Cryptozoica

by Mark Ellis

  Turning his head, he saw Honoré’s stricken face behind a spider-web pattern of cracks in the side window. Her tousled sunset-colored mane fell loosely around her shoulders. “I’m all right,” he said a third time, even though he didn’t feel particularly right.

  There was numbness on the right side of his face and a fierce ache in his left leg. He fumbled with the catch on the harness, realizing that his body leaned painfully to the right at a twenty-five degree angle. He looked at Crowe and saw that the man had already freed himself of his seat. He turned toward the passenger compartment.

  “You okay, Gus?” Kavanaugh asked, pulling off his headset.

  “Just grand.” Threads of blood inched from the man’s nostrils. His voice sounded nasal and snuffling. “You?”

  “Great.” Kavanaugh opened the harness release and nearly fell atop Crowe.

  Together, they stumbled into the passenger compartment. The entire ASTAR listed to one side, so walking upright was difficult. The compartment was a jumbled mess, with Oakshott, Belleau and Mouzi all struggling to get free of the straps. The hatch door gaped open.

  “Everybody needs to get out fast!” Honoré Roxton’s thin voice came from outside. She staggered out of the tangled greenery. “This bloody thing could explode any second! It’s leaking petrol like the hind end of a goose!”

  “As long as nobody lights a match,” Crowe grunted, helping a cursing Mouzi get free of her harness, “we’ll be all right. Choppers aren’t that volatile, no matter what you see in the movies.”

  Oakshott reached over, and with his two massive hands, gripped the canvas straps, and tore them away from Belleau’s torso. The little man half-crawled, half-slid out of the hatch and onto the ground, clutching his satchel in one hand and his walking stick in the other. He would have fallen on his face if not for Honoré’s restraining hand.

  “Where’s McQuay?” asked Kavanaugh, blinking back blood that dripped into his left eye from a shallow cut right above it. He opened the release catch on Oakshott’s safety harness and the giant swiftly shrugged out of it.

  “He’s out here,” Honoré said tremulously. “He’s not in a good way, I’m afraid. That’s why I got him out first.”

  After everyone had clambered out of the wreckage, they stood in knee high grass and breathed hard. The undergrowth stretched away on all sides.

  Crowe planted his hands on his hips and muttered, “Well, at least we’re the first human beings to have been knocked out of the sky by a pterodactyl. That ought to count for something.”

  Kavanaugh surveyed the ASTAR, feeling a leaden weight gather in his guts. He felt very tired and very afraid. The helicopter lay between a pair of tall resak trees. The bent chopper blades had ripped away the bark and shredded the trunks so they looked like ears of shucked corn. The tail assembly lay several yards away, so bent and twisted that it barely qualified as a piece of machinery. Faintly, he heard the steady plop-plop of fuel dripping from the punctured tank.

  He turned toward Honoré. “Are you all right?”

  She rubbed her right hip. “A little bruised, but nothing is broken. How about everyone else?”

  The rest of the party stated their physical conditions in monosyllables. No one complained of being in pain.

  “Where’d you put McQuay?” asked Kavanaugh.

  Honoré gestured toward a bed of ferns, where the man lay on his back, stirring feebly. He moaned between split and bloody lips. “He was unconscious when I got him out.”

  Kavanaugh eyed her lean frame and then cameraman’s burly physique. “All by yourself? You must do some serious working out.”

  She smiled wanly, settling her battered Stetson firmly on her head. “I’m stronger than I look.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Kavanaugh kneeled beside the man, wincing at the flare of pain his left leg.

  McQuay’s eyelids fluttered and he whispered hoarsely, “My head hurts.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Kavanaugh said, carefully examining the laceration on the right side of his scalp. Although it had bled profusely, painting the side of the man’s face scarlet, the wound did not look critical.

  He did not see the gleam of cranial bone, so he didn’t think a skull fracture was likely. Still, he knew head traumas were tricky and not easy to diagnose or treat.

  “I shouldn’t have unbuckled,” said McQuay, “but I wanted to get the shot.”

  “Did you?”

  He grinned, exposing red-filmed teeth. “Yeah. Hope my camera made it out.”

  “It did,” Honoré said. “I don’t know if it still works, but you can check it over later.”

  Crowe handed Kavanaugh a flat aluminum case marked with a red cross on the lid. “This came through, too…I have Mouzi testing the radio. I’ll scout around and get an idea of where we are in relation to the Petting Zoo.”

  Kavanaugh propped McQuay up in a sitting position so Honoré could cleanse the scalp wound with a cotton swab soaked in liquid antiseptic. Watching her deft, expert movements, Kavanaugh said, “You’re very good at this, doctor.”

  “I ought to be,” she replied. “I’ve been out in the middle of nowhere and had to set broken bones with boot-laces and sticks. I even sucked rattlesnake venom out of one of my students.”

  “From where?” Kavanaugh asked.

  “Texas,” she answered, deadpan, applying a gauze patch to McQuay’s laceration.

  Kavanaugh held the patch in place while Honoré wrapped the cameraman’s head with a length of bandage. She examined her work with an appraising eye and said, “Best I can do, under the circumstances.”

  From a plastic pill bottle, Kavanaugh shook out two yellow pentazocine tablets into McQuay’s hand. “Take these. It’ll help with the pain.”

  Belleau, who had stood by silently watching the display of field medicine, asked, “What’s the plan?”

  “If we can reach anybody by radio, then we’ll have one.” Kavanaugh stood up, silently enduring the spasm of pain in his leg.

  Honoré stood up with him, eyed his face and then dabbed at his forehead with an antiseptic soaked cotton swab. He flinched away from the sting. “Ow.”

  “Don’t be a baby,” she murmured. “Even nicks can become septic very quickly in a place like this.”

  Kavanaugh only raised a sardonic eyebrow and the woman responded in kind. Neither said anything, but Honoré did a very poor job of repressing a smile. She applied a small butterfly bandage to the laceration.

  “Pardon me,” Belleau announced peremptorily. “Even if we can radio for help, can we be rescued this far inland? There’s not an airstrip here, is there? And not another helicopter within a couple of thousand kilometers?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Kavanaugh replied, “no.”

  “You have nothing like a satellite emergency position indicating beacon?”

  “Afraid not. The idea was to keep this place a secret, remember?”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  “Walk, to begin with,” Crowe declared.

  He came striding through the brush, gesturing to the wall of undergrowth behind him. “The Petting Zoo is about a half a mile thataway. Once we get there, the worst case scenario is that we sail downriver to the sea, around the headland and back to Big Tamtung.”

  “Sail in what?” Oakshott demanded.

  “A Crossover Nautique 226,” Crowe replied. “A cabin cruiser, an inboard tour boat. She’s a sweet ride.”

  Mouzi called from the interior of the ASTAR: “Hey, I raised somebody!”

  Crowe hurried over to the chopper and crawled into the cockpit. The light on the General Dynamic VHF radio console glowed green, but it flickered.

  “Reception is in and out,” Mouzi said, handing Crowe the headset. “But I reached Pendlebury.”

  “Better than nobody…sort of.” Crowe heard the voice of Pendlebury filtered through the headphones, shot through with pops and hisses of static.

  “—read me? Copy that, over. Read me? Over and out? Ten-f
our? Breaker, breaker.”

  “Stop stringing trucker jargon together, Bert!” Crowe interrupted. “Where’s Howard?”

  “On Bai Suzhen’s boat.”

  “Call him and tell we have a situation out here. The chopper crashed on Big Tamtung, pretty close to the Petting Zoo site. McQuay is injured. We need to be picked up.”

  “How can we do that?” asked Pendlebury. “The chopper is the only way into the Petting Zoo.”

  “We’ll walk to the beach if we have to, but first we’ll find out if McQuay is ambulatory.”

  Pendlebury’s voice dissolved in a hash of crackles. Mouzi hammered on the radio console with the heel of her hand but the green power light faded completely. Grimly, she said, “I bet the battery casing is busted.”

  Crowe took off the headset. “We let them know our situation. Let’s get moving.”

  Before leaving the chopper, Mouzi pried open a deck plate and removed several packages—a six-pack of bottled water, a box of power-bars, a cellophane bag of beef jerky, and a vinyl case containing two guns.

  Crowe chose the M15 General Officer’s autopistol, checking the action and making sure it held a full magazine. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants. Mouzi angled the Kel-Tec SU-16 semiautomatic carbine over her shoulder. Made primarily of high-strength polymer plastic, the carbine was perfect for a girl of her diminutive size and weight.

  When they rejoined the group, Kavanaugh and Honoré were trying to help McQuay to his feet. “I think I can walk,” the cameraman said. “As long as I don’t have to run from Godzilla or anything.”

  Kavanaugh glanced sharply at Oakshott. “A little help from the gentleman’s gentleman?”

  The big man looked questioningly at Belleau who nodded his grudging assent. Oakshott stepped over, took McQuay by the right arm and the collar of his shirt and heaved him effortlessly to his feet. McQuay swayed as if he might fall, but Honoré steadied him. She held his camcorder in her right hand.

  Crowe turned toward Belleau. “Have you got your satphone with you?”

  Belleau patted his satchel. “It’s in here. I tried it already. No bars.”

  “When did you try?” Honoré asked.

  “While you and Tombstone Jacky were treating Mr. McQuay.”

  “What else do you have in there?” Kavanaugh demanded.

  “Nothing of any use to you,” Belleau retorted primly. “Personal effects.”

  Mouzi’s brown eyes slitted suspiciously. “Why would you bring personal effects on what was supposed to be a three-hour tour?”

  “Maybe he’s taking a cue from Thurston Howell,” Kavanaugh said, an icy edge to his tone.

  “I don’t have to answer to anyone here,” stated Belleau haughtily. “I could ask you why you brought weapons and food on what was supposed to be a brief junket.”

  “That’s easy,” said Crowe, snapping off a three-finger salute from his sweat-pebbled brow. “Navy SEALS and the Boy Scouts share the same motto—be prepared.”

  “Food, weapons and water are standard equipment in this part of the world,” Kavanaugh replied. “You don’t go anywhere without at least two of them.”

  Honoré gazed steadily at Belleau as if she dared the little man to speak further. He affected not to notice.

  Instead, Aubrey Belleau turned toward the brushline, hefting his walking stick. “I stand corrected. Shall we get going?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The hot yellow disk of the sun slowly darkened at the edges as heavy clouds scudded across the sky. By degrees, the sun was swallowed by huge black thunderheads. Cloud mountains massed in the west and a crooked finger of lightning arced across them.

  Almost automatically, Kavanaugh counted the seconds. When the thick humid air shivered to a clap of thunder, he estimated the storm front was less than ten miles away and moving very fast.

  After the thunder, he heard the chittering of curious monkeys and the clacking screech of birds. He also heard the buzz of flies winging over and settling on the bloody bandage around McQuay’s head. The high humidity would prevent the blood from drying for some hours and the odor was sure to draw scavengers larger than flies. He hoped the rain arrived before that.

  All around them, huge hardwood trees loomed, towering a hundred feet above the forest floor. Flowering lianas hung from every branch and bough. Bright red orchids bloomed between the gnarled buttress roots of the giant trees. Broad leaves and vines blocked the sunlight, creating a greenish labyrinth through which multi-colored butterflies darted back and forth.

  Honoré stared upward at the intertwining boughs. “This looks like a very old-growth forest. I wonder what kind of trees those are.”

  “Dipterocarps,” Crowe answered promptly. “They share a common ancestor with the Sarcolaenacea, a tree family indigenous to Madagascar. So, that suggests the ancestor of the Dipterocarps originated on Laurasia…and since these are very old trees, it seems pretty obvious that the Tamtungs were originally part of the Laurasian supercontinent.”

  Honoré threw him a fleeting smile of appreciation. “All of you here continue to surprise and impress me. I was led to believe that you were a bunch of ne’er-do-wells who concocted one con after another.”

  “Interesting,” grunted Crowe. “I wonder who gave you that impression.”

  Kavanaugh came to a sudden halt, throwing out an arm. “Hold up.”

  Everyone stumbled to unsteady stops. Honoré, Crowe, and Belleau followed the man’s gaze. A crumpled, bleeding mass of leathery wings lay in their path. Flies buzzed around the disemboweled corpse of the Quetzalcoatlus, crawling along loops of its blue-sheened intestines. The creature’s humped, limp body resembled a collapsed circus tent made of greasy black leather.

  “Almighty God,” Honoré breathed, moving forward to nudge the tip of a wing with one boot. “It looks like the reconstructions of the animals I’ve seen, but there are a few significant differences.”

  “Like what?” asked Belleau.

  Stepping carefully, as if she feared the monster was only asleep; Honoré touched the talon-tipped fingers curving from the apex of a wing joint. Each one was the length of her entire hand. “The digits are longer than the fossils would lead us to think they are. They seem built for grasping and holding. I’d guess when the Quetzal is on the ground, it walks on all fours, much like a bat.”

  Tilting her head back and lifting the brim of her hat, she squinted toward the dark bulk of the escarpment several miles distant, the summit barely visible above the treeline. “The Quetzal must roost on the ledges and outcroppings. Trying to launch itself from the ground would be exceedingly difficult, if not outright impossible.”

  “And they’re not supposed to have teeth, either,” Belleau said resentfully.

  Honoré frowned as she stared at the half-folded and broken wings. “I still say the level of aggression it showed us was not normal.”

  Mouzi said, “It thought we were something new to eat.”

  “The something new factor should have made it fly away from us as fast as it could, not made it hungry or put it on the offensive. Very odd behavior.”

  Kavanaugh edged around the creature’s half-open jaws, glaring down at its glassy, staring eyes. “All I know is that the sonofabitch killed my chopper before my chopper killed it.”

  Belleau snorted. “Don’t be childish. You can’t blame an animal for acting like an animal.”

  “I don’t.” Kavanaugh swung his gaze toward the little Englishman. “I blame you. We stirred it up because you insisted on flying too close to the escarpment.”

  “If that makes you feel better,” Belleau said, not unkindly, “then I will accept your blame. However, we really weren’t all that close to the escarpment and we all managed to survive…unlike the last time you ferried people here. Of course, then your very expensive helicopter made it out intact, so you should look at this as a form of karmic balancing.”

  Balling his fists, Kavanaugh leaned toward Aubrey Belleau, as if he were on the verge of leap
ing atop the dwarfish man. Oakshott tensed. But Kavanaugh turned around and started walking again, giving the fly-encrusted body of the Quetzalcoatlus a wide berth. He favored his left leg. Needles of pain stabbed through it with every step.

  Honoré caught up with him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Never better, thanks for asking. I just want to get to the site so we can figure out how to get home.”

  “It’s only a couple of miles to Little Tamtung, right? Conceivably, we could even swim.”

  “Conceivably––if the riptides didn’t carry us out to open sea and we didn’t draw the attention of barracuda, sharks, sea snakes, sea wasps, moray eels, Portuguese Man o’ Wars, and even more sharks.”

  Honoré mimed a shudder. “I don’t like eels.”

  She looked at the jungle closing around them. Sunlight, filtered through the sky-filling, broad-leaved canopy, tinted everything with an emerald hue. “Are there snakes on this island?”

  “Do you not like them either?”

  “Not very much, no.”

  “You and Indiana Jones. Yeah, there are king cobras, spitting cobras and kraits, and a couple of different kinds of constrictor, like the short-tailed python. But they’re not likely to bother us. They have other enemies to worry about.”

  A line of worry appeared on Honoré’s forehead. “Like what?”

  Absently, Kavanaugh, touched the scar on his face. “Like the Deinonychus.”

  Eyes widening, Honoré glanced around, and over her shoulder at the people walking single file behind. McQuay marched between Oakshott and Crowe, impatiently brushing flies away from his bandage.

  “I read your deposition,” she said quietly. “The one that was never submitted. When the Deinonychus pack attacked you and your party, you were far from here. Out in the grasslands, right?”

  “Right. But that doesn’t mean they can’t smell blood on the wind. They move like lightning.”

  “You claimed they tended to follow the Hadrosaur herd.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a competing predator.”