Dinosaur Wars

Chapter five - Ghosts

The shriek sliced the air, harsh and shrill. Adam, from where he hid in a cupboard of his father's hardware store, knew it was his mother crying out - her voice piercing the shouts of the bushwackers, the shots, the terrified groans of men and boys as they fell before the guns and swords of the murderers on horseback. 

The raiders had rode into town at dawn, the earth shaking beneath their horses' hooves, and the killing started straight off.  

Adam was up early with his father, readying the horses and wagon for a trip to Kansas city to buy stock for the store. He was excited as it was the first time his dad had allowed him to travel the forty odd miles with him, despite his begging him prior to every trip over the last two years. His father's face now loomed over from on top of the wagon, his eyes big and frightened, yelling at him him to run, hide!  

Adam sprinted from their small house toward the town, where he saw Mr Pickering, the newspaper man, stumble out of his door in his nightshirt. The leading horses knocked him down and the following riders trampled his body till it looked like a red sack.  

Adam ran without thinking, his legs taking him to the hardware store that his dad owned. He found the key hidden beneath the step, unlocked the front door and crashed in with the mayhem around him and the noise of panic in his head. He slammed the door shut. A bullet shattered one of the two windows at the front and another slammed into the side of building.  

A row of low cupboards on the left-hand side of the store housed stock. Adam opened one and squeezed in next to boxes of nails, pulling the cupboard closed behind him.  

The cupboard closed off some of the noise. In the suffocating darkness the rout sounded like a storm coursing through, the hooves a terrible gale, the gunshots cracking branches, the moans and shouts buildings bending and creaking before the assault. Adam felt like he couldn't breathe for the fear in him. It felt like it had been the whole morning that he had been there, but it may have only been minutes when he heard his mother scream. She was screaming his name, again and again.  

He froze in the darkness. His mother's voice twisted in the storm. It wound around the cupboard where he trembled and cried, around and around, and it spun the cupboard in the air. Faster and faster into a tornado in the sky where he could see the town burning beneath him, the tail of the twister ripping the flaming buildings apart. 

He woke suddenly, with the feeling of still being high in the air, even though he lay in his bed. He sat up and looked around his room. His trousers and shirt still hung over the chair by the chest of drawers. A portrait of his parents faced him from the wall. Morning light streamed through the window beside him, obscuring their faces so that the picture looked like a blank sheet of light. 

He rose and poured water from the pitcher into a bowl on a second set of drawers. After washing, he dressed with limbs that felt heavy and awkward, then left the room and descended the stairs. Passing the kitchen on his way to his uncle's study, Adam could hear the housekeeper, Mrs Gillespie, singing as she worked.  

The study was next to the drawing room. Adam looked in. The room was empty. On James' desk, beneath a large magnifying glass held aloft by a wooden frame, was one of the eggs from the expedition. No doubt, James was in the barn, as was his early morning habit, working on the articulation of the giant dinosaur skeleton he had been assembling ever since Adam's parents had been killed and he had come to live in his uncle's care. 

As Adam stepped out of the rear door of the house to walk the fifty yards to the barn, a terrible, rolling crash erupted from inside the structure. Adam ran toward the sound of disaster. 

Some moments before, his uncle had been tinkering with the articulated skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus-rex that filled much of the building. Several of the bones were missing, held together by supports, pins and casts. The whole massive sketeton was supported by a cable looped over a hook attached to a metal plate bolted into the central roofbeam of the barn's structure. The cable attached to the dinosaur's backbone that were linked together with wires and pins.