Dinosaur Hunter Diaries #066: White Man Speak With Forked Tongue
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter #18
The shadowy secret behind all human catastrophe, revealed inside!
Turok and his CIA tactical team pilot, Brody Blair, have just barely survived a bionisaur attack that did not go as planned — their team is dead and so are the bionisaurs, only the latter faction triggered a volutnary self-destruct; getting chomped was hardly a tactical decision. Blair, the one currently shitting his pants in fear, elects Turok leader and lets him call the shots…
… unless it involves following the beasts. Blair had intercepted microwave transmissions through the helicopter’s radio before the bionisaurs attacked, and was able to detect its source as somewhere in Utah. Turok’s already been burned trusting governments to detain his hated foes (see Turok: Dinosaur Hunter Yearbook!), so he has no interest in flying back to base just to tell them of their agents’ ineptitude.
By the way, Turok swiped the Kirby-dotted knife of infiltration specialist David German’s. It’s not like he’ll be needing it anyway.
They give a radio report and claim to be on their way back, but they’ve got other ideas. First: a call to Aric, Turok’s blood brother and the head of Orb Industries. The X-O Manowar is eager to assist, but at the moment, his aid would compromise their secrecy — better for Turok to make his move, and Aric to come if he doesn’t call back.
Big mood.
Turok and Blair arrive in Utah, but the pilot quickly buggers off, leaving Turok alone with all the best guns. Undeterred, he continues through the woods, following tracks unlike any he’s seen before–
— because they belong to something he’s never fought before! A winged, two-headed bionisaur! Even the monster doesn’t seem acquainted with the concept, its two heads fighting for dominance…
… so Turok levels the playing field by blasting one in its metallic brain implant. While it reorientates itself and fights its own rabid head, Turok books it for the river–
— only to be snagged by its claws in mid-air. He loses the knife in his attempts to fight it off, but using the beast’s severed claw, he strikes at the smart head’s throat to draw blood…
… and lets the rabid head’s bloodlust do the rest. Turok just barely grabs hold of the cliff again and hoists himself up, fearing he’ll die of blood loss before he even uncovers this mystery.
… so what’s Blair been up to this whole time?
He happened to find a familiar face in the woods after he peaced out, which you’d think was one hell of a coincidence, this being the middle of nowhere. And you’d be right — it’s Thomas Higdon, their contact back at CIA headquarters! And he’s aligned himself with the Spider Aliens, Aric’s hated enemies! He’s already got Blair hostage, and Turok is quickly taken captive as well.
Because it’s too good an opportunity to pass up, he tells our hero all about his allegiance with the Spider Aliens, and their millennia-spanning interest in human affairs, having secretly plotted the course of humanity all this time. The black plague? The cold war? The Reagan administration? All Spider Aliens, baby.
But didn’t Aric kill them all during The Chaos Effect? Well, nearly all of them. The only survivors of his onslaught were the ones that never even made it to space, grounded on earth during the worldwide blackout in that event. They’ve since become desperate to claw back whatever influence they could get… and hotwiring the bionisaurs was a good start. With a slimy human associate like Higdon to feed them top-secret information, and access to every single bionisaur on the planet, they got themselves a good old-fashioned international conflict on their hands. Just like old times!
And if that wasn’t enough, they applied some Spider Alien ingenuity to the bionisaurs, cooking up brand new designs like the two-headed monstrosity we saw earlier. Maybe Turok will get to see more of them up close and personal, if the Spider Aliens don’t eat him first.
Twenty six hours have passed, and neither Aric nor the CIA have heard back from Turok. Aric takes matters into his own hands, and sets out in the X-O Manowar armour — all he knows is his friend is in danger, but what a surprise he’ll get when he sees who’s behind all this!
More conspiracy! Turok’s distrust of the white man is always a good way of pushing the story forward, and I love it. The CIA haven’t exactly proven themselves trustworthy or capable, so he’s right to think so. There’s a whole lot of ineptitude going on, honestly; the bio-engineered winged bionisaur didn’t exactly prove its worth as a credible threat, but points for originality. Pteranodons don’t quite cut it like they used to.
The Spider Alien malarkey is perhaps a bit much to take onboard — had I followed more of X-O Manowar, maybe this shadowy cabal running human history behind the scenes would feel like a natural conclusion to their sinister manipulations. As it is, it’s kind of hilariously bewildering… and I love it. I mean, why should Turok care? It could just as easily be Higdon talking a load of shit, in which case there’s extra incentive to kick his ass for wasting our time. If so, hats off for taking the plunge: the man has his only adversary totally powerless, so why not fill his head with total crock?
