We were cruising along at a thousand feet, and my vertigo wasn’t giving me grief for once. The ocean lay far off to our right, a pale blue blotch on the horizon.

Cody had been silent for the past few minutes as he got to grips with my bizarre story and the impact it was going to have on their world.

I was carrying out my own analysis. The dinosaurs would be creatures of habit; eat, sleep, reproduce. They couldn’t be beaten into submission by taking out their leader. They were, at least normally, independent beings that competed with one another. I wondered if the cooperation between the solitary scorpions was any indication of a wider goal on the part of Sheldon, or if it was just a quirk as Liza suggested. That left me with the knowledge that even if I did kill Sheldon, the Pandora’s Box he’d opened may be impossible to close.

“It can’t be,” I mumbled to myself.

“Can’t what?” asked Liza, picking it up on the sensitive mic.

“Just thinking out loud again.”

“Two heads are better than one,” she suggested.

“It’s the scale of the problem. We can assume that if he’s successfully engineered insects from prehistoric times, the same could be said of the dinosaurs themselves.”

“Don’t forget the animals.”

I had completely forgotten about the animals. Sabre-tooth tigers, woolly mammoths, and other hulking monstrosities.

“Shit! Ok, add them in too. My point is that if they’re already grown, or born, or whatever you want to call it, and all he needs to do is open the cages so to speak, what the hell can we do to stop it?”

“My boss may not believe your story right now,” said Cody, “but if what you say is true and the bigger ones are coming, it’ll be a lot easier to convince them when a stegosaurus is beating down their door with a spiked tail.”

“But that’s my point. I worry that by then it’ll be too late.”

“What’s the alternative?” asked Liza.

“We warn the people. We start from the ground up, rather than top down. In movies where the government is slow on the uptake, or they’re purposefully keeping information suppressed, the plucky heroes get it out to the public in other ways. Brave reporters that work for well-regarded newspapers. Videos with incontrovertible facts in them. You have internet?”

“Of course,” Liza replied.

Cody interjected. “But it’s also been acting funny. If I were a betting man, I’d say Sheldon has taken back control of that too. Access is extremely limited on what websites you can visit.”

“Ok, so he controls the satellites and the internet. What about normal radio frequencies?”

“Radio is down too. All the stations are nothing but static.”

“What about stuff like ham radio. Loners sat in cabins talking to other crazy people, that kind of thing.”

“Hey!” Cody protested. “We had ham radio on our farm!”

“Sorry, it’s just how it gets portrayed on my world. But what about it? Is it down?”

“I haven’t tried it for years, but possibly not. I get the feeling he wants to control the airwaves on a much larger scale.”

“How far can they reach with each transmission?”

“Depends on the setup,” Liza replied. “Could be a couple of miles, could be thousands. More powerful rigs can transmit much further, but if he’s messing with the frequencies I’d only count on a low range. Maybe thirty. I’m not an expert, so I could be way off.”

“Only thirty?”

She held her hands up. “Not an expert.”

I sighed. “Damn.” That put paid to that idea. I could feel the water boiling around me, but the population of this world were fully insulated against the creeping temperature. They didn’t even know they were in a pot to begin with.

“Don’t write it off just yet. Think of it like rain on a pond. Or…” Cody snorted with frustration. “I don’t know, but imagine that first ripple, it then hits the next person who sends it out, creating another ripple, one after the other, until the whole pond is alive with movement from the droplets. Do you get what I mean?”

“Kind of like a virus, jumping from one cell to the next?”

“Cody’s explanation was nicer,” replied Liza, “but basically, yes. And most people with that equipment are already pretty self-sufficient anyway. Remote, well stocked, well-armed, a lot of veterans too. Farmsteaders, ranchers, folk who like the solitude of a few hundred acres, they’ll be able to survive for a while at least.”

“When you say well-armed, you means guns?” I asked.

“And lots of them,” Cody replied.

The landmass that we were located was more similar to America than I could’ve hoped for. We had that on our side. Coupled with a sizeable military, the invasion of scaly bastards might get shut down before anything could really get going. On the flip side, my presence here kind of negated that possibility. I doubted Bart and his people were interested in observing me watch while tanks and jets shot the shit out of a bunch of dinosaurs like it was a pheasant hunt. The fact I was here meant that it wasn’t going to go well for the people. Warning them was still a solid first step, though. “When was the last time you checked the radio?”

“It went down a few days ago. The techs think that there are jammers being put up all over the place, but no one can find them.”

“It’s the same with the hidden air processors. How can stuff like that stay undiscovered?” I asked, bewildered.

“They might be a million square foot installations underground with a three foot wide vent.”

“And when you don’t have the satellites anymore, walking the streets looking for massive turbines or whatever the hell they’re using isn’t really an option. They could be three miles beyond the city limits and no one would ever find them. Hell, they could be on top of the apartment blocks and we’d be none the wiser.”

“So he blinds you, then deafens you? What next?”

“Unless he wants to get rid of our taste buds or sense of smell, I’d say the next step is to get physical. Your dino theory, finally revealed. If we can’t coordinate a united response, we’re in trouble before the first one even appears. The military works as a cohesive entity.”

“Don’t they have protocols for when communication gets shut down?”

“For regular war, I’d say yes. But what protocols could they possibly have for a dinosaur invasion?”

“Not many,” I admitted. “I guess shooting at each other across a battlefield is slightly different to facing down a raging herd of brontosaurus.”

“You can’t lay down suppressive fire on fifty-ton reptiles,” he agreed. “I expect it would just piss them off even more.”

Mark, you have incoming, warned Bart in my head. Sorry it took a while to drop them in.

Mate, we’re in the bloody air!

It’s ok. Just warn your companions so they don’t freak out and crash.

Where were they, anyway?

I felt the pause of thought. Loading screen?

You people really need to get your shit together.

I know. And with that, Bart checked out.

I moved the mic closer to my mouth for no reason other than I was feeling mighty awkward about what I was going to say. “Erm, the friends I was talking about? They’re about to arrive.”

“In our world?” asked Liza.

“Umm, a little closer I think.”

Cody didn’t sound convinced. “A little closer?”

“Don’t be shocked when they pop in. Have you got two more headsets?”

“Under the seats, in the cases,” said Cody.

I was reaching to retrieve them when Sun and Cris appeared in the seats across from us. I looked up into their fearful faces, but Cris’s shock quickly faded into a smile upon seeing me. Sun, on the other hand, took one look out through the window and froze solid. I could see in her pinched features that the hellish noise of the helicopter was painful, so I politely edged between her legs and pulled out the headset. Her eyes bored into my own as I pulled the ear cups open and dropped them in to place. The look of relief was stark. Cris took hers from beneath her seat and popped them on gratefully.

“Oh my god,” she groaned. “That’s bliss.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure why Bart dropped you in at such a stupid time. Sun, are you ok?” I asked as I strapped her in.

“Are we in a bird?” she asked through gritted teeth, her entire body quivering with tension.

“In a manner of speaking. You know I always said about our world being more advanced than yours? Well, this is part of it. This is a helicopter.”

Without being asked, Cris reached out and took Sun’s hand. Knowing her dislike of being touched, I was surprised to see her reciprocate the grip.

“How does this thing get off the ground? Does it have wings? It seems very heavy.”

“I’ll try and explain everything once we touch down, ok? You’ll understand better when you can see what we’re in.”

She nodded and stared at the panel behind me, refusing to look out at the jungle again.

“How long have you been here?” asked Cris.

“A couple of hours. I think they messed up your integration.”

It was now Liza’s turn to look at me strangely. As much as she might’ve believed my story, it was quite another thing to have two new faces appear, thousands of feet in the air. I saw her eyes flicker as she checked over the main quest.

“What the hell? Did enough people really pick the dinosaur world?”

“Nope, the aliens shafted us. They want to break our spirit, according to Bart.”

“At least we’re not in the fairy land. That place would suck hard.”

I ignored the slight jolt of shock that came from our eavesdropping pilot at our bizarre back and forth. His entire understanding of the universe had been turned upside down no less than Liza’s, so I couldn’t blame him for being jittery. “What do you mean? I chose the fairies. It’s gotta be easier than T-Rexes.”

“Magical powers? Consciousness? Evil plans with the capacity to carry them out? Give me a T-Rex any day,” she replied.

I hadn’t even thought about it like that. I had a picture of weak, gossamer-winged creatures that I could swat like flies. At least until we reached Leafwillow or whatever her name was. Even the potential for toll-charging bridge trolls and disguised wolfen grandmothers hadn’t put me off. Cris’s simple explanation of the increased danger posed in that world rang true, and I slipped it a little further down my own list of top choices. In fact, they were all set to avoid like the plague, except we didn’t have that luxury.

I suddenly realised what an arse I was being in the continued silence. “I’m so sorry. Liza, this is Cris and Sun, they’re the friends I was telling you about. The guy flying us at the front is her brother Cody. She’s a science genius. He’s a ranger.”

“Why’d you say it like that?” asked the pilot, waving a hand through the gap to say hi to the unseen newcomers.

“No reason,” I lied, meeting Cris’s knowing gaze. We had a tank. We had a pure melee member. And we had a mage. A rogue wouldn’t go amiss, nor would a cleric, though I filled the healer position in a limited capacity for now. What we lacked was a ranged, physical class.

“How are you with guns?” asked Cris, a smile forming on her face as we both came to the same conclusion.

“We don’t have classifications in the rangers, but if I was active military I’d probably pass as an expert in rifles and pistols. I’ve dabbled with sniper rifles too, but I wouldn’t want to count on myself if the shit hit the fan. I’m pretty good out to about five hundred yards. I can probably hit one in four out to a thousand depending on the conditions.”

“That’s brilliant,” Cris replied.

Without any knowledge of what he was talking about, I left it to her better judgement. “What about bows?”

“We were both hunting as soon as we moved to the farm,” answered Liza. “But it’s been a while since I picked one up. Cody, have you kept up with it?”

“I could still hit a wolf at full tilt at one hundred meters if I had a mind to.”

“You might need to be hitting things a bloody sight bigger than wolves in the coming days,” I warned him.

“So it seems,” he replied, sourly.

“Do you mind if I ask? Why would someone who was brought up hunting go into a job as an anti-poacher, or ranger, you know what I mean?”

“We hunted to keep the wolf and bear populations down when they got out of hand. You could always tell when they grew too large because they would come down from the hills and raid the farms and towns for food. People would get hurt and killed if we didn’t cull a few here and there.”

“No recreational hunting?” asked Cris. “Deer, feral hogs, stuff like that?”

“The deer have enough to worry about from predators, without us picking them off. It’s against the law. Feral hogs went extinct out in the wilds decades ago. Most of their remaining number are kept in small reserves where they can’t tear stuff up or get themselves eaten. You still haven’t explained why you were asking.”

“When we get to where we’re going, I’ll explain a little better,” I promised.

Liza nudged me in the side and mouthed the words full party. I chuckled and nodded. “Almost.”

We flew on, and I explained to my friends the bizarre happenings since my own, earlier arrival.