Kingdom of Monsters Page 3

  Jonah had read stories describing how five-ton elephants could stand unseen within meters of you in heavy brush.

  But it was something else when a T. rex did it.

  How could such a giant beast be so damned sneaky?

  The first to separate from the forest was Rudy, followed by Moose, Archie and Jughead – the JV squad.

  Opposite the clearing, the sickle-claws turned to face them, claws cocked.

  Jonah and Naomi exchanged a worried glance. Trapped between them in the open ground, there was nowhere to run.

  “We might be in trouble,” Jonah said.

  Chapter 3

  Even in a world of monsters, T. rex was special.

  Giant carnivorous dinosaurs came in a variety of forms, but among all flesh-eaters, Tyrannosaurus rex stood out like a pitbull in a dog-show.

  The massive skull was built for impact – reinforced to take the shock of its own charging attack with its hydraulically muscular neck and skull, while its assault drove home twelve-inch, armor-piercing teeth, scissoring together to CHOMP out a scoop of flesh the size of a fifty-gallon barrel.

  The reason T. rex didn't tolerate competitors was because they didn't have to. Jonah had seen more than one big carcharodont square-off with a rex – with the carnosaur usually holding a clear size-advantage. But faced with a rival predator, the carcharodonts unerringly made the tactical error of locking jaws with the smaller tyrannosaur.

  In most cases, the big carnosaur simply had its face bitten away, sometimes with a simultaneous jerk that left its neck broken.

  The JV squad were teenage T. rex – thin-boned for their size, but that still put them at twenty-feet tall and just under forty feet long. And while they maintained a svelte average bodyweight barely in excess of five tons, not yet filled out into full, stout adulthood, they were pretty damn fast at that size. More than that, they accelerated quickly – built for explosive movement, they could get that five tons coming at you like a white shark hitting a surfboard.

  Jonah also saw that their hides were adorned with freshly-healed burns. The napalm-induced wildfire had left its mark. He wondered what happened to Trix and the others. Or the rogue. The fire had obviously separated the JV squad off into the valley.

  The painful wounds could not have improved the mood of the already intolerant T. rex.

  Nor would the presence of sickle-claws.

  But as Jonah realized a moment later, that was undoubtedly what saved their lives.

  Up the road, the caravan had now come into open view.

  Like a rabbit in a greyhound race, the two Ottos darted in their direction.

  The sickle-claws broke as a flock, immediately on their heels.

  Like five-ton greyhounds, the T. rex bolted after them.

  Without a sideways glance, the rex pack thundered past, leaving the three huddling humans in the clearing miraculously untouched.

  And as much as the tyrannosaurs hated sickle-claws, Jonah knew it was Otto they were after.

  That was another thing Jonah had seen demonstrated – repeatedly – if T. rex hated sickle-claws, it LOATHED those little bastards. Jonah had seen tyrannosaurs walk through fire and munitions just to stomp a single Otto flat.

  And God forbid an infected rex get a whiff – entire skyscrapers might fall for even one of the scaly little rats hiding in the basement.

  T. rex understood the concept of a flyswatter, but it carried a sledge.

  On the other hand, if they had an odd instinctive compulsion to smash those parrot-talking little bastards into paste, Jonah was fine with it – he didn't particularly like them either.

  In any case, it had certainly proved reliable behavior.

  Reliability that, Jonah now realized, was being exploited.

  A rex would chase those scaly rats wherever they went, and right now they were running straight at the convoy.

  Recognizing the danger, Meyers tried to sit up, struggling to reach for his radio, but his wounds immediately began to bleed.

  Jonah looked grimly after the juvie-gang of T. rex chasing the hooligan pack of sickle-claws, and then to the unsuspecting troops, only now coming around the bend.

  “Sorry, pal,” Jonah said, as he hiked Meyers' weight up enough to pull the radio from his belt, eliciting a painful curse from the wounded soldier. Jonah fiddled with the switches, trying to make it work.

  “Oh for God's sake,” Naomi said “Give me that!” She grabbed it up and flipped the transmit switch. “Hello? Anyone there?”

  “This is Sergeant Robert Jameson,” the voice barked back. “Who the hell is this?”

  Meyers grimaced as reached for the radio, his voice a painful grunt as he hit the switch.

  “Listen up, Bob,” he said, “this is Meyers. You've got incoming!”

  “What are you talking about...?” came the response, but now the convoy pulled into view and the situation spoke for itself.

  The sickle-claw pack was leopard-sized, but when they were attacking, they didn't come at you like mammalian pack hunters – they mobbed.

  Sergeant Bob's voice sounded over the radio. “Oh shit!”

  Machine gun fire erupted. The half-dozen vehicles skidded to a halt as the sickle-claws swept over them in a wave.

  Barely two-hundred yards away, the outpost clearing provided a clear view.

  It was a one-two assault – the sickle-claw mob drew the troops' initial attention for those first vital moments.

  A convoy like this would carry munitions that could take down a T. rex, but it took a big gun – you were talking about a creature the size of an elephant, but much more densely constructed, and far more muscular and thicker-boned. Putting one down required bazooka-level munitions.

  But the troops' initial reaction was to engage the smaller sickle-claws already upon them – a man-sized animal, more easily dealt with using rifles.

  When the JV squad battened down, bare moments later, they simply never had a chance.

  Jonah estimated two-dozen men over the six vehicles. Gunshots quickly mixed with screams after the few seconds of the sickle-claw assault.

  Then the T. rex hit.

  “Oh Jesus,” Meyers said, covering his eyes.

  Jonah had seen rex packs do this to convoys before – they simply bulldozed anything in their path. RVs crumpled like paper under stomping feet, chomping jaws bit cleanly through metal chassis, or were simply grabbed and physically thrown.

  And a machine gun just pissed-off a T. rex – probably the worst move under the circumstances because it attracted their attention. If the troops had simply run, the JV squad would have probably ignored them. As it was, the retaliatory gunfire was promptly snuffed. In less than a minute, the convoy was smashed into wreckage, and the troops along with it.

  The rex pack took a few hits, but ignored the angry rash of peppered bullet wounds, as they now turned to the renegade sickle-claws, and in particular, to Otto.

  Normally, a sickle-claw raiding party would sensibly retreat once a rex pack appeared on the scene, but today, in Otto's presence, they instead turned to fight – a strategy that proved helpful for the T. rex.

  As the dromaeosaurs attempted to mob the outnumbered rex, the tyrannosaurs met them face-first, snapping wildly in every direction, like swordfish in a tight grouping of tuna.

  Jonah once read you could hear a crocodile's 'jaw-snap' over a greater distance than a shotgun. T. rex jaws coming together echoed like a cannon blast.

  In another minute, this secondary skirmish was over and quickly followed by several judiciously-placed stomps as the big rex rooted out and squashed the scampering Ottos.

  Once the last of the little lizards was accounted for, the rex pack settled down and started picking at the scraps.

  Jonah saw Jughead toss a soldier's body down his massive gullet like a pelican swallowing a fish. The others poked and pecked among the wreckage like giant pigeons.

  But Jonah knew what came next.

  Rudy was the first to turn his head in their di
rection. Jonah turned a nervous eye to Naomi. She nodded back.

  “We've got to get out of here,” she said.

  Jonah looked around. The radio tower wouldn't protect them from a rex. But trying to escape on foot, they would just be run down.

  There was, however, the chopper.

  Jonah shut his eyes. He'd become a pilot because he'd grown up wanting to fly. But as an adult, he'd discovered it was not the feeling of a soaring bird, so much as driving a big, heavy truck high up in the air – a rather frightening sensation that he'd never really gotten over, even after getting his commercial license. It was why he preferred smaller aircraft, like his little buzz-chopper, or a little single-engine plane.

  This thing was a friggin' flying tank.

  “Can you fly it?” Naomi asked, clearly no happier than he was.

  Behind them, Jughead was also now looking after them curiously, his head cocked over the smoking ruins of the convoy, a dead sickle-claw dangling from his jaws.

  Jonah ran to where the pilot had fallen. Keeping his eyes averted from the gory remains, he rifled through the dead man's pockets until he found the key chain.

  Naomi was now standing over Meyers' still form. In her hand, she had his dog-tags.

  “He's dead,” she said. “Let's get out of here.”

  Rudy was moving in their direction – not a run, just a casual stride. On twelve-foot legs.

  A T. rex had good eyes, and they were attracted to movement like cats, easily enticed to chase.

  Jonah and Naomi were now the only things still moving.

  The two of them scrambled aboard the chopper – and then sat for several excruciating moments, as Jonah first determined the correct key, and then figured out how to start the damned thing.

  Naomi twisted in the co-pilot's seat, looking anxiously over her shoulder.

  Jughead was following Rudy, a dozen steps and closing fast.

  “Jonah...” Naomi began.

  There was a startling roar as the twin rotors suddenly fired to life.

  Rudy answered with a roar of his own, breaking into a lumbering run.

  Jonah yanked the joystick – the craft was just as heavy and awkward as he feared, and the chopper threatened to spin, even as the air-blast yanked them off the ground like the jerk of a hanging rope.

  Rudy was coming up fast, and Jonah was certain the rear rotors were going to strike the rex as it came charging in.

  For a split second, they hung nearly eye-to-jaw as Rudy's four-and-a-half-foot skull split into a gaping maw.

  Jonah heard the jaw-snap, like the smash of six-ton anvils, less than two feet from his window, before the chopper launched in a twisting lurch into the air.

  Naomi grabbed her seat, shutting her eyes as the forest spun around them, her voice trilling in a low moan. “Ohhhh God....”

  But as they ascended the tree-tops, the wobble straightened out.

  Jonah took them straight up, letting the spinning momentum wind itself out, until he had control.

  Jughead joined Rudy below, bellowing angrily after the retreating chopper.

  Jonah took a breath.

  “Well, that was closer than I would have liked.”

  Naomi was still rigid, looking down at the tantruming T. rex. Rudy roared and stamped his feet. Jughead sniffed briefly at Meyers' body and then snapped it up. Naomi turned away, grimly, pointing to the west.

  “He told us his base was up on the mountain,” she said.

  “You sure that's a good idea?”

  Naomi indicated the scene below as Rudy and Jughead turned to rejoin the others, pecking clean the last scraps of the convoy.

  “I don't want to be on the ground,” she said. “We've got to go somewhere.”

  Jonah had no better ideas, and started to veer west. The big aircraft moved sluggishly, but with an excess of power.

  “These things are too big,” he said, wrestling with the joystick. “Scares the hell out of me.”

  Naomi quipped brief laughter. “Scares you? I've flown with you twice. You've crashed both times. Try not to make it three for three.”

  Jonah frowned. There were a lot of extraneous circumstances she was leaving out. One of those incidents had been a pterosaur attack, and the other was the blast wave from a nuclear explosion.

  To be fair, he thought he'd done alright.

  “We're both still here,” he said, “I haven't killed us yet.”

  Naomi kept her eyes on the hard ground below as Jonah wobbled the big chopper unsteadily.

  “Not yet,” she replied.

  Chapter 4

  Rosa had seen pterosaurs take down choppers before.

  That was why their military transport picked up speed as it passed over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains – by Rosa's estimate somewhere between Colorado and Utah.

  It didn't matter. Once they got near the trees, pterosaurs came up at them in flocks, like clouds of bats, some of them forty-feet across.

  Not that size seemed to make a difference. A four-foot pterodactyl would charge a fully-gunned Blackhawk, diving blindly right through the rotor blades

  The transport chopper was flying twelve deep. Besides the two pilots, there were eight civilian passengers – or 'seven-and-a-half', counting the very smallest, who was less than six-months old, and as far as Rosa knew, he was the only newborn in North America – perhaps the world.

  There were also two gunmen on-board, and as the mob of pterosaurs flocked in, they slid the side-panel open, letting in the blast of cold wind. In careful, measured shots, they began to pick off the flying dragons that seemed to zero-in on the chopper like moths to flame.

  As she saw the first of the pterosaurs drop limply out of the air, Rosa's confidence rose a notch – the gunners were clearly sharp-shooters.

  But the freezing wind and gunshots prompted frightened wails from the little bundle, clutched tightly to the breast of the woman beside her.

  Rosa had been a doctor in her previous life – Doctor Rosa Holland, MD – and she had met this then-expectant mother on KT-day.

  Allison was her name, and Rosa remembered assessing her with a tiredly jaded-eye – body-art and pole-dancer, just showing pregnant – a type Rosa had seen many times – usually druggies – often the sort that delivered meth-addicted babies.

  Then there was the man with her – 'Bud' – just a bit older – another animal Rosa had known before – the doting, low-rent sucker, who Allison would settle for in place of a sugar-daddy, now that she was knocked-up. Rosa had never asked if Bud was the father, although she suspected his wallet would be acting like he was.

  This snap-judgment had been within thirty seconds of meeting them. Since the world ended, Allison and Bud had saved her life half-a-dozen times.

  They had all survived together on the road for the past year.

  For her part, during that time, Rosa had helped deliver Allison's young son – possibly the first birth in the new world. In the months since, Allison watched over him like a mother bear.

  And now the blasts of gunfire, and the cold grab of wind were terrifying.

  Allison, herself, was in tears as she tried to calm her crying infant. Bud lay a protective arm helplessly over her shoulder, as the chopper rocked around them.

  One of the other passengers, however, rose from her seat – the one woman out of the group of four the transport had picked up on their last stop, only an hour before.

  Rosa didn't know what to make of her yet.

  The young woman had caught Rosa's eye as they'd boarded and taken the seats opposite the cabin. She was strikingly beautiful, although in the manner of an athlete rather than a supermodel – she moved like a performance artist in a ballet, as she rose from her seat as casually as a passenger on a commercial flight. Her eyes were bright and unguarded, and as she caught Rosa's eye, she smiled gently with the comfortable familiarity of an old friend.

  Her companions called her Shanna, and now she knelt easily at Allison's knee, balanced with that dancer's grace, amid ri
nging gunshots at her ear, the whistling wind, and the chopper's abrupt back-and-forth lurches.

  “Shhhh,” Shanna said, as she first set a soft hand on Allison's shoulder, and then touched her wailing little bundle on one tear-streaked cheek.

  Like a passing squall, the cries faded away.

  The little eyes blinking out of the wrapped blankets matched those of his mother as Allison smiled shyly back.

  Shanna nodded to Rosa as she sat back down, clutching the side of the rocking aircraft like a carnival ride.

  Rosa was frankly amazed. She had known Allison nearly a year, and while perhaps unfairly judging her character, the scars Rosa had recognized in that cynical first appraisal were very real.

  Happenstance placed them together on KT-day, trapped among the wreckage, along with a handful of other survivors. But even huddling among the cracks, in the days and weeks that followed, as the apocalypse erupted all around them, Allison had sat away from the rest. Only Bud would sometimes sit apart with her.

  But today, when Shanna had bent at her knee, Allison had leaned close, as if huddling by a fire – although, her eyes still blinked away, as if not to stare directly at the burning embers, not quite ready to step fully into the light.

  Whatever happened to her in the old world scarred her deep. The most common vices always did. It was possible the apocalypse had saved her life – even the life of her baby, if it happened to have dried her out.

  Speculations, of course. These were all questions Rosa had never asked.

  None of it mattered after KT-day.

  And none of it would have mattered at all but for a swaggering fly-jockey, who just happened to crash his jet almost on top of their huddled group of survivors, and had somehow managed to sheer alpha-male them out of the devastated city, all the way to his base.

  Lieutenant Lucas Walker – call-sign 'Skywalker' – a chiseled specimen, who represented everything Rosa considered primitive and animal-like about the human male – made worse by the keen, wry mind that piloted his not-inconsiderable physique.

  Rosa, an anti-war pacifist, who loathed everything he stood for, had nonetheless found herself swept back to the primitive, and by the time she'd seen the last of him, she was pretty sure she had been in love with him – a married man, no less, who was himself waiting on word of his missing wife.