"Hold on," Colt said. "Look at the trees beneath them."
The tree tops were being ruffled slightly, as if something was passing by. The motion went back several yards behind the brontosauruses, indicating that there were other creatures causing the disturbance. They could see the heads of a few other dinosaurs along the tree tops; these were not brontosauruses, but other dinosaurs that Colt originally thought were chasing the slower, taller prey.
But that didn’t look right. It reminded him far too much of what he had seen before the stampede of raptors had attacked them.
"Are they being chased?" Colt asked Leslie.
"It looks that way," she said.
They watched as the forest continued to be disturbed. Ken peered ahead, watching the angle of their retreat carefully. "They are running at an angle." He held a finger up and traced backwards, following the trail of commotion. "Damn," he said.
"Whatever it is…" Leslie said.
"It's right behind us," Ken finished.
"What the hell is it?" Joseph asked.
"Who cares?" Colt asked. "We can either wait to find out, or we can run."
"Agreed," Leslie said, and started running forward.
Everyone else followed, taking off in a huge dashing cloud of legs and arms. No sooner had they started than they heard an enormous footfall behind them. Colt dared a chance back behind them and saw a bend in the tree tops. As he watched, a tree snapped along the top and went sailing. Behind it, he saw a huge body marching along in an awkward posture.
And then it let out a roar.
It was deafening and violent. It was a roar that made it quite clear that the creature voicing it was intent on death and destruction.
"Faster!" Colt screamed.
"What is it?" Joseph asked.
"I'm not sure, but I'm afraid I have a good idea."
Ahead of him, Leslie turned around and he watched as her eyes grew wide. She then seemed to kick herself into a faster gear when she screamed out the same thing that Colt had been thinking.
"T-rex!"
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In the course of his many travels and filming for his television shows, Colt had managed to get himself into some dangerous situations. He'd been stranded on a mountainside in the wake of an avalanche. He'd been chased by a tiger while investigating in Africa. He'd been bitten by two snakes, one of which had been rather poisonous. And in one of his favorite clips of all time, he had fallen nearly twenty feet from a cliff in Indonesia only to have a local trail guide reach out at the last time to save him.
But all of that paled into comparison to what he was enduring now. He was last in line of the four survivors of Joseph's crew and there was a prehistoric killing machine stomping along behind him. By the time the monster had taken its third stride towards them, Colt could feel the tremors in the ground. Ahead of him, Joseph cried out and went to the ground. In a move that was so fluid Colt could barely believe he'd done it, he reached down and scooped Joseph up by the armpit and shoved him forward, back on his feet and running.
Colt glanced back and realized that while the T-rex looked like it was moving slowly, it was incredibly misleading. One huge stride of its feet closed the distance between them quickly. Trees were knocked over and dirt was kicked up as it caught up to them. Colt was running as fast as he could, so fast that he passed Joseph, catching up to Ken and Leslie. He had never run so fast in his life but the T-rex was still catching up somehow.
The fear that was shooting through him felt like electricity and he could barely even feel his feet hitting the ground. Behind him, another stride from the T-rex made his legs feel like jelly. It let out another roar that he could actually feel pressing against his back. Colt tried to move faster, but he had already stretched his limits. He was now behind Leslie, whom was ridiculously fast. Ken was directly behind him, and Joseph trailed in the end.
Colt was dimly aware of the fact that he still had the gun in his hand but he knew it would be useless; he may as well have tried throwing rocks at it. And besides that, in the time it would take him to stop and turn, the damn thing would be right on top of him. So there was nothing they could do but run, hoping to find some way to escape the monster that was even now closing in on them more and more.
He turned his head to see how much closer the thing had gotten and when he did, all he saw was the rough leather-like grey of its stomach. Its arms were small but still vicious, making claws about fifteen feet over his head. Colt turned his head, screamed, and bolted forward again and when he did, his right foot struck an outcropped root.
He went down to the ground hard, barely able to get his arms up in time to keep from breaking his nose. He then worked on pure instinct, rolling hard to the left and into a thick green plant of some sort. When he did, he barely caught sight of Ken just ahead of him. He saw Ken for only a second before he was engulfed in an enormous shadow.
"Ken! Move your ass!"
But Colt already knew that Ken was running at full speed. There was no escape. Even when Ken tried angling hard to the left, he was unable to get out of the shadow.
Colt watched with horror as that shadow grew larger and larger until it was no longer a shadow but a mammoth foot, spiked with unimaginable claws. The foot came down hard and Colt's one relief was that the foot was so big, it hid all of the gore as it came crashing down on Ken.
This was not the case when the T-rex raised that same foot. A spray of red and flesh-colored mess went upward a few feet and then came splattering back down to the ground.
Colt screamed in disgust and got to his feet. He had missed that foot by less than the length of his body and there was no way to get that out of his head. The only thing that kept him from going into shock was seeing Leslie on the ground about ten feet further ahead. She was looking at him, lying flat on her stomach with her hands over her head. She nodded furiously to him, telling him to get back on the ground.
It dawned on him then; the T-rex was so damned big that just a few steps too far ahead of them would give them a great head start if they ran in a different direction, By the time the massive beast got itself turned around and re-acclimated to the hunt, they'd be a safe distance away…until it caught up with them again.
He spotted Joseph several feet to Leslie's right, just a few paces away from where Ken's remains were smashed into the ground. He was lying in the same position as Leslie, his eyes still locked on the towering monstrosity.
The T-rex made one more lumbering step and then came to a stop. The very ground it stood on seemed to groan from its presence. It made a snorting sound and then very tentatively lifted its leg as if to go forward.
Leslie let out a very forceful whisper and said: "Go!"
They got up as quietly and as quickly as they could. Colt feared that even the noise of his knees popping would alert the T-rex but he didn't stop moving. He followed Leslie as she broke to the right, close to the direction they had been moving in the first place, if Colt's intuition was right.
With Leslie leading, they made their way through the thickness of the forest. All three of them kept looking back to the T-rex. It continued to stand still, as if waiting for them to screw up and give away their location.
Colt, Leslie, and Joseph continued to move and as they did, some other creature cried out from nearby. The T-rex, now about thirty yards behind them, roared out at this and the noise of it was impossibly loud. Colt felt the pressure of it in his skull.
"Screw it," Colt said. "Might as well haul ass now."
They did, just as the T-rex resumed its stalking. It was heading in their direction, but off to the right just slightly. It was apparently more interested in what had just cried out. Noticing this, Leslie stopped for a moment, waited for the beast to get ahead of them, and then darted straight to the left, in a more direct path towards the wall Ken had been leading them to in the first place.
Bunched together in a central core of running legs, Joseph whispered. His voice was just as thin as Colt's own lung
s felt.
"It stepped on Ken," he said. "I saw it happen and I…my God…I can’t believe it. He was alive and then he was gone. Smashed. It was…"
"Got it," Colt said. "I saw it, too. But if we get hung up on that, we're going to end up the same way. This is your expedition so you better not go off the deep end on us."
"No, I—" he started, but was interrupted by yet another galloping noise.
It was coming from the right and by the time Colt turned to see what was coming, the herd of dinosaurs was already upon them. They were retreating from the path of the T-rex and seemed to not care about the scrambling humans at all. They looked like what Colt had seen in pictures of a triceratops but these were smaller and their horns looked blunt and dull rather than the majestic pointed death horns Colt had seen. On all fours, they were just slightly taller than a person.
One of them struck Joseph as it passed, sending him off of his feet and whirling in a perfect one-eighty before he hit the ground. Leslie and Colt remained still as the herd of what was at least twenty of them passed through. Feeling the wind of their passing and the shudder of the ground as their immense bodies nearly collided with Colt in a way that was nearly thrilling. Colt was sure that he would have felt different if he’d been nearly run over like Joseph had, though.
"What the hell?" Joseph asked, shaken and clearly terrified for his life.
"They're running away from the T-rex," Leslie said.
"Something we should continue doing," Colt said.
"Yes, it's a great idea," Leslie said, "and certainly, going back to the wall is the only way to get out of here. But what happens if that thing traps us between itself and the wall?"
It was a question none of them wanted to answer, so they didn't. They did the only thing they knew to do: keep running.
Somehow, Colt found himself in the lead again. This made him uneasy because, although he would have never admitted it to Ken, he'd always had guides on his show to lead him where they needed to go. Without the actual visual guide of the cavernous walls ahead of them, Colt had no idea where they were headed. For all he knew, the entrance they had come in by was nowhere nearby. But if this was the general direction Ken had been running in, than he was slightly more comfortable with that.
Behind them, something cried out and there was a tremendous commotion of trees being knocked down and something heavy striking the ground. This was followed by a squealing cry of pain and another of those monstrous roars from the T-rex.
"Damn!" Joseph said.
"What?" Leslie asked.
"Ken had the phone…the only thing with pictures on it. All of the evidence was smashed…"
"Are you kidding right now?" Colt asked. "Are you really that insensitive?"
Joseph gave Colt a look, his eyes practically asking if Colt was crazy. But that passed by like a storm cloud and Colt saw, to his surprise, what looked like regret. "You're right, I can't think like that. But we…"
His mouth snapped shut at the sound of thunderous footsteps, coming from the same direction the last roar from the T-rex had come. We all turned to look and saw that there was a very clear path within the treetops as they were being pressed down. Above them, barely visible above the tree line, was the unmistakable head of the T-rex.
Without a word, they ran, headed for the wall ahead of them because it was really the only concrete idea any of them had.
But even then, with that wretched thing on top us, bringing death with every step, Colt was starting to see it Leslie's way. Maybe heading to the wall wasn't such a great idea. What if they were trapped? What if they were running towards certain death?
This thought was beautifully blown away when Colt spotted what looked like a large fissure running down the wall. They were about one hundred yards away now and the crack along the wall was hard to see in the murky light, but it was most definitely there. While he couldn't see the bottom of the wall due to the thickness of the forest ahead of him, he did see where the fissure seemed to widen out a bit the further down it went. Maybe there was some sort of small cave or a simple hole in the side of the cavern wall that would allow them to safely hide from the beast.
"You see that?" Colt asked, pointing ahead.
"Sure do," Joseph said. "Looks like our only hope."
"You good with it?" Colt asked Leslie as they continued to run. Behind them, there were two more footfalls and the rending of more forest as it was demolished behind them.
"No," she said. "But for right now, it's our only option."
She had a good point and it was what drove them on, running blindly to a potential safe zone, with the T-rex once again getting closer.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As the forest started to thin out the closer they got to the wall, the more Colt started to think that the hope of hiding away in a crevice along the wall was a longshot. Yes, it had appeared to widen out from further back in the forest but now that they were nearly there and could see it all the way down, Colt saw that the fissure closed in rapidly. In fact, as it came to the ground, it was nearly closed up altogether.
Still, he could see an opening, a small hole that was essentially a tiny cave. He dared a look over his shoulder, his lungs burning and his legs numb from running in terror. The T-rex was dangerously close now. It would probably be within stomping distance within five more monstrous strides. Colt was in the lead and when they reached the wall, he stood by to let Leslie in. She reached the wall just as the tyrannosaur made yet another stride. Bits of grit and debris fell from the wall, speckling Colt's face.
Leslie screamed as she took a high step up into the crevice. It was barely wide enough to get all the way in, leaving less than six inches between the edges of the crevice and each of her shoulders. Colt scrambled in next just as Joseph made it to the wall. Before he was fully inside the hole in the wall, Joseph was there, squeezing his way in and slightly pushing Colt further back.
"Hold it," Leslie screamed. "There's no more room here!"
Colt looked back and could see almost nothing. The darkness was pitch black here, broken only by the soft ambient light from outside the small hole in the cavern wall.
Joseph kept pushing, cramming into Colt. Colt tried to push back but his footing slipped and he went back into Leslie. She let out a grunt of pain and Colt could feel the resistance behind her.
He shoved Joseph, not violently but just enough to get him off of them. "Stop," he said. "There's nowhere else to go. We're crushing Leslie."
Looking at Joseph, Colt saw that there was less than two feet between him and the opening to the hole. Outside, the little light they had was being dwarfed by the hulking T-rex as it came to the wall.
It roared out at them and slammed its body into the wall. The entire world seemed to shudder and Colt could hear something large shifting somewhere over their heads. The next few moments were spent in horror as the beast continued to attack the wall. It tried getting to them with its arms but its massive body wouldn't let it reach at such an angle. It went down to its haunches and peered into the hole, its golden eye peering into the darkness at them with spite and hate. It roared at them from that position, the sound reverberating from the tight walls. The stench from the thing's breath was like raw meat and forgotten catacombs.
Behind Colt, Leslie was shuddering. She was gripping his shoulder tightly and he didn’t know if it was for some sort of comfort or to use him as a human shield in the event the T-rex could get to them.
"Will it get bored?" Colt asked Leslie.
"I don't know," she said. "We can't predict it. But if it behaves with any other animal's instincts and behaviors, then I think it will."
It roared at them again, this time not quite as vicious. It then reared up to its full height and struck at the wall again. More small debris fell from above as it attacked but already, Colt was feeling hopeful. The first attacks had been out of a genuine attempt to get at them. But now the T-rex seemed to have accepted its defeat was doing nothing more than throwing a massive te
mper tantrum.
The good news was that it had realized that it couldn't get to them. But the bad news was that the sounds of shifting rocks and debris overhead seemed to be getting louder. They remained there, stuck in the small crevice, for what seemed like forever before the T-rex gave one final surge against the wall, followed by a defeated roar of raging frustration.
Bits of grit and dust fell down on them. Directly in front of Colt, a rock the size of a softball fell from above, dislodged from the cracked wall over their heads. They listened to the sound of the monster as it retreated, feeling the reverberations of its feet get softer and softer as it made its way deeper into the woodlands for something else to torment.
No one said anything until its footsteps were gone completely. Outside of their small hideaway, the forest seemed to have gone dead quiet again.
"Do either of you have any ideas on what to do next?" Joseph asked.
"You're the expedition leader," Colt said. "Aren't you supposed to have all of the plans?"
"No," Joseph said, trying to muster up anger into his voice but failing. "That's what I hired all of you people for. I had one big overall plan and then hired the best there were to get us in and out alive."
"Well," Colt said, "it seems stupid to deviate from our original plan."
"That's right," Leslie said. "I say we get out of this hole and stick beside the wall until we get to the place where we came in. From there, I guess it comes down to luck."
It hit Colt for the first time that even if they did make it back to the entrance, there was no guarantee that they could get out. While it was certainly possible, they had a hell of a lot of work ahead of them.
"That sounds like a plan, then," Joseph said. He then looked to Colt and asked: "How many rounds left in that gun?"
Colt checked, squinting into the darkness. As he did, he was also aware of Liu's katana holstered along his back. "Five rounds," he said when he was done with the count.
Jurassic Island: A Prehistoric Thriller Page 10