Tamer: King of Dinosaurs

by Brian King

  “This isn’t over,” I said with growing dread.

  The rumble got louder with each second and everyone but Trel stood at the barrier to watch outside. As we peered between the gaps in the branches, Galmine grabbed my arm and slung it over her shoulder so she could lean against me.

  I pulled her tight against me as the noise continued to build.

  “It sounds like an avalanche,” I said in an increasingly loud voice, though the idea was insane. The nearest mountain I knew about was the volcano, and that was miles from our cave.

  “Or a spaceship,” Trel said as she joined us at the door. “It could be my sisters!” she yelled above the din.

  I looked over at Trel and smiled because I hoped she was right. A giant fucking rescue ship with thrusters and shit blowing down trees and catching things on fire would perfectly explain why the birds and small dinos were fleeing.

  All four of us stood at the exit while waiting for confirmation of some sort. I’d gotten a little excited at the prospect of rescue even though I’d given up on the idea a long time ago. Trel’s joyous face, combined with that unusual disturbance, gave me hope it was possible to leave this hellish world.

  “There!” Sheela shouted as she pointed down into the grove.

  I saw it, too, but gave a sideways glance at Trel to watch as her demeanor flip-flopped from happy to sad.

  “A stampede!” Sheela added.

  A horde of gray-skinned dinosaurs moved together inside a tumbling cloud of dust and debris. Several huge trikes ran at the front of the pack as if using their horns and wide crests as snow plows. The dinos further back were harder to pick out from inside the fast-moving dust cloud. I caught sight of some of those funny-shaped tubular crests, there were also a few Brontosaurus-looking long necks, and dozens of ostrich-like dinos trotted along the fringes.

  The roar from clomping feet was deafening, and it shook the ground so much that it felt like we were standing among them. Galmine pushed up against me as we both experienced the rattle of rock under our feet.

  One of the white-feathered dinos fell from above the cave, crashed onto our doorstep, and then bounded down the ramp toward the passing stampede. A moment before it reached the other runners, a massive red-scaled predator lunged from the dust cloud and snatched it mid-jump. The white bird fought for a few frantic seconds, but it still ended up crushed by the powerful jaws of the much larger dinosaur.

  I leaned on the turnstile and tried to get the clearest line of sight to the new reptilian monster. This time the Eye-Q gave me an answer right away.

  “Identification: Dinosaur, Carnotaurus sastrei, male.”

  As I celebrated capturing intel from such a long distance, the new dino dropped the bird and seemed to look our way. It was as if a bull mated with a crocodile and then took on the general shape of a two story building with teeth. The rigid scales and bumps on his back were very much like a crocodile. His tiny forearms were a lot like a Rex, but they were so much smaller I almost missed them. Finally, his burnt red scales and two stubby devilish horns reminded me of a bullfighter’s worst nightmare.

  It was a fucking huge, angry, and its eyes looked hungry.

  Could it see us through the branches and leaves of the barrier? Should I clear everyone from the door, or would that movement get his attention? I stayed frozen while the carnotaurus made up its mind.

  As the stampede shuffled along, the trailing plume of dust got larger and closer to the cave opening. The horned dinosaur took a few steps our way just as the arriving tide of debris really started to blow in. I still didn’t allow myself to move, though I almost pissed myself when I saw several other carnotaurus appear in the grove. Most continued to chase the main stampede, giving us the answer to what caused it, but at least one more joined the curious male hanging out below our cave. The dust blew through the door before I could see where they went.

  “Holy shit, this is crazy!” I said even though no one could hear me.

  Sheela remained near the tree-barrier as sheets of dust blew in her face. Our gate remained closed, but she held her spear as if one of the devil-dinos was about to break through. I watched her for a moment and then launched into a fit of coughing as the dust kept coming.

  I guided Galmine away from the door and sat her down at the fire. It was still too noisy to talk, so I smiled to keep her calm. I then got a spear off our weapons rack and stood next to Sheela.

  The roar of the stampede finally began to lessen as it moved away. The dust remained thick, though, so there was no way to know what was still outside. At least two of those predators were down there, but I had some hope they got caught up in the dust and moved on.

  I stifled my coughing as a carnotaurus howled from very close by.

  The roar was loud enough to make our cave shake.

  Adrenaline spilled out into my body as Sheela and I both took a step backward. The acoustics of the cave made sound difficult to pin down, and the dust made it even worse, but the dino seemed no farther than the bottom of the ramp.

  I glanced at the frightened Galmine and wanted to walk back over and console her, but I saw Trel standing beside the fire with her spear ready, and I turned back to protect the door.

  The carnivore roared again, and it practically stole air from my lungs. Another howl responded to it from not far away. I held up two fingers to Sheela, and she responded with a nod, and then we both took a few more steps back so we were next to Trel and Galmine at the fire. The flimsy barrier was great against birds and flappy pterodactyls, but the big meat-seeking carnotaurus could probably pick it apart with ease. The more relevant question was whether the big hunters could fit through our door.

  We listened for a couple of minutes as the second predator got closer to its friend. I didn’t think I could summon any additional fear inside me, but when they came together, they howled and barked back and forth like they were talking. I imagined them discussing the best way to storm our cave and pluck us out. One of them ended their food discussion by bellowing for five seconds like it had won the coin toss.

  “Oh, fuck,” I whispered while pushing my warrior friend behind me. “Sheela, back up. They’re coming.” If giant carnivores punched through that door, they were going to meet me first.

  I clenched my spear in a death grip and pointed it forward. My racing heart stole all the blood from my brain and directed it to my muscles as part of my fight response. I got tunnel vision as I focused completely on the swirl of dust just outside the turnstile. But the dinos didn’t plow through right away, and it took several minutes of tense anticipation before I accepted they weren’t coming at all.

  The predators continued to growl and shriek, but I heard the distinct snap of giant teeth, too. That went on for a couple of minutes before everything got silent out there. In the lull, I managed to step a few paces toward the barrier before one of the dinos belted out another of its huge roars. It was no less scary, but I could tell by the echo the dinosaur was no longer right outside our cave.

  The sounds of the stampede were much reduced as well. It was once again a distant freight train and heading in the appropriate direction away from us. The stampede’s smoke trail was settling, but it still hadn’t entirely dissipated.

  It seemed prudent to wait until the air was clear before doing anything outside the cave. Even if it trashed our workflow for the rest of the day.

  “They are leaving,” Sheela said as she stepped next to me again.

  I pulled off my hat and ran my fingers through my wet hair to calm my nerves. My heart rate would probably remain on high alert until the day I left this planet, either by spaceship or in a body bag. It didn’t come down at all as I watched the dust outside.

  “I thought for sure they saw us. Do you think they’ll come back?” I quietly asked our resident hunter.

  “I do not know. Maybe their vision is not that good, or they were looking at something else,” Sheela said thoughtfully.

  There was nothing else out there except the dino slot
h’s body.

  “I bet they saw the dino we already killed and thought it was easy pickin’s,” I said as if processing Sheela’s suggestion.

  “It was a hunting party,” Sheela said with clinical detachment. “The carnivores banded together to cause the stampede and take down whatever they could. If the dust had arrived a minute sooner, they might have missed our kill and kept after the main herd. It was bad luck.”

  “They have better luck than Victor, that’s for sure,” Trel suggested with sarcasm.

  I didn’t have any appropriate comebacks inside me. I was coming off my adrenaline rush, and I steadied my shaking body by leaning against the wall. I kept it low-key by pretending to need to catch my breath, since Trel was the last person I wanted to see me having any weakness.

  “Thank you for what you did,” Sheela began in a low voice, “but we can fight better side-by-side.” She was no doubt talking about how I whipped out the chivalry and stepped in front of her when we were waiting for the carno’s to rip through our makeshift gate.

  “I’m not sure why I did that,” I said. “I know you fight better than me, but I wanted to take the edge off whatever was going to attack us, so you could keep them safe.” I motioned back to Trel and Galmine. “But I’ll resist it the next time, so we can fight together.”

  “We are alive,” the blonde warrior continued. “You fought skillfully against the black-feathered dinosaur. I can see why Galmine feels as she does.” Her strong eyes were unusually soft.

  “Thank you. Seriously. You got me out of that tree and beat me back to the cave to help fight off the intruder. The victory belongs to us both.” My body was starting to level out from all the excitement, and I felt exhausted.

  Sheela and I stared outside until the dust settled. We could hear the two carnotaurus moving away with their incessant howling; like a pair of self-obsessed teens. A little later, the air quality improved enough that we could see the nearest trees in the redwood grove, including the ground around them.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I spat out as my heart tumbled into my stomach.

  “No, no, no, nooo,” Sheela added with a long groan. “This took us ten days.”

  The fort was toast.

  I imagined it had been picked up by a tornado, slammed against the redwood, and then dropped fifty feet away. The tidy square fort should have been on the left side of our sequoia, but it was now a long pile of logs on the right, as if someone wiped an ugly blotch of paint across the forest clearing. A fifty-yard swath of destruction ran left and right through the grove, and it ripped up or beat down anything green on the ground and knocked over many of the smallest trees. The fort was just a small part of all the damage.

  Galmine and Trel both joined us at the gate to look at the devastation. The rock-woman gasped when she saw the wreck, but Trel surprised me again by keeping her mouth shut. Instead, she quietly walked away.

  I felt the weight of ten full days of labor flushing right down the crapper. We could rebuild it in probably half the time because all the logs were cut and shaped, but damn it was going to be a bitch to do it all again. And then what if another stampede came through?

  “I, uh, know this looks bad,” I began in a calm voice, “but if my mom were here, she would remind me to focus on the fact no one got hurt. If Sheela and I had been down there when the place went nuts, we might have been trampled or eaten. So that’s a good thing. We weren’t injured fighting the black-feathered dinosaur, and we got lucky about six different times. So that’s awesome. And those big predators didn’t try to sneak through our door, which I’m calling an epic win.”

  I hoped my words didn’t sound hollow. I’d often heard the term “fake it till you make it,” and now I felt like I was living those words. This was really bad, and I had to blink a few times to keep the tears out of my eyes.

  “I’ll help in any way I can,” Galmine said with teary eyes and a brave smile. “I was just so looking forward to being out there in our new home.”

  “Hey, we’ll be out there in no time. I promise,” I replied with a voice as upbeat as I could make it. “I’ve had a lot of time to plan while building our fort. I’ve thought about all the commands I’ve given to Jinx, and I think now is the time to tame a real dinosaur to help us. Something big like a triceratops or one of those crest-topped guys. That way we can drag more logs, dig bigger holes, and make the fort stronger than the last one. This is a setback, but it just means we have to go big to get it done in time.” I felt a bit more confident as the words came from my mouth. A big dinosaur could really help us build a new fort.

  All I had to do was tame one.

  “This is but one more challenge from this world,” Sheela said. She sounded down but far from beaten.

  “Yeah, see. We lost some stuff, but big deal. As long as we’re alive, things aren’t as bad as they could be.” I didn’t mention that we had less than twenty days before the orange birds were coming to kick us out. “We’ll go get a big dinosaur and use it to help us do big stuff. We’ll rebuild the camp better the second time. I think a trike would work.”

  “Why bother?” Trel called from her curtained area. The partition was open, and I turned to see the spider-woman’s back was turned to us.

  “We have to do something to try and survive,” I said as I walked toward Trel’s private alcove. I stopped a foot or so from her curtain, and then I took a deep breath before stepping into her room. She didn’t answer, and I moved to stand right behind her.

  “Trel?” I whispered as I braced myself for her to turn around and pepper me with insults.

  “What?” she whispered back. I didn’t see her face, but she was hugging herself.

  “We are going to be okay,” I said. “I’ll go get a big dinosaur, and we’ll move bigger logs. It’s going to be alright.”

  “No. No it won’t,” she whispered, and I could see her shoulders shaking a bit.

  “Can you turn around?” I asked.

  “No,” she hissed. “Go away. Go find your dinosaur. It isn’t going to help. We are going to die here. My sisters aren’t coming for me. You were right. We are stuck here forever. Our only hope was that camp and now it is ruined.”

  “Hey, hey, hey.” I reached my hand out cautiously and laid it on her shoulder. I expected her to jump, or spin around and scream at me, but she didn’t move when I touched her. “Can you turn around so we can talk?”

  “We are talking right now,” Trel sighed, but then she surprised me by actually turning around. I had to step back a bit so that her spider legs didn’t smack into me, and I took my hand off her shoulder.

  Trel looked like she was doing everything she could to keep from bawling. Her face was frozen in a painful frown, and she was blinking her black eyes a dozen times every second.

  In that instant, I knew everything I needed to know about the beautiful woman. I knew she had raised a wall to keep us all out, and I knew it was now crumbling down around her.

  I reached out to touch her shoulder again, and then I pulled Trel against my chest.

  I felt her body stiffen, and she inhaled a sharp breath of surprise.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “When my parents died, there was no one to hug me. It was all I wanted.” My arms wrapped around her shoulders tighter, and my left hand came up to stroke her hair. She was shorter than me, and her face was pressed into my collarbone.

  I halfway expected her to scream, or to call me a stupid male, or to push away from me, or to do something else that would make me regret showing her any affection. But instead, Trel just stood against me for a few moments.

  Then she began to cry.

  It was a low whine at first, but then she pushed her face into my chest, and I felt her body spasm with each painful sob.

  “They aren’t coming,” she gasped between her cries while her clawlike fingers gently kneaded the outside of my shoulders.

  I didn’t say anything. I simply held her.

  �
�I’m never going to get home. I’m stuck here forever. Why? Why me? I didn’t want this. I didn’t agree. I don’t want to die. I’m not supposed to be here.” Her spider legs drummed against the floor behind her as if they were throwing a temper tantrum.

  I continued to stroke her hair gently.

  “We worked so hard on that wall, and then it’s gone. We wasted so much time. How are we going to build another one? You are right. Those orange birds are coming. We are going to die. We’ll build another wall, but they will just tear it down again. I don’t want to die!” Trel actually hugged me tighter and rubbed her face against my chest. Then she started sobbing again.

  I wrapped my arms tighter around her slender shoulders and then pressed my cheek against the side of her head.

  I felt another set of arms circle us on the right, and I turned my head a bit to see Galmine. The gray-skinned woman smiled at me, and then she pressed herself against Trel and me. Then Sheela was on my left, and her hair wrapped around my neck as she embraced us.

  I didn’t know how long the four of us stood there holding each other, but Trel’s sobs eventually stopped. She still didn’t pull her face away from my chest though, and her hands still grabbed me as if I was a life raft and she was in danger of drowning. A few more minutes passed, and I knew that it would be okay to let her go. I needed to let her go. There was too much shit to do if we wanted to live.

  I pulled my face away from Trel and turned to Galmine. Her emerald eyes were closed, but she seemed to sense I was looking at her, and she opened them before she gave me a loving smile.

  I turned to Sheela and saw that she was already watching me. Her yellow-gold eyes glowed a bit in the firelight, and I took a long breath.

  “I’m going to do everything I can to protect the three of you,” I whispered. “If we work together, we’ll get through this.”

  “I believe in you, Victor,” Galmine whispered.

  “I do as well,” Sheela agreed.

  Trel didn’t say anything, but her hands loosened from my shoulders a bit, and she let out a long sigh.

  “Let’s go find a dinosaur to help us build a better wall,” I said to Sheela, and the beautiful cat-woman gave me a short nod.