Beyond the flashback, p.5
Beyond the Flashback, page 5
She descended the steps tentatively and held out the device, and Williams couldn’t help but to notice that her entire body was trembling. “That’s it, that’s a good girl,” he cajoled, then pointed at one of her hands and raised his brows as if to ask, May I?—before taking it in his own and guiding it to Ank’s snout, which she began to stroke slowly, cautiously.
“I’m getting to that.” And to Luna Williams said, “Your radio. Can you play it for us? We—we’ve been travelling for a long time, and we miss the sound of other voices. Would you mind?”
She didn’t respond right away but only continued to stroke Ank, who’s stony texture seemed to fascinate her endlessly. At length she said, “Okay,” and turned one of its dials, and the room was immediately filled with the slightly raspy voice of a woman, who continued, “... if you’re heading our way through Shadow Canyon, following that beautiful river, perhaps, be advised there’s a pair of allosaurs operating in that area we call Lenny and Squiggy, and stay alert. And while we’d prefer you didn’t kill them if in fact you are armed, we wouldn’t recommend you get too friendly with them either. Once again this is Radio Free Montana, nestled just south of Paradise at Barley’s Hot Springs Resort, where we’ve got power, lights, food, and about three-hundred survivors who’d love nothing more than to meet you. But be advised as always: if you’re a marauder or a carpetbagger, you won’t like what we’ve prepared for you. So take a little advice from Bella Ray and don’t even try it. And on that it’s another round of AC/DC ... for those struggling to get here even now, we salute you!”
It would have been difficult to overestimate the swelling in Williams’ chest as he looked to Ank and the armored dinosaur looked right back, for both of them sensed that this could be the destination they’d searched for—Tanelorn, as they called it. The place where both of them might find comfort and possibly even some answers to the riddles they each embodied.
“My God, Ank,” Williams stammered. “Do you think—”
“Yes, we could drop her off there if nothing—”
“You’re crazy, aren’t you?”
Williams came out of his thoughts as if from a dream and just looked at her. At Luna. Because her hair was white. “Maybe,” he offered, and then winked. “And you’re an albino. So what’s your point? If you ask me, I’d say a crazy man, an albino, and an ankylosaur make a pretty good team.”
She looked at him a little quizzically, as though unsure whether he was having her on or not. And then she just grinned infectiously, and Williams knew she’d accepted it—as he had finally accepted it: Ank as a possible talking reality, the Flashback, all of it. And then the spell was broken by a voice both familiar and alien, a voice which was human and at the same time serpentine, a voice which called out amidst the brewing storm: “Come out, Williams!”—and was instantly joined by another, which chimed in, parrot-like, “Yes, come out!” And another: “Eggsucker! Pig-fucker!”
And they knew the were-raptors had zeroed in on them at last.
“Those I can hear,” said Luna—and began retreating up the stairs again. “They only talk when they’re about to attack.”
Williams, meanwhile, had focused on Ank. “Jesus ... it called me by name.”
Ank stared at him from beneath his brow.
Williams nodded slowly. “But how in God’s name? The only one who knew our names was ... Unless—”
Williams misted up as he thought of the saloon girl who had shown him such affection. “I won’t shoot them, then.”
“I said I won’t shoot them,” he snapped, and turned toward Luna, who was cowering at the top of the stairs. “We’ll have to find another way.” To Luna he said: “It’s all right, sweetie. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Meh,” Williams sighed angrily and moved toward the building’s front windows, which Ank had blocked with pinball machines and video games, with only partial success.
He lumbered after him, the tiled floor cracking beneath his elephantine feet.
“Go away!” Williams hissed. He peeked around one of the machines and saw the raptors lined up in the gathering dark, waiting to make their move, waiting to rush the snack bar and overwhelm them, waiting to kill them or, worse, to turn them into creatures like themselves.
“Are you talking to me?” whined the girl, her voice seeming to bleed as if cut by invisible knives. “Why would you want me to go away all of a sudden?”
“No—that’s not what I meant—I ...”
Williams held up his rifle—pressed his forehead against it.
“Come out, Williams!”
“Yes, my love, come out!” A new voice. Her voice. Katrina.
Williams squeezed his eyes shut.
And then they were coming, he could hear their growls and the tapping of their awful sickle-claws against the cracked and broken pavement, and Ank was charging past him, breaking through the windows and walls, roaring defiantly, and when Williams looked up he saw the dinosaurs collide like thunderheads, heard Luna scream her piercing, drill bit scream, and knew they’d never make it to Barley, to say nothing of Tanelorn.
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.
He exhaled heavily.
Williams only nodded, staring at the corpse at his feet, which had finished reverting to its human form.
“Decker,” he said.
Ank looked down at the body nearest him.
Williams stirred as if from a trance and hurried back to the snack bar, Ank loping after him, where they found Luna standing straight as a board amidst what was now essentially a ruin—her violet eyes empty and eerily glazed over, and still staring at where the battle had taken place.
“You smell that?” Williams asked Ank. He waved a hand in front of her face.
They looked around; nothing was on fire. Williams kneeled before her and gently rubbed her shoulder. When at last she began to come out of it he asked, “What were you seeing just now? Can you tell us?”
“I was ... thinking about something I killed once. An ant. His name was Fred. He was my friend ... but I burned him all up.”
Williams moved to speak but hesitated—it wasn’t just because he was both charmed and disturbed by her words. No, an image had come into his mind with a vividness that was startling: an image of a black ant crawling beneath the thick lens of a magnifying glass—a lens in which he discerned the reflection of a boy—and which had been positioned so that it caught the sun and focused its rays upon the insect, which caught fire and curled upon itself and was immolated as the boy watched. Then it was gone and he was left, despite the cruelness of the act, with a distinct feeling of euphoria. For the boy, he knew, was himself.
“Ank ...” He turned to face the ankylosaur incredulously. “I—just had a memory. I’m sure of it.”
Ank regarded him from beneath his bony brow.
He told him about it. At last the dinosaur communicated,
“I will, I promise,” he said, and ruffled Luna’s hair. “As for you: you burned an insect with a magnifying glass, I think.” He stood and patted her shoulder. “We all did. It’s like, a rite of passage. Doesn’t make you Hitler.”
He paused, looking at Ank. “How do I know that? Old books, historical figures ...”
“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?”
Williams spread the map out in the sun as Ank and Luna looked over his shoulder. “Here’s where we’re at.” He tapped the map as the shadow of a pterodactyl passed over it, then another. “Montana Highway 200, at Mirabeau Park. We were taking it to Spokane instead of the more obvious Interstate 90 for one simple reason, even though we’d have to double back ...” He indicated a winding blue line. “The Clark Fork, which runs its entire length—clean water being job one, always. Now, if we diverge here, and take 382, we can cut across the Camas Prairie—badlands, essentially—and hook up with 28. Here.” He tapped the map again. “Then it’s clear sailing all the way to Niarada—there’s even a reservoir, here, at Dry Lake, in case we don’t find any running water in Benton or Lonepine.” He took off his hat and wiped his brow. “After that it would be back into what amounts to badlands, but with no road to guide us, all the way to Barley’s—for a total distance of, I’m going to say 80 miles.”
“What’s this?” asked Luna, and pointed.
“It says Shadow Canyon. And look here, see? A river runs through it, the Santiago. So, more water. The only problem I can see is that we’ll have to ford it.”
“The last time we tried that was with a bigger river. This looks like little more than a creek. Besides, we’ll need the water after crossing the badlands. And look here, see, Barley’s is right on the other side.”
“I can’t swim,” said Luna.
“You can ride on Ank’s back,” said Williams, and stood. He redonned his hat. “As for travel time, well, that’s anyone’s guess. There’s three of us now,” He ruffled Luna’s hair. “One with short legs.”
She beamed up at him.
communicated Ank,
“No,” said Williams. “But it’s the only one I got.
Williams patted the air as if to say, When we get there, Ank. When we get there. “For now, let’s get some food in her. And in us too.” He turned to Luna. “So what’ll it be? Potatoes or potatoes?”
“Potatoes!”
“Potatoes it is,” he said.
And then a cry rang out that made them all freeze, for it was the cry of a were-raptor, just as clear as day, nor was it particularly far away. And it was followed by a shriek—a human shriek, a woman’s shriek.
Katrina.
“This is Radio Free Montana, coming at you from the soothing, steaming pools of Barley’s Hot Springs Resort just south of Paradise, and I’ve got another string of hits just raring to go—plus some travel tips and advisories for all you nomads still working your way through the Big Not-So-Easy ...”
Williams looked around for Luna and her radio and quickly realized she had fallen behind yet again; nor was it her fault, he was walking too fast, as always. “Sorry,” he said, and cooled his pace. He added: “Can you turn that up, please?”
She did so, hustling to catch up. The announcer continued: “But first we’re going to check in with Felix the Fixed-wing Wonder, who’s airborne and on the air and milking those extra fuel tanks for all they’re worth, as he tracks a herd of brachiosaurs near beautiful Billings, Montana. What say you, Felix? Are they playing nice like normal herbivores, or are they showing signs of having been touched by the lights?”
“Jesus, Ank, are you listening? An airplane!”
“Yeah. The bastard that swung back around as I waved—then high-tailed it out of there just as fast as he could. I remember.” He listened to the radio:
“Seem pretty harmless to me, Bella. Just your normal herd of migrating sauropods, probably heading for the ponds around Eastlake. Still, all the usual warnings apply. I’m going to swing around Billings and check for survivors ...”
“I’m getting to that.” And to Luna Williams said, “Your radio. Can you play it for us? We—we’ve been travelling for a long time, and we miss the sound of other voices. Would you mind?”
She didn’t respond right away but only continued to stroke Ank, who’s stony texture seemed to fascinate her endlessly. At length she said, “Okay,” and turned one of its dials, and the room was immediately filled with the slightly raspy voice of a woman, who continued, “... if you’re heading our way through Shadow Canyon, following that beautiful river, perhaps, be advised there’s a pair of allosaurs operating in that area we call Lenny and Squiggy, and stay alert. And while we’d prefer you didn’t kill them if in fact you are armed, we wouldn’t recommend you get too friendly with them either. Once again this is Radio Free Montana, nestled just south of Paradise at Barley’s Hot Springs Resort, where we’ve got power, lights, food, and about three-hundred survivors who’d love nothing more than to meet you. But be advised as always: if you’re a marauder or a carpetbagger, you won’t like what we’ve prepared for you. So take a little advice from Bella Ray and don’t even try it. And on that it’s another round of AC/DC ... for those struggling to get here even now, we salute you!”
It would have been difficult to overestimate the swelling in Williams’ chest as he looked to Ank and the armored dinosaur looked right back, for both of them sensed that this could be the destination they’d searched for—Tanelorn, as they called it. The place where both of them might find comfort and possibly even some answers to the riddles they each embodied.
“My God, Ank,” Williams stammered. “Do you think—”
“Yes, we could drop her off there if nothing—”
“You’re crazy, aren’t you?”
Williams came out of his thoughts as if from a dream and just looked at her. At Luna. Because her hair was white. “Maybe,” he offered, and then winked. “And you’re an albino. So what’s your point? If you ask me, I’d say a crazy man, an albino, and an ankylosaur make a pretty good team.”
She looked at him a little quizzically, as though unsure whether he was having her on or not. And then she just grinned infectiously, and Williams knew she’d accepted it—as he had finally accepted it: Ank as a possible talking reality, the Flashback, all of it. And then the spell was broken by a voice both familiar and alien, a voice which was human and at the same time serpentine, a voice which called out amidst the brewing storm: “Come out, Williams!”—and was instantly joined by another, which chimed in, parrot-like, “Yes, come out!” And another: “Eggsucker! Pig-fucker!”
And they knew the were-raptors had zeroed in on them at last.
“Those I can hear,” said Luna—and began retreating up the stairs again. “They only talk when they’re about to attack.”
Williams, meanwhile, had focused on Ank. “Jesus ... it called me by name.”
Ank stared at him from beneath his brow.
Williams nodded slowly. “But how in God’s name? The only one who knew our names was ... Unless—”
Williams misted up as he thought of the saloon girl who had shown him such affection. “I won’t shoot them, then.”
“I said I won’t shoot them,” he snapped, and turned toward Luna, who was cowering at the top of the stairs. “We’ll have to find another way.” To Luna he said: “It’s all right, sweetie. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Meh,” Williams sighed angrily and moved toward the building’s front windows, which Ank had blocked with pinball machines and video games, with only partial success.
“Go away!” Williams hissed. He peeked around one of the machines and saw the raptors lined up in the gathering dark, waiting to make their move, waiting to rush the snack bar and overwhelm them, waiting to kill them or, worse, to turn them into creatures like themselves.
“Are you talking to me?” whined the girl, her voice seeming to bleed as if cut by invisible knives. “Why would you want me to go away all of a sudden?”
“No—that’s not what I meant—I ...”
Williams held up his rifle—pressed his forehead against it.
“Come out, Williams!”
“Yes, my love, come out!” A new voice. Her voice. Katrina.
Williams squeezed his eyes shut.
And then they were coming, he could hear their growls and the tapping of their awful sickle-claws against the cracked and broken pavement, and Ank was charging past him, breaking through the windows and walls, roaring defiantly, and when Williams looked up he saw the dinosaurs collide like thunderheads, heard Luna scream her piercing, drill bit scream, and knew they’d never make it to Barley, to say nothing of Tanelorn.
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.
Williams only nodded, staring at the corpse at his feet, which had finished reverting to its human form.
“Decker,” he said.
Ank looked down at the body nearest him.
Williams stirred as if from a trance and hurried back to the snack bar, Ank loping after him, where they found Luna standing straight as a board amidst what was now essentially a ruin—her violet eyes empty and eerily glazed over, and still staring at where the battle had taken place.
“You smell that?” Williams asked Ank. He waved a hand in front of her face.
They looked around; nothing was on fire. Williams kneeled before her and gently rubbed her shoulder. When at last she began to come out of it he asked, “What were you seeing just now? Can you tell us?”
“I was ... thinking about something I killed once. An ant. His name was Fred. He was my friend ... but I burned him all up.”
Williams moved to speak but hesitated—it wasn’t just because he was both charmed and disturbed by her words. No, an image had come into his mind with a vividness that was startling: an image of a black ant crawling beneath the thick lens of a magnifying glass—a lens in which he discerned the reflection of a boy—and which had been positioned so that it caught the sun and focused its rays upon the insect, which caught fire and curled upon itself and was immolated as the boy watched. Then it was gone and he was left, despite the cruelness of the act, with a distinct feeling of euphoria. For the boy, he knew, was himself.
“Ank ...” He turned to face the ankylosaur incredulously. “I—just had a memory. I’m sure of it.”
Ank regarded him from beneath his bony brow.
He told him about it. At last the dinosaur communicated,
“I will, I promise,” he said, and ruffled Luna’s hair. “As for you: you burned an insect with a magnifying glass, I think.” He stood and patted her shoulder. “We all did. It’s like, a rite of passage. Doesn’t make you Hitler.”
He paused, looking at Ank. “How do I know that? Old books, historical figures ...”
“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?”
Williams spread the map out in the sun as Ank and Luna looked over his shoulder. “Here’s where we’re at.” He tapped the map as the shadow of a pterodactyl passed over it, then another. “Montana Highway 200, at Mirabeau Park. We were taking it to Spokane instead of the more obvious Interstate 90 for one simple reason, even though we’d have to double back ...” He indicated a winding blue line. “The Clark Fork, which runs its entire length—clean water being job one, always. Now, if we diverge here, and take 382, we can cut across the Camas Prairie—badlands, essentially—and hook up with 28. Here.” He tapped the map again. “Then it’s clear sailing all the way to Niarada—there’s even a reservoir, here, at Dry Lake, in case we don’t find any running water in Benton or Lonepine.” He took off his hat and wiped his brow. “After that it would be back into what amounts to badlands, but with no road to guide us, all the way to Barley’s—for a total distance of, I’m going to say 80 miles.”
“What’s this?” asked Luna, and pointed.
“It says Shadow Canyon. And look here, see? A river runs through it, the Santiago. So, more water. The only problem I can see is that we’ll have to ford it.”
“The last time we tried that was with a bigger river. This looks like little more than a creek. Besides, we’ll need the water after crossing the badlands. And look here, see, Barley’s is right on the other side.”
“I can’t swim,” said Luna.
“You can ride on Ank’s back,” said Williams, and stood. He redonned his hat. “As for travel time, well, that’s anyone’s guess. There’s three of us now,” He ruffled Luna’s hair. “One with short legs.”
She beamed up at him.
“No,” said Williams. “But it’s the only one I got.
Williams patted the air as if to say, When we get there, Ank. When we get there. “For now, let’s get some food in her. And in us too.” He turned to Luna. “So what’ll it be? Potatoes or potatoes?”
“Potatoes!”
“Potatoes it is,” he said.
And then a cry rang out that made them all freeze, for it was the cry of a were-raptor, just as clear as day, nor was it particularly far away. And it was followed by a shriek—a human shriek, a woman’s shriek.
Katrina.
“This is Radio Free Montana, coming at you from the soothing, steaming pools of Barley’s Hot Springs Resort just south of Paradise, and I’ve got another string of hits just raring to go—plus some travel tips and advisories for all you nomads still working your way through the Big Not-So-Easy ...”
Williams looked around for Luna and her radio and quickly realized she had fallen behind yet again; nor was it her fault, he was walking too fast, as always. “Sorry,” he said, and cooled his pace. He added: “Can you turn that up, please?”
She did so, hustling to catch up. The announcer continued: “But first we’re going to check in with Felix the Fixed-wing Wonder, who’s airborne and on the air and milking those extra fuel tanks for all they’re worth, as he tracks a herd of brachiosaurs near beautiful Billings, Montana. What say you, Felix? Are they playing nice like normal herbivores, or are they showing signs of having been touched by the lights?”
“Jesus, Ank, are you listening? An airplane!”
“Yeah. The bastard that swung back around as I waved—then high-tailed it out of there just as fast as he could. I remember.” He listened to the radio:
“Seem pretty harmless to me, Bella. Just your normal herd of migrating sauropods, probably heading for the ponds around Eastlake. Still, all the usual warnings apply. I’m going to swing around Billings and check for survivors ...”
