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.”