by Eddie Patin
"Fuck!" he shouted through a wild scream of pain. Jason frantically pulled at the dinosaur’s winged right arm to let the claws loose, just like he did sometimes when his cat, Zelda, became stuck in his skin back home. Only now, the claws were much bigger and dug down into his muscles, causing shocking jolts of disorienting pain to zip through his nerves. As the man pulled the claws loose, his left hand fluttered with the weird feeling. Jason tried not to cry out again.
Other dinosaurs trilled and chirped around in the pitch-black night, and spots flared across Jason's vision from his Glock's muzzle flash, he realized that the glow of the coals nearby was gone.
The raptor at his feet thrashed once, twice, and Jason scrambled to get away from the beast, facing the scraggly tree behind him. He reached up and fumbled up for any branches he could find while being blind and winced in the darkness as his left arm pulsed and seemed to sizzle with fiery pain. He realized that he still had his gun in his hand, which was numb with adrenaline.
Something big ran by behind him, quick steps in the black night.
Shit.
Jason holstered his Glock as carefully as he could—being careful not to shoot himself in the ass in the dark—then turned fully into the unknown tree. He felt blindly for bigger branches, pulling himself up. He was stabbed in the face by unseen twigs and banged his head more than once on larger, scratchy branches. Still, he pushed onward and upward, higher and higher.
When he felt that he was high enough, the man strived to get even further up, even though the cuts in his shoulder felt like they were on fire and his bad knee was agonizing. He had to get high enough that the mini-rexes wouldn’t be able to reach him if they came up this way.
Down below, Jason heard the noises of raptors and other dinosaurs running and hopping around in the darkness. He heard little growls and the sounds of fighting. Small bodies fluttered and scrabbled around under the tree.
Probably fighting over the body, he thought.
"Goddamn it!" Jason muttered, grimacing against the pain as he pulled himself higher and higher in the tree, blindly coating his body with pine needles and bark chunks and probably getting his clothing and hair sticky with tree sap.
So much damned pain. Constant pain.
Better than dying, he thought.
"Just keep telling yourself that," he said.
But is this real?
The singed and raw edges of sliced skin on his left shoulder sure felt fucking real.
When Jason felt much higher than he needed to be, he finally slowed down and felt around in the pitch-black night for a branch thick enough to sit comfortably on. After a little while of trial and error, he managed to blindly find a spot where he could rest without another big branch blocking his head or body.
He stopped moving at last and breathed in the quiet air for a while, listening to the rustling of dinosaurs down on the ground. He heard them scraping; tearing. There were little scuffles and animalistic sounds of warnings and arguments here and there.
His knee throbbed with stabbing pain, and his shoulder flared hotly. He was probably bleeding.
"What the hell happened?!" he muttered, looking up at the brilliant mural of stars in the night sky. Jason could see all of the stars, along with the cloudy band of a nebula. Maybe it was the swirling rim of the galaxy he was in; he didn’t know.
The shelter had collapsed.
Jason thought for sure that he tied it all down nice and tight. True, it had been a while since he worked with knots in any truly useful way—mostly he just rigged up paracord for this and that to make daily life easier—but he knew ropes. He knew knots. He’d spent time with his dad in his youth on sailboats and in Boy Scouts. When Jason had set up that ramshackle canopy out of the dinosaur hide, paracord, and fallen timber, it was solid.
It should have been solid, even against that heavy rain.
So what the hell happened?!
Maybe his knots weren’t as good as he thought they were...
When Jason moved again, he felt the injuries from the raptor’s claws tear open once more, and the skin of his shoulder and surrounding areas that were cut seemed to catch fire. His knee pulsed with a dull, stabbing pain.
"Damn it..."
Taking off his backpack, Jason first pulled out his flashlight and shined it down to the ground. Through the narrow LED beam, he saw the dead raptor perhaps a dozen feet down—maybe more.
"Hopefully I'm high enough," he said to himself.
The dead body was colored with a mix of dark brown and cream quills. There were red blooms of blood staining the feathers of its chest in at least two places where he'd shot it. Its long snout was cracked open, and he could see the beast's pink tongue lolling out between its small and sharp hooked teeth. The eye that Jason could see was open and glassy, and the thing's head wobbled from side to side as smaller raptors tore at its neck and body. Several little monsters roamed around the corpse, taking bites out of it whenever and wherever they could, fighting for space and darting in and out of the scene. Only the largest of the little predators stuck around for long, but all were eventually displaced back into the dance of scavenging because of nervousness when other animals came in too close.
Jason shined the light down to the crook to examine the remains of his shelter. It was exactly as he remembered it—posts and beams pulled apart and the hide sheet draped haphazardly over the mess.
He wanted to check his Glock to see how many rounds he'd shot—he thought it was three?—but he didn’t want to risk dropping the gun. He’d check in the morning.
Biting back his fear, Jason checked the wounds on his left arm, cleaning them out a little with his meager water supply and doing what he could to hold the cut skin together with half of his Band-Aids supply.
Then, still groggy but full of pain, Jason strapped in again with paracord for another night in a tree...
In the morning, all of the little predators were gone and all that was left of the raptor’s body was a collection of sinewy bones and unwanted strips of skin and scales and feathers.
Jason climbed down carefully, amazed that he was lucky enough to find this tree in pitch darkness so close to his shelter. He took great care not to stretch out his left arm—he didn’t want the lacerations to pull apart again—and he winced at the twinging pain in his bad knee whenever he had to flex his right quad.
He carefully looked over the remains of the dinosaur.
It was definitely a raptor of some kind. Seeing its dead body reduced to a skeleton coated with strips of tendons and muscle sheathing was like looking at a picture of a fossil. The way the dinosaur had curled up its arms and legs when it died reminded Jason of looking at photos of the dark brown ancient remains of such creatures preserved in museums. Its tail was stretched out—much longer than Jason figured it would be—and its head, stripped of its eyes, tongue, and some skin, stared at nothing while revealing a tight, toothy grin.
The raptor was almost as tall as Jason. Well ... maybe chest-height. But as short as it was, with that long tail and its long, S-shaped neck, it must have been almost ten feet from snout to tuft!
Terrifying.
Was this a Velociraptor, a la Jurassic Park?
"No," Jason said as the chirping and trilling sounds of the forest woke up around him. "Too big." Maybe it was a Deinonychus—a man-sized raptor popular before the release of those movies. He had no idea. Perhaps Deinonychus were supposed to be smaller as well.
Jason walked back to the shelter on aching feet and legs to assess the damage. He picked up his cane when he found it. Lifting up one of the support posts from the fallen structure, Jason was surprised to see scores of tiny dark vines grasping at the wood; hooked around and into it. The miniscule vines tore away with a shredding sound as he lifted the beam.
Where the hell did those come from?
As Jason resurrected the structure, pushing all of the wood back into place and tightening down his paracord joints, he saw that almost the entire structure had been embedd
ed with those tiny, subtle vines. The tendrils grew out of the earth and wrapped into the wood, holding on tightly like little claws.
"What the hell are these?!"
When the structure was back to normal—the dinosaur hide mostly taut on top and the paracord tight (and his knots double-checked)—the man shaved off the thicker areas of vines with his knife then severed all of the connections he could find sprouting from the dirt.
Jason found the time to use the bathroom around the corner without being pounced on then drank some water, contemplating the hill around him from the front of the crook shelter.
His arm stung like hell, and his knee still hurt. The pain in his little raptor bite wasn’t as bad now, but Jason was worried more than ever about infection. The claw wounds he sustained last night were more than just little pokes and tears. Those would take a while to heal—Jason was sure that the open wounds would become infected without any ability to sterilize them.
"Not good," he said, frowning at his ugly injuries.
It was still early morning. Jason figured that his mission for the day was to secure more water. That meant loading up on water from the creek without being eaten by crocodiles—collecting and boiling one cup at a time until his backpack bladder was full. Then, maybe he could reinforce the shelter some more before nightfall.
Hell—maybe Jason could find something to eat.
His stomach felt like a painful pit and it pulled inward, cramping from time to time.
Taking all of his gear with him and his coffee cup quickly accessible, Jason painfully and carefully descended the hill back into the trees then down to Doe Creek. When he heard the approaching rushing of water, the man opened his eyes wide and approached the creek slowly with his senses alive. He peered at every stick and log in the water, scanning for eyes and teeth and ridges—anything that could have been a crocodile...
Jason slowly stepped into some squelching gravel at the water’s edge, brimming with fear that made his skin buzz and his ears ripple with white noise. He peeled his coffee cup sling off of his body, and filled up the metal mug, screwing the lid back on tightly.
He rapidly backed away from the river, scanning for incoming predators.
Suddenly fearing the mini-rexes, Jason’s eyes flashed up to the other shore, and he peered through the shadowy depths of the forest to the west—the wooded area between the creek and the valley...
Nothing. The coast was clear.
After taking several reaching steps up the slope away from the water, ignoring the screaming pain in his right knee, Jason looked back and paused when something interesting caught his eye...
Further down the creek, along a narrow strip of sandy shore, he saw the skeletal remains of two big turtles. The white bones of their clawed arms and legs and long, bleached vertebra of their tails were of no interest to him. Jason immediately considered the big, deep dorsal shells. Those turtle shells were perhaps two feet across and at least six inches deep—similar in shape, but bigger than the widest stir-fry skillets Jason had ever seen!
Jason scanned for crocs while slinging the full coffee cup of water around him, then carefully slid down to the shore and the turtles' remains.
Seeing no incoming monsters, the man pulled the first turtle body out of the sand. He ripped the chest plate away from the shell, rapidly snapping his cane around at the loosely connected legs, neck, and tail—anything that was in the way—shucking all but the back shell itself. Then, checking the immediate area for crocs again, Jason rushed in at the creek, sweeping into the rapid, cool water with the shell. The man grunted when he filled the shell and pulled it back out of the water, carrying who knows how many coffee cups’ worth inside. His sore back twinged in pain.
Carefully backpedaling away from the water’s edge, Jason left the creek and headed up the hill as quickly as he could without spilling water from the shell.
"Awesome," he said quietly and smiled to himself.
With a lot of pain in his knee, Jason carried the turtle shell full of water back up the hill to the crook, pausing when he had to. When he finally reached his shelter again, he carefully lowered the heavy shell to an area of soft dirt where he settled the heavy thing side to side until it was mostly stable.
"So much for one coffee cup at a time..."
It was still early. With the good fortune of finding that turtle shell, Jason would have a lot more time on his hands. He collected some wood and started another fire, then started the boil of his coffee cup full of river water.
As Jason was waiting, he thought about the other shell down there...
"One more," he said.
With a quick look down at the creek then back down at his coffee cup sitting in the fire, Jason figured that he had time to get another shell before the boiling water really got going. He dipped his hands into the big turtle-shell-bowl of water and splashed his face, smiling at the simple pleasure it gave him.
With a grunt of pain, the man climbed back to his feet, leaning on his cane, then went down the hill for more.
As Jason approached the sandy area with the other turtle shell sticking out of the sand, he paused a moment to scan the creek and the far shore for dinosaurs or crocodiles that would try to eat him...
There were little feathered dinosaurs flapping and gliding from tree to tree. Some swooped down to the creek, chasing the large, long-legged flies that lingered there. They hopped around gulping the insects down before flying back up into the trees or hopping away into the underbrush. Two of the crow-looking creatures with the four wings passed through, cawing and chirping at each other from each branch they stopped at.
There was a thump from across the creek which gave Jason a fright, but as he searched for movement in the woods, he eventually made out the body of a horse-sized ceratopsian with long limbs and a single, long curved horn on its beaked snout. The creature had a simple crest that wasn’t very large; smooth and free of spikes.
"Mono..." Jason whispered. "Mono-something..."
With another quick look at the rushing water, Jason braced himself against the pain he knew he’d feel in his knee and shoulder, then dashed down to the riverbank, repeating the deboning process on the shell he targeted. He slid his cane around the connection points and knocked skeletal appendages away and down to the sand, then cast the chest plate aside. He dashed down toward the water to take another big scoop then grunted as he hefted the shell up again against the flow of the creek.
There was a splash from upriver and Jason looked up, crouched over his shell-bowl.
A large crocodile was running his way through a shallow section, its eyes gleaming and its huge mouth full of crooked fangs leering with malice. Jason gasped and his belly felt filled with ice. The monster plopped along on its longer-than-normal arms and legs in a loping gait, splashing through the water toward him.
"Shit!"
Jason was briefly torn between either dropping the shell to run for it or trying to save the shell and the water and get away anyway.
Instead, he awkwardly pitched the shell to one side as he moved, spilling half of the water, then the man fell over into the creek when he tried to recover. Cool water flooded into Jason's clothes and he almost breathed in a lungful of river water.
Jason scrambled, stuck in the creek. He looked down at his hand on the creek bottom and saw the daylight reflect on something yellow down there...
The croc was coming. It ran goofily through the water, almost looking funny. But it wouldn’t be funny when it caught Jason with strong jaws that he couldn’t possibly pry apart. It wouldn’t be funny when it shook the man and tore one of his arms off, or violently rolled him over in the creek to drown him and rip him to pieces.
But for the moment, Jason’s eyes went back to the little, shiny glints of metallic stones scattered all around his hand, underwater in the sand and gravel.
Coursing with adrenaline and about to bolt to safety, Jason saw that they were glints of gold.
Chapter 19
Full of wil
d fear and vapid curiosity, Jason tore his eyes away from the gold nuggets scattered around his hand on the creek bottom
He stared up at the oncoming crocodile in horror.
The impulse of flight surged back into him, and the man found himself suddenly buzzing with energy! He jumped to his feet, cane hooked around one arm, and grabbed the dropped turtle shell with one hand. With the other hand, he seized a scoop of water, sand, gold, and gravel from the creek bed, then launched into a soggy sprint away from the water!
Jason scrambled up the incline over slick underbrush and vines, desperate to get away before the crocodile caught up to him...
He tripped once, dropped the shell, then picked it up again. His heartbeat pounded in his head, and his limbs were shooting with buzzing, cold fear. He could imagine the croc running along behind him, waiting to catch him if he slipped up...
Jason struggled up the slope, pausing to shove his handful of gold and creek-bed stuff into his left pocket. He pulled his cane out from the crook of his elbow and used it to help in his escape.
Once he burst into the sunshine again—out of the trees that grew extra-thick around the winding creek—Jason finally paused to take several heaving breaths. He turned to look behind him, expecting to see the crocodile following with slithering steps through the grass. His heartbeat was a sharp hammer, hitting again and again in his ears, and Jason breathed the thick, humid air so deeply that he started to feel dizzy...
The crocodile wasn’t behind him.
Jason figured that it probably wouldn’t range too far away from the creek.
"Yeah, don’t bet on it," he said to himself between deep breaths.
Peering into the gloom, trying to listen to anything above the rhythmic pounding of his body’s frantic flight response, Jason eventually made out the form of the crocodile down near the water. The beast stood still for a while, grinning with its huge mouth cracked open. It was a strange sight—standing taller than a crocodile should with longer legs.
