by Rick Chesler
Richard winced with the effort of reaching for the machete in his pack, only to remember with a flood of adrenaline that the last time he saw it, it was buried to the hilt in the velociraptor. But the machete was not his only blade. He swiped a fixed blade knife with a five-inch blade from a sheath attached to the outside of his pack. He managed to grip it and hold it in front of him just as one of the reptile-chickens launched itself at his chest. Richard hit the animal square in the neck with his blade, cutting the head off.
“How do you like me now, turkey?” Ethan glanced over at the explorer in time to see him throw his head back and cackle madly, clearly enjoying his kill way too much. Richard caught him staring and straightened up, asking Ethan, “Where are those girls, anyway?” He looked out across the lake.
But as much as Richard wanted to move on to the next problem at hand, the small dinosaurs still loitered around, and they were far from done. Not all of them were satisfied with gorging on the dead goliath, either. Six of them now launched themselves at Ethan. They hopped up into the air, flapping their wings a bit but not actually flying. The messy bird brigade swarmed around the photographer, their sharp beaks pecking at his legs. Even with jeans on, he could feel them drawing blood, and possibly infecting him with God knows what, maybe some prehistoric disease for which there could be no cure. Great.
“Richard, if you can move, I could use some help.” Ethan grabbed one of the reptiles with both hands and gave it an overhead, double-armed catapult into the lake, where it fluttered its wings for a moment and then sank quickly out of sight.
“The little bastards can’t swim! Chuck ‘em into the lake if you can.” Ethan soccer-kicked another one into the water, taking pleasure in feeling the creature’s bones crack beneath his boot. Then, as he prepared to defend himself against another pint-sized attacker, the bird-thing’s head exploded. Ethan saw a fist-sized hunk of rock come to rest on the ground next to the dead animal, and next he heard Richard whooping it up.
“Score!” After a few more similar volleys, the remaining animals scurried off out of sight along the ledge. By the time both of them checked their wounds, Richard saying his were insignificant compared to the ones he had already sustained, the raft was gliding up onto the rocky shore.
Chapter 18
Ethan grabbed a rope thrown by Anita and pulled the raft up onto the shore. The three women got out and looked around, more surprised to see only two people waiting for them than they were by the dead triceratops slopped on the ledge. Skylar, seeing that Richard was bad off, walked up to Ethan. “What happened here? It’s just you two?” She eyed the three-horned behemoth doubtfully.
Ethan nodded solemnly before taking a deep breath. Then he recounted the grisly deaths of Kai, George, and the Tongan native, finishing with an account of Richard’s injuries and the triceratops and chicken-dinos.
Skylar, in turn, relayed what happened to Joystna, finishing by looking away from the group with a gleam in her eye. They were worried about losing the doctor, but she was secretly glad to have lost George. Now that the other geologist was dead—the only other scientist on the expedition, period—Skylar’s personal agenda just got a little easier. There was no one to challenge her geological descriptions now. She’d been concerned that if one of the team members mentioned that the glittering jewels embedded into the volcano were mica—a superficially glittery mineral but that also happened to be near worthless—that it would come back to haunt her. No need to worry about that now. By the time anyone asked about back in the States, it would be too late. She’d be gone with her diamonds.
Ethan’s face fell with the implication that they’d lost Joystna. “Aye, tough break, losing our physician.” Richard, who had been watching them converse, spoke up, his voice weak and phlegmy.
“Where’s Joystna? You need to go back across to get her in a second trip? You could have put the doctor aboard first, you know.” His body shook with a hacking, wet cough.
Ethan shook his head while walking toward Richard. “Joystna didn’t make it.”
Richard’s eyes opened wide as he was stunned into silence with the grave ramifications. There would be no significant medical care for any of them until they got off the island.
Lara read his expression and told him how they’d divided the contents of Joystna’s medical kit among them. Lara told him she’d take a look at his wounds, clean them up, and see what she could do. She gave him some antibiotics and pain pills, but Richard’s mood continued to sour along with the blood that continued to seep out of him. He nodded to the satellite phone that could be seen clipped to Lara’s pack where she’d left it on the ground.
“Have you gotten out with that yet?”
Lara shook her head. “No, tried several times, but we need a clear signal to the sky. We need to get topside. Now that our two teams are together…” She paused, looking around and seeing that the entire expedition now consisted of only five people. “…we can get up top and place that extraction call.”
After a brief rest, they began loading their gear into the raft. Anita eyed the little boat dubiously. “It’s only rated for four people max, and now we’ve got five plus lots of gear. We’ll be overloaded, but if we go slow, we should be okay.”
“I hope you’re right.” Richard pushed off the ledge he’d been sitting on with a grunt, standing on his own two feet. “Because believe me, you wouldn’t want to swim around in that lake if you saw the thing that ate George.” He shuddered visibly as though recalling the incident with the plesiosaur clearly in his mind’s eye.
After reiterating that Ethan and Richard had fallen into the lake through the collapsed slope and therefore had not found a way down from above, Lara mentioned that there were a series of caves on the opposite shore. Seeing nothing promising on this side of the lake, and combined with the fact that a triceratops and herd of small dinosaurs roamed somewhere nearby, they decided to row back across the lake to explore those possibilities.
They carried Richard into the raft, gently easing him down to a laying position to reduce the strain on his newly dressed dinosaur wounds. Then the rest of them carefully boarded, Anita once again in charge of paddling. Ethan was last to board, and he took a final look at the massacred triceratops, which had started to smell as it rotted into the fetid, humid air. He looked at it closely and thought there was something odd about it. He couldn’t place it at first but then it occurred to him: no bugs. How odd was it to see a rotting corpse in the wilderness that attracted no insects? Ethan had never seen it before, that was for sure. He had little doubt that if this carcass were to lay on an African savannah for all of ten minutes, it’d be crawling with bugs.
He climbed into the raft and gave them a shove off from shore. They glided out onto the vapor-shrouded surface of the lake. Ethan, Skylar and Lara shined their flashlights in all directions from the raft, searching both the shoreline for ways topside and the water itself for potential dangers including large sea creatures.
Even though the lake surface was calm and mostly smooth, the ripples from the earthquake waves having mostly subsided, the going was slow. After a time, they settled into a brooding silence. When at last they could see the opposite shore, Lara produced a pair of binoculars and began scoping out potential landing sites while Skylar shone the search beam. After scanning the area for about a minute, she zoomed in on a particular feature and fine-tuned the focus while Skylar held the light steady.
“There’s a large cave opening, there.” She pointed to a spot on shore while handing the binoculars off to the others, who took a look and passed them around.
“Looks plenty big, like it could lead somewhere.” Ethan made eye contact with the others. “What do you think?”
They agreed to explore it, and Anita paddled the boat toward the new cave.
#
Once the raft had been safely brought up onto the rocky plateau that skirted the lake, the explorers made their way to the cave entrance. They entered five abreast, marveling at how wide th
e cave was. A cavern, really, except that the ceiling wasn’t all that high, perhaps ten feet overhead. Around them, a series of gem-studded stalagmites shot up from the floor. They walked between them as they penetrated deeper into the cavern.
As they made their way deeper inside, the cavern narrowed until they could no longer walk side by side. Ethan took the lead, with the others walking two-by-two behind him.
“Doesn’t look like this leads up, unfortunately.” Ethan stooped as the ceiling lowered to barely above his head. He paced out a few more steps and then turned back to the others. “But it does lead somewhere—down. Let me see if I can get down there. I might be able to—whoa!”
Whatever it was he had viewed down below, it caused him to cut off what he was about to say in mid-sentence.
“What is it?” Skylar and the others clamored for a view of what lay beyond and below.
Ethan shook his head in wonderment before putting a finger to his lips and widening his eyes. Then he peered down once again on the incredible scene. A nest of dinosaurs—at least that’s how Ethan thought of it, made of rocks. What little plant life had managed to grow so far on this brand new island was not nearly enough to line a nest, but the four-foot-high circular wall of rock was clearly intended to be a place for the mother to raise her young.
In the center of the nest, an adult two-legged dinosaur stood about twenty feet tall, its head reaching about to the level of Ethan in the tunnel, but about fifteen feet away. It superficially resembled a T. rex, its skin a pale greenish color. Maybe it was a T. rex? Ethan wasn’t certain, but to him it looked more like… What was that other one called? He racked his brain to recall his childhood books.
Allosaurus! He mentally compared the long-ago images he’d seen in the books to the living, breathing beast right below him. That’s it! I’m looking at a mother allosaurus with her babies! As the dinosaur reached its head down to the cavern floor and raised it again, this time bearing a hunk of meat, Ethan reached for his camera. His hands fumbled with excitement as he brought it to his eyes. He had just composed his image when he realized what the piece of meat was.
A human leg.
Dark-skinned, he knew it likely belonged to one of the Tongan party. His finger kept pressing the shutter button, but he had to look away from the scene as the four baby dinosaurs eagerly pulled at the carnivorous offering.
Suddenly, the allosaurus stopped moving. It froze, its head perfectly still but for the flaring of its nostrils. Ethan put a hand out for the others to be silent. Did it smell them? He didn’t have long to wonder, for one second later, the allosaur leaped out of its nest, leaving its young to fight over the human leg.
It hopped once off the floor of the cavern, leaping at Ethan, who scrambled to turn and run with the others. But Anita blocked his path. She stood there transfixed, mesmerized by the oncoming monster, staring at it in a kind of bewildered rapture.
“Go, go!” Ethan urged, and she did, but a moment too late. The allosaurus jammed its oversized head into the ceiling over Ethan. He felt the rough, scaly skin of the underside of the reptile’s chin scrape the back of his leg as he ran away. He gritted his teeth, expecting to feel the teeth bite into his leg next, and he pictured his own leg being ripped apart in the nest like the Tongan’s. But the pain never came. Yet that in no way meant he was out of danger.
Up ahead, Ethan heard Anita cry out a split second before a slab of rock came crashing down from the ceiling, jarred loose by the dinosaur’s head ram. He saw the others kneel down up ahead, and Ethan wondered why they would do that. Then he got to them and saw that Anita was pinned beneath the section of rock that had fallen. Behind them, the allosaur continued to growl and bash its head into the opening of the cave, no doubt seeking the prey inside.
Ethan watched the dinosaur for a few seconds to make sure it couldn’t reach them. When he turned back to Anita, he expected her to be standing again, but she was still pinned beneath the fallen rock. “Come on, guys, help her up. We’ve got to go!”
As if to underscore Ethan’s point, the allosaurus swung its wrecking ball of a head into the wall of the cave opening and knocked out a sizable hunk, making the entrance a little wider for it. “C’mon already, before it knocks enough wall down to fit its head back here!”
“We need a shovel.” This from Lara, who shook her head at the impossibility of lifting the hunk of rock off of Anita.
“Skylar’s got the only shovel.”
They all looked to the geologist, and she hesitated for a moment, as if unsure about something.
“Skylar, come on!” Ethan urged.
Then she knelt down to her pack and produced a rock hammer, a stout tool, but nowhere near the length of a shovel.
“We need that shovel, Skylar!” Ethan couldn’t hide the exasperation in his voice. The allosaur still rampaged at the entrance, breaking away the tunnel piece by crashing piece.
“I don’t have it.”
“What do you mean you don’t have it?” Ethan spoke over Anita’s yelps of pain as they moved the rock little by precious little over her trapped leg.
“I’m sorry, but it seems I forgot to put it back in my pack after one of our rest stops.”
“Just give us the hammer, then!” Lara held out her two hands, willing her to toss it to her. She went to work on the rock while the allosaurus went to work on its own rock at the entrance to the tunnel.
With Richard nearly incapacitated, the going was much slower than any of them preferred, especially Anita. But Lara managed to make progress, chipping away at the slab of rock pinning down the explorer. Still, the dinosaur’s head reached further and further inside the tunnel-like passage with each passing minute. When its jaws snapped only a foot from Anita’s torso, everyone else having moved to the other side of the rock that pinned her, the handle of the rock hammer cracked in half.
Anita’s eyes bugged out as she saw it happen. “Fix it! Get another one! Do something, please! Don’t let that thing eat me, whatever you do, please don’t let it eat me!”
Ethan’s gaze roved around the group. “Who’s got another rock hammer, anything?” Everyone either replied in the negative or else bent down and searched through their backpacks. Time was not going to permit that, however, with the allosaurus now thrashing the base of its thick tail against the entrance of the cave, further loosening the rock and allowing its head to penetrate even farther inside, only inches from Anita’s trapped body.
Ethan picked up a chunk of rock that had split off from the slab and used it as a crude hammer to break away the remaining pieces trapping Anita. Lara also picked up a rock and did the same, and just as the big lizard’s scaly snout thrust forward, they snatched Anita out from under the pile of rubble. The creature’s jaws snapped at the heap of broken rock while the group rushed back toward the main cavern.
When they got to within sight of the entrance, Ethan stopped and looked back toward the chamber containing the nest to see if the allosaurus was still in pursuit, if it had somehow made it through the tunnel. But either it could not fit, or had decided the humans no longer posed a threat to its young and so abandoned the pursuit.
“Come on, Ethan, let’s get out of here.” Richard’s voice sounded weaker, no doubt as a result of the excitement and exertion. He fell into step with the others, and they exited the cave the same way they entered.
“I’m glad we made it out of there okay,” Ethan said on exiting while looking out on the lake, “but we’re still no closer to finding a way topside. Where should we try next?”
“Let’s get back in the boat,” Lara said, and they piled into it.
Anita paddled them out a little ways so that they had a good view of the shoreline. Skylar pointed to their left, along the rocky shelf fronting the lake. “We’re not too far from where we ran from the stegosaurus into the raft. It ran into that narrow opening, there.”
Lara nodded. “If that dinosaur fit back through there, the cave must be pretty big. It’s tall, too.” She looked up at
the volcano’s interior, the distant cone of light at the top at once mocking and beckoning them.
“Might as well try it,” Ethan said. “I see other, smaller caves besides that one, too, if it turns out to be a dead end. Hopefully, they’re not all full of allosaurus nests.”
Anita rowed the raft near to the same spot they had launched from while the others kept a sharp lookout for predators. Lara stared into the fissure with binoculars and reported no sign of the behemoth.
Anita brought the boat up to the ledge and Ethan jumped out. He held the raft in place with a rope while the gear was handed out and everyone climbed up on shore. Richard was helped out by Skylar and Ethan, moaning softly but not complaining about anything for the time being.
“What about the raft?” Anita eyed their craft now abandoned on the edge of the shelf. “Should we fold it up and take it with us in case we need it?”
This was met with a round of groans. After already taking on increased loads due to the medical kit, the last thing anyone looked forward to was carrying more stuff. But the boat did provide utility that only it could provide.
“Let’s leave it here, but make sure it doesn’t go anywhere.” Ethan grabbed the rope and dragged the raft further from the edge, then picked up a medium-sized stone and set it inside the flimsy boat to weight it down. No one had any objections, and so they trekked across the ledge to the fissure.
Its jagged, oblong outline glowed orange as the team, with Skylar in the lead, entered the volcano’s innards.
Chapter 19
“Stay in the middle.” Skylar’s warning was hardly necessary. On both sides of what was essentially a narrow gorge, with natural light filtering in from high above, rivers of lava flowed toward the lake. They hadn’t seen them emptying into the lake, but Skylar said they must drain to it beneath the rock ledges.