Landing Party: A Dinosaur Thriller

by Rick Chesler

  Chapter 28

  Skylar disconnected the call and smiled to herself. She had set everything in motion. She would get through this on her own. She—

  “Skylar!”

  The geologist whipped her head around to see Ethan standing behind her, hands on his hips, an angry scowl on his face. “What the hell is going on? I just heard you mention dropping a bomb on the island, and that I wasn’t alive. Care to explain yourself?”

  Skylar produced the gun she had taken from Richard’s backpack and leveled the barrel at Ethan’s chest.

  “Because you’re not alive, Ethan.”

  Skylar’s finger pulled back on the trigger but just then the earth shook, knocking her slightly off balance as the gun fired. The bullet went wide left, grazing Ethan’s right arm, which dripped blood onto the scorched rock.

  The ground continued to shake, knocking both of them off balance. By the time they regained their feet, the unbelievably large head of the T. rex was visible behind where Ethan had been standing. Skylar fired off two rounds at it, both of them disappearing somewhere into the monster’s chin. The reptile paused for one second before resuming its course toward the humans.

  Making matters worse, the source of the skittering, scratching noises made itself known as a herd of the chicken-sized beasts that materialized from behind them. Skylar spun and blasted off three more rounds while Ethan ran off to the right without a word. Fortunately for Skylar, the T. rex chased after Ethan, who thought that might happen but wasn’t sure how many bullets Skylar had left and so opted for what he perceived as the lesser of two evils.

  He found earlier that by bobbing and weaving his way down the slope, taking cover for a few seconds at a time among different rock formations, that he could trick the giant dinosaur into thinking he had run another way. He wasn’t sure about the animal’s sense of smell, how good it was, but figured that the sulfurous gasses wafting through the air might be preventing it from detecting him. At least he hoped so.

  Skylar fired off more rounds into the herd of birdlike attackers. Surprisingly, they scattered into multiple directions, leaving those that remained ineffectual against her raging boots. She stamped on a few of the lingering chicken-like beasts, until those that remained scuttled out of sight down the volcanic slope.

  She looked around for Ethan and the T. rex, but they were both somewhere out of sight. She hoped the terrible lizard would consume Ethan, and with him, her witness to attempted murder, but unless she saw him dead, she wasn’t going to believe it. He had managed to survive out there with it while she was in the crevice, after all. Besides, she still needed to worry about herself. These small predators could return at any moment.

  Skylar checked her weapon’s clip: only a single shot remaining. She should have searched Richard’s backpack more carefully to see if he had brought along extra ammunition. Frowning, she moved off in search of Ethan. She had reported him as dead! Even though, should they both end up testifying before some committee back in New York, it was only his word against hers as to what happened here, her voicemail saying she was the only survivor would be the final nail in her coffin… Unless she could manage to hunt Ethan down. Hunt him down and kill him the same way these God-awful dinosaurs were doing to the rest of the expedition members. Then she would simply dump his bullet-riddled body into a lava pit and say he was carried off by a T. Rex. She made a mental note to recover his cameras after she killed him in order to have proof of the animal threat here.

  One shot left, though, will have to be very careful… She now wished she hadn’t ditched her pick axe in order to collect more diamonds. It would come in handy as a backup weapon in case the first shot didn’t take Ethan down. Not to mention against the animals. But after she dispatched Ethan, she would scavenge his equipment.

  The geologist moved off cautiously onto the summit, listening carefully as she picked her way across the uneven slope. She was under no illusions that it would be a simple matter to locate her quarry. The summit was full of nooks and crannies, caves and crevices in which he could hide. And she wasn’t his only threat, either. That tyrannosaur gave him extra incentive to hunker down somewhere, and fast. But that could be a good thing, since it meant he was less likely to try to get to another part of the island altogether. He would almost certainly hide out somewhere nearby.

  It also occurred to her, as she slinked around a jagged outcropping of rock, that she wasn’t exactly immune from danger herself simply because she had a gun with one bullet. Ethan was like a cornered animal now, and everyone knew cornered animals could be extremely dangerous. He could leap out from behind a rock at any moment—

  She heard a noise up ahead and froze. Something like a rock being dislodged. “Come on out, Ethan. Let’s talk about this. If you come at me, you leave me no choice.”

  Seconds passed in silence. “Ethan! Don’t do anything stupid. If—”

  But it wasn’t Ethan who crept out from behind the rock. It was a strange dinosaur, sort of like a modern day monitor lizard but much larger, and with a large sail fin on its back. A narrow, forked tongue flicked in and out of its mouth as it moved slowly toward Skylar.

  Shit. She didn’t see how at first the outcropping could conceal such sizable bulk, but as the lizard moved out of the way, she realized it had crawled up and out of a hole in the ground. While she was staring at this, the animal lunged at her. Skylar had no choice but to use her final bullet. She fired at the animal’s chest and hit it in the neck. A fount of blood geysered out of its throat and the big lizard stopped in its tracks, lowering its head.

  Skylar didn’t stick around to see if the damage she had done would have a lasting effect. She ran off to her right, down the slope, skidding here and there on loose rock but not stopping for anything until she was out of sight of the beast. She lay on her backside and listened for telltale signs of the animal’s approach, hearing none. Apparently, she had dealt it enough damage that it had decided she wasn’t worth the effort. That was her final bullet, though.

  She looked at the gun still clutched in her right hand. It was now useless, except as a means to scare Ethan, since he had no way to know it was empty. But that didn’t give her a lot of comfort. Even if he was fooled by the impotent firearm, she now had no easy way to kill him. She would have to trick him into thinking she had ammo left, tie him up, and then…do something messy.

  She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she didn’t see what choice she had at this point. Keeping the gun out on the ground in front of her, in case Ethan showed up, she decided enough time had passed that it was worth checking if she had received any kind of acknowledging message on the sat-phone in reply to her voicemail. It would be good to know when that helicopter was going to get here. She lifted her butt off the ground and removed the device from her back pocket.

  Her heart sank before she even looked at the screen. She could feel a web of cracked glass. You idiot, you sat on the phone! She flashed on her battle with the sail-fin lizard and realized with an uncomfortable start what must have happened. When she had backed away from the beast down the slope and fell, she had landed hard on her backside—and the phone. She cursed herself for putting the fragile device in her back pocket instead of a front one, or even better, stowing it away in her pack again.

  What was she thinking? Now she would have no way to coordinate her pickup when the helicopter or plane or whatever it was they were sending arrived to drop the bomb. Sure, she had told them in the voicemail to proceed with the bombing if they didn’t hear from her, but that was just showmanship to make herself appear more altruistic—that she was willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good. She had planned all along to call them when she heard the engine and have them pick her up before they dropped the bomb. Surely the U.N. would supply them with a sat-phone that had the expedition’s number in it? She supposed she may be able to contact the plane using her handheld radio, but in reality, she suspected she was going to have to make herself physically visible by standing out on the
summit waving some kind of signal flag.

  And that meant making herself vulnerable to the dinosaurs. And Ethan.

  She stared at the empty gun in front of her and strategized.

  #

  Ethan Jones actually managed a grin as he stared with one eye through his camera’s viewfinder. The T. rex’s eyeball filled the lens, but from a safe enough distance. He was hunkered down in a cave so small as to be claustrophobic, but right now, he wouldn’t have it any other way. If he could barely fit, it meant that nothing else big enough to eat him would be able to, either. And that was more than fine with him.

  He snapped off a few more shots of the incredible creature and then dropped the camera around his neck. Besides the fact that a rogue T. rex roamed about within throwing distance, and that one of his expedition members—the only surviving one—had gone crazy and tried to kill him, something worried him. When he had picked his way down the slope on the way to finding this cave, he had seen more cysts hatching. Quite a few more. He didn’t stick around to see what was going to emerge from them, but for all he knew, there could be a dozen T. rexes about to come looking for human prey.

  The sharp crack of another cyst hatching open somewhere in the immediate vicinity of his hideout interrupted his grim thoughts. He thought about what was happening on this island, about how it was that these dinosaurs had come to be here. He knew the entire island had formed when an undersea volcano had spewed up magma from deep inside the Earth out of the ocean floor. Was it possible that these…cysts…these strange rocks, were carried up by the magma, and able to withstand the heat without shattering or dissolving? That in so doing they had transported through the eons a set of animals that should be extinct? How many of them could there be? Hundreds, he knew that for sure. Thousands? How many more waited to be ejected from the depths of the Earth and hatched into the present?

  He ruminated over these unsettling thoughts while the popping of more cysts continued all around him outside. How long would the island itself even hold together? Crack… At this rate, the whole fiery rock would be in pieces before that bomb Skylar phoned in even got here…

  And speaking of Skylar… Ethan began to look through his pack. He would have to do something about her if he was going to get off of this island alive.

  Chapter 29

  Nuku'alofa, Tonga

  CIA Special Agent Valea Esau summoned all the restraint he could muster in order to politely thank King Nau’s guard and assistant before he was ushered into the Malo Nau’s suite. He had to keep up the illusion that everything was all right, just another day in paradise. He knew that Nau’s people knew him only as a local mechanic who worked on the royal fleet, but at the same time, the sheer number of personal visits to the king’s palace would seem out of place for a man of his stature. Valea knew the rumor mill would start to swirl if this kept up, but he was pretty sure this would be the last visit for a long time.

  The door to the suite was closed as soon as he stepped inside and a smiling Nau greeted him ebulliently before moving to the bar. But this time, Nau waved him over.

  “Please, Malo, no drinks today. Time is very short and what I have to say is entirely sobering.”

  Nau halted a few steps from the row of crystal decanters and frowned, but then took a seat opposite Valea without having made a drink. “Tell me, Valea, what is happening?”

  “The U.N. received a call from Expedition Gaia—the single surviving member of it.”

  The king’s bushy eyebrows made a tent above his eyes. “All except for one are…”

  “Seven out of eight are dead. A rescue mission is being prepared as we speak to pick up the sole survivor, a geologist, Skylar Hanson. I wanted you to know, because…”

  “Because they are going to bomb the island?”

  Valea nodded wordlessly.

  “Was no evidence of my landing party discovered?”

  The g-man made uneasy eye contact with the king before going on. “Actually, Malo, they did.” He related what he knew, which was relayed to him from his U.K. agent, Baxter. “Our asset on the trip—now deceased—got out a satellite call stating that they had found a Tongan man alive but in very bad shape. Those were all the details I had at that time, and Hanson’s call made no further mention of it.”

  The king looked confused. “I do not understand, Valea. As unfortunate as that it is for my people on the landing party, discovering one of them means that they did in fact land on the island, which is good for our political situation as it relates to the Neptune’s Inferno project, is it not?”

  “Yes, and I even had our mole plant some Tongan flags to bolster the presence.”

  The king reared his head back. “Then what on Earth is the problem?”

  Valea took a deep breath while he tried to think of how he was going to explain the dinosaurs. “Maybe it is time for those drinks after all, Your Majesty.”

  The king smiled and made the trip to his bar, then returned with two glasses of amber liquid. Then he listened as Valea recounted Skylar’s report of living dinosaurs rampaging across the island, infesting it.

  “I do not want these monsters invading Tonga. Perhaps it would be better to bomb the island, after all.” The king held up a finger before continuing. “Assuming, of course, that Tonga receives its fee, as you promised.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty.”

  Chapter 30

  How long would it take for the aircraft to arrive? Skylar wasn’t sure, but she did know one thing: she needed to be atop the summit when it showed up. Not to be visible to that aircraft was tantamount to suicide. At the same time, she couldn’t simply hang around in plain sight on the summit unless she wanted to ring a dinner bell for the cornucopia of prehistoric super-predators that roamed this fiery isle.

  Ethan could come for her, too. She couldn’t rule it out. She’d tried to shoot him, so he may take an offensive approach for Round 2. So where to position herself up here so that she could wait around in as least jeopardy as possible? She didn’t think the air support would take more than twenty-four hours at the most to arrive, and possibly as few as eight. She needed to get ready.

  Skylar looked about from her current position. Wedged in between a cluster of rocks that formed sort of a teepee over her head, she was nice and safe from a predatory perspective, but it wouldn’t do for when that aircraft arrived. Reluctantly, she emerged from the natural shelter and glanced about the summit slope. She had worked her way down slope and now would have to regain some ground to make the summit peak again.

  Empty gun in one hand (for Ethan) and a small knife in the other (for everything else), she began making her way up. The rain, falling harder now, made her footing less secure; she had to place each step with care. Despite the fact that her heavy pack slowed her down considerably, she would not consider lightening her load of precious gems. She was not about to go through all of this for anything less than a life-changing financial windfall. She spidered her way up the slope, ducking into rock formations for cover here and there, emerging again after listening for animals.

  When she had nearly reached the summit, a large head peeked over a rocky ledge. A tongue flicked in and out of a mouth. A humongous lizard, perhaps the size of a Guinness Book of World Records alligator, stared at her with black eyes. Then she heard skittering off to her right, turned and saw more of the chicken-things coming her way.

  This was simply not going to work. Eyeing the summit, her best hope was to hang out inside the crevice where she’d found the sat-phone, then wait and pop out when she heard the aircraft. But there was no way she was going to reach that with these dinosaurs blocking the way. What’s more, it wasn’t exactly a comfortable, safe spot where she could lay down and rest. She’d have to hang on vertically, wedged in there until the plane or helicopter got here. If she fell asleep or tired and lost her grip, she’d fall all the way through to the lake.

  Operating on the principle that there had to be something better than that—hoping there was, anyway—Skyla
r altered her upward course in favor of one that took her laterally around the summit rather than higher. For some reason, there were more dinosaurs up top. That didn’t mean she didn’t have to fight a few off here and there, though. The little ones. Fortunately, she didn’t encounter a large mob of them like on the cliff, but instead, smaller gangs of 10-20 roamed the hillside, seemingly at random. When they neared her, she stomped on one with her boots and the others would scatter and get back into formation some distance away.

  She trudged on, now with a rip in her pant leg where a smear of blood showed through. Need. This. To. End. But wishing wouldn’t make it so, and she forced herself to march onward. To where, she wasn’t sure, but somewhere, anywhere, to hide from the dinosaurs and that would also afford her at least a chance of spotting the aircraft before it dropped the bomb.

  After a while, she began to cough, too. She’d never been a smoker, was not asthmatic, and so she knew it must be the poor air quality here on the island. But it hadn’t been this bad when she’d first got here. Looking up toward the summit, she saw clouds of ash darkening the sky, raining slowly down upon her as they mixed with the actual rain to form sludgy, gray pustules of ash that stuck to her skin.

  She zoned into a kind of hiking trance, daydreaming of better times gone by while devoting a part of her brain to a kind of auto-pilot, remaining alert for the sights and sounds of dinosaurs and the volcano itself. She still had a lot of time to pass, and, as she glanced down again at her bleeding leg while hearing a screech from an unknown animal somewhere above on the slope, she knew she would not last out in the open until the aircraft arrived. When she had made it about three-quarters of the way around the volcano, though, she still hadn’t seen a good opportunity for a hiding place.