But sauropods were big. Big. They made the other dinosaurs look like a child’s action figures. “The Raccoon’s going to need a lot of stuff.”
“Well, you’d better get moving, then,” she said, pulling up schema on her computer.
“No, Mom,” I said, trying again. “You don’t understand. It’s going to take everything. We’d have to empty your whole place—furniture, mattresses, fridge, clothes—everything. Heck, we’ll probably need curtains and carpet, and everything in the tool shed for that matter.”
She tossed the notebook into the chute. “Pack me a suitcase.”
I finally understood. She’d known. She’d known about the finances—why wouldn’t she? Mom was brilliant, competent—I’d underestimated her. She hadn’t needed me or Uncle Louis policing her decisions, telling her what she’d already known years ago. She’d planned this so that she could leave on her own terms.
I’d always loved my mom for the unwavering faith she put in me. In that moment, I realized I liked her, too.
We moved the dinosaur engine to the driveway. The Brontosaurus needed room to stand as it extruded. The stars were radiant in the 4:00 am dark. We drank coffee in silence. I’d gotten the cowgirl mug this time. She sipped from a handmade clay mug, a gift for my grandmother in her own girlhood. We tossed our cups down the chute when we finished, then we got to work, hauling and breaking furniture to feed to the Raccoon.
The Brontosaurus head emerged around sunrise. It towered over me when it wobbled out on a shaky neck, blinking in the new sun. It opened its mouth—such huge, flat teeth!—and lowed. I stroked the ridge above its eye, and that seemed to calm it. It pressed its nose into my middle and snuffled, its hot, moist breath sucking and pulling at my clothes.
“We’re going to need a lot more stuff,” Mom said from the porch. With each trip to the machine, the neck got longer and thicker until the whole body was straining at the flange. The Brontosaurus lowed its distress, this time louder. The dinosaur engine shook and bounced and rattled on its wheels, and the power dimmed and flickered. It was like watching a live birth.
By noon, the Brontosaurus stood on tree-trunk front legs, and its neck extended past the chicken yard, where it chewed up the blueberry bushes with muscular jaws. By 3:00 pm, the hind legs cleared the flange. Mom hobbled the legs with rope to keep it from moving before the tail was done.
The last foot of tail finally snapped free after 7:00 pm. By then, we’d emptied the house into the Raccoon, even the bedroom doors and the carpet. One of the last things to go in was Mom’s framed PhD.
“It only mattered because of the memories,” Mom said when we added it to the Brontosaurus slurry. “Now we’ll make new ones.”
And then it was over. The dinosaur engine shuddered and switched off, and we cut the hobbling ropes. Mom and I sat arm in arm on my truck’s hood and watched our creation shamble away into the field. With each slow, ponderous step, it fought gravity and won.
How did anything ever get to be so big? How can anything so big ever die?
“This is something entirely new,” said Mom, her weary voice triumphant. “No one has ever seen this before, because it never existed until right this moment. There has never before been a Brontosaurus. Now there is.” Wood snapped and cracked distantly as it took down all the walls and fences in its path. No holding back the dinosaurs anymore. It was out of our hands now.
My mother had done this. All these years, and I’d thought I had her figured out. What hubris, that I’d ever called myself her daughter, having come from her body. But the dinosaurs had come from her mind.
“It’s enough,” I said. “It’s enough to have brought them into existence. Whatever happens next.”
She smiled and ruffled my hair, and she was just my mom again. “Whatever happens, kiddo.”
Cry Havoc
written by
Julie Frost
illustrated by
Vlada Monakhova
* * *
about the author
Julie Frost was raised as an Army brat by parents who taught her to love reading by the age of four. She started writing in high school, but didn’t pick up her keyboard seriously until she was in her 40s. Since then, she’s written an eclectic mixture of short science fiction and fantasy, which has appeared in Cosmos, Unlikely Story, Plasma Frequency, Stupefying Stories, and many other venues, and has been a finalist at the Hidden Prize for Prose. Her first novel, Pack Dynamics, was published by WordFire Press in 2015.
She lives in Utah with her family, which consists of more pets than people, along with a collection of anteater figurines and Oaxacan carvings, some of which intersect. When not writing, she enjoys traveling to zoos, wildlife refuges, and National Parks to take pictures. When not traveling, she cuddles with her husband, cats, and guinea pigs and watches bad werewolf movies and good TV.
This fine story was her 29th entry to Writers of the Future, which she hopes teaches everyone the value of psychotic persistence. “Never give up, never surrender.”
about the illustrator
Vlada Monakhova is a freelance illustrator working in the genres of fantasy and speculative fiction. She has studied fine art at MacEwan University with a specialty in drawing and painting. She has done work for Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and the special issue of Fantasy Magazine: Queers Destroy Fantasy!
Her personal aesthetic is heavily influenced by Slavic mythology and Eastern European folk art. She aims to combine decorative and elegant treatment with dramatic and often unsettling subjects, favoring powerful women and expressive characters. She is interested in costume, set, and character design.
She lives in Edmonton, Alberta, and survives through the harsh winters by reading long books.
Cry Havoc
I wanted to feel something, anything, as I gazed down at the body of my packmate on the medical examiner’s table. All I could muster was a kind of numb stoicism. Katrina was the eighth, and last. A single silver bullet to the back of her head had burned her brain to a crisp and left her beautiful face a ruin. She hadn’t even had the chance to see it coming.
But as a werewolf, and, moreover, her alpha, I didn’t rely on facial recognition. Not only could I smell who she was, even over the stink of death, chemicals, and stainless steel in the morgue, but I knew her, down in my marrow. I’d felt her die, a lightning-stab through every nerve ending and a scorching blaze in my skull that jerked me awake screaming in the wee hours of the morning. She’d gone in for some kind of crisis at the all-night restaurant she managed—and been ambushed.
Brushing a strand of her dark-brown hair behind her ear, I swallowed and closed my eyes, nodding. “Yeah, Lou.” After four meetings very like this—the last time, I’d had to identify five of my pack all at once—the medical examiner and I were on a first-name basis. “It’s her.”
He knew better than to touch me; the first time he’d laid a hand on my shoulder in solace, I nearly snapped it off at the elbow. Back then, immediate rage had been the overwhelming emotion.
“I’m sorry, Nate,” he said.
VLADA MONAKHOVA
A stray wolf had come through a couple months previous, pulling a serial killer shtick that precipitated this particular hunt. A local hunter had bagged the stray before I could, and then everyone else decided my pack was next. It was an excuse for them to be more bloodthirsty than they thought we were—with no season and certainly no limit. The law turned a blind eye, regarding our status as a gray area somewhere between human and not, and leaving us and the hunters to duke it out without interference. No one would face justice for her death, at least not in court.
I heaved a heavy, hopeless sigh. “Well. This’ll be the last time you see me.” Unless I ended up on his slab myself. But no one was left to claim my body.
On autopilot, I made my way to the Snake in My Boot, the little tavern I’d chosen for my go-to brooding nest, e
ven during the week. A country song about lost love twanged on the jukebox, a stock car race played on the small-screen TV above the bar, and a pair of couples two-stepped on the parquet dance floor. It was a working-class place filled with working-class people, and the odors of stale beer and cheap whiskey predominated.
I ordered a double Jack Daniels, straight up, and the cocktail waitress took one look at my expression and left the bottle. I didn’t know if I was drinking to remember, or forget. Either way, it wasn’t working.
A hunter and several of his friends walked in, chattering and laughing. The miasma of silver wafted after him, reaching my corner table, and he stood at the bar with his elaborately stitched cowboy boot on the brass footrest. When his beer arrived, he lifted it in a toast. “The only good werewolf is a dead werewolf.”
I’d heard that too many times to count, but hearing it again after IDing Katrina’s body was a bit much. She’d been a soft little thing, completely harmless, with few werewolf tells. She didn’t even hunt deer with us on moon nights. Fangs and claws were simple enough to bring forth without fully shifting to wolf, which came in handy when I wanted to make a point without tearing out of my clothes. I bared a desultory eyetooth at the braggadocious hunter from the darkness of my corner before going back to my bout of heavy, ineffective drinking.
Slumped in my chair, I eyed him through a fog of cold indifference, trying to hate him but unable to muster the energy, pondering what he’d said. Maybe this clandestine war should come out in the open. Maybe they should see what it was like to be hunted and afraid.
Maybe the only good hunter was a dead hunter.
After finishing my drink and dumping money I didn’t care enough to count on the table, I slouched out the door, catching the hunter’s scent with a single sniff on my way past him. I easily located his truck in the half-empty lot. It reeked of silver, and he hadn’t even parked under a light. Careless of him.
I was a predator in my own right, and used to waiting. I wondered, distantly, if killing him would make me feel anything, even the weight of my own failure for not starting sooner.
It didn’t. He never saw me coming, and I slaughtered him like a particularly stupid steer.
I caught a glimpse of a stocky man with short-cropped iron-gray hair smoking a cigarette under a lamp in the lot right after the hunter fell under my claws. I shot a glare his way, and he shrugged and touched the brim of his rattlesnake-banded black felt cowboy hat before disappearing into the darkness. I had a sniff around the area, but all it revealed was ordinary human. Not one of us, not one of them.
I gazed in the direction he’d gone, and wondered.
This was war, declared or not, and I was exceptionally equipped to fight it. I’d been a soldier once, long ago and far away in a conflict no one wanted to remember or acknowledge anymore. I had retired into an obscure life as a construction foreman, but I still remembered how to fight. If I couldn’t protect my pack before the hunters obliterated them, I could damn sure take bloody vengeance after the fact. Even if it was more by dreary rote than anything else.
A group of three had killed the bulk of my pack. We’d gathered in a safe house—or what we thought was a safe house—and I’d gone out to do a perimeter sweep. They hit the place hard and fast from the sides I wasn’t on, firing powerful homemade bombs filled with silver shrapnel through the windows that destroyed five of my friends, along with the house, in one fell swoop.
I lived through it, burned and with several broken bones. God help me, I wished I hadn’t.
But I’d gotten a sniff of the perpetrators. Hunting tended to be a family enterprise, and it didn’t seem to matter to most that ninety percent of the time, we were just as human as they were, that we weren’t sociopaths as a group. There are good and bad wolves just like there are good and bad people. We could police our own, and usually did, but I hadn’t been given the chance.
When the hunters started coming after us, I’d been restrained. Too restrained, in retrospect. Defending ourselves in the heat of battle was one thing; no one objected to that and it was a cost of doing business for hunters. But actively hunting them back was quite another, and I couldn’t bring myself to unleash my wolves on them. I was the leader, the conscience of the pack, and I needed to set an example. To be better than that, better than those who would massacre us indiscriminately.
I didn’t have anyone left to set an example for.
I could cover a lot of ground as a wolf, prowling around neighborhoods until the reek of silver got me the right scent and an address. A reverse lookup gave me phone numbers and names: the Caine brothers.
It was dead easy to set an ambush for them. A breathless call about a stray wolf skulking around an abandoned junkyard brought all three running right into my jaws. Caine Number One disappeared, screaming, under a pile of flattened cars when I used my considerable werewolf strength to push them on top of him. His brothers rushed to his rescue, but couldn’t get the rusted hunks of metal shoved aside in time. Screams faded to moans, then silence. One down.
They had the emotional wherewithal to be angry, the lucky bastards. They stood back to back, practically bristling like wolves themselves, radiating threat and testosterone, looking everywhere but where I was, which was on top of another stack of flat cars. No one ever looked up.
I’d grabbed a hubcap on my way, an antique one made of stainless steel, with jagged edges. Taking aim, I threw it hard, like a lethal Frisbee—
And watched with something akin to satisfaction as it imbedded itself in Caine Number Two’s throat, thunking home against his spine. He fell bonelessly to sit against an amorphous pile of parts, mouth opening and closing with no sound, blood gushing from his neck and lips. He died in a matter of seconds. Two down.
Caine Number Three waved his gun around, firing wildly at shadows exactly where I wasn’t. I hit him from the side like a pitiless freight train, smashing him to the ground and landing on his chest, still human except for my bared fangs and claws. The weapon skittered away, and I wrapped my hand around his throat, three-inch claws pricking but not breaking the skin. Yet. He froze.
“How’s it feel to be hunted?” I asked conversationally. “Not very nice, is it.” It wasn’t a question. “Funny thing about pack links. I feel it when one of my wolves is hurt. Imagine how it feels to me when one of them dies.” Leaning down into his face, I bared my dripping fangs, but kept my tone light. “Imagine how it feels when five of them die at the same time.”
He whimpered down in his throat. “Please.”
“Please,” I mused. “My people didn’t get a chance to say that before you bombed the house. I imagine the answer would have been the same.”
With no effort at all, my claws ripped through his throat in a spray of red mist.
I sat back on my heels and watched impassively as he bled out. I thought I might feel something. Vindication, at least. But all I felt was hollow. My shoulders slumped, and my eyes were dry and aching.
I stumbled to my feet and found the same old guy standing there a few feet away, leaning against a crumbling classic Chevy with his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed back, knee bent and that foot propped against the fender. I sighed and started to scrub my hand over my face, but it still dripped blood. “What do you want?” I asked wearily.
He was quiet, not intimidated, certainly not acting as if he’d just watched me murder three people with no hesitation. “I think the question, Nate, is what do you want.”
That brought me up short. What did I want? But I deflected. “How do you know my name?”
“I know a lot about you, son. Enough to know that what’s been done to you ain’t fair, and enough to know why you’re doing what you’re doing.” He shrugged, keeping it casual. “And it ain’t my business, so long as you keep your vengeance confined to them as deserves it and don’t leak it all over innocents.”
“I would never,” I said,
offended.
“I believe that, I do.” He pushed his hat farther back with his thumb and gave me a level look. “But you know as well as I that revenge can become its own reward, and there’s times you can start seein’ folks as complicit because they didn’t speak up when they’d oughta. Don’t get caught up like that, and you and I got no quarrel.”
I looked at the bodies. “I’m done. These are the ones who killed most of my pack. They needed to die for that, but—” I shook my head.
“But you don’t feel any better, do you?”
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“My name is Iann MacKinnon. And let’s just say I’ve been where you’re at, a few decades gone, and I’ve taken an interest.” His chin lifted, along with his eyebrow. “So. Again. What do you want?”
I choked. “I want to kill every hunter in this city and make it safe for my people again.” Even though I was the only one left of “my people.” “But I won’t. It doesn’t help.” Nothing helped. I wondered if I’d ever feel anything again, and spun on my heel and walked away from him and his uncomfortable truths.
I still had a construction job to work and a lawn to mow, and those things didn’t go away just because I had no real reason to do them anymore besides habit. Lunchtime arrived at the site of the new big-box shopping center, and I tossed my hard hat onto a handy table and walked toward the sub shop a half mile away. A low, human growl from a half-finished storefront made me stop and frown, however, especially when I smelled fear mingled with understated perfume. “Give me your purse, bitch!”
Oh. A mugging. In my territory. Well.
I stepped into the space, with its bare concrete floor and naked studs and beams, to find a homeless guy brandishing a knife at a thirty-ish blonde woman in heels and a powersuit—one of the execs checking out the site. Her dark-blue jacket was partly torn off one shoulder, and she clutched the purse to her chest. “Actually,” I said to the bum, standing straight and crossing my arms, “you should think about your stupid, stupid choices, apologize to the lady, and walk away.”
Writers of the Future 32 Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthology Page 23
