Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  And now he’d arrived.

  Jermaine sighed contentedly and was about to sign off for the weekend—it was already 3:30 and there was nothing else he wanted to do this Friday afternoon—when his calendar popped up and showed a reminder.

  Oh, right. The potential clients from Singapore.

  As if reading his mind, the phone on his desk beeped. He hit the speaker button and his assistant’s voice came over the line: “Your 3:30 is here.”

  “Thanks, send them in.”

  He heard a pop over the speaker and stared at the phone in irritation. It had been acting up lately, and he’d need to get it replaced.

  The door opened and Jermaine frowned as a man in a light grey suit showed himself in. “Didn’t Siena offer to show you in?”

  “She did,” the man replied. “I kept her from getting up. I can show myself through a door.”

  “Ah, good.” He’d have to talk to Siena, too. She knew that ushering people was part of her job, and she’d supposedly been trained not to give them any option other Ooption. “Please have a seat.”

  He studied his guest. The suit he was wearing was loose around the shoulders and waist. Jermaine didn’t consider that an insult. His potential clients were the kind of people for whom the very fact that the man was wearing a suit at all could indicate a huge concession to the niceties of formality.

  Apart from that, the man didn’t look in the least bit Asian. He was tall and blond and lithe, but that was par for the course in this business. Everyone triangulated their purchases through shell companies and intermediaries. The kind of people who wanted to buy dinosaurs that would kill people didn’t exactly advertise the fact.

  And that was how he opened. “Are you authorized to negotiate?”

  “To the very end,” the man replied. His accent was perfectly neutral. It was impossible to know where he was from.

  “Good.” It wasn’t really a surprise. This man—or, more precisely the people he worked for—would have been vetted by both the business and security side of ZooDef’s operation. Only after making his way through them would this man have been allowed to see Jermaine. “Then I’m sure we can get this done quickly. As you know, we’ve got favorable prices for our early adopters.”

  “That doesn’t concern me in the least,” the man said, putting a hand into the pocket of his jacket. “My employer is not interested in your price list.”

  Jermaine let the man speak; he’d name his conditions and the bargaining could begin.

  “I represent a man named Lai bin Amir. He is Malaysian.”

  The man paused, and Jermaine thought about the name for a moment. Lai… Lai… he knew he’d heard it, but couldn’t quite place it among the groups that might be interested in his wares. Then his eyes widened as he recognized the name of the single important person involved in the Stern Liberia fiasco. A man who’d survived.

  “Ah,” his visitor said, nodding approvingly. “I see you’ve placed him. He sends his regards, and says his main regret is that Cora can’t be here to deliver this message personally.”

  “Who the hell is Cora?” Jermaine sputtered. “What message? No, forget it. I don’t care. I’ll have security throw you out.”

  “No need,” the man replied, standing. “I’ll show myself out.” In a quick motion, he pulled a pistol with a silencer out of his jacket, aimed it at Jermaine’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet hit him right between the eyes and he knew nothing more.

  THE END

  Read on for a free sample of Monsters In The Clouds

  Or find more great dinosaur books at www.severedpress.com

  Chapter One

  On the bright side, Grant Coleman had to acknowledge that at least today’s challenges wouldn’t kill him.

  The line of customers snaked through the bookstore aisles and all the way to the front door. Every one held a copy of Cavern of the Damned and patiently awaited their turn to get the author’s signature.

  Grant had been at it for thirty minutes so far. A cramp plagued his hand, and his plastered-on smile threatened to crack. A book tour seemed like a soaring adventure when the publisher floated the idea. A month in, it had transformed into a grueling slog. He couldn’t wait to get back to his college classroom next month.

  He reminded himself it was a walk in the park compared to the real-life hell he’d endured, the events that had inspired the book. The readers loved Cavern of the Damned’s fantasy of giant scorpions and carnivorous bats. Grant doubted they would ever believe it had all had been reality.

  A twenty-something guy in a local college T-shirt handed Grant a book from across the table. “Dr. Coleman, this is such an honor. You inspired me.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. The way you used real science as the basis for your novel? It really fired me up for my paleontology classes. All the creatures in the cave are completely unreal, but it’s like grounded enough in fact that somehow it was like totally believable.”

  “Even scientists need to stretch their imaginations now and then,” Grant said. “This book was just me stretching mine.”

  It took another hour for the line to wind down. The last customer approached as the publisher’s rep and Grant’s agent stepped away to talk sales numbers with the store manager. A woman Grant’s age in a short red dress and black boots handed him her book. Her blonde hair was gathered in a short ponytail. The dress caught his attention, but her green eyes held it. He straightened his glasses and squared his shoulders, as if that made him seem less paunchy.

  “You tell quite a story, Dr. Coleman,” she said.

  “It’s fun to spin a little fantasy,” he said. In his head it sounded flirtier than it actually did when he said it.

  “But easier to just relate actualities.” She opened her black leather purse and pulled out the tip of a giant cave scorpion’s claw. She set it in front of him.

  Grant froze. Memories of the awful days in the cave came rushing back. He’d barely escaped with his life when the cavern flooded. He didn’t think any physical proof had survived. “W-where did you…?”

  “We followed some rumors to a place in Montana. Found far more fact than fiction when we sifted through a creek bed there.”

  Grant had a bestseller under his belt. It would be a major studio blockbuster next summer. The fame had landed him a tenure-track teaching position. Any claims that he thought what he’d written had been real would brand him a crackpot, destroy all he’d built these last two years. Sweat rolled down his temple.

  “Don’t worry, Doctor. I’m not here to tell the world that Cavern of the Damned is an autobiography. I’m here to pitch your follow-up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She pulled a tablet from her purse and laid it on the table. With a few taps, an aerial photograph of a rainforest appeared. She pointed to a lush plateau towering over the landscape.

  “My name is Thana Katsoros.” She handed him a business card with the Transworld Union logo on it and a Brazilian address. “My organization just discovered this place, deep in a closed indigenous area in the Amazon rainforest. It’s been isolated for who knows how long—the locals say since the world was created. Though the valley floods every year, no one climbs this plateau to escape the rising water. They say monsters rule in the clouds.”

  “Myths common in every culture.”

  She tapped the screen and magnified a specific spot on the photograph. “Tell me this is common in every culture.”

  Grant bent over and stared in shock.

  An apatosaurus’s head stuck out from the trees. Grant gasped.

  “Dinosaurs, Dr. Coleman, walking the earth in a Brazilian rainforest. It takes a special kind of scientist to face down a species like that for the first time. We think your book says that scientist is you. Are we wrong?”

  Grant couldn’t take his eyes off the sauropod.

  “No,” he said. “You aren’t wrong at all.”

  Chapter Two

 
As he sat at his hotel room desk the next morning, Grant began his second round of second thoughts.

  His initial rush of excitement had yielded to a long list of concerns. The first was the environment. He’d been a paleontologist and professor for over a decade. Field work was nothing new. But excavating dinosaurs was a very desert-oriented endeavor. Dry, quiet, and safe. Amazonian jungles were wet, loud, and dangerous. His first internet search had brought up a list of a dozen things that could kill him, from a microscopic virus to a two-hundred-pound jaguar. Katsoros and Transworld had offered him a lot of money, but he couldn’t cash the check if he was dead.

  Second, an apatosaurus was a little outside of his area of expertise. The average person dumped any animal that preceded Homo sapiens into the “prehistoric” category. That time frame was actually four billion years long and split into at least ten different periods, each with unique flora and fauna. apatosaurus’s Jurassic period was about two hundred million years ahead of the Age of Mammals, his era of choice.

  He’d learned one important lesson from his Montana monster hunt. Check out your supposed benefactor. The head of the expedition that ended up delivering Cavern of the Damned had turned out to be a con artist.

  He started with an internet search for some background on Transworld Union. Pages of results popped up. This was an actual company, listed on multiple stock exchanges, the usual global conglomerate with interests in shipping, energy, pharmaceuticals, and a dozen other things that appeared unrelated. At least its check wouldn’t bounce.

  He searched Thana Katsoros within Transworld. An employee information page appeared. Her picture matched the person he’d met, so that was a good start. She had a business degree from a college in Greece and had been with Transworld for eleven years, currently the head of South American Exigent Product Development. The vague title did match the expedition she’d mentioned.

  Her picture reminded him of the exposure Katsoros had threatened about his inspiration for Cavern of the Damned. He only had two semesters under his belt at the university. The dean was fine with Grant publishing fiction in his off hours, but any crazy stories about real giant scorpions would open the college up to ridicule. If Katsoros went public, he might not have a job to return to when the fall semester started next month.

  Just as the decision pendulum started to swing right, to the “go for it” position, the idea of dying thrust the weight back hard to the left. Even without being stomped by a dinosaur, there were just too many ways to end up a corpse. Besides, there was no way dinosaurs had survived into the modern era.

  Grant’s phone rang. The caller ID read Blood Sucking Leech.

  “Damn it.” That would be Howard Berman, his ex-wife’s divorce attorney. Grant could let it go to voice mail, but whenever he did, the bastard called every fifteen minutes until Grant answered. Grant pressed Accept.

  “Howard, what a pleasant surprise.”

  “If I didn’t know better,” Howard said, “I’d say that was disingenuous.”

  “Disingenuous? Certainly not. More like a flat out lie.”

  “Mr. Coleman, when you choose to act as your own attorney, you get to interact with other attorneys. That’s one of the perks.”

  Grant hadn’t chosen to be his own attorney when he got divorced. Poverty had forced the decision upon him. Times like now he regretted it.

  “We need to discuss the alimony,” Howard said.

  “I’m paid up, Howie. Since the university hired me, it’s been coming straight out of my paycheck so Her Majesty can make her next yacht payment.”

  “Not discussing past payments. Future payments. There’s a cut of author royalties she’s due.”

  Only the expense of replacing his phone kept Grant from throwing it against the wall. “And how do you come to that conclusion?”

  “The income scaling clause in the agreement, the one you demanded.”

  Grant cursed himself. His brilliant contribution to the settlement had been to have his alimony be a percent of income rather than a fixed amount. He wanted to protect himself from being thrown into debt if he ended up between teaching jobs or had to take a pay cut. He never thought he’d make any real money outside of his profession.

  “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is that the two of you have been following my writing career,” Grant said. “You know that book royalties don’t pay much.”

  “No, not as much as selling those movie rights did.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Grant whispered to himself. Grant had only found out about the rights sale last week. “No way she deserves a cut of this, Howzer. I did all this work after we were divorced.”

  “Feel free to fight the modification,” Howard said. “You’ll lose and I’ll tack my legal billing to the alimony, as well as the accrued interest from the delay. Think on that and we’ll get together when you get back from this little tour.”

  “Don’t you think sleeping with my ex-wife creates a conflict of interest in handling her divorce?”

  “If that slanderous accusation was true, which it isn’t, I’d think it would just make for a more zealous advocate. Talk to you soon.”

  Howard hung up. Grant again beat back the impulse to destroy his phone.

  This little bit of extortion would be expensive to fight. But he was going to fight it, and with an actual lawyer on his side this time. He might lose, but he’d take a pound of flesh from Howard and the ex-wife doing it. Pyrrhic victories didn’t come cheap though.

  Lucky for him, he had a chance to make a little money in the Amazon.

  The dino-decision pendulum swung back full right, and he searched his papers for Katsoros’s business card.

  Monsters In The Clouds Is available from Amazon HERE!

  Or find more great dinosaur books at www.severedpress.com