Monsters In The Clouds

by Russell James

  “Okay, everyone can hear me now,” McCabe said. “Stay seated and strapped in. It’s going to be loud, it’s going to be warm, it’s going to be uncomfortable. Boo hoo. Above all, keep these on. When we get to the DZ I’ll give you instructions to load up for the drop. Miss that announcement and you may still be on board when everyone else exits.”

  Compared to being strapped in a box and thrown out the back of a perfectly good airplane, Grant didn’t consider that to be such a bad alternative.

  ***

  The next three hours passed as McCabe had promised—loud, warm, and uncomfortable. The good news was that Grant managed to nod off for most of it. The bad news was that he woke up needing to pee.

  McCabe’s voice came over the headset. “We’re arriving at the plateau. Listen for my order to prepare for insertion.”

  Down at the loading ramp, Griggs stood and strapped on a parachute.

  Grant’s bladder made another, stronger cry for relief. McCabe’s earlier welcome message hadn’t included any mention of an inflight bathroom, but Grant reasoned that there had to be one. Even without passengers, the crew would be flying for six hours. Surely they didn’t resort to empty soda bottles?

  He hung his headset back on the wall, unbuckled his seat belt and tottered to the front of the aircraft. The door to the cockpit stood open, with the flight deck a few steps higher than the cargo area. Curiosity took hold, and Grant stepped up into the doorway.

  The two pilots sat at the controls. Through the windshields Grant saw plateau like in the pictures. It rose like an island from a sea of white fog. Trepidation and exhilaration sparred as he worried about parachuting in and anticipated what waited below in that unexplored land. The plane flew over the plateau.

  Suddenly, something big and brown slammed through the co-pilot’s windshield. The cockpit exploded into a maelstrom of blasting, roaring wind. The mass of whatever it was sliced into the co-pilot’s neck and decapitated him. His severed head smashed into the bulkhead next to Grant.

  Alarms blared. Warning lights bathed the cockpit in red. Something exploded outside along the starboard wing and the plane lurched right.

  Grant lost his grip and sailed into the starboard bulkhead. His head hit metal and he saw stars. The plane snapped back level and he slid to the cargo bay floor. His head swam as he sat up.

  The roar of the air through the smashed windshield obliterated any other noise, so the cargo area looked like a high-speed silent movie. Griggs dropped the cargo ramp and the airflow now rushed straight through the aircraft like a wind tunnel. Riffaud snapped some of the cargo straps free on the first pallet. McCabe rushed all the non-military personnel from the uncomfortable mesh seats into the drop container. He’d donned his parachute as well.

  Grant realized he was about to be left behind.

  He pulled himself to his feet. At the door of the personnel carrier, Janaina pointed over McCabe’s shoulder at Grant. McCabe ignored her and shoved her into the box.

  Griggs released the last cargo strap on the first pallet. It slid down the ramp and out of the aircraft. A static line pulled the parachute open and the load disappeared from view. Griggs tightened his rifle to his chest and leapt out the open door.

  The plane lurched left. The door to the personnel container slammed shut. Grant careened across the cargo floor and slammed into the port side exit door. The handle poked him hard in the side and added another bruise to his growing collection.

  The plane leveled, but the sinking feeling in Grant’s middle ear said it was still falling. McCabe pulled a knife from his belt and slashed the cargo straps on the personnel pallet. He shoved it forward and it rolled toward the gaping opening in the aircraft’s rear. McCabe spun and cut the straps on the Bobcat’s pallet. The personnel carrier dropped out of the ramp and the parachute deployed. The Bobcat pallet started to roll toward McCabe. He sprinted for the door and dove through head first.

  The plane rocked again. The nose rose and fell as the pilot struggled for altitude. The last pallet stopped rolling. Grant was no expert, but this had all the earmarks of an impending crash.

  Riding it out would be suicide. There weren’t any spare parachutes hanging on the bulkhead. There was only one potentially safe way to the ground, and it was about to roll out the door.

  Grant ran for the Bobcat.

  He caught up with it as it resumed rolling toward the ramp. Fueled by adrenaline, he bounded onto the front bucket and dropped through the cage into the seat. The pallet accelerated toward the open ramp. Grant snapped the seatbelt around his waist, and immediately wondered what good that would possibly do. He clamped his hands to the sides of the cage and held his breath.

  The pallet rolled out the ramp and all Grant saw was blue sky.

  Then the pallet rotated forward, and all he saw was jungle. And it was coming up fast.

  Chapter Seven

  The parachute’s static line uncoiled like a snake from the top of the Bobcat as it plummeted down. With a thunk it snapped tight and released the chute. Nylon whipped against nylon as the canopy deployed. Grant’s terrified focus stayed glued on the approaching ground.

  Wind caught the chute and it popped wide open. The pallet leveled and Grant compressed into the seat as the descent jerked to a slower speed.

  Slower, but nowhere near slow. The closer he came to the ground, the faster it seemed to approach. A rolling meadow, no doubt the original intended landing strip, lay kilometers away. A kilometer or more in front of him floated the other pallet and the personnel carrier. It looked like they had a fighting chance of making a small burned-over clearing at the jungle’s edge. The three individual parachutes of the military team followed them down from above.

  Below him stretched nothing but trees. Even if he could steer this sinking ship, he could never get to the clearing before impact.

  From somewhere behind him came the scream of engines and then a crash and a boom. The C-130 had probably spiraled in. But Grant didn’t have time to look. Treetops were coming up fast. A quick death aboard the C-130 might have been a better option.

  The last thirty meters of the drop came at high speed. Suddenly it seemed like he could count the leaves on the trees. Then he was in them.

  The pallet burst through the jungle like a plow through snow. Animals screamed warnings from the jungle around him as the pallet sent leaves and branches flying like a noisy, earth-colored blizzard. Tree limbs snapped like toothpicks.

  The parachute caught on the treetops and shredded into streamers. The pallet dropped like a stone. Grant closed his eyes and prayed.

  The pallet slammed into the earth. The Bobcat compressed its springs and bottomed out against the steel. Grant’s body yanked forward into an L around his seatbelt. His jaw slammed his knee in a feat of flexibility he didn’t know he’d possessed. Teeth sliced lip and blood flowed.

  Then all went silent. He tasted warm copper. Grant opened one eye, then the other. His spine made a creaking noise as he sat up. He exhaled.

  “Still not dead,” he muttered in amazement.

  He unclicked the seatbelt and gave the buckle a caress. “Seat belts save lives.”

  The pallet sat in a clearing. Seconds before it hadn’t been so, but the plummeting pallet had made short work of the rain forest. Hazy sunlight through the cloud cover illuminated the ground around him.

  A quick self-diagnostic told him he hadn’t broken anything save the skin where he’d tried to bite through his lip on impact. He’d been lucky.

  Now if this were a movie, he’d fire up the Bobcat, and then clear himself a way through the jungle to the others. This not being a movie, he had no key for the Bobcat and didn’t know how to drive it if he had one. He gave brief consideration to the idea of sitting here until someone came to the rescue. They would likely be in search of the Bobcat instead of him, but it would all be the same in the end.

  But what if Janaina or Katsoros were in that rescue party, hacking through the jungle while he sat here in a cushioned vinyl
seat? That was a big bite of manhood surrender that he wasn’t about to swallow.

  He climbed down and stepped on the spongy earth. It crossed his mind that he was the first human being to set foot on this particular spot. It was like the feeling he had when he unearthed a fossil after it had been buried a few million years. Except that this sensation was more visceral, more alive.

  Then he remembered the last time he’d felt this way, in the Montana cavern, where every creature he encountered wanted to kill him.

  He set out in the direction of the burned over clearing, and the safety of numbers.

  ***

  Two hours and multiple scratches and bumps later, he stepped out into the clearing. The scent of char tinged the air. Though the clearing looked wide open from the air, at ground level it was obvious that the lightning had only caused a flash fire. While the canopy and the underbrush had turned to cinders, the larger trees still stood like stripped, blackened sentinels. In no time, the regenerative power of the forest would no doubt heal this wound. Out west he could see the high ground further out on the plateau.

  Off to the left, the personnel carrier lay on its side, one of the twin doors wide open. Its parachute draped across the ground like a deflated balloon. He had a bad feeling the box was full of corpses. He shifted to a less morbid train of thought, that maybe someone inside might need help. He ran to the open door.

  He stuck his head inside. It was dark, but he could make out the seats on both sides. All empty. No corpses. He sighed.

  He stepped away from the container and practically ran into Griggs. Startled, he let out a little yelp.

  “Where’d you come from?” Griggs said.

  “Originally, Salt Lake City.”

  Griggs didn’t look amused.

  “I hitched a ride on the pallet with the Bobcat,” Grant said

  “The Bobcat made it? Where?”

  “Why yes, I’m fine. Thanks for asking. And the Bobcat is about a mile north of this clearing. Where are the others?”

  “This way.”

  Griggs led him out of the clearing and into the jungle. A hundred yards in, the survivors from the plane were unloading the other pallet. From the looks of the gap in the canopy, it had crash landed about as well as the Bobcat. Maybe worse. Several cracked containers had spewed their contents all over the jungle. He searched faces until he found Janaina. She looked uninjured. That made him smile. Getting hurt on a trip where no one wanted her in the first place would just make her even more miserable. Grant did a head count and came up one short.

  Then he noticed the missing person. Riffaud sat up about fifteen feet in the crook of a tree, scanning the area with binoculars, automatic rifle lying across two branches beside him.

  Griggs walked Grant over to McCabe, who was studying a map.

  “Located the Bobcat,” Griggs said.

  McCabe looked up, right past Grant without pause, and locked eyes on Griggs. “You’re kidding? Damage report?”

  Grant wedged his face in front of McCabe. “Still in one piece. As am I. Seriously, you two need to stop gushing over my survival.”

  McCabe pushed Grant back with one finger. “And where the hell were you when everything went sideways?”

  “Standing by the cockpit, looking for a restroom.” He realized he no longer needed to go. He didn’t want to know why. “Something crashed into the windshield and killed one of the pilots.”

  “And then from the sound of it, we lost at least one engine,” McCabe said. “Probably a bird strike at the low level we were flying.”

  “Since no planes have ever been here,” Grant said, “birds would have no clue about aircraft. They couldn’t judge the speed and avoid one.”

  Grant was pretty proud of his insightful addition to the conversation. McCabe looked not only unimpressed, but possibly irritated. He turned back to Griggs. “Take one of the science geeks and go find the Bobcat. It should have enough juice to get back here. By then we’ll have the solar panels up for recharging.”

  McCabe headed over to Riffaud’s tree and began to brief him on what Griggs was doing. Janaina saw Grant and rushed over.

  “Ai, meu Deus! We were all thinking you were dead. How did you get here?”

  “I drove the Bobcat.”

  She looked at him in confusion.

  “I mean, not the whole way, obviously. I got it from the plane to the ground. That’s the hard part, right? Griggs is leaving to bring it the rest of the way here. I’ll let him have his moment.”

  “I… I don’t know how much of what you are saying is a joke.”

  “Then we’ll get along splendidly.”

  Katsoros approached the group with a satellite phone in her hand. “This thing didn’t survive the drop. We have no communication back to Transworld.” She gave Grant a double-take. “Dr. Coleman! We were afraid that you went down with the plane.”

  “Only half of the way,” Grant said.

  McCabe returned. “Did you see where it crashed?”

  “Northeast of here somewhere.”

  “That matches the location of a smoke plume earlier. Wasn’t sure if that was the plane or a fire like the one that burned this place over.”

  “Hate to be a downer after surviving the crash,” Grant said. “But with no way to call home, how do we get out of here?”

  “Plan B,” Katsoros said. “Any loss in communications and a rescue team launches in seventy-two hours.”

  “Maybe earlier when the C-130 doesn’t return,” McCabe said.

  “Then we do what we came to do until then,” Katsoros said. “It looks like we have the basics we need to do it.”

  Griggs corralled Dixit and Hobart, and told Dixit he was taking Hobart to get the Bobcat. Dixit nodded and began searching an open equipment container. Griggs frog-marched Hobart westward.

  “Dixit seems more worried about his equipment than that his assistant just got sent into an uncharted jungle, maybe filled with dinosaurs,” Janaina said.

  “Maybe Hobart’s gift is the dino poo collecting,” Grant said. “As long as he’s back in time for that…”

  Janaina knit her brow. “What is, how you say, ‘poo’?”

  “Pretty much most of my conversation. Just let it slide.”

  ***

  Two hours later, the setting sun backlit the Bobcat as it rolled out of the jungle. It appeared that it also brought a good deal of the jungle wrapped around it. A silent electric motor instead of a growling diesel engine made the arrival even more surreal. Hobart hung from the back, looking over the cage with a big goofy grin. Grant thought that Hobart likely didn’t get out of the lab much.

  By now everyone had sorted their items and inventoried their losses. Grant had brought the least, just some basics in a backpack, but had lost the most of anyone: all of it. In the humidity he already smelled more gamey than he preferred. This was going to be a long trip. With few friends.

  He did find the fossil-hunting kit he’d shipped ahead to Transworld. He wasn’t sure what they’d find while they were here, but while others searched for living fossils, he didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if they happened across any Triassic-era versions.

  Griggs pulled the Bobcat up to the toppled personnel carrier. He used the bucket loader to lift one edge and set the box upright with a crash.

  They spent the time until dusk ferrying everything from the crashed pallet to the container in the bucket loader. There they set up one area for supplies and another by the rear of the container as a work area for Dixit and Hobart. Riffaud even fashioned a sunshade out of some tree limbs and one of the parachutes. After the early start, the adrenaline rush of the crash, and the exercise setting up the base camp, everyone was exhausted.

  “Listen up!” McCabe called out. “It’s almost dark. We don’t know what’s out here, but whatever’s here will be curious about the creatures that crashed down from the sky. I want any meetings we have with the local wildlife to be on my terms, not theirs. The most secure place is the big box, s
o you are all going in. My men and I will stand guard in rotation so you can all sleep without worry.”

  “And how are we to all sleep in such a place?” Dixit said. His clipped, accented delivery was exceptionally shrill. “There is no room to lie down.”

  “Sitting up and strapped in,” McCabe said. “Or you can sleep out here with the unknown. See if it has a taste for human flesh. I’ll try to kill it before it eats you, but it’ll be dark and I make no guarantees.”

  Dixit’s lips quivered. “Sitting up it is, then.”

  The group trudged to the box, Hobart on Dixit’s heels, Katsoros right behind them. Janaina followed her. Grant was torn between wanting to sit next to her and fearing having his scent repel her if he did. He decided to chance it and followed her in.

  The mesh along the sides let some more-than-welcome air pass through. Everyone took a seat and strapped in. Riffaud and Griggs took the seats on either side of the door. McCabe swung it shut. The waning sunlight barely lit the interior through the screens. The men propped their rifles against the side of the container, leaned back in the seats, and were almost instantly asleep. The rest of the team quickly followed suit.

  He tucked his glasses into his pocket for safe-keeping. Tired as he was, the anticipation of what lay ahead tomorrow gave Grant a mental rush that made sleep elusive. He might be face-to-face with a dinosaur in hours.

  Chapter Eight

  Grant’s morning revelation was that if he was tired enough, he could sleep sitting upright strapped into a rock-hard seat. He sighed with relief, because he had at least two more nights of it ahead of him. He put his glasses on and brought the world back into focus.

  As he got up, he felt the impact. He was stiff as hell. Between sticking the landing in the Bobcat yesterday and a full night of pressure on his spine, his back felt like he’d borrowed every vertebra from an octogenarian.