by Brian Keene
All we had was what had been in our pockets—a bit of paper and a pencil, Deke’s compass, a pouch of chewing tobacco, Janelle’s frilly lace handkerchief, some money, and other odds and ends. It got cold after the sun went down. We had no matches or flint. We huddled together for warmth. Janelle fell asleep with her cheek resting on my shoulder. When she breathed, her breasts rubbed against my arm, soft and warm. That made everything we’d been through almost worth it.
A few lizards passed by, close enough for us to see them. None of them were like the ones from the creek. One was the size of a cow, with a long neck and even longer tail. It sniffed around the base of the tree, but was more interested in eating leaves than it was in us. Another one, a baby judging by its size, had a bill like a duck. One of the creatures shook the ground as it lumbered by. Trees snapped, crashing to the earth. We saw its legs and hind end, but not the rest of it. Some of the lizards had feathers. Most didn’t. Right before sundown, the forest got real dark as something flew overhead. I poked my head out and looked up. Through the branches, I caught a glimpse of a flying creature with a fifteen-foot wingspan. It reminded me more of a bat than a bird.
We stayed there all night. We didn’t talk much. When we did, it was in short, hushed whispers so we wouldn’t attract attention. Janelle and Deke slept. Jorge shut his eyes, but opened them every time there was a noise from the forest. Deke cried in his sleep, but I didn’t mention it to him. After all, I cried, too. Only difference was my eyes were open.
• • •
“What are they?” Janelle asked the next morning.
“Big damn lizards,” Deke told her.
“I know that. But where did they come from?”
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Ya’ll know about these big bones in the rocks that folks dig up out of the ground, right?”
“Sure,” Deke replied. “There’s rich people who collect them.”
Janelle nodded. “They’re called fossils—all that remains of the dinosaurs.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the word. I reckon these lizards are living versions of those fossils. They’re dinosaurs.”
“The Reverend might have disagreed with you on that,” Deke said. “He seemed to think they were something out of the Bible. I don’t remember any dinosaurs in the good book.”
“Well, the Reverend’s dead. I don’t reckon he’ll be any more help.”
Janelle frowned. “You should be more respectful of the dead, Mr. Hogan.”
“I usually am. But our recent experiences with the dead have soured me a bit. It’s hard to be respectful of something when it’s trying to eat you.”
“But the Reverend wasn’t like those dead.”
“No, he wasn’t. I reckon he was one of the lucky ones.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” Deke said. “I thought dinosaurs were supposed to be extinct.”
“Somebody forgot to tell them that.”
Jorge glanced at each of us as we talked, clearly trying to follow the conversation. His expression was desperate. I smiled at him. He smiled back and then pointed outside.
“I’m with him,” Deke said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We need to find our way back to the desert,” I agreed.
“But the dead are still out there,” Janelle said.
“They’re here in the valley, too,” I reminded her. “But there aren’t any dinosaurs in the desert. Given a choice, I’d rather take my chances with just the dead, rather than worrying about them both.”
Deke rubbed the whiskers on his chin. “You remember how to get back to the canyon entrance?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I got all turned around when we ran. I was hoping one of you knew the way.”
Neither Deke or Janelle remembered, and when we tried asking Jorge, he just stared at us in confusion and pointed outside again.
“Try your compass,” I told Deke. “Let’s get a bearing on where we are, and which direction we’ll need to go.”
He pulled it out, wiped condensation from the lens, and then stared at it.
“What’s wrong?” Janelle asked.
“Damned thing ain’t working,” Deke muttered. “It’s just spinning round and round, like it can’t find north.”
“Let me see.” I tried it for myself. Sure enough, the needle just kept spinning in a circle. I handed it back to him. “How much did you pay for that?”
“Five cents.”
“That was five cents too much.”
“It worked in the desert.”
“Well, it ain’t working now.”
Jorge pointed outside again.
“We can’t just go stumbling around through this valley,” Deke said. “We’ll get eaten.”
“That might be so,” I agreed, “but we can’t stay here, either.”
“Then what do you propose, Hogan?”
“I say we head for high ground. The valley is ringed by those hills. I say we get to the top of one of them, and then work our way back down to the desert. Should be easy without the horses.”
“That’s another problem,” Deke said. “With no mounts, how do we stay ahead of the dead once we make it out of here?”
I shrugged. “They’re slow. And judging by the shape those coyotes were in yesterday, I’d say the desert has been harder on them than it was on us. Long as we keep moving, we should be able to outpace them. With any luck, they’ll fall apart before too much longer.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Janelle asked.
I didn’t have an answer for her. None of us did.
• • •
Soon as it was light, we crept outside and held our breath. When nothing charged out of the undergrowth, we relaxed. I shimmied up a tree and got a fix on our location. The hills were there on the horizon, ringing the valley. Pale clouds floated above them, almost touching their tips. I saw a few dinosaurs—long-necked, soft-eyed things with square, blunt teeth, chewing on the treetops. They reminded me of cows. Just a lot larger. I shuddered, watching them warily. Big as they were, they could have reached me in no time. Luckily, they paid me no attention.
We set off on our trek through the valley. I took the lead, followed by Deke and Janelle. Jorge brought up the rear. We went slowly, communicating with each other through hand gestures. The forest was full of animal noises, but they weren’t sounds that I recognized. There were croaking, raspy grunts and long hisses and chirps that sounded almost, but not quite, like bird-songs.
The first sound we recognized was a tree snapping—a loud crack, like a schoolmarm’s paddle smacking someone’s behind. We couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from. Then we heard it crash to the ground. The forest floor vibrated with the impact. Another tree snapped. We caught a glimpse of the thing— a tail as long as a stagecoach and hind legs taller than a barn. It was walking away from us. We hurried straight ahead, not wanting to attract its attention. We moved so fast that we didn’t see the dead dinosaur until it lurched out of the undergrowth.
Janelle’s shriek echoed through the valley. Deke and I dove to the side. Jorge stood there gaping as it towered over him, staring down at him with one good eye. I recognized the lizard right away. It was the same one we’d encountered the day before. The missing eye and the scars on its face were unmistakable. When we’d last seen it, the dinosaur was still alive. Apparently, the dead coyote it had eaten hadn’t agreed with it, because now it was dead—infected with Hamelin’s Revenge. It already stank. A swarm of flies hovered around it. Its movements were sluggish, but it was still quick enough to catch Jorge. He tried to run, but it swiped at his back, plunging its talons into his skin and lifting him off the ground. Jorge jerked and jittered like a drunk at a square dance. He opened his mouth to scream and vomited blood instead. The lizard’s claws burst through his chest. Then the dinosaur ripped him in half.
I grabbed Janelle’s hand and forced her to run with me. Deke was at my side, breathing heavily. His cheeks were flushed. I wanted to ask him if he was a
ll right, but couldn’t spare the breath. We plunged through the greenery, heedless of where we were going or what was around us. One-Eye lumbered after us. We couldn’t see him, but his steady, thudding footfalls kept pace.
The ground started to slope upward. The trees tilted forward, then thinned out. Janelle stumbled and fell, but I scooped her up in my arms and continued on. Deke’s face turned beet red. He was drenched with sweat.
“Not much further,” I panted. “Just keep climbing.”
They nodded. Janelle tapped my shoulder, indicating that she wanted down. She was wobbly when she first tried to stand, but soon regained her footing. We scrabbled upward. The vegetation thinned to scrub, and the soil turned rocky. Huge boulders thrust from the earth. I glanced back down into the forest and saw treetops swaying back and forth as One-Eye passed beneath them. Then he lurched into sight. Without pausing, he started up the hill, thundering toward us.
“It’s no use,” Deke sobbed, mopping his brow with his shirt-tail. “That thing’s dead. It won’t tire. It’ll just keep coming until we tucker out, and then get us.”
“I ain’t gonna let that happen,” I said.
“Well, how do you reckon you can stop it?” Deke glanced back down at the dinosaur, creeping closer but still a long way off. “We ain’t got any weapons.”
“Sure we do.” I smiled, patting the boulder next to me.
“Hogan, you’ve lost your damned mind.” Deke stumbled to his feet. “What are you gonna do? Spit at it?”
“No. When it gets closer, I’m gonna drop this rock on its head. That was your idea yesterday, remember?”
“Will that work?” Janelle asked.
I shrugged. “I reckon that depends on whether I hit him or not.”
We waited for it to get closer. Janelle got nervous, but I calmed her down, assuring her that my plan would work. And it did. When the dinosaur was right below us, close enough that we could smell it again and hear the insects buzzing around its corpse, Deke and I rolled the boulder out over the ledge and dropped it right on the lizard’s head. There was a loud crack, like the sounds the snapping tree trunks had made. One-Eye sank to the ground. The boulder tumbled down the hillside. After a moment, the twice-dead dinosaur did the same.
Cheering, Janelle and Deke both hugged me. Then, before I even realized what was happening, Janelle kissed me. Her lips were blistered and cracked from the sun, but I didn’t mind. I pulled her to me and kissed her back. We didn’t stop until Deke cleared his throat.
“We ought to get going,” he said. “I reckon there will be more like him coming along shortly.”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed. “Let’s go. I’ll race you both to the top.”
We scrabbled to the summit, laughing and talking about our good fortune. It occurred to me that we should feel bad about Jorge and the others, and I did, of course. But at that moment, I was just happy to be alive, and even happier about that kiss. I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Hope.
That sensation crumbled when we reached the summit. We stood there, unable to speak. Janelle began to cry. Instead of desert, spread out before us was more forest—an endless sea of green treetops swaying as things passed beneath them.
“No,” Deke whispered. “This can’t be right. This ain’t on any of the maps.”
I put my arm around Janelle. “I don’t think we’re on the maps anymore, Deke.”
Deep in the valley below, something roared. I glanced over my shoulder. Another dinosaur emerged from the forest. Its head was as big as a full-grown buffalo and its teeth were the size of tent pegs. It was obviously dead. It might have escaped extinction, but it couldn’t escape Hamelin’s Revenge. Death is funny that way. In the end, it gets us all.
As we ran, I wondered if one day, folks would dig our bones out of the ground like they had the dinosaurs, and if so, which kind of dead we’d be.
STORY NOTE: This tale first came about after Joe R. Lansdale asked me to write a story for an anthology he was editing. He wanted something “fun and retro-pulpy.” I wrote him this. Unfortunately, the story was too long, and there wasn’t room for it in the book. Joe and the publisher were nice enough to recommend the story to John Joseph Adams, who was editing an anthology of zombie stories called The Living Dead 2. John contacted me and the story found a home there, under the original title “Lost Canyon of the Damned”. It has since been adapted into a comic book, as well.
Although this story takes place in the Old West (or, at least, it does until they step through that dimensional doorway and end up in a world of dinosaurs), the virus that causes the zombie outbreak is the same as the one from my novels Dead Sea and Entombed. Consider it an alternate reality where the zombie apocalypse happened during the days of the Old West.
THE WHITE WORM
STORY NOTE: This note actually applies to the next two stories that follow—“The White Worm” and “A Darker Shade of Winter”.
Very early in my career, (late-1999, to be specific) a Canadian publishing company contracted me to develop a short horror novel for children, and to also write a short story (roughly 400 words long); both of which were supposed to be skewed toward a nine or ten-year old child’s reading level. These books were being produced in French for children living in Quebec. The way it worked was like this—I would write the short story in English, then they would hire a writer to adapt my story into a full-length, French-language short novel. My byline would appear on the short story, and I’d share credit on the novel in the form of ‘based on a story by Brian Keene’.
So, basically, all I had to do was write a short story for kids, agree to let someone else turn it into a French-language novel, and I’d get paid a handsome sum of $100. All of which I agreed to, because at that point in my career, I didn’t have a career. I’d sold a handful of short stories to a handful of fanzines, most of which had paid me in copies. The only real money I’d made was for a dozen newspaper articles I’d written, and one short story which I’d sold for pro-rates. I was living in Buffalo, and working two jobs (neither of which involved writing), and $100 was money I could use.
I wrote and submitted “The White Worm”. I received and signed a contract, got paid, and the check didn’t bounce so I used it to pay my car insurance bill. Then the publisher told me that they’d decided not to publish short stories, and instead, simply adapt them into the kid’s novels. I saw a cover design for the novel, and then I never heard from the company again, nor have I ever been able to find a record of the book actually being published. This was in the prehistoric days of the Internet, when your web-hosting service was in danger of getting eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and things like Google were just a twinkle in the New World Order’s eye. Years later, when Google was finally invented, I searched for the publishing company and discovered that they’d turned into an industrial supply business (same name, same owners, but a different product).
Writing is a strange gig.
I never bothered submitting “The White Worm” anywhere else, because (at the time) there weren’t many places I could sell it to. Boy’s Life was the only market I could think of, but they weren’t publishing horror stories. The following year, I instead adapted it into a much longer story for adults, called “A Darker Shade of Winter”. And I now present both stories here, side-by-side. You’ll see their common ground, but I think you’ll also agree that they are very different tales. I should also caution you that they are the work of a younger writer who was still struggling to find his voice, so (to my eyes, at least) they read pretty rough. Maybe you’ll feel differently. Maybe you won’t. But I can’t call this series of books The Complete Short Fiction of Brian Keene if I don’t actually include everything—even the ones that are rough around the edges.
It should also be noted that when these stories were written, the Internet was still new, and just starting to spread into most households. The second story’s references to modems and news reports about websites might seem more than a
bit dated now, but I’ve resisted the urge to update the text.
Eric sniffled, blinking back tears as their laughter surrounded him. Ever since his family had moved here, Luke, Ron and Willie constantly teased him. Today, they’d chased him home from school, demanding his lunch money, ripping his backpack from his shoulders, tossing his books around, and pushing him down face first in the frozen mud.
“Look, the new kid is gonna cry.” Luke sneered, towering over him. “Crybaby!”
“Leave me alone,” Eric shouted, getting to his feet. He shoved past them, and bent to pick up his books. Willie, who was smaller than Eric, but had the others to hide behind, kicked Eric’s science textbook out into the street.
“We’re not done with you,” Ron called.
Wiping the tears off his muddy face, Eric ran home.
“Eric,” his mother shouted. “How many times have I told you not to slam the door?”
Eric slunk into the kitchen. His mother was busy feeding Janice, his baby sister. His father had his head buried in the newspaper.
“Look at you,” she scolded. “You’re a mess!”
“But...”
“No excuses, young man. Go to your room this second!”
“But Mom...”
“Eric, you heard your mother!” His father’s voice was stern.
Sadly, Eric went upstairs and switched on his computer. He’d asked for a dog for his birthday and got a computer instead. He didn’t mind. His parents paid attention to Janice. The computer paid attention to him. The computer didn’t beat him up or make fun of him.
