Natty looked up at the half-dead Ajax pinning him to the ground.
“Run!” Ajax said.
The twenty-foot tall dinosaur ripped Ajax away from Natty.
“I can't shield you anymore!” Ajax gasped and sputtered, the blood trickling out of his mouth. His severed artery leading to his missing leg hosing the ground as if it were determined to put out a fire.
The dinosaur hybrid took a step toward Natty, but peppered by Natty’s gunfire, decided he wasn’t worth the trouble. That or… Natty could swear he saw recognition in the giant lizard’s eyes, as if this one was off limits. The creature turned his back on Natty, which was more resistant to the gunfire, owing to the more armor-plated backside.
Natty got a reprise of Ajax being eaten alive. A ripping sound was followed by another Ajax-specific scream, as the other leg was torn clear for nibbling on. Natty vomited, and, sobbed, and fled into the woods.
He didn't make it far before the camouflaged DeWitt grabbed him. He put his finger to his mouth to shush Natty's sobbing. “He was a good soldier,” DeWitt whispered.
They watched the last of Ajax's life bleed out of him in the dinosaur hybrid’s mouth.
DeWitt studied Natty. “I see he had time turn you into a good soldier too before he died.” When Natty hit him with the quizzical eyes, he said, “I saw your handiwork back there with the gun.”
“For all the penetration I got, I may as well have been masturbating!” he shout-whispered.
DeWitt looked down at the sentient dinosaur’s footprint in the mud beside them. He regarded the rustling wake of tree branches. “I guess the next time the wife sends me out for a pair of alligator shoes, I'll have to object on moral grounds. Never mind the complete apoplexy the sight of reptile skin will likely give me.”
He pulled Natty out of harm's way as he saw the dinosaur hybrid turning their way. They bolted into the forest cover.
Elsewhere in the woods, moments later, they paused to catch their breath. After initially gaining on them, the dinosaur sounds had faded in the distance. “What are you even doing here?” Natty said. “I thought you went off in a whole different direction.”
“I have the best night vision in the group. I opted to track the footprints instead of the dripping blood. Led me back here. We better get going.”
They reached an area where the ground was suddenly clear and the trees overhead had their lowest branches high above their heads. DeWitt stepped out into the middle of the opening, looking in all directions, disoriented. “I think we're lost.”
DeWitt stepped over what looked like the root of a tree extending well into the clearing.
“I don't give a damn about being lost!” Natty exclaimed. “Just don't die on me, okay?”
“Why would I do that? You're not the only one who thinks highly of himself, you know?”
Natty erupted in nervous laughter, de-stressing somewhat from the last encounter.
Suddenly his laughter stopped. DeWitt, still laughing, studied his face for some indication why. Natty's complexion continued to blanch white. It might have been dark, even by glowing-forest standards, but there was enough glow-worm illumination coming from the ground to see the color drain from his skin. Of these things he was sure, not because he was holding a mirror up to his face, but because he could feel his skin run cold, his heart weakening from fright, and so not pumping as strongly as it was just a moment ago.
Then DeWitt looked down at "the root" of the tree curling up around him. It was the tail of one of the sentient dinosaurs.
As it curled up, its spines punctured DeWitt along his entire length.
The lizard man, hiding with his face to the tree, turned towards his tail, bringing DeWitt towards his mouth.
DeWitt witnessed Natty sobbing. “You can't shoot through a veil of tears. Clear your eyes.”
Natty had dumped Ajax’s empty, jammed pistol some distance back in the woods. He wiped his eyes. Grabbed the holstered gun that DeWitt could no longer reach. Fired DeWitt’s piece at Lizard Man's eyes. Blinding him with some lucky shots. It was weird, though. The eyes cracked and splintered like glass, like bulletproof glass that had simply exceeded its threshold before .40 caliber high-velocity shots fired from just feet away. The eyes designed to stop a smaller caliber bullet, or a rifle shot fired from further away, or a knife jab. Those adaptations he and Leon were talking about earlier.
The human hybrid was forced to use DeWitt's body as a battering ram and shield, blindly bashing him about in an effort to squish Natty.
Natty was forced in turn to see DeWitt repeatedly bludgeoned against the ground where the dinosaur hybrid thought he was standing. Hearing a different set of DeWitt’s bones crunching with each hammering contact with the ground. Natty changed position every time his gun fire revealed his location.
DeWitt reached for the camera in his shirt pocket and threw it at Natty’s feet. “Just make me look good, kid. While I make the new face on the medal of honor.” He smiled his cheesy fake smile as Natty wiped the tears out of his own eyes and snapped the picture.
“My ten year old will thank you for this cliff hanger to cap his graphic novel.” Finally, the last of DeWitt's life bled out of him. His face no longer recognizable now that every bone in it had been broken. The eyes still looked alive. But only briefly. They went dull as he threw a pained smile Natty’s way. Natty realized there was no reason to stay any longer. He lowered his eyes in defeat.
The next thing he saw on the ground was the foot of the dinosaur stepping into his eye line. Natty looked up in time to see the hybrid with the sentient eyes about to take his head off with a back hand. But again he resisted his urges for some unfathomable reason as he took a deep whiff of Natty.
Natty, taking advantage of the creature’s hesitation, ducked, plucked a couple grenades off of the dead DeWitt's body, then darted into the forest cover.
Moments later, panting, and exhausted, he muttered, “Yeah, let's break up into one-man teams to make ourselves less of a target and for better recon! Time to rewrite the cursed field manual, you think?”
He heard the sentient serpents north of him clearly battling someone. Natty’s body hardened as his resolve rocketed up. “Funny how wanting to exterminate someone can just liberate you from truckloads of fear.” He took a step in the direction of the sounds.
***
A short while after leaving the dead DeWitt behind, Natty came upon another clearing.
Crumley was sparring with one of the dinosaur hybrids, rather acrobatically. This one, at just eight foot tall, was even more of a juvenile than the one Natty and Ajax had run into. Again, Natty was fascinated how someone who looked more like a gorilla than a man when it came to the thickness of his torso and limbs, could move so nimbly.
Natty noticed the capoeira flips he was using to dodge the sentient dinosaur’s tail. But there was more to Crumley's defenses. There were blades taped to his feet and arms.
Every time Crumley did a back flip out of the way, he got a slice of the dinosaur, creating the yelping sounds that drew Natty here in the first place. A regular knife wouldn’t have been able to find purchase against its thick hide. A nano-edged knife? He seemed to remember drawing one out on paper, like when he was five.
“Stay back, kid,” Crumley said. “I got this.”
Natty hung back, trying to catch the rhythm Crumley felt so naturally when dodging the creature. Until he could do so, Natty stayed beyond the monster’s peripheral vision to avoid being unwittingly taken out himself.
But soon he was getting a sense of how to do the bobbing and weaving Crumley was doing. He decided to step into the ring.
“Stay back, I said!” Crumley commanded.
“Not on your life!”
A phantom image of Laney watched from the cover of the woods.
Natty waited for the sentient dinosaur to turn towards him, then hurtled one of Crumley’s knives that had been dropped in combat at the creature’s soft underside, about where his heart ought to b
e.
The nano-edged knife seated well into the giant lizard, and generated a lot of roaring.
Crumley took advantage of the moment to move in closer, continuing to bob and weave around the spastic tail that was attempting to take off his head.
Once in close, Crumley finished the hybrid off with multiple kicks and jabs of his blade-tipped limbs.
He watched the creature fall with a certain satisfaction, wiping the blood off his lips. Then he turned his back on the monster, walking towards Natty. “Nice to see you all growed up, kid.”
“I don’t understand why your blades brought him down? They barely scratched his surface.”
“Dipped in squeezed juice from a poisonous plant I fancy, Strychnos. Just a drop of the concentrate will kill ten men.”
Natty, who still hadn't relaxed his guard, wary, watching Crumley's back, said, “You think you could walk a little faster? I know you're tired from your workout and all...”
Crumley chuckled. “Thanks for the concern, kid. But it's the living I fear, not the dead.”
Just then the dinosaur's eyes popped open and his tail rose into the air and it slammed down on Crumley.
Crumley was hammered into the tree beside Natty with the thorns of the hybrid's tail driven through his body. From head to toe. Crumley looked like a designer knife-rack.
With his dying breath, Crumley handed Natty the compass from his pocket. “I think you found your way at last...but just in case.” He died in tandem with the lizard man.
Natty collapsed, the flow of tears once again blinding him, even as he fought furiously to clear his eyes to maintain a vigil for more camouflaged lizard men who might just pick now to make their presence felt. He felt drained of vitality, as if he might pass out from the fatigue. His headache was reaching crippling migraine intensity. He had chest pain, digestive upset. All in all, grief wore on him only slightly better than being rolled over by a Mack truck.
The needle on the compass in his hand pointed to some mountain off in the distance.
He pulled himself up by grabbing hold of the tree, and pocketed the compass.
As he wiped his eyes he thought he saw Laney. “Laney?”
He rushed to her and she opened her arms to him but he ended up hugging a ghost who disappeared on contact. “The damn adrenaline is making me delirious.”
FORTY-TWO
“Laney, is that you?”
She rematerialized right in front of Natty. “Who else you know that can scare you worse than Leon and his people and dinosaurs running wild?”
He smiled despite himself. “So you’re alive and well. That’s a relief at least. But you’re still on ice, using that mindchip to communicate with me?”
“Actually I’m in one of the many labs in a compound atop that hill that your compass points to, for the times when the trees block your view of it. And I’m no longer on ice. They’re in the process of reviving me.”
“Wait a second?” he said, feeling her up, not believing how solid she was. This was not simply a sharper, more focused thought projection. He could still pass his hands through her if he squeezed hard enough, but she felt tangible all the same. “I designed that chip to allow you to astral travel out of your body. Not to allow you to be in two places at once.”
“Apparently it can do both. It’s a quantum chip and it seems able to take advantage of nonlocality. Though I haven’t entirely mastered that game yet, as you can see.”
“Cassandra has, maybe she can give you some pointers.” He was gently touching her surface to get used to the tactile sensation. “She did it old school, without any nanites migrating through her system to dial up her chi energy and fire up her chakras and the rest of her energy body, just with meditation, like saints and sages of old. That had to be one ball-breaking exercise.”
“I thought she was nano-infested.”
“Yeah, but those earlier incarnations were built in keeping with Western Medicine, not Eastern Energy Medicine, so couldn’t have been any help to her there.” It finally occurred to him. “Hey, since when are you fluent in quantum chips and nonlocality?”
“I have a psychic connection with your mind now. Truman was blocking it earlier. But I studied the lizard people who are naturally very psychic, figured out how they get inside each other’s heads even without nanotech and mindchips, and applied that learning to you.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that involve?”
“A lot of complex biophysics I won’t trouble you with now. But here’s the kicker. You have to have tremendous love in your heart for the empathic connection to work. Truman’s sentient serpents may not be as ruled by fear as he thinks.”
“That’s my girl! You’ve accomplished so much. Though I’m not sure I’m all that partial to having you inside my head.”
“I’m sorry about your friends,” she said.
Natty’s head dropped, feeling suddenly a lot heavier, just at the mention of them. “They’re your friends too, but I guess I got to know them a little better than you since you’ve been in cahoots with Truman.” He raised his eyes to her again. “Don’t deny it; I see evidence of your handiwork. My designs for sentient serpents weren’t nearly this advanced.”
She glanced away in shame. “It’s why they’re reviving me. I’m to perform surgery on the lizard people to advance Truman’s sick science.” She sighed. “It’s what I want to talk to you about. You need to find Leon and what’s left of his people and stop them from fighting the sentient serpents.”
“Which ones?”
“Both. I named the larger breed, the Nomads. And the smaller one, the Umbrage. Killing either will only play into Truman’s war games.”
“I do believe that’s why we’re out here, like it or not.”
“They evolve very rapidly, thanks to my modifications. You drop an atomic bomb on one, their descendants pop out of the womb resistant to such approaches. Assuming any of them survive the blast radius.”
“Holy shit!”
“I don’t think you want to give Truman any better weapons than the ones I’ve already given him by playing unwittingly into his hands, as you are doing now.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll find Leon and tell him. Providing I survive long enough to get to him.”
“The lizard people won’t hurt you. I imprinted on them your image and the rationale for leaving you alone. I’d do the same for Leon and the others but it’s too late now. The more you fight against them, the more their fear-driven minds kick in and then they won’t even listen to me.”
“I’ll get to Leon and his people,” he said. “But as selfish as it sounds, I want to take a timeout just for the two of us, okay? Don’t know how many more chances we’re going to get together before Truman has his way with us.”
He took hold of her ethereal hand and held it, finding it strange the avatar felt so real, if a bit cold and sponge-like. “I can’t believe this is the first heart to heart talk I’ve had in a long time, and it’s with your ghost.”
“My astral projection.”
“Whatever.”
“You forget how your own chip works?”
He walked with her, holding hands. “I remember reading some hippy-dippy shit about chakras and Zen masters doing screwy stuff with their energy bodies. And I thought, what the hell? Why not? I mean, Christ walked on water, right? And if you were to do it, how would you do it? And the Chinese energy medicine seemed to have the only credible answer at the time with their ability to play with chi energy like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars plays with the force. I remember being very enchanted by the idea at the time I built the chip. Then I woke up and realized it was probably just a lot of hokum.”
“Apparently not.”
“Well, I’m thankful for the opportunity it’s given the two of us.”
“You don’t need to talk to me like it’s too late, Natty. I’m not dead. I’m just in a mad man’s lair on a mountain.”
He laughed. They continued to stroll aside one another along the nearest trail in th
e forest. “What did people do when they couldn’t have a conversation with their wife in VR? Life must have been so dull.”
“Is that what you’re doing with your tech breakthroughs? Rescuing us all from boredom? It’s missionary work, then. Going out and converting the heathens from their depraved, imagination-deprived lives.”
“Stop it. I know I act all superior sometimes. It’s just a defense mechanism. You don’t think that’s how I really am, do you?”
“I think you’re a god who’s learning to be human. And he’s running out of time. Because if just one person could wreak such havoc on the world, think what a world full of people like you will do? And if not you, then someone just like you, will free them to that degree eventually.”
Natty sighed. “People like me are creating the transhumans as we speak. Each will come so mentally and physically enhanced that, yes, they will have more in common with gods than with humans. If not at first, then over time, with each generation of upgrades getting them that much closer.”
“It’s weird when someone translates the subtext of your life, your every action and thought. It’s painful.”
Was that the subtext of his life? The determination to turn humans into gods? The need to figure out a way not to lose what was most precious about our humanity in the process? He supposed it was. “That’s why no one ever says what they mean. Are we going to be like that too?”
“What’s the alternative? Hurting one another?”
“Maybe that’s what we’re here to find out,” she said, clasping his hand tighter as they walked. She felt colder as a result, and he felt hotter, as his blood rushed to the hand to compensate. “Maybe the war games are just a pretext.”
“I like Leon’s and his men’s approach,” Natty said. “Life gets too painful, they make jokes. Better than making more toys that kill, don’t you think?”
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 39
