by Tony Burgess
“Are you okay?” Alex dabbed her shirt sleeve in a pulpy crater on the back of his arm.
“Dizzy. Feel dizzy,” Eric moaned.
A low throaty noise in the bushes behind us. A gravelly, growly sound that could only have come from something big. Alex was nearest the wall of vegetation. She put a shaking hand to her mouth to prevent a scream. I slid over to Joost. She had an odd smile on her muddy face.
“I don’t mind if I get eaten, Captain. I just can’t let kids get hurt. It’s my nature to stand in the way of that.”
“I know. You’re a very good person, Ms. Joost. Better than I ever imagined.”
The rolling growl grew behind us. A huge animal could see or smell us. Ready to pounce. We were trapped there, waiting for a barbaric beast to attack us.
Joost whispered in a weak voice. “Why was I so awful, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“To that boy? I was awful to him. When it’s your job to protect children, you protect them all. You don’t push one away.”
“I know.”
“You save everyone.”
I lowered my head. I don’t know what I was thinking. I can see, as well as you, that I am sorry. It’s too late now. I can’t change things now. It’s not that I was terrible toward Idaho. It’s that I used others to be cruel. Ms. Joost would never have done the things I forced her to do.
Ms. Joost growled. With a wild look in her eyes, she leapt madly into the wall of purple leaves, disappearing like a circus clown crashing through a fake backdrop. Gone. Alex and Eric both hopped to their feet, but stopped when I raised my hand. The jungle was quiet. We all crept slowly to the edge and peered into the frightening flora.
Monsters.
This is too much. What I’m about to tell you may be what we saw, but I don’t want you for even a second to think that I made this part up. I couldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t. It makes me think that maybe this isn’t really a book anymore. It’s some kind of out-of-control reality machine. Anyway, here goes: Brody, the lead singer of the Distillers, was lying on a bale of hay. She was snoring loudly. A deep nose-cracking snore. That was the formidable monster: the cavernous sinuses of Brody Dalle, lying asleep across a bale of hay. And near her, sitting on the jungle floor, was Tré Cool, the drummer from Green Day. He sat with his legs flat and spread apart, with his hands planted firmly on the mush at his hips. His eyes bulged and his cheeks and neck were hugely distorted because, and this is what we found ourselves staring at, the poor tired feet of Ms. Joost were jutting out of the drummer’s mouth. He looked like a mad fat frog that couldn’t swallow the last bits of a giant mantis, so he sat there, waiting for digestion to make room.
“You got somebody there.”
An oddly casual remark. Billie Joe, the lead singer of Green Day, pushed aside some ferns. He smirked and popped a primordial weed stalk into the corner of his mouth and chewed. Eric stepped forward.
“Wow. You’re Billie Joe. You’re Billie Joe!”
Billie Joe leaned slightly back as a single eyebrow flicked up.
“Whoa, junior. That what I am? Billie Joe?”
“Yeah. Yeah. From Green Day. You’re in a rock band. A punk band. Like, a pop band, only punk. Rock.”
“Oh, yeah? Any good? You a fan?”
It was very strange to see this familiar face in this very strange land.
“Yeah, sure. Sure, I am.” Eric was caught up in his own enthusiasm.
“That’s great. So you like Green Day?”
Eric paused as if listening to what he was about to say.
“Uh . . . no. Actually. No, I’m not a huge fan. It’s okay I guess, but . . .”
“That’s okay. I don’t care. What do ya like?”
“Classic rock.”
“That’s what teenagers like. Dads like Green Day, kids like Black Sabbath. Doesn’t matter to me.”
Alex and I crept closer to Tré Cool. The loud snores from Brody rumbled right through our bones. The drummer’s eyes appeared ready to pop from his skull. Ms. Joost’s toes were wiggling a wee bit.
“Can we get our friend out of here, Billie?”
Billie swirled the stalk juice from cheek to cheek, then spat.
“Not really. Not without wrecking Mr. Cool. You can’t kill him, but I’m pretty sure you can wreck him.”
Alex lay a hand on Tré’s bloated front. “Is she in his stomach? Is he eating her?”
Billie stood and lifted a small branch to Joost’s feet and shook its leaves on her soles. Tré snorted.
“Not eating her. She’ll just kinda disappear into him. Once you’re inside Tré you’re kinda wearing him like a suit.”
That was not good. Poor Ms. Joost.
“She’s gonna be her, but in a Tré suit.”
“So what happens to Tré?” Alex asked.
“Not sure. The last thing he ate was a giant frog and he’s sat there for the past couple days, lookin’ stupid. I don’t think he’s been Tré for quite a while. Frog, really. A frog that Tré ate ate your friend.”
Tré Cool’s body jerked suddenly and Ms. Joost’s feet slid into his mouth and down his throat. The drummer burped loudly, then retracted his head on his fat neck and slowly closed his big bubble eyes. Alex touched his back, feeling up to his neck.
“I think we may need to operate on Cool the Frog.”
Billie shrugged.
“Don’t wreck him too bad. I’m still trying to figure out how to get him back. He’s gonna have to swallow himself.”
“Are there other Tré Cools running around here?”
Billie nodded. “Yeah, several. But this one’s got sentimental value.”
Tré Cool looked from Alex to me with an expression of amphibious incomprehension. She stepped around behind him and withdrew a jackknife from her shirt pocket. Her hand was shaking.
“Can we stop her?” Alex pointed to the prone body of Brody, who was still snoring beside Billie Joe on the hay. “That noise is wrecking my nerves.”
“Nope. That’s a dino repellent. Brody’s snore sounds exactly like a T. Rex growl. As long as she snores, the monsters stay away. We gotta just make sure she eats lotsa this stuff.” Billie Joe held up a white flower, leathery with heavy petals, the kind that grew at the waterline. “They put her to sleep.”
Alex nodded then turned to Tré’s back. She placed a hand over his spine then drew the tiny blade down. A thin red line appeared. When the incision was a few inches long, a mouth pushed through. Oncet, the head, saw what Alex was attempting to do. Oncet wiggled back and forth like a head coming through a too-tight turtleneck. He popped out and suddenly Tré’s back closed snugly around his neck. Oncet snorted fluid from his nose. There was very little blood. The gag was caught in the wound and was pulling the head’s jaw down. Alex slid her knife under the gag and sliced upward. The gag fell to the ground. Tré craned his head around to see. Tré seemed to have lost his frog expression. He wasn’t himself anymore. He was Ms. Joost.
“Ms. Joost! Ms. Joost!” Alex put her hand to her mouth in joyful disbelief. Eric laughed and embraced his sister. Alex was crying. I was, too. Ms. Joost lived. We reached for her, recognizing her tough but beautiful expression even if all it had to work with was a manic drummer’s bug-eyed face. It was an amazing feeling that radiated outward from her. The recognition we felt was profound. She was there, a selfless and wonderful crossing guard filling the shoulders of Tré Cool with her own special brand of strength.
Billie, standing over us, pointed to Oncet, the head.
“That thing’s trying to talk.”
At that moment, Brody stopped snoring. She had rolled over in her sleep and fallen to the ground. She coughed. The head, upside down on Mr. Cool’s back, was staring at me. The eyes were focusing. A small shudder, then . . .
“A pair of rare black velociraptors are running along
the river’s edge on legs that propel them forward as if on springs. Their speed is surprising. Their heads point the way forward, never bouncing or jerking with all the movement. Instead they seem to float like sleek, pointy black boots. Each head has small silver eyes and sharp nostrils. They are hunting, occasionally snapping at lime-colored dragonflies. One of the velociraptors whips its tail to the side, a braking maneuver, and comes to stop in a high skirt of water. It has rotated itself 180 degrees, its back facing its partner, who is racing on ahead. She yelps out a noise, a seal-like bark, calling to her partner to stop. He is out of sight, further down the river, but he hears her and stops in the same fashion she did, with his tail high. He walks back, his long legs pushing his heavy tail up and down as he goes.
“She crouches near a fallen tree. Her head is low. She looks like a hunting dog that has sensed prey. He stops at some distance, lowers his head and slips into an opening on the bank above him. She turns her head out quickly, noting where he has gone in, then she goes down on her small forelegs, creeping slowly into the brush. She smells them. Mammals. Soft, but thin. Humans. Not a feast, but once you pull them apart there’s still a lunch to be had. She clicks with her tongue across the inside of her teeth. Soon she hears the same noise, her mate’s response, and he agrees that it’s worth the effort. She advances a little further in, slowly bending branches down under her steps to avoid any snaps or breaks. She is perfectly silent as she draws her powerful haunches up under her body to prepare herself for a strike. The humans are mere feet away. They appear alert. They don’t seem to know she’s here, but they are nervous. Suddenly she hears her mate crashing loudly, flaying in the dense undergrowth. He’s fleeing, not attacking. He is being chased. Then she hears it, the unmistakable deep growl of a Tyrannosaurus rex. She doesn’t move, waiting to see if the superior predator will charge her mate and reveal its position. The next noise she hears isn’t that, however. Instead —”
“Wow! Hey! Wow! That is so cool. What is that?”
Billie Joe was stroking Brody’s jet-black hair as she resumed her thunderous snore.
“That’s our secret weapon,” Alex said. “That’s why I had to operate. We gotta move on from here.”
“Well, why’d ya shut it up? C’mon, leave that thing going. That’s the best thing we got. That and Brody’s monster apnea.”
Alex and Eric were lifting Tré to his feet. He appeared able to stand, but there was still a stunned expression on his face. I helped Billie Joe lift Brody up off the hay bales.
“Throw her over your back.”
“Will she stay asleep?”
“Yeah, sure. We just gotta keep feedin’ her flowers. She’ll sleep through anything.”
I pulled her wrists and hung her up across my back. She was a surprisingly heavy young woman.
“So why don’t you leave that head talking? Seems to me, that thing’s got some need-to-know insight.”
I lurched forward. Ahead, Alex was trying to get Tré Cool to walk on his own. She looked back at Billie.
“We can only use the head in small doses. It has an effect on your thinking. You let it go for long and you’ll stop. You’ll just sit down and start listening to it. It’s for emergencies.”
Alex smiled at Billie Joe. She liked him. I could tell because I rarely saw softness seeping into that young woman’s eyes when she was setting people straight.
“Sorry your friend is messed up.” Billie caught up to Alex as we made our way into the sparser bush that opened up beyond the river. Tré was walking, smiling, but clumsy. He clearly couldn’t be left to walk without assistance. “She’s in there. But so’s a frog and Tré and some plants he was eating and, oh yeah, a big snake.”
Alex lifted Tré’s hand in hers, encouraging him to walk beside her.
“Poor Ms. Joost. She’s such a strong woman. Even with all that, I feel her. I would feel unsafe without her.”
Eric had been point man, leading quite skillfully through the easier bush, but now he had stopped. “Okay. I got a question.”
We all stopped. I felt Brody slip to the ground, her snore uninterrupted.
“Where are we going? Do we know if this is a good direction? I’m not comfortable leading.”
I stepped forward, leaving Ms. Brody leaning against an angle of black root.
“We’re looking for Madison.”
I had just remembered this.
“She’s on that river somewhere. We’ll have to go back, but the sun’s setting soon and I think we have to find a safer place to spend the night. I don’t know if Mom-bats are afraid of snoring rock stars.”
Billie Joe snorted. Eric shot him a look.
“Hey, what happens if a T. Rex hears that noise?”
Billie Joe shrugged.
“I don’t know. That’s a good question.”
The question was answered sooner than I’d have liked. The massive head of a T. Rex swung down ahead of us. She drove an immense palm tree into our path. I dove to the side and ran. We all headed in different directions as the beast crashed on her enormous legs toward Brody. I stopped and almost ran back, but there was no point. I would have been killed instantly. I saw the others; they too had stopped. Eric and Billie Joe were helping Alex drag Tré around toward me.
The T. Rex stood over Brody, its great torso swaying. Everything shook; leaves fell and stones bounced when she roared. My eardrums felt as if they’d been stabbed. As the head swung back down like the heavy shovel on a giant digger, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t watch. I could only hope it was quick. That that poor woman didn’t suffer. I opened my eyes. The T. Rex was still standing over Brody, but now it was softly nudging her, gently as if . . . Of course! Brody’s snore sounded like a sleeping baby T. Rex. That was even scarier to other dinosaurs. No one would want to get between a T. Rex and her baby. The others were watching, too.
Alex whispered, “Billie, how long will she sleep?”
“Long time. I stuffed her with flowers before we left. Hours. Maybe even a couple days.”
Alex rose slowly, quietly.
“Then we have to come back for her.”
I watched as the T. Rex settled in to keep guard over her baby. The T. Rex was giant. I could have stood in her mouth. I felt Eric’s hand on my shoulder.
“She’ll be okay. She’s probably safer than us. We have to move.”
More.
We snuck away as silently as we could, putting distance between the dinosaur and us. The jungle was sparer the further we moved from the river. Patches of bald earth began to appear and we tried to pick up the pace. At one point I had thought I was saving a book from ruin. In truth, it was my life and the lives of these people that were in real peril. I wanted us all to live. Idaho must have watched Jurassic Park. I think that’s pretty obvious. What scares me more is this guy by the moon. I’ve seen him before. I know who he is. The Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum. I bet it was Early’s favorite movie. I bet he made his son watch it. Probably scared the kid to death.
Alex held up her hand for us to stop. “I think we have to think about settling in for the night. The light is dying.” She was right. Night would soon come. I felt that it no longer mattered to anyone if I agreed or disagreed. I didn’t blame them.
I looked around for a place to sit.
Alex turned to me, her back to the others, and spoke in a hush. “I need to know all the dangers. Is there anything you need to tell me? What’s going to happen if we sleep here?”
I desperately wanted to help, wanted to tell her everything, but I was pretty sure I didn’t know much more than she did. I enumerated a list.
“Dinosaurs. Mom-bats. Could be alligators and snakes. Giant spiders . . .”
The list had no end.
“Things falling. A piano would be bad. Crush us in our sleep. Sharks. They don’t come up on land, but I wouldn’t rule it out. . . .”
I sounded crazy, but, honestly, in this place, in this world, a list of dangers had to include everything. Alex turned me toward the others.
“Okay. Listen, everyone. Listen.”
The others looked to me. Tré’s face was sloppy and drooped toward the ground.
“Well, I was just saying that . . . I was just telling Alex what dangers I thought we might face through the night.”
I glanced at Alex and she gave me an encouraging face.
“Okay. Where was I? Sharks. Yeah. Possibly sharks. Rocks or sticks, someone was throwing them at us, could be very bad. Hammers, for that matter, and axes. Spears, I guess, anything like that, anything long and pointy might be thrown. Um. Hot water. Boiling water poured on us. Oh, that’s awful. And . . . And I can’t think of . . .”
Eric looked to Alex as he spoke. “What about things like monkeys? And apes and gorillas? They could even be rabid and insane. And if you’re going to include giant spiders, why not huge ants? Or centipedes?”
“Cars.”
Billie Joe looked up, clearly spooked.
“What if a car just rips through here, runs us over in our sleep?”
Alex agreed.
“Cars with minds of their own. And teeth.”
“Shadows,” I said. “The shadows could start pulling at us, drag us under the brush and strangle us. Shadows could get very involved. But light, too. Moonlight in the form of knives or razors or teeth. And then there’s, you know, just a plain old crazy person. What’s to stop a crazy person from hacking his way through the trees right there and doing God knows what?”
We all stared at each other in horrified silence. A crazy person. Someone running into our midst who was completely out of control. Alex was frightened now. The light was dying, but her wide eyes glowed.
“Doing what? Finish. Doing what?”
For a moment I felt strange. I didn’t know along what lines I was imagining things. I wasn’t sure if I knew something or if I was inventing something. My voice, when I found it, was deep and solid and terrifying.
