“I couldn’t agree with you more, Captain,” Slick said. “I’ve already been thinking ahead of you. With fifty-one men, I figure we can assign ten or so each to one leader. Three groups will be assigned to camp operations, the other two will split security and recon duties. Of the base groups, one group will be responsible for finding food. One will be responsible for preparing food, and the other general camp maintenance.”
“Good, good, I like the way this is shaping up,” Brazo said. “Right now, I think we stay here for a maximum of two weeks. Unless a miracle occurs and we’re rescued, I’m going to move us to higher ground. As we paddled to shore, I noticed the tallest point north of here. It’s going to be a hike, but we can learn the most about our situation from up there.”
“We could always send a recon team out,” Slick said.
“We could, but I wouldn’t want them that far away without backup. If there’re more dangers out there, I want all of us to be together in the fight. To win, we’ll need all the numbers we have. You know what we faced in the ocean. I’m sure you’ve considered what we may find on land.”
“All the life we’ve encountered so far hasn’t proved much of a threat. Maybe animals on land are different. Maybe evolution on land here is different than in the ocean.”
“Sounds a lot like wishful thinking,” Brazo said. He looked around. “Large animals would avoid dense jungles. Something the size of a T. rex needs real food, not something the size of a banty rooster. Big dinosaurs would live in areas not as dense even as we’re in right now. And big dinosaurs need to eat other big dinosaurs.”
“Understood,” Slick said. “One last thing, before I go check on the men. The Germans, if they’re here, what about them?”
Brazo slowly nodded. “Indeed…what about the Germans?” His voice had faded in the end.
*
Rodrigue and Underwood had paired up when the XO assigned eight crewmen to help guard the perimeter while the other crewmen were busy setting up camp.
Adam Rodrigue had been a church-going boy whose father taught him the difference between right and wrong from the time he was in the cradle. Growing up in the ʼ30s had been tough in Thibodaux, Louisiana, on the banks of Bayou Lafourche. The sugar cane industry had steadily declined over the years, and his father had resorted to hunting and fishing to provide his family food and income.
Adam had been a curious child and had chores suited for a boy well above his age level. His father rose well before the sun came up, but Adam would always be at the kitchen table right after the first pot of coffee came off the stove to share a cup.
His father taught him how to tie a clinch knot on a hook and how to tease the fish into taking the bait. By the age of five, Adam had his own .22 rifle. The gun was a single shot crack barrel, and his first kill had been a beaver. His dad hated beavers. The pests constantly blocked streams and threatened their property with flooding. His mother had used the tail to make soup with egg noodles and peas.
By the age of ten, Adam could disassemble and reassemble his dad’s 3.3 HP Evinrude boat motor. There was no task he was too afraid to try and learn. Even welding, which didn’t prove to be one of his better skills.
Education had been secondary to learning life skills. Still, he had mastered math basics and understood fractions and decimals. He was told his reading level was a couple of grades behind, but so far, as long as the words were in English, it hadn’t proved to be much of a hindrance.
Adam looked over at Danny Underwood and wondered what was going on in his buddy’s head. He didn’t know much about Danny, other than he was from New Orleans and looked to be a few years older. So far, he hadn’t made an effort to talk to anyone about the horror they just went through to get here. Was Danny scared? The man didn’t show it. Adam had felt a burning pit in his gut ever since they reached shore. There were parts of him that felt numb. It took concentrated effort to keep his wits alert, pushing the images of his mates torn apart from his own mind.
“What are you staring at?” Danny asked. He was around ten feet away, leaning his left shoulder against a tree.
The black cloud of Adam’s reverie dissipated, and Danny came into focus once again. “Uh, nothing. Just thinking.”
“Better keep your eyes moving. You want to live, don’t you?”
Adam quickly looked about, fearing his lack of attention had put them both in danger.
Several minutes went by without anyone saying a word, then Danny said, “You look kind of young to be in the Navy.”
“I didn’t feel too young, until today.”
“I’m twenty-two. Been in for four years now. I’ve seen some action.” Danny dropped his gaze. “Nothing like today, though.”
“I’ll turn eighteen in a month. Seven months in, stateside. The Sutton is my first deployment.”
“Seventeen. You must have lied to join up.”
“No, the recruiter knew I was seventeen. My dad signed the papers to let me join.”
“Your dad? Man, he must’ve wanted to get rid of you.”
Adam shook his head. “No, it wasn’t like that. My Uncle David died in Normandy storming the beach on D-Day. He...” Adam’s voice broke. “He was my Parrain.”
“Parrain, that means Godfather. You must be Catholic.”
“I am,” Adam pulled out a medal of Saint Valerie from under his shirt and rubbed his thumb over it.
“How many Hail Marys did you say while the monsters were attacking us?”
“I lost count.”
Danny laughed. “I don’t think much about religion and stuff. But if that’s works for you, it’s a free country.”
“Yeah, and I want to make it a free world, too. I was so mad when I got the news Uncle David died. He never married or had children. So, I guess he thought of me as his own. He joined the Army wanting to put a stop to Hitler and Mussolini, and gave his life trying. I had to badger my dad and mom day and night for two months before they agreed to let me sign up with the Navy.”
“Your Uncle David sounds like a good man. At least you know he didn’t give his life in vain. Hitler and Mussolini are both dead, and it’s men like him who allowed the Allies to kick the Axis’ butt in Europe.”
“Yeah, just as soon as we finish the job in Europe, I’m gonna get transferred to the Pacific. There isn’t ever going to be peace until we kick the dog out of all our enemies,” Adam said.
“Can’t let the Japanese beat us. They’ll make us start eating raw fish heads,” Danny said.
“I can’t—” Adam stopped mid-sentence as something rustled a fern in his peripheral. He darted his gaze over to it and brought the barrel of his M1 up to waist level.
There was nothing there. It could have been just the wind, but an inner voice didn’t believe so.
Danny was on full alert, and hurriedly brought his rifle to his shoulder as a reptilian bird hiss-cawed and bolted from a nearby branch.
An eerier stillness fell about. Adam looked over at Danny for direction, but the man seemed just as unsure as he.
After several minutes had passed, Danny relaxed and rested the rifle stock on the ground.
The knotted muscles in Adam’s back loosened, allowing him to expand his chest and take in a deep, refreshing breath of air. Staying this on edge all the time was exhausting. His mind drifted in anticipation of his watch being over, hoping for the cool of the night and a place to lay his head to ease in blessed relief.
A head poked through fern leaves a few yards away. It took a moment for Adam’s eyes to take focus. At first, the head didn’t look real. The head reminded him a grass snake’s, but it was larger than a German Shepherd’s head. It opened its mouth, and instead of a forked tongue coming out and tasting the air, it showed rows of leaf-shaped teeth. The eyes appeared large for its head, and penetrated deeply into Adam’s alert gaze, setting off every danger signal in his brain.
The head disappeared, rocking the fern as it made its escape.
He brought his rifle up, but there was
nothing to aim at.
Danny took two steps closer, and whispered, “I saw it too. What was that thing?”
“I dunno. I don’t know much about dinosaurs. That one didn’t look too big.”
“Well, it didn’t stick around. Maybe it’s more afraid of us than we are of it.”
“You think?” Adam said, hope in his tone. He craned his neck as far as he could to see beyond the foliage. “Well, I guess it’s gone. We—”
Danny cried out in surprise.
Turning, Adam saw his crewmate face-down on the ground and being pulled backward by a dinosaur that had him by his left foot. The creature in many ways looked like a larger version of the smaller dinosaurs they had encountered on the way to camp.
Directly behind it, another of its kind waited to join in on the feeding. Long, slender legs with raised sickle-shaped claws on the inside of feet gave it a bird-like appearance. The head and body were all reptilian, though, stretching at least six feet in length, and over three feet in height. Its olive-green skin had golden stripes marking its spine.
Adam raised the rifle and fired at the troodon holding Danny in its tooth laden trap. The bullet ripped into its left side and knocked it off balance. The other beast brought its small arms into its chest and cocked its head back in surprise.
He fired again, striking the wounded attacker where the heart should have been.
The dinosaur dropped, and its companion backed away.
Before Adam could get off another shot, something hooked into his shirt above his belt, digging past the top layer of skin and pulling him off balance, down to the ground on his back.
Golden eyes with curved, blade-like pupils loomed above a troodon’s open maw. It struck snake-like for his throat.
Adam barely had time to bring the M1 over between them. The dinosaur’s jaws snapped down on the rifle’s stock and steel barrel instead of his soft neck. The troodon uttered a raspy hiss. Bits of teeth chipped off and hit him on the cheek.
Danny started screaming latticed cries of pain and not surprise.
Stealing a quick glance, Adam was horrified seeing three troodons had Danny surrounded. One had him by the left leg, another, the right arm. His rifle lay useless on the ground. Adam could do nothing but watch as the third troodon raked the sickle-shaped claw across Danny’s abdomen. Blood, intestines, and assorted viscera belched out over his thighs.
Adam’s pulse throbbed in his ears, rhythmically blocking Danny’s shrill shrieks of agony for far too brief of moments. His crewmate was getting slaughtered, and he was in the fight of his life.
The troodon gave up on biting through the rifle and retracted its head. Adam wasted no time in bringing the butt of the rifle over and smashing the dinosaur on the side of its skull. The blow was effective, as it staggered sideways, giving him time to roll over to his feet. Bringing up the gun, he shot the troodon in the chest before it had a chance to attack.
Danny’s cries had given way to sickening sounds of teeth ripping into raw flesh and guttural grunts, as chunks of his body disappeared down the troodons’ throats.
Two more troodons appeared from behind the feeding frenzy. Apparently, they didn’t want to share in the kill, and instead, preferred a fresh one for themselves.
The two separated and came toward Adam, cautiously stalking in an attempt to surround him. The wounded troodon’s left arm had gone limp, but it still had plenty of fight left in the rest of its body.
There was more commotion behind Danny. An unknown number of troodons headed toward the camp! Adam prayed the gunshots had everyone on alert and ready to fight. He was in no situation to warn them. In fact, unless he acted quickly, he would share Danny’s fate in a matter of seconds.
The rifle went up, and he fired two shots into one troodon, two shots into another, and one more into the wounded one, who keeled over dead.
The other two hissed and snapped into empty air but didn’t go down.
Carefully aiming this time, he squeezed the trigger, only to hear a dull click. Out of ammo! His clip had failed to eject, reminding him he was empty.
Sensing the advantage, the two wounded troodons advanced toward Adam.
Instinct took over, and Adam spun around on his heels and ran in the opposite direction. Fear gave wings to his feet as he fumbled to remove the M1’s clip. He didn’t know how fast the dinosaurs could run, especially now that they had been shot, but through fleeting glances backward, he knew they struggled in pursuit. He zigged and zagged, doing his best to lose them.
Time lost all meaning at first. All his mind knew was to keep running and never stop. Jungle foliage became a blur. His feet went up and down, each inch hopefully pushing him from harm’s way. He ran and ran, too scared to stop in case they were right behind him.
A wall of thick brush veered him off his path to offer cover after maybe a good quarter hour of fleeing. He smashed past a scrubby bush, not feeling the cutting leaves on his arms until he was well past them. The skin would grow back. The pain didn’t matter. If the dinosaurs got a hold of him, it would be the end.
He had fished an ammo clip from his pocket between strides and racked a bullet in the chamber. In this thick brush, it would do him little good to lie in wait as the dinosaurs would have to be on top of him before he’d see them and get off a shot. Too close for comfort. He needed to reach an open area and find a place to hide, take them out as they exited the brush.
He put both arms up and pushed past a large palmetto. His foot came down on empty air and Adam lost his balance, tumbling down the side of a steep hill.
The foliage wasn’t near as thick there, which was a disadvantage. More plants would have helped to break his fall. Now, he struggled to hold on to his rifle, roll down the hill, and keep from twisting a foot or breaking an arm. He narrowly missed smashing into a tree trunk. Over and over, down he went on a wild rollercoaster ride.
Finally, after a descent that seemed like it would never end, the land flattened out, and he rolled to a stop.
The next few moments he lay still, cautiously testing various parts of his body to measure injury, but keeping his gaze on his surroundings in case more predators were in the area.
As near as he could tell, there was nothing worse than scrapes and bruises, although a couple of his ribs on the left side might have been cracked. Still, nothing that would put him out of commission.
He pushed himself up from his hands and knees, and then picked up the rifle. At this point, he was so turned around he wasn’t sure which way was camp. How far had he run? It couldn’t be that far as a crow flies, but heading in any direction other than the right direction, would be disastrous.
Surveying the area, he realized a gully at least fifteen feet wide stretching as far as he could see to either end hindered him from traveling north. He walked over to the gully and saw the walls of either side dropped off some thirty feet.
There was one advantage. A medium sized tree had fallen some time ago and lay across the gully, acting as a natural bridge. Its branches had long since rotted off, and Adam questioned its integrity.
One of the troodons following him poked through the foliage at the top of the hill. This surprised Adam, thinking his shots would have done more damage. It didn’t make the same mistake as he and slowly stepped down the hill.
The other troodon arrived, and now two were coming for him.
No matter, he had eight fresh bullets and several more clips in his pocket. He would wait for them to get a little closer and take them out like ducks in a shooting gallery.
Just as fast as his confidence grew, it came all crashing down. Five new troodons emerged to join the wounded.
The odds were no longer on Adam’s side. It was unlikely he could get in enough successful shots before succumbing to the hungry mouths of the dinosaurs.
He looked over at the tree spanning the gully, feeling a little light headed as death quickly approached. Running over to the tree, he hopped on the three-foot diameter trunk, and stood on wobbly legs.<
br />
The troodons were close enough that he could hear the clawed feet kicking up dirt and the hisses of anticipation.
Adam held the M1 in front of him like a balance pole and began to step across the tree.
At first, he put one foot in front of the other, trying to keep his gaze across to the land on the other side. He imagined that if this tree had been lying on flat ground, he could have run across it. But it wasn’t, and heights had always made his knees weak.
One step was a little less than sure, and he almost lost his balance. His butt felt like it rose up and stuck in his throat. He steadied himself, and now led with his left foot only, inching his way across the tree, his right foot trailing his left in measured steps.
A troodon arrived at the tree and hissed loudly.
The hairs on Adam’s neck bristled. For a moment, he thought he felt its hot breath. But that was just his imagination. He had to maintain control and concentrate on his walk, not the danger that he prayed to God wasn’t capable of following.
More troodons arrived. He felt them strike the tree with their claws and bodies, not knowing if it was out of frustration or if they were so angry they were trying to knock him to the depths below.
Were these dinosaurs smart enough to work together like that? He hoped not, and just wanted them to leave. What would he have done if they had followed him across the tree?
Just a few more steps, and then just a couple of more. Soon his foot found solid ground, and he quickly brought the other by its side. He had made it!
Turning, he saw the seven troodons snaking their heads back and forth, obviously frustrated.
One of the wounded could barely stand. It listed to one side. When it reached its limit, its left leg collapsed, and the beast tumbled down into the gully’s darkness.
Adam considered taking careful aim and killing as many as he could, but then thought better. He was safe for the moment. Firing his weapon would only signal his location to other creatures in this land. That, he didn’t need.
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