Blood Beast Read online

Part III

  It goes against your instincts to run. You, the supreme carnivore of a much harsher world than this one with the mild yellow sun and the soft, machine-building prey that came to dominate it. But the tendrils on the top of your thickly-plated skull can feel the vibrations in the air of six more flying machines of the humans. You are certain that the flying machine you destroyed could not have been built for fighting. It had too much weakness and vulnerability. But in the brief time since your re-awakening in the cavern you have seen that the humans govern the world in this epoch, however weak and undeveloped they may have been when you encountered them before.

  Everywhere there are signs of them, evidence of their busy construction can be seen even in the forest, and nowhere is the air completely free from traces of the vapours poured forth from their machines. You assume they have the ability to be fierce adversaries, although thus far they have been simple prey. So far they have used weapons against you that would be appropriate for killing other small and soft creatures like themselves.

  Your intelligence molds to whatever needs present themselves to you. When you stalked the great beasts in the distant past, your cunning and knowledge of their ways was sufficient to allow your strength and savagery to hunt down any creature you came across.

  Your built-in weapons- the hundreds of long, razor-sharp teeth, the tentacles with their sharp claws and retracting barbs, your thick, almost impervious hide, the powerful hind legs and the grasping forelegs, the spike-tipped tail and the crushing force of your massive jaws- all these worked in the service of your complex brain and its array of sensory organs. Now you are faced with new challenges unlike any you have ever encountered and yet you face them with neither surprise nor curiosity. There is simply awareness and a logical understanding of the implications of everything you come across.

  The first of the humans you had eaten were easy, weak prey. They fell helplessly like so many other plant-eating herd animals you have encountered over hundreds of years of hunting spread out between your long hibernations across millions of years of time. You assumed, as much as you thought of it at all, that they must have a capability to out-breed any of their predators. It soon became clear from the nature of their machines and the roads and the structures they have built that these were animals without any significant predation. They had thrived and dominated because there was no other challenge to them. If nothing in this world is as dangerous as you, then you were master of their world and could feed on them at will.

  But the few that have stood their ground with weapons shows you that some of them have the qualities of aggression that you admire in your victims. And the behaviour of these new flying machines you feel approaching tells you something that sharpens all your considerable senses and awareness. Your brain triangulates and calculates the complex data from your sensory tendrils and concludes that from their greater speed and power, the direct flight from some distant place to your location, the way they have spread out to sweep the terrain and encircle you- all this means that you are now being hunted.

  The areas of forest here in the lowlands are small and patchy. Openings for buildings, roads and fields with the four-legged prey make up most of the land. But your speed allows you to cover ground quickly. It is an almost new sensation for you to be hunted. You do not know yet that you are vulnerable, but you are certain you will be attacked. You will ensure that when it happens you will be in position to defend yourself effectively.

  Once, in that vastly long-ago time when you were a hatchling, first ranging out on your own away from the protection of your mother, you came upon a tyrannosaurid nest.

  The young tyrannosaurs were fighting amongst each other, two of them ganging up on the weakest of the brood. You could smell its blood even under the sharp, acrid stench of the mother’s urine that was copiously sprayed in the area around the nest to warn off any other creature.

  They were less than a third your size, but they did attempt to fight back when you strode into the nesting place and began to spear them with the barbed claws of your tentacles and the straight spike of your tail.

  You had been hunting with your mother on many occasions and knew how to fight, and you enjoyed the challenge of having the three creatures to contend with as they desperately attacked you. When you stood over their torn-apart bodies and fed on their carcasses you could hear the roar of their mother approaching and feel the ground shake under her strides.

  You felt some fear but mostly excitement as she leaped into the clearing enraged at the loss of her brood. You dodged the massive jaws as they snapped down all round you. The huge back legs and clawed feet attempted to stamp you into the hard-packed dirt.

  Your mother had warned you of these, the top predators of this world, even as the two of you had hunted them. You would lurk inside the massive carcasses of other great beasts you had brought down and attack them as they came to scavenge. The advantage of surprise made killing them deceptively simple. Now, in open combat with one goaded into the ultimate fury by the bold destruction of her entire litter, you saw you were outmatched. Still you did not run when the opportunity presented itself, for while the huge carnivore was fast and powerful, you were a little faster.

  Dashing underneath the huge clashing jaws in the hot reek of rotten meat from its breath you speared upwards with your shoulder tentacles. The sharp, barbed claws swiped upwards to stab into the belly flesh as you dodged the stamping hind feet. The wickedly sharp tentacle claws easily pierced the tough hide of the tyrannosaur, for you were a creature made for much harsher world even than this.

  Still, you were small, and eventually the massive carnivore pinned you with the huge claw of one of its back feet. The crushing weight squeezed your chest plates. You were a beast made for a planet of higher gravity than this, and your dense bone structure could endure it, but the tons of force generated by the creature’s jaws would surely sever your neck even as you whipped and stabbed with the one tentacle that was still free.

  It was at this point your mother attacked. Leaping onto the thing’s back she bit down on its neck while at the same time her tentacles reached around to stab into its sides, cutting downward. A huge pile of intestines slopped out onto the ground and the tyrannosaur’s head rolled forward, connected only by a tenuous strip of flesh on the front of its neck. The creature still stood on its tree-trunk sized legs for a few more seconds, tottering, bent over and headless, and then collapsed.

  You extracted yourself from the huge, gutted carcass and immediately savaged into it alongside your mother in a frenzy of delight at the copious blood and flesh, her jaws and yours snapping and clacking open and shut as you both gorged on huge chunks of meat and slippery entrails. And as you both fed, transported joyfully in the blood-glut frenzy, you could feel her thoughts questioning you. She had been watching you the whole time.

  “What have you learned, my hatchling, my fierce offspring?”

  “That it may take more than a courageous attack to win.”

  “That is true. The world I was taken from, the world where our kind belongs is a fiercer world than this. No creature in this world is as deadly as you. And yet, if you are careless, there are many which could still defeat you.”

  No other thoughts have shared your mind in so long. Your life has been one of internal silence for 65 million years. Perhaps that was why you have woken so seldom in the time since you lost her in the cataclysm that changed the world.

  Even when the world had healed itself of the impact that wiped out those early great beasts and other kinds of animals roamed its rich forests, you often hibernated for thousands of years at a time. Other creatures sometimes equaled the beasts of those early days of your youth and fell beneath you in terrible struggles. You have hunted well countless times; thrilled to the wanton killing, the frenzied eating and blood-lust that is your purpose, but you never felt the degree of pleasure and satisfaction as when you and your mother shared in the kill.

  Now creeping through th
e trees with the helicopters flying a pattern above you, you think back on the things you learned from your mother and the things you have learned today.

  You probe the spots where the bullets have struck your heavy hide and extract them with a claw. The larger ones have penetrated deep. They are made of a soft metal. If these humans have larger weapons that can fire even more powerful projectiles, they could actually be dangerous to you.

  You can sense the helicopters are searching for you. You sense they have a kind of night vision that probes for body heat as you do, but you know your thick hide was made to protect you from the radiation of the giant blue-hot sun of your home-world. Very little of the heat from your body escapes. You slow your breathing to reduce the plume of hot gas from your nostrils. As long as you stay within the trees you will be almost undetectable to them. You see you have left a clear trail, though. The weight of your heavy, dense body presses deep in the earth. You will be found eventually and when daylight comes it should be easy for them to track you.

  You smell water on the night wind. Earlier you could sense a river had cut this valley you find yourself in. If you can make the river, escape should be simple. In the meantime, you need to determine the abilities of the humans’ flying machines.

  There is a clearing that runs though this forest. In the clearing tall metal towers at regular intervals suspend lengths of wire that stretch off into the distance. You can feel the presence of a powerful magnetic field. You can sense the power coursing through the wires. It is like the magnetic field of the earth that unfailingly gives you direction only stronger, tighter, wrapped and flowing around the wires. If there were a way to entangle the helicopters in the wire or collapse the towers onto them you will be able to bring them down even if they are much more rugged than the one you destroyed previously.

  You consider tearing off parts of the trees and throwing them at the helicopters, but the deadfall and branches are clearly too light to do any damage. Then the idea hits you. The forested areas near where the humans live show a great deal of their presence. Debris obviously of their making can be seen almost anywhere. You have grown sensitive to the many things they create, the unique signature of the human, your prey, your competition, your enemy.

  Piles of rusted metal that you recognize as abandoned vehicles can be found in many places. Some are out in the open, too exposed to risk approaching with the helicopters overhead, but others are tucked away under the trees.

  You go to one of the wrecked cars and tear into it. Heavy pieces of steel can be pulled out from the underside of the rusted old machine, even the steel frame-work can be pulled from the car’s body. You carry the steel wreckage to a sheltered spot, a dip in the earth under the trees, as near as you can get to one of the towers.

  To test your ability and to draw them to you, you throw a large piece of steel at one of the towers. You throw with force and accuracy- you have learned fast and the practice you had earlier has imprinted itself in your brain. The heavy steel hits the lattice-work corner of the tower, breaking one strut and bending others. The upper section of the tower tilts and the shock of the impact travels along the wires, whipping them back and forth violently.

  The vibrations picked up by the tendrils on your head tell you all the helicopters are responding. Three are forming up to fly along the power lines, the other three you can sense hovering somewhere up above and behind you. They must be able to communicate with each other. Perhaps they hear each other’s thoughts as your kind do.

  You grab the section of steel vehicle frame and tentatively swing it back and forth in preparation, calibrating the force you will need to hurl it. You sense the approach of the three helicopters down the power line; you judge their height and speed. The first passes, then the second. You hurl the steel frame skyward with all your strength well ahead of the third. It spins lazily up into the air in the darkness into the path of the oncoming flying machine. You are pleased with your shot. It contacts the blurred disc of the spinning arms perfectly with a hard metal clang. You are impressed. The machine continues to fly, but it shudders and wobbles violently and loses altitude fast. It lands in the clearing, more or less intact. You only have a couple of seconds to enjoy the sight because the sky behind you suddenly explodes in a hail of fire and spitting projectiles.

 

  As you thought, the first three were hoping to draw you out so the others could attack, but the intensity of the fire coming from the three hovering machines behind actually surprises you. These humans can build truly wonderful weapons.

  Thousands of heavy impacts rain down around you at incredible speed. You can feel the force of the heavy slugs thudding into the earth. Branches are flying through the air, shot to pieces, the tree trunks behind you are being eroded into splinters under the intense hail of bullets. Streaks of flame blaze past you and all around you to explode in blinding concussions.

  Curled up in the hollow of the earth, you receive some protection from the tree-trunks at your back, but you know these projectiles could kill you if they hit you directly. You had thought you might lure the flying machines out into the clearing and bring down the tower and its wires down upon them. You know now that you would have no chance against these in the open. The burning pain of fragments slams into your hide. You have never been in such danger since you were a hatchling.

  You grab a heavy piece of steel that you had wrenched from under one of the abandoned vehicles and your powerful back legs tense and spring. You break directly for the three attacking machines, acutely conscious of the other two banking around to flank you. You are dodging back and forth in a random pattern with all the speed you can muster. Thousands of prey have fled from you over time, on occasion a very few have escaped. You learned much every time this happened, the bolt of speed, the random abrupt change of direction. Every dodge and every maneuver that a fleeing creature once employed against you, you now call upon to evade the onslaught of thousands of slamming tearing projectiles blasting the forest canopy above you.

  One of the helicopters is moving forward ahead and above you. You hurl the heavy cone-shaped metal object at it. You do not see it hit, you have already bolted from the spot, but from the sounds it makes, the machine is spinning out of control into the trees. An enormous fireball erupts behind you as you circle back through the blasted woodland and with a tremendous burst of speed you spring for the cover of the undisturbed forest.

  The four remaining helicopters are flying back and forth, shooting at random and lighting up the night with flares. You can tell from the way they concentrate their fire that if they did actually see you, they have not guessed at your speed and have lost you. You follow the smell of the water and soon you reach the river. It is a wide, muddy river and you slip into its dark waters and vanish from sight.