“Really, you said ‘put him down’?” Savant wheezed.
“Almost as stupid as your ‘tada.’ Now get off me.”
Savant flew off him. The Dark Rider had him by the neck.
Jake desperately slapped the ground looking for the gun. His palm hit only the empty street. He slapped harder hoping somehow the weapon would magically appear in his hand.
And then it did. The gun was in his hand. He leapt to his feet and decided to figure out the how of it all later. But his question was already being answered.
Savant fell to the ground once more as the Dark Rider became occupied with trying to pull a monkey from its back.
The creature was a blur of brown fur and blue spacesuit as it scrambled up and down the dystopian soldier, using all four hands and its tail to confound the machine.
Savant took the opportunity to crabwalk away from the fight. “What is that thing?” he asked, rejoining Jake on the sidewalk.
Jake smiled as he answered, “It’s Commander Mike McMonkey.”
“You’re such a dork.”
The Monkeynaut spoke with the voice of a leader. “You with the gun.”
The monkey scrambled down the machine’s leg and pointed to the Dark Rider’s knee. “Shoot here.”
Jake did as the monkey instructed and fired at the Rider’s knee. By the time he had pulled the trigger, the monkey had moved on to the Dark Rider’s shoulders.
The Rider’s leg buckled and it dented the ground as it crashed to one knee.
“Now shoot him here, please,” Commander Mike said with a furry finger pointed at the machine’s side.
Jake complied as the monkey leapt onto the Rider’s head. With the flick of a tail and a mighty yank the monkey removed the Rider’s helmet and scurried to Jake’s side.
Jake stood next to his childhood hero and smiled.
“Now in the head if you wouldn’t mind.” The Monkeynaut dropped the helmet and let it bounce away as the Dark Rider moved forward. “I thought that was obvious.”
Jake quickly fired two shots at the Dark Rider’s exposed head. Sparks exploded out the back of the metal skull and the Rider froze in its tracks.
Three more Dark Riders appeared at the end of the street. The rail in the street echoed the change in their direction as they maneuvered their Dark Cycles around the corner.
Jake pivoted to address the threat. “What do we do now, Commander Mike?”
There was no answer, only the scampering sound of twenty fingers.
Jake and Savant turned to see their rescuer halfway down the street.
“Commander Mike?” Jake shouted.
“Now we run.”
12
A lot of shitty things had happened already, so Mason wasn’t honestly too surprised when their getaway Triceratops was shot out from underneath them.
The beast howled as its front legs gave out and it went stumbling headfirst into the ground. Rocks began to spray as its horn caught the ground and dug furrows into the Earth just before it flipped.
The two men were catapulted from the howdah over the dinosaur’s shield. Mason landed hard on a cobblestone street. He was able to tuck and roll, but the smooth uneven stones beat at his back. He felt the rumble in the streets as the Triceratops landed behind him, slid to a stop and kicked up a cloud of dust that engulfed him as he was taking a deep breath. Even over the coughing fit that followed he could hear Glitch calling for him somewhere in the cloud of dust.
The disarmed cyborg found him in the cloud and helped him to his feet. “Are you okay, Mason?”
Mason gave one last good lung-clearing hack and answered, “Never better.”
Glitch acknowledged the sarcasm with a nod and looked at their fallen mount. “What happened?”
“Well, Glitch, it looks like someone shot our dinosaur.”
Glitch shook his head. “Who’d have thought?”
“I did,” Mason said. “I woke up this morning and figured that after we parachuted into an abandoned amusement park we would soon find ourselves without our gear, attacked by killer teddy bears before being rescued by a jungle man and his friendly apes where we’d be put on the back of a stampeding Triceratops only to have it shot out from under us once we crossed into, judging by the gas lights and the old timey buildings, President Town.”
“Hmmm,” Glitch said. “I wouldn’t have thought that.”
A camera drone drifted into their conversation to try and catch the exchange, but Mason saw no reason to repeat the entire conversation. “Yeah. I saw this whole thing coming.”
“Bully!” came the exclamation as Theodore Roosevelt stepped out from behind a stack of wooden crates, cradling an elephant gun in his arms. A bald and spindly looking man stood close behind him.
Roosevelt’s voice boomed. “I’ve bagged us another one for the museum, Tyler. Tag it. Document it and get it to the Smithsonian right away.”
The former president walked toward the fallen animal and stopped in front of the two men. He examined each one for a moment, looked them each up and down. Then he chuckled and waved them aside. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”
Mason and Glitch shuffled aside as the President made his way around the fallen Triceratops to the dinosaur’s head. He put his foot on the creature’s snout, stuck out his chest and smiled. He held this pose for an awkward thirty seconds or so before he barked, “Dammit, Tyler!”
President John Tyler hopped at the sound of his name, produced a box camera and ran forward. He was muttering the whole time. “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.”
Roosevelt resumed his pose as Tyler fumbled with the camera. The flash soon followed and Tyler gave a thumbs up. “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.”
“Bully,” said Roosevelt and waved Tyler away.
The President nodded and said, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” once more then scampered off.
“Now, may I ask who you two stout gentlemen are that could break this magnificent beast and ride it—not without some trouble obviously— but ride it nonetheless into President Town?”
“Well,” Mason said. “We call this guy Glitch because we don’t respect him enough to use his real name, and I’m the guy that’s pissed off you shot our dinosaur. So, who the hell are you?”
Roosevelt had big teeth and a bigger laugh. He bared them both with a lungful of hearty chuckling that only made Mason angrier.
Glitch leaned in toward Mason. “Mason, this is Theodore Roosevelt. The 26th President of the United States.”
Roosevelt stuck out his hand. “Indeed I am, son. It’s a pleasure to meet both of you fine citizens. I must make my apologies for shooting your beast here—if indeed your claim is true. I wouldn’t have shot it had I known better.”
“You just go around shooting everything you see?” Mason asked.
“It seemed like the appropriate action at the time.” Roosevelt looked up and to the right. He stared into the distance as his hands found his lapels. “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” The President nodded like he had said something important.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Mason said and threw a thumb in Glitch’s direction. “And I work with this guy every day.”
But the transgression had been forgotten and Roosevelt smiled once more. “Now tell me, friends. What brings you to President Town today?”
Glitch spoke up. “We just escaped from the Bearberry Bears, sir. They tried to kill us and our friends. Now we have to find them. Our friends that is. That’s who we have to find.”
“Bearberry Bears,” Roosevelt spoke the words like they were a curse.
“Yeah,” Mason said. “You know those sadistic little Teddy Bears?” Before he could react, the President was in his face.
“Do not call them that.” Roosevelt glared into Mason’s eyes, then he looked up and to the right. He stared into the distance as his hands found his
lapels. “The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.”
“Okay,” Mason said and tried to back away.
But, Roosevelt grabbed him by the throat and lifted him from the ground. “Never besmirch it by attaching it to those devils. Do we understand each other?”
Mason’s voice was barely a squeak through the robot’s grip. “We understand each other.”
The President set Mason back on his feet and smiled broadly once more. “Bully! I’ll want to hear more about your friends. Perhaps my battalion of statesmen and I can help you.”
“That would be great, sir,” Glitch said.
“Quit calling him sir, Glitch. It’s just a stupid robot.”
Theodore’s voice grew solemn once more. “Son, I am the President of the United States of America.”
“Some of us have respect for the office, Mason,” Glitch said. “No matter who sits in it.”
This set the President to laughing again. “Did you hear that, Tyler?”
President John Tyler gave a thumbs up and yelled, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”
Mason pointed to Tyler and asked, “What is wrong with President Catchphrase?”
“What do you mean?” Teddy asked.
“Is that all he says?”
“It is,” confirmed Roosevelt.
“Any reason for that?”
“I could never figure that out myself. My best guess is if you haven’t done much, you really don’t have much to say.”
“Mission accomplished!”
“Now let me be clear!”
The two panicked shouts came out of the darkness moments before Presidents Bush and Obama appeared in the street. The two ran straight for Roosevelt.
“Mission accomplished!” Bush shouted, pointing down the gas lit street behind him.
“Calm down, George,” Roosevelt said. “Just tell me what you saw.”
President Obama jumped in to explain the situation. “Now let me be clear. Now let me be clear.”
Roosevelt’s face grew more and more stern as Obama insisted over and over again that he be clear. He fed another round into his hunting rifle and snapped the barrel shut. “That son of a bitch.”
Roosevelt took off down the street. Tyler, Obama and Bush ran after him.
Mason yelled after the Presidents, “Who’s a son of a bitch?”
“Taft,” was Roosevelt’s only explanation.
Mason and Glitch shared a look that said, “You know, now that we suddenly find ourselves alone next to the corpse of a robot dinosaur on a gas lit, cobblestone street on an abandoned island in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, it might be a good idea to stick with President Roosevelt.”
With the look shared and silently agreed upon, the two ran after the Presidents.
They caught up to the four machines as they rounded a corner and saw what had gotten Obama and Bush so excited.
“Oh blast,” Roosevelt said gazing upon the scene before them. “They caught Harding.”
They were standing in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s Contra Bandstand. LBJ had Warren G. Harding in a full nelson while Jimmy Carter beat on the 29th President of the United States with an oversized Habitat for Humanity hammer.
LBJ shouted, “Hit him again, Jimmy.”
President Carter shouted, “Not just peanuts!” and struck Harding in the head with the hammerhead.
“That’s for appointing Daugherty!” cried LBJ as the hammer bounced off the robot Harding’s metal forehead.
“Not just peanuts!” Carter screamed, and struck the former President again.
“And that’s for Teapot Dome!”
Carter smiled as he spun the hammer around in his hand. He drove the claw through Harding’s forehead, killing the President faster than a heart attack in San Francisco.
A burst of sparks erupted from Warren G’s temple and for the second time in his life, the scandal-ridden President fell to the ground dead.
Carter giggled with a southern accent as Harding collapsed. “Not. Just. Peanuts.”
The blast from Roosevelt’s gun tore a hole in Carter’s chest and the former Commander in Chief flew into the air. He soared several feet before crashing through the window of Clinton’s Cigar Emporium.
Johnson turned and smiled. “Roosevelt.”
“You’re next, Lyndy.” Teddy snapped open the barrel of his rifle and pulled the spent cartridge.
“I don’t think so, Teddy.”
Roosevelt dropped two fresh cartridges into the barrel and snapped it shut. He pulled the Holland & Holland to his shoulder as Johnson started forward.
The first shot missed and shattered the window to Tricky Dick’s Magic Shop, but the second shot tore through LBJ’s shoulder and sent him spinning to the ground.
Teddy broke the barrel again and pulled out the empty casings.
LBJ rose to his full six-foot-four stature. His right arm dangled limp at his side so he pointed with his left. “One of these days, Roosevelt, you’re going to get the Johnson Treatment. And I’m going to give it to you.”
With this, LBJ turned and ran off into the park.
Roosevelt snapped his rifle closed. “Is it just me or did that always sound dirty?”
The other three Presidents giggled at the remark.
Bush nodded with a laugh and said, “Mission accomplished.”
Obama agreed with a hearty, “Now let me be clear.”
Tyler gave a boisterous, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”
Mason gave Glitch a confused look. They were used to dealing with machines and shutting down violent robots. But those machines rarely had personalities, let alone recognizable faces. And it wasn’t so much that he knew Warren G. Harding’s face, or when he was president, or anything the man had done, but it was all very disturbing nonetheless.
“Mister President,” Mason said. “What is happening here?”
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, trustbuster, founder of the national park system and face on Mount Rushmore looked at the two men, took a deep breath and said, “I’m not going to lie to you boys. It’s pretty fucked up.”
13
The triceratops rushed through the park with several of the white apes racing along beside it like some hairy version of the Secret Service.
Hailey was tossed back and forth and around the bottom of the leather basket on the beast’s back as she did her best to hold on to both the howdah and her grasp of reality. Kat wasn’t helping with that last bit.
The young woman stood barefoot on the triceratops’s back as it galloped along. The wind ripped through her long, black hair as she stood like a rock atop the dinosaur’s shoulders. Her legs absorbed every one of the creature’s steps with what appeared to be nothing more than an unconscious movement. It was as if she had done this before. A lot.
Hailey wrapped her hand around a leather strap and stopped her constant tumble about the basket long enough to peer over the back of the dino. The wooden bridge continued to burn in the distance. From the basket, it was impossible to tell if the structure had collapsed or survived, but her friends were no longer behind them. She hoped they hadn’t been caught in the explosion. There was no way to tell. The comms were useless. Shouting was futile.
One of the camera drones buzzed overhead, but its lens was focused on the odd spectacle that was the team’s mechanic steering a thirty-foot lizard with nothing but her voice. But even if Hailey was in the camera’s eye, there was no way to signal the others.
Kat shouted something that sounded more like a grunt than words and the dinosaur responded instantly by turning slightly right and speeding up.
Hailey slid across the basket once more but this time she was able to pull herself up to a, roughly, seated position.
Kat leaned into the turn and stood through it all. She never even repositioned her feet. She screamed something in a language Hailey couldn’t come close to identifying. The response to her call was a low rumbling groan and the sharp creaking of a wooden
door.
The gates were massive and constructed of timbers still covered in bark. Hailey didn’t even see them until they passed through. They were fifty feet tall at least and lashed together with ropes twice as thick as her arm.
Once inside, the apes broke off from their escort and rushed to help close the giant doors. The ropes creaked, the wood groaned and the colossal structure closed, shutting off the entrance of Prehistoria from the rest of the park.
Kat shouted something that would draw stares in the real world. But, since the real world had taken a back seat to this imagination nightmare, the triceratops responded to the command and slowed to a gallop, then a walk and eventually stopped altogether.
Kat grunted something that had to be the equivalent of “good boy” and turned to Hailey. “We’re here.” She stepped into the air and dropped silently to the ground below.
Hailey let out the breath she suddenly realized she’d been holding for most of the ride and chose to ask just one of the thousand questions that were running through her head. “Where in the hell is ‘here,’ Kat?”
“Home,” Kat said and smiled. “Here is home.”
Hailey sat up and looked around. A couple of dozen white apes milled around. And that should have seemed odd, but she had already seen those, so she merely mused at how quickly someone could adjust to the bizarre and gaped at the giant tigers instead. Those were new.
More than a few of these mingled with the white apes in a village composed of straw huts and lit by a massive brazier suspended by three crossed timbers that towered above them. The blazing fire crackled, casting sparks and shadows on the prowling cats and the rest of the village.
“Home sucks, Kat.”
“But home is always safe.” The mechanic held out her hands to help Hailey from the back of the triceratops.
Hailey slid to the ground, thankful to have her feet, and not a prehistoric animal, under her once more. She rubbed the tops of her legs and looked around the village. Thatched huts lined the edge of the clearing. Beyond them were massive palm trees larger than Hailey had ever seen. Another clearing had a collection of animal skin drums and crude percussion instruments formed from hollow logs. She figured the only thing missing was a giant pot of boiling water to cook their captives in. But then she spotted it behind one of the tigers.
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