MenoSaurus

By S J House and Zoran Zlaticanin

The year is 3017. The powerful, shape-shifting Menosuars are watching Earth from their home planet, Prehistoria. Finally, after eons, their plan to take control of Earth and its scarce reserves of Grandidierite, is almost complete.

Surviving a near-fatal plane crash, Rex, has been rebuilt and wired like a computer. As he recuperates at home, a blazing, fiery rock crashes across the roof of Rex’s home and explodes in the nearby forest. Suddenly, Rex and his best buddy, the furry, yeti-droid Rion, find themselves caught up in the adventure of a lifetime. Can they survive with only Rex’s wits and technology to help them against the deadly alien invaders and trigger-happy, nuke-blasting marines?

• Language: English
• Publisher: S J HOUSE
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019

Book preview

Boy

Introduction

Have you ever traveled away from your world, outside of this solar system, beyond the stars, beyond this galaxy? People always ask the questions, Is there anybody out there? Is there life beyond our planet?

Well, I’m here to tell you that there is.

There’s life beyond this universe. Millions upon millions of light years away there’s life, a race of highly developed superhuman beings. They once lived on our Earth, millions of years before us as we are now… and before the dinosaurs.

Have you ever looked at a crater in the Earth? Did you think, What made this deep hole? What caused this deep impact all those millions of years ago? A meteorite?

Well, yes… and no. I’m talking about what was inside of the meteorites.

Inside meteorites there’s water. And if there’s water, then there’s life, right? You see, that superhuman race living millions of light years away has also traveled to Earth inside of asteroids.

Just as we grow inside our mother’s womb, this race grows inside the rock. The asteroid reaches its destination, then explodes on the surface of a planet, making a deep crater in the ground. But this isn’t the end; this isn’t destruction. This is birth for the superhuman beings; it’s the beginning of their new life.

They’re called Menosaurs, an alien race that’s half humanoid and half dinosaur; aliens who can change into any dinosaur at will.

The Menosaurs first landed on the Earth thousands of years before the dinosaurs even existed. They actually created the dinosaurs as we know them today. They created them and they also destroyed them, leaving our planet to die when they left our world to return to theirs. They left behind only the traces of craters, fossils, and bones.

For millions of years, the Menosaurs have been gone from the Earth, leaving our planet alone until now. But something has changed; something has shifted in space. A new gravitational pull has begun, drawing a mass of asteroids toward our galaxy, toward our planet.

Inside this mass of asteroid rock, something is growing, something is heating up. The hotter the asteroids become, the more the creatures inside grow. When the rocks hit our Earth’s atmosphere and are at the highest temperature, that’s when the creatures inside are almost fully grown, expanding at a tremendous rate.

Inside are the Menosaurs. Their asteroids will strike Earth at any moment. The Menosaurs’ mission, their purpose, is to take the Earth back. Or, so we are to think….

Chapter One

Blazing Trail of Fire

In upstate New York, in a forest clearing, stands a modern farmhouse. In the depths of night, the full moon hangs high above its shiny slate roof. A silver luminous light reflects into the brilliant starlit sky. A dog barks in the distance just as a large bat swoops across the gnarly wintery treetops. Its leathery wings break the deathly silence as it flaps past a square-framed bedroom window with dark glass.

If you look inside the window, you’ll see the room is pitch-black. The only light source is the full moon. Its glow slices across the wooden floorboards, illuminating toys, comics, a skateboard, and a 1970’s square-headed robot. Its shadow is a huge ominous giant on the bedroom wall.

The moonlight is sectioned into squares by the window design. It replicates these shapes throughout the room in a symmetrical ghostly fashion, cutting sharp, black lines over the floor and up the walls.

The light catches dark grey fur. You see a face like a human’s, but not quite. Its tiny sharp features are surrounded by hair that splays out thick around the outer rim of its head, leading up to pointy black ears. Its tiny, pink, moist nose in the center of its face breathes softly; the only sign that the creature is alive.

Across the room on a single bed, lies a mound of blankets in a fetus-like shape. They move up and down with something’s gentle breathing. The eyes of the boy under the blankets move rapidly behind closed eyelids.

And just for a moment, everything is complete calm, still, and just how it should be in the dead of night under the full moon… until there comes a slight shake.

It’s nothing at first but then it grows as if it’s the beginning of an earthquake. The farmhouse starts to rattle. The skateboard rolls forward, the robot tips head-first to the floor, and the distant dog begins to bark once more.

The furry creature suddenly opens his eyes wide and bright, like sharp piercing laser lights. They’re fiery-orange in color, surrounding large, jet-black pupils. They shift quickly from side to side as the creature is thinking in nanoseconds about what to do next. The room shakes and shudders violently as if the house were being ripped from its foundations.

The sound becomes deafening. It’s as if the newest, seven-story-high cruise-plane, equipped with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and grand casino, were about to pass directly overhead.

The furry creature springs to his feet. He stands over seven feet tall. As his ghostly shadow moves swiftly across the room, he reaches out a long, ape-like arm. His hand, with long black talons, grabs at the bedcovers, shaking the boy.

"Rex, Rex! he shouts in a computer-like voice. Rex, wake up. Wake up, Rex, quickly! The boy under the blankets stirs. He lets out a murmur that barely escapes his lips. Just five more minutes, Dad, please."

"Rex, it’s not your father. It’s me, Rion. Wake up, Rex, now!"

What? murmurs Rex? What is it? What’s going on? His eyes remain squinted tightly shut.

But Rex begins to slowly enter reality after dreaming of a lost world where he was king and everybody was at his command. He hears the deafening noise. It slams like a freight train with no brakes into his sleepy ears. His eyes widen as though he were being attacked by a tiger, then he springs out of bed like a martial artist in combat stance.

What’s that, Rion? he shouts as their eyes meet. Rion’s eyes are staring wild and bright, circling around in rapid motion… He’s in survival mode.

I don’t know, Rex! Rion shouts. "It’s coming from outside. Something’s passing overhead. It sounds big… really big!"

The farmhouse vibrates violently, and they both rush toward the Georgian window and stare outside. Something shoots over the roof, just missing it by meters. Slates rip off and fly in all directions as if hit by a wild tornado. Now a deep scar along the roof catches fire.

The boy and his creature watch the fiery sky in total awe; their eyes widen in disbelief, trying to take in what’s unfolding.

It’s a massive meteorite! shouts Rex, his left brain computing the situation. "Look! It’s a meteorite about to crash into the Earth! It’s the end of the world!"

Rion’s eyes shoot into focus faster than a card-counter while he, too, computes the situation. He zooms in with his infrared night vision. This makes a luminous, green-squared diagram from his pupil home in on the giant burning rock. It’s traveling at tremendous speed, with a blazing trail of fire streaming behind it.

Rion’s inner-eye computes; it’s indeed a meteorite. His night vision gives the meteorite’s size and shape, weight, and the speed it’s traveling at, as it also flashes: Warning. Warning. Incoming alert. Take cover now. Warning. Warning.

"Get down, Rex!" shouts Rion, flinging his buddy to the bedroom floor then jumping on top of him to shield him with a mass of grey fur. The wiring of Rex’s rebuilt brain shoot his body full of fear messages. His heart thuds. Wha—what’s happening? he wonders. There’s only a split nanosecond of calm before Rion’s computer-brain flashes in red the word: Impact. And then they hear a massive explosion that erupts like a dormant volcano.

The farmhouse shudders uncontrollably like a passenger jet in severe turbulence. The Georgian window blows inwards, scattering shards of glass like darts across the room. Rex startles in panic, pressing himself to the floor. Holy moly, we’re going to lose the house!

Silence, now.

Even the dog is quiet.

Not a sound…

… just as if nothing has happened.

As Rion stands, glass falls from his fur and he exposes Rex lying face-up and staring at where his bedroom ceiling once was. Now he can see a billion stars, like his own private planetarium.

His right eye blinks sharply into focus behind his black-framed glasses. Gaining back his senses, he too computes the situation, running data through his half-human, half-computer, boy brain. It glows, transmitting in colors inside his head.

He pushes his dark-blond hair back from his pale face, exposing one blue eye while the other is slightly larger with a black center. It’s his camera-lens eye; it zooms into focus, staring up into space through the missing lens of his glasses.

* * *

Rex is an only child. He lives in the farmhouse in upstate New York with his father, a very wealthy and important man. He lost his mother in a plane crash that he was also in. His mother died instantly but Rex survived, although he was, at first, thought dead. He was dead, technically, until he was revived by the droid-paramedic whose robot hands thrust through the smashed cockpit screen, frantically trying to resuscitate him. He was eventually aero-choppered to a nearby hospital. His head injuries were so severe that no one believed he would survive. He’d also lost too much