Hot Iron and Cold Blood by Jeff Strand

Author:Jeff Strand [Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dead Sky Publishing
Published: 2023-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

The best thing about Lloyd Lamed’s antique pop machine was that it really kept the bottled soft drinks ice-cold. Lloyd had just taken a good swig off of his Dr. Pepper when the Tyrannosaurus Rex crushed his Texaco station. It jammed its grinning, leathery skull through the roof of the garage, nearly uprooting the entire building, and its confined thrashing took out louvered metal doors and cinderblock walls like toothpicks and cardboard. It kicked down the office. It wiped out the Ladies Room with its fat cable of tail.

Lloyd took three staggering backward steps away from the demolition, his dropped pop bottle disintegrating on the hot-topped drive. He never saw the pumps blow up because the devilish reptile snatched him high and segmented him with six-inch teeth. One swallow and most of Lloyd was gone. The fireball born of the exploding service station — two bays, four pumps and one hellacious overhead — billowed skyward, shoving the animal forward on a warm, concussive cushion. Its tail sent a fire hydrant spinning across the residential street. As it recoiled from the heat blast, it stomped on a canary yellow Corvette T-top parked at the curb, reducing it to a mashed tinfoil joke. A plume of water spewed twenty feet into the afternoon air. It bent over in a fashion never depicted in children’s books and drank from the flow with a mottled crimson tongue.

Howie Raper, who had been larking on the crapper while Lloyd was stealing the Dr. Pepper from his own machine (Lloyd never paid and always used his key), lay buried from the waist down in a fall of shattered concrete, his left eye blinded by the flow of blood from his scalp. He was dying with his pants around his ankles. The vision flickered in his good eye long enough for him to witness the Rex’s departure. It rampaged down the side street and into the twilight, away from the blaze, moving with huge, loping strides. Howie made one peculiar observation before he succumbed to smoke inhalation.

Jesus God, a purple dinosaur . . .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.