Age of Monsters by John Schneider (books to read for self improvement .TXT) 📗

That seemed to satisfy her.  She even smiled a little.

“So,” she said, “what now?”

And with that, Jonah stood.

“Well,” he said, “Now, it's about two-hundred miles northeast back to my cabin.”

He made as if to check his watch.  “Think we can make it?”

She looked up at him quizzically.

“We?” she said.

Jonah sighed.

Never giving an inch, he thought.  He tried to imagine what it must be like to play in her league.  It took a higher-grade model.

“Well,” he said, “I'm going home.”

Jonah turned, as if ready to start walking up the beach that very moment, pausing only to look back over his shoulder.

“You are under no obligation to follow,” he said.

He started to walk, turning his back, leaving her still sitting there on her log.

He wondered what he would do if she didn't follow.

But he knew well enough.  He stopped and waited.

And then she was standing beside him.

“Okay,” she said.  “Let's go.”

Jonah found himself smiling – and it must have been a bit too smug, because she reached out and slugged him in the arm – right in that spot where the shoulder meets the bone.

Naomi tilted her head.

“That didn't hurt, did it?”

Jonah tossed a tear off his cheek. “Nah.”

And now she smiled back.

The tide was coming in and the beach up ahead was growing narrow.  Jonah wondered how far before they could find a path up into the hills – and then he wondered what the terrain might look like on the far side.

Two-hundred miles – and that was assuming his cabin was still there.  No telling how far the seismic upheaval had traveled – or for that matter, if it was even all done.

Only one way to find out, he decided.

Naomi fell into step beside him.

Ahead of them, a new world waited.  Jonah didn't know if that world had a place for them in it.

Time would tell.

Chapter 51

The rex lay where it had fallen.

After the blast, much of the surrounding forest had burned, spreading the damage far beyond the ten-mile blast-radius.

It had actually been the quake that had gone a long way towards smothering that fire – burying it.  The air had gone black with smoke and floating bits of ash, from both volcanic and nuclear eruption.

But now the dust settled.  The body of the rex was covered as if with a light layer of snow.

And finally, after three days, the first of the scavengers appeared at the edges.

Otto hopped out of the surrounding brush.

There were several of them, in fact.  They scampered to the edge of the stream, chirping excitedly at the body of the fallen tyrant.

Things had gone badly in this region.  The majority of their war-beasts had been taken out in the blast – and Otto himself – themselves – had been nearly wiped-out.

Not that it mattered, in the larger picture – there wasn't really ONE of them, anymore – they had been cloned so many times that none of them would have known the difference anyway.

Otto had been one of the first products of the 'Monster Island' project – judged an amusing failure, he/it/they had been around for a long time.

And they had been all over.  They had been a mascot, after all.

And wherever a rat could be, so could Otto.

The military word for it was 'infiltration'.

And whatever communal, hive-mind that the little lizards shared, their organic memory banks had absorbed every command, every clearance code, mimicked every voice – as well as a working knowledge of every base, communication tower – every missile silo – as well as access to almost all the world's munitions.

That was not to mention other, not so conventional doomsday devices, that all the different governments kept coming up with – such as a super-virus to disable the entire worldwide web, all at once.

Not that the nuclear strikes hadn't been wildly successful – except locally, of course.  But world-wide, the disgusting tailless apes that had infested the planet had been effectively cleansed away.

That left only the cleaning of its own house.

Besides straggling vestiges of two-legged apes in this particular region, there was the matter of the rex packs – curiously immune to their domination.

Time to fix that.

The Food of the Gods had run its cycle – by now most of the infected beasts would have died – and where they hadn't, the nukes had burned it out.

There still remained, however, the odd carcass – like that of the rex.

If Otto could have understood poetic irony, it might have appreciated the thought that the rex itself would be the vehicle to finally wipe out the pesky stubborn resistance of its kind once and for all.

The pack of Ottos began to screech and howl, and the call was more than vocal – it was that psychic stench that seemed to reek worse wherever they were in numbers.

There were still 'normals' stocked deep in the woods – all just waiting for their turn at the plate.

It was tyrannosaur territory, but the exodus had brought in killers of all kinds.

None of the big carnosaurs dared the area – not yet.  But a few of the larger sickle-claws were already poking out from the brush, eyeing the massive carcass laid out in the basin.

It was a start.

Now they would simply begin again.

The little pack of Ottos hopped discreetly out of the way, as the first of their larger cousins cautiously approached the tantalizing mountain of free meat.

A few of them began to nibble experimentally, pulling at the tough flesh.

Otto watched.  They would wait for them to feed.

Soon their eyes would begin to glow green.

And then they would have another rampaging army.

They would wipe out those last pockets of hairless apes once and