Monsters In The Clouds

by Russell James

  The ankylosaur rushed at full speed straight for Grant. Its head went between the two trees, but its body shell crashed hard into both. It squeaked as it jerked to a stop and its head smacked into the ground.

  The thing was vulnerable, for a moment. Grant could finish it. He dropped the empty rifle and drew his machete. One thrust, through the eye socket and into its tiny brain. That was all it would take. He raised the blade with both hands.

  “Hey dinosaur!” Janaina shouted. “Over here you big bully!”

  In the clearing behind the animal, Janaina wound up and hurled a rock at the ankylosaur. It hit the creature in the leg. The animal roared and backed out of the two-tree trap. It turned to the sound of Janaina’s voice.

  “Yes, you!” She pegged it in the head with another rock. “Come see what picking on a woman gets you.”

  Grant grimaced. He’d cleared the way for Janaina’s escape. Now they were both going to end up getting killed.

  The dinosaur charged Janaina. She turned and ran back across the clearing, toward the cliff. She shouted again at the animal and it barreled toward her voice. It closed with each bound. Janaina approached the cliff’s edge without slowing. Grant’s heart skipped a beat. Could she stop?

  The ankylosaur snapped at her heels. Janaina reached the edge of the cliff, shouted once more at the creature, and launched herself into the air.

  “No!” Grant screamed.

  Janaina disappeared over the edge. The blind ankylosaur careened over the precipice behind her. Too late, the animal realized its mistake as its front legs sailed out into space. It twisted to reverse course, but momentum dragged its rear legs across the earth, and it flew off the cliff. The great ball at the end of its tail smashed the ground as the animal rotated belly up and dropped toward the jungle below. Its diminishing scream followed it down and then cut off.

  For a second Grant stood stunned at the sacrifice he’d just seen. Then he ran to the precipice. As he passed the tree he noticed that the rope that had been tied around the trunk was stretched out, tight and quivering over the edge of the cliff. He ran to the edge and looked down.

  Janaina hung upside down, a loop of rope tied around one ankle. She looked up at Grant.

  “You going to pull me up or just stand there gawking?”

  Grant dropped his machete and pulled her up, hand over hand. Near the top, her hands found purchase and she turned herself upright and crawled up over the edge. She stood up and dusted some dirt from her shirt.

  “What the hell did you do?” he said.

  “Once you distracted the ankylosaur, I tied a bowline into the end of the rope by the cliff. Just before I jumped I hooked a foot into the loop.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t yank your foot off.”

  “I know how long to make a safety line. There was no risk at all.”

  Grant looked over the edge at the splattered dinosaur at the base of the cliff. “Except to it.”

  “Ready to head down at a slower rate than the dinosaur did?”

  “I was ready days ago.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The descent took over five hours. Five hours and thirty-two minutes. Grant knew precisely because he counted every minute until his feet were again on a piece of ground more than a few centimeters wide.

  They’d let their packs dangle several meters below them on short lengths of rope so that the packs wouldn’t throw them off balance. As soon as his touched the ground, Grant had to restrain himself from jumping the last few meters after it.

  Janaina had tied a rope safety harness around him that circumnavigated his waist then wrapped uncomfortably between and around his legs. He untied it first thing and prayed that his manhood hadn’t suffered any permanent damage from the compression.

  Janaina hopped down beside him from two meters up.

  “See, easy as cake.”

  “Easy as pie, and it wasn’t. I know for a fact that cliff was trying to kill me.”

  She tapped him on the chest. “Well, it did a poor job of it.”

  Around him, the trees were all familiar looking. Insects buzzed and chirped around them. Travel a hundred meters and he was back in the 21st century. A trail snaked away into the jungle.

  “That should take us to the river,” Janaina said. “And the river takes us home.”

  A short time later, the trail ended at the river. Narrow sandy banks ran along both sides. The water ran swift.

  “Is this normal?” Grant said.

  He pointed up into a tree. A dugout canoe lay wedged between two branches. Moss grew along one side.

  “Oh! Wonderful. That is a local design. It was probably lost in a flood and washed down river to get stuck here. We just need to get it down and that will be our ticket home.”

  Grant looked at the rippling river. Both overgrown banks appeared untouched by man.

  “We might be the first non-natives to ever travel down this section of the river,” he said.

  “Sounds like that might turn into an adventure,” Janaina said.

  Grant had an unsettling feeling that it most certainly would.

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of Titanoboa: Journey To The Amazon

  Afterword

  Since the first excavation of their fossils, dinosaurs have captured people’s imaginations. It seems that every boy, and many girls, go through a “dinosaur phase” where the animals become an obsession. Tens of thousands of people never grow out of it and have fashioned careers trying to find more clues and extrapolate more understanding about these extinct creatures. Jules Verne fantasized about finding some; the Jurassic Park films dreamed of recreating them.

  Dinosaurs ruled my primary school life. I had books about them and toys that represented them. I wish I still had my View-Master reels of three-dimensional dinosaurs and my battery powered T-Rex that walked across the room with glowing red eyes. A middle-school visit to the dinosaur exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Natural History was such an anticipated event that I’m certain I drove my parents insane talking about it for weeks before and after. Standing in the shadows of the bones of those creatures was thrilling.

  So, fresh off surviving his ordeal in Cavern of the Damned, I thought it would be great to let Dr. Grant Coleman do what I’d always dreamed of—go face to face with some dinosaurs.

  The ones in the story are mostly true to life. The phoberomys are a species discovered in South America that lived about eight million years ago. The ankylosaurus is a pretty commonly known dinosaur, but I added its carnivorous activities because plant eaters wrapped in defensive armor usually are not the threatening type. It really did have a huge bony club at the end of its tail, which had to give many predators pause.

  The pterosaurs are an amalgamation of many species that have been excavated over the centuries. Whether they flew or just glided, whether they just perched or actually walked, all is up for conjecture, and the conventional wisdom seems to shift a lot. What they definitely didn’t have are ovipositors in the end of their bills.

  The giant ants are based on the normal-sized version we like to spray with a can of Raid. Soldier ants and weaver ants and ants making bridges all happen in the real world, though not all coming from the same colony. And before you whine that the spiracles that allow for ants’ passive breathing through their skin means they’d never get so big, I will direct you to Grant hearing them use active respiration. Oh, and I’d remind you that this is fiction.

  The mind-controlling larvae in the ants’ skulls are also based on real science. Do an internet search on the emerald cockroach wasp for a really fascinating example of a wasp doing this with venom. Then there’s a Costa Rican wasp that lays eggs on orb spiders and the larvae make the spider spin a strange, new web. And don’t miss hairworms infecting dry land crickets with a larva that drives the crickets into water, where the cricket drowns, but the hairworm can emerge and live on. Who needs scary fiction when Mother Nature serves up stuff like this?

  An
d finally, there really are Stone Age tribes deep in the Amazon that have had no or limited contact with the 21st century world. Debate rages on about how to treat these pockets of our distant past. Isolation, integration, or something in between? Like Heisenberg’s principle, there is the likelihood that even our act of observation will forever alter their culture. Real-world Janainas champion their cause.

  Special thanks goes out to Beta Readers Extraordinaire Donna Fitzpatrick, Teresa Robeson, Deborah Grace, and Belinda Whitney. They are sworn to secrecy about the horrendous errors they pointed out.

  What’s in store for Grant Coleman? Who knows. But that’s a pretty long river he’ll need to navigate to get back to civilization. It might get dangerous.

  Russell James

  October 2017

  1

  As he once again boarded the Lucky Lucy, Dr. Hank Newstead reflected again on the smell permeating all around him. There were lots of rivers throughout the world, lots of pristine places that were resisting the encroachment of man, but the Amazon somehow managed to smell unique among them all. Sure, there was the lush greenery and smell of exotic growing things, the sharp scent of fish and murky water and things growing and living beneath the sometimes calm and sometimes roiling surface. But there were also other things, things that could be found nowhere else in the world. There were the pungent odors of flowers and plants that could only be found here, and a deep, almost incomprehensible odor wafting out of the flood waters flowing among the roots of the trees.

  All of it was a far cry from the stale, antiseptic scent of labs and academia he was surrounded by when not in the field. And even though he was uncountable miles away from his mailing address, that ever-present smell made him feel truly at home.

  “Newstead, you’re doing it again,” Morgan said.

  Hank blinked several times, bringing himself back to the moment. “Doing what again?”

  “Doing that brainy, ‘I-smell-a-thing,’ hippy-dippy shit you do.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do. Every time you come back to the Lucky Lucy, you stop and do that and look like a fool, all while making us late. So are you going to get your ass back to packing up the boat, or what?”

  Although anyone else would have interpreted Captain M. Morgan’s words as gruff and angry, Hank had worked with him so often in the past that he was able to recognize the fondness hidden underneath his words. Morgan was somewhere in his fifties, and while graying hair and thick gray beard reflected that, no one would have otherwise guessed his age correctly based on his toned, rugged body, the product of a lifetime spent ferrying people just like Hank up and down the Amazon River in search of whatever scientific specimens. Morgan had been the first captain Hank had ever hired for an expedition fifteen years ago, and even though Hank had spent half that trip wanting to throttle the aggravating man in his sleep, there had never been any question about hiring anyone else for future expeditions. Captain Morgan knew the Amazon, and he knew how to get them out of predicaments most people wouldn’t have imagined. If you hired Morgan, you got an attitude, but you also an untold amount of skill and experience.

  Which was quite the opposite of the other people currently crowding around Hank on the dock. He had five students, interns, and undergraduates with him this time, more than he was used to for an expedition like this, and already he was regretting it. As expeditions went, this was going to be pretty routine, and he’d thought that meant he could use that as a learning opportunity for a few of his students. He’d forgotten, however, what it was like being out in the field for the first time, the uncertainty, the awkwardness, the sea-sickness. Already one of the students was throwing up over the side of the dock, and they hadn’t even gotten on the boat yet.

  As Katherine caught her breath between heaves, her boyfriend Stu rubbed her back and cooed soothing things to her, all while trying to hide the fact that he desperately wanted to laugh his butt off at her predicament. Katherine was the one Hank had specifically invited, given her crazy-high intellect and exceedingly young age – she was only nineteen, yet already an undergraduate – and when she had asked if Stu could come as well, Hank had initially been doubtful. Then he found out that Stu came from a well-to-do family of professional catamaran racers, and Hank had figured it would be good to have another person on the boat that knew how to hold his own on the water. Katherine, apparently, was not as used to the water as he was. Just the slight movement of the dock upon the river had already made her sick to her stomach.

  Rounding out the group were Jasmine, Hank’s mousy little teaching assistant, Randy, a young colleague of Hank’s from the Folger Institute of Amphibian and Reptilian Studies, and Erin. Erin was one of Hank’s students, and if pressed, he would have told everyone that Erin was simply here because she had shown such an intent interest in the trip. In truth, Erin and Hank were in a relationship that straddled the edge of ethical lines between teacher and student. Erin’s interest in herpetology was actually minimal. She was here only because Hank needed to work out with her exactly where their relationship was going, and to see if they could find a way to do it without any major ethics violations.

  Erin was the one who went directly down the dock and immediately stuck out her hand for the captain to shake. “Hi! Erin Gershwin. Hank has told me a lot about you.”

  Morgan, obviously taken aback by the tiny blonde’s friendliness and forthrightness, did something Hank rarely saw him do with anyone else: he actually reached forward and took her hand, giving it two quick pumps before letting go, as though he thought the human contact would result in some kind of flesh-eating disease if he held on for too long. “A pleasure, I guess,” he said. Morgan looked back to Hank. “Everything you sent ahead is already aboard. Get your people on already so we can get the hell out of here.”

  “Don’t you want to be introduced to the rest, first?” Hank asked. He couldn’t help but smile. This question had become something of a tradition between the two of them whenever they were starting an expedition, as had the answer that Morgan was about to throw at him.

  “Introductions are for people who plan on screwing at the end of the night,” Morgan said, not even bothering to look at Hank as he gave the customary response. “And I’m not going to screw over a single one of you.”

  As the captain went about his business doing the final preparations on his boat, Randy came up to Hank and spoke quietly to him. “Dr. Newstead, this guy looks about as trustworthy as I can throw him. We should find someone else.”

  Hank scowled. “Not only do we not have the time to look for anyone else, but I’ve lost count of the number of trips I’ve made with Captain Morgan. I trust him more than I trust some of my own family.” And certainly more than I trust you, Hank thought, although he didn’t dare say it.

  “Captain Morgan?” Randy asked incredulously. “That’s seriously his name? Sounds more like…”

  Randy apparently hadn’t noticed the captain coming up behind him until Morgan cleared his throat. “Sounds more like what?”

  “Uh…”

  “No, go ahead. Make a joke about my name. I don’t mind, but only on one condition. It has to be one I’ve never heard before. If I have, then I’ll break your arm.”

  Randy blinked. “I’m sure you wouldn’t really…”

  He stopped when he saw that both Hank and Captain Morgan were nodding solemnly.

  “Um, I think I’ll just skip the joke for now,” Randy said.

  The captain put a meaty hand on Randy’s shoulder, gripping it with enough force that Hank saw Randy wince. “Good man,” Morgan said, then wandered off again. Once Randy was dead certain that the captain was again out of hearing range, he spoke again. “I would have never approved of this guy if you had asked me first.”

  “Since when do I have to ask you first, Randy?” Hank asked. Normally, he was able to keep his cool around this guy, but all the tensions of their flight down to South America, not to mention the funding wars the two of them had been fighting for
the last several months against each other, were taking their toll on his calm. “I’ve been doing these expeditions since you were learning your ABCs with Big Bird.”

  “Yeah, back when your expeditions to gather rare frogs actually found frogs,” Randy said. “Look, I told you I don’t want to fight about this.”

  That was a lie, and they both knew it. Randy got off on their rivalry, just as he enjoyed the fact that he’d managed to get the Folger Institute to reduce Hank’s funding. Although Hank couldn’t prove it, he even though Randy’s only reason for being here was to gather more fuel for the idea that Dr. Hank Newstead was in need of an early retirement. Not that Hank didn’t necessarily agree; these expeditions were getting harder and harder on his body, and he still had a respectable income and profession in teaching. But the idea of being forced out of something that had defined most of his life was something he just couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate. If Randall Folger wanted a fight out of him, then that’s what he was going to get.

  “All I’m saying,” Randy said, “is that it’s okay for you to let someone else take over some of the planning and duties on this expedition.”

  “I absolutely agree,” Hank said.

  “Of course,” Randy said, then did a double take. “Wait, you do?”

  “I do. That’s why I’ve already handed over most of the planning duties to Jasmine.”

  “Jasmine? Seriously? But she’s just your TA. She doesn’t have my…” He pulled up short, but Hank knew full well that the man had been about to say my money. Not that it was even his money. His grandfather had founded the Folger Institute, and it was his grandfather’s fortune that funded all this. In Randy’s mind, that meant he was the one who had done all this and deserved the credit. “She doesn’t have any experience in the field.”

  Neither do you, Hank thought. “She knows what she’s doing.”