Chapter 28 - Fifteen Impossible Things Before Breakfast

  No shit, there I was, an undead triceratops bearing down on me, and all I could think about was ‘Jurassic World, eat your heart out!’ I mean, sure, those movies had awesome animatronic dinosaurs that looked super cool, and they mostly even had decent soundtracks.

  What they didn’t have were actual undead dinos wandering around trying to stomp people into the pavement.

  Cliff was headed straight for me, and while I was pretty tough to hurt, I lacked any sort of confidence that my Natural Armor was going to be proof against something this big. The odds felt decent that he’d flatten me into a pancake and barely even notice the squishy mess between his toes.

  I did what any sensible person would do—I dove sideways and hoped he couldn’t corner well!

  The good news was that he couldn’t. Cliff saw me moving and tried to slow down, but his weight worked against him there. It was hard for something that massive to change directions quickly. The Event appeared to have changed a lot about how physics worked, but it hadn’t altered momentum and inertia too much, it seemed. My Agility let me sidestep and avoid his charge, and although Cliff tried to hit the brakes, his charge turned into a skid as he crashed headlong into the side of a minivan.

  The horns went into the side of the car with a sound like the worst fingernails on the biggest chalkboard you’ve ever seen. Cliff roared in frustration and tried to toss his head, but he was stuck fast. The car was just too big for even a dinosaur to swing it around.

  I used the moment to rush in and swing my steel bar at Cliff’s left foreleg as hard as I could. The bar impacted with a sound like a bell tolling before bouncing backward. I almost landed on my ass, the reverberation was so strong, but I managed to just barely keep both my feet and my grip on the weapon. For all the good it was doing me.

  Cliff felt the strike, because the dinosaur roared again as I recovered from my own attack. He backed up a few steps, pulling his horns out of the car with more screeching sounds of stressed metal, and he was favoring that leg as he walked. I’d done something with the hit, but it wasn’t close to enough.

  The dinosaur turned toward me again and snorted, then pawed the ground. It was like staring down a rhino that wanted you dead—except this thing was bigger than any rhino.

  I held the metal bar in front of me, and the dinosaur paused. It was wary of me now, which was something. Maybe I could talk to it? Worth a shot, anyway.“Whoa, Cliff. Easy there. Maybe we can find you some nice grass to eat or some—“

  Cliff cut me off in mid-sentence when he darted forward. I got the steel bar up to blunt the rush, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The triceratops’s nose smashed into the bar, driving it back into my chest. All my air went out in a whoosh and then I was flying!

  That airborne trip seemed to take forever, but it ended abruptly as my back crashed into a stalled-out SUV.

  I think I blacked out for a second or two, but I know it wasn’t much more than that. When I opened my eyes, Cliff was still standing where I’d left him, shaking his head. Apparently that impact had hurt him almost as much as it hurt me. Good. I hoped he had as bad a headache as I did!

  The impact had totaled the SUV I’d collided with. As I stood back up, I surveyed the wreck behind me. I’d literally dented in the entire side of the vehicle! The metal was bent, warped, and twisted; the windows were all shattered. I took stock of myself and was surprised to see nothing more than a few small cuts and scrapes. No broken bones, although my head and back hurt like hell, and my clothing had seen better days.

  My improvised spear hadn’t fared as well as I had. It lay a few feet away, a massive bend in the center of the steel bar. That wasn’t going to do me much good in a fight. Maybe I could fix the thing, later, but for the time being I’d have to do the best I could with what I had on hand.

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  Cliff had shaken off the impact and was trotting in my direction again. If I didn’t want to end up impaled on the tips of those horns, I’d need to figure out something quick! I turned toward the car behind me and without thinking about it, grabbed the door I’d bent when I hit it and ripped it the rest of the way off its hinges. Then I turned back toward Cliff, using the door like a shield.

  He slowed down. Seemed like he’d learned something of a lesson from our first couple of exchanges of blows. That was something. But then all at once he raced forward again, nose down, horns aiming straight for me.

  I shoved the shield into his face. All three horns tore into the metal. One of the two longer ones punched through the door and stabbed deep into my left shoulder. Before I could even scream from the pain, the impact of the dino’s body hitting the door sent me sailing backward again. I smashed into the same SUV a second time, this time finishing the job I’d started. There wasn’t much left of it anymore.

  Trying my best to shake it off, I scrambled through the car and out the far side. If I could put some steel between me and this creature, get a little breathing room, maybe I could come up with a plan to deal with it. What that plan might look like, I didn’t know.

  A globe of water appeared around Cliff’s face. Alex’s work, for sure! I looked around and finally spotted him, crouched down between a couple of cars about fifty feet away. He was taking some serious chances even showing his face; if the dinosaur spotted him, he’d have a tough time getting away from it, and unlike me there was no way Alex was going to live through even one blow.

  My shoulder was bleeding heavily, soaking my shirt. The pain was enough to make it difficult to think, but I knew I had to do something fast. Cliff was shaking his head, trying to dislodge the water—it was a decent temporary distraction, but an undead dino wasn’t going to drown. We needed a more permanent solution.

  Then Alex must have made a noise or something, because the dinosaur’s head pivoted toward him. I couldn’t let it get set to charge, so I raced in.

  A single leap carried me through the air over the crushed SUV. I landed easily enough and closed the remaining gap in seconds. Cliff was facing the other way but had to have heard me coming, because his head pivoted back toward me. It was almost like he moved in slow motion, though—my Agility was high enough that I could really move, now.

  I didn’t have a weapon in my hands anymore, but with my Strength and Natural Armor, I was the weapon. I brought my right hand into a fist as I closed with the creature and then slammed my knuckles into the side of its snout with every ounce of force I could bring to bear.

  The blow hit with a booming sound. Cliff’s head snapped away from me and crashed into the pavement. I saw an honest to god crack form in the side of his skull, where I’d hit.

  My hand hurt like hell, too, but Cliff was reeling from the blow.

  I knew I had to act fast if I wanted to finish this, but I also knew that my knuckles weren’t going to be up to a boxing match with a dinosaur. I hadn’t broken any bones, but that impact hurt me almost as much as it hurt Cliff.

  “Castle!” Alex shouted. “Throw it!”

  For a moment I didn’t understand what the heck he was on about. Then I remembered some of the bits of information I’d been ‘taught’ by the crystals as I absorbed them. Tier five strength was enough to elevate someone to the peak of human potential in an area. Each step above that was bigger and better. At tier six, I’d hit about twice the strength that any human being could naturally reach. With the additional tier three stone, I was stronger still.

  Even with that, I had no idea if this was going to work, but it was worth a shot. I dashed sideways as Cliff twisted his head toward me, trying to impale me on his horns again. I was far too fast for him to catch, and slipped back behind his left rear foot, then grabbed a hold of his tail in both hands.

  Moment of truth time. Could I do this? My eyes said no, there was no way. It was impossible. No person could lift a fossilized dinosaur. Cliff had to way like two thousand pounds!

  But I’d seen a ton of impossible things happen lately.

  Hell, at this point, I’d become one of those impossible things. I ground my teeth together, set my jaw, braced my feet against the pavement as best I could, and then lifted with everything I had.

  Impossibly, it worked.

  Before I knew it was happening, I had lifted Cliff into the air by his tail, flipping him over my head as I finished the swing and sent him crashing into the pavement on his back. The dinosaur roared again, this time as much in pain as anger.

  For a couple of seconds, I just stood there staring. What I just done was impossible. Everything I knew told me that. But this was another great example of how the rules had all been rewritten. Nothing was the same as it had been. The impossible was now part of my everyday experience.

  It was a dazed but furious triceratops that staggered back to his feet, then whirled around to face me.