After a couple of puffs, and blowing a smoke ring that broke apart in the still air, he assessed himself. And he didn’t like it. His calm serenity, his acceptance of what was, of having lost what had been, was gone. It had been replaced by a constant, nagging fear that the rex was going to tear through the side of his mobile home at any time in the middle of the night, looking for the chewy center.
Hugh hadn’t thought much about his own death up until now. After his family had died, he’d carried on as best he could, knowing they were watching him from above and that he’d be with them someday. So, he’d kept on doing what he thought was right: living his life and waiting for his time to be with them again. But now he was haunted by the thought that maybe it was time to go, time to leave the family legacy—what there was left of it—behind.
Between that and the rex… This was different from the quiet life he’d been living. This was like having been led to the gallows and waiting for some unseen person to show up and pull the lever at some random, unknown time.
As he sat there, his quiet fear turned into frustration and then anger, simmering in the sun until it boiled over. “Shit!” He picked up the rifle and slammed the butt against the steering wheel, cursing the horn that had lured the rex here. The horn sounded as he hit it, and hit it again, and a third time.
Rage spent, and feeling more stupid than angry now, Hugh laid the rifle back across his lap and took another drag off the smoke. He wasn’t normally prone to anger, let alone outbursts, and his ears burned with shame under his straw hat as he wondered what his wife, his daughters, would think of him now: an angry coward ready to quit.
The silence became oppressive. Even the flies seemed to have been chased off by his behavior.
He reached out to the dashboard and flipped open the old ashtray. Crushing the cigarette out in it, he dropped the butt on top of the other ancient butts, most smoked by his father, and felt the emptiness inside of him grow from being so close to something touched by one of his family, but still being so far, so impossibly far away from all of them. Tears welled in his eyes. He didn’t bother to wipe them away.
After they dried on his cheeks in the afternoon heat, he stood up, carefully holding the hilt of his machete so it wouldn’t catch on the arm of the chair, and climbed out of the convertible. He took two steps before he saw the rex feeding at the pile.
The sinewy muscles down its back rippled and moved like steel cables under its dappled hide as it nosed the pile and gingerly picked nippers up with its teeth. Hugh didn’t know much about anything when it came to dinos, but looking at all of the scars and the defined shapes of ribs on its sides, he figured this creature had been through hell and back and had come out malnourished
It raised its head slightly, still chewing, and glanced at him, as though it had known he was there all along, before it bent back to scoop up the last of the pile. When it had downed the small mouthful, it snuffled around the ground for a moment and then stood tall, meeting Hugh’s eyes.
Hugh held still, assuming that if he ran, the predatory instinct would kick in and it would chase him, just as dogs did.
The rex took one step closer, unblinkingly holding Hugh’s gaze with its golden eyes. Unlike the cold, black eyes of the nippers, the rex’s glittered with an intelligence Hugh hadn’t expected. It sniffed at him, snorted, and then turned to slowly amble away, not looking back.
“PRESS GANGS ROAM THE ABANDONED LANDS!” The NetTab headline had to be clickbait, but Hugh followed the link anyway as he sipped his coffee. If there were really press gangs, surely he’d have heard something about it when he’d been to Dino Town to trade goods yesterday.
The article was nothing but rumor and speculation about people who’d disappeared possibly being forced into the Texas Army. But people disappeared all the time, most just up and leaving, and Hugh regretted wasting his time reading it.
On the other hand, driving all the way to Dino Town, as the pop-up trading post was being called, had not been a waste of time. It had been a great success. The town had been there longer than he’d thought and was well established, which made him wonder if the traders in Rapid City intentionally never talked about it. Which made sense, as they were business competitors, of a sort.
He’d gotten nearly twice as much as he’d expected for his haul and had come back loaded with supplies. And a new security system.
It had been tempting to take the money and go, but the better earnings made him think twice. If he could pocket the extra money from four or five more trips, he’d have enough to establish himself somewhere instead of throwing his fate to the wind and hoping for the best. Not to mention he’d met a dino farmer—someone who was raising them and selling them—who was doing all right for himself. Well enough to make Hugh consider whether it would be feasible out here as well.
Though who the hell would buy nippers, which was all he had, he couldn’t begin to guess.
He closed the uninformative article and opened the new security app. Thirty small vids appeared on the NetTab screen at once, each too small to make out what they were showing, but each showing a different part of the junkyard, both inside and out. One vid flashed a yellow outline, and he tapped on it to expand it to fill the screen. It was a high view of the trailer home and the garage, taken from a camera he’d placed up on an old power pole. A little nipper, slowly walking out from behind the garage, had its outline highlighted as the AI tracked it and listed its size, estimated weight, speed, distance from Hugh, and, to Hugh’s surprise, its species: Parvicursor remotus.
Hugh tapped the name and a pop-up gave him information on what was known of the feeding and nesting habits, as well as its currently recognized range and a warning of danger if they were in a pack. It also asked if he wanted more information and if he wanted to report it or call for assistance.
A grin crept across Hugh’s face. His family had never been able to afford a household AI, and while this wasn’t really one of those, it was the closest he’d ever come. It made him feel affluent to have such a luxury, and he continued to watch as the AI tracked the nipper around the junkyard and then picked up and followed the motions of two more as they approached the junkyard fence line.
Sliding the app from the NetTab to his wristphone, Hugh marveled at how smoothly it placed him on the map of the junkyard and showed where the three nippers were in relation to him, still tracking their movements.
He took a deep breath and let it out, feeling tension go with it. He was going to walk out the front door without fearing for his life for the first time in nearly two weeks.
The pile of dead nippers was getting big enough Hugh was considering getting the tractor out. The size of the heap wasn’t the real problem though. The smell was starting to waft all the way to the house and, in the evenings, not having the windows open to cool the trailer home was not an option.
He sat the bucket down and looked out to the treeline, wondering if the rex was out there somewhere. An idea crossed his mind, and he worked his way up to the convertible. Taking a seat, and lighting a fresh cigarette from a new pack, he settled in and pulled up the security app on his wristphone.
Yellow dots, four of them now, slowly moved around the tiny map of the junkyard, but none were anywhere near his own blue dot at the edge of the screen.