2- RACE WITH THE DEVIL

I stood in place a second longer than I should’ve, looking for wires, a projector, a costume flap, anything that might tell me this was some sort of elaborate prank.

I mean, I’d seen this sort of shit on YouTube … kinda.

The thing was, this didn’t look like one of those janky T-Rex costumes, and it sure as hell was moving way too smoothly to be some animatronic.

Head to tail, it was over thirty feet long and covered in feathers, all of them various shades of green – giving it some serious camouflage against the forest backdrop. No wonder I hadn’t seen it sooner.

What struck me most of all, though, were the eyes. They focused right on me. There was no uncanny valley or thousand yard stare to this thing. It was staring my way with obvious intent to do harm.

Before, with the bus, I’d felt a slight sense of relief. I was tired of fighting and for one brief moment the idea of it all being over was almost appealing. However, faced with my imminent death twice in as many minutes, I found that sense of relief replaced with one of utter terror.

The truth was, I didn’t really want to die and I sure as shit didn’t want to end up devoured by some monster from the land that time forgot.

No. What I needed to do was listen to that disembodied voice and get my ass moving.

Fuck this noise!

I turned and ran, hoping to hell that line from the movie about the T-Rex being clocked at thirty miles per hour was nothing more than Hollywood bs.

Behind me, the beast let out a heavy grunt and gave chase. I didn’t need to turn and look to know this. I could feel the thud of its heavy feet and hear the crack of branches as it plowed right through them.

Jesus H. Christ! I was a fucking thirty-eight year old middle manager. I wasn’t some high school track star and I sure as shit wasn’t Bear Grylls. Sure, I tried to stay in decent shape. I had a Bowflex in my garage and played racquetball every other week – or at least I had before Deb and her lawyer had taken a steaming shit all over my life. All the same, I had a sinking feeling that if this kept up for more than a mile then I was as good as toast.

Or maybe more like an uncooked side of long pig.

I dared a glance over my shoulder, finding I’d managed to put a tiny bit of distance between myself and the brute thanks to the myriad obstacles in this forest. It wasn’t nearly enough, though. The question now was all about endurance. How long could I keep up this pace?

Hell, I was already breathing hard – a fact not helped by the heat and humidity.

I needed to find a place to hide, but where could I go to escape an apex predator? Up a tree maybe? Yeah, like there was any chance I’d make it before…

Wait!

I spied something off to the left. What the hell? Past some trees, within yet another clearing was a bright green ball of light that appeared to be … floating a few feet above the ground.

I had no idea what it might be, but it seemed more promising than whatever lay in every other direction, so I abruptly turned that way. Sadly for me, my running partner did too. I heard it stumble, followed by the sharp crack of what sounded like a sapling coming down, then once again it was hot on my tail.

Please be something useful, I thought. Not that I had any clue how a floating traffic light was going to be of use. At least it would be something interesting to look at as I got swallowed whole by this monster.

“Way to go, chaser!” that damnable voice from earlier called, except it was different this time. Before it had been coming from everywhere. Now I distinctly heard it from up ahead.

Behind me, the beast let out a growl and I felt the vibrations beneath my feet intensify.

Son of a bitch! It was actually putting on speed, like it had been toying with me but was now growing tired of my shit.

“You might want to run faster.”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?!” I cried, despite seeing nothing but trees, dirt, and that weird ball of light.

I was almost to the clearing where it floated, but the dinosaur was quickly closing the gap between us. I felt hot breath wash over my backside. It smelled like garbage that had been left out in the hot sun for a week.

“He’s right on top of you! Dive, chaser, dive!”

Dive? This wasn’t a goddamned baseball game. On the flip side, there came another huff of fetid breath on my neck – close enough to tell me that the next sensation I was going to feel would likely be my top half being bitten clean through.

What did I have to lose?

I launched myself through the gap between two trees in the moment before there came a savage crunch of teeth clicking together from right behind me. I hit the ground and rolled several feet before sliding to a halt. This was it. All I could do was lay there and hope this thing finished me off quickly.

Instead of being devoured, though, there came instead a heavy thump noise. It was followed by lots of angry grunting by the beast, yet still I remained undigested.

“You can open your eyes now, chaser. You made it.”

It was the same voice, except gone was the freakish amplification from earlier. It sounded like whoever was talking was standing right next to me.

I dared to look, nearly soiling my khakis in the process. Standing barely fifteen feet away was the dinosaur. This close it appeared absolutely ginormous, a nightmare given flesh. Worse, it looked seriously ticked off.

It saw me staring at it and lunged forward. I couldn’t help the scream that escaped my lips as it … stopped right at the edge of the tree line? The air in front of the beast flashed an angry red as the beast appeared to collide with something solid – like this small clearing was surrounded by the world’s strongest pane of glass. Yet there was nothing there. I had leapt through that same space just moments earlier. Hell, I could still feel this thing’s death breath washing down on me.

“All right, that’s enough,” the disembodied voice said. “Go on now. There’s nothing for you here. Scram! Vámonos. Hasta la vista, motherfucker.”

Sure enough, after another moment or two, the beast grunted unhappily then turned and stomped off into the wilderness. Several long minutes passed before I was convinced it was finally gone.

“That was…” I stammered, trying to keep my heart from beating out of my chest. “That was … a fucking T-Rex, an actual Tyrannosaurus.”

“Don’t be stupid,” the voice replied. “Of course it wasn’t.”

I turned in a circle, continuing to look for whoever was speaking. “Yeah, pretty sure it was.”

“Nuh uh.”

“What? Are you saying I imagined it?”

“Not at all,” it said. “What I’m saying, Bill Nye, is that you might want to study up on your paleontology a bit. That was actually just a run of the mill Mapusaurus, and not even a full grown one at that.”

***

“A Mapu…”

“A Mapusaurus, duh!” the voice reiterated. “A relatively large carcharodontosaurid that lived roughly 90 million of your years ago in what you now call Argentina. You’re welcome, by the way. Knowledge is power after all.”

I shook my head, trying to make sense of this all. “Okay fine, but what the hell was it doing here?”

“Simple. It was brought here. That was the prechase qualification round. Think of it like the entrance exam to a college, except with less essays and more teeth. Just to be clear, though, you passed with flying colors. Congratulations!”

There followed a bit of trumpeted fanfare that carried through the thick air.

“Entrance exam?” I asked, looking around but not seeing the source of either the voice or the music.

“Yes indeed, chaser. Oh, and in the interest of not making you look any stupider than you already do, I’m right here.”

I turned, once again seeing nothing except that green ghost light hanging in midair. Wait. Is the voice coming from that?

“Look at you finally starting to get it. Like a puppy realizing the tail it’s been chasing has been attached to its own behind all along.”

“Is this … some kind of Bluetooth speaker?” I jabbed a finger into the green light, watching it sink in up to the knuckle. It wasn’t hot, but it did cause my hand to tingle.

“Hey!” the voice cried as the light zipped back about five feet. “We don’t have that kind of relationship. At least not yet anyway. Of course, a lot will depend on your progress in the coming days. That said, if I might be totally frank, I’m just not that into you, dude.”

Hold on. Is this thing alive?! “Um sorry, I guess.”

“No problem, chaser. Such rudeness is to be expected from semi-sapient life forms.”

“Listen, I don’t exactly know how to phrase this. But … what the hell are you? And why do you keep calling me chaser? I already told you, my name’s Mac.”

“And we’ve already established that’s complete and utter bullshit. However, I’ll be happy to call you Timothy instead if you prefer, or maybe Tim if that’s your cup of tea.”

“Sure, whatever. Tim is fine,” I replied, too dumbfounded to fire back. “Now back to my…”

“Excellent,” the ghost light blithely responded. “As for what I am, here’s where it starts to get good. Prepare to have your primitive twenty-first century brain blown, for I am your official FAST unit.”

“You don’t seem to be moving all that quickly to me.”

“Not speed, stupid. FAST. It stands for Free-form, Autonomous, Sapient Tracker. In layman’s terms, I am the customary artificial intelligence unit assigned to chasers such as yourself.”

I nodded. “Okay, so you’re some kind of AI? Like one of those image generators that asks for a prompt to…?”

“Survey says XXX,” it interrupted, somehow managing to sound insulted. “What you call AI, I’d call a barely functional copy of Zork sitting on a fingerprint laden floppy disk. By the way, that’s a simple text based game by Infocom. First released in…”

“I know what Zork is!”

“Very well. As I said, knowledge is power. Getting back to my point, I am a living, breathing super computer designed and built by a hyper-evolved race of beings the likes of which your pedestrian level imagination can’t possibly hope to fathom.”

“Really?”

“Fine. You got me. I technically don’t breath.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I meant those hyper … things.”

“Ah, yes. As I was saying, I was constructed by an advanced race of entities that are as far above you as you are above… Hmmm.”

“What do you mean hmmm?”

The ghost light fluttered back and forth in the air a few times. “Well, I was going to say cockroaches, but that’s not quite true. Imagine something lower. Sub-cockroaches maybe, and then go back a couple million years from there. You catching my drift yet?”

My mind was racing too fast to be insulted, yet I kind of was anyway. “Y’know, for such a self-proclaimed advanced piece of tech you really do sound just like a run-of-the-mill asshole.”

“That’s wonderful to hear!”

“It is?”

“Of course. You see, that’s by design. In being assigned to you, I’ve been specifically programmed with colloquialisms from your time. That way you’re sure to understand me. I mean, imagine the confusion if I were to accidentally call you a hep-cat and or tell you to slip me some skin, my man.”

“I know what both those mean.”

“Sure you do,” it replied dismissively. “Anyway, this feature also exists for your own protection.”

“My protection?”

“Precisely, Timothy old pal. You won’t be able to grasp this, but if I were to, say, throw some shade your way that originated from a race more than two evolutionary steps above your own, why, the resulting shame would likely cause your brain to instantly liquify.”

“Why do I somehow doubt that?” I replied.

“You do you, as the saying goes. Regardless, let’s not be in a hurry to test that hypothesis. Trust me when I say there will be plenty of opportunity for you to meet an equally gruesome fate in the coming stages.”

I was about to say something else, but its words hit me like a brick to the balls. “I thought you said I was being given a second chance.”

“You are, emphasis on chance. Mind you, I never said it was a good chance.”

I backed away, looking around. My first thoughts upon arriving here was that this must be the afterlife. However, it was beginning to slowly dawn on me that it might be something far worse. “What exactly is this place?” I considered what it had said about that dinosaur. “Is this … Argentina?”

“Not quite,” the light replied. “It just looks like it, for the moment anyway. In actuality, my friend, you are standing in a dimension that exists outside of time and space as you know it. In short, welcome to the void, chaser! What happens from this point onward will be entirely up to you.”