They avalanche toward us, and the reek of them hits me like a wall: yet I keep my feet. I uncoil the rope about my left arm, drop the cold metal hook into my left palm. You up there, you see the tyrannosaurs huge on the screens but you have no idea just how massive they really are. You can’t begin to understand that until they are charging at you, explosions of sand about their feet. Nor can you even imagine how deadly, how lethal they are, if you have never looked closely in their eyes, as I have. Today is my first Patriot Day, but I have practiced mounting many times with Mai’s harsh voice barking out directions, and many times I have looked into the tyrannosaur’s eyes. Darker than dark and deep as time, and alien like a bird’s eyes.
They are pack hunters, and fierce. Early in my training, I watched them stalk elephants in the jungle on Orbital Conservatory Station IX-C. They leap on their prey; they are incredibly powerful animals, worthy to run for the goddess.
– The Running of the Tyrannosaurs is here. Come give it a read!
[…] The Running of the Tyrannosaurs, a stand-alone story, not quite a novella but a longer short story, tells a first-person account of a ritualistic, barbaric dinosaur race, run by naked, scientifically modified young women in some distant, dystopian future. […]