Tamer- King of Dinosaurs Book 6

by Michael-Scott Earle

  Clone Emerald shook her head vigorously and then gave me a wide smile as she pointed down at the spot where Emerald once was. Then she pointed to her own chest, pushed the palms of her hands together, pulled them apart, and then pushed them back together. Finally she held up one finger and pointed back to her chest before she pointed at me and gestured to her face. She frowned, and then she smiled.

  “You were both Emerald,” I said. “There was no original and no clone. You were both the same person copied, so I shouldn’t worry that she died.”

  Emerald nodded like I knew she would.

  “Well, I do feel a lot better,” I sighed. “I thought I lost you, and my heart was aching.”

  Emerald nodded and then she reached over to my face. I held still, and she wiped away one of the tears that had flowed down my cheek. Then she opened her mouth and pushed her finger between her lips so she could suck on it.

  I thought about asking her why she wanted to taste my tears, but the asshole I’d just de-legged let out a cry of agony, and I stood up and took a few steps back over to him.

  “Pleeeeaassseeee,” he gasped through clenched teeth. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”

  “I’m going to hurt you a lot more,” I said. “You could have just left us alone, but no, you had to be a dick. I promised you I’d kill you slow so that you would regret attacking us, didn’t I?”

  “Yessss, but… mercy?” he coughed. It looked like he still couldn’t open his big eyes, and their size made me think that his home world was probably dark.

  “No,” I said flatly.

  Then I brought up my obsidian covered club and smashed it down on his thigh.

  He screamed, and more blood sprayed across the camp.

  Then I repeated the motion on the other leg.

  He screamed until his body was just his torso and head some ten minutes later. Then I began to chop his stomach apart, and his long black tongue finally rolled out of his mouth and his head leaned to the side.

  I was covered with blue ichor that smelled like old pennies, and I let out a gasp when he finally died. I’d performed the slow torture as if I was in some sort of trance, and now that it was over, I kind of wondered why I had even bothered.

  The troodons, Nicole, and the pachys watched me the entire time without moving, but I didn’t feel any emotion from them other than a small amount of what felt like pride.

  “Shit,” I sighed as I turned to Emerald and gestured at my bloody body. “I guess I went a bit overboard, but fuck that guy.”

  Emerald shook her head, crossed the few feet between us with two quick steps, wrapped her fingers around the back of my head, and kissed me passionately.

  My mind went numb for half a moment, but then I returned her kiss and our tongues danced together for what felt like half a minute of pure bliss. When our lips finally parted, she still held onto my head with her left hand and then stared into my eyes as she fluttered her eyelids slightly.

  “I should have realized that you weren’t going to die,” I whispered. “I just thought that if the original one--”

  Emerald shook her head and then pointed to my mouth before she pointed at the hacked up corpse of the man who had killed her other body. Then she pointed down to the Cricket Bat of Doom, nodded, tapped her chest where her heart was, and pointed at me.

  “You love that I kept my word and punished him?” I asked.

  She nodded, and her mouth split into a wide grin that matched her predatory eyes. Then she ran her hand up my bloody chest before she slid it to my arm and squeezed my bicep.

  “I guess I should wash up,” I said as her right hand continued to rub over my bloody chest.

  She nodded, but I realized that her left hand was still clamped around the back of my neck, so I gently reached up and rubbed it with my fingers before she opened her mouth wide, pulled it away, and then gave me an apologetic smile.

  “No worries,” I said as I pointed to the fish she had been cooking for breakfast. “Did you get that from the creek over there?”

  She nodded and then moved to pull it out of the fire.

  “Looks burnt,” I said. “Let’s just catch some more at the creek, cook them quick, and get the fuck out of here. That guy’s body is going to attract flies in an hour.”

  Emerald nodded, and we headed toward the edge of the grove where Grumpy was curled up with his eyes closed. The massive purussaurus let out a low rumble when I walked past him, and I paused for a second before I reached out and laid my hand on his flank.

  “That’s okay,” I whispered, and then Emerald and I walked past him.

  When we were halfway to the creek, the green-haired woman gestured back to Grumpy as she raised an eyebrow.

  “He said he was sorry he couldn’t help,” I explained. “He was too big to really fit in the grove, so he didn’t want to accidentally hurt you or me by trying to attack that guy.”

  Emerald smiled, pointed back over her shoulder, and then hugged her arms to her chest.

  “Yeah,” I laughed. “Grumpy may act grumpy, but he’s a great guy, and he cares about us.”

  Emerald nodded, and we continued on across the small grass clearing and to the side of the creek. The stream was about five feet across, moving pretty quickly, and I saw the occasional trout looking fish splash through the current.

  I set down the Cricket Bat of Doom and then scooped up handfuls of cold water before I splashed it on my shoulder. Emerald helped, and after a few minutes my chest was clean of the blue goop. Then I rinsed off my weapon right as Bruce landed in the clearing next to us.

  “Hey buddy,” I said as he hopped over to us, and then he opened his mouth and dropped two small fish on the grass.

  Emerald clapped and then reached up to pet his neck, and the big pteranodon leaned into her so that she could scratch him easier.

  “Can you start cooking those?” I asked her. “I’d like to get a move on as soon as possible, but I want to wash my feet.”

  Emerald nodded, and then she grabbed the fish by the tails and walked back toward our campsite. I waited until she was back in the grove and then I turned to Bruce.

  “I saw out of your eyes, what’s up with that?”

  He leaned his head on my shoulder and then whispered a honk.

  “Did you know?” I asked. “Or is that because I’ve gained a level in Tame?”

  Bruce let out a happy little honk, and I chuckled.

  “Yeah, you have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s okay. I guess I don’t need to know exactly how it works right now.”

  I took off my shoes, scrubbed my feet in the creek, and then did my best to wash my socks. Then I walked barefoot over the grass back to the campsite. Emerald was about half way done cooking the fish, but I began to pack up all of our tools on Nicole so that I didn’t waste any time.

  “I’m hoping we can make it there by the end of the day,” I said after we’d climbed up on Nicole’s back and began to eat breakfast, “but it’s a bit hard to tell exactly how far away the coast is.”

  Emerald nodded at me, pointed to the sun and gestured toward the ground. Then she held up one finger.

  “We’ll get there an hour or so after sunset?” I asked.

  She nodded, but then pointed back over her shoulder and then at the spear on the saddle next to her.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “As long as we don’t get attacked again.”

  Emerald nodded and then gestured to the dinosaurs and the surrounding landscape.

  “You are right,” I chuckled. “This is Dinosaurland. The chances of us getting attacked again are pretty high.”

  Emerald nodded, but then she smiled fiercely, pointed at the Cricket Bat of Doom and then she squeezed my bicep muscle.

  “I’m getting stronger, but that doesn’t mean I want to get in fights,” I said. “It’s best to avoid them.”

  Emerald shrugged, opened up the palm of her left hand and brought her right fist down into it. Then she nodded and smiled at me.

  I nodde
d back at her and then looked forward so that I could watch where Nicole was trotting.

  Emerald had just said that getting into fights was fine as long as you crush your enemies, and it made me wonder if everything she’d explained about her past was true. Then again, if my brother had killed my family and betrayed me, I’d probably be all about vengeance too.

  I was just glad that the beautiful green woman was on my side, even though I really didn’t understand everything about her quite yet.

  Chapter 10

  The first valley on the other side of the mountains was a lightly forested everglade. It reminded me a bit of the parts of Florida I once visited when my parents took me to Disneyworld, and we often had to take a meandering path through the trees and grassy plains so that we could avoid ponds and swamps.

  For the first half of the day, we didn’t encounter much beyond the occasional squadron of brightly feathered birds that squawked when we passed under their trees, and the few ten-foot long snakes that slithered in and out of the various bodies of water we passed.

  During the zig-zagging, we found what looked like a solid trampled path that was raised a bit over the soft dirt. It may have once been a river bed, or maybe the side of another smaller valley that got hammered down after a billion years of water and wind. Either way, there were dinosaur footprints in the loose rock and dirt of the path, and it quickly became clear that it made a straight line south through this valley.

  The next hill wasn’t very steep, or tall, and we were soon trotting through the next valley. This one was less wet than the previous bowl, and the trees were an assortment of oak trees, crepe myrtle, and holly. I wanted to talk to Emerald a bit about how strange it was that each valley seemed to have a slight ecosystem variance from its neighbors, but the beautiful green-haired woman had leaned her head against my shoulder during our travels, and a combination of the warm sun and Nicole’s gentle trotting movements had lulled her to sleep.

  The next valley was similar to the previous, but then they started to take on a bit more of a jungle theme again, and I lost count of the number of valleys I passed. Eventually, the trees grew thicker, and I began to taste a bit of salt water on the breeze, so I figured that I was getting closer to the ocean.

  Emerald had slept through most of the day, but as I crested the last hill and saw that the ocean laid before us, she woke up, raised her arms over her head to stretch, and then gently brushed her fingers across my cheeks before she gave me a light kiss on the lips.

  “We made good time,” I said as I pointed at the soon to be setting sun. It was almost about to touch the ocean, and the endless sea was various shades of bruised purple and angry orange.

  Emerald nodded, tapped her cheek below her right eye and then gestured over her shoulder in the direction we had come from.

  “I didn’t see many places we could use as a fort,” I answered. “The valleys were all pretty flat at the bottom, and some of them had too much standing water. On the way back, we can try to skirt along the edges of each slope and look for something, but I’m hoping we find what we are looking for closer to the ocean.”

  Emerald nodded and then turned to look at the distant water. I guessed that the top of the crest we were on was a good twelve-hundred feet above the sea, and the shore looked to be about two miles away. There were some switchback trails leading downward, but the dense jungle trees half a mile down the slope made it hard to see the exact topography of our destination, or the shape of the paths that would take us there.

  “The sun will probably set by the time we reach the beach.” I said as I glanced at a massive flock of pteranodons floating over the ocean. “So, we should look for a place to camp on the way.”

  Emerald nodded, and then I commanded our group of dinosaurs to descend the other side of the mountain toward the ocean.

  The top of the crest actually reminded me a bit of Southern California. There were hardy rosemary, lavender, and sage bushes to either side of us, and the few scattered oak trees grew wide and low near the ground instead of high into the air. But soon this scattered vegetation turned back into the heavy cover of the jungle, and we made the next few hours of travel in a tree induced twilight.

  “We haven’t really had any more run-ins with predators since the--” I started to say to Emerald, but then a distant roar of something huge echoed from our right.

  Emerald grabbed my arm, and I felt Nicole tense under the saddle.

  “Sounds like a carnotaurus,” I said as I tried to get a feel for how far away the roar had been.

  Emerald nodded, and I glanced back to look at Grumpy. As usual, he didn’t seem at all intimidated by the other predator, but my troodons and pachys were just about as tense as Nicole was.

  “I’m not sure how long until we get through these switchbacks,” I whispered to everyone. “Let’s try to go quietly.”

  I commanded the procession to move forward again, but then there was another roar across the jungle, and it did sound a bit closer.

  “Shit,” I hissed under my breath as I looked around. The angle of our descent was probably about five percent, so it wasn’t super steep, but the jungle was pretty dense on both sides. That could be a good thing, since it would prevent the carnos from plowing through the jungle to get to us, or it could be a bad thing, since we didn’t have a lot of room to maneuver, and the only way I could beat the massive predators is if I could use Nicole in a somewhat open space.

  We continued down, and I tried to listen to the sounds of the jungle over the bass-drum beat of my heart in my chest. There was a third roar about a minute after the second, and I realized that the trail was starting to bend in that direction. I started to get the suspicion that the road would lead us straight to the predators, so I started looking to our left for any way that we could get off the trail safely.

  “How about that?” I asked Emerald as I pointed to a ledge on the switchback turnaround. The spot looked a little less overgrown than the other parts of the jungle, and there were only a few tree overhangs, so I guessed that it might be a path somewhere.

  I just didn’t know to where and I couldn’t see more than a dozen or so feet into the jungle.

  Emerald shrugged her shoulders, but then a pair of roars sounded from our right, and it really did seem like they were fifty yards or so around the next corner.

  “Okay,” I grunted. “Decision made. Scoob, go scout ahead.”

  The troodon let out a soft hoot, and then he dashed to our left and hopped through the tall grass. Fred, Bevis, and Butt-head followed him, and then Grumpy and the other troodons took spots behind Nicole as we pushed into the narrow jungle trail. I looked up above and saw Bruce circling around us, but he hadn’t let out his usual honk of warning, so I guessed that he thought I was making a good decision by going this way.

  “This does seem like it was once a patch on the side of the hill,” I whispered to Emerald after we had pushed through the trees for a bit.

  The green-haired woman nodded and then glanced to our right side, where we only had another five feet of space before the ledge seemed to slide down into the jungle. She didn’t actually seem that worried, but the path was overgrown with grass, so it was kind of hard to see our footing, and I was nervous about keeping Nicole’s feet on solid earth.

  The edge of the ledge twisted around to the left behind the slope of the mountain and I let out a bit of a relieved sigh when I realized that the carnos wouldn’t be able to see us now.

  The path was now bending back toward the mountain, so I was able to see that Scoob, Fred, Bevis, and Butt-Head had reached the next twist ahead of us. The jungle was actually falling away from the sides of the slope at that junction, and I noticed that the mountainside had transitioned into a rocky face.

  And the rocks were a familiar green in color.

  “Woah,” I gasped. “That looks like malachite.”

  Emerald nodded, and I tried to contain my excitement as I urged Nicole carefully forward. A few moments later we arrived a
t the base of the rocky wall, and I leaned the trike into the slope so that I could try to pull one of the green rocks free.

  “Pass me one of the axes, please,” I ordered Emerald as I tried to yank on a few stubborn rocks.

  She gave me the tool, and two strikes later I had a fist-sized chunk of it in my hand.

  “Yep, that’s malachite!” I smiled as I passed her the rock, and she returned my grin as she ran her fingers over the bright green section I’d just cut from the wall.

  I let my eyes roam over the side of the mountain, and I realized that some vines and tropical looking bushes were covering a good area of the face. Nicole followed my unspoken command and moved forward to the next bend around the mountain, and I let out a long whistle as I ran my hands over the rocks.

  “It looks like this entire side is mostly malachite,” I said. “It’s about the same size as the place Liahpa and I mined. Let’s see what is around the bend.”

  We continued on the path, and then I let out a happy chuckle when I saw that there was even more malachite against the mountainside. Two weeks ago, I never would have even known how to find the stuff, but now that my eyes were trained, I could see the veins of it running vertically along the side of the mountain between the gray igneous rock that I guessed was granite, or maybe it was limestone. Was limestone even an igneous rock or was it a sedimentary rock? I had never spent that much time researching rocks when I was younger, and now I wished that I had.

  “It’s probably two-and-a-half times as much volume as the place we mined a few days ago,” I restated to Emerald as I waved my hand toward the walls. “If we can find a new fort location somewhat near here, we are going to be set with copper.”

  Emerald clapped her hands as she smiled, but then I heard a cautious hoot up ahead of us, and I urged Nicole forward around the next bend of the mountain side.

  As soon as we turned back toward the wall, I saw why Scoob had wanted to alert me. There was an opening in the side of the mountain right at the bend some sixty feet ahead of us, and the vines dangling from the top lip of the opening made me think of some sort of swamp monster’s maw and dripping fangs.