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خطوة إلى عالم لا حدود له من القصص

الاستماع والقراءة

Wayne Kyle Spitzer

She didn't respond right away but only continued to stroke Ank, who's stony texture seemed to fascinate her endlessly. At length she said, "Okay," and turned one of its dials, and the room was immediately filled with the slightly raspy voice of a woman, who continued, "… if you're heading our way through Shadow Canyon, following that beautiful river, perhaps, be advised there's a pair of allosaurs operating in that area we call Lenny and Squiggy, and stay alert. And while we'd prefer you didn't kill them if in fact you are armed, we wouldn't recommend you get too friendly with them either. Once again this is Radio Free Montana, nestled just south of Paradise at Barley's Hot Springs Resort, where we've got power, lights, food, and about three-hundred survivors who'd love nothing more than to meet you. But be advised as always: if you're a marauder or a carpetbagger, you won't like what we've prepared for you. So take a little advice from Bella Ray and don't even try it. And on that it's another round of AC/DC … for those struggling to get here even now, we salute you!"

Hobb's End Books

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend (A Serialized Novel)

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend (#1): "Radio Free Montana"

“You talk to yourself a lot, don’t you?” said Luna.

 Williams looked at her and finally smiled
in spite of himself. “Or it just may be that he’s really talking to me, and you
just can’t hear it.” He tweaked her nose. “Yet. Either way, you need to eat
something and get some sleep. We all do. We’ve got a big day ahead of us
tomorrow.”

“Why a big day?”

“Ank, camping gear,” he said, and the dinosaur
folded his front legs with a groan. “Because we’re going to head out for Barley’s
in the morning.” He loosed his bedroll from the supplies strapped to Ank’s back
and tossed it to her. “The place where the sounds on your radio come from. We’ve—we’re searching for something. A place we call
Tanelorn. And we think that might be it.”

“Tanelorn,” she repeated. “What’s that?”

Williams rested his arms on the bundles of
supplies, thinking about it. “I don’t know, exactly. I reckon it’s just a place
someone feels drawn to … even if they don’t know why. A place where the
homeless can find a home, maybe.” He looked at the lights in the sky, the Alien
Borealis, as Ank called it, and wondered. “But it may be that it’s something
else—a kind of Omega Point. A place where all the colors of the spectrum meet,
like a prism. And become focused into a single, burning light. Maybe that’s
what people mean when they talk about the power and the glory.” He tugged on a
rope, releasing a waterfall of pots and pans. “Meh. It’s just something to keep
us going.”

“Like a magnifying glass,” she said, ignoring his
last statement.

He paused, thinking
about it. “Like a magnifying glass,” he agreed. Then he added, “Now, what’ll it
be? Beans or beans?”

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend: "Into the Badlands"

“You’re worried about him, aren’t you?”

Williams didn’t turn around. “Yeah. I guess I am.”
He exhaled cigar smoke. “It’s not like him to be so …”

“Morose?”

“Yeah. I guess that’s it. You know, he’s been at
that pond almost since we got here … just drinking and staring … completely
oblivious. Remember how I told you that neither of us could recall our previous
lives? Well, maybe he’s recalling …” He paused, struggling to find the right
words. “A different state of being. A different incarnation. I think he was a
man once. A man who lived for a very long time.”

“A lonely man, then …”

“Yes. Sort of a last man standing. And I think
when we met … he rediscovered something he’d been missing for a long time.”

“Friendship. Someone to talk to,” she said.

“More than that. A reason to live. I—I’ve felt it
myself. All those weeks, months, spent walking alone. I told you about
Tanelorn. Well that was what we called our reason to live … our reason for
putting one foot in front of the other. Because without that …”

“‘Gazelle Theory,’” she said.

“What?”

She laughed a little. “Something my husband used
to say. It means, ‘move or die.’”

He laughed a little
himself. “That’s good. ‘Move or die.’ Whether it’s a physical death or an
emotional one.” He stared at Ank in the gloaming before another hand touched
him, this time Luna. “Is Ank all right?”

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend:: "Blues for a Drifter"

“This is who we are,” said the man in the bandana,
who stood next to him on the grassy hill. “And this, fellow paladin, is what we
do. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Williams watched as the steeples of a church
burned and collapsed, then focused on a woman carrying a child from the
wreckage.

The stranger continued: “Don’t look to us for the
method of carnage—fire is of the Other’s design. We
only use it as a means to an end. But watch now as I show you what will happen when
we descend upon your Barley—and what mercy to expect from us when we finally do.
And tell me if it would not be better to simply turn
around now, while you still can, and ignore the Call completely.”

Williams squinted through the smoke as a
motorcycle burst into view and bore down upon the woman, its headlight creating
a halo, its rider brandishing a sword. Then, before he could so much as cry out
a warning, the rider struck, beheading the woman in one fell swoop before
continuing on with a rumble and leaving the child abandoned in her arms.

And then Williams was
turning to the mysterious figure with the intent of killing him with his bare
hands, but froze when he saw that the man was no longer there: that he had been
replaced with something else, something about 9-feet-tall and covered with kinky
hair, with a goat’s head and six golden eyes, which vanished as he blinked—awakening
with a start—and heard Sheila say, with desperation in her voice: “Will, It’s
Ank. And he’s gone.”

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend:: "The Enemy Comes in Dream"

Williams
stared at him for what seemed a long time before finally appearing to relent.

“Okay,”
he said at last, and shrugged. “We’ll try to build a raft …”

“Now
you’re talking!” said Sammy. He shot a sidelong glance at Sheila. “He’s talking
now, am I right?”

Sheila
began to nod and smile in a flood of relief.

And
then a gunshot rang out and everyone jumped—and
when the smoke had cleared Williams was standing with his rifle raised,
although he lowered it quickly to prevent further alarm. Sammy, meanwhile,
lifted his wildly trembling gun hand and merely looked at it, for Williams had
shot the weapon clean from his grasp.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Williams. “Now here’s
what I want you to do …”

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend: "A Lament for the Dead"

“It’s okay,” he said, softly, gently. “I know you belong to him. Like I
said, we just got—carried away. That’s all.”

She lay against his chest in silence for what seemed a long time.

“I don’t know who I belong to anymore,” she said.

And soon she slept and dreamed once again—in
which she found herself making love to her husband in the shitty trailer house
in Anchor Rock … which morphed into the ramshackle house in Lonepine and Will;
which bled into the tent with Sammy and the vision … a vision to which she
returned, lost, wandering, until she found the man in the dirty bandana. Until
they, too, were making love, or a perversion of it, and she knew not in truth
who she even was anymore, but sensed that she had become not just a woman but a
focusing point, an epitome, a river of menstrual blood as dark as it was
unpredictable—the mother and whore to the entire world.

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend 7:: "The Prairie and the Darkness"

She focused on her breathing, trying indeed not to hyperventilate, but feeling as though her heart might punch through her chest at any moment. The spot where he had touched her seemed to burn and freeze at the same time.

“You don’t remember … do you?” His brown eyes suddenly twinkled and he shook his head. “No? You don’t remember calling on me in the depths of those first awful nights, when you were at your most exposed, when you were at your most vulnerable?” He stroked her long, brown hair with an almost impossible gentleness; it was as though a cool-warm breeze rifled it rather than his fingers. “When it was just you and the boy … alone, scared. Cold. Hungry?”

She began to shake her head almost violently, her breathing and heartrate accelerating once again.

“Oh, yes,” he said, squinting, smiling. “You did. All the world did. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You called on many during that time, in those hours and days and weeks after the Flashback—you wouldn’t have been aware of it. And you cursed the One who had brought it upon you … who had taken your husband and your daughter; who had taken so many husbands and daughters. It’s okay. We—we don’t judge. Not like them,” He looked at the hazy sky and the alien-colored lights, at the sun itself which was a white disk in the smoke. “Not like Him.”

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend 8: "The Slim Hand of the Past"

He stopped stabbing at her long enough to change his technique, choosing instead to penetrate her slowly, deeply. She ground her hips against him as if to concur, welcoming the respite, attempting to catch her breath. But it was difficult to do for he seemed to grow more powerful with each push—seeming literally to expand, to get bigger and bigger.

He continued: What did thou thinkest Creation was if not the animation of dead matter from the simple infusion of conflict? Aye, so you’ve sculpted a homunculus and there it lay—how then to get it to raise its little arm? Why, give it Free Will, of course! For first and foremost it has to CHOOSE—that is the secret behind every act of creation. ‘I will lift thine arm,’ the homunculus says, and in so doing pits one muscle against the next—pushing thine blood to thine heart and thine eyes.

Again he increased the tempo of his thrusts—as if to emphasize his point—and her breath came and went in ragged gasps.

That is it, of course, the whole of the secret in one simple shell. And thus you mistake your wars and disease and mortality for misfortune; when in fact they are but Life itself—material life, which is to say life as He reinvented it; not us. This is the reason for which we came when they instigated the Flashback—they, the judgers and the experimenters, the scramblers of Time, the halflings between this world and the next. For we shared with them a common goal: the complete eradication of your kind—by which I mean not your First Realm doppelgangers but your material manifestations, which mock us. And now it must all play out, even though the end is no doubt presumed. For if we know anything of Him and His followers, it is that they—

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend 9: "The Demon and the Avatar"

They streamed out from the tree line in a veritable blitzkrieg, the guns of the tanks rotating and firing, the foot soldiers alternately taking cover behind vehicles and squeezing off bursts, the raptors and triceratops and stegosaurs charging—as Red and Charlotte and Roger and Savanna continued shooting and the children ran ammo and Bella lit the gasoline trenches, as Gojira and the clerk prepared shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. As hundreds of others joined the battle belatedly and began to kill and to be killed.

And then they were there; they were at the gates, and the triceratops and stegosaurs had waded into the burning trenches and begun serving as bridges—sacrificing themselves so that the raptors and the foot soldiers could cross—even as a column of bulldozers fanned out along the perimeter and prepared to break the lines for good: dropping their blades—which rattled and clinked against the hail of gunfire—revving their engines, spewing black smoke.

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend (A Serialized Novel)

A Dinosaur Is A Man's Best Friend (A Serialized Novel)

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الاستماع والقراءة