Jurassic Earth Trilogy Box Set

by Logan T Stark

  A few drops of lava had melted through the seat cushioning of the bike, making the seat hot, but it wasn’t unbearable. There were numerous drops of cooling crusty lava across the bike, but she knew she simply had to accept getting burned. Burns weren’t death. Burns would heal.

  “Take a bite, Becca. Take a bite and swallow it.”

  She held the door in place, resting it on her back, then switched on the quad and gunned the throttle. Something heavy pounded the floor behind. She didn’t turn to look, instead she tore a path towards the cooksite. There was so much lava rain she found it difficult to override her instinct to dodge when a drop fell directly ahead. She knew if she steered too wildly she’d topple and possibly damage the bike. That would spell game over. She couldn’t do that, there was no plan B. She held her face low and forced herself to accept the steadily accumulating burns. Either side of the trail trees exploded, spraying flaming sap in an ongoing chain reaction of pounding destruction. The bike suddenly lurched as the front tire deflated. She bogged down and veered wildly to the right. By some miracle she managed to avoid flipping and corrected the struggling quad.

  “Keep it together,” she shouted. “Come on you pile, not much further.”

  Sometime later, having battled through an onslaught of fire bombs and falling snowy ash, the lava rain subsiding, Becca drove past the remains of the viewing platform which, until this morning, had overlooked a majestic lake surrounded by lush green prairielands. A raised monorail had run through the tropical paradise, which had been teeming with wildlife. Now, there was no green, no life and no monorail. Only the lake remained, oily black, reflecting the alien structures arching overhead, which now resembled the legs of an enormous spider that had crawled from the mouth of Hell.

  The titanic demon was perched menacingly on the cliff wall of the plateau. Between its legs, Becca could see what remained of the volcano. Its left flank and the side facing the plateau had been completely blasted away. The explosion had cleaved a deep wound in the Earth’s crust, into which the Tethys Ocean was swarming. Violent jets of moaning steam, lit crimson, were erupting from the newly formed abyss.

  “Gone…” was all Becca could find. She inadvertently released the throttle and the bike slowed. “That’s gonna make fog, scalding fog. Anything else?” She said, looking up. “You’re laying it a little thick don’t you think?”

  She cried out and recoiled as something hopped onto the bike’s handle bars. A little creature was chattering wildly, its large eyes full of terror. She quickly recognized it as one of the meerkat creatures Reece enjoyed feeding in his spare time. Because of Reece’s interactions, the fuzzy little critters were accustomed to humans now. She couldn’t remember what he’d called them. The Jurassic team had discovered so many animals and plants over the past half a year of exploration, none of which were in the archaeological record, it was impossible to keep track of the rapidly growing encyclopaedia.

  Another few creatures scurried from the ash covered foliage and hopped onto the bike, all wailing at Becca, their little hands frenziedly grappling for purchase. Her heart sank. There had been an entire colony of the magnificent animals and now they’d been reduced to a mere few terrified survivors.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, moving off slowly so her passengers could ride along safely. “Hold on, we’re getting out of here, just keep hold.”

  There was a new sound now, taking center stage, a deafening hiss. Logically, Becca knew it was steam venting from the lava filled wound in the Earth’s crust as it filled with ocean water, but she imagined it to be angry Gods, hissing at her for the destruction she’d wrought upon their world. An entire island, abundant with life, had been blasted from the face of the planet and she’d played a hand in its destruction. The island blamed her and she knew she deserved it.

  Exhausted and mortified, Becca arrived at the cooksite. She barely took in the fact it was splattered with dark volcanic rock and almost totally unrecognizable. She ditched the quad and staggered for the bunker, flanked by a handful of the cutest creatures nature had ever conjured. She heaved open the security door and held it, allowing the creatures to scamper inside. One of the animals stopped short. It stood on its hind legs and clutched its paws to its chest, casting fearful glances at the dark interior of the bunker and the firestorm raging through the forest either side of the clearing.

  “It’s okay, it’s safe,” Becca said softly. “I won’t hurt you. I promise, I won’t hurt you. I just wanna help.”

  The creature gave a distressed cry, its tiny pink tongue flapping, its wild eyes pleading.

  “I’m sorry. There’s nowhere else to go,” Becca said, stooping down and holding out a palm. “You have to come with me if you want to live.”

  The animal threw a terrified glance at its burning home, as though saying goodbye, then scampered past Becca.

  The bunker door closed with a loud click. Inside, a series of reinforced windows only an inch or two high skirted below the roofline. They glowed orange. Propped against the far wall were some folded camp beds and chairs, a good number of twenty-five liter water barrels, paraffin, charcoal, a rack of dining utensils and some dry packaged foods. There were also crates which she guessed contained shelters of some kind, or sports equipment perhaps. Reece always dealt with that kind of thing.

  Becca shrugged off her backpack and moved to the rear of the bunker. She took a few bowls from the rack, filled them with water and set them on the floor. She drank some herself, then sank down in the corner against the concrete. Whilst her companions enthusiastically lapped, Becca genuinely considered the unthinkable for the first time in her life. Sometime later, spiralling into a well of hopelessly dark thoughts, mewling and squeaking creatures engulfed her, slipping under her arms and nestling into her lap. A tear rolled down her cheek. The little critters would never understand they’d probably saved her life.

  Angry Gods

  T he days moved with sluggish unease, as though the immortal bow-master who fired the arrows of time had become distracted for the first instance since the spark of creation. Time now moved in feverish fits and starts, drenched in sweltering darkness and punctuated by Becca’s bleeping watch, in which distended shapes flashed behind a shattered web of glass. The deformed timepiece heralded the arrival of tidal waves that battered the broken island. The shaking roar of the waves was accompanied by the distant boom of volcanoes on the surrounding islands which, as expected, erupted when the moon passed over. The obliterated beast at the center of Jura Island remained silent. It would take thousands of years for the volcano to summon another cataclysmic scream.

  The cycle of earthshattering noises continued without discernible rhythm. Becca was beginning to wonder whether the cracking detonations that shattered the darkness weren’t angry Gods, testing their artillery, their weapons of war, readying for a final assault, taunting her until she decided to venture from the safety of the bunker, at which time they’d squash her like a bug. She tried to banish the idea, becoming aware the hopelessness of her situation was sending her thoughts to unhealthy places, but the effort seemed more impossible than constructing a starship from rock and wood that might ferry her back to the future. There was no escape. There was no hope. No one was returning to an island they thought was destroyed to search for a person they believed was dead. There were no two ways about it, she was going to die here and there would be no one to hold her hand in the final moments.

  A sense of shame began snaking through her mind. She was beginning to realize she’d never stopped to consider the safety nets that had surrounded her back at home. Sure, at the back of her mind she’d known they were there, but she’d never stopped long enough to give genuine thanks for the bounties of modern life. The banality of things people whinged about now seemed utterly absurd. Modern people were becoming enraged by everything, most of it trivial, like how people went nuts if the Wi-Fi went down or if someone had a different opinion to theirs. From where Becca sat, there wasn’t a place on Earth she would
n’t have swapped for her dank cave one-hundred and forty-eight million years from home.

  Modern humans seemed increasingly blinded to one inalienable truth, that on twenty-first century Earth humanity had found equal footing with the Gods. For the first time in history, the tools to overcome almost every hurdle was in development or available and spreading to the corners of the planet. Advancements in food production, medicines, transport, energy, housing, education, mechanics, computers and a wide range of technologies were improving the lives of everyone everywhere, almost without exception, yet everyone seemed angrier by the year and desperate to hunt down reasons to be enraged, reasons to be offended. Hardly anyone was stepping back to acknowledge how good things had become.

  Sure, awful things and tragedies would always occur, fate wasn’t always kind, but there was hardly a problem out there humanity wasn’t combatting head on, like the plans to construct mobile snow machines powered by wind turbines, which would suck up sea water, freeze it and re-coat the Poles in snow, reversing global warming. There were also the refrigeration coils that extended beneath artificial solar-panelled islands, which helped lower ocean surface temperatures and weaken hurricanes. They’d already saved trillions of dollars and countless lives. No matter how big or small, someone somewhere was working on a solution. Wave powered machines were already clearing the oceans of plastic and in Greenland, forests of carbon trees had been erected to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Mistakes and problems across the board were getting solved.

  People didn’t need to choose sides so aggressively. People didn’t need to ruthlessly enforce their opinions or agree on everything. Everyone was missing the point. They were missing all that was good and only focussing on the small percentage that was bad. The truth was, that compared to ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of humans that had ever walked the planet, life had become so good, so comfortable, so bountiful, so secure, that people had forgotten to be thankful and were instead teaching themselves and others to become outraged by an ever increasing roster of pettiness.

  Becca knew she’d been guilty of this too. Everyone was. The acuteness of her situation was reshaping her mind into a lens she’d never been forced to gaze through, showing her with absolute clarity how mindless she and everyone was becoming. She’d wasted so much time on anger, she’d forgotten to acknowledge the beauty that had surrounded her. Now, she had all the time in the world, but nothing to do with it and no one to share it with.

  “I’d do anything for one more day,” she whispered, “just twenty-four hours, just that. I’d fill it with so much magic. I’d do so many good things. I swear I would.”

  The rains returned as Becca pondered the wretchedness of her situation and the growing anger of mankind. Perhaps the problem was human nature. Maybe it was in our DNA to find ever more elaborate ways to destroy ourselves, to group ourselves off and fight. It certainly seemed like the end goal for some, especially the types who were drawn to power. Maybe we weren’t designed to be so many, living in increasingly close proximity. Perhaps overpopulation was the underlying cause.

  Then again, maybe the anger had always been there, in all civilizations throughout time. Maybe we were simply more aware of it nowadays because of mass media coverage, twenty-four hour rolling news, eager to turn the trivial into overblown dramas of epic proportions, actual societal Armageddon. Perhaps the media was the root of the problem, stretching truth and spinning stories into life or death issues, the end of civilization as we know it, triggering their followers to become enraged and eager for updates, the fuel for their righteous fury.

  The internal debate raged, but the answers continued to elude Becca. Rain drummed overhead and her head ached. Sometime later, squeaking sounds distracted her from the infernal noise rattling around her brain.

  “Uch, thank you,” she said with a sigh, rolling on her camp bed and fumbling for the gas lamp on the floor, which she’d found on the shelves at the back of the bunker. “Oowowow, that’s bright,” she said, shielding her eyes and allowing them to adjust. “Just a sec.”

  The small room, no bigger than ten meters by ten meters, had become a sauna and the sweat on Becca’s arms and legs glistened. She’d removed most of her clothes and her survival suit to stay as cool as possible. If it was making a difference it was hard to tell. The heat was close to unbearable. When she sat up the squeaking amplified. Next to a gathering of bowls beyond her bed, she saw five twitching noses and five sets of hopeful eyes, shining brightly.

  “Hungry?” She said, chuckling. “Come on then.”

  The creatures began darting amongst one another, hopping and bounding, squealing ever louder as Becca swung her legs from the camp bed. She’d decided to name her roommates eepees, as it was the closest thing to the sound they made when excited or hungry. They also liked to pee, a lot. A few days back, Becca had sliced up some tent canvasing and made an eepee latrine in the far corner, which she’d walled off with a camp-bed placed on its side, but the creatures hadn’t seemed interested in being housetrained. Instead, they went wherever they pleased whenever they chose. She’d even caught one peeing in its own water, which although disgusting to humans, wasn’t uncommon for wild mammals. The eepee was simply marking its property. They regularly cleaned their bits with their tongues so a small squirt of urine wasn’t going to do it any harm.

  That said, the mess created by five wild creatures living in a confined space was beginning to accumulate. Becca was doing her best to collect and bag the worst of the filth. She was positive the place would smell riotously unholy to anyone entering from the outside, and was under no illusions she wasn’t also adding to the funk. After a restless sleep on the first night she’d had a wash to soothe her burns and blisters, and clean off the worst of the dirt, but was too fearful to waste water on washing ever since. They were already drinking more than she’d bargained on due to the aggressive heat. There was a fresh water source nearby, which fed a waterfall that cascaded from the plateau, but she’d no idea if it was still flowing and had no way of checking.

  She couldn’t venture outside because of the scalding fog, which would boil her in seconds. She’d discovered this to her cost after opening the door some days ago, perhaps it had been a week. It was hard to tell. Her left hand and chest were still sore from coming into contact with the steam. Opening the door had at least confirmed something positive. It wasn’t sealed by lava and that was a triumph. They weren’t entombed alive. Silver linings and all that. Becca felt confident the scalding fog would subside in a week or so, and had enough supplies to weather the storm. There was no reason to leave the bunker just yet. If the Gods wanted to smite her, they would have to wait.

  She re-filled the eepee’s water bowls and crunched half the contents of a tube of Pringles, which she sprinkled on the floor. The eepees were quickly squabbling and stuffing their faces with eager hands, little cheeks bulging. She hoped they could soon return to their diet of grubs, insects and plants. Their current diet, which rotated between Pringles, Pretzels and Doritos, wasn’t exactly balanced. It certainly wasn’t doing Becca’s digestion any good. She longed for fresh fruit, a strawberry or some melon, or some milk to ease her growing acid reflux, or some avocado, delicious avocado. On the other hand, she felt fortunate they had a diet at all.

  If they were careful there was enough food and water to last a few more weeks. To avoid mishaps, she’d stored the supplies in a crate and weighed down the lid. Little hands attached to little brains wouldn’t understand a midnight binge could kill them all, which she was trying to delay for as long as possible.

  Whilst taking stock and rationing their supplies, Becca had discovered a crate containing a number of vacuum sealed pouches of potatoes and a few rolls of silver foil, for tourists to roast in the cooksite fire pit. She quickly worked out she could heat the potatoes using the gas lamp, but was holding off until the bunker’s dry foods and the energy bars from Reece’s ready bag ran out. She only had a couple more gas canisters and didn’t want to waste t
hem on long burns. With the ash clouds blocking the sun, and now that the fires across the island had died, there was absolutely no light entering the bunker through the narrow windows. The ability to see was also a commodity she’d been forced to ration.

  She’d found a Maglite and some spare batteries in the ready bag, but was saving that as a last resort as the beam was directional. It didn’t shed light in a three-hundred sixty degree arc like the gas lamp. She didn’t like the way the torch made the shadows creep and crawl. It made her mind do funny things, which it was doing far too much of lately. She needed the moments of steady light and the sight of the eepees to flush away the darkness gathering inside her skull.

  When Becca and the eepees had finished their rations, she reluctantly switched off the gas lamp. She lay back in her bed and stared in the direction of the thin windows skirting the bunker. Still no light. Despite the sweltering heat, she shivered. She wasn’t sure how long it had been since she’d seen the sun. She was now a mole person, a Morlock, a being of the underworld. The mad thoughts were crawling towards her again, from all sides, formless inky beings that penetrated deep and writhed in her brain like maggots on rotting flesh. The Gods continued to taunt her, to test their mighty weapons, shaking the planet in fits of vengeful rage. As usual, the frightened eepees joined her on the cot where she soothed and petted them to sleep.

  “I know what you are,” she said as the little creatures rumbled and snored. “You’re angels come to save me.”

  Born to Die

  O n the plus side, Becca’s arm felt free from pain and she’d cured the worst of her burns by licking them and blowing on the wetted patch. She’d gotten the idea from listening to the eepees clean themselves in the darkness. The improvised treatment had worked miracles. Scarring appeared minimal, not that it mattered. On the negative side, the absence of pain informed her at least three or four weeks had passed since she’d entered the bunker, which was further confirmed by their dwindling rations. Only a small amount of dry food remained and the gas canisters were spent. They’d depleted much faster than she’d anticipated, which meant she was forced to use the Maglite, which she hated, but at least it was light.