by Eddie Patin
Then, one of the larger ones looked up at the tree line where Jason was standing.
Its big, dark eyes stopped on Jason...
Jason froze.
Shit! he thought.
The monster turned and started heading his way with long, loping steps.
Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap...
Freezing fear like nothing Jason had ever felt before rose in his guts like a geyser of ice. His hand—suddenly numb and shaking—almost dropped his cane.
"Oh God save me..." Jason muttered, feeling a tremendous buzzing rise up in his head and around his ears.
The other two mini-rexes looked over and changed course as well. Suddenly all three of them were bounding along, their heavy, clawed feet thumping on the grassy valley floor; all heading his way...
"Oh my God!" Jason whispered, frozen to the spot. His knees felt like jelly and his whole body was buzzing.
The mini-rexes were massive and their long, toothy snouts seemed to smile. Jason could clearly see the long T-Rex-like teeth gleaming in the sun where they rested over the creatures’ lower lips like a goofy overbite.
When Jason started to feel the thumping under his feet, he finally drove himself to flee!
Run! his mind screamed. Run, goddamn it. Run!
He finally snapped out of it.
Turning into the forest again, Jason ran like hell, sprinting as fast as he could—damn the pain in his knee—not even noticing the little bite from the raptor stinging on his thigh anymore. He ran for his life, pumping his arms and carrying his cane like an afterthought, pounding at the soft earth with his boots and not caring if any little raptors or other small dinosaurs appeared in his path.
When Jason glanced behind him, he saw the first of the three mini-rexes appear in the trees next to where he’d been standing and watching. Its huge, feathered body was silhouetted in shadow by the sunny valley behind it. Jason could tell that the monster was far taller than he was. He had an idea of their height before, looking down at the scene in the valley, but now, Jason could really appreciate how massive the predator was compared to a man...
It was coming for him.
The beast spotted him effortlessly and continued into the trees, followed by the two others.
"Shit!" Jason cried, sprinting on, his neck and face exploding with his frantic heartbeat and pulsing blood coursing with fear.
He scanned the forest in desperation, waiting for an idea to leap out at him and save his life, but there was nothing. Jason considered running off ahead and dropping down to hide in the underbrush, but what if those things could smell him? A horrific scene played through the man's imagination of their heavy steps stalking around near his hiding place. He could imagine hearing their large snouts snuffling around as they sought him out. Jason could visualize one of the monsters finding him then unceremoniously plucking him out of the bush by one of his legs as if he was a doll. There would be a moment of stark terror, then they'd play tug-of-war with his body, tearing Jason limb from limb while he screamed and wished that he was at home, sitting on his couch...
Besides, it was too late to try and fall into ground cover now—they’d see him for sure.
Jason could feel the thumps of the mini-rexes’ heavy footfalls as they pursued him into the woods. One of them let out a low, bellowing sound that rumbled his guts, and the man almost lost control of his legs in fright.
He ran on and on, begging the world to throw him some sort of escape!
Then, he looked up at the massive trees. There were all sorts of trees—even huge pine trees with long branches as thick as Jason’s legs or bigger.
Jason thought about pulling his pistol, but quickly decided that he couldn’t stop three medium-sized tyrannosaurs that might each weigh a metric ton; not now, not like this, not this fast.
Fear scrambled through Jason’s veins, scratching along his insides with icy claws and cascading numbness as his boots pounded the earth. He looked back, only to see the three giant beasts still there, calmly running along with him, slowly gaining...
Jason screamed in utter terror and scanned the trees ahead of him for options.
Chapter 13
Pursued by giant predators, Jason dashed toward the first pine tree he thought he could climb, ignoring the agony of his burning legs and stabbing pains in his bad knee. He launched himself into its thick branches, dropping his cane onto the forest floor. Struggling and hefting himself up the tree like a damned monkey—the adrenaline buzzing through his entire being making him feel more like a skinny teenage boy than an out-of-shape thirty-three-year-old with a bad knee—Jason climbed as high as he could as fast as he could. He knew that he had to get away from carnivores that could probably reach ten feet or more up in the air with their long jaws and huge teeth...
After a moment of thinking he was safe, a wild fear shook through Jason when he looked down and saw a massive, feathered skull thrusting in at him with open jaws full of gleaming fangs! Not high enough!
"Shit!"
In the chaos of the tree branches, Jason instinctively scrabbled around the trunk to the other side of the tree like a damned squirrel as a huge mouth big enough to close around his body—rows of teeth as big as his fingers—flashed at him! The man narrowly escaped out of reach before pulling himself up again, then pulled himself up higher and higher as fast as he could.
Bits of bark flew everywhere and the thick odor of pine and tree-sap filled Jason’s nose. He was tearing the shit out of his hands and scraping up his body, but he didn’t care. He felt a branch scratch roughly at his cheek, but he remained focused and climbed. Jason tried like hell to conquer the tree. He didn’t stop, even as his knee was wracked with intense pain from pushing him up, branch after branch. Jason climbed until his primal survival brain finally shouted at him that he was high enough.
Jason slowed, buzzing and numb all over with bits of tree bark in his eyes and on his lips. Tiny branches clutched at his shaggy hair and scratched at his skin.
And he felt the thumping of the mini-rexes down below.
There was a low grunt and a huffing growl.
Looking down, Jason saw the strange forms of the three mini-rexes from above. He was maybe twenty feet high in the tree and unless those horrific predators could climb—or knock down the tree, he thought—it looked like he was safe for now.
The monsters paced around down below, appearing as long necks and narrow bodies and tails, swerving around as they wandered, no doubt wondering how to get to their prey. Jason could see now that the monsters’ feathers were not like a normal bird’s feathers. They were long and soft; downy and more like quills, a mix of dark brown and lighter tan colors with tufts of white sprinkled in here and there. The mini-rexes were colored like gargantuan birds of prey.
Every once in a while, Jason saw one of the beasts crane its neck to peer up at him, and he watched that goofy yet terrifying grin of exposed teeth at the front of its jaws as the creature regarded him with dark, glittering eyes...
"Holy hell..." Jason said finally, feeling the oppressing pain of his body flood in on him. The agony of his knee started pulsing in dark, stabbing waves.
Safe? Jason wondered with a sigh. Am I really safe? What's next?!
Grunting and groaning in pain all over, Jason hefted himself around the big branches he was tangled up in until he could sit more comfortably on a large one thick enough to support his weight. He had to take his weight off of his bad knee—he felt like he was going to die from the pain!
Jason's left foot suddenly slipped on the chunky bark of a branch beneath his seat, and the man’s mind exploded in fear as he felt for an instant that he was falling, but Jason caught himself with an arm and an elbow and his right foot, which made his bad knee twinge so badly that he cried out.
Pulling himself back into a sitting position, Jason immediately put his right foot up on another branch so that he could massage his ruined knee and the muscles that were so inflamed and angry above it. He almost cried from the pain—te
ars welled up in his eyes—but he rubbed the quadriceps above the kneecap anyway, even though it didn’t really help.
He took a sip of water from his CamelBak's bite valve and looked down again at the mini-rexes thumping around below.
One of the big ones had squatted down on its haunches like a huge chicken, and it tilted its neck and head, watching Jason. Its massive tail lashed slowly back and forth.
"Damn it," Jason muttered to himself. "This isn’t good."
He watched the huge creatures down below while he massaged his leg. Now, having seen the predators more closely, Jason could tell that the mini-rexes—that’s what he’d call them since he didn’t know what they were for sure—were indeed a lot like a T-Rex, but smaller and slender. The carnivores were still gigantic compared to himself, of course.
As the deadly creatures moved around at the base of the tree, rumbling and making deep noises at each other here and there, Jason took a better look. They each had two tiny claws on each of their little front arms, almost hidden entirely by the brown quills and feathers that hung down around their shoulders. Each monster had two small ridges on their heads in front of their eyes and up on their snouts, similar to tiny horns but not. Their long jaws and snouts were very T-Rex-like; Jason had gotten an uncomfortably close look at one of them. Even the teeth were the same: curved slightly and at least as long as Jason's longest fingers, off-white and serrated, just like the teeth Jason had once seen in the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a museum.
Jason thought back to the big dinosaur predators he remembered from his youth. The only names he could think of was Tyrannosaurus Rex and Allosaurus, which was smaller. Were these Allosaurs? No, he thought. Allosaurs had longer front arms and had three claws on each hand; not two. For as much as Jason thought he knew about dinosaurs, he was disappointed at how little he remembered. Then again, it had been almost two decades since school and his brief obsession with the fictional genetic creations on Isla Nublar. It didn’t surprise Jason that after all this time, he mainly held onto just the most iconic ideas.
He was definitely surprised at the dinosaurs' feathers, and the bird-like traits in all of the predators he’d seen so far. Hell—it took Jason several glances before he even realized that the raptors he saw in the beginning weren’t just some sort of weird chickens. He’d always thought of dinosaurs as green and scaly; reptilian-looking.
Once again, the feathers of the mini-rexes—dark and almost glossy with accents that gave the impressions of striped and spotted patterns here and there—reminded Jason of his dream.
In the short story that he'd written for school, Jason had tried his best to describe the Dreadwraith as it patrolled around the outside of a haunted house that his main character was stuck in. If the character—he couldn’t remember his name by now—ever tried to escape the hostile home, the great, feathery T-Rex-creature would catch him outside. Later in life, Jason even painted a picture of the Dreadwraith, which his mom had hung in the hall between the living room and the kitchen. In the colorful but dark acrylic painting, the black and crimson monster was outside the haunted house and fighting the animated carpet-snake like it had in his story, tearing it to ribbons...
Jason had never thought of his Dreadwraith as a dinosaur before. But now—looking down at those terrible, large theropods and contemplating their similarity to the monster from his childhood dreams—something really bothered the man, and he couldn’t quite place it...
"Well," he said to himself, drawing a curious grunt from below, "I’ve got plenty of time to think about it, don't I?"
There was suddenly a flutter in front of him—Jason gasped in surprise—and a huge bug landed on a branch nearby. Adrenaline threatened to rise again, but the man held onto the tree and tried to keep calm. He didn’t even recognize what the hell the thing was. It was like a mix between wasp and a praying mantis, green and blue and as big as his hand. The insect moved slowly across the branch as if it was some sort of alien.
Jason wished that he had his cane with him so that he could knock the nasty thing off of the branch.
But his cane was down there...
He looked down again and couldn’t see his black, polypropylene cane on the forest floor, but figured that it was still there. Those eight-foot-tall predators loitering around his tree wouldn’t have any reason to mess with it.
After a while, the big bug fluttered its bright red wings and took off again, disappearing into the forest.
"What the hell am I gonna do?!" Jason asked himself.
Before realizing it, he found himself pulling out his phone, turning off Airplane mode, and opening YouTube.
Yep. Still offline.
"Fuck!"
He didn't have any hope for a signal, or to magically wake up out of a very realistic dream, but Jason obeyed the compulsion to check his phone anyway.
Whether the man was stuck back in time or ... on some alien world, he was here—up in a tree. There was no denying it. This terrible world wouldn't wait for him to figure things out. It would eat him if he let it. If this was a crazy drug trip or something, or if Jason had slipped into a coma back on the hiking trail and was winding through a sea of vivid, crazy dreams, then there was no way for him to know.
Despite the uncertainty, the pain all over his body felt real. That was for sure. Jason's scratched-up skin, sticky in some areas with tree sap, and the thick, oily smell of pine in his nose sure seemed real enough. The stinging of his eardrums from shooting his Glock without hearing protection felt real...
If Jason was stuck here—wherever or whenever here was—he had to make choices. He couldn’t just sit in a tree the whole time.
"I can try to survive," he said, talking to himself like he so frequently did when he was alone, "or I can just lie down and die."
But to what end? Jason thought. What was the end game here? He was in the middle of the woods with no purpose or goal in sight. There was no way home as far as he knew. He just—
"God..." Jason scoffed. He was so freaking hot. All this time he’d been wearing his walking clothes, which were all for a cold, snowy morning in Ridgeview, Colorado.
The man paused his planning and shuffled around all of his gear. He struggled to remove his sweaty fleece jacket without falling off of the branch or dropping anything. Once Jason was finally settled in, still hot as hell but feeling a lot better, he tied the jacket onto his backpack and took another drink, while cinching his CamelBak straps tighter around his shoulders.
"So ... survive, and ... then what?" Jason asked himself. One of the mini-rexes let out a curious grunt down below. "Then just hope that I can find some way home back to the present?! Where the hell do I even begin?"
Survival, he thought. The basic elements of survival.
Jason looked up to see how long he had until nightfall. Thick, spindly branches extended in all directions above him, blotting out the sky. He suddenly remembered the giant spider that had attacked him behind his house. Feeling a sudden burst of panic, Jason scanned the tree he was in and the other tall trees nearby, searching for huge arachnids.
He didn't see any.
"I need to build a shelter," he said. "Find food. Water..."
Jason's pack held a liter and a half of water, but it wouldn’t last forever. And it wasn’t like he was going to find any tap water around here. He’d have to get water from a stream or a creek or whatever he could find. There’d be bacteria. He’d have to boil the water if he could, else he’d get sick...
The man reached down to the metal coffee cup hanging on his pack's side from the paracord lanyard he’d built. Pulling the mug around and opening the latching lid, Jason tilted the cup back and drank the last dregs of his black coffee, which was now lukewarm. He closed it again and turned the cup over in his hands.
I could use this to boil water, he thought. He’d just need to put the coffee cup in a fire and not let it get too hot, or it would melt the plastic lid. Even still, if the soft parts melted away, he’d be able to boil water in
the metal cup that remained...
"Water first," Jason said. "Then shelter near a source of water. Then food."
Jason adjusted his butt on the big branch.
"But ... I’m not gonna get shit done stuck up in this tree..."
They’ll leave eventually, Jason thought, looking down at the mini-rexes that wandered around and looked up at him here and there. Damn, but those beasts could see a long way! Jason suddenly realized with a shock how easily the first one had spotted him from where they were gathered down in the valley. Jason had been up a hill and in front of a dark tree line at least two hundred yards away. Those mini-rexes must have had sharp eyesight like eagle's or a hawk's. The thought was terrifying...
"Just go down when they leave," he said quietly. "I'll get my cane, find water, make shelter, find food ... then ... find my way home? Somehow...?"
Jason waited, hanging in the upper branches of the massive pine tree. The carnivores waited to make him a snack out of him down below. He watched pterosaurs soar in the deep blue sky through the scant open spaces in the canopy of the thick trees. Jason massaged his painful knee and ignored his grumbling stomach.
After being up in the pine tree for a few hours, he longed to be back on the ground, but the monsters remained, patiently waiting him out.
Jason sipped at his water carefully—just enough to tide him over until he could find a source somewhere below. He pondered how in the hell he could possibly get home, but had no freaking idea. Solving the problem of getting back to his own time was like trying to come up with an answer to a question with zero options—there was nothing to work with!
As the sun lowered up the hill in the west, the forest gradually slipped into darkness. By the time the ridge in the sky to the east was painted with piercing rays of gold and orange, the woods where Jason hid in the tree was full of inky shadows.
When the sky outside the forest darkened to twilight, the inside of the forest was as black as pitch.
