Dinner Is Ready

Jesse and his men were not prepared for the frag grenade that landed right in the middle of their squad. Who was ever prepared to be blown up? Sure, it was always a possibility in war, especially in a battle this fierce, but one was never really prepared to die.

And yet, Jesse didn’t die.

The grenade went off, and each of the eight men in the squad, himself included, went flying in a perfect semi-sphere from the focal point of the blast. In an instant, his men were torn apart like wet paper towels and tossed away like an old toy a child has moved on from.

Jesse knew that his men hadn’t survived. He knew there was no saving any of them. But he still had to check.

After a few agonizing minutes of confirming that all seven of his brothers in arms were dead, Jesse knelt to the ground for just a moment to pay his respects.

Sure there were bombs detonating all around him. Sure air strikes were causing the earth to quake. And sure he was an open target to any enemy aware enough to pick off a sitting duck. But these men were Jesse’s friends. They were men he had bled with. And he would not be so callous as to leave without even a moment of prayer for them.

Honor given, Jesse picked up his pack and left his brothers to finish his mission. He was only one hundred yards from his destination. Only one hundred yards from safety. Only one hundred yards from ending this god-forsaken war.

And so, he ran.

Bullets zipped through the air, passionately pursuing pulsating flesh. And unfortunately, Jesse was no exception to the hunger of the frenzied gunman. He took a bullet to the shoulder from his left, then another to his thigh on the same side. He stumbled a bit, dropping to his good knee from the flash of pain.

To his front-right, he saw what appeared to be the entrance to an underground bunker of some sorts. Not knowing whether it was enemy occupied or friendly to him, he made up his mind that it was the safest place for him.

And so, amidst the hailstorm of artillery fire, he crawled. He crawled with everything in him the twenty or so feet to the open hatch. And once arriving, he gave only the faintest glance in to the glistening twilight gazing back at him from the hatch before dropping in.

Jesse fell with his eyes shut, bracing himself for a brutal impact. But it never came. In fact, Jesse no longer even felt the sense of falling, rather, a sense of floating. Had he hit water and not even known it?

Loosening his body and opening his eyes, Jesse gasped at the realization of where he was. He was not in an underground bunker, nor was he sinking to the watery blue depths of an underground lake. For all the insanity of what he had seen on that battlefront, what he saw now was utter madness.

Jesse was free-floating in outer space.

Was he dead? Had he hit his head on the fall into the bunker? But no, he wasn’t dead. The pain in his shoulder and thigh were too real. And the blood that leaked from his wounds was not running down his body anymore, but was floating, suspended on nothing in front of him.

Jesse reached his good arm towards the drops of blood, examining the bizarre sight around him. As his eyes focused on the blood droplets, his peripheral vision caught sight of something glimmering in the distance.

Focusing his sight on the reflective object, Jesse realized that what he saw in the distance was a sleek and silvery space-ship, with a hawk-beaked nose and harsh angular wings. And it was moving. Right toward him.

In a moment of panic, Jesse realized he didn’t have a space suit on or a helmet to help him breath. He began to thrash about, though not actually moving any distance, until he was forced to take a breath, but as he inhaled sharply, expecting to be suffocated by the lack of oxygen, he was surprised to see that he could actually breath.

That was odd.

None of this made sense. Why was he here? Why was he floating in space? Why wasn’t he back on the battlefield in a bunker?

He had only a few minutes to ponder these questions as he floated helplessly in space, waiting for the incoming space ship to get close enough for him to board. But as the ship got closer, he had enough common sense to realize that there would be no way for him to board the ship without endangering everyone else on it.

Fortunately though, the side of the ship opened up, extending a large metallic claw. The claw reminded him of the bucket end of a back-hoe, except if two buckets were put together like a claw-machine at a cheap arcade.

Having trained enough in the military to know when to struggle and fight and when to let someone take charge, Jesse just let the claw grab him, trusting that the people who were picking him up were benevolent people.

After the claw grabbed Jesse, it closed around him completely, then pressurized with a loud hiss, causing Jesse to quickly cover his ears. The sound passed and Jesse looked around at what was effectively a four foot by four foot cubicle that had saved him. Safety in a box. Or perhaps a prison?

There were no windows in his box, so Jesse had to rely on the sounds he heard and the movement of the ship. He took the next few minutes to do some basic first aid on himself as he tried to asses where they were going. From what he could tell, the ship was picking up speed, and though he knew he was in outer space, it almost felt like they were moving downward.

Was there a planet nearby? If there was a ship flying around close enough to pick me up, Jesse thought, then maybe we are going into orbit.

His suspicions were soon confirmed. He had never entered or exited the atmosphere, but having flown jets and worked on parachuting missions, Jesse knew enough to know that this ship was entering the atmosphere.

After a grueling amount of time, and an even more grueling experience in his tiny confinement on re-entry, Jesse felt the ship touch down on hard earth. Jesse wasn’t sure if those who had picked him up were kindly or beastly, so he armed himself with the only weapon he still had, a small serrated pocket knife.

Waiting in suspense for what seemed like an eternity, Jesse finally heard the whine of his confinement chamber depressurizing, and before the claws were even fully open, he sprung from his captivity, ready to defend himself from whoever was on the other side, assuming they were hostile.

But for the second time in the last few hours, Jesse was completely stupefied by what he saw.

Surrounding the ship on every side were behemoths that should have been long dead for the past fifty million years. Surrounding the space ship were dinosaurs.

Directly in front of him a brightly colored tyrannosaurs rex feasted on smaller prey too weak to fight back. To his left, a pack of vicious velociraptor’s made quick work of defenseless infant dinosaurs as the mothers watched helplessly. And Brachiosaurus’ as tall as the young redwoods Jesse used to play among as a child foraged in the distance from the foliage no other dinosaur could reach.

Jesse was in awe. Utter awe. Surely this was a dream. Surely he had hit his head. But no, this was real. He knew with a surety that years of mental training brought that he wasn’t dreaming.

Having been caught off guard by the dinosaurs around him, Jesse failed to notice the people who had saved, or possibly captured, him. They were humans, just like him. In fact, they were soldiers just like him. They even wore the same uniforms as him from the battlefield.

But before he even had time to think of a question to ask the men, they began rushing him away toward’s an air hanger just a few hundred yards away. They were shouting commands at each other, and they were clearly dealing with a serious issue given the tone of their commands.

Jesse caught a few words here and there, things like, “Out of containment,” and “must deliver the asset,” and, “war depends on it.”

Rushing in to the hanger, Jesse fought to catch his breath as the strain of his wounds caused him great pain. But before he was given a chance to sit down, he was pushed into the passenger seat of a 2004 Dodge Viper with royal blue paint and white racing stripes down the center of the body.

The man who was rushing him hopped into the drivers seat and revved up the engine. Around him, another four vehicles revved their engines as well. There were another two sports cars, similar to the one Jesse was in, as well what appeared to be a monster truck, and even surprisingly, a hippie van with a surfboard attached to the top.

All five vehicles lined up at the back doors of the hanger, opposite where they entered, with Jesse’s car right in the middle. The doors opened and they peeled out at blindingly fast speeds.

He instantly understood why they were driving so fast. The dinosaurs he had seen when he first landed had been drawn by the space-ship, and all of them, even the herbivores, were seemingly coming to attack the base.

And now, seeing the five cars pulling out of the hanger, the dinosaurs changed their direction and began chasing the cars.

To say that Jesse’s day was not what he had expected it to be was an understatement. Had he only been shot, he wouldn’t have found the day to be so unexpected. But falling through a hole into space, then being rescued by people who appeared to be from the same army he served in, to now being chased by dinosaurs in a sports car on a planet that was clearly not Earth — yeah, today was definitely not the day Jesse expected.

But just when he thought it couldn’t get any crazier, the man driving the car turned on the radio, as if he were on a leisurely Sunday drive.

He flipped through the stations one at a time, skipping country, rock and roll, and classical music, before he finally settled on a talk show. Jesse was flabbergasted. Of all the things he had seen today, this was the most bizarre.

But then, before he even had time to process what kind of sanity this man must have had to listen to the radio while being pursued by voracious dinosaurs, he heard a familiar voice speak through the radio, saying, “Jesse, dinner is ready.”

Dinner is ready? Jesse thought, What kind of nonsense is that?

The voice repeated itself, this time a bit louder, and Jesse realized whose voice it was.

Sitting up and setting the contents of his hands on the ground, Jesse crawled out of the suspiciously large cardboard box wrapped in brown paper that his parents had let him use until trash day came.

It was dinner time, and Jesse was hungry. He could get back to his adventure later and finish the story of Lieutenant Jesse once he had full belly.

And so, Jesse ran back to the house to feast, leaving behind a pile of battered toy soldiers, a sleek and silvery space ship, a plethora of dinosaurs, and five Hot Wheel cars with Lieutenant Jesse astride his blue Viper.