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“What was all that bollocks with the gold melting, Cap?” Wiggins said, shouting to be heard above the rotors.
Banks looked directly at Buller.
“The wanker here said it himself,” Banks replied. “Magic. Snake magic. I think somehow the gold and the snake were part of the same thing. And if the wanker here wants to come back and fuck with it again, that’s up to him. But we’ll be leaving it well alone.”
He went up front and was looking out of the window as they passed over the dredger rig. Boitata had come down river with them, her bulk sending a wake crashing across both sides of the river as she surged and with one smooth movement flowed over the facility, crushing it down into little more than bent metal and splinters of wood in a matter of seconds.
By the time the chopper had passed fully overhead, the whole platform was a mass of debris in the water. The pilot banked around to give Buller a final look at his failure.
The last thing they saw was the river god, Boitata, swimming back upstream, the wash from her passing sending more great waves against the bank on either side.
“Time to go home, lads,” Banks said, to an array of smiles from the squad.
“Good. I never want to see a snake that size again,” Hynd said.
“Funny, that’s what your wife said to me,” Wiggins replied.
The End
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Chapter One
Taking this job had been the worst mistake of Emiliano’s life.
That fact grew clearer each day. Cutting timber in the Amazon hadn’t been the adventure he’d thought it would be. He slept in a hammock under a thatched roof with nineteen other men. Food ranged from bad all the way down to inedible. Even after sunset, the temperature never dipped below incinerating and the humidity threatened to suffocate him. The work was tough, the biting insects tougher.
Then there were the nights. Darker than any he’d ever experienced. The creepy animal noises from the rainforest and the impenetrable blackness stoked primal fears he thought he’d left behind under his childhood bed. This logging camp made him wonder how many stories of Amazonian monsters were actually true. Many days he doubted he was any better off than he’d been in the Sao Paulo barrio shack he’d abandoned.
This morning, men worked around the edge of the several hectare clear cut, swinging axes and wielding chainsaws. Near the center stood a pile of scrap timber and debris. Bruno, a stout man in baggy shorts and a tattered red T-shirt wore the tanks of a flamethrower on his back. He aimed the wand at the debris and sent a stream of orange fire into the heart of the pile. It burst into flame.
Emiliano finished filling his chainsaw with gas and screwed the gas cap back on. Fuel leaked from the carburetor’s base and created a shiny trail down the saw’s side. The chemical stink combined with the oppressive heat made his head swim. He stood up and shook it off.
“Gabriel, come on,” he said.
His younger brother approached with a chainsaw resting on his shoulder. Two years younger but four inches taller, with a shaved head and broad shoulders, the muscle shirt he wore exposed strong biceps and a simple five-pointed star on a heavy chain around his neck. Gabriel should have been intimidating as hell. But mentally, he’d never gotten past eight years old, and Emiliano had been looking out for him ever since. Recruiting his brother, his last living relative, for this adventure had seemed a necessity. He’d been afraid to leave Gabriel behind to fend for himself. Now he was afraid he’d led him into a jungle hell instead.
Emiliano pointed to a huge mahogany tree at the clearing’s edge. “That one’s ours. You ready?”
Gabriel gave one of his goofy grins, made even more comical by his crooked teeth. “Okay, Mili.”
Emiliano wished he deserved the complete trust Gabriel bestowed on him, but after getting them into this mess…
“I’ll go high, you go low,” Emiliano said. He judged which way the tree would fall, then pointed to where he wanted Gabriel to start cutting.
Gabriel went to the other side of the tree. They both yanked their chainsaws to life and sent the teeth biting into the dense wood. Two rooster tails of shavings sprayed through the air.
The mahogany surrendered slowly to the saws. Gabriel’s saw bit too hard and stalled. He worked it back out of the slot he’d cut.
But he’d done enough. Emiliano drove his saw deep. A wedge of wood dropped out of the trunk. Emiliano extracted the saw. The tree began to buckle at the cut.
Then, meters away from the trunk, the roots at the far side began to pull from the ground. The tree leaned in the opposite direction of the cut. Its shadow swept across the ground and landed on Gabriel like a sniper’s crosshairs. Gabriel stood oblivious in the dark stripe, trying to restart his saw.
“Gabriel!” Emiliano dropped his saw and charged his brother. He gripped Gabriel’s waist in his headlong rush and drove him away from the falling tree’s path. Gabriel dropped his saw as Emiliano drove him to the ground.
The tree smashed to the ground with the staccato crackle of snapping branches. It missed their feet by millimeters and sprayed a shower of dirt all across their legs. The trunk crushed Gabriel’s saw and the stink of gasoline and oil polluted the air in an instant. The echo of the crash rolled away and left the clearing dead silent.
Other workers sent up a cry. Men from around the clearing sprinted to Emiliano and Gabriel. Emiliano shook his brother.
“Are you okay?”
Gabriel grasped the star around his neck with one hand. He wiped some dirt from his mouth and nodded. “I think so.” He looked over at his crushed chainsaw. “The boss will not be happy about that.”
Emiliano got to his feet and swept some leaves from his hair. He helped his brother up.
A worker arrived at the tree and cried out in terror.
The fallen tree displayed a fan of dirt-clotted roots like a peacock’s tail. They exposed a sheet of gray stone underneath. Emiliano stepped around for a closer look.
Embedded in the rock was the fossilized skeleton of a giant snake, with huge fangs and a head nearly a meter long.
The man who’d screamed stepped away from the stone. Others arrived and jerked to a stop beside him, as if the fossil emitted some repellent force.
“It’s a demon,” one man whispered.
“Creature of Hell,” another said.
Gabriel looked over Emiliano’s shoulder. He grabbed his brother’s elbow. “Is that a demon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are there more like it still around?”
Emiliano certainly hoped not.
Chapter Two
Four years ago
The tarp covering the desert excavation created a parallelogram of shade, but it made no difference. Dr. Grant Coleman still felt like he had a front seat to a blast furnace. But if his team could get this Allosaurus skull out of the sandstone in one piece, the discomfort would be well worth the reward.
At Grant’s feet, three sunburned graduate students in T-shirts and frayed shorts worked at the fossil with dental picks and brushes.
“This is so slow,” one of them whined. “We’ve been digging this out a millimeter at a time for days.”
“It’s been there for a few million years,” Grant said. “There’s really no hurry to do it improperly.”
“But seriously, this is so…mind numbing.”
“Because you aren’t savoring the thrill of discovery,” Grant said in over-the-top dramatics. “The excitement of being the first set of human eyes to see what you’re bringing to light. Here you are, in the solitude and silence of the desert. It’s just you and a former apex predator.”
“You have to admit,” another student said. “The heat and all is a little draining.”
“But there are no insects, no drenching rains, and the air wicks away sweat in an instant. You can’t always pick and choose where to do paleontology, but when I can, I pick the desert. You wouldn’t catc
h me dead in a jungle.”
Grant left the excavation and joined Hannah, one of his most promising students as she searched a rock wall for signs of their next big find. Multi-colored layers of sediment ran like wavy lines across the stone. A broad, floppy hat shielded her pale face from the sun.
“Anything promising?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
She sidestepped left without looking. Something rattled at her feet.
A rattlesnake lay coiled in the sun between two rocks. Its raised head pointed at the two of them. Its rattle stood erect and vibrated its chilling warning.
Hannah froze. Grant’s pulse spiked. He gripped Hannah’s shoulders.
“Nice and easy,” he whispered. “Step straight back with me.”
She followed his lead as an awkward dance partner. One, two, three, four synchronized steps backwards. The rattling stopped. The snake lowered its head.
“Oh my God,” Hannah whispered. “I didn’t see that snake at all. That was so close.”
“Too close. Rule of thumb: give a snake all the room it wants.”
“Wow.” She looked up at him in admiration. “You stayed pretty cool around that snake.”
“I’ve seen a lot of them in the desert. You get used to them.”
In reality, sweat ran down his spine and his heart hadn’t slowed down yet. Snakes gave him the creeps, with their slick scales and their penetrating slit irises. He hoped Hannah wouldn’t notice the tremble in his hands. He transitioned the discussion into a moment of instruction.
“In the past, they got much bigger than that. There are documented snake fossils over ten meters long and over a meter wide.”
“I’d hate to stumble across one of those.”
“So would I. Lucky for us we missed their heyday by millions of years.” He directed Hannah to the right. “Let’s check the sediments a little further over here.”
He glanced back at the snake. Its forked tongue whipped in and out of its mouth. It didn’t blink.
He decided he could go years without seeing another snake up close, and that would be just fine.
Chapter Three
Present day
Grant slapped an insect on his cheek. He checked his palm and saw a splat of blood. The Amazon jungle was turning out to be everything he’d thought he’d hate, and more. He dipped his paddle back into the river and kept the canoe moving downstream.
“There are more insects down here than up on the plateau, no?” Janaina Silva said.
“Yes, but at least they’re smaller.”
Grant and Janaina were the sole survivors of an expedition to an unknown plateau in the far reaches of Amazonia. They had battled an Ankylosaurus, pterosaurs, and giant ants. They’d barely escaped with their lives, climbed down to the river, and begun a long downstream paddle they’d hoped would get them back to civilization. Back in the United States, Grant was a professor of paleontology and a horror novelist. Janaina was an environmentalist and advocate for native peoples’ rights here in Brazil.
The humidity seemed to sap every bit of energy from Grant. Sweat rolled down the sides of his face. His arms ached from paddling.
The canoe navigated a curve in the river. A sandbar appeared up ahead, an unnatural white between the rich greens of the jungle and the river’s tannin-brown.
“That would be a safe place,” Janaina said. “Perhaps we take a break, stretch our legs.”
“Hey, you know that I’m good for another hundred miles, easy. But if you need a break, then we should certainly take one.”
Janaina flashed a bright white smile. “You are so kind to be putting my needs first.”
Grant pulled in his paddle and sagged in the seat. “Well, it’s all about the team effort.”
Janaina steered the canoe onto the sandbar. It nosed in and Grant stepped out. After a few hours folded up, his legs took some coaxing to keep him erect. He finally rose to his full height. The younger Janaina hopped out without effort.
“No need to show off,” he muttered to himself.
Janaina pulled her dark hair out of its pony tail and gave it a shake. It brushed her shoulders. The week of outdoor adventure had bronzed her skin. Grant had just burned.
“I have to confess something,” Grant said. “Fighting the dinosaurs up above the clouds? That wasn’t my first rodeo.”
Janaina drew her hair back into a pony tail. “That was not a rodeo. I have been to the Festa do Peão de Barretos. I have seen a rodeo.”
“Sorry, that’s an American phrase. I meant to say that last week wasn’t my first encounter with giant creatures the world thought were extinct.”
“Now I think you are, how you say, pulling my foot.”
“That’s pulling your leg, and no, I’m not. Over a year ago, I was recruited to explore a cavern in Montana that had been sealed for thousands of years. Inside, we discovered giant scorpions, a giant bat, and a host of other species that hadn’t ever encountered modern man.”
“Such a discovery should have made you famous, no?”
“The cavern flooded and all the evidence was destroyed.”
“Wait, wasn’t that event what you wrote your little scary novel about?”
“Yes, it was. And that non-fiction fiction did make me a bit famous. Famous enough that the late Ms. Katsoros recruited me for our adventure with the pterosaurs because she knew the story was true.”
“Ah, so that is why of all the paleontologists in the world, TransUnion hired you.”
“That and I work cheap. As an example, I’m not even charging them for the days we are going to spend here paddling down river.”
“You are quite magnanimous.”
“Just one of my many faults.” Grant stretched his back. It creaked. “Now I don’t want you thinking I’m some kind of giant monster magnet. My first experience was a fluke, and the second time someone else brought me to them on purpose. I have complete confidence that we will get downriver without encountering any mythical monsters.”
“That is good. We will just keep the list of worries to pit vipers, anacondas, crocodiles, piranha fish, jaguars, and a dozen painful or poisonous insects.”
“That list makes the pterosaurs look kind of good.”
“We can paddle back upstream if you’d like.”
“Nah, been there, done that. We’ll stick with snakes and jaguars. Normal sized.”
“If we stay on this sandbar much longer,” Janaina said, “we’ll see crocodiles. This is a prime sunning spot.”
Grant hopped for the canoe. “No need to tell me that twice. I’m at my big reptile quota for the week.”
They pushed the canoe back out into the river. As he prepared to step in, Grant noticed water seeping into the bottom through a split in the old wood.
“Whoa! Wait!” He pulled the canoe back onto the sandbar. Grant lifted his end out of the water. A hairline crack ran along the seam between the two sides. “This isn’t going to get us home.”
Janaina scanned the river bank. “Wait…I saw…there!” She pointed upstream. “We need to go there.”
Grant thought they’d get that far before sinking. They boarded the canoe and paddled to the river bank. His estimate of their seaworthiness was way off. More water seeped through the crack on the way over. A lot more.
“There had better be a solution here,” he said, “because that was this canoe’s last trip.”
“There is one right here,” Janaina stepped out of the canoe and over to a rough-barked tree with narrow, waxy, green leaves. “Wild rubber.”
She took off her belt and used the prong in the buckle’s center to gouge a descending line across the trunk. The wound slowly filled with milky sap.
“We will patch the split. Mother Nature provides.”
The sap drew slowly. It was almost an hour before they had enough to fill the crack. Janaina caught the sap and applied it to the canoe’s wound with some leaves.
“That may stop the leak, but not the split,” Grant said. “Hand me yo
ur belt.”
Janaina gave him her belt. He took off his own and joined them together. He looped them around the stern of the canoe and cinched them tight. The crack closed up and squirted rubber sap from the tightened split.
“That ought to hold it,” Grant said. He didn’t sound as certain as he’d planned to.
He prayed it would last to the river’s end, wherever that was. They relaunched the canoe, and headed downriver into the unknown.
The Curse of the Viper King is available from Amazon here!
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