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

Once the last of the little lizards was accounted for, the rex pack settled down and started picking at the scraps.

Jonah saw Jughead toss a soldier's body down his massive gullet like a pelican swallowing a fish.   The others poked and pecked among the wreckage like giant pigeons.

But Jonah knew what came next.

Rudy was the first to turn his head in their direction.  Jonah turned a nervous eye to Naomi.  She nodded back.

“We've got to get out of here,” she said.

Jonah looked around.  The radio tower wouldn't protect them from a rex.   But trying to escape on foot, they would just be run down.

There was, however, the chopper.

Jonah shut his eyes.  He'd become a pilot because he'd grown up wanting to fly.  But as an adult, he'd discovered it was not the feeling of a soaring bird, so much as driving a big, heavy truck high up in the air – a rather frightening sensation that he'd never really gotten over, even after getting his commercial license.  It was why he preferred smaller aircraft, like his little buzz-chopper, or a little single-engine plane.

This thing was a friggin' flying tank.

“Can you fly it?” Naomi asked, clearly no happier than he was.

Behind them, Jughead was also now looking after them curiously, his head cocked over the smoking ruins of the convoy, a dead sickle-claw dangling from his jaws.

Jonah ran to where the pilot had fallen.  Keeping his eyes averted from the gory remains, he rifled through the dead man's pockets until he found the key chain.

Naomi was now standing over Meyers' still form.  In her hand, she had his dog-tags.

“He's dead,” she said.  “Let's get out of here.”

Rudy was moving in their direction – not a run, just a casual stride.  On twelve-foot legs.

A T. rex had good eyes, and they were attracted to movement like cats, easily enticed to chase.

Jonah and Naomi were now the only things still moving.

The two of them scrambled aboard the chopper – and then sat for several excruciating moments, as Jonah first determined the correct key, and then figured out how to start the damned thing.

Naomi twisted in the co-pilot's seat, looking anxiously over her shoulder.

Jughead was following Rudy, a dozen steps and closing fast.

“Jonah...” Naomi began.

There was a startling roar as the twin rotors suddenly fired to life.

Rudy answered with a roar of his own, breaking into a lumbering run.

Jonah yanked the joystick – the craft was just as heavy and awkward as he feared, and the chopper threatened to spin, even as the air-blast yanked them off the ground like the jerk of a hanging rope.

Rudy was coming up fast, and Jonah was certain the rear rotors were going to strike the rex as it came charging in.

For a split second, they hung nearly eye-to-jaw as Rudy's four-and-a-half-foot skull split into a gaping maw.

Jonah heard the jaw-snap, like the smash of six-ton anvils, less than two feet from his window, before the chopper launched in a twisting lurch into the air.

Naomi grabbed her seat, shutting her eyes as the forest spun around them, her voice trilling in a low moan.  “Ohhhh God....”

But as they ascended the tree-tops, the wobble straightened out.

Jonah took them straight up, letting the spinning momentum wind itself out, until he had control.

Jughead joined Rudy below, bellowing angrily after the retreating chopper.

Jonah took a breath.

“Well, that was closer than I would have liked.”

Naomi was still rigid, looking down at the tantruming T. rex.  Rudy roared and stamped his feet.  Jughead sniffed briefly at Meyers' body and then snapped it up.  Naomi turned away, grimly, pointing to the west.

“He told us his base was up on the mountain,” she said.

“You sure that's a good idea?”

Naomi indicated the scene below as Rudy and Jughead turned to rejoin the others, pecking clean the last scraps of the convoy.

“I don't want to be on the ground,” she said.  “We've got to go somewhere.”

Jonah had no better ideas, and started to veer west.  The big aircraft moved sluggishly, but with an excess of power.

“These things are too big,” he said, wrestling with the joystick.  “Scares the hell out of me.”

Naomi quipped brief laughter.  “Scares you?  I've flown with you twice.  You've crashed both times.  Try not to make it three for three.”

Jonah frowned.  There were a lot of extraneous circumstances she was leaving out. One of those incidents had been a pterosaur attack, and the other was the blast wave from a nuclear explosion.

To be fair, he thought he'd done alright.

“We're both still here,” he said, “I haven't killed us yet.”

Naomi kept her eyes on the hard ground below as Jonah wobbled the big chopper unsteadily.

“Not yet,” she replied.

Chapter 4

Rosa had seen pterosaurs take down choppers before.

That was why their military transport picked up speed as it passed over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains – by Rosa's estimate somewhere between Colorado and Utah.

It didn't matter.  Once they got near the trees, pterosaurs came up at them in flocks, like clouds of bats, some of them forty-feet across.

Not that size seemed to make a difference.  A four-foot pterodactyl would charge a fully-gunned Blackhawk, diving blindly right through the rotor blades

The transport chopper was flying twelve deep.  Besides the two pilots, there were eight civilian passengers – or 'seven-and-a-half', counting the very smallest, who was less than six-months old, and as far as Rosa knew, he was the only newborn in North America – perhaps the world.

There were also two gunmen on-board, and as the mob of pterosaurs flocked in, they slid the side-panel open, letting in the blast of cold wind.  In careful, measured shots, they began to pick off the flying dragons that seemed to zero-in on the chopper like moths to flame.

As she saw the first of the pterosaurs drop limply out of the air, Rosa's confidence rose a notch – the gunners were clearly sharp-shooters.

But the freezing wind and gunshots prompted frightened wails from the little bundle, clutched tightly to the breast of the woman beside