A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend Books

“Those I can hear,” said Luna—and began retreating up the stairs again. “They only talk when they’re about to attack.” Williams, meanwhile, had focused on Ank. “Jesus … it called me by name.” Ank stared at him from beneath his brow. (A survivor of Devil’s Gorge, maybe?) Williams nodded slowly. “But how in God’s name? The only one who knew our names was … Unless—” (Unless the town was attacked by another pack of were-raptors after we left. Which would mean those outside could be anyone—Sheriff Decker, Katrina …) Williams misted up as he thought of the saloon girl who had shown him such affection. “I won’t shoot them, then.” (Now listen, Will. Don’t let your personal feelings—) “I said I won’t shoot them,” he snapped, and turned toward Luna, who was cowering at the top of the stairs. “We’ll have to find another way.” To Luna he said: “It’s all right, sweetie. Everything’s going to be all right.” (Dammit, Will, I can’t handle an entire pack on my own, and you know it. Now are we serious about making it to Tanelorn, or at least Barley’s, or not? Or have all our plans changed because a saloon girl threw a leg up on you in a town we will never see again?) “Meh,” Williams sighed angrily and moved toward the building’s front windows, which Ank had blocked with pinball machines and video games, with only partial success. (Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you, dammit!) He lumbered after him, the tiled floor cracking beneath his elephantine feet. (We made a pact. And what about the girl? Would you see her torn to pieces by those things while you simply watched?) “Go away!” Williams hissed. He peeked around one of the machines and saw the raptors lined up in the gathering dark, waiting to make their move, waiting to rush the snack bar and overwhelm them, waiting to kill them or, worse, to turn them into creatures like themselves.

“You talk to yourself a lot, don’t you?” said Luna. Williams looked at her and finally smiled in spite of himself. “Or it just may be that he’s really talking to me, and you just can’t hear it.” He tweaked her nose. “Yet. Either way, you need to eat something and get some sleep. We all do. We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.” “Why a big day?” “Ank, camping gear,” he said, and the dinosaur folded his front legs with a groan. “Because we’re going to head out for Barley’s in the morning.” He loosed his bedroll from the supplies strapped to Ank’s back and tossed it to her. “The place where the sounds on your radio come from. We’ve—we’re searching for something. A place we call Tanelorn. And we think that might be it.” “Tanelorn,” she repeated. “What’s that?” Williams rested his arms on the bundles of supplies, thinking about it. “I don’t know, exactly. I reckon it’s just a place someone feels drawn to … even if they don’t know why. A place where the homeless can find a home, maybe.” He looked at the lights in the sky, the Alien Borealis, as Ank called it, and wondered. “But it may be that it’s something else—a kind of Omega Point. A place where all the colors of the spectrum meet, like a prism. And become focused into a single, burning light. Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about the power and the glory.” He tugged on a rope, releasing a waterfall of pots and pans. “Meh. It’s just something to keep us going.” “Like a magnifying glass,” she said, ignoring his last statement. He paused, thinking about it. “Like a magnifying glass,” he agreed. Then he added, “Now, what’ll it be? Beans or beans?”

He walked until he came to a brushy rise which overlooked the prairie, which was bathed in moonlight now that the clouds had parted some, and looked out at it in silence. At length he heard movement and turned to see Sheila looking at him in the dark. “Are you all right?” she asked. She took a step closer and paused. “I don’t know,” he said. The breeze kicked up slightly, blowing her dirty hair sidelong across her face. “I’ve got to go,” she said at last. “I don’t know where. Somewhere Erik can be safe.” He turned away and stared out over the plains again. At last he said, softly, “You were heading north before you ever heard the broadcast … weren’t you?” “Yes. I—I lost my husband and a daughter to the Flashback in a town called Anchor Rock … a long ways from here. A Sheriff tried to help us … we lost him too. After that I just—I can’t explain it. It’s like, when you spend enough time alone, or nearly so … when the whole world is quiet … you grow an antenna you never knew you had. Like the land itself is talking to you, trying to tell you something. It’s—it’s always been talking to you. You just couldn’t hear it, not through all the noise. Is that what you mean?” “Yes,” he said. He didn’t elaborate. “Where will you go?” she asked. The silence was deafening. At last he said, “Come with us.” She laughed, a little too harshly, she felt. But then she had become a harsh person. “To where? To Barley’s? No … absolutely no. They’re on their own. I’ve got a kid to think about. You … you’re not actually going to continue on there. Are you?” He turned to face her slowly. “There’s nowhere else to go. I think you know that. Come with us. You know as well as I do there’s nothing back the way we came. You said so yourself, your car’s been your primary weapon. What will you do when a pack or raptors or worse finds you on the open plain—kill them all with your six bullets? And what then; what will you do when the bullets run out, when there’s not even enough to put your kid out mercifully, much less yourself?”

"What I don’t understand is how you ended up crash-landing in the middle of Montana,” said Sheila. “You said the plane was bound for Houston.” “Yeah, well,” Peter glanced at Samantha. “That’s the damndest thing. Because both of us just had a sense that … we should head north. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I assure you, I can’t.” Williams and Sheila looked at each other. “And so, with what fuel we had, we did exactly that: leaving Texas for Wyoming and finally entering Montana, where we began to catch snippets of a broadcast. Radio—” “Free Montana, yes,” said Sheila. She shook the hair out of her eyes. “We’ve been listening to it too. The girl, Luna here, has a radio, one of those Red Cross ones with the hand crank.” She glanced at Williams warily. “I don’t suppose you’ve been able to listen to it lately, have you?” “No,” said Samantha. “Not since the crash.” She looked suddenly troubled. “Why?” Williams and Sheila exchanged nervous glances again. At last Williams said, “Because they’ve got trouble—big trouble. Trouble in the form of an armed armada heading their way right now … burning everything in its wake.” He put on his hat, which he’d found near his rifle in the middle of the clearing. “And we’re going there, anyway. Me, Sheila, the kids, you and Samantha. And we should probably get going before we lose the day completely.” “Well now wait just a minute,” protested Peter. “An armada? What do you mean?” Williams knelt by Ank. “I mean every bad apple survivor from here to New York has somehow found each other and his heading this way.” He stroked the ankylosaur’s head with what Sheila thought was surprising gentleness. “And that you aren’t the only ones to have had, I don’t know, a feeling, an impulse, to head north. All of us have.” To Ank he said: “Can you travel, old boy?” The dinosaur stirred. (I don’t know. I think so. Just—give me a minute.) Williams patted his back and stood. “And that …” He thought about it and shook his head. “We’ve got a responsibility, somehow. Like you said, don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t.”

“This is who we are,” said the man in the bandana, who stood next to him on the grassy hill. “And this, fellow paladin, is what we do. Beautiful, isn’t it?” Williams watched as the steeples of a church burned and collapsed, then focused on a woman carrying a child from the wreckage. The stranger continued: “Don’t look to us for the method of carnage—fire is of the Other’s design. We only use it as a means to an end. But watch now as I show you what will happen when we descend upon your Barley—and what mercy to expect from us when we finally do. And tell me if it would not be better to simply turn around now, while you still can, and ignore the Call completely.” Williams squinted through the smoke as a motorcycle burst into view and bore down upon the woman, its headlight creating a halo, its rider brandishing a sword. Then, before he could so much as cry out a warning, the rider struck, beheading the woman in one fell swoop before continuing on with a rumble and leaving the child abandoned in her arms. And then Williams was turning to the mysterious figure with the intent of killing him with his bare hands, but froze when he saw that the man was no longer there: that he had been replaced with something else, something about 9-feet-tall and covered with kinky hair, with a goat’s head and six golden eyes, which vanished as he blinked—awakening with a start—and heard Sheila say, with desperation in her voice: “Will, It’s Ank. And he’s gone.”

All eyes turned toward Williams as the river raged and the sun continued to sink. At length he set down his rifle and eased the backpack from his shoulders. “Just one,” he said, retaking up his weapon. “Something I was planning on doing when we reached Barley, anyway.” He looked at Sheila, knowing that if anyone tried to stop him it would be her. “See, a mistake was made when we left Ank behind—a mistake I’ve been trying to reconcile ever since Lonepine. I don’t know, but it’s like—it’s like I had a lapse in faith … a lapse in brotherly love, something; one we’re paying for even now.” He paced back and forth with his rifle, trying to figure it out, trying to find the right words. “I read the tea leaves wrong—misinterpreted the entrails—whatever. But the fact is,” He looked at them one by one. “Ank was meant to be with us now. He was meant to ford us across that river. And the only reason he isn’t … is because I failed our friendship.” He paused as drop of rain flecked his nose and the clouds rumbled gently overhead. “Surely you can feel it, just as I do. The feeling that … we’re being tested. That the Flashback was not just an apocalypse in the physical sense. It was an apocalypse in the spiritual sense. That there’s more at play here than dinosaurs and strange lights in the sky—aliens, whatever—that the battle has now been joined by something else entirely. Something, I don’t know–” “Dear God, he’s going to say it,” protested Peter. “Yes, yes, I am,” said Williams rapidly, and added: “Something divine. And I guess what I’m trying to tell you all now, especially you, Sheila, and you, Luna, is that … well, I’m being called to go find Ank.”

He listened as the scratching at the metal door ceased, but took no heart from it: they’d only refocused their efforts on finding another way in, of that he was certain. Nor could he bear the thought of what would happen when they finally broke through—not the terror and pain of them gutting him like a fish, for Katrina would only wound him, he knew, but the inconceivable horror of walking the earth like them. Like a zombie. Like a dead man walking a dead planet. So, too, would they know then, having added his consciousness to theirs. They would know that Barley Hot Springs lay just beyond the Santiago River, which he suspected they could swim, and that nothing in the others’ experience would have prepared them for an attack from the rear. No, no, he couldn’t under any circumstances allow that—it alone was enough to justify what he couldn’t help but see as a surrender under cowardice, a spitting in God’s eye. For there was no God, otherwise the Flashback could never have happened. There was no light to counter the dark, no paladin to counter the Bandana Man, no magnifying glass to focus the sun. There was only the lights in the sky and a world gone mad, only death and pain and suffering without end—and time itself, which had been scrambled like eggs. He repositioned the rifle so that it pressed against his forehead then slipped his thumb across its trigger.

She focused on her breathing, trying indeed not to hyperventilate, but feeling as though her heart might punch through her chest at any moment. The spot where he had touched her seemed to burn and freeze at the same time. “You don’t remember … do you?” His brown eyes suddenly twinkled and he shook his head. “No? You don’t remember calling on me in the depths of those first awful nights, when you were at your most exposed, when you were at your most vulnerable?” He stroked her long, brown hair with an almost impossible gentleness; it was as though a cool-warm breeze rifled it rather than his fingers. “When it was just you and the boy … alone, scared. Cold. Hungry?” She began to shake her head almost violently, her breathing and heart rate accelerating once again. “Oh, yes,” he said, squinting, smiling. “You did. All the world did. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You called on many during that time, in those hours and days and weeks after the Flashback—you wouldn’t have been aware of it. And you cursed the One who had brought it upon you … who had taken your husband and your daughter; who had taken so many husbands and daughters. It’s okay. We—we don’t judge. Not like them,” He looked at the hazy sky and the alien-colored lights, at the sun itself which was a white disk in the smoke. “Not like Him.”

They both felt it at the same time, even as the train lurched forward and the cars jolted thunderously—a tremor in the very fabric of things, like a ripple in a foam of potentiality which contained in it the threads of all their possible futures. Something, somewhere, had just happened—something directly related to their current endeavor of delivering the bomb to Barley and detonating it amidst the Enemy. (An attack, you think, maybe an ambush? So soon?) communicated Ank, still smarting from his struggle to climb onto the flatcar with the added weight of the weapon. “You felt it too? Like one door closed and another had opened, but with disastrous consequences, for us all …” Williams looked at him, rattled and bewildered. “Ank, how could we know that?” (It’s possible that whatever this—this thing is, this event horizon, this convergence of power dynamics … it’s speeding up as we get closer, growing stronger. Meaning that the psychological link between us could be expanding to incorporate others. Regardless, it also means that our window for getting there has narrowed still further, possibly to the point of impossi—) “Ank, don’t.” (It’s something we need to prepare ourselves for, Will. At any rate, I’d suggest just now that you encourage our friendly engineer to step on the gas a little, or a lot.) Williams leaned forward until they were almost nose to nose. “Our friendly engineer, in case you haven’t noticed, is clearly insane!” (All the more reason to give it a shot. Just do it, Will. He may actually listen.) And then Williams was leaning over the side using one of Ank’s spikes for a handhold while simultaneously yelling at the engineer, who poked his head out the engine’s side window, his long, gray hair flying, and shouted, “You want speed, you got it, ha-ha! The world, she’s a comin’ back, yesiree!” He sounded the horn suddenly and Williams covered an ear, even as his hat blew off and fluttered away behind them. “The New World Special is back in service—and it’s taking its passengers to the Promised Land! Ha-ha!”

They streamed out from the tree line in a veritable blitzkrieg, the guns of the tanks rotating and firing, the foot soldiers alternately taking cover behind vehicles and squeezing off bursts, the raptors and triceratops and stegosaurs charging—as Red and Charlotte and Roger and Savanna continued shooting and the children ran ammo and Bella lit the gasoline trenches, as Gojira and the clerk prepared shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. As hundreds of others joined the battle belatedly and began to kill and to be killed. And then they were there; they were at the gates, and the triceratops and stegosaurs had waded into the burning trenches and begun serving as bridges—sacrificing themselves so that the raptors and the foot soldiers could cross—even as a column of bulldozers fanned out along the perimeter and prepared to break the lines for good: dropping their blades—which rattled and clinked against the hail of gunfire—revving their engines, spewing black smoke. “Bayonets!” cried Red as the raptors fell upon them, thrusting his own so that it skewered one of the dinosaurs like a shish kabob even before he used its own weight and momentum to swing it over and behind himself.