IGMS Issue 38

by IGMS

  Almost as soon as I finished explaining that to Renner, there was a sudden crash and one of the jeeps was lifted into the air, catapulted out of sight. We had the guns at our sides, and almost immediately, we opened fire.

  There was enough moonlight to see that it was a broad-tailed coffin mouth, twelve feet tall at the hip, and long as a bus. The shotguns weren't doing any more than stinging it; we'd need artillery to do any serious harm.

  Not that it liked the gunfire. It reared up and shrieked like a steam-whistle, and then it came down, snapping jaws big enough to cut a man in half. I was sure that we were going to die, but I kept loading and firing; there didn't seem anything else to do.

  I wasn't paying close attention to my ammunition when I reloaded, and I happened to put in a load of fossil gravel and bone dust rather than lead shot. That did the trick, in a way that heavier ammunition hadn't; the whole front of the coffin-mouth disappeared with a single shot, and then the rest of the body melted away, disappeared.

  I looked at Renner, and he looked at me, and neither of us had anything to say. That wasn't a ghost, not like any we had heard of. It had lifted the jeep, and tossed it more than twenty feet, which is far beyond what poltergism can accomplish. There had been gobs of saliva hanging from its jaw, and it had bled where the lead touched it. I had smelled it, I had felt the steam of its breath. Ghosts couldn't manage any of that, let alone all of it.

  "That was the fossil-powder load, right?" asked Renner, after a time.

  "Right," I replied.

  "Are they all . . . is everything here revived? I mean --"

  There was a thundering crash from the bank of the lake and I raised up my gun again; the coiling serpent threw itself forward, out of the water, and was disintegrated by another load of fossil powder.

  "Seems so," I said.

  We loaded up again, and waited. Then Renner fell back screaming, clutching his leg. There was a scrabbling in the dirt near him. Scorpion. I cracked one of my cartridges open, tossed the fossil gravel out in the mud around us. It caught the edge of the scorpion, which twisted up, convulsed, fell apart. The welt on Renner's leg was visible even in the moonlight, and spreading. I stepped over to him, pressed a fragment of bone to the center of the wound, and watched the welt clear, the poison gone.

  Renner's breathing had gone ragged after the scorpion had hit, and it smoothed out after I put the fossil on him, but he didn't wake. I moved him up into the bench of our remaining jeep, and started pulling out boxes of finds, breaking the seals. When that was done, I joined him in the jeep, with a barricade of fossils all around us.

  When I had stepped over to Renner, the ground had been dry where I had scattered the bits of fossil in the ghost-hunting cartridge. Acting on a hunch, I held a chunk of an Arnhelm's web-crest's knuckle to the antenna of the radio, and turned it on. The second verse of, "A Round, Round Girl in a Round, Round World," rolled out; it was very strange to hear something so contemporary on the banks of a primeval lake.

  When I removed the fragment of a bone, the static rolled back in. I spent a few minutes fiddling with that, trying to gauge how much bone was needed, and how close it had to be, when Renner woke. He convulsed, grabbing for his leg, and then looked at me, surprised.

  "It's all raised," I said. "All of it; trees and flowers, dinosaurs and pterosaurs, the scorpions, and the poison in their stings. Even the water in the mud has been brought back; when you lay down fossil dust, it dries."

  Renner took the knuckle from me, and rolled it thoughtfully. "I can believe the coffin-mouth as a night hunting predator. I can even believe the coiling serpent as having been drawn out of the lake by the sounds of the fight. But that scorpion . . . it came after me, Doctor Hapt. That's not something that you expect from arthropods."

  I nodded. "It could be that they had different behavior patterns in the past," I said.

  "No." Renner shook his head. "No, there is something out there that raised up all of this, and it wants us dead."

  "It could be that you're right," I said. "We'll sleep in the jeep, in watches."

  We did, and while I wasn't entirely convinced by Renner's assertion, there were a couple of other attacks that night; another coffin-mouth, smaller than the first, managed to get within fifty feet of the jeep before breaking cover, and coming at us in a run, and later we were swarmed by mosquitoes; we had to send up clouds of fossil dust before we could drive them off.

  It wasn't the most restful night I've ever enjoyed.

  The next morning, the sun came up an angry red, through the steam that was rising off of the lake. The pterosaurs were chasing dragonflies out over the water, and a family of horn-fringes were bathing in the shallows. As Renner got back to filming, I took stock of the situation.

  The jeep that the coffin-mouth had tossed wasn't going to be much use. The force of the throw had cracked the front axle, and there was no hope of salvaging the engine. The gas tank was still sound, so I spent much of the morning siphoning off fuel, and filling up the extra tanks on the one jeep we still had.

  Finding our way back to civilization was going to be tricky. Our compasses were all right, once they were doused in fossil powder, but that was only part of the problem. The ground was muddy, where the fossil dust hadn't reached, really muddy, which meant that the water had been brought back from the distant past. Experiment established that other parts of the terrain would disappear on contact with fossil bone -- trees, obviously, but also rocks and clumps of mud. So even if Renner was wrong about the active malice on the part of the prehistoric terrain, an over-zealous application of our finds could send us plunging into a canyon or sinkhole.

  Even if we powdered all of our finds, we didn't have enough raw material with us to clear a path all the way back to the Tiqueron, so we were going to have to travel on the prehistoric terrain at least some of the time. What was needed was some way of clearing the terrain ahead of us when we were faced with an obstacle we couldn't get past. It would have to spread dust over a large enough area for us to get through, without scattering it on the ground beneath us, and without wasting too much powder.

  While Renner filmed a coiling serpent taking a horn-fringe, I did my best to remember everything I had ever learned in shop class. We had brought along a welding torch for repairs, and while my seams were clumsy, they got the job done; the passenger side of the jeep's front bench was soon graced with a god-awful contraption built from parts of the atomizer we used to spray fixative, the compressor from the ruined jeep's engine, and a metal water tank pounded into a hopper for fossil dust.

  It took me several hours before the thing was working properly with the sand I had been using for testing, and even when I was finished, it certainly wasn't something I wanted to trust my life with. Not that I had a choice. "Time to strike camp, Renner," I said.

  He nodded, and started folding up his camera equipment, doing his best to hide his reluctance. Truth was, I didn't want to interrupt him any more than he wanted to be interrupted. We had to turn our weeks of carefully collected finds into fossil powder, and when that was done, all we'd have left were our records, a few still photographs, and Renner's film canisters.

  Unless we got out, that film wouldn't do either of us a lick of good, so we got to grinding. We only spared the latest of our finds, where the fixative hadn't completely dried. Everything else was turned into something as functional as Himmeltonner and Supp's Grade A Pulverized, and of as much use to paleontological science.

  It was around noon when we were done, and if it hadn't been for the coffin-mouths, I'd have held off traveling until the next dawn. The hills around the lake were gentle enough, but if we used the dust, we'd be back in the High Malafan. Which is hard terrain under the best of circumstances, and when I managed to break through the static on the radio, the weather service was issuing a flash-flood warning for the whole old border. In the end, waiting seemed like a worse idea than a late start, so when we were done grinding, we set off.

  While working on my dust thr
ower, I had all but concluded that Renner's feeling that we were facing an active opponent was in error. I hadn't faced anything worse than the occasional biting insect, and a young mace-tail, which fled when I clapped my hands at it.

  Once we started moving, I was forced to change my mind. In the same way that some animals will only strike at moving prey, while our opponent had been content to let us be when we were stationary, things changed once we tried to leave.

  The terrain kept trying to pull us back, trails looping back towards the lake, hills rising up to block us, cliffs coming up to herd us back in. It wasn't just geography; there were three attacks by mace-tails, one of which knocked the jeep halfway down a steep hill and into a pool of stagnant water, and two dive attacks by pterosaurs.

  Renner was handling the driving, and I was manning my dust-casting contraption, with my shotgun wedged in between me and the door. It was my own fault, but the dust caster was terrifically unreliable, and while it could clear us a path, those paths could be pretty damn narrow. It was entirely to Renner Bock's credit that we got as far as we did, and as quickly; he made that old army jeep prance like a pony, going up and down slopes where I would have wrecked at half his speed.

  I had just blasted us a path through a rocky cliffside, when I heard a rumble from off to the side.

  "Hold off," I yelled.

  There was a plains titan up on the ridge, with its shoulder against a rock that must have weighed fifty tons. There wasn't any hope of getting the dust caster around quickly enough, so I took a shot with the shotgun, as the boulder started bouncing down toward us.

  My shot hit; I saw the speck of pink sandstone it dislodged. "Rock's real," I yelled.

  Renner took a look, and mashed down on the gas. The boulder was far too big to avoid by backing up, but it was picking up speed quickly enough that trying to squeeze out ahead of it was going to be a near thing.

  I couldn't do anything to help with that, so I took a shot at the titan. We were going twenty-five, maybe thirty miles an hour, and the rock was coming down at us faster than that, but the titan was big enough that I couldn't help but hit it.

  It was so big that even a full load of fossil powder didn't bring it down. It made a crater big enough to park a truck in, and the titan keeled over on its side, bellowing in agony, but I hadn't killed it.

  It hadn't killed us either; Renner got us through, although the boulder came near enough to scratch the paint on the rear of the jeep.

  "Titans," he said, not looking up from the trail ahead of us, "were extinct a hundred and ten million years before the coffin-mouths evolved."

  That was an angle that I hadn't considered. He was right, of course.

  "Did you notice," I asked, "a couple of little guys leaping off the titan, after it was hit?"

  "Had my attention elsewhere, at that point," said Renner, "but I think I did. And there was something familiar about the way they jumped."

  We had been going fast, and I hadn't gotten a good view of them. But he was right; there had been something familiar about the way the way the smaller dinosaurs had leapt. They hadn't been attacking the titan, either.

  "I told you there was something there after us," said Renner. "Those sickle-tooths are necromancers."

  It was the only thing that made sense.

  The one we had raised had made a pattern in the dirt, and then spilled the blood of the jackrabbit in that pattern. If it had raised the other sickle-tooth, that'd be a better explanation for the missing skeleton than any I had come up with. That one could have raised more.

  "We've got other problems," I said. "Hear that?"

  Renner looked across at me. "The dying titan?" he asked.

  "Not just." The sounds had gotten louder, and deeper. "Thunder."

  "Shit," said Renner. "Do you think it's real?"

  I shook my head. "Don't know. But there was the weather report."

  We were in an area of rolling sandy hills, dotted with whisperweed and Renner's magnolia. We were also in one of the badland watercourses -- we saw that whenever I had cause to use the dust sprayer. If that was a real storm coming, whatever it was that was trying to kill us could wait until the flood-waters came and smash us to nothing by letting go of the re-created terrain. Fossil dust might work against an ancient flood, but it'd do nothing against real water.

  "It's a hell of a coincidence," said Renner. "If it is real, I mean."

  "It might be weather magic." Human sorcerers had never managed to do much with the weather, but it could be the sickle-tooths were better than we were at calling storms. They certainly seemed to be better necromancers than anything mankind had produced.

  "Could be illusion," said Renner.

  A drop of water spatted down on the windshield of the jeep, then another. They didn't disappear when I applied the fossil dust.

  "Want to chance it?" I asked.

  Renner snarled, and I gave the terrain around us a spray of fossil powder. A hard pan river bed, with sheer rocks rising up on the sides, too steep for the jeep to climb. Not very promising.

  "Try for somewhere else?" asked Renner.

  The rain was coming down, turning the pale dirt brown. "We have to get to high ground," I said.

  The water was real, and the storm had come up behind us. It wouldn't be long before the floodwaters followed.

  We unloaded the jeep, carrying up everything we could, as the sounds of thunder grew closer and closer together, and the rain kept falling.

  "We'll push the jeep up later," I told Renner, and I think we would have managed it, if it weren't for the harassment of the dinosaurs. Mace-tails came after us in twos and threes, and light-bodied hunting types were in among the boxes, pushing them back down into the canyon when our attention faltered.

  They slowed us sufficiently that the jeep was less than halfway emptied when the flood came. I could see it coming like a snake, black debris and white foam, and I yelled down to Renner to hurry on up. He was carrying the movie camera and a couple of specimen boxes up the muddy slope, but he wasn't making much progress, and the flood was coming on fast. There were rocks and bits of wood rushing towards us, a long yellow-brown snake of water with a black dirt head.

  There were beaked striders down in the riverbed with him, moving fast and light on their long legs. Another anomaly; they came from a time before the titans. While that lake shore had all been of a piece, it seemed that the sickle-tooths had been raising everything that they could find out in the High Malafan badlands, and that there was a lot to find.

  I took my shot, nailed one of the striders. The other three paced in, headed for Renner.

  "Forget the camera," I yelled, setting up another shot. He dropped it as I fired, and brought his own gun around. The camera dropped into the riverbed, shattering as it fell, and we took out the remaining striders, Renner shooting the last one as it came forward in a killing leap; they were no further than two feet apart when the gravel hit.

  I hoisted him up just as the floodwaters reached the jeep. It turned as the water hit it; was steady for a few seconds, then rolled down with the flood, tumbling, smashing against the sides of the canyon as the water level rose, and the force increased, disappearing in the wash of brown.

  "That's it," said Renner, watching it go. "We're not getting out."

  "We're not dead yet," I replied. "I wouldn't think that we're more than twenty miles from the Tiqueron, at this point. When the flooding stops, we can --"

  "Doesn't matter," said Renner. "Not with those sickle-tooths hunting us. So long as we had the jeep, we could outpace them. Now . . . hell, we've even lost most of our fossil powder."

  I had to admit, it didn't look good. The sickle-tooths hadn't tried the scorpion trick a second time, and that was probably because by the time the scorpion was raised, we'd be beyond where it could catch us. On foot, it'd be harder to avoid things like that.

  There were striders up on the opposite bank of the canyon, hissing at us. One of them took a run in our direction, blindingly
fast. We had lost a lot of ammunition with the jeep, so I held off firing as it leapt. Like I hoped, it couldn't clear the canyon. It landed in the floodwater, and was carried off, screaming in agony until it hit a rock and was still.

  "They don't like the water," said Renner. "Probably the fossil dust in it."

  Made sense, given how rich the High Malafan was in finds. That was probably why the sickle-tooths had let the recreated terrain drop -- that, or the fact that we weren't going anywhere any time soon.

  "Maybe we can wade out, once the rain lets up," I said.

  "Maybe," said Renner, "But it's not as though it died until it hit that rock."

  I nodded, and took a brief walk around the knob of rock we had found ourselves on. There was water at our backs, as well -- another channel for the rainwater pouring down off the High Malafan. For the moment, we were safe.

  "Hell of a rain," I said, coming back to our pitifully small pile of possessions.

  Renner nodded, looking across to where the striders were still hissing. "Enjoy it while it lasts," he said. "They're going to be ready for us as soon as it's done."

  There was a coffin mouth already up and moving, and while some of the noises in the distance were thunder, others were the bellows of titans, and the stamp of their feet.

  "Do you want to try packing up the film, some of the other finds, and sending them downstream?" asked Renner.

  Justified or not, I wasn't enjoying his pessimism. "Nah," I said. "The sickle-tooths will just smash it up; we're going to have to --"

  "Them?" said Renner. "I doubt that they knew what tools were until we started shooting at them. They're not going to recognize film cannisters as something that could hurt them."

  That was an interesting theory; seemed to cover the facts as we knew them. It might even explain why they had gone after Corder, and left the rest of us be. If the only tool they knew was magic, they might not have recognized Renner or me as sapient. Still.