Month: June 2023

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

Warbell showed up the next morning after I bugged his place, but he had little explanation for his behavior. Instead he was smiling.

“Sometimes you need to get away,” he said. “And those cocktails hit me a lot harder than I thought. It’s been a while since I felt that sick.”

“You can’t go running off, Warbell!” I said. “I am looking after you. If you disappear, it looks bad for me. It looks bad for both of us.”

“You didn’t want to watch any more of that,” Warbell said. “No one wants to watch a tyrannosaurus barf in the street.”

I shook my head and jutted out my jaw, trying to look intimidating despite the fact I was standing in my front lawn again in my pajamas, and no matter how far I could jut my chin, I wasn’t about to spook a dino.

“It’s my job to keep track of you,” I said. “If I don’t do that, I am not doing my job.”

“Then do your job to help me do my job,” he said. “I am training today to become a real masseur. I need people who trust me and who will be willing to be my guinea pigs as I learn how to do the best therapeutic massage two dinosaur fingers can offer.”

In my mind, I imagined people signing a waiver before getting a massage. “Warning: You might get squished into tomato paste.” Or maybe, “Pay extra to insure your life against dinosaur claws.”

“No pressure,” Warbell said. “Though it would probably be more comfortable to give my first massage to someone I know. And there is quite the sign-up list already for people who want to try the novelty of a t-rex massage. We put up flyers yesterday, and we are already getting a tremendous response.”

“Great, great,” I said. “But Warb… what was the ‘very important thing’ you wanted to talk about yesterday? What is going on?”

Warbell’s expression clouded over, and there was a pause as the dinosaur searched for words. A squirrel scolded him roundly for standing too close to a particular tree as he considered my question, the chitterings of the obnoxious furball filling the awkward silence.

Maybe it was the same squirrel Warbell had coughed into a passing car.

“You want to have this talk before breakfast?” he asked.

“If it’s important, yeah,” I said. “We should get it over with.”

Warbell nodded, and I felt my body tensing up for some reason as my nerves jangled.

“Alright then,” Warbell said. “Your leg… did you lose it on April 22, 2015?”

My mouth ran off without me in that moment, and I found myself yelling at the top of my lungs in the crisp air of the morning.

“What do you know about my leg?” I shouted. “What do you know about that? Why are you poking your head into this? Did you look at my medical files? Stay out of my files! None of this, none of it, is any of your business whatsoever!”

Warbell didn’t say anything. He just shook his head solemnly and turned away.

“I have to practice my masseur techniques,” he said. “No breakfast today.”

And he was gone, and I was left with my heart beating with anger and something jittering in the back of my mind. Something very much like fear.

By me, with art by the great Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

I tried to chase him, but a tyrannosaurus has longer legs than a human, and my bike was not equipped for offroading. That didn’t stop me from yelling myself hoarse in the middle of a strange field, and I thought I saw some spooked locals drive by slowly as I belted out the dinosaur’s name.

“Warbell! Where are you? Get back here!”

Since “Warbell” was just my pet name for the dinosaur, the public shouldn’t have any idea why I would be out screaming in the middle of a field.

I waited at least fifteen minutes for Warbell to come back, but when he didn’t, I jumped back on my bike, grinding my teeth. If that’s how Warbell wanted it—but what on earth had he been talking about? Too late for what? And who was going to die?

Was he talking about the invasion of the dinosaurs against human civilization?

I kicked the bike stand up and started peddling. I didn’t go particularly fast, but neither is Final Pumpklin a huge city, and thus it didn’t take long to get back to my house. Warbell wasn’t there, either.

Out of frustration, I hatched a crazy idea. I should bug Warbell’s room and listen in on any conversations he might have in that big lonely garage with whatever dinosaurs use instead of cellphones. I’d never seen him use a cellphone before, but then again he also had that insane trick with his teeth. Surely these dinosaur folks had iPhones like the rest of us.

So instead of chasing Warbell, I spent half the night setting up hidden microphones and cameras in the garage. If Warbell did have secret conversations, they weren’t going to be so secret anymore. Luckily Warbell did not return while I was bugging his room, and so I finished up quickly and fell into my bed.

As a side note, I heard a rumor a few days later that some joyriders in their Mustang had skidded out when they hit Warbell’s puke patch and ended up stuck in the ditch with a nice car splattered in stinky dinosaur vomit. It kind of made me appreciate Warbell a little more when I heard about it.

Read the next chapter.

By me, and with gorgeous art from my friend Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

“What do you mean, you decided to become a masseur?”

We were on our way home shortly after the run in with the Wringlers, me peddling slow on my bike, and Warbell strolling lightly (or as lightly as he could) beside me. He was smiling, obviously happy to get away from the cocktail party. Still, despite his attempts to avoid drinking the champagne, his breath reeked of alcohol. And fish. He had eaten a lot of fish.

“It’s the perfect job,” he said, and his breath was so bad I could almost see drunk tuna swimming before my eyes. “I can get to know people, talk to them, on a closer level than just as a curiosity or as a celebrity in town.”

“But your arms!” I said. “They are so small!”

“They are about the size of human arms,” Warbell said. “Precisely one of the reasons why this job is a good fit.”

“You only have two fingers on each hand, and those claws…”

“Can be trimmed,” Warbell finished. “And there are techniques to get around the lack of fingers. I have been talking with some of the best masseurs in the nation. Several have expressed interest in training me.”

“It’s absolutely crazy,” I said. “You’ll crush people! On accident!”

We made a turn, and Warbell nearly took out a stop sign. An oncoming car with an ogling driver also made him slow and move behind my bike for a few steps, but then once the car had passed he moved up next to me again.

“I am very gentle by nature,” he said. “Except for when I used to hunt. I wasn’t gentle back then. But I have changed.”

“That,” I said. “That right there. You’re a meat-eater. Meat-eaters shouldn’t be kneading the flesh of… of animals that you might think about eating. It’s like you’re playing with your food.”

Because of increased traffic, Warbell tried to walk up on the sidewalk, but his weight shattered the cement and broke the curb. For a while he walked back behind my bike again, which made me feel uncomfortable, as if Warbell was hunting my trusty five-speed like a predator.

“I don’t think of humans as my food,” he said. “Ugh, that taste. I wish I had never eaten anything in this awful world at all. It’s going to be the end of me.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so I pedaled in silence, watching him in the rearview mirror I had attached to my bike handles. He had his head down, and I could hear him breathing heavily, puffing and snorting in a strange way. Along with the nasty dinosaur breath, I also picked up a stink as if an army of sopping wet mutts were walking by in a parade. Bizarrely, I could have sworn I heard the flustered trumpet of an elephant out of nowhere, and I just assumed Warb must have cussed in dinosaur pidgin or something. He was also slowing down. Given that he wasn’t running very quickly, I didn’t think he could be tired out already, but something seemed to be wrong. I slowed and stopped near a field, and Warbell stopped, too.

“Hey,” I said. “Problems?”

Warbell jerked and pawed at the ground, eyes blinking, lips working uncomfortably over his huge teeth. Then, in an incredibly burst of sound and stink and fury, he vomited all over the road. Chunks and streams of bile rolled and swam across the pavement. Warbell snapped his jaws together a few times, looking around.

“It’s no good,” he said. “No, leave me alone. Probably I can’t do anything to help anybody anyway, and I’ll just perish, helpless and alone. I shouldn’t have gotten you mixed up with this as well. And so many people are going to keep dying.”

There was a haunted look in Warbell’s eyes—anger, fear, frustration, rage. Then he made a quick movement, spun on one foot, and dashed out into a nearby field.

Continue reading.