Cryptozoica

by Mark Ellis

  Honoré swallowed. “Got it.”

  From another pocket he removed the black stub of a cheroot, barely two inches long. Putting it between his teeth, he struck a match into flame and lit the cheroot, sending up a plume of acrid smoke. Honoré coughed and fanned the air.

  “Ghastly stench,” she said.

  “It’ll keep the mosquitoes away,” Crowe replied, puffing on the stub until the end glowed bright red. He took it from his mouth and held it out, his eyebrows raised questioningly. “Who wants to be responsible for it?”

  Without hesitation, Bai Suzhen took it, sliding it between her index and third finger, she puffed on the end experimentally. “I’ll keep it lit.”

  Crowe handed the Titadyne sticks to Honoré. “Start crimping.”

  Kavanaugh looked at Crowe. “Ready, Gus?”

  “No, but let’s do it anyway.”

  Carefully, they raised their heads up above the top of the statue. Almost immediately, a barrage of bullets spewed from three weapons, thudding into the sculpture, chopping out fragments, but not penetrating it. Crowe and Kavanaugh returned the fire, shooting blindly. The syncopation of the gunfire was deafening, but they fixed in their minds the two points from which the subguns blazed.

  Crowe turned toward Bai. “Light me up.”

  She picked up a stick of explosive, touched the fuse to the end of the cheroot in her mouth and when it sparked, slapped the cylinder into his waiting hand. He hurled the Titadyne in a looping overhand.

  One of the Ghost Shadows saw the spark-spewing tube bouncing across the ground and he opened his mouth to scream a warning. A thunderclap blast slammed his words back into his throat.

  For a microsecond, the area was haloed in a red flash. Flying tongues of flame billowed outward. The detonation of the Titadyne hurled two bodies into the air. A fine drizzle of dirt and pulverized pebbles rained down. Crowe and Kavanaugh looked up, over their stone shelter. Two men lay motionless, draped across the broken walls.

  “Think that’ll discourage them?” Crowe asked quietly.

  “Depends on whether we got Jimmy.”

  As if on cue, Cao’s strident voice lifted, screaming out commands in hard-edged Chinese. A wedge of men, at least half a dozen, ran around the far end of a wall in a milling rush. Wielding their Type 64 subguns, they began to fan out warily but swiftly around the perimeter, staying close to the shadows of a long stretch of wall.

  Kavanaugh extended a hand toward Bai, who lit a fuse with the cheroot, and quickly placed the stick of Titadyne in his palm. He lobbed it around the curve in the wall. Eyes wide and fearful, the Ghost Shadow soldier dug in his heels and tried to stop, but the men behind him pushed him forward.

  The explosive detonated in a tremendous cracking blast, a blinding burst of dirt and rock erupting from the ground. The echo of the explosion instantly bled into a grinding rumble, as a long section of the wall toppled forward in a cascade of bouncing blocks and spurting dust. All the men were engulfed, buried by the down-rushing tons of basalt and limestone.

  After the rolling echo of the crash faded, there came a stunned silence, stitched through with a clicking of pebbles and faint moans. Grit-laden dust hung in the air over the fallen mass of rock, blending with the perennial mist to make a nearly impenetrable haze.

  Everyone cautiously stood up, coughing, waving the air in front of their faces. Mouzi whispered, “Think that did it?”

  Kavanaugh opened his mouth to reply, and then held up a hand for silence. The steady reverberations of heavy weights slamming repeatedly against the ground sent corresponding shivers up his spine.

  A dark shadow loomed against the cloud of smoke and mist. The revolting odor of rotten meat and the stench of excrement clogged everyone’s nostrils.

  Crowe groaned in heartfelt disbelief and disgust. “Oh, no, don’t tell me—”

  Vegetation swished and crashed, saplings snapped and the Majungasaur bounded out of the undergrowth bordering the ruins, hopping like a kangaroo afflicted with St. Vitus Dance. The creature lowered its head and bellowed, overwhelming everyone with its carrion and septic tank breath. Its armored hide was acrawl with flies, caked with dried mud and blood.

  “How the hell did it escape the quagmire?” demanded Honoré in a high, wild voice. “And why did it track us down?”

  Kavanaugh pulled her back by her left hand. “Like I said before—it’s personal.”

  “That’s mad.” She looked ill, her eyes darting wildly like a trapped animal’s. “Insane.”

  He tightened his grip on her hand. “Don’t go simple on me, Dr. Roxton.” He pitched his voice at a calm, unemotional level. “I don’t want to have to slap you.”

  Honoré’s eyes flicked toward him and she forced a chuckle. “That’s a good thing…for you.”

  From behind fallen pillars and heaps of stone, two men bolted in terror, running in blind, screaming panic. One of them brandished a dao sword. Bai leaned forward intently, the smoldering cheroot dropping from her fingers. “That’s Jimmy!”

  “I think he’s gone raw prawn,” Mouzi observed dryly.

  The Majungasaur’s head whipped back and forth as if trying to decide which sprinting human would be easier prey. It sneezed explosively, and then dug at its nostrils with three-fingered foreclaws.

  “All this smoke acts as an irritant,” Honoré observed, bending down to pick up the stub of the cheroot. “Probably bothers its eyes, too.”

  “Let’s take advantage of that,” Crowe said grimly, “We’ll spread out, and confuse this damn thing. Grab the dynamite and start running.”

  The Majungasaur pivoted and pounced, its talon-tipped toes tearing out great clots of damp earth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Majungasaur, with its upper body parallel to the ground and head outthrust like a missile, raced after the screaming Ghost Shadow soldier. The man ran among a row of freestanding megalithic stones, squeezing through the narrow space between them, hoping to delay the animal if only for a few seconds. Without slowing, the carnotaur slammed into the slabs of stone, uprooting and knocking them over, causing a domino effect. Pillars and walls toppled.

  The man sprinted only a few yards before the giant jaws of the creature closed over his head and shoulders. The crack of bone was clearly audible as the man’s skull and spine broke like rotten latticework.

  The saurian let the slack-limbed body drop from its blood-flecked maw and it stood upright, tiny eyes surveying the landscape, looking for more victims. Kavanaugh realized the creature wasn’t hunting for food but for revenge.

  Slowly, it turned its head, nostrils dilating and flaring. Its vision fixed on Mouzi crouched in the shadowed lee of two pillars and part of a fallen roof. Bellowing, the Majungasaur charged her. With a cry of fright, she flung herself in a backward somersault beneath the roof overhang. The animal stooped over, trying to jam its huge head under the rubble

  Raising her M16, Mouzi squeezed off a short burst, the reports barely audible over the beast’s snarls. The snarls were replaced by a roar and it scuttled backward, blood spurting from the wounds on its snout. Lifting one hind leg, the carnotaur stomped down hard on the section of roof under which Mouzi crouched. It collapsed with a crash.

  She dove out headlong, then dodged between the legs of the infuriated Majungasaur, evading by a hands-breath a snap of six-inch long fangs. She spun and ran in the opposite direction. She heard loud gunshots as Crowe drew the animal’s attention with his revolvers. The heavy caliber bullets pounded into its flank, knocking it off balance long enough for Crowe to take Mouzi by the hand and run toward the far end of the ruins.

  The carnotaur roared angrily as its prey sprinted away, crashing through the broken columns, knocking aside giant stone blocks and trampling heaps of masonry in single-minded juggernaut pursuit. The two people separated, running in opposite directions.

  The animal paused, confused about which human to pursue, then it spied Honoré and Kavanaugh standing before a wall. The saurian launched its
huge body directly at them, head down, mouth open as it roared in vicious triumph. Although the Majungasaur changed direction far faster than Kavanaugh and Honoré thought, they didn’t move until it was only a few yards away. Both people kicked themselves backward, shoulder rolling through an intact archway and over the stone-littered ground.

  Saliva-and-blood wet fangs clashed shut within inches of Honoré Roxton’s toes. She and Kavanaugh scrambled away from the snout of the raging Majungasaur. It had wedged its entire head and upper body through the arch and then become lodged. Snapping its jaws at the two humans just out of reach, the enraged predator strained to reach them with twitching, talon-tipped fingers. A network of cracks spread through the archway and wall, flakes of stone and ancient mortar popping loose.

  Honoré applied the fuse of the Titadyne stick to the stub of the cheroot jammed into the corner of her mouth. When it sparked, she tossed the sizzling cylinder into the maw of the giant saurian. The jaws closed on it with a loud clack. She and Kavanaugh whirled away just as the head of the Majungasaur dissolved in a hellfire bloom of flame, smoke and red, wet flesh. The concussion struck them like a wave. Hunks of bone, shreds of muscle and fragments of teeth pattered down all around, accompanied by a crimson drizzle.

  The body of the Majungasaur collapsed into a strange, half-crouching position, only a misshapen travesty of its massive skull barely recognizable.

  Honoré and Kavanaugh slowly climbed to their feet. They stared at the settling corpse of the dinosaur without speaking, as if they feared that if it heard their voices, the creature would be restored to full, vengeful life.

  Kavanaugh coughed, cleared his throat, and said quietly, “Well, I guess his head was full of air.”

  Honoré smiled abashedly. She took the cheroot out of her mouth, blew a stream of smoke, then turned around and vomited.

  * * *

  Needles of pain jabbed through Bai Suzhen’s shoulder as she clambered over the wall. Breathing hard, she looked behind her at the yawning entrance to the cavern, then back to the ruins that spread out before her.

  Upon hearing the explosion, she had gone to ground and waited to hear anything further, but when no sound was forthcoming, she climbed atop the low wall. Even with a slightly elevated vantage point she could not see far. Visibility was limited, due to the smoke-and-cloud veiled sun. In a short time, night would fall and she doubted even the light of the full Moon could penetrate the clinging umbrella of mist.

  She jumped off the wall and the chipped masonry clattered beneath her shoes—so loudly she didn’t hear the crunch of running feet until Jimmy Cao was almost behind her.

  He slashed wildly with the dao sword, shaving a lock of hair from Bai’s head. He wheeled around and Bai backpedaled carefully, parrying Cao’s thrusts and swings, steel clashing loudly against steel.

  “You must be the last one left of your crew,” Bai said softly, tauntingly. “You can’t go back to Zhou Zhi or the council now. United Bamboo will expunge you and your triad from the scrolls.”

  Jimmy Cao didn’t reply and Bai realized he understood all of that. His clothes hung in tatters, his hair was plastered with sweat and he breathed deeply through expanded nostrils. Purple veins throbbed on his temples. He stank with a strong, vile odor more animal than human. All he cared about was killing her before he died.

  He lashed out with his blade, a decapitating stroke. Bai twisted aside and slashed swiftly in return, a half-cut, half-thrust at Jimmy Cao’s groin, seeking to sever the femoral artery.

  He skipped backward, and then lunged back in, whipping his sword in whistling left-to-right arcs, trying to overpower her. Bai parried desperately, metal clanging and rasping, little starbursts of sparks flaring from the points of impact.

  Although he wasn’t an accomplished swordsman, what training he had, combined with psychopathic rage, made him very dangerous. One of the cuts got through her guard and sliced into her left forearm. Fiery pain streaked down into her hand.

  Wrenching her body backward, she blocked an overhead strike with the jian. The force of the blow staggered her. As she tried to recover her balance, a piece of masonry broke beneath her weight and she stumbled. Jimmy Cao launched a straight-leg kick that connected solidly with her midriff. She went with the force of the kick and threw herself to one side, as a follow-up swing of the dao missed her throat by a finger’s width.

  Bai Suzhen hit the ground hard and she heard the man husk out a low chuckle, a savage gloating sound. He stood above her, sword angled up and over his shoulder for a stroke that would sever her head from her shoulders.

  Then she heard the high-pitched skreek.

  Jimmy Cao heard it too and looked up, just as a Deinonychus slammed into him, flying from the gloom in a spring-legged bound. A swipe of the scimitar toe-claws flayed his shirt and almost all the flesh from Cao’s torso. He went down screaming, amid flying liquid ribbons of crimson.

  As Bai Suzhen watched with horrid fascination, the Deinonychus gutted Jimmy Cao with two more slashes of its hind claws. Loops of blue-pink intestines spilled out onto the ground.

  The jaws of the raptor closed around the man’s head with a crunch and the Deinonychus jerked him fiercely back and forth. The cracking of vertebrae sounded like a series of distant finger-snaps.

  The Deinonychus gathered itself and bounded toward the cave entrance, the eviscerated body of Jimmy Cao hanging head first from its blood-streaked jaws.

  Bai slowly rose to her feet, weak and trembling in every limb, stunned by the blinding-fast ferocity of the animal’s attack. Her eyes followed the trail of the Deinonychus. She watched it disappear into the darkness of the cavern opening and caught a fleeting hint of a tall figure in the shadows. Words impressed themselves into her mind, like whispers borne on the breeze of a forgotten childhood.

  Pá-yaa-na aak tí-daa, ram laa.

  Farewell, Naga daughter.

  Bai Suzhen nodded, tears stinging her eyes. She pressed her hands together beneath her chin and for the second time in an hour, she murmured, “Pa-yaa-na aak ti-daa, ram laa…farewell, Naga mother.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  May 14th

  The dawn air was cool for about twenty minutes, and then as the sun topped the treeline, the heat trapped beneath the cloud cover turned the rain forest and the ruins into a vast open-air steam bath.

  Honoré Roxton flipped through the leather-bound journal and winced when her fingers touched a sticky spatter of half-dried blood on the inside back cover.

  Kavanaugh squatted on the collar of interlocking stone slabs that surrounded the pool of Prima Materia. He poked at the thick surface with a stick, trying not to make too obvious a show of breathing through his mouth.

  He said conversationally, “If Aubrey jumped in here, he sank straight to the bottom. There’s no telling how deep it is.”

  Honoré sighed. “I’m afraid you’re right. He’s the type of man to take desperate measures, particularly if he was out of his head with shock and pain.”

  Rather than attempt to track Aubrey Belleau the evening before, the five people voted to find a defensible place to camp in the ruins. After the events of the day, Kavanaugh was astonished he had fallen asleep so quickly. He was keyed-up, his mind racing like an out of control engine. He had stretched out on the ground, thinking only to rest. He slept until daybreak, jerking awake to find his head in Bai Suzhen’s lap and a loudly snoring Mouzi using his ankles as a pillow.

  They had eaten the last of the power bars and beef jerky and then engaged in a search for Belleau. Kavanaugh’s guess that he would head for the pool of Prima Materia had been borne out by the blood trail that led directly to it. They found Darwin’s journal lying on the ground at the base of a glyph-covered pillar.

  Crowe and Mouzi returned from circling the perimeter. “Nothing,” the man said flatly. “If Belleau wasn’t three-quarters dead when he jumped in the wallow, then he drowned pretty damn quick. There’s no sign he climbed out.”

  Honoré tucked the bo
ok under an arm, then lifted her camera to her eyes and snapped a photo of the glyphs. “We can at least try to decipher the Enochian alphabet and learn if these characters actually do deal with genetic engineering. I would imagine any conclusive answers are years away.”

  Crowe said, “If we wanted to get ourselves torn to pieces by the Deinonychus, we could always try to get a DNA sample from Wadjet. Maybe you could ask her real nice, Jack. She seems to have a little something for you.”

  Kavanaugh stared at him stonily but did not reply.

  Honoré said, “Actually, I have a theory about that. I think Wadjet is so old, her higher brain functions are subsumed by the old R-complex instincts. Her maternal impulses are very, very powerful. She thought Aubrey was an undernourished child and she probably thought you were the wayward bad-boy son, Jack. All you needed was some tender loving understanding.”

  Mouzi snorted. “Please.”

  Honoré smiled. “There’s a lot of figuring out yet to do.”

  Kavanaugh sighed and stood up, tossing aside the stick. “We’d better figure out a way to get out of here.”

  “Done,” announced Bai Suzhen as she approached through the mist shrouding the columns. “Transportation is on its way.”

  She extended the satphone in her left hand. “This is Jimmy’s. I found it over by the cave. He used it to track Belleau here and I’m guessing he came most of the distance downriver, in the Keying’s launch. There was just enough juice in the battery to make one call.”

  “To whom?” asked Crowe.

  “Bertram…Bert.”

  “Bert?” Kavanaugh echoed, raising an eyebrow.

  She smiled slightly, seductively. “We’re on a first name basis now. I apologized for the loss of his fingers and he apologized for trying to feel me up. He claimed too much liquor and I claimed too much heat and not enough sleep. It was a bad combination for a first meeting. Now he thinks this may be the beginning of a profitable friendship.”