CHAPTER 18
“Madre de Dios!” cried Vic Suarez, training his mounted heavy machine gun on the enraged duckbill from the command hatch of his tank. The huge beast stood erect and threatening, not more than twenty feet from him, honking and flailing its arms. Suarez nervously fingered the trigger but hesitated.
General Davis and Colonel MacIlvain jogged up to his tank on the side opposite the creature. He looked down at them questioningly. “What do you want me to do, General?”
Davis stared at the beast for a long moment. “What the heck is it, anyway?”
Suarez hadn’t expected a question in reply to his own. “A very angry dinosaur, sir.”
Davis turned to a group of officers who had followed him out of the house. “Somebody want to help me out? What is this thing? It looks like a cross between Godzilla and Daffy Duck.”
Nobody had an answer.
“Don’t shoot it,” the General told Suarez. “That much noise would alert the enemy.” He put his hands on his hips and scowled. “I guess we’re in a fix.”
“I can handle this,” said Colonel MacIlvain. He drew his sidearm and took a silencer out of a slipcase on his gun belt. He screwed it on and walked forward, aiming at the beast, which stopped hooting and stomping to watch him. Sighting at the parasaurolophus’s head, he asked, “Shall I, sir?”
“Wait!” Kit Daniels cried, rushing out between the tank and the dinosaur, turning her back on the beast to face MacIlvain. “What’s going on here?” she snarled like a lioness.
To Suarez, it seemed she would be smarter to keep an eye out behind her. The big beast towered over her, but she didn’t pay it any attention. He figured this civilian was about to buy it, right before his eyes.
MacIlvain continued sighting over her head at the dinosaur. “Shut up, lady.”
“Put that gun away,” she shouted at him, stamping her cowboy booted foot just like the dinosaur had been doing. “Rufus only wants food for his babies. You guys parked your tanks between him and the barn. Back them up!”
Davis nodded his assent and Suarez called down to his driver, “Fire it up, Ed. Let’s do what she says.”
A moment later the tank and Bradley rolled back a dozen yards, and that was that. Rufus immediately lost interest in them and moved to the hayloft. Kit hurried inside the barn, went up to the loft door and smiled down at the beast. “Easy, Rufus,” she cooed. “It’s okay. Just calm down.” She pushed a bale of hay out the loft door to the ground and Rufus pulled a huge mouthful loose and trotted back to the pasture where the other duckbilled dinosaurs waited.
Kit hurried back from the barn to the house and as she stalked past MacIlvain she pointed a finger at him and growled, “Don’t you ever point a gun at one of my dinosaurs again!” Stamping up the back stairs and into the house, she kicked the door shut behind her.
Suarez looked down at Chase Armstrong, who stood near his tank.
“Hey man, did she call that thing Rufus?”
“Yeah,” Chase replied. “He’s harmless if you don’t mess with his hay.”
“Are you saying he’s her pet?”
Chase shrugged. “Something like that.”
Suarez rolled his eyes. “Too crazy, man.”