Kingdom of Monsters Read online

  KINGDOM of

  MONSTERS

  by

  John Lee Schneider

  www.severedpresss.com

  Copyright 2021 by John Lee Schneider

  “It was surely well for man that he came late in the order of creation. There were powers abroad in earlier days which no courage and no mechanism of his could have met. What could his sling, his throwing-stick, or his arrow avail him against such forces as have been loose tonight? Even with a modern rifle, it would be all odds on the monster.”

  The Lost World

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Chapter 1

  Jonah and Naomi had been traveling the mountains for three weeks when they saw the military chopper passing above.

  The sudden roar of rotor blades was like the shriek of some giant predatory bird. Naomi's hand instinctively dropped to the pistol at her hip.

  That was the thing about living post-apocalypse – even once-familiar sights became fearful and threatening.

  “He's coming in low,” Naomi said. “It looks like he's landing.”

  It was not the first chopper they'd seen. The two of them had been following the path of military transit, sticking to the highland passes. These days it was the safest way to travel.

  When you lived in Tyrannosaurus territory, you learned to mind your surroundings.

  Jonah quite vividly remembered the first time he'd wandered out of the general store to find a T. rex waiting in the parking lot.

  He had seen all the old movies – everything from stop-motion animation, to rubber suits and animatronics, to fancy CGI – but instead, he'd discovered tyrannosaurs were really more like giant road-runners – he'd barely out-distanced the thing in his pick-up on a paved mountain road – and both of those were luxuries you couldn't expect anymore.

  Not since the end of the world.

  In a purely detached way, it was remarkable how quickly the world of humankind had receded. Although, when you thought about it, ninety-percent of people lived – had lived – in major population centers, which had been the hardest hit.

  At first, there had been lingering radio reports of varying credibility, wild speculations involving everything from genetic experiments gone wrong to beasts and dragons from the Pit.

  Personally, Jonah doubted he would ever live to know. He had lived like a hermit before the end of the world – a rustic cabin high in the mountains – and if he hadn't come into town after fishing that day, he might have missed it.

  That was one of the more subtle, yet jarring differences, Jonah thought – the end of the flow of information. There was no news anymore. The Internet and cellphones had been replaced by CBs and walkie-talkies, and a lot of wide-open space in-between.

  All Jonah really knew was that, one day, monsters had just walked out of the woods, right into the cities and towns, as if they'd been out there waiting all along.

  On the ground, it didn't matter whether that day had come because of Biblical judgment, or all-too-human bio-genetic-buggery – either one got you there.

  And either way, Jonah had found himself running ever since.

  Naomi had been running right beside him – neither by choice or plan – only the simple happenstance of walking out into that same general store parking lot, and escaping with him in his truck, just as a prehistoric beast that had no business being there, bore down on them like a train-engine with teeth.

  Their old lives had been torn away in an instant as they fled the apocalypse together.

  Naomi had been the wife of a fighter pilot – one of those genuine American heroes.

  Lieutenant Lucas Walker had died fighting the apocalypse. In his final breath, he had delivered a nuclear payload that likely preserved what remained of human life in the majority of the western states, releasing his missiles even as the winged beasts in the air, as terrible as T. rex on the ground, finally chased him down.

  Naomi had watched his fighter destroyed, exploding in the jaws of a giant flying dragon.

  Jonah, ten years divorced from a woman who had traded-up without looking back, could only imagine the grief of losing a genuine soulmate.

  He also knew he was a poor substitute – a reclusive, backwater guide pilot, who flew rust-bucket choppers and propeller planes, but preferred traveling by boat. It was perhaps understandable that Naomi might be a bit indignant at the fates for saddling her in his company. She had certainly not been shy about saying so.

  Still, the end of the world was a bonding experience, especially after an ill-fated jaunt in Jonah's rusty, tin-bucket chopper. Hoping to find their way to Naomi's husband's Navy base, they had instead discovered pterosaurs would go right after a chopper.

  They'd crashed in the mountains along the Oregon/California border, and were forced to travel cross-land, walking through the Apocalypse on foot.

  But in the end, they'd made it back to Jonah's cabin, which remained miraculously untouched, and really not looking much different than before the world ended.

  Naomi, of course, had set about putting a change to that. As was her way, she settled in, and in short order, began making the place her own.

  A woman's touch on the rustic cabin was undeniable. Jonah was reminded of college – the sorority palaces and the fraternity dives, often sharing a fence, right next door to each other.

  The cabin was also high in the mountains, which made it relatively safe.

  Funny thing about the Mesozoic-era – it was an oxygen-rich, fertile-world, quite unlike the arid climate of modern Earth. A Cretaceous creature like T. rex didn't like the thin air in the mountains.

  So the beasts didn't bother them, and they settled into a routine – hunting, fishing – Naomi started up a garden.

  It had seemed a strange interlude, perhaps even a reward.

  Jonah had thought so, right up until their one night together.

  To speak the truth and shame the Devil, Jonah had been in love with her almost from the moment they'd met. Naomi, naturally, was perfectly aware, and fine with it, as long as he clearly understood that, even as the last man on Earth, she was still out of his league.

  Jonah, for his part, was fine with sleeping on the couch in his single-bedroom cabin.

  Then one night, just over three weeks ago – Jonah didn't know why at the time – he had come back in from the river, his back aching, cold, tired and wet, to find her halfway into a bottle of wine.

  He'd frowned. Naomi could get a little chirpy with alcohol. But tonight she just seemed melancholy.

  Thinking about the husband again, he thought, tiredly. That always bode trouble.

  Jonah had referred to him as 'her ex' once – a mistake he'd not made twice.

  “He is not my ex,” she had hissed, rounding on him, her eyes flashing venomously, as she held up the ring she still wore on her finger. “He died.”

  But tonight, she had a fire crackling, and had folded herself in a nest of blankets on the couch.

  Jonah tossed off his jacket and wet boots, and sat down on the floor in front of the fireplace, his cold skin prickling with goose-flesh at the warm gust of flame.

  Sliding behind him on the couch, Naomi touched her hand against his cheek.

  “You're chilled,” she said.

  And remarkably, he felt her fingers touch his shoulders, which were tight and sore, and began to rub.

  “You're also tight as knot,” she said.

  Jonah looked at the half-bottle of wine as her hands now stole down onto his chest.

  He started to turn, and suddenly she was in his arms, slipping down off the couch and pulling him down with her beside the fire.

  Her eyes were wide as her arms circled his back, drawing him close.

  Half-a-bottle of wine, Jonah though
t.

  “We shouldn't do this,” he said, without conviction.

  Those dark eyes had blinked once, looking up at him, half-lidded.

  “Shouldn't we?” she murmured back.

  As if it had ever been in doubt.

  Jonah would later wonder if nobility was strained, or would he simply have been foolish to turn away a good thing?

  Push came to shove, he found he didn't care.

  All he knew was that, whatever came next, he now had that moment etched in his memory, where she pulled him down beside her and they first touched.

  That was a moment he wouldn't give up for anything.

  Perhaps symbolically, he was awakened the next day when the earth moved.

  A rumbling in the ground was cause for alarm these days. The entire region was a semi-active volcanic range, and seismic activity had recently increased tenfold.

  Of all the loose nukes that had been tossed about in the immediate aftermath of 'KT-day', Jonah had heard reports that at least one of them, by accident or design, had hit dead center on the San Andreas fault.

  He also had it from multiple sources that the resulting tectonic shift had finally delivered on the long-promised collapse of southern California into the ocean.

  And neither had the earthquakes stopped. Far from it. Instead, tremors seemed to step-up in tempo by the day, and long-dormant forest-covered mountains suddenly began burping smoke and ash, as their bowels boiled with molten pressure from down below.

  Jonah had almost learned to ignore the semi-regular tremors, much the way they once had in southern California before it collapsed into the ocean – not that attentiveness would have made a lot of difference.

  But as he was stirred awake, Jonah's bleary consciousness registered something was different about these tremors.

  The second thing he realized was that Naomi was gone from his side.

  As he blinked away the fog of sleep and looked around, he saw her sitting at the window, legs folded, her feet curled up beside her. She was wrapped in her robe, as if she'd been up for a while.

  He sat up to greet her but saw the furtive look in her face.

  “That's not a quake,” she said.

  Jonah paused, listening, even as he felt the impact again, followed half-a-tick later by the heavy booming sound, echoing like a delayed pulse of distant thunder.

  Like footsteps, Jonah realized. Heavy enough to shake the mountain.

  Even big T. rex were only nine or ten tons. They couldn't do that.

  This was something else.

  Jonah and Naomi quickly dressed, and had hiked up to the edge of the ridge, where the trees cleared, offering a view of the surrounding terrain.

  On the very opposite peak, less than half-a-mile distant, a giant shadow loomed.

  It wasn't a quake – not from the Earth.

  The first time you saw one of these beasts, you found yourself just sort of standing and staring, the way you would at an incoming storm – or like an avalanche moving down a mountain – almost disassociated by the scale of it, until you realized it was coming right at you.

  To Jonah, it looked like a giant cloud, blocking out the sky.

  This cloud was in the shape of a giant rex – a rex that reared its head more than two-hundred feet high, its unguessable tonnage shaking the earth with each lumbering step.

  And out of the middle of that cloud, stared two blinking eyes.

  They glowed emerald green.

  It was a signature tell of the giants – or any infected animal – an odd side-effect.

  This creature would have once been a normal rex, before the rabies-like progression of the infection – which Jonah had noted was passed on, at least to some degree, by ingestion, a cycle that could take anywhere from weeks to months.

  Among the drifting rumors echoing over the barren airwaves, Jonah heard it called the 'Food of the Gods' – another contribution from the 'genetic-engineering' faction of the tin-hat theorists.

  But it was what really destroyed the world.

  A normal rex might top out at forty-feet, nose-to-tail. The largest sauropods, on the other hand, approached two-hundred feet.

  An infected sauropod might stretch two-thousand feet or better, and a herd of these rage-infected giants would rampage until the madness burned its cycle and the beasts finally died.

  Weeks to months.

  Entire cities had literally been trampled flat. These infected behemoths had barely noticed humanity's efforts to add to the destruction with missiles and bombs.

  Now, as the giant rex perched on the opposite hill, just as abrupt and sudden as an avalanche, Jonah could see this beast was in the very late stages.

  The rabies-madness set in once growth topped out, as if whatever chemical-biological reaction percolating the DNA just kept forcing more and more energy into the system, like a constant diet of cocaine and steroids, until the infected organism finally died.

  This rex had passed the last of the rage phase – or more properly, lost the physical/cognitive ability to continue acting upon it, simply shambling forward until its failing biological life-process finally allowed its suffering to end.

  That day had also been the first time they'd seen military presence in the area.

  As the rex began moving down the hill, there came the buzzing drone of rotor blades, and two choppers appeared above, like giant wasps, hot on the tail of the infected giant.

  Naomi had stiffened at the sight – her husband's colors.

  The rex didn't seem to notice the buzzing metal bugs as they circled and flew past. Jonah hoped they wouldn't attack – if the beast noticed at all, it would only piss it off, perhaps even summoning up one last maddened rampage.

  But instead, the choppers circled back, disappearing over the horizon in the direction they'd come.

  Obviously, someone in the military had learned futility. There was no point in engaging an already-dying giant.

  As the rex trundled the downward slope, it stumbled.

  The staccato footsteps were replaced by a rumble, like rolling boulders, as the giant rex collapsed forward, an avalanche all on its own, and an entire swath of timber was wiped away as the massive beast crashed to the forest floor.

  The impact continued to reverberate beneath their feet for nearly a minute before it finally stilled.

  In the beast's eyes, the green glow of the Food of the Gods faded as its life left it.

  Unfortunately, it wasn't over.

  Because now they were looking at an ecological time bomb.

  Here was a mountain of free meat, and its scent would carry like ringing a dinner bell for miles around.

  But it was infected.

  Jonah and Naomi worked their way further down the hillside, hoping for a better view. They moved with caution, judicious in any wilderness, although Jonah had learned to treat it like any lifetime woodsman – it was no different than knowing where the bears were when you lived in Alaska.

  The T. rex didn't like the hills, but would follow you there if they got on your tail – and they could be damn stubborn about it.

  Which caused Jonah to wonder, what might this big beast have been following?

  He did not, however, question what had drawn the first of the valley's other predators.

  Naomi pulled at his shoulder, pointing to the big rex' path along the opposite peak.

  The dying giant had likely been casting chemical messages in the air that its end was near, and the scent would have carried. Any freeloaders looking for an easy meal would be following right behind, prowling like circling sharks.

  And sure enough, the first of the 'normals' appeared on the scene.

  The valley south of Jonah's cabin was patrolled by a big rogue male rex, easily approaching ten tons, and it was this mighty beast that followed closest in the dying giant's footsteps.

  Likely, the pack of females, who traveled together, would not be far behind.

  The senior female would keep the pack in-line until the big rogue claime
d the territory – and of course, ate his fill, showing due reverence for the Tyrant King.

  T. rex' social habits rather resembled those of some large ground birds. The senior female kept her troop separate from the solitary males, except when she would pair-bond for a period of weeks with the territory's dominant rogue.

  Young males would sometimes run in their own small groups once they got too big for the female pack – like many raptor birds, male rex were highly aggressive, and couldn't be tolerated among the more social females – and even these juvie-teenage mini-packs always eventually broke down as every swaggering buck, sooner or later, got too big, too mean, and just had to challenge for the top spot, and either be king or be killed.

  And the king tended to be right there handy when that moment came. The juvie-packs often followed the rogue's path, always at a respectful distance, waiting to freeload off his kills. In turn, he would let them stand and wait their turn, while he confiscated anything they happened to bring down – in both cases, after he'd consumed his lion's share, and provided he'd taken a nap half-a-mile away down by the river.

  The rogue allowed it – just like anything else that went on in his territory.

  Very generously, he allowed it, up until the moment, every now and then, when he had to kill one of them.

  Jonah supposed, in its way, it was a very stress-free life.

  And as far as living around them, on the flip-side, T. rex did NOT tolerate other predators.

  Jonah had seen that demonstrated time and time again. To be a big carnosaur within the nigh-uncanny scent range of a rex, or any tyrannosaur of anywhere near comparable size, was to get your ass bit off.

  The rex also seemed to particularly hate sickle-claws – any sickle-claws in scent range, and they would dig out their burrows and dens like bears rooting out termites.

  Naomi actually seemed to have become rather fond of the local T. rex troops, in an admiring-the-lion kind of way. She had named the big senior female Trix, and called her flock Josie and the pussycats – Josie being the second-largest female, and presumably, either Trix' little sister or daughter. There were also two other adults, likely sisters, Daphne and Velma.