by Brian King
I’d fight to the death to keep these women alive.
Chapter 15
“It’s just like a doggie door,” I said to Trel as she demonstrated walking through Hope’s swinging gate.
It took us two weeks of hard labor to get to this point, but the extra-wide door was the last big piece of our fort we had to complete. We still had a five-foot section of wall to finish, but I was confident we’d move in by the end of today.
“I don’t know what a ‘doggie’ is, but whatever,” she said with a tired laugh. “And please teach Hope not to crash into the door when she goes in and out, or it might break apart.”
“I doubt that,” I replied. “You designed it to last.”
“I am a genius,” Trel agreed while letting the door swing backward once she came through, “but this is my first time designing structures for dinosaurs.”
We’d spent every waking moment of the past two weeks working on the new and improved fort, and even though the birds were the reason for us moving, everything about the fort, including the stout wooden door, was designed to protect us against much bigger dinosaurs.
We were on day thirty of Sheela’s timeline, which was well into the red zone of when the orange-feathered nightmares were supposed to swoop in and take over. I had a bad headache from not enough sleep, every muscle in my body was sore from endless labor, and we would soon be out of daylight. However, we were so close to finishing the fort that nothing could get me down.
“We’d call you a scholar-athlete back home, Trel. That means you are the whole package of smarts and muscle.” As I spoke, I did my best not to check out her work outfit. When she first started offering advice, she’d do it by walking around and pointing at things while in her beautiful silk dress. But a few days ago, when it looked like we were going to miss our deadline, she came down to the job site dressed in a silk sports cut bra and form-hugging yoga type shorts. It looked like she had cut up her dress to make them, but I didn’t ask for fear that she’d change her mind and go back into the cave.
Nothing was said, but Trel picked up a log with Sheela and set it into the ground like she’d been doing it all along. Today she was working as hard as I’d ever seen her.
“I’m going to go get Hope and test the gate,” I stated. “I want her safe in here while we finish up.”
“What can I do?” Trel said, sounding even more stressed than I was.
“You need to take a little break or do something easy for a bit,” I suggested as we both walked a few paces toward our new hut. “Maybe help Galmine with the leaves.”
“Okay, but I’m not stopping until we get this done,” the dark-haired woman said with exasperation. “You remember how close we were the last time. I’m not going to be responsible for another disaster.”
She got to a pile of flat, pillow-sized leaves, picked up an armful, and threw them onto the top of the hut. Galmine was up there laying the leaves like shingles over the sloped wooden slats of our roof, and she caught most of Trel’s bundle with an easy movement.
I also threw a batch of leaves since I was standing right there. Trel had designed our yurt-like home to sit inside the larger circle of the outer wall, though part of it leaned against the sequoia’s trunk. The inside was just big enough for us to sleep like spokes of a wheel around the cooking fire. There was no time to make it any bigger, but I didn’t mind sleeping so close to the alluring women.
“Thank you!” Galmine called down in a happy voice.
“Wait. You think losing the first fort was your fault?” I said to Trel after my over-exhausted brain figured out what she meant.
“I was too proud to help back then,” the black-haired woman said as she gave a determined heave to an armful of leaves. “If I’d contributed for even one day, the fort would have been completed and built right. We would have survived the stampede and now be living in safety. I’m not going to risk that again when we are this close. Besides, you’re the one who needs a break, male.”
The spider-woman glanced at me, smiled, and then brushed away some wild hair from her sweaty brow. It looked like she’d been working hard, and she had, but she was still drop dead gorgeous.
I returned the grin though I could only imagine my own appearance.
“She is right, Victor, you need a rest,” Sheela said as she finished tying off another log on our wall. The feline woman was sweaty and dirty from our laboring, but the endless work never seemed to slow her down. In fact, my only worry about her was which half of her torn bikini was going to fall apart first.
I hadn’t slept at all the past two nights even though I tried. I’d end up sharpening axes, twisting cord, and cutting new arrows because my brain would not stop worrying about protecting the women. After throwing a couple of armfuls of leaves with Trel, I knew it was time to go on to more critical tasks.
“Trel, thanks for helping me with the door, but now you have to help Sheela finish the barricade,” I said as I moved toward the five-foot hole in the front side of our wall. “I’m going to get Hope and then finish the fort.”
“Then we can relax?” Galmine asked from up above.
“As much as possible in this world, yes,” I replied while snagging one of our spears leaning against the hut.
“I am looking forward to relaxing with you,” the emerald-eyed woman suggested in a teasing way.
I savored her words as I looked where I had to go.
Hope hung out eating leaves near the ramp. I kept her close to the cave entrance as a way of making the birds think twice about going in that direction. We’d been running back and forth from the cave as we transferred our belongings to our new hut, and some of the orange birds had begun to gather in the thirty yards of open ground between the fort and the ramp. It was still possible to cross the field and avoid them, but more birds kept trickling in.
“Victor, wait,” Sheela shouted with urgency.
“Try not to antagonize them,” she added while pointing to the orange birds. “Once they think the cave is theirs, we have to be very careful of them. I shot them after they claimed their roost the last time because I did not know better. After that, they chased me for a mile anytime they saw me.”
I did a double take.
“You think they already own the cave?” It had only been a couple hours since we got our last things, but we didn’t send up a red flare to announce we’d abandoned the cavern.
“I can only tell you of my experience, and I should have thought of this much earlier, but I suggest we be overly cautious around this breed,” Sheela said as she bent down to get another log with Trel. It also backed up the decision as to why we had to build the fort a few dozen yards out in the grove rather than right next to the cave.
“You think they’ll overlook that we’ve killed a shitload of their scouts?” I said with a nervous laugh. We’d battled groups of ten and twenty birds almost every day, but we stopped trying to kill them all. It just wasn’t possible.
“We shall see,” Sheela replied.
There was nothing more to say, but I always trusted the athletic warrior when it came to strategy, so it seemed prudent now to leave the birds alone instead of kicking the shit out of them as I wanted to do.
I jogged toward Hope and avoided the birds as much as possible. Most of them fluttered away from where I ran, but one fat bird squatted in the dust and wouldn’t get out of my way. That forced me to go around it, and I thought of Sheela’s words that the little orange devils might begin aggressively defending their new home.
“I’m just passing through,” I suggested to the flock as I stepped around more and more birds. “Nothing to see here.”
“Hope! Lower that pretty neck,” I called out to the gray and brown parasaur when I felt I was close enough not to frighten all the birds.
She was on her back legs while eating from some of the small tree branches overhead, but I sensed that she understood my anxiety. After scanning left and right, her front feet returned to the ground and then she lowered so
I could mount her. I felt like an action hero as I took a running leap, flung my leg over her neck, and perfectly landed the maneuver just as Sheela had demonstrated.
“Go!” I commanded. “But don’t step on the little bastards.”
Hope trotted through the loose gaggle of noisy birds, but they cleared a path for the big dinosaur. I guided her over to the sequoia and had her walk all the way around our massive home tree. Despite everything, I was always amazed when I got close to the imposing redwood, and I gawked up the clean, straight lines of the giant until we were on the back side of the fort.
“This is your new home,” I said to my dinosaur steed. “You are going to share space with us, so we can keep each other safe.”
She tooted a friendly note as I edged her right up to the doggie door on the back side of the fort.
“Just push it open,” I suggested.
Hope gingerly placed her snout against the middle of the door, and I encouraged her to push. The gate swung from its overhead hinge and began to open. The door scraped over her crest, and I had to hold up both of my arms to keep it from coming down on top of me. I held the wooden gate above me as long as I could but had to let it drop onto the ridge of Hope’s back. From there it slid down and off the end of her tail.
“Fantastic!” I proclaimed.
“Your spot is right there.” I guided her to the large open area which served as the courtyard of our circular enclosure. A pile of logs took up some space, but there was just enough room for the big dinosaur to curl up against the outer wall.
I hopped down from Hope and suggested she eat the fern leaves we’d placed for her. Then I ran back to the gate and weaved a long rope through the slats of the door and tied both ends to the outer frame to keep it shut. It was a temporary solution until we had the wall finished and could make a better lock.
“Sheela, can you take a break and check our weapons?” I asked when I jogged over to where she and Trel worked on the final bit of wall. It only took two people to move the big logs, so I wanted my weapons expert checking our defenses one last time. Once we were out of the cave, we’d have nowhere left to retreat.
“I will do as you wish,” the feline woman said as she stepped away.
“Another log done,” Trel said as she tossed her axe down to me.
“Looks like we have about seven to go,” I said as I caught the axe and set it against the wall.
“We’ll need to be outside to place the last one,” Trel reminded me. We’d discussed the final keystone log during planning, but I’d pretty much forgotten about it because the end seemed so far away. Now it was time to consider how that last pole was supposed to fit.
“I remember,” I replied. “It makes sense because of the circle design. We won’t be able to squeeze the last log in place from the inside. We can just take it through the door and then leverage it up from outside.”
“Yes. Once set, we’ll have interlocking logs supporting each other all the way around the wall, just as I said we would.” Trel seemed very proud, and she had every right to be. Our fort was badass, and it was all her design.
The spider-woman walked with me to the woodpile and we rolled another log from the dwindling stack. We’d used the central pile as a staging area for building the barricade these past weeks, but now it was almost empty. The six remaining large poles sat on top of a few of the smaller twenty-footers left over from our original fort.
“Ready?” I asked Trel after we'd dragged the log next to the hole in our wall.
“Always,” she replied.
We lifted together, and it easily went up. Once we’d propped it almost vertically, it fell a few feet into the hole so only the top seven feet was above ground.
“Please hold,” Trel said as she stepped backward.
We’d done this so many times it had become second nature, but I was still impressed as I watched her in construction mode. I reached down and picked up the axe without taking my hand off the log or my eyes off of the sweat-drenched spider-woman.
Trel grabbed a length of rope with one of her human hands, and then used her spider legs to climb the wall next to the opening and position herself on top so she could pull the loose log in her direction. With remarkable speed, she twisted the rope, so it held the two upright poles together.
“Axe,” she said as if she was a surgeon standing over a patient.
That was another part of our routine, and I tossed the tool she had just given me back up to her. She snatched it out of the air with lightning-fast reflexes and started chopping madly at the charred top of the log as if it had personally stranded her on this planet.
While she worked on the top end, I used another length of rope to tie off the bottom part. When each log was in place, they’d be locked into the two poles on either side. Just as in Trel’s example with sticks, it made each section of the fort’s curved wall very secure. The dirt at the bottom was just one more safeguard in her design.
By the time I was finished with my rope, Trel just about had the top wood chiseled away so it formed a rudimentary point. We’d done the same with all the other logs on the assumption that anything big enough to lean over the top might find it painful.
“Are you done yet?” I asked Trel as a joke.
“Hold your horses, male,” she snapped back with her pretend attitude. I’d taught her that saying after she and I worked together to create a small saddle for Hope. Once I explained what a horse was, and how humans typically rode them, she was able to craft a seat out of cord and some giant leaves. She designed it to wrap around Hope’s neck and tie into the towing harness. Trel even included some extra rope netting so we could carry the water jugs or lash spears to the parasaur’s beefy flank.
Somewhere during that project, “hold your horses” came up, and I had to fill her in on what it meant. Each of the women seemed to enjoy learning my phrases and did a pretty good job using them in the appropriate situations.
“The main flock is arriving,” Sheela reported as she jogged up to us.
“Are we sure we don’t need anything from the cave?” I asked, worried we’d left something important in our old home.
“There is nothing left in there but the fire ring, Victor,” Sheela responded.
“We have plenty of rocks out here,” I said with a laugh. “We’ll make a new one. But for right now, grab a weapon and be ready.”
The squawks of the orange birds grew like an approaching storm, and more Pelagornis Cardiffirus started dropping out of the redwood pine boughs above us.
We all stopped what we were doing to watch them fall like snow toward our cave. Galmine nervously held a spear, as did Trel, but Sheela and I both had bows. The blonde woman had hers at the ready but didn’t fire at any birds even when they were close.
“I hope they do not remember me,” the cat-like warrior said quietly.
“As you said, we will live and let live with our new neighbors.” I stepped closer and offered Sheela a reassuring smile.
In just a few minutes, there were hundreds of birds swarming around the entrance to our cave.
“How did they know it was open?” I asked my friends. “We aren’t out of the cave an hour and they flock in to take over.”
“I bet it was Jinx,” Galmine suggested. “I brought him to his new home out here, and the other birds knew our cave guardian was gone.” She giggled while she stepped down a small ladder to get off the roof of the hut.
“He did an awesome job,” I replied. I didn’t see my little blue friend at that moment, but we’d put him down in a pile of leaves we’d stacked inside the hut. No matter where we put him, he rarely came outside when the hungry orange birds were near.
“They have been watching us go in and out for weeks,” Sheela said, “and I believe they made their decision when they saw the four of us together out here for most of today.”
“Ah. That makes sense, though I don’t like to let anything go without a fight,” I added.
“We have killed many of them
over these past weeks,” Sheela said. “We would need twenty hunters with a hundred arrows each to wipe out all of them.” Sheela looked at the still-gathering flock as if sizing them up for battle. “We held them off only as long as we needed to get our new home done, and that is a victory just as surely as if we killed every last one.”
“Okay, let’s get back to work,” I said as I tried to keep things moving.
I gave the finger to the birds over by the cave, but then noticed the odd looks from my companions.
“It means ‘fuck you’ back home,” I said while shaking my head. “It also means I’m not afraid of them.”
“We are not afraid of them, either,” Sheela said in her steady voice.
“All I know is that it’s a good thing you listened to me about putting a camp outside the cave like this,” Trel said with a deadpan delivery.
Despite the bustle of arriving birds and our pressing chores, the three of us froze and turned to Trel. But before I said a word about all the things wrong with her statement, she cracked a smile and then began to laugh.
“Hah! Too easy!” the sexy spider-woman taunted as she looked at me.
“You,” I growled while pointing to Trel, “get your buns over to the woodpile. We have a job to finish.”
I was still chuckling as she and I picked up and scooted log number six over to the open section of wall. We lifted so it tipped into the trench and we immediately began tying the ropes. Trel took care of securing the top while I kneeled and tied off the bottom.
A minute later, Hope made odd noises and began to stomp one of her feet.
“What is it? Out of leaves?” I asked my dinosaur without looking at her.
She continued to stomp, but it wasn’t until Jinx screeched annoyingly that I finally looked up from tying the rope.
“Victor, Jinx is acting really weird in here,” Galmine said from inside the hut.
“Oh, shit. Jinx and Hope are both warning us!” I shouted.
I peered around the log to see outside the gap in the wall. The orange and black birds weren’t doing anything unusual in the front, so the threat was probably out back.
