Connor Ficlet. Gen. Reviews are love, and flames will be doused with a cup of tea.
I own nothing. If I did, Abby wouldn't be the one in her underwear all the time.
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You are running. You are running so hard you can barely breathe. You can hear the footsteps behind you, following you, catching you up.
You have no idea where you are, other than 'the forest'. You have no idea where you are going, other than 'anywhere but here'. You have no idea where anyone else is, other than 'not being chased by a bloody T-Rex'.
It's getting closer. Undergrowth that you are struggling through is being crushed easily under the dinosaur's feet. The thing is huge, and fast, and you know that the only reason it hasn't caught and eaten you is that it has been confused by walking through the anomaly from the nice, warm Cretaceous and finding itself in the rather cold and damp British October.
You are still running, and you haul yourself around a tree, intending to make a u-turn, and head back to the anomaly site, where there are lots of Men With Big Guns.
Unfortunately, trees have roots. And this one has been very inconsiderate and let one of those roots grow above the ground. Just at the right height for your foot to catch it and send you sprawling.
You roll, a little too far, and find yourself dropping over the edge of a mini-cliff, and landing heavily on a bed of leaf litter a metre below. You land on your front, sharp pains shooting up limbs from your ankle, and the wrist you managed to land on. You have a cut and a lovely bruise on your cheek as well.
Rolling onto your back, you notice that you are lying in a deep ditch that stretches away from your head, but blocks you in everywhere else. It doesn't hold you attention for long, as a nose appears in your line of sight.
Praying the dinosaur doesn't see you; you freeze. Your bad luck continues however, as a huge eye focuses on your heaving chest and the blood on your cheek. The beast leans down towards you, opens its mouth as you close your eyes, and it roars, a wave of warm, stinking air rushing over you.
Suddenly there is a loud bang. Your eyes fly open and the T-Rex jerks away. More bangs make the dinosaur roar and you suddenly realise that the Men With Big Guns have followed the path that the two of you have made.
Blood is running down the muzzle of the beast, spraying across nearby trees as it shakes its head. Part of you knows you should move, but you are still frozen, you can't help watching.
You realise this is a mistake as another burst of machine gun fire sounds, and the dinosaur collapses. You wriggle along the ditch as quickly as possible, ignoring the pain in your ankle, and when the beast hits the ground, your legs are the only part of you under the corpse.
One of the arms is dangling into the ditch, and you can't help staring at the claws that are lying next to your leg. You barely register it when two of the Men With Big Guns jump down next to you and haul you out of there, and before you know it you are sitting on a fallen log with an ice back on your leg, and a steri-strip on your face, watching the Men With Big Guns try and figure out how to move the beast. And Stephen is with them, waving around his own Big Gun, and the Professor is walking towards you with a worried frown on his face.
He sits next to you and asks 'Are you alright, Connor?' and you shake your head because you were almost eaten, and your ankle hurts, and you can't stop shaking, and you were almost eaten.
You close your eyes as he puts his arm around you, and you lean into his solid warmth. You are safe. The running has stopped. And you can breathe.
