Savage Island: A Dinosaur Thriller

by Alan Spencer

  Think.

  Don't die like this!

  Any wrong move could drop him twenty stories to his death. Pierce would be useless if every bone in his body was broken. He did such a terrible job protecting the team when they were on that boat, he had to do something to redeem himself, and quick.

  Pierce slipped into a new version of himself. He no longer feared death. He was this close to taking that final walk into the ocean only twenty-four hours ago. What the fuck did he care if some flying dinosaur wanted him for lunch? The only thing on his mind was saving Susan and her father.

  The wind picked up, throwing Pierce up at an angle where his shirt and skin tore, giving him freedom from the pterodactyl's grip. He would've freefell, except he twisted his body, dug his hands into the beast's wing, and climbed onto its back. The transition occurred in a split-second, and if he ever tried it again, the feat would never work.

  Pierce didn't give a fuck.

  He was flying on the back of a pterodactyl!

  The dinosaur was angry, throwing its head back, and shrilling like a dying vulture with a megaphone. The pterodactyl kept trying to buck him off its back.

  Pierce didn't give the monster a chance. One hand slipped over the side of its head, and the other hand under its head, and Pierce cricked its neck to the side to break it. That distinct "crunch" sound awarded his efforts. The dinosaur's body went limp.

  Oh no.

  Oh shit!

  He was headed straight down at increasing speeds.

  They were going to crash.

  Crash Landing

  Pierce dug his fingers into the pterodactyl's back. Speeding down faster and faster, Pierce closed his eyes against the wind smacking him in the face. He heard the smash of the dinosaur's body connect into several trees. Twisting and turning, changing directions five times before landing upside down in a tree, the dinosaur's body was perched haphazardly between three tree branches. One slight movement, and its body could fall between the limbs. Pierce was stealthy dismounting the beast and latching onto the tree. Carefully dismounting the tropical looking tree, he managed to touch his feet on the ground safely.

  He was standing in the thick of jungle. One direction was identical to any other. Where had he seen that building beyond the electric fences? Pierce had no compass. He couldn't see the sun from his vantage point either.

  "You have to find the sun," Skeeter advised. "Maybe it'll lead you back to the ocean. You need to get off this island, somehow. You can build a raft out of raw materials."

  "He's not going to run away," Shark said, standing at the other side of Pierce. "This boy's ready to kick some ass. He's not leaving Susan behind without tagging that sweet ass first."

  Hard Case was sitting on a half-rotted log. "All of you are forgetting about that flying dinosaur. You can't fist fight with a dinosaur. Pierce will lose."

  Shark threw a broken stick at Hard Case. "You kidding me? He snapped that dinosaur's neck! Pure badass. Pierce has got this situation under control. Dial him up, he’ll get the job done."

  Pierce squeezed his eyes shut tight. This wasn't the best time to see and hear the ghosts of his mind argue like a bunch of angry apes. He was drenched in sweat. If he didn't get water soon, he would become dehydrated.

  Pierce whipped around when he heard the crunch of leaves. A bated breath turned into angry words. "It's you. Unbelievable."

  A strange buzzing sound was coming closer and closer. It sounded like a tin can stuffed with roaring flies. The noises were closing in, and fast. Pierce could see them from afar. They were mosquitoes the size of softballs. Each had blue-green bulbous eyes, and a proboscis as long as a steak knife. The bugs were streaks of motion.

  "Get down," Berkley said in a hushed voice. "There must be a carcass nearby. Come on, hot shot. Down on the ground, now. Let's pray they don't smell us."

  They hit the ground, and barely avoided the mosquitoes. They roared through the jungle, searching for the next freshly dead thing to devour. Pierce imagined how hard those dagger proboscis tubes could suck the blood out of an organism, and he did not want to be that organism.

  Berkley got up from the ground, as did Pierce. Berkley was drenched, as if he'd jumped into a body of water recently. The side of his head was covered in blood from a small gash across his forehead. The old man's eyes were buggy and incensed. Berkley carried a 9mm in one hand, and a sharp stick in the other. Pierce imagined the stick as something that could be driven through a vampire's heart, and then some.

  "You were the first to go down when the shit started," Berkley said, accusingly. "Susan said you were the expert. That you knew what you were doing. And you're the first to go down. Susan believed in you. She acted like you were going to save the day. You're no better than the rest of us. You're no better than a washed up has been.

  "I don't need you, you big shot, tough guy, machismo, asshole. I got away from those henchmen by myself. I can handle this without your help. I'm not going to let those awful, hideous people ever touch me again. This island's a cesspool of chemicals and…and…and I saw a pack of raptors. Like ten of them! It'd be amazing, if I wasn't risking my life to see it.

  "We're going to save Susan and Lee, and blow the lid off this island. We'll show them what environmentalists can do when they put their minds to it. We don't need money, or power, or corporate bullshit to get results. We'll show them! And we don't need no mercenary wannabe's help. You might as well turn around, and forget you ever met us. Your services are no longer required."

  Pierce wanted to tell Berkley to take a pill. That they were in this together. Nobody was equipped to take on this situation, be it a man of nature, or a man of war. Berkley must've been whapped upside the head too hard by whatever had caused his dumb dome to bleed, Pierce reasoned. Still, Pierce had to choose his words wisely. Diplomacy was the name of the—

  Whomp.

  A wooden staff pierced through Berkley's chest with such force, he was thrown up against a tree and impaled. The sound of breaking sternum bones punctuated the damage. Berkley's body went limp. The man's eyes didn't close in death. They looked on in fearful reverence.

  Pierce had no chance to compute Berkley's death.

  Hundreds of wild calls followed the moment of violence: "Yip-yip-yip-yip-yigggggggh!"

  They arrived from every direction, and were rushing in at Pierce. Arrows, spears, blow darts, and wooden staffs were sailing towards Pierce. Pierce leapt forward, and lunged into the woods, frantic to escape certain death yet again!

  Pierce only got a brief glimpse of the angry mob of jungle people. They were naked except for the tatters of loincloths covering their genitals. Men and women alike were decorated in brownish-red war paint—what could've been the dried blood of an animal or a human.

  What was more concerning, their skin was covered in bubbling sores. Pus and yellow fluids leaked from those sores. Whoever these native tribal people were, they had suffered strange mutations. Some had extra arms and legs, and a few had an extra head or two! A few had hearts and intestines that were on the outside of their bodies, and covered in a clear filmy substance. He imagined the film to be a cross between gel and snot.

  The ground dropped beneath his feet before Pierce could make sense of the mutations. He tumbled down a hill, and landed in a pit of picked clean human bones. He was wading in hundreds and hundreds of broken up human skeletons. Up over the edge of the pit, what looked more like a bowl, the indigenous people were waving spears and crude wooden weapons. They were coming in after him to do cannibal things.

  Pierce was helpless to stop them.

  The cannibals would feast.

  Time to Eat

  Forced out of the pit of human skeletal remains by the raving mad cannibals, Pierce was pulled in every direction. The tribes were chanting, cheering, raving, and screeching nonsense. Pierce jerked his arms, and tried to rip free from their holds. If he managed to shake off one grip, a new set of hands would quickly reclaim him. His hair was being yanked and nearly torn from
the roots. These awful maniacs wanted to savage him.

  New evidence of their intentions soon appeared after they hiked through half a mile of dense jungle foliage. These strange people were using crude stone hatchets, sharpened bones (both human and dinosaur) to clear the jungle thick. Huddles of straw huts appeared in a circular clearing up ahead. Dead center of that clearing was a stage for brutality.

  A great pit of fire featured a spit where two sets of human ribs were sizzling and cooking. The meat smell was horrible to take in. One, because Pierce was weakened by hunger, and two, because he saw Staff's head hanging from a rope nearby. The rest of Staff's body was picked clean of meat except for his feet, which dangled from the skeleton body, dripping blood. Huddles of tribe people who hadn't hunted Pierce down were noshing down on human innards, and chewing them with the fervor of someone freshly reintroduced to the pleasures of eating. Gristle and fat were flensed from bone, and devoured with smiles painted on by blood. A circle of children were fighting over a spleen, and laughing like children should while playing childish games. Stone hatchets were chopping up pink and purple cutlets of half-cooked flesh as the group continued their carnal feast.

  Savages.

  Murdering bastards.

  Bloodthirsty cannibals.

  Pierce renewed his efforts to escape their clutches. He stopped when he heard the piercing screams of a woman.

  Lords was strapped down to a table created by laying down three trees stripped of their bark. She was naked and writhing under the restraints of several bands of rope. Lords's eyes met Pierce's for a split second. She called out the first part of his name right when a cannibal woman smashed a large rock over her head to end her screams.

  Dozens of stone hatchet-wielding savages rendered her body into thirty pieces in under thirty seconds. Hunks of flesh and spatters of blood covered the band of cannibals. One held a long tongue freshly ripped from Lords' mouth, and played his own tongue along the piece of meat before chewing it with extreme voraciousness. Hands, feet, legs, and intestines were all dumped into a steel cauldron, and cooked over a bed of red-hot coals. One of the cannibals had strayed from the group to play with two bloody breasts. The sick savage kept squeezing and squeezing them. Two women were fighting over Lords' scalped head of hair.

  Pierce couldn't take anymore.

  The truth was setting in.

  He was next on the menu.

  Shark was standing among the cannibals. His face was a mask of shock. "You got to do something, dude. They'll eat you from head to toe. They're giving you the hungry eyes. I'm feeling uncomfortable, and I'm dead."

  Skeeter's frightened expression mirrored Shark's. "Whoa, man. I'm sorry, Pierce. You don't deserve this. You should've taken that walk in the ocean while you had the chance."

  "No, fuck that noise," Hard Case raged. "The only way to beat an enemy like this is to outdo them. Show them up. Come on! You're not dying like this. Not now, not today, never! Angel would want you to fight. Fucking bring it! Break some skulls!"

  That got Pierce fuming mad.

  These cannibals weren't going to eat a single nugget of flesh from his body.

  The tribe was about to turn on him. One adorned in a headdress made of human bones, various sticks and twigs, and numerous dried out snakeskins approached Pierce. This could've been the chief. Pierce didn't understand cannibal tribe politics, nor did he give a good Goddamn. The chief's leathery, calloused hands played over his chest and biceps. Then the hand touched his chin lovingly. Pierce imagined a butcher ogling the fattest pig in the pen, and the son-of-a-bitch getting a stomach erection.

  "Show them what brutality really means," Hard Case roared. "Now's your chance!"

  Pierce didn't think.

  He acted on sheer impulse.

  "Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

  Pierce bit down on the chief's nose, clamped down his teeth, and bit through cartilage and flesh. He spat out the nose. The chief's exposed sinuses were burbling up blood. The chief was howling in terror. He fell backwards, and his face kept spewing blood.

  This time Pierce threw aside his captors. He hit the ground, rolled forward, and stole a stone hatchet. He ran to the fire, and managed to steal a long stick that was burning at the end. Pierce clutched both, ready to kill anybody who dared to come close enough to suffer the business end of blunt force and fire.

  The cannibals ran screaming in the other direction.

  "Yeah, that's right. Fuck you! The meat market's closet. Get your meat off some other poor son-of-a-bitch's back!"

  Pierce stopped.

  He realized his mistake.

  The cannibals weren't afraid of him.

  A greater threat loomed near.

  Run For Your Life

  This was something out of a fucking textbook. Pierce strained his neck to look up so high, and take in its entire body. Every step it took, it rocked the earth. The great beast threw back its head, and unleashed a monstrous cry. The cannibals scattered. They were smart, Pierce realized, as he watched the cannibals race to a hole previously dug up in the ground. The group had disappeared underground in less than ten seconds. At the front of the hole, a door of bamboo covered in long wooden spears carved to sharp perfection threatened to cut any menace that dared to try and bash through the barrier. That left Pierce standing there with a stone axe, and a torch slowly trying to go out.

  The weapons would do very little against the T-Rex.

  This time, the mercenaries in his head didn't show up to give him courage.

  Pierce was on his own.

  Another screech left its angry mouth before the T-Rex stomped after Pierce. Pierce threw aside the weapons, and ran like hell.

  Doom. Doom. Doom. Doom.

  The stomping sounded just like his future.

  Doom.

  Doom.

  Doom.

  The reptilian tail bashed the sides of trees. The T-Rex's body itself was battering aside trees, snapping them like nothing but twigs. A fifty-foot long shard of tree spun over Pierce's head before bouncing twice, and rolling down a hill.

  Goddamn, that was close!

  Pierce got a brief glimpse of the island in the far distance.

  From another pocket of the island, dozens of velociraptors, stegosauruses, and brontosauruses were fleeing from ten speeding jeeps. A large machine gun was pumping hundreds of rounds a minute at the fleeing reptiles from each vehicle. The men in the dark blue painter's suits were laughing it up as they watched the dinosaurs run for their lives. Behind those jeeps, a large semi-truck carried a bed of biohazard barrels across the crudely built road.

  Pierce lost sight of them.

  The T-Rex had little trouble catching up to him. The giant was at his heels. This was it, Pierce thought. He avoided being disembodied and devoured by cannibals, only to be swallowed whole by a ravenous dinosaur.

  Pierce couldn't feel his body anymore. He was outside of himself, driven out of his body by fear. Still running, still hoping there was a way to survive this insane encounter, Pierce experienced a new burst of energy. He raced to the beacon up ahead knowing, he was thrusting himself from one dangerous option to another. One option had zero possibility of survival, while the other had a thin sliver of a happy ending.

  Fuck it.

  I have nothing to lose.

  Pierce cut through the jungle, and reached the end of a cliff. Near the edge was a waterfall that dropped he didn't know how many stories, to a great pool of clear blue water.

  Racing to the edge of the cliff, Pierce jumped for his life, and prayed the T-Rex didn't take the plunge with him.

  Over The Falls

  The drop wasn't like in the movies where time slows down for dramatic impact. In under five seconds, Pierce went from being airborne to plunging down into a deep body of water. He was already weakened from sprinting from the T-Rex, and had little strength to lift himself back to the surface. Somehow, he managed to fight his way back to air, and stay afloat. Deciding it was best to stay out of the open, he paddle
d towards the waterfall itself. He could take shelter behind the falling threads of water. Pierce crawled up on a rock ledge, and stayed in the nook to catch his breath.

  After his breathing and the pounding of his heart both leveled out, Pierce heard the shriek of the T-Rex topside. It stomped its feet in anger, and then stalked the jungle for its next meal. Pierce had escaped certain death once again.

  Willy, the cannibals, the dinosaurs, the secrets of the island, they all repeated in his dizzy and tired mind. They paraded around in his skull to remind him he didn't stand a chance of getting off of this island alive. Whatever Lee Branch had come here to investigate, the man knew very little of the truths that existed on the island.

  The next step was hard to determine. He needed food and water, and quick, or he'd die before making any real attempt at tracking down Susan.

  "There's nobody here to help you," Skeeter said. "I respect you as a private investigator. You could solve any case, but you're not a mercenary. Angel wanted you to be like us. She never told you that. She had you tag along on all of those expeditions in the chance you might become interested in our work. But you can't be something you're not. No matter how hard you try."

  Hard Case gave Pierce his two cents next. "Skeeter's right. You're not a mercenary. You learned a few things, sure, but it takes more than guts and balls and insanity to do what we do. You have to have that killer instinct, and you either have it or you don't. You don't have it, Pierce. Angel couldn't get over it. She refused to quit trying. She loved you that much. She didn't want to leave you, even if your relationship was doomed to fail."

  Shark spoke up. "None of us were married for a reason. Think about it, Pierce. Our job isn't safe. Our income comes at random times. We disappear for weeks at a time. You can't start a family like that. Angel thought she could do both with you, but she kept forgetting you can't be a mercenary and a mom. It doesn't work. She tried. She refused to give up, the poor bitch."