The Flashback Trilogy

Chapter 9

“How can you know that?” shouted someone from the back. “How do you know the fence won’t simply disappear at any minute, or that one of those things won’t just materialize right here and now?”

Red dropped his cigar and rubbed it out with his boot. “I don’t. But we do know the Flashback has slowed. We know it’s not as deadly as it was before. Has anyone of us simply vanished? Have any prehistoric trees appeared out of nowhere, or, as the gentleman said, has a T. Rex simply manifested amongst us and gone on a feeding frenzy?”

“What are you getting at?”

“What I’m getting at is that there’s time. Not an unlimited supply of it, but ... time. Time to implement what we’ve all known would be necessary since we first came together here and settled in.”

“Jesus, Gods, he’s talking about the Wagon Train,” said Blue, exasperated.

“A wagon train!” someone shouted.

“Where in the hell to?”

“A wagon train of RVs,” said Blue incredulously, even as the hall reignited into chaos. “What are we going to fuel them with? Toxic masculinity?”

Charlotte threw up her arms in defeat as the hall became a bedlam.

Red shouted over the din, “If anyone has any better ideas I’d pay good money to hear them!”

But the bedlam only intensified, doubling and redoubling, until it was shattered irrevocably by a volley of gunshots, which echoed throughout the atrium like a string of dynamite, causing Red to fall upon Charlotte in an effort to shield her. When all those gathered had picked themselves up off the floor and turned their attention to the back of the hall, they saw Lieutenant Corbin standing there with his AR-15 in one hand and his other in a sling.

Charlotte was the first to speak up, thanking Red quietly before standing up and brushing herself off and saying, furiously, “Have you gone mad, Corbin?”

“Maybe,” he said at last, and slung his rifle over his shoulder. “And maybe not. But I do have a better idea.”

The atrium fell silent as everyone focused on him. “And you assholes are going to hear it.”

“Now, wait just—who in the hell do you think you are?” said Dean. “By what right do you come in here—”

Corbin snatched the rifle off his shoulder in a flash and everyone ducked—but he was pointing it at the ceiling, not the Chairman. “Shhh,” he said, and c****d his head. “Just listen.”

Charlotte did so, her ears still ringing. Slowly it became manifest: the sound of cavern raptors barking amidst the catacombs, barking and seeming to answer themselves, and something else, which answered them all. The Cat. The smilodon. The saber-toothed tiger which bore little in common with any of its modern-day descendants nor any of its prehistoric ones, for it was the size of a small bus. And beyond that ... another. Something closer in tone to the raptors and yet altogether different. Something bigger, more robust. Something none of them had ever heard before.

“You all need to understand something,” he said finally, slowly re-slinging his g*n, “and that is before I found this place I was precinct commander of an entire police force dedicated to combating these ... things. And if there’s one thing we learned ...” He paused, smiling a little to himself. “‘We.’ He seemed to dismiss the thought. “If there’s one thing we learned before our unit was torn to pieces ... one thing they learned, my men, before being bitten in half, beheaded, slit open by sickle-claws so that their intestines unspooled across the city streets like sausage links ... is that these things are not animals.” He smiled to himself again as though reliving a lifetime’s worth of humbling nightmares. “No, an animal is something comprehensible, even relatable. An animal is something flesh and blood same as you or me, with the same needs, the same hunger, the same will to survive. But these things, these so-called dinosaurs and prehistoric cats, they’re not animals, not the way we understand them. They’re weapons. They have purpose. Intent. They’ve been infused with it somehow. Someone, something, has weaponized them against us.” He nodded slowly, distantly. “Those lights in the sky, I think. And I can promise you this ... they will not go away.” The haunting smile returned as he shook his head. “They won’t give up, you understand. And they won’t stop until every man, woman, and child in this compound has been torn apart and devoured.”

The atrium moaned as a wind blew in from the caverns, and no one said anything.

At last Dean said, “And what ...” He paused to clear his throat. “What would you propose we do, Lieutenant?”

Corbin just looked at him—then he laughed, as though responding to a punchline only he could hear. He began limping toward the front of the hall, the crowd parting to let him through. “What would I propose? I propose we start stocking up on weapons instead of breakfast cereal and tuna cans. I propose we train every person here in the use and maintenance of those weapons, and that we start taking the fight to the enemy. I propose we start making excursions into the caverns instead of abandoned supermarkets; that we locate their eggs and their nests and destroy them, and that we find whatever ingress they’re using and stop it up, cutting them off. And then I propose we kill them as mercilessly as they’re going to kill us.”

“And what about the power?” said Blue, “Are we going to simply attack that, too?”