by catt dahman
“They are really Alex and Fish?”
“They really are. Tom lost all the guilt and pain that was in his eyes, and he is over the moon happy,” Helen added.
“Happy ending then?” Scott hoped.
Helen chewed her bottom lip and said, “Not exactly. Do you hear the storm? It’s bad, just as Susan predicted. Hurricane-type storm, and Scott? The sky is still yellow. Everyone is terrified.”
It wasn’t enough just to be afraid of a storm that was as bad as a hurricane; it was even worse to be scared because of the damned power used by the storm.
Scott had once thought it might be okay to reset his own scenario, but now that it was a real possibility, he didn’t want to wash up on the island again and do things again, like some repeating loop of time. He wanted to be safe with Helen and the baby she was carrying. His baby.
Scott held Helen close and tried to pray, but the choppy seas made it hard to believe anything was okay. The wind increased, and the waves became worse. It was like being back in the Connie Louise when a rogue wave picked it up and hurled it across the water, leaving it torn, broken, battered, and ripped open.
Scott wondered if anything had really happened, but instead, he was back on the Connie Louise, experiencing that battering again. Maybe he hit his head at that time and had imagined months on a terrible island.
Of course, that was it. He never was on the island of dinosaurs. Alex and Fish never died, or returned. Durango and the others were here with him, and Scott only dreamed of the dinosaurs, snakes, and slugs.
Screaming came from outside his room, and the wood and steel of the small ship squealed and snapped with the pressure of the waves that tried to pull it apart.
When an extra roar filled the room, Scott went flying from the bed and slammed into a wall, and Helen smacked into him. That saved her from serious injury, but the action snapped Scott’s arm right above his wrist, making him yelp. His head thumped the wall, and he blacked out.
When he awoke the next time, Helen was beside him, his arm was splinted and wrapped, but he was in vicious pain. However, the sky was blue, and all the violent movements of the ship had ended.
His concern was that instead of a nice, clean hospital room with a television, a pain pump, soft sheets, and fluffy pillows, he was lying on the sand.
“So the Connie Louise wrecked, and I dreamed everything?” Scott didn’t know if he was relieved or saddened by that.
“What?” asked Helen.
“I dreamed we wrecked on an island of dinosaurs, and much worse, and that there were time loops…Bermuda Triangle crap.”
“That was real. We were rescued during another storm. Remember?” asked Helen.
“Oh, why are we…are we wrecked again?” Scott asked.
“We did wreck, but we didn’t break up entirely; just the bottom of the ship is gone, caught on the sand. We came to shore as soon as the weather broke. You’ve got to stop hitting your head.”
“Where are we?” Scott asked.
“Somewhere in North America,” Helen said.
Scott grinned and said, “We made it home? We did it? Helen, we’re home?”
She didn’t look pleased but nodded. “This isn’t our time, though. The storm screwed up the time for us, like it does to everyone,” she said.
“Are we like we were on the island? Back in the days of the dinosaurs? Have we gone back again?” asked Scott, feeling tired and dizzy, yet only part was because of his broken arm and his head injury. “But you said we were in North America. How would you know that if we went back in time?”
Helen brushed hair off Scott’s forehead and tried to look less depressed than she felt.
It had been difficult during the storms and wreck and then the subsequent evacuation of the boat to explain things to the crew of the ship. Even with Susan there to help tell the story, the events were slippery and hard to grasp long enough to understand.
Helen told Scott that as soon as they washed ashore, they were shocked to see a small pack of compsognathus run by and to hear a big predator roaring from somewhere over the horizon.
“And? Helen, what’s wrong?” Scott worried about the lines on her face. Something deep concerned her.
“We’re not back in the dinosaurs’ time. We’re somewhere else in another time or in another dimension, maybe. I guess over a very long time and with many storms, they came to us, here. I mean the dinosaurs came to the mainland, the U.S. They came to our time,” she said as she raised Scott’s head and shoulders so he could sit up.
He almost wished he hadn’t seen.
Rows of old buildings, once tourists’ shops, dive shops, restaurants, and bars lined the beach. Their colors were long ago faded, the wood was grey and bleached, and many of the buildings were battered and torn apart. Vines grew over broken windows. Telephone and power poles had fallen years before, left to rot in the sand, and not too far from where Scott lay was a rusted shell of a car.
Scott saw a one-armed man, Tom, chase a small raptor away from the car, shouting at it to go away. He felt cheated. “We said we accepted we couldn’t come home…”
Helen nodded.
Scott closed his eyes to shut out the reality of what he saw. “There’s no home to go back to, is there?”
“All in semantics, Scott. What we have found, is that like it or not, we are home.”
Over there. I think most of the crew actually survived and they…”
They found dinosaurs, made a fortress, and grew an exceptional garden for their food, Joy explained. She said she thought they did very well, despite the circumstances of the island with all of the dangers. “They lived here, didn’t they, Scott?”
“Yes, and I think they lived here a long time. On the other side of the wreck, there is a horrible, pitiful pile of human bones and I think there was a fight with some dinosaurs there on the beach. There are dino bones, but I can’t tell them apart except these are big and they had pointed teeth.”
“They were here and they died. Some did. Then, a hundred years later, in a storm, they crashed again, but on our end of the island. The ship broke apart and sank and no one survived. Explain that,” Harold asked.
Alex closed one eye and warded off a headache. He wanted a drink of the whiskey they brought, but held himself back.“Once they are dead, the ship, boar, or plane can come back again, maybe in a year, or five, or ten. They’ve gone at least twice, right?”
Scott nodded.
Alex theorized that the Violet Marie crashed five years before and all or some died then. He said Littleton, Jada, Benny, and Amy might have died in the crash or lived a while and been killed later. The boat crashed again and those who were dead already, or some of those, were put back in time for a second chance. This time, the four survived the crash.
“Jada told me something strange. She said she had de je vu, and felt as if she had been there before and had nightmares about dinosaurs.”
“Benny has had them, but Amy said she doesn’t and Littleton said he never did, but he said he had a nightmare about drowning,” Scott told them. “You’re thinking that they have a hidden memory of their deaths?”
Read on for a free sample of The Valley
PROLOGUE
The Valley
Argentina
The Year 2079
With the exception of a few renegade clouds floating above the canopy of trees, the sky was a perfect blue. The air was muggy with a syrupy thickness, the humidity steaming. In tropical brush so dense and with leaves as large as elephant ears, Jon Jacoby hacked his way through the thickets with the blade of a machete, swinging errantly knowing that the distance between two points was a straight line. And to get to the Gates of Freedom, Jon had to cut a swath through the jungle’s core if he was to survive.
Emily Anderson was behind him holding a Glock with a bullet in the chamber and three in the magazine. Their beige jumpsuits, declared to be the property of the Argentina Department of Corrections, with ADOC stenciled on the backs, were torn a
nd badly soiled. Rorschach blots of sweat circled beneath their armpits and backs. The bangs of their hair stuck wetly to their brow. Razor-thin cuts and slashes marred their faces and their hands, the blood having crusted and caked into scabs. And their jumpsuits were beginning to hang on them like drapery, the two having lost so much weight.
It had taken them five days to cross the valley, which was surrounded by 80-foot sheer walls, straight up with no foot- or handholds, and no promise or means of escape.
When they were less than 100 yards away from the Gates of Freedom, Jon and Emily hunkered low in the jungle brush, listening.
The shape of the Gates was an arch, and the top bullet-shaped, with chiseled lettering above the entranceway: YOUR FREEDOM IS BUT A FEW STEPS AWAY.
“The gate’s closed,” Emily whispered. When she started to rise and head forward, Jon lashed out and grabbed her by the forearm, stopping her. “What?” she asked.
He set a forefinger against his lips, shushing her. Listen!
In the brush to their left something moved, causing the elephant-sized leaves to shake and betray its position.
They were not alone.
The thicket and brambles to their right began to sound off, a rustling.
Then Emily’s eyes started to the size of communion wafers and her face began to crack, her eyes welling with tears. They were so close, she thought. So . . . close.
And now they were being flanked.
As she raised her firearm, Jon gripped the machete until he was white-knuckled.
“We have to make a run for it,” he told her. “A hundred yards.”
“We’ll never make it.”
“We can’t just sit here, Em, and let them close in.”
And then a tear slipped from the corner of her eye and tracked slowly along her cheek, then to her chin where it dangled precariously for a moment before dropping. “We were so close, Jon” she whispered. “All this way . . . Forty miles. The last two.”
Jon looked deep into her eyes, and leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. She was right, he considered. They started out as a team of twelve, all able-bodied, all convicts of the ADOC having a singular goal: to live. Some died the moment they stepped inside the valley. Others perished during the night as nocturnal creatures dragged them into the darkness with their screams growing distant, and then gone, the cries dying abruptly. Others simply disappeared.
He sighed. “So close,” he said softly. “So . . . close.”
Whatever was in the brush to their left and to their right, was steadily closing in.
Suddenly Emily barked a cry as white-hot pain pierced her side, the point of the machete driving deep. When Jon pulled the blade free, the look on her face nearly crushed him. The look was one of questioning sadness, one that asked why he betrayed her.
“Because when they come,” he said remorsefully, “they’ll come after you. They’ll take the weak and wounded first.” Then: “I’m so sorry, Em. But you’re giving me a chance to live.” He then reached down and grabbed her gun away, which was loosely gripped in her hand, leaned forward, and kissed her gingerly on the forehead. “Thank you.”
After shoving her back, he began his final leg of the 100-yard journey.
#
Emily lay there watching the blood spill from the wound. Then from her position she cried out after Jon. “You son of a bitch!” Then she winced, the effort of crying out causing an electric charge of pain to shoot through her body.
The brush to her immediate right began to move, the distance just beyond an arm’s reach. It was that close. The same on her left, the predators within striking range.
Then the moving stopped.
And there was a silence that was terrifying.
Emily rocked her head from side to side, looking for the faces of her predators, wanting to see the ugliness behind the mask of Death.
Silence.
Then a face poked out from between the large fans of leaves. A head that was canine-sized but crocodilian in shape, with a long snout and reptilian teeth. Its eyes were golden-yellow with black vertical slits for pupils. And a waddle of loose flesh hung at the base of its neck.
When it came out of the brush and into the small clearing, it began to circle Emily in study by cocking its head from one side to the next, the other joined its side. They were short and blunt with strong-looking limbs, the reptiles standing no taller than three feet in height. When they communicated, it sounded like the soft cooing of a bird.
Emily began to crawl backward and deeper into the bush; the reptiles matched her actions and kept pace, their heads turning as if to figure out this life force, to determine if it was predator or prey.
When Emily could go no further, when her back was up against a felled log, she waited.
The lizards looked at her, then at each other, the sound coming from the backs of their throats, a series of soft clicks and cooing, and ended when the larger of the two opened its jaws wide and issued a high-piercing scream. The loose flesh around its throat rose into a frill around its head, the fan of its skin then shaking and rattling in rage, the head looking as if it was haloed by an Elizabethan collar.
The other followed, the flesh around its throat expanding outward in a collar, shaking, then rattling. And then it spat a viscous, tarry substance from its mouth, the mud-like matter striking her eyes, blinding her, the saliva of the matter highly toxic. Her eyes began to burn, then the corneas, the irises and pupils burned with an indescribable intensity, which ultimately drove a scream deep from her.
Birds suddenly took flight as if her cry was like a gunshot.
And then it suddenly stopped.
Leaving only a deep . . . and horrible . . . silence.
#
Jon felt his scrotum crawl the moment he heard Emily cry out in pain that was surely absolute.
He kept the gun in one hand, the machete in the other.
He was fifty yards away and closing.
He read the script above the door.
YOUR FREEDOM IS BUT A FEW STEPS AWAY.
When he was thirty yards away, the massive metal doors began to swing wide. He was so close that he could see the rivets that held the thick panels in place.
If freedom could be detected by one of the five senses, Jon was sure that he could taste it.
Then the doors began to close, quickly.
“No!” he shouted. “You can’t do this! I earned this!”
He began to pick up his pace, running like the wind.
And that was when he felt the earth tremor beneath his feet.
When the doors slammed shut with a horrible shudder, he knew it was to keep something from getting out, something awful and deadly.
Another tremor—from a footfall of something large.
Jon stood his ground ten feet from the Gates of Freedom.
. . . Boom . . . Boom . . . Boom . . . Boom . . .
It was getting close.
Then the earth fell stable
Nothing moved.
Jon stood as still as a Grecian statue listening to nothing but his own heartbeat.
And then all Hell broke loose.
Thirty-foot tall trees divided and pared back, creating an avenue of approach for a Spinosaurus, a massive creature 55-feet in length from head to tail, nearly 25-feet tall, with the enlarged neural spines of the dorsal vertebrae supporting a skin sail quite similar to the dorsal fin of a sailfish. Its head was long and massive with spike-like teeth. Its arms, unlike the T-Rex, whose limbs are blunted and puny in comparison, were rather large and muscular, and sported claws that were as long and sharp as industrial meat hooks.
When it craned its head and roared, the air shook, the reverberations of its cry causing the surroundings to vibrate. Then it stepped forward, tail swinging to maintain balance, its head and bowling-ball sized eyes focusing on Jon, its nostrils flaring, taking in the man’s scent so that its olfactory senses could deter
mine if Jon was something of a threat.
Another roar.
And Jon fell to his knees, lifted his firearm, and pulled the trigger in quick succession, the bullets pelting its thick hide but doing little to slow it down. Sobbing, he released the gun, the weapon now useless. The Spinosaurus leaned forward so that its head drew a shadow over Jon, and stretched its jaws wide, showing gossamer strands of saliva that connected the upper line of teeth to the lower.
Jon, feeling absolutely defeated, read the inscription over the door one last time.
YOUR FREEDOM IS BUT A FEW STEPS AWAY.
“It’s not fair,” he whispered. “It’s not.”
Hot, fetid breath pressed down on him, the stench of rancid and decayed meat.
Its teeth now loomed large, its jaw widening.
And then it closed in, the snap of its action so quick that Jon didn’t have time to register that he was already dead.
The Valley had won again.
The Valley is available from Amazon here
