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

chunks like a Great White tearing blubber from a dead whale.

And so the clock was set on the first living time-bomb.

Naomi handed Jonah the binoculars, and he zoomed in on the feeding rex.

Just as if lighting up a fuse, he could see the rogue's eyes, already glowing green.

And waiting in the wings, Jonah now spotted Trix, along with Josie and the pussycats, ambling their way through the convenient space in the trees the giant had left in its passing.

The flock paused on the crest, looking down to where the rogue assaulted the carcass, waiting until he worked that initial aggression out of his system.

Doubtless, lingering somewhere, still out of sight, was the third-stringer JV squad, pulling up the rear.

Already a few of the pussycats ventured down the slope, taking their first nibbles at the dead giant's tail, which by its sheer size stretched beyond the rogue's immediate comfort zone.

Keeping a careful eye on the big alpha rex, a number of the female gang began wolfing down huge mouthfuls of meat.

A single infected rex qualified as a regional threat, let alone a pack.

And that was to say nothing of a sauropod.  The largest titanosaurs that ever lived could look Godzilla in the eye before the Food of the Gods – an infected Argentinosaurus, in the final throes of madness, could knock the Kraken on its ass.

And so the infection would bloom up again, like a slow-motion nuclear strike that spread like a virus.

This time, however, someone was taking steps to arrest that pattern.

From the direction the choppers had disappeared, now came the roar of jet engines.

Fighters armed with ordinary missiles were ineffective against an infected giant.

A napalm strike to burn a corpse, on the other hand...

Jonah and Naomi watched helplessly as three jets came in low, each releasing a deluge of weaponized fire.

In the echoing space of the surrounding peaks, came the screams of the rex pack gathered around the now-burning carcass.  The forest around them burned as well – probably the only time of year that the perpetually damp Oregon rainforest would burn.

Visibility from below was quickly reduced to near zero as the flames began to spread.

The jets veered back the way they had come – mission accomplished.

Jonah understood the strategic reasons for this burn – an effort to avoid the spread of the infection.  Whether it was an effective method or not remained to be seen, but it definitely looked to successfully destroy a wide expanse of landscape.

And looking down at the express-delivered, instant-inferno, Jonah realized the flame was going to overtake the cabin as well.

That had been three weeks ago.

They had fled the area via the river, with nothing but what they could load in a boat and carry in a pack.

Remarkably, Jonah found that Naomi actually seemed to hold it against him – apparently for not stopping a forest fire, a napalm strike, or a two-hundred-foot Tyrannosaurus rex.  He hadn't moved Heaven and Earth.

Worse, she seemed to connect it as some kind of karmic retribution for their night before.

Either way, she never mentioned being together again, and in the time since, her posture had reverted to what it had been at the beginning – firmly at arm's length.

They were lucky just to escape the fire.  The river had only taken them so far and, since then, they'd been on foot.

The fire followed them for days, a towering cloud of ever-present smoke, always at their heels, advancing inexorably, like one of the infected beasts itself.

Then, finally, on the fourth day, there was a heavy rain, which went a long way to extinguishing the bulk of the blaze.  Having no better destination, Jonah and Naomi continued north – the direction the planes had gone after they'd destroyed their home.

And just today, they had come out onto a ridge, right at the edge of the mountains, overlooking the greater valley.

They could see what had once been the community below.

As the elevation rapidly dropped, the main highway descended down through the rural farmlands into what must have been a bedroom town outside of Portland.

Naomi had paused, looking down at the houses, all lined up in rows – what had once been families.

Abruptly she stepped aside.  As she turned away, Jonah realized she was crying.

Naomi deliberately gave him her back, inviting no comfort.  Jonah had learned not to bother her in those odd moments.  He obligingly held off while she allowed the sting of tears to dry.

She was just drying up when there came the first sudden blast of air as the helicopter flew past up above.

It looked like a cargo chopper – bulky with dual rotors front and back.  It seemed to be following the highway they had seen below.

As Naomi raised her binoculars, peering down at the distant road, she saw several vehicles traveling under the chopper's escort – a caravan, half-a-dozen RVs deep.

The chopper had pulled ahead of the procession, cresting the hill, leaving the caravan to follow the road all the way around.

Once over the peak, the bird's altitude began to drop.

“It's landing,” Naomi affirmed, and started up the hill at a lope.

“Hold on a minute,” Jonah objected.  “What if we're following them into a fight?”

Naomi shrugged.  “Would you rather wait for them to napalm us?”

She turned, without waiting for him.

Jonah gritted his teeth as he hurried along to follow.

Chapter 2

Just over the ridge was a communications outpost, and what looked like a freshly-built radio tower, set at the highest point that still allowed access to where the main road wound around the mountain on its way down into the valley.

As the chopper circled in to land, Naomi pulled her binoculars and scouted them from their vantage above.

Experience had engendered a modicum of caution.  The world was dangerous, and encountering strangers of any stripe carried risk.  In their time on the road, there had been at least one attempted robbery at gunpoint.

There had also been filtered rumors about sideways-encounters with military.

Some of these stories were scary, and all plausible enough, given conditions of desperation – but