Embedded in the rock was the fossilized skeleton of a giant snake, with huge fangs and a head nearly a meter long.
The man who’d screamed stepped away from the stone. Others arrived and jerked to a stop beside him, as if the fossil emitted some repellent force.
“It’s a demon,” one man whispered.
“Creature of Hell,” another said.
Gabriel looked over Emiliano’s shoulder. He grabbed his brother’s elbow. “Is that a demon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are there more like it still around?”
Emiliano certainly hoped not.
Chapter Two
Four years ago
The tarp covering the desert excavation created a parallelogram of shade, but it made no difference. Dr. Grant Coleman still felt like he had a front seat to a blast furnace. But if his team could get this Allosaurus skull out of the sandstone in one piece, the discomfort would be well worth the reward.
At Grant’s feet, three sunburned graduate students in T-shirts and frayed shorts worked at the fossil with dental picks and brushes.
“This is so slow,” one of them whined. “We’ve been digging this out a millimeter at a time for days.”
“It’s been there for a few million years,” Grant said. “There’s really no hurry to do it improperly.”
“But seriously, this is so…mind numbing.”
“Because you aren’t savoring the thrill of discovery,” Grant said in over-the-top dramatics. “The excitement of being the first set of human eyes to see what you’re bringing to light. Here you are, in the solitude and silence of the desert. It’s just you and a former apex predator.”
“You have to admit,” another student said. “The heat and all is a little draining.”
“But there are no insects, no drenching rains, and the air wicks away sweat in an instant. You can’t always pick and choose where to do paleontology, but when I can, I pick the desert. You wouldn’t catch me dead in a jungle.”
Grant left the excavation and joined Hannah, one of his most promising students as she searched a rock wall for signs of their next big find. Multi-colored layers of sediment ran like wavy lines across the stone. A broad, floppy hat shielded her pale face from the sun.
“Anything promising?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
She sidestepped left without looking. Something rattled at her feet.
A rattlesnake lay coiled in the sun between two rocks. Its raised head pointed at the two of them. Its rattle stood erect and vibrated its chilling warning.
Hannah froze. Grant’s pulse spiked. He gripped Hannah’s shoulders.
“Nice and easy,” he whispered. “Step straight back with me.”
She followed his lead as an awkward dance partner. One, two, three, four synchronized steps backwards. The rattling stopped. The snake lowered its head.
“Oh my God,” Hannah whispered. “I didn’t see that snake at all. That was so close.”
“Too close. Rule of thumb: give a snake all the room it wants.”
“Wow.” She looked up at him in admiration. “You stayed pretty cool around that snake.”
“I’ve seen a lot of them in the desert. You get used to them.”
In reality, sweat ran down his spine and his heart hadn’t slowed down yet. Snakes gave him the creeps, with their slick scales and their penetrating slit irises. He hoped Hannah wouldn’t notice the tremble in his hands. He transitioned the discussion into a moment of instruction.
“In the past, they got much bigger than that. There are documented snake fossils over ten meters long and over a meter wide.”
“I’d hate to stumble across one of those.”
“So would I. Lucky for us we missed their heyday by millions of years.” He directed Hannah to the right. “Let’s check the sediments a little further over here.”
He glanced back at the snake. Its forked tongue whipped in and out of its mouth. It didn’t blink.
He decided he could go years without seeing another snake up close, and that would be just fine.
Chapter Three
Present day
Grant slapped an insect on his cheek. He checked his palm and saw a splat of blood. The Amazon jungle was turning out to be everything he’d thought he’d hate, and more. He dipped his paddle back into the river and kept the canoe moving downstream.
“There are more insects down here than up on the plateau, no?” Janaina Silva said.
“Yes, but at least they’re smaller.”
Grant and Janaina were the sole survivors of an expedition to an unknown plateau in the far reaches of Amazonia. They had battled an Ankylosaurus, pterosaurs, and giant ants. They’d barely escaped with their lives, climbed down to the river, and begun a long downstream paddle they’d hoped would get them back to civilization. Back in the United States, Grant was a professor of paleontology and a horror novelist. Janaina was an environmentalist and advocate for native peoples’ rights here in Brazil.
The humidity seemed to sap every bit of energy from Grant. Sweat rolled down the sides of his face. His arms ached from paddling.
The canoe navigated a curve in the river. A sandbar appeared up ahead, an unnatural white between the rich greens of the jungle and the river’s tannin-brown.
“That would be a safe place,” Janaina said. “Perhaps we take a break, stretch our legs.”
“Hey, you know that I’m good for another hundred miles, easy. But if you need a break, then we should certainly take one.”
Janaina flashed a bright white smile. “You are so kind to be putting my needs first.”
Grant pulled in his paddle and sagged in the seat. “Well, it’s all about the team effort.”
Janaina steered the canoe onto the sandbar. It nosed in and Grant stepped out. After a few hours folded up, his legs took some coaxing to keep him erect. He finally rose to his full height. The younger Janaina hopped out without effort.
“No need to show off,” he muttered to himself.
Janaina pulled her dark hair out of its pony tail and gave it a shake. It brushed her shoulders. The week of outdoor adventure had bronzed her skin. Grant had just burned.
“I have to confess something,” Grant said. “Fighting the dinosaurs up above the clouds? That wasn’t my first rodeo.”
Janaina drew her hair back into a pony tail. “That was not a rodeo. I have been to the Festa do Peão de Barretos. I have seen a rodeo.”
“Sorry, that’s an American phrase. I meant to say that last week wasn’t my first encounter with giant creatures the world thought were extinct.”
“Now I think you are, how you say, pulling my foot.”
“That’s pulling your leg, and no, I’m not. Over a year ago, I was recruited to explore a cavern in Montana that had been sealed for thousands of years. Inside, we discovered giant scorpions, a giant bat, and a host of other species that hadn’t ever encountered modern man.”
“Such a discovery should have made you famous, no?”
“The cavern flooded and all the evidence was destroyed.”
“Wait, wasn’t that event what you wrote your little scary novel about?”
“Yes, it was. And that non-fiction fiction did make me a bit famous. Famous enough that the late Ms. Katsoros recruited me for our adventure with the pterosaurs because she knew the story was true.”
“Ah, so that is why of all the paleontologists in the world, TransUnion hired you.”
“That and I work cheap. As an example, I’m not even charging them for the days we are going to spend here paddling down river.”
“You are quite magnanimous.”
“Just one of my many faults.” Grant stretched his back. It creaked. “Now I don’t want you thinking I’m some kind of giant monster magnet. My first experience was a fluke, and the second time someone else brought me to them on purpose. I have complete confidence that we will get downriver without encountering any mythical monsters.”
“That is good. We wi
ll just keep the list of worries to pit vipers, anacondas, crocodiles, piranha fish, jaguars, and a dozen painful or poisonous insects.”
“That list makes the pterosaurs look kind of good.”
“We can paddle back upstream if you’d like.”
“Nah, been there, done that. We’ll stick with snakes and jaguars. Normal sized.”
“If we stay on this sandbar much longer,” Janaina said, “we’ll see crocodiles. This is a prime sunning spot.”
Grant hopped for the canoe. “No need to tell me that twice. I’m at my big reptile quota for the week.”
They pushed the canoe back out into the river. As he prepared to step in, Grant noticed water seeping into the bottom through a split in the old wood.
“Whoa! Wait!” He pulled the canoe back onto the sandbar. Grant lifted his end out of the water. A hairline crack ran along the seam between the two sides. “This isn’t going to get us home.”
Janaina scanned the river bank. “Wait…I saw…there!” She pointed upstream. “We need to go there.”
Grant thought they’d get that far before sinking. They boarded the canoe and paddled to the river bank. His estimate of their seaworthiness was way off. More water seeped through the crack on the way over. A lot more.
“There had better be a solution here,” he said, “because that was this canoe’s last trip.”
“There is one right here,” Janaina stepped out of the canoe and over to a rough-barked tree with narrow, waxy, green leaves. “Wild rubber.”
She took off her belt and used the prong in the buckle’s center to gouge a descending line across the trunk. The wound slowly filled with milky sap.
“We will patch the split. Mother Nature provides.”
The sap drew slowly. It was almost an hour before they had enough to fill the crack. Janaina caught the sap and applied it to the canoe’s wound with some leaves.
“That may stop the leak, but not the split,” Grant said. “Hand me your belt.”
Janaina gave him her belt. He took off his own and joined them together. He looped them around the stern of the canoe and cinched them tight. The crack closed up and squirted rubber sap from the tightened split.
“That ought to hold it,” Grant said. He didn’t sound as certain as he’d planned to.
He prayed it would last to the river’s end, wherever that was. They relaunched the canoe, and headed downriver into the unknown.
The Curse Of The Viper King is available from Amazon here!
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