by Rick Chesler
The nasty fall saved his life, for at that very moment, the ankylosaurus turned and trod across the spot where Ethan had been standing seconds earlier.
The photographer saw his camera with the cracked lens lying on the ground, and recovered enough to return his thoughts to photography, Must. Get. Pictures! No one will ever believe this if I don’t! He reached into one of the many pockets of his vest and withdrew a small point-and-shoot digital job that he used as a backup or to frame quick compositions for reference. He’d never intended for it to shoot something so important, so utterly momentous, but things being what they were, it would have to do.
While Ethan lay there on the ground, activating his camera, the other team members scattered. Richard backed off slowly on the opposite side of the broken rock shelf, while George did the same not far from him, but calling out, “Fanbloodytastic, will you get a look at that! It’s a bloody dinosaur!”
Richard paused behind a chest-high mound of rock, confident he was safe enough to rest here a moment as long as the ankylosaurus continued on its current path. He pointed to the animal’s foot and ankle, where the Tongan’s blood and cranial fluids dripped down the leg.
“It’s a bloody dinosaur, all right. Literally, mate. Our Tongan friend is dead, skull crushed by that thing.”
George blanched when he saw the lifeless, now headless form of the islander still slumped over the lava rock, transformed into nothing but an inanimate torso, his legs having been burned away and his head pulverized into innumerable skull fragments.
“We’ve got to—”
“Kai! Look out!” Ethan’s yell cut George off. Ethan pointed to the ankylosaurus, which was in the midst of swinging its tail, the powerful biological mace at the end of it careening toward their translator.
Kai opted for a flat-out run over the uneven terrain, and whether the sudden rapid motion excited the beast, or if he simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time wasn’t clear to Ethan. But when the heavy club slammed into Kai’s upper back, impaling him with two of its spikes, none of that mattered anymore.
The translator, still stuck to the tail weapon, was flung through the air as the dinosaur thrashed about. The three Slope team members watched helplessly as their translator was flung into the rocky ground, bones breaking, blood spilling, before being dragged across the field of lava rock while the dinosaur thundered off. Then suddenly, it whirled back around, flipping its tail again like an irritated cat, the spiked man flying into the air along with it before being dashed to the ground once more, this time to his untimely death.
Having shed its club of the dead weight, the ankylosaurus gave a couple of flicks of its tail before running back toward the rock from which it had hatched. Richard and George flexed their legs, ready to run in whichever direction gave them the best chance of survival, while Ethan took video from his low profile position on open ground, afraid to move for fear of drawing the creature’s attention.
The rampaging dinosaur settled into a straight course, a course that put it on a dead reckoning for George, who cowered between two jagged spires. Ethan didn’t think the columns were anywhere near solid enough to withstand a hit from the marauding ankylosaurus, but he also didn’t see what other options the geologist had. All around him was wide open space, until he got to Richard, a good thirty feet away. Didn’t seem far, but when you were being run down by a galloping mega-lizard, every foot mattered.
George braced himself, putting an elbow in front of his face—a pathetic gesture really, when confronted with such a monstrous onslaught—when the ground suddenly opened up around the ankylosaurus and the huge animal sunk into a pit. It hung there for a few seconds, baying and caterwauling, an unnatural, otherworldly sound, until more rock slipped away and the beast dropped out of sight below.
Ethan rose, still taking video, and walked as close as he dared to the opened earth. He peered down into it, trying to see where the dinosaur had gone, if it would be able to get back up. Was it still a threat? But he could see they didn’t need to worry about that.
“I can see the lake!”
“What?” Richard stuck his head out from around his lava rock cover.
“I’m looking down into the water in the middle of the volcano—the lake!” Ethan snapped off another photo down into the volcano.
“Where’s that thing?” This from George, who tentatively emerged from his meager hiding spot.
“The dinosaur?”
“I guess that’s what it is, yeah.”
“Pretty sure it’s an ankylosaurus. It fell into the lake. I saw it splash in. I don’t think they can swim, so the Boat Team should be okay, as long as it didn’t land on them.”
At that, Richard and George began walking closer to Ethan’s position where the dinosaur had plummeted through. They had nearly made it to the photographer again when the ground opened up once more, made less stable by what had already fallen through.
Richard’s scream was the loudest, a feral shriek that would have done any haunted house justice on Halloween night. He slid down a suddenly created incline, bloodying his hands as he tried in vain to hold on, but gravity was too strong. He hit a protuberance at the bottom of the hanging section of volcano that served only to bounce him up into the air before he free-fell about fifty feet into the lake.
Popping and cracking noises erupted all around Ethan and George as the unstable slope continued to buckle. Ethan let his camera dangle by a neck lanyard, letting the video roll to capture what it might, but now concerned for his very life. He looked over at George to see the explorer pulling the Slope Team’s satellite phone from his pocket. Time to call for help, people were dead. Good thinking, George. We need help, we need to get out of here…
But the ground opened up beneath George’s feet again, and he was slammed onto his backside, jolting the phone from his hand. It bounced along the uneven terrain until it landed deep in a rocky fissure and wedged there. George scrambled to higher ground and stared down at the communications piece with terrified frustration. He looked back over to Ethan to see if he had witnessed what transpired. Ethan was watching, and the two made eye contact, the unspoken thought between them: No way to call for help without that thing. At least not until they reunited with Boat Team, who also had one. But they were somewhere down in the lake, and they needed help now.
George inched close to the crevice, reaching a hand out. “I think I can grab it.”
“Forget it! We need to get clear of this area before—”
The volcano completed his sentence for him, the ground opening up completely in a wide circle around the two surviving men. George fell first, on his way to the lake while Ethan scrambled for a rocky pinnacle. He grabbed it, but then the entire base of the structure itself fell right through the sloped ground, and Ethan was free-falling to the lake.
Chapter 9
“This chamber looks very unstable. Keep us away from the walls.” Skylar pointed to a horizontal orange streak moving behind cavern walls that were not yet fully solidified. Anita nodded, digging the paddle into the water on the right side of the boat, veering it away from the fiery wall. Around them, steam vented into the air from the water below, where magma still issued from deep within the Earth.
“I see a place it looks like we could get out on, over there.” Lara put her radio away. She gave up trying to contact Slope Team since no signal could penetrate the cave walls. She pointed off to their right. Sure enough, a flat rocky shelf could barely be seen through the shroud of vapors. The others agreed to check it out, and Anita rowed them in that direction.
“There’s water bubbling up over there!” Joystna indicated an area next to the rock shelf where the water roiled with frothy activity. “It’s okay, just take us to the left of it,” Skylar advised. “Don’t go through the steam.”
Anita guided them to the other side of the landing shelf from the active water. She paddled faster as she approached the ledge, and soon they heard the soft hiss of the raft’s bottom sliding over the ro
ck.
“Everybody out!” Anita said, jumping from the raft onto the rocky flat. “We don’t want to puncture the boat bottom.” The others hopped out of the boat, and they lifted it up onto dry ground before flipping on additional flashlights to have a look around.
The ceiling was low over half of the lava shelf, but high over the other half. The sounds of bubbling water and the occasional rock falling from high above echoed throughout the chamber.
The four of them spread out and walked toward the rear of the platform, looking for ways to get either further inside or higher up. They found neither. Skylar was in the midst of proposing a geological reason for this when she was interrupted by the sound of intense rushing water.
Anita pointed to what before had been a mere bubbly patch in the water, but now was a veritable geyser, shooting skyward with great force.
“Could this whole chamber flood?” Lara asked no one in particular. It was certainly an uncomfortable thought, to perish in this hellish cave system, crushed up against the chamber ceiling, clawing for the exit… Before anyone could give a response, a dark mass was buoyed up from the depths by the fountain of water.
“Stand back!” Joystna instinctively held her arm out to herd the others further from the edge of the platform, where a boulder was being lifted out of the water by the geyser.
The four explorers watched in disbelief as the large rock—perhaps the size of an overstuffed armchair—was tossed into the air. Then they covered their faces with their arms as the rock was smashed against the ceiling of the cave, casting off bits of rock shrapnel. The boulder landed on the rock shelf with a sonorous crack, wobbled for a second, and then settled.
They stood in place for a minute more, observing the geyser to see if it would throw up more projectiles from below, but the column of water gradually fizzled out, returning once again to the patch of bubbly water it had been when they arrived.
Curiosity got the better of Skylar, and she went to the big rock. She removed her rock hammer from her pack and struck the rock lightly until some of its surface layers chipped away. Lara moved closer behind her to shine a light on the work surface. As Skylar chipped away at the boulder, a thin vein of precious gemstone was uncovered. It sparkled hectically in the direct artificial light.
“What is that, more of that…what’d you say it was called?” Anita asked.
Skylar looked away from the rock for a second to frown in Lara’s general direction, so she didn’t see the boulder wobble slightly. “Mica. I’m not sure yet, need to get a better look…”
She resumed work again with the hammer, bringing the tool down near the mineral vein. Skylar cracked off a large sheet of the boulder and then paused with the hammer. She had opened up a sizable cavity so as to be able to reach in and try to excavate a chunk of what she was sure was diamond.
She had just passed her hand inside the cavity when the entire rock began to shake.
Chapter 10
Ethan wasn’t sure which way was up. The water in the lake was dark. Adding to the confusion of being dumped underwater from about fifty feet up were the strange noises—the rumbling and popping of geological activity still at work as magma rushed out from the Earth. Spot fires burned around him underwater, adding to the surreal dream scene. Making matters worse, he still wore his pack, which threatened to pull him down into the abyss, however deep this body of enclosed water was. His plastic canteen bumped him in the face as it floated up, and that’s when Ethan realized he was swimming the wrong way, down.
The photographer flipped himself around and kicked, straining against the weight of his backpack, but at the same time unwilling to ditch it except as a very last resort. He would be next to helpless on this island without his gear, and he couldn’t be that far from the surface already, could he? A few seconds later, his face broke into humid air, and he gasped for precious breath, inhaling the sulfur-tinged atmosphere, air that had never tasted any sweeter to him than right now. But the triumph of figuring out how to keep breathing soon gave way to another predicament.
Where the heck was he? Ethan tread water while spinning in circles. Somewhere out in the middle of the lake. Looking up, he could see the main opening of the volcano, as well as a smaller aperture to one side of it—the new hole where he had fallen through with the collapsing slope rock. He heard splashing to his right. Hoping it wasn’t the ankylosaurus swimming for him—surely it sank by now?—he looked over to see a person splashing toward him.
“Ethan? George?” a male voice called out.
“Ethan here, Richard.” Ethan couldn’t yet see the man as anything more than a blurry form, but he recognized the English accent.
“Any sign of George?” Richard swam over to Ethan, and the two of them looked around until they heard another voice, a little farther away from Ethan than Richard had been.
“Over here!” They spun in the direction of the words. Just visible through the mist were a pair of waving arms.
“George?” Ethan called.
“Yes, it’s me.” George started swimming and soon disappeared into the fog.
“Wrong way, George. Turn around,” Ethan said.
The geologist, disoriented in the misty vapor, spun around until he was looking in the right direction. Richard activated a waterproof flashlight, and then George homed in on that with ungainly, splashy kicks. While they waited for him to reach them, Ethan and Richard looked around at their surroundings. They were far from the shore of the lake on all sides, near the middle. George reached them, and they asked one another if they were okay. All had cuts and bruises but nothing major; thankfully, all three were able to swim.
Richard, still wearing his pack, removed it and took from it a two-way radio. “Glad we sprung for the waterproof model now, right, mates?” Ethan nodded, but George looked around briefly. “I lost my pack. I wasn’t wearing it when the ground fell through.”
“Don’t worry about that right now. You’re still alive. I’m sure Kai would like to be in your position, precarious as it may be at the moment.” Richard pulled the radio from a compartment of his pack. “Ah, here we are. Let’s see if we can raise our Boat Team, perhaps we can arrange to be picked up. They must be putting about in here somewhere, right?”
Ethan spun about in a slow circle. “I don’t see or hear them…” Then he cupped his hands together and yelled through the vapors. “Skylar? Anita? Lara? Joystna?”
They waited a moment for the echoes to die down, but when no reply was forthcoming, Richard held up the radio. “Let’s give this a try, shall we?” He depressed the Talk button and spoke into the radio’s microphone. “Slope Team to Boat, Slope Team to Boat, do you read, over?”
A few seconds passed during which nothing, not even static, was heard. “You on channel 22?” Ethan asked.
Richard nodded. “Affirmative, I’m on 22. That’s what they should be on.” He tried the radio again, telling boat team they had fallen into the lake, lest they think the reason for the call was routine and were ignoring it. But still no response came.
“Why can’t we reach them? Shouldn’t they be in the lake? That’s where we dropped them, right?” George’s voice sounded as though he was on the verge of panic.
Richard leveled a stare at him. “Lots of reasons why it might not work. Signal could be bouncing all around down here, maybe they entered a cave along the shore, who knows?”
Richard shook his head as he clipped the radio off to a shoulder strap on his pack. “I’ll leave it on, but I think we’re going to have to take matters into our own hands at this point.”
All three of them once again surveyed the lake. “You mean swim for shore, right?” George asked.
Richard laughed. “Uh, yeah, unless you have some magical way out of here, or you know how to fly or something.”
“Hey, no need to be an ass about it, I was just—”
“Take it easy, mates.” Ethan tried to sound upbeat. “We’re all in this together, and we’re all going to get out of this together.
So let’s figure out which way the shore is closest, then we’ll start our little power swim, okay?”
Richard shone his light beam straight toward the shore in the direction he faced. “You gentlemen still have your lights?”
Ethan felt around the outside of his pack until he found his. He unclipped it and then flicked it on, leveling the beam in the opposite direction from Richard.
“I don’t have a light. It was in my pack.” George sounded downbeat.
“I’m guessing about a quarter-mile in this direction.” Richard waved his light against the lava rock shore. “But it’s hard to say for sure.” Ethan turned around to look, comparing the distance to shore in the opposite direction, where the vapors were thicker. “I think your way is closest.”
“Let’s get on with it, then, before more crap falls on us from above, or more magma pushes up from below.” Richard clipped his light back on to his pack but left it on as a beacon for the others, so that they could find one another if separated. Ethan did the same with his light, and the three of them swam toward shore.
Ethan felt the weight of his wet pack on his shoulders as he kicked along, noting that Richard must feel the same. Only George lacked a pack, and for that reason, he was the fastest among them. It was strange to need the lights to see the shoreline, yet the center of the lake was bathed in daylight. Sunlight at this time of day penetrated straight down, leaving a cone of light in the middle of the lake and the surrounding shore in darkness. As they passed through the cone of sunshine, Ethan saw George stop swimming up ahead. At first, he thought it might be because he was afraid of getting too far ahead of Ethan and Richard, for to lose them would mean he was on his own with no equipment in the dark volcano.
But then George spoke. “Something touched me.”
“Keep swimming, George, don’t freak yourself out.” Richard heeded his own advice, transporting his heavy pack via his lumbering crawl stroke.
“Probably just some floating debris, maybe a cooled magma pillow drifting around the lake,” Ethan offered.