DINO EATER (IT'S NOT OVER YET)

[Shroom Man 777]

RETURN!

This chapter will be called EXPOSITION IS WHAT'S FOR DINNER!

I actually wrote more, but it's rather incomplete, so I'm once more piecemealing this to bite sized chunks. I mean, the last two chapters were loooong. Like loooongcat.

So, here:



It was a cold and silent night. All around the prefabricated EVIL lair and the derelict facilities were hardhat henchmen and mercenary guerillas tending their posts, and beyond the teslalectric fences and automated defenses that demarcated the encroaching jungle were sentries perched atop high-hideouts, sweeping the underbrush below them with laser-sighted precision weaponry.

There were no stars in the night sky above the employees of EVIL, for though the jungle canopy and the underbrush had been cleared off, a new shroud had been erected, a tent-like marquee composed of stealth-fabric to obscure the machinations underneath its blanket from any scrutinizing eyes in the sky.

The derelict facilities themselves were buildings of archaic construct, a mix of steel and glass and ferrocrete fashioned in anachronistic designs. However, that was unimportant in the greater scheme of things, for the corporation in its extensive real-estate dealings had far more aesthetic properties in its disposal – such as volcano lairs in the Caribbean and Nordic ice fortresses. Rather, it was the content held within the buildings’ vaults, hermetically sealed and preserved, that so tempted the scientists of EVIL’s research and development department. And in turn, it was the potential profits resulting from such a rediscovery that tempted the shareholders and decision-makers of the great multinational monopolizer of menace that was the EVIL Corporation.

At the figurative center of the lair was a tent. Though there were many encampments pitched to provide the henchmen and South American mercenaries with quick but comfortable housing complete with climate control and indoor toilets, this particular tent was different. It was much larger than the others, composed of protective nanosilk fabric on a titanium-alloy frame, with a barricade of ablative sandbags for protection, and a squad of black-armored EVIL Elites surrounding it like some Praetorian guard.

But like the abandoned complex, the tent itself was irrelevant. What was inside the tent, though…



Donald Dennaro savored the last of the exquisite liquid with a silent slurp. He noted with pleasure that it had a very thick, sticky and slippery texture, and while the shredded shark’s fin itself had little in the way of taste, it was the boiled cartilaginous appendages’ ability to absorb the rich flavors of the soup’s other constituents that made it such a delicacy. That, and the fact that the primary ingredient was obtained by slaughtering a rare oceanic predator, removing its fins, and throwing the rest of it back into the sea, and then shipping it halfway across the globe all just to appease the appetites of one Marcus Elliot Hunt…

Decadent. And one day, Donald Dennaro hoped that he too would enjoy the same wanton luxuries. If he did things right, of course.

He decided to try the Giant Squid Sashimi. It was the highlight of the meal, after all. Far rarer than the severed appendages of a Carcharodon carcharias, the Great White Shark; and more expensive than the half-eaten Beluga caviar in their spoons made out of mother of pearl and the Foie gras, liver from an Etruscan swan force-fed stem cells for twelve consecutive days, put together. Though the procurement of the giant squid meat was undoubtedly a trade secret, Dennaro knew that its preparation involved a special weeklong marinating to remove the ammonia from the cephalopodic flesh.

With ivory chopsticks, he picked up one of the inch-wide slices, put it in his mouth, chewed it, and considered its peculiar taste. For Dennaro, an apt description of the flavor was difficult. It was his first and, for all he knew, they were the first persons on Earth since long-since forgotten times to have tried Giant Squid Sashimi. All he knew was that he wanted some more.

“Donald,” began Marcus Elliot Hunt. The corporate bigwig was seated across the table, a glass of blood-red wine in hand. He took a sip and regarded at the lawyer. “I’m glad you could spare the time to have dinner with me.”

“Of course, sir,” Dennaro replied coolly. “As satisfied as I am with my duties here in the jungle, I certainly couldn’t back down from your invitation…” he took a sip of the wine. “Is this 1985 Chateau Lafite?”

“The very same,” Marcus nodded. “How is it?”

“Exquisite.”

“Though I hope the wine doesn’t overshadow the giant squid sashimi,” Marcus noted. With his other hand, he stabbed a piece of squid with a fork and placed it in his mouth.

“Certainly not. The sashimi is excellent; I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything else quite like it…”

Marcus smiled. “Either way, I didn’t bring you here to discuss the particulars of the culinary masterpieces I’ve commissioned.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“And neither will I mince words,” the old man continued.

Dennaro wondered where the man was going at. The best way to find out was to be direct. “Then why did you bring me here, sir?”

“Donald, what would be your evaluation of the EVIL Corporation’s current performance?”

“To be honest sir…” Dennaro trailed off, considering his next words carefully. “I think we could be doing better.”

“Oh?” Marcus feigned surprise. “Please do expound on that.”

“Well, sir, there have been many factors inhibiting the continued growth of the EVIL Corporation throughout its long history of international crime and extortion, chief among them being the efforts of global intelligence agencies – and their international men of mystery,” Dennaro stated the obvious to humor his superior. Ever since its inception, the EVIL Corporation has been the bane of intelligence organizations worldwide. Because of the corporation’s frequently morally reprehensible actions, it has had as much friends as it had enemies – and those definitions often changed with the ever-interesting times.

Dennaro continued: “There’s also the proliferation of metahuman vigilantism. There’s nothing heroic about getting in the way of good business… We’ve tried bribing politicians to pass anti-mutite legislation, but ultimately, we had to get our own superpowered freaks and some of our shareholders weren’t so keen on that decision – although you yourself sir argued for the recruitment of freak mercenaries.

“And then there’s the very nature of the business itself. It’s really more like an everlasting game of high-stakes poker – every venture is a gamble, every roll of the dice a potential disaster. The Corporation has barely been able to balance the profits it’s earned from successfully blackmailing nations with the losses it’s incurred from every self-destructed volcano lair or demolished earthquake-machine. That’s why the corporation is shifting from its traditional Global Extortion packages to more long-term plans that don’t cater to clients who are power-crazed madmen but instead provide continuous security and logistics to saner but just-as-sinister Machiavellian megalomaniacs who know to bide their time in hatching their schemes.”

Dennaro paused to catch his breath and was about to continue his spiel when Marcus Hunt stopped him with a slight gesture of the hand. “That’s enough.”

“Sir?” uncertainty gripped Dennaro. Some of the higher-ups in the EVIL Corporation have been known to dispose of incompetent employees via hidden trap doors that led to incinerators, or piranha pools, or other unsavory but exotic ends. Dennaro couldn’t help but check for any hidden panels underneath his seat as he did not want to meet an unsavory but exotic end in a tank full of mutant lobsters.

“It’s good to know that while you can be an insufferable brownnoser at times, you at least know the reality the Corporation has to deal with,” Marcus Elliot Hunt smiled, and this time Dennaro could finally breathe easy. “And the wine does overshadow the giant squid sashimi.”

Before Dennaro could say anything, Hunt continued speaking, beginning with an exposition of the Corporation and other things: “When the illustrious Ferric Fourfingers founded our corporation, it was a much simpler time. There were less…superhumans with delusions of grandeur, to put it frankly. The only threat to the Corporation was from those you so aptly described as ‘international men of mystery’. Ferric could and did deal with the world’s intelligence agencies; it was all in the name of good business, after all. During the Cold War, both sides had the right sense to hire the Corporation’s services for ‘plausibly deniable contracts’ and Ferric played them for every penny they had. As the years went by, he gradually accumulated an unknowable sum of money for himself and the Corporation.

“But all good things come to an end and we were barely able to adapt in the ensuing chaos. Ferric, after his years of bold and innovative leadership, retired – trading his career of villainy for philanthropy, using his accumulated assets for the betterment of Third World shitholes everywhere. It did win the corporation PR-points and now we get lots of clientele who happen to be despots from the developing world. Nonetheless, the rest of the world has grown tired of our blatant shenanigans.

“The EVIL Corporation used to be the foremost marketer of menace. We once had a monopoly over the world market but now we’re playing second-fiddle to defense contractor megacorporations like Saintly Concerns, Vagrant Arms, and their pet PMCs,” Marcus sighed and gulped the last of his wine. “And that is why we are here, Donald. We are here to discuss the future of the EVIL Corporation.”

“The future, sir?” was all what Dennaro could utter. By now he was totally uncertain as to what exactly was going on. Was it a test? That was his first assumption when they had dumped him, a corporate lawyer, into the middle of the jungle in some top-secret R&D facility under the false pretenses of ‘ensuring the legality’ of ‘acquiring’ dispossessed real-estate. Real estate that he could only guess was the site of some mad scientist’s long gone experiment. Prior to this dead-end assignment, he had the notion of ascending the ranks of the Corporation, going from a mere legal consultant to a full-blown power broker. Which was why, as Marcus so perceptively observed, he was acting like a total obsequious ass. Thus, he had to be very careful. Trapdoors and mutant lobsters. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

“Donald, the EVIL Corporation is beset by threats from all sides – from without and from within.”

“Corporate espionage…” Dennaro trailed off. “So that’s why the Corporation chose to put this R&D operation in the middle of the jungle…”

“Yes,” Marcus said. “And, believe it or not, these abandoned facilities are actually of some importance to the corporation and its greater plan.”

“Indeed?” Dennaro knew that from a financial standpoint, the only benefit of the abandoned facilities was that the Corporation didn’t have to invest more resources in setting up anything permanent, as it could make do with merely renovating the preexisting structures and setting up some prefabs. “I find that hard to believe, sir. While the real estate is in remarkably good condition despite being nearly swallowed by the jungle, even with the equipment still intact, this facility was still abandoned decades ago. It’s positively ancient.”

“Ah, but you should realize, Donald, that appearances can be deceiving, and in our line of work, they almost certainly are,” Marcus stated. “Donald. We’ve taken over some long gone madman’s abandoned laboratory and it is in fact a very extensive scientific facility intentionally obscured in the darkest heart of the jungle. The Corporation is in a very bad way, as you and I have so eloquently elaborated in our little dinnertime exposition, and it is the opinion of our shareholders that we might uncover a much-needed technological edge from these forsaken laboratories.

“If we can harness whatever arcane discovery that drove away the past proprietor of this place, while simultaneously developing an entire legion of cyborg dinosaurs, and proliferating both to ferment Third World upheavals that will inevitably fill our pockets with copious amounts of money…”

Dennaro nodded as sudden realization struck him. The Corporation was desperate for a bleeding edge in the increasingly competitive market, aside from this venture, the corporation was also investing heavily on other avenues of R&D. Underneath the deep blue sea, there were laboratories breeding hyperintelligent sharks for weaponization, while in the frostbitten wastes of Antarctica were outposts excavating extraterrestrial remains and Pre-Cambrian artifacts. Whichever team of EVIL mad scientists, executives and lawyers struck gold first… “If we are successful, then the profits will surely put us back on top!”

“Yes, and now that you are aware of this venture’s utter importance to the Corporation, then you know that we must guard it very selfishly,” Marcus said conspiratorially. “Be aware that the Corporation’s enemies will do whatever they can to usurp what is ours. Even the goddamned communists are at it! With that Cuban snake slithering around in the jungle, taking down our boys, nothing is safe…

“And we also can’t forget about our rivals, corporate spies might take advantage of our beleaguered state and if they get to him, I doubt our Doctor Thornier can keep his mouth shut or his files closed…he is a mad scientist after all, not exactly a professional – when pushed, he’ll go for the highest bidder.” Marcus leaned towards Donald and locked eyes with him. “This is why I need to know if you can be trusted, Donald. If I can trust you to protect the Corporation.”

“You can trust me, sir.”

“Good,” Marcus relaxed visibly and leaned back on his chair as a hardhat-clad henchman entered the tent. The henchman served two plates of moist and delicious-looking chocolate cake. “Now, how about some dessert?”



The nighttime wind was a mild and pleasant sensation - coming in a cool and gentle breeze that blew over her uncovered face and disturbed her strawberry blonde hair just so slightly. She brushed a stray lock aside before taking a bite of the strange jungle fruit she held in her hand, savoring its sweet yet sour flavor and the refreshing moistness of its meat. It tasted like unripe mango, but it wasn’t.

Her appetite sated for the moment, she decided to linger for a while, sweltering idly on a thick and outstretched tree branch and letting her legs dangle, savoring whatever enjoyment she could out of the cool jungle wind and the hushed nocturnal ambience.

It had been a long while since her last time here. She had almost forgotten how it was in the jungle, the cloying wilderness forsaken by the reach of daylight, so far away from the eyes of civilization, leaving only darkness and silence through the night. She sighed.

It was years ago, and back then, she was just an expendable asset, a young and loyal one at that. She wanted to serve her country, wanted to excel, to succeed in places few would dare to tread – to wash the distaste of mediocrity out of her mouth. While the initial rush wore off, she was still loyal to the end, perfectly willing to do whatever was asked of her. Often, these things were of questionable nature, and she was quick to realize that… But no, she didn’t grow cynical or bitter or jaded. She was proud of her proficiency, proud of her abilities, and though she was fully aware of the implications of her acts… she just didn’t care.

She was good at what she did, and she liked it, but sometimes, being good just wasn’t enough.

Though that fateful mistake wasn’t entirely hers, she was still amongst those disowned and sacrificed in the name of convenience, asked to pay not with her life, but with her honor. The Company got what it wanted and emerged unscathed, while she lost the career that she only belatedly realized was her life. A final act of loyalty – that was how she had thought of it then, how she accepted it. Only she hadn’t.

Now, years later, she had returned to the jungle, and it welcomed her back with open arms that led into its darkest heart. She remembered her first time, her initiation, how she sensed that palpable taste of fear and disgust, that lingering aroma of death. How she watched and, after a while, was so kindly asked to join in, to participate, to partake. Whatever innocence she had left was lost then, and so she consigned herself to this forsaken place.

Welcome to the jungle.

She shook her head – this time she had no misplaced convictions regarding her homeland or national security, no naiveté to exploit, she was in it for the money, and her loyalties were only to herself. They paid good cash for people with her experience, her talents.

Here again.

After some time passed by, she decided to get up. In her other hand was a helmet in the form of a gasmask, with two massive, bulging, milky lenses to see out of, the face narrowing down in an inverted triangle to end in a rebreather protected by chitinous plates. In one smooth motion, she put it on and her face became a dead-eyed insectile visage. A hissing noise came from the collar as her armor hermetically sealed itself.

Amy Gardener. Alias Mya Lilly, the Problem Solver. Orchid Mantis.

She surveyed the darkness of the jungle with the compound eyes of her multifaceted lenses and saw everything. Advanced image intensification turned blackest night into brightest day while enhancers artificially colored and augmented the night vision’s monochromatic view, and infrared thermographics highlighted the warmth of living things of all shapes, forms and sizes. Tiny red-white and yellow forms fluttered above and below the canopy, vampire bats out for dinner, while many more were clustered amidst the trees and ground, sleeping birds and mammals huddled in fear for the sanctity of their bodily fluids.

From her vantage point atop the tree, she scanned her environs, looking from side to side, before turning around and –

She paused. The unmistakable heat signature of a human being emerged from the cool blue-black jungle foliage not too far from her position. Even in the low-light conditions, she could not take any chances of being seen. Secrecy and stealth were the ways of her previous life in the Company, and though it had been years since then, lessons learned could never be unlearnt. Sparing no time, she activated her thermoptic camouflage and became one with the jungle.

Invisibly, she regarded the man below her.

A fellow Problem Solver? Two of them were down, though two others – herself excluded - were still around. Was it one of them? No, it wasn’t. It was him.

She activated her tactical microbead radio.

“Whistleblower. This is Mantis. Do you read me?”

“Yes,” replied the encrypted voice. “What is your status?”

“I’m en route to the objective,” she replied, deactivating the safeties of her weapon with a silent click as she watched him scurry about obliviously in the underbrush. “But I’ve found something else…”

“Yes?”

“The Cuban, Fidel.”

“Have you made contact?”

“No. Shall I engage him?”

“Negative. His presence is irrelevant. Continue with your infiltration and proceed to your objective.”

“Affirmative,” Amy nodded, with just a slight trace of disappointment in her voice. As the transmission ended, she reactivated her weapon’s safeties and watched him go. “Maybe next time.”



He held the sniper rifle at the ready, emerging from behind the trees with his weapon first, sweeping it from side to side as he scanned his surroundings with the tri-oculars’ night scopes. He gripped his weapon tensely; aiming it at every sign movement or sound he could see or hear – aiming at the shifting shadows, at the treetops, at every probable firing angle. After a brief moment, his shoulders sagged as he exhaled sharply, and then he breathed in, gulping down the cool nighttime air. He needed a place to rest, needed it badly. The consecutive battles had taken their toll on him and now he was exhausted and tired, battered and wounded. Even he had limits to his endurance, limits to how far he could push himself before crashing.

Fidel Castro removed the tri-oculars from his face, detaching it from its headband mounting and letting it dangle by the strap around his neck. Also around his neck was his bandana, wrapped like a scarf to bandage the wound inflicted by a near miss from the Reckoner. He was lucky it was just a flesh wound.

On the other hand, the shot that had found its way through his posterior torso was definitely not just a flesh wound. Though it had missed a nonexistent organ, a kidney removed due to past injuries, there were still two holes in his body - one where the bullet went in, and another where it went out.

He unbuttoned and unzipped the top of his Subsistence Suit, taking it off and letting it hang on the branch of a nearby tree, where the chameleonic camouflage became indistinguishable from the vegetation. Fidel looked at his side, at that part where the chest and abdomen met, right below the ribs. Because of the angle of entry, the exit wound was located at the lateral side of his abdomen, while the entry wound was at the posterior side. Aside from their positioning, their formation also meant that suturing was out of the option. Luckily, he had a roll of tape and some field dressing, so all he did was dress the injury before using the field dressing’s plastic wrapper to make a tight seal. It was a simple survival viewing technique used in case of chest wounds to prevent a pneumothorax, a collapsed lung caused by the accumulation of air in the chest cavity, but it was also useful in waterproofing other wounds. He had to, since he had planned on ambushing the Reckoner immediately after administering first aid, and his cunning plan necessitated hiding half-naked in the river’s shallows before trick-or-treating the sniper savant while wearing a severed caiman head…

Fidel laughed, in spite of everything. How that particular strategem worked, he had no idea. The only flaw he could see with that plan was that now, his chest was almost entirely covered in leeches – wriggly bloodsucking little water-maggots that bit through his skin and pumped anti-coagulants into him to better drink his bodily fluids.

“Ugh. Disgusting,” Fidel spat. In times like this, there was only one he could do. He sifted through what was left of his inventory, he didn’t have much after the Reckoner shot that flashbang grenade in his breastpocket – detonating it and blasting his tactical webbing off him – but still. “Here we go.”

He produced a pack of cigarettes from a waterproof pocket, it was the pack his contacts, the Enriques, had given him back on the Cessna, before the mission proper began. Before they were killed and stripped to the bone by something inhuman and left to rot in the coffin of their plane’s wreckage… From another pocket, Fidel pulled out a metal lighter. It was something he got from ransacking the paralyzed half-corpse of Eduardo, the merc who swallowed the poison frog, the merc whose brown bandana Fidel now had around his neck.

Between the affable Enrique brothers and that pendejo Eduardo, the past few hours had seen dozens of men killed and maimed, most of them by his hand. Fidel shook his head, perhaps in disbelief, perhaps in gratitude, at the fact that he was still standing. Still alive.

It was the jungle, and he knew that ‘deserve’ had nothing to do with it…

He ripped the filter off, lit the cigarette and took a long drag. Then, with his thumb and index finger, he pulled the cigarette off his mouth and exhaled, watching the bluish smoke flow out of his mouth and nostrils. Without looking, he placed the glowing tip of the cigarette against a particularly fat leech contentedly sucking on his arm, causing it to regurgitate its stomach contents and quickly detach. Fidel winced as some of the cigarette’s hot ash fell on his skin.



Silently, she made her way through the jungle’s dense underbrush. It was a strange yet eerily familiar place; it was foreign…yet nonetheless registered with her instincts. Almost as if like she had been here long ago.

She darted, between twigs and branches, underneath leaves and ferns, leaping above roots, sulking about in the shadows, scurrying quickly as she went by.

She was as quiet as she was fast. Her camouflage, like that of a chameleon’s, blended her perfectly well with her surroundings. With the darkness of the night she was, for all points and purposes, invisible.

Her mind was focused solely on the objective given to her. She had coordinates, and her sense of direction was practically magnetically attuned to them. With her sensors she could perceive the world around her in ways no natural creature could. Dark and light, hot and cold, sounds and echoes in the night, the scent of molecules drifting in the air ‘read’ by olfactory processors – all blended into one cohesive compound and composite view of the world.

She maintained communications, transmitting via fiber-optic lines that ended in a tiny antennae that trailed behind her like a tail. Every so often, her ‘line’ would send a pulse of encrypted information, data that contained telemetry gathered by her sensors. Whenever she did, she paused to aim her antennae up in a proper angle, to get the most signal coverage possible. Then she would wait for a second, to receive a response, before continuing.

The latest incoming data packet was decrypted and presented a mental map outlining new coordinates, directions that would bring her to reverse her course. And so she did, turning around to head off to the rendezvous point…

As she did so, her sensors briefly caught glance of an aberrant heat signature. A tiny speck of burning warmth. It caught her attention, and as she focused on it, her other scanners also noted strange chemicals, toxic substances, wafting about in the air currents.

Curiosity got the better of her and so she approached this strange phenomenon. She was very careful, focusing her sensory array at the unknown thing in front of her, thoroughly attuning herself to it.

When she heard the sound of a breaking twig and felt the disturbed air of movement, it was too late. The next sensations engulfed her in pain as she heard her own spine snap and felt sharp teeth dig into her flesh.



The wriggling creature went limp in Fidel’s grip, and he immediately bit off a great chunk of its flesh. He was hungry, he wanted dinner.

“Hrm…” he muttered, chewing on the mouthful of meat while trying to discern what it was he was masticating. It tasted a little bit like chicken, the meat was lean, with no fat, and had a similar grain to – something hard and sharp that wasn’t bone, which rewarded him with a painful jolt of electricity that stabbed deep down into the roots of his teeth, causing his jaws to clench and his face to warp in a shock-spasm grimace.

He spat it out – whatever the hell it was – and moaned in pain, placing his hand on his jaw like a root canal recipient. His mouth was numb and the profanities he sputtered were inarticulate.

“That was horrible!” he finally managed to say, wiping the spit off his mouth. “What kind of jungle chicken was that?!”

He contemplated throwing the damn thing as far away as he could, but curiosity got the better of him and so he held his dead dinner up by its neck, letting its lifeless body dangle.

“What the…”

He flicked on his radio and called the Major.

[Sidewinder]

A good start. I imagine Fidel's not happy to find a land-based version of the electric eel. Hopefully, we'll see some Fidel vs. Dino action soon, e.g., the Cuban making an Allosaurus eat an RPG. By the way, why doesn't the subsistence suit suppress Fidel's infrared signature? Is the Cuban military budget too tight for them to R & D that?

And what does "pendejo" mean? "Bastard"?

[Shroom Man 777]

Pendejo

The Subsistence Suit can't suppress Fidel's heat signature cause, well, it's the jungle. If the Suit kept all that body heat inside, Fidel would cook up. You'd need some sort of fancy shmancy cooling mechanism or some other expensive stuff. The Cuban military (in OZ COMIX) is merely stuck to using Cold War-era Soviet hand-me-downs, including Red Alert-style Tesla coils for coastal defense

[JointStrikeFighter]

Great shit as usual Shroom, even if it took FUCKING AGES! for the update

[Big Orange]

Hopefully the EVIL and and Dinosaur Rebellion factions will finally start fighting each other (the EVIL executives and scientists can easily escape their base camp leaving the expendable EVIL guards and Latin mercs behind). I'm puzzled why Orchid Matis was ordered elsewhere and left a dangerous intruder be. And why infiltration?

[Crazedwraith]

Solid Chapter Shroomz. Not much akshun but then Fidel can't be constantly fighting boss battles. There have to be bits in between. Hope he gets better at the sneaky sneak though...

And Orchid's mission is interesting. What problems do they have that aren't Fidel? The plot as they say... Thickens.

[Shroom Man 777]

“Major Muerte, this is Fidel. Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear. Have you rendezvoused with N yet?”

“No… but I did bump into someone else.”

“Hm? Who is it?”

“‘It’ is a small dinosaur, one as big as a chicken,” Fidel answered, sitting down and putting the dino-corpse on his lap to examine it more thoroughly.

“I see.” the Major replied knowingly. “Did you…”

“Yeah,” Fidel cut him off, knowing what was coming. “Apparently it’s been cyberized, with mechanical components all over… it’s even got wiring inside of it.”

“Interesting. Do you think it’s another one of the EVIL Corporation’s projects?”

“Probably… could be the Uprising’s, but I haven’t seen them setting up any lairs in the middle of the jungle,” Fidel replied. “Anyway, this little lizard’s cybernetics are quite extensive. Its got sensors implanted on its head, tiny hydraulics bracing its arms and legs, and a miniaturized communication’s array on its tail. Smaller than my microbead radio, probably more advanced… though that’s not saying much. I don’t think it’s armed, but it did have good camouflage.”

“Hrm, you should talk to L about this.”

“Yeah… I should. I chatted with her a while ago, after I dealt with the Reckoner,” Fidel said. “But when I found this thing, I thought it was best to run it by you first.”

“That’s good, but I’m not exactly a paleontologist and I’ve never taught counter-dinosaur tactics in Camp Mantanzas,” the Major commented dryly. “I guess that makes you a pioneer in this new field of warfare, eh Fidel?”

“Right. I’ll be sure to impart my battlefield experience to the next generation of elite Cuban soldiers and spies as soon as I get back to Camp Mantanzas,” Fidel answered back. “I wonder if L knows anything about cybernetics…”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“That’s a good idea. Hang on,” Fidel switched frequencies. “L?”

“Still here,” the familiar female voice replied. “How are things on your end, Fidel?”

“I found a dinosaur.”

“Another Allosaurus?”

“No… it’s a smaller one.”

“Oh?”

“It was so small that I thought it was a chicken or some kind of jungle bird, so I tried to eat it.”

“You what?!” in that instant, the calm and gentle yet tired-sounding quality of her voice was replaced by absolute shock and disgust.

“Yeah.”

“That’s… that’s…” Fidel could hear her slap her forehead over the radio.

“It did taste like chicken… before I bit on one of its cybernetic parts and burned my tongue. I guess your friend Dr. Grant was right all along about that link between birds and dinosaurs.”

“So you were listening to me,” Dr. Ellie Settler sounded pleasantly surprised yet frustrated at the same time. In a prior one-sided radio conversation, she had talked to him about everything from visiting the dinosaur park in Isla Norte and GenInc.’s creations, to the latest theories in paleontology and excavating up fossils in Montana. “But that still doesn’t excuse you from… preying on that poor hapless animal.”

“It was far from hapless, L. Besides, it had excellent camouflage. I barely saw it even when it was less than two feet away from me.”

“As small as a chicken… was it like a chameleon?”

“Come to think about it, yeah. It was hard to spot since it blended with its surroundings a bit like my Subsis-” Fidel stopped himself. The circumstances the mission allowed for select amounts of information regarding the ‘dinosaur-situation’ to be disclosed, since L was their ‘conscripted’ dinosaur specialist, but nonetheless Fidel had to watch what he divulged. He was still on a top-secret mission and she was working for them solely on a need-to-know basis. He didn’t want to trouble her with information she didn’t need to know, it would’ve been inconsiderate of him, to say the least…

“Compsognathus,” she said brightly, interrupting his line of thought.

“What?”

“Compsognathus,” she repeated herself. “A small bipedal carnivorous dinosaur from the late Jurassic Period. It‘s famous for being a nearly complete specimen, preserved almost perfectly in limestone. It was discovered in Germany not long before the Archaeopteryx, a creature many consider one of the first birds. The anatomical similarities between Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx are so evident that… that it’s not surprising you mistook it for a chicken. Fidel?”

“Still here,” Fidel smirked.

“I’m sorry, Fidel. I just get carried away sometimes.”

“It’s alright. Is this… Compy one of GenInc’s?”

“Actually, it is. The fact that Compsognathus had chameleonic skin was unexpected, Alan and I were really quite surprised. We were expecting them to be covered in feathers or something.”

“Why?”

“The prevalent theory was that dinosaurs like Compsognathus had feathers since they were closely related to birds. It would’ve kept them warm, and we also found evidence of feathers in fossilized dinosaurs similar to Compsognathus. We asked the geneticists about it and…”

“And?”

“…I think they were genetically altering the dinosaurs. Mutating them.”

“Mutant dinosaurs,” Fidel sighed. He was glad he didn’t’ swallow any of that Compy. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“Ian, Doctor Goldblum, thought that it was part of GenInc’s bioweapons research project,” L continued. “Back then, I thought he was just being obtuse. But in light of recent events… I guess he wasn’t so far off.”

“Who’s Ian Goldblum? Another paleontologist?”

“Oh, he’s a mathematician specializing in chaos theory.”

“Hmm…” Fidel wondered why they needed a mathematician in a dinosaur park, but that was really the least of his concerns. “About those mutated dinosaurs. Were there any more… irregularities?”

“Remember those velociraptors we talked about?”

“They got pumped so full of steroidified growth hormones that they became hyperaggressive, right?”

“Yup. GenInc. also had another therapod that was altered to have chameleonic skin. Carnotaurus. A distant relative of the Allosaurus, not quite as big, but still a large predatory dinosaur.”

“Hm…” Fidel wondered. “L, how long does it take to… create a fully grown dinosaur?”

“At least a month.”

“So if they were using the GenInc. genetic material they got a week ago…”

“They? Who are you talking about…?”

“Nevermind.”

“Oh, right. Anyway, it would take you at least a month and that’s with the use of advanced growth enhancement techniques,” L stated. “And even then, it’s not exactly advisable…”

“Why?”

“Growth enhancement involves accelerating the rate of cellular division in a developing fetus or embryo, and that’s a very dangerous process. If you don’t do it right, you can end up killing your pocket-dinosaur with cancer,” she answered. “And even if you do do it right, you’re still going to end up with potential physical and behavioral instabilities developing down the road after your dinosaur’s hatched, causing a drastic decrease in lifespan. It’s not very profitable, you’d end up having to buy a new dinosaur after a while.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I talked to the geneticists a lot. You know, typical scientist chit-chat, not that you’d be interested about it…” she went on. “There was this guy, Ned - ”

“Ned?” Fidel remembered him, that fat scientist he was supposed to extract from Isla Norte. The man with the ‘can of whipped cream’ that concealed something the Intelligence Directorate so badly wanted… too bad the velociraptors gobbled him up.

“Yeah, you know him?”

“…No.”

“Right. Anyway, he told me that GenInc’s CEO, Don Lemonde, was thinking of just selling his dinosaurs to zoos all over the world. It would’ve spared him the trouble of building a park of his own in the Caribbean. Of course, if he went through with that plan, GenInc. would’ve used growth enhancement to make the dinosaur-production go faster. And with their shortened lifespans, the dinosaurs would require periodic replacement, which big zoos like San Diego could afford. It’d be like… consumer-dinosaurs.”

“Selling dinosaurs for profit, with planned obsolescence to keep the demand up, clever capitalists,” Fidel muttered, knowing that the situation would be no different if the dinosaurs were weaponized and if the zoos were replaced with Third World insurgencies. The same thing happened when the Americans proliferated walking tanks back in the Cold War. “Hrm…”

He thought the situation over. There was a Gen.Inc.-spec cyborg dinosaur skittering around the jungle, performing covert reconnaissance, at least until he snapped its neck and bit off a chunk of it. Now, if the EVIL Corporation needed at least a month to create a dinosaur with GenInc’s data…

“L, thanks for all the help. I’m gonna have to switch frequencies now. Keep in touch, okay?”

“Okay.”

Fidel switched over to the Major. “You got all that?”

“Yes,” the Major replied. “Though I don’t know what to make out of it, exactly. Sounds like the EVIL Corporation is picking up right where GenInc. left off. What do you think?”

“I think we’re in big trouble,” Fidel answered tersely. “I think the Dinosaur Uprising is -”

He stopped as a sudden yet lingering wave of unease crept up his body, slithering like an icy snake, making its way up his spine, crawling up his innards to grip him from the inside with an unknowable coldness. His body shivered involuntarily.

“Fidel?” the voice from his earpiece microbead was almost inaudible. “What’s going on?”

The jungle was cool at night, but this was an abnormal chill. Yet Fidel’s body continued to perspire heavily, as if stricken by jungle fever. A sick sensation filled his stomach, writhing inside him.

“Fidel, respond! Fidel!” the Major’s voice was drowned out now, as the coldness was joined by a new sensation. Hushed sounds that came from behind the trees, from beneath the underbrush, from somewhere he couldn’t quite see, almost intelligible but not quite, echoing in the stillness of the night air. He wasn’t sure if he was actually hearing it, or if it was something seeping into his mind. It sounded like…

Whispers.

“FIDEL!”

In one quick motion, Fidel got up and placed his Subsistence Suit back on, zipping it shut even as the innumerable leeches continued to infest his flesh. He grabbed the Reckoner’s rifle, the Ultima Ratio Hecate II, worked the bolt and chambered a .50 caliber round. Then he donned the tri-oculars, and the night became a green day.

“Major, I’m not alone,” he said before killing his radio.



Fireflies filled the night air in a constellation of little green lights, forming an intricately starlit stellar dance that brought illumination to a place now so well hidden in shadows. Like true stars, they hovered up high, where they could be seen but not reached, and like the stars they watched dispassionately as the glow of their light was drowned out by the jungle’s darkest heart.



A lone figure clad in fluttering black cloth stalked his way through the shadows of the night. Silently, swiftly, like a wraith. A feral grin was etched across his face that, with his wide bloodshot eyes, gave him a crazed thirsting look. He was like a wild dog, one that had smelled the blood of wounded, bleeding prey.

An unhinged and ecstatic noise left him as he felt himself reach out through the darkness, calling to the night. And he felt the blackness melt into him, felt it blanket him in a cold and lifeless embrace, felt himself flowing out into cold void, bleeding out and submerging into that horrible silence where there was nothing to differentiate the pathetic and hollow emptiness inside him from the outside world’s barren desolation. It was like being cut open, eviscerated, and he felt his insides slowly spill out to engulf everything around him with his diseased and writhing viscera, at once losing himself while at the same time insinuating himself against everything surrounding him.

It was then that he felt a fleeting source of warmth, and he recoiled from it instantly, a look of seething hate contorting his face into a twisted mask as that noise from his mouth turned into laughter. His voice echoed unnaturally through the nocturnal stillness as his laughter grew louder and louder and louder. Then Theodore Coleman – the Bloodsucker - finally declared: “There’s no place to run, Fidel! No place to hide!”

The hunt was on.

And like all good hunters, this one made its prey think that it was on the run.



Fidel positioned himself against the side of a tree, shouldered his rifle, and got down to one knee. He flipped the tri-oculars off his face, placed his cheek on the rifle’s polymer stock, and looked into the scope. The complicated modifications made the rifle difficult for unfamiliar hands to use, but he had learned most of the weapon’s many functions in the short time he had it. A flick of the switch activated the telescopic sight’s image intensifier, as well as its other more esoteric sensory apparatuses. Then, by turning a knob, he began calibrating the directional microphone. A wire extended from the side of the scope, connected to a bud in his other ear.

With one eye closed, he gazed into the many different shades of green that composed the sniper scope’s digital depiction of the world, ignoring the incomprehensible alphanumeric data-displays and focusing solely on the targeting reticule and whatever fell under its crosshairs.

He controlled his breathing, inhaling slow and deep before exhaling a few seconds after, and listened intently.

With the directional microphone, he could pick up sounds normally imperceptible to the human ear, greatly aiding in target acquisition. But since an ear was already occupied by his microbead radio, he only wore only one of the microphone’s earpieces, limiting him to mono – neither stereo, nor surround sound. So he had to sweep the gun, and by extension the microphone, side-to-side. Not that it mattered, he still had to scan with his scope anyway since he didn’t have backup, no one with a pair of binoculars to be his spotter.

He gritted his teeth whenever he heard the sounds. They weren’t natural, he knew they weren’t even real. They weren’t carried by the wind, didn’t really come from behind the trees or from the shadows. But they came from all angles, from everywhere, from his sides, from in front of him, from behind him, maybe even from inside his head, he could even feel it in his flesh as the sounds echoed and resounded. The noise assaulted him, disoriented him, disturbed his senses and caught him off-balance, maybe it would’ve frightened him if it wasn’t so goddamn annoying.

But that was the whole point of the thing, wasn’t it? It was psychological warfare. Just a sadistic little maricon playing Jedi mind games.

Fidel controlled his breathing. Inhaled slow and deep. Exhaled a few seconds later. Listened intently.

There.

Slowly, he pivoted his rifle to the left. Delicately, a little more to the left.

“I see you,” Fidel said silently. He lined the shot up until it was perfect, so the Hecate’s .50 Whisper would punch a fist-sized hole through the chest. They weren’t so far apart, but only one of them was running around bare-chested save for a trenchcoat for everyone to see.

Fidel began squeezing the trigger, gently, delicately. Between a breath and a heartbeat.

Click

Puzzled, Fidel squeezed the trigger again, with similar results. Another click followed by another. Then he worked the bolt viciously and ejected the fat fifty-caliber round, chambered a fresh one in and squeezed again.

Click

Then it hit him. The same thing happened when he ‘borrowed’ the evil albino’s sidearm, right before he got his ass kicked because the gun suddenly didn’t work. The safeties were off, he had worked the slide and the bolt, chambered them with fresh rounds… but both weapons denied him.

They were ID guns, he realized as he reexamined the weapon. Then he cursed himself and replaced his tri-oculars, looking at where his target was.

Gone.



“I found you.”

The jungle’s nocturnal solitude was dashed by the crack of gunfire and the unrestrained muzzle flash of full-automatic steel. Theodore Coleman – the Bloodsucker – began his pursuit, laughing all the way as his Uzi 9mm sent round after round after full metal jacketed round at his fleeing prey.

The hunter was now the hunted. The predator now the prey. The young sadist relished every moment, each palpable second that came and went by as he gave chase through the lightless jungle, his black heart beating in sync with every footfall, every shot fired, every ragged breath that escaped his cracked lips. With each fleeting glimpse he caught of his prey, he fired a staccato-like burst from his Uzi, merely pointing the gun towards the general direction with one hand, not even bothering to take aim.

“You can’t get away!” he mocked as he laughed. “There’s no escape!”

He fired again and again as he went after the runaway Cuban. The flash of his gun was only source of light in that godforsaken place.

He laughed.

He laughed.



He cursed.

In a final act of betrayal, the Reckoner had almost indirectly caused his death. For that, Fidel threw the treacherous sniper rifle away, relieving himself of the burdensome weight and allowing him to run faster.

Behind him, he could hear the mad laughter of Coleman, his voice no longer resonating unnaturally, but now plainly audible, sounding like the barking of a leprous and diseased canine. It made him want to turn around and take pleasure in gutting the boy like a fish, but that train of thought was abruptly interrupted by the snap-hiss and crack of whizzing bullets, just so narrowly missing him and ripping nearby trees and foliage apart instead, exploding bark and branches, leaves and vines. For now, he focused on staying alive.

Fidel kept on running, letting the bastard laugh while he could. Foliage whipped his face as he ran in a zigzagging path, putting the trees behind him as cover, denying his pursuer any chance at a clean shot, going in a path that would disorient Coleman, playing with his unfamiliarity of the jungle’s terrain to establish distance.

Call it a tactical retreat.



Theodore threw the spent magazine away and slammed a fresh one in, wasting no time in resuming fire. The recoil made the gun jump in his hands, made it harder to control. He was actually aiming now, having folded the Uzi’s stock and using the butt as a foregrip to steady the weapon, and he struggled with to keep it leveled. He fired a rapid series of short sputtering bursts, quick but intermittent, controllable and precise – exploding random items of shrubbery within an increasingly closer proximity to Fidel’s fleeing form.

“You’re not getting away from me that easily,” he hissed, spittle flying out his mouth as a predatory grim splayed across his face. The flashes that came with every gunshot lit up his vicious visage, but it also infringed upon his natural night sight, forcing his eyes to adjust with each burst. Not that it mattered; he knew where Fidel was, his telepathic powers told him that -

Theodore Coleman – the Bloodsucker – gave a yelp of surprise as his foot tripped on a certain large sniper rifle discarded on jungle floor. He fell, his face landing on the wet mud.

“SON OF A BITCH!” he shrieked as he lashed out blindly at Fidel’s fleeting silhouette. He reached out, not just clawing with his hands but also with his hate.

He closed his hand into a fist.



Fidel screamed as red-hot pain suddenly engulfed him. He staggered as he nearly lost himself, flailed feebly at the air, swiped at the branches in his way, looking for something to grab onto for support, to give him purchase. Inadvertently, his anguished screams disturbed a flock of arboreal creatures roosting up a tree, causing them to flock out and swarm him. They screeched spitefully as they flew past him, and those that got behind him shrieked as they suddenly detonated in a rather bloody spray of flying bat-bits and organs. The same thing happened to the leeches that had so thoroughly infested his backside, perforating him with a million needle-stabs of abject agony as they popped like oversized invertebrate zits.

But He didn’t stop. Not with his backside seeping with his own blood, not with his Subsistence Suit smeared with the gore and exploderized remains of a dozen vampire bats. He hacked and coughed out something warm, but kept on going.

Kept on running.



Theodore followed.

Got up and continued right where he left off. He would not stop. Not until he had what he wanted. Not until he killed Fidel Castro. Or Fidel killed him. It made no difference, really.

He felt alive again.

“That’s it,” he said icily as he resumed his hunt. No longer running, just walking slowly, surely. Inevitably. “Run, Fidel. Run.”

He raised his weapon and fired. Felt the kickback of the recoil. The smell of hot brass and burning cordite.

“I’ll find you. Eventually, after you run out of blood. And then I’ll -”

A reply, silenced gunfire returning to him like whispers. Calmly, he avoided them, stepped out of their way as they whizzed past his head.

“And then I’ll kill you.”

A retort, soundless compared to his Uzi, without muzzle flash. One round ripped through the side of his arm, tearing his coat and cutting his flesh. His grimace turned into a smile.

“You’ll see, Fidel. It’ll be like show and tell.”

He continued walking, dodging incoming fire, swerving away, leaning to the side, narrowly evading them as he reciprocated in turn, scything with his submachinegun without halting his advance.

“Where are you?!”

He entered a clearing where the jungle floor turned into a shallow pond, a reflecting pool that mirrored the sky above, the fireflies that glowed as they hovered up high, and the moon that slowly emerged from its cover of clouds.

He made his way to the middle of the pond, the water seemingly undisturbed, minding neither his presence nor his movement.

Fidel emerged from the shadows, at the furthest edge of the pond and Theodore Coleman – the Bloodsucker – turned to face him.

“Die.”



A click, a muffled sound, and then another click as Fidel’s pistol locked open.

Theodore Coleman – the Bloodsucker – dropped his Uzi. Perplexed, he looked down and saw a tiny hole in his gut, only understanding its full implication when blood began to slowly ooze out of it. He crumpled into the water.



“You first,” Fidel growled. With a press of a button, he ejected the spent magazine and his pistol’s mechanism slid shut with a snap. He holstered his sidearm as there was nothing left to reload it with. He flicked on his radio. “Major.”

“Fidel, what happened? What’s your status?”

“I was ambushed by the Bloodsucker,” Fidel groaned as he wiped off a thin line of blood trailing down his nostrils.

“The torturer? The one who could read minds and manipulate blood?”

“Yeah…”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m not sure… by all means I should’ve been dead from internal hemorrhaging, but I think his powers only work when he’s focused, and when he’s not, the effects stop. Anyway, he’s dead, so that’s taken care of. I don’t like this, though. I think I’m being set up.”

“By N?”

“Maybe. He contacted me whenever I encountered one of those freak mercenaries, those Problem Solvers. But he didn’t leave a message when the Bloodsucker jumped me. I think it’s a trap.”

“Then what are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to spring it.”

Ripples began marring the pond’s serene surface; blurring its placid reflections as something disturbed the shallow water.

“Major… I think I’m going to have to call you back,” Fidel said as he noticed the vibrations and turned to its source…



Theodore Coleman – the Bloodsucker – laughed evilly as his form emerged from the water, rising unnaturally until he was upright. The blood that had been oozing from the gunshot wound in his gut was slowly flowing back into his body as he willed his mighty system of organs to reabsorb his precious bodily fluids. He giggled insanely as he pointed to Fidel, declaring with exquisite glee: “You can’t kill what you can’t understand, Fidel! I refuse to die!”

And with that, Theodore struck, lashing out with his hemokinesis and striking Fidel down! He could feel the pain emanating from the battered man, how parts of him ruptured due to the unnatural manipulation of his body’s blood, his veins dilating, blood starting to make their way out of his orifices.

Fidel Castro collapsed to his knees and Theodore’s grin became a grimace of pain as his own gut-wound spurted out blood and bile.

Theodore knew his hemokinesis was what prevented his own exsanguination, and should he squander his powers by draining Fidel’s lifeblood, then he would have nothing left to keep his own arteries from running dry.

It was a quandary he solved by pulling out his trusty Desert Eagle .44.



Fidel endured the pain as he felt his circulatory system literally vent its contents into the bloodworms latching onto his skin, to the point that he could feel the leeches swell into oversized pulsating spheres all over his body.

They popped, less like oversized invertebrate zits and more like a synchronized detonation of bubble wrap, and Fidel screamed until it subsided and all he felt was a sick sticky wetness all over his body.

He knelt down, waiting for more.

But when no more came, he did not hesitate. He went for Coleman. With his knife.



Theodore fired and the Desert Eagle nearly broke his wrist.

Fidel felt the round zip mere inches from his face, ripping the tip of his fluttering bandana.

The second round was further off the mark, and the third one wasn’t even close.

Ted’s cackling laughter turned to screams of frustration as he sought to correct his mistake and aimed straight at Fidel’s face, right between the eyes. The Cuban was so close, it was impossible to miss.

He squeezed the trigger.

But the Cuban was so close that his hand was already on the gun’s white-hot barrel, gripping it so the slide would be forced back to spit out the chambered bullet.

Fidel let go and Ted got his gun back, just as its half-empty magazine dropped into the water. No magazine, no round chambered. Ted gibbered and was about to say something.

When Fidel brought the knife across his face.

Ted let out a horrible scream and brought both hands to obscure his face. “My face! You dirty Cuban spic! No one makes me bleed my own – urk!”

Fidel wrung his free hand around Theodore Coleman’s bloodsucking neck and slammed him down into the shallow water. No CQC, no more fancy judo, just plain old-fashioned human strangulation.

“You’re not like the others, are you?” with his other hand, Fidel brought the knife to less than an inch away from one of Coleman’s fear-widened eyeballs. “You just don’t know when to quit. I should put you down like a dog.”

Despite the strangulation, Theodore Coleman – the Bloodsucker - let out a scream of unmitigated horror and in his eyes, Fidel could see the reflection of a great and inhuman thing coming down to kill them all.

He left Coleman just in time, leaping out of the way as an enormous column-like foot landed with the sound of crunching bones and organs – and the screams stopped.

[Crazedwraith]

Not the best boss fight but then Coleman's just a punk kid with some guns rather than actual professional like Mantis or The Reckoner and Desert Eagles suck, let this be known.

[Shroom Man 777]

I had trouble writing it. I have to say that I just wanted it over (OVER!) with.

So, yeah, as far as bossfights go, this was just a merry frolicking about in the jungle.

Compared to the action-packed invisigunfight that was FIDEL versus SLINGER (refer to art link in my sig) that included tumbleweeds and arcane ruinations and a brutal pwning.

And then there's FIDEL versus RECKONER. An epic sniper duel that pitted patience against persistence, a grueling ordeal that culminated in the epic clash of paradigms - the order and false veneer of rationality of man, versus the harshness of the jungle! Where, to triumph, a man must shed his vain platitudes of civilitude and embrace his primordial evolutionary birthright!

[Sidewinder]

Another badass chapter. So the Bloodsucker died when a dinosaur-- may I assume it's a dinosaur-- stomped on him? Good riddance.

[Shroom Man 777]

The earth trembled with the fall of its foot. Apatosaurus Ajax, a long-necked sauropod, towered above all its surroundings, far taller than the Amazon’s canopy or anything else amidst the procession that followed in its wake. It led the way, striding deliberately with the thunderous steps of its elephantine legs, and the whip-crack of its tail scything through the trees in an act of careless deforestation. Those that followed kept their distance as the sauropod lashed out with its appendage, its whiptail surpassing the speed of sound and felling trees with a sonic crack.

With their way cleared, the rest followed unimpeded, marching with mechanical purpose, a parade of saurian supremacy resplendent in its resurrected glory. Together and shoulder to shoulder, Rexes armed with rockets, missile-racks and the capacity to breathe out liquid fire stomped in unison with armored Triceratopses mounting microwave weapons on crowns of horns and howitzers on their backs, and crackling Spinosaurs with flesh-grafted Tesla blades flanked lumbering Stegosaurs with radiothermal warfare arrays integrated into their dorsal plates. Amidst them were numerous Troodont troops and Cyber-raptors – autonomous sentinels with shoulder-mounted cannons and staff weapons.

The smoldering stumps of felled trees lined their path, brunt bark still red and smoking, casting an eerie haze that refracted the artificial blood-light emanating from hollow eyes. It was a Mesozoic March from Hell.



Adolph observed calmly with his cobalt-blue eyes. Detached, dispassionate and calm – a stoic demeanor befitting one of his hybrid heritage. He was an Albertosaurus whose Tyrannosaurid genus was infused with superhuman Aryan DNA courtesy of his mad Nazi creator, his ‘father’ the Theozoologist. Thus, he was an Aryanosaur, unique like his brothers and sisters. But it was he who was the most perfect, the smartest and the strongest – the inheritor of the dominant genes.

He and his kin were unlike the rest of the Uprising’s drone dinosaurs whose primitive minds were altered and enslaved by microchips, chemicals and pterodactyl telepathy. Though those winged Matriarchs of the Uprising insinuated that he and his Aryanosaurs were impure mongrels and human-dinosaur hybrids, at least Adolph could watch the procession of mindless dinosaurian-drones with cold half-reptilian eyes that were his own.

Adolph’s thoughts were interrupted by a shadowy reptilian wraith perching itself atop the crown of a nearby Triceratops. Though the thing was a lesser creature than the Matriarch Aggressive who oversaw the operation, Adolph could not disregard it. For it was the Matron Contempt, though unlike its master, it was an it, not yet a she.

Aryanosaur, Contempt spoke to him with its mind.

Adolph turned his large predatory head to regard the pterosaur that called him. “Ja?”

What are you doing? it asked coldly. Contemplating absently before the battle? The Matriarch orders you to assemble with the rest of your kind and prepare for combat, not to idle by. Though I wonder of what your thoughts are...

“My thoughts are my own, Contempt,” Adolph retorted as he looked straight into the Matron’s milky-white eyes and felt the thing’s attempts at his mentallic defenses. “And as long as they are my own, they will not betray me.”

So be it.

“I will ready my brothers for war. I trust you too have your own preparations to make with your peons. Take care in your menial instructions, Contempt. I will go now.”

Adolph hefted his weapon of choice, an oversized Maschinengewehr 42, with his hydraulic arms and strode on bird-like legs, moving with predatory grace as he sought his brothers-in-arms.

As he did so, the Matron Contempt took to the skies and circled the formation before landing atop the leading Apatosaurus, the pterosaur using the sauropod’s tiny head as pedestal. Then the Matron craned its head up and made a high-pitched shriek that broke into a sharp digitized noise as it melded with the minds of the Uprising’s dinosaurs.



He watched from downwind, out of range of their keen olfactories, though to be doubly sure he had smeared himself in mud to mask the scent of blood. Blood that seeped out from where the leeches had detonated, like the one had exploded rather painfully in the back of his mouth, swelling up to the size of a golf ball before popping betwixt his tonsils. It made his throat sore.

“Have you contacted L for information?” the Major asked him.

“Yeah,” Fidel replied. He replaced his tri-oculars with a pair of binoculars, before flipping the goggles back on. Even with the sheer size of that convoy of dinosaurs, he still couldn’t get a complete view from his vantage point, and he didn’t want to get too close. “Major, I still can’t get a complete view from my vantage point… and I don’t want to get too close.”

“Did you at least get a visual on their weaponry?”

“I did,” Fidel paused, the blood that leaked down his throat made talking a bit difficult. “The Rexes have missile racks, sort of like those on Hind gunships, and Katyushas on their backs. And the Triceratops have cannons and heatrays,” the latter was technology reverse-engineered by the British after the Invasion of 1898, the so-called War of the Worlds. “The Spinosaurs have electro-ion weaponry, and the Stegosaurs look like they’re carrying radiothermal ECM,” Russian mil-spec Tesla tech designed to counter the British rayguns. “But the biggest one, the Brontosaurus, it’s completely decked out in all kinds of weapons. Not to mention it’s clearing a road for the rest of them with its tail… it’s leading the way, heading for the EVIL facilities. This is going to get messy.”

“The Brontosaurus?”

“The Apatosaurus, I mean…” he corrected himself. L was lecturing him on the taxonomic inaccuracy of the Brontosaurus moniker and how the oversized lizard was actually an Apatosaurus before he told her to spare him the thesis and focus. To her credit, she was quick to understand the gravity of the situation… Fidel swallowed some more of the blood that seeped down the back of his throat from his nasal cavities, and wiped off some that had dried on his moustache. He was getting too well acquainted with that metallic taste…

“Fidel.”

“Major?”

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah…”

“Are you sure? Taking on those freak mercenaries one after another must have taken its toll on your body. Your condition will affect your ability to carry out your mission effectively and you must be prepared for the worst.” the Major began. “While your current priority is evasion and observation, you have to be ready to take on both the EVIL Corporation and the Dinosaur Uprising, just in case if all hell breaks loose, and we both know it will.”

“…” Fidel groaned. He knew another lecture on battlefield technique was coming up, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

"Fidel, tactical espionage action involves surveillance - the covert reconnaissance of enemy positions, assets, strengths and weak points. Watching the enemy is a bit like reading a book and eventually your eyes and your body will get tired – especially in your current state. Take a break and rest for a while, when you get back, you might end up finding something between the lines."

“Major, I don’t have any time for breaks, I still have to-”

“Meet up with N?”

Fidel nodded, even if the Major had no way of knowing his non-verbal response.

“Are you sure that’s the wisest course of action? A lot has happened since the last transmission.”

“I don’t know…” Fidel answered. “The situation’s changed radically… it might not be safe, N could be dead, or it could be an ambush. But it’s the only thing I’ve got. I can’t stay here, pretty soon I’ll have no where to run and no where to hide. I have no choice, I’ll have to take that chance.”

“Very well, I understand. But remember, the only rule in the battlefield is to survive. Do whatever you have to do and come back home alive Fidel, Cuba needs both its Castros.”

“Don’t worry Major,” Fidel replied. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“Good. Rendezvous with N, extract whatever information you can get from him, especially on the Uprising. If possible, find an escape route. If not, then maintain a low profile until the whole thing is over, until you’re the last one left standing. You’re a survivor, Fidel. Do what you do best.”

“Understood,” Fidel stopped before he could kill the microbead radio. “Major...”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember why I was in Isla Norte?”

“Yes. You were sent to retrieve a package from one of our contacts…why?”

“Nothing. Nevermind.”



The High Hide was a prefab outpost built on top of the tall treetops of the jungle. It was a platform that was suspended by cables tied to a tree’s sturdy trunk and branches, allowing it to elevate or lower itself through a series of industrial winches. It was basically a paramilitary tree house made out of cheap lightweight aluminum and covered in camouflage mesh and netting – a jungle watchtower with enough room for two or three men and their weapons, their gear, and a small refrigerator filled with rations and refreshments.

Carl was one of the men posted on High Hide #0017G and he was doing his assigned duty of staring aimlessly at the jungle while lamenting the post given to him by Henchmen Resources. Despite the modest paycheck and the great dental plan, the job lacked the glamorous action of defending volcano lairs from besieging British commandos, and Carl longed for that kind of action greatly. The best he got was defending himself against the dangers of malaria and botflies, bugs that laid their eggs in human flesh so their larva could hatch out and enjoy a free meal, and to make matters worse…

“Hey, El Capitan, whatchu doin’ mang?” asked Frederico, clapping him on the shoulder. The man was one of the mercs Carl was supposed to be training. “There’s nothin’ out there… nobody’s seen that secret agent mang for hours.”

“Yeah…” Carl muttered. Alarms were raised during the wee hours of the morning when a captive was reported to have escaped into the jungle. Carl didn’t even know they were holding captives, though word had spread out that the man was a Cuban agent sent to spy on them. That was a little surprising, usually it was the CIA or the MI6 who were so keen on knowing what the Corporation was up to… “I guess it’s time to raise the Hide. We’ve been hanging low for hours and we haven’t seen any sign of that man. I think they were chasing him to the other side of the jungle, anyway.”

“Si,” Frederico nodded.

“Right, I’ll work the winch,” Carl said as he walked over to the other side of the Hide, trading places with Frederico. “Okay, hold on to the rails, I’m gonna pull us up and-”

“Madre de Dios! El Capitan!”

Carl turned around and found himself looking at a screaming Frederico grasping desperately onto the rails as a huge thing tried to drag him down. It was a cyborg reptilian skull with hydraulic jaws crushing the entirety of Frederico’s lower body, the man was screaming incoherent profanities while simultaneously gurgling out a fountain of blood.

Some of Frederico’s fluids splattered on Carl’s face, prompting him to act and jerk the activation lever of the winch, kick-starting it and propelling the High Hide up a rapid ascent. The suddenness of this basically ripped Frederico into two as he grasped desperately onto the rails while the dinosaur bit hungrily onto him as the Hide rose quickly up the canopy.

Carl saw ½ Frederico let go of the rails, and the dead man mouthed out a silent scream as he fell.

Carl also fell, on his ass, and began muttering in shocked incomprehensibly. He knew the EVIL Corporation was doing experiments, just like that Dinosaur Park, that it was turning its own dinosaurs into even deadlier robotified killing machines. He also knew of how experiments, done by the EVIL Corporation and practically everyone else, often went horribly wrong – like those hyperintelligent sharks and military supercomputers…

He didn’t have any time to think. Still on his ass, he scrambled for the telephone. The High Hides had telephones, with lines that went all over and reached back to the main base. He picked it up and began dialing and… realized that there was no dial tone.

The phone was dead. The lines that went between the Hides and the bases were tough, so monkeys couldn’t chew on them or anything… they were hard to cut. Carl lifted the whole phone up and saw that the cord, not the line, was cut. Cordless.

He didn’t notice the significance of that, and instead grabbed a walkie talkie. All he got was static.

He did notice the significance of that, and so he grabbed a flare gun. He got up, scrambled over to the side of the Hide, and pointed his gun up in the air.

He was too high for that Allosaurus, or that Stegoceratops, or whatever the hell it was, so it couldn’t just tiptoe and eat him like it did Frederico. To get him, the dinosaur would’ve had to chop the entire tree, or use one of its in-built grenade launchers or something. Carl didn’t know that the dinosaurs simply didn’t want to make noise, and that was why his phone was cut, why his radio wasn’t working, why there weren’t any explosions and why –

A camouflaged compsognathus leapt up from behind him and sunk its teeth into his neck.

Carl screamed, he struggled, and he fell over the rails.

He aimed the flare gun up and squeezed the trigger.

Then the Tyrannosaurus Rex ate him.

A burning ball of red light sailed into the air.



Matriarch.

The systematic elimination of human early-warning systems and outlying outposts has commenced.

Compsognathid scouts were deployed in advance to reconnoiter the enemy’s position and sabotage their communications infrastructure.

Radio jamming has been initiated.

The attack shall begin as planned.

By dawn, we shall have the objective.



With a splash, his foot landed in a wet hole in the ground, and he staggered as he tried to avoid falling down face first into the mud.

“Huh?”

He bent down to examine what nearly tripped him. His eyes had adjusted to the no-light conditions, and with the help of one hand touching and feeling the soil, and the collected water reflecting what little light there was, he could see that the hole wasn’t just a hole, but an imprint of a large foot with at least three clawed toes.

Fidel flicked on his radio.

“L, this is Fidel…”

There was no reply save for static.

He tried another frequency, the Major’s. Nothing.

“Jammed…”

It didn’t matter. He had seen the Uprising’s attack force, not all of it, but enough of it to know what was coming. They were jamming the airwaves, and were preparing for an all out war. The EVIL Corporates wouldn't even know what hit them, their almighty dollar help them…

Nonetheless, that foreknowledge wasn’t going to make what was to come any easier. He still had to rendezvous with N, extract whatever information there was to extract, and weather the oncoming storm. It would be much harder without ‘mission control’. The tiny radio and the earpiece stuck in his ear had saved his life countless times, helped him retain his sanity in the miserable steaming jungles, and made solo sneaking ops actually bearable.

Right now, he was on his own.

He unsheathed his knife, his only remaining weapon, and soldiered on uphill. His emptied .45 was inside the holster on his thigh, and that was all he had. He wasn’t even using the Reckoner’s tri-oculars, in an attempt to conserve battery-life. If a patrol of cyber-raptors ran into him in the dark…

He reassure himself by thinking the situation through. The dinosaurs were mobilizing and deploying, and if they assumed the EVIL Corporates knew nothing of their presence, and that was a wise assumption, then perhaps they would be lax in deploying a rear guard. Their infantry would not be left behind unnecessarily, but would be deployed together with the main force as they converged forward towards their primary objective.

Besides, if he needed his gun, he would be as good as dead anyway.

In the battlefield, the ability to think and react to the situation with intact nerves and senses was more important than any physical weapon. As long as he could keep his head, Fidel had all the ammunition he needed.

Thus he maneuvered himself deftly, low and slow, scanning the angles of the jungle as best he could. He didn’t really need the tri-oculars to see in the dark, he still had natural nightvision and other means of navigating the pitch blackness. Sometimes, NV goggles could cause disorientation – older ones, the outdated ones he was most familiar with, restricted depth perception – and concentrating on the grainy green images could take focus away from the other senses. Hearing and listening for the enemy was just as important as looking for him, if not more so in the jungle, as was smelling and being scented, which was why he was navigating downwind from the dinosaurs. L had told him of how the majority of a Tyrannosaurus rex’ fruit-sized brain was dedicated to the sense of smell.

Fidel heard a hissing noise and froze.

His heart nearly stopped. He was in a low position, crouched by some trees, as he looked up and saw the flare soar into the sky, its red light casting shadows in the night. He closed an eye, quickly adapting his sight to the sudden illumination, and opened it only when he decided to look away.

Maybe one of the mercenary patrols had spotted the Uprising, letting out the flare before the cyborg dinosaurs quickly took care of them. It didn’t really matter, but Fidel found himself hoping that the Corporates were warned by that single signal.

It would be easier to survive in the confusion of a pitched battle than in the one-sided slaughter of a human extermination.

The incoming call was as unexpected as the flare. Fidel flicked on his microbead.

“N.”

“Fidel. You are close,” it wasn’t a question, but a statement.

“Yeah… the airwaves are being jammed. If it wasn’t for our proximity, all you’d be getting out of me would be static,” Fidel replied.

“You certainly took your time, Fidel,” despite its distortion, there was discernable impatience in the voice.

“Just like in Isla Norte,” Fidel answered back.

No reply.

“I’ll be there,” he continued. “Just hold on to that package.”

“There isn’t much time,” that artificially modulated voice finally uttered. “You must hurry.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t keep you waiting.” Fidel killed his radio and smiled.



The cake was exquisite, smeared in the decadent oozing blackness of molten chocolate – so dark that light couldn’t escape its surface…

“Yet we were able to recover from the losses, sir?”

“The Atlantic fault-line facility was hardly irreplaceable, it was just a modified oil rig, and we were able to evacuate most of our valuable men despite the ongoing assault. The Elites were able to hold off the SBS commandos and Number 13 was able to kill one of the British agents. Sadly, we lost Doctor Hansgruber and were barely able to salvage Deadbolt. The facility had to be self-destructed. But, as they say, eggs and omelets… it’s all hush-hush, anyway. Those losses won’t be mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, you can be sure of that.”

“Of course, and I must say, sir, that this cake is extremely –”

The door opened and a chrome-plated cyborg stormed towards them, ignoring Donald Dennaro, the lawyer with a mouth full of cake. Instead, he fixed his gaze on Marcus, the man who ran the show.

“Deadbolt?”

“Sir,” the man-machine uttered, micro-servos whirring softly as they articulated his metal jaws. “We have a problem.”

“Indeed?” the elder man neatly wiped his mouth with a serviette.

“Yes. Come with me.”



The high-definition holoscreen displayed the image crisply and clearly, with an obtusely quantified resolution of ten thousand metapixels per micron. The image in the holographic screen was of an overhead view of the jungle, displaying the multiple derelict facilities now in the Corporation’s possession, along with the pre-fab outposts and infrastructure they had erected. The facilities were interspaced by vast expanses of jungle and as the image zoomed out the facilities became rather insignificant compared to the sheer size of the surrounding Amazon. The EVIL assets were tiny compared to the jungle, or the big red blips in the jungle that were moving towards them. The big red blips had circular patterns emanating out of them.

“What are those big red blips?” Donald Dennaro asked. “The ones with circular patterns emanating out of - ”

“We have insufficient information,” answered Deadbolt, the loyal EVIL employee and cybernetic organism. “Our sensor and communication capabilities have been neutralized.”

“How can anyone do that without our knowing so?” Marcus asked. Though he was clearly perturbed, he nonetheless graciously accepted the cup of coffee offered by a hardhat-wearing henchman. “Thank you, Jonathan.”

“We have insufficient information,” Deadbolt repeated himself.

“Then how do we know what those are, then?” Dennaro continued to point at the big red blips.

“Sonar-seismic sensors,” a new voice entered the confines of the command trailer, female and accented. It was Oktavia Boyer, the EVIL engineering specialist. She too had a hardhat. “Sonar-seismic sensors are standard equipment for our volcano lairs, and we bring them along even when we’re nowhere near any volcanoes or fault lines, just to be safe. When our communications and sensors were blacked out, the sonar was the only thing we had left that worked.”

Marcus sipped his coffee and, once more, wiped his mouth with a serviette. “And what can you gleam from this, Mrs. Boyer? Enlighten us, please.”

“The readings are hard to interpret, but we can tell that they are many, of considerable tonnage, and that they are coming for our facilities from multiple angles. We can’t phone or radio our other outposts, but we were able to warn them, nonetheless.”

“How?”

“Flares and smoke signals,” Oktavia replied dryly. “And Morse code. Short-range walkie-talkies can also function, to a limited extent, as long as they stay within visual range. We’re trying to jerry-rig some kind of comm. relay.”

“Have you alerted our henchmen and mercenaries of the situation?” Dennaro asked.

With a whir of actuators, Deadbolt turned to face him. “It is standard protocol for all EVIL security assets to mobilize and prepare for combat in case of a communications blackout.”

“It doesn’t take any protocol to know we’re going to be under attack soon,” Marcus said to himself. “Where is Number 13?”

“He is readying the Elites, the henchmen and the mercenaries,” the cyborg answered.

“Good, I knew I could count on him, at least.”

“There’s also one more thing…” Oktavia said unsurely.

“Yes?”

“The readings we’ve heard from the sonar… sound like footsteps,” for emphasis, she pressed a button and the holoscreen’s map was replaced by the sonar readings. They could hear a dull yet rhythmic noise, and that rhythm was represented by a graphic that resembled an electrocardiogram’s – with jagged lines that rose and fell in sync with the thundering booms of footfalls.

Sudden realization struck Marcus Elliot Hunt..

“It can’t be…”

“Sir?”

Marcus shook his head. “Have Number 13 redouble his efforts at preparing the forces. I want him ready to provide maximum resistance against whatever’s coming for us. Mrs. Boyer, are the emergency defense systems ready?”

“Yes sir, though are you suggesting that - ”

“We must evacuate.” Marcus announced.

“Acknowledged,” Deadbolt confirmed. “Sir, do you have any other commands?”

“We have to reach Doctor Thornier and activate his creations. All of them.”



Fidel crawled over the rim of the ravine, now a shallow gully, and finally found regular, leveled land.

As he paused to catch his breath, he noticed a Land Rover parked by a not-so-nearby tree. He wasn’t alone.

“N?”

“Fidel,” that familiar artificially modulated voice answered, from somewhere Fidel couldn’t pinpoint – though it definitely didn’t come from his earpiece.

“Alright, drop the act,” Fidel said between shallow breaths. “I think I know who you are.”

“Who do you think I am?”

“Ned. Somehow, you survived Isla Norte and those velociraptors,” Fidel answered. “Either the Corporates got you, and now you want out, or you’re with the Uprising.”

“Wrong,” N replied, though his voice was no longer artificially modulated. His voice had become her voice. “Not even remotely close, Fidel.”

She stalked out of the shadows, not far from the Land Rover, but closer to him than to the vehicle. She had dark eyes and raven black hair, contrasting with her fair complexion and blending with their nocturnal background. Her figure was clad in a sneaking suit – poly-aramid from the look of it.

“D,” Fidel spat. “Dementieva.”

“My first name’s Natasha. That’s what the letters stood for, Natasha Dementieva. A little unimaginative, I’m sure, but still… managed to fool you,” she smiled. “Hello, Fidel.”

Fidel wiped his scowling face with a muddy forearm.

“Surprised to see me?” she asked pleasantly.

“Yeah…” Fidel grumbled. “What the hell do you want?”

“Aw,” she pouted. “What’s wrong, Fidel? Did I break your heart?”

“More like a couple of my ribs.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” that amused smile returned. “I knew a round of rock salt wasn’t enough to put you down permanently. After all, you were so vigorous.”

“What the hell do you want with me?” Fidel repeated himself.

“I need your help.”

He looked at her with a confused glare.

“I kept you alive for a reason, Fidel,” she explained. “I didn’t want you dead in Isla Norte and I don’t want you dead now. If I did, then you wouldn’t have made it this far – but I need you, because you’re a useful little instrument, if a bit blunt.”

Fidel began walking towards her. “But there’s nothing stopping me from-”

“Oh, but there is,” she wagged her pointing finger at him. “I’m your contact and I have what you need to complete your mission. If you kill me, or if you force me to… replace you with another instrument, then it’s game over. You’ll be stuck in this miserable little jungle until those overgrown lizards finish all of us up systematically.”

“What do you want?” Fidel asked after a short silence.

“How’s your Commandante, Fidel?”

“What does he have to do with anything?”

“Indulge me.”

“President Fidel Castro is fine,” Fidel Castro answered tersely. He wasn’t sure of it, though. Before the mission, the Major had assured him of it, but still. “He dodged the assassin’s bullet.”

She regarded him curiously before finally asking: “Do you know who pulled the trigger?”

“I don’t know. It could be the CIA, or those goddamned exiles, or both of them working together,” frustration filled Fidel’s voice. “What’s this got to do with anything? Do you know who -”

“I do. Another question, and an answer: Are you familiar with the name ‘Crimson Dawn’?”

“No.”

“Then you better listen- ”

“No.” Fidel said. “You listen. I’ve had it with this bullshit- ”

“You better listen,” Natasha Dementieva repeated herself, this time pointing a silenced AKM with an underbarrel grenade launcher at his face. He recognized it as formerly belonging to him. She smiled. “Shall I continue?”

“Please do.”

“This affair with the cyborg dinosaurs, in the greater scheme of things, it’s nothing,” Natasha began. “I don’t know what the deal is with this ‘Uprising’, but I know they won’t last. I mean, come on.”

“This whole thing is insane,” Fidel agreed.

“Yes, it is. But they’re not our main concern,” Natasha winked conspiratorially at him. “Crimson Dawn is.”

“Crimson Dawn?”

“It’s a shadow organization, a cabal, a conspiracy, call it whatever you want. It was formed during the last days of the Cold War to perpetuate the cause of global communism despite the coming collapse of the USSR. Well, you know the drill. The collapse affected nations all over the world, nations like Cuba.”

“The Período especial en tiempo de paz… The Special Period in Peacetime.”

“Correct. The Dawn wants to re-create what was lost, and is trying to do so in Cuba as well. Your Commandante is, apparently, a stubborn man. A bit like you, I suppose,” there was that smile again. “He didn’t go along with their plans, he didn’t want to be their tool, and so they tried to replace him with a more willing instrument. But apparently, your leader has had a lot of experience in dodging death.”

“And what does this have to do with-”

“Oh, you know what these shadowy conspiratorial cabals are all about.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

“They have enemies everywhere and they have their fingers inside it all, prying into all those hidden corners – trying to manipulate everyone who’s with or against them, all to suit their needs.”

“Just like you.”

“Just like me,” she said it like a teacher responding to a student who finally figured out the answer to an obvious question. She was clearly enjoying herself. “The EVIL Corporation is the epitome of what the Dawn stands against, so we’re an obvious target for them.”

“And Cuba?”

“A blunt instrument like yourself.”

“The cyborg dinosaurs?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Great,” Fidel replied with all the tired sarcasm he could muster.

“They might be interested in cyborg dinosaur technology, for all it’s worth, though I for one don’t think it’s worth much at all… but as they say, knowledge is power.”

“Right.”

“Do you know who rescued you at Isla Norte, Fidel?” Natasha asked, though no doubt she already knew the answer. “The ones who came for you in the mini-sub, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Fidel answered. Then, in more of a sarcastic snort than a question, he asked: “Was it them?”

“Yes it was. They have plans for you, Fidel. Which is why I have plans for you.”

She tossed the AKM at Fidel and he caught it with one hand. Carefully, he inspected the weapon and noted that while the 40mm grenade launcher tube was empty, the rifle itself had a fresh magazine with a round already chambered in.

“Thanks,” Fidel uttered. Then he pointed the gun at D, Dementieva, Natasha, whoever the hell she was – and squeezed the trigger.

There was no muzzle flash, but silencers were never truly silent, so he could still hear the muffled sound of gunfire while feeling the recoil, and seeing the spent casing out of the corner of his eye.

“Oh Fidel,” she shook her head and sighed.

“Blanks,” Fidel uttered.

“Well,” Natasha shrugged indifferently. “I’m sure it was worth a try, anyway.”

“Where’s the rest of my gear?” Natasha had obviously gone to some trouble to acquire his gun, so maybe she had the rest of his things too.

“It’s in the Land R-”

The blast wave threw Fidel backwards, striking him like a bludgeoning to the head done by a freight train, and he landed hard on his ass. As he regained his senses, and as an uprooted tree returned to the earth, he noted a distinct noise… that sounded like clicking, a rapidly repeating reptilian clicking.

Then it came again. He could see it, a snaking tendril of acrid black smoke, the contrail of some rocket propelled projectile seemingly coming in slow motion. He didn’t need to duck for cover now that he was on his ass, and he could see the dark trail terminating in a red-orange shaped detonation.

“Run!” Natasha shouted as she crawled back on her feet. “Get to the Rover!”

She didn’t need to say it twice, Fidel was already on his feet – running to the Land Rover as fast as he could. She was ahead of him, already scrambling into the vehicle and hopping onto the driver’s seat as he clambered atop the back of the vehicle, grasping the roll cage like a jungle gym. In the back of the Land Rover, he found a fully stocked set of tactical webbing – with his AKM’s ammunition, grenades, the Semtex, and all the other things taken from him in his capture, tranqs included. He also found an M-60 machinegun mounted on the Rover’s back.

“Drive,” Fidel growled, sparing no time in wearing his gear and manning the machinegun – working the bolt and chambering one of the belt-fed rounds.

The Land Rover came to life, diesel engine roaring, and it rolled out just in time – a black contrail streaking towards its previous position and blasting with a force that uprooted a nearby tree along with assorted shrubberies.

Fidel cursed as mud and dirt and splinters and bits of bark and burning bushes rained down on him. He scanned for the attacker, looking for the source of the rocket-grenades, but he couldn’t see shit.

“Hold on!” Natasha yelled.



It saw the world through enhanced oculars within hollowed sockets, and through an additional hexose of thermoscopic implantations. With these artificial eyes, it could see a monochromatic blood-red view of the world, filled with alphanumeric designations and reticules that highlighted environmental threat assessments and target acquisitions - the slaved-CPU component of its half-machine mind interpreting and translating the perceptions of the remnants of its reptile brain and relaying it via data-net to the psychic cybrains of its pterosaurian overlords.


> scanning. lowthreat targets acquired. engaging targets. targets escaping...
> > commencing pursuit...
> > > receiving incoming transmission. pursuit joined. cyberaptors will assist in pursuit and termination...


Mutant scales changed color, hue and texture to match the environment’s – as though flesh was melding and melting into the darkness. That massive horned head, with its spider-like constellations of glowing red eyes, opened a gaping dagger-filled maw and let out a mighty roar.

The hunt was on.

Carnotaurus sastrei gave chase.

[Ford Prefect]

I imagine there would have to be a lock and load montage where Fidel got all his gear back. It was a pretty tense piece of writing in places. Marcus' order that they go get Doc Thornier and his cyborg dinosaurs into gear is foreshadowing for excellence.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Fuck yeh shroomy! FUCK YEH!

[Sidewinder]

Awesome!

By the way, why the "Shoot at the guy (or gal) who screwed me over, only to find out my gun is loaded with blanks" scene from 'Escape from LA'?

[Shroom Man 777]

Wait. You're asking why?

Um. Because I thought it was cool.

Which is really what DINO EATER is all about. It has everything I think of as cool lumped together. So far, it has done me no wrong.

[Seriously. It's to show that D/N/whatever she calls herself, Natsha, is not an idiot - or maybe she is, or maybe she's a super-manipulative bitch (and she's probably packing other heat as well). And that Fidel isn't willing to just set differences aside. Too often you have "good guys" being perfectly willing to work with the bad guys to face a third-party threat. Not Fidel. Sure, he was willing to work with her, but had the gun not been loaded with blanks, we would've seen that he was also willing to shoot her head off.

I originally wanted D/N to pull out a SPAS or a Milkor MGL when the Carnotaurus attacked. But decided to RUN! GET TO THE ROVAH! instead.]

[Darth Nostril]

Holy spunkfuck this is insane yet compellingly awesome

Oh you utter bastard

“One of them suffered blunt-force trauma to the head, the other one has been poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” 13 raised an eyebrow.

“With a tree-frog, to the throat, sir.”

“Resourceful…” 13 said to himself.

I had a mouthful of hot tea when I read that, managed to clean the mess off my keyboard but it's going to be days before I can smell anything again
Now I'm just waiting for Fidel to falcon punch a velociraptor to totally make my day

[Shroom Man 777]

Also:

Those black dark contrails made by those tree-uprooting RPGs from the Carno is a tribute to the Black Smoke Monster from Lost. Which also makes weirdo sounds AND uproots trees.

[Crazedwraith]

Nice chapter, Shroomz. Crimson Dawn eh? Was that one of Kamins?

Still pretty nifty. The plot as they say thickens...

[Ford Prefect]

Crimson Dawn eh? Was that one of Kamins?

The Crimson Dawn is an organisation the Shroomy invented, not Kamin.

[Shroom Man 777]

The diesel engine roared and sent the Land Rover tearing through the jungle undergrowth, rolling over unpaved earth and rending flora and fauna asunder with its wheels. Mud and pulped plants were smeared on the fender, and bugs and branches were smashed against the bulletproof windshield as the whole vehicle bucked like a steroidified bronco and reached the maximum unsafe speed for off-road travel.

The headlights were turned off as the driver steered the vehicle in a zigzagging route, evasive driving meant to avoid weapons fire and establish distance. In the backseat, her passenger was being assaulted by whipping plant life and bludgeoned by rocking roll cage, all while his bandana fluttered in the rushing air – and all while he aimed the vehicle’s mounted machinegun towards their rear.

For pursuing them relentlessly was Carnotaurus sastrei. It would not tire, nor would it stop, for its blood-lit eyes had burned its targets into its reptile brain. Though it was all but invisible in the night, it left an unmistakable wake – paying no heed to neither terrain nor obstacle as it smashed trees aside, and even uprooted some in casual acts of deforestation. It let out a guttural snarl as it prepared to unleash its payload of anti-armor weaponry.



He could see that formless, shapeless thing as it followed them, as it moved like a shifting shadow, a shadow with a roar that shook his very form. Suddenly, there were flashes as rocket-propelled grenades ignited and streaked towards them – lighting up the night as they came with indecent speed.

“RPGs!” Fidel warned as the projectiles shrieked past them, missing just barely as the Land Rover swerved to the side. The rockets exploded ahead of them, detonating trees, raining down burnt bark and scattered splinters.

“Return fire!” Natasha yelled from the driver’s seat. “Shoot back, damn it!”

Fidel didn’t need to be told twice, but he could barely see their pursuer – it had optic camouflage.

“I can barely see it!” he shouted back. “It has optic camouflage!”

“Just shoot something!” Natasha cried as another barrage blasted more of the jungle on their Land Rover.

Fidel gritted his teeth and peered down the space between the gun shields, lining up the iron sights of the M-60 machinegun and aiming at whatever the hell was after them. He tried to zero in on it, but with the Land Rover bouncing up and down the non-existent road, and with trees and foliage and vines whipping past him and obscuring everything in sight – their pursuer didn’t even need optic camouflage to be invisible.

Then there was a plume of smoke and fire as another wave of rockets was launched at them.

Fidel fired. The M-60 roared to life as muzzle flash and supersonic steel spewed out of its barrel, as it began ejecting spent casing and disintegrating ammunition belt, and as recoil rocked its ring mount. Tracers burned lines of light through the night, lancing towards their mark – but only a few found their target.

The incandescent magnesium-lit metal scorched shifting scales, burned through flesh, and pinged against the hyperalloy combat chassis beneath it. The Carnotaurus roared as part of it felt pain, as part of it reacted in anger – and as its machine intelligence reasserted itself and assessed the damage done to it. Tracers did work both ways, after all, and its targetters followed the path of illuminated lead back to its source.

“Incoming!” Fidel screamed – but it was too late. He let go of the machinegun and allowed himself to fall on his ass just as hot rocket exhaust washed over him. The blast shook the whole vehicle, and when his hearing returned, he could hear a faint moaning. “D? Natasha?”

He turned around and saw that the Land Rover’s windshield had been fractured into a spider web of broken glass.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. Hold on!”

Fidel steadied himself and held on to the roll cage for dear life as Natasha floored the accelerator and propelled the Land Rover even faster – good old-fashioned internal combustion outrunning even the invisible predator’s hydraulic-reinforced legs.

“We’re losing it,” Fidel muttered, though he was far from certain. The surrounding undergrowth had given way to slick and slippery mud, which made maneuvering difficult, so he hoped to hell that they were out of rocket-range. The thing was still barely visible though, and as if to spite him, it launched another rocket straight at them.

Fidel was about to curse when the Land Rover jerked to the side, power-sliding on the wet ground as its driver pulled the handbrake and turned really hard – transferring the vehicle’s weight to the outside tires, locking the rear wheels and upsetting the adhesion between them and the non-existent road’s surface. Mud flew everywhere as the incoming rocket missed completely and ended up hitting the semi-solid ground – detonating in a sticky-sounding blast of earth and water.

As the Land Rover righted itself, Fidel realized how he had conducted his rendezvous with N while being completely covered in mud – and how he was still smeared in the stuff up to now. He also noticed how their vehicle was now facing in the direction of what he now knew was an optically camouflaged dinosaur armed with an automatic rocket launcher.

“Not good,” Natasha said as she worked the clutch and sent the Land Rover in reverse. Fidel clambered back up to the mounted M-60 as more rocket-grenades came for them, and as their vehicle moved to avoid being blown to pieces, he swiveled his weapon and resumed firing. Bullets notwithstanding, their attacker began to catch up on them, roaring in reptilian rage as the Land Rover once more continued its mud-spraying zigzagging evasion – though this time they were going in reverse. “Get down!”

Fidel ducked just as the Land Rover passed by an exceptionally thick tree with an outstretched trunk-like branch. Had he been a second too slow, it would have broken him like a thin stick-like twig.

The closing Carnotaurus did not mind this obstruction, at least not until both thick tree and rampaging reptile met head on – but even then, it was just a matter of overpowering the overgrown plant with its horned skull and pseudo-mechanical legs. The thick tree wouldn’t give way though, so the Carnotaurus had to make it explode.

With that done, it returned its attention to its escaping quarry… and found that they were gone.



In the brief time their attacker had struggled with the tree, the Land Rover found a patch of flattened earth, a dirt road. No longer off-road, the vehicle could now go faster and Natasha used it for all it was worth – establishing as much distance as she could. While their pursuer was no longer in sight, they could still hear it as it roared and stomped and smashed through as many trees as it could in a bid to find them and kill them. If she could have, she would have placed the entire jungle between them and whatever the hell it was.

She glanced at her rearview mirror.

“Still alive?”

“Yeah…” Fidel was slumped against the M-60 machinegun, one arm over its thick stock while the other wiped mud off his face. “That was some fancy driving, you’re pretty good.”

“I’m a very talented woman,” Natasha answered back with a tired smile. “Now… where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?”

“I don’t know…” Fidel muttered. “Crimson Dawn?”

“Yeah,” she snorted. “Well, that’s the least of our priorities now, isn’t it?”

“Then where are we going?”

“To the laboratories. Thornier’s facility will have everything we need.”

“Everything we need?”

“Yes,” Natasha adjusted her rearview mirror again. “And naturally, that’s where Mr. Hunt and everyone else will evacuate to when all hell breaks loose – and believe me, it already has.”

“Why?” Fidel asked.

“Because it’s where we keep our cyborg dinosaurs.”

“Right.”

“Then after that, it’s to Site B.”

“Site B?”

“It’s the final fallback point in the mountains and -”

There was a flash of light, and then a part of the Land Rover simply vanished in a blast of molten metal and burning rubber. The spare tire on the back half-vaporized by –

“Velociraptors!” Fidel shouted. Cyborg velociraptors, with their flesh carved out and replaced with black steel and tangled wiring.

They let out an inhuman cry as they tore through the bush to give chase – blasting away with their shoulder cannons, more strobe-flashes preceded by the snap hiss of teslalectric buildups. Lines of incandescentry stabbed through the darkness in a lethal lightshow as the cyborg velociraptors, Cyberaptors, came with an unnatural speed – long legs working with animalistic grace, bodies in sync with their rhythmic motions, straightened tails counterbalancing their shifting masses, their entire bodies working like pistons.

There were three of them, coming in a delta formation and firing for effect.

Fidel spared no time in working the M-60. He squeezed the trigger and in response to the superheated salvos, the machinegun’s retort was that of steel.

The pyrotechnic strontium-magnesium tracer scorched skin and scale. Its slow approach was an illusion, and as it came closer, it appeared to speed up considerably. Less than a blink of an eye later, five unlit rounds followed and dismembered the leading raptor – rounds ripping through flesh, blood and bone, igniting its power cell in an explosion of sparks. The Cyberaptor jerked back and collapsed – some parts of it still moving and kicking, muscles twitching and trying to continue the pursuit, while other components lost power and shut down entirely.

Tracers scythed through the darkness, a fleeting response soon silenced by more silver slivers of coagulated light.

One of the bolts came in at an angle, liquefying a portion of roll cage before splashing molten metal on Fidel’s gun shield, forcing him to duck and take cover. Another flash of strobe light later, and the gun shield itself was glowing red-hot and missing a sizeable chunk.

“Phased plasma,” Fidel uttered as he finally realized what the raptors were trying to kill them with.

“What was your first clue?” Natasha half-asked and half-shouted as she sent the Land Rover jinking and skidding and swerving to avoid the incoming blasts, violently manipulating the steering wheel for all it was worth. Every glancing blow from the raptors carved out glowing gashes all over the Land Rover’s bodywork – sending burning bits flying off – but the vehicle remained mostly intact as it twisted and turned and left behind a contrail of smoke from its still-burning spare tire. “And why aren’t you shooting back?!”

“I’m pinned down!” Fidel shouted back. In his experience, the gunner’s position was a very unsafe one, being a favorite target for everything from African child soldiers to Afghan Mujahadeens, to even – as he was now re-learning – cyborg velociraptors armed with high-tech weaponry. There was a saying common amongst gunners…

When the going gets tough, the tough get cyclic.

If he didn’t make himself a target, Fidel knew that the blasts would eventually turn the rest of their vehicle into something similar to their still-burning spare tire. So, he got up and got back to the M-60 – and with a shout, he resumed firing, the ensuing full-automatic fusillade deafening him from the sound of his own hoarse war cry.

The Cyberaptors had thought that they had eliminated the gunner, a designated primary threat, so when there was a resumption of return fire, they immediately ceased closing-in and went back to their evasive patterns – weaving between the tracers and the projected projectile trajectories, their in-brain computers telling them to avoid anything that might cause them damage. Cyberaptors were optimized for speed, to close in for the kill, and were thus lightweight, reduced armoring traded for more hydraulic servos in their legs. They couldn’t take damage, but they could certainly give it.

But when their targets could match them in speed and keep distance while returning fire, it complicated things. So, when a near-miss from a tracer caused a Cyberaptor’s eyeball to boil off its socket, their networked minds decided to greatly simplify matters.

Claws dug into ground to increase traction, and fuel cell power was diverted to cause a violent burst of speed – the Raptors leaving behind trails of picked-up dust as they closed in for the kill.

“Shit,” Fidel cursed. The M-60’s ceramic barrel was glowing white-hot. Old-fashioned metal barrels required replacements when overheated, and some M-60s came with asbestos muffin mittens for that purpose. But while the new ceramic barrels could cool off faster, he still had to cease fire before he could resume fire.

At the same time, the Cyberaptors’ 15-megawatt plasma cannons were infused with liquid nitrogen coolant. They could now resume firing, and so they did. The shoulder-guns hissed as teslalectric buildups prepared the weapons for initiation, electricity coursing through the compact barrels and -

Fidel ditched the steaming M-60 and got down as fast as humanly possible, before getting right back up and firing a burst from his AKM.

The rounds pinged off the armored shoulder of the nearest Cyberaptor. It did nothing to the shoulder-cannon itself, but coolant lines were severed and liquid nitrogen began hissing out of the raptor’s side. Not that it mattered, as the Cyberaptor went on undeterred and fired its weapon.

There was a snap-hiss and a flash of light, and then the sound of crackling and fizzling. Smoke started coming out of the shoulder-cannon.

Fidel spared no time, gunning for the other raptor with his successive burst. The Cyberaptor merely leapt to the side, avoiding the rounds entirely, and returned fire with its own weapon – but it hadn’t compensated for the sudden movement and it too missed entirely.

Fidel didn’t wait for the raptor to reacquire him, he fired one more burst and got down before the next plasma bolt burned through where his head was at just a half-second ago – searing nothing but air and hair.

Natasha glanced at her rearview mirror.

“They’re closing in on us,” she said. “Do something!”

“Like what?” Fidel spat back as he tried not to get thrown out of the violently-heaving Land Rover. Something that was hanging off the now-ruined roll cage fell off and landed on his chest, and upon a cursory glance, he realized that it was a satchel bag full of grenades. He picked one up and pulled its pin off. He didn’t grip the safety lever, and it came off with the pin as the striker rotated to detonate the primer.

“I think I left a satchel full of grenades in the back - ” Natasha was cut off as the Land Rover’s left-view mirror suddenly turned into steam, and as something behind the Land Rover went off with a loud bang.

Fidel had thrown the hand grenade at the last possible moment, once more catching the Cyberaptors off-guard. The grenade sailed through the air and was halfway from the ground - when it exploded and killed them.

One of them, at least.

The remaining Cyberaptor, scarred by shrapnel, with bleeding wounds and sparking mechanical components all over its robo-reptilian form, lunged – leaping over the Land Rover’s burning spare tire and clambering onto the roll cage. Damaged servos whined, and it hissed as it caught sight of Fidel – the blood-red ocular beneath its ruined eye narrowing to glare at him.

It fired its shoulder-cannon, but instead of casting plasma, it spewed out an ineffectual spray of sparks.

At this, the Cyberaptor snarled in irritation and decided to kill its prey the old-fashioned way. Its vibro-viscerator toe-claws began humming like electric carving knives while its hydraulic jaws gaped wide – displaying rows of serrated teeth. It came for Fidel, to bite his face off.

The shotgun blast sprayed depleted uranium pellets all over the Cyberaptor’s abdomen, perforating its tissues and ripping out its guts, of both the intestinal and electrical varieties. It wailed as the impact caused it to stagger back precariously, its belly-blasted hole trailing out wires and organs as it did so. As it tried to balance itself, Fidel got up and used the machinegun to make its head explode.

The decapitated Cyberaptor convulsed as the rest of its headless form was riddled with bullets and torn to bloody bits, with more than a few mechanical parts coming off as well, and then it fell off the Land Rover.

With the last velociraptor dead, Fidel turned around and found Natasha driving one handed, with her other hand holding a SPAS-12 shotgun over her shoulder. She had aimed her shot through the rearview mirror with convenient accuracy.

Fidel nodded an inaudible thanks and took the satchel bag of grenades, hanging it on to the ruined roll cage, back where he found it. Then he slumped over the M-60 and wiped his brow.

“Good job,” Natasha finally said. “I knew you were the right man for this kind of thing.”

“Heh…” if it weren’t for her driving, both of them would’ve been dead. Fidel had to give her that, at least… Natasha Dementieva - D, N, or whatever it was she called herself at the moment. “And this is why I’m in the middle of this mess?”

“Yes.” It was probably the most honest thing she had ever told him.

“And how do you figure in all this? Cyborg dinosaurs, EVIL Corporations, Crimson Dawn…”

“Remember that night at the beach? What did I say to you?” she asked, answering his question with one of her own.

“You said that if you told me anything, you’d have to kill me,” Fidel noticed that she still had her SPAS-12 shotgun pointed at his general direction. “But I’m too useful to you. You can’t just off me anytime soon, huh?”

“Right. So you better not disappoint me,” Natasha said as she placed her shotgun on her lap, for quick and easy access. “I’d hate to think that all of this was just a waste of time.”

“Informing the Intelligence Directorate of GenInc’s activities, contacting Ned, even helping organize the mission to Isla Norte… all just to snag me into this? That must’ve taken you a lot of work.”

“Sure did.”

“And you’re not even going to tell me about what I’m going to be used for?”

“Nope.”

For a short while, neither of them said anything, until they noticed a dim glow in the distance, hazy light emanating into the sky, the far away flickering of fire. Somewhere deeper in the jungle, something was burning – a lot of somethings.

“It’s already starting,” Natasha said. “If we can’t get there in time…”

“Then you better step on it,” Fidel said as he got up and checked the M-60. Despite everything, it was still firmly mounted on its ring mount, though it was almost out of ammunition.

Fidel was replacing the machinegun’s bullet box when the trees in front of the Land Rover parted like the Red Sea to give way to an all-too-familiar and all-too-horrible sight.

“Hell no.”

The Carnotaurus came for them.

And the Land Rover was heading straight for it.

Like before, Fidel could see that formless shapeless thing as it neared them – though now, it wasn’t so formless, nor was it so shapeless. It had form, large and lethal like any predator with automatic rocket launchers bolted onto it. It had shape, Fidel could see its head, its hydraulic jaws filled with rows of spike-like teeth, and its bull horns. He could also see six glowing red eyes unlike those of any natural creature’s.

There was no time to scream obscenities, as there were no words for the sight of that thing as it came down to end them.

The horned head smashed through crumple zones and shattered already-shattered bulletproof glass. Its teeth sank into steel and seat cushioning, and large chunks of car hood and bodywork and passenger-side chair filled its maw. But the driver of the mauled Land Rover didn’t slow down, not even with the Carnotaurus’ face right beside her, eating parts of her car. Natasha simply stomped on the accelerator and worked the steering wheel for all it was worth, while hoping that the airbag wouldn’t erupt out of it.

The Carnotaurus had a mouthful of Land Rover, but it wasn’t enough. With the sound of shredding steel, the vehicle broke free and tore through the dirt path, utterly mangled and mutilated, but still escaping partially intact. The Carnotaurus spat out its mouthful of Land Rover, turned around, and immediately resumed its pursuit. It would not lose them, not again.

Fidel turned away from the sight of the chasing dinosaur and looked at Natasha, who was still buckled safely on the driver’s seat and still driving the vehicle. He looked at what was left of the passenger’s side to her right – which was entirely gone, everything to the right of the handbrake along with what looked like half of the Land Rover’s front end. Most of the hood was torn off, revealing the V8 diesel engine, while the windshield and dashboard were also no longer present. All that was left was a mess of twisted metal.

Then he turned back to the pursuing Carnotaurus – remembering L’s definition of a large predatory dinosaur with optic camouflage.

It resumed firing its rocket-propelled grenades, and Fidel settled back into the old routine. He returned the favor with his machinegun.

The M-60 roared as it spat out muzzle flash and supersonic steel. Then it ran out of bullets.

“Shit!” Fidel spat. He had been reloading the M-60 when the dinosaur came out of the trees and made him spill the contents of the box magazine. Now, he had to open the machinegun’s receiver, pick up the fallen belt, and shove it into the loading port as fast as he could – all while everything around him exploded, and all while the Carnotaurus came closer and closer.

Despite everything, Fidel didn’t allow himself to panic. He calmly slapped the receiver cover shut, worked the slide to chamber a new round, and screamed as he emptied the contents of his machinegun right into the approaching dinosaur’s face.

It didn’t work. The Carnotaurus was already so close that it had ceased firing its rockets altogether – not because it was running out of them, but because it was once again getting ready to take a bite off the Land Rover, with an extra serving of Cuban commando.

The M-60’s rounds tore through scale and pinged off the hyperalloy underneath, tracers and armor-piercing bullets having no effect save for destroying a pair of the Carnotaurus’ six-eyes. Fidel was close enough to see black liquid oozing from the ruptured ocular implants, close enough to smell the cyborg dinosaur’s septic breath, and close enough to realize that it was only a matter of seconds before the Carnotaurus would lunge at the Land Rover.

The Carnotaurus lunged at the Land Rover.

Fidel abandoned the M-60 for the final time, hitting the Land Rover’s floor as everything above him was consumed by that terrible lizard. Roll cage and ring mount, machinegun and gun shield and ammunition box, everything above him was literally devoured. Masticated. Eaten.

The massive horned head and its six angry red eyes loomed. Within its jaws was a mess of metal with bits of roll cage hanging out. The M-60 and its bullet box were sticking out between its teeth, and the grenade satchel was also amidst the oral wreckage.

Fidel could see this, and so could Natasha. The dinosaur in her rearview mirror was definitely larger than it appeared.

One more go and the Carnotaurus would kill them all. Fidel had to think fast, and act even faster. In the battlefield, one was either quick or dead.

He looked around, the AKM was worth nothing, and at this range, grenades weren’t the smartest choice either. He had nothing else; there was nothing he could do to the Carnotaurus.

Except to burn it. With fire.

So he threw a can of petrol at the Carnotaurus, and the cyborg dinosaur readily accepted it. Its mouth, already filled with miscellaneous metals, bit on the fuel container and thrashed, spilling gasoline all over its head. Then Fidel got up and stood there before the beast, holding a road flare in one hand. He ignited it, lighting it up with a red glare, and then he threw it at the dinosaur’s fossil fuel-soaked face.

It unleashed a horrible roar as its pain receptors were overwhelmed, as its infrared hexoculars were made sightless, and as its face caught fire. Blinded and burning, the Carnotaurus thrashed its horned head wildly in a vain effort to remove the liquid flame, but it achieved nothing – except for striking the Land Rover and sending it careening off the dirt road.

The Land Rover came to an abrupt halt as it crashed, and the impact threw Fidel off the vehicle and into another tree. However, the sound of possibly fracturing bones was drowned out by that of ammunition cooking off and popping like firecrackers, sending stray bullets flying everywhere. Then the blast of the detonating grenade satchel silenced everything, including the Carnotaurus’ own feeble bellowing.



When he got back to his feet, Fidel checked himself for fractures and found that the only thing he might have broken was the AKM slung over his back. The rugged rifle had saved his spine from the tree.

Wearily, he surveyed the scene around him. The Land Rover was totally trashed, parts of its mangled form was bent around the tree it had collided with, while the bumper and the bullbar on it had been dislodged entirely. Steam was slowly rising out of its exposed engine, and the faint scent of leaking gasoline could be discerned – though whether it was coming from the crashed vehicle, or from somewhere else, Fidel wasn’t entirely sure.

Neither was he entirely sure if Natasha was still alive.

The scent of gasoline was stronger now. And along with it came the smell of burnt meat.

Fidel turned around and began backing away, slowly.

The Carnotaurus regarded him with its remaining red eyes. Most of its head was a burnt and blackened mess, with scales scorched and smoking. Charred flesh was peeling off the bone while the underlying hyperalloy sizzled and seared everything on it and around it. A full half of its face was ruined – bleeding blood and black liquid. Its glowing oculars narrowed at Fidel, glaring at him, identifying him as a target – as the one who had caused it damage and pain.

It roared.

And Fidel threw a grenade at its face.

The grenade detonated with a flash and a bang, and the Carnotaurus ducked its head to avoid the expected explosion. This time, however, it was not mangled by shrapnel, but blinded and deafened for a fleeting moment.

Fidel ran for his life.

He ran as fast as his legs could take him, as fast as his bruised body would allow him. He staggered and ran without any particular direction, but he didn’t need any to tell him where he needed to go. Without even looking back, he could tell that the Carnotaurus was behind him. He could hear it as it smashed trees aside in its single-minded pursuit. He could feel it as its multi-ton mass shook the ground, he didn’t know how close it was, but he didn’t even have to look over his shoulders. All he knew was that he had to get as far away as possible.

All he knew was that he had to survive.

Fidel checked his AKM, his grenades, and his Semtex.

Now was no longer the time for tactical espionage. Now was the time for action.



The Carnotaurus saw the world in a blood-red monochrome. But with the damage it had incurred, even its perceptions began to fail it. The monochromatic view flickered and the targeting reticules faltered despite attempts at compensation. Thermoscopes built into the hexoculars had been ruined when its face caught fire, and some of the ocular implants themselves had been destroyed by the subsequent grenade blasts.


+status: significant damage incurred. primary sensors compromised+

+initiative: reroute processing power to secondary olfactory apparatus+


Its nostrils flared wide open as it began inhaling copious amounts of air. Olfactory receptors at the roof of its nasal cavity sampled the scent molecules in the inhaled particulates, and the reptile’s in-brain computers began processing an entire world of smell.

It filtered the scent of gasoline and the smell of its own burnt flesh, systematically ignoring them and placing scrutiny on everything else it could perceive. It could smell sweat and blood, but subtle differences in chemical composition told its brain that these smells were not its own. That these smells were familiar for another reason…

The Carnotaurus swayed its mangled head side-to-side, gauging where the scent trail led to. With a growl, it lumbered on towards the most promising direction.


+ resume original directive: search and destroy+



He got down to a crouch and leaned his back on a nearby tree. He propped his gun on the exposed tree roots, and used both his hands to scoop moist soil from the ground. It wasn’t mud, but it would do.

Fidel smeared the damp dirt all over himself – covering his hair, his face, and even his moustache with the stuff. He pulled up his sleeves and rubbed some more of the grime on his forearms, smearing his new cuts and burns with it to conceal himself.

Despite the light of faraway fires permeating a dim glow through the jungle, Fidel chose to rely on his sense of hearing instead of his sight. He rested his head against the tree and closed his eyes, breathing in deep breaths.

He could hear himself, the dull sounds of his heart beating, and the noise of his lungs expanding and contracting with every breath. He could also hear distant gunfire, the echoes of cracking firearms, and the thundering rumble of explosions. Something big was going on out there, but whatever it was, Fidel had other problems…

He could hear the dull thud of heavy footsteps, even feel the subtle vibrations through the tree he was leaning on…

Fidel picked his AKM up, slid a 40mm grenade into its silenced underbarrel launcher, and slowly closed the tube, shutting it with an audible snap.



The Carnotaurus had its nose on the ground, sniffing like a bloodhound. Finally, it had found something. A trail of blood. Blood from its bleeding quarry.

More than that, there was a tattered piece of bloody cloth and –

The Carnotaurus lifted his head up. It had heard something, and immediately its in-brain CPU redirected processing power from its nose to its ears.


+status: search mode initiated. scanning area with olfactory and acoustic arrays+

+target acquired+

+initiative: terminate target with extreme prejudice+


The rotary drum magazines of its twin automatic grenade launchers began spinning, whirring and then clicking as they locked and loaded rocket-propelled rounds into the launch tubes.

The Carnotaurus growled, a guttural noise as its predatory instincts asserted themselves. It stalked forward, stomping its foot down hard on the single evidence of its prey, that tattered piece of bloody cloth and –


Fidel worked the detonator’s trigger.


A brick of Semtex was buried beneath Fidel’s bloody handkerchief, and when the signal came, the plastique spared no time in exploding. The blast sent soil into the air and scores of steel pellets, previously ingrained in the explosive itself, through the Carnotaurus’ three-clawed foot - turning it from an appendage of locomotion into a bloody hydraulically-augmented stump.

The Carnotaurus reared up to roar in reptilian rage when a 40mm grenade shot through the air in a parabolic arc and landed on its face. It detonated, a lesser explosion than that of the Semtex, but it was nonetheless effective in blowing a chunk off the dinosaur’s head. The Carnotaurus was now missing a horn and all of its face was now a mangled mess that bled blood and black liquid.

Fidel emerged from behind the tree and worked his grenade launcher, sliding it open and sending a spent 40mm casing flying out of the tube chamber. He slid another fat round in and closed the launcher shut with a snap.

The Carnotaurus was turning to face him while firing indiscriminately with its automatic grenade launchers and turning its immediate vicinity into a scene of multiple explosions that combined into a much larger and all-encompassing one – a storm of shrapnel and deafening noise.

Rockets shrieked past Fidel, leaving black contrails as they destroyed everything around him except himself. As if the rockets weren’t enough, the exploding trees themselves were very much like grenades as they sent stake-like splinters flying everywhere. Pieces of wood tried to impale Fidel through his limited body armor, but he ignored that and ran through the storm.

He threw himself to avoid a nearby blast, and as he landed, he went into a roll and got back semi-upright in a kneeling position. His weapon was still firmly in hand, and he countered the Carnotaurus’ barrage with a single well-placed round at one of the cyborg dinosaur’s weapons – crippling it.

However, the Carnotaurus’ remaining launcher sent an un-aimed rocket-propelled grenade straight at Fidel and, once more, he threw himself out of its path. The warhead struck a nearby tree instead, and the blast sent him flying like a rag doll into another tree.



The AKM was no longer on him when the blast wave threw him into a tree, and he could hear an unpleasant sound when his back met with bark. It hurt a lot.

Eventually, the explosions stopped, and Fidel laid there in pain. He sighed in relief when he found out that he could still move his legs, and groaned when he felt pain from the gunshot wound on his backside. It wasn’t bleeding, but still, with the trauma and the bruising... He moved to apply pressure on it while looking around with controlled panic. He knew it wasn’t over yet.

He found his AKM lying on the ground less than ten meters away from him, and he immediately began crawling for it.

The Carnotaurus’ remaining foot landed on the AKM, and the weapon disappeared underfoot with the sound of crumpling steel. The cyborg dinosaur limped on its good leg, staggering as it balanced itself and as its remaining auto-launcher cycled to reload more ammunition. Its head was an eyeless, practically faceless mess of mutilated flesh and bone, the underlying hyperalloy being only thing holding it all together.

Utterly blind and deaf, and probably dying, the Carnotaurus nonetheless carried on its mission parameters. The cranial injuries it had sustained were near-fatal to its reptile brain, but its CPU kept it alive – for the sole purpose of finishing its objectives.

Nostrils flared as it struggled to reacquire the scent of its target over the smell of its own burnt and decaying flesh.

It bent down and leaned forward, moving closer and closer to Fidel.

Until it was so near that both of them were now facing one another, with less than a meter between them.

The Carnotaurus growled as its automatic launcher chambered its last rocket-propelled grenade.

And Fidel struck. Unsheathing his CQC knife and stabbing it into the tip of the Carnotaurus’ snout, impaling the blade as deep as he could into the cyborg dinosaur’s skull. Before the Carnotaurus could react to this sudden stimuli, Fidel used the knife’s protruding handle as a kind of climbing piton, using its leverage to pull himself up in one quick motion.

He clambered atop of the Carnotaurus’ head before its machine intelligence could realize what had just happened, and he ran on top of the Carnotaurus as fast as he could, balancing himself on its back until the beast finally moved to throw him off.

Once more, Fidel landed on hard ground, but he didn’t stop. He crawled back to his feet and ran from the Carnotaurus, away from it and towards his AKM. He staggered and fell and clawed through mud and dirt as he pulled his half-buried dinosaur-stomped Kalashnikov out of the ground.

The rugged rifle was intact and, more importantly, so was its grenade launcher. Fidel slid the tube open, ejecting the spent casing as he did so, and shoved a new round in and snapped it shut.

The Carnotaurus turned around, but Fidel was faster. Before the beast could bring itself to bear, Fidel squeezed the oversized trigger and the silenced grenade launcher belched out its explosive projectile.

The Carnotaurus completed its turn just as the grenade struck the ankle above its remaining foot. The blast destroyed flesh and bone, and the strain of the multi-ton predator’s motion caused the steel of the ruined hydraulic supports to snap. The Carnotaurus’ leg broke and it fell on its side, its mass crushing its remaining auto-launcher.

But it wouldn’t stop. Despite its debilitating damage, despite its ruined legs, the Carnotaurus tried to move forward – its tiny forelimbs clawing while its footless legs struggled to bring itself back up to its no-longer-existent feet. All it achieved was a bizarre kind of feeble undulating motion.

Fidel slid the grenade launcher’s tube open and shoved a new round in.

The Carnotaurus roared at him in a final act of defiance.

And the 40mm grenade detonated in its mouth, blasting through its skull and destroying the remnants of its reptile brain and its CPU.

The Carnotaurus died. And its last vestigial hexocular finally ceased glowing.



He let out a relieved sigh and, for a while, just laid there on the ground with his gun across his chest.

After a while, he noticed that his microbead earpiece was vibrating. He flicked the radio on.

“Fidel,” came Natasha’s voice. It was distorted, not because of any voice modulation, but due to heavy interference – jamming from dinosaur ECM. “Are you still alive?”

“Yeah…” Fidel tried to get back up to his feet, but ended up falling back on his ass. “Pretty much.”

“What happened to the dinosaur? What’s your status?”

“I’m fine, it’s not.” he answered as he finally managed to get up. He flexed his torso and was rewarded by cricking noise from his still-intact spinal cord.

“Good.”

“I need a ride,” Fidel started walking towards the Carnotaurus’ felled corpse. “Can you pick me up?”

“I can’t. The Land Rover’s barely running and I’m already on the move. I couldn’t wait for you, not with everything going to hell.”

“Great. Now what?”

“I know this place, it’s a small outpost probably not too far from your location. You might find a ride there,” Natasha answered. “I’ll give you the directions.”

“Thanks,” Fidel killed his radio as he stopped before the Carnotaurus’ felled corpse.

He got his knife back.

[Crazedwraith]

First: The phrase " a bloody hydraulically-augmented stump. " is among the awesomest ever.

Second: Grenade launchers can be silenced? Surely when a big ass explosion goes off. people are going to know there are grenades!

Third: Nice Akshun.

Finally Forth(Alliteration, Ace!): More. Now. Susan.

[Shroom Man 777]

The Russians did have silenced grenade launcher (but not silenced explosions), for all that's worth . Those boys came in 30mm, though. I'm just making some fictional GL that's a combination of that, and an M203.

[JointStrikeFighter]

ITS NOT OVER YET!!!


Cool work as usual Shrrom, but not your best I am sorry too say Too many..short sentences, kind of like shaky cam. In a book. SHAKY BOOK!.

That should totally be Fidel's next opponent BTW; a guy with the power to make Fidel's vision SHAKY!!!! with 5 million cuts per minute!

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, I had to quicken up the pace. A lot of things happened in this last 15-paged chapter, more than some of the previous chapters that were longer and slower. I was thinking of how I might be criticized for having chapters that were too looooong. So, yeah, I sped things up.

It was also frustrating trying to get this done "on time". I'm such a shmuck.

[Sidewinder]

Good chapter, but you should be careful with the technobabble. Machine guns are issued with a spare barrel that is installed when the original barrel overheats; when the spare overheats, gunner will reinstall the original in the hopes that it's cooled down enough to use again. Change the ceramic barrel's description from "doesn't need replacement" to "cools down faster," and it should be okay.

If you need help with guns, feel free to PM me.

That should totally be Fidel's next opponent BTW; a guy with the power to make Fidel's vision SHAKY!!!! with 5 million cuts per minute!

A psychic who can blur Fidel's vision, forcing the Cuban to close his eyes and rely on other senses? Seems interesting, but godlike writing skills are needed to avoid turning Fidel into the cliche "blind samurai."