He’d tried being a fisherman and failed, he thought, taking the knife to the pelt and separating it from the carcass. Making sure to roll the animal on its back first. And to remove the sexual organs prior to inserting the knife at a shallow enough angle to make sure he didn’t damage the rest of the internal organs. The fisherman lifestyle wasn’t so bad, but it stunk worse than this and to make much of a living, you needed a boat. No surprise he didn’t last long at that. To say nothing of the incessant dangers of being that close to the water. Where lived the Cayman. And the Giant Anaconda. Piranha. Flies that laid eggs in your eyes and left you blind. The list went on. As dangerous as hunting jaguars was, a person should try plying a trade on the water.
Though, this being bird men country, he was in a hurry to get to hell out. Mercifully, the forest in this region glowed at night, making his efforts to remove and preserve the hide a little easier.
Once the skin was off, he made sure to scrape every particle of fat and flesh from the hide. From there the next step was to spread a generous layer of non-iodized salt on the exposed underside of the coat so he could continue air drying the carcass at his leisure, later, well away from here. For now, he rolled it up, tucked it under his arm, and ran, his rifle over his shoulder. He was hungry and thirsty but there’d be time to eat once he was out of bird man territory.
He was nearly delirious from dehydration by the time he found himself on flat ground. By now he just had the fireflies to illuminate the night, though they seemed to be doing a pretty good job. He was just glad to be out of bird man country alive. The stories he’d heard about those guys made the thought of giving fishing for a living another try—boat or no boat—a tempting one.
He stopped to take a breather in the clearing beneath the high branches of the canopy trees.
A hellacious roar tore at his eardrums. It was such a voluminous sound it was hard to pin down to any one area. He heard it again, couldn’t be sure if it was getting closer or further away. The forest played tricks with sound that way. He’d learned the hard way a long time ago trying to find his way back to the river to the canoe he’d parked as a getaway vehicle (another stolen item. From a Yanomami tribe, no less.) He really needed to find a safer line of work. What he needed most was to get rich quick. Living poor was just too damn dangerous to his health.
He kept turning around on himself to track the roar. What the hell was that thing? It sounded prehistoric. Coming from high up. And it sure as hell wasn’t some bird.
When he finished turning around on himself again he found the source of the roar. So it really had been a dinosaur! The monster was staring down at him. Turning its head one way then the other, birdlike, as it scrutinized him.
He slowly unrolled the jaguar pelt before it, as an offering. He felt like a damn fool, but he’d feel like a bigger fool provoking this thing with his rifle. It towered over him. At twenty-plus feet in the air, it scraped the understory of the canopy trees every time it stopped leaning forward and stood upright. There was enough armoring on it, he wasn’t about to pierce its hide with a cannon. The eyes maybe, they might be worth a shot. And the tail, flicking suggestively, that looked prepared to scissor him in half.
He debated taking the shot but his hands were shaking, so were his arms and his entire body. He didn’t think he could hold the weapon steady enough.
So plan B it was then.
He laid down on the hide and wrapped himself up in it by rolling over on himself. Figuring it might mask his scent. All he had to do was lie still enough. Maybe the creature would become confused, or at least disinterested, and meander on its way.
Instead the monster let out a roar of approval and bit down on his sandwich wrap. Piercing the peasant’s skin. Crushing his bones. And flooding his lungs with blood. He tried to breathe. To get enough air in his lungs to cry out. But he was already drowning in his own fluids.
The animal took a few more tenderizing chews. By which time the peasant was pretty much done for. All he could think was, maybe it was the dehydration. Maybe he’d wake up from this in the morning and it’d all be a bad dream. It was the third to last thought to penetrate his head before the animal’s teeth punctured his skull. His second to last thought was, “Did you know that the jaguar’s jaws press down with a force of fifteen hundred pounds per square inch, more powerful even than the tiger’s and the lion’s bite, though the latter are far bigger cats? He remembered that statistic from the same Scientific American article that had taught him the Calvin Klein trick with the cologne. His final thought was, “I think this lizard bites harder.”
FORTY
Leon and his crew watched Jacko's men attempt to capture one of the dinosaur hybrids. As they dropped a net on it from a couple of helicopters, it ejected fire from its mouth, taking out one of the copters. Before the second copter could finish pulling up and away, it took the helo out with its tail, the thorns on that tail hitting it like missiles. Far from finished, it then used its tail to bat the ground troops closing in on it into the far off trees like baseballs. Some of the soldiers just got impaled to the spikes at the end of the tail like so much shish-kebab.
“This one isn’t like the one we saw coming out of the pod,” Natty whispered to Leon. “Way bigger. To say nothing of the tail. It’s like there are different classes of them.”
“I was telling Laney not too long ago that the reptiles are what really hold this forest together. They’re the bridge between the insects and the animal kingdom. Without them, and their ability to mutate rapidly in response to environmental stress, the system can’t maintain balance.”
“I think you’re referring to frogs and amphibians, not reptiles. And those mutations are usually not helpful.”
“Really?” Leon rubbernecked his direction, and sighed. “I hate being wrong.”
“Maybe, thanks to Laney, you’re not.”
Both men returned their eyes to the dinosaur hybrid. It was struggling with the net, which was some kind of super-strong, enhanced nano-weave. The net behaved like it had a consciousness of its own, constricting around extremities, and frustrating attempts to throw it off. The nano hive mind was arguably doing more than adding strength.
“Why do you think Truman is out to kill me?” Natty asked. “He can’t seriously have expected you guys to have kept me alive through everything we’ve been through. He makes it sound like it’s just one team building exercise after another, but the lethalness of these campaigns exposes that lie for all its worth.”
As Leon analyzed the assault on the monster, “Honestly, kid, I stopped caring when lizard men walked the Earth.”
Natty turned his attention back to the attempt to subdue the sentient serpent. Although this one seemed almost all giant lizard. Actually, even more like a dinosaur. Except for the intelligence in the eyes. That was all too human. “Yeah, I guess it's a moot point. But we are all still clear on keeping the super genius - that's me - alive, right? I'd hate to think we were getting off track here.”
“You don't mind if we save our own asses in the process, do you?”
“I have no trouble with secondary objectives. Just so they're, you know, secondary.” He eyed the rapidly failing attempt to subdue Lizard Man with abject terror.
The heavy artillery salvos levied at the creature caused it to release cries of agony as it finished tearing out of the net—its talons, its fangs, and the spikes on its tail proving too much for the nanoweave. The dinosaur fled into the woods away from the gunfire.
And then came the orange gas, dispersing faster than the monster could run.
Leon took a whiff. An acrid tang. “Napalm? Who brings napalm to paradise?”
“Paradise?” Ajax hit him with the “you can’t be serious” face as he slid into position on Leon’s other flank. “There are ticks here bigger than my balls.” He slipped away to a position a good distance from Natty and Leon to get a better vantage point, just in case those troops took a sudden interest in them, or the creature decided to circle back.
“So, why’s Truman shooting at his own creations?” Leon mused out loud.
“If the lizards mutate readily to environmental stressors, maybe on account of Laney’s interventions, or Truman isolating the dinosaur genes that could pull it off, or both,” Natty said, thinking out loud. “Then they really are the glue that holds the forest together, and maybe he’s doing what battle hardening he has left to do on them he couldn’t do on the ship.”
Leon nodded, the bells ringing in his head. “So even before we can get to them, they’ve been toughened up enough to make our jobs a hell of a lot harder. Definitely fits with what I know about Truman.”
With a twist of his neck and a tilt of his chin, Leon signaled his men to chase after the fleeing dinosaur. “Well, it's a cinch Truman knew you'd get to me, recruit me to your way of thinking about things, explaining why I and my troops are suddenly so dispensable.” Eying Natty, he said, “What I still don't get is why he'd cash in his golden boy - with God knows how many more inventions you have locked up in that Pandora's box of a mind?”
“That was the question I had for you,” Natty sighed, “though I suppose I’m the one to answer it.”
Natty's eyes lost focus as he searched inwards for the answer. As his eyes cleared, he sighed. “I guess he knew there was no getting through to me. With each day I became more of a child just so I wouldn't have to face the consequences of what I was doing. The next step was complete mental breakdown. I wasn't good to him anymore and he knew it.”
Natty pulled the rest of the way out of the reverie. “And if, on the odd chance I did survive this, I'd likely become just what he wanted - if only to keep people like him in check.”
“Without a proper initiation, he probably couldn't put into play all those world-killing machines you designed before you grew a conscience.”
It was Natty's turn to lower his eyes in shame. “Laney's right. It's time I became a man and accepted a man's responsibilities.”
***
Following on the trail of the creature, it wasn’t long before DeWitt spied the glowing green blood the more-lizard-than-man hybrid left behind. He brought the leaf back for Leon to inspect. Natty looked over his shoulder as Leon held the leaf in his hand.
“Glowing green blood?” Natty said. “That's so unoriginal.” Pacing, he added, “Why does everything ominous have to be glowing and green?”
Leon, thinking aloud to himself, mumbled, “Where would you go if you were part lizard?”
Suddenly they were all looking up at the trees in tandem, snapping to attention with their guns. The kapok trees nearby were the biggest in the Amazon rainforest. They could certainly support a twenty to thirty-foot lizard man, even if he were of the dinosaur variety.
“No!” Natty exclaimed. “Think it through. Most lizards catch insects with their tongues, right? Only, something that size would need bigger food. Likely the birds and the snakes up in the trees wouldn’t be big enough either.”
“What about the monkeys?” Ajax said with a higher than normal pitch to his voice. “Some varieties of monkeys can get pretty damn big.”
Natty was chewing his fingernails when he said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
No one had taken the sights of their weapons off the trees while they deliberated the point.
The birds flying through the trees and singing their songs, the monkeys swinging from branches up on high, didn’t bode well for their treed-lizard theory. Things would have gone silent up there if they felt a new presence.
“What about holed up in a cave somewhere?” Cronos suggested.
“By day maybe. In the dead of night like this, they can pretty much roam freely and hunt whatever they like. Their night vision is greater than ours,” Leon said. “Besides, you heard that aerial bombardment same as me, went on for quite some time. There’s too many of those beasts to be holed up in some cave.”
“Rains heavy in these parts, this time of year,” Crumley said. “All that water’s got to go somewhere. For all we know the run off that seeps into the ground flows for miles, hollowing out caverns and tunnels from one end of the Amazon rainforest to the other.”
“I don't know,” Leon mumbled, his eyes still searching the trees. “It might well seek out a protective, womb-like underground cave system to hide out in, maybe to feast on its kill. I’m thinking some of the soldiers who were giving it such misery might make a satisfying meal. Still, it feels like a stretch.”
“You mean like a fire-breathing dinosaur?” Natty balked. “A stretch like that?”
Leon thought it over, as he continued canvassing high and low with his eyes. Finding nothing, he said, “Fine.” He shouldered his rifle. “We’ll break up into multiple search teams, several to canvass above ground, one looking for someplace subterranean they could crawl into to avoid detection by day. With any luck, the trail of blood and dead bodies will lead to an entrance to this underworld. I’ll take the cave systems, because it’s the idea least likely to pay dividends, and if I’m going to waste anybody’s time, I’d just as soon it be mine.” Turning to DeWitt, he said, “Any caves around here that might just be linked to others?”
DeWitt brought out topographical maps for him to inspect. Pulling the laminated sections out of one of his camo cargo pant pockets, and unfolding it accordion-like. Showing him on the map, he said, “This one's the closest. The ground penetrating radar goes down to about forty feet. Based on that, this may well be the start of something.”
“Since when do they have caves highlighted on maps?” Natty asked, peeking over their shoulders. “Especially this deep into uncharted territory.”
“It’s smart fabric,” DeWitt explained. “Receiving military satellite feeds that expose any potential asset in the area.”
“I designed that?” Natty said, rubbing his fingers up against the smart fabric.
“Yeah,” DeWitt replied. “I mean DuPont did, but you improved on it.”
“Okay, I feel less stupid now.”
Leon signaled Ajax with one of their many private-language nonverbal communiqués that involved a couple fingers pointing at Natty towards the end. “The rest of you scatter to the wind and head off on any trail you can pick up. It’s just recon for now. Let’s not have anyone get any bright ideas about starting a one-man war. And remember, these things are likely as smart as they are lethal. If one of them picks up on your trailing them, they might try to turn the tables on you.” Leon marched off, heading in the direction of the cave. The rest melted into the forest, heading the four directions. Save for Ajax.
Ajax took Natty by the arm and dragged him off along another tangent. In the direction of the dripping green blood left by the one that had been wounded.
Lovely.
FORTY-ONE
Feeling the sense of separation from the pack, Natty said, “Why are we fanning out? I don't get it. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”
“Yeah,” Ajax agreed, “if the two points you're talking about are life and death.”
He gestured towards an area high up in the trees. “You can't always see where the attack's coming from. So you spread out to make yourself less of a target.”
Natty, looking at where he was pointing, saw the camouflaged sentient serpent staring straight at him, one of the smaller ones, sans a tail, like he initially saw climbing out of the pod. They had gone maybe fifty yards from where the group was originally congregated. A little change in perspective was everything. They could just as easily have walked into an ambush. Maybe for recon purposes, moreover, it did make sense to split up, but to his way of seeing things, they were like a mobile think tank that could only do its work with everyone together to solve this latest problem. Natty said, “I'm still not sure I buy that line of reasoning.”
He heard Ajax scream, looked behind him and up to find the arrow-point of one of the dinosaur lizard’s tails driven through Ajax's chest.
With blood coming out his mouth and faintly audible sounds coming from his voic
e box, Ajax, fading fast, said, “What do you call a lesbian dinosaur? Lick-a-lotta-puss.”
***
Lying on an examination table, in an undisclosed lab buried in the heart of the Amazon jungle, Laney stirred fitfully. Free of the ice block, and much warmer than she’d been in a while, she paradoxically shivered. The violent shuddering more reliable than her heartbeat, which had yet to find such a steady rhythm. Still in a semi-coma, she watched what was going on with Natty, courtesy of the electronic device planted over her third eye.
***
Suspending Ajax high off the ground at the end of his tail, Lizard Man brought the tail towards his mouth, and took a bite out of Ajax. He enjoyed his meal, ripping off the arm with the rifle Ajax was currently firing into him without effect, even as Ajax squealed to high heaven. Ajax roared and gasped as he fought to compose himself. “What do a penis and a Rubik’s Cube have in common?” He couldn’t get out the line without crying as he reached for his cutlass with his remaining arm. “The more you play with it, the harder it gets.” He jabbed the point of his machete into the creature’s eye, but the blade just broke in two on impact.
Another scream of frustration escaped his mouth like a bat out of hell, capped by a “God damn it!” Sniveling, snorting, and sobbing, he spat out, “What does one saggy boob say to the other saggy boob?” Ajax tapped his heels together and blades jutted out the tips of his sandals. Natty could see the oil dripping off them. He doubted it was lubricant. Probably more like poison. “If we don’t get some support, people will think we’re nuts.”
Ajax lashed out with his legs, determined to drive the blades underneath the scales. He succeeded and the monster roared in anguish. It relieved him of one of his legs for the trouble.
Natty, freaked at seeing his friend turned into finger food, picked up Ajax's dropped gun—it had fallen out from the small of his back when he inverted himself to drive in his toe blades—and pelted the dinosaur with the sentient eyes with gunfire. The hybrid creature covered his face protectively, and batted Natty to the ground using Ajax at the end of this tail as a battering ram.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 38