By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
I know what you are thinking. The disappearing death virus. Before Razzberry died, I had never heard of this phenomenon. And it’s not a virus, by the way. I am convinced it’s something else. But let me finish my story.
The other dinosaurs—kind of a medical team of hadrosaurs—couldn’t save Razzberry. Of course they couldn’t. You can’t restart an animal when some of the parts are missing. At first they seemed as upset as I was. They tried to console me. We dinosaurs don’t really cry like you do—we don’t weep tears when we are emotional—but still the hadrosaur medics stayed close to me, and we cried together in a different way. We screamed at the sky. Furbud stayed close to me during this time as well.
I couldn’t stay in Final Pumpkin after Razzberry died. Emotionally, I couldn’t stay. So I returned to our frozen kingdom again, and I brought Furbud with me. Now sometimes I think I was being cruel to the mammoth, and Furbud seemed very confused and upset after I brought him through to the frozen place. But at that time, again on an emotional level, I just couldn’t leave him behind.
Of course there was an investigation. They autopsied Razzberry. Despite the fact I was her mate, they refused to let me look at the results of the autopsy. They said it was a heart attack, combined with technological malfunctions with her cyborg implants. When I pushed back and told them about what her monitors had said, about the missing body parts, they claimed that was part of the malfunctioning.
I didn’t really believe them. But what could I do? I couldn’t imagine there was a conspiracy to hide the truth—not then. So for a time I let it go. I went back to living in the frozen kingdom, this time with a furry pet. I watched Furbud growing more intelligent in that world, and together we developed means to communicate—he can do sign language with his trunk. And I tried in that time to live as peacefully as I could.
But I missed the wind. I missed the smells. I missed the need to eat, even if I had to eat something tasteless like a pile of leaves. Yet I could not think of any good reason to go back to your world, Wal. It seemed like my place was in the frozen kingdom, perhaps forever.
Until I heard about the others who had suffered from the same sorts of effects, the same sorts of disappearances… of body parts disappearing, and of sudden death, and the endless questions, with no happy answers.