Chapter 7

Karen started feeling much better and wanted badly to go on our trip to try out the armed Humvee. She did make one concession, though, and asked me to drive. She figured that she could handle the forward gun, but was reluctant to venture cross country as the driver. That was okay with Jane and me, so that was what we decided to do.

We drove out of the bunker the way we had come in. We headed south simply because we had headed north on our last trip. Very soon after leaving Miami, I turned to the right and kind of split the difference between south and west. I was confident of one thing: if I got lost, all I had to do was to drive east until I came to the highway that we had used to reach Miami. We also could depend on AI for directions. AI was linked to us by radio and always knew exactly where we were relative to Miami.

We drove for about 30 minutes and were about to decide that we were not accomplishing anything, then we saw a bunch of the largest animals that we had ever seen. The locals had called these animals “long necks,” and that name was certainly good enough for us. The largest of these animals were at least 75 feet long from nose to tail and had to be close to 40 feet tall at the shoulder. According to AI, the locals had not considered these herbivores to be very tasty, and they were a pain to handle when dead because of their gigantic size.

Okay, well they were interesting to look at. There was no question that these were dinosaurs, but they had no feathers. Of course that made no difference to us, but it was an item of curiosity. We noticed that these herbivores were walking very purposely in a southwesterly direction, but they were moving quite slowly. So slow, in fact, that we could have moved faster than they were moving if we got out of the Humvee and walked.

Well, there was no way we were going to move that slowly, so I drove around the herd and headed in the same direction that the long necks had been following. In the process of going around them at a safe distance, we saw a number of smaller animals that resembled the carnivores that we had learned about in school and had seen in movies. Some of these dinosaurs had feathers and others did not, and, frankly, we couldn’t see the why of the feathers. Oh, well, that was somebody else’s job; we were just tourists at this point.

It didn’t take us long to cover the next three miles, and there we found a huge lake. The original people of Miami called it “Big Lake” according to AI. Well, we would leave the name at that for now, but we did note that the previous occupants had not been very imaginative when it came to naming places and things.

As we got closer, we spotted a number of the same kind of carnivores that we had seen back when we passed the long necks. The interesting thing was that they also saw us. I got concerned when several of them began following us. It seemed to me that we were being checked out as guests of honor at the next banquet.

I think that they were intimidated by the strange appearance of the Humvee, but that was not stopping their progress toward us. When they got closer, I said, “Jane, knock off one of those predators following us, and let’s see what happens.”

She agreed and picked two of the largest in what looked like a pack of them. I was glad to see that the animals had no chance against her laser and dropped immediately when they were hit by the energy beam. There was no blood spattered about because of the way the laser cauterized the wound, but the rest of the pack had no trouble telling that their companions were dead.

I had thought that the other animals would stop to eat the fresh kills, but that was not at all what happened. Instead, the rest of the pack immediately identified us as the cause of the death of the two dinosaurs and charged right at us. Of course, I accelerated as soon as I saw that.

“Jane, shoot as many of those animals chasing us as you can. Karen, help her if you can.” I tried to hold a steady pace and direction while the women were shooting in order to have a reasonably steady shooting platform, but the ground was not as smooth as it looked. We bounced around quite a bit, and that made it hard for the women to hold an aim on a specific animal.

This meant that I was heading in the same direction as when the chase started. It seemed sudden to me that we came to another river. It was smaller than the Mississippi River, but it was still plenty wide. It seemed to me that I had no choice but to run parallel to the river. I don’t know why, but I chose to follow the north bank.

Oh, shit, suddenly I saw in front of us a mass of crocodiles sunning themselves on the river bank. I had no choice but to turn right again to keep from running into that mass of walking death. A lot of those crocs were over 30 feet long, and I knew that they were nothing to mess with. Most of them completely ignored us as we came scooting by. A few did look at us with bored expressions, if one can say that about crocodiles.

By this time, we were being chased by only two or three of the original dinosaurs, and Jane picked them off as they ran by the crocodiles. Now the reaction was completely different and the crocs went after the dead dinosaurs in an eating frenzy. I thought crocs only ate while they were in the water, but that was not true for many of these crocs. Dammit, I was glad to escape that area with a whole unperforated skin.

As far as I was concerned, we had proved that the guns worked as advertised, and the Humvee still performed very well over rough ground, so I was ready to go home. The women agreed. This had been a much more harrowing trip than I had bargained for, and I could hardly wait to get home.

It seemed to me that we needed to do a more careful survey of the territory before we went out again on the surface. Hell, with the pterodactyls, flying was dangerous enough, but surface travel was more chancy than I wanted to deal with. Talk about your dangerous country—wow!

When we got back home, Karen acted exhausted. Jane and I were worried about her, but she insisted that she was okay. Well, that obviously was not true, but we did not know what to do about it. However, if she did not feel better by tomorrow, I was going to insist that she visit the medical department again. If nothing else, something should be done to help her feel better.

By the next morning, Karen was still not feeling any better, so all of us shepherded her back to the medical office to see if something could be done to help her. We practically shoved her into the chamber, and the medical computer did a run down on her condition.

It kept her in the chamber while it spoke to Jane and me. “I cannot find anything wrong with Karen, but I agree that she is not recovering the way I expected. It must be that I just do not have all of the background information on your species to be able to do my usual level of work for her. Right now, I propose to give her a general pain killer that will not affect the two fetuses that I find her to be carrying.

“I think that you two will have to give her a lot of moral support to bring her out of the depressed state that she is sinking into. The more you can help her, the faster and more likely she is to overcome what is bothering her so much.”

Jane and I helped Karen back home and talked her into going to bed. She had said that she had not slept very well, so we were convinced that more sleep couldn’t hurt, and it might help. Besides, with Karen sleeping, Jane and I could discuss what we might do to help her with overcoming her depression.