Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

“Goddam you, Bassin.” There was nothing worse than a Crown Prince who had the humility and discipline to follow orders.

Snort.

Almost nothing.

FIFTY

A WRONK STALKED TOWARD US out of a tree clump, head low, tail high, snarling and slobbering in the twilight, upwind and eighty yards north of us along the escarpment.

The monster looked like its citified cousins, the ones the Marini hitched to their chariots, but thinner, dirtier, and, of course, unmuzzled. A wronk can’t run down a healthy duckbill, and is just smart enough not to try. But a wronk sure scares hell out of anything else it meets.

So Rosy reared and squealed, then leapt over the escarpment. I had made the ten-foot leap easily with her twice before, but this time, exhausted and terrified, she landed badly, cartwheeled, and I somersaulted off down the slope.

By the time I scrambled to my knees, Rosy was trying to stand, and the wronk was pacing back and forth along the Escarpment lip, rumbling as it smelled fresh, relatively stationary meat that it couldn’t get at. Another thing a wronk was just smart enough to know was that even its massive legs couldn’t absorb eight tons landing after a ten-foot jump.

But, in about thirty seconds, the pacing wronk was going to stumble onto the path down the Escarpment, and come down below to make us into snacks.

No problem, as long as we kept moving. I ran to Rosy, grabbed her reins, and said, “Up, girl. We gotta go.”

Rosy bleated, then hobbled on three legs, holding her right rear leg in the air, while her lower leg below the knee joint dangled. The tibia protruded, white and bloody, exposed in an open fracture.

I snapped my head around, looked away, and felt sicker than I had when I smelled the rotten hole in Sergeant Yulen’s gut. With a broken leg, Rosy was going to die even if the carnosaur vanished in the next second like an extinguished holo.

Wronk.

The beast found the way down the escarpment, and put a first foot on the path.

Wronk.

I spun and looked in the direction of the second bellow.

The only thing worse than being chased by a slobbering, fifty-foot-long carnosaur is being caught between it and a forty-foot-long one.

While I had been riding the High Plains, every wronk within an area the size of New Denver must have plodded to the ruins of the Great Fair, perhaps attracted by the bird cloud wheeling overhead, certainly attracted by the stench of the biggest putrefacted smorgasbord this world had known in centuries.

The downslope monster advanced up the hill toward Rosy and me, head down and roaring. When it got within twenty yards, Rosy gave up hobbling, and rolled on her back, hissing, and kicking at the carnosaur with her sound hind leg.

The wronk hung back, dodging Rosy’s punches, and snapped at me as I stood between it and Rosy. More, I supposed, to scare away an annoying competitor than to catch a snack.

For weapons, I had an M-40 slung across my back for which I had only empty magazines, a utility knife no longer than one wronk tooth, and, in my thigh pocket, clipped alongside my Aid Pak, the single-shot.22 caliber survival pistol toy.

I stood my ground between Rosy and the monster, unslung my M-40, reversed it in my hands, and swung it at him stock first, like a Louisville Slugger.

The wronk lunged, and tried to reward my Quixotic stupidity by biting me in half at the torso.

Whether I stumbled back over prostrate Rosy, or the wronk’s breath blew me back across her like a putrescent typhoon, I’ll never know.

I found myself on my ass in the grass, with Rosy between me and the big wronk, staring into her huge brown eyes as she screamed.

The beast’s snout thudded into her flank, its jaws clamped, and bone cracked. Rosy wailed and thrashed as the carnosaur began to eat her alive.

I fumbled out the survival pistol, pressed it against Rosy’s eye socket, and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Then I fired the tiny bullet through her eye, into what I hoped was her brain.

I lay face down and still alongside her, trembling, but her body continued to thrash for what seemed like minutes. Finally, I realized the movement was the carnosaur heaving her lifeless two-ton corpse, as it wrenched her hind leg off like a turkey drumstick.

With the wronk preoccupied, I low-crawled away from Rosy’s body, dragging my useless M-40 by its sling, freezing in place every few feet, while I waited to feel huge jaws crush my body.

I was ten yards away from Rosy’s corpse when the sound of wrenched gristle and cracking bone stopped. A low rumble replaced the noise.

I turned my head. The smaller wronk had lifted its snout out of Rosy’s rib cage, and gobbets of gore plopped from its jaws back into her body cavity.

Ten yards to my right, the bigger wronk that had challenged us at the top of the Escarpment thrust its head at the smaller monster, and roared a hiss like a jet engine.

The bigger beast trotted to Rosy, and muscled in alongside the small one.

While the two tussled, I scrambled to my feet and ran like hell, watching over my shoulder.

The big wronk hip-checked the smaller one so hard that the smaller one staggered three paces away from the carcass, then caught its balance and snarled. The big wronk snorted, and turned back to feed.

When the smaller carnosaur raised its head, it saw me, tearing ass downhill, just slower than a wronk could run. It swung its head once more at the big bully, then bellowed and stalked after an easy consolation prize, that being me.

I cross-slung my rifle to free my hands, then shucked my pack, hoping that the beast would stop and examine it, and also to lighten my load. Meanwhile, I ran like my hair was on fire downhill, toward the charnel ground that had been the Fair.

The wronk trampled my pack without a sniff, and kept coming, but it was eighty yards behind me and didn’t seem to be gaining.

Plan B was that when I got to the Fair, some rotten morsel would distract the wronk.

Four minutes later, I entered the mounds of by-now skeletal remains, and debris swarming with scavengers. The chain reaction provided by abandoned livestock and scavengers that got themselves killed in the fray had kept the flesh party jumping for days.

Scavengers snapped and snarled at me as I ran by, and I could hear them doing the same to the wronk as it passed them. In the frenzy, fast-moving small fry like me passed through, ignored by those among the scavengers that were strong enough to bite through Eternads.

Five minutes later, I emerged from the obstacle course with the beast still hot on my trail, and now only fifty yards back.

The prof on my Cretaceous-life holo concluded that tyrannosaurs were too big, slow, myopic, fragile, clumsy, and stupid to hunt. I wished he were here. Not so he could reconsider. So I wouldn’t have to outrun the wronk, I’d just have to outrun him.

Three hundred yards downslope my salvation shimmered in the sunset. If a web-footed Tassini wobblehead couldn’t swim a flooded wadi, a wronk surely couldn’t swim the Marin. All I had to do was make it into the river, swim out to deeper water than the wronk could wade, then climb aboard some hunk of shipwreck flotsam, and wait until the dumb brute lost interest in standing on the shore.

But I was running on repaired legs, breathing with a regrown lung, and hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. Adrenaline takes you only so far.

The beast had closed the gap between us to within twenty yards by the time my boots splashed into the Marin. I high stepped out thigh-deep, then belly flopped, and churned my arms and legs like a monster was chasing me.

Eternads are watertight if the vents are sealed. They aren’t designed for swimming, but they trap enough air, and are light enough, that a GI can actually swim faster in them than without them. They say a Navy SEAL wearing Eternads swam faster than Olympic Record time for the sixteen hundred freestyle while he was bagged, to win a bar bet. Probably Squid blarney, but the part about being bagged lends credibility.