“Good job guys!” I shouted with encouragement when it was obvious that the two crocs were trying to crawl away. Unfortunately, as soon as I turned my head away, the dilo sensed the opportunity and did something I hadn’t expected.
He clamped his teeth around my spear and yanked the weapon free of my grasp.
I tried to keep a hold of it, but the dilophosaurus must have weighed around eight hundred pounds, and he’d really put his back into the movement. I instantly moved to grab the second spear, but the fucker was hellbent on eating Kacerie, and he dashed in between Bob’s legs before the parasaur could step on him.
I threw myself off Bob’s back and fell toward the dilo with my spear pointed down, as I floated in the air for a moment, I wondered why I was risking my life again to save Kacerie, especially now that I had decided to kick her out of the camp.
Then my spear punched through the dilo’s spine below his neck, and all I could worry about was the thing trying to turn around a chomp my face off.
“Shit!” I growled as I pushed, pulled, and swung the spear around. I knew I’d hit the creature with a critical wound, but it was still refusing to believe that it was dead, and the thing kept trying to spin on me so that it could rip a tooth or claw through my flesh.
I ordered Bob to move in, and the parasaur brought his massive foot down on the tail of the speared dilo. This stopped the fucker’s attempts to lunge at me, but I left the spear in his back so that Bob could keep walking up the tail. Each step the parasaurs took shattered the dilo’s bones and spine, and the thing finally let out a death rattle after Bob’s feet almost reached my spear.
I turned to Sonny and Cher. Both of the parasaurs had pushed the crocs all the way into the jungle, so I commanded them to retreat back to me. They did so quickly, and the crocs wiggled across the sand so they could get back into the water.
Then the dinosaur fight was over, and I turned to face Kacerie. Her face was still covered with tears, but the terror was easy to see in her eyes.
“You saved me?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Look. I didn’t want you to get--”
“Please Victor!” she begged as she threw herself at my feet. “Please don’t leave me out here. I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I’ll have sex with you, or cook for you, or clean, or do whatever. I’ll be your slave. Just don’t leave me out here!” It was a bit hard to understand her words through her sobs, but I got the gist of it after she repeated it a second time.
“It’s not about you fucking me, or being my slave,” I said as looked down at her bright pink hair. “I just don’t trust you. You are going to get your Lance back and then use it on us.”
“No!” Kacerie screeched as she looked up at me. “I won’t. I get it now. You left me alone for five minutes and three dinosaurs tried to kill and eat me. There is no way I’d survive without you. Please, Victor. I want to live. I’ll work for you. I’ll do everything you, or Trel, or Galmine, or Sheela asks. You can have sex--”
“Stop talking about sex,” I interrupted her. “I get it. You don’t need to offer yourself to me. That’s not how I am.”
“I just want to live,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry I complained. You’ll never hear it from me again. I’ll do two guard shifts. I’ll cook every meal. I’ll figure out how to fit in and add to your group. Just please don’t leave me out here. Take me back. I need you.”
“Alright,” I said after I thought about it a moment. “Let’s get back on Bob.”
“Really?” she gasped as if she didn’t believe that I’d actually reconsidered.
“Yeah,” I replied as I helped her stand. “It seems like you realize what’s going to happen now if we don’t work together.”
“I do, yes! Oh, Victor!” she threw her arms around her shoulders and cried into my neck. “Thank you! Thank you!”
“That’s fine. It’s okay.” I patted her back awkwardly and then just wrapped my arms around her narrow waist in a hug. She sighed when I held her, and we stood together in silence for half a minute.
“Sorry,” she whispered when we parted. “You were right to leave me. Thank you for--”
“We aren’t going to talk about this anymore,” I interrupted her. “We are going to get back to camp, and you are going to cooperate with a smile on your face. When the others ask you what happened, you just tell them that everything is great between us. Got it?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“Good,” I said. “Don’t make me regret this.”
“You won’t,” she said as she held her hands up in a praying position. “I will work as hard as the three of them to make you happy. Thank you again.”
“Get up on Bob,” I said as the parasaur kneeled behind me. “I need to go look at Sonny’s tail.”
“Yes, Victor,” she nodded, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and then climbed up into the saddle.
I walked over to Sonny and Cher and then checked their legs, arms, bellies, and tails for damage. Cher had a few scratches on her legs that were bleeding a bit, but it didn’t look like a major injury. The bite mark on Sonny’s tail was deep, but even though it leaked some blood on the sand, it didn’t look like it had cut into an artery or vein.
“We are going to go a bit slower on the way back,” I said to Kacerie when I climbed up onto the saddle. “I don’t want their cuts to open up anymore.”
“Whatever you want to do, I’m fine,” she said as she wrapped her arms around my stomach. “Just don’t leave me again.”
“Yeah, I won’t if you do what you said you would do.” I ordered Sonny and Cher to run a bit ahead of Bob so that I could watch their injuries, and then the three parasaurs jogged up the hill and out of the lake valley.
“I’m going to make another loop,” I said as soon as we descended back down into our valley and reached the river we normally forded.
“Okay,” Kacerie agreed, and we turned left at the river and followed it down the edge of our territory until we reached the spot where we usually got water. I crossed the river here and then ran the parasaurs around the massive fallen redwood. I intended to keep going around the river and maybe approach the orange bird cave from the other side, but the sight of the massive fallen tree had grabbed my attention, and I felt the beginnings of an idea spin around in my head.
I didn’t know what the idea was, but something about the fallen tree was making my brain overheat, so I stopped our little caravan as soon as we reached the end where the roots were exposed. Each strand of the fallen tree’s roots stretched through the air as if they were trying to grasp onto the small amount of sunlight cutting through the canopy. I knew the tree was long dead, but the shape of the roots made it look as if it was some sort of terrible Kraken that was rising up from the sea of brown dirt.
“Shiiiiit,” I gasped as I stared at the dirt.
“What’s wrong?” Kacerie asked fearfully.
“Oh damn.” I laughed as the idea fully formed in my brain. “I just figured out how to get the trees down way faster. If this works how I think it will, then we’ll finish the new fort wall in two days instead of six weeks.”
Chapter 10
“Let’s get back!” I shouted a second before I ordered the parasaur trio to run through the forest.
“What did you figure out?” Kacerie asked, but I told Bob to increase his speed, and the wind filled my ears.
We made it to the clearing half a minute later, and I saw that the crowd of scavengers had almost tripled in size. There were probably a hundred smaller dinos feasting on the corpses, and I saw a few dozen vulture looking birds circling overhead. The sight of the birds worried me a bit since it was a clear indication to anyone watching the sky that there was something dead below them. It could alert an enemy tribe we were here, but then again, dinosaurs were dying all the time, and anyone watching the skyline might not think much of it.