Spinosaurus: A Dinosaur Thriller

by Hugo Navikov

  Which was going to be the case with Ellie and me, and now Bonte as well since he joined our merry band of the doomed. I could see Atari’s whole scheme now, and it looked as motivated by cruelty and just plain psychosis as it was by greed or revenge: he used his connections at The Organization to take vacation time just when I was assigned to the “Kasai Rex” endangered-animal rescue. He got himself ensconced with Cryptids Alive! by murdering their cameraman and taking his place. He had already set up the purchase of a majority chunk of Vermeulen stock, maybe with financial partners who had no idea of the machinations to come and thought they were just getting the opportunity to take part in an excellently timed hostile takeover. So, when the main man in his family’s company is lost—in reality shot in cold blood by Atari but probably thrown into the Kasai River with rocks to keep his body at the bottom and listed as “missing” amidst the massacre of the miners—the stock price plunges and Atari’s automated purchase kicks in and boom, he’s the new owner of the mining arm of Vermeulen International.

  That was the logical part of it, at least—but Atari had made it plain that he loved killing the miners and now looked forward to wiping out every one of them currently subcontracted with Vermeulen Mining and replacing them with men operating Caterpillar earth-moving equipment. He hated me for reasons I didn’t even understand—and hated The Corporation just as much, for reasons he hadn’t even attempted to explain to me beyond being “overworked and underpaid.” Did he want me to go on a vendetta against The Corporation because—according to his pose as my Boss—they murdered my wife and son to get my full attention and devotion? Did he want me to despair because they were firing me for becoming a “true believer” and also used their widespread influence to change my identity completely to my cover story?

  The only conclusion I was able to reach was that “Atari” Bushnell was out of his goddamned mind, a murderous psychopath very good at doing horrible things for almost no reason and making otherwise clever moves (like the hostile takeover) stained by his complete disregard for human life.

  I was no closer to the truth than I was when I set out on this little adventure, but my gaze snapped up from my boots to the direction of a sound I would never have wanted to hear once, let alone once again.

  It was a drawn-out sibilant, a long and loud HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

  Everybody stopped dead. Even Cephu froze in place, and I remembered that he always had his henchmen do his dirty work in the jungle, meaning that they probably had ways of avoiding the biggest dangers through sheer repetition, but the general had never personally encountered a Red Megacobra—

  Ellie whispered in terrified awe, “That’s a Crowing Crested Cobra. They exist.”

  Okay, the general had never personally encountered a Crowing Crested Cobra, but then, neither had any of the rest of us, although of course the prime mover behind Cryptids Alive! knew all about it. About its myth, anyway, but this was as real as the trees around us.

  It straightened its body 25 feet high as it hissed, the 10-foot hood around its alien head swelling in anticipation of the meal about to take place. Its enormous forked tongue jabbed out and tasted the delicious air accompanied by an even longer and louder HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS that made me want to run for my life, something that would not last for long if I separated myself from the group and presented a moving target for the Megacobra (or whatever the hell it was called) to pounce on, paralyze with its venom, and gobble up.

  “Pourquoi faut-il pas attaquer?” the general asked Ellie, the woman he and his boys had been ten seconds away from raping and killing just a few hours before: Why does it not attack?

  Ellie answered in English: “This is my first time at this rodeo myself, Cap’n Crunch.”

  She did the thing! With the colloquialisms to annoy the general! Despite our imminent agonizing deaths, she and I exchanged a smile and surreptitious fist-bump.

  “Quoi?”

  She gave him a break and said in French, “It may not realize we are food … yet. Or, if it acts like regular-size cobras, it may be petrifying us with fear so that its hatchlings can sneak up and eat us.”

  Hatchlings? How big would the just-hatched offspring of this Mother Of All Snakes have to be—

  My question was almost immediately answered by a rustling in the brush to our left, and then also to our right, flanking us while their loving Mum kept us frozen in place. The “babies” made the same move as cobras everywhere, including the three-story-high red one in front of us, standing up their first thirds or so and flapping out their hoods.

  I am six-foot-two. The three hatchlings were at least five feet high as they stood in attack mode.

  Bonte looked like a ghost. Ellie looked like she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt like I was going to piss myself for the first time since I was in kindergarten. But the general, my God …

  General Cephu looked like he had grabbed a high-voltage wire and was galvanized in place, about to burst into flames from within. He shook as he stared at one of the hatchlings on his side—he was lucky enough to have two while I had “just” one. His eyes were bulging out of his head. I think he might have shit his pants.

  The hatchling knew a frightened rabbit when it saw one, and spit a tremendous glob of venom right onto Cephu’s crotch. (Maybe it was trying to go for his eyes and wasn’t developed enough yet to aim well.) The acid immediately sizzled and ate through the general’s camos, not stopping as it turned his penis into bubbling cinders.

  I had never heard a scream anything like what General Cephu let out as the venom ate through his dick and then his pelvis. It didn’t last long, however—the hatchling moved in and shoved its mouth down and around Cephu’s head, yanking him to the ground so he could get all of the fresh meat down its gullet for a nice day of digestion.

  We ran. There was one hatchling on the left and one on the right, with Mum right in the middle. I didn’t mean to take the lead—I certainly didn’t do it consciously—but I did figure that if I went from standing to running as fast as humanly possible, I could get right next to Mum where she couldn’t get at me. Running along the mother’s flank might also keep the babies from immediately striking, I thought, so I went for it, Bonte and Ellie following like noontime shadows.

  It worked. Mum Cobra couldn’t see where we had gone at first, and the babies hesitated as we “merged” with her. Their hesitation gave us long enough to get running—as fast as we could through jungle growth, which wasn’t terribly fast—and put at least a sporting amount of distance between us and the Megareptiles.

  It was too good to last, of course, as Mum got her bearings and twisted around to chase us, the hatchlings following quickly, but not as quickly as their mother. One saving grace was that mother had to get down from her high stance before turning around and giving chase, and any time she wanted to hock another hunk of venom our way, she had to get back up into attack position. This also meant we were another twenty feet away from her, with us on the ground and her that high in the air.

  There was another titanic HISS and something flew right between Ellie’s head and mine, splatting against a huge rock—a rock—that instantly started sizzling and melting away and was a quarter of the way dissolved before we even ran past it five seconds later.

  Where were the babies? We had been so focused on outrunning Mum that the hatchlings were able to flank us in motion and try to hurl themselves onto us. The one on the left launched itself—I did not know snakes could do that—and one fang in its open mouth snagged the back of Bonte’s safari shirt and ripped it almost all the way off him but missed his dark flesh. He screamed and I’m pretty sure Ellie and I screamed when he screamed. We all continued running and screaming, but everyone was beginning to tire.

  “Ellie, what can’t snakes do?”

  “What?”

  “They can swim, they can climb trees—how the hell do you get away from a regular snake? Or a giant one? Ellie!”

  “I’m thinking!” she yelled, and it l
ooked to me like she was.

  “You have to scare it off!” Bonte yelled. “Snakes are afraid of humans!”

  “It’s true!” Ellie yelled. “Snakes usually attack only when provoked!”

  I gave their words a moment to sink in, and, looking behind us while hoping not to trip and die, yelled, “You guys are freaking insane! Maybe normal-sized snakes are afraid of people, but there’s a whole family of giant cobras chasing us right … now …”

  I stopped running. There was no longer anything chasing us. I put my hands on my knees and worked desperately to regain my breath. After a few seconds, Ellie and Bonte joined me in both attempting to get oxygen and also to marvel that we were no longer on the monumental snakes’ prey-dar.

  “That’s it?” I said between breaths. “They quit?”

  “What, are you disappointed?” Ellie said, trying to let out a laugh as she hyperventilated. “We must have accidentally walked just past their nest or other safe place. That’s why it’s so hard for cryptid hunters to—”

  “Save it, please,” I said, not unkindly, holding up a hand to pause her PSA on the mistreatment of Bigfoot stalkers by the mass media. “General Cephu is Snake Chow now. I’m not sad about that. But he was the only one who knew where we were supposed to go. Shit, we don’t even know where we are.”

  “I don’t want to find the place Cephu was leading us to,” Ellie said. “He was taking us to steal eggs from a Kasai Rex so the animal could eat us.”

  I squinted and took a close look around us, turning so that I could take in all 360 degrees to see if I could detect that very subtle path through the jungle that I had noticed before. I saw nothing. And even if I had found it, Ellie was right: Why would we want to go to the monster’s nest and have the same greeting we just got from the Megacobra?

  “My friends, we are between the rock and the hard place,” Bonte said, looking at a certain spot I could swear I had looked at closely. “If we go forward, we either get lost and we die. Or if we don’t get lost, we will find the nest, and Kasai Rex sees us, and we die.”

  I grumbled, “Well, that’s a cheerful—”

  “That is not all, Monsieur Brett. If we stop now while there is a little bit of light and manage to miraculously find our way out of the jungle but without the egg, Monsieur Bushnell’s guard will be waiting, and we die.”

  Ellie mused, “I don’t like the sound of—”

  “There is more, Miss White. If we are able to steal an egg to avoid being shot, we don’t know how to get out of the jungle, the Kasai Rex will find us or we end up fifty kilometers into nowhere, and we die.”

  I whistled in appreciation of our predicament.

  “And finally—”

  “Oh, good Christ.”

  Bonte continued, “If we are able to steal an egg to avoid being shot, and we are able to outrun the monster, and we are able to get out of the jungle, then we will be responsible for the Kasai Rex killing the miners, all of whom will be locked out of the safe building.”

  We stood in silence for a moment, or for what passed as silence in the African rainforest. “So,” Ellie said, “should we just kill ourselves right now?”

  I would have expected Bonte to smile at that, but he was not in “jolly taxi driver” mode. He shook his head somberly and said, “Monsieur Bushnell does not expect us to make it back alive. He surely has soldiers and a new general who will be carrying back an egg if we do not show up. They know how to get through the jungle very fast back to the camp with le monstre right behind them. Thus, if we kill ourselves now, Miss Ellie, all of the miners will die and ‘Atari’ will get everything he wants.”

  “You’re depressing the shit out of me,” I said.

  “I am sorry, Monsieur Brett.”

  I put my hands on my hips, and I could feel the slight tightness in my belt due to the .45 jammed in back. But even if my bullets could hurt, let alone kill, the rampaging Kasai Rex, we’d have to find it first—and we’d have to find it while there was still even the meager amount of light we got on the ground from the canopy above.

  I looked all around us for any signs of Mega-anything, cobras or crocodiles or spiders or name-your-cryptid—God, why couldn’t this have just been a regular extraction like my last hundred assignments?—and, seeing nothing, I just looked at the ground. Actually, there was a noticeably greater illumination of the patch of jungle we were standing in at that moment. It wasn’t bright by any means, but you could have read the top of an eye chart by it, and that was quite a difference right there.

  That made me look up at the treetops, and of course that prompted Ellie and Bonte to look as well. Apparently not seeing anything in particular, they both lowered their gazes to me, and finally I returned them. “The trees are a little thinner here, am I right in that?”

  Bonte looked up and Ellie looked down, and both of them looked at me again and nodded.

  Good, it wasn’t just me. Because I also noted that our little relative amount of clearing was wide enough for even a very large dinosaur-like animal to stomp through. And though it was hard to discern, I believed that I could make out the clearing extending a little ways before making a bend.

  “I think we’re on a path. The path.”

  Bonte said, “I don’t see a path, my friend. I see a random jungle arrangement.”

  I said to Ellie, “Do you see anything?”

  She screwed up her lips and shrugged.

  “Do you have a plan?” I asked Bonte, knowing obviously his speech of thirty seconds earlier showed he didn’t have any such thing.

  “I do not.”

  “We do now—I think this is a path, and I think we should follow it. We got nothing else, and I don’t feel like just standing around and waiting for our inevitable deaths.”

  Ellie smiled and motioned for me to take the lead. “After you, Mister Optimism.”

  Bonte laughed at that, and I did too, no matter how shit-scared I was that this “path” might turn out to be nothing … or it might turn out to be the exact thing to lead us to the nest of the Kasai Rex. What would happen then, as they said around these parts, was up to the ancestors.

  Chapter 16

  It was a path. Not clearly defined like the hole at the edge of the Kasai River near the mines, but there was no mistaking that whatever trees and other obstacles that might be leveled by a running lizard monster were gone. Mossy stumps big enough to trip a human (or stop him entirely) were all over the place, but the trees that once stood open them had either been knocked into the thicker jungle on either side or left where they fell to rot and be trampled again and again into mush.

  But what was this a path to? Confirmation bias—oh yes, I had become intimately familiar with every logical fallacy one could use to get what he wants—told me that because the path was wide enough for a monster of the size I judged to have bitten through that Megapython, well, then it had to be a path the monster had forged.

  This was a dangerous and stupid fallacy to be tricked into when hunting “cryptids,” which never were what the locals thought it was. So I was not going to fall for it now. This could be an old path, something abandoned, even if it were at one time used by my Kasai Rex. But it’s all we had, so we continued to follow it. Actually, it was becoming even more clearly a thoroughfare of some kind, probably for animals but could have been salted during World War II to allow troops to move through. It was something to follow, though, like I said, so we followed, even if we were just to have something to do.

  “I thought this was gonna be a crocodile. Not even an endangered one,” I said to Ellie, who smiled ruefully.

  “I thought maybe we’d find some spoor, some little clues.” She sighed. “Everybody knows we never actually find anyth—”

  “Baba zangu,” Bonte said in astonishment.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled in the same tone, “what he said.”

  We were looking at another river. What we had been walking on, what the path had transversed, was an island. This was the Kasai again, flowing
slower and so wide here we could just barely see the other shore.

  “Does anyone have an iPhone?” I said, not tearing my eyes away from the vista in front of us.

  “I have Google Android,” Bonte said.

  “Oh, good, can I borrow—”

  “But I do not use it.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “No service out here.”

  “Oh, of course, duh,” I said, figuring he would understand the sentiment.

  “Also, it is back in the Vermeulen wagon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Plus, it is also broken and has no battery.”

  Before I could scream, Ellie said, “God, I wish we had the satellite phone,” Ellie said. “I know Atari compromised it, but we could use it as a hotspot for our phones. Are you dying to call in your discovery, Sir Richard?”

  I gave her a smile at that but said, “No, I want to see a satellite view of this place. I never thought to survey the region, just looked at the map of Tshikapa and the mines, noting that it was right next to a deep tributary of the Congo, and so it was a croc dragging people off.” Goddamn confirmation bias. No need to look at the rest of the map! Moron.

  “I have a map,” Bonte said.

  I didn’t even say anything this time, just looked at him, waiting.

  “However, it is in the car.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “And I think this part of the river is not on it. I use it for driving in Tshikapa.”

  Ellie intervened. “The path you noticed, Brett … it basically stretches right through this island, connecting one side with the other.”

  “Huh, yes, right.” It was one of those statements that sounds like utter trivia until you think about it … and then you realize it answers a lot of questions.

  “Kasai Rex is said to be essentially amphibian,” the cryptid hunter said. “And the giant crocodile and python you saw … no one has ever seen the crocodiles, even though they’re enormous, because they’re semi-aquatic and nest on this side of the island.”