by Greig Beck
The creature also lunged, perhaps stirred by the activity. It became a test of which killer would be quicker.
Brocke never got to fire a shot.
*****
On the shoreline, they watched with a mix of horror and fury. Helen had hands up on each side of her head, and a small sound escaped her lips like that from a tiny, frightened animal. Camilla sat down and turned away, her lips moving rapidly. But Andy was riveted.
Drake, Fergus, and Ajax had waded back into the water, guns tight to their shoulders, but the attack was too far out for them to do anything but watch, teeth bared in impotent rage.
Emma stared as the animal surged and then jaws that were longer than the man sprung open and closed over Brocke, snapping shut with an audible clack like a bear trap closing. The massive beast’s momentum took it upward and its huge body lumped in the water before diving again. A tail as long as a Buick flapped in the air, and then in only a few more seconds, the surface of the lake returned to calm.
Drake lowered his weapon and let his eyes drop to Juan who was nearing the shore. He half-turned to his men.
“Get him out.”
“What the fuck was that?” Ajax’s voice was high.
“Freshwater mosasaur,” Helen breathed. “Probably.”
“They’re usually sea-going creatures, and those guys can get to seventy feet.” Andy stared out into the lake. “But they also lived in large bodies of fresh water. And grew pretty big there as well.”
“No shit,” Ajax seethed, and then spun back to the lake. “Fu-uuuuuuk!” He continued to roar his curse as he fired a long burst into the water, throwing up a zipper of sprays out to where Brocke had been taken.
“Stow that!” Drake yelled.
The young soldier spun to Emma and jabbed his finger at her. “She knew. She fucking knew that thing was in there.”
“Shut it.” Drake showed his teeth. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re not in fucking Kansas anymore.”
Ajax still stared from under lowered brows. “If we had—”
“Nothing,” Drake cut him off. “So what if she did? We crashed, remember? We weren’t supposed to be anywhere near a goddamn lake.”
Ajax continued to glare as Fergus helped Juan up onto the bank, and his jaws tightened for a moment before he marched over and jammed the muzzle of his rifle into the Venezuelan’s stomach.
“Why didn’t it take this fat piece of shit? He’s the one bleeding and probably attracted it.”
“So are you,” Emma said softly.
Ajax looked down his body to see blood seeping through his pants. He slapped the wound hard. “Fuck it.” He turned away, cursing even more.
Drake looked down at Juan who was now up onto the bank and lying down, breathing hard.
“Brocke, our brave soldier and friend, died doing what we were designed to do, what we were bred to do—protect people.” He looked up into Emma’s eyes. “That is our lot.” He turned to Fergus first, who nodded, and then to the sullen Ajax.
Emma looked around, trying to get her bearings. It was the same, and it was different to how she remembered: alien.
Huge trees launched up into the sky, but between them, there were stands of strange plants that looked like 30-foot-high green pompoms on sticks. Spiky-looking cycads spread wide on the ground, in between ferns with strappy or broad, pulpy fronds, and stuff that looked like hanging beads that might have been fruit, seedpods, or maybe even insect eggs, for all she knew.
Emma sighed. “We need to move. And we need to be silent. There are hunters everywhere.”
“Equipment and supplies check, everyone,” Drake said, and the group quickly looked over what they managed to salvage.
Emma looked back out to the lake. A few packages, boxes, and assorted flotsam and jetsam bobbed there. They might as well have been on the far side of the moon, as no one was going to get them.
Fergus squatted by his packs, forearms on his thighs. “Good ammunition for the M4s, we’ve got a dozen grenades for the launchers, and a few spare mags for the SIG Sauer; not so bad.” He looked up. “A defensible ordnance. Not enough to make war, but enough to stand our ground.”
Drake grunted. “Good. We only need to do that for twenty-four hours.”
Andy and Helen sorted through some other packs. “A bottle of water each, water purifiers, and some protein bars.” She sighed. “I’ve got some personal medical supplies, but the medical kit wasn’t stored away after Juan, so…”
“So it’s lost.” Drake exhaled through his nose. “Okay, overall, could have been a lot worse.”
Ajax scoffed. “Jesus, man, are you missing the fucking elephant in the phone booth here?” His face was flushed and eyes wide. “The balloon’s gone; you know, that big fucking thing we were gonna fly out in?”
“We climb down,” Fergus said evenly.
“Oh yeah, how? If Ben really has been here ten years, why didn’t he climb down then? He was top-notch Special Forces guy. If anyone coulda done it, he could have.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Emma stepped forward. “If Ben had climbed down at any time other than when the portal was open, he’d be climbing down into the world as it was a 100 million years ago.”
“So he needs to try it now?” Andy queried.
“Exactly,” Emma replied. “Now that the two time zones have been thrust up against each other.”
“Now?” Helen repeated, her gaze flat. “Now, when the plateau is as high as the top of the Empire State Building.”
Emma turned, her voice quieter. “We’ll find a way.”
“Oh, we’re fucked.” Ajax threw his hands up and walked in a circle.
“We’re alive. So I think you just won the lottery,” Emma said. “Coulda been worse…just ask Brocke.”
Ajax’s eyes bulged for a moment, but he kept his mouth shut.
“We gotta move,” Drake said. He turned to Emma. “You think Ben might have tried to get to the cliff edge? Where you scaled down?”
She nodded. “It’s where I’d go.”
“Then that’s where we try first. How far?” Drake asked.
Emma pointed. “Miles, I don’t know. This isn’t part of the jungle we went through. But it took us about four hours to get there. We followed a stream…but that was a mistake.”
“Why?” Helen asked.
Emma turned. “Because that was where the snake found us.”
Helen stared. “The snake, our snake?”
Emma nodded.
“Oh Jesus.” Helen rubbed her face.
Andy put his arm around her shoulders. “This is crazy, but I want to see it, and I also don’t want to see it. I can’t help it, I’m a scientist.”
Helen gave him a horrified look. “Not sure I do now.”
“Trust me; you don’t want to see it either,” Emma said, sounding wearied.
Andy looked around and saw everyone’s expressions. “Okay, yeah, well then let’s avoid following the river.”
They loaded up, Drake checked the group, and then ordered Fergus to lead them out. Emma stood staring back out over the water, and he came closer.
“I was going to go back for Juan,” she said. “But Brocke took my place.”
Drake exhaled and nodded. “Well then… I guess it was just his time, and not yours.” He turned to her. “Five minutes in, and we’re already one down,” he said softly. “I don’t intend to lose any more.”
She half-turned to him for a moment and studied his face. After a few more seconds, she just grunted and turned back to the water. She bet he didn’t intend to lose Brocke either. This place makes the decisions, not us, she thought bleakly.
“Come on, let’s catch up.” She headed into the jungle.
CHAPTER 26
Drake crouched and scanned the undergrowth. Jungles were crap places to make war. There were so many potential places of concealment that it rendered the human eye next to useless. As a Special Forces soldier, he was trained to identify shapes—heads, faces, human
forms, even if those shapes were fragmented and broken up by camouflage. But in here, that’s not the type of adversaries they were trying to avoid.
In jungles, human camouflage was reaching new levels of sophistication thanks largely to technology. He heard that the next thing to come off the production line was real invisibility tech that grabbed surrounding landscapes and projected the images onto a uniform. The result was that you didn’t just blend into the environment, you became part of it.
But evolution, not technology, ruled in this place. Things had evolved to hide, and wait, and not be seen while they were doing it. Drake had been in jungles all over the world and witnessed how some creatures were able to change the colors of their skin, use weird body shapes to merge with their surroundings, and even pretend to be something else entirely.
He’d read Emma’s report. And basically, right here, right now, there were animals that had that ability, except were a hundred times bigger and meaner. And that worried the hell out of him.
He looked down again at the print in the mud—three-toed, many inches deep, and had to be close to six feet long; whatever made it weighed several tons.
Drake turned to the group; all had eyes on him bar Camilla and Juan. The cameraman was sitting down and looking flushed in the face. Camilla was holding a water bottle to his lips. The guy had lost plenty of blood and now was being asked to push himself beyond his limits—tough; there was no other option.
Drake clicked his fingers to get Helen’s attention and waved her over. Emma and Andy came with her.
He pointed to the mud. “Like your expert opinion here.”
“Jesus.” Helen touched the print gently with the tips of her fingers.
“Big theropod carnivore.” Andy rested on his haunches. “Aucasaurus?”
“Hmm, no, I think bigger,” Helen replied.
“Carnotaurus? That bad boy was a local down here and grew to thirty feet in length. Stood nearly ten feet tall and weighed in at about three tons.” Andy raised his eyebrows.
“Look; this is hard soil, and check again the depths of the print.” Helen turned to look at her brother. “Think even bigger.”
“Oh wow,” Andy breathed. “Giganotosaurus.”
“Okay, I only got the first part of that.” Fergus crouched beside them. “But I’m betting anything with the word gigantic on the front of it has got to be bad news.”
“The baddest,” Andy replied. “It was the biggest shark-toothed dinosaur that lived in these parts during the Late Cretaceous Period.”
“Shark-toothed, huh?” Fergus’ mouth twisted. “Well, that sounds fucked up.”
“Yeah, and I hear it only ate redheads.” Drake raised a brow at him.
“Ate everything,” Andy said. “Had an oversized head and jaws, giving it massive bite power, plus ten-inch-long serrated teeth.”
“Jesus.” Fergus ran a hand up through his sweaty hair and Andy went on.
“Walked on two large and powerful hind legs, small three-clawed arms, and was up to forty feet long, fifteen feet high.” The young paleontologist made both his hands into three-fingered hooks. “And even though it weighed in at about thirteen tons, it was extremely fast and agile.”
“Yeah, well that motherfucker is going to be even faster when it gets a grenade up its ass. Let’s see it run fast with a three-foot hole in its gut.” Ajax grinned down at them like a death’s head.
“Were they solitary hunters?” Emma asked.
“We think so,” Helen replied. “The mega alphas tended to be territorial, so they pushed anything else out, even their own kind. Mating season excluded.”
“Good.” Emma looked up. “The big guys were a nightmare. But it was the smaller ones that hunted in packs that were the real threat. They moved like greased lightning. Hard to outrun them.”
“That fast?” Fergus asked.
“Think of a cheetah crossed with an alligator.” Emma gave him a humorless smile.
Fergus turned to Drake. “Thank you for inviting me.”
Drake scoffed. “This from the guy who said he missed the action only six months back.” He looked across to Emma. “Anything else you can tell us, based on your experience?”
Emma thought for a moment. “Their colors are more striking and varied than you can imagine.”
“Like you said about the Titanoboa?” Andy queried.
“The what?” Ajax asked.
“The snake.” Drake frowned. “You read Emma’s report, right?”
The huge soldier just shrugged. “Some of it.”
“Good prep, soldier. Since when did you start going on missions without doing your homework?” Drake glared.
“One, this ain’t a mission, and two, who thought any of this shit was actually going to be real?” He glared back.
“In this place, reality comes at you fast,” Emma said dismissively, and then turned back to Andy. “As for body markings, mostly striped or blotched with colors ranging from brick red, to shades of green and brown.”
“If they’re motionless in dappled light, they’ll be invisible,” Drake said.
“Until you walk right into them,” Andy said.
“I read Emma’s notes on the snake. Is it as big a threat to us as she says?” Fergus stared hard at the young scientist.
Andy took in a deep breath. “The Titanoboa was the largest snake that ever lived. Its fossil remains were found right around these parts. They were deep in a coalmine. At this point, we don’t know if it was down there due to sedimentary settling, it lived there, or just crawled down there to die.” He rested on his haunches and picked up a stick. He cleared away some dirt and began to draw.
“One of the biggest snakes alive today is the Asiatic reticulated python. Grows to about thirty feet in length and can weigh in at five hundred pounds.” He had drawn a stick figure of a man, and a squiggly line, the snake, next to him. The snake was enormous and five times the size of the human. He looked up at Ajax. “About twice your body weight I’d say.”
“Big sucker,” Ajax replied.
“It certainly is…today.” Andy grinned up at him. “But it’s an earthworm compared to what existed in our primordial past.” He began to draw again. “Those fossils the scientists discovered in that mine just a few years back had paleontologists estimating its length to be well over fifty feet. But here’s the kicker, they had no idea whether the specimen found might even have been representative of the largest of its kind, so they could have grown bigger, much bigger.”
Andy finished his drawing and looked up, brows raised. “Imagine, a snake fifty, seventy, feet long?” He dropped the stick. “They called the snake Titanoboa; the name says it all. And it wasn’t just long, but solid muscle that was as thick around as a small car.”
Fergus rubbed his face hard, and Ajax seemed to be brooding as he took it all in. The picture now showed a monstrous snake; thick, powerful, that made the stick figure look like a bite-sized toy.
“One more thing,” Emma said. “It wasn’t slow moving. It was quick, very quick. For something so big, it moved like lightning.”
“And thus ends the motivation session.” Drake checked his weapon and cradled it in his arms. “We need to do our jobs, and then work on getting the hell home. Any questions?”
Andy got to his feet and wiped his hands off. “I still want to see one.” He looked at Helen. “Just a glimpse…but from a distance.” He smiled crookedly.
“No,” Emma said. “Just forget it. If you see it, it means it’ll have already have seen you. And then you’re dead.”
“Well, maybe,” Andy said, and his eyes gleamed. “But just imagine a snake that big.”
“I don’t need to imagine,” Emma shot back.
Andy continued to beam, and Fergus nudged Drake with an elbow. “Jesus, look at this kid, will ya? He’s lovin’ being here.”
“Beats working in a museum.” Andy waggled his eyebrows.
Drake sighed. “Come on, move out.”
CHAPTER 27
But just as big fish ate small fish, it was also true that big fish got eaten by even bigger fish. While Ben was being mauled, and he thought his number was finally up, something had burst from the jungle and scooped up the seven-foot-tall theropod standing on his chest like it weighed nothing. The others of its pack had fled screeching in panic back into the undergrowth.
Ben didn’t wait to hand out thank yous, but instead ignored the pain and ran between a pair of clawed feet that must have been six feet long. One thing he’d found out about being in the vicinity of a big carnivore was that everything else headed for the hills. So the jungle had been empty on his blind run.
But now, he had other priorities. Wounds festered, and even a minor cut could mean blood poisoning if not attended to.
He slithered on, finally seeing what he was looking for. He pulled himself into the patch of thick grasses, choosing the greenest stalks and carefully tugging them from the damp soil. He was careful not to dislodge the bulbs as they came up. He quickly shelled one the size of his thumb, and then stuck it in his mouth, grinding the bitter plant root down to pulp, and then spat the mush back onto his hand.
Maybe one day the plant would evolve into an onion or garlic. But as he hoped when he first found them, whatever it was, it was close enough to contain a potent chemical called allicin that was a powerful natural antibiotic.
With his vision blurring from pain, Ben smeared the salve into the chest wounds, feeling the agony as he rubbed the bitter mush into the torn flesh. The extra bonus was the odor of the root masked the smell of open wounds. He chewed some more, his jaw working slowly as he made sure to liberally coat all his wounds. He then finally tugged up some more bulbs and stuck them into a sack which was the last shred of his shirt that had long given up as a garment of wear.