Bobby & Emma's Excellent Adventure:
Chapter Two: Another Fine Mess
"I hate you, Robert Drake."
I roll my eyes. "I think I got that the first twenty times you said that, Emma." Swatting aside the camera that Spiral left to watch us as it buzzes noisily around my head, I glance ahead of me and try to make out something from the endless green in front of me. Coming to a stop, I point up the trail ahead of us. "Okay," I begin, looking at both Emma and at Lisa, the civilian girl who got pulled back in time with us, "there's a waterhole in front of us. Emma, I need you to do a scan for me, just to give us a clue of what's out there."
Emma raises an eyebrow. "What do you expect me to say, Bobby? 'Oh yes, I clearly recognise those thoughts as a Tyrannosaurus Rex'?" She sighs, and rubs at her sweat-streaked forehead with one hand. "I can sense a few minds, but they're too vague for me to get any kind of fix on them."
"I could fly ahead," Lisa pipes up suddenly, causing both Emma and me to look at her in surprise. She raises her eyebrows briefly, and then shrugs herself out of her jacket, tying its sleeves around her waist. When she's done that, I can see a couple of folded, shimmering wings hanging from Lisa's shoulders, which are bunched up beneath a couple of hardened covers. As they extend to their full length, she continues "I usually keep these hidden, but I figure we could use them right now, don't you?"
"Good idea," I agree, suddenly feeling pretty impressed with how Lisa's decided to handle this situation. She could have told us both to go to hell, but she's actually trying to help us all out – which is a better reaction than I could have expected from a lot of people I know. "Be careful though, okay?"
"Careful's my middle name," Lisa grins, before she spreads her wings and lifts herself off the ground and into the insect-thick air. "See you soon, handsome." She rises above the jungle canopy and flies ahead of us, moving so quickly that it's only a few moments before we've lost sight of her. When she's gone, I turn to Emma and see her standing with her hands on her hips.
"Don't say a word, Bobby," she says. "I can't stand you when you're full of yourself."
"Hey, she likes what she sees. I can't help it if I'm irresistible, can I?"
"You're not as irresistible as you like to think, Bobby," Emma retorts. Then she turns to the camera that's floating by her impossibly-tidy hair and says "Bobby here wants me to get a tattoo that says 'Bobby Drake is my best lover ever' on one of my buttocks. And then he wants me to do it with another girl just so he can watch. Isn't that right, Bobby?"
Suddenly I feel like I want to scrape myself a big, deep hole and crawl into it to escape. I can feel my cheeks burning with horribly intense embarrassment (although I don't know why. The Spineless Ones on the other end of the camera won't care one way or the other if what Emma's just said is true or not – they're just after good TV), and I find myself looking at the camera with a wounded look on my face, saying "That's not true! She made it all up!"
Emma simply looks at her nails and laughs. "Oh, I bet you wish it was all untrue, don't you… Tarzan." She winks at the camera before blowing me a kiss. "That's the name he likes me to call him when we're… you know." Don't worry, Bobby, I'll take it all back before we go home. She wrinkles her nose at me, marking an X across her chest. Cross my heart.
I scowl. "Somehow that doesn't fill me with confidence."
Before Emma can reply and rob me of any more of my dignity, Lisa lands beside us, her feet touching the leafy forest floor without making a sound. She folds her wings up inside their cases and jerks a thumb towards the waterhole in front of us. "Well, there's good news, and there's bad news. The good news is that we've got a wide open space ahead of us, with plenty of plant-eaters around."
"What's the bad news?" I ask, knowing right away that I'm going to regret asking.
Lisa raises her eyebrows, and rubs at the corner of her segmented eyes with her multi-jointed fingers. "The bad news… the bad news is that there's five big-ass tyrannosaurus rex drinking from that pond out there, and they don't look like they're just there for milk and cookies."
"Five?" Emma says, looking surprised for the first time in I don't know how long. "I thought these things were solitary?"
"That's what Hollywood likes to portray them as, yeah," Lisa replies. "Doesn't tie up with the fossil record, though – quite a few finds have three or four skeletons in them. Apparently T-Rex liked to gather together, at least some of the time. Like now, for instance." She absorbs the stunned looks that Emma and I are quite obviously giving her, and grins. "What can I say? I watch the Discovery Channel a lot."
"Guess I should quit watching VH-1," I mutter, pushing forwards through the undergrowth to take a look at what we're up against. The sight steals my breath from my throat, even though I've spent more than a little while in the Savage Land, and seeing living dinosaurs isn't exactly news to me. This is the real deal, not a preserved rerun, and the stars are getting very restless. They're bigger than I expected, too, which doesn't help – there are five of them, as Lisa said, and they all average about fourteen metres long from the tips of their tails to the lethal mouthfuls of teeth they're carrying in their huge, heavy skulls. Their hides are decorated with unique patterns of stripes, spots and blotches of colour, and they're all busy chewing the bones of a dead three-horned dinosaur – I can't tell what kind, though, because there isn't much left of it. Blood streaks their skin and they're all totally focused on eating, pulling huge chunks of skin and muscle clear of the carcass, and swallowing them whole. "Okay," I whisper, trying hard not to pee my pants, "here's what we're going to do –"
"Run like hell, and hope they don't notice us?" Emma says sourly. "Good God, Drake, those things could outrun us without even breathing hard."
I nod. "I know – and that's why we're not going to try to outrun them." Pointing to the tree line on the other side of the clearing, I say "That's where we need to be, right? So we're going to get there by keeping in cover, and hoping those guys don't spot us." Taking a deep breath, I start creeping around the edge of the clearing, taking small, careful footsteps so as not to snap any twigs, with Emma and Lisa following me doing the same thing. As we move, we can see two of the T-Rex start snapping angrily at each other, their massive teeth shearing into each other's flanks and spraying bright blood everywhere.
"Guess someone forgot their table manners," Lisa mutters as she pushes aside a large flat leaf. "Remind me not to piss those guys off."
"I second that," I say, watching the two animals glaring at each other with their beady eyes. "Come on; we're almost in the clear –"
Just then, the camera that's been following us turns back towards the feeding dinosaurs and screeches loudly, making every single one of the massive monsters turn their huge skulls in our direction. Emma gulps, and for the first time in a long time, I can feel that she's afraid – terrified, even – and that feeling only gets worse when the largest of the dinosaurs roars, so loudly that it almost cuts a slice out of the air, and begins to move towards us. The movement is slow at first, but it rapidly begins to pick up, and before long the monster is charging towards us at full speed. "Move!" I yell. "If we get into cover it won't be able to follow us!" Stumbling into the shadow of a massive redwood tree, I drag Emma and Lisa with me, putting the bulk of a shattered, horizontal tree-trunk between us and the bull as it runs towards us. As we keep running, I look behind us to see the bull smashing the fallen tree with one massive foot, not even breaking stride to look at its handiwork. Oh well, I find myself thinking absently. There goes that idea…
Beside me I can hear a wheezy prayer. Lisa is reciting a Hail Mary as she runs, every word scraping out of her throat as if it is two sizes too big. Emma, on the other hand, has stopped running and is standing facing the T-Rex as it approaches us. "Emma!" I shout. "Come on!" Predictably, she ignores me, and stays where she is.
As the bull is almost about to crush her with its jaws, she clenches both fists and braces her feet on the ground as if she's about to get hit in the stomach. The bull is suddenly frozen in place, its butcher-knife teeth stuck a few feet away from Emma's body, drool dripping off them in gooey, blood-streaked ropes. "Bad dog," Emma purrs, patting it on the nose with one hand. "Go play with your friends." Abruptly, the dinosaur turns and stalks stiffly back to the clearing, as nails-on-a-chalkboard calls echo in the air above us.
When Lisa and I walk back to where Emma is standing, we find her standing with her arms folded and with a smug (but also pretty obviously relieved) grin on her face. "It's all right," she says. "You can thank me now, or you can thank me later. It's entirely up to you."
"Are you crazy?" I yell, suddenly furious that Emma would put herself at risk like that. "You could have been killed!"
"Could have, yes. But I wasn't, was I, Robert?" Emma chuckles. "Do you really think that a human brain couldn't affect a dinosaur brain? That T-Rex was putty in my hands."
"Okay," I say, trying desperately to keep at least a little bit of my composure. "So why didn't you pull that trick before you almost got your head chewed off like a cheap Pez dispenser? Why couldn't you have just let us get past those guys without any trouble?"
"It wasn't fun," Emma replies, shrugging. "Don't tell me your heart wasn't racing then."
"Guys," Lisa interrupts, looking like she's just about ready to pop Emma's skull open and scoop out her brains herself, "I think we have bigger problems." She jerks a long, chitin-tipped thumb at the hovering camera, which zips away to a safer distance as she glares at it. "That thing made sure we got spotted by those dinosaurs in the first place. How many more times is it going to do that before one of us gets killed?"
"Let's not think about that right now, huh?" I say, wiping some dirty sweat out of my face. "How about we try moving away from the rest of those guys and finding somewhere that we can chill out for a while?"
"Good idea," Lisa agrees. "Lead the way."
About half an hour later, we come across a cave that leads down underneath the ground. It's damp, it's cold and there's water dripping down the walls, but it's better than staying out in the open, so we all hurry inside and try not to make that much noise – with the echo inside the cave, it'd be like holding up a big neon sign saying "Chow time".
Emma stretches as she sits on a large rock, her hands clenching into fists as she does so, and then she says "So what's our next move?"
"Well, we can't stay here forever," Lisa replies, before gesturing to the path we cleared for ourselves on the way to our current location. "Sooner or later something's going to catch our scent, and then we'll be sunk."
"Good point," I say, looking out of the cave's entrance to see what's around. Luckily for us, there's nothing really big waiting to use us as a running buffet – but there are a couple of huge armoured monsters with massive clubs on the ends of their tails wandering past. They're not walking together, but just going in the same direction – they seem to be keeping their distance from each other. "Wait a second," I whisper, pointing at them with an outstretched finger. "What are they?"
"Ankylosaurs," Lisa replies. "Plant eaters. We should be fine as long as we don't get in their way."
Well, that's a comfort, I think sourly. "Come on, guys. Let's get moving – don't want to be stuck in a Godzilla movie for any longer than we have to be, right?"
Creeping past the two dinosaurs as quietly as we can, we manage to get away without making either of them mad, which I count as a very good thing. Both of them look like they could squash the three of us into greasy red smears without breaking a sweat… if dinosaurs could actually sweat, that is. Stupid biology.
Beside me, Emma is muttering rude words to herself as she gets her sleeve caught on a tangled bunch of thorns, and the fabric tears with an angry ripping sound. "This is all your fault, Drake," she snarls, stabbing her finger at me like a knife. "If I hadn't been sitting around with you, I'd never have been dragged here."
"That's true," I say patiently, trying to see if I can find a path through the dense thicket of ferns in front of me, "but you've been in worse situations before. Try dealing with it, and see what happens."
Emma scowls. "I hate you."
Coughing slightly, Lisa points to the sky, and says pointedly "You guys want me to fly around for a bit so you can finish this up in private? I can, you know. Just say the word."
Emma visibly straightens, pulling down the frayed edges of her jacket and tucking her hair behind her ears. "No," she replies. "No, don't do that. I'm sure Drake and I can get on long enough for you to stay here. Isn't that right, Bobby?"
"Sure," I say, shrugging casually. "No problems here."
Lisa raises her eyebrows and then nods towards the horizon, before she flexes her wings and stretches, her wing cases skittering against her lower back. "Okay, then – glad that's settled."
Just then, though, a whirling pool of light appears at the back of the cave, and out of it steps Spiral, clapping with two of her hands and laughing crazily. "Bravo, darlings, bravo," she says in a delighted tone. "Lord Mojo is very pleased with your performances so far. He was especially fond of your telepathic trick with the tyrannosaurus, Emma." Spiral pauses long enough for Emma to fold her arms and look smug for a second or two, and then continues "But you're not done yet, I'm afraid." She clicks her fingers and the cave melts away, everything around us melting into a fuzzy white and black mess, like a TV that's been tuned wrongly, and I can feel my stomach doing a couple of backflips as I realise that I have absolutely no idea of what's going to happen next. That's not the greatest feeling in the world, I have to admit, and I really don't relish it. Spiral clicks her fingers again then, and I can feel something happening around us. I'm not sure what it is, but it feels like we're being thrown forwards like a rock from a catapult. And just before I feel like I'm going to puke, we come to a sudden halt and everything fades back into reality – or as close to reality as we're going to get while Mojo is having his fun with us, anyway.
The first thing I notice is the stink of horse crap. It's so strong that I almost can't focus on anything else – until I notice what I'm wearing. The clothes I'd been wearing before this all started have vanished, and I'm wearing a rough, ragged brown poncho over a dark shirt and dusty black pants. On top of my head is a battered Stetson, and I can feel the weight of two pistols at my hips.
What the hell is going on here?
It's then that I notice what Emma is wearing. She's dressed in a long, hooped white dress with a neckline that reaches almost up to her jaw, and has the strings of a dark blue bonnet tied under her chin. While she's looking at what I've been shoved into, Emma sees me gaping at her, and then takes a look down at herself curiously – and screams like she's just had her hand caught in a bear trap, her eyes going as wide as dinner plates.
"What is this?" she shrieks, grabbing handfuls of her skirt and shaking them at Spiral. "What have you done to me?"
"I've done nothing except prepare you all for your next little… trip, screwloose," Spiral chuckles. "Better saddle up, cowpokes." Then, she snaps her fingers and disappears into the same kind of whirling light that brought us all here, leaving the three of us all looking around in complete confusion. When she's got her bearings, though, Lisa (who's dressed in pretty much the same way as Emma, her wings and antennae all hidden by the masses of purple fabric that have wrapped themselves around her) points to her right, her long finger hidden inside a velvet glove.
"I think I see a saloon," she says. "You guys want to go check it out?"
"This is no time to think about getting drunk," Emma snaps, batting away the hovering camera with one irritated hand. Lisa shrugs, the lashes around her segmented eyes fluttering as she blinks slowly.
"Hey, who says we have to drink anything? We might at least find out where we are that way."
I nod. "Good idea. Come on, Emma – we might learn how to rope a steer while we're at it."
"You're getting funnier every day, Bobby," Emma snarls, before she picks up her skirts and flounces off towards the swinging doors of the saloon. "Don't fall behind."
When the three of us enter the saloon, there is a moment of unease as everybody else falls silent. I can feel dozens of eyes watching me as I walk up to the bar. "Three shots of gulping whiskey, please," I ask the woman serving the rest of the tanned, gun-toting lowlifes around us.
"Don't like strangers in these parts much," she says, making me feel like I've stepped into a bad Clint Eastwood movie. "You better be just passing through, boy."
"Oh, I hope so," I say, handing over the coins that I find have magically appeared in my pockets. "Wouldn't want to disturb you fine folks any more than we already have."
"Is that right?" says a rough, cigar-stained voice from behind me – and the quiet bar gets even quieter, if that's possible. I turn around and see a muscular man toting a pistol and a bad case of five o'clock shadow, along with a couple of gaps in his crooked smile where teeth have been knocked out. A wet lump of chewing tobacco is shoved into the side of his jaw, and he spits a long stream of brown drool into the bucket close to my feet. Some of it hits my pants, and I begin to guess that he's just looking for a fight.
Well, if it's a fight he wants…
Pushing up the rim of my hat, I look him right in the eye, step up to him so that we're nose-to-nose, and say in a confident voice (or as confident a voice as I can manage) "Your shoelace is untied."