Hugh watched for a moment, heart racing. The size and sheer lethality of the creature was hard to comprehend. And the scars it bore, long jagged white ones to smaller lumpy spots Hugh assumed were from being shot, covered the length of its body from snout to tail tip.
After what felt like forever, Hugh’s breathing calmed, and he put the forklift into reverse and slowly backed out of sight, hoping the rex would forget all about him and leave the area when it got done snacking on dead nippers.
Hugh slung the .30-06 rifle over his shoulder and adjusted the machete handle so it wouldn’t hit the stock. He kissed his fingers and touched them to his family’s photo. With a deep breath, he steeled himself and opened the front door into the morning sun.
He stood on the top of the wooden steps but couldn’t bring himself to stomp down on them. As near as he could tell, the tyrannosaur had wandered off yesterday morning after eating its fill, but Hugh hadn’t pushed too hard to find out. Instead, he’d spent the rest of the day sitting very quietly in the trailer and reading up on what was known about rexes.
There had only been eighteen of them confirmed to have existed—and killed. No one thought there were any more, and the occasional rumored sightings were disregarded as either exaggerations of what had become known as stalkers—man-sized troodonts, ambush predators, that walked on two legs and hunted in packs of two to five—or outright lies intended to bring hunters and money into dying towns. There weren’t even official government bounties offered on them anymore.
There was a hundred-million-dollar reward offered by a private company for anyone who could bring them a live Tyrannosaurus rex.
Hugh walked down the wooden steps, self-conscious of the noise he made for the first time in years. A hundred million was a lot, but it might as well have been a reward for flying to the moon with construction-paper wings for all the chance he had of taking that thing alive on his own. He didn’t want to take it on at all.
He drew his machete, not wanting to risk the sound of a gunshot, and lifted the wooden steps with the toe of his boot but didn’t let them fall over. Nothing came rushing out, so he quietly dropped it back down, tapped it with the side of his blade a couple of times and lifted it again.
Still nothing.
Kneeling and, against his better judgment, but not willing to make noise, Hugh lifted the steps with his hand and peeked under. The trap was undisturbed. He set the steps down and walked into the junkyard, listening to the crunch of gravel under his boots and wondering if it had always been so loud and what he’d been thinking about to not have noticed it in the past.
The trap at the pallets had caught another one. The giant mousetrap design seemed perfect for nabbing long-necked lizards as they reached in for a bite of food. He left it be and didn’t bother to check any of the others, instead heading toward the back of the junkyard where he’d left his bucket on top of the car stack yesterday. He sheathed his machete when he got there, flexing sore fingers that had been gripping it too tightly, and quietly began ascending.
At the top, he found his bucket. Next to it were a couple spots of blood he must have dropped from his hand as he’d run by. He’d cleaned and bandaged the wound yesterday but hadn’t thought to clean up the rest of the mess. What if the rex came back and ate the damned tractor because the cab smelled like his blood?
His chore list suddenly gained a new priority.
Hugh looked down to where he’d been dumping the buckets. The remnants of the pile were still hidden in the early morning shadows and hard to see. As far as he could tell, it had been nearly cleaned up, and the smell was gone but replaced by something a bit mustier and more pungent.
A crater-like depression in the dirt indicated a large amount of liquid had been dumped there, and Hugh hoped the rex hadn’t been marking its territory. The footprints all around the area reminded him of turkey prints—if the turkey had fat, size two-thousand feet.
Turkeys were something else Hugh hadn’t seen in a long time. The thought made him sad. He didn’t know where the pre-historic creatures had come from—military experiments, if the rumors were to be believed—but the effects, even beyond the people fleeing the country, were obvious.
Looking out to the river, he wondered if the rex was still out there, somewhere, hidden in the trees. How far away was that? A mile? And when Hugh had accidentally sounded the horn, it had made it to him in, what, less than a minute? And Hugh hadn’t heard a thing until it was damn-near sniffing his hair.
The thought chilled him.
Without the pile to keep them distracted elsewhere, and maybe because of the new smell outside the fence, the ankle-nippers were in the junkyard in force, and Hugh finally began setting the traps three times a day to try to keep the numbers down. He wasn’t sure what they were eating, if anything, that kept them coming here. Maybe they just liked the artificial shelter, as the mice, rats, and rabbits once had.
But mice, rats, and rabbits didn’t jump out and try to bite him as he worked to strip metals from the old machinery, and Hugh hated the little bastards. They’d gotten him a couple of times in the past, and their bites always seemed to get infected. Needless to say, finding a quiet corner to take a leak was a thing of the past.
His dump truck was almost full now, and he’d make a trip in another day or two to trade the copper wire, circuit boards, catalytic converters, and other miscellaneous precious metals and parts for supplies. More rattraps were on the top of his list, as well as some kind of perimeter security. The one he had now couldn’t tell a car from a cow, not that he’d seen either out here in nearly a year, but he wanted to know what he was dealing with before he went outside if the rex ever came back. It wouldn’t be cheap, but at this point sleep wasn’t exactly coming cheap either.
Between rampaging thoughts of the rex and wondering if it was just time to give up and pack up, Hugh felt lost.
He’d heard a new trading post had sprung up near Cheyenne, which would be twice as far, but it would be an easier drive, and supposedly it paid better because of the direct route to Denver down I-25, so he was considering trying that, though he was a bit worried about bandits and pissing off his established contacts in Rapid City. But if it paid well enough…maybe he would just keep right on driving afterward. Spend the night in Denver, and then, who knows. Maybe continue on to whatever the hell Texas was calling itself now. Or maybe Mexico. There weren’t any dinos in Mexico yet, as far as he knew.
Bucket full again, he made his third trip of the day to the top of the car wall and poured the floppy contents out into the growing pile. The late afternoon sun was brutal, and in his eyes, so his view of the river trees was limited, but he stared out at them anyway, knowing it was silly, knowing he would always look to see if the rex was there now, despite the fact a creature that large couldn’t possibly stay in one place and support itself on the meager hunting available in such a small area.
He sat the bucket down and fished into his shirt pocket for the ancient pack of cigarettes. There were only three left now, and a new pack was the third thing on his supplies list. He hadn’t expected to enjoy them so much after years of not smoking, but each one seemed to carry with it a bit of a memory, seemed to bring a tiny bit of peace to his soul that he hadn’t ever expected to feel again, and made him feel closer to his father.
Besides, he was pretty sure his chances of dying of old age out here were close to nothing.
He put the cigarette in his lips and the pack back into his pocket and walked the rest of the way up to the convertible and the folding lawn chair he’d set up over the ruined seat to watch the sunset last night. Stepping down into the car, he pushed in the lighter and waited for it to pop out before lighting his smoke and settling into the chair with the rifle across his lap.