Hugh could feel the accusation in the piercing eyes. How a giant lizard monster could have feelings behind its eyes, he couldn’t say, but there it was.
“It’s vitamins,” Hugh said, feeling his shaky voice sounded puny and lost as it floated down from the top of the cars toward the imposing rex. “Good for you. You should eat it all.”
The rex held frozen for a moment, as if shocked Hugh had spoken to it, and Hugh wondered if anything ever intentionally made noises around a t-rex.
The rex snorted again, dropped its head, and slowly gouged a long furrow into the ground with its right foot before looking back up to meet Hugh’s eyes.
Hugh swallowed hard and nodded back.
The rex leaned over the pile and nosed the ’ceratops. Suddenly, with a quick snap of its massive jaws, the rex bit the calf-size ’ceratops in half and began to eat greedily.
Hugh, listening to the bones snap like twigs and thinking how stupid he’d been to allow the rex to get anywhere near him, quickly and quietly worked his way down the car wall and back to his trailer.
The NetTab, the vidscreen on the wall, and Hugh’s wristphone all flashed to life at the same time, blinking red warning symbols, filling the dark bedroom with flashing light and a buzzing warning tone. Hugh jerked upright in his bed, heart suddenly racing. He’d been dreading this moment for weeks, waiting for the rex to come skulking about in the middle of the night to rip open the trailer home and snatch him out of his bed, shaking him apart like dog with a ragdoll.
He’d been a fool tempting fate and feeding the monster, teaching it there was food to be found around the junkyard. He was out of bed, pulling on pants, and then grabbing for guns when the buzzing stopped and the screens all dimmed, nearly leaving him in the dark. A warning began scrolling across the screens. He stepped closer to read it. WARNING: FIREARMS DETECTED. MALICIOUS INTENT POSSIBLE. SILENT MODE/DARK MODE ENGAGED. QUICKLY AND QUIETLY SEEK SHELTER. CALL FOR HELP?
Hugh frowned and tapped the vidscreen to enlarge the camera feeds while avoiding the call for help button. Finding the vid feed outlined in red, he expanded it. If it weren’t for the AI’s glowing yellow outlines, he wouldn’t have realized the swirling mess he was looking at was two vehicles coming down the road with normal headlights off and several infrared spotlights sweeping back and forth like stiff, wooden legs on a giant spider. Rifle barrels, sticking out of the passenger windows, were outlined in red.
DISTANCE: 1.6 KM (-). CALL FOR HELP?
Ignoring the text, Hugh finished clipping the .357 and the machete to his belt before grabbing the .30-06. Feeling a bit calmer now that he knew it wasn’t the rex, he headed for the front door, grabbing a pair of night-vision binoculars off the shelf as he went by and out into the stifling heat of the still night.
Dino hunters were rare but not unheard of, though there hadn’t been any passing through here in a long time. Scavengers were rarer, as there wasn’t anything out here to take for miles and miles, but they were more dangerous, often willing to kill to take people’s property. He wasn’t worried about that, though. Scavengers rarely traveled at night, spotlights or no. It was too easy to miss the treasures of abandoned things in the dark and too easy to stumble upon a nest full of things with nasty teeth.
Hugh could hear the motors of the approaching vehicles in the distance. He broke into a jog, hoping to get up on top of the garage, where he could get a good look at them on the road as they went past. He was halfway to the garage when his wristphone vibrated. Glancing at it, he saw the warning that he was on an intercept course with a yellow dot; one of the nippers. He drew his machete and kept moving.
The map on the wristphone turned out to be very accurate. It zoomed in as he got closer to the yellow dot, enlarging the immediate area around him until his blue dot became recognizable as a human figure and the yellow dot looked like a skinny, long-tailed chicken.
Hugh slowed at the corner of the garage, where the little nipper had stopped moving, apparently waiting to see what was coming toward it instead of fleeing from the sound of his approach.
A lightning-fast shadow flashed out of the dark, lunging at Hugh. He barely saw it coming, despite knowing it was there, and swung the machete out at it. He felt it connect near his hand, almost at the pommel, knocking the little monster down. With a kick against Hugh’s boot, the nipper silently ran off into the night, vanishing somewhere around the old car crusher.
Hugh paused a second to take a deep breath and calm himself. Without the security system AI watching over him, he would have likely lost a finger that time. He’d never seen a nipper that aggressive singly, but then, he didn’t usually wander around at night.
Checking the wristphone and seeing that no more were near, he sheathed the machete and took a step forward, feeling his boot kick something and send it rolling.
He paused to look down and spotted the nipper’s severed head lying in the dust, its mouthful of nasty teeth gleaming in the dark and still opening and closing. Looking toward where the body had run off to, Hugh wondered how far it would get. Something to think about some other time, he chided himself and resumed his jog to the ladder.
The metal ladder, bolted to the outside wall of the garage, creaked and popped under his weight as he pulled himself up, trying not to let the rifle butt bang against the aluminum siding. The last thing he wanted was to make a bunch of noise and attract attention to himself. He couldn’t hear the motors of the vehicles anymore, which meant it was likely they had stopped nearby and would easily hear any loud noise he made.
Having been distracted by the nipper, he wasn’t exactly sure when he’d stopped hearing the motors, but he assumed they had to be close. Maybe even at the front gate.
He hadn’t seen anyone out here in months, and no casual passers-by in over a year. And with those guns and spotlights, the only thing Hugh could think of was that they were dino hunters and they’d somehow heard about the rex, although he didn’t know how. He hadn’t said anything about it to anyone and didn’t think there was anyone else around this area to have seen it. He was also pretty sure the AI wouldn’t have reported it unless he had called for help, but then, there were a lot of people who didn’t trust AIs.
Other than the rex, there was little reason for dino hunters to have stopped at his place, which added credence to the scavenger theory, which meant they might be more dangerous than he’d hoped. Unless they were stopping to ask him if he’d seen the rex.
Hugh shook off the worthless circular thoughts and pulled himself up onto the roof, staying on his belly, and crawling his way to the peak just in case anyone was watching the junkyard through infrareds and decided to take a pot-shot at something moving. Worse and stupider things had happened in the last few years. Especially out here in the Abandoned Lands.
He checked his wristphone again. Two red dots were now situated in a place Hugh knew seemed to be a blind spot when you drove up, and it made him wonder if they were trying not to be seen.
He lifted the night vision binoculars to his eyes and searched in the direction the map had showed them to be. All the infrared spotlights were off, which surprised him, but what surprised him more were the men, in leg irons, hopping down from the backs of what appeared to be large, armored trucks. Other men with rifles, looking and acting like prison guards, were helping as much as pushing the prisoners out of the trucks. When the captives—all nine of them—were lined up along the fence Hugh’s gut tightened in fear at the thought of what he was seeing happen.