Subterranea

by P. K. Hawkins

  Agent Larson turned to one of the nearest soldiers. “Get some grenades, or anything else explosive that we can set around the portal. We still might be able to interrupt the portal’s frequency with something smaller than we originally planned.”

  Murky continued to scream at Chicago as he refused to let go of the creature, which was finally forced to turn all of its attention to the dinosaur. It raked its huge mandibles against the leg Chicago was chomping, an act that succeeded in dislodging the dinosaur but also tore off a large portion of its own leg. The cry the ant-lion gave was unearthly, unlike anything they had ever heard before, but Laura took it as a good sign that maybe they might be able to win this. A couple of soldiers ran forward with open crates of what Laura assumed had to be the explosives, although to her they looked more like ropes made out of some kind of long, thin, clay-like material. “Um, is this stuff really explosive?” Laura asked as she gingerly pulled one out and held it up where she could see it.

  “It’s something experimental,” one of the soldiers said. To Laura’s surprise, he didn’t make a fuss about the fact that a teenager with no military experience was handling a volatile substance. Instead he showed her how to stick the detonators into each of the ropes. “You don’t need to worry about setting it off. That can only be done by remote.”

  While Laura was preoccupied with that, Henderson found himself next to a similar crate as it was opened. But instead of the strange explosives, this one had a large number of grenades. “Oh hell yeah!” Henderson said and reached in to grab a handful, startling the soldier that had opened the crate.

  “Wait, kid, what are you doing?” he asked. “You can’t just…”

  “Watch me!” Henderson said, then ran in the direction of the portal and the giant ant-lion. The soldier didn’t seem to know whether he should be trying to stop him or direct him about the best place to throw the weapons. Henderson, however, was smart enough to not just go tossing the hand grenades willy-nilly at the ant-lion. With his luck it would probably hit the creature’s chitin and then bounce back to explode in his face. Instead he looked for a large spot between the edge of the portal and the ant-lion’s body where he would be able to chuck the grenades, some place where their explosions wouldn’t shower the townsfolk and soldiers in shrapnel.

  While Henderson, with assistance from Jesse, started lobbing the grenades down the portal like they were basketballs, Murky ran over to the spot where Chicago had been thrown to the ground some distance from the raging battle. “Chicago! Please, please be okay!”

  But she could tell just from a quick look at him that he was not going to be okay at all. The leg that she had previously wrapped up with Henderson’s gym shirt was twisted at a sickening angle, and there were gashes and cuts all over him that bled profusely. This wasn’t something she would be able to patch up with torn pieces of clothing this time, and she doubted there was a veterinarian in the area who was practiced with healing damaged velociraptor anatomy.

  Still, she didn’t want to give up on him just yet. “Come on, Chicago. Get up. We can still get you somewhere safe. Just get up and I promise I’ll take care of you for as long as I live.”

  Chicago looked at her, and there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that he knew what she was trying to say, whether he understood her language or not. If there was something he wanted to say back to her though, it was beyond his abilities. He was at least able to stand back up, even though it caused him obvious pain and gave Murky one last look that was almost tender in nature.

  Murky understood. Before he could do anything, she flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Goodbye,” she said through copious tears.

  Henderson and Jesse’s maneuvers with the grenades must have been doing quite a lot of damage to the creature down in the hole where they couldn’t see, because the ant-lion was slipping slowly back in. That didn’t stop it from trying to grab a few of the townspeople to take down with it. Before it could reach anyone with its mandibles though, Chicago threw himself into their reach. The ant-lion grabbed on to him and tried to crush him, but the dinosaur slashed at the giant insect’s face, tearing up its eyes and causing the thing to howl in pain.

  “The charges are set!” Laura called out. “Everyone get out of the way!”

  The last few people who hadn’t already run dove out of the way for cover. Murky looked away from the flash as the explosives went off. At first she didn’t think they had worked, but then the edge of the portal became erratic, and the color of the blue light intensified. The ant-lion gave one last scream of agony then dropped all the way back down the hole.

  The blue portal snapped shut with a terrific boom, leaving nothing behind to show that it had ever been there but dirt, rock, and broken pavement.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As the buzzing and thrumming that had been caused by the portal died down and echoed off into the night, an uneasy silence fell over Kettle Hollow for several seconds. Then, as one, everyone in the center of town cheered. Or at least, the ones who were still alive did.

  The four young friends found each other and made their way through the throngs, looking for anyone in authority that they might be able to speak to. Agent Larson was at the edge of the crowd, her hands on the hips of her now-ragged suit and a smile on her face despite the obvious exhaustion. “I don’t know how any of you did it, but I’m not going to deny the results.”

  Laura looked down at the ground, although she otherwise stood tall. “Are we going to get in trouble then?”

  “It’s kind of hard to get you in trouble for something that, on the record, never even happened,” Larson said.

  “So we’re not going to be able to tell anyone about any of this?” Laura asked.

  “Of course not,” Larson said. “If you don’t want the government to disappear you somewhere, you’re going to need to keep quiet about this for the rest of your life.”

  “But what about Chicago?” Murky asked. She wiped her cheeks to get rid of some of the tears, but more just replaced them. “He deserves to be remembered for what he did, doesn’t he?”

  “Uh, who’s Chicago?” Agent Larson asked.

  “The dinosaur,” Laura said. “And yeah, he does. He saved our lives in the end. He probably saved yours, too.”

  “I suppose there might be something that could be done,” Larson said as she looked at the ruined and wrecked mass of earth and concrete that had once been Kettle Hollow’s only intersection with a stoplight. “The government is going to have some rebuilding to do if they want to keep the townsfolk quiet. I don’t see why we can’t put a statue of your friend at the center of it as a memorial. We just couldn’t put anything on it explaining why.”

  “I… I think that would be good,” Murky said through a series of sniffles.

  “George!” someone yelled from the confusion of townsfolk and soldiers. Henderson turned toward the sound of his given name and saw his father running straight for him. Henderson stiffened like he was afraid his dad was about to yell at him, but instead the man ran right up to his son and hugged him hard.

  “I’m so proud of you, George,” he said.

  “It’s Henderson,” Henderson said. “I prefer that to George.”

  His dad pulled back and looked Henderson in the eye. He must have seen something there more grown-up than he’d expected, because he nodded. “When did you start going by that?”

  “I’ve been going by that for a long time, Dad.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll call you.”

  “Agent Larson?” one of the soldiers asked. “What are your orders now?”

  “Orders? Why would you be asking for orders from me?” she asked.

  The soldier actually looked sheepishly at her. “The general and most of his subordinates were either eaten, crushed or blown up,” he said. “You’re now the highest-ranking person here, even if you are technically a civilian. For the moment, you’re completely in charge of Project Subterranea.”

  “Then until someo
ne higher up says otherwise, we are shutting everything down,” Larson said. “No more attempts to weaponize any of this.” She began issuing orders to the remaining military people, having them pull back from the ruined center of town and escort the townspeople to the makeshift camps they had set up around the outside of the town limits. Surprisingly few of the people of Kettle Hollow complained about not being able to go directly home. Those homes would have been ransacked when the ant people came out of the portal to take them, making the houses little more than bad reminders right now of what kind of hellish night they’d all had. Everyone followed the military without question, and many were already nodding along as men in camouflage explained that they were all going to have to agree to a cover story if they wanted to continue the rest of their lives without mysteriously disappearing. Everyone was so lost in their own issues that no one, not even Agent Larson or their parents, noticed that the four kids who had saved them all weren’t immediately following.

  Laura, Henderson, Jesse, and Murky stood in the ruined street where, twenty-four hours ago, there had been Kettle Hollow’s only stoplight, and twenty-four minutes ago there had been a glowing blue portal to some other kind of world.

  “You know, it’s kind of sad that no one outside of Kettle Hollow is going to ever know this happened,” Henderson said.

  “Probably can’t be helped,” Laura said. “If everyone else knew what was possible, and what the government had been doing…”

  “No, not that,” Henderson said. “I don’t care a single rat’s fart about that. I mean that no one will ever know that we’re the awesome ones who saved everyone. At the very least, Agent Larson should give us a secret medal. Or a million dollars.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’d prefer the million dollars,” Jesse said.

  “Yeah. Forget about the medal,” Henderson said. “That’s lame.”

  “Maybe we can at least convince them to give us all new bikes,” Murky said through her continued sniffles. “Henderson, you might even be able to convince them to give you a Murray X20c.”

  “Screw that,” Henderson said. “If the military is going to reward us, I’m asking for a Skyway T/A. If the government is paying, I might as well go for one of the best, right?”

  Finally they followed the rest of the group, laughing and trying to forget for now everything they had just endured. For now, the town of Kettle Hollow was once again deserted.

  In the center of it all, in the ruined mess where the single stoplight had once been, a hole about a foot and a half wide opened in the dirt. Unlike the portal that had been there earlier, this one wasn’t surrounded by shimmering blue light. It was a perfectly ordinary hole in the dirt, unremarkable in almost every way except for the thing that was now crawling out of it. An ant, roughly two-foot long and with eight legs instead of six, scurried out of the hole and looked around itself as though bewildered and uncertain of where it was. While it didn’t walk on its back two pairs of legs, it was clearly not something of this Earth.

  It scurried off into the darkness of a midwestern autumn night, surely not to be the cause of any future trouble. After all, it was only an ant.

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of Spinosaurus

  Prologue: Tshikapa, Congo

  Arthur Mabele dug in the muddy clay of the Vermeulen mines next to the Kasai River, a tributary of the mighty Congo and itself deeper than most rivers in the world. On the other side of the river from the mine is thick rainforest jungle, most of which has never been charted by man, even today. Satellites cannot see through the ceiling of foliage, and there would be little reason to do so anyway—it is a terra incognita, which isn’t worth the trouble financially, and scientists or others interested in penetrating its mysteries are not the kind who get funding.

  But Vermeulen Mining Corp. and other commercial miners of rare earth metals and diamonds do find it very financially rewarding to occupy that part of Congo. Diamonds are dug up by hand by the people of the area, some from holes dug fifty feet into the banks of the Kasai where the water has to be pumped out by methods old when the Romans built their aqueducts.

  So the miners dig by hand, getting maybe five dollars for a gem that, when cut and polished, will bring ten thousand or more. Diamonds are very plentiful in Tshikapa, so supply and demand keeps prices shrinkingly low and lets Vermeulen and other companies buy them for almost nothing.

  Arthur Mabele had been extraordinarily lucky at his mining endeavors, and got his entire family spending fifteen hours a day digging for what passed for treasure there. They lived in the tent city at the mines like everyone else to protect them from the militias that wanted control of Vermeulen’s property, but they had a television set and one of those dishes that gets television from space back at home, plus a box that let them watch everything for free.

  His favorite show when they took days off, which was infrequently, was Cryptids Alive! a show in which the beautiful Ellie White led viewers on a search for mythical creatures that probably actually existed. They had never found one that they could get video of, but that didn’t matter. They were always so close, and that’s what was exciting. It was in English, but that didn’t matter—monsters were monsters, and there were lots of “artist’s conceptions” and Ellie running toward or away from giant cryptids to keep Arthur and his family mesmerized.

  It was night at the mine, too dark to see anything except the security lights on at the Vermeulen building, and Arthur was bone-tired after a day in which he found six rocks—six, enough for his family to have something other than gristle and skin for their meal. But, as sometimes happened, his body was too thoroughly worn out for him to immediately fall asleep, so he left his sleeping wife and boy and girl in the tent as he went out to look at the stars. It was relaxing and reminded him that there was a universe outside the diamond mines, a mysterious universe that enchanted him as much as the mysteries on Cryptids Alive!

  It was also as silent as it got this close to the rainforest’s edge. He could hear the cawing birds and the occasional screech of the monkeys, but the sounds themselves were muffled, swallowed by the thick vegetation. That’s why he could hear a motorboat revving across the river and landing on the mine’s side. That sound was followed by loud whispers and the slap-slap-slap of someone in boots running through the mud of the mine area—they had to know what they were doing, because the bank was marked by deep holes and shallow ones—and then between the workers’ tents, heading for the far side.

  Arthur couldn’t make them out well, except as silhouetted by the company building’s floodlights, but he could see it was two men in military-type uniforms and caps, one of them carrying … a big smooth rock? Something inside a sack? Whatever it was, it seemed heavy and the man carrying it let out a huge sigh of relief when he put it down next to the tent closest to the mine complex’s entry gate. Then, as far as Arthur could tell since they ran off into the darkness, they left through that way. He heard a vehicle start up and drive off.

  Lots of weird things happened in a Congo mine, but this was crazy. The military in Tshikapa never entered the Vermeulen area, it being officially Belgian property, even a poor miner like Arthur Mabele knew that. But the militias who everybody knew wanted control of the mines and to force out the Belgians, they snuck into the mines whenever they could, something butchering the unfortunate workers as a warning not to work for foreigners, to refuse to mine for them so they would leave and the militias could take what “belongs to the people of Congo.”

  The murders certainly didn’t help morale among the miners, but what could they do? They had to work if they were to eat. It wasn’t like the militias were inviting them to dinner so they wouldn’t have to toil for the Belgians.

  Was it a bomb, this thing that the two soldiers had placed next to that far tent? Arthur wasn’t religious and had no interest in being a martyr, but he found a mystery even as probably banal as this one irresistible. He stood up from the crouch he had assumed when he heard the men coming and ve
ry slowly and silently placed his bare feet in the mud, then the dirt, as he approached the edge of the tent city, where the object lay.

  With excitement, he peeked around the corner of the tent—pointlessly, he knew, if it was a bomb; it wasn’t like a piece of fabric was going to protect him from an explosion. He didn’t have a flashlight and the floodlights from the building illuminated nothing this far away. So he bent down and put his hands on it.

  It was smooth, like a river rock. Or an egg. He pushed on it a little and it was so heavy it barely even moved. It had a weird, kind of musty smell, exactly like one would expect from a dredged-up river rock—

  HRANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNH!

  Arthur almost fell down at the sound, thinking at first a plane from the town’s little airport had crashed and blown up. But that wasn’t what it sounded like, not really. It was more like a roar. Like a—

  HAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNHHHHH!

  That one was even longer and louder. What in the name of his ancestors was that? He couldn’t see anything in the dark, but he could see just enough to get back to his family’s tent, seeing that many miners had been awakened by the unholy shrieking, snarling, screaming ROAR that he could tell had come from the far side of the Kasai.

  “Get up! Get up! Come with me!” he roused his family in Swahili, grabbing his children by their arms and dragging them out of the tent until they had woken enough to walk on their own. Arthur’s wife was slow to awaken, but once she realized the children were gone, she snapped to and rushed out of the tent to follow her family into the brush on the edge of the tent city.

  Some fires had been lit inside tents, no doubt instinctively at the outset of some kind of chaos, and Arthur could see the fires were around rags around tree branches, the fabric doused with cooking oil to make torches.