By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
It was at this time something crystalized in me. I knew then, deep inside, that Warbell was telling the truth.
It just came together for me. The doubt fell away. Seeing the mammoth, the fire, and my friend fighting for his life—yes, suddenly I thought of this dinosaur as my friend. And it was at that time I knew I had to do everything I could to help him with his mission.
Looking back on it, I think a big part of me just didn’t want to see the old lizard die.
At any rate, I sped out of First Pumpkin in my truck, weaving around cars and fleeing civilians. All my old driver’s instincts were coming back to me with renewed clarity and urgency as I barreled from Cornelius Street to Pumpkin Way to Cornelius Pumpkin Straightaway and out of the city.
Warbell was beside me the whole time, moving at an impossible speed, giving a literal running explanation of why he could run this fast.
“I shouldn’t be going this fast,” Warbell said. “Though my cybernetic enhancements make it possible to move much faster than a normal dinosaur, it isn’t good for my body. I should have broken quite a few bones already, and would have if it weren’t for some structural enhancements done to my body. What I mean to say is, this really hurts.”
“Did you find your wife?” asked Colander. “Were they her bones?”
“No,” said Warbell. “I was able to confirm that they were not her bones. There would have been a number of technological enhancements, such as the malleable teeth that I possess. I scanned the skeleton before being attacked. It wasn’t her.”
I couldn’t read Warbell’s emotions from what he said. He spoke with little feeling, though his words were punctuated and interrupted by the rhythms of the crazy headlong dash he was doing to keep up with my truck.
“What is that green fire?” I asked. “Sulfur from hell or what?”
Warbell calmly dodged around an oncoming bus, then sidled up beside my truck again.
“It’s a special artificial flame that, upon contact with the body of an enhanced dinosaur, deactivates the cybernetic systems inside,” Warbell said. “The cybernetic systems are so deeply connected to our bodily tissues that if they are turned off, we can’t move—at least at first. The foam I was exuding, obviously, is a defense mechanism. It puts out the fire, and helps to restart the cybernetic systems inside our bodies. Thankfully it doesn’t take very long to work.”
“So that big guy wasn’t trying to kill you?” I asked.
“Probably not,” Warbell said. “At least, not yet.”
“It’s not going to be fun going back to Final Pumpkin,” shouted Colander. She was in the back of the pickup with the potato cannon, holding on for dear life.
“Oh?” asked Warbell.
“We were followed,” Colander shouted. “We saw them chasing us in the fields. Your mammoth tried to stop them, but we don’t really know what happened in the end. We just sped away as fast as we could.”
Warbell almost missed a stride, stumbling visibly as he reacted to the news.
“You found Furbud?”
“More like Furbud found us,” I said. “I don’t know where he came from.”
“I was hiding him,” Warbell said. “Apparently he was worried about me, the big galoot.”
“But how do you hide a mammoth in a city?” asked Colander. “Don’t tell me you painted his toenails red and put him up an apple tree.”
“No, we put him in Final Pumpkin Lake,” said Warbell with a dinosaurian shrug. “We gave him optional gills, Thinkwilder and I. Plus you may have noticed he can turn invisible.”
I accepted what Warbell said with little reaction. Everything was ridiculous at this point, so an invisible mammoth with gills sounded about as plausible as a breakfast of toast and eggs tomorrow—which I wasn’t sure was plausible at all.
It was really dark now, and I was straining to see past my high beams. I was still dodging around cars as the local residents retreated from the city. It couldn’t have been a comfortable ride in the back for Colander, but she didn’t utter a single complaint. In fact, I could hear her humming an old hymn.
“We need to close the portal,” said Warbell. “It’s obvious the people of my world don’t want to give up stealing physical matter from your world. And your people would not be able to survive a war against mine. The key to closing the portal is built into…”
“Sorry to interrupt, but we have trouble ahead!” I said.
Warbell looked, and groaned.
Three dinosaurs were moving through the shadows of a nearby field, huge, black, thundering through the crops right towards us.
Furbud was nowhere to be seen.