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Traffic, Texans, and Triceratops

 Travis was impatient. Could you blame him? The summer heat exacerbated everything, made the cab of his eighteen-wheeler into a steel coffin of sticky and humid and horrible, even with the expensive AC clattering not a foot from his ear. He sat hunched over the wheel so far it pressed into his extended gut, faded blue eyes staring hawkishly out into the road. The GPS said he was eighty miles from some other godforsaken Texan town or another while beside it clicked down a timer for his latest delivery. Ominous looking letters read back at him THREE HOURS, TEN MINUTES, FIFTEEN SECONDS. 


Christ. Travis pushed himself hard over the wheel again and his bulging frog eyes looked back out over the road as if with a piercing gaze he might clear the impediments. 


The dinosaurs didn’t notice, and didn’t care. 


They were everywhere, easily a hundred dump-truck sized animals all amassed, stretching from nearby woodland across the road and back into the trees on the opposite side. They jostled each other in a slow moving ocean of muscle and flesh, and Travis watched as the massive frilled faces swayed this way then that. Angrily colored crimson-black splashes plastered themselves over those fearsome looking faces and when one of them, a particularly large specimen, swung its gaze in his direction, Travis felt something small and mammalian cringe far down beneath him.  It wasn’t just the color, or the size— no, no, there was more to the monsters. Horns. From the frill sprouted an array of ebony horns, some of them nearly twice the length of a man like something made from countless siege-makers fantasies. The helpless truck driver watched as two of the big animals lazily locked horns and even behind the glass he heard a loud *crack* when they came together, fifteen tons pressing back and forth in a kind of “play” that could annihilate metal, cement, bone. 


Travis hated dinosaurs. Big, stupid lizards. Big, stupid lizards with cold eyes and lazy dispositions, he thought. They were unnatural, ungodly. Before the Regenesis Travis had considered them satanic myth, the creation of naysayers and degenerates trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. And now, because of them, he was going to be late. An ugly, reptilian sneer fixed on his face. 


Everyone knew the warnings, and everyone too had seen the aftermath of attacks. Vehicles punctured and smashed like toys clobbered by abusive giants, mangled bodies identifiable only by a few surviving teeth in gory puddles. Travis knew better, but before he could stop himself, before higher reasoning could act— he laid his palm on the trucks obnoxious horn— and pressed. 


Massive, bony faces snapped to attention as if a phalanx had been called to battle assembly. Travis felt that tiny mammalian ancestral memory inside him blossom with so much primal fear.  The dinosaurs ranks separated and in growing terror Travis watched an enormous frilled-face emerge, a colossus amongst colossi. Scars brought faded, white lashes across its protective patterning, and one horn had long ago been snapped by catastrophic battle.  The Colossus growled with such intensity it rattled the windshield, swung that huge head back and forth, swaying. Preparing. 


And then, with its head lowered, the dinosaur charged.

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