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

  The wyvern screeched, showing Jason its long, dragon-like mouth and rows of sharp teeth, assaulting the man's eardrums. Terror hit Jason like a wave. The roar of the portal engulfed his senses as it spit and sputtered and stabilized...

  As the monster burst into motion, slithering toward him on its big wings, Jason leapt into the portal hoping that wherever he ended up, it would be better than becoming the wyvern’s roasted dinner...

  Chapter 29

  "Oh God!"

  Jason heard his voice screaming as if outside of himself.

  He landed in a strange and dim world that made his skin buzz and his mind fly with panic. At first, all the man could see was red—a deep crimson sky that seemed to flow like water, boiling and roiling like a hot tub with jets on all over. Maybe it was more like the air was full of invisible gasses that flowed and coiled constantly.

  Jason caught a quick glimpse of his house up the hill. It was carved from a weird, dark and slick stone, and it was on fire! Sheets of wicked flames bathed all surfaces, and Jason realized that he could hear the sound like burning jets of gas—like a giant propane oven on maximum flame—all the way down from down where he was standing surrounded by the bloody glow.

  Then he heard strange underwater-like bubbling and a constant swooshing that drowned his ears. As the sounds of dark, warbling backwards voices slithered into his ears, Jason suddenly remembered the wyvern, and spun around to face the portal, his eyes bleary and tearing up, suddenly stinging with pain.

  Through the blurry haze—God his eyes were burning—Jason saw the dark, muddy shapes of the cave lit up by the swirling sparks on the other side. He saw the gleaming scales and spikes of the wyvern speed by—impossibly fast—slipping around his window of vision as if the monster was moving in extreme fast forward.

  "Close!" Jason cried, terror rising up over the intense fear inspired by the weird and painful red world. He imagined the monster coming through after him; snaking its brutal head through the swirling gateway to pull him back into its domain...

  With a shimmer and a pop, the portal closed, its loud fluttering sounds drowned out by the horrific drone and dark voices swimming through Jason’s ears. He wasn’t sure if he had closed the portal by willing it or if it had closed on its own. Maybe the weird gateways could only stay open for so long...

  Jason was left standing in the crimson, smothering world, staring at the scrubs and trees that ran up the ridge to the east, black and hard to see through his burning eyes. He had to be crying like crazy. Was this what tear gas felt like? Turning back to the house, Jason gasped when he saw the house on fire again. The loud sound of the burning jets was fresh in his ears again. The sight was like something out of a nightmare; bizarre and fantastical, somehow jerking through time in an incomprehensible way...

  The gasp made Jason's chest hurt; a deep, crushing pain appearing under his breastbone.

  "What can I do?" he asked, his voice only a vibration in his own head.

  Jason realized—heart pounding inaudibly—that he was breathing shallowly. Suddenly he was gulping for air. He couldn’t hear anything over the whooshing and backwards-speak enveloping his head, but realized that he was gasping for breath like a fish...

  Shit!

  The air—the bizarre air of the place was killing him! Or, he didn’t have enough oxygen, or—

  Jason’s thoughts evaporated when he looked up at the boiling, crimson sky and saw that the sun was a gigantic eyeball staring down at him. Through his bleary, painful vision, the man could see the huge, fleshy orb, shaking with jerky motions. He could even make out the dark red veins branching out all around it; the massive, orange iris and black hole of a pupil staring at him intently...

  Panic flooded Jason’s blood and he obeyed his fear, stumbling backwards toward the bushes to hide. When he neared the blurry, black branches, Jason screamed silently when he saw them moving and snapping at him. The trees were snakes.

  Hearing nothing but the swooshing roiling air and the deep, unintelligible backwards speaking that vibrated through his bones, Jason felt his head and body start buzzing. The intense crimson that burned at his brain started to darken at the edges. Numbness began creeping over him...

  He had to leave or he’d pass out and die.

  Even if the wyvern was still there in the cave, Jason had to take his chances. He was coughing now. It took a moment to notice because he couldn’t hear himself.

  He’d die here for sure if he stayed much longer.

  Taking a few shaky steps away from the horrific bushes, Jason reached into his pocket with buzzing fingers and pulled out the piezoelectric crystal. Trying his best to clear his head with the abyssal voices moaning through his very being, Jason held out the stone, focusing on the wyvern’s cave...

  With blurry, burning eyes, he saw a spot of brightness open up in front of his face. He watched the distinct swirling rim of the portal open, throwing sparks off into the hostile world around him. As darkness started closing in around the edges of Jason's vision, he stumbled toward the gloom of the wyvern's cavern in the window of the spinning, fiery orange disc...

  Jason woke himself up coughing.

  His eyes burned and his lungs felt crushed and on fire. He coughed uncontrollably, each violent hack wracking his body with pain.

  Fetid darkness was around him. The heavy stench of mud and rot and the dense, hot air told him that he was in the wyvern’s cave.

  But where's the wyvern? Jason thought.

  How long had he been out?

  How long was he in that nightmare world? Did the wyvern just come in and go back outside again?

  Jason coughed more into his hand, hoping he hadn’t dropped his cane in that horrifying, red world. The place was so poisonous or otherwise hostile to his body that he couldn’t have been in there for more than a minute before almost passing out.

  His skin was prickly and weird and he hurt all over—especially his eyes, throat, and lungs—but Jason pulled himself together, sitting up on the cavern floor. Pulling off his CamelBak, the man fished out his flashlight and took several long drinks from his bite-valve.

  The water made his mouth and throat feel a lot better.

  Shining the flashlight around, Jason immediately saw that his hand—the one he’d coughed into—was splattered with blood.

  "Shit!" he croaked, which led to another bout of coughing.

  Jason coughed into his other hand, examining the dark red sludge misting his palm within the bright spot of his LED. At first, he was afraid that he was coughing up blood, but the red stuff didn’t look quite like blood. He played with the expelled gunk with one finger and smelled it.

  It wasn’t blood, not by its smell. And he didn’t taste blood from coughing it up. He didn’t taste anything aside from the rotten odor in the fetid air of the cave. That red stuff must have been in the air of the other world—crap that he was breathing in—and now his lungs were trying to get rid of it.

  Coughing when he needed to and spitting onto the cave floor, Jason shined the light around and picked up his cane. Good, he thought. He suddenly remembered that he barely avoided being a wyvern-snack and that there were still at least two wyvern babies around the corner.

  He tried to hurry. Jason checked to make sure that his Glock was still in its holster. It was.

  With his lungs still burning, Jason left the cave, stepping out into the mist of morning.

  "What?!" he said to himself.

  It was after this time when he came out here before—morning, yeah, but not this early. Had he been passed out in the cave all night? No way, Jason thought. The wyvern would have come home and eaten him for sure. So what happened? Did time pass by really slowly in the red world? It would have had to be really slowly...

  Jason remembered the brief sight of seeing the wyvern moving in super-fast-forward through the portal. Smacking his head with his hands, Jason clenched his eyes. He was too hungry—too insane—to make sense of it...

  The man spent a minute scanning
for cannibals. The coast was clear. There was no sign of the wyvern either. Jason entertained the idea that this was another version of the same world. Did he return to a parallel version of this dinosaur world without a wyvern? Without cannibals? A large herd of duckbills roamed down in the valley a to the south, grazing and lumbering, as tall at the shoulder as monster trucks. They were positively huge compared to humans; gentle giants.

  Jason looked down to the sacrificial slab. It was still there, along with blood and burned feathered plastered to the rock and surrounded by haphazard stacks of sticks.

  Okay, so the wyvern and the cannibals are still here, he thought.

  Jason carefully descended into the mist of the valley, watching keenly for cannibals and the three mini-rexes. The morning air was thick with fog in the low areas. The mist felt cool against his skin in the otherwise warm humidity. Halfway across the valley, Jason heard one of the mini-rexes roar in the distance—which sent a blast of cold fear shooting up his spine—but the monster was far away...

  Near the trees, he was approached by three mini-raptors. They chirped and trilled, shaking their feathers and dashing around him. When one came to close, Jason swung his cane at it, and the three of them hopped away into the mist like ghosts.

  A short ways into the forest, Jason was startled when he saw a large shape suddenly move between the trees—green and brown in the fog. The dinosaur grunted like a huge elk and ran away from him to the south, spooking all of the other ones like it in the area. When Jason heard the thundering of heavy feet rumbling away, he realized that it must have been duckbills at the fringe of the herd. The rolling thunder headed south, growing and rumbling the earth. Jason figured that he must have spooked the whole lot of them.

  Through the woods, the man descended to the Doe Creek, pausing to scout the water for crocodiles. Seeing none, he went down the water’s edge, filled his coffee cup, then ran like mad across the water and up the hill toward his cave when he saw a log with a pair of eyes floating his way from about twenty feet down-river.

  By now, Jason's lungs were starting to feel a little more back to normal. Each time he wiped his mouth, he saw less and less of the dark red gunk coming from his lips. He could also see better, and was feeling pretty normal again overall—normal at least for being on the brink of starvation and wounded all over from days of brutal survival.

  The oppressive hunger gnawed at Jason and he looked across the hillside to the woods where he knew that the Monoclonius group lived. He thought about the eggs. Even the briefest idea of the bloody and disgusting fetal dinosaur made his stomach growl.

  But Jason wasn’t thinking of taking another egg.

  He thought of that egg stealing ostrich dinosaur. That creature was as fast as the wind and a bit bigger than he was himself, but Jason had the notion that it was definitely not as formidable a fighter a larger raptor or one of the other many predators Jason had been dealing with...

  The ostrich dinosaur just stole eggs, and it was fast.

  Jason climbed all the way back up to his cave, thinking about that egg-stealer dinosaur. He took his time and approached quietly, dropping low by the time he could see the entrance. The man watched for cannibals and tried to ignore the slight pain building in his right knee as he flexed his legs in stealth...

  By the time Jason reached the mouth of the cave—cane held before him with his right hand resting on the grip of his holstered pistol—Jason was pretty sure that the coast was clear. It was quiet outside. The body of the cannibal he had killed was gone—probably taken away by the other savages; perhaps eaten not very far away. Jason crept through the tunnel all the way to the small cavern with the glowing mushrooms ready for a fight, then let out a long sigh when he saw that his home was empty.

  It wasn’t long before Jason had a fire going—feeling an acute dread that his cigarette lighter was almost dead—and he set his coffee cup of water to boil. Then, the man picked out a new long, straight stick with which to make another spear.

  Jason sat down in front of the fire to whittle a sharp point with his knife...

  The heavy grunts and footfalls of the nearest Monoclonius bothered Jason a little, but he felt confident that he was out of the family’s way enough to not get stomped on.

  Jason lay in wait on his back—covered from head to toe in leaves and foliage except for his eyes—cradled in the slight depression of a game trail leading to one of the ceratopsians’ nests. He’d spotted the nests—three of them this time—and could have easily snuck in to capture a few if he wanted to, but the eggs were not Jason’s quarry.

  Hidden on the ground like an invisible sniper but on his back, Jason waited, quiet and breathing slowly, clutching his spear with both hands.

  He was entirely concealed...

  Every once in a while, a small bug—once a beetle as large as Jason’s hand—would crawl across him through his cover, but Jason ignored the insects. By now, he’d been through worse.

  In the early afternoon, the egg-stealer he was waiting for finally came.

  On light, speedy footfalls, the ostrich dinosaur stalked down the game trail in the same place where Jason had seen it before, moving with long and fluid motions like a giant bird. The creature stared ahead at the Monoclonius group with wide, dark eyes, its beak opening and closing in anticipation. With every few steps, it paused to watch, ruffling its cream-colored, soft feathers. Jason noticed that its coat was covered with subtle spots.

  In between the ostrich dinosaur and the nest at the end of the trail ... was Jason.

  His stomach growled.

  The man held his breath and waited...

  When the egg stealer started down the trail with long, unpredictable steps—its head bobbing on a long, curved neck—Jason tightened his grip on the spear...

  He waited...

  The moment the creature stepped over him, Jason brought the spear up, bursting from the leaves with a grimace! He stabbed the dinosaur in the belly close to its ribcage. The ostrich-like creature was startled to holy hell and leapt almost five feet in the air as if wound with tight springs, but Jason was suddenly up and on it—thrusting his spear further into the creature’s body as if his life depended on it. The beast let out a rattling squawk, thrashing to one side trying to get away, but it lost its balance and fell into the underbrush, its long tail lashing madly and its long neck striving, lifting its body off of the ground. Jason pushed into his prey, focusing like a laser on not letting it get away—not letting the spear out of its body. He pressed hard and realized that he was growling like a savage himself! The dinosaur thrashed around, making the spear leap in Jason’s hands, but the creature didn’t attack him—it didn’t try to kick him or bite him with its small beak. It just struggled desperately to get away...

  Jason heard the bleating call of a Monoclonius issuing a challenge behind them. Another joined in shortly after. But the man didn’t look back. He focused on just the spear in the dinosaur and he pushed. He wanted to eat! He wanted to live!

  After what seemed like an eternity of struggling, the egg-stealer beast finally fell limp, twitching with one winged forearm and letting out a rattling hiss from its small head. The long, feathered tail twitched twice more then fell into the bushes, limp.

  Adrenaline coursed through the man, making him feel like a god...

  Jason pressed the spear further into the creature’s body, quickly turning around to glance at the ceratopsians that were surely not very far away judging by the sounds they made.

  The Monoclonius were arranging themselves in an outwardly-facing circle a respectable distance away from Jason through the trees. The car-sized herbivores stared at him dumbly, bleating and grunting and stamping their feet. They merely stood their ground. The herbivores were protecting themselves—protecting their eggs and their young.

  Regardless, Jason would have to hurry.

  He could smell the ostrich dinosaur's blood—which made his stomach insane with hunger—and had no doubts that other predators could smell it as
well...

  The realization hit that Jason had finally successfully hunted and killed a dinosaur for food. Elation rushed over the man, making him grin madly. He looked down at the dead body and his chest swirled with emotions of pride and gratitude; accomplishment and relief. There was a shadow of sadness deep inside Jason too, just like when he killed the young duckbill. But he was so hungry—his stomach on fire and cramping in anticipation—that Jason didn’t think about the spirit of the creature. He just wanted its meat!

  The man released the spear and pulled out his pocket knife, scanning his surroundings. The mini-rexes wouldn’t be up here. There were raptors in these woods—and cannibals—but the coast was clear for now.

  He looked down at the large, feathered creature in awe. How many pounds of meat did it have? There was no way that Jason could eat it all, at least before the little predators started congregating and scavenging for their parts of the pie...

  Jason quickly got to work, seizing one of the long, muscular hind legs. He cut into the long feathers and skin around the connection of the thigh and the body, pulling feathers out of the way with his other hand and discarding what he could into the surrounding foliage. Eventually, cutting all the way around and de-feathering as much as he could to make sense of the leg, Jason could see the muscles underneath, and knew where he’d have to cut.

  Pulling out his captured stone axe, Jason removed the leg at the hip without much trouble, put all of his gear away, then heaved the long haunch up onto his shoulder. Most of the leg was naked with tan, leathery skin, but the top of the thigh was covered in feathers now spattered with blood. He glanced back down to the Monoclonius family and saw them acting the same way they did before, huffing and stamping and guarding their nesting grounds.

  "You’re welcome," Jason grunted, grabbing the heavy leg with both hands and starting back to his cave. He left the bloody spear behind.