Month: November 2023

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

First Pumpkin was a city of about thirty thousand, and the first of a clutch of towns and settlements founded by Cornelius Pumpkin, the great frontiersman and gourd enthusiast. It was said that Mr. Pumpkin had personally crossbred at least fifty different varieties of gourds, and while rumors persisted among some (delusional) individuals that pumpkins themselves were named after Mr. Pumpkin, apparently he was actually inspired by his last name to get into the gourd business. He argued that his own specially-cultivated “Pumpkin pumpkin” (I can’t make this stuff up) was the best for carving jack o lanterns, something about the stiffness of the rind and the pleasantness of the scent of the slop inside. Some of the other cities and towns founded by Mr. Pumpkin were Second Pumpkin, Middle Pumpkin, and Best Pumpkin.

He wasn’t very imaginative with the names he bestowed upon his settlements. Not that it’s either here nor there, but he also named his two sons Cornelius. Both of them.

So it was that we entered First Pumpkin via Fifth Pumpkin Street, and Colander (who was much more familiar with the area and knew where the target museum was located) directed me to turn onto 23^rd Pumpkin Avenue, then onto Cornelius Boulevard toward the center of town. We were both tense, and neither of us spoke much. At least, not until we heard the explosions.

We saw the green shimmering against the sky long before we witnessed what was happening. Folks were running away from the scene, and folks drove like maniacs trying to escape from… something. I was nearly sideswiped several times by panicking drivers, first by a sedan, then by a man in an orange electric car that purred as he blasted down Cornelius Drive.

Pretty soon we saw the crackling, spitting green fire that danced along the streets and hovered menacingly over the buildings. Strangely, the conflagration didn’t seem to actually burn anything, but just floated inches over each physical surface, coughing and spitting chunks of green fire and lightning. We heard the sirens as well—police, firemen. We passed a team of firefighters futilely spraying water at a wall of green flame with little effect. When they saw us, they tried to wave us back, but for some reason I stubbornly drove past them, ignoring their warnings.

Just then, Warbell came dashing around the corner of Pass the Gas Station (a local fuel chain with flatulence-inspired decor), dodging and leaping over the sputtering green flames with unreal speed and dexterity. An eerie mellifluent honking roar reverberated through the air, morphing into a series of angry grunts and wheezes. While I didn’t see the source of the sound yet, it had to be the enormous orange rex that had visited my house, now chasing Warbell.

I put the truck in reverse, trying to back up.

“What is that noise?” asked Colander, covering her ears. “It sounds like a gaggle of giant geese getting slaughtered in the midst of a death metal concert.”

Before I had time to respond, and as Warbell came barreling toward us, the wall next to him exploded in a burst of green fire. Warbell tumbled and crashed to the ground, coming to a stop mere feet away from my truck.

I got out of the truck immediately and heard Colander bang the door open on the other side. All around Warbell’s body I could see a bubbling foam exuding from his skin that began flowing across the pavement, and when it hit the green fire, with a hiss and a puff of blackish smoke, the fire went out. Warbell saw me.

“Walter,” he said.

Then from over the roof of Pass the Gas Station came a figure, and it took me a moment to recognize what the horrible nightmare vision was. It was the massive orange tyrannosaurus, now flying, the air around its body seeming to vibrate as the tech-enhanced creature skimmed over the roof. On its shoulders were biomechanical cannons, the same kind I must have seen emerge from Furbud’s body.

The cannons turned and aimed at Warbell’s fallen body.

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read the first chapter.

“They’re following us,” I said in a whisper.

“I don’t think you have to whisper,” Colander said. “They don’t seem to care very much if you can hear them.”

“But they are invisible,” I said. “It looks like they don’t want to be seen.”

I was trying not to stare out at the magically self-trampling fields, given that I was driving. I tried accelerating, but the invisible monsters accelerated, too—their noisy charge getting even louder as they plowed through the corn faster. Furbud was making urgent grunting noises, as if trying to tell us something.

“What do we do?” I said again, still whispering. “We’re leading them right to Warbell. I mean, is that good or bad?”

“We need to find out before we throw Warbell to the wolves, don’t you think?” Colander said. “Or in this case, before we throw him to those who walk behind the rows. That sounds even worse.”

“Yeah, I agree,” I said. “I don’t understand half of what was written in that journal, but it seemed pretty honest—or drunk. Often that’s the same thing.”

“Well, you could just drive to Port Lollard instead of First Pumpkin, and lead them on a wild goose chase,” Colander said.

“Yeah, assuming they don’t just jump out of the shadows and eat us!” I said. “Besides, I already told the dino authorities where Warbell is when I talked to the big orange guy. Unless this is another splinter group or something.”

“True,” Colander said. “Maybe they are just trying to keep an eye on you. At any rate, we can’t have them following you around if we can do something about it. I’m going to try something crazy.”

“What?” I said as she started to open her window. “What are you doing? You aren’t going to jump out, are you?”

Colander leaned out the window and gestured emphatically at the invisible monsters in the field.

“Furbud!” she shouted. “Go get them!”

Somehow, the overgrown furry pachyderm understood and veered off into the field with a mighty trumpet. Instinctively I punched the gas, putting distance between ourselves and the conflict. In the rearview mirror I saw something emerge from Furbud’s shoulders, and moments later the evening sky was lit up by domes of spreading green fire that crackled and spat. In the light I saw that the skin on Furbud’s shoulders had stretched and formed into organic cannons covered with fur.

Furbud began firing again, and the resultant gouts of green reached for the sky. In the chaos I saw shadowy beasts emerging, horrific monstrous roars rising in the green firelight. Then I locked my eyes on the road and drove and floored it, the continuing horrific lightshow receding in the distance.

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

We made a futile attempt to coax Furbud into my garage after a futile attempt to communicate with him in English, but he refused to go inside and kept nudging the truck, even pushing it several feet down the road as if to urge us to get going.

“Apparently he’s been out here wandering the city for a while and hasn’t caused a lot of problems,” said Colander. “So just let him be. We need to go.”

I agreed, but I insisted on driving—this was my vehicle after all, and there was just something that felt right about me taking the wheel again after all this time. Colander called “shotgun” and actually had a shotgun with her—or at least my old rifle. I started up the truck and we flew down the road.

And Furbud came running behind us, ears flapping and trunk whipping about. As I increased speed, I was sure we would quickly outpace the hirsute pachyderm, but miraculously the beast continued gaining speed and jollily running beside the truck. When we were going seventy miles per hour and the mammoth was keeping pace, I knew something was amiss.

“Warbell must have modified you with cybernetics, too, huh?” I said out the window to the absurdly galloping mammal beside me. I was surprised to see Furbud actually nod. Or maybe it was my imagination and just a natural bounce to his head when running so fast.

Colander was reading the Warbell journal on the seat beside me, occasionally gasping or tut-tutting.

“Could any of this be true?” she asked. “This is the most outlandish thing I have read all week, and I read a lot of sci-fi, fantasy, and political theories in the last few days.”

“Furbud was real,” I said. “Maybe the rest of it is, too.”

“I mean,” said Colander, “this is all hand-written. How did Warbell write such a long letter with just two fingers on each hand?”

I nodded as I went into a turn, trying my best to corner without using the brakes at all.

“That’s the part that sticks out to you?” I said.

“Well, it is weird, right?” she said. “My hand would cramp up writing just a quarter of this book, and I am a librarian! They expect me to write stuff sometimes as part of the job.”

Suddenly Furbud trumpeted. We looked outside. As we did so, the mammoth disappeared. We could only see the dust being thrown up by his footsteps, or the weeds getting smashed down on the side of the road. It was actually kind of cool to watch. Then I heard a gasp beside me, and Colander reached across me, pointing into the field of corn. I looked, too—and then I gasped as well.

Out in the corn we could see something huge moving as well, the stalks breaking and falling against an invisible force. As we looked, we realized that it wasn’t just one invisible beast, but two or three based on how the crops were being crushed in straight lines.

The snaps of the foliage rang out in the quiet evening air as the three invisible beings came right towards us.

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

“It’s actually a potato launcher,” Colander said, loading the huge weapon into the back. “But instead of potatoes, I have several alternative boom-booms. Home-made Molotov cocktails. An exploding grenade of itching powder. Homemade tear gas. Flash bombs. As a librarian, it’s amazing what sorts of things you can learn on your downtime.”

I was gingerly placing a belt loaded with the aforementioned bombs and grenades into the toolbox in the back. The belt looked like it had been modified by Colander, and a number of stylized animal-mascot-styl cloth patches had been attached to the pockets, like armadillos in combat sweats, alligators with machine guns, and pangolins with battle axes cross-stitched into them. She had brought these things over in her little two-seater after I texted her, and I had never seen her so jittery and excited.

“Why do you even have all this stuff?” I asked.

“What?” she asked. “We all do what we have to in order to feel safe living in the same town as a king predator.”

I looked at her goggle-eyed.

“You were always saying I was too paranoid!” I protested. “You always defended Warbell!”

Colander pursed her lips as she tied her hair back.

“You need to be ready for anything,” she said. “I got the dinosaur massage, but I had my bear mace with me just in case.”

I started walking towards the front of the truck, towards the driver’s side, when I bumped into something. I wasn’t walking too fast, but I felt like I had hit a wall with my face. I stood still, shaking my head.

“Having second thoughts?” Colander asked. “Let me drive. You haven’t driven with that leg in months, and we need to put the pedal to the metal.”

“I ran into something,” I said, waving my arms around. “I don’t know what it was. It seems to be gone now, but I can hear something weird.”

Colander came around the truck, brandishing a bat like a baseball-themed buccaneer. We were both listening to the open space around us, me waving my arms higgledy piggledy, she poking at the air with her bat.

“You said Warbell could turn invisible somehow, yeah?” she said. “Do you have some, like, old buckets of paint or something we can throw in the air as a sort of improvised invisible dinosaur detection system?”

Just then I felt something descend on my shoulders. It was long and sinuous and wrapped around my head. I couldn’t see anything, and that just made me scream louder.

“It’s a snake!” I bellowed. “A giant invisible dinosaur snake, and it’s going to swallow my head!”

Before Colander could brain me with her unsensibly fashionable club, the “snake,” and everything attached to it, materialized before our eyes in the shadowy dark.

It was a large, very furry, very friendly mammoth with its trunk draped around my head.

“Oh gosh,” I said between uncomfortable jostling via halitosis-encrusted tusks. “You must be Furbud.”

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

The first thing I thought when I put down Warbell’s journal was that he STILL did not explain why he wanted so badly to live in MY garage. I just read through that whole thing, and all those bizarre ramblings about time travel and cyborg dinosaurs and idiotic names (Razzberry? Really?), and Warbell still didn’t have the decency to answer the first question I asked him?

And oh, man, was I ever confused after reading that tome! My brain didn’t feel up to the challenge of understanding half of what was written in that thing.

But if what Warbell had written in that journal was true, then he was not just innocent of all charges, but he was trying to protect all of humankind… and I had just told the bad guys where he was going. I texted Colander with a brief and bewildering message about what I had learned—something like, “Warbell might be saving the world from matter-stealing interdimensional lovesick dinosaurs, and I just gave directions to the evil villains as to where he is going!”

I glanced at the time. It was getting to be around eight pm. A sense of determination filled my gut. I grabbed my jacket, my rifle (it probably wouldn’t do much to stop an evil dinosaur from a timeless dimension, but I had to bring something or else I felt like I was just running naked into a fight with an army of monsters), placed it and my other things on my porch, and marched over to Charlie’s place.

I banged on the door.

Charlie’s daughter Harriet opened it.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Daddy said that he isn’t home if you come over, but you can buy some Tyrannosaurus Mex from me. It’s my new stall. Instead of just lemonade, I decided to try selling tyrannosaurus-themed tacos, and they are really popular. What do you think is a better name, Tyrannosaurus Mex, or just Rex Mex?”

“Sorry, kiddo, but this time, I really need my truck back,” I said.

“Oh,” the kid said. “Daddy said if you said you really need your truck back, then I should say he is…”

The little girl pulled out a note from her pocket and checked it, then cleared her throat.

“He is in the hospital right now with appendicitis and I am sorry but he can’t come talk with you.”

This was getting me nowhere.

“Charlie!” I shouted. “I saw your kid’s note, and I know you’re in there! Just give me my truck back because I need it to save the world!”

At first there was no response, but his daughter was looking up at me with something like awe on her face.

“I’ll get him,” she said. “If you gotta save the world, then Daddy can drive the rusty old jalopy this week.”

Within five minutes, I was in my truck, turning the key. It felt really strange to be in that truck again. My heart pounded as the engine turned over, as I hit the clutch, as I pulled slowly out of the garage. Part of me was still terrified to be behind that steering wheel. I paused for a moment and took a deep breath.

Someone knocked on my window. I looked over, and was startled to see Colander standing in the street with what looked like a bazooka strapped to her back. Her eye patch had the more traditional skull and crossbones this time, though the color was pink instead of black. I rolled down my window.

“I’m coming with you,” she said.

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

This journal has already become incredibly long, but really there is so much to explain, and even now I feel like I am just glossing over everything in a hurry. There are a few other specific tidbits I wanted to make clear, as a courtesy to our admittedly fragile working relationship up to this point.

You may still be wondering why I can speak English. Maybe you think I am using some kind of universal translating device. We do have things like that, but even a universal translating device needs to hear you speak before it can translate what you have said. It’s much more convenient to simply be able to speak the language. And because of the strange way that the frozen time of my world interacts with our brains, remembering things—anything—becomes remarkably easy. For that reason, as us dinosaurs have observed your world, most of us have taken it upon ourselves to learn a few languages. English is one of the more common languages to learn, and most of us learned a handful of tongues to fluency before even the first honeymoon trips to your world ever took place. For the record, I can speak English, Chinese, and Portuguese.

Before I came, too, I prepared what I would tell the people of Final Pumpkin about where I came from. In retrospect, the story I gave about oversleeping was really stupid, but I am not sure it was any less believable than this the real deal—would you have believed me on the first day if I opened up by talking about dinosaurs from a timeless dimension harvesting materials from the earth and breeding on time traveling honeymoon trips throughout history? And I really had lived near Final Pumpkin in your distant past. Also, the fact that your people had a nickname for my species—king of the dinosaurs—was just too cute for me to pass up. I simply had to claim I was your king. Plus I enjoy commanding people to do things, so I really wanted to give royalty a try, at least for a while.

As I said, I also went back to earth’s dinosaur age, and I put my footprints around the area as proof that I am your king. You are probably thinking it doesn’t make any sense that those fossilized footprints would remain many millions of years, and that’s true. It doesn’t make sense. However, when dinosaurs interfere with your timeline, as I said before, the reverberations through time have strange effects, and the fact that I jumped through time from there to here seems to have had a preserving effect on my footprints… as well as on my dinosaur poop underneath your house.

Sorry about that.

Oh, and my pants. I had those made because it seems that your people have a cultural prohibition against the exposure of body parts related to sexual reproduction. I don’t get it, but I thought I should try to follow the conventions of your culture, and therefore trousers.

There is more to my story of course. There is always more to say. But I wanted to know if it was true, if my mate and many others were really killed because of romantic trips and pilfering organic material from your world connected to other pockets of time throughout history and the dinosaurs dwelling in them (gosh, it’s hard to write about this whole issue sensibly in English!). If I am right, then my people are hiding the truth and destroying the lives of many. Not just dinosaurs, but even more so the people of your earth.

Part of the issue is also that my people are stealing raw materials, metals and rocks and such, and those raw materials are causing buildings to collapse and conking out electronics in your world. That makes your electrician’s business really busy, doesn’t it?

But then there’s the actual deaths.

When I saw the boy from the bacon restaurant fall, I was seeing my mate all over again. It was so similar. And it was horrific. I could not just stand by and watch him suffer, just as I could not stand by and allow my mate’s death to be covered up and lied about. And as I have realized that so many human beings and other animals may also be suffering because of these harvesting policies, I have come to the realization that I have to do something. My people must stop stealing from your people and destroying your lives.

Because as I learned during my investigations into this issue, at the time the bacon boy nearly died and several others did perish, a family of brachiosaurs returned from their honeymoon time period in the past. They re-entered the frozen kingdom at the same time (funneled through the effects of the portal) that a number of people died or were crippled by the disappearing death virus. I confirmed all of this with Thinkwilder, as I am still in contact with him.

Everything I have gathered so far points to my people’s guilt. I am trying to collect as much evidence as I can, but the truth seems apparent to me already. And I have to do everything in my power to stop this murderous business. I am sure you probably still have a lot of questions, but they will have to wait. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I hope you will at least take the time to read this letter thoroughly and carefully and consider honestly and with an open heart the critical information I am telling you. We may be able to save many more lives throughout history if we move quickly.

Take care, Wal.

Warbell

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