The Complete Flashback Saga

Chapter 2-5

Waiting ...

He'd tried to prevent that. He'd ignored the warnings of his fellow officers and spilled everything in court. Almost overnight he'd become a hero to the public and a pariah to his own. But he'd kept his job in spite of all the harassment, thanks to the support of a few close friends, all cops, and the watchful eye of the media—which had descended upon the Seattle Police Department like a swarm of angry locusts during the trial, and had kept in touch afterward. Under all that scrutiny, no one had dared to fire him, and he'd kept his job.

Almost ...

But he would have liked to have done much more than that, really. He would have liked to have gotten four very bad cops off the street and into the slammer where they belonged—right there with the other so-called “bad-guys,” all four of them bitching and moaning and endlessly repeating the one phrase they themselves had heard so often as cops, the one that had never failed to make them laugh and snicker and sneer at the people they were binding up like captured stray dogs, the phrase that always went something like: “Why you hassling me, man? Why aren't you chasing the real bad guys? I'm just a normal person. I got a wife, kids, a good job ...” and so on.

The dark stand of trees and its boulder-crested mountain of dirt were looming close now.

That's precisely right, Tanner fantasized with a sardonic little grin. Cop or not, you’re just a normal person. And now you’re doing time for your very own screw-up, just like normal people do.

But that, of course, was only fantasy. In reality those cops were still out there—still wearing badges, still carrying guns, still slinking around under cover of night.

And the tyrannosaur sprung forward.

Startled from his trance, Tanner looked up into its growing, dark eyes and knew he could never outrun them. All in a split-second, he decided not to try. He lifted high his revolver instead, knowing himself to be but a fighting dead man.

But what happened next was so alien, so displaced in time and orientation, so skewed—that Deputy Orley Tanner would find himself laughing, not screaming, as he sprinted desperately for the very doors he'd vowed not to enter.

X | ReplayTHE COP WAS JUST STANDING there, staring at the trees. And staring at the rex, too—though he clearly didn't know it.

“My God,” Savanna pleaded. “ You can't just let him be ripped to pieces ...”

Omar raised an eyebrow. “No?” He slid off the table and approached her. “And why not?”

She hesitated. His face hovered in her own like some foam-latex Halloween mask—Uncle Pervus, perhaps, or Baby Stinky. “You, you just can’t,” she stammered.

He c****d his head to one side and smiled broadly, wickedly. “You ever been to prison, sugar-muffin?”

His teeth seemed covered with a yellow, p***y substance which reminded Savanna of that gummy liquid SPAM was packed in.

She shook her head.

“That's too bad .... they'd like you there.” He stepped closer and Savanna felt his coat pressing against her breasts. The reek of liquor-sweat and pitted-out leather seemed to radiate off him in waves.  “You ever heard stories about what goes on inside?”

Again, she shook her head. The glass of the window was cold against her back, as if it had frosted on the inside.

“They stick you in a little room to rot,” he said, and with the word rot came an invisible cloud of stale barley which made her eyes water and her throat want to close in on itself. “But the trick is, they don't put you in there alone. No, they always put you in there with some shifty-eyed S.O.B. who's crazier even then you are ...” His voice had become a quavering hiss, like sparks running along a fuse. “They put you in there with some poetry-writing faggot, or some jittering crackpot who's so hard-up for a cigarette he picks butts out of the toilet, or some darkie ...”

He glanced sidelong at the cashier and menaced him with molten eyes. The stout black man was unmoved. Omar turned back to Savanna. “... who's built like Mike Tyson and wants you to be his joy-boy. And if that's what he wants, that's what he'll get ... because you're not going anywhere. And don't think the guards will help you, sister. Because they won’t. They’ll just walk right by whistling and swinging their keys. You're helpless, just like you’re helpless now ...”

Savanna felt a cold hand scurry up her tunic like a spider.

It all happened at once, and so nobody but the clerk noticed the trooper bust his a*s on the ice. Roger lunged forward to attack, Omar (The Biker from Hell) spun upon him with the pistol upraised and tried to jam its cold, chrome muzzle into his left nostril, and the cashier bolted for the door—  apparently to warn the unknowing trooper.

The black man had his hand cupped to his cheek and his lungs full of air when three of the bikers jumped him from behind. They worked as a team, with one clamping a hand over his mouth, another snaking an arm around his neck, and the third punching him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. Still more bikers piled on top of them and the whole tangled group smashed writhing to the floor, like some kind of giant squid. Clearly, they'd done this sort of thing before. Then the door lazed slowly shut and it was over.

Omar was vapid with anger, his foul breath coming and going in harsh, ragged gasps. He suddenly grabbed Roger by the scruff of the neck and yanked his head back as if to cut his throat, then squeezed the pistol's muzzle still tighter against his nostril.

“Chivalry's dead, sucker,” he hissed, and c****d the g*n with a greasy thumb—so that it clicked in the silence like a ratchet-handle turned slowly. “And so are you ...”

“Jesus Christ, " someone gasped. “Doesn't he see the thing? He's walking right towards it!”

Omar turned his head.

It was true. The stupid cop was waltzing right into its clutches, like a lamb to the s*******r.

He started laughing hoarsely, then wrestled Roger around to face the window as well.

He shifted the g*n to Roger's temple. “Now I want you to watch this, Sir Lancelot,” he breathed into his ear.  “And think about your pretty little wife there. You dig?”

Savanna shrunk against the glass, eyeing him fearfully.

The cashier struggled desperately within his prison of chains and leather, while Clara Bonner huddled trembling by the radio. Several moments passed, maybe two or three, maybe a hundred. The room buzzed with tension as if it's walls were electrified. Outside, the rex lunged toward the trooper.

"Bye-bye, sucker ...” Omar whispered.

The fleet-footed carnosaur was but a blurred shadow as it bounded for the trooper and—

(“Holy s**t!” someone exclaimed.)

—fell. It's long, sinewy legs simply slid out from under it, causing its sleek body (narrowly built but heavy as an elephant's) to smash against the concrete, rattling the station's windows.

Omar could only stare in bewilderment as the thing struggled to right itself; its great tail lashing at the pavement, its streamlined hips pumping wildly, its little forearms waggling uselessly. Its tortured bellow was like a five-ton Peterbilt exploding down a cliff—all shrieking steel and tumbling boulders.

“It slipped on the ice, man!” one of the bikers hollered incredulously.

The state trooper had nearly covered the distance from the edge of the lot to the front of the store when he, too, slipped once again on a patch of ice. He was just shy of the front walk when he fell sprawling to the ground, skidding along with his hands held out before him. Roger grunted as he visualized the flesh of the man's palms being sanded away, and the streaks of blood on the ice which must surely have followed. But the trooper quickly scrambled to his feet again and continued hurrying for the doors. Roger knew and everyone else knew he was going to make it.

Realizing this, Omar jammed the pistol even tighter against Roger's head and began jerking him away from the window. “Don’t even breathe,” he warned.

But what happened next simply defied explanation: That something so big could move so blindingly fast was a possibility no one had considered. The deputy had dashed to within a dozen yards of the station before the rex managed to gain its feet; he was slowing down in anticipation of the doors when the predator thundered after him.

And he was bounding onto the front walk, laughing, when the rex's jaws swung in from the right—clamping brutally about his pelvis and folding him like a lawn-chair, whisking him from the ground.

Savanna shrieked as his lacerated hands smacked open-palmed against the door, fingers splayed, and squeaked sideways along the glass leaving smears of dark blood. Then he was gone, but not very far, and the thing was shaking him like a ragdoll though he was surely dead already.

Even so, Savanna couldn't stop screaming, nor could she look away. She watched in helpless horror as it dropped him to the ground and stepped on his head, pinning him there like a moth on corkboard. And she watched in helpless horror as its big head flashed down, its jaws hung wide to feed, its curved teeth gleaming scarlet. And she watched in helpless horror as the head came to a sudden stop, tilted as if listening, and rose up with an angry howl. Something moved in the corner of her eye and she turned to look.

It was another dinosaur.

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