Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (17 page)

Jasper turned and fired a few more laser bolts back into the trees. Shouts and exclamations of anger reached them. Cannibals grabbed at their spears and scrambled for their war-joeys.

Leaping over logs, skidding down slopes, spattering brooks, the three kids fled. Soon they could hear the pounding of kangaroos behind them.

Jasper stopped his flight and stood astraddle the path, gun raised in both hands, one eye a-squint. Needles of blue flame beat through the trees. For a moment, the warriors halted, their steeds rearing back on nervous, tawny legs. Jasper waved his gun and yelled, “There's more where that came from, you rascals!” Again, he pulled the trigger.

The trigger clicked. No fire.

He added, “…as soon as I dig in my rucksack for some triple-A batteries.”

And began to run again.

The whole messy, bouncy cavalcade poured on down the hillside after him.

“We're…never…going to make it…,” said Katie. She kept grabbing at Lily's hand, yanking her friend. Lily stumbled—desperate for speed—reaching out for her faster pal.

Jasper screamed, “They're coming!”

“Do you think…,” said Katie, “they'll marinate us first? Because I really wrinkle in vinegar.”

Lily didn't answer.

Then it was over, it seemed. Scowling kangaroos were on either side of them. Men waved forks.

Lily's heart broke. She could run no more.

“I give up,” said Katie, also slowing. “All I'm doing is toughening my flank steaks.”

“We can get out of this, chums,” said Jasper. “I will not die without dignity. And a complete list of the sides I shall be served with.”

But as they stopped and turned to meet their baker, they realized that their pursuers were silent. All over the slope, the warriors hunched atop their twitch-nosed steeds. They did not move.

They stared in horror.

Jasper, Lily, and Katie looked up.

They had just passed under a stone arch. They looked down the path, the way they had been running.

There were buildings. Stone buildings. And a giant, flame-eyed statue of a skeleton.

Suddenly, the three realized that the cannibals would not be capturing them. The cannibals were afraid. The cannibals pointed at the city and muttered words in their language.

The cannibals turned silently and fled.

They leaped back up the slope, hardly daring to look behind them. The chief touched himself on the forehead in a blessing and whispered a prayer. Then he ran.

Soon, all that was left were several spears discarded in the rush and a pile of s'more fixins.

And so our three heroes found themselves in the ruined, monster-haunted city of Greylag.

No one knows who built Greylag; none can say if they were of the race of men or some older, forgotten race that walked upon the earth when the brachiosaurus still made his home in the swamps and the allosaur still gazed out from the hills at dusk, razor teeth glinting in the sunset, and called her hideous children home.

Lily, Katie, and Jasper walked down a flight of steps inhumanly large and found themselves in a ruined square. The statue of the skeleton kept watch, much of his legs chipped off when the temple by which he had stood had been smashed some hundreds of years before.

Vines hung all around them. They gazed up and saw a green sky full of bright birds.

A whisper of a shoe on sand—they jumped—
and saw Bntno seated on a fallen pillar, eating a roast beef sandwich with horseradish.

“Hello, little guests!” he said, smiling.

“Ah,” said Jasper, a little nettled. “Bntno.”

“You all is looking well—but not well-done. Still rare. Ha? Yes? This just being a joke. This just being a thing I say.” He laughed and took a bite of his sandwich.

“You cleared out pretty quickly,” said Katie. “When the going got tough.”

“Oh, indeed. I am the very fast runner.”

“You set a record,” said Katie. “You beat us all.”

“I fold up sandwich, and we walk through city. Now very quiet. Very quiet. Shush, shush! This is, generally, place of doom.” He wrapped up the sandwich in a piece of tinfoil, running his tongue around his teeth. He stuck the sandwich back in his backpack. He gestured, and they followed him into the ruined city of monsters.

The stones of that place were massive. It was built of granite, yes, but also of black basalt and
slabs of crystal. Its towers were in ruin; most of the walls were fallen, and upon them grew the banyan tree and vine. Wild orchids bobbed in the ancient alleyways. Huge faces were cracked apart by roots.

Bntno walked, keeping his body low, stepping carefully to avoid scraping his rubber soles along the gritty flagstones. The others followed his lead. They paused before each ancient avenue to make sure that nothing terrible scuttled along it seeking food.

“We must leave city before night,” whispered Bntno at one point, shifting his eyes from side to side, spidering his fingers around. “We stay in night, then very, very bad chomping.”

Lily felt like she couldn't breathe.

It didn't help that Bntno almost immediately got them lost.

Jasper pointed out, “We've passed that statue seven times in the last hour.”

“Very popular,” said Bntno. “Who don't like that statue?”

“We're going in circles,” said Jasper.

“Not circles,” said Bntno. “Irregular polygons.”

“Oh, come on!” complained Katie.

“No,” said Jasper ruefully, “he's right. Maybe a trapezoid.”

They wandered through squares and past palaces. Temples lay slumped over in the streets. They passed courtyards and brackish pools.

Once, they saw a tiny dinosaur head on a long, serpentine neck crane itself above a pyramid. They jumped, startled, but the creature just browsed on vines.

They crept away as quickly as they could.

“It getting dark,” said Bntno. He told them sadly, “I would run away now and leave my jolly friends behind if I could find quick exit.”

The jungle quieted around them. Monkeys stopped howling. The weird rose of dying light fell on the ancient walls. It hung in the steamy atmosphere so the air itself looked golden and perfumed.

And then evening fell. Everything was gray and unclear. Each black entrance to a house, each pit leading to unimaginable caverns, sent little chills of panic through Lily's limbs. Danger could be anywhere.

Jasper whispered, “At least the cannibals and the monsters will stop whoever's been following us.”

“Great,” said Katie. “Thanks for this whole adventure. I'm really enjoying it.”

They passed by a huge dome inscribed with ancient words.

Just at bloody sunset, they saw a procession of ghosts. It was on one of the main avenues. They were of a tall race dressed in robes, with faces like twisted and fingered clay. They walked sorrowfully through the city and disappeared.

Somewhere, in the ruined plazas, a bell tolled.

Bntno fell to his knees, touched his hands to his forehead in a prayer, and moaned.

“I guess this isn't good,” said Katie.

“Let's keep going,” said Lily, gripping her own fingers. “We have to find that bridge.”

Bntno got up and started scuttling forward. The others rushed to follow him.

They no longer worried about making noise. They were too panicked, all of them. Jasper had his atomic torch in one hand and his ray gun clutched in the other. They scampered through the empty squares.

Then Bntno held out his hand—they skated to a stop.

There, in the lee of an ancient drive-thru restaurant, was the nest of some carnivorous dinosaur, lying like a snoring, saw-jawed minivan among tamped-down grasses and a clutch of huge eggs. The monster was maybe thirty feet long from its head to the tip of its tail, which was wrapped around the beast like a feather boa on a sleeping starlet. The meat-eater stirred in her sleep and gently licked her eggs.

“A Tyrannosaurus rex
, ” gasped Jasper.

“An allosaurus,” said Katie. “If we're quiet, maybe we can sneak past.”

“Is it an allosaurus? It does look like a T. rex.”

“Yeah. The short horns near the eyes mean it's an allosaurus.”

“Perhaps you're right. But I believe it is a T. rex based on its size. It seems to me much larger than an allosaurus.”

“Okay, you may have a Ph.D. in archeology or whatever. But I redid that dinosaur report. It's a—”

“Um,” said Lily urgently, and they saw the monster stirred in her sleep.

They shut up and crept around the sweet-scented nest.

Maybe they would have made it if, when they had passed it, Jasper, who was in a very unfortunately strained mood, had not said, “I believe the Tyrannosaurus rex has fallen back asleep.”

“Jasper,” Katie protested, “look at the horned ridges by—”

“The forearms are—”

The massive head swiveled up.

They all saw it lurch in the gloom.

Lily grabbed their hands and pulled them forward.

And then, terrible to hear, came the sound of stomping.

They didn't turn to look. They didn't turn to see that massive gut, those terrible claws springing along the empty avenue—those awful, ancient features twisted in an hideous, toothy grin, because they didn't want to know that something so massive might seek their flesh, snatch them up, tear them to pieces.

They ran.

Through the dark, falling over one another, the light from Jasper's atomic torch wheeling across the battered walls, they fled. They felt the earth shake beneath them. Bntno let out a continual whine.

Their guide led them through the maze of streets and through the nightmare eve, where things slithered in the catacombs and chuckled in old windows. The dinosaur stomped behind them.

“Maybe if we dodged into a building, the T. rex couldn't follow us!” Jasper shouted.

“But then we'd still be followed,” Katie called back, “by the
allosaurus
that's chasing us!”

“While I respect your hypothesis—”

“La la la la la! Not listening!”

“The therapod's two, rather than three fingers, on the anterior claws suggest to me—”

Katie sang brashly,
“It was an A! It was an L! It was an A. L. L.-o-saurus! That's what's about to gore us! I wish it would—”

“T. rex!”

“…ignore us!”

“Um, guys?” said Lily. “Maybe we should—”

They stopped arguing. The crashing footsteps were getting closer. The four ran down a wide street, jolting at each footfall of the colossus.

Suddenly, Bntno skidded in his tracks. “No!” he said. “You sing so much my brain is scramble! This way!”

Katie, Lily, and Jasper turned in horror to look at him. He was pointing back toward the dimly seen bulk of the giant dino.

“I see the door to bridge!” he said. He gestured again back the way they had come. “We pass! There!” he said, and pointed at a door.

And so they ran right toward the dinosaur.

“Shortcut,” said Bntno. “No problem.”

They shifted their bags on their shoulders and began to cross.

“Under us, Drawyer River,” said Bntno.

Lily looked down over the edge of the railing of the bridge. She could not see the river.

Instead, she saw something looking back up.

It had a thousand eyes. It was crawling up the wall. Mouths flapped open and shut, and chipped, yellow teeth clacked closed, gulping air.

Lily yelled a warning to the others, and they began to run—but the creature pulled itself up, towering like a column right next to the end of the bridge.

The eldritch demon-spawn yawned and smacked over the pit, hungering for sacrifice. It swayed and waited and unfurled its tentacles to pluck at prey. Flights of black and orange butterflies flittered before it, rising past the tiger lilies on the cliffs.

Everything was confusion. Bntno, rubber heels slapping at the stone, bolted right past to the other side and kept on going. Lily had made
it too and lingered by the stairs. Jasper pointed his gun, shouted for Katie to just run past the thing—and he began to fire.

Jasper's gun was still out of juice, but he jiggled it, and he got a few darts of blue light to shoot out at the beast. The monster screamed from several mouths, bellowing like a pipe organ—waved its tentacles—and shot forward to grab Katie.

She battered the spongy arms with one of her bags.

Jasper shot another ray into the monster, its flesh sizzling. It sent a tentacle reeling at him, and he danced away, firing. The cavern flickered with hot, blue light.

The monster had tangled its grapplers in the straps of Katie's two packs. One of them—her own—was still on her shoulders, yanked by the monster. The other—which she'd been carrying for Jasper—was hurled into one of the monster's maws.

Katie struggled, she kicked, but she was being dragged toward the chasm—and toward the beast itself.