by Rick Chesler
Ethan ran to the dinosaur with his head lowered. He rammed the beast in the side like a football linebacker, feeling a spray of Richard’s blood land on his face as the velociraptor whirled around in surprise, reacting to this new threat.
Richard wasted no time in taking advantage of this saving grace, the distraction Ethan had provided. He rolled away from the dinosaur and swiped his machete from his pack. While the raptor faced off with Ethan, Richard rose to his feet and raised the long blade high over his head in a two-handed Samurai stance. He brought the machete down while the dinosaur was leaning over Ethan, who was kicking it in the face with his steel-toed hiking boots.
The blade sunk into the dinosaur’s back for half its length. The beast hissed and spun around so fast that its tail slammed into Richard’s upper body and sent him flying—feet clear off the ground—until he hit the cave wall and slumped to its floor. Behind the raptor, Ethan had scooped up a sizable chunk of rock, preparing to launch it at their attacker.
But the raptor had had enough. It loped out of the cavern, bleating like a wounded animal, the machete still protruding from its back.
Ethan moved to Richard, whose midsection was dark red with copious amounts of thick blood. The explorer held his hands together over his stomach. Ethan knelt down next to him.
“Let me take a look, mate.” He was terrified he’d see guts spilling out of the man once he took his hands away, but Ethan was relieved to see it wasn’t quite that serious. The wound was definitely bad, though, a deep gut opening and bleeding heavily. Not only that, but it wasn’t the only one. Another gouge almost as large marred his upper thigh, and numerous smaller cuts peppered his body as though he’d been beaten with rakes.
Ethan ran to his pack and removed a first-aid kit. He cleaned and sterilized the wounds as best he could and then bandaged them, but the gauze soaked through with blood almost immediately. He didn’t think a tourniquet could be applied to a mid-section wound, but wasn’t sure. The only thing he was sure of was that they needed the doctor, and fast. He handed Richard a couple of painkillers and a bottle of water. Richard washed back the pills and leaned his head against the rock wall.
“Christ almighty, we have to get out of here. Between the Tongan we found half-alive, and those guys over there,” he said, nodding to the bones, “we know what happened here.”
Richard tried to get to his feet. Ethan assisted him, and he had to pause once, but eventually he was able to take steps on his own. Ethan carried the explorer’s pack for him, while wearing his own on his back.
“Don’t worry, mate. As soon as we reunite with Boat Team, the doc will patch you right up.”
Chapter 14
Skylar watched Lara fiddle with her walkie-talkie. “Still nothing?”
The comm tech shook her head, turning a knob on the radio. “I thought maybe if I adjust the squelch so that…” Static emanated from the tinny speaker. “There! Hold on…”
Lara pressed the Talk button. “Boat Team to Slope, do you read?” She held her fingers over the controls, occasionally fine-tuning the settings. For a while, the static dropped out, and silence ruled the channel during which Anita’s quiet sobs seemed like the loudest thing on the island. Then the static returned, this time with a scratchy human voice.
Lara tapped a control and spoke into the radio. “Boat Team, you out there?”
“…read you…hurt.”
A frustrating minute went by during which the two radio operators struggled to improve their signal. Finally, Slope Team was clear enough to hear. “Lara here. Who am I talking to? Is that Ethan?”
“Yes, it’s me. Listen, glad we made contact, but I need to cut right to the chase. We have had two deaths, I repeat, deaths caused by strange animals, over.”
Skylar exchanged a glance with Lara. “Say again, Ethan. Did you say ‘deaths caused by animals’?”
“Affirmative.”
“We’ve had that problem, too. One dead. Listen: we’re near the edge of a cave system right now, on the lake shore but under a large overhang, near the water level. Where are you?”
A burst of static garbled his transmission, then he was audible again. Lara asked him to repeat his last message.
“We’re also somewhere down along the lake, but in a cave system. We’re almost out of it. Our progress is slow because Richard has been seriously injured, but we’ll make it out to the lake, over.”
Skylar raised her eyebrows. “They’re down here? Ask them how they got down here.”
Lara nodded. “Thought you guys would still be topside on the outer slope. Looks like you found a good way down. We’re looking for a way up ourselves, so maybe we can follow you guys back outside?”
Ethan’s reply was immediate. “Sorry to tell you, but we’re looking for a way up out of here, too.”
Lara looked confused as she spoke into the walkie. “But I thought you said—”
“Let’s just say we didn’t mean to drop in on you like this, but it happened. Fill you in on the details when we meet up.”
“Okay, Ethan—listen up: move out to the edge of the lake so that we can see each other—flash a light—and we’ll have a stronger radio signal.”
“Copy that. On our way now. Over and out.”
Lara clipped the radio back onto her belt and looked at Skylar, who in turn eyed Anita, now wiping tears from her face.
“You ready to go, Anita?” The sailor nodded.
Lara pointed toward the end of the ledge. “We should head out there and get out from under this overhang. Hopefully, they’re already on this side of the lake, but we’ll see.”
Wearily, Anita got to her feet and shouldered her pack. The three women started to walk toward the end of the ledge, but Lara stopped when they came to Joystna’s backpack.
“We should take her pack.”
“I don’t want to carry it.” Skylar kept walking.
Lara raised her voice. “We don’t have a doctor anymore, but we could at least redistribute her medical supplies so that we have those.”
“She’s right.” Anita shrugged off her pack and knelt down next to the dead physician’s bag. She opened it and began taking out the medical supplies and equipment. She and Lara began stuffing their own packs with the medical gear while Skylar stood and watched from a distance.
“Come on, Skylar. There’s lots of stuff here. We should take her other gear like flashlights and tools, too, if we can. Come over and put some of this stuff in your pack, please. We might need it later.”
Skylar frowned in Lara’s direction. “All right. One minute, let me organize some room in my pack.” The geologist knelt behind the fragments of the rock the pterodactyl had hatched from. Then she remembered. She turned her head to look at the inside of the rock that somehow acted as an egg for the dinosaur. Maybe like a cyst, Skylar mused. But she could take that up with the biologists later. Right now what concerned her was not leaving behind all those glittering hunks of high-grade diamond ore.
She looked back at her fellow expedition members and saw the growing pile of medical kit gear Lara and Anita were stacking off to one side—Skylar’s share of the increased burden she would have to take on if they had any hope of providing their own medical care whatsoever—that she was supposed to put in her pack. She had to be able to take all that stuff or they would get suspicious, she thought, scooping diamonds into the deep bottom part of her backpack, on top of the football-sized specimen she already had. Have to do something better with these the next time I can, put them inside something, but this will have to do for now…
She saw a small collapsible shovel she hadn’t used yet and removed it from the pack, laying it beneath some crumbled rock pieces. Probably won’t need this thing, anyway. She did the same with a coil of climbing rope. This is just my extra rope, anyway, I also have a main set, so out with this, too… She repeated this process a couple of more times with different types of expeditionary gear, then sat back on her haunches, grinning while she looked into her bag. Ple
nty of room now.
Skylar grabbed two more fistfuls of raw diamonds and dropped them into the bag before standing, picking up her pack and walking over to Lara and Anita at the medical pack. She began transferring the pile of medical supplies into her own backpack.
Anita looked over at Skylar while they stowed the new supplies into their packs. “I know you’re a geologist and not a biologist, but still, you’re a scientist. How do you think it’s possible that that…pterodactyl, right? That it got here?”
Skylar shrugged. “My best guess is that the ‘rocks’ are not really true rocks at all, but actually some kind of pods, or cysts, that protected the animals inside over the millennia. Until today, when they experienced sufficient trauma through the volcanic processes that created this island to break apart and hatch.”
“But baby animals hatch, like birds that start out as chicks. That pterodactyl was fully grown, though.”
“How do you know?”
Anita looked up from her pack, suddenly embarrassed. More than embarrassed…there was another emotion there, too—fear. “Well, I’ve seen pictures—”
“You’ve seen pictures that are artists’ guesses as to how they looked. We’re probably the first humans ever to lay eyes on a living pterodactyl. What if this…” She pointed over to the broken cyst, mentally cautioning herself not to draw too much attention to her private diamond mine. “…is the size at which they hatch, and they only grow bigger from here on out?”
Anita exhaled heavily through her nose, but it was Lara who put words to the situation. “Bones, right? Fossils? Don’t those tell us the size?”
Skylar nodded as she dropped a roll of gauze into her bag. “They definitely help, but the fossil record is by no means complete. What if—?”
But Lara waved a hand, cutting her off as if suddenly frustrated. “Let’s not think about all that just yet, okay?” She held up the satellite phone before dropping it back inside her pack. “We only need to be here long enough to reach the outer slope, where we’ll have a clear signal for the sat-phone, and then we’ll call the U.N. for an early extraction.”
Skylar grimaced under the weight of her pack, laden with stones.
“You okay, Skylar?” Anita glanced at the geologist’s legs with concern.
“Oh yeah, I’m fine. Just a little leg cramp, that’s all. Ready to move out.”
Anita’s gaze lingered a few seconds more, this time on Skylar’s pack itself, probably to see if she had it adjusted right, Skylar thought. Gotta get used to this heavy load fast or they’ll want to redistribute my gear…
Lara’s voice broke Skylar’s train of thought. “Okay, we’ve got everything. Let’s see if we can get out from under this ledge and make contact with the rest of our team.”
Lara walked off toward the end of the ledge while Skylar wondered how long she should let her think she was in charge.
Chapter 15
Ethan was grateful to see the lake water ahead of him. It meant they had finally emerged from the maze-like cave system they’d been exploring. He and Richard, who had slowed the pair down considerably but was able to move himself along with Ethan carrying his pack, leaned against a shallow ledge while they looked out on the lake. As before, a circular cone of sunlight fell upon the middle of the water, with the edges in near darkness.
Ethan had concerns about Richard’s physical outlook but knew they only had to get topside. Then they could use a sat-phone to request a helicopter pickup. That’s how he hoped things would unfold, anyway, but he had traveled to enough remote parts of the planet photographing nature to know that what he hoped for and what would actually come to pass were oftentimes not one and the same.
Still, they had a working plan, and he would stick to it. He flipped on both his headlamp and a handheld flashlight, the beam of which he began sweeping around the lake shore, illuminating the dark reaches where sunlight did not fall. Richard wordlessly did the same. Their four lights swept the lake’s surface and shoreline as they searched for signs of Boat Team.
Ethan had just raised the radio to his lips when Richard pointed. “There!”
Ethan turned in time to see a bluish-tinted xenon bulb flashing on the opposite lake shore. He clicked the button on his flashlight three times until it entered strobe mode, and pointed it toward Boat Team’s light. In return, he received a flashing pattern from across the lake.
He held the Talk button on his radio and spoke into it. “Slope team to Boat, you copy?”
“Yes!” The reply was shouted across the lake, not transmitted through the radio.
“Good to hear your voice, Lara.” And Ethan meant it. He would never admit it to anyone, least of all Richard, but the isolation was getting to him. He found it mentally uplifting to hear another human voice besides Richard’s without the aid of a radio. Then the voice issued through the speaker.
“Okay, so we see each other. What’s the best way to meet up? Seems like a long way to try to walk all the way around, if that’s even possible. Feel like swimming?” The last question was meant to be a joke, but Richard literally groaned at the thought. The matter of what lived in the lake’s dark waters didn’t sit well with Ethan, either, not after what had happened to George. Ethan forced an image of the plesiosaur out of his mind while he replied.
“What about the raft, do you still have it?”
“We beached it up on the shore a little ways from here, to our left as we’re facing you. But it’s not all that far. We could get it and then row across to your location. Does that sound like a plan?”
Ethan looked over at Richard, who nodded vigorously.
“Sounds like a plan, Lara. We’ll be right here, and I’ll be standing by on this channel, over.”
Ethan thought he could hear what sounded like arguing—angry female voices—across the lake. But the lights began moving off toward the raft, so he didn’t ask about it. Truth be told, he and Richard needed them more than he and Richard were needed, no doubt about that. If push came to shove, Boat Team had a sat-phone, they had climbing gear. They could get out of here without the decimated Slope Team if they had to. Richard, meanwhile, could barely move without Ethan’s help.
“Sounds like they’re arguing about something.” Richard set his flashlight on a rock so that it pointed toward the boat team without him having to hold it, a fixed beacon.
“Can you make out what they’re saying? I can’t.”
“I can’t either. Not that I give a damn as long as they get over here. I’m going to take a nap while we wait, Ethan.” Richard adjusted his pack so that he could lean against it.
“Suit yourself. I’ll be right over here, having a little snack.” Ethan climbed up onto a flat plateau about six feet above the ledge he and Richard occupied. He thought it might give him a better vantage point from which to monitor Boat team’s progress across the lake.
A few minutes later, Ethan heard the sound of Richard snoring and looked over to see the famed explorer catching some Zs with his head propped against his pack, standing on one leg with the other laid out flat on a ledge. Ethan felt a little guilty that he couldn’t find a way to get him up here, where there was ample room to really stretch out and relax, but damned if he was going to haul his ass up here.
He was considering tossing a pebble on the man to see if it might disrupt his snoring without waking him up, when he became aware of a different sound, one that cut through the snores. Ethan lay himself out prone on the ledge so as to present as low a profile possible to whatever might be coming their way. It couldn’t possibly be the Boat Team, he could still see the women’s lights bobbing way across the lake. He tossed a pebble over at Richard. It landed on his wrist and did the trick—with a last wheezing sound, he stopped snoring.
Just in time for a tremendously sized beast to come plodding out onto the ledge. Ethan could hardly believe his eyes.
The dinosaur was a massive four-legged beast, substantially larger than the largest elephant or rhino or water buffalo Ethan had ever s
een. Four trunk-like legs with hooves the diameter of a small redwood tree. A long tail that came to a taper with no club or spiked weapon on the end of it. Most distinctive of all, an armored, bony collar at the base of the head, flaring out around the neck and tipped with bony knobs. A pair of pointy horns as long as Ethan was tall jutted from above the beast’s eyes, and a single smaller horn sat atop its nostrils. The trio of horns gave the creature its name.
Triceratops.
Ethan couldn’t help but notice the animal’s mouth was oddly beak-like, as if the mouth of a giant squid had been fastened to the face of this monolithic reptile. The photographer shrunk back out of an abundance of caution. He could not imagine a more horrific fate than to be mauled to death by one of these primordial brutes. As he watched the triceratops, it dug its right front hoof into the ground, repeatedly sliding it across the same spot as if digging for something. It accompanied these efforts with grunts and snorts. Occasionally, it would dip its head down and employ one of its long tusks to assist in the digging.
Suddenly, the animal stopped its rooting around and lifted its gargantuan head while keeping its body still. Ethan found it amazing that such sheer bulk could be controlled so precisely. It stood stock still, eyes laser-focused on a spot in the distance. Ethan looked that way and didn’t see anything. So what was the beast concerned with? A chill came over him as he was struck with a possibility. Had it detected the humans’ scent? Or Richard’s ragged breathing? If he started to snore again…
But in the next few seconds, that terrifying notion was dispelled when a second dinosaur—also an adult triceratops—rambled into sight, this one from the right side of the ledge near where Richard slept. The newcomer also halted suddenly upon sensing it was not alone. Not only was there another creature there, but one of its own kind. Although he’d never had the chance to observe dinosaurs in the wild before this fateful trip, Ethan knew that when two adult animals of the same species met, they were likely either one of two things: potential mates, or rivals. Which would these be? He certainly had no idea how to tell a male triceratops from a female at a distance.