More Hell than Creek - Another short story about a famous carnivore who gets mixed up with humans

NOTE: Canonically, this short story is an excerpt from an interview with a surprisingly disgruntled Tyrannosaurus whose story nobody believes. Grab a snack and enjoy. 

Where am I? No clue.

How’d I get here? I only have a vague idea.

What are my chances of getting free? Zero.

So, what do I know?

I’m now in a place with alien plants, as hot as my old home, and being fed alien animals by aliens. The place I am trapped in is surrounded by alien grey structures that make lightning. There’s also some more alien grey stuff, that looks more like rocks, that surrounds the alien grey lightning structures. On the other side, beyond more lightning structures, are animals I actually know. So far, I’m the only one in here, and my prison is surrounded by an excited crowd of the aliens that abducted me.

This place, though, seems a lot easier to live in than my old home. It’s lonely, but food, water, heat, and healing aliens are provided. But nah, there were healers of my own kind back home, so why stay here? I’ve studied every part of my prison. And it seems I have a solution, but it won’t be easy.

Some days, the aliens that speak in noises I can’t hear put large, sharp objects into me. They make me sleepy, but the aliens always have a reserve of those things inside a tree. How is that even supposed to work?! Other days, they make me open my mouth and not close it on them as their hands clean my teeth, both the hands and teeth the same size, and I watch another one of them with small, shiny objects work on something inside a tree. The trees of this place cannot be trusted.

Now that I smell the rain clouds, and the high-voiced aliens are paying more attention to the animals in the prison beyond mine, I’ve got the perfect time to try to get out. I remember the alien was working on a tree towards the sunrise side from the centre of this alien prison, but I don’t remember which one. I turn my head and bite a tree I know is real, and then I bite parts of the place where the alien healers work. Now I have my comparisons ready.

Biting trees, I find out many are real. I do not bite too hard, because the aliens are quick to notice if something dies. Oh! A funny little toy, one I’ve liked, pops up. I’ll be sure to take this back home. Whenever I’ve tried to escape, it comes out of nowhere. I grab it in my arms (this is hard) and bite another tree. It crunches differently! Pulling off a large piece of what the aliens hoped I’d mistake for bark, the inside of the tree is the alien-grey colour that looks like the shiny lightning structures. And there’s a symbol.

It meanders like a river, but it’s not.

It looks like the one on the lightning fence!

It’s a simplified bolt of lightning!

This is probably the tree that controls the lightning structures, so destroying it is how this will break down. Before I bite at it, I remember that the last time I tried to gnaw through the lightning fence, after falling back, I was drowsy, my mouth burned, and I felt like I was going to die. But maybe the rain, the clouds now visible, would wake me up. Home means a lot, so maybe this was worth it. Clutching the toy, I bit hard.

My mouth is on fire, and not the kind of fire during the dry season. This feels drier, but in a very, very short amount of time, it stops. The toy had fallen next to my leg, and I kick it towards myself. Before my heart gives way and leaves the abductor aliens to fix the false tree, I bellow in pain, trying to wake myself up. A cold drop lands on my back. Tiredly, but surely, I grab my toy, stand up, and walk towards the only lake I can access. It usually became a warm volcanic spring in cold times, but now, it is as cold as the rain was.

Which is good because that’ll help me recover from the lightning burns slightly faster.

Breathing is hard. Stepping into the lake didn’t help much, nor do the raindrops falling into my nose. I growl again, before bellowing a call to fight, a call to liberty. Right by the side of the lake was more of the barrier. There is a dry twig under a canopy, alien-made, and I press it to the lightning barrier. It doesn’t burn up, so I run out of the lake and up to the fence. To make sure it doesn’t burn me, I press my toy to it using my jaws.

It didn’t burn up!

I’m free!

Catching the toy back in my arms, which is still difficult, I pull down the alien-grey vines with my jaws and feet. There are aliens watching me, but I don’t care. They run away, their mouths open, producing a sound I can’t hear. Another blast of lightning and panicked sounds from the lump-heads across the alien rock trackway alert me that the rain has destroyed the other prison’s lightning vines.

Biting away the alien barrier, I bring down a lump-head. This feels more like home! Eating my prey with blinding speed, a hook-hand and a raptor come and try to get scraps. Now that I’m full, and the raptor and hook-hand are too, I get onto the alien trackway and follow it around. There’s not much I learn, other than that the aliens have a LOT of those sleep spikes, there are the large sea animals from home in a big, invisible container of water, and there’s a big structure which could be where I ended up on the day I ended up far from home.

There are big doors, but I can’t open them, even if I try, and I know the aliens will be angrier with me if I break it down. I’m too tall, and my arms are too big, so there’s no way I can open the door through the small holes as the aliens do. But then I see the hook-hand standing on top of the raptor and fiddling with the box to the side of the doors. Red turns green, I let the hook-hand climb onto my head, and I push the doors open.

Inside, staring at me, is one more of my kind! I give a friendly bellow, but they don’t answer. And then I see that half of them is completely devoid of any soft tissue whatsoever, just bones. There are more animals like them, confusing me as I walk through the hall. Then, at the end of it, there’s a room with moving yet flat depictions of a rock coming out of the stars and burning and falling into a ball that looks blue and green, like a forest by the sea. The flat box then shows a lot of destruction, including something that looks like one of my kind dying.

And then I realise something.

The aliens KNOW what happened to my kind.

This place is not somewhere else on the home I knew!

It’s what was going to happen!

What’s the point of going home if I know that everyone would die on a day nobody could predict?! Talking to these future aliens is impossible! I feel frozen in a thick layer of mud, and then I feel something soft on my face and something soft on my feet. The raptor and hook-hand wanted to go home too, and maybe I could die free. I take one of the rocks from the ceiling, place it on the floor, and kick it into the next barrier as hard as possible, much to the fright of a future alien.

Then I see something I actually remember, though hazily, as I was half asleep: an alien-white room with rainbow lights. The raptor appears mesmerised by it, and maybe the hook-hand is, too! Another flat, glowing box shows strange shapes. One is a picture of one of my kind. It shows a green light. What does that mean? Then I remember the door light: green means safety. It means it’s a safe time to return to, and that the rock from the stars won’t kill me the moment I get back.

I see Hook-hand frantically trying to figure out a way to go back to the time that once was, possibly chirping in a tone inaudible to me, when a rumble comes from behind. Looking back, I notice a herd that’s literally stampeding coming towards us, with one of the aliens from the future, one I don’t dislike, riding on top of a lump-head. They’re the only one I know who might be able to operate this way back to the time I lived in. I gesture towards it and grunt. The alien comes closer! It’s working!

The hook-hand, the raptor, and I watch in awe as we know we’re going home at last! When the low hum grows louder, I know this is our one ticket home. Before I go, I lean downwards, drop the toy, and nudge it towards the alien who was nicest to me. They nudge it back to me, so I grunt and nudge it back to them. Then I turn, walk very fast, enter the alien machine, get crammed in with many other animals, see the doors close, and get thrown to my former present, the present past, and the future present, a time I miss.

The contraption opens.

Where am I? Back where I was abducted from. How did I get here? Same way I left, just reversed by my alien friend. What are the chances that another one of my kind- one hundred percent! My hunting partner’s right here, and he’s confused!

Now all I have left to ask that I should worry about is “What are the chances he’ll believe my story?” And I know it’ll be zero. But still, I’m pretty sure he’ll tell it to the rest of the small pack. Eh, doesn’t matter anyways, as he’s watching the horn-face nip off some authentic leaves from our time, not the aliens’. The rock from the stars might come within the next solstice, the next 100 solstices, or maybe after a solstice so far away we’ve become ancient history.

So, what do I know?

I’m a free animal. I have time to live and be. And no more phony trees!

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P.S. Here is a list of the species that were mentioned in this story: 

-Tyrannosaurus rex (main character and hunting partner) 

-Unspecified plants (from Anthropocene) 

-Homo sapiens (aliens) 

-Edmontosaurus annectens (lump-heads; have soft tissue crest) 

-Trierarchuncus prairiensis (hook-hand; is an alvarezsaur) 

-Dakotaraptor steini (obviously the raptor) 

-A mosasaur (large sea creature from home; species indeterminate) 

-Triceratops prorsus (horn-face; guessed randomly which species they were) 

-Unspecified plants (genuine Maastrichtian)