by Brian King
“I don’t know about that,” I said as I thought about the pink-haired woman’s power. Yeah, I’d like to say that I would go out there to help anyone, and maybe I would have, but I was safe in here with three beautiful women who liked me, and out there was a bunch of hungry raptors. I was risking my life so that I could save someone that would turn the tide in Dinosaurland.
Besides, it wasn’t like it was that dangerous. She could just blast any of the raptors that came after us.
“You do have honor. It is why I love you so much. Come back safe, my dear Victor.” Galmine untied the last of the rope, but she paused so that we could wait for the other two women to give us the signal when they had the raptors on the far side of the fort.
“How’s it look--” I started to yell over to them, but Trel was already waving at me, and Sheela was standing on the ladder and leaning over the top of the wall to tempt the raptors.
“They are all over here! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Trel ordered.
I turned to Galmine and nodded at her to release the last knot.
“When we return, be careful of those things coming in after us!” I shouted to my friends.
“Be safe, I love you.” Galmine stepped out of the way of the door and blew me a kiss.
“Come on, Hope! Giddyup!” I shouted as I pushed my dinosaur through the door and out into the field.
No raptors were waiting for us in front of the gate, but I saw a bunch of tails to our left as they ran toward where Sheela and Trel were screaming.
“Go!” I said when we were clear of the gate.
Hope broke into a run across the open ground of the grove. I glanced over my shoulder when we reached the nearest big sequoia to make sure the raptors weren’t getting inside the fort.
I was relieved to see the gate was already shut.
But then my balls shriveled when I saw a few raptors peel off from the barricade so they could give chase to Hope.
“You’ll be happy to know they’re coming for us,” I shouted to Hope with a sarcastic laugh. I’d gotten us both into some serious shit.
I guided her around another massive redwood tree and then turned so that we aimed back parallel to the clearing. I nudged Hope to run faster and hoped the trailing raptors couldn’t see our path through the dense forest. My plan was to lose them in the forest and then come out the side of the clearing before angling back to the pink-haired woman. I hoped that I’d lose the chasing raptors in the redwoods, but at the least, I didn’t want to lead them straight to the woman.
For one glorious moment I enjoyed the sunshine and wind blowing on my face from the top of my dinosaur steed. I listened to the air pump in and out of her lungs with a deep bass sound a lot like a horse. She ran faster than I’d ever seen, and I got the sense she fed off my adrenaline.
“Go. Go. Go,” I urged her mentally. I was afraid to push her too hard, or I’d wear her down before we could get back home, but for the moment she was going fast enough that I didn’t think the raptors could catch up.
But then we found some of the green-feathered assholes. I didn’t know where they came from, but I suspected they were running toward the light that had dropped the pink-haired woman.
I saw the first raptor slinking through the ferns near one of the redwoods like it was sneaking up on a victim. My biggest advantage over those little hunters was that I wasn’t slowing down.
But they were chasing me now.
“Shit. Don’t stop, Hope,” I breathlessly relayed to my friend.
The green-feathered runners sped up to match our pace, but as one raptor got close, I adjusted Hope’s path so we drifted away from a collision. One monster made a biting lunge at Hope’s side, but it was too slow and ended up snapping at her tail instead.
I glanced back to see it chasing us, along with three others, and my heart almost ejected out of my mouth.
I ordered Hope to give me all she had, and she blasted forward like a rocket ship. The raptors seemed startled by her speed, and they let out an angry squawk as we lost them.
I turned to the right again and focused my attention on the clearing approaching in front of us. I pulled out my spear and kept Hope running along a curving route toward the woman. I wanted to come at the new arrival from the side while keeping away from the main pack of predators until the last second.
Hope galloped through the forest at what must have been thirty miles per hour. I almost couldn’t see because of the wind in my eyes. I turned back and saw that she’d lost all of the green-feathered monsters.
I felt as if I was jockeying a Triple Crown racehorse, and I urged Hope to sprint even faster.
The parasaur ran on her rear feet but kept her head low to the ground. Her long tail stuck out straight behind her and probably acted as a counterweight to that crested head. The faster she went, the smoother the ride became as she and I reached a finely tuned balance of motion together.
Hope crashed through some small evergreens, and we emerged in a clearing at full gallop. “There!” I burst out as I directed Hope toward the woman.
She was still on her knees and her pink hair fell around her face, but she seemed to sense I was riding toward her and turned her face up to me with surprise.
I hated to give up the speed, but I slowed Hope a little so I wouldn’t plow into the woman.
My heart rate and adrenaline revved dangerously as we crossed the open ground. I turned to my right and saw the group of raptors still at the wall of our fort. I then twisted my head over my shoulder and didn’t see any chasing behind us. It looked like we were in the clear, but I couldn’t shake the feeling we were going to arrive a second too late to save her. I squeezed the neck rope in my sweaty hands and swiveled back and forth to look for our pursuers.
“Get ready to jump up!” I shouted when I was fifty feet away.
“What is this place? I’m not going--” she started to reply
I watched her jaw drop as she got a look at what was coming out of the woods behind me. I didn’t even need to glance back. It was now or never for her.
“Whoa, girl!” I yelled to Hope as I yanked on the neck rope in my best effort to put on the brakes.
The woman’s eyes bulged as we bore down on her.
Hope’s feet dug into the loose topsoil and skidded like we were on ice. We slid up right next to the young lady. I reached out my hand, intending to help her up so she could sit behind me, but she kept her bulging eyes on the raptors.
“More are coming!” she screamed.
“Get up here, damn it!” I ordered.
I held my hand over the side as a clear sign of what she needed to do.
She looked up at me and opened her mouth to say something.
“You can do it,” I said in a reassuring voice. “Hurry!”
Hope was jittery as she sucked in mountains of air, and it reminded me we’d have to run all the way back with an extra load on her shoulders. We needed every second.
“You need to give me your hand right now, or you need to blast them with your power again,” I said as I glanced over my shoulder. There were four raptors coming out of the woods, and we only had like fifteen seconds.
“I only have two hands!” she screamed. “I can’t do anymore!”
“Then get on now or you’re going to fucking die,” I said in my ordering-animals tone of voice.
That got her full attention. She reached out her hand, and I yanked her up across my lap.
Then I turned and saw a group of raptors running toward us from the fort. We couldn’t ride straight back home. We were going to have to go around through the trees.
So much for a quick and easy rescue.
“Fucking go! Go! Go!” I yelled to Hope while also prodding her neck with my legs.
Hope bolted forward and the woman in my lap screamed.
I had no time to put her behind me where she belonged. I wrestled with the rope while holding the beautiful woman by the ass to keep her from tumbling off. I kept the spear under my armpit, but it was on
e more thing to juggle. Hope wasn’t up to speed, and the parasaur’s movements were bouncy and unpredictable, like a lost raft at the wave pool. It was all made worse because I couldn’t focus on any one task, like telling my mount where to run.
Hope crashed through some tall saplings, and one of the branches nearly clothes-lined me right off her shoulders. She headed for a denser patch of trees. It was the perfect place for losing our pursuit if I could get my shit together.
I got back into position just in time to see a raptor overtake us on our right side, and then lunge for the woman’s long dangling legs. I flinched to the left, which put pressure on Hope’s right side. She must have read it as my desire to turn to the right because that’s where she went.
“No!” I screamed because it wasn’t where I wanted to go.
The raptor was in the air when Hope shifted course, and instead of taking a bite of the woman it smashed into the parasaur’s rigid neck. Hope let out a pained honk and veered to the side while the raptor ricocheted off, and the woman balanced on my lap let out a surprised screech.
“Hold on!” I shouted as I grabbed her tight ass. She probably had no idea how close she’d come to losing a leg from the raptor, or that she’d almost bounced off Hope’s back twenty times in the last thirty seconds.
The course change, along with my inconsistent commands and the unfamiliar woods, meant Hope wasn’t able to run at peak efficiency. If I’d just let her go with her instincts, she might have just gotten us the hell out of there, but my taming skill was playing against us at that moment.
We had to work together to survive.
Another raptor slammed into Hope’s side, and the woman screamed like a banshee. “It’s stuck to us!”
The saddle jiggled as if someone was tugging the attachment ropes. Hope immediately became less responsive, like the air had been let out of her tires, and I leaned to my right so I could see what the woman was talking about.
A fucking raptor was hanging on to the saddle by its wing, and Hope was now carrying the weight of three.
“You have to hold on,” I yelled to the woman. There was no manual on riding dinosaurs, but if there were, I’d probably be doing everything just the opposite of what it said. My pretty passenger held onto my left pant leg with a fingernail death grip while I yanked my spear from under my arm. When I write the book on riding a dinosaur, I am going to have a whole chapter on riding while distracted.
I used my thighs to hold myself onto Hope’s neck while the woman and I bounced along in the primitive saddle. At the same time, I got the spear into my right hand and aimed for the raptor hanging from the saddle rope on Hope’s flank.
The first strike missed by a mile, and the raptor let out what sounded like a mocking chuckle as it tried to free its wing from the straps.
The green-feathered monster was holding on with great determination, but I could almost see it think through how easy it would be to slash into Hope’s meaty flesh.
“Get off, you fucker!” I shouted.
I poked again and landed a strike on the inside of its mouth just as it howled at me. It didn’t draw blood, but the raptor recoiled at the foreign object, slid its wing out from the strap, and tumbled to the ground behind us. Sheela would say that was good enough to call a victory.
There was no time to celebrate. I slid the spear back under my arm and focused myself on actually getting Hope where she needed to be. We danced in and out of the thicker clumps of trees and ferns as I searched for a clearing.
The squawks of the raptors followed us. They actually sounded closer.
“Go faster!” I commanded Hope as we reached the edge of the familiar redwood trees.
Hope broke from a trot up to a run, but I knew right away she wasn’t going as fast as she had before. She still ran pretty fast as we moved through the open spaces of the redwood grove, but I wasn’t feeling the lighter-than-air sensation I felt when she was in top form. She must have been getting tired, and it made sense. She had been running a long time at max speed.
“Oh, no! There’s more of those things,” the woman shouted. “I want to sit up!”
I didn’t blame her, but there was no time to shuffle in our seats.
“Just stay still! We’re almost home,” I replied as I pulled my hand off of her ass. Almost as soon as I let my hand off, Hope leapt over a log, and I had to smack the woman’s butt cheek to keep her down on my lap.
“Home? We’re going back to Candraria?” she asked with a gasp.
“What? No. I meant we’re almost back at the fort. Now hang on!”
I lost the advantage of being somewhat concealed among the little evergreens and bushes back where we’d picked up the woman. The redwoods were more open, and now the whole pack of raptors knew where we were. A handful of the original chasers trailed behind us, but others were closing in from many other directions.
There were a lot of these fuckers.
I tried to pick the place toward home with the fewest little shits and then aimed Hope in that direction. It was a particularly ancient redwood with a large number of ferns growing around its base.
“Right there,” I said to myself as I guided Hope to the right side of the tree.
Some of the raptors hung back like they were also running out of steam, but there were plenty of them still nipping at our ass. I brought Hope alongside the tree and then tried to kick her into overdrive as we made the left turn, just as we did with the carno. She gave me her best, and for a few seconds, I felt that magical sensation of flying while riding her back, but we didn’t get far enough away before the main field of raptors rounded the tree behind us. I glanced back even as Hope was slowing down. She’d given us a little space, but there wasn’t enough time.
We weren’t going to make it.
“Come on, girl. You can do this,” I said with an empathetic voice.
“Don’t slow down. They are right behind us!” The woman was able to look backward easier than me because she was lying across my lap.
“Can you use your powers again?” I shouted as her fingers dug into my thighs like nails.
“Are you dumb? I only have two hands!”
“What does that mean?” I shouted in reply. “I know you have two hands!”
“Then why are you asking me to use my Lance again?” she asked.
“Never-fucking-mind!” I shouted down. I didn’t have time to figure out how her ability worked. We had to get back to the fort.
We came around another redwood tree and I immediately recognized how close we were to the wall. If Hope was at full speed we’d be back in under a minute, but, she was still slowing. I needed a plan, or we were going to be swarmed, and then killed, and then eaten.
So I slowed her even more.
“What are you doing?” the woman screamed in a panicked voice.
I was making a gamer’s decision on the battlefield. Hope wasn’t going to make it if I tried to run her the whole way. We weren’t that far, but it was all open ground.
“This is where it gets tough,” I said. “I have to beat off the ones at the front, or they will take us down. You sure you can’t use your Lance thingy?”
“No! Why do you keep asking?” she turned to look up at me, but then her eye widened when she saw our pursuers.
Hope now ran at a decent trot, but it was far under the pace needed to escape all the green feathered fuckers around us. I guided her toward a sequoia I recognized; it was the one just across the open field behind the fort.
More green raptors appeared in one’s and two’s on both our sides. Some almost seemed to hesitate when they saw Hope bounding by with apparent lack of concern for predators. But that pause didn’t last for long.
Another raptor ran up from behind and sprang onto Hope’s left side. The parasaur turned left and right to try to shake the stowaway, but the raptor held fast to her scales as well as the over-the-back rope harness.
“Come on, you little fucker!” I yelled at it. It was crazy hard to turn myself eno
ugh that I could wield my spear, but I managed to get just far enough I could point it in the direction of the feathery bastard now standing on Hope’s back.
I caught a glimpse of another raptor that ran at us from the side, but I could only deal with one at a time.
And there were a dozen more approaching.
I did one fast swing with my spear and then shot a glance toward our front. I made one little correction to Hope’s path, fought against my terror, and then gave the raptor my full attention.
The raptor shifted a bit as Hope adjusted her path, but didn’t tumble over the side. Instead, it chose that moment to lunge at me.
I braced the spear under my right arm and pointed it at the leaping lizard. I didn’t think I could thrust with one hand while doing all my other shit, so I planned to use my spear differently.
The raptor advanced along the ridge of Hope’s back with its mouth leading the charge. I countered by wedging the spear under the raptor’s tiny wing, then I used the pole to shove the beast aside, and momentum knocked the flapping creature over the edge. I felt the fallen attacker bounce off my foot as it tumbled into the dirt below.
We approached the final tree on our route, and I shifted our path toward home one last time. I managed to keep Hope to the slower trotting pace as we neared the tree, but I sped her up as we made the turn. The fort appeared only a few dozen yards ahead of us and I felt a bit of relief flood my stomach.
“There it is!” I shouted to my dinosaur.
I asked her for a run, and she gave it to me, but Hope’s once-majestic breathing was now ragged and wet.
“Come on, Hope. You can make it,” I yelled.
I couldn’t accept that we’d die within sight of our home.
We had to make one last push.
“Galmine! We’re coming in!” I screamed as I directed Hope toward the gate. I could almost hear the raptors panting behind us, and the woman in my lap started begging me to go faster.
Hope hit her stride for a few precious seconds as we cruised across the first half of the open ground, but too soon she shifted back down to a tired trot. I spun around to see the raptors coming around the tree and slinking out of the ferns on both sides of the trunk. We’d been going much too slow to fool them with direction changes.
