The Flashback Trilogy

Chapter 5

She’d barely had time to react much less to stretch between the seats when he threw open the door and began running toward the exit, hooting and hollering to get the raptors’ attention. The creatures leapt from the truck immediately and pursued.

“What the hell does MGTOW mean?” asked Corbin as she slid behind the wheel.

She jammed the truck into gear. “Men Going Their Own Way,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “You know, like you. But by choice.”

––––––––

Red ran, raking a hand along the shelves, knocking jars and cans and boxes onto the floor, hoping it would trip the raptors up, hoping they might slip on the spilled contents. He ran until he could hear their breathing only several feet behind him, then swiveled at last and opened fire. Two of them danced wildly, throwing off blood, and fell, thrashing about, but the others continued the pursuit. Worse, they had gained on him, and were now merely a few yards away. Worse still, when he refocused forward he saw yet another velociraptor had circled around the aisle and now blocked his path to the exit. Good lord, he thought, does it know that’s a door? Could it possibly know that? Then he zigged sideways and, without even thinking, dashed into the corridor that led to the back stock-room. There was a glassed-in office immediately to his right, and he gripped the knob.

It was open. No sooner had he squeezed through and pulled the door shut behind him than the raptors collided against it, scratching and biting. He turned around and looked at them through the glass inset: at their moist, yellow eyes and cracked, scaly hides, at their mohawks of dark, ruffled feathers which, when combined with their frenzied and erratic movements, reminded Red of the Zuni Fetish Doll from a TV movie he had seen as a kid—Trilogy of Terror, as he recalled. Nor had he gotten used to the idea of being so low on the food chain; indeed, he’d be the first to admit that the notion still woke him in the middle of the night, sweating and trembling uncontrollably, as it had from the first day of the Flashback.

But the glass was thin and time was short, so he searched the office for a point of egress and, finding no door, blew out the small window near the manager’s desk.

He was clearing the shards from the sill, wondering where the primitive-looking girl had come from, marveling at how she’d seemed to materialize out of thin air, when he noticed the eerie, flickering glow of the television monitors—an entire bank of them—in the far corner of the room. And it struck him immediately that the collision had undoubtedly been caught on tape. He stuck his head out the shattered window briefly, just long enough to determine that Charlotte and Corbin weren’t already on their way, then hurried to the security console.

It didn’t take him long to find the footage of their entry into the supermarket, and yet, despite the vantage of no less than fourteen television cameras, no trace of the primitive girl could be found, either before or after their arrival (although the mystery of the raptors had been solved, for they had, indeed, filed in through the busted doors). That left only the collision itself, which he caught in passing as he jogged the video forward, before stopping the tape abruptly, and reversing to the moment just before they’d struck her. And here was the damnedest thing: because, despite Corbin’s lecture, Red had seen things materialize out of nowhere since the Flashback; not a raptor directly into a man, that much was true, but a cycad tree where before there had only been empty space. And so he knew what these manifestations looked like, and what he saw on the video, was not that. For those were instant replacements, not so much as though something had suddenly appeared but as though one had just noticed something which had always been there. No, for while the girl had appeared out of nowhere, all right, she had appeared in a flash of light. A shaft of light, rather, only instants before they’d struck her.

Glass shattered suddenly and shards flew everywhere, nicking his cheeks, and before he’d even realized that the sheer volume of sound and fury was more than what the door itself, if compromised, could have provided, one of the beasts was upon him, having leapt feet-first through the glass wall that looked out upon the stock room.

He squeezed off a few rounds which went wildly astray before the g*n was knocked from his hands and sent skittering across the floor. And then he had only his hands, which he clasped about the predator’s jaws in what he knew would be a vain attempt to keep its teeth from sinking into his neck. And it struck him that what filled his mind in what he was convinced were his last moments were but two things: the mural he’d been working on in the great reception hall of their compound—a mural which would now remain unfinished—and Charlotte. What happened next happened very fast, although for Red it seemed like hours—hours spent twisting and thrashing like a madman in order to thwart the beasts’ attempts to clamp their jaws about a limb, or to exploit an opening in his abdominal area (for he could see the deadly sickle-claws on their feet flashing by the light of the monitors). But in fact only seconds had passed before the top of his primary attacker’s head simply exploded—splattering him with blood and bits of brain—leaving only its lower mandible to continue biting at dead air, and Red realized, craning his neck to look up at the window he’d shot out, that Corbin was crouched in its frame, picking the animals off with militarily precise headshots.