This is a story which I wrote. Please enjoy.

 

 

The Last Dinosaur

 

He was surrounded. There was no getting out of this one alive. Rex, the Tyrannosaurus was going to kill him. Dennis the Triceratops did not know why Rex resented him with such a passion. Dennis decided that Rex was just one of those people who felt better when others felt worse. It probably was from a low amount of self esteem. Oh well. At least when Dennis was gone, Rex would not be any better off. Dennis got on his knees, closed his eyes, and prepared to take whatever punishment he was about to sustain. He waited for a few minutes, but did not feel anything. That was odd. He should be dead right now. Then there was a thundering roar which shook the earth.

Dennis opened his eyes and what he saw chilled him to his very core.

In the sky were thousands upon thousands of suns plummeting to the Earth. It was a beautiful sight in all actuality. Dennis found himself paralyzed, staring at the incredible sight. He was quickly snapped out of his trance when about a hundred feet away, an explosive ball of fire erupted, sending flaming branches flying in every direction.

Dennis ran. He was not sure where precisely, because enormous balls of fire were falling everywhere, and consuming everything in their path, but those were just his instincts. A fireball exploded ten feet away, throwing him to the side. He landed hard and hit his head on a rock, knocking him out.

Dennis awoke. When he opened his eyes, the brightness stung. It was too overpowering, so he shut his eyes again. He was sore all over, except for his leg. He could not feel his leg. He opened his eyes again, and refused to close them until he got used to the light. He found that it actually was not bright at all. The sky was a dark grey, only allowing a few renegade rays of sun to peek through. He surveyed his surroundings, and what he found puzzled him. There was nothing but large mounds of dark grey ash, and a few charred, blackened logs for as far as the eye could see. Dennis was not quite sure what to make of this until he remembered how he had gotten there. That is when it hit him. Everything, and everyone was gone.

He began to panic and he tried to stand up but found that something was pinning him down. A blackened log was splayed across his numb leg. His leg was bloodied, limp, and mangled into an unnatural position. Dennis tried to lift the log at least enough so that he could slide his leg out. He pushed with all of his might, but alas, it was not enough. He had never been a particularly physically fit dinosaur, and his coma had sapped his strength.

Trapped under the log, Dennis was not sure what he was going to do. He had to get out somehow.

He looked down at his leg, and it rather repulsed him. It was blackened and bloodied, and contorted in such a way that made Dennis woozy if he really thought about it for a moment. Even if he got it out from under the log, it would not do him any good. It would be dead weight that he would be dragging along.

That is when a thought crossed his mind that any other time would be absolutely ridiculous. But, this was the end of the world, he decided, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Dennis was going to have to sever his own leg.

Then the question of how drifted his mind, and though a solution did cross his mind, this one was absolutely ridiculous, even for the end of the world. No, he simply was not going to do it. He was not going to chew through his own leg. He would sooner starve than do that.

So he sat. He sat and waited for hunger to take him, and wither him away to nothing but a sack of bones. He waited for three days, each day getting a little bit hungrier, and letting his mind slip a little more. Then on the fourth day, in his hunger driven delirium, he did the unthinkable, and chewed through his own leg. And he did not just cut through the flesh, he swallowed it for food. It took him several hours, but he finally got to the point where one good wrench of his body pulled him from his leg. His insanity made so that he hardly felt it.

Dennis tried to stand up, but could not stay upright, due to a combination of weakness, and the lack of a leg. It took several more tries to stay up, but once he did, he went on his way. First though, he went and retrieved his leg from under the tree; he would need food for the journey.

His destination was the fiery mountain. It was a volcano which had a large network of caves, where many dinosaurs lived around the area. Dennis thought it likely that some fellow dinosaurs would have taken shelter here during the firestorm. It was only a few miles to the cave entrance, but Dennis was still weak, and the trip was slow going. He tripped over charred logs, and rocks along the way, which were hidden by the dark gray ash that now covered everything.

He made his way to the mountain, and found the cave entrance, under different circumstances, this area would be bustling with the comings, and goings of dinosaurs of all types and varieties. It was eerie for Dennis to see it as silent and dead as it was.

Dennis was also disappointed to find the spring that so many had used in the years before, was now replaced by more of the all- consuming ash.

Dennis, stepped into the large cave entrance, and made his way up to the top of the volcano, seeing blackened skeletons as he went. When he made it to the top, what he saw sapped all the strength from his body, stealing his will to live. He saw nothing.

He hoped to find something alive, someone with whom he could share his grief and pain. Instead, all he found was more bodies, and a cliff leading to a drop that ended in a pool of molten lava.

Dennis dropped to his three remaining knees, and wept. He thought that being spared the fiery death was a miracle, a gift from the universe. Instead, it turned out to be a curse, a punishment. Dennis was the last of his kind, and what is the point of being the last of a kind if there is no one to share it with.

The last of the dinosaurs, in his insane, lonely state, jumped off the cliff into the fiery pit below.

That was how the last of the dinosaurs met his ultimate demise; spared one fiery death, to be replaced by another.