Flashback Dawn: It Begins

Charlotte popped the hatch and grabbed a couple baskets, began filling them with tuna. A cry sounded from somewhere near the back of the store which Red recognized instantly. Charlotte and he exchanged glances. “You hear that, Corbin?” he shouted.

Corbin was but a tiny figure at the end of the aisle. “Yeah, asshole. I heard it. Let’s go.”

“What’s the matter, Supercop? Afraid of something that might fight you back? Give her a minute.”

Charlotte exchanged her baskets for empty ones and rushed down the aisle.

The call sounded again and yet another responded, this one from the front of the store. “Those are raptors, Michelangelo. She’s got about sixty seconds before I come down there and take that Jeep with or without you.”

“Where did they come from?” said Charlotte, piling cans into her baskets.

“Probably filed in after us,” said Red, or slipped through a back door we missed.”

“They can appear out of nowhere, a*****e,” hollered Corbin. “I’ve seen one materialize right where a man was standing.” Another call echoed throughout the store and he aimed his rifle into the dark. “Want to know what happened?”

“No!” shouted Charlotte. She scrambled for the Jeep with her baskets laden with cans.

Corbin began backing toward them. “It fused with the poor bastard—became sort of a man-dinosaur hybrid, just a jumbled mess of flesh with eyeballs in all the wrong places and their organs mixed together, like a casserole. Fortunately, it didn’t live very—”

There was a tumult of cascading cans and jars which clattered and broke against the floor as a velociraptor leapt atop the shelves between them, and he instantly raised his gun and opened fire.