Corporal Meyers had told them his base was this direction.
The camp would not, however, be on the valley floor. You simply couldn't have permanent structures on the lowlands. They would have to look to the high-ground.
But as they surveyed the peaks, there was nothing obvious. The heavily forested terrain was its own camouflage.
“Well,” Naomi said. “This is the area.”
She grabbed up the radio.
“Hello? Anyone out there?”
There was a scratch of static and an irritated-sounding whine, before a voice suddenly barked back over the air.
“This is Major Justin Travis. Who the hell is this?”
“Hi there, Major Travis, my name's Naomi. Your convoy got taken out by a sickle-claw raid and a pack of T. rex. We took your chopper and got the hell out of there. Now we need a place to land.”
There was a brief pulse of static before Travis responded.
“Who's we? Are you civilians? How many are you?”
“There's two of us. I'm a four-star widow.” Naomi glanced at Jonah. “I'm traveling with a civilian.”
“What about the convoy?” Travis asked. “Were there any survivors?”
“None,” Naomi said. “And you lost your outpost sentry as well.”
There was another pause and scratch of static. When he spoke, his voice was deliberately neutral.
“You'll need to land immediately. Head west from your position.”
The Coast mountains were not as large as the Cascades, but still maintained some respectable peaks. Just a few miles off one of the major highways, where the river had carved out a heavily wooded canyon, was what had once been a state prison, mounted high on an isolated peak above the water, and accessible by a single winding road.
Jonah could see why they had selected the site – the access-road was narrow, with a drop-off on one side and rock wall on the other. The prison itself bordered a sheer drop several hundred feet down to the river.
A runway/landing-strip was built across the modest plateau like on an aircraft carrier, and they could see several fighters tethered in rows. The tower was armed with gun-turrets on all sides, most likely as defense against pterosaurs.
Jonah circled, dropping altitude gingerly, trying not to overcompensate with the unfamiliar rear rotor, but the brisk side-winds took him by surprise. Thirty feet above the tarmac, a sudden gust pulled the chopper sideways.
There was a rush of movement from the gathered troops on the landing strip as the blades of the chopper turned briefly in their direction. Jonah cursed, wrestling the joystick. He had already started his drop when the gust hit, and was not quite able to get level before the landing gear struck asphalt, one side first, jarring them sharply to one side.
Naomi sucked breath as they felt the metal leg break, even as the other strut hit the ground. There was a paralyzing moment where it seemed the chopper might tip and roll, breaking the still-spinning rotors like bladed shrapnel, maybe even tossing them off the cliff into the ravine.
Jonah cut the engine. The chopper rocked itself to a stop.
As the rotors slowed, the troops waiting on the runway surrounded them. They had their guns drawn.
The leader tapped on the chopper's cabin. “Please exit the aircraft.”
Jonah glanced at Naomi, who shrugged, unlatching her seat-belt, turning to push open the cabin door. Jonah followed, stepping down out of the chopper behind her as the soldiers circled the chopper.
Jonah looked around uncomfortably. This was not quite what he was expecting.
The soldier who had spoken before raised his radio.
“We've got them, Major. They've landed.”
“Thank you, Sergeant Meyers,” the radio barked back. “Bring them up.”
“Meyers?” Naomi said. “We met a Corporal Meyers on the convoy.”
The sergeant's eyes were grim.
“My brother,” he said, in a tone that suggested he'd already gotten word.
Naomi reached in her pocket and held up Corporal Meyers' dog-tags. She offered them to his brother.
The sergeant frowned. He lowered his rifle and took the tags.
“You're going to need to come with us,” he said. He motioned with his rifle, still hung ready over one shoulder.
As they walked, the rest of the armed escort followed
A second soldier stepped up beside them with a clipboard, asking their names and ages.
And then to Jonah he asked, “Do you have any special skills?”
“Well,” Jonah said, a little uncomfortably, “I'm a pilot.”
Beside him, Naomi snickered. “They saw you land.”
“You're not helping,” Jonah muttered.
The soldier with the clipboard shrugged, making a notation. He then proceeded to ask further questions about Jonah's health, family history, blood-type, and whether he'd ever had children.
He seemed satisfied just with Naomi's name and age.
Jonah could guess why.
He was a liability who would have to pull his weight. Naomi, on the other hand, was the most precious resource left.
Naomi's face was touched by a shadow of a frown, and Jonah could see a little of that boundless confidence evaporate with the awareness that things were not as before.
The former prison readily adapted itself for a fortress. And as they were marched into the main compound, it felt very much like they were off to see the warden, perhaps in anticipation of solitary.
Cages for human beings, Jonah thought, looking at the oppressive bars around him.
Naomi seemed unbothered.
Major Travis was, in fact, waiting in the former warden's office. Sergeant Meyers handed the Major the clipboard with their – or rather Jonah's – information before stepping outside and closing the door.
Travis perused the notes briefly.
“Alright,” he said, setting the clipboard down, “I'd like to hear how all my troops are dead and you're flying their helicopter.”
“We were onsite when the rex hit the outpost,” Naomi replied.
“And what were you doing on our outpost?”
“Well,” Naomi said archly, “we've been on the road for the last three weeks, ever since you people burned us out of our home.”
Travis frowned.
“You were caught in the last burn,” Travis said. He shook his head regretfully. “You were collateral damage. For that, I'm sorry. However, your presence here is a bit of a problem, and I'm not sure what to do about it.”
The Major sat back, hands folded.
“This is a high-security base you've stumbled onto,” he said. “We don't take refugees here. And since you now have operational knowledge of our assets, you have officially become a security risk.”
Naomi chirped derisive laughter.
“Security risk? Who are we going to tell?”
Travis nodded. “Well, that's part of why I'm not sure what to do with you. Regulations dictate you be detained. And that rules out transporting you to any refugee facilities.”
“If this base is so high-security, why did you let us land?” Naomi asked.
“Because we'd lost contact with our convoy and you were flying their chopper,” Travis replied thinly. “We've also had several other convoys hit in the last few weeks by apparently random rex attacks, just like this one. And we need to know why.”
Jonah had been silent, but now he was shaking his head.
“Major,” he said, “your convoy wasn't hit by a random attack. The T. rex were lured.”
Travis' eyes narrowed. “Lured by what?”
Jonah glanced at Naomi, who shrugged.
“Tell him,” she said.
“Intelligent lizards,” Jonah said. “They ride sickle-claws. You've probably seen them eating human corpses. They talk like myna birds.”
Travis absorbed this quietly.
“The T. rex hate them,” Jonah continued. “They'll pretty much charge through fire – or a military convoy – just to
get at one of them.”
Jonah eyed the major's reaction, which was so-far totally non-committal.
“And,” Naomi added, “it was your Corporal Meyers that let the things loose.”
Travis regarded them a moment longer before leaning forward and touching his intercom switch.
“Security? I think we're done here.”
“You don't believe us?” Jonah said.
The Major sighed.
“Oh, I believe you.”
Sergeant Meyers appeared at the door with two guards. Travis nodded to Jonah and Naomi.
“Would you please take these two to holding,” Travis instructed.
“Are we prisoners?” Naomi asked.
Travis shrugged. “I'm not sure yet.” He nodded to Meyers. “I need to talk to the General ASAP.”
“Sir,” Meyers said, “the General's already been in contact. I came to tell you. We're on alert.”
Travis frowned. He nodded to Jonah and Naomi.
“Take these two to holding,” he said, “then get me a wire.”
Jonah exchanged a nervous glance with Naomi as they were ushered out of Travis' office, down the caged hallways of the former prison.
And not a hundred yards away, out where Jonah had not-quite crashed, the runway crews were clearing away the chopper.
As they loaded the damaged bird to be towed, there was a rustling as the cargo in back was disturbed – none of the work crew paid any mind.
Only one of them looked up briefly when he thought he heard the sound of skittering rats.
Half-a-dozen little lizards scurried discreetly out of the cargo hold, out onto the runway, and immediately bolted for the surrounding foliage that bordered the site, slipping quickly through the barred gate into the forest beyond.
Chapter 17
To look at Otto, you would not have guessed intelligence – and perhaps that wasn't quite the right word.
While they clearly operated under studied actions, they seemed to act, both individually and in groups, as if programmed – living drones.
It was also difficult to say if their actions were precisely planned so much as studied impulse.
In truth, Otto's pre-avian/post-reptilian mind was not capable of advanced thought.
But if you got enough of them together...?
Well, they destroyed the world.
The destruction had even been a bit more total than anticipated, because Otto, himself – themselves – were unexpectedly stamped out with it.
Tyrannosaurs had done that – wherever they had them – not all T. rex – Tarbosaurus in Russia and Asia, Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus in Canada – all consistent with their historical geography as the Mesozoic world was imposed on what had briefly been a land of humans.
Otto's presence could influence most of the other beasts, to greater or lesser degree of usefulness.
Carnosaurs were willing enough soldiers, including the big carcharodonts that populated Africa and South America, but damned if they hadn't nuked large sections of both continents.
Then there were the herd beasts, but they were mostly limited to trampling and goring, depending on the clade, and didn't have many buttons beyond go, stop, and eat.
Humans, of course, continued to be a problem, but without their technology, they were highly dysfunctional, and at the numbers the species had dropped to, should already guarantee extinction.
The biggest problem, by far, were the T. rex.
Otto could never even have made it across the tyrannosaur-dominated territory by land – the rex would have rooted them out.
Tyrannosaurs, and T. rex in particular, instinctively resisted domination – which should not have been so terrible as a single clade of only a few species versus the rest of the implanted ecosystem. But the rex were an especially DOMINENT element of that ecosystem, and tended to kick the shit out of Otto's own foot soldiers – to the tune of four-to-one versus a large carnosaur.
Big herd animals could be weapons against them, but were much more mentally primitive. They could be angered and set into motion, but with no particular nuance.
It was the presence of the T. rex that had caused the Food of the Gods to backfire so badly.
A rex was hostile towards Otto by nature, but once they became infected, suddenly any Otto within perception-range became the subject of a search-and-destroy mission.
And unique to the other infected giants, an infected rex became focused.
So while humanity had been largely stomped out, Otto had been stomped out with it – and not just stomped, but hunted, rooted out, and eaten.
It followed that the next logical step, then, was to eliminate the rex.
Again, it was not a conscious decision exactly, so much as an instinctive response – acting on the simple goals of any computer chess game.
The rex, unfortunately, guarded their strongholds. The West Coast, and the northwest states were particularly dense population centers.
Sprouting blooms in the area was dicey, as the last thing they wanted was an infected rex.
On the other hand, they applied opportunism when it presented itself.
At first, they had started burning forests themselves, skulking into the territory, in small raids, minimizing their presence, and of course, always accompanied by a pack of sickle-claws. But the combination of the smell of smoke, and their own psychic-stench, alerted the rex to their presence, and invariably got them rooted out and stomped. Neither did the damp forests of the northwest readily burn out of season.
Just as it was easier to hitch a ride cross-country on their choppers, it was easier to get the humans to do it – they could be reliably counted on to dump napalm on the slightest presence of the Food of the Gods. And the largest bloom initiated in the region in the aftermath of KT-day, the humans had taken out with a nuke.
The rex packs were also quite predictable. In Otto's presence they would attack unrelentingly.
In this regard, T. rex was even more reliable than humans.
And if it could be depended upon, it could be factored and used.
The troop of Ottos began hooting softly, mimicking the bird-calls in the surrounding forests, not drawing undue attention yet.
But it was not long before the calls were answered by a rustling in the brush.
Sickle-claws from all the surrounding areas had been drawn in, just for the occasion.
Just as Congo and the rex responded to the lady, the sickle-claws and the meaner, more primitive beasts, responded to the lizard.
The dromaeosaur-packs remained just out of sight.
Over the last hour, they had systematically eliminated all the guards and sentries along the road leading to the prison, as well as the border fence.
Acting in the trained-dog fashion they always did in Otto's presence, they also took out the security cameras that lined the perimeter.
Thus there was not the early warning there might have been when Rudy and the JV squad separated from the forest and began making their way up the now-unguarded road.
Otto and the sickle-claws began flocking as a group through the perimeter fence, ducking between, over and under the gates, flooding all at once into the humans' compound.
Reliably enough, Rudy and the JV squad would be following along behind.
They could be trusted to charge through machine-gun fire for the chance to stomp a single Otto flat.
Had the fire separated them to the other side of the mountain, the JV pack might have been part of the exodus with Trix and the others, following Shanna's empathic light, but on this side of the mountains, the most poisonous, acrid smell was them – that foul sting in the sinus.
The rex pack knew the humans were up there too, and were quite aware the troublesome hominids were capable of inflicting a lot of pain.
Not that it mattered. A Triceratops could dish out a lot of pain – a T. rex, like Rudy, was used to tolerating pain.
The only thing he wasn't prepared to tolerate was that scaly little rat-bastard br
eathing his air, and too bad for anything standing in his way.
Chapter 18
Rosa could hardly believe they were alive. She also had to hand it to Maverick, who had utterly no shame in taking credit for what she judged to be almost blind luck.
Two things had saved them, the first being their mangled landing gear tangling with the vegetation, which served to check their fall into half-a-dozen broken lurches.
More significantly, the cliff had broken off in layers, and stair-stepped onto a narrow ledge approximately a hundred feet below. The chopper had landed nose-first, and still remained dangling, tail-up, from the mass of roots torn away from the cliff wall. The fuel tank had been punctured, and some of it had burned.
Miraculously, no one had been killed, although Wilkes and Garner were both the worse for wear. Wilkes had been in the cockpit, and was dotted with broken glass and shrapnel. Garner had been thrown forward, hitting his face on the back of the pilot's seat. Maverick had reflexively belted himself in when he'd taken the controls, and didn't have a scratch on him.
Most of the others had been tossed roughly. Allison had belted in, with Bud wrapped over her, the both of them a protective ball over baby Lucas. Mr. Wilson had tumbled and was nearly thrown out of the open side door.
Rosa's seat had torn completely loose, narrowly missing Garner, nearly landing in the inverted cockpit. The seat landed bottom first, otherwise she would have been crushed.
But the only one that was really injured was Shanna. When the chopper hit the ledge, she was thrown on top of Cameron, and the two of them tumbled awkwardly. Cameron ended up on the bottom, taking the brunt of the fall, as well as Shanna landing on top of him, and gained a pretty good assortment of cuts and bruises of his own. But it was Shanna who earned herself a broken leg.
Rosa had set the leg as best she could – a break just above the knee that should heal just fine – but Shanna would not be walking anywhere soon.
She wouldn't be climbing, either, Rosa thought, as she looked up at a hundred-feet of cliff.
To the other side was a dizzying drop of a thousand feet or better.
None of them were quite sure yet what to do.
For the moment, they had a fire going, and were using the shelter of the crashed chopper against the chill mountain wind. Allison had Lucas practically bubble-wrapped in blankets. Cameron set up a similar cocoon for Shanna in front of the fire, her injured leg propped up.
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