Bently McQuinn Saves Literature

Bently felt Harlima’s soft fur slip through his fingers, then a warm sensation in his chest, and when he opened his eyes, he was in a humid, rich-looking bungalow.

“Well, I got it right this time,” Meggie said happily, putting the book back in her bag.

The bungalow was empty, much like Bently had expected. He had gotten used to most of the people who populated these worlds to either be possessed, transfigured, or just gone.

“Okay, where too?” Bently asked, straitening up. His hand was still aching and felt very, very weird.

“We need to find Dr. Grant so he can tell us what’s going on in this book,” said King, and he lead the way out of the bungalow. Bently caught up and walked with him, a little ahead of the girls.

“King?”

“Yeah? How’s your hand?”

“It still feels really funny. Do you know if…?”

“If injuries are permanent?” King asked grimly. Bently nodded. King brushed back the salt and pepper hair that covered his ears, and Bently saw that King was missing a small chunk off the top of his ear. “You might have to do a bit more explaining though,” he added. “Although I’m sure if we tried hard enough, we could write you a fake finger until you can figure something out.”

Bently sighed and ran his hand gingerly along the healed wound. The skin was smooth and there wasn’t a scar, but it was the weirdest sensation ever. He was not only missing his finger, but most of the knuckle and muscle from that side of his hand.

“Shh,” King said, holding out an arm to stop them. They all stopped and listened intently. At first, Bently didn’t hear anything, but then he heard a soft breathing, and a slight rustling in the bushes. Slowly, King pulled his knife, and then Bently and Lucy followed suit.

“Run to the compound, as fast as possible,” whispered King so softly Bently didn’t think he had heard him. And then without warning, King was sprinting towards a large white roof that stood out above the trees. Without really thinking, Bently’s legs whisked him away at the fastest possible speed.

‘Run, run, run away from all your problems,’ Bently couldn’t help but think as his heart pounded in his ears, and he thought his blood vessels in his neck might explode from the fast-flowing blood. Behind him, he could hear Lucy and Meggie running, and he followed King up towards the compound he must had been talking about. He took the steps three at a time and burst through the doors. He could have sworn he could hear a rustling and some sort of animal noises in the bushes outside the building.

King took many twists and turns, almost like he knew where he was going. Bently couldn’t afford to glance behind him, but he could hear both Meggie and Lucy still behind him. He almost reached for his wand, but then remembered that this was a world like his own: there was no magic here to use. After several more turns, they found themselves going down a switch-back ramp that lead to a door.

Through the large glass windows, Bently could see an ample sized control room, filled with dozens of computers. But they were older computers, not the sleek kind Bently was used to using. No, these were the big, clucky, white kind of computers that people used when PC’s first came around.

And in the middle of the room was the dusty man who had been in the Great Hall: Dr. Grant.

When the doctor saw them, he ran over and opened the door, allowing the four companions into the room. Grant shut the door firmly behind them, and relocked it.

“What took you so long?” Grant asked.

“We—had some other—books to take care of,” Meggie gasped out.

“That and Bently decided to go losing a finger,” King joked, and Bently held up his four-fingered hand.

Grant gave him a sympathetic smile. “Just hope you don’t lose more than that while you’re here.”

“Why were we running? Where are we?” asked Lucy, a bit irritated. She did not enjoy all the marathons they had been running today.

“We’re in Jurassic Park—oh right, you don’t know about that book…” said Meggie. “It’s this really popular science fiction book about cloning dinosaurs.”

“And now everything’s completely messed up,” said Grant. “That vampire psychopath Carlisle did something to all the dinosaurs and he can now control them. He’s amassed an army of them in the T-rex exhibit, and he’s got the velociraptors posted all around the compound. Everyone else is… dead.”

“So that’s what we heard? Velociraptors?” Bently asked.

King nodded. “I’ve read this book many times, but I never thought I’d actually be here one day.”

“Well, glad to see you can navigate yourself,” said Grant. “Now, let’s figure out what to do before the raptors find us. I’m sure they followed you at least to the doors.”

Slowly, Grant pulled up a map of the park and started showing them where Carlisle had the dinosaurs. He muttered occasional how he hated computers, but Bently didn’t exactly pay attention to that. He was worried about how in the world they could get to Carlisle in order to kill him.

“We’ve got a small stock of guns, but King, you and I should be the ones to handle them,” said Grant, pointing over to the corner. King nodded.

“No, go for it, I hate guns,” said Meggie in disgust.

“And I have no idea what’s going on,” said Lucy simply. “All I know is I can heal just about anything.”

“And I can write,” added Bently. “If we can get somewhere safe, I’m sure we could come up with something.”

“I guess that could work,” said King. “Now if we can just—”

“AHH!”

Everyone looked at Lucy, who was staring at the glass with an absolutely terrified look on her face.

On the other side of the glass was an animal Bently had only seen in the movie of the book he was currently in: a velociraptor. It’s brown and red scaled body was about as tall as he was, and it’s long, fanged snout was sort of grinning horribly. It’s eyes were pitch black, and they were fixed on Lucy.

“Shit,” King muttered, and he started to move towards the gun corner.

“No!” Grant hissed. “No sudden movements!”

But the raptor just stared at Lucy, who was completely speechless. She looked very pale, perhaps nauseated. Bently’s hand itched for the sword at his side. If it tried to get in…

And with a crash, it jumped through the window. Everything happened at once, and later, Bently wondered how he had managed to do it. The raptor was moving so fast it seemed impossible. It moved as fast as the vampires had been moving. King and Grant went for the guns, and Meggie ducked under a table. But Lucy was frozen to the spot, looking like a child from a horror movie who had just witnessed her parent’s deaths. Bently drew out Gryffindor’s Sword and swung it over his head. Leaping, he brought it down just as the raptor was nearing Lucy, severing its head. The head and body fell separately to the floor, it’s eyes blinking rapidly and it’s body twitching. Only then did Lucy scream again.

“It’s alright, it’s dead,” Bently reassured her, dropping the sword to his side so he could pull Lucy into a tight one-armed hug. She shook in his embrace, but didn’t allow herself to cry.

“Come on,” said Grant, cocking a gun while King loaded his. “We need to get out of here and to somewhere that’s safe.”

“Wh—where will that be?” Meggie asked shakily as she came out from under the desk. “They’re everywhere.”

“If we can get into the T-rex exhibit and up a very tall tree, they shouldn’t be able to reach us,” said Grant. “I’ve been up several of them. We’ll just need to find one of those jeeps so we can get there relatively safely.”

“I think there’s one near where we came in,” said King, who was pocketing more ammunition. “You mean those funny-looking green jeeps?”

“Yes.”

“And we need to get there without drawing any more attention,” added Meggie.

“Are you sure you’re alright, Lucy?” Bently asked, looking at her with concern.

“Yes,” she muttered, drawing her knife back out. “I’m fine now. That was just, so…”

“We get it,” Meggie assured her with a smile. “At least you know how to defend yourself.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Lucy, offering her a weak smile back. “Onward?”

“Onward,” King agree, and Grant lead the way out a back door.

They marched in a sort of group. Grant lead with his rifle, and then Bently followed with the sword. He didn’t trust his knife skills, and he knew that if he swung a sword rather than a knife, he was more likely to hit something. Lucy and Meggie came next, sticking as close together as possible. King brought up the rear, checking periodically over his shoulder to make sure any raptors weren’t sneaking up from behind.

Finally, they made it back to the main entrance hall. There weren’t any raptors in sight, and none blocked the door, which had been unfortunately left open, so they couldn’t know for certain. Grant lead them out the door with even more caution, pointing his gun all around in case of an attack. They were all out of the building now. Bently could see the jeep just a few meters up the road from them. They were almost there…

Gunshots, and then yells and screeches. Bently whipped around to find King shooting at three raptors that had sprung from the bushes down the road from them. King shot furiously, and one collapsed dead, but the other two kept coming.

“Go, go, go!” Grant yelled, and he and the two girls booked it for the jeep. Bently, however, ran to help King, Gryffindor’s Sword poised over his head, ready for the kill.

One raptor had veered off and went for Bently while the other jumped up and slashed at King. One of it’s large claws caught him, and there was a lot of tearing and blood, and then King was on the ground. Bently hacked at the one that had come after him and managed to get it on the ground before he went to go help King. Grant was now frantically searching for the keys while the girls watched, horrified, from the windows.

All Bently needed to see was blood and King on the ground to know that things weren’t going good. The raptor was now zeroing in to make the kill, but Bently wasn’t about to let that happen. “Eat this!” he yelled as he swung his sword at the raptor. The initial blow missed, but it distracted the raptor, who lunged at Bently. With no ideas on how to counter, Bently simply held up his sword and shut his eyes tight, preparing for the worst.

He was hit by a huge amount of force that knocking him over and nearly took the sword right out of his hands, but he held on tightly. He could feel a huge weight laying and slightly struggling on him, and warm, sticky blood oozing all over him. He opened his eyes to find a dead velociraptor on him, impaled on the sword. Then he remembered why he was here, and that King was injured, possibly really injured, and he started struggling. The raptor was really heavy, but he finally got out from under it and yanked the sword out of it.

King was lying on the ground, groaning in pain, but at least he was struggling to get to his feet. Bently rushed over to help him, but King waved him off. “It only got my arm, go!”

“No, you come on,” Bently said through gritted teeth, and he forced King to stand. He started dragging him along towards the jeep, where Grant had the trunk open. In the bushes, Bently could hear more raptors coming.

“Come on Bently!” screamed Meggie. They were just about to reach the jeep when two more raptors rushed out of the bushes, with three more just behind them. Bently turned around and took a firm stance with the sword so he could give King some extra time to crawl in. The first raptor reached him, and he hacked at it’s neck, severing it for the most part. The second raptor, he caught in the mouth, and he thought it was going to rip the sword right out of his hands when he somehow managed to cut it’s bottom jaw off. Then he scrambled into the jeep, and shut the door as Grant took off as fast as he could. For a while, the raptors ran after them, then they gave up and went back to their dead comrades.

-

It seemed like they drove for forever. They drove down dirt paths and paved roads, through tunnels of tropical trees and past grassy plains. They saw a few dinosaurs at a distance, but they were of the herbivore variety and didn’t seem to notice the jeep hurtling along.

King’s arm had been slashed pretty bad by the raptor’s claws. The wound was long and deep, but it hadn’t reached the bone quite, thankfully. Bently had bound up the wound as best he could for now, to at least stop the bleeding, and Lucy would heal him with her magic potion when they had gotten stopped and set up camp in a tree for the night.

Bently himself was very shaken. He kept trembling from leftover adrenaline, and the images of the fight kept running through his mind. He still couldn’t believe that he had actually killed those raptors with a sword. King and Grant had only taken out about two with the guns, but Bently had killed around four or five with his sword. He considered himself both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because he had survived, but unlucky because his only set of cloths was dyed with dark raptor blood, and there wasn’t any magic around for him to be able to get the blood out, if not make new cloths. The blood was making his cloths stiff, his skin sticky, and his smell like that of rotting flesh. It was very unpleasant. Plus, the smell of blood might attract God-knows-what sort of creatures.

They stopped several hours later when the sun was finally starting to go down. They parked on a paved road that ran along side a very tall, broken fence. “The T-rex broke through it when the power initially went out,” said Grant as they got out, slightly stiff. “We just need to climb down the ropes, into the enclosure, and up a tree. There are plenty of nice, tall ones on this side.”

And so they followed him out the car to the concrete edge. Looking down, Bently realized that they were on a cliff edge, and it was at least a two hundred foot drop to the bottom. He gulped, his eyes following the thick cables that ran down the edge.

“Alright, we’ll go in groups. Lucy, Meggie, you’ll go with me, and then Stephen and Bently will follow, go it?” said Grant. Everyone nodded, and he and the girls each grabbed a cable and started their decent down. When they had hit the bottom, Bently and King began their decent.

Bently had a hard time of it because all the dried blood on his hands and arms made moving his arms a bit problematic, and because of his missing finger he couldn't quite get a proper grip. He would second-guess himself when he couldn’t feel his right pinky go around the rope, and it took him a moment or so to realize that he had no pinky. It was a very depressing thought indeed.

And finally, after a few near-fatal slips, Bently reached the bottom. Grant, Lucy, Meggie and King had already washed themselves off in a pool of water near the wall, so he did the same, getting the blood off his skin and most of it out of his cloths. ‘This’ll do until I can get to some magic,’ he thought.

“Come on, this tree looks good,” said Grant. Lucy was stumbling; she was exhausted.

“Just a little further, Lucy, then you can sleep,” King assured her.

Grant lead them up and up and up a tall, tangled tree, which was a very slow process due to it being dark and Meggie and King not being good tree climbers, until they finally reached an area in the branches that was spacious enough for all of them to sleep relatively close together. Bently found a branch that looked rather comfortable, and was about to sit down and go to sleep when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

Lucy was standing behind him. “Kneel and give me your sword, Bently,” she instructed, and without question, Bently did as he was told. He was far too tired to question. “Now bow your head.” He did so. Then he felt the blade of the sword on his shoulder. “For the exemplary bravery you have shown today, I, Lucy Pensive, Queen of Narnia, hereby knight you. Rise, Bently Raptor Slayer McQuinn, Knight of Narnia.”

There was applause, and Bently rose, a smile on his face. Lucy handed him back his sword and hugged him. “Thank you Bently.”