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

  With that, Jason took his spear and painfully made his way down to the woods where the Monoclonius dinosaurs lived...

  Less than an hour later, Jason was running out of the woods back up the hill, spear in one hand, knee hurting like hell, clutching a single egg the length of a football. He carried it like a football, too.

  The ceratopsians crashed around in the forest behind him, bellowing with loud, low sounds. Those herbivores were furious, and Jason was sure that he was going to be trampled or gored with one of those white scimitar-sized horns, but the trees were thick, and he was small enough to zigzag through them as they crashed and blundered after him, shaking the ground under his feet. Those things were huge—bigger than horses and probably a lot heavier, too.

  But he did it! He had an egg!

  Jason didn’t quite know what to expect, but he had a pretty good idea. Even though an egg wouldn’t give him as many calories as, say, a dino-steak, it would be a great boost to his energy and overall well-being, and he loved eggs! This was the biggest egg Jason had ever seen in his life. It had to have so much inside—so much fatty yolk—that he’d be surprised if he could even eat it all.

  But who was he kidding? He was starving. Of course he could eat it all...

  An egg, he thought with a broad smile. Jason loved eggs! He ate raw eggs almost every morning—at least when he didn't feel like going to the trouble of cooking it. Lazy, yeah, but once he tried it the first time, he realized that he liked the taste, and it was quick and easy.

  Now, hiking back up to the spider cave with his painful knee, Jason salivated as he imagined cracking the monstrous egg open carefully—don’t spill a drop of that nourishing goodness! he thought—then drinking it like an enormous protein shake. Anyone who ever knew Jason thought that it was gross that he liked raw eggs, but he never really cared. Some people ate raw eggs, right? It was normal! Body builders do it all the time. Jason knew a million ways to cook an egg—well not literally—and sometimes, he just felt like cracking one open and slurping it down raw.

  Jason's stomach growled furiously at the thought that he was about to do the same thing on a Cretaceous scale...

  By the time he reached his spider cave, the sun was on the horizon and the sky was pink and orange like a massive fire spreading out into the clouds all around until melting into a deep, inky blue.

  The trills and chirps of roaming raptors were starting up amidst the droning sounds of bugs, and Jason quickly ducked into the tunnel.

  Holding the egg carefully in one hand and dropping his spear near the cave entrance, Jason hurried through to the inner cavern, desperate to get there and plop down so that he could finally eat—finally do something to satisfy his crazy hunger and loudly-complaining stomach. He visualized cracking open a chicken egg from the fridge into a cup—seeing the clear whites and the bright yellow yolk—and chugging it back, feeling it slip down his throat. Then he imagined it on a dinosaur scale with a grin...

  If he wasn’t so desperately hungry, Jason wouldn’t have been so insanely excited about eating a giant, raw egg. But here he was.

  Reaching the dimly glowing cavern, Jason ran straight to a flagstone-like rock he remembered that could work as a makeshift table, and sat down in front of it. His knee hurt like hell.

  The man placed the egg on the big rock, pulled out his pocket knife, and picked up another, smaller rock from the floor.

  Jason considered the egg.

  Then, nodding, he reached out, held the long, cylindrical egg vertically, and started carefully opening a small spout at the top with his knife and the little rock. He cracked at the tough shell, digging into it carefully with his small blade to start some lines for breaking, then he tapped at the top with the rock. Jason didn’t want to have an accident and spill the whole thing on the floor—he didn’t want to waste a drop!

  Once he finally opened a little porthole in the top of the egg, Jason could see the whites inside glistening in the glow of the mushrooms.

  He dropped the knife and rock and carefully lifted the egg to his lips, taking a greedy drink from the hole in the shell...

  Slick fluid filled Jason’s mouth and slipped down his throat. He felt a moment of bliss as he took another gulp of the eggy, slightly-chalky flavored mass, then a mild concern grew in him as he tasted something weird.

  He stopped.

  As he swallowed the rest, a heavy, pungent aftertaste hit him.

  Blood.

  There was something else weird, too—a strange body-fluid taste that he couldn’t put his finger on. But the creamy texture he experienced at first was quickly replaced by a sour taste of blood and something unknown that pulled the moisture out of Jason’s mouth.

  He looked down but couldn’t see the inside of the egg in the dim light—he couldn’t tell what he just drank...

  Propping the big egg standing against the big rock, Jason tore off his backpack and pulled out his flashlight.

  Click.

  When he shined the brilliant white LED at the inside of the egg, he saw a bloody mess. Instead of clear egg whites like he was expecting, the fluid inside the dinosaur egg was dense and dark pink with spots of bright, red blood and ... something else. Deeper within the cloudy, pink fluid were other things that Jason couldn’t quite make out...

  A burst of cold panic rose inside Jason, and he felt a gag pushing up in his throat.

  He fought it down, jumping to his feet. He took the egg and the flashlight outside.

  Stopping just outside the cave’s mouth, Jason crouched, making his knee hurt like hell, and held his flashlight in his mouth, looking at the egg. He glanced around at the ground outside, and rushed over to a big, flat rock. Jason cracked the egg, breaking it open on top of the slab.

  The stuff that came out wasn’t the clear and yellow like he was expecting.

  Transparent and pink amniotic fluid poured out onto the rock, clouded with pockets of bright red blood. A strange-looking dinosaur fetus—along with a thick, meaty placenta and connecting cords, fine veins, and arteries—splashed out in a mess onto the rock. The creature was as long as Jason’s hand, curled somewhat with a short, blunted tail and undeveloped features including big, black eyeballs visible through its semi-transparent pinkish-grey eyelids. In the white light of Jason’s LED, the sight of it all was ghastly, and many bright, organic colors glared at him from the complex mass of baby and its support network. The fetal creature was still. Jason didn’t expect it to be moving, but he wasn’t sure. The bloody amniotic fluid spilled out over the edges of the rock, disappearing into the dirt...

  "Oh God..."

  Eat it, he thought.

  Jason reached down to a twig by his foot and poked at the fetus's compact, rounded body. It moved with the motion of the stick. It was real, alright.

  "It's gross," he said.

  But you're starving.

  He was so hungry. Jason’s mouth tasted like blood, and the bold flavor made his stomach come alive—either with sickness or with desperate hunger for more, Jason wasn’t sure which—but he had to eat something. He was ridiculous with hunger.

  The man pictured himself touching the fetus with his fingers, but he knew that doing so would leave his fingertips coated with the blood-flavored stuff he just drank. It was too gross.

  But then he found himself picking up the creature by its abdomen. The big placenta hung in the air, suspended by fine, colorful cords.

  Head with the brains and skull? he wondered. Or back end full of guts?

  Jason closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself not knowing—treating it like a roll of the dice—but he knew that he was slowly inserting the fetus's head and upper body into his open mouth...

  He wished that he was somewhere else...

  When Jason bit down, grinding his front teeth to sever the bite of Monoclonius fetus, then chewed, his mouth was filled with more of the same flavor: slimy egg-like slickness with a strong mix of blood. But there was also a feeling like chewing on cartilage as well as a rich and dar
k flavor like liver or some other organ meat. Then, after chewing quickly and swallowing the bite even more rapidly, there was the strong aftertaste of blood again.

  Opening his eyes, Jason saw the remains of the dinosaur fetus from the chest down held by his fingers. He'd bit clean through it as if it was a chocolate Easter bunny. His hand began to shake and he dropped the creature to the ground.

  "Oh fuck..." he muttered, immediately fighting to urge to violently throw up. A knot rose in his throat, and Jason felt green and feverish, his face hot and sick, desperate to vomit.

  He fought it, then drank several gulps from his CamelBak. He tried to will the knot in his throat to go away. Stay down, he thought. Stay down...

  Looking back at the partly eaten fetus in the dirt, Jason saw two giant ants approach it—insects as big as his pinky finger—touching the disgusting body with their feelers. The man suddenly noticed the raptor noises around him, and he looked around in the pitch black night, knowing full well that he was being watched.

  Fighting the urge to double over and vomit up the pasty and cartilage-textured bite boiling in his stomach acid, Jason struggled back to the tunnel to spend his first night in his new shelter, trying to forget the taste of blood...

  Chapter 22

  The next morning found Jason amazingly hungry.

  With a mouth tasting like coppery blood and chalky, raw egg, Jason drank sip after sip of water, swishing it around in his mouth, but couldn’t get rid of the spectral flavor of the fetal Monoclonius. He'd dreamed of people eating fetal ducks in eggs—he couldn’t remember what the dish was called; something exotic from Asian countries—but he doubted that any of those people ever ate their fertilized duck eggs raw.

  Eating a raw dinosaur fetus was beyond disgusting—he couldn’t believe he'd done it.

  But Jason was so damned hungry. Would he do it again if he had the chance? If he had a second dinosaur egg? He told himself that he wouldn’t, but he didn’t really know for sure. Jason had to eat something soon or his body might start consuming his own muscles to keep his brain and organs alive.

  When he woke up and sat on the dinosaur hide in the dim glow of the mushrooms for a while thinking about this, he stared at the hard-skinned and bristly bodies of the spiders and the Ettercap stacked in a corner.

  "No fucking way," he said, putting a hand to his stomach. Positively too vile...

  What's worse than raw dino fetus? He thought. Probably dead Ettercap...

  Jason stood and went outside to look over morning in the valley and pee, surprised by a thunderous calamity as he climbed out of the dark tunnel, squinting against the daylight.

  There was a huge herd of duckbill dinosaurs all around him, standing on all fours along the hillside and blending into the surrounding woods. Some of them were lying down in the grass; some slowly walking along like huge cows, pausing to graze. But when Jason appeared suddenly in their midst, the massive animals all spooked, exploding into motion that shook the mountainside and made the man crouch in surprise, shielding his eyes from the dust and pebbles being thrown all around from above the cave mouth. The lumbering beasts moved away from him in a concerted action, converging together like a rolling battle formation that flowed like a flock of birds. Their large, greenish-brown bodies thundered away like ghosts into the lower tree line; long, flat and heavy tails held parallel to the ground and their steady feet rumbling a symphony of cannon fire!

  Jason stood alone and feeling embarrassed but awestruck. He watched as the duckbills flowed down the hillside through the dark forest and down across the creek. He couldn’t see the herd down there, but he could hear them thumping through the trees. In a short time, they burst out into the valley far below and highlighted in the sunlight, where they eventually slowed down to a stop, spreading out to graze again...

  Jason’s stomach cramped and he clutched at his midsection. He felt so empty. The sensation was fascinating but very uncomfortable. In the end, however, his pain was the decider.

  The man looked down at his spear left leaning against the cave mouth’s wall. After a quick piss, Jason grabbed the weapon, secured his cane into his backpack tie-downs, and started down the hill after the herd.

  Leaning on the spear as he descended toward the river, Jason’s bad knee reminded him of his injury with occasional twinges of pain, but he didn’t give a damn.

  "A man's gotta eat..." he muttered to himself.

  Those duckbills were flighty, but Jason was small, and armed, and just might be able to take down a little one if he was careful...

  Down the hill and through the trees, Jason took a moment here and there to look back so that he could find his way home to the spider cave if and when he had some meat to bring back. He scanned the ridge and the hillside around his cave. The entrance was pretty-well concealed by the layout of the slope, so he memorized everything he could to ensure his ability to find his way home. Eventually, predicated by the sounds of the running water, Jason found Doe Creek along with a narrower section he could get across without spending much time in the water. He scanned for crocodiles, double-checked, then carefully made his way to the other side.

  On the far bank of Doe Creek, Jason paused (after checking for crocs again) to pull up big, sloppy handfuls of mud. He coated his arms, legs, and neck, hoping that it would help mask his scent. It seemed like a good idea, anyway...

  Past the water, Jason continued his approach low and quiet. It was hard on his knee, but he would need to take his time and approach the herd slowly without making any sounds abrupt enough to spook them again. He’d have to be careful to stay visually hidden, too. Jason didn’t know how strong these herbivores’ eyesight was, but he had to assume that their eyes were pretty keen.

  The man crouched and moved carefully through thick bushes and fern fronds with his spear low on his right. Jason didn’t know whether or not the river mud would help conceal his scent, but he could sure smell the earthy odor of it himself.

  Crossing the woods between the river and the valley took a lot less time than he expected, and Jason reminded himself that he was a lot further north than he was last time he was out this way. In fact, he thought, he was pretty even with the wyvern cave, and might run into cannibals if he wasn’t careful. But right now, the forest seemed pretty clear—peaceful, even—with all sorts of small dinosaurs, mini-raptors, and primordial birds alive with activity around him. Bugs of all sorts crawled across the thickly-foliaged forest floor, or fluttered past the man here and there. He saw another one of those snake-sized millipedes and gave it a wide berth.

  Jason eventually saw the light ahead through the gloomy woods of the sunlit valley peeking through the many trees. He stealthily weaved through the underbrush, keen on making little noise, until he could see the bright green world of the hunting grounds open up before him.

  Peering out through the trees from the shadows of the forest, Jason looked on the herd of duckbills. There were over a hundred of the massive creatures, most of which were far taller at the shoulder than the top of Jason's head. They must have weighed a few tons, although the man had no basis for comparison—he truly had no idea.

  Stalking along the edge of the trees, just out of the sun, Jason followed the herd as they slowly thumped along grazing.

  There was no way he’d be able to take down a full-sized one of those dinosaurs—maybe not even with his Glock. They were huge, and the idea of him even approaching a big one on foot made Jason very nervous. He could easily be trampled to death.

  After a while of searching, listening to their low, dull grunts and the other elk-like sounds they made to each other, Jason’s eyes landed on a young duckbill at the edge of the large, feeding group. It was quite a bit smaller—maybe just a touch larger overall than Jason was himself—and similarly shaped, but the colors of its thick-looking skin were more vibrant and varied. The dinosaur youth's camouflage was a little more complicated than that of the adults. Jason was reminded of the difference between does and fawns—the very young deer
that had spots in addition to their normal color patterns.

  "Bingo," he whispered to himself, scanning for a way to approach the creature.

  The young duckbill moved just like the adults did: grazing on all fours, pausing to move several steps here and there. Every once in a while, the dinosaur youth would stop to lift its head and look around or glance dumbly at a passing mini-raptor. The herd didn’t seem to consider tiny raptors a threat.

  How do I get there without freaking them all out? Jason thought.

  His dad was quite a hunter among many other things, and there were a few times Jason had gone out with him to Alaska or Africa or other places during his teenage years. Jason had a distinct memory of bow hunting moose with his father in the Yukon Territory. He was only thirteen at the time of the moose hunt, so when his dad made a stealthy approach on a huge bull on the other side of a clearing, Jason stayed behind to watch, hiding in the trees. Dad slowly crawled up on the moose, low to the ground and pausing whenever the beast wasn’t distracted. Eventually, the man had crawled up to a place where he was satisfied with the range and presentation he had. So Jason's dad rose from the grass to his knees, took aim, and killed the huge animal with one clean shot behind its shoulder.

  Jason remembered how tiny his dad looked next to the moose—dressed in camouflage and carrying his complicated compound bow—kneeling thirty yards away from the huge creature as he took the shot.

  His father was a big man, of stature and of heart.

  Jason loved his dad.

  With that memory fresh in his mind, Jason took his crude spear with its fire-hardened point and crawled low out into the valley. He took his time and stayed on a constant low approach to the young duckbill. He paused occasionally to carefully raise his head, obscured by grasses and bushes, to make sure that he was still headed in the right direction.

  Jason’s stomach growled and his mind was a razor’s edge of determination and anxiety, but he went on, crawling through the wet, thick grasses and dense underbrush, checking on his quarry every several feet.