A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend 2: "Into the Badlands" (A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend (A Serialized Novel), #2) E-Book

Wayne Kyle Spitzer

• Herausgeber: Wayne Kyle Spitzer
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

“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?”

Leseprobe

A Dinosaur is a Man’s Best Friend

by

Wayne Kyle Spitzer

Table of Contents

Title Page

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend: "Into the Badlands" (A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend (A Serialized Novel), #2)

II

A new novel set in the Flashback universe

Copyright © 2018 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. All Rights Reserved. Published by Hobb’s End Books, a division of ACME Sprockets & Visions. Cover design Copyright © 2018 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. Please direct all inquiries to: [email protected]

Based upon “Flashback,” first published by Books in Motion/Classic Ventures, 1993. Reprinted by Hobb’s End Books, 2017.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this book is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

II

“Dammit, just dammit,” Williams cursed as he gripped his rifle and scrambled over the rubble toward the battling dinosaurs, then shouted over his shoulder, “Luna, take cover!”

And then he was sighting were-raptors with non-lethal precision (even as the thunderheads collided and the sky boomed and the rain came down in merciless torrents), targeting them in their legs, their thighs, their tails: fearing with each squeeze of the trigger that he might inadvertently strike a killing blow; that he might destroy the very people who had shown him such kindness, that he might murder the woman with whom he’d formed such a powerful and inexplicable bond—worse, that he might wound or even kill Ank.

He zeroed in on the thigh of one of the animals that had gotten too close to Ank’s unprotected underbelly, a thigh that looked like so much uncooked chicken, and fired, blasting a hole the size of a teacup in it ... and causing the creature to drop instantly and to scramble away. Was that you, Katrina? he thought as he cocked and sighted another—this time the head of a raptor trying to close its jaws about Ank’s neck. He fired and its skull blew apart. Was that you?

Ank, for his part, was putting up one hell of a fight: clubbing one of the beasts with his tail and sending it flying, ramming another with his horns so that it was crushed against a rusted and overgrown automobile. But Williams’ presence had not gone unremarked, and he shuffled backward as several raptors, four, to be exact, broke from the pack, and began stalking toward him—for they were pure raptors only in form, and the parts of them that were human understood guns and bullets full well. He cocked and fired almost instinctively as the animals approached, hitting one in its shank so that it fell like a sack of potatoes and began crawling away through the rain, then, just as the rest were preparing to leap forward all at once, he shouted, “The next shots will be kill-shots—one for each of you—if you don’t break off your attack. You know I can do it.”

The animals paused ... tapping their sickle-claws, cocking their heads. At last one of them said, in a perversion of Katrina’s voice: “But you won’t do it—how can you? We are your friends, remember?”

And another, also in Katrina’s voice: “Why don’t you join us?”

And still another: “Yes, join us!”

Williams hesitated. One of them was Katrina, but which one?

And then they were leaping, all three of them, and he cocked and fired twice, debilitating two of them instantly with non-lethal blows while delivering a shattering kill-shot to the third—even as it knocked him to the ground and pinned him there beneath its hemorrhaging dead weight. And such was the force of the impact that he dropped his rifle and found himself gripping the creature’s snout—a snout he knew could morph back into a human face at any instant—Decker’s face, her face. And he shoved it off with a violence that shocked him—even as Ank cried out in pain and he looked to see a final raptor attaching itself to his friend’s exposed neck, just beneath the armored plating, and fired from where he lay.

And then the thing dropped and it was over, and neither Ank nor Williams could do anything but to try and catch their breath as the surviving raptors fled and the storm slowly subsided.

<Thanks, Will. I—I really appreciate that. I ...  understand how conflicted you must have been.>  He exhaled heavily.