Since the last one was a cliffhanger, I'm back with the second installment of Sidekick Carl in a week, and an action scene! Yes, I am still using characters I came up with back in the day, and yes, all prehistoric creatures described are real. Again, here's links for the first and previous chapters.
His name was John Carter. As far as anyone knew, it was by coincidence that he shared the name with a famed adventurer of fiction, but he was still proud of it. He was a senior auxiliary investigator for what most referred to as the Agency, known in full as the United Nations Coordinating Agency For the Assessment of Para-terrestrial Entities and Phenomena. The organization had been founded a little almost 60 years earlier, when dim lore told that the leaders of the war-torn world had discovered or been contacted by beings from distant planets, far futures and unknown dimensions. Now, they monitored the discoveries and technologies that the same beings had brought to the Earth. At the moment, he watched the feeds from satellites and unmanned aircraft searching the American southwest for two people in a 20-year-old RV, along with Lauren, his wife of 15 years.
“You’re right,” he said.
“It has to be them.”
“It wasn’t that hard,” Lauren’s
voice said in his ear. “The vehicle’s 4.4 meters tall and almost 10 meters long.”
“Yes, but we had to search half a million square kilometers,” he said. “And they’re… damn. 996 kilometers from the convention center, and we already knew they didn’t get there on any of the main roads. I’d say it was impossible, if I didn’t know the specs on the RV. Do we have any agents in the area?”
“No,” his wife answered. She was herself on the other side of the continent, on what had originally been an assignment to audit the data center for the continent’s biggest space shuttle port. “The nearest local police units are 80 km away. Our closest response teams are still in the Sierra Nevadas.”
“I’ll have to go myself,
then,” Carter said. He looked over his shoulder, at a compact set of blue armor
hanging on the wall.
“John,” Lauren said. He
paused as he rose. “You need to hurry. There’s three infrared signatures in the
vehicle. One of them isn’t human.”
***
Dana awoke more abruptly than Carl did. She opened her eyes to find him perched on the edge of the bed, peering into the darkness. She pushed back the sheet that covered her. Underneath, she was dressed in shorts and a tank top that didn’t quite meet at her midriff, originally made as an extra large basketball uniform. She silently rose to a crouch, following his gaze. In the process, she confirmed that his outer suit still lay on the floor at the mouth of the corridor, just past a cut-off corner of the converted dinette. Only then did she hear the second crash as the rear door broke open. Somehow, she found a moment to wonder why it was locked; but of course, Carl must have locked it when they came inside.
“Get to the cab and start
driving,” Carl said in a low voice. When she opened her mouth to question him,
he added, “There could still be more of them outside.”
“I’m not leaving you,” she said. There was an audible scraping sound, undoubtedly from some kind of claws on the vinyl flooring. There was a second crash as the bathroom door broke open. After a moment of silence, the scraping came again, now close enough that she could hear the padding of heavy feet. The sound stopped, right where the corridor made its sharp diagonal jog.
“How much do you weigh?”
Carl said. He answered before she did, “About 350 pounds…”
“339,” she corrected
instinctively. He nodded. From the corridor came only silence.
“It could be bigger, but not by much. If it had weapons, we would already know.”
In what seemed the blink of an eye, he was not only on his feet but reaching at the kitchen counter. An already reinforced drawer splintered as he yanked it open. He came up with her largest knife, a cleaver she sometimes used on large melons. Then he lunged forward, straight for the mouth of the corridor.
A moment later, Carl came toppling back, under a hulking, almost boxy form. A flash of moonlight showed the shape of a cat or something like it, with a bronze pelt dappled with large rosettes. There was also a gleam of reddened ivory from a pair of canines that had closed on and driven through his upraised forearm. He managed to swing the blade once. A powerful forelimb, longer and more robust than what could be seen of the creature’s hindquarters, sent it literally flying, with enough force to fracture a window on the far side of the RV. The lower jaw seemed to unhinge as it struck for his skull.
That was when Dana swung down, her legs already extended in a double kick. With uninterrupted space, she might have knocked it back out of the RV. Instead, she slammed it into the diagonal face of a kitchen cabinet, now on its hind legs with her feet against its massive rib cage. Only then did either of them see the tufted stub of its tail. For a moment, it seemed she had it pinned, but then the door caved in enough for it to drop back. She lost her grip then, and cried out as she dropped. For a split second, she had a vision of breaking her pelvis or her back, then lying with Carl pinned or crushed beneath her. Instead, she bounced on the edge of the bed and somehow came out upright. She had one unforgettable glimpse of the silhouette of the cat and its luminous eyes. There was an unmistakable sense of calculation as it returned her gaze. Already, it had lurched free of the wreckage of the cabinet, still balanced on its hind legs. There was time for just one more blow-
Almost a minute passed before Carl turned on the lights. The sudden light revealed Dana poised on one leg. The other leg extended at full length and an upward angle. Beyond was the cat, still upright against the wall of the corridor. Her second strike had pinned it in truth, with her heel almost directly beneath the hinge of its jaw. It tried to swipe at her with its front paws, but only added to a handful of scratches on her calf. She flinched, but did not yield. It was clear from the marks that it was already weakening. “I must have gotten its windpipe,” she said. “I think I can hold it. Can you tell what it is?”
He cautiously approached. “It’s a homothere… a dirk cat,” he said. “Constructor told me about them; once, he went out with a cryptozoological expedition that was studying them. They’re related to the sabertooths, smaller teeth, even stronger bite… and as you can see, they have the most powerful front paws of any cat that ever lived.”
“Okay,” Dana said. “Where
did it come from, and why is it in my RV?”
“The only ones that survived longer than the sabertooths were in South America,” Carl said. He stepped close enough to examine the creature. It started to turn its head; Dana shifted her foot in warning, and it tilted its head back in submission. “Most of the scientists thought even those died out hundreds of years ago. When he came back from the expedition, Constructor said they were probably right. Then, a couple years before he died, another team caught just one. Last I heard, it was in a zoo on the west coast. Constructor was asking for permission to examine it, before…”
He had already paused a moment when Dana spoke up. “I told you I could hold it,” she said. “I still can, but I’m not sure how long. And I can’t tell how much air it’s really getting. If it’s playing possum, it might still be strong enough to attack if I let it go. But if I do this long enough to be sure, it might die. So… should I?”
Carl did not answer, but only peered closer. Finally, he said, “Ivan.” Immediately, he turned to Dana. “Let him go.”
She lowered her leg with a groan of relief. The creature shuddered and slumped unwholesomely as it dropped to the floor. When they looked down, they beheld a very fat man with hair turned almost entirely white. Dana stifled a cry when he moved, but finally relaxed when he failed to do more than raise his head.
The intruder grinned at
Carl. “Well,” he said, “isn’t it nice… to meet an old friend?” Then he sank
back to the deck.
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