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.