Excerpt: What You Don't Know

My feet spun up off the ground touched the ground as Noel powered along, gripping my arm, spraying a mist of dry sand up behind us. I heard the groaning roar of the T-Rex as it started to follow us. Noel might have been so fast that I was literally clinging to his arm and flapping behind him like a flag, but the T-Rex had the advantage of size, and every time it snapped its hungry maw at us it only barely missed my feet.
I was torn between telling Noel that I was slipping and close to letting go, and screaming at him to hurry the hell up. The three of us were storming across the beach, leaving a deep trail behind us that made it look as though a giant ice-cream scoop had dug a path along the shoreline, full of broken logs, my blanket, Noel’s sunglasses and one of his shoes.
The gigantic carnivore snapped again, and barely missed my ankles. It screeched in fury, and snapped more. I felt a jerk as Noel changed direction, and grabbed his arm with my other hand. He had started running on the water.
‘We’re too heavy!’ I managed to protest before having to shut my eyes against the salty spray. He was curving steeply around as the T-Rex angrily howled and groaned at us from the shallows. We were already about forty meters out from the safety of the shore and the water was a terrifyingly dark blue. I had had my fill of nearly drowning the day before last, I was tempted to say, but I don’t think Noel would have listened. It felt strangely like water-skiing.
I opened my eyes just as Noel’s other shoe came flying off his blur of a foot and nearly smacked me in the face. I screamed in retaliation, but was grateful to catch a glimpse of the beach as we started back toward it, before I had to close my eyes again.
I heard the splish-vroom turn into the more preferable shukka-shukka-shukka as Noel hit the beach, and looked back. The T-Rex was about a kilometre behind us.
Noel’s monkey grip on my hand did not feel as reinforced as I would have liked, so I tightened both my hands around his wrist. He shouted something violent, and I looked up ahead. We were nearing where we had started, and as soon as we started shooting through the foliage, we were on the other side, and he stopped suddenly. I smacked heavily into his back and grunted, sliding off and landing flat on my arse in the middle of the road. Noel’s hands flew up, and landed on his head. He cried out and fell to his knees. I looked up, about to shout at him for his ungraceful stopping, but could only gape. The bus, or what used to be the bus, and a van that must have belonged to the mechanic, were blackened and rusted. It looked like they had blown up. Ash was still floating through the air is sparse clouds.
The ominous call of the T-Rex rang out behind us and to the right.
‘How ... what ...’ I could barely think. My breath was coming in short gasps. Noel stood up again, and looked down at me.
‘I don’t know. It really isn’t possible. Which means ... those sons of bitches.’
It only took me a second to catch up.
‘Demons.’
‘No doubt about it. But why ... this normally isn’t their style.’
‘Who fucking cares what’s normally their style?!’ I cried, stumbling to my feet and brushing off my jacket. ‘What the hell are we going to do now is what we should be figuring out! Honestly.’
Noel nodded rapidly and squinted. I registered how few clouds there were, and the brightness of the sun. The T-Rex was sounding significantly closer.
‘Can’t we run to the town really quickly? It’s not like that thing can follow our scent.’
‘I’m not so fast that I can outrun it completely. I’m not superman,’ Noel protested. ‘It’s always going to catch up. And to lead it to a town would be just ... I mean, it’s just stupid.’
He looked anxiously at the location where the T-Rex calls were coming from, and bobbed up and down on the balls of his bare sandy feet.
‘We need to find a way to distract it. I dunno, another bigger food source, or the dead wallaby I saw at the side of the road before we stopped.’
‘Right, because road kill is totally the best way to distract a Tyrannosaurus Rex.’
‘Got any better ideas?’
We glared at each other steadily for a few seconds, but the roar of the dinosaur himself snapped us back to reality.
‘I’ll get the flat wallaby.’
‘I’ll hide behind a tree.’
Noel shot off and I staggered to the other side of the road, crouching down beneath a clump of ferns, praying Noel was coming back within the minute.
I heard the beast before I saw it. It towered above the trees as it passed them, swinging its head and tail in time, sniffing at the bus, knocking aside bits of metal, clawing almost benignly at the blackened husk. It bobbed its face into where the windshield had once been, and tore a strip of leathery black out of the front seat. I grimaced and clutched my tight stomach as I realized what the red and black meaty strips where.
I must have made a sound, because it suddenly turned in my direction, sniffing loudly. Thankfully, a white, red and grey smudge skipped into my peripheral vision, carrying what looked suspiciously like a dead wallaby. He was moving silently from tree branch to tree branch, scooting up and down limbs and trunks like a demented gecko. Noel disappeared behind the T-Rex for a few seconds and emerged beneath it, placing the dead wallaby by its foot. He barely got out in time before the dinosaur’s nose caught his superfluous scent and stepped back, leaning down and noticing the wallaby.
He was by my side in an instant.
‘Let’s move quickly. He’s only checking it out.’