McCabe looked at the wound on his leg. He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere. You go. I’ll buy you time.”
“You can’t hold off the whole colony.”
“I won’t have to.” McCabe unslung the chaff tube from his shoulder. “I’m going to kill them.”
“The poison isn’t instant. They’ll tear you apart before they die.”
“But they’ll still die. They’re going to pay for Riffaud and Griggs.”
Grant was about to raise another objection when McCabe let a burst of rounds loose into advancing ants in the tunnel. Ant parts splattered the wall.
“Get out of here. Save Janaina and yourself. I’ll be pissed as hell if I die in here for nothing.”
Grant couldn’t argue. “Good luck.”
“Losers need luck.”
Grant backed down the tunnel. McCabe checked the switch for the chaff and slung the tube loose at his shoulder. He stood and steadied himself against the wall, then pointed his rifle down toward the nest with one hand, the chaff dispenser with the other. Arm muscles bulged as he pulled the trigger and sprayed bullets into the tube ahead of him.
“What’s the matter, boys? Allergic to lead?” McCabe staggered out of sight. “Payback’s coming!”
More automatic weapons fire sounded. Muzzle flashes flickered in the darkness. Grant turned and ran for the exit.
Behind him an explosion rocked the walls as McCabe fired off the chaff tube. His sharp scream followed, then silence.
From far ahead came the low glow of light at the tunnel entrance. Janaina’s shadow played back and forth across it as she ran.
Scraping sounded behind him, coming up fast. Grant turned to see two ants charging, their heads and mandibles filling the tunnel. He sprayed a half dozen rounds their way. The ants didn’t stop. Grant sprinted for his life.
Up ahead, Janaina broke out into daylight. But that end of the tunnel seemed impossibly far away. He could smell, no, he could sense that the ants were right behind him. His heart slammed in his chest and his leg muscles burned like they were on fire.
A crash sounded centimeters behind him. Then another. He looked over his shoulder. The ants lay in a pile. He stopped running and looked closer, amazed that his un-aimed shots had hit them somewhere vital.
They hadn’t. The ants were in one piece. Except for the strips of aluminum foil plastered to their bodies.
The poison had worked.
Grant staggered to the tunnel exit, completely out of breath and nearly dragging the rifle. He stepped into the daylight. Janaina was waiting.
“McCabe? Dixit?” she asked.
Grant shook his head. “Didn’t make it. But McCabe blew the poison into the nest. Any ants that aren’t already dead soon will be. We’re safe.”
Her eyes widened. “No we’re not.” She pointed over Grant’s shoulder.
Out to the west, by the pterosaur rookery, a dark cloud appeared to rise into the air.
Even at this distance, it looked angry.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Back in the tunnel?” Janaina asked.
“Blocked by dead ants by now. And those pterosaurs will walk in to find us, the way they did at the plane wreck.”
“And the jungle won’t hide us.”
The toppled sleeping container lay in the compound’s center
“The sleeping container,” Grant said “We can close the doors behind us.”
“It’s a cage. How long can we survive in there?”
Grant handed her his rifle. “Longer than out here.”
From the west, the pterosaurs were closing fast. Janaina ran for the container. Grant noticed the second chaff tube beside the tunnel entrance. He grabbed it and followed.
The container’s right door hung down to cut the opening in half. They ducked under as they dashed in. Pterosaur screeches sounded overhead. Grant reached down to pull the left door up into place. It didn’t budge.
“Damn. The hinge must be bent or something.”
Janaina joined him and they gave the door a yank. The hinges moaned and the door swung closed. They secured it from the inside.
“Maybe they won’t know we’re in here,” Grant said.
“They saw us go in and can smell us from the outside.”
“Forgive my wishful thinking.”
Pterosaurs screamed from just outside the container. Metal crunched as creatures landed on the container’s top facing side.
“Maybe they’ll get frustrated and leave,” Grant said. “Or do you want to shoot down that bit of optimism as well?”
“No, you go ahead and nurture that one.”
Claws scraped like knife blades against the metal door. It jerked against the hinges as a pterosaur tried to open it. The lock held.
“See,” Grant said. “They can’t get in.”
Suddenly a bill pierced through the top of the container. It missed Grant by millimeters. He jumped back.
Janaina jammed the rifle barrel against the container next to the bill and fired. A pterosaur screamed and the bill withdrew. Another bill slammed through the container at the far end. Other bills hammered at the container from all sides, leaving dents in the steel.
“Limited ammunition,” she said. “Unlimited dinosaurs.”
Grant smiled and hefted the chaff tube. “But we have this.”
Janaina grabbed the two wires hanging from the bottom and held them up. “And?”
Grant realized that the ignition system for the tube was still strapped to McCabe somewhere in the dying ant nest. “McCabe said only electricity could set it off.”
A bill smashed through the vertical wooden floor of the container and into one of the sleeping seats. The bill stuck and the pterosaur jerked the seat back and forth trying to free it. The seat tore loose, and its weight snapped the bill in two. The chair dropped to the ground and the jagged stump of the pterosaur bill slipped away.
Grant and Janaina began a frantic search through the mess in the container for something, anything with a battery. Grant remembered the flashlight on the rifle.
“Got it!” He slit the securing duct tape with his machete. He flicked the switch. The bulb glowed. He turned it off.
Another bill pierced the weak spot along the crease in the container. A second punched in beside it. Then a third.
“They are working together,” Janaina said. “Opening a hole to get in.”
“We’ll use that hole to get this out.”
He rolled the chaff tube on its side. He unscrewed the flashlight and tied the two chaff tube wires off to contacts inside.
“Is that enough power to light the charge?” Janaina said.
“I have no idea, and no other options.”
“And this poison will kill the pterosaurs?”
“Same answer.”
Two more bills speared the container top and disappeared.
“As soon as there’s a hole the size of this tube,” Grant said, “I’m going to jam the tube through it. Then you need to throw that flashlight switch.”
“Roger that.” She nodded in satisfaction. “I decided I’m keeping that phrase.”
She gripped the flashlight in both hands and stared at the top of the container.
Pterosaurs pounded on all sides. Janaina shouted something but it was lost in the din. Bills pierced the top faster and faster. Several peppered the middle section until the perforations nearly all touched.
Suddenly a pterosaur head burst through the weakened steel. It screamed and with a snap of its head it slammed Grant into the side of the container.
Janaina dropped the flashlight and grabbed the rifle. The pterosaur shrieked at her. She jammed the rifle up into its open bill and fired. The bullet blasted through the elongated rear of the dinosaur’s skull. Blood and brains splattered Grant’s face.
The dinosaur dropped in through the hole and fell at Grant’s feet. Grant grabbed the chaff tube and shoved it up through the hole in the container. “Hit it!”
Janaina
dropped the rifle and scrambled for the flashlight. It lay in a pool of pterosaur blood. She grabbed for it and it slipped through her fingers.
Enraged pterosaurs accelerated the assault. Bills pierced all sides of the container. Pterosaurs pulled at the door and it bent in the hinges.
Janaina dove into the dinosaur blood with both hands. She gripped the flashlight, felt the switch, and pushed it.
Grant braced for the explosion. The chaff tube boomed. The recoil tore the tube from his hands. Grant looked through the hole in the roof to see a snowfall of flashing chaff flutter through and around a flock of soaring pterosaurs.
At the report of the chaff tube, the attack stopped.
Then the pterosaurs erupted in a chorused roar. The attack resumed, more furious than before.
Bills shredded the container sides. Grant shoved the tube into the ceiling hole to block another pterosaur invasion. Pterosaurs jabbed it from above so hard that it shoved Grant across the blood-soaked floor.
Dozens of pterosaur strikes dimpled the walls. A bill drove through the side and slashed Grant’s arm. He dropped the chaff tube and clamped a hand to his bleeding bicep.
The container door bent outward in the middle and snapped off its hinges. Daylight flooded the interior and Grant squinted.
Janaina grabbed the rifle and pointed it at the open container door. Grant drew his machete and prepared to die.
The attack stopped. All around the container dying pterosaurs thudded to the ground. Through the open door, two hit the ground nearby and disappeared in a cloud of dust. Then all went silent.
“Could it be?” Janaina said.
She headed out the door, rifle pointed straight ahead. Grant followed her and they both stood in the compound’s center.
“Well, I’m still not dead,” Grant said. “But they are.”
Dead pterosaurs littered the ground. Here and there a wing fluttered in the last spasms of the animal’s death throes. To the west, a flock of pterosaurs retreated home. Some dropped out of formation and plummeted to the ground.
“They’re going to take that poisoned chaff back to the rookery and kill the rest, aren’t they?” Janaina said.
“Even if they don’t, they’re doomed. Some may be able to survive without the ants providing food, but with no way to gestate their larvae, this will be their last generation. I’d feel pretty melancholy about it if the damn things hadn’t been trying to kill us.”
“Transworld Union gets their way. No species to get in the way of mining uranium.”
“We don’t know that. We haven’t seen the entire plateau. And when we get back, the whole world will know about this place.”
The faint drone of aircraft engines came from far away. Grant and Janaina turned around to face east.
In the distance, the silhouette of a C-130 popped in and out of clouds. It banked left to head for the plateau.
“The chaff is gone,” Janaina said. “They’ll never see us.”
“We need to make certain they do.”
They began to search through the wreckage of the camp, pulling dead pterosaurs off smashed boxes and upturned crates. Grant hoped for a radio, a mirror, a flamethrower, anything that might cause a commotion pilots might notice from thousands of feet up. He pulled one box aside and revealed one of the big white parachutes from their initial drop.
“Here! Grab this.”
He and Janaina dragged it out to an open area. Working from both ends, they untangled the sheet from itself and stretched it out. The plane popped out of a cloud on a course closer to the compound.
“Yes!” Janaina jumped and began to raise and lower the parachute.
Grant matched her movements and the parachute rose and fell like a great, white wave. Sunlight flickered off the metal fittings. His hope began to rise. They were going to get the hell out of here after all.
The C-130 leveled out, still over a kilometer from where they stood, and not coming any closer.
“No, no, no,” Grant said. “Hey, over here!”
“Turn this way!” Janaina screamed.
They shouted, though there was no way the pilots could possibly hear them. Grant’s arms ached as he flapped the parachute high over his head.
The plane continued on, turned left again, and headed away on a course to São Paulo. Clouds again swallowed it up.
Grant dropped the parachute. “That’s it?” he yelled after the plane. “That’s as hard as you’re going to try?”
Janaina froze in shock and dropped her side of the parachute. A breeze picked up the edge, and the parachute blew across the compound.
Grant’s heart sank to his knees. He was out of optimism. There was only so long they could survive in this land that so wanted to kill them.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“This isn’t good,” Grant said. “Who knows if Transworld will ever send another expedition out here, and if they do, when.”
“Everything is a mess around the compound, but it isn’t destroyed. We should be able to salvage much of the food, and the stream has fresh water.”
“Eventually, we’ll have to live off the land. And the truth is that we probably can’t. These primitive plants are very simple. They won’t have evolved deep reservoirs of nutrients and we won’t be able to digest them. And I don’t even want to think about eating phoberomys. Of course, all those problems will become academic if something out there eats us first.” Grant pointed to the destroyed container. “And where would we live? That thing is more colander than container now.”
“Then we must go home.”
“There’s no way up and out of here.”
“Then we’ll go down. If the indigenous people came up the cliff side to make those offerings, we should be able to go down.”
“It’s hundreds of feet, and I get scared on step ladders.”
“More scared than facing dinosaurs?”
Grant paused. “Well, no. But even if we get to the bottom, what then? We’re hundreds of miles from anything.”
“But the river below will take us to the coast, or civilization long before that. I’ve spent months doing research in Amazonia. The world of the past is up here. That is your world. The jungle below, that is mine.”
There was no hope of survival staying up here, and only a 90 percent chance that climbing down a cliff would give Grant a fatal heart attack. “Okay, I’m in.”
Over the next half hour, they salvaged backpacks from the Swiss-cheesed container and stuffed them with food and water. Grant’s rifle was the only firearm to be found and a check of his magazine showed only three rounds. Wherever McCabe had secured the rest of the ammunition, if there was any, was a mystery they didn’t have time to solve. Janaina found two coils of rope and a second machete. That was all they had to get them back to São Paulo.
Grant checked all of Dixit’s lab equipment. The combination of pterosaur and ant attacks had destroyed everything. Even the small laptop was in pieces. Grant smashed the case with the handle of his machete and extracted the hard drive. It might contain the only physical proof that anything up here had once existed.
The plateau’s silence was even more unnerving with the pterosaur corpses surrounding them. The imperative to get away from all the death, human and animal, grew with each minute. By the time Grant shouldered his pack, the idea of climbing down the side of the plateau seemed like a relatively welcome relief.
The two of them scaled the berm around the compound for a final time and set out across the ankylosaur-churned ground around the perimeter. They followed the path they had beaten through the jungle that first day, when the plateau was still benign and they were excited about encountering a peaceful apatosaurus. The rifle slipped in Grant’s sweating palms. Unlike his first walk along this route, he was hyper-aware that something new and deadly might raise its head at any moment.
At last the jungle opened up to the sacrificial clearing and the cliff face to the east. Below stretched a seemingly infinite green jungle, sliced by the blue-
green water of the river that would take them home. Grant’s sense of relief was tempered by dread about the next, literally large step he was about to take, off the side of a cliff. Janaina dropped her backpack beside a tree and Grant dropped his coil of rope beside it. They both stepped over to the edge.
The sheer drop seemed about twice as long as Grant remembered it. A jumble of boulders at the base promised an instant, gruesome death if he fell. His equilibrium did a little whirl and he stepped back away from the edge.
“Now, you can’t be that way,” Janaina said. She dropped her rope. “Remember that people climbed this with bare hands and feet.”
“People younger. And thinner.”
“I can see the path they have carved from here. We’ll use this rope to get past this steep section where some of the foot holds look questionable. Then it will be, how you say, a walk in the park. Unlike climbing, gravity will do half the work.”
“I’m afraid of gravity getting bossy and deciding to do all the work.”
Janaina tied one of the coils of rope off to the trunk of the tree. Grant wandered over to the far end of the clearing, ostensibly to look again at the ankylosaur offerings the locals had erected, but in reality to relish the feeling of solid earth beneath his feet while he still could.
To the left, branches crashed. Suddenly, an ankylosaur burst into the clearing. Barely a hundred meters away, it was the same one they’d encountered before. Blood dried to black coated its neck. The knife still protruded from one eye socket and the other was just a scabby hollow. It bellowed with a bass roar that made the ground tremble.
In a panicked reaction, Grant leveled the rifle at the dinosaur and fired without aiming. The bullet ricocheted off the creature’s back plating.
It might have been blind, but apparently it could still hear, smell, and feel. It turned its head in Grant’s direction. Grant aimed and fired twice.
Both rounds deflected off the creature’s cranial armor. It roared again and charged Grant. Out of bullets and ideas, he ran. He angled away from Janaina. He might die, but at least he’d give her time to get over the cliff. He dashed between two huge trees and into the jungle.
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