By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
It happened some time after we arrived in Final Pumpkin, completely unexpected. I was taking a mid-afternoon nap in a field. It was perfectly safe. All of my monitoring devices indicated we were both very healthy, perhaps healthier than ever given all the exercise we got chasing Furbud around or just exploring the landscape, and we were careful to eat a balanced diet. I wasn’t worried about anything, really. Even that constant anxiety we dinosaurs from the frozen world often feel living in your world, vulnerable to death and pain, had started to fade and at this point. The wind, which before had irritated me with its subtle and sinister alien caresses, by that point had begun to sooth me to sleep because I had acclimated so well. Sometimes the open field was all I needed to calm down.
I was awakened by Furbud, who was really upset. He was snorting, trumpeting, and I remember he pulled on my left arm, then pushed me hard with his head to get me moving.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the big hurry, Furbud?”
Then I noticed that an alarm was also going off on my cyborg implants. Along with all the devices implanted to monitor our own systems, we also had a device that maintained a connection between Razzberry and I. What I mean is, as part of my cyborg implants, I had a system that monitored my mate’s vitals so that if anything went wrong, if there was ever an emergency, we could contact each other, or check on one another, instantly. When I checked on Razzberry, I found with even the briefest glance at the readouts that my mate was in grave danger.
It was the highest emergency. Razzberry was dying.
And I panicked. I ran, but at first blindly, calling for her. Furbud pulled me in the right direction and helped me to regain my senses. How can I explain the feelings I had then? I could list the barrage of emotions I felt for the first time in my life as I ran with Furbud. But just writing words on paper does not do justice to the terror I felt, which threatened to tear me into bloody shards and consume the world in chaos.
I found her lying on the river bank. She had been catching a pile of my favorite fish. I think she was hoping to surprise me when I woke up. Catfish, a whole lot of them, in a bag. And she was lying next to the bag, blood gurgling out of her mouth, breaths shaking her body.
She saw me with a wide, scared eye. And do you know what she did, Wal? Her breathing slowed as she saw me approaching. And she smiled. The widest smile I can remember her giving me. Blood was on her teeth. I can see it now. Pink and red swirls on her herbivore teeth.
“I got you some fish,” she said. “I hope you enjoy them.”
Those were her last words. Just moments later, she died, according to the monitors in her cyborg-enhanced body.
There are a number of tricks you can use to try to revive a dead dinosaur, tricks built into the cyborg interface. I tried them all, even as the drones arrived, as the other dinosaurs arrived, as the rescue team came down beside me.
And I remember before they carted her off that I saw the diagnostics from her internal monitoring systems. And they said that parts of her body, her internal organs—parts of her stomach and lungs and even the arteries around her heart—were just gone.
Parts of her body had just… disappeared.