BUTCHER

The nearest human settlement was a suburb, but to the Indoraptor it was set up like a buffet. One of the first things the humans had done with him was introduce the concept of a latch, and the undoing of a latch. They placed meat shanks within glass containers and starved him until he figured out how to get his next meal, tasering him when he gave up or smashed the windows. He'd learned under duress how to manipulate his dexterous hands and fingers around a handle or doorknob, to grip and turn soundlessly until he could gain entry. It was how he stole into the closest house to the forest; a quick self-taught lesson on sliding glass doors, and he was creeping inside, sickle claws tapping the laminated kitchen floor.

Instantly he felt gratified; here were walls and ceilings and chilly air conditioning, everything he was used to. The echoes from his claw taps fed him a mental map of the rooms within, and he could sense the heat radiating from two bodies upstairs.

There were two humans sleeping; he ripped them apart before they woke, splattering the walls with red. In crash dummies stuffed with meat, the scientists had taught the Indoraptor where best to tear, until every human shape and body was an exercise for his teeth. It was gruesome, and he shamelessly liked it. He used to smear blood from his meat or his own feces across the walls of his cell, at a loss for anything else to do. Each killing left in him a sense of satisfaction and gain.

House to house he crept to continue the butchery, over wooden fences and leaping from roof to roof where he could. His dark hide drank in light. In some houses, barking dogs met him at the door, dispatched with teeth or claws; in others, alarms pealed the second he entered the house, panicking him and sending him into a frenzy. Sometimes humans woke before he made it to their rooms, but their screams ceased all the same. Most of the time, there were very small humans, like Maisie Lockwood. He stopped and ate parts of those.

It was a mindless massacre. There was no limit to the Indoraptor's killing, because he had never been taught a limit. Living things were to be killed, and he was the one to do it. Nothing had ever existed with him and lived, nothing except three humans and Blue.

With a few lights on and multiple security alarms triggered in his wake, it was only a matter of time before the entire neighborhood was roused and panicked. Neighbor checked on neighbor and found slaughter; the horror was unprecedented. By the Indoraptor's sixteenth house, police cruisers were crammed bumper to bumper down the cul-de-sac, and it was becoming apparent from a clear trail of disturbance that the perpetrator was still active.

The Indoraptor padded out a former family of six's home and came face to face with the ends of dozens of handguns. Gore smeared his mouth, hands, and feet. He screamed at them, every jagged tooth and claw painted red, and the gobsmacked officers, expecting a very human serial killer and not a lab-grown hybrid dinosaur, either did not shoot or missed if they did. The Indoraptor dove among them, camouflaged by the deluge of flashing red and blue lights in the night. He ripped them apart. People were thrown against their cruisers, sometimes in pieces.

One officer scrambled into her cruiser and blared on the horn. It startled the Indoraptor into dropping the half-crushed skull of another human and turning to screech at the offending sound. It was with this opportunity that another cruiser slammed into him, knocking him end over end onto the dewy green lawn. Bullets studded his flesh, peppered his flanks and elbows. He screamed, scrambling claws tearing chunks of grass from the earth in his fervor to escape the hail of gunfire. He launched to his feet and collided with the side of the house, smearing bright red blood across the cheery yellow paint, and took off into the backyard.

The Indoraptor ran blindly until his limbs gave out, until the limp bestowed on him by a mosaic of bullet holes in his hind legs crippled him. By then he was in the forest again, still close enough to hear the distant shouts of panicked humans barking orders. He collapsed on a hump of dry wild grass, sides heaving, throat whistling. His hands shook. His wounds wept blood, and his mouth wept sobs, pained gurgles he had no instinct to hide. The Indoraptor advertised his suffering freely; he had never thought to cover up his misery, because it had never made a difference to the humans anyway.

Something in him told him that he should have stayed, and slaughtered the humans until either they all died or he did. But in him was the same swelling force that had kept him alive in his cell the past three years, had reared its head each time he was tasered or sliced open or drowned: He wanted desperately to live. He knew death waited when his body reached its limit; he had tasted it often, electrocuted until he vomited blood or drowned to test his stamina until he felt like even his mind was floating. Death clung to the jagged ribs sticking forever out of his sides, was there in every whistling, pneumonic breath. Escaping it for just another day eclipsed any training.

The Indoraptor was beginning to think that the humans brought death wherever they went. Suddenly, life in the forest felt quite tempting.

Before he could set to work picking out the bullets from his hide, he scented a newcomer and bristled. Blue padded out of the darkness, her eyes green discs in the moonlight. She stood a safe distance away and sniffed the air, head weaving on the end of her neck. The Indoraptor snarled, offended by her presence in the midst of his misery. He was threatened and humiliated by her fighting superiority.

But Blue made no move to fight, despite the fresh wounds on her neck and back. She merely stood there, sniffing at him and staring at him. The Indoraptor stared back. Compared to the bullets embedded in his flesh, her stare seemed laughably survivable.

Blue took one step forward, and the Indoraptor smiled at her. She stumbled back, lips curling back to reveal her own teeth. Smiling was something the Indoraptor picked up from the humans who approached his cell. Pearly white smiles were what greeted him every time he was tasered, when the guards banged on the bars and laughed when he flinched. When he manipulated the muscles around his mouth and smiled back at them, they always became so quiet. And usually, they left in a hurry.

He didn't mean to intimidate Blue, for once. He merely wanted to signal her to keep away, and he was shocked that it worked. Communicating with Blue felt as impossible as understanding the humans, but now, he could somehow see the similarities. She too tapped a sickle claw against the earth, and she too stood both tall and straight, and she too had a tail that lashed anxiously through the air.

Blue was seeing it too. The Indoraptor's pained cries were what drew her, and seeing him finally prone and pliant is what made her stay. She was perplexed at him, raptor and not raptor. Every time she tried to recognize him as one of her kind, the dissimilarities grew in prominence: his too-big head, his lipless mouth, his apish forelimbs and armored spine. He was an oddity.

She tilted her head to the left. The Indoraptor mirrored her, and tilted his head to the right. She tilted her head to the right. He tilted his head to the left.

That she could recognize, the acknowledgement that what she did was seen and responded to. He was not a brick wall but a sponge, too long dry but learning. And inevitably, the more they had in common — and the more the both of them realized it — the less likely it was that he would come bursting out of the brush to attack her again. So Blue did what she had done with the Tyrannosaurus; she hid her needle-sharp teeth behind her lips, stood tall and clearly seen, and warbled. She demonstrated clearly that she would make no moves, neither should he, and hopefully mutual ignorance would flourish.

Blue turned and padded back to the bushes, though she didn't disappear; rather, she slunk to the underbrush downwind to keep an eye on the Indoraptor. And the Indoraptor, thinking himself alone, turned to the mess that was his legs and, as he set to work clawing the bullets from his flesh, did a very unraptorish thing: he began to regret.

The Indoraptor was a homeless predator. His attempt to return to the familiar and what his training and torture had prepared him for had ended with his near death. To make another attempt felt impossible, and he was frustrated at his own foolishness. What had he intended to do, beg for the cage and the taser and the tank? Throw himself on the cold metal table to be vivisected without anesthetic one more time? He'd learned an important lesson: the instant gratification of a kill was not worth his carelessness in getting discovered by humans with the means to harm him. He would need to remember this for his second attempt.

A second attempt? The thought flickered and died as he realized his foolishness again. The pain of the bullet moving around in his flank beneath his probing claw was a sharp reminder of why he wished sincerely to never see a human again. The drive to infiltrate urban settings was artificially implanted by every meaningless test he was put through. Matched against the consequences of a real-life application, the legitimacy of those tests evaporated.

He was supposed to be rewarded for this, not punished.

But the alternative was that the Indoraptor now had no place and now purpose. The humans were never interested in giving him a life beyond testing their weapon for the next batch of better, healthier raptors. Unbeknownst to him, they'd intended to end his short, meaningless life after the auction that would whet the appetites of those who wanted to use his genetic descendants.

The Indoraptor was not supposed to be alive. And though he didn't know these facts for certain or the intent of the humans who had created him, he felt it still, in limbo between the violence he'd created and the eerie wilderness of the forest, and the creatures within it. He didn't belong to either world.

The Indoraptor's entire body stung by the time he extracted the last bullet, his hide a good deal more scratched up than it was before he started. He rested, neck limp and eyes closed to the pain, too tired to even clean the blood from his claws and jaws. In the distance, where police cruiser lights still flashed, civilians cried out their confusion and devastation. They were caught unawares, totally undeserving of the mindless slaughter that had visited in the night.

And as humans tend to do, they mobilized to end the threat.

—

When Blue saw the Indoraptor creep out of the forest and approach the water's edge, she whistled a warning high in her throat. Her maw was coated with red from dining on her kill, a mule deer, on a rocky island in the midst of a rapid river. The Indoraptor didn't respond, though he could hear her whine over the water's dull roar; he just reared up tall on his still-raw hind legs and stared. After a minute of eyeing each other up, Blue warily resumed eating, but kept a diligent orange eye on him at all times.

The Indoraptor continued to watch her, noting how picky she was, extracting the liver, heart, and kidneys first before ripping chunks from muscle. His eyes mapped out her killing strike: deep teeth marks on the base of the skull, gouges carved out by her sickle claws on the soft sides behind the rib cage. The hunt itself had taken place deeper in the forest, but she'd dragged the carcass here to eat undisturbed. All of these details made sense to the Indoraptor upon seeing them in action, but he could never have thought of them all himself.

His stomach rumbled for fresh blood, but he let her be, not eager to be reminded how awful he was at fighting other predators. Even deer gave him trouble, running far faster than he had the breath to chase and lashing out with kicks he could never predict. And ever since he'd decided to follow Blue — a decision not wholly, consciously made, but really was a product of his homelessness — he was experimenting with what mutual peace could bring.

The Indoraptor filled his mouth with water and let it flow down his throat a few times, shaking drops off his teeth, then leapt with difficulty to some rocks at the center of the rapids some distance below Blue. Blue straightened up and masked the curious look she gave him by swallowing a hunk of meat with a jerk of her head. There the Indoraptor turned downstream and hugged the top of the rock, mouth open and ready for fish to come flying. It had taken a while before he'd successfully copied the bear's trick, but now he'd gotten the hang of it reliably enough to acquire a taste for salmon.

Tolerating the presence of another in close vicinity took some getting used to, but the Indoraptor found that he could ignore Blue if he tried. Blue, too, eventually eased, gratified that her message from a few nights ago had gotten through; they were to leave each other be. And though she would make no overt moves, a part of her was satisfied to share space with another. It had been too long since she'd seen her sisters, heard their chatter and bickering. The Indoraptor's clumsy attempts at being a living thing would have to do.

A salmon flew flailing out of the water, and the Indoraptor snapped it out of the air, tipping his head back to let it slide down his gullet whole. Another followed soon after, then another. Sated — sick of vomiting when he overate, the Indoraptor had learned to quit while he was ahead — he grabbed one more and gripped it with his claws, pinning it against the rock until it stopped struggling. He picked it up by the head in his mouth and whipped it around, enjoying the swing of its weight and the flash of its scales.

During a flip of his head, the Indoraptor glimpsed a close presence, jumped, and turned. Blue had halved the distance between them and stood on the edge of a rock, her body tilted forward, eyes and nose at attention to understand what he was doing. After a pause, the Indoraptor continued playing. He accidentally bit the fish in half, so he waited for another to come flying out and resumed his play with that one.

Blue peered closely at the carcass of the bisected fish. On an impulse, the Indoraptor tossed his head and flung the salmon in his mouth up at her. She scrambled back as it landed limp on the rock, then crept forward to sniff and lick it, not knowing what it was. Red meat was her sole diet in the paddock and in the wild; she had never thought to foray into seafood.

Blue looked back up at him and vocalized. It was a short, inquisitive chirp, a question. Her sisters would have indulged her, and led her to the source of an interesting scent on their feet, or nosed a bone in her direction. What she wanted from the Indoraptor was direction on what to do with the strange, slippery creature before her.

But to the Indoraptor, this was noise. He just stared. Blue asked again, and he blinked slowly. She rasped, an expression of frustration and disappointment. This too was foreign to the Indoraptor. He had never before communicated through voice, and had no grasp for what she desired.

Feeling like he was missing something, the Indoraptor parted his jaws and gurgled, chattered a long stream of croaks and grunts. He simply opened his mouth and let his throat rumble, untempered into something intelligible. It was nonsense, garbled garbage. Blue leaned back and cocked her head, eyes wide. There was nothing hostile about the meaningless tirade, but it wasn't something she could understand.

She looked between the fish and him again. Restless, the Indoraptor scooped the bisected fish's head up with his teeth and tossed it toward her too. Its body, trailing blood and water, followed. Blue twitched back, confused, and in her confusion decided to take part in this strange game, and with lips curled back, she grasped the whole fish's tail and tossed it back down at him.

This continued a few times, Blue copying the Indoraptor out of sheer bewilderment and the Indoraptor making it up as he went along, until a well-lobbed fish from Blue landed smack on his nose instead of into his teeth. He shook it off, snorting; it disappeared into the water beside him. He rubbed his snout against the rock, then into his palm.

Blue crouched and crept as close as possible to the edge of the rock overhang separating them. They would be close enough to touch if the Indoraptor stretched himself upward, which after a moment of hesitation is exactly what he did. Neck stretched forward like a heron's, the Indoraptor padded to the overhang and stood tall to reach Blue. Unimaginably tense, they sniffed noses, eyes wide and watching for a sudden move. The Indoraptor could feel Blue's exhales against his snout. Suddenly her face so close to his violently overwhelmed him. He snorted and leapt back, jaw open and head twitching. His scales itched.

Blue regarded him, tail swishing, confused at what she might have done to make him recoil. She tossed a fish tail from her end, but the Indoraptor backed away from it and didn't reciprocate.

Recognizing distress, Blue stuck her neck out and crooned. It was the same steady croak she gave Owen Grady when he feigned sobs, the same she offered her sisters when one suffered the worse end of a squabble. She kept it going, and after a moment, the Indoraptor raised his shaking head and imitated the noise, wobbly at first before smoothing into another croon.

Blue made the inquisitive noise again. The Indoraptor copied it. She called, enticing him to step closer again; that noise he knew, and he replied in kind. But he'd had enough for one day. He reluctantly turned away and leapt back to the shoreline, disappearing into the brush to seek shade. Blue coughed a call; he called back.

Each knowing where the other was, they returned to their own devices.

—

The morning dawned cloudless and clear. Birds sang the morning chorus to a gently waking forest, and yolk-yellow sunlight illuminated the dust and dew in the air between the mountains' foothills. The animals of the wood rose languidly, visiting creeks for their morning water and snuffling the early air. The Indoraptor, up for hours before the sunrise, stalked adjacent, observing and learning them as he followed Blue from a passive distance.

All belied what would come.

When the beat of whirring helicopters echoed in the distance, the Indoraptor slunk beneath bushes and warbled. He didn't recognize the creatures that made those even, pulsing thuds, but they were too rhythmic to be natural, reminding him of the generators in the rooms near his old cell. Humans must be making them.

He hid, and Blue hid, and that is what saved them from the initial sweeps of troops in full military regalia, searching for the black-scaled murderer that had taken dozens of lives. When they found no murderer nor his tracks, they withdrew, and the forest life deemed it safe to creep out again.

As the late afternoon heat beat down, the Indoraptor crammed himself beneath a mossy overhang and dozed, contorted awkwardly to keep his marred rump out of the dirt. When he woke, his heart began to pound. Something was wrong.

He stuck his head out into the sunlight and blinked around. He heard no birdsong, and smelled no fresh tracks, not even those of lizards or mice. Flocks of fleeing birds called to each other frantically in the distance, peeling away from the forest. As the Indoraptor watched, a herd of deer raced right by him, paying him no mind, even when he perked up and jumped up to chase them before the odd atmosphere killed any desire he had for hunting.

Blue, too, was long gone; the Indoraptor could barely pick up her scent, and he grew distressed, realizing how alone he was. They hadn't approached each other since he had fished by the river, but following her around was most of what his days consisted of.

The Indoraptor wandered in circles, aware enough to be disconcerted but too ignorant to flee. He did not yet possess the common sense to make himself scarce where others had deemed it wise to do so themselves, and instead tried to investigate their absences himself. And when a scent that set his heart to racing came floating through the trees, the Indoraptor approached it.

The heady scent grew stronger until it filled the air, choking the forest with smog. A faint orange glow grew between the tree trunks before him. The Indoraptor had never before encountered fire, but could tell immediately that he didn't like it. It reminded him of the residue in the air after guns were fired. It flickered in a stretched mass before him, lazily climbing the fire ladder into the canopy with each tree it consumed. Crown to crown it leapt, snapping, filling the sky with a dull roar.

The Indoraptor turned tail and trotted away, his weak lungs beginning to twinge. When he looked over his shoulder and saw the fire spreading after him, he broke into a panicked run, rasping. He booked it for higher ground, the air thickening all around him.

Halfway up a steep slope, the Indoraptor was surrounded by orange. He stopped to pant, muscles shaking, and turned to watch fearfully the smoke rising thick and torrential from the burning forest. The flames licked the bottom of the hill; the Indoraptor pushed himself upward before they could advance on him further. But a flurry of heat and rumbling drew his eye again. The fire was chasing him up. Treetop to treetop it ate, climbing the slope faster than he had run it, a blistering inferno of death.

The Indoraptor took off, cawing in terror. No matter where he raced, more fire blocked his path. It was all around him and beneath him now, sucking the oxygen from his lungs, scorching his scales with agonizing tongues of flame. The heat and smoke were spears to his weeping eyes. Nowhere was safe to step, to touch. The sky was orange, the ground was orange, the horizon was a wall of orange, broken only by the black husks of stripped trees.

The Indoraptor fled in circles, screaming, the soles of his feet scorching with every step, searching in vain for an escape. His heart pounded on fumes, then on empty; a panicked inhale sucked in nothing but smoke, and so did those that followed. He gagged, crouched and tucked in on himself, baking in an oven of fire with no way out.

But faintly through the rushing roar of fire came a raspy bark.

He coughed a weak reply, and a chorus of barks came from somewhere to his left. He staggered to his feet and stampeded in that direction, eyes closed to slits. His chest begged for air; his muscles, for energy. His legs pumped with no fuel but he forced them to carry him anyway, tearing blindly through the burning forest toward the call.

All at once he broke into a clearer area, and fresh air poured into his lungs like ice water. He collapsed on his stomach, mouth gaping and gasping, his heartbeat racing so fast it was almost like one continuous thrum. Still the bark sounded ahead of him, so he dragged himself to his feet again and forced himself to move. When he had the breath to do so, he barked back.

Back and forth the two raptors called, at once racing and leading each other out of the death trap set by the humans. The air was too blackened for them to see where they were going, but the ground took them up and down, across hillsides and through meadows of crackling, foggy grass. When the smog was blue with spent smoke they could glimpse each other, the silhouettes of sprinting legs off to their sides, the curved bend of a neck.

The Indoraptor's entire body sang with hurt and exhaustion. He slowed, then stopped on a cliff far from the inferno. Blue stopped and panted beside him. He watched the fire devour the woods on the back of the mountain he'd just escaped, a glowing boil that ate green and left nothing but black. The humans had taken advantage of the dry forest to flush him out to their guns or kill him. They would have succeeded if Blue had not turned back for him.

The Indoraptor and Blue looked at each other. He rasped, and Blue's jaws parted to lick the tip of his snout.

—

listen you can't tell me they made an entire ass dinosaur bulletproof

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