Kingdom of Monsters by John Schneider (latest novels to read .TXT) 📕

far as the government was concerned, that had made him an 'asset' – and as such, he had already been in 'protective custody', sequestered far away from the cities, when the day ultimately arrived.

But it was only a temporary stay – the marching apocalypse finally caught up with him too, and the entire base where he had been stationed was stomped flat.

That night, he had also lost a young woman he had cared a mountain for.

Mark and Sally had spent the year together, mostly in incarceration, living on-base like married recruits – just not free to come and go.

They met on a cruise – shortly before their boat sank, just off the Central American Pacific Coast.

Cruise-wrecks were actually fairly common, because they navigated shallow waters, putting them at risk of collision with reefs.  It was almost routine – all passengers had made it to lifeboats.

In fact, no one would have died, if they hadn't made it to shore.

Mark had heard stories about castaways landing along this coast and stumbling into anything from modern pirates to Cartel drug-grow operations, and never being seen again.

This was more like a grow-operation of flesh-eating monsters.

Out of the hundred-plus survivors of the wreck, only Mark and Sally had made their way out of the jungle a few bare miles north to a bustling tropic port.

That's how close it was, all along.

They had been taken into custody shortly upon arriving back to the States.

Sally had been raised in what Mark generously called 'polite' society, and was totally unprepared for survivalist rigors.  The time in the jungle had taken its toll.  Mark watched her wither over the following months, with a recurring, strength-sapping illness, that seemed to take a little more of her each time it came back.

After a recent bout of nausea, she had finally been taken to the infirmary – the first time they'd been apart in over a year.

That night, the beasts had come.

He remembered hearing that steady approach, hours away, like the rumble of encroaching thunder.  Except this rumble was in the ground, like an earthquake.  And then, somewhere in the darkest hours of the night, the storm landed on top of them.

He never saw any of it clearly.

There were explosions and burning light. Beyond that, there were… sounds – like giant footsteps, accompanied by reverberating bellows that might have echoed up from the depths of a volcano – and then the buildings had tumbled down on top of him.

For a long time, he was trapped in darkness.  But eventually, the sounds of the giants faded, followed by a deadened stony silence.

Sometime after that, he began to pick his way through the rubble.

After he'd dug himself free, Mark had made his way across the demolished base.  He had gone far enough to see what was left of the hospital.

He stood there long enough to absorb it – to accept it – to make it real.

Then he had turned and been gone, even as more choppers circled above, arriving on the scene – rescue troops that were hours too late and would have been laughably ineffective if they'd been right on time.

With Sally gone, Mark had no more need of what was left of the old world.  He'd never done that well within it anyway.

He had fled into the forest – into a new world – a lost world.

The grow-operation had spread – and the monsters had followed.

Or had it just been like that everywhere?  Drug-cartels operated grow-operations in the States too.  Just out of sight, on protected lands.  Natural preserves.  Entire stretches of open wilderness, off-limits to the public, but walking distance to every major city in the world.

It wasn't like people disappearing in the woods was something new.

Mark imagined a hiker that stumbled into a T. rex on an off-limits nature-trail would have left little evidence of the encounter behind.

In fact, Mark was willing to bet in the days before KT-day, the odd T. rex might even have cleared out a cartel pot-field or two.  Sickle-claws would have been a handful too – true, those operations tended to be guarded with automatic weapons, but Mark could bear direct witness that a sickle-claw running at you in the dark was damn hard to hit.

Of course, bullets would just piss-off a T. rex.

And you really didn't want to piss-off a T. rex.  For whatever reason, they held grudges.

Having once crossed a mamma rex, Mark sure wouldn't do it again.

Although, it wasn't like he meant to, the first time.  He had literally just escaped the wrecked base, and after hiding the night in the bushes, less than a mile from where choppers still circled above, he had taken off on foot.

And as if he just couldn't screw himself fast enough, he had run right into the middle of a rex-nest.

For those who had never seen one up close, a T. rex yearling was about the size of a golden retriever, with a mouth like a similarly-sized crocodile.

There were half-a-dozen of them, and they came at him like a pack of piranha.

Mark shot them all, reflexively, in quick succession – he had never grouped shots like that together, before or after, in his life, and if he hadn't, at least one would have gotten him, with the last of them dropping literally at his feet, the little beast's jaws snapping shut like a guillotine, bare inches from his shoe.

Then he had looked up to see the mama.

The chase was on from there on out.

Rexy, as he came to call her, ran him a merry chase that day, but it was only the beginning.  That damned dragon-beast had followed him halfway across the country.  Led by that bloody damned nose, she could ferret you right out.  She didn't even have to hurry – just kept walking.

She had tailed him up into the Rockies, where T. rex were few and far between, except for the ones obsessively following him, and she would have caught him too, but for an unfortunate tumble over a cliff.

Mark had actually ended up