the pain—and examine the dead dinosaur with the crushed head; to pull at its hooked fingers and take a closer look at its arms. He wanted to see what it felt like under those feathers; to touch and feel that long, curved claw on each nimble foot.

  Instead, Jason turned away and hurried down the hill.

  He continued walking the same way the duckbills had gone, figuring that there had to be some sort of safety down there—that’s why they went that way, right? Jason felt a stinging in his leg where the creature had bit him and wanted to look at his wound, but he felt a pressing need to get the hell out of the forest before he slowed down again. The pistol shot scared away the raptors, but they’d probably be back...

  Every other step down the gentle slope brought terrible pain to Jason's bad knee as he dodged around fallen trees and roots and heavy underbrush. The man tried to do what he could with his cane to help and moved on and on. Something told Jason that he was heading to the valley. This place was like Ridgeview—at least partly—and he felt like he was somewhere to the south of where his house would have been. The valley leading to the ridge was ahead. Even though Jason had been pretty turned around by now after fleeing the wyvern’s cave, the man had always had an amazing sense of direction that he could never explain. Now, he felt pretty good about the direction he was going. Downhill felt like east.

  The combination compass and emergency whistle hanging from Jason's pack clicked as he hustled through the woods, and his big, metal coffee cup bounced against his back on its paracord sling as he hobbled along.

  Eventually, as he expected, Jason burst through the forest’s edge out into the warm sunlight again. The same valley he saw before stretched out before him at the bottom of a gently sloping hill, and Jason gasped at the sight. Ahead, across the valley, was the ridge. Jason immediately had a sense—judging by where he was in relation to the unique landmark that named his town—that if this was Ridgeview, he should be standing about two neighborhoods to the south of his house.

  But the similarity to his hometown wasn't what caught the man's attention.

  Jason stood at the edge of the thick woods, looking a few hundred yards down the hillside at the big valley that ran from north to south on his neighborhood's side of the ridge. Here, in this crazy, wild world, the valley held many great beast
s—other dinosaurs, large and small—that tickled the memories and fantasies of Jason’s youth. Down in the valley, easy to see from the great shadows they cast in the bright sunlight, stood a languid herd of horned, grazing dinosaurs on all fours. They were something like a Triceratops—that iconic three-horned, crested herbivore that everyone in the free world knew—but not quite. The horns on these beasts' armored foreheads weren’t as long as they should have been, while the horn on their noses seemed too long. Small spikes extended from the edges of the shield-like crests that protected the animals' necks. These ceratopsians didn’t have feathers. They were instead covered with thick hide like the duckbills were; colored with a blend of greyish-green and brown. Their crests, however, were brilliant, sporting bold blue and red shades that must have been evolved for mating displays or intimidation. Jason could also see the herd of duckbills down there—dozens of them, maybe a hundred—further down the valley to the south, grazing on the lush, green grasses and shrubs down there. He could see the quick, small forms of raptors of various sizes and other little feathered dinosaurs down there too, scavenging and hunting smaller creatures. There was also a small group of ostrich-looking dinosaurs walking through the valley in a close cluster, their long legs and neck naked, but heavy, dark feathers coated their bodies and long tails. Jason smiled in wonder when he realized that those ostrich dinosaurs were much taller than he thought at first glance—they must have been eight feet tall or more at the shoulder, and their small heads bobbed back and forth much higher than that atop long, slender necks. He stared at the lumbering ceratopsians again who fed on the grasses, indifferent to the valley around them; positively huge in size!

  "Look at all of them!" Jason marveled to himself. "Real dinosaurs!"

  He would have never thought of dinosaurs having feathers. The last time Jason had paid any attention to the development of the paleontology world was ... over ten years ago. Those big ostrich dinosaurs down there literally looked like big ostriches, though with long, tufted tails and elongated skulls. They had the same slender snouts as the raptors, or perhaps more like the bills of big geese.

  But for all of the wonder and amazement, Jason felt a numbing fear growing in his heart. His stomach felt cold and then, when he was paying attention to it, it grumbled in hunger. He could suddenly feel the pain in his knee pulsing through him with each beat of his heart. The heat of the tropical air was stifling through his fleece jacket. His face prickled from the heat, and his leg stung where the raptor bit him.

  He was thirsty.

  Jason drank more from his water bladder—which made the whole experience suddenly feel more real—and the man was suddenly overwhelmed with relief and gratitude that he had all of his walking gear with him. If he’d been walking through his neighborhood instead of on the back path that morning, he might not have brought his backpack with him to this terrifying other world; other time.

  "But why?!" he demanded.

  With a long sigh, Jason let the bite valve fall from his lips, and looked up into the sky. He felt an overwhelming urge to be home, sitting on his couch, turning on the TV and his console. He wanted to play a video game more than he wanted to breathe just then...

  He closed his eyes, feeling the sun on his cheeks, wishing to be home.

  "Where the hell am I...?" Jason asked, opening his eyes and watching the eagles soar and circle on thermals high in the air. He suddenly realized that they weren’t eagles—they were pterosaurs; flying dinosaurs with broad wingspans and long beaks like pelicans. Some had long spikes or crests extending from the backs of their skulls.

  Looking around the valley again, Jason realized that he was south of the wyvern’s cave. If he were to follow the tree line to the north, he’d eventually see the cave mouth appear around the curving edge of the forest. He looked down at the little compass on his pack, and confirmed that he was interpreting the directions properly.

  With a quick look back into the darker woods to make sure no raptors were sneaking up behind him, Jason looked back out at the valley and pulled out his phone. He turned the screen on, unlocked it, and saw that there was still no service. Not a damned bit.

  He compulsively opened YouTube again, and saw the same message of being offline.

  The battery was already ten percent lower than when he looked at his phone last.

  "Damn," he said to himself. "Searching for a signal that’s not there..."

  As Jason pulled down his menu to put the phone into Airplane mode to save his battery, there was a sudden explosion of movement and the cracking of splitting trees down in the valley below. He almost dropped his phone in surprise when he looked down there, and saw a massive predator burst out of the trees near the ostrich dinosaurs! The huge beast ran on two powerful hind legs and had two tiny front arms—not unlike a Tyrannosaurus Rex, though perhaps a little smaller and thinner—and it rushed into the group of smaller dinosaurs, its huge jaws wide...

  Ostrich dinosaurs panicked and sprinted away in all directions as fast as galloping horses, fluffy feathers raised and bobbing in the air. They fled the tall and muscular predator—the Mini-rex—with ease. They were much faster. And the mini-rex was feathered too! From the top of its menacing skull, all along the monster’s neck and back, then partway down its long, thick tail was a coat of strange dark-brown quills. The massive beast ran along after the tall ostrich dinosaurs, immediately losing ground and slowing down. It reminded Jason of seeing lions on TV suddenly (and often unsuccessfully) ambushing prey from hiding, bursting from the shadows with raw power then slowing down as the fleet-footed gazelle or zebra dashed away...

  As the ostrich dinosaurs fled the large predator, clustering again and sprinting along the woods, Jason gasped when a second mini-rex suddenly erupted from hiding in the tree line right in their path...

  Chapter 12

  When Jason was a child, he had a dream that stuck with him for the rest of his life.

  He didn’t remember exactly when as a child he had that dream, but ever since, the monster in the basement of his mind was always there, always waiting...

  In middle school, Jason revived the monster from his dream in a short story that he wrote for English class. In those murky waters of his oldest memories a beast roamed the darkness of his subconscious—a great and terrible creature that was part Tyrannosaur, part gigantic bird of prey...

  Jason called it the Dreadwraith. It was much like a Tyrannosaurus Rex in almost every way: huge and bulky, twenty feet tall and forty feet long with a massive, three-foot long skull full of serrated teeth like steak-knives. It walked leaned forward with unexpected agility on its two powerfully-muscled hind legs, and had a long, broad tail held up behind it for balance. Unlike a T-Rex, however, the Dreadwraith was dark and shadowy with diminutive wings where its tiny arms should be, and the nightmare creature was colored with a blend of crimson red and deep black. The monster shook the ground wherever it walked, and it was coated with thick, ebony feathers that ran from its skull, over its back, shoulders, and thighs, then partway down its thick tail...

  The Dreadwraith from Jason's distant dream looked a lot like the mini-rexes that were chasing the ostrich dinosaurs now...

  When Jason suddenly registered the resemblance between the smaller tyrannosaur-cousins and the black and crimson monster from his childhood dream, a chill trickled down his spine. As he watched the two mini-rexes converge on the ostrich dinosaurs—who reacted with speedy reflexes and bolted away from both of them—Jason dropped his phone.

  "Damn!"

  Those mini-rexes were a lot smaller than the Dreadwraith—smaller than the T-Rex he remembered studying when he was young and later seeing on Jurassic Park—but they also appeared to be less bulky and of a lighter build. The large predators were still a horrifying eight feet tall—as far as Jason could tell from up on the hillside—and he was certain that one bite from their massive jaws would mean instant death to a puny human like him...

  Jason crouched down and picked up his phone, frantically br
ushing the dirt off of it before returning it to its special pouch. A primal fear was building inside the man that he didn’t fully understand. Just seeing those dark, feathered predators set a serious unease simmering under Jason's skin, and he resisted the urge to just turn and run away into the forest as fast as he could.

  There was something about those creatures—those mini-rexes—that terrified Jason. It probably had something to do with the fact that they could eat him in a few bites and were too big and powerful to resist. He was also chilled at how similar they looked to the Dreadwraith from his dreams. Their colors were different—dark brown like a golden eagle with intermittent highlights of lighter, sandy tan—and the carnivores obviously weren’t actual T-Rex’s, but the way that their strange, quill-like feathers ran along their dorsal sides reminded him a lot of the dread monster from his dream. The resemblance frightened Jason for some reason, a strange color of fear that he didn't understand...

  When Jason looked back down again at the action in the valley, he saw that the chase was winding down. The ostrich dinosaurs had all escaped and were sprinting off as a tight group down the valley to the south, their big, dark-brown feathers puffed out and ruffling in the wind they made with their movement. By God, they really did look like giant ostriches with tails!

  The two mini-rexes had also slowed down and drew in close to each other. Then, a slightly smaller one emerged from the trees—perhaps a juvenile.

  "There are three!" Jason exclaimed quietly to himself, watching the large beasts pad around down below. They scanned the valley around them.

  Something suddenly slivered over Jason's foot and he yelped in surprise. Looking down, the man saw another one of those giant millipedes moving away from him. The huge arthropod was over three feet long and as thick as a beer bottle and the same glossy, dark brown.

  Jason shook his head and looked back down to the mini-rexes. The three mighty predators were walking lazily through the valley looking around at the other dinosaurs in the area.