Kingdom of Monsters by John Schneider (microsoft ebook reader .TXT) 📗

his part, was fine with sleeping on the couch in his single-bedroom cabin.

Then one night, just over three weeks ago – Jonah didn't know why at the time – he had come back in from the river, his back aching, cold, tired and wet, to find her halfway into a bottle of wine.

He'd frowned.  Naomi could get a little chirpy with alcohol.  But tonight she just seemed melancholy.

Thinking about the husband again, he thought, tiredly.  That always bode trouble.

Jonah had referred to him as 'her ex' once – a mistake he'd not made twice.

“He is not my ex,” she had hissed, rounding on him, her eyes flashing venomously, as she held up the ring she still wore on her finger.  “He died.”

But tonight, she had a fire crackling, and had folded herself in a nest of blankets on the couch.

Jonah tossed off his jacket and wet boots, and sat down on the floor in front of the fireplace, his cold skin prickling with goose-flesh at the warm gust of flame.

Sliding behind him on the couch, Naomi touched her hand against his cheek.

“You're chilled,” she said.

And remarkably, he felt her fingers touch his shoulders, which were tight and sore, and began to rub.

“You're also tight as knot,” she said.

Jonah looked at the half-bottle of wine as her hands now stole down onto his chest.

He started to turn, and suddenly she was in his arms, slipping down off the couch and pulling him down with her beside the fire.

Her eyes were wide as her arms circled his back, drawing him close.

Half-a-bottle of wine, Jonah thought.

“We shouldn't do this,” he said, without conviction.

Those dark eyes had blinked once, looking up at him, half-lidded.

“Shouldn't we?” she murmured back.

As if it had ever been in doubt.

Jonah would later wonder if nobility was strained, or would he simply have been foolish to turn away a good thing?

Push came to shove, he found he didn't care.

All he knew was that, whatever came next, he now had that moment etched in his memory, where she pulled him down beside her and they first touched.

That was a moment he wouldn't give up for anything.

Perhaps symbolically, he was awakened the next day when the earth moved.

A rumbling in the ground was cause for alarm these days.  The entire region was a semi-active volcanic range, and seismic activity had recently increased tenfold.

Of all the loose nukes that had been tossed about in the immediate aftermath of 'KT-day', Jonah had heard reports that at least one of them, by accident or design, had hit dead center on the San Andreas fault.

He also had it from multiple sources that the resulting tectonic shift had finally delivered on the long-promised collapse of southern California into the ocean.

And neither had the earthquakes stopped.  Far from it.  Instead, tremors seemed to step-up in tempo by the day, and long-dormant forest-covered mountains suddenly began burping smoke and ash, as their bowels boiled with molten pressure from down below.

Jonah had almost learned to ignore the semi-regular tremors, much the way they once had in southern California before it collapsed into the ocean – not that attentiveness would have made a lot of difference.

But as he was stirred awake, Jonah's bleary consciousness registered something was different about these tremors.

The second thing he realized was that Naomi was gone from his side.

As he blinked away the fog of sleep and looked around, he saw her sitting at the window, legs folded, her feet curled up beside her.  She was wrapped in her robe, as if she'd been up for a while.

He sat up to greet her but saw the furtive look in her face.

“That's not a quake,” she said.

Jonah paused, listening, even as he felt the impact again, followed half-a-tick later by the heavy booming sound, echoing like a delayed pulse of distant thunder.

Like footsteps, Jonah realized.  Heavy enough to shake the mountain.

Even big T. rex were only nine or ten tons.  They couldn't do that.

This was something else.

Jonah and Naomi quickly dressed, and had hiked up to the edge of the ridge, where the trees cleared, offering a view of the surrounding terrain.

On the very opposite peak, less than half-a-mile distant, a giant shadow loomed.

It wasn't a quake – not from the Earth.

The first time you saw one of these beasts, you found yourself just sort of standing and staring, the way you would at an incoming storm – or like an avalanche moving down a mountain – almost disassociated by the scale of it, until you realized it was coming right at you.

To Jonah, it looked like a giant cloud, blocking out the sky.

This cloud was in the shape of a giant rex – a rex that reared its head more than two-hundred feet high, its unguessable tonnage shaking the earth with each lumbering step.

And out of the middle of that cloud, stared two blinking eyes.

They glowed emerald green.

It was a signature tell of the giants – or any infected animal – an odd side-effect.

This creature would have once been a normal rex, before the rabies-like progression of the infection – which Jonah had noted was passed on, at least to some degree, by ingestion, a cycle that could take anywhere from weeks to months.

Among the drifting rumors echoing over the barren airwaves, Jonah heard it called the 'Food of the Gods' – another contribution from the 'genetic-engineering' faction of the tin-hat theorists.

But it was what really destroyed the world.

A normal rex might top out at forty-feet, nose-to-tail.  The largest sauropods, on the other hand, approached two-hundred feet.

An infected sauropod might stretch two-thousand feet or better, and a herd of these rage-infected giants would rampage until the madness burned its cycle and the beasts finally died.

Weeks to months.

Entire cities had literally been trampled flat.  These infected behemoths had barely noticed humanity's efforts to add to the destruction with missiles and bombs.

Now, as the giant rex perched on the opposite hill, just as abrupt and sudden as an avalanche, Jonah could see this beast was in the very late