Dinosaur Island 2: Cretaceous Freeze

Chapter 8: Dark Silence

The four finally got to the Paleozoic Era right as it was turning dark. The fences were all destroyed and the sign with 'Paleozoic Era' on it was half buried in the snow. The spines of a dead dimetrodon protruded from the snow with its skull also barely visible. Jeff used the skeleton as a seat. Jose and Annabelle started gathering wood for a fire. Ben, on the other hand, wandered through what was left of the sub-section of the island.

Scutosaurus skeletons littered the ground as Ben recalled what had happened last time he was here. The carnotaurus smashing through the gate and chasing them towards the squid. Speaking of the tusoteuthis, Ben went over to the hole in the ground the squid had escaped to. The beast was frozen in the ice with its tentacles reaching up, like it had tried to escape it's icy fate.

"There goes about half the list," Jose says as he looks around at all of the dead creatures.

"Yeah, the island's not like it used to be," Ben replies while taking one last glance at the squid.

The sky grew pitch black; the clouds covered the moon and stars leaving only the light of the campfire to give the humans light to see. Ben sat and watched the campfire.

Jose then started to say something, "Your friend Joe named some of the dinosaurs that you came across, right?"

Ben nodded.

"I think we should name the big crested thing, Scar, since it had a scar across it's upper jaw," Jose said.

This made Ben grin a little; giving a name to one of the cryolophosaurus' made them seem less like monsters to Ben.

After Jose was done talking, the crackling of the fire was the only thing he could hear. Everything else was silence. Silence. Silence. Jeff made a strange gurgle. Silence. Silence. Jose made a cough, and then Ben heard a branch snap somewhere nearby.

"Wait! Shhh," Ben said.

The four of them went quiet to listen. Silence. Suddenly something made a growl and a cryolophosaurus sped out of the darkness. It tackled Jose and started eating him. Jeff flipped out and sped off into the forest. Ben and Annabelle started running after Jeff. The three soon got split up. Ben ended up falling down a ledge and getting knocked out.

The stomping feet of a creature awakened Ben. Ben opened his eyes to see a bright sky. Ben looked to see that he had fell into a brachiosaurus skeleton. He looked up at what the stomping creature was; Annabelle was feeding a stegosaurus and it's child. Ben couldn't believe it. He slowly walked up to them.

"Are you alright Ben? You had a big fall last night," Annabelle asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine, but how did you escape the cryolophosaurus'?" Ben said still astonished by the Stegosauruses.

"This girl saved me, she thought that her baby was in danger, so she scared away the cryos."

"How'd you get the stegosaurus to trust you?"

"I'm a veterinarian, I know how to handle animals, even large prehistoric ones."

Annabelle let Ben pet the animal. The mother stegosaurus made friendly groans as the child seemed happy.

"I went back to our camp and grabbed our bags," Annabelle said as she pointed to his, her, and Jose's bags on the ground, "Those things must have took Jose somewhere else, because his body wasn't there."

"What about Jeff?" Ben asked.

"Don't know; that guy is more like the dinosaurs than us at this point," Annabelle replied.

Annabelle then grabs two tracking devices out of Jose's bag. She carefully makes an incision on the mother stegosaurus and puts the tracking device in her skin. Annabelle is careful as to make sure the dinosaur stays calm. She does the same with the child, but the child wines quite a bit. This made the mother nervous, but Ben kept petting her as to stay calm. Suddenly someone yelled something behind them.

"DEMONS!" Jeff yelled as he shot his pistol at the stegosauruses.

Jeff's hands were so shaky that he didn't land a single hit, but he did startle the dinos. The mother stomped around in a frenzy, swinging her giant spiked tail and almost impaling Ben and Annabelle. The dinos ran off as Ben ran over towards Jeff.

"Give me that!" Ben yelled at Jeff.

Ben took Jeff's pistol away; it was now empty, but Ben threw it away from Jeff.

"Bad Jeff, very bad Jeff," Ben said almost as if he was talking to a child.

"NO! Good Jeff! Jeff scared the demons away!" Jeff yelled back at Ben.

Ben and Jeff argued for a few more minutes until the ground started rumbling. The all looked over at a distant hill to see a herd of stampeding woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos running towards them. The herd was being chased by the cryolophosaurus'.

"Hairy demon stampede!" Jeff yelled as he started running.

Ben and Annabelle quickly followed suit. The stampeding herd was quick though. Ben and Annabelle had to be quick and wary as to not get trampled or impaled by the clutter of tusks and horns. Ben saw that if they got behind the herd then the cryos would get them. Annabelle pointed to Jeff as he somehow climbed onto the back of a mammoth. Annabelle tried the same thing, somehow holding onto the great woolly beast as it ran in terror. Ben tried jumping onto a mammoth, but a woolly rhino rushed by and Ben ended up riding the rhino instead. The herd still stampeding into some direction, even after one of the weaker mammoths had been picked of by the hungry dinosaurs.