Jurassic Dead

by Rick Chesler

  JURASSIC DEAD

  Rick Chesler and David Sakmyster

  Copyright 2014 by Rick Chesler and David Sakmyster

  Cover art copyright 2014 by Clarissa Yeo

  The authors would like to thank our first readers, Phillip Tomasso, Jonathan Maberry and Daz Pulsford for their encouragement and support. Thanks of course to Gary Lucas and Severed Press for breathing life into our creation, thanks to Finn for providing inspiration with his dinosaurs on the floor, and thanks to you, the readers... we hope you'll stick along for the ride.

  1.

  Antarctic Circle–Russian Drill Site Theta-1, five miles south of Vostok

  Alex Ramirez wished he had stayed at the surface. Halfway down the freshly-drilled pit, the temperature had actually warmed to a balmy minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and at least they were out of the brutal whipping winds, but the cold was preferable to this. In fact, he began to wish he had stayed back in San Diego altogether.

  How did he let Tony talk him into this madness? This insanely death-defying stunt to strike at the heart of two heartless nations trying to profit at the expense of the natural world?

  Oh right, Alex thought, because my father is one of those heartless bastards.

  In a modern-day spin on the Cold War, Russia and America each had set up shop on opposite sides of a massive underground lake, above a discovery that had the whole scientific world abuzz. All that pressure from two thick miles of ice, over millions of years, had created a pocket that had expanded, heated, and melted the glacial ice, eventually forming an enormous underground lake. From initial surveys, it appeared to be teeming with microscopic biological organisms. Some possibly hundreds of millions of years old.

  Following the notion that competition spurns innovation and success, the U.N. sanctioned a race to see which nation could get there first. Much more than pride was riding on the outcome, for the research spoils as well as the biological and mineral output down there could be considerable—and worse, from Alex and Tony’s points of view—could lead even to more exploitation of the last pristine continent left on Earth. Antarctica was the only place left on the planet still untouched by corporate greed. If no one else was going to step in and protect those tiny life forms—which certainly could not stand up to modern-day contamination, let alone further drilling, mining, erosion, and utter destruction of their natural habitat—then he would take it upon himself to do just that.

  Alex adjusted the camera mounted around his neck. It was set up for dual-action filming, both away and toward his face as he rappelled. “How much farther?” he shouted into the mouthpiece under his hood.

  He could barely hear Tony’s answer through all those layers. Through the perpetual gloom above, and all this darkness here, his night-vision visor barely registered the glowing form twenty yards below.

  “What?” Come on, man, don’t leave me hanging—literally.

  The ice sheet tapered at this point, moving to a steep incline as the Russian drill had angled, veering for a sloping entrance to the lake. It was about a half a mile ahead, according to his GPS. Unlike the American site, this one offered more varied approach advantages, including this sloping angle, but perhaps it required more finesse to avoid bedrock and other impediments than a straight linear descent.

  He checked the screen mounted to the camera and confirmed their distance, seeing his and Tony’s icons slightly apart.

  “…setting the charges,” came Tony’s voice crackling in his earpiece. “Almost there.”

  “Stop smelling the roses! Remind me again why you need me down here? I could have stayed up top, securing the climbing gear, and made sure your ass didn’t fall and wind up in the lake.”

  “Redundancy!” Tony yelled back. “This mission is too important to fail. We only get one shot at it. So yeah, redundancy…and heat signatures.”

  “What?”

  “The Russian base was right there, man. Come on, even though it’s nearly pitch black up there and surrounded by winds, you can bet your ass they have infrared cameras and sensors. We got lucky we weren’t spotted.”

  “That’s not luck,” Alex said, grunting after his boots struck awkwardly and he broke into a half-run, half-leaping descent, finally tugging on the clamps to slow his approach. He was almost at Tony’s location, but still could barely see anything.

  “We trained for this,” he added after digging in his boots. “Used up all our considerable Kickstarter funding with these fancy gadgets and schematics, diagrams of the bases and the security movements and… not to mention chartering a plane from Chile.”

  “Should have paid for you to take a few extra flying lessons.”

  “I have my license!”

  “Yeah, but clearly not enough logged hours.”

  “You know what they say, any landing you can walk away from…”

  “We walked away, but barely, and that plane’s toast. Hope you didn’t leave a hefty deposit.”

  “Insurance rules, and hell, we’re probably not coming back, at least not of our own volition or without chains. That was the plan.”

  “Prison barge, only way to go.” Tony fastened some more wires, packed ice around the C-4 and rubbed his hands together. “Anyway, we had nothing to worry about. Security was a joke up there.” Tony raised his hand as Alex approached. He moved to the side and Alex winced with the sudden light from Tony’s flashlight—highlighting the pack of C-4 wedged into a crevasse he had created with a small pickaxe in his left hand. “It was like they were all out on a vodka break. Let’s hope the American side is more of a challenge.”

  Alex shrugged. “How about we count our blessings?” Still, the ease with which they got this far bothered him. He had never expected it. In fact, he had fully anticipated that he and Tony would be in Russian custody at this point, and if they allowed him one phone call, it would be to his father across the ice, to break the news that once again, his useless prodigy had found a way to be a major pain in the ass.

  At least, then good old Dad would have to pay him some attention. His father had run all over the world, gone throughout Alex’s childhood, hunting down old fossils and ancient teeth, caring more about the long dead than the still living. That included his sick wife, Alex’s mother. At this point, Alex wanted nothing more than for his old man to suffer, in whatever form it took. Even if it was having the embarrassment of a lunatic liberal son doing ridiculously dangerous things to save the environment and protect the smallest of Earth’s defenseless creatures.

  “Set the charges,” Alex said grimly, “and then let’s pay a visit to the other team and leave them an equally generous gift.”

  “Double kaboom,” Tony said with flair, and Alex could just about imagine the grin stretching under that visor. “All set here, let’s get down there, steal the sub—which better still be docked there—and haul over to the Americans to set those charges. Then we kick back and—wait, what’s that?”

  Alex followed the direction of the flashlight beam…Down.

  The glare affected his vision through the visor, adding to the ice and fog. He wiped at it and squinted.

  “Oh shit. The Russians.”

  They were coming, rising up from the pit, from the shadows. At least a dozen men.

  “Where are their ropes?” Tony asked, incredulous.

  Alex focused harder. The air temperature dropped, and those dark forms, loping, leaping, darting faster than anything should have been able to climb, moving as if in silent communication, and with a purpose. “Don’t see any, they’re just… climbing.”

  Fast.

  A wave of sudden, absolute and animalistic terror washed over Alex in advance of the approaching figures, and he had the sudden certainty that whatever those things were, moving
with impossible speed and dizzying, jerking motions, they weren’t Russians. Not anymore.

  “We have to get the hell out of here.”

  They turned, attempting to climb, knowing it would be futile—and saw that up was no escape either.

  Another wave of figures perched at the top, waiting silently, patiently.

  Hungrily.

  2.

  “One chance,” Tony said. “Follow my lead!” Ever the daredevil, Alex was sure this wasn’t going to be good, but they had no choice. The Russian figures were a green-black blur in his night-vision, and a wave of icy terror shot ahead of them, rooting Alex to the spot. He felt the tug of gravity, the pull of the blackness down there, and thought he heard whispers in his head beckoning him to come on down and explore…

  Maybe Tony heard the same thing, because a moment later, just as the sound of a multitude of scrabbling boots mixed with some sort of inhuman, almost reptilian hissing echoed off the smooth icy walls of the pit, Tony literally cut the cord.

  “Wait—” Alex started as he felt the vibration in his harness and the tug, and then—Tony was gone. A snap and he shot away and down, tucking like a circus performer shot out of a cannon. He was a rolling blur, blasting right between a gap in the approaching soldiers who turned and swiped at him, but missed.

  “Tony!” Alex struggled, hanging and flailing his arms, adjusting to the lack of weight now that his partner had disconnected. He reached to his belt, fumbling around. Where—

  Got it! The knife…but the latch was frozen. He tugged and pulled. Oh God, I have no time—

  They were almost upon him, and in a glance that he immediately regretted taking, he saw their eyes—glowing and alien-like, ferocious and more than hungry—starving. It was the look of carnivores left in cages for weeks and then tossed a bloody chunk of meat.

  However, it was all Alex needed to galvanize his muscles. That and hearing Tony’s grunting screams, as if he was rolling and crashing into things down there.

  He couldn’t think about Tony’s fate. There was no choice but to take the same route. Another moment and they would be upon him. He released the knife, turned backwards and slashed down hard on the cord—and it didn’t break. Only halfway.

  “Shit!” He screamed and bent his legs, slashed down again as he launched upward. Just in time, he barreled backwards, crunching through a flurry of bodies. Hands and arms reached for him but had no grasp on his Gore-Tex coat. He soared out into the air and sideways for he didn’t know how long, before reconnecting with the incline, jarring hard on the glacial wall, slamming his shoulder, and then rolling and launching into the air again. The camera shattered, but remained attached, twisted around the side of his neck. His visor cracked, and all he could see was a spinning, jarring, green-flecked darkness punctuated by flashes of lighter walls, and in the direction he thought he had come—a multitude of forms, like tiny bats, fluttered after him.

  Shit, he thought. They leapt down toward him in pursuit.

  What the hell are they?

  He didn’t have much time to think, as in the next second, his body flattened out and he slid feet first like an Olympic luger. Looking down past his boots, he couldn’t make out anything at first, and then he saw the tiny flickering glows of what could only be small flares. Nearing the lake shore, he felt the incline leveling slightly, as his body bumped and jarred with the terrain. He dug in his heels as much as he dared without flipping himself over, and reached out—with the knife still in his right hand. Surprisingly, he hadn’t stabbed himself, but now he slammed the blade into the ice, then spun around and grabbed the hilt with his left hand as well.

  It almost wrenched from his hands, but he held on, forcing a huge gash through the packed snow and ice as his descent began to slow.

  He looked back and saw the flares glowing and bathing the area in a dull but painful glare. He took in a wall of crates and machinery, smaller cranes and a generator, and by the shore—something that may have been a two-person submersible.

  Then he dared a look back up, and amidst the ice shards kicking up in his wake, he saw the thing he most feared.

  The pursuers were not slowing.

  They were gaining, and fast.

  As soon as he could, Alex let go of the knife and pushed up with his frayed gloves. Launched to his feet, backpedalling and then leveling out. He had a moment of fright that he would trip on something and crash backward into the lake, but just before tumbling, a dripping wet hand caught his shoulder.

  “Run,” Tony said—and his voice sounded like he spoke through lungs filled with ice water. He shoved Alex with surprising strength. Shoved him far and hard to the left, toward the submarine and one of the flares.

  Alex tumbled and rolled, then slid on a sheet of ice. He yanked off his visor and wiped a sheen of sweat off his face. It was so much warmer down here, almost tropical. He was suffocating in his coat, but he looked back.

  Tony was framed in a red glow from a dying flare by the shore of the formless expanse of the lake. He spread his arms wide as he faced the tunnel to the surface.

  The Russians burst from the shadows.

  Alex’s vision adjusted to the illumination and he noted the device in Tony’s right hand. His friend turned, and in the flickering light, his face looked almost scaled. The flesh around his cheeks was yellow and brittle, his eyes slanted and almost reptilian, and there was only the barest hint of humanity in those pupils—a hint that flashed and winked at him an instant before the horde of Russians swarmed upon him, an instant before—

  —he pressed the detonator.

  3.

  Transfixed, Alex barely heard the muffled explosion over the screams and sounds of rending, biting and ripping. It was like a pack of rabid dogs were attacking one of their own. Alex shuddered and hesitated, then was about to turn to the sub when the mob just… stopped. One of the figures stepped back, holding what looked like a shredded limb, looked at it, sniffed it, and then just dropped it. The others backed away in a semi-circle from the figure on the bloody ice. Tony was barely recognizable, his coat shredded along with his flesh, his ribs protruding from huge bite marks, but a viscous darker mass oozed from lacerations on his face and neck.

  All this Alex could only register in an instant, before mind-numbing fear took hold, as the entire horde of Russians turned toward him, tensing, about to rush him when—a wall of ice and snow roared over them. A massive avalanche collapsed the tunnel with hundreds of tons of glacial ice, silt and earth, and a rolling wave of demolition swept over the soldiers, annihilating everything and sweeping them into the lake.

  It was just the impetus Alex needed to turn and run. The tunnel was gone, the flares winking out, all but one… Sounds of scraping and growling in the darkness behind him. Splashing feet…

  Alex got to the lake edge and hauled open the sub’s hatch. A two-seater…perfect. He angled the nose toward what he hoped was the American side, pushed it free of the shore, and jumped in. He locked the hatch back down and powered on the control systems. Refusing to waste time trying to interpret the Russian symbols, he piloted by instinct, knowing it couldn’t be too different from flying a Cessna or a Beechcraft, and he had studied the schematics for one of these for weeks back home.

  He could do this.

  Now…find the exterior lights.

  He flicked them on, swelling with satisfaction as the twin halogen beams stabbed out into the gloom. The depth gauge immediately caught his attention. The sub was drifting down, fast, so he found the thrusters, angled the control joystick and veered back up. Compass…? There. Guide it, come on. Accelerate.

  Imagining a small army of swimming figures pursuing relentlessly underwater, Alex resisted every urge to look back.

  Sorry Tony.

  Staying on course, keeping the shoreline (or what he hoped was the shoreline) on his left, he maintained a depth of twenty meters and kept moving straight. Fifty meters. One hundred. He shrugged off the coat and threw it in the empty co-pilot seat, breathing a si
gh of relief. Then he took a moment to study the environment outside.

  The water—and the creatures in it. Floating particles, some of them exhibiting non-random movements. Alex could only imagine what he couldn’t see: the microscopic bacterial organisms—those plentiful, ancient life forms he and Tony had set out to preserve and protect.

  He swallowed hard. Thinking… thinking again about the lake. About Tony, and the Russians. He had fallen in, and certainly had been cut up. Did bacteria infect him, get in his bloodstream? Had the same thing happened to the Russians earlier?

  Did what we had come to protect, instead see us as hosts, and attack?

  What had happened to the Russians, and what was happening to Tony?

  Alex studied the inner structure of the sub, breathing hard. His lips were dry and he cut his speed, worried suddenly about striking a rock or a wall, breaking the Plexiglas and letting in those…things.

  He cut the thrusters just as the sub entered an area that had its own illumination. Brighter lights bobbed in the water, and beams were projected from above.

  Welcome to America, he thought, slowing and preparing to descend again, hopefully out of sight before anyone noticed. He would make his way carefully to the far wall and rise to where—according to the American schematics—there should be a dock and an exit ladder.

  First… he turned the sub gently—but stopped before he began to accelerate. Something huge was in the way.

  Apparently lodged in the muck and rising some…fifty feet at least, according to his gauge, Alex had no idea what it could be.

  A rock formation, or a huge glacial deposit?

  Alex steered, trying to go around it to the right. Moving in closer, the bright beams focused and reflected off patchy green flecks, like aquatic lichen or bioluminescent sponges. Here and there were deep gouges taken out of the surface of whatever this thing was, segments plucked out in ways that Alex figured were far from natural. He was no geologist, but the manner of erosion—or whatever this was—seemed…violent and…