Tamer: King of Dinosaurs 2

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

End Notes

Michael-Scott Earle

Chapter 1

Warmth wrapped me in a cocoon, and I felt something squeeze my chest tightly. A bright light burned my eyes as I struggled to escape the bonds around my torso. I screamed, shouted, and thrashed.

Then I woke up in a hut.

I was still terrified of the light, but it was a weird thing to fear. After getting swarmed by raptors, threatened by flesh-eating birds, and chased by a huge fucking carnotaurus, my brain had plenty of nightmare material from my time in Dinosaurland. Nine times out of ten, fangs and teeth were my biggest threats. But this flash of light was very distinct, and I remembered it coming out of a pair of hands. Then I recalled that the woman I had saved shot beams of energy from her palms.

I shuddered with a chill despite the jungle heat of this world. Inside the round yurt-like hut I called home, it felt even hotter. The indoor cooking fire burned low, but it still bumped the temp an extra ten degrees. I studied the light coming in through the door and tried to think cool thoughts.

I pushed the flashy nightmare away from my mind while relaxing under the relative coolness generated by my lover as she lay draped across my chest. She could dispel any bad dream.

Galmine was a curvaceous woman with skin that was somewhat like gray stone. Her long silver hair and vibrant emerald eyes made her seem just alien enough to be sexy, but not so alien that I didn’t recognize her human similarities. In fact, I was still trying to figure out how I was lucky enough to end up with this supermodel of a woman.

Last night, after finishing the fort, saving the pink-haired woman, who called herself Kacerie, from certain death, and collapsing into my bed of leaves, Galmine entered the hut and asked to become my lover. I was looking forward to my first real night of sleep in days, but the alien woman beamed me out of this world instead.

She wasn’t my first sexual experience, but after my night with Galmine, I wasn’t ashamed to admit it was my first time making love. The sexy emerald-eyed woman had mastery over her movements, and it didn’t take long for her to control mine. Her timing was so precise I’d begun to think it bordered on magic. She knew when I was getting close to my own climax, but she held me on the edge until she was ready to explode with me.

The whole night was a blur of pleasure.

Now I watched her sleep on my chest. Her silver hair was wildly out of place, so I gently brushed it back from her face. She smiled in her sleep and seemingly hugged me even tighter. She was already pressed against me, but I wanted more from her.

My eyes followed the curve of her spine down to the start of her amazing ass, but I couldn’t see any lower because of how she was laying on me. I ran two fingers down her back while appreciating how smooth her rock-like skin actually felt. Her ability to create the illusion of clothing was now turned off, and her body was totally nude.

That was enough to get me stiff as a board again. I argued with my conscience about waking her, and the cute little peeps of her snores made the choice even harder, but peace was so rare in Dinosaurland it would have been a crime to waste it.

“Wake up, Galmine. I’m not done collecting on what you owe me,” I whispered as I rubbed her shoulder with my fingertips.

I was only twenty, and my man brain was in constantly aroused mode. For the past month, it endlessly thought about fucking Galmine even as the rest of me fought off dinosaurs, talked respectably to the other women, or stood guard over the camp. However, the world was so dangerous I was never able to follow through on those fantasies without putting everyone else at risk.

So now I was going to make love to her again.

I reached down to caress one of her butt cheeks, but the curvy part where it met her leg was just out of my reach.

“I can move so you can touch me anywhere,” she said with a sleepy chuckle.

“There are a few places I’d like to explore,” I said as I ran the tips of my fingers over her curves.

Her skin was cool when at rest, but it could also get almost too hot to touch. At some points last night, I was certain she’d somehow doused her amazing skin with baby oil and heated it up with our friction.

“Mmm,” she said as if tasting something yummy.

Without opening her eyes, she slid slowly across my abdominals like a melting ice cube. Soon her breasts pressed against my ribs, and my boner was smothered underneath her stomach. Her skin was warm and slick where it met mine, but I wanted her to keep going lower so that she could take me in her mouth.

I groaned with pleasure as she slid herself a bit more in the right direction. Just a few inches lower and it was going to be a great morning. “Strike while the iron is hot,” I said while enjoying her slowly gyrating on top of me.

“I do owe you more for saving our lives,” she whispered.

“Yeah, hey. If you want to keep paying me back, I won’t complain.”

I held my arms around her neck as I took a moment to look in her eyes. I caught a whiff of her flowery perfume and didn’t hide my effort to breathe it in. I’d figured out it was another trick of her alien body, probably designed to make her suitors unable to resist her, but I didn’t really need it because I couldn’t have desired her more than I already did.

“I will accept every ounce you give me,” she whispered.

“Oh gaawwwd,” I moaned when she slid lower and kissed my stomach. My man brain began to run the show. She was saying all the right things to stroke my ego.

“All I know is that I need you again,” Galmine said between kisses. “And again. And—” She slid up my body and cut me off with a quick peck on the lips that momentarily moved her warmth from where I wanted it. “You are hard and soft, just as I imagined all those nights when I was left on my own.”

Galmine began melting down my body again, and her fingers grabbed at the base of my shaft so she could angle it into her mouth.

“Victor, I am sorry to interrupt, but I need you to look at something,” Sheela called to me from outside the flimsy curtain blocking the interior of the hut.

“Ugh, Sheela. For real?” I shot back as Glamine’s mouth hung open only a few inches from my tip. Her green eyes were practically begging me to let her taste my cock.

“Yes, it is-- Victor!” the cat-woman’s voice had been calm when she first spoke into the hut, but now she shouted my name.

Galmine gasped when I pushed her off me, and then Jinx let out a surprised squawk from his spot in the corner of the hut. I rolled across the floor toward my underwear, kicked one leg into my Fruit of the Looms, hopped toward the door, and got my other leg through a half second before I plowed through the curtain.

The afternoon sunlight smacked me in the face painfully, but I forced my eyes open and twisted toward where I saw Sheela’s mane of long blonde hair. The cat-woman held her bow in her hand, and she was running toward Trel and Kacerie, the new woman that I had saved yesterday. Both the spider-woman and the pink-haired woman were backing away from the swing door of the fort, and it only took me a moment to see what they were afraid of.

One of the green raptors had somehow climbed to the top of Hope’s swinging door.

“Shit!” I growled as I snatched a spear from its spot leaning against the hut and ran after Sheela. The warrior woman was raising her bow, and she let one of our primitive arrows loose just as the dinosaur leapt from the top of the door.

The arrow cut through the air with an angry hiss and slammed into the skull of the beast as it dropped. The creature didn’t even let out a squeak or yelp; it just dropped in the air all insta-kill style. I reached it in ten more steps and then slammed my spear into its throat just to make sure that it was dead.

“Damn, Sheela, great job with--” I started to say, but then I saw a patch of green feathers appear as another deinonychus crested the wall.

Then three more joined it.

“I only have two more arrows!” Sheela shouted as she pulled one of the shafts from her hip sheath.

“Trel and Kacerie, get to the hut!” I shouted, and my words seemed to shock the two women out of their slow backpedal. They turned to run past us, and I prayed that Sheela and I would be able to stand against four of these fuckers.

“Hit the one on the right!” I ordered Sheela as she pulled the string of her bow back. She let loose with the shaft, and the arrow hit the raptor in the shoulder. The green-feathered bastard screamed, and for half a moment it looked like it was going to tip over and fall on the other side of the wall.

But then it fell forward into our fort as the other three jumped inside.

“Hit another one!” Adrenaline was making the world seem to slow to a crawl, and I sprinted toward the closest jumping raptor.

For half a moment, I wondered what the fuck I was doing charging these guys. Each of them was about the size of a Great Dane, with teeth that could tear through my muscles and bones ten times easier than the big Scooby-Doo breeds. Then I remembered Sheela at my side, Glamine and Trel in the hut, and Kacerie’s look of terror when I saved her yesterday.

If I didn’t kill these fuckers, these beautiful women would probably die.

I imagined that my arms were like rubber bands, and I pulled my spear back before I let it thrust forward into the first landing raptor. My weapon connected with him just as his legs took the pressure of his landing, and he really wasn’t able to dodge or snap his jaws at me. The tip tore into his chest with surprising ease, and he let out a painful yelp when I shuffled forward and drove the shaft of my weapon deeper into him.

Sheela’s last arrow whizzed by my head and hit the raptor who had landed to my right. The shaft sunk into his throat, but the dinosaur somehow ignored the damage and took three quick steps toward me.

I twisted myself around the spear I still had impaled inside of the first raptor and then pushed the shaft at the dino Sheela just injured. It was a cumbersome movement, but the monster’s jaws closed around the wood in between my hands, and I got an alarmingly close look into the eyes of the angry beast.

I could also smell its sour breath and feel the muscles in its neck strain.

“Shit!” I gasped as the raptor with an arrow in its neck thrashed the spear free of my grip. The pointy end was still attached the first raptor, and that one let out another pained screech as its friend accidentally drove the weapon deeper.

“Victor!” Trel screamed from behind me, and I kicked the raptor away before I turned to see her toss a spare spear at me. I’d always been terrible at sports, but I somehow snatched it from the air as if we had practiced the move a hundred times. It was a good thing too, since the only uninjured raptor was sprinting toward me with its head down, and I only had a single second to get my weapon pointed in the correct direction.

The impact caused a shock of energy to hammer my arms and chest. I hadn’t really based out my legs, and the speed and weight of the raptor almost threatened to knock me over. Fortunately, my bare feet were able to kind of grip the ground as I stumbled backward, and the raptor took my spear through its stomach. Unfortunately, the dinosaur didn’t seem to care that I’d run it through, and it continued to push toward me as my spear slid through its body.

“Ahhh!” I gasped as I tried to push my spear into it. The raptor’s jaws snapped closed about two inches away from my front hand, and a bit of panic replaced the adrenaline.

“Hold your spear!” Trel yelled as she landed at my side. Two of her legs thrust out like finger flicks and knocked into the nose of the dinosaur. It didn’t look like she hit it hard, but the monster was easily distracted and forgot about biting my hands so that it could try to chomp into Trel.

“No!” I growled as I leaned into the spear and tried to muscle the raptor away from the spider-woman. This was a big son of a bitch, maybe it actually weighed more than I did, but my muscles were being fueled by primitive survival instincts, and I was able to leverage the thing away from Trel.

I quickly glanced over to Sheela and saw that she’d moved to protect my back from the other raptors. She was jabbing a spear into the dino with an arrow in its neck, but the one she’d shot in the shoulder was circling to her side, and I knew she was going to need help in a few seconds.

“Fucking die!” I screamed as I tried to lift up with my spear. The problem with this raptor was that I’d gotten him in the stomach and not hit an organ that would cause him to die in a few moments. Hell, he was probably as juiced up on adrenaline as I was, and might not have even known that I’d run him through the stomach.

One of Trel’s spider legs smacked him across the face, but his eyes turned down to the spear, and I saw the spark of intelligence there. The raptor took a step away from me, and I was all of a sudden trying to keep him on my weapon instead of keeping him away from me.

“Trel, help Sheela!” I shouted as I took a few quick steps toward the raptor I’d impaled.

“Got it!” she yelled, and I saw her spider legs coil under her human body half a moment before she sprung into the air.

The raptor on my spear suddenly changed his strategy, and he surged forward when I thought he was going to keep moving backward. His sudden forward step caused him to slide deeper down my spear and his jaws angled to bite me in the face.

His teeth closed not even an inch from my nose.

I grunted, lifted up the back of my spear, and then pushed forward as hard as I could. The raptor tried to keep coming at me, but the angle of my weapon was too steep, and I was pushing too hard. We both ran across the open courtyard of the fort before I slammed the tip of the spear into a crack in the walls. My weapon pushed through the tiny gap in the logs we had erected and I felt it kind of lock in place.

“Sit tight, asshole,” I gasped as I moved my grip to the back part of the spear. The raptor let out a frustrated growl as it thrashed against the stuck spear, but it looked like it was starting to lose a bit of its strength, and blood was pouring out of its stomach as if someone had turned on a bath faucet.

A trio of spears leaned up against the wall, and I grabbed one before turning to the last three raptors. Trel and Sheela were keeping the ones with the arrows in their bodies at bay, but the one that I just speared in its chest had wiggled free of my weapon. He was spewing blood all over the ground of our fort, but he also looked really pissed off, and he turned toward me with a low rumbling hiss.

He then turned toward the hut where Kacerie and Galmine watched our battle.

“No!” I shouted as the injured raptor sprinted toward them.

I was about twenty yards away from the raptor, and I knew the beast could run faster than me, but I threw all logic out the window and sprinted toward the hut. I was already gasping for breath because of the fighting, but I ignored the agony in my chest, the blackness on the edges of my vision, and the pain of my bare feet slamming into the ground.

The raptor wasn’t moving as fast as I expected, probably because of its chest wound, but it still looked like it would reach the door of our hut before I would get there. I tried to pump my legs faster, and I felt a bit of surprise when my limbs actually complied.

Both Galmine and Kacerie were peeking out from behind the curtain, but they ducked back inside as soon as they saw the raptor and I sprinting toward them. They seemed to be frozen with shock, and I wanted to scream a warning to them, but I didn’t want to sacrifice even a tiny bit of oxygen.

If I got there half a second after the raptor, things would be really bad.

But we got there at the same time.

“Ahhhhhgggghhh!” I screamed as I plowed into the raptor. I’d meant to impale him with my spear, but the tip of my weapon had skipped across his hide and gone over his back. I adjusted by bringing my right shoulder into him, and we both smashed through the curtain of the hut like wrecking balls.

Kacerie and Galmine both let out screams when we landed in the center of the hut. Fortunately, my shoulder check had knocked the raptor into the fire, and it screeched as flames began to crawl up its feathers. The dinosaur twisted on his back as if he was a dog trying to scratch his shoulder, but his movements only made the fire crawl up him faster.

“Watch out!” I shouted as it lashed out with its feet. The hut wasn’t nearly big enough for the four of us, and one of its kicks almost sliced Kacerie.

Jinx was a lot smaller than this raptor, but he let out an angry screech and then bit the bigger dino right on his snout. The raptor growled with annoyance and then made a quick snap at my little blue friend. The deinoychus jaws closed over empty air, and my buddy zipped around the campfire so that he could stand next to Galmine.

I still had my spear in my hand, and I pushed the butt of the weapon against the floor so that I could rocket to my feet. Almost as soon as I’d set the weapon to stab into the asshole, it rolled to the side and got its feet on the ground.

I made a lunge over the smoking fire, aimed the tip of my weapon at the neck of the deinonychus, and then shoved my spear down as I landed. My strike was true, and the weapon tore into the side of the creature’s throat as if it was made of wax.

It choked out a soft gurgling sound, turned its hateful eyes toward me, and then coughed out a half gallon of blood as it died.

“Uhh--”

“Wait here!” I interrupted Kacerie as I yanked my spear out of the monster’s neck and dashed out of the hut.

Sheela and Trel had killed one of the other raptors, and I watched the cat-woman drive a spear into the chest of the last one they had been fighting. It collapsed with an angry screech, and I adjusted the direction I was running so that I would head toward the fucker I’d impaled against the wall.

The last living raptor was still thrashing against the spear stuck in the wall, so I stabbed my spear into his neck twice, and his body started to slow. By the fourth stab, he had stopped moving altogether, and his chest made a final death rattle sound.

“Damn,” I gasped as I turned around to survey the damage to the camp.

There was a ton of blood on the grass, and both Sheela and Trel were breathing heavily, but there didn’t appear to be any damage to the hut or Hope’s little corral.

“Are there any more out there?” I shouted to Sheela and Trel.

“I only saw the four trying to climb, and I only had two arrows, that is why I came to get you.” Sheela pointed to the hut, and I turned to see Kacerie and Galmine both poking their heads out. I gestured for them to come toward us as I walked to the center of the camp.

“You two okay?” I asked Trel and Sheela when I reached them.

“Yes, Victor,” Sheela said with a curt nod.

“Trel?” I asked.

“Fine.” The spider-woman shrugged. “But I have to go outside and look at the door. I’m hoping it isn’t damaged.”

“They figured out how to climb it,” I said. “We have to worry about that too.”

“I already have an idea.” Trel’s full red lips curled into a smile, and I could see her vampire looking fangs.

“I figured you would.” I returned her smile, but my legs were starting to shake, and my stomach was spinning. My mind was beginning to come to terms with the fact that I’d somehow Conaned the fuck out of a bunch of raptors, and it was trying to explain to me that I was a dogcatcher from Earth who shouldn’t be here.

“You did well, Victor,” Sheela said as she rested her hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I replied as I took a few long breaths. “Just trying to protect you all.”

“Is it going to be like this every day?” Kacerie whined as she came to stand near us.

“Yes,” I answered her curtly. Then I turned to Sheela. “Check the walls again to make sure that this was the last of them.”

“Yes, Victor,” the cat-woman’s gold-colored eyes glittered, and she dashed toward the wall.

“What kind of answer is that? Yes? Don’t you care that they are attacking us?” Kacerie was pointing her finger at me, and her pretty nose was scrunched up.

“I just spent the last day explaining everything to you,” Trel groaned. “Don’t bug Victor. He has stuff to do.”

“Like the gray woman in the hut?” Kacerie crossed her arms. “Yeah, he’s been doing her for almost a day. I want to go home. Why don’t you all take me home?”

“Her name is Galmine.” Trel’s eyes narrowed. “I told you her name and I explained that we are all stuck here and there is no going home.”

“You did, but he didn’t.” The pink-haired woman pointed at me.

“Ugggggghhh,” Trel moaned. “I can’t deal with this. I’m going to go check the wall on the other side of the camp. Victor, I want to speak with you later.”

“Got it,” I said to the beautiful spider-woman, and she walked away on her human legs.

“So what’s your deal?” Kacerie asked as soon as Trel was out of earshot.

“Sounds like Trel told you what is going on,” I said as I glanced over Kacerie’s shoulder. Galmine was still walking toward us from the hut, and she could probably hear what we were saying.

“So did the fuzzy one, but I’m asking you…”

“Victor,” I reminded her as I saw her searching to remember my name.

“Yeah, that’s it. Sorry. I’m normally good with names. I’m just having a hard time.”

“I get it,” I said as I smiled at her.

“Victor, I brought you your pants and shirt,” Galmine said as she neared us.

“Ahh thanks,” I said as I took the clothes from her and started to put them on.

“Are you going to answer my questions?” Kacerie asked impatiently as I put one of my legs into my pants.

“We are stuck here,” I explained. “We were taken by powerful aliens and dumped on this world. Dinosaurs are trying to eat us, so we have to work together to survive.”

“But when are they going to let us go home?” Kacerie’s eyes were a light pastel blue that contrasted with her pink hair.

“Probably never,” I said as I buttoned my pants.

“But you don’t know for sure?” she asked.

“Victor knows a lot of things,” Galmine said with a gentle smile. “We are alive because he protected us.”

“Look, I don’t want to be here,” Kacerie said to both of us.

“Sorry,” I said with a shrug. “I didn’t put you here. I’ve only been on this world for a month. We are just trying to survive. I’m sure Trel and Sheela explained to you that we could use your help.”

“Clear over here!” Sheela yelled, and I nodded across the camp to her.

“Same over here!” Trel shouted.

“I’m not really interested in helping,” the pink-haired woman continued.

“Then you can leave.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wondered if I had actually said them. It kind of didn’t sound like something I would say, but damn it, I’d just worked my ass off for a solid month to make this camp.

“What?” the woman asked with surprise.

“Yeah, this is our camp. We built it. I also rode out there on Hope to save your life. You haven’t even said thank you.” It was a bit petty since I didn’t really need her thanks, but it would have been nice if she’d said something instead of whining.

“You can’t kick me out,” she said as she waved her hands. “It is really dangerous out there. Those green feathered monsters keep trying to eat us. I won’t last an hour--”

“Then you need to stop demanding shit, start answering my questions, and then do what I tell you to do,” I interrupted her as I slid my sweat-stained T-shirt over my head. I was sure my clothes smelled awful, but I’d gotten used to living in my own sweat, so I couldn’t even tell anymore.

Bathtubs or a shower. One more thing for the too long of a list of shit we needed to build.

“Uhhh,” Kacerie’s mouth hung open, and she glanced over at Galmine to see if I was joking.

“Victor is really nice. It was his plan to build this fort. He is also a really great lover. You should let him penetrate you tonig--”

“Ahhhh that’s okay!” I interrupted Galmine and felt my cheeks turn red. “We don’t need to talk about it.” I sighed and then looked at the two women on the walls.

“Alright gang, group meeting!” I shouted. “It’s time to figure out what we are going to do next.”

Chapter 2

“First, things first,” I said after the four women had gathered around me. “How are we on food and water?”

“We need more water,” Sheela said. “Our jugs are almost empty.”

“Alright,” I said. “We can get that quickly.

“We have killed many of the orange birds,” Galmine said. “But they will spoil soon. We are also running low on berries.”

“So we don’t need to eat these raptors?” I said as I gestured the two corpses we stood beside.

“Ewww, you would eat those?” Kacerie asked with disgust.

“We do what we need to survive,” Sheela stated.

“I won’t eat it,” Kacerie said.

“You need to get with the program,” Trel growled as she tapped her legs on the ground. “If I can deal with this food, you can too.”

“Oh? Here we go again; you think you are better than me. Sorry spider-girl, just because you are some sort of princess or--”

“Duchess,” Trel corrected as she raised a clawed finger, “and yes. If you would like to go there, I am better than you. I’m more beautiful, smarter, stronger; and did I mention I was a duchess? What did you do on your world again? Cut hair? You are just a peasant.”

“No one on my world speaks to each other as you have just spoken to me, or they get Lanced. So you better watch your tongue in a week.”

“You said Lance?” I asked. “That’s the beam that comes out of your hands?”

“Yes,” Kacerie answered. “While you were fucking the gray woman, these two explained this Eye-Q stuff.”

“Her name is Galmine,” I growled.

“Galmine, sorry.” Kacerie shrugged.

“You are a hairdresser?” I asked.

“Yes.” Kacerie crossed her arms. “One of the best in my city. I could definitely do something about this.” She pointed to Trel’s head. The spider-woman’s hair was a long lustrous obsidian color, but it was obviously tangled from all the work.

“My hair is--”

“Perfect,” I interrupted Trel. “Kacerie, tell us about your ability. The one your Eye-Q says.”

“Lance? Everyone on my world can do it. Once a week per hand. We can destroy another life if we choose.”

“That’s crazy,” I said as I glanced at her crossed arms.

“It’s crazy you all can’t do it,” the pink-haired woman said. “How did you maintain law and order on your homeworlds? Seems like idiots would just take advantage of people.”

“There was plenty of that on my world, but we are getting a bit off topic.” I gestured to her arms. “It takes you a week to recharge?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Until then, I am defenseless, and so alone here.”

“You aren’t alone,” I said.

“I will be if you kick me out,” she sighed. “You just said you would.”

“We all need to work together to help each other,” I said as I rubbed my forehead. “If you don’t help, then you can get the fuck out.”

“Victor is right,” Trel said. “We don’t want any freeloaders. It’s incredibly rude to just sit around and let others do all the work.”

Sheela and I glanced at each other, but I decided not to point out the irony to the black-haired woman. She’d spent most of the last month letting us do all the work around the camp.

“I don’t know how to do anything around here,” Kacerie said. “They showed me how to make those little stone knives, but I--”

“We’ll show you what to do,” I said. “We’ll also need your ideas to improve the camp.”

“I don’t know anything about surviving!” Kacerie shouted. “I’ll cut your hair or something. That’s the only thing I know how to do, but I can’t hunt those things or build walls, or dig ditches to poop in. It’s gross.”

“Look,” I sighed. “We all want to go home, but our number one priority is surviving. We need to get water and food every day. We also need to ensure the camp is stronger so that the dinosaurs can’t get inside. If we can live through the next few months, we’ll probably be able to have a pretty efficient system. We’ll also rescue more people. You can’t just sit around here. We need your help.”

My mind was spinning with all the different tasks ahead of us, and I started to feel a bit annoyed with myself for relaxing with Galmine. Yeah, the lovemaking had been wonderful, and I felt way more “manly” after being with such a gorgeous woman, but we had a lot of shit to do, and I needed to be the one directing everyone.

“Fine,” Kacerie moaned as she rolled her eyes. “I’ll help. Or do whatever. If you are going to throw me out if I don’t do it. I guess I have little choice. I’m defenseless until my Lance recharges, anyway. You’ll probably try to rape me or something.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.

“Galmine just said I had to let you penetrate me tonight. What happens when I tell you no? Will you just do it anyway or throw me out of the camp?”

“Wow, you are an idiot,” Trel said with a sarcastic tone. “Victor just spent the night with Galmine, and tonight he will be inseminating my womb so that I bear children. Why would he bother with you when he could have either of us?”

“Because I’m--”

“Stop,” I said as I raised my hand to interrupt Kacerie. “I’m not going to force myself on you. I just spent the last month with these three, and I didn’t touch them. I’m not some sort of crazy monster. I’m done talking about your hang-ups. Let’s all discuss what we need to do then come up with a plan to do it.”

Trel, Sheela, and Galmine all nodded, but Kacerie just frowned.

“Let’s talk about water some more,” I said.

“Yes,” Sheela agreed.

“We are getting the water runs done quickly with Hope,” I started, “but I’d like to get it to the point where we only do one run a day. Heck, I’d like to get it to where we don’t even need to go get water.”

“How would we do that, Victor?” Galmine asked with interest.

“Check those clouds over there,” I said as I pointed up and to the distance. “They look like storm clouds. We’ve only had a few days of rain in the last month, but each of those days dumped enough water to last us a few months. We just have to figure out how to capture and hold it.”

“We will need a tank,” Trel said as she tapped one of her black claw-fingers against her lip.

“Yeah,” I said. “It sounds like a complicated endeavor right now, but we need to start thinking about making way more pots and methods of capturing rainwater.”

“We will need a lot of clay for pots,” Galmine said, “but I am good with it. I could make a tub to hold water if you get me enough.”

“We’ll start with a bunch of pots,” I said. “If we can carry eight or so on Hope, we’ll only need to make a single run every couple of days. Sheela and I can go and get more clay, and then you can show Kacerie how to make them.”

“Okay,” Galmine agreed as she slowly clapped her hands together.

“Along with that,” I said as I looked at Trel, “we’ll need a better harness for Hope so we can carry more water and clay.”

“I will think on it,” the spider-woman said as she glanced at our parasaurus. As if she knew we were talking about her, Hope let out a pleasant little toot.

“So that’s a plan for water,” I said. “We need to get some more today, and then we need a lot of clay. Let’s talk about food next.”

“Are you hungry?” Galmine asked. “Should I prepare us a midday meal?”

“When was the last time you all ate?” I asked Sheela, Trel, and Kacerie.

“It was lunch yesterday,” Sheela said, and I felt a bit of surprise that Trel had not barged in on Galmine and me last night to demand we make her food.

“Yeah, Galmine, let’s get food cooking. Trel, can you inspect the door to make sure the raptors didn’t damage it before you join us?”

“Yes, Victor,” the spider woman said, and then she bounded away from me.

The four women and I returned to the hut, and Sheela and I dragged the corpse of the raptor outside. Once he was gone, and we got the fire going at full power again, Galmine pulled the already cleaned and defeathered carcass of an orange bird out of a clay pot. It was one we killed yesterday and didn’t actually smell bad.

“Butchers often hang meat,” I said as I thought about various movies and books I’d read. “I don’t really know if it that keeps the meat fresher for longer, but we are going to have to figure out how to preserve things we hunt or gather, or farm.”

“Salt,” Sheela said.

“Yeah,” I replied to her with a smile. “I don’t know anything about getting salt or even how to use it to preserve food. Do you just throw a lot of it on the meat?”

“Yes,” Sheela answered. “The salt keeps the meat too dry for bacteria to infect. The thinner the slices the better, but we would need to find salt. We can also smoke the meat for a similar effect.”

“So we’ll need to find salt, or build some kind of oven that we can use to smoke,” I said as I thought through the labor.

“Victor, this might not be important right now,” Sheela said. “There is vast wildlife on this world, and it is not difficult to hunt or fish for food.”

“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “I’m just worried about if we have to hunker down inside the fort because there are a ton of raptors or a carnotaurus out there. We might not be able to leave the walls, so I want to be prepared. I’ll shelve the idea for now, but let’s talk about other ways to get food. We’ve got hunting, gathering, and farming. Seems like we are halfway decent at hunting. How do we get better at gathering?”

“We need more baskets,” Galmine said as she put the bird meat on a spit and set it over the fire. “Then we need to pick the berries. There are also roots and leaves we can eat.”

“Do you know which ones we can eat?” I asked. “I’m guessing that we each have different stomach workings.”

“I have a good idea,” the gray-skinned woman said. “We are different, but some vegetables, nuts, and tubers can also be soaked to remove harmful poisons. Then they can be eaten. I haven’t been able to get out of our cave and show you all what to look for.”

“Hmmmm,” I said as I rubbed the beard growing on my face.

“The door is undamaged,” Trel said as she walked into the hut. “The logs we used are a bit rough, and they were able to wedge their claws on some of the knots and leverage themselves up.”

“So how do we fix it?” I asked.

“We’ll need to take some knives or axes and shave some parts so they are smoother,” she answered. “I will work on it later. What did I miss in the conversation?”

“Galmine knows how to identify berries and plants we can eat, but we’d have to take her outside,” I explained.

“Ewww,” Trel said as she made a choking sound. “Who wants to eat plants? That is what my food eats.”

“It is what I also eat, Trel,” Galmine said with a friendly smile. “This meat hurts my stomach.”

“Ugh,” Trel sighed. “So we have to get plants?”

“We’ll also need some for Hope,” I said. “She’ll eat the grass inside of our fort, but we’ll eventually run out. We’ll need to bring more in, or figure out a way for her to be out to pasture.”

“The solution is simple,” Trel said, and we all turned to her. “Victor needs to tame a bigger dinosaur. Galmine can ride on its back and tell us what vegetables to eat, then we can pick them.”

“Then we can put them in the baskets and bring them back,” Galmine said. “It is a good idea.”

“If I can tame a larger dino,” I said. “Even if I do tame one, where would we keep it? We might be able to fit another two or three parasaurs in there with Hope, but then it’s going to get really cramped. Especially with them pooping all the time.”

“Speaking of poop,” Galmine said with a giggle. “It is a good fertilizer. I am very skilled at growing a garden, but I don’t have enough space inside the fort. If we go out and grab some berries or other edible plants, I’ll be able to start a garden outside the fort.”

“I like the idea, but I also don’t,” I said. “I really want us to have a farm, but I don’t want you outside of the walls where it is dangerous.”

“I agree,” Sheela said.

“I don’t,” Trel said, and we all gave her a confused look. “The answer is simple, again. This isn’t our permanent home.”

“But I like this place,” Galmine said. “We all built it together and--”

“I’m not saying we need to leave this spot,” Trel interrupted. “But we built this fort this size because we didn’t have a lot of time. But Victor wants to pick berries, or leaves, or whatever with you, so having a larger dinosaur to ride will be safer, and we need more space. Now he wants a farm, we need more space. I bet that once he starts talking about defending the fort, we are going to come up with the same answer: more space.” Trel folded her arms over her magnificent breasts and gave us all a smirk. “Trust me, I’m smart. We need more space. Especially if we want to rescue more people. I will need some privacy with Victor tonight so that we can breed, and we only have room for this small hut inside of the fort. You all will have to sit outside while he inseminates me.”

“Uhh Trel, I’m not so--” I started to say, but the spider-woman kept talking.

“What happens when there are ten of us? Or twenty? Or fifty? We will need more space and private huts.”

“I agree with more huts,” Kacerie said as she shot Galmine and me an exasperated look. “If I must be here, I want my privacy.”

“Okay,” I said as I held up my hands so their attention came back to me. “I think this is a good segway into our next topic: Defense.”

“Yes,” Sheela said. “These walls are tall, but we will still have a problem with one of the larger carnotaurus type dinosaurs that we have seen. A tall one might be able to lean over the top.”

“Sounds like you are voting for larger walls and a bigger fort,” I said.

“Maybe.” Sheela shrugged. “How large do we make it? The whole clearing? It will take many months of work and be hard to guard without more help. A larger dinosaur might help us haul some of the more massive trees over, but we would have a problem lifting them into the support holes.”

“That will not be a problem,” Trel said. “I have devised a weight and fulcrum strategy that will easily tip larger logs into holes with little effort on our part. We can implement it with Hope, or we can use a larger dinosaur if you tame one.”

“Really?” I asked. “How does it work?”

“I can get into it now,” she said with a shrug, “but it isn’t immediately important. Just know that I can do it.”

“We can build around this fort,” Sheela said as she gestured out of the hut. “If we go another fifty feet out, we can make a new outer circle using the same design that Trel thought of. Then we will be able to fit in a garden and a larger pen for more dinosaurs.”

“But then we’ll have to rebuild another wall when we get more people,” Trel said. “We should go a hundred feet out. Our current fort is about seventy-five feet in diameter, so if we go a hundred more feet out, we’ll have a bit under sixty thousand square feet.”

“That seems big,” I said as I remembered that an acre was around forty-three thousand square feet and a bit smaller than a football field.

“It will be too hard to defend,” Sheela said. “It will also take too long to build.”

“If this one cooperates, it will take us another six weeks. I have already done the math.” Trel pointed to Kacerie.

“I don’t know how to build anything,” Kacerie said. “It sounds like a lot of work.”

“Welcome to our life,” Trel scoffed. “Believe me, I’d rather be at home sorting through my line of male suitors from atop my throne of silk pillows, but we are here now.”

“It will still be too hard to guard,” Sheela argued.

“We will find more people to help us,” Trel said. “There is one of those sky beams every few days, and I will give birth to my brood in three months. If we only go fifty feet out, it will leave us with twenty-four thousand feet. That sounds like a lot until we factor in a garden for Galmine, a pen for more of Victor’s dinosaurs, and huts for the other people who might join us. If we do a larger fort, we won’t need to upgrade again when we have another four people. We’ll probably be able to fit twenty, and once we have those twenty, it will be easy enough to expand the wall out so that we take over the whole clearing.” Trel’s voice came out in an excited flurry of words, and it seemed like she was fighting the smile on her face.

“Six weeks?” I asked.

“Six weeks,” Trel replied with a nod. “If nothing goes wrong, of course. It might even go faster if you can get some extra dinosaurs to drag trees and dig holes faster. Yes, I’m liking this idea even more. We’ll have enough space to let your pet dinosaurs graze inside the walls. We can even make moveable pens so we can cycle them through different pasture.”

“Alright,” I said as I tried to forget about her mentioning her brood. “I’ll think about it.” Six weeks didn’t seem like a long investment to rebuild the fort walls, but then I realized that I’d already spent a month here, and I had no idea if I’d ever get back home.

“We will need to create platforms on the interior walls, of this fort, and any future fort we build.” Sheela gestured outside again.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“If I wish to shoot an arrow or use my spear, I must climb on top of the wall. We need a platform where we can stand elevated and shoot arrows down on creatures trying to gain entry.”

“Ahh yeah, that makes sense,” I said as I turned to Trel.

“I can build one tomorrow,” the spider woman said with a nod. “Will take me about half the day, but only a few hours if someone else helps.”

“We will need more than one,” Sheela said. “So that we can shoot from multiple angles.”

“How about three?” Trel asked. “Two flanking the door, and then one at the rear should work. If you both help me, I can get them done tomorrow. Then I can build larger ones when we have our new and improved walls built.”

“You are really into this,” I said as I smiled at the beautiful spider-woman.

“Hmmm.” Her lips curled a bit. “I guess I have a knack for building stuff. It’s strange since I never cared about it before coming here.”

“You are smart,” I said with a shrug, “it just sounded like you didn’t have to work much before you came here.”

“Oh, my dear Victor,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “You had no idea how hard it was picking out suitors. I don’t need to worry about that anymore.”

“You don’t?” Galmine asked with confusion.

“No,” Trel said as she wrapped her long stiff fingers around my bicep. “Tonight Victor will impregnate me. I’ll use my venom on one of the raptor corpses outside. It won’t be perfect, but the muscles, bones, and fat of the thing should be ready by the time I give birth. Then they will feed upon it and grow stronger. Life will be easy then since they will do my bidding.”

“Uhhh, Trel,” I said as I looked down at the hand she had wrapped around my bicep. “I’m not really sure I can impregnate you.”

“Don’t be silly. I am ovulating. You will impregnate me.”

“It doesn’t quite work that way,” I said as carefully as I could.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Does your penis not work?” Trel turned to Galmine.

“Oh, it works wonderfully,” Galmine said as she smiled at me.

“That’s not the point--” I started to say, but Trel asked Galmine another question.

“Does he not make sperm then?”

“Oh, plenty of sperm,” Galmine moaned and licked her lips. “Plenty of delicious sp--”

“Ewwww!” Kacerie shouted. “If you are going to talk about his dick all day, I’ll just leave.”

“We are having an important discussion,” Trel said to the pink-haired woman. “Just as on my homeworld, my pregnancy here should be considered with the correct amount of awe and reverence. Victor and I are the most important people in our little tribe, and our offspring will ensure that we all survive. Really, you should be honored that I’m allowing you to take part in this conversation.”

“Is she always like this?” Kacerie asked Sheela, but the cat-woman just shrugged.

“Trel, we are different species,” I said. “We can’t have children.”

“I don’t see why being different species has anything to do with it,” Trel said, but then her eyes narrowed. “Unless you do not find me attractive.”

“Uhhh, no. I mean, ahh, you are--”

“Ha! I know you find me attractive,” she interrupted me. “You are male, and I am beautiful. I watch your pants bulge whenever I talk to you. I already told you I would not kill you afterward, so what is your problem?”

“We just won’t have children. It’s impossible.” I tried to calm my pounding heart as her black eyes stared into mine.

“Fine,” Trel sighed. “I see how this is going to be. I’ll take care of everything.”

“What do you mean?” I asked as my stomach dropped. Having a night of sex with Galmine had really given me a boost in my self-confidence, but that was quickly withering under Trel’s dark piercing gaze.

“I’ll do all the work. You can just lie there, and I’ll ensure you fill my womb with every last ounce of your--”

“How did we get here?” Kacerie interrupted. “I thought you all were going to talk about survival, not having sex.”

“Good point, Kacerie,” I said. “Let’s get back on topic.”

“Whatever,” Trel hissed as her fingers tightened on my arm. “I’m not done with you.”

“So we need to build a new wall, and it will probably help to get another parasaur.” I thought about my Tame ability and wondered how big of a dinosaur I could control. Hope worked great, and she fit inside of our fort, but if I could get a big triceratops, it might be able to knock over a tree without us even cutting it. “I also want to get another parasaur so we can test out someone else riding it while I’m not around.”

“What do you mean?” Sheela asked.

“We’ve both ridden on Hope,” I explained. “I’ve also been by myself. I’m wondering if you can ride her to the lake or stream without me.”

“Hmmm,” Sheela said, and she suddenly looked a bit nervous.

“You could test that now,” Trel said.

“Yeah, but if Hope throws Sheela and then bolts, we might be out our only parasaur. It will be better for us to test it with a second one, so we don’t risk it.

“It is a good plan,” Sheela said quickly, and I guessed that the powerful cat-woman might have been a bit scared of riding one of the dinos by herself.

“Yeah, okay. I think we’ve got a short list of shit we have to do,” I said as I ran through them in my head. “Sheela and I have to go get water at the stream and then make a few runs for clay. Then we need to look for another parasaur or other rideable dino that can help us build the camp. While we are out, we’ll look for some sort of salt lick and more leaves to make cordage and baskets. Then our main focus will be on cutting down bigger trees and building the new wall. Sheela, did I miss anything?”

“No, Victor,” she replied.

“You forgot about your job with me tonight and helping me make the platforms tomorrow,” Trel said.

“Ahh yeah. Okay.” I felt my cheeks flush, and I tried to move my hips casually so that my hard-on wouldn’t be noticed by the spider-woman. Trel was all sorts of scary, but who was I kidding? She was also dangerously beautiful, and I knew I’d get over the legs coming out of her back as soon as we were having sex.

As long as she didn’t kill me afterward.

“Trel should also help us with the saddle for Hope so that we can carry more water,” Sheela offered.

“I know,” Trel said with a sigh. “I’m also going to fix the door and then think about the rainwater collection idea. I didn’t pay much attention when Galmine made all the pots, but I’ll look at her process this time and see if I can find some inspiration.”

“Great,” I said. “So Galmine and Kacerie will work on pots, spears, arrows, and baskets-- hey I have an idea.” The thought jumped in my head and I got excited. “They make traps to catch fish, I don’t really know how they are made, but I’m sure we can figure them out.”

“Traps to catch fish?” Galmine asked as she turned the meat over the fire. The smell of turkey was filling the hut, and my stomach let out a low rumble.

“Ahh, I know this one,” Kacerie said as she raised her hand. “One of my boyfriends was a commercial fisher, and he used traps.” The pink-haired woman made a motion with her hands so they were in a “V” shape. “There is a funnel basket that goes into a larger basket. The fish swim down the funnel toward a bit of food or something, and then they come out inside of the larger basket, they aren’t smart enough to swim back out of the smaller hole.”

“Okay, that’s your job when Galmine shows you how to put together the baskets.”

“I also need shoes,” Kacerie said as she pointed down her tight jeans toward her bare feet.

“Hmmm,” I said. “We could probably weave something with the stuff we used for the baskets.”

“Ugh,” Kacerie groaned. “They are going to look terrible, I can already imagine them.”

“You could just go barefoot,” I said with a shrug.

“Those heels I took off? They are ten thousand credit shoes.” Kacerie moaned and put her face in her hands. “I can’t believe I’m here. This is a nightmare.”

“Yeah, but you could be dead,” I sighed, and the woman turned her light blue eyes to me.

“Yeah… Uhhh. Look, Victor, I haven’t thanked you yet. Sorry I’ve been kind of a bitch. I’d be monster shit right now if it weren’t for your bravery. I want to go home, but until we find out how to do that, I’ll help however I can.”

“Thanks, good to hear,” I said as I nodded along with Galmine, Sheela, and Trel. Her attitude seemed to have taken a 180 degree turn, but I wasn’t going to worry about it right now. I had too much shit to do and not enough time to do it in.

“The food is done!” Galmine exclaimed as she finished turning the spit. We had some clay plates stacked in a corner, and she ripped pieces of the steaming bird off to give to us.

“Doesn’t that hurt your hand?” Kacerie asked with what sounded like a mixture of amazement and disgust.

“No,” Galmine answered. “I have thick skin. Here, this is yours. Welcome to our family.” She passed the plate to Kacerie and the pink-haired woman glanced down at it.

“Something wrong?” Sheela asked her after she took her plate from Galmine.

“Uhhh, nothing,” Kacerie answered.

“Then why aren’t you eating?” Trel asked after she finished chewing on her first bite of food.

“It’s uhhh. Nothing.” Kacerie still hadn’t looked up from the food.

The rest of us ate in silence for a few moments. The meat really did need some salt, but I was starving, and I only gave each piece a few cooling puffs of my breath before I shoved them in my mouth.

“You still aren’t eating,” Galmine said with a pouty face. “Do you not like it?”

“I ahhh. It’s just dirty.” Kacerie sighed.

“Dirty?” Galmine’s face formed an “O” shape.

“Yeah, you picked it up with your fingers. Sorry. I’m kind of a germaphobe. I didn’t see you wash your hands or anything.”

“Ohhh!” Galmine said with a delighted sigh. “You don’t have to worry, my hands are clean.”

“Oh, okay. Thanks.” Kacerie carefully took a small piece of the cooked bird meat and then pushed it into her mouth. She chewed a few times, smiled, and then swallowed before grabbing the next piece. Soon she was tearing into the food and letting out soft moans of pleasure.

“Glad you like it!” Galmine said after Kacerie was almost done with her piece.

“Yeah, sorry I thought your hands weren’t clean. I’m embarrassed that I accused you of--.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Galmine said. “I washed them last night before Victor and I made love. They are very clean.”

“Excuse me?” Kacerie’s mouth froze mid-chew.

“Yes,” Galmine said proudly. “I didn’t want to get any dirt on Victor’s body, so I washed them last night.”

“But… you didn’t… uhhh.” Kacerie’s face had paled, and she looked over to me. “Wash them after?”

“We only have half a jug of water left. I didn’t want to waste it on my hands. Besides, Victor’s body was yummy.”

“Galmine,” I groaned. “You have to wash your hands before you start cooking.”

“Oh? I do? I’ve never done it before.”

“I have to go,” Kacerie said as she set down her plate, turned to the curtain of the hut, and then dashed out.

“Ohh, she didn’t like it,” Galmine sighed as we heard gagging in the distance.

“I would like a second helping,” Sheela said as she held out her plate toward Galmine for more.

“Meeeh,” Trel said with a shrug of her shoulders. “She’ll be fine. Besides, I’m looking forward to tasting more of Victor.”

Chapter 3

After we finished eating, Sheela, Trel, and I exited the hut and worked to clean up the bodies of the raptors. The spider woman asked us to leave the one I had impaled against the wall so that she could use her digestive poison to prepare it for her children. I didn’t really want to know the details of how her process worked, so I busied myself with hauling the other three bodies outside of the gate with Sheela.

“The orange birds seem happy that we have left,” Sheela said after we dragged the first raptor body out of the door. I turned to look where she was and saw a few dozen perched on the ramp outside of what used to be our cave. They were about a hundred yards away from us, and they hadn’t seemed to care about our fort.

“Think they will eat the corpses of these raptors?” I asked as I looked down at our burden.

“They might, but I worry about getting too close to them.”

“Yeah,” I said as I glanced back to our walls. The corpses of the other raptors we had killed were still there, and I debated on our course of action. We didn’t want to be anywhere near these things when they started to rot. The smell would be terrible, but it would also attract other scavengers that might be dangerous.

“Let’s go a little closer,” I said. “Then we can drop the body off and hope that they dispose of it.

“How much closer?” Sheela asked, and I could hear the concern in her voice.

“Maybe halfway?”

“Victor, they are very territorial. If they attack us, they will chase us back to our fort.”

“Then we’ll kill them there,” I said with a shrug. “The raptor corpses have to be moved, and I don’t want to drag all of them to the edge of the redwood forest. That will take us the rest of the day, and we need to go get water and clay.”

“Understood,” Sheela said. “I will do as you ask.”

We dragged the first corpse to the halfway point between our camp and the cave. Part of me wanted to go a bit closer, but Sheela’s worry was eating at me, so I decided to leave the corpse there and hoped that the orange birds would try to eat it.

“Next one,” I said as we turned back toward the camp. “We’ll clear the inside out first and then get the ones outside.”

“Very well,” Sheela said with her usual stoic nod.

“What do you think of Kacerie?” I asked.

“I do not have an opinion yet,” Sheela answered.

“You spent almost a whole day with her,” I said.

“Trel did most of the talking, I watched the clearing for raptors.”

“Ahh,” I said, and silence fell between us.

We reached the door, ducked back inside, and then grabbed the next corpse. Sheela didn’t speak as we dragged it back out across the clearing, and I started to get worried. The cat-woman was never much for conversation, but we had spent the majority of the last month working side by side, and there was something different about her today.

I didn’t say anything until we had grabbed the last raptor corpse from inside our walls and taken it almost to the dump site.

“Did I do something to piss you off?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “How do I piss off?”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s an expression. Are you angry with me?”

“No, Victor, of course not,” she answered quickly.

“You seem angry about something,” I said.

“It is nothing,” she said.

“Seems like it is something,” I replied. “Come on. We are buddies. Yeah, we got Trel’s help, but you and I pretty much built that whole fort and the one before it. You can tell me stuff if you want to.”

“I was thinking of my husband,” she said with a sigh.

“Oh, yeah.” I felt my stomach drop a bit.

I couldn’t really understand Sheela’s perspective, so I didn’t know if it was worth trying. On one hand, she was married to a man who had like sixteen other wives. She didn’t really know the man, and it sometimes sounded as if she had been unhappy. On the other hand, Sheela seemed like the kind of woman who enjoyed having her place set in life.

“It is not how you might think,” she said. “I do not miss him.”

“Ahh. Okay. I don’t want to pry.”

We set the corpse down beside the other bodies and then walked back toward the wall. There were twelve or so raptor bodies from our fight yesterday, and we each grabbed onto the one closest to the door.

“We have very little chaos in our lives,” she continued without me asking. “There can be violence between families when a male tries to take another’s harem, but major struggles have not happened in my area of the world for quite some time.”

“I’m trying to understand how your culture works. Did you have cars, streets, cities, and jobs?”

“We didn’t have the vehicles you spoke of,” Sheela said. “We did have machines, engines, and electricity, but our people enjoyed running. Yes, we had cities and streets made out of stone or metal. Most men had jobs, but only a few women did. Once they were married, they were responsible for raising the children and taking care of the home.”

“So every one of your race just ran everywhere?” I asked as I glanced at Sheela’s impressive body.

“Yes,” she answered with a half smile. “Oh, the women sometimes hunted game animals to provide food for the family, but we also had stores where food could be purchased.”

“Sounds kind of fun,” I said. “A blend of modern convenience and physical activity.”

“You mentioned that your people ride mostly in those cars and watch their ‘tell visions’? Did you enjoy physical activity before coming to this world?”

“They are called televisions.” I smiled at her as we dumped down the body. “And yeah, I liked going outdoors, but I also liked watching television and playing games that showed on the screen. I would have never thought I would be capable of building something like this.” I gestured back at the fort’s walls as we walked toward another corpse.

“What will you do when we return home?” she asked.

“Uhh, what do you mean?” I was a bit surprised by her question, and I turned to see her amber eyes glowing.

“It is an exercise I have been performing; which may have caused the mood you observed. If we were suddenly returned home, how would your life be different?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I feel like I gave up on rescue a few weeks ago when I had my talk with Trel.”

“When you were both alone in the cave?” Sheela asked with a raised eyebrow.

“I kind of realized that if her sisters with their spaceships and advanced technology weren’t going to come save her, there was no way anyone from my world was going to rescue me. So, I just accepted that I would be here forever.”

“Hmm,” Sheela said as she studied me.

“Yeah, but to answer your question, I think I’d do a lot of things differently. I would probably look for a new job.”

“Your occupation was animal hunter, correct?”

“Well kinda,” I said with a sheepish smile. “I helped find lost animals and moved dangerous ones out of our city. It was a good job but, my parents were animal doctors. When they died, I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. I think I kind of sabotaged myself and took a job around animals that didn’t pay great. If I went back, I’d try to find something that paid more money and do my best to continue schooling so I could open up my own animal hospital.”

“Like your parents?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I lost my way, but now I realize that life is pretty brief. I was always kind of shy and didn’t really jump at opportunities. I was afraid of failure or being mocked, but this last month has taught me a lot.”

“But would you be happy if you returned?” she asked as we grabbed another corpse.

“Huh,” I said as I thought about her question. “I think happiness is kind of what you make of it. I really wasn’t happy in my old life. I was letting my parent’s death kind of define me. Know what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said with her usual nod.

“It’s weird, but I’m really happy here.” My words made me chuckle a bit, and I looked down at the raptor carcass we carried. “I could die at any second, but I’ve kind of learned what I am made of. If I got back home, I think I’d really change my life. I sure as hell would be a lot more grateful that I wasn’t getting attacked by dinosaurs every day.”

“I understand,” Sheela replied, and we didn’t speak for a few more minutes.

The cat-woman and I grabbed another corpse, and then another, and then I kind of realized I hadn’t asked her the question she had asked me, and I wondered if that had been her intent.

“Would you be happy if you returned?”

“No,” she answered simply.

“Uhhh no? Why not?”

“I was alone.”

“But you are married and there were the other wives. Didn’t you have friends?”

“My husband cared little for me,” she said. “We met briefly on our wedding day and exchanged only a few words.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Is it supposed to be like that?”

“He had other wives. I was unimportant to him emotionally. He married me for ties to my family, and then I moved across our continent so I could live in his home.”

“That sucks,” I said. “You two didn’t like… uhhh… Spend any--”

“We consummated the marriage,” she said. “He bent me over our wedding bed, thrust into me four times, climaxed, and then left without speaking to me.”

“Uhhh. Fuck. What an asshole.” My head spun with her words. Part of me couldn’t believe she was sharing this much detail, but another part of me ached that my beautiful friend was married to someone who didn’t care for her.

“It is what it is,” Sheela replied as we dumped the body. “From the conversations you and I have shared, it seems that male and females on your world have an even balance of power.”

“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “It’s complicated, but it doesn’t swing as far north or south as your and Trel’s world. It seems to be closer to Galmine’s, only without all the orgies. Or at least, I’ve never been to any orgies.”

“Me either.” She smiled at me, and her eyes glowed a bit.

“So, uhh, you don’t want to go home then?” I asked hesitantly.

“No,” she replied. “That is what I have been thinking about. There is nothing for me there. Here, I have friends and a purpose. Yes, it is dangerous, but I also feel alive. At home, I felt as if the days passed by in a numbing tumble. To occupy myself, I would take long runs through the forest and plains. I would hunt alone, and now I realize I was hoping for something tragic to befall me.”

“For real?” I asked with concern. “That sounds like some serious depression.”

“Depression?” she asked with confusion.

“A deep sadness,” I explained.

“Yes,” she said. “That is a good description. I felt as if I had no escape.”

“You couldn’t have gotten a divorce?” I asked as we dumped another corpse on the pile. “I thought you mentioned something about divorce being possible.”

“Yes, but the situation is complicated. I would have to attach myself to another male, and my husband could challenge him in battle. I could not leave on my own, and if I did find a new husband, my potential mate would need to be willing to fight for me.”

“Damn,” I said as my heart beat heavy in my chest. “You are beautiful, smart, caring, and talented. I’m surprised you didn’t have more men lining up to fight for you.”

“My husband is very powerful.” Sheela shrugged. “Most men of my race stand about as tall as me, perhaps a bit taller. My head only came up to his shoulders, and his arms were as thick as my legs. Most men would lose, and any who might win have their own wives they were probably satisfied with.”

“Ugh,” I said. “That just sucks. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what that must be like to go through.”

“It is fine,” she replied as we grabbed another corpse.

“It’s not though,” I said. “You are my friend, and I don’t want you to feel sad.”

“Sadness is a part of life,” she said. “We can only hope it does not last forever. My sadness has passed though. As I said, I am happy on this world. I am happy with you.”

“Me?” I asked as I looked at her.

“With us. Our small tribe,” she corrected quickly. “As I said, I have a purpose now. I feel important and valued.”

“So you want to stay?” I asked, and we held each other’s eyes for a few moments.

“Yes,” she answered. “Perhaps you think me insane.”

“No. I get it.” My mind reviewed what she said, and I found that I did agree with her. I wouldn’t want to live in her world, and even though Dinosaurland was incredibly challenging, I felt like I was starting to belong here.

I still would have gone home if given the chance, but maybe one day I would prefer to stay here.

Sheela and I didn’t speak for a few more minutes, and soon we were grabbing the last corpse. The orange birds still hadn’t come to investigate the pile of bodies we made, but it was still far enough from our camp to provide me with peace of mind.

I just hoped that something smaller than a carnotaurus showed up to eat the pile of bodies.

“That’s the last one,” I said as we hauled the final raptor on the pile.

“Water now?” Sheela asked.

“Yeah,” I replied as we made our way back to the camp. Our task of cleaning up all the bodies had taken us a few hours, and the sun was hanging really low in the sky. It was almost the perfect time to ride to the stream, but I worried we might be too late to go and get clay.

“Huh,” I said as soon as Sheela and I walked under the gate. Hope was already standing beside the exit, and she had two of the larger water jugs tied to her saddle.

“I got Hope ready for you,” Trel said as she strolled toward us.

“Wow, thanks,” I said. “That was nice of you.”

“I do not wish to waste time,” the spider-woman replied as she held out the quiver and bow to Sheela. “We made more arrows for you. Only fifteen, but I have devised a new method that will allow us to craft them more efficiently.”

“Thank you, Trel,” Sheela said as she wrapped the quiver belt around her hip.

“Hurry back,” Trel said as she turned her dark eyes to me.

“We’ll still have to get clay after this,” I said.

“Uhhh, I know.” The spider woman rolled her head back. “That’s why I’m telling you to hurry. It will be night soon. I will fix the door while you are gone.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You are being really helpful.”

“I’m being selfish,” Trel said with a laugh. “I want to have my children, and I want to live. Don’t forget your spear.”

“Got it,” I said as I grabbed one that was leaning against the wall by the door. As I got on top of Hope’s saddle, I kind of felt like I was leaving my wife for a day of work, but then Sheela mounted behind me and pressed her body tightly against my back. This was one hell of a strange job, and the relationship I had with these three women was pretty far away from a typical “marriage.”

Hope let out a happy toot when we passed under the gate. As soon as we were a few dozen feet clear of the walls, I urged her to go faster, and her long legs stretched out in a long lope.

I had no way of really knowing exactly how fast Hope could run, but the wind was soon stinging my eyes, and Sheela was squeezing her strong arms around my stomach. We dashed through the forest of massive redwoods, leapt over tall hedges of ferns, and then winded around the various moss-covered boulders. We made it to our small river in record time, and I felt a bit of disappointment when I slowed the parasaur down.

“That was exhilarating,” Sheela said as she flipped off Hope’s back.

“Yeah,” I agreed as I slid off with a much less graceful movement. I handed Sheela one of the jugs and then took the other to the edge of the water with her. I left my spear on Hope’s saddle, but she was only ten yards away, and Sheela had her bow slung over her shoulders. If anything attacked us, she could buy me the few seconds I needed to get my spear out.

“You still seem upset about something,” I said as she pulled her jug out of the water.

“Why do you say so?” she asked as she brought the clay to her lips to drink.

“I just know you.”

“I am sorry I am acting strange,” she said.

“Is it Kacerie? You kind of dodged my question about her earlier.” I took a long drink from my own jug and let my eyes wander over the surrounding terrain.

“Perhaps I am a bit worried about her,” Sheela admitted.

“Why?”

“She was asking about our abilities. Her power is the beams from her hands. Her Eye-Q said it was level 2. She seemed amazed that we didn’t have it. Her questions concerned me a bit.”

“Do you think she’ll use her powers against us?” I asked as my stomach knotted up. Sheela was my battle expert, and I trusted her instincts. Especially when the enemy was a beautiful woman. I knew that I tended to think more with my penis than my brain around them.

“It is worth considering,” Sheela said. “I do not want us to kick someone out of our camp since it would mean probable death, but I am happy there are three capable fighters in our small group.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I would most likely be her first target, then either you or Trel. I would bet Trel since our friend is more capable than you in combat.”

“I’m trying to get better,” I said with a chuckle.

“I know,” Sheela replied, “I am just thinking what I would do if I wanted to take over the camp.”

“Kacerie would still have to hunt and gather water, and whatever. She needs us.”

“Agreed.” Sheela nodded. “Perhaps my fears are unjustified, but as I said before, you three are very important to me, and I do not wish to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose you either,” I said.

“I noticed Kacerie’s attitude change around you,” Sheela said with a slight frown. “She was somewhat rude to me. It did not bother me much, but I decided to let Trel handle her. When you awoke, Kacerie went to you immediately with her complaints. You were unphased by her, so she quickly changed her strategy to become more agreeable.”

“She still seemed whiny and bitchy to me,” I sighed as I took another long gulp of water. “I’m glad Trel is cooperating with us now, but I really don’t have the energy to deal with someone else like her. I would like Kacerie’s help, but we are just fine without her.”

“I am glad you feel that way,” Sheela said, and I noticed her eyes drift to my lips. “Still, she is an attractive woman. I would not be surprised if she tries to appeal to your masculine properties.”

I let out a bit of a long laugh and shook my head. “I don’t have that many masculine properties. I’m just trying to make sure we all survive.”

“And you are succeeding,” she said. “I find it attractive.”

“Uhhh, yeah. Thanks.” I turned my eyes to her, but she was looking down at the water and filling her jug again. The angle of her crouch let me easily see the shape of her firm breasts, and it almost looked like her tattered bikini top couldn’t contain them.

“So let’s get back and then get clay,” I said as I forced my eyes away from the shape of her beautiful body. “We’ll need to--”

My voice froze in my throat as I turned back to Hope. The parasaurs was turning toward the tree line of the redwood forest, and she was stamping her feet impatiently.

“There is something in the trees!” Sheela hissed as we both stepped across the shore toward Hope.

The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, and my stomach was trying to hold down a hundred angry butterflies.

“I don’t see anything,” I whispered as I desperately scanned my eyes through the dark shadows of the trees.

“Me either,” Sheela said, but Hope snorted angrily, and she actually took a step away from the edge of the water.

As if she was getting ready to run.

“Come back, Sweetie,” I called out to Hope, and the parasaur turned her head a bit so that she could see me with one eye. I half expected her to dash away and leave us stranded, but she stepped back toward us, and I quickly attached my jug to her saddle.

“Sheela, get your jug on and we’ll--” I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned my head sharply to the left. At the edge of one of the large redwood trunks, I saw a flash of feathers.

The shadows were dark, but I recognized the shade of green.

“Get on!” I jumped on Hope the instant four raptors leapt from behind a clump of ferns.

Sheela dropped her jug and leapt up to the saddle behind me. As soon as I felt one of her arms around my chest, I kicked Hope forward, and the parasaur sprang away from the edge of the stream. We were pointed away from the group charging us, and quickly outpaced them, but then my stomach dropped when I saw six of the large-clawed dinos pop out of the fern hedges some forty yards ahead.

These fuckers were herding us.

“Hold on!” I shouted to Sheela as I pulled left on Hope’s reins and pushed into her flank with my right leg.

The parasaur twisted to the left, and we shot toward the stump of the massive hollowed out tree. The twist in our direction allowed me to see the two groups of raptors chasing us, and Sheela reached over her shoulder so she could free her bow.

Hope let out a startled toot from her horn as I steered her into the wide open maw of the fallen log. There was plenty of space up top, but I still ducked my head a bit to ensure that I didn’t get clipped.

Sheela had her bow out, and her left arm slid free of my chest. I let out a cry of terror when I felt her let me go, but before I could reach back to grab her, I felt her legs wrap around my abdomen. I spared a quick glance behind me and saw the blonde warrior woman twist her upper body around so she could point her bow at the group chasing us. She was using her legs to anchor herself to my body, and I lowered my left hand to her shins to ensure that she didn’t accidentally bump loose.

Up ahead, the ground of the log-tunnel was broken by a jagged spike of petrified wood. It jutted out some four feet like a mini mountain, and I realized there wasn’t enough space to steer Hope around it.

“I’m going to jump it!” I shouted as I urged my mount to run faster. Hope sensed my desire, and she ducked her head down so that she could get more speed.

I felt Sheela’s arm pull her bow back. Then I heard the twang of the string and a howl of agony behind us. I didn’t have time to look, but I guessed that we had one less deinonychus to worry about.

Then we reached the hurdle of sharp wood, and I prayed for Hope to jump over it without cutting her belly open.

There was a moment of weightlessness, and I almost dropped my right hand from the reins so that I could push Sheela’s thighs into me. It would have been a mistake though since Hope’s landing was really bumpy, and I felt my legs start to slip free of the saddle.

“Shit!” I growled as I yanked my hand on the rein so that I could stay on top of Hope’s back. The movement made the parasaur toot angrily, but she didn’t stop her sprint.

“How soon until we are out of the tunnel?” Sheela shouted as I felt her body tense with the movement of another bow pull.

“Fifty yards!” I guesstimated as I looked at the distant hole of dim golden light.

Sheela let loose with another arrow, but I didn’t hear a scream behind us. I did, however, see a flurry of movement through the cracks in the ceiling of the massive hollow tree trunk. They were quick whips of black and green color that blocked the sunset from spilling through the breaks of the wood, and I guessed that some of the raptors were pursuing us from on top of the tree.

These fuckers were way too smart.

“We are going to have company as soon as we get outside!” I shouted to Sheela as I willed Hope to try to run faster. My eyes were stinging from our speed, and the cracks of gold light coming through the musty wood were causing a kaleidoscope effect on my vision.

Twenty yards left, and the shadows from the roof made me think the ones up there were just a bit behind us.

“How many are behind us?” I shouted without looking back.

“Five!” Sheela replied over the sound of the wind blowing past my ears, and I guessed that four of the ten had jumped up onto the log.

We reached the end of the hollowed out redwood, and I heard Sheela shoot another arrow. A howl of surprise echoed from behind us, and I guessed that she had gotten another.

Then we shot out of the end of the log like a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun.

I looked up as we ran and saw the raptors leap into the air. Sheela shouted something that I couldn’t understand, and I pulled Hope’s reins to the right while I pushed on my left foot. The parasaur angled in the direction I wanted to go, but two of the raptors still landed right next to her.

And they brought their clawed feet down as they landed.

The one on my left missed tearing my leg in half by just a few inches. His oversized toe claw tore through the saddle instead, and I kicked out with my left leg to push him away so he couldn’t bite at my chest.

The one on the right actually nicked Hope’s front shoulder, and the parasaur let out a startled honk from her horn as she twisted away from her attacker. I hadn’t quite expected Hope to shift as she did, but it wouldn’t have been much of a problem if the raptor on my left hadn’t sliced through the cord that held the saddle in place.

Hope twisted left, and our saddle kept going forward. Both Sheela and I were flung from the top of the parasaur’s back and we rolled on the ground like tossed marbles.

For half a moment, the world was just green grass, brown tree trunks, and a spinning blend of those colors. I rolled across a surprisingly soft ground and tried to protect my head the best I could with my arms. A rock dug into my shoulder a moment before I stopped tumbling, but it hadn’t really injured me, and I was able to pop back up on my feet only a second after Sheela.

Then I saw the raptors closing in on us.

I knew that Sheela and I were about to die, so I commanded Hope to keep running home. The saddle was still beside me, and even though the clay jug of water had broken in the fall, my spear was still in its holder, and I was able to yank it free before the group of green feathered assholes made it to us.

“Stay close together!” Sheela ordered in a surprisingly calm voice as she pulled an arrow from her quiver and put it against her bowstring.

“Okay!” I replied, but my voice cracked in the middle, and I felt my limbs start to go numb. I’d been brave this morning and taken on four of these fucks, but this was almost twice that number, and they were charging toward us at full speed.

I lowered my spear and then watched Sheela’s arrow leave her bow in slow motion. It connected with the face of the fucker closest to us, and I pointed the tip of my own weapon at the raptor that was next in line.

Then they were on us.

Chapter 4

I thrust my spear forward and up at the green feathered raptor leaping toward me. His jump had taken him over the flailing body of the dino that Sheela just arrowed in the face, and the angle of his descent gave me a good view of his throat.

I didn’t really have any training with a spear beside the few hours I’d spent with Sheela and the combat I’ve been through, but the weapon was really easy to use, and I found it easy enough to angle the tip upward toward the target. I was also a bit lucky, and the point tore through the raptor’s throat at the side, and the beast didn’t get stuck on the weapon. Instead, he flopped on the ground beside me with a spray of crimson rain.

I carried my thrust to my left and aimed my weapon at the other fucker jumping toward Sheela. The cat-woman was still calmly loading an arrow, and I wondered if she somehow thought that she’d be able to get it on the string, pull it back, and then kill the raptor as it was in mid-air.

Maybe she could, but I was still going to try my best to defend her.

My spear-tip hit the thing in the chest below its left wing. He hadn’t leapt as high as the first one I’d just killed, but the impact of my thrust was powerful enough to dig a good four inches into his flesh, and the thing let out a screech when I managed to heave it backward into its friends.

“Good!” Sheela said as she raised her bow sideways and let loose with the arrow she had half-nocked.

The bolt flew the ten feet between the raptors and took another one in the chest. It screeched with surprise when it realized that it had gotten hit and then slowed its running speed suddenly.

And all the other raptors skidded to a halt.

“What. The. Fuck?” I whispered slowly as the raptors all turned to one Sheela had just hit.

“Maybe that is the leader,” Sheela said as we both took a step away from the group of dinosaurs. They were all hissing at the one Sheela had just shot, and it, in turn was hissing back at them between wheezes.

“Shit,” I gasped as I realized that they had some way of communicating to each other. “I totally underestimated these fucks.”

“There is a tree behind us,” Sheela whispered as she spared a quick glance back. “We need to be near it so they cannot surround us.

“Got it,” I replied as we started to step backward. Unfortunately, our movement got the attention of the raptors, and they turned away from their boss to screech at us.

Sheela let go of the arrow she had nocked, and it hit the leader again in the chest. He let out a bellow of surprise, and I had to make a quick few jabbing motions with my spear to keep the group at bay.

Then, just like Sheela predicted, they began to circle us.

“Fuck,” I gasped as we backpedaled toward the massive redwood tree behind us.

The leader was still standing, even with the two arrows sticking out of his ribs, and he let out a snarl as he took a few steps toward us. Most of these raptors were about the size of giant dogs, maybe two hundred pounds at the most, but this guy looked almost big enough for me to ride, and he must have been around two hundred and fifty pounds. He was probably the alpha for the whole little family we’d been murdering for the last day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d decided that it was time to deal with us personally.

But then again, these fucking feathered dinos probably weren’t that smart.

At least, I hoped they weren’t smart enough to plan this whole ambush.

My feet felt the roots of the redwood under me, and I glanced down so I didn’t trip over anything. One of the raptors on my right saw me look away, and he darted forward toward my leg at the same time as one on the left jumped at Sheela. Her bow sang as I shoved my spear forward. My weapon went right into my attacker’s jaw, and it let out a hysterical screech when I tore through the back of its throat. The raptor Sheela shot with her bow tumbled on the ground between us and the group of his friends, and I saw the warrior woman had put her arrow through his throat.

“Victor, some of my arrows fell out of my quiver when we fell. I only have two left.”

“Fucking shit fuck,” I growled as I tried to keep my wits about me. There were still too many of these assholes around us, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to kill them all.

Maybe Sheela could.

“I’ll give you my spear after you use your arrows,” I said. I hated the idea of giving up my weapon, but Sheela was a better warrior than me, and it was the best chance we had for surviving.

“I believe we can climb the tree,” she said as the butt of my spear bumped into the massive trunk.

“Uhh, how? The thing is like ten feet in diameter, and the closest branch is thirty feet up.”

“The saddle is made of many lengths of cord,” she said as she pulled one of her arrows back. “We can use it to wrap around the trunk and then scale it.”

“Shit!” I shouted as one of the raptors jumped at me. The point of my spear missed him, and I overstepped a bit. His jaws snapped down and around my weapon, and I could have sworn that his teeth closed around the hairs of my knuckles.

“The saddle is all the way over there!” I shouted as I nodded toward the device Trel had made. It was some twenty feet to our left, and Sheela would have to run around the group of raptors to get to it.

Or she would have to go through them.

“I can get it,” she said nonchalantly.

“Uhh, then how are we going to untie all the rope and wrap it around the tree?” I asked as I swung my spear around to keep the raptors at bay. I figured we had about half a minute before they realized that they could all just attack at once, and then Sheela and I would be lunch.

“You can climb up first while I defend with your spear, then I will climb up.”

“I don’t know how to climb up the tree like--” A raptor interrupted me by making a sliding type movement toward my legs. I was caught completely off guard by his maneuver, and my spear passed harmlessly over his head. I stepped back in time to keep my legs from getting sliced open by his snapping jaws, but I knew I’d damned near gotten killed.

We couldn’t do this for much longer. There were too many of these oversized roosters, and they were slowly figuring out how to coordinate attacks.

“I will climb using my claws and then lower a rope to you. Then you can climb up.” Sheela’s plan sounded less crazy than me trying to lumberjack up the tree, but there was one thing she probably didn’t realize.

I couldn’t really do a pull-up, and I doubted that I’d be able to climb a rope fast enough.

A cold realization came over me, and I felt my brain begin to calm. At the moment, there were only three possible outcomes to this situation. The first was that both Sheela and I would get killed and devoured by the group of snarling raptors. The second was that one of us would live, and the other would die. The third was that we both lived.

I didn’t think I’d be able to climb the rope fast enough, but if I could buy some time, my friend could live.

Even if it meant my own death.

“Go run and get the saddle.” The words escaped my mouth as if someone else had said them. I almost didn’t feel like I was in control of my body anymore. I was looking at myself over my shoulder as if this was a game I played.

“I will wait until the ones on the left are--” Sheela interrupted her own words by sending an arrow into the one on our far left, it stumbled away from us when the shaft pierced its eyeball, and the two beside it turned to look at their snarling friend.

Then Sheela sprinted away from me.

The big-clawed raptors turned toward her, then glanced back toward me, and seemed conflicted about what to do. It was a bit of a blessing, and I stepped toward the one who had almost bitten off my hand and jabbed my spear at his face. The point of my weapon hit him in the head but didn’t pierce his skull. Still, he twisted away with a surprised screech of pain, and the entire group turned their attention back to me.

Uh oh.

I stepped back as the alpha raptor darted toward me. He moved like lightning, even though the asshole had two arrows sticking out of his chest, but I managed to lean my face out of the way before he could bite it off.

Another one on my left made a lunge at me, but I kicked out with my left leg and managed slam my foot into his throat before he could snap his jaws over my hip. I spun my spear around to the side and then thrust the weapon into the face of another raptor that had leapt toward me. He screamed when I tore his face open, and blood showered the ground as he turned to dash away from me.

I turned toward the saddle, but it wasn’t where I had seen it lying, and my heart dropped into my stomach. Where was Sheela? Had one of the raptors gotten her before she grabbed the saddle? Then where was it? I couldn’t believe that she’d been able to grab it so fast, but I didn’t hear her return.

“Victor!” she shouted from above me, and I raised my head slightly to see one of our ropes fall through the air. She had somehow already retrieved the saddle, and climbed up the tree, tied all the ropes from the saddle together, and then thrown it down to me in like thirty seconds.

“I’m not going to be able to pull myself up quick enough!” I shouted as I swung my spear around like it was some sort of long sword. The raptors were starting to close in around me, and I saw the alpha’s eyes focus on the rope next to me.

“Slip your leg through the loop and then jump when I say!” she shouted, and I glanced down to see that the end of the rope tied into a noose-like knot.

“I’m in!” I shouted as I kicked my leg through the loop and thrust my spear at the alpha. I was a good two feet too far away though, and the animal didn’t even flinch when my spear missed him.

“Jump!” she shouted, and I coiled my legs before I jumped up and grabbed as high as I could on the rope with my left hand.

I slingshotted off the ground as if a giant had flicked me.

The rope tightened around my groin like a vice, and I let out a scream of agony as my nuts got squeezed. I almost dropped the spear I carried in my right hand when the shock spread through my groin, but I somehow kept hold of it, and then found myself face to face with Sheela.

“Hello,” she said with a half smile. She was dangling from the other end of the rope, and I realized that she had thrown herself off the tree branch and used the momentum of her fall to lift me off the ground. We were both hanging some fifteen feet in the air, and I glanced down to see the angry group of raptors circling below us.

“Hi,” I gasped as another wave of agony coursed through my stomach and legs. My vision was spinning a bit, and I felt like I had to throw up.

But at least I was alive.

“Give me your spear,” Sheela asked, and I handed it to her without question. The cat-woman grabbed it with her right hand, and then I watched her use her left hand to climb up the rope. Her movements looked effortless, but I could see the long muscles in her arm, shoulder, and back tense a bit each time she pulled herself up on the rope. She used her feet to hold onto the rope when she had to reach up, and I couldn’t imagine the amount of muscle control she must have possessed.

She really was amazing.

“I will coil the rope around the branch to keep it from unraveling,” Sheela said once she reached the branch, and I watched her wind her length of rope around under mine so that it wouldn’t slip loose. “Can you climb? If not, I will pull you up.”

“I’ll… try…” I gasped through clenched teeth as I reached my right arm up to join my left. The agony in my nuts was now making my lower body numb, and I knew I couldn’t do a pull-up to save my life. Still, I wanted to give it a try before I had to tell Sheela that she needed to haul me up like a bucket of bricks.

I pulled my elbows down toward my hips and let out a gasp of surprise when my body easily rose up the length of rope.

Now that the tension was out of the cord, the pressure on my groin was a lot less. A bit of relief flooded through my stomach, and I reached with my left arm to grab higher on the rope. Then I did it again with my right hand and was soon pulling myself up on the tree branch with Sheela’s help.

“What is wrong? Are you injured?” her hands rested on my shoulder while her golden eyes stared at me with obvious concern.

“I’ll be okay,” I whispered as I carefully pulled the rope from between my legs.

The raptors were now far below us, and I saw a few of them attempt to climb the tree. Their claws couldn’t find purchase on the bark, and they kept tumbling away from the trunk. The scene might have been a bit comical if we hadn’t almost died and my body wasn’t in agonizing pain.

“You do not look okay,” Sheela whispered.

“The rope just got me,” I said as I gestured down to my belt, and I saw her gold eyes open wide with understanding.

“Ahh. I see.”

“Thanks for the save,” I said as I forced myself to stand up on the branch. It was surprisingly wide, maybe two feet in diameter, but I still kept one hand on the tree trunk to steady myself. Then I pumped my feet up and down in an attempt to force blood back down my legs.

“It was the only solution I could think of. I am sorry for your pain.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll be alright. We are alive, that’s what is important, but now we have bigger problems.”

“Agreed,” Sheela said. “We are still running distance from our camp, but I am afraid that the raptors will wait for us.”

“I feel like these guys have been stalking us,” I said as I looked at the large alpha raptor. He was standing back from the group and looking up at me with angry eyes. “The biggest one that you already put two arrows in seems to be the leader.”

“He is larger than the others,” Sheela agreed.

“Do you have any arrows left?” I asked as I glanced at the bow lying on the branch.

“I have one,” she said as she held it up. “It is a far shot, though. I do not think I will make it.”

“You hit one of the fuckers jumping over the door in mid-leap.”

“Yes, but that was only from twenty feet. He is at least fifty.”

“Is your Critical Strike skill ready?” I asked.

“Do you think I should use it?” She raised a blonde eyebrow slightly.

“I’m just wondering what will happen if we take the head guy out. Will the rest still stay to bother us? Or will they leave us alone?”

“I can try,” she said as bent over to grab her bow. She turned her ass to me when she leaned over, and even though my groin was feeling all sorts of agony, I couldn’t help but stare at the place where her bikini bottom barely hid her vagina.

Sheela stood up with her bow nocked, blinked her eyes twice, and then adjusted her aim a bit lower. She held there for half a moment frozen like some sort of Greek Goddess statue, and then the arrow left her weapon with an angry twang.

I watched the shaft arch through the air before it plummeted below the line of our branch. It seemed to gain speed as it dropped, and then it sank into the head of the massive alpha raptor with a wet thud that echoed through the redwood grove.

The alpha raptor dropped to the ground instantly, and its body didn’t even spasm.

“Yes!” I shouted as the other raptors turned toward their boss. One of them took a few steps closer and bent its neck down to touch the corpse. It seemed to realize that its leader was dead after a few seconds of investigation, and it let out a guttural growl.

The remaining raptors seemed confused by the alpha’s death, and they spent the next few minutes milling around the base of our tree. Before they were either trying to climb it, or were glancing up in our direction, but now they wandered like dogs trying to pick up a scent, and they weren’t even bothering to look up at Sheela and me.

A few minutes later, they all dispersed in different directions.

“Wow, that was weird,” I said. “It’s like they suddenly all got stupid after you killed him.”

“Interesting,” Sheela said. “It is understandable though. The leader is the most important part of a group. Without them, order and tactics are often forgotten.”

“Maybe with animals,” I said with a shrug. “But it just seems odd that they were so much smarter with the big guy around.”

“Try to recall how Trel, Galmine, and I were surviving without you,” Sheela said. “We were not faring so well. It would be difficult if we lost you. The three of us are friends, but you give us a purpose and keep us united.”

“Awww, thanks, Sheela,” I said as I turned to her. “You are pretty damn awesome yourself. You were shooting arrows at those raptors while holding onto me with your legs, and you scaled this tree, tied the rope, and hauled my ass up in less than half a minute. I’d be all sorts of dead without you.”

“I am happy to help,” she said with a wide grin that showed her sharp cat-like teeth. “I…” she started to say, but then her voice trailed off and her eyes stared into mine.

“Hmmm?” I asked as I shook my leg to get more feeling back into my crotch.

“It is nothing,” she said quickly as she looked down at her feet. “I do not know if the danger has passed. How long do you think we should wait?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t even know if Hope made it back to camp. I’m actually kind of worried about her returning without us. Trel and Galmine will be concerned.”

“Trel will come looking for us,” Sheela said.

“You think?” I asked with a snicker. “The farthest she ever came out of the cave was to the fort. She doesn’t seem interested in exploring the wilderness.”

“She will for you,” Sheela said. “She has developed deep feelings for you.”

“Well, it’s dangerous for her or Galmine to leave the camp. Hell, it is dangerous for you and me to leave the camp.”

“I agree,” Sheela said as she gestured down to the corpse of the raptor. “After seeing how the group responded to his death, I believe that you are too valuable to risk on these missions. If you can tame a dinosaur to carry me, I believe a natural evolution of our progress will involve you staying in the camp where it is safer.”

“Nope,” I replied. “I’m not sending you out alone if I don’t have to.”

“It makes sense,” Sheela said. “I am the most suited to this dangerous role, and my loss will not impact the efficiency of the camp. Especially when you have fish traps, water capturing, and farming figured out.”

“No, Sheela,” I said. “You are more than just someone who gets our food and water. You are my friend, and I need you. Also not to mention, that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing half the time, I’m still learning from you every day.” Her eyes opened a bit at my words, and she crossed her arms.

“I understand, but your needs are just emotional. It is not--”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” I interrupted her. “You were depressed on your home world because you needed to feel like you had a place. Now you do. Your place is by my side. I need you, so don’t talk anymore about how expendable you are. That’s an order.”

“Yes, Victor,” she said as she closed her eyes and bowed her head.

“I’m going to see if I can get Hope to come back to us,” I said. “She might already be back at the fort, but maybe she is still roaming, and she’ll return.”

“What if the raptors are still around?” Sheela asked.

“Then I’ll tell her to run,” I said. “Hope is faster than them with me on her back, so she’s gotta be way faster without me. The only reason they caught up to us is because she carried both you and me, and they laid an ambush for us. Hold on, let me try to focus on this for a few minutes.”

I thought about Hope, and then kind of imagined her running down around the bottom of our tree. It was similar to the instructions I’d mentally give her when I was close, but I always did those when I had a line of sight on her. I had no idea how it would work when I didn’t know how far away she was from me.

I thought about Hope, and our tree and Hope coming to the foot of our tree for what felt like fifteen minutes. My head actually started to hurt from my extended bout of concentration, and I finally let out a sigh and decided to take a bit of a break.

“Looks like she’s not com--”

“Hey! Victor! Sheela!” I heard a voice cry out from behind us, and we both spun to see Trel riding on Hope’s back. The obsidian-haired woman had her spider-legs curled up behind her like wings, and she was scanning the forest with her clawed hand over her brow.

“Trel!” Sheela and I shouted, and our friend immediately looked up to see us.

“There you are!” Trel said with an exasperated sigh. “What are you doing? You were supposed to be getting water, not sitting up in a tree.”

“Uhhh, we were attacked by raptors,” I said.

“So?” Hope continued her trek toward the tree and then stopped right where I had imagined she would and began to munch on some ferns.

“There were many of them,” Sheela said.

“So?” Trel repeated. “You should have just killed them instead of climbing a tree.”

“Ugh,” I groaned as I tried to control my anger. “We tried. There were just too many of them and we had to--”

“I’m playing with you!” Trel laughed. “Can’t you take a joke?”

“Oh,” both Sheela and I said.

“Yeah, we all got scared when Hope came back alone. Galmine, Kacerie, and I were arguing about what to do, but then Hope started scratching at the gate and honking. I wondered if she knew where you were, so I got on her back.

“Damn, good job, Trel,” I said.

I gestured for Sheela to climb down the rope as Trel dismounted, and the cat-woman did so. My palms got sweaty when I looked at the distance down to the ground, but I remembered how easily it had been for me to climb the rope up, and I leaned over the branch to grasp the rope. A few dozen seconds later and I was standing on the ground and Trel’s lips were pressed against mine.

“I was worried,” she whispered in my ear after our passionate kiss ended.

“Me too,” I replied. “We are going to lose this rope, and you’ll need to make a new saddle, and we’ll need to make another trip back with our spare pots for water.”

“I can get the rope,” Trel said as her spider legs extended from her back.

I watched her scale the tree like some sort of Doctor Octopus from the Spiderman comics. Her arachnid legs did all the work of clinging to the wall, and her human body just floated in the air. It took her less than five seconds to reach the branch and untangle the rope, and she descended even faster.

“Easy,” Trel said as she handed the coiled rope to Sheela. “You know, I’ve never been this far out of the camp before.” She looked up to the trees, and I saw her wink her eyes a few times.

“What are you thinking?” I asked as I turned an eye toward Hope. The parasaur didn’t seem worried about anything, so I guessed that the raptors were long gone.

“We could build in the trees,” she said as she blinked her eyes to use her Eye-Q. “They are very strong and we would be safe high off the ground.”

“Hmm,” I said as I looked up at the tall trunks of the massive redwoods. “What about a farm or stable for our tamed dinos?”

“Might be useful as a backup fort,” Trel said with a shrug of her shoulders. “Besides, you have only tamed two dinosaurs so far, so I’m not thinking our stables need to be that big.”

“Hey, I’m working on it!” I said with a laugh. Damn, it felt good to be alive. It felt great to kiss Trel, and it felt wonderful to know there was going to be a tomorrow. For a few minutes, I was sure I was going to die, and I’d been okay with it because I knew Sheela might live.

“Well, you need to work on getting water, and then clay, and then inseminating me,” Trel said with a coy smile. “So let’s get back on Hope, return to the fort, and complete our tasks.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a mock salute.

Then the two beautiful women and I climbed onto Hope’s back and rode back to our fort.

Chapter 5

Sheela and I went right back out as soon as we returned Trel to the fort. Galmine and Kacerie didn’t want us to leave again, especially after we told them about the organized raptor attack, but we really didn’t have a choice, we had no water left, and we had broken two of our jugs. We did have four more that we could use for water, but I hadn’t planned on breaking two of them, and now we really needed clay.

The ride back to the stream was uneventful, but Sheela and I were on high alert and knew that we would be in big trouble if we got attacked again. We didn’t have a saddle to help us stay on Hope, and we could only really carry one spear and two jugs between us. The trip was tense, and we both breathed a long sigh of relief once we had returned safely with the water.

“Victor, I believe we should skip the trip to the lake for clay,” Sheela said as she gestured to the sun. There was only a sliver left of light, and the air was beginning to fill with the sound of frogs and crickets.

“Damn,” I sighed and tried to rearrange my plans so that we all wouldn’t waste too much time. I intended to have Galmine show Kacerie her clay handling techniques while Sheela, Trel, and I worked on baskets. Then, when the clay was drying, Galmine and Kacerie could continue with either baskets or cordage.

“Trel,” I called out to the spider-woman as Sheela and I slid off Hope’s back.

“Yes?” the obsidian-haired woman answered without looking over to me. She had laid out some of our thinner poles on the ground in a trapezoid shape, and I saw her blink her eyes a few times as she tapped her lips with one of her black fingers.

“Can you work on the saddle tonight and tomorrow? That is the priority now.”

“Victor.” She sighed and finally looked over to me. “Priority is my pregnancy; everything else is secondary.”

“If we don’t have the saddle, it will be hard for us to get a lot of clay,” I said. “If we don’t get enough clay, we’ll have to keep making runs for water every day, which will take time away from working on the improved fort.”

“Not a big deal,” she said. “It only takes you a few minutes to get water every day.” The woman turned her black eyes away from me and looked up to the branches of the massive redwood tree we had built our fort walls against. Then she looked down at the trapezoid shaped array of wood poles on the ground.

“Except today Sheela and I were almost killed by raptors,” I said as I tried to control my voice. She was suddenly being difficult, but I remembered who I was talking to. Trel was brilliant, but also selfish. I was going to have to show her what was in it for her.

“But you weren’t,” Trel said as she glanced back up to the tree again.

“If if I had, what would that mean for your babies?” My question caught her attention, and she turned down from the tree so she could see me.

“Hmm, I see your point, Victor. I will work on the saddle tonight.” Trel turned her black eyes to Sheela and cleared her throat. “You are both going to be astounded by what I am about to say.”

“Astounded?” Sheela asked as her cat-eyes opened.

“Yes,” Trel sighed. “I’m afraid I have made a mistake.”

Sheela and I both looked at each other and then turned back to Trel.

“I was thinking of the trees in the forest, and I realized that we could easily occupy this one.” Trel pointed up above her to our tree, and I cranked my neck back so I could see it. The massive redwood was probably a good sixty feet in diameter, and the nearest branches were probably that high off the ground.

“How?” I asked.

“It would be difficult without nails,” Trel said, “but I realized I can use rope to suspend platforms. I can ascend the trunk easily, and we can have a rope ladder descend so the rest of you can follow.”

“So we are going to need a shitload of rope,” I said.

“Yes,” Trel said. “But the cordage we are making with plant fibers will not be strong enough. This is the mistake I made.”

“How are we going to make stronger rope?” I asked.

“Dinosaur sinew,” Trel said with a sly smile. “I will still need a lot of it, but it will last much longer than what we are using now, and it will support more weight. I made a mistake by not thinking of it sooner.”

“We have a pile of raptors out there,” I said as I pointed to the door of our fort.

“Yes, but night approaches. If they are still there in the morning, we can use them, or we can all drag them back into the fort and then begin the long process of cutting them open and tearing out their tendons and ligaments.”

“We also need to get fibers to make baskets,” I said as I went back to my plan about what to do tonight without clay.

“That will be much easier to gather,” Trel said. “You should leave now and get them. The sinew approach will take a long time for us to process. We will need to tear them out of the corpses, then let them dry, then cut them into thinner strips, then wind them together, then combine them into thicker cords, then rope. It will take two, maybe three times as long to come up with cordage using it, but the result will be much stronger.”

“It would be much better for bows,” Sheela said.

“Yes. It is a better material. I am apologizing because I didn’t think of it before, and I’m angry for the time we wasted.”

“That’s okay, Trel,” I said. “We aren’t used to doing this. We are all learning as we live. We know now. If the raptor bodies are still there tomorrow, we’ll get what sinew we can, if not, there will be other fuckers that attack us. We’ll use every piece of them to survive.”

“Good,” she said. “Now, before I get to the saddle, let me show you this platform. This will be the side support structure. I will join them together with slots and cordage. The shape of the trapezoid creates a slope on this one end. I will just need to make a rectangle at the back, steps on the front, and a floor to it. Then we will be able to step up and stand at an elevated position.”

“It is a good design,” Sheela said.

“Of course it is!” Trel beamed. “Now go get more material for cordage, and I will begin building a new saddle. Bring as much as you can before the sun sets.”

“Got it,” I said.

“I’ll put the water in the hut and then join you,” Sheela said as she carried the two jugs away.

I gave Trel a smile, and then turned to walk back to Hope, but the obsidian-haired woman grabbed my arm.

“We have a problem that you will need to deal with,” she whispered.

“Oh?” I asked.

“Kacerie is not willing to leave the hut tonight. I will not make love to you outside like some sort of animal. You need to deal with her so that she gives us our privacy.”

“Deal with her?” I asked with a bit of surprise since Trel had emphasized those words.

“Yes, kill her or something. She is annoying and getting in the way of my pregnancy.”

“I’m sure she can be reasoned with,” I said. “No one needs to kill anyone.”

“I said ‘or something.’” Trel huffed. “If it were up to me, I’d just kill her.”

“Trel,” I started to say, but she continued.

“I knew that would anger you! That is why I haven’t done it. You think she is useful, for whatever reason. Anyways, you are our leader and my selected mate. Just tell her where her place is in our tribe so that I can give you a night of pleasure. My womb is ripe and craves your seed.” Trel’s dark eyes pierced mine, and I felt a shiver of excitement descend my spine.

“I’ll fix it,” I said as I saw Sheela exit the hut. Neither of the two women seemed to like Kacerie, but I wasn’t going to judge her until I spent more time with the woman.

Sheela and I jumped back on Hope and trotted out of the doorway. The trip to the closest group of ferns was really quick, but we were going to be able to carry more on the back of Hope than if Sheela and I had just run there.

“Now it appears something is bothering you,” Sheela said as I cut the dozenth fern away from the ground and stacked it in her arms.

“Neither you nor Trel seem to like Kacerie,” I said. “I need to spend some time with her.”

“Agreed,” Sheela said. “Galmine, Trel, and I have developed a strong bond with you. I believe Kacerie will as well.”

“Yeah,” I said as I put another bundle of ferns into Sheela’s arms. “That seems like enough. Let’s--”

A loud roar cut through the forest. It was almost deafening, and I saw the fallen leaves and needles on the ground actually vibrate.

“Get the fuck home!” I hissed as I turned to Hope. The parasaur’s head was held up high, and I saw her twist her neck toward where the noise had come from.

Sheela and I ran to the side of our steed, and I helped my friend mount so that she didn’t drop all the ferns. Then I leapt up in front of her, and Hope sprinted back to the gate. Another roar sounded as soon as we made it through, and I quickly tied our locking ropes around the door handles so that it couldn’t be moved.

Kacerie and Trel were running toward me on bare feet, and I saw Galmine poke her head out of the hut’s door.

“What was that? How close is it? Do we need to hide?” Kacerie asked.

“Something big, I don’t know, and we have nowhere to hide,” I answered as I grabbed some of the ferns from Sheela.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Aren’t you our leader? You are supposed to--”

“Let’s go in the hut, eat dinner, and work on these ferns,” I said to the women. Kacerie’s face turned red when I didn’t answer her, but Sheela and Trel moved to follow my instructions, and the pink-haired woman was forced to follow.

The inside of the hut was a bit cramped with five of us, but I opted to sit with my back at the doorway, and we soon had the ferns distributed among us.

“We don’t have clay, so we are going to work on cordage and baskets,” I began as soon as we all sat down. “Trel and I are going to figure out better ways to make baskets, while Sheela and Galmine teach Kacerie how to make cordage. We’ll use the center parts of the fern for the baskets and the outer parts for the cordage so we don’t waste any of the parts. Stack the basket parts over by Trel and me. Any questions?”

“What are we going to do if the monster that roared comes?” Kacerie asked.

“We’ll probably die,” I said with a shrug.

“What kind of answer is that?” she hissed. “You won’t save us?”

“Do you want me to save you?” I asked her with a half-smile.

“Uhh, yeah.”

“Cool, don’t worry then. I’ll save you.”

Kacerie’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, you should,” Galmine said. “Victor is incredibly brave. He’s fought many dinosaurs and never been beaten. He will protect us. You don’t need to worry.”

Kacerie rolled her eyes, but I noticed Sheela’s mouth open wide. She turned to look at me, and her eyes seemed to glow with the firelight.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her, but the cat-woman shut her mouth and then shook her head.

“Get to work,” I said. “We can’t do anything about that big motherfucker finding us, but we can focus on the baskets and cordage. Make it happen.”

My friends all nodded, and we split into the two task groups.

During the last week of fort-building with Trel, we’d developed a much closer relationship. She used to belittle me at every chance, insult me when I made a mistake, or harass me when I tried to work with her. Our friendship had reached a turning point when she told me that she loved me and didn’t want to lose me. It had triggered an alert in my Eye-Q and added her to my list of “Women” assets. I still didn’t know exactly how the system knew for sure that she should be on the list, but as we sat and puzzled through the best way to weave baskets, I knew the spider-woman had come to value me as a friend and leader.

Soon, I hoped she would value me as a lover.

After a few different attempts, we came up with two basket designs we knew would work for our purposes. The first we created by taking the smaller offshoot leaves from the ferns, stacking them together in bunches of ten that were about a finger in length, and the bending them in half around another bunch. We then tied them together with one of the longer arms of the leaf Sheela, Kacerie, and Galmine were using to make cordage. The design took on a bit of a circular-spiral shape after we did this a few dozen times, and the tightness of the leaves meant that mud, clay, or any other semi-liquid type fill would have trouble escaping. We made the bottom circular-spiral about a foot in diameter and then used the same “stacked and bent leaf” method to create rolled sides that we tied to the base. The end result was a cylinder basket with three-foot tall sides and a circumference that was easy to wrap our arms around. There were small holes in a few spots where we didn’t quite get the leaves tight enough, but it was going to be the perfect basket to carry clay or mud in. The best part of the design was that it was made entirely with the smaller parts of the fern, and it incorporated using the leaves we really didn’t have much use for with our cordage making process. It left the larger center stalks available to peel and use for cordage, but Trel and I came up with our second design that used those thicker parts to make baskets that would be great for trapping fish or carrying ferns.

For our second design, we took eight thick center stalks from the fern leaves and laid them out on the ground in a star shape. We bound the center where these eight stalks intersected with cordage, and then we weaved one of the stalks using an alternating pattern of up and over or down and under each of the star arms.

The concept was pretty simple, and we were able to push the weaved parts closer to the intersection and create a similar base to what we had with our leaf designed basket. It wasn’t nearly as liquid-tight, but it was strong, and I was confident the bottom wouldn’t fall out if we put weight on it. When we were happy with the size of the base, we just bent up the arms of the star and then wove more of the stalks through the arms. This basket wasn’t near as air-tight as the first one, but it would be able to hold leaves, firewood, and trap fish just fine. It also didn’t use the same parts of the fern as the earlier design. We might even be able to craft stronger baskets with this design if we used really thin tree stalks.

We didn’t hear anymore roars from distant dinosaurs while we puzzled through the baskets, and my friends quickly began chatting about plans for the fort, starting a farm, and building fish traps. Kacerie didn’t really participate in the conversation, but I noticed she was exceptionally skilled at winding the cordage. She wasn’t as quick as Trel, but I could tell that her background in hair styling had given her a lot of finger dexterity.

After we finished the first two baskets, Trel and I showed the other women the designs. Galmine continued with her cordage making, but Sheela and Kacerie switched tasks and went to work building more baskets.

“I am going to go work on the saddle replacement,” Trel said as she grabbed a coil of rope from the floor of the tent.

“It is dark out there,” I said.

“I can see in the dark,” she said. “I’ll return for dinner. I believe you have another job to attend to?”

“Yeah,” I replied, and I saw Sheela shoot me a questioning look.

Trel left without saying another word, and I turned my attention to Kacerie. I didn’t really know how to approach the subject. It seemed as if I was being a bit of a dick by asking these women to leave the hut so that Trel and I could make love.

“Kacerie, you are doing a great job weaving those baskets,” I said.

“Ahh, thanks,” she said as she looked up from her work. “It’s pretty simple.”

“It’s a big help. I know this has been a hard transition for you,” I said.

“You have no idea.” The woman sighed and closed her light-blue eyes.

“Well, I kind of do,” I said. “We all do. We were all taken from our worlds without any explanation and then just put here. We know what you are going through.”

“Do you?” she said as her eyes narrowed. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I’d like to know more,” I said with a shrug. “I think maybe we got off on the wrong foot.”

“What do you mean by wrong foot? I took my shoes off when you asked me.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “It’s a saying from my world. It means that we didn’t really get a chance to talk or become friends quickly. I just grabbed you from the raptors and got you back here.”

“Yeah,” she said with a shrug. “I already thanked you for that.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Can you tell us a bit about yourself?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Tell us about your world, and how you grew up, and your job. Did you have a family, or husband, or kids?”

“Oh ewwww no,” she said with a sour look on her beautiful face. “Kids are annoying. No husband either. I never found anyone good enough to marry, but I was dating four different men. All rich, of course, I was heading to meet one when I ended up here.”

“Like a date?” I asked.

“Sure.” She shrugged. “It was this expensive party-- look, you all don’t care, and I don’t care to talk about it. I’m here, working on this basket instead of lounging around my apartment, or going on dates, or working. It’s terrible.”

“Yeah, I get--”

“I could be dead,” she interrupted me, “but I’m guessing you saving me is just delaying the inevitable.”

“No,” I said. “We are going to live. We have a plan, and--”

“Weaving baskets?” she asked with disgust in her voice. “Did you hear the same roar I heard? Whatever made that sound isn’t going to care about the walls you built or the baskets we are making. You don’t even think you can fight it. How are we supposed to survive on this world? Everything wants to kill us. I thought you and Sheela were dead when Hope came back. I’m thankful you aren’t, but what about tomorrow?”

“You are right to be afraid,” I said, “but we can’t control the big dinosaur out there. All we can do is what we can do with what we have. Tonight we are weaving baskets, tomorrow we’ll be getting clay and making pots, then we’ll be making sinew rope and I’ll tame a larger dinosaur. We’ll build a bigger wall. We’ll build a farm. We’ll get stronger. In a few months, we’ll hear that roar and laugh about how worried we once were. We just have to keep moving and trying to survive. We can’t do anything about it now, but we will in a month.”

“So, just pray it doesn’t come eat us?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Or don’t bother. Just focus on what is in front of you.”

“Alright,” she said with a sigh. Then she looked down at her basket and continued her work.

I puzzled through how I was going to tell the three women that Trel and I needed the hut. It had been easier with Galmine, because I’d just come in last night to sleep, and the gray-skinned woman followed me inside. Now I was pretty much telling them that they needed to leave and stand outside while Trel and I had sex.

“So, I need to talk to the three of you about something,” I said after a few more minutes of pondering my words.

“Yes, Victor?” Galmine asked as she smiled at me.

“I have feelings for you, Galmine,” I said. “I had a wonderful time last night, and this morning.”

“I know.” She smiled sweetly at me.

“I also have feelings for Trel. I know we didn’t start off as friends, but we get along well together. She thinks I’ll be able to get her pregnant, but I don’t--”

“Victor!” I heard Trel hiss from outside of our hut, and I turned around to look out the curtain.

“What’s--”

“Come out here, please,” she asked, and I felt a little concerned because I’d never heard her use the word “please.”

I quickly stepped out of the hut and heard Sheela following me. The light from the white moon was pretty bright, so I could see the entire area of our walled-in camp.

“What is wrong?” I whispered to Trel.

“Come look,” she urged as she gestured toward the door. Sheela and I walked with her, and I started to hear angry squawks in the distance.

“Can you climb up the wall?” Trel asked as she pointed.

“I will lift you,” Sheela answered before I could, and the cat-woman held out her hands in a cradle as soon as we reached the logs.

I put my left boot in her hands, felt her pulse her arms two times, and then I pushed off the ground with my right leg as she lifted. Sheela was crazy strong, and I was easily able to pull myself up to the top points of our fort wall. Trel skittered up easily, and Sheela climbed up with only a little more effort.

“What am I looking at?” I asked as I felt a bit of fear descend my spine. I could smell something off in the air. Kind of like the time when I drove past farmlands that had just been fertilized.

“Look by the corpses you put down,” Trel said, and I glanced off into the darkness.

“I can’t really see anything,” I said.

“I can,” Sheela replied with a sigh.

“Oh wait,” I hissed as I started to see shapes move across the ground and lift into the air.

Then I realized that the screaming I heard in the distance was actually closer than I thought.

“They are fighting,” Sheela said as my own eyes struggled to make sense of the dark shapes fluttering through the moonlight.

“It is the orange birds and the larger green type, like the one that was in this tree,” Trel said.

“Pterodactyl,” I said.

“Whatever,” she replied. “There are hundreds of them. Some are going after the corpses, but others are trying to get into the cave.

As soon as she spoke, I heard a screech tear through the sky above us. It sounded like it was only a foot over our heads, and the three of us ducked.

“They are coming this way,” Sheela said.

“Fuck,” I groaned. “Alright. Everyone inside. We are done for the night. Let’s get something to eat, work on whatever baskets we need, and then see what tomorrow brings us.”

“But we have something to do tonight,” Trel sighed.

“I know, but it will have to wait.” I pushed away from the wall and dropped down to the floor of our camp just as another screech sounded above us. Trel and Sheela quickly followed, and we made haste back to our hut.

By the time we all got inside, the screams sounded like they were right above us.

“What is that?” Kacerie asked with obvious fear painted on her face.

“Two types of flying dinosaurs are fighting above us,” I explained. “We need to stay in here for the rest of the night.”

“They are ruining my planned pregnancy,” Trel growled as she sat down. “I don’t really want to have sex with them screaming above us, but I do suppose these are desperate times.”

“Trel,” I said. “We are going to have to try again tomorrow.”

“What?” she gasped. “Why?”

“Because,” I said as I gestured to the other women in the small hut.

“They can’t watch,” Trel crossed her arms. “I’m not into that.”

“Yeah, uhh no. Well, they can’t go outside. I think we are safe in here, but I don’t want anyone to get attacked.”

“Ugh!” Trel moaned. “Fine, give me a fern so that I might turn it into a--”

“I just used the last of them.” Kacerie frowned as she held up her half-made basket.

“Meeerrawww,” Trel groaned, and her spider legs tapped angrily against the ground. “This is unbelievably frustrating. Victor, I only have a few days of ovulation. Tomorrow you will perform your duties as my mate.”

“Yeah,” I said as I sat down next to her.

“You don’t seem excited enough, nor are you upset enough that we are unable to have sex right now.”

“Wait, you want me both excited and upset at the same time?” I tried not to laugh, but it came out anyway.

“Yes,” she replied seriously.

“I’ll work on that, but now, I’m going to sleep.” I couldn’t do anything about the massive aerial dinosaur battle going on outside, and the sound was extremely annoying, but not sleeping would cause me problems tomorrow.

And we had a lot of shit to do tomorrow.

“You do not want dinner?” Galmine asked me with concern.

“Naw,” I said. “I’m really tired, and we have a lot of work tomorrow.”

“What of Hope?” Sheela asked.

“I doubt that either of the flying dinos will attack her, but there isn’t anything we can do either way. There are hundreds out there, and they’ll tear us into pieces if we get their attention. I’m going to use my ability to make sure she stays calm.” I hadn’t gotten any sense of movement or heard any noise from Hope, but I tried to imagine her just laying down calmly and sleeping through all the racket in the air.

“I will also skip the meal then,” Trel proclaimed. “Victor, you must wrap your arms around me when you sleep. Understood?”

“Uhh, yeah.” Her words surprised me, but I lay out on the floor of our hut and held my arms open for her.

The spider woman let out a soft sigh and then slid down next to me. She pushed her face into my chest, and I felt her long pointy fingers kind of knead into my stomach.

“Arms. Around. Me.” Her voice was a whisper, but I followed her wishes, and she sighed again when she laid the side of her head on my bicep.

“I like your scent,” Trel whispered softly in my ear. “I was foolish to treat you as I once did. Tomorrow I will make it up to you.” She was only wearing her tight silk bra and boy-shorts, and I kind of wished that I’d taken off at least my shirt before lying down. But then again, everyone else was still in the hut, and I noticed Sheela staring at me.

The cat-woman’s golden eyes flashed for half a moment, but then she turned away before I could understand the expression on her face. It almost looked like Sheela was angry, and I realized that we were going to have to talk about our friendship soon. I wasn’t sure if she had feelings for me, but I had them for her, so I figured I needed to man up and say something.

“I will sleep also,” Sheela said over the screams of the dinosaurs fighting above us.

“Same,” Kacerie said. “Although I don’t know how I’ll do it with them screeching. Aren’t you all worried about one of them falling on our hut?”

“We’ll deal with it if it happens,” I said. “No use worrying about it now.”

“You seem to not worry about anything,” Kacerie grunted as she lay down beside Sheela.

“No,” I whispered. “I’m worrying about everything, but focus on what I can fix.”

“I will keep watch while I lay next to Victor.” Galmine wiggled against my back, but Trel was already twitching with the first hints of a deep sleep, and I guessed that the spider-woman was beyond exhausted.

“You okay to lay there without sleeping?” I whispered.

“Yes, I am fine. Please rest, Victor. You will need all your energy tomorrow.”

Galmine didn’t have to offer again, the sensation of Trel in my arms, Galmine against my back, and the combined scent of their bodies were making my eyelids weigh two-hundred pounds.

Sleep came quickly, and I dreamed about riding on the back of a dinosaur larger than a T-Rex.

Chapter 6

I awoke to sunlight piercing through my eyelids like splintery chopsticks. The light was a dark gold in color, and I guessed that it was early dawn. I felt Galmine’s body pressed against my back, and Trel was still unconscious in my arms. I glanced down at her sleeping face with a bit of amazement. We weren’t lovers yet, but that was only because of circumstances outside of our control. Trel had been my antagonist for practically the entire month I’d been in Dinosaurland, but now she snuggled up against my chest peacefully.

I slowly lifted my head to where I remembered Sheela falling asleep on the other side of the small hut. She wasn’t there, but Kacerie was laying with her back to me.

I moved as slowly as I could and untangled my arms from under Trel. She let out a soft sigh when I slid my bicep away from her head, but I used my fingers to lower her down to the ground softly. I untangled her sharp fingers from my shirt and then wiggled out from in-between Galmine and Trel. I was a bit surprised my movements didn’t wake them up, but we were all still struggling against the exhaustion of building this fort, so I was happy that I hadn’t woken them.

Jinx was curled into a ball besides Galmine’s tummy, and he gave me a lazy gaze before he ducked his head down and closed his eyes again. That guy had absolutely zero reasons to be lazy, but I figured he would keep Galmine company while she slept.

I walked out of the hut and prepared myself to witness the devastation of the battle fought over our heads last night.

I wasn’t disappointed.

There were over a dozen corpses of orange birds inside of our walls and a good fifteen larger pterodactyl bodies. Some were impaled on the spiky tips of our walls, some were splayed open next to the corral where we kept Hope, and a smaller orange bird had actually crashed into the roof of our hut. There were bodies everywhere, and where there weren’t bodies, there was blood and orange feathers.

I didn’t see Sheela around, so I tiptoed over to Hope. The parasaur was lying curled up in her little home, but she was awake and lifted her head up as I walked toward her.

“Hey girl,” I said as I ran my hands over her snout and pressed my forehead against her. “Sorry about last night. You didn’t seem worried,”

She let out a soft toot and then shook her head slowly so that my face rubbed against her’s.

“Did you see Sheela?” I asked her as I patted under her chin.

Hope surprised me by turning toward the door and letting out a soft toot. I saw that the rope locking the gate was actually off, and I grabbed a spear before moving toward it.

The open clearing on the other side of our walls looked even more chaotic than inside our fort. There were even more bodies out here, more feathers, and almost a lake of blood at one spot some fifty yards from us. It had been World War Dino out here, but it was clear who was the winner: the distant cave where we once lived still had orange birds at the mouth, but there were a lot less of them roosting than before.

I saw Sheela off to my left. She had one of the leaf baskets on the ground next to her, and she was kneeling with her back to me.

“Hey,” I said as I walked up behind her.

“Hello, Victor. Did you sleep well?” Her lips curved into a slight smile, and I could see her sharp cat-teeth.

“Yeah,” I said as I looked down at her hands. She was butchering one of the pterodactyls with a small flint blade, but her cuts were focused on the legs and wings of the animal. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Sinew,” she replied as she gestured to the basket. She had the large cylinder almost half-way filled with the wet, bloody bands, and I realized that every corpse within twenty feet of her had been operated on.

“Good thinking. Trel will be happy if we can get her all of these.” I gestured to the almost endless bodies in the clearing. “Why didn’t you work on the ones inside of the camp first?”

“Those are already ours,” she said with a shrug. “I fear that scavengers will descend upon this spot soon, so I wanted to claim what I could for us.”

“Yeah,” I said as I reached into my shirt pocket for my own blade. It was actually surprisingly simple to make razor sharp stone knives. Their blades didn’t last for long, but I’d gotten skilled at breaking the right kind of rocks at the right kind of angles and then sharpening them again.

“We’ll need to get clay soon, but let’s fill up the basket as much as we can until everyone else wakes up. Can you show me where to cut?”

“Of course,” Sheela answered. “But perhaps this is a better use of our time than getting clay.”

“Hmmm,” I said as I turned her recommendation over in my head. “We still need to get clay soon. This is a great windfall, but if we spend the day cutting out sinew, then Galmine won’t be doing much. If we take an hour and get clay, she will be able to work on that project and teach Kacerie. Then you and I can go back to doing this.”

“I will obey your orders,” Sheela said with her usual shrug.

“It’s not really my orders,” I said with a laugh. “More like my wishes. Do you like it when I order you around?”

“I do,” she said as she turned toward me. Her eyes stared into mine, and I felt my heart start to hammer in my chest.

“So teach me how to cut their tendons and ligaments out,” I whispered. Then she blinked, nodded, and pointed to the wing of the pterodactyl she was working on.

“Cut here,” she said as she drew her small flint blade across the inside part of the wing arm. “Then pull the skin aside. This is the wing tendon.” Sheela then moved her blade to the ends of the wing joint and used the knife to pry the wide band off the bone. Then she cut it free with a quick jerk of her arm.

“Simple enough,” I said as I reached for the other wing.

We worked for a few minutes in silence, and I watched her gather the sinew from the creature’s legs. It wasn’t really as gruesome as I thought it would be, and I knew that the long rubbery bands would be able to help us build better bows and building materials. Maybe even a better saddle.

“Sheela, you were talking about your husband yesterday, and--”

“Victor,” Sheela interrupted. “I misspoke yesterday. I am honor bound to my husband, and I made it sound to you as if I was not happy with him. That is not the case.”

“Ahh,” I said as I tried not to let my disappointment show on my face. “I get it. Don’t worry. I don’t think negatively about you at all.”

“You do not?” she asked.

“No!” I said with a laugh. “In case you haven’t noticed, I really like you. I enjoy the time we spend together, and I wish I could make you happy.”

The blond woman stared at me for a few seconds. “You are a good man, Victor Shelby. I am honored to know you.”

“I’m honored to know you, Sheela. I don’t want to offend you, but I think your husband is a--”

“Please,” she interrupted me again with a wave of her bloody hand. “I do not wish to speak poorly of him. He is how he is, and I am who I am. I am here now, and I am thankful to have a purpose. Let us change the subject.”

“Alright,” I said with a sigh.

“I have something important to ask you.”

“Yeah?”

“Before you were brought to this planet, you mentioned that you had captured a small reptile at a party.”

“It was a poisonous snake.”

“We have such creatures on my world. Can you give me details about how you captured it?”

“Uhh. The snake? What do you mean? I just scooped it up into a box that the woman at the party laid over it.” My memories jumped back to Lacey’s party, and I wondered if my high school crush had thought about me not ever coming back to her party.

“It was that simple? It did not bite you?” Sheela turned to me and the interest was evident in her cat eyes.

“Yeah. It tried to bite me, but I moved my hand out of the way and grabbed it.”

“Ahh, so they are slow? The snakes in my world are very fast.”

“No, it was fast,” I said. “This one was a rattlesnake. The end of its tail makes a noise to warn other animals not to mess with it.”

“So the rattlesnake shook its tail, then tried to bite you? You had a warning?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why are you so interested?”

“It was something Galmine said last night,” Sheela said as she cut out another tendon.

“About what?”

“You once told me you never had any warrior training. Is that true?”

“Well, I took a bit of martial arts when I was a kid. Most kids do, but I started helping my parents around their clinic and--”

“They cared for animals, correct?” Sheela turned to me.

“Look, just come out and say what you mean to say.” I stood up from the pterodactyl corpse I was working on and crossed my arms.

“Victor, I do not know what I wish to say yet. That is why I am asking you questions. Were you ever bit while working for your parents?”

“Uhhh,” I said as I thought back. I’d always been great with animals, and I’d been around them almost my whole life, but Sheela had just made a strange observation. “No. I’ve actually never been bitten. Or really scratched by an animal.”

“Yet you’ve worked with them often?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just lucky. I always wore protective equipment on my hands and--”

“No,” Sheela said. “There is something else going on. Galmine said that you have ‘fought many dinosaurs and never been beaten.’ It was an interesting comment for her to make.”

“I’m just lucky,” I said. “I don’t know where you are going with this. Galmine’s statement is kinda… like obvious. If I had gotten killed by a dinosaur, I wouldn’t be here. Then she wouldn’t have said that about me. This is survivor bias logic stuff.”

“Maybe,” Sheela shrugged. “But I have fought beside you many times now. When I think back to yesterday, you killed two of the raptors that climbed our wall yourself.”

“Well, you had already shot them with arrows,” I countered.

“Perhaps, but then when we went to get water, we were ambushed. We were almost surrounded, and our backs were against the tree when they attacked both of us. I have trained for combat, but even for me, these beasts attacked with blinding speed. None of them laid a tooth or claw on you though.”

“Sooooo… I still don’t get what you are saying,” I replied. “Are you saying that I have some sort of dinosaur combat superpower?”

“Do you?” she asked with a cat-like grin.

I laughed and then bent back down to cut more of the tendons out of the dino I was working on. “Remember the crocodile in the lake? You saved my ass from him. He would have eaten me easy. None of those raptors got a claw or tooth on you either, and you ran right through them.”

“Hmmm,” Sheela said. “Maybe, but if I remember the crocodile correctly, the beast had lunged out of the water and missed you with his first chomp. Then he dashed up the slope of the lake and you evaded his jaws once more before I counter attacked.”

“I don’t really remember,” I said. “It was a blur. I was thirsty, and tired, and scared. All I know is that you saved my life and brought me to the cave. I’m very thankful for you.” I smiled at the beautiful woman, and her eyes met mine.

“I am grateful for you too, Victor,” she whispered, and I saw her eyes drift down to my lips. “I have trained in combat for many years, but you mentioned you have not. I feel as if you have much potential.”

“Uhh, listen,” I said as I felt my heart start to hammer in my chest. “Sheela, is there something going on between us?” As soon as I asked the question, I felt kind of dumb. It was fucking obvious that something was going on between us.

“What do you mean?” she asked as she raised a blonde eyebrow.

“My question was dumb. Sheela, I want something to be going on between us.” My own words made my stomach tumble and churn, but I reached out with my left hand to touch her bicep.

The beautiful cat-woman’s golden eyes grew wide, and she looked down at my fingers. I couldn’t read anything else but surprise on her face, and I braced myself for her to shoot me down. On the one hand, her rejection wouldn’t hurt that bad because Galmine was already my lover, and Trel soon would be, but I also didn’t want to mess up the friendship Sheela and I had nurtured over the last month. It just seemed painfully obvious the woman was into me even though she had turned the conversation to her marriage every time we meandered anywhere near a romantic topic.

“Hey!” a voice called out from our gate, and I turned to see Trel lifting up the door with a pair of her spider-legs while she walked under. She carried two plates of food in her hands, and one of the water jugs was cradled under her armpit. “It is breakfast time.”

“Thanks, Trel,” I said as I took the plate of smoking dinosaur from her.

“Yes,” Sheela said. “Thank you, Trel.”

“They made a mess last night,” Trel said with disgust as she gestured to the surrounding carnage.

“Yeah, but we’ll get plenty of sinew.” I nodded to the basket and noticed that Jinx had come out with Trel. The cat-sized blue feathered dino was rubbing against Trel’s leg.

“Good. I need a lot of it,” she said as she bent down to pick Jinx up. The little chocobo dino didn’t complain, and she began to stroke his feathers with her right hand as she cradled him in her left.

“You like Jinx now?” I asked.

“Now? My dear Victor. I have always loved this adorable little pet of yours.”

“Uhhh, right,” I said with a laugh.

“That laughter seems mocking,” Trel said as her eyes narrowed. “Jinx is a valuable member of our tribe. He isn’t as important as me or you of course, but he ranks a few notches above Kacerie at the moment.”

“She’ll come around,” I said. “I’m guessing Galmine is awake and made this?”

“Yes,” Trel replied. “I am ready for you to inseminate me now.”

“Listen, Trel,” I said as I prepared to argue with her. “I really want to... ummm do this with you.”

“Of course you do,” she replied as her eyes narrowed, “but something in the tone of your voice makes me think you are about to displease me.”

“I need to make sure that everyone is working on something. I can’t be the bottleneck. I have to go get clay so Galmine and Kacerie can work. We also have a bunch of corpses where we can get sinew. I also need to find a larger dinosaur to tame. I also--”

“Stop,” she said. “You are speaking nonsense. I will only be ovulating for another day. As my selected mate, you must perform your duties. All other tasks are unimportant.”

“Our survival is the most important,” I said. “So Sheela and I are going to run to get clay really quick, then we are going to come back with a bunch in one of the baskets we made. Galmine, you, and Kacerie are going to use as much as you can to figure out larger jugs, and maybe a tub. While the clay is getting heated by the fire, you and I will kick everyone else out and use the hut. I’m thinking after lunch. Cool?”

Trel’s mouth twisted, but I couldn’t tell if she was trying to hide a smile or not. “What of my platforms and the saddle?”

“I thought you fixed the saddle last night?”

“No, the birds interrupted me.”

“Well, we aren’t going to be able to go get clay until you fix the saddle, so Sheela and I will get more sinew while we wait for you.” I turned to Sheela and gestured to the camp. “Teach Galmine and Kacerie how to pull the tendons out. I don’t want them wasting any time.”

“Yes, Victor,” Sheela replied, and she jogged back to the camp with her plate in her hands.

“I feel as if you might be delaying our cotius,” Trel pouted as she crossed her arms. “If not for the bulge in your pants or the way you stare at my body, I might think you were not interested in filling my womb with your seed.”

“I’m really interested,” I said. “But I don’t want everyone else standing around with their thumbs up their ass while you and I spend an hour in the hut.”

“But, Victor,” Trel sighed. “We are more important than them. Also, we will require much more than an hour. I need all of you to ensure--”

“I get it,” I said as I fought against the tight feeling in my pants. “Get that saddle fixed. I’ve got a plan and I need to execute it before I have fun.”

“Very well,” Trel pouted. The woman turned to walk away from me, and I couldn’t help but fix my eyes on her fantastic ass. The tight silk shorts she wore didn’t cover up the curve of her butt cheeks, and my mouth almost started to water when I thought about making love to her. The beautiful spider-woman turned around and caught me staring at her, and she winked at me with a coy smile. I thought she’d try again to convince me to change my plans, but she just returned to the fort.

I poured some of the water on my hands to help wash and then ate the still steaming meat on my plate. My hands were still covered with grime, dried blood, and who knows what else, but there wasn’t a bar of soap within probably a thousand light years of me, so I was just going to have to deal with germs.

I scarfed my food and then went back to cutting the tendons. We had a decent amount in the basket now, but I wanted to get as much as I could before the scavengers came.

The list of competing tasks I needed to complete seemed too overwhelming.

I wished we had thirty more people in the camp. I was expecting Kacerie to fall in line, but I figured that I was going to need to talk to her many more times before I got her cooperation.

“Victor! I have completed the saddle!” Trel shouted from the wall.

“Great! Coming back!” I threw my plate and the jug of water in my basket of cut sinew and then carried it back to the door.

Trel held it open so I could walk inside, and then I set down the basket at her feet. Sheela was teaching Galmine and Kacerie how to remove the tendons of the dead dinosaurs inside of our walls, and I could tell from the look on the pink-haired woman’s face that she was not excited about the task.

“Looks good,” I said to Trel as I checked on Hope’s saddle. The side straps looked a lot thicker, and there were now loops to hold a total of six jugs. “I’m really happy that you could do this so quickly.”

“I’m highly motivated,” Trel said as she bit her lower lip. “Please hurry back.”

“You got it,” I said. “Sheela, get a new leaf basket, we are going to get clay. Everyone else, cut as many tendons as you can from the bodies. Try to get them from outside of the wall, but don’t be too far away. Safety first.”

“Yes, Victor,” Galmine said with a wide smile, but I saw Kacerie’s face pale.

“You expect me to go outside? Uhhh. No.” The hairdresser crossed her arms.

“You have your orders,” I said as I climbed on Hope’s back. Trel handed me two spears, and I pushed them into the sheaths on the saddle.

“And who made you boss? Why do I have to listen to you? It’s not safe out there.” Kacerie’s voice cracked a little.

“Look, just stay close to the walls, so you can run back inside if you need to. We need the sinew, and it’s time you contributed.”

“I’m just going to stay inside,” she said.

“Then I’ll deal with you when I get back,” I growled as our eyes met. The old Victor would have probably tried harder to convince her, but I’d saved the woman’s life from a group of green raptors more than once. She could pull her fucking weight.

“That sounds like a thre--”

“Sheela!” I shouted, and she darted out of the hut with one of the leaf baskets. The cat-woman made the leap onto Hope’s back without using her arms, and then I spun the parasaur around so we could exit the fort.

Then we pushed under the door, and I kicked the parasaur into overdrive.

The wind caressed my face and Sheela’s hair tickled my nose as Hope dashed across the clearing. Even though I could smell the blood in the air, and there were corpses of flying dinos everywhere, riding Hope made me feel alive.

“How are you holding onto the basket?” I shouted over my shoulder as I angled Hope adjacent to the area where the orange birds occupied the cave. Both of her arms were wrapped around my waist, but I didn’t want to turn around while I was guiding Hope.

“I used cordage to tie it around my waist and the saddle!” Sheela shouted over the wind, and I nodded.

Hope hit the foothills next to the cave, and I pushed her up to the side of the slope. I kept her pace a little slower than I would have on flat ground so she didn’t actually stumble, and we were soon riding near the tips of the smaller pine trees that skirted the much larger redwoods. Other than the parts deep in the redwood section, the rest of our small valley was visible, and I slowed even more so that I could twist my head around.

“Something wrong?” Sheela asked as I looked back over my shoulder.

“Just want to get a high view of our valley.” I turned from side to side to look over the clearing and the distant river where we got our water, and I noticed Sheela watching me instead of looking toward our home.

“Looks fine,” I said. “One day we might want to have a scout station up here. We can give someone a fast dino to ride down to the camp, or some sort of signal flare. I doubt the larger carnivores can climb up a slope this steep.”

“It is a good idea,” Sheela said, and our eyes met. The tension between us was more than obvious now, but it was hard to tell if she was upset at me that I’d made a pass at her, or interested.

I was really bad with women, and I knew even less about beautiful alien women. I was feeling a lot more comfortable bossing them around because of the success I’d just had with the fort, and the sex with Galmine had boosted my confidence, but I really didn’t know how far I could toe the line with the beautiful warrior woman.

“Let’s continue,” I said, and she nodded before I kicked Hope’s sides.

The rest of the ride to the lake was uneventful. We forded through the second river in the valley, pushed up the far hill’s switch back game trail, and then came to the top of the crest where we could look down on the lake. A few herds of parasaurs drank on the far distant side of the water, but the finger area where Sheela and I preferred to fish and get our clay was unoccupied by any other dinos.

That might not have been a good sign.

“Keep a look out,” I said to Sheela as I guided Hope down the far slope. The area over here was dense jungle, but I stayed on the lower part of the hill’s slope until we could get down onto the sandy beach.

“Should we hunt for some fish while we are here?” Sheela asked. “We have eaten the orange birds for the last two weeks.”

“It’s a good idea, but I don’t want to spend too much time on it. I’ll gather the clay, and you spear whatever fish you can. If you don’t catch any by the time I’ve got all the clay in the basket, then we’ll leave without any.”

“I will get some,” she said with a sly smile.

I rode Hope in a circular pattern around the spot and checked her attitude. She didn’t seem nervous, or excited, or tense, but I still looked into the dense jungle to our side. After a few minutes of riding slowly around our spot, I guessed that there was no danger, and I edged us closer to the shore of the lake.

Sheela took her hands off my stomach and untied the rope around her own waist. We both dismounted with practiced movements and I traded her one of the spears for her basket. The fishing spot and the area to collect clay were about forty feet from each other, and I saw her test the waters a bit with her spear before she stepped in. The sight of her long muscular body walking into the water with her tattered swimsuit on almost made me trip, and I turned away so I could focus on getting the clay.

Then I froze in my tracks and felt the air leave my chest.

There was a group of boot marks in the clay, and they were most definitely not the ones I left from the last time I was here.

“Sheela!” I hissed as I turned to the woman. She looked up from where she was fishing, saw the expression on my face, and then jumped out of the water.

“What is wrong, Victor?” she whispered after she ran to my side, but her golden eyes focused on where I was pointing.

“How many do you think?” I asked.

“Three,” she whispered as she carefully stepped toward the clay. “The sand did not keep their footprints, so it is hard to know where they came from, or where they went, but they were most definitely here.”

“How long ago?” I should have been excited by the tracks since it meant more people were alive besides us, but I only felt a bit of dread.

I had no idea who these people were. They could have been evil men that would gladly kill me and rape my friends.

“Yesterday,” she said. “Perhaps the day before.”

“Doesn’t look like they took any clay,” I said as I studied the spot. My hypothesis might not have been true since the muddy stuff tended to reform after I took pieces out, but I’d made multiple trips here and seen the gouges I made when I collected for a few days in a row.

“They must have come for water,” she said as she scanned the jungle. “I can patrol the edge of the trees and attempt to see where they exited.

“I don’t like the idea of tracking three people we don’t know through a dinosaur infested jungle,” I said. “Let’s stick to the plan, get the clay, maybe grab some fish, and then get back to our fort.”

“Understood,” Sheela said as she returned to her fishing spot.

I set our new leaf basket down on the sand next to the clay and grabbed a massive handful of the light vermillion colored material. I was unsure exactly how much weight the basket would safely carry, so I paused after my tenth scoop and carefully tested the bottom. It was still holding, so I scooped ten more handfuls in before testing it again. I guessed it weight about twenty-five pounds, and the bottom was still holding strong. It was also about half full, so I put ten more handfuls in before trying to lift the basket. The bottom felt surprisingly sturdy, and I guessed that I could probably do another ten scoops, but this was significantly more clay than we had ever been able to pull in one trip, so I didn’t want to get too greedy. If the basket broke then the whole trip would have been pointless.

“How you doing?” I asked Sheela as I picked the basket up and brought it over to Hope.

“I seem to have acquired some fish.” Sheela grinned and then gestured to the three large white fish lying on the sand. I hadn’t even noticed her catching them, but it looked like more than enough for us all to eat for lunch.

“Great job, Sheela,” I said. “Let’s get go--” I saw movement across the small lake finger some hundred yards from us, and I felt my body tense. The jungle was vibrating as if it was trying to shake itself from the earth, but before I could jump on Hope, grab Sheela, and get the hell out of here, the green curtain parted, and three large triceratops pushed out onto the beach.

“Damn,” I hissed with relief. “I thought we were going to have to run.” The trikes seemed like they were minding their own business and they moved to the edge of the beach so they could dip their massive heads into the water.

“They seem peaceful if not disturbed,” Sheela commented as she threaded one of our cords through the fish gills. “I am ready to return.”

“Hmmm,” I said as I studied the trio of three-horned dinosaurs. They were each around ten feet tall at the shoulder, and my Eye-Q told me that there was one male and two females.

“Victor?” Sheela asked after I didn’t move for a few moments.

“Sheela, I want to tame a trike.”

Chapter 7

“Victor, that is different from the plan you wanted to follow,” she grunted.

“Kinda,” I chuckled. “I want to tame a trike in the next few days, but I think they are probably going to be too big for me.”

“Then we will attempt later,” she said.

“Yeah, but we are still going to tame something right now,” I pointed over to the distant side of the lake where the herd of parasaurs was located. “I know I can get one of those since I already tamed Hope. If we had an extra one, both you and I could ride to get water, clay, and food. We’d also have an easier time hauling logs to build the new fort walls.”

“What of the boot prints? You were worried about us returning.”

“This will only take a minute,” I said as I set my yes on the distant parasaurs.

“I am unsure about being on one of these parasaurs by myself,” Sheela said hesitantly.

“It’s easy,” I said. “Here, let’s tie this basket to her saddle and then you can drive while I sit behind you.”

“But that is the subservient seat.” Sheela shook her head. “You are my lead--”

“It’s just going to be over to the other side of the lake,” I said. “I want you to get used to controlling one. Then I’ll tame one more and we can ride it back to our fort.”

“They are grouped tightly together,” Sheela said as she glanced across the lake. “When you tamed Hope, she was separated from the group.”

“I’m confident this will work,” I said. “We should be able to get close because we are riding on Hope.”

“What if they attack us?” Sheela asked.

“They won’t, but if they do, we’ll just haul ass away. Hope is plenty fast.”

“But she will bear the weight of both of us on her. The other parasaurs are larger and will be able to catch her.”

“Then we’ll shove a spear in them and tell them to fuck off,” I sighed. “Why do you have such a problem with this?”

“The inside of our fort is already very small,” she said without answering my question. “Hope is a smaller parasaur. It will be difficult to fit an additional one inside.”

“But it won’t be impossible,” I replied. “I’ll make it work. Is it the riding thing? Are you afraid of controlling Hope without me?”

Our eyes met for a brief moment, and she nodded slowly. “I do not enjoy admitting fear, Victor. I know I should not be afraid of such--”

“No,” I said. “I get it. In your world, you didn’t have cars or horses, or bikes, or anything. You just ran everywhere. It makes sense. But we aren’t on your world now. We are in Dinosaurland. You are going to have to figure out how to ride these beasts. That’s my order.”

“Yes, Victor,” she said. “I will do as you tell me.”

“So let’s tie this clay and then you can steer. No more complaints or fear. I’ll be right behind you to help you learn how to steer. Also, I can control Hope from on the back of whichever beast I choose to tame, so it really won’t be that risky for you. Don’t worry, you’ll do great.”

I lifted the basket of clay onto Hope’s saddle and then Sheela helped me tie it down with a few lengths of cord. As soon as it was secure, I jumped up to the rear part of the saddle and gestured for her to sit in front of me. The beautiful blonde woman frowned as she looked at Hope’s reins, but then she took my hand and I pulled her up.

“Tap the heels of your feet against her sides to make her go forward,” I instructed, and Sheela followed my directions.

Hope moved forward slowly, and I wrapped my arms around Sheela’s tight stomach. My friend seemed to relax when I held onto her, and I felt her exhale.

“Pull on the reins to make her stop. Try it now.”

Sheela pulled gently on the reins, and Hope stopped. Then she let out a happy toot, and I heard Sheela gasp with surprise.

“That’s okay,” I said. “She likes you. Don’t be afraid. Make her move forward again.”

Sheela tapped her heels on Hope’s flanks and the parasaur walked along the shore of the beach.

“How do I make her go faster?” Sheela asked.

“Ha!” I laughed. “I just taught you how to start and stop and you already want to start speeding. Typical.”

“You are mocking me,” she chuckled.

“Naw, I would never mock you, Sheela. Let’s try turning though. Press with one heel into her side and then pull on the reins to point her head in that direction.”

Sheela did as I instructed, and Hope turned away from the shore of the lake and pointed toward the jungle.

“Now turn her back around,” I said, and Sheela did so.

“You are a natural at this,” I said.

“Thank you,” she replied. “Perhaps it is the teacher?”

“Naw, although it could be the steed. Hope’s a good girl. Aren’t you girl?”

Hope replied with a happy toot, and I laughed.

“Okay, so tap a few more times on her sides and she’ll increase speed. She’s good at sensing how fast you want to go, and if you lean forward, it’s easier for her to understand you want to go faster.”

“I will try,” Sheela said as she tapped her heels against Hope’s sides three times. The parasaur turned her walk into an easy trot, and we were soon moving across the beach at a comfortable lope.

“Some speeds are more comfortable than others,” I said. “This is kind of like a slow jog. Feel how jarring it is?”

“Y-y-y-yes,” Sheela said as she bounced against the saddle and my chest.

“Go a bit faster and she’ll put her head down and run smoother,” I said.

Sheela followed my instructions and Hope’s speed increased. The parasaur’s strides grew longer, and the ride smoothed out a bunch.

“Great job!” I shouted over the wind that was now blowing Sheela’s long mane of blonde hair in my face. Her hair smelled like sandalwood mixed with a bit of pine, and I pulled a bunch of it out of my face so it lay over my shoulder.

“Thank you,” she replied as she steered Hope toward the outskirts of the lake.

“Turn her so you go on the left side of that log,” I said into Sheela’s ear, and she pulled on the reins. Hope did as Sheela told her, and we turned away from the shore of the beach.

“Now go right around that palm tree. Then left around that boulder!” I pointed ahead, and Sheela yanked on the reins. We twisted through a few more obstacles easily, and I felt like my friend had gotten the hang of handling the magnificent parasaur.

“Alright, take us over to the herd,” I said.

“Yes, Victor,” Sheela replied, and she kicked Hope’s sides to increase our speed. I expected the movement, but I still tightened my arms around Sheela’s stomach.

It took us a good five minutes to circle the lake and come around the other group of parasaurs. A quick count gave me thirty-four in the herd, and I identified ten males in the group. They stood maybe two feet taller than the females and glanced at us suspiciously as we approached.

But they didn’t signal the herd to run.

“Slow down a bit,” I said, but Hope’s speed had already decreased so that we were moving at a fast walk, and I wondered if I’d accidentally controlled her.

The closer we got to the herd, the more I realized how much of a runt Hope was. The males of the group weren’t as bulky huge as the triceratops on the other side of the lake, but they were actually a two or three feet taller at the shoulder when on all fours, and they were a good twenty-five feet tall when they reared up on their hind legs. If hope was a big bed truck, then these were all semi’s. I was going to need a step ladder to get on the back of any of these beasts, or I was going to have to make the leap while standing on Hope’s back.

I knew I could tame one of these crest-headed dinos. I’d already done so with Hope. I didn’t know for sure that I could tame a trike, and something about the three-horned dinos made me think I’d be trying to punch too high of a weight class if I tried. I still hadn’t really used my tame ability, so I needed to practice it on a few more dinos, get the hang of it, and then try it on a triceratops.

“Which one do you think will be the best?” I asked Sheela as we slowly approached the herd.

“There is a group on the opposite side that appears to have smaller ones,” Sheela said as she pointed.

“Yeah, I see them, but they actually look really young. Hope’s young too, but I have a feeling they kind of kicked her out because she wasn’t growing fast enough.”

“The others do seem much larger than her,” Sheela agreed.

“What about the male closest to us?” I asked as I pointed. He was probably the smallest male of the group, but he still stood about twelve feet tall at the shoulder and had a tail that was probably just as long.

“He is still quite large,” she whispered.

“Yeah, but we need a boyfriend for Hope,” I said as I fought against the laughter in my stomach. “I already have a name picked out: Bob.”

“It sounds like a fine name, Victor, but--”

“It’s actually a great name,” I giggled. “Let’s do this. Bring us closer.”

Sheela kicked lightly against Hope’s sides, and the parasaur moved toward the water where her kin drank, washed, and ate. The male we were targeting had a reddish-brown hide, and he let out a long, low-pitched toot when we got within twenty feet of the first female of his group. Sheela’s body tensed, but Bob didn’t run away or attack, so Hope kept walking toward him.

He was knee deep in the water of the lake, some thirty yards from us, and Hope pushed into the ring of females that gathered around him.

“Hey, buddy. How’s it going?” I whispered as the massive dinosaur turned his eyes to me. They were actually a light shade of brown, and they looked at me without any hostility. Any sort of fear I might have had about approaching the magnificent animal faded. This guy was meant to be my pal, and I knew we’d have a great time together.

“I’m Victor,” I whispered as Sheela guided Hope closer. “You are a good looking boy. Look at your skin! It’s quite handsome. You’ve got great muscles too. Look at all the women around you. Are these all your girlfriends?”

Bob let out a low pitched toot, and I felt my rib bones vibrate. It was like a tuba being played into a train tunnel, and a tiny bit of my fear came back.

“I’d like you to come back with me and be my pal. I promise I’ll take good care of you. We’ll feed ya lots of great food, and I’ll take you on adventures every day. Sound good?” We were ten feet from the side of the massive male, and I felt my heart start to hammer in my chest. Or maybe I was just feeling Sheela’s heart hammer so hard in her chest that I thought it was mine.

“Whoooooa boy,” I said as he took a big step away from me. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. I’d just like to pet you. You are such a good looking boy. Awww. There we go.” Sheela had stopped Hope right next to the male’s left side, and I reached out to touch the massive parasaur’s flank. His scales felt just like Hope’s, but each one was almost twice the size as what was on her hide.

My Eye-Q was already open, and I turned my head so I could look into his gentle eyes.

“I’m gonna get on your back now, and you are going to come with me,” I said with confidence that actually surprised me.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then Bob sank down lower in the water.

Parasaurolophus Walkeri tamed. Flashed across my vision, and my heart leapt into my chest.

“I did it,” I whispered to Sheela as I let go of her stomach. I held my hands on her shoulders to help me balance when I stood, and then I leaned over so that I could touch the top of Bob’s back ridge. I grunted, leapt, and then pulled myself up on his back.

The ridge on his spine jutted up about four inches, and there wasn’t really a great place to sit without squeezing my nuts, so I kneeled on either side of the ridge and then mentally commanded the massive parasaur to stand up on his hind legs. He shifted backward as he stood up from the water, and I leaned forward so that I could clamp my fingers around the ridge at the base of his long neck.

“Sheela, do you see this?” I asked her.

“Yes, Victor,” she replied as she looked up at me. Her eyes glowed with the light of the sun, and she held the reins tightly against her breasts. “You look magnificent. I am very impressed.”

“Ha!” I laughed loudly, and a few of the parasaurs stepped away with surprise. “Nothing impresses you, so I’ll take it.”

“Not true,” she replied. “You impress me every day, Victor.”

“Awww, thanks. Well, I feel the same way about you.”

“Oh?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, let’s get out of the water.” I thought about Bob walking to the shore of the lake, and my mount took a big step through the water. The females moved aside to let him pass, and we soon made it back to the beach.

Riding Hope had been amazing, but being on Bob’s back was a whole new experience. I was at least sixteen feet off the ground when he stood on his hind legs, and I towered over all the other dinos. It felt almost like I was riding on a tank, and every step Bob took felt like it equaled three of Hope’s.

“Wow, wow, wow,” I said as I thought about him spinning around on the beach. He was a bit slower to obey my command than Hope was, but I figured that it was because we hadn’t spent as much time together. He still pivoted as gracefully as the smaller parasaur, but I could tell he wasn’t used to making such acute movements.

“Let’s go home, buddy. I want to introduce you to Trel, Galmine, and Kacerie.”

Bob let out a low happy toot, and I patted his shoulder gently.

“Sheela, you ready?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered as she looked up at me. The clay basket on her saddle looked almost too big, and I knew we’d be able to carry three times as much on the back of Bob. Hell, I could carry Galmine, Trel, Kacerie, and a bunch of baskets on the back of Bob if I commanded him to walk on all fours.

But now I had him on his back legs, and I wanted to see how fast he could go.

“Giddyap, Bob!” I hissed as I tapped my heels against his flanks.

My new parasaur took a long step forward, then another, and then a third before he found his jogging pace. It immediately became apparent that he couldn’t accelerate as quickly as Hope could, but it only took another six steps for me to figure out that his top speed was way faster. The wind almost instantly began to make my eyes water, but I didn’t care. His long lopping steps set down perfectly on the sandy beach, and there were almost no jarring bounces. He was actually a bit easier to ride than Hope, and I turned around to see Sheela chasing behind me.

“Is that as fast as you can go?” I shouted at her as I willed Bob to pick up some more speed. My new pal obeyed me, and he bent his neck down a bit so that he could really bring his tail into play.

Then his engine opened up like a race car.

“Shiiiitttt!” I growled as he seemed to go from thirty to seventy in two steps. I clamped my fingers harder around the ridge on his neck and ducked my head low so that I could see through the wind. I really had no idea how fast Bob was going, but the wind was pushing on my chest like crazy, and it took every ounce of willpower to keep my eyes open. I thought about him slowing down a bit, and he made a few more steps at a much slower pace.

Then he let out a quick bass toot as if to tell me that I should be careful about what I wished for.

I turned around and saw that I’d put a good hundred yards between Sheela and me. She wasn’t riding Hope as fast as I normally did, but she was moving at a good clip; Bob was just a big lumbering drag racer.

But I guessed he also had a good tractor engine. He must have weighed four tons, and I imagined his wide lizard feet would really be able to grab onto the ground. He probably couldn’t haul as much as a triceratops, but he was going to be a great help with our future build plans.

“He is fast!” Sheela shouted as she pulled Hope up alongside me.

“Yeah! I’ll go a bit slower. Try and keep up! We’ll do a quick ride around the north side of the valley.”

Sheela nodded, and I kicked Bob’s flanks lightly so that he’d pick up speed. The big parasaurs let out a French horn sounding note and then floated across the sand on his massive legs. We ran past the same few obstacles I had Sheela steer Hope around, and I practiced steering Bob around the palm tree, past the boulder, and over the downed log. He was big enough to just step over the log without even jumping, and I let out a short laugh.

The green raptors weren’t going to be much of a problem for Bob. They might be able to nip at his legs, but a single stomp from his foot would squash one, and I’d be able to spear or rain arrows down from the safety of his high back.

I glanced back to ensure the Sheela was still following me. She was, so I angled Bob toward the side of the jungle where the hill slope met the beach. My new pet plowed up the slope with no perceived loss of speed, and I angled him up to the higher parts of the hillside. I was soon racing across the wide path on the ledge, and I turned to look back down on the lake.

Then I saw the smoke and ordered Bob to stop.

It was hard to tell how far away the fire was. Or even if it was a fire. All I could see was a thick plume of black smoke lifting up into the eastern sky.

“Sheela!” I hissed when she rode up next to me, and my friend turned to look where I was.

“It is far away,” she said. “Perhaps over fifteen miles.”

“There hasn’t been any sort of storm recently,” I said. “So I don’t think lightning caused it.”

“I agree,” she said.

“It is probably another camp,” I said. “Maybe they are clearing the forest for space.

“Victor, I do not think that is the reality.” She shrugged.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “It’s probably something bad. Either dinosaurs attacked someone’s camp, and a fire got out of control, or…”

“Or a tribe of survivors is attacking another tribe of survivors,” Sheela finished my sentence.

“Let’s do as I planned. We’ll do a quick ride around the valley’s crest. Keep an eye out for any fires or trees that we didn’t clear. Got it?”

“Yes, Victor,” she said. “Will you tell the others about this once we return?”

“Hmmmm. Let’s not. Whoever is fighting is far away, but I think we need to consider that the dinosaurs aren’t the only threat here. We need to put a priority on building our walls and saving people that come with the teleport beams.”

“So you will not mention this to Trel, Galmine, or Kacerie?” Sheela asked.

“Definitely not Kacerie,” I said. “She’s having enough problems dealing with the menial tasks. If I tell her there are survivors out there that might not be friendly, she could freak out even more. I’ll tell Trel and Galmine tomorrow. Today, we need to celebrate getting Bob, and cut out as much sinew as we can.”

“Understood,” Sheela said.

“The problem is that this creates even more pressure on us,” I said. “It’s only a matter of time before someone finds us. If they are cool, then it will be cool, but I’m guessing they aren’t going to be cool, so it’s not going to be cool.”

“You use that word often,” Sheela said.

“It’s cool.” I winked and got a half-smile out of the cat-woman.

“There is much more work to do.”

“Yeah, and on top of learning how to survive, we might also need to learn how to fight. Good thing we have a badass warrior woman that can train us.” I smiled down at my friend, and it seemed as if the skin beneath the fur on her cheeks reddened a bit.

“I would enjoy teaching you all,” she admitted.

“Let’s do our patrol.” I gestured to the side of the hill and thought about all the tasks we had to do. If there were other tribes out there, and they were aggressive, they weren’t going to wait around for us to get our shit together.

We had a lot of work to do, and no time to do it.

Sheela and I both kicked our parasaurs into sprints that took us over the crest of the hill and into our valley.

Chapter 8

Sheela and I had already made a few trips on the north hillside of our valley and hadn’t seen any sign of other survivors, so I wasn’t expecting to see any on this trip. However, I was a bit more concerned about the possibility of getting attacked by things that were not dinosaurs, so I paid closer attention to the trees we rode past. I also looked at the side of the hill for any signs of passage while we rode our parasaurs down the shores of the river we had to ford to make it to the lake. We didn’t see signs of anything humanoid, but we still made a wide loop around the redwood grove that circled our camp clearing before we rode back toward our fort.

The clearing was pretty much how we left it. There were still a few hundred corpses on the grass, the pile of dead raptors, and a small pond of blood off to the side of our fort. The pond was about half the size it was before we left to get clay, so I figured it would all soak into the ground in the next hour.

Trel, Kacerie, and Galmine were actually outside of the gate working on cutting sinew from a pile of corpses by the door. Trel had been super smart, and just dragged the corpses over so that the women could process them right by the entrance to our fort. If they saw danger, they could duck inside the door.

The three of them looked up as soon as Bob emerged from the clearing, and I saw Kacerie turn and dash into the fort. I guessed that she hadn’t seen me on top of the giant parasaur.

“Trel! Galmine! Kacerie!” I waved as I dashed through the clearing. Bob seemed to sense my excitement, and the big boy let out a few low toots that sounded like he was blowing raspberries into a trombone while pulling on the slide.

“What is that?” Trel asked as she stood up from her work.

“This is Bob!” I said proudly. “He’s Hope’s new friend!”

Trel’s pretty mouth was opened with surprise, and she craned her head to look up at me.

“Wow,” Galmine said. “Victor, he is amazing! I am so proud of you for taming him! He will really help us build quicker. It looks very safe up on top of his back.”

“Yeah it is, but we are going to need to build a bigger saddle, and a bigger door, and probably a bigger fort, but we already planned on that last one.”

“Yeeeaaaappp,” Trel sighed as she looked up and down the large dinosaur. “Did you have to get one this large?”

“Of course!” I said. “Go big or go home. That’s what they say.”

“Who says that?” Trel huffed. “This isn’t efficient at all! Even if I build a door, he’ll take up every square inch Hope and the hut don’t occupy!”

“Then you’ll have to fix it,” I said as I smiled down at her.

“But you want me to build platforms, and I have to help with baskets, and then we need to cut down trees, and--”

“Hey, Trel,” I interrupted her and held my hand down. “Come climb up here.”

“What? On that thing? No. Thank. You. I was just beginning to tolerate Hope’s smell and oafish demeanor.”

“Come on,” I said as I beckoned with my fingers. “You’ll like this.”

“Like what?” she asked with a sour expression on her face.

“Just climb up here and sit behind me!”

“Fine!” Trel stepped toward Bob as I thought of him crouching down so she could climb easier. He followed my wishes, and the spider-woman skittered up his legs before she stood behind me.

“Kneel down,” I said.

“The ridge on his back is uncomfortable,” she hissed.

“Just kneel like me. You’ll need to make a padded saddle that can account for the spine.”

“Ugh. He smells worse than Hope.” Trel’s shapely human legs coiled underneath her hips, and I gestured for her to wrap her arms around my stomach. She didn’t squeeze me very hard, but as soon as I ordered Bob to push forward, Trel let out a small gasp and grabbed me tightly.

I steered him around the walls of the fort and then toward the spot on the south side where I had saved Kacerie a few days ago. I didn’t put much speed down because of all the corpses, but as soon as I made it to the redwood tree line, I told Bob to go a bit faster, and we plunged into the canopy like a speeding monster truck.

“Yeeeeeeee!” Trel howled when the parasaur picked up more speed and dipped his head down. I let out a light laugh and then twisted him around the base of a big redwood before pointing him toward the small river where we got our water. We made it to the massive hollowed out tree in only a handful of seconds, but I thought Bob was too big to fit inside without freaking out Trel, so I just ran parallel to it until we reached the river.

“The riv--” she started to shout as soon as we reached it, but I only slowed Bob down a little, and he plowed through the water like a bulldozer. Massive waves sprang up on each side of his thick torso, and Trel let out a shriek as she pushed her face into my back. The water just misted over us though, and we hit the other side without slowing down much.

Bob let out a happy sounding toot as soon as we reached the other side of the river, and he gave a little wiggle to throw some of the water off his legs. The movement wasn’t enough to upset our seats, but Trel still gasped while her spider legs all braced down on his back so that he wouldn’t throw us.

“Cool, huh?” I asked as I slowed him down. “I feel invincible up here.”

“It is terrifying!” Trel hissed. “Please let me get down.”

“Naw,” I laughed. “I can’t let you down here. For one, it’s too dangerous. Also, you don’t like it yet. We need to keep going until you are laughing.”

“Victor, I am not going to enjoy--” she started to say, but the words caught in her mouth when I ordered Bob to start sprinting again.

I ran the parasaur around the river until it wrapped all the way around the north side of the valley. I found the spot where we usually crossed to get to the lake, and then we forded the water with another magnificent splash. Trel screeched again when we did this, but she didn’t push her face into my back.

I tore up the slope of the north hill and then picked a path up near the crest. I didn’t want to get all the way up for fear of potential enemies being able to see us, but I felt safe enough staying on the sloped side that faced our small valley. I made Bob stop up close to the top, and I pointed out toward where the clearing to our camp was.

“This is our territory. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah,” Trel agreed. “I will admit this is a good view.”

“Will you also admit that you like riding on Bob’s back?” I turned my head so I could smirk at her.

“Hmmmm.” Our faces were a few inches apart, and her dark eyes stared into mine. “It is not as bad as it first was, but there is another male I would prefer to be riding.”

“As soon as we get back,” I said. Then I kissed her softly and found her mouth eager for mine.

“You have been putting me off,” she whispered after our lips parted. “I have never been so frustrated. You frustrated me the moment I met you.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I found you attractive, of course, but you weren’t taking any of my hints.”

“Uhh. Hints? You were really mean to me.”

“Yes, but you should have realized that was because I wanted you. Ugh. Yes, I’m sorry I was mean to you, but it’s kind of your fault.”

“Let’s put it behind us,” I said. “Can you make a saddle for Bob? I’d also like to tame a few more of these so we can each ride one.”

“I can make one, of course,” Trel said. “But I still have to do the platforms, and we will need to hurry with the new wall so that we have space. If you want a dinosaur pet for each of us, we should push the wall out even more. Perhaps we need two acres.”

“It will be too much,” I said. “We still need more people, and--” as I spoke, I saw a pillar of light descend on the other side of the hill to our north. It was a pale orange color, but I couldn’t really tell how far away it was without cresting the hill. Normally, the pillars seemed to appear in groups, but I didn’t see any others descend from the sky.