by Greig Beck
“So, we need to find the canoes and travel along those rivers again. If they’re still there.” Emma laughed bitterly. “If we get down.”
“When we get down.” He smiled back at her, trying to radiate a confidence he didn’t feel.
Emma stood and held out a hand. He took it and she groaned as she helped in hauling his 225-pound frame to his feet.
“Then we search along the plateau edge – further down.” She turned to look back in at the dark foreboding jungle just in from them. Mist twined in and around the trunks and dripping fronds. “Besides, I don’t exactly feel like going back in there yet.”
Ben felt a little lightheaded and knew the search for food and water would eventually drive them in whether they liked it or not. “Let’s just remember what Jenny told us; things live in caves.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, so you’re saying we should be careful?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, right, I didn’t need to say that, did I?”
*****
Emma watched Ben walking a little in front of her. His broad shoulders and large frame were carried lightly. The man knew what he was doing, and he chose to walk between her and the jungle as a shield. She knew that too.
She smiled. She always liked him, and him coming back had made her heart dance with excitement, anticipation, and the promise of something good. Her Joie de vivre had vanished and she just wished now that when they all sat around talking about searching for the missing notebook, she had stopped them at that. There had been multiple opportunities along the way, and she had ignored them all, allowing her curiosity to override her judgement.
Maybe it’s her fault, she thought darkly. Maybe she had urged Ben to go along with the adventure as a way to keep him interested and not leave town. Great plan, and now there was just the two of them, and instead of them sitting home together or in some bar and grill having cold beers and ribs, they were stuck in some prehistoric hell.
Emma looked at the roll of his shoulders again; the raw power of the man made her feel safe. She imagined what it would be like if he was gone – she’d be soon dead, and she probably wouldn’t even care. But while he was alive, more than anything she wanted to be alive too.
They came to a stream that had pooled at the plateau edge. It poured over the lip and an updraft brought a veil of water mist back up at them. At its center, the swimming pool-sized pond looked quite deep, and more interestingly, they saw darting fish there.
Ben looked to the plateau edge, and then back to the jungle. “We’re going to have to re-enter the jungle here. Not sure I want to take my chance wading out into that water without knowing what else is living in there.”
Emma nodded. “I don’t think it’s big enough for some big beast to live in. But I guess a lot of little things with too many teeth is just as bad.”
Ben took one last glance at the jungle before staring into the water. “One thing’s for sure, we are at least going to try and catch some of the fish.” He looked along the pool edge and saw where there were some marshy edges closer to where the jungle started.
He took a last look at the pool’s center and then sucked in a breath. “Okay, I’m going to wade into the shallows, and try and coax some of those babies into the reeds. And that’s where you’ll be waiting for an ambush.”
“I’m so hungry, I’ll grab ‘em like a bear – with my teeth.” Emma grinned. She quickly found a six-foot-long stick, and drew her knife to knock the end into a spear shape. She held it up to examine.
“Ready, Tarzan?” Ben grinned.
“That’s Jane to you.” She nodded and then nodded towards the water. “Come on, let’s see what you’ve got.”
Ben waded in, pulling his knife, just in case something decided he was on the menu rather than vice versa.
The water wasn’t that clear, and he felt a gravel-like bottom under his feet. Clumps of weed and water grasses were becoming sparser the deeper he went. Silver torpedo shapes shot past him, one, two, and then another. Several were now between him and the reeds – just where he wanted them.
He took one last look at the deeper area of the pool and then started to turn, holding his arms out, as if herding cattle.
“Come on, guys, in you go.”
Ben could see out in front of him some of the shapes moving into the shallower water where the reeds poked up, and Emma waited with her sharp stick poised.
There came a splash from behind him, and he spun – at the center of the pond, something lumped and a V-shape started to head towards him.
“Ah, shit.” He began to back up, his knife ready.
Ben half turned. “How you doin’ there, Emma?” He continued to back away from the deeper water, his eyes fixed on the surface.
There was silence, and he wanted to turn, but knew that there was something in the water that might be a lot bigger than the fish…and it was making its way toward him.
“Emm?” Ben tightened his grip on his blade. “Emma?”
There was the sound of splash behind him, and then: “Ha!”
He continued to back up, as there came a sound of wet flapping. “Got one; a beauty.”
“Then I’m outta here.” He turned and started to run with high-legged strides out of the water. He saw that Emma was already moving up onto the dry bank with a fish flapping on the end of her stick.
When he got to the shallows he spun, just in time to see something the size and shape of a dolphin angle away, the water lumping as it turned,
“Jesus.” He blew air through his lips. “This place.”
He crossed to Emma who had already placed the fish on a rock and was using a knife to push it off the stick. She then pinned it down, holding it ready for him to work on. “Careful; looks a bit like a catfish, and I think there’s spines behind its head and gills.” She looked up, brows raised. “Anyone for Cajun-style blackened catfish?”
“I’m thinking more, catfish, sashimi style.” Ben reached forward. “Hold that sucker down.” He began to slice the fillets from it, laying them out on the dry rock. The blood ran down, and he immediately became concerned that the odor might attract the hunters.
“We need to be quick.” He stuffed a bit in his mouth. It was cold, muddy tasting, and he suddenly remembered why he liked sushi – because he used to drench it in salty soy sauce – not because he liked raw fish.
He chewed the meat from the tough skin and spat that out. “I’ve had better.”
Emma lifted a slice and held it over her mouth, winked at him, and then popped it in. She closed her eyes as she chewed and after a while removed the tough skin from her mouth.
She then smacked her lips. “Right now, just about anything would taste good.”
Ben turned. “It’s a good place to fish. As long as we don’t go out too far.” He nodded towards the pond. “Something out there got a little too curious. We should get this down quickly, fill up our canteens, and then head off before something else catches the scent of blood.”
“Yeah.” She nodded and popped another piece of fish into her mouth.
In another few seconds, the fish was gone, and Ben lifted the head with a string of bones attached and tossed it out into the center of the pool. Almost immediately there was a surge from a few different places as whatever was in there converged on the still-bleeding remains.
Ben then tossed sand and gravel up onto the bloody rock, but his hands were still sticky and smelled of fish.
“Let’s wash our hands and get moving.”
There was no way they could wade through the pool, and it extended right to the plateau edge so the only way forward was to follow the stream up into the jungle until they found a place shallow enough to cross. They had no choice but to enter the jungle depths.
Ben crept forward, and his feet squelched in a particularly muddy area. The tree roots were now growing mangrove-like up on stilt-like roots to try and stop their trunks drowning in the soaked landscape.
Unfortunately, the further they went, the more the
river deepened and when he peered up along the water course, he saw it wasn’t getting any better further in. In fact, the jungle seemed more tangled, darker, and primordial, turning into a marshy bog-land.
Swarms of tiny black flies nipped at them and created a constant background whine in their ears.
“I don’t like it,” he whispered.
“I stopped liking it days back,” Emma responded softly. She nudged him. “Look.”
He followed her gaze. Underneath the stilt-like roots of a massive tree was a mound of rounded objects that looked like off-white river stones. Ben craned his neck, frowning at first as his mind tried to sort them into something recognizable.
They were each about two feet long, not round or oval, more oval-but-stretched like giant vitamin capsules.
“They look like leather,” Emma murmured.
“Yeah, like big, rubber footballs.” His memory nagged at him. “They remind me of something. I feel like I’ve…” Then his mind jumped back to a Congolese jungle mission from ten years back where his squad came across a python clutch – the massive snake had laid its eggs in a nest, and they looked the same – except less than about one-quarter of the size.
Mother of the river, he remembered as they stood on the edge of the water. He suddenly felt like he received an electric shock.
“Oh shit.” He grabbed Emma and started to drag her back the way they’d come.
“What?” She frowned as she backed up.
“Snake eggs,” he choked out and dragged her faster.
Emma gasped and her eyes widened. She turned and started to burrow through the mad, green tangle of vines, but Ben held on.
“Slowly…silently,” he whispered.
Ben tried to see everywhere at once, and he felt his neck tingle. There were just too many places that they could be ambushed from.
He held onto Emma, slowing her, but his mind kept screaming at him to run, and his legs wanted to obey.
He had to let Emma go so he could burrow a path for them through the thick tangle of vines, creepers, and fleshy fronds. His neck continued to prickle, but he needed to force himself to slow down – he’d seen the way the snake had been attracted by movement, so a couple of soft and warm bipeds, moving fast, would have drawn attention from any snake for hundreds of feet.
There was a crash behind him, and Ben swung back, gun up. But it was only Emma who had slipped and fallen to the ground. She grimaced and shook a hand she had just grazed against a rock.
“I’m okay.” She rubbed it against her chest.
They arrived back at the stream, still deep, and Ben stared, weighing up the risks. “Damn it, we go for it; it’s as shallow and narrow here as anywhere else.” He steeled himself. “Follow me.”
He gritted his teeth, gripped the knife, and headed in. The jungle was dark here, and it meant the water was like ink.
“Ah, Jesus.” He immediately sank to his waist and his boots were sucked into the ooze on the bottom. His testicles shriveled from fear.
Emma was right behind him, right behind him, and she hung onto his shirt so close he felt her body continually bumping into his. He edged forward, keeping his arms and shoulders high, trying to see everywhere at once.
Ben felt his nerves tightening, and he kept waiting for the monstrous diamond-shaped head to rise up from below – Mother of the Water, Mother of the Water – he wished his mind would shut the hell up.
He placed his boot on something that wriggled out from under his foot, and a jolt of fear and revulsion shot through him. Thankfully, it squirmed away and didn’t come back to take a piece out of his leg.
In another few moments, he put his foot on a rock, and then another, and then the stream was shallowing out as they reached the other side.
“Jesus.” He felt a surge of relief but didn’t slow. He reached back to grab Emma and kept tugging her with him as he entered the jungle. But it was only for a short distance, as he knew they needed to follow the stream back to find the plateau edge again.
Ben held Emma’s hand now, and she gripped his hard. He wanted to live and wanted her to live more than anything he had ever wanted in his life.
We can make it, he told himself. They had to.
*****
The massive snake, a female Titanoboa, was 70 feet long and four foot wide at its girth. It wasn’t a dinosaur, but one of the largest true land reptiles that ever lived on the planet, and ever would.
It slid along the jungle floor, pouring around tree trunks and over the top of ferns. Its hunt had been unsuccessful, and its hunger now gnawed away at it.
It would return to its clutch to check on the eggs, but then take another scout of its territory. There was always game, and if need be, it could hunt the creatures in the rivers and pools as well.
The reptile returned to the riverbank, and its tongue continued to flick in and out tasting the air. It froze – there was something different – something that it had never sensed before.
Its muscles coiled, expecting a challenge or threat. Even the biggest hunters knew to avoid something of its size, but they may have come looking for its eggs.
It tasted the air again, only just picking up the faint odors of the creature’s exhalations, and there was something else.
It poured forward, coming to a rock at the stream edge and lowering its head. There were traces of blood. Its tongue shot out faster and faster, and actually dipped into the scraping. Its mind gathered the information and formed an image, and then a direction.
The things had dared to invade its territory. But the scent also excited its digestion and once again its hunger flared.
The huge diamond-shaped head swung around. And then like a molten river of scales and muscle, it forged forward, flowing across the river in seconds.
CHAPTER 33
12 Hours Past Apparition
Comet P/2018-YG874, designate name Primordia, was now arcing away from the third planet to the sun to continue on its eternal elliptical voyage around our solar system.
Its magnetic presence that had dragged at the planet’s surface and even distorted the very air was lessening in intensity by the seconds and in just a few more hours would vanish completely.
The clock was ticking down, and soon there would be another 10 years of calm over the jungle mountaintops of the Venezuelan Amazon jungle.
CHAPTER 34
Thirty minutes later, Ben and Emma emerged back out onto the plateau’s edge, this time on the opposite side of the pond and stream. They wasted no time making their way along its edge, heading east.
The wind seemed to come from everywhere at once, oddly drawing from the plateau edge and up into the sky. Ben looked out over the rim and saw that the jungle below was beginning to become visible, but was indistinct – not just from the usual cloud haze, but this time it seemed a little oily and distorted, as if he was looking at it through a dirty or warped window. He ignored it for now, putting it down to fatigue. Besides, he thought, they had enough to worry about.
He looked over his shoulder. “How you doin’?”
Emma nodded. “Good.” She smiled back, squinting from the grit in the maelstrom. Ben saw she had dirt smudged on her forehead and cheek, her eyes were rimmed and watered, her shirt was torn, and there was dried blood on one of her hands. In the other, she held her hunting knife, backwards, dagger style. She looked tiny, tired, but still full of bravado. Ben knew he loved her then. And would fight and die to keep her alive.
They came to a broad patch of vacant ground where the jungle seemed to have been pulled back but was matted with some type of creeper that had thick rope-like tendrils running across it.
In amongst them, Ben noticed bulbous fruit-like things and used his blade to cut one free. Emma wandered a little closer to the cliff edge.
Ben lifted the fruit to his ear and shook it – something rattled inside like dry seeds. He lifted his knife and sliced the fruit in half, trying to be careful not to get too much sap or juice on his hands. He knew that it
might be toxic, but his mouth watered, and at this point, he was prepared to take a risk.
His blade struggled to cut the fibrous bulb to begin with, but then it cracked through and the thing broke in half.
“Gak!” He flung it away and stood shaking his hands – the thing hadn’t been fruit at all, but some sort of insect egg. Hundreds of spindly, multi-legged monstrosities burst free running in all directions, and the ones that escaped now sought hiding places, under the vines, under the bulbs, and up on his legs. He started to dance and back away.
“How’s dinner looking?” Emma chuckled wearily.
Ben shook his hands and stomped his feet to shake off the bugs. “Well…” He shook his arms again. “Fruit’s off the menu.”
“Hey, look.” Emma crouched, cleared away some soil and gravel, and lifted an old revolver. She shook it and then blew dust from it. “Looks old; heavy.” She held it up, sighting along it, and then crossed to him.
Ben could see that the long-barreled gun was brown with age with rotating cartridge cylinders and wooden inserts on the grip. She held it out and he took it from her.
“Wow.” He immediately saw the imprint. “It’s a Colt; gotta be over a hundred years old if it’s a day.” He looked into the cartridge chambers and saw they were empty. He tried to break it open, but it was fused closed.
Ben knew immediately it was the sort of weapon someone would have possessed back in 1908. He slowly looked up at her.
She met his eyes. “Benjamin?”
He nodded and turned to the cliff edge. “He was here.” He flinched as a wave of grit was hurled into his face. He spat some out. “And the gun being empty tells me that he wasn’t at the start of his expedition.”
“This might be where he ended up.” Emma turned back to the plateau edge. “And if this is where he ended up; then this is where he was…before he got down.”