A Moment From the Human-Dinosaur War

It was 12:34 AM when the Deinonychi initiated their ambush on HRM Congo Base Camp.

They crept silently, stealthily taking out the night guards in the course of a half hour. When they had finally disposed of the final man standing, who didn’t even realize that he was all alone at the time of death, the raptors moved on to the infiltration phase. They managed to climb the surrounding trees, scaling the branches and clutching to the soft timber with their curved claws and sickled toe claw, and leapt over the electric fence. Not one Deinonychus was even caught on the barbed wire.

 

Now, the Cretaceous hunters were inside the encampment, with no one aware of their presence. They were so cunning, so careful with carrying out their plan that the commandos and soldiers lay in their beds without knowing that their enemy was literally watching them sleep. They had been practicing many months for this night. They did not plan on seeing it fail.

 

It was finally time for the last part of the mission. It was time for them to reach their goal. It was time for them to eliminate this rogue squadron of humans.

 

It was time for them to eat.

 

The Deinonychi silently crept into the first bunk house they saw. With lightning speed and deadly efficiency, they cut the throats of all ten soldiers sleeping in their bunks. Not one of them made a sound, other than a quiet yet horrible choking noise. One down. Twelve more to go. They repeated their maneuver again in the next bunk house and were greeted with the same success.

 

The Deinonychi silently communicated to each other that their mission was going even better than they expected. The men were brave and dangerous by day, always alert and prepared for a battle. But with the exception of rotating soldiers on the night shift, all of them must sleep and make themselves vulnerable once the sun sinks past the horizon and the moon takes its place in the sky.

 

The intelligent beasts thought of nothing else. At the moment, the killing was the only thing that truly mattered. It would be a crucial victory for the Army, or at least for the troops stationed in this region.

 

They opened the door to the third bunk house without a sound. The raptors looked around and felt that there was something different about this place. There was an odd atmosphere to this particular room, but they could not point out what was causing the sensation. They cautiously, without knowing why they felt the need to be even more cautious, peered over their victims, claws extended, looming over their throats at the exact spot where they would die quickly and without breaking the silence …

 

A loud noise broke it. Shattered it to pieces. It was followed by a wail of agony and a barrage of that same din. When the smoke had cleared, all ten soldiers were awake, sitting up and holding smoking guns. The raptors lay dead on the floor, killed by a firestorm of hot bullets. Closest to the door was the man who fired the first shot. He was awake the entire time and watched the creatures come in, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. The ambush had failed because of Tau Demauri.

 

The thunder sound of the gunshots got everyone in the camp to their feet. In five minutes, the once-sleeping men were now fully alert soldiers, on guard, armed, and ready for action. They all knew from experience that the ambushing troop was only a warning. At 1:09 AM, they waited.

 

Tau never understood why the dinosaurs did this. He figured that the best way to ambush was to go all in, without the enemies having any idea of it until it was too late. It is certainly not that the creatures are stupid. They were able to use advanced weapons and technology made for humans. They were even able to plan tactical strategies, like the ambush. Perhaps they just liked a good fight.

 

The clock struck 1:10. They waited.

 

There was a faint sound, too low for most to hear and too fast for most to care. Tau picked it up and cocked his head in the direction of the noise, but it was just a soldier further down the row who tapped his boot. Tau looked straight ahead, his senses even more heightened than before. It may not have been a threat, but he could not afford to ignore other sounds. He had been careless before. For that, he got permanent scars on his left cheek and a lesson that was just as enduring.

 

1:11 now. They waited.

 

Another sound was audible, but unlike the one Tau sensed the minute before, it was more audible and represented a real threat. It was the sound of wings.

 

The Quetzalcoatli finally became visible, and tied to their underbellies by nets were devastating bombs. The pterodactyl air strike was here. The foot soldiers would arrive in less than a minute. The battle had begun.

 

As soon as the rats with wings came into view, the soldiers broke formation and scrambled to get away from the spots where the bombs would fall. Having been trained in this, almost all survived the blitz. Some of the better shooters picked off a fewof the pterodactyls, sending them crashing into the dirt. Tau noted that that was a good thing about fighting against dinosaurs: some of them are used like planes and tanks were decades ago, but they were still living things that could be taken down when hit in the right place. The ones that avoided the bullets turned around and flew back in the direction they came. They would be reloaded for the next attack, whenever that would be.

 

Finally, the military showed up. They did not march in lines and rows. They ran out of the jungle, jumped out of the trees, seemingly manifested out of nowhere. Plenty of them carried guns. While some carried the same archaic rifles their ancestors used in the early days of the uprising, others wielded arms scavenged from soldiers killed only recently. The rest of the troops carried nothing, preferring to fight with their natural weapons as their predecessors did millions of years ago. No matter what they used in battle, bare tooth and claw or laser guns and sabers, they were a deadly force.

 

The battle, like all battles before it, would be intense and bloody.

 

He thought, “Bring it.”

 

The firing of lasers, the destructive explosions, the screams of the dying were deafening, a thick and dense soundtrack that accompanied a scene of truly epic warfare. The human soldiers gave their all and went for the gusto, taking out as many of the prehistoric beasts as they could. The enemy reptiles were a force to be reckoned with, especially the agile and cunning raptors and the mighty carnivores. The herbivores were also dangerous despite being plant-eaters. The titanic sauropods crushed men under their feet like elephants trampling tiny rodents, and the Ankylosauruses, who were more heavily armored than anything else solely with their naturally thick skin, were living, breathing tanks.

 

If there was one species Tau hated and feared more than any, it had to be the raptors. More than any other dinosaur, they were the brightest, quickest, and therefore most dangerous. Even before the genetic testing that boosted the animals’ intelligence, they were crafty creatures and team players who plotted strategically to stalk and kill prey. Their name even means “terrible claw”, which perfectly describes their defining feature: a sickle-shaped claw in the middle toe that was used to stab and tear flesh.

 

These facts are what went through Tau’s head before he took on a Deinonychus pack.

 

This was not Tau Demauri’s first battle. He had been a soldier since the early days of the Human Resistance Movement, and he was such a skilled fighter and leader that he was able to blast through the raptors’ skulls while dodging their raging claws and flying kicks. However, the creatures were crafty and terribly nimble. After seven of the eight monsters had been killed, the last one remaining leaped onto his body and pinned him to the ground. He was able to brush off its legs with his own, keeping it from simply gutting his stomach with its "terrible claw", but he was locked in a struggle to keep its gaping jaw, with its sixty teeth shaped like blades, away from him.

 

As he stared into the angry, reptilian eyes of the beast threatening to bite his face off, Tau realized the true peril of the situation. He saw his life flash before his eyes: his childhood in Johannesburg, watching the film Jurassic Park for the first time, hearing as a teenager the news that scientists had been able to bring dinosaurs back to life, reading about the tests to see if they were fit to be labor animals, learning that they were genetically modifying some of the creatures, and humanity’s downward spiral that came when the test subjects became so intelligent they grew self-aware. He recalled the dinosaur armies overtaking the United States of America, then the rest of North America and Europe, and then spreading into the rest of the world like a pandemic or a plague. Finally, he saw himself, from fifteen years before, applying for the Congo branch of the Human Resistance Movement. The lad says after turning in the application, “I swear I will not stop fighting until the day dinosaurs become extinct again.”

 

The promise had not been fulfilled yet, and this gave Tau the strength to shove the terrible lizard off and blast its brains out. Without wasting another second, he got back in the fight.

 

The lengthy, violent battle lasted until after sunrise, when the dinosaurs realized they were outgunned and ran back into the forests from whence they came. The ground of the base was scarred and stained. Forty-eight men lay dead, while the other human casualties were either in a monster’s stomach or being dragged to the mysterious enemy camp. Only dead men have ever been there.

 

Despite the loss, the struggle ended in victory. The bodies of raptors, Triceratopses, Tyrannosauruses, sauropods, and others were strewn all over the field, their blood and organs staining the dirt. Decapitated limbs, sauropod heads and necks without bodies, arms neatly sliced off by laser swords, and various appendages were scattered around. Soot blotches marking explosions were on walls and on the earth; empty shells and stray bullets littered the ground; craters and mounds were new landforms. HRM Congo Military Base Camp had been transformed.

 

The battle may have been a triumph, but it had minimal impact other than most of the human regiment was still alive. Tau stared off into the underbrush where the dinosaurs retreated, wondering just where they come from, where they run off to, where they lurk and plot their attacks. Where is the camp of the creatures? How do they know where we live when we don’t know where they’re based? What technology do they have besides the weapons they carry to these skirmishes?

 

The biggest question he had in his mind: how can we find out?