Tamer_King of Dinosaurs 2

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “Something to work toward,” I said. “Imagine riding on top of one. We wouldn’t need a tree fort, their backs are just as high, and I bet they can run as fast as the trikes.”

  “They are powerful,” Sheela said as she scooped up clay into one of the baskets.

  “They are scary,” Kacerie said. “Everything on this planet is dangerous.”

  “You are lucky Victor saved you,” Trel scoffed. “You would have gotten--”

  “I know,” the pink-haired woman interrupted. “Look, I’m really thankful to Victor, and you, and Sheela, and Galmine. I know I was a pain for the last few days, but I’m going to work to help you all survive. I was one of the best hairdressers in my city, maybe even my world, so I’m just trying to come to grips with the fact that I’m never going back home. I don’t have the skill set that you or Sheela have. I want to get better and offer something unique to you all. I want to be part of the team. Okay?”

  Kacerie’s words caught Trel off guard a bit, and I saw the spider-woman’s lips pull to the side. Neither of them said anything more for a few moments, so I turned my head toward the lake to make sure nothing was sneaking up on us. It looked clear, so I grabbed a full basket from Sheela and then ordered Bob to step out of the water some so I could tie it to his saddle.

  “Well, we do need grooming,” Trel finally said. “My hair is normally far more beautiful. I’ve grown used to the odor of our bodies, but we all need baths and a way to wash our clothes. It isn’t as important as a new fort, but we’ll eventually need to clean ourselves and upkeep our appearance.”

  “Hmmm,” Kacerie said as she looked down at the clay she was scooping up in her hands. It covered up her forearms, and she froze for half a moment. “Huh. I think I know of something I can do.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Soap,” she replied. “I’ve never made it, but I know what goes into it. I bet I could figure it out.”

  “You can make soap?” Trel’s voice seemed to quicken with excitement. “Really?”

  “I think I can,” Kacerie said. “It’s just animal fat and lye. There must be two or three hundred pounds of fat on each of the giant dinosaurs that Victor killed. I’ll just need to heat it up to render it and then combine it with lye and maybe something for scent and texture.”

  “But lye?” Trel asked urgently. “How do you make that?”

  “It’s wood ash,” Kacerie said. “Like I said, I’ve never done it before, but I can try it. Too bad we don’t have any metal pots or pans, but I could probably heat the water enough in a thick clay pot. I think I just need to put some wood ash in water, heat it, and then take the lye off the top. Then I’ll mix it with the rendered animal fat and whatever we come up with for scent.”

  “This is of interest to me,” Trel said quickly. “I will help you make it.”

  “Yeah,” Kacerie said as she nodded to herself. “I think I can do it. Then we can all clean ourselves, our clothes, and our cookware. It will help keep us from getting sick.”

  “Ohhh,” Trel moaned. “I can’t wait. A bath with soap and warm water sounds divine. Did I tell you that I am a duchess? I had ten servants who would wash my body and then massage the finest oils into my skin.” Trel let out a long sigh and then looked off into the distance as if she was daydreaming.

  “I like the idea, Kacerie,” I said, “but we have to build the fort walls first before you start playing with it.”

  “Got it,” she agreed, but her beautiful face now wore a wide grin. “Once we have soap, I’d be able to shave that beard off you, and I can cut everyone’s hair.”

  “You’d be able to shave this off?” I asked as I ran my hand through my beard. I didn’t really have access to a mirror, so I didn’t know exactly how long it had gotten.

  “Yes, shave his beard off,” Trel said. “He has a handsome face. I want to see it all the time.”

  “These stone knives are really sharp,” Kacerie said as she reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled one of the blades out. “I could easily shave your face with it. I’ve done it with thousands of my male clients.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Kacerie, I think we are starting to figure out a role for you, and it is an important one. Sanitation is critical for survival.”

  “Yeah. I think I like the idea.” The pink-haired woman smiled at me again, and her pale blue eyes glittered. We stared at each other for a few moments, and then she looked back down to the clay basket.

  “Speaking of baths and showering,” I said as I grabbed another basket and tied it onto Bob’s back. “Trel, we need to get water to the camp. How do we do it?”

  “Not from here,” she said as she gestured to the lake. “It’s too far away. Didn’t you say that the river where you normally get water is closer?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s still about a mile away though. The lake is like three.”

  “And it’s also over a hill,” Trel said. “I’d like to see the river. I think the flowing water could help us.”

  “Help us move the water a mile?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied as she tapped on her lips with her black finger. “There is no energy in this lake, it moves, but not quickly. The river should have energy that we might be able to use. I’ll need to see it again. Just so you know, I have no idea about plumbing, but I am a genius, so I’m sure I’ll figure out something.”

  “I think you will,” I said as I grabbed the last basket. “Let’s get the jugs filled up and then go--” my words caught in my throat as I spotted movement on the other side of the lake. It took me half a second to realize what was going on, but as soon as I did, I let out a gasp of surprise.

  “Do you see those raptors?” I asked as I nodded across the lake.

  “Where?” Trel and Kacerie asked.

  “They are in the trees,” Sheela hissed and the other two women gasped.

  It was difficult to see them since the dinos had feathers that were black and dark red, but once I identified the movements, it was easier to pick them out of the jungle. There was a group of maybe eight of them I could see, and they appeared to be sneaking up on the two brontos.

  “Why do they think they can attack those big long-necked ones?” Trel asked. “It looks like they are much smaller.”

  “They are bigger than the green feathered dinos,” I whispered, and then I saw one of the raptors emerge from the trees.

  My estimation of its size had been spot on. The green deinonychus raptors were about as large as Great Danes, and maybe weighed two-hundred pounds, but these new raptors were nearly as big as a horse, and even though they were all the way on the other side of the lake, it was obvious that their claws were longer than my arm.

  “I still don’t see how they expect to take down the--”

  “Let’s get out of the valley and get water from the river,” I interrupted Trel as I commanded my gang of dinos to exit the water. It was too far away for my Eye-Q to identify the new species of raptors, but I was getting a sinking feeling in my stomach, and my instinct was telling me I didn’t want to be anywhere close to the battle that was about to go down.

  “They are so small though,” Trel said. “The big ones will just step on them.”

  “Maybe, but let’s fucking go.” My voice was a growl now, maybe because of my headache, and Trel nodded before she got up in the saddle with me.

  Then the raptors attacked the brontos, and I couldn’t look away.

  I had first counted eight raptors hiding in the jungle, but over twenty poured out of the trees and sprinted toward the two brontos. The massive dinos were standing hip deep on the shore of the lake and didn’t seem to notice their attackers at first, but that changed as soon as the raptor in the point position reached the long tail of the smaller bronto I guessed was the female. She let out a bellow that seemed to shake the ground when the raptor latched onto her tail, and the male swung around his head to face the wave of attackers.

  Half of the raptors were swimming throug
h the water toward the long-necked dinos, but the other half were on the shore and seemed to be angling around to get on the other side. I guessed this was to keep the brontos from trying to get back on the shore easily, but I wasn’t quite sure.

  “The larger one is--” Sheela started to say, but her words were interrupted by what sounded like a cannon blast going off. The male brontosaurus had flicked his massive tail around like a whip, and one of the swimming raptors evaporated into a puff of red mist.

  The female emulated her mate’s movement with her tail, and the first raptor that had latched on was launched into the trees of the jungle some two hundred yards away. There were four others to take his place though, and I saw their front arm claws hook into her legs like ice climbing axes. The female tried to stomp them off, but the water was making her movements slow, and the raptors brought their foot claws into play. They raked their feet against her legs and both brontos let out frustrated screams.

  The male swung his head down low across the female’s feet and knocked two of the raptors off, but a new group was now attaching to his legs, and he began to move like a bucking horse. The raptors wouldn’t come free though, and that whole side of the turquoise lake began to turn dark red with gallons of brontosaurus blood.

  The female flicked her tail again, and she killed one of the raptors on the shore, it wasn’t one of the fuckers digging into her leg though, and she let out another screech of agony.

  The male bronto tried to swipe his head across his mate’s legs again, but another group of raptors had swam to the spot, and two of them jumped out of the water and caught onto his face when he brought it lower. They stuck like spider-monkeys, and the male thrashed his head around violently in an attempt to dislodge them. One of the raptors flew off, but it looked like he took one of the bronto’s eyeballs out, and the larger dino’s face leaked out gallons of blood. It fell from his skull like a waterfall, and it sprayed across the lake like a sprinkler when he shook his head.

  The battle was horrific, and I shook my aching head to bring myself back to what really mattered: getting the fuck out of here as soon as we could.

  “Let’s go,” I said as I commanded the team of dinos to race away from our side of the lake. I doubted that these new larger raptors cared about us since the two brontos would probably feed them for a bit, but it was obvious that this pack was way more dangerous than the group of carnos I’d just killed.

  These raptors were going to finish eating those brontos, and then they were going to need more to consume. Unfortunately, our camp was only three-ish miles from the lake, and we had seven rotting carnotaurus bodies near us.

  We needed our new walls built yesterday.

  I led our dinos into the jungle first and then pushed them up the hill. The path was a bit longer than I would have liked, but I didn’t want to risk the raptors seeing us going up the open hill. We were soon cresting the slope that led into our valley, and I directed our caravan of dinos down along the river until we reached the spot where the massive rotting tree was overturned.

  “This is where we normally get water when we don’t need clay,” I explained to Trel after we had arrived.

  “And our fort is that way?” she asked as she pointed into the trees.

  “Yeah,” I confirmed.

  “Does it go uphill, or downhill or…?”

  “It varies,” Sheela said. “I would say that our fort is actually at a higher elevation.”

  “Hmmm,” Trel said as she looked at the river, the shore, and the closest trees.

  “Let’s get the jugs filled,” I said as I commanded Bob to sit on the shore.

  All the other dinos had filled up on water at the lake, but I set Tom, Nicole, and Katie to guard us against anything that might come at us from the trees. I doubted the larger raptors saw us, but I wanted to be careful. There were no second chances in Dinosaurland.

  Sheela, Kacerie and I filled up the water while Trel surveyed the river and shore. We had six jugs to fill, but it only took a half a minute with the three of us.

  “You just take it from the river?” Trel asked, and I saw her blink her eyes to use her Eye-Q.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “We try to go as deep as we can, but it’s just like the lake.”

  “The lake is even worse. We are lucky that no one has gotten sick. I haven’t been paying attention to our water issue. Ugh.”

  “I know,” I said. “But this is the best we can do.”

  “I can make a filter. Maybe something that has three or four stages.” Trel bit her lip and nodded her head as she thought about the problem. “We can get rocks, sand, finer sand, and I’ll make a funnel with clay that will be mounted on a tripod pedestal. We can pour it into the top of the funnel and then the water will drip down into a secondary jug. Then we can take that jug of water and pour it into a system of finer sand and gravel. It should get rid of most of the pathogens and viruses.”

  “When I first got here, I worried that I couldn’t drink anything without boiling it.”

  “Hmmm,” Trel mused. “I don’t think we’ll have to do that. I need to play around with the clay, but I should be able to make an ultra-fine filter with the material. It can have pores so small that only water molecules can fit through. It will take a long time to filter, but I can make a tank with a lid on top of it. Then we can pour the second stage water into the vat and drink that water when it slowly drips into a final tank.

  “Add this to the list after building the fort,” I sighed.

  “We have been lucky so far,” Trel said with a sigh. “All it takes is an animal shitting upstream a few minutes before you gather water, and we will all become sick.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “We should have some clay left over after we start the fires in the logs,” Trel continued. “I’ll play around with some funnel designs. It won’t take that much time, even if we just get the first two stages of filters working in the next few days, it will be much safer. If we want to grow our tribe, we’ll have to be able to provide clean water consistently.”

  “Yeah, I agree,” I said. “And that’s also why we need the aqueduct. What do you think? Can you build one?”

  “I know how to build a pump that will use the momentum of the river to push water uphill,” she said as she gestured up to the trees. “My first thought is to have the pipes go up into the trees and then flow through the canopy to us. The advantage would be that it will be harder for dinosaurs to break, but the disadvantage is that the wind twists the branches, and we might have pipes break. I think the best option would be to make pipes and bury them deep in the ground.”

  “So a mile of pipes?” Kacerie said. “That sounds like a lot of work. We’d make them out of clay?”

  “Yeah,” Trel said with a shrug. “I’d have to figure out how to craft some sort of template, and we would have to figure out a way to join each pipe piece together. I’ll need some sort of glue, or each piece will need to be finely crafted so that they fit together snugly. I’ll also have to create check valves so we can inspect the line.”

  “Check valves?” I asked with concern. This was beginning to sound really complicated, but I was the one that wanted the work done.

  “Yeah,” Trel huffed. “Let’s say we lay a mile of the clay pipe, and for some reason, the water stops coming. I won’t know where the issue is, so we’ll have to either find a spot on the ground that is flooded with water, or we’ll have to dig up the full mile again. If I put a check valve every hundred or so feet, I can just open it and see if water comes out. If it does, then I know the break happened closer to our fort, and I can save a lot of time repairing.”

  “Damn Trel,” I said with awe. “You are so smart.”

  “I am a genius,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve told you many times. Of course, I don’t quite know how we would effectively build these pipes. We will need a lot of them and the check valves. I can have the filters figured out in a few days, but getting the water from the river to our camp will b
e much harder. I haven’t even talked about making the pump. It needs to be made out of metal, or I need to figure out how to make a clay that can take a lot of pressure. That is the only way it will work.”

  “But there is a way?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Then we’ll figure it out. I have faith in us.”

  “I do too.” Trel smiled at me, and for half a moment I forgot about the horse-sized raptors butchering brontos only three miles away from us.

  “Is there anything we can take from the shore here that will allow you to make the filter when you return?” Sheela asked pragmatically, and Trel and I blinked as we looked away from each other.

  “Ohh, grab some of those larger leaves growing out of the water on the shore.” Trel pointed at what looked like lily pads, only they were the size of my chest. “Then put some of the larger sand inside of three of them. Bah, I’m excited about the idea so I’ll help you collect some.”

  The spider-woman leapt down from Bob’s back and then frantically began scooping up sand from the shore of the river. Sheela and Kacerie grabbed more of the lily pads, but I stayed on top of Bob and gave another glance around the river shore. The trikes didn’t seem to be alarmed by anything, but I still wanted to be able to race away if we needed to, and the new breed of super raptors was making me paranoid.

  “I need some finer sand,” Trel said as she held up her leaf. “Sheela, have you seen any sand better than this? The stuff at the lake was actually coarser, so that’s not going to work.”

  “The ocean to our west or south has fine sand,” the cat-woman replied. “I journeyed there once. It is about six miles away.”

  “I can make a trip and grab some,” I said. “As soon as the walls are built.”

  “Hmmm, you and your walls,” Trel said.

  “Uhhh. Didn’t you just see those raptors butcher two giant dinosaurs? We need walls right fucking now.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “Alright. I suppose this will be the best I can do for now. Let’s take it back to the camp, and I’ll puzzle through it for a few hours. Then we’ll burn the logs and start on the wall tomorrow.”