Dinosaur Queen by Paul Wilson
AP Wire (March 6, 2022)—Taylor Jones, known to her fans as Nightshade, died today while filming a video for her new album. All members of her band (and manager) were also killed when a tiger being used for the video attacked. An investigation has been launched but details are scarce.
* * * * *
But that’s not what really happened.
* * * *
Taylor Jones became a rockstar out of necessity. It happened one spring night, in the woods, at a crossroads.
* * * * *
Taylor ran. She ran from the horrible things her mother had said and suggested and promised. More, Taylor ran from the trap her life had become.
A tattoo beat in her head: Let me out, let me the fuck out . . .
She fled the trailer park and ended up in the woods, huddled at the base of a tree. She had nothing to cover herself with, no blanket or hoodie, just a tissue-thin Alice Cooper t-shirt and shredded jeans. She crawled into the shelter of thick roots and bawled. Her make-up ran black down her cheeks. She was not a pretty crier.
Eventually her tears dried, she sniffed snot, and Taylor was left with the cold reality that nothing had changed. Nothing was better. She still had to deal with her life, her mother, and the suggestion that selling her body was a viable solution to their money troubles. While the other seniors in her class were drooling over their college acceptances, Taylor was wondering if she would have a home next month.
As she often did in times of stress, Taylor began to sing. Her voice was silk dragged along a razor: frayed, torn, and gorgeous. As she sang—just trying to make herself feel better—something heard her. Her pain and pleading called it like the smell of roasting food. It found her; the Something’s always find the broken.
It did not hide itself but stood tall, foul, and proud on split clover hooves. Stink radiated from its body in waves and fat mutant flies buzzed around its back. Taylor met its gaze. She had seen worse this night; worse was the dead-eyed stare of her mother suggesting she fuck for money.
Taylor and the creature began their dealing between the trees, but the creature insisted they walk. It created a path that led to an intersection of dirt roads. It wanted her there. That was tradition. Taylor followed unafraid. The wind was growing, and she felt things changing. Her approaching future was flung grit scraping her skin.
When they arrived in the inverted cross, the beast talked, and Taylor listened. She leaned against a signpost with destinations she couldn’t pronounce. Hazy blue wraiths traveled the four roads, making a chilly stream around them.
The creature made promises. When Taylor asked for proof it drew baubles from the air—a beer, a cigarette, a sandwich. Taylor considered while she consumed. The thing was content to wait. “Patience is the true currency of any deal,” it said and chuckled.
It required her blood now, an act tonight, and at the end of her life it wanted her soul. Blood was easy. The act would be pleasure. But Taylor paused at her soul.
“You could live a long time,” it said. “Don’t you want that time blessed?”
She did.
“And besides—what good is a soul to things like us?”
Taylor had no answer for that. What she did have was a way out of her squalor, bizarre as the exit may have been. She agreed. The contract was made, Taylor delivered, and the next day her life began.
* * * * *
Six years later, 2022, Taylor was twenty-three.
She was in Vancouver, shooting a video for her band’s latest album. Money flowed like the booze and drugs, sex and fame. Taylor had escaped her mother and never looked back. She had been happy since that night in the woods, happiness born from security. She was free. For six years she had been able to breath, relax—fucking live!
The video was jungle themed. Computer-generated dinosaurs would roam the fake foliage, eventually bursting out to consume the band. The twist was that Taylor would transform into their Queen and the video would end with them bowing at her feet amid the carnage of her bandmates.
She was in the make-up chair, letting the prosthetics for the dinosaur persona dry, when she smelled the familiar spoor of her savior. He appeared behind her, clacking his fingernails together.
“It’s time,” he said.
“What? No! I just got started! I have a tour coming up! That’s not fair!”
“I know.” It grinned and reached for her with thick hands. The mis-matched watches along its arm chimed midnight despite the true hour. But Taylor was prepared. As it touched her, an electric-blue light engulfed its hand. The thing howled as its skin cooked.
“Witch!”
“Just a spell I picked up from an actual witch. Protection. I’m not going with you. Not now, not ever!”
“You would break our deal, then?”
She gave the creature her famous sneer and finished it off with her equally famous middle finger.
“Then we will do this the other way.”
It vanished.
* * * * *
Taylor was dancing on top of a plastic rock in spiked 9-inch heels when the pain seared along her skull. She was supposed to be faking agony at that point according to the song lyrics, so no one realized she was in trouble until Taylor unleashed a real scream instead of lip syncing to the track. Her bassist was the first to reach her. The poor bastard had been in love with her for months and his concern was genuine. Unfortunately, so were Taylor’s new teeth. The demon had enacted his revenge. The prosthetics were make-up no more. He had turned her costume real.
“Taylor?”
She lunged forward, sinking 9-inch fangs into his throat. He howled, tried to scramble back, but she held him and chewed. Blood flew in a gory sheet. It covered him, her new snout, and washed into her blonde-white hair. When he fell, Taylor placed her foot on the remains of his face and roared.
She was fast. Her new powerful legs let her spring around the room with ease. The new Taylor-saurus captured her drummer by the back of his head and crushed his skull like a dollar store lightbulb. Brains and bone went down her throat, congealed grits. She licked her muzzle and sprang again, grabbing her tech/keyboard guru. He had tried to hide in a plastic log. Taylor chomped him from the feet up. The internal pressure of the whirling dervish of her jaws caused his guts to erupt from his mouth. When she reached his head, Taylor slurped them down in a gooey wad.
Her guitarist tried to run but Taylor—almost casually—reached out and grabbed his arm in her new double-jointed claw. It sliced into the meat of his bicep, showing snow-white bone underneath. He squealed in her grip, pogo-ing in agony, screaming “WhatthefuckTaylor!” before she swallowed the broken appendage. He hemorrhaged, fell, and she bent to finish him. When Taylor raised her head, she studied her chaos: Tech-people running, screaming, escaping, and the electric-metal smell of hot blood.
Pleased, she roared. Then thick brown plates knitted themselves across her head. Spikes erupted. She screeched.
Her manager was the only man left with sense. He pulled his gun and took aim. This was incredible, horrible, fantastical, but he had always known there was something odd about Taylor. Something dark. Sold her soul to a demon for fame? Looked that way. She wouldn’t be the first, not even the first he managed.
“Sorry old girl,” he said, and fired.
The pop of his gun was impotent. The bullets simply rode her thick scales around, ricocheting off, and exploded lights. He squealed. She charged him. The spikes on her head slid into his guts, under his ribs, and Taylor shook her manager back and forth atop her head like a terrier with a rag. When she finally flung him away, both arms were dislocated, and his insides were running out.
Taylor roamed. Taylor ate. She walked the set and her song played on repeat. The special effects continued to run, completing her Jurassic fantasy. She stalked to the shadow of a huge tree—a costly thing that had been shipped in from the South—and scratched at the floor, tearing up wood, concrete, and made a nest. She bedded down, her face slick with the blood of her kills. She made a peaceful picture except for the pieces of people scattered about.
Taylor had become the Dinosaur Queen as planned for the video.
She slept as the cameras continued to film. All were still on, the only eyes that could watch her without horror.
In the rafters above, in the gloom, the demon chuckled. Satisfied, it disappeared in a wisp of foul-smelling smoke.
—
I have published multiple times in Theme of Absence (most recently March 2022) and Tales from the Moonlit Path (February 2022). April 2022 Full House Literary will publish me in their Featured Creators website section. I also have work in the Bag of Bones Press “206 Word Stories Anthology” which quickly became a February best seller in the UK. My work has appeared in Dream of Shadow, Electric Spec, Hallozine, and Vampire Cat. I have work in three WU! Anthologies as well as the Input/Output Press anthology “And the Dead Shall Sleep No More” (October 2021) and Mischief Publishing’s “Love Bites” anthology (December 2021). January 2022, I published with Bullshit Literature as well as Night Terror Novels’ “Theatre Phantasmagoria” flash fiction series. Black Rose Writing published my fantasy western novel Cassidy Smith Book One September 2021.
