Primordia 2: Return to the Lost World

by Greig Beck

  Ben stared down and waved a hand in front of his face. The fog was thickening, and he looked to Emma. “Time to portal close?”

  She quickly checked her watch and grimaced. “We’ve got twelve minutes, and we need to be down…” She shook her head. “…I have no idea how far.”

  “Then no time to waste—and deeper has got to be better. So…” Ben was first over the side. Stuck in his belt were a few of his spears tipped with the grenade slugs.

  Drake had discarded the empty gun and hobbled as best he could. He moved Helen in front of him but grabbed her arm and looked deep into her eyes.

  “Don’t look back. Just keep your eyes on Ben the whole time, okay?”

  She nodded but looked like she didn’t trust herself to speak. Ben looked into the pit, and what looked like miles down deep, there was a pinprick of red light. With his back to the wall, he began to navigate a set of steps that were narrow, crumbling, and in some places coated in moss.

  He moved as fast as risk would allow—too slow, and they were all staying—too fast, and he’d slip and tumble into the void.

  Concentration, persistence, patience, his mind whispered to him as he descended. His legs wanted to run, and he fought with them every step of the way. Concentration, persistence, patience, he told himself over and over.

  *****

  The snake burst into the nesting chamber and reared up. The bodies of the young were everywhere, and even some of the eggs were riddled with holes and leaking their precious life fluid.

  Its tongue flicked out, sensing the fresh blood, and also tasting the chemical traces of the small beings.

  The massive 70-foot creature had been challenged many times in its long life, and it prevailed every time. In its primitive reptile brain, it was concerned with territory, mating, eating, and survival.

  But surveying the destruction of its brood created another sensation not felt before in its entire life—hate.

  It surged toward the hole in the cavern floor and without stopping went over the surrounding stones.

  In the darkness of the pit, it could see the creature’s flaring warmth—they weren’t far ahead of it. The Titanoboa increased its speed as it flowed like water around the outside of the shaft.

  *****

  “Five minutes!” Emma yelled.

  She heard Ben curse and try to speed up. He succeeded in slipping on one of the steps, and cursing even more.

  The wind rushed up past them as it was sucked up inside the tunnel. The mist was so thick now that they could only just make each other out by their shapes and the glow of their flashlights.

  “How far down—do you think—?” Ben continued to edge along. “—we need to get?”

  Emma followed closely, her fingertips almost touching his, but he still became indistinct in the foggy darkness. She had to squint from the flying debris smashing into her. Behind her, Helen and Drake were just shadows.

  “I remember, that first time, when I came out of the mist layer, everything just seemed to…settle down.” She wracked her mind, but the detail wasn’t there. “But I can’t remember how far I had to climb.” She grimaced. “It took a while. I think.”

  “We must hurry.” Ben turned and yelled up the shaft. “Drake, get a move on.”

  Ben turned back and kept going, and as his foot alighted on one of the steps, it simply crumbled underneath him.

  Ben’s arms pinwheeled for a moment, and then he fell.

  “Ben!”

  Emma went to grab for him, but nearly overbalanced herself. Ben spun in the air and threw out both arms. His fingertips caught the edge of the next step down and he swung hard but managed to cling there.

  Drake and Helen bunched up behind her, but their path was so narrow, no one was getting past anyone else. Emma carefully straightened and went to step over Ben’s fingers to try and get below him.

  Immediately, the rushing wind stopped dead in the shaft.

  She froze. “Oh no.” Emma lifted her gun, pointing it upward. “Everyone…get down.”

  “Down where?” Drake said.

  The huge snake came dropping down at them like a missile of scales and teeth. Emma immediately fired several rapid shots into a head that seemed to fill the entire shaft.

  Drake could do little other than throw an arm over the shrieking Helen and cover her with his own body.

  Ben screamed his frustration and tried to lever himself up. The monstrous snake seemed to coil around the outside of the shaft, its muscular body laying on the winding steps, and pressing outwards to hold itself in place. With the snake now not fully blocking the shaft, the gale-force wind started to howl upward again.

  Ben released one hand to reach down for his spears, knowing he couldn’t possibly get the leverage to throw them, but thinking he might be able to pass them up to Emma or Drake.

  As he fumbled them out, the snake lunged, and Emma fired her remaining rounds into its open mouth. The snake pulled to the side just over Drake and Helen, smashing into the side of the shaft to avoid the stinging pellets.

  “I’m out!” Emma yelled and looked down at her watch, and Ben could tell by her face, their time was up. Around them, the entire shaft shuddered, and chunks of the steps, dust, and debris rained down.

  Ben held out the spears. “Take these…”

  A baseball-sized chunk of rock flew down from above and struck his wrist, smashing the spears from his hand, and they tumbled away into the void.

  “Shit!” he yelled. He looked briefly over his shoulder, but they were already gone. He’d lost their last weapon, but more importantly, he wondered would they…

  The detonation was like a thunderclap. The shaft lit momentarily as an orange flower bloomed several hundred feet below them. The snake pulled back on itself a few dozen feet, as the hurricane winds first brought the heat of the blast, to be quickly followed by the sound of collapsing stone.

  And then there was just dead air.

  Ben stared downwards, knowing what that meant. He turned away to look up at Emma, and their eyes met.

  She mouthed the fateful words he already knew.

  “Time’s up.”

  He felt like just letting go and letting himself drop to the bottom of the collapsed shaft. They were all doomed now anyway, he thought.

  Ben looked past Emma and saw the snake still hanging above them, glassine, soulless eyes on them again. It seemed confident now that the bloom of the explosion didn’t mean any harm to it, and then it burst into action.

  The Titanoboa came down on them and its coils against the blocks sounded like a miller’s stone crushing the rock to dust. Drake turned toward it, and then stood, defiant and waiting. But as the monstrous reptile opened its enormous mouth, displaying rows of backward-curving, tusk-like teeth, the air around it became indistinct.

  It just seemed to become frozen, like an old movie on a projector where the film wheel has stopped.

  “What?” Ben’s mouth hung open.

  And then…it simply vanished.

  Everyone just stared, mouth’s gaping, and no one able to speak for several moments.

  “What. Just. Happened?” Ben asked softly.

  “It’s gone,” Emma said with a chuckle. “The snake, the world, Primordia, it must be all gone.”

  “Primordia has left us and taken that goddamn snake with it,” Drake whooped. “Yes!”

  “Little help here.” Ben still dangled on the step, his fingertips now bloodless from the strain.

  Emma finally was able to step over him and help him get an arm up over the remaining steps. Ben climbed back up and sat with his back against the wall. He looked up at her. “We can’t go down.”

  “So we go up.” She grinned and rubbed his shoulder.

  Ben nodded. “We go up. And we pray.”

  CHAPTER 45

  They scaled upward, taking them hours this time. At first, the massive body of the snake had crushed the stone steps, but further up, they simply ceased to exist. The carved steps had been totally e
roded back into the wall.

  Emma’s rock climbing skills allowed her to lead the way, and when they finally reached the top, she found there was no well-like structure built around the rim, but instead a roof of solid stone over the top of them. There was a slim crack of light showing, and together, they battered, beat, and bludgeoned the hole wide enough for Emma to be able to slide through.

  She stayed down on her belly for a few more seconds, hugging the stone, and trying to shake off the fatigue and disorientation. They weren’t in a cave anymore, and she felt slightly nauseous as she got slowly to her feet.

  “Wow.” She took a few halting steps, looking one way then the other, before quickly coming back to pick up a rock and bash the hole wide enough so Ben, Drake, and Helen could slide out.

  They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, not moving, but simply adjusting, as they let their eyes move over the landscape.

  Drake limped forward a few paces. “Ho-oooly shit.” He turned. “Did this just happen?”

  Ben nodded slowly but reached up to wipe streaming eyes. “Yeah, yeah it did.” He smiled through his tears. “And now it’s over.” He threw his head back and whooped.

  The tepui was different—very different. There was no monstrous snake, no gargantuan dinosaurs, or flesh-eating bugs. There was no primordial jungle, no lake, no temple, no nothing. It was like they had been transported to another planet.

  Instead, there was just a weather-beaten, heavily cracked surface of a flat-topped mountain. Instead, there were a few stunted trees, wind-ravaged spindly grasses, ponds of water, and a clear blue sky above them.

  “Gone, all gone.” Emma turned, arms out. Her face broke into a broad smile and she rushed to Ben to wrap both arms around him. “We made it.”

  “We made it. WE MADE IT!” Ben lifted Emma off her feet and spun her around. “We’re back.”

  “Thank God,” Helen said and tilted her face to the sun. “Home.”

  Drake hobbled back to them. “We’re not home just yet.” He pointed. “We’re still right in the middle of the Amazon jungle.”

  Emma looked out at the endless landscape—the tepui mountain was a floating island in a sea of impenetrable green for as far as the eye could see in every direction.

  “Not this time,” Emma said. “Cynthia knows where we are.” She looked at Ben. “And you just try and keep this guy’s mom from seeing her little lost boy.”

  Ben laughed out loud. “Today is a good day.” He put his arm around her and looked up into the sky. High up and toward the west, there was a faint streak, like an artist had daubed a tiny dash of white.

  “Primordia is going again.”

  “Good riddance,” Emma said.

  “It’ll be back again,” Ben said. “In ten years.”

  “Yeah, well, when it is…” Drake grinned. “Please don’t call me.” His face became serious, and he fumbled in his pocket for his canteen. He shook it, eliciting the sound of a few drops sloshing around inside. He then uncapped it and held it up.

  “To our friends not with us—to Brocke, Ajax, Fergus, Camilla, Juan, and Andy. We thank you and will miss you.” He sipped and passed it to Emma, and then Ben.

  “Um.” Emma winced and turned to see Helen walking away, looking down at the bleak rock.

  “No, we didn’t lose him,” Ben said. “He chose his path. I just hope he finds what he’s looking for.” Ben looked out toward the east. He knew just over the mountains there lay a sparkling blue ocean. On its shore today were the bustling metropolises of Georgetown, Paramaribo, and hundreds of smaller villages like Mahaica and Suddie and countless more. But it wasn’t always like that.

  “Yeah, I just hope he finds what he’s looking for.” He turned away. “And lives long enough to enjoy it.”

  CHAPTER 46

  End of Comet Apparition

  Primordia was gone from the third planet, and already on its way to the middle star where it would be grabbed by its gravitational forces and then flung back to begin its decade-long elliptical voyage around our solar system all over again.

  The monsoon-like rains dried, and the clouds parted, then cleared. The magnetic distortion on the eastern jungles of Venezuela had ceased, doorways closed, and pathways were erased. On the surface of the tabletop mountain, silence and stillness settled over the sparse grasses and fissured landscape.

  A few tiny skink lizards, insects, some hardy birds, and a handful of human beings were all that remained on the huge plateau. The wettest season was at an end, and once again, there would be 10 years of calm over a single jungle mountaintop in the depths of the Venezuelan Amazon jungle.

  CHAPTER 47

  Venezuelan National Institute of Meteorological Services

  Nicolás frowned, fiddled with the resolution, and frowned even deeper. He leaned back.

  “I think I can see something in there.”

  “Huh?” Mateo turned. “In where?”

  “The Amazon, ah, over that tepui. The clouds have dissipated, and the localized effects are now gone. That wettest season of yours seems over.” He licked his lips and rolled his chair in closer to his desk. “So I’ve been playing around with the saved data from the last twenty-four hours. And I can tell you there is, I mean was, something weird inside there.”

  Mateo folded his arms and waited. “Weird, hmm?”

  “It looked like a balloon, and it traveled into the eye of that storm, and then vanished.” Nicolás shrugged.

  “Balloon, huh?” Mateo looked at him from under lowered brows. “Are you sure it wasn’t a lady with an umbrella?” He chuckled.

  Nicolás didn’t get it. “No, a balloon. But it’s a little hard to make out as the image is heavily distorted. Plus, there looked to be a lot of other debris flying around.”

  “Yeah, that happens in storms.” Mateo sighed and rolled his chair closer to where the young meteorologist had set himself up. His bank of screens were all analyzing the data, but the largest held an image of the swirling purple clouds that had hung over the tepui for over 24 hours.

  Mateo squinted. “Could be.” He bobbed his head, and let the image roll forward and rewound it, and rolled it forward several more times. The entire grab was only three seconds, and blurred, but there was definitely something there. He thumbed to another server.

  “Use the Paradox software to try and clean it up.”

  “Oh yeah, yeah. Good idea.” The young man jumped from his chair and brought the smaller server online. The Paradox software program used a heuristic analysis application to apply a best-guess logic to images that were indistinct. It could never be relied on as 100% accurate, but it did give the user a high-probability suggestion based on what it saw, and what it could be.

  “Working now,” Nicolás said and craned forward, watching the screen closely. The image cleared, then cleared some more, as a bar along the bottom of the screen filled up to ping when at 100% complete.

  “Run it,” Mateo said.

  Nicolás rewound and then ran the portion of video they were interested in. Their mouths hung open—a large orange balloon, with what could be several people jammed into the basket, dropped toward a funnel-shaped vortex in the center of the cloud mass. But what happened next had both men feeling lightheaded.

  Things, big bird-like things, came out of the cloud and attacked the balloon. Then it was gone.

  Nicolás ran and reran the film several more times, and for the last, he froze the image of one of the giant bat-like creatures on the screen. Both men just sat in silence, staring at it. Nicolás finally cleared his throat and turned to his senior colleague.

  “What do we do now?”

  Mateo blew air through pressed lips and shook his head slowly. “Normally, I would say, make a note, sign it, and then leave it for ten more years’ time. But instead, today I say, we didn’t see a thing.”

  “But…?” Nicolás swung around.

  Mateo held up a hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll check again.” Mateo rolled back to his desk. “In ten years’ time.”


  EPILOGUE

  South American East Coast, Late Cretaceous Period, 100 Million Years Ago

  The ocean seemed endless, and under a clear azure sky, the water was a blue blanket sprinkled with glittering diamonds as the sunlight caught tiny ripples on its surface.

  On the cliff top, Andy turned his head slowly, scanning the horizon. There were no dots of ships, large or small, and wouldn’t be for another 100 million years. There was also no high-tide line on the beach crowded with rubbish, no islands of floating plastic, no slicks of oil, and no brown haze on the horizon creating unnaturally colored sunsets.

  The young paleontologist inhaled the fresh sweet sea air, and his face split in a broad grin. He was in heaven and he only wished his sister could see what he was seeing.

  He sat and wrapped his arms around his legs and watched as long necks of plesiosaurs rose from the sea surface, and then dived down, returning with flapping fish in sharp-toothed mouths.

  In the time he’d been here, he’d seen ocean giants, like the mosasaur, tylosaur, and even once a monstrous kronosaur that was like a flipper-finned blue whale, attacking pods of plesiosaurs like those in the ocean now. He had watched, mesmerized, as gliding pterosaurs lifted fish from the sea surface, and also packs of theropods scouring the tide line for the carcasses of dead sea beasts washed up to scavenge upon.

  Every day brought something weird, wild, or fantastic. He knew, to a man like Ben Cartwright, these things would have been perceived as a threat, and they were. But to him, they were his life’s work brought to life. Even if he only had one more day to live, he could die happy.

  Down on the rocks below, there were the raw bones of a boat he had begun to construct. It would take him more months to build, using old construction methods of wooden pegs instead of nails, rope from vines, plant resins as sealants, and a beaten-out dinosaur hide as a sail.