Especially now that the whole world was a combat zone.
The caravan trailed about a mile behind, as measured by the windy mountain road, no portion of which could be trusted beyond sight of the next bend.
Topography was not even reliable anymore. The Big One had purportedly left the new southwestern coastline a sheer, broken cliff a hundred miles south of the Oregon border.
On a more localized level, the terrain had shifted and broken, splitting along tectonic cracks. Even minor rumblings could easily collapse tunnels and break apart paved roads.
Adjusting her focus, Naomi followed the pilot climbing out of the chopper over to the outpost's single sentry coming out to meet him.
Three more soldiers followed the pilot, hopping out of the chopper, performing a perfunctory sweep of the area, guns out and drawn – alert, but obviously routine, as they then began to offload supplies, carrying a procession of boxes and crates into the outpost storage bunker below the tower.
One of the soldiers, with a medium-sized crate, stepped discreetly away from the others, and made his way to the edge of the clearing, glancing over his shoulder as he went.
Naomi frowned. “What's this guy doing?”
The soldier unstrapped the crate and opened the front. There was scurrying movement from inside.
“Oh no,” Naomi said aloud. “Check this out,”
She handed the binocs to Jonah and he zoomed down into the clearing.
Skittering out of the carrying crate were what looked like a troop of miniature plucked emus – short, gangly, little two-legged lizards, no more than two feet tall.
“Oh no,” Jonah repeated.
They had seen this little lizard before.
There had been a lot of them running around after KT-day – seemingly a breed of small sickle-claw, although unique in that its birdlike chirps and screeches could shape their utterances into uncanny myna-birdlike imitations, repeating human phrases like a parrot.
They were disgusting creatures – ghouls, who in the days after the fall, seemed to specifically scavenge human corpses.
It called itself Otto – and they all did – in the same strange man's voice.
“My name is Otto.”
But they were a lot more than just a parrot.
And the soldier releasing this small troop – it looked like at least three of them – apparently had no idea.
But it was a lesson not long in coming.
The first of the little lizards hopped nonchalantly to the edge of the brush.
All the way up on the ridge, Jonah and Naomi could hear the screeching cry, as the little lizard bugled like a trumpet.
The other soldiers looked up at the caterwauling, and the errant young man stepped away from the shrieking lizard as if startled.
There was a brief pause as the screeching echoed to a stop.
Then the bushes suddenly erupted with a warbling scream.
“Oh my God,” Jonah breathed, setting down the scopes and reaching for his rifle. Naomi's pistol was already out and drawn.
A pack of sickle-claws burst from the brush.
Dromaeosaurs were a particularly nasty clade, and these were big ones – leopard-sized.
The hapless soldier who had released the little lizards fell back, grabbing for his sidearm. To his credit, he got a shot into the first of his attackers before it landed on top of him and bore him to the ground.
As the giant hooked claws dug into him, the man's scream echoed up to the ridge.
The other soldiers had their weapons ready, and there was the blast of machine-gun fire, but the sickle-claws were already upon them.
From the ridge, Jonah was trying to track the fast-moving beasts for a clear shot. He jumped as, beside him, there was a sharp retort from Naomi's pistol. Down below, one of the sickle-claws dropped.
It didn't matter – there were half-a-dozen of the clawed devils, and they set upon the four remaining men like a pack of bounding kangaroos.
The chopper pilot went first, his throat torn away by an eight-inch foot claw. The outpost sentry was next, disemboweled.
The remaining two soldiers made a fight of it, taking out two more of their taloned attackers, even as Naomi caught another from the ridge – but the last two got through, piling into both troopers at once, their deadly sickles tearing and slashing.
One man fell, trying to wrestle the clawed beast, even as its foot-sickle gutted him. Jonah managed to drop the beast with a rifle shot – a bit belatedly for the soldier's sake.
The other man was already down, and the sound of ripping tissue carried all the way up the ridge. Naomi dropped the beast off his chest with a single shot, but it was clear the damage was already done.
Jonah scoped the remaining beast, where it still lay over the body of the first soldier, but it appeared the one shot the young man had gotten off had done its work, and the creature was unmoving.
The little group of Ottos perked, looking up as a troop towards the ridge.
Naomi drew a bead and fired another shot, but the scaly rats scattered into the surrounding brush.
That wasn't good. Any time those little bastards were around, things went south fast.
The fact of the six-dead sickle-claws was also bad – not that they were dead, but now you knew they were in the area. And this troop must have been prowling within their scent range all morning.
And as they made their way through the camouflaging bush, down to the clearing, Jonah and Naomi were both unhappily aware that likely meant there were more of them prowling about,
The carnage was typical of a sickle-claw attack. The men who had been hit were hard to look at.
But now there came a low moan.
The first soldier, who had released the Ottos, still lying under the dead body of the dromaeosaur he'd shot, was alive.
Jonah started to roll the lifeless beast away, only to see where both foot claws were buried in the young man's chest, the hand claws clasped onto his
