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spookyspaghettisundae · 10 months ago

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One Less Headache

A red light flashed. An annoying beep cut through Chloe Grant’s sleep. An alarm.

Not the kind of alarm she set on a clock to time her napping, but an alert. It had been weeks of onboarding at Future Proof, with several drills and exercises to drive home how headquarters operated.

Sleep remained an ethereal haze while the beeping continued. A remnant of a dream floated on the boundary between her mind and reality. Every time she opened another drawer to look for a corkscrew, she kept finding only more kitchen knives. Her dinner date was getting impatient while she searched each drawer, and only found more useless knives. It was as annoying as the beeping alarm, bleeding into the dream somehow.

The alert. An alert so subtle when it resounded in the offices. It barely reflected the loud klaxons and red flashing lights that must have been going off underground at the same time, in the bottom levels, shielded by layers of earth and metal.

Alert. Chloe Grant stopped searching drawers for a corkscrew. The dinner date in her dream could wait. She snapped out of her haze and sat up on her office’s couch. The date and the drawers and everything else hadn’t been real. Only the beeping.

Red alert. Her computer’s screen flashed. It had reactivated itself.

Red alert. All hands on deck.

Consciousness cut through the haze, dispelling the last of its unreal imagery. She slipped into her sneakers and rushed out of her office.

She ran into Rida Singh on the elevator down. His hairdo looked like she felt, like the alert had also risen him from slumber in his own office. On second glance, however, both avoiding eye contact with each other, she noted the sheen of hair product, and how his messy ‘do appeared to be deliberate in its styling.

Grant sighed, lifting a foot to smooth out the crease in her sneaker—it had been smooshed from hastily donning the shoes, now fitting snugly around her heel.

“It’s gonna be something big,” he muttered with a sidelong glance.

“Huh?”

“Gonna be something big, Grant. Haven’t had an alarm like this since, well, uh… I’ll shut up now, you don’t have a frame of reference, do you?”

He shook his head, staring at the silvery doors of the elevator in front of them.

The ride down was long, and slow. The ready room for such emergencies awaited deep down from the upper-level offices, deep underground, which only the top echelon of personnel ever accessed with their black-tier keycards.

Grant arched a brow and said, “Come on. I’ve had nothing to do but study docs on previous field ops all week. Odds are, I know what you’re referencing.”

Singh swallowed. Cast another furtive sideways glance at her.

He licked his lips and said, “’Kay. Well, last time we had a sitch like this was when Air Force One—"

“Pterodactyls. And the US government is breathing down Spencer’s neck ever since.”

“Yup.” Singh furrowed his brows and sighed. “Haven’t had a red alert like that since.”

DING, the elevator sang. Minus two. Silvery doors whooshed open.

Red lights flashed on the walls and klaxons blared, just like her unconscious mind had put together, drilled into Grant’s mind by repeated drills in recent weeks.

Grant and Singh stormed out with hasty steps, soon arriving in the ready room, which Carter had referred to as “the war room” to Grant.

Speaking of which, Max Carter leaned against a wall on the side of the room where they entered. Most of field operations had gathered there: Mischchenko stood by the table with crossed arms, flanked by Pruitt, who had a toothpick sticking out of the corner of his mouth. They both nodded at Grant in greeting.

Ruiz was absent.

All heads of R&D had also assembled in the ready room: Doctors Burch, Trémaux, Chao, and Solomon all stood on the side opposite the field operators.

At the head of the long table, Danielle Bennett from IT and Marcus Stantz, the company’s resident spin doctor, flanked Malachi Spencer. The CEO himself stood there like a gargoyle. Dressed in another one of his expensive three-piece suits, the tall, knife-shaped man stared daggers at Singh and Grant for arriving late.

He unhooked his thumbs from his pockets, then gestured to the array of screens projected onto the table’s surface.

“Good, you’re all here. Please direct your attention to—”

“Ruiz still on vacay?” Carter grumbled.

Pruitt nodded, nobody else commented. Spencer glared at Carter. The burly, bearded young man shrugged in response, seemingly without caring if he offended the CEO himself.

Bennett thumbed on her phone with blind routine. The klaxons stopped blaring outside the ready room.

“We have a situation here in Texas.” Spencer got right to the point. He always got the point, as sharply as all his syllables dropped. He waved a hand over the screen in front of him on the table, enlarging satellite images and photography of the area. “This is Midland. A Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Hadrosaurus are currently rampaging across the outskirts of the city, near old, abandoned oil fields.”

The briefing washed over Chloe Grant in a blur. Waves of concern, lapping at her from every side, both from the people in the ready room, and from within the wells of her own thoughts.

Flashes and glimpses of the on-screen data kept coming back to her while she and the field operations team geared up in the locker rooms, arming up with their EMD rifles and soon rushing to the helipad.

Spencer displayed no hectic during the briefing. He informed them of the problems at hand. Grant had a pit in her stomach with every subsequent sentence, because it wouldn’t only be their operators in the field this time—Stantz, Singh, Doctor Burch, and Doctor Solomon would be joining them for this mission.

Civilians.

Grant loathed the idea of having to babysit these four, all of them clearly untrained in combat. Carter even voiced his protest thereof, speaking what Grant felt brewing in her gut, but Spencer immediately shut him down.

PR needed to act on-site immediately to prevent a news media meltdown. They’d need Singh to operate as a forward IT relay for Bennett in the field if they needed to hack any systems. Burch, the head paleontologist, was in demand to assess handling the dinosaurs, and Solomon as the chief of engineering needed to ensure their tech worked without a hitch this time, unlike the last op.

It all caught up to Grant as she zipped up her black armored bodysuit.

She had a terrible feeling about how this was going to go.

The T-Rex had already claimed several lives in Midland. Carter swore under his breath, and the blank stares from Mischchenko and Pruitt spoke their own volumes of shock.

Worse, the US government had dispatched a black ops team to the area. Though parts of the administration were aware of the true nature of the situation—of the Anomalies, and the dinosaur incursions—Future Proof now needed to expect the military entangling the private company in a pissing contest.

This shit had hit the fan in their own backyard of Texas, and the president of the USA had questions as to why the corporation’s Anomaly Detection system hadn’t raised any alarm any sooner.

That’s why some elite hardcases, led by a Captain Dariel Rose, were now scouring the area—and bound to get in their way.

Solomon had no explanation for the Detector’s failure, and Spencer didn’t care for excuses. He limited the briefing to a matter of minutes before sending the entire staff scrambling, racing off in every direction. Damage control was their top priority.

The EMD whined in Grant’s hands as she powered the futuristic rifle up on the way to the airlift.

Her haze dissipated by the time she sat inside the chopper, clumped up with her fellow operators and civilians alike.

Another helmeted, black-suited field operative joined them at the last second.

Ruiz.

Under the deafening noise of rotors, Ruiz hopped up to the chopper while it was already taking off, pulled up the last step by Carter, just as the airlift parted from the ground.

Nervous faces surrounded Grant. Carter swallowed all jokes about finally running into a T-Rex—Grant could sense it.

“Up to speed?” Mischchenko asked Ruiz.

He nodded without losing a word.

Grant’s digits tingled. She splayed her fingers, then curled them into fists. Ruiz displayed almost the exact same thing with his shooting hand, wiggling his fingers, like a guitarist loosening up before a performance.

Their gazes met through blackened visors, invisible to one another. Burning.

She wondered if he harbored the same uncertainty. Ruiz had been working this job for far longer than her.

Sweat beaded on Singh’s forehead. He was too much of a man to protest being sent into the field, though Spencer had communicated something clearly in sending him over Bennett to Midland.

Singh was expendable. Bennett wasn’t.

The docs on previous operations revealed as much to Grant. Every other one read like an obituary. None of the current team of operators had worked with Future Proof’s earliest crew of ex-soldiers on the payroll. And in some occasions when Spencer had civilians tag along, they wound up dead.

The generous insurance benefits now started making a lot more sense to Grant.

To her surprise, Marcus Stantz looked as calm and collected as ever. He rode the chopper in a fancy blue suit, looking eerily comfortable about their situation—even though he must have been aware of their track record—or despite knowing it. Even the headset over his ears looked like it belonged. It occurred to Grant that Stantz must have accompanied previous missions on-site before, and the fact that other dinosaur incursions had stayed out of the news spoke volumes of his skill.

Alisha Burch was the opposite of Stantz. The mousy black woman stared at the tips of her shoes for almost the entire ride. Like Singh, she had little to no field experience, and records indicated she had spent most of her time in Future Proof behind a desk and whiteboards, burying her nose in classified research on the specimens they contained downstairs.

Doctor Solomon looked almost excited. Nervous, but not in a bad way. He smoothed out the collar of his gray suit.

The team stayed almost silent on the cross-state flight. The hour felt like a day, yet somehow flew by like the landscape. The haze had lifted, the soup in Grant’s mind congealed into a solid state.

Instinct. Like back when she used to play basketball.

Feel—don’t think.

Act.

The chopper touched down, she yanked open the hatch, and hopped out first, securing the landing site with Carter and Ruiz. The rest of the team filed out after them.

Pruitt, piloting the helicopter, lifted off the very moment everybody else stood on the ground. He was their eye in the sky.

Another black helicopter circled the horizon—likely the US military’s.

The pit in Grant’s stomach never loosened.

There was one more hitch in planning and operations they had to pay attention to: the oil fields themselves. Any sort of fire could result in disaster, and they were already dealing with a Class-3 incursion.

It bordered on a miracle that local news hadn’t reported on dinosaurs rampaging in Texas yet. Before takeoff, Stantz remarked the whole city and region’s media was blacked out—quite literally, as Spencer had pulled strings with Shareholder Cole of the military-industrial complex, and gotten local authorities to shut down the area’s entire power grid.

Singh looked even more nervous after landing than he had on the flight over. He hastily set up shop in an old shack while Ruiz and Carter got a generator running to power his equipment, and Singh kept fumbling with cables and objects. He uttered a string of profanities as he repeatedly failed to plug in a USB cable.

Part of him looked grateful when Grant picked up a thermos can he knocked over in his frantic motions. She gingerly handed it back to the nerd, and he flashed a nervous smile at her expressionless black-helmeted mask.

Another part of him looked like a fish out of water. Like he was surrounded by aliens in an alien world. His face carried an air of torment, and he soon poured all his attention into portable computer screens, while he chattered away via headset with Bennett in HQ, establishing connections and setting up on-site monitoring of any camera feeds, satellite imagery, and other data streams they could intercept.

No sign of a T-Rex or Hadrosaurus. This only tightened the knot in Grant’s stomach.

How on Earth could such huge dinos evade detection like this?

Before Mischchenko could drop an order for the operators to roll out into the field, Pruitt radioed in with them.

“Got a kid running across the fields out here. Covered in blood. Over.”

“Copy that,” Mischchenko replied. “Grant, Ruiz, you’re with me. Carter, you stay put, keep watch with comms down here.”

“Fuuuck,” Carter growled. “You’re making me babysit these fuckin’ geeks?”

Stantz chortled and helped himself to a sip of coffee from Singh’s thermos, Singh was fully absorbed by Bennett’s voice on his headset and the myriads of data on-screen, Solomon muttered something of which only the word “compliment” was intelligible, and only Doctor Burch glared at Carter’s black-helmeted face upon hearing his comment.

“What, do you wanna babysit an actual kid in the field?” Mischchenko fired back.

This elicited muffled chuckles from Ruiz and Grant.

“Eh, fuck it, fair point. Have fun playing twenty questions with the kid,” Carter growled back. He shrugged and shouldered his heavy EMD rifle.

“Scanners operational,” Solomon commented from the side. “But there’s some kind of interference, maybe why we’re not detecting any Anomalies.”

“Just locate it,” said Stantz. He gulped another sip of Singh’s coffee. “The sooner we clean up this shitshow, the better.”

Carter stood guard outside the shack while Burch searched the horizon with binoculars, and the rest of field ops followed Pruitt’s directions to the fleeing child.

Minutes melted away as the ex-soldiers jogged through dusty fields.

Crops hadn’t grown out here in a long time, all wild and abandoned like weeds. Old ranches looked like graveyards. Broad daylight painted this world in yellow and brown hues.

Withered old plants, dry as a bone, swayed in the cold breeze of their spirited charge. Dirt and gravel crunched underfoot wherever the field agents stomped down in their jog, and they sloshed through ankle-deep sludge, leftovers of brackish water and oil from old, decaying derricks and their leaks.

It felt like chasing through an apocalyptic wasteland.

Zoning out while keeping quiet, Grant glimpsed flashes of such a bleak future in her mind’s eye. A future wiped out, where humanity and its dizzying towers of glass and steel all crumbled away under a dying sun, all chewed upon by storms, savaged by beasts from the future and past alike, and buried under mountains of dust and debris.

They jogged past an old farmhouse—it looked like a wrecking ball had torn straight through the premises. When Ruiz commented on that being the work of dinosaurs, Pruitt responded on the radio.

“Yo, you should see some of these other places. The dinos reeeally went to town out here.” Then, moments later, he reported something even more unsettling. “Some Hadrosaurus carcasses out here, but the military’s black ops and some peeps in HAZMAT suits are swarming all over them like ants. Orders?”

A chill ran down Grant’s spine, mere seconds before someone answered Pruitt on the radio. Someone whose voice she had not heard since leaving Future Proof’s HQ.

Malachi Spencer.

The CEO said, “Stantz, take Burch and Carter and visit our friends.” He drawled out that last word with such contempt that it sent another chill down Grant’s spine. “It’s imperative they don’t remove any specimens or field data we could salvage for research. Make it quick.”

“On my way,” Stantz replied over the radio.

Mischchenko clicked her tongue. “Where the hell is this kid? Any eyes on him, Pruitt?”

“Negatory, ground team. Only got two eyes to spare up here. Can’t do all the work for ya now, can I. Over.”

“No sweat,” Ruiz said. “I think I know where the kid went.”

For emphasis, he pointed the muzzle of his EMD rifle at a container building. They had reached the edge of another oil-drilling field. Everything left behind here was caked in rust and dust. The last vehicles to leave tracks out here had not been operational in years. Brackish sludge rested in every groove of the earth.

Grant took point, catching her breath, and creeping closer to the rusty blue container outside the drilling rig. Mischchenko followed.

They flicked the flashlights on their EMD rifles on, and shone light into the hollow bowels of the blue container.

From between mounds of old trash, a boy peered back out at them. His face mirrored the desolate ruins around him, caked in dirt and dried blood. Grant couldn’t have told if it was the kid’s own blood, or someone else’s.

He was shivering. Wide-eyed. Terrified.

Staring at his own horrified face, distorted in a reflection on Grant’s black visor.

“Found ‘im,” Ruiz reported.

The boy wouldn’t hear it, but Stantz uttered the most callous thing she had heard since signing up with Future Proof.

“At the risk of sounding messed up, it’s kind of a shame the kid didn’t get eaten—woulda been one less headache for me.”

Without a single shred of amusement, Carter’s tinny voice on the radio chided Stantz, “You are one sick puppy, aren’t cha?”

Mischchenko spoke up, softer than she had ever uttered anything before. It made Grant wonder if her colleague had kids of her own.

“It’s all gonna be okay, we’re here to help,” said the hunter. She lowered her rifle to no longer blind the child, crouched down, and waved a hand at him, inviting him to approach them. “What’s your name?”

Grant stepped away, behind Mischchenko, also lowering her rifle, and scouring their environs for any other threats. Ruiz also kept lookout with her.

“They’re dead,” whispered the boy. Hissing, he repeated himself. “They’re all dead.”

He refused to budge from his dark hiding spot.

His eyes flashed like those of a wounded, cornered animal.

Grant shuddered.

She didn’t like where this was headed.

Then the T-Rex roared.

The ground shook with violent tremors. Giant footsteps neared.

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spookyspaghettisundae · 10 months ago

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Ripples

The ground shook. Water rippled.

Aiden, a twelve-year-old kid, froze. Stopped juggling. He gazed into a brackish puddle. Tremors continued to cause ripples. Like a giant’s footsteps, making the ground quake, they grew stronger.

Closer.

The boy rose from where he was kneeling, peeling his gaze off the puddle and its ripples. He stared into a horizon of blue over yellow, where wind fans lazily churned in the distance, and the carcasses of rusty old oil rigs slept.

The tremors neared. More ripples. And with them, a moving silhouette drew closer.

Duck-billed, giant, and saurian. The kid recognized its frame. Though he couldn’t remember the name of this genus, he recognized it from artistic renditions in books on dinosaurs: a Hadrosaurus. This living, breathing specimen of the creature bobbed and weaved between green trees on the ranch.

Closer. Stronger tremors matched the motions of its nearing, matching the rhythm of powerful legs, scaled trunks stomping down onto dry earth. Its gait was lumbering, erratic. Wounded.

Dark fluid dripped from its neck.

Blood dripped from its neck.

The boy fled.

He ran all the way back to the farmhouse. His small feet and bright red shoes thumped up wooden steps onto the porch, and carried him inside, though his weight was nowhere near enough to cause those ground-shaking tremors, nor those ripples in the puddle in the field outside.

The kid’s mother and brother were in the kitchen. Aiden’s mom, busy kneading dough in a chromed bowl on the counter, hummed while Aiden’s little brother, Baz, sat at the table, tapping thumbs away at his portable video game, complete with the bleeps and bloops the small device was continuously producing.

Oblivious.

Both of them were oblivious to the giant lizard approaching their house.

They both looked up when Aiden stormed into the kitchen, gasping for air. His breathless cries for attention made no sense to them.

“Dinosaur! There’s a dinosaur coming here!”

All the while, Aiden felt those tremors—in his blood, in his bones, and in his skull, ever thumping. Closer, ever closer.

“Honey, the dinos have gone extinct, a very, very long time ago,” his mother said with a soft laugh.

Baz’s eyes returned focus to the screen of his game and he continued tapping buttons, then whined. A little musical cue punctuated his complaint when he said, “Aw man, you made me die!”

Aiden shook his head and flailed his arms for attention. To no effect. “That earthquake, don’t you feel it? That’s a dino, it’s coming closer!”

His mother stared into the bowl where she kneaded the dough, wrists sprinkled in flour. She laughed again.

“Aiden, honey, please. That’s probably just another one of those silly companies prospecting for oil out here, drilling. You know?”

Ripples.

Aiden saw them in his mind’s eye. Ripples on the water, brought there by the tremors. By the quaking footsteps. Now… just outside.

“No, it’s not poss-specters, it’s a dinosaur, Mom!” he whined in response.

He turned to see how close the Hadrosaurus had gotten.

Dust rained from the ceiling now. He could feel the tremors in his teeth. A giant silhouette passed by outside the fly door.

Aiden’s mouth agape, he stood there, dumbfounded. Stared.

“That does feel like it’s getting closer, though, dagnabbit,” his mother said with a back turned to the horrific spectacle, with a hint of alarm now entering her tone. “What on Earth are they thinking?”

The dinosaur cast a hulking shadow through the windows of the living room it passed by next. Aiden’s blood curdled. With bated breath, he watched the Hadrosaurus circling around the building.

Thundering footsteps. Glass and ceramics rattled in the kitchen cupboards. Glass was just another liquid, and the ripples now sliced through everything. Rattling, clattering, rumbling, thundering.

His mother muttered, mouth ending as agape as Aiden’s. “What the—”

Quaking. Shaking. Rattling glass.

The portable video game in Baz’s hands emitted another little death tune for another virtual life lost. The nine-year-old looked up at his glass of milk on the table, and the ripples inside of it, now unsteadily shaking—the glass of milk was almost hopping atop the covered table’s surface.

Then the world exploded. Wood cracked, splintered. Thousands of shards of glass flew everywhere, blanketing the area like a rain of sharp shrapnel, and a skeletal architecture groaned under the strain of raw, crushing force. The backside of the farmhouse yawned wide open where a giant had torn through its side, unleashing an explosion of chaos and destruction.

Of screaming. A scream from Aiden’s mother, cut off as mountains of debris crashed down and buried her. An ongoing, blood-curdling scream from Baz, slicing high-pitched through the bedlam of collapsing house. And screams of terror, which Aiden eventually understood were coming from his own throat.

A strange and alien roar of the Hadrosaurus, almost more like an animal whine, drowned out the humans with its deafening cry of anguish.

Powerful legs, thick as tree branches, stomped around, shattering floors and turning the venerable home into a ruin.

Worlds collided as the dinosaur crashed sideways through the building. A piece of second-story floor jutted down like a jagged blade of wood, and nearly decapitated Aiden, cut short by the massive boards getting lodged on other debris. The boy’s voice died with his screams, choked out by gasps, and a growing, silent panic.

Blood splattered everywhere. Whose blood? The dinosaur’s blood? His own? His—

An even greater giant emerged from this chaos, towering over the house, and the Hadrosaurus.

A Tyrannosaurus Rex, as it lived and breathed. A living tower of death. A maw of death. A maw that could swallow Aiden whole, widening to show rows of teeth like knives, stained with blood.

Unlike the wounded Hadrosaurus, the T-Rex did not roar. It…

It sang. An alien, reptilian song, forgotten across the span of billions of years on this Earth. Now brought here through a fissure in time.

The Hadrosaurus whipped around and demolished another wall with its tail—almost decapitating the invisible Aiden in the process. Failing architecture crumbled and collapsed, braking the tail’s momentum, and stopping it from stopping the T-Rex that loomed over them.

The T-Rex lunged and its giant head rammed through twisting wood and metal, tearing through the structure like it was a toy house. Walls and floors groaned again as they bent and wobbled and deformed in every wrong direction, and the Hadrosaurus stumbled through the building’s midst, crashing and staggering out the front door’s side.

The T-Rex’s giant, clawed foot smashed down onto debris—where the boys’ mother was buried?

Baz screamed.

The T-Rex’s reptilian eye widened, and its maw gaped again.

Another lunge from the monolithic beast.

And Baz was gone. Aiden would remember the tiny limb and little red shoe sticking out from between the teeth like a gruesome toothpick. The crunch of breaking bones, a scream first muffled, then falling silent with abruptness.

And the beast chewed twice, and swallowed, and Baz was gone.

Paralyzed, Aiden stayed frozen like a statue, blending into the debris around him like a chameleon.

In the distance, the Hadrosaurus whined again, gaining distance.

Water in the brackish puddle outside continued to ripple with each thundering footstep. Tremors repeated as the prey Hadrosaurus fled, and the predator T-Rex gave chase.

And in the ruins of that farmhouse, a shellshocked Aiden remained. Nestled between the rubble and wreckage. Too terrified to move. Too horrified to grasp how he had lost his mother and brother, too paralyzed to even gasp for the air his lungs were screaming for, holding his breath as if it would help prevent him from being devoured.

Ripples continued. Ripples in the water. The T-Rex stomped away, chasing the Hadrosaurus with single-minded determination. With bloodlust.

Ripples reached through time. A single point, from which the waves moved outwards in every direction, past and future both. Pasts preserved—futures destroyed. Melting back together into the same body of water between every ripple.

Elsewhere, far out in the fields, an Anomaly glittered and gleamed in broad daylight. A hovering, orb-like light scintillated there—a connection between the eras, from which the dinosaurs had arrived.

The T-Rex chased the Hadrosaurus into the old oil fields of Midland.

Aiden fled in the opposite direction. Covered in dust, dirt, and blood—whose blood? His own?

The boy fled from his ruined home.

Hope was the last thing on his mind. Ripples consumed all.

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