by Greig Beck
Alex turned to her, catching her looking at him. “At least we get to move out of this coastal jungle.” He raised his eyebrows. “But no more diversions until we get there. We’re not here for a picnic, got it?”
“Nope.” She turned back to the pond. “No more.”
Alex turned. “What? Tired, need a break?
“Not at all. In fact, I’m totally invigorated.” Cate waved an arm about. “See this? All of this? It’s my life’s work. So, no, I’m not asking for a picnic, just a minute or two now and then, and maybe you can share a little more of what you know.” Alex ignored her, and she folded her arms. “You wouldn’t even be down here if not for me.”
Alex turned, his expression hardening for a moment. “Maybe. Look, I know we have different objectives. But as soon as we find the submarine, then you can spend a little time on exploration – provided it’s safe. Okay?
“No, Alex.” She smiled flatly. “This is both my objective and my passion. All my life I’ve dreamed of this, ever since I was that kid lying on a muddy bank somewhere. How can I pass it by?” She shrugged. “I can’t. You go find your missing submarine; it’s your job. But for me, my job is this … paradise.” She waved an arm about again. “You go, I’ll be fine. Swing past on the way back.”
“Oh for Chrissake.” Alex rubbed a hand up through sweat-slicked hair. “Cate, down here is nothing like you’ve ever known. It’s not the Everglades, it’s not the Congo, or even the Amazon, and it sure as hell isn’t a paradise. It’s hell for human beings – everything down here wants to eat you. I can’t begin to …”
She held up a hand. “I know, I know.” She shrugged. “I’ll be careful.”
Alex stared at her for a few moments. He pulled one of his Ka-bar knives from a sheath at his back, and handed the seven-inch black blade to her.
“I can’t promise I’ll be back. So stay silent, keep your head down, and … good luck.” He turned and left.
Cate stood open-mouthed for a moment, not really expecting him to simply leave. “Wow.” She stuck the blade on her belt. “Thanks, and you still owe me a drink.”
He was already gone.
*
Cate had used the knife to sharpen the stalk of a dried frond into a multi-purpose spear, walking stick, and probe, and used it to carefully move through the thickening fronds. Perspiration ran down her face and stung her eyes. She had pulled the wetsuit down and tied its arms around her waist. Her white t-shirt was already stained and stuck slickly to her from the rivulets of sweat that streamed from her.
She stopped and lifted her canteen to her lips. It was only a third full. Not good, as she was losing a lot of fluid. She’d need to find water soon, as drinking the brackish pond-soup was out of the question. She felt confident, as she’d been in jungles before, and one thing a place like this wasn’t short of was drinkable water – you just need to know where to look. She pushed through another frond barrier and grinned.
“Oh wow.”
There was a small lake, around a hundred feet across, with an algae-covered island about forty feet out at its center. Heavy fronds overhung the water’s edge, and there was the soft purr of insect wings beating furiously as they hovered over the surface.
“I’m in heaven,” she whispered and squatted on the bank, pulling herself into a small ball and gripping her knees. A smile of wonder on her lips, she was content to just stay idle and watch as a scene straight from prehistory played out in real time, just for her.
She stayed motionless, letting her eyes move along the bank. On the far side, there was a fallen tree trunk, and a shiver of movement caught her attention. Crawling along its top was a reptile – no, not a reptile – the breath caught in her throat. It was something far more fantastic.
The creature turned in her direction, staring with ruby-red eyes. It was about six feet long and had a stiff sail along its back. It was mottled green and brown, and expertly camouflaged. Its hide wasn’t scaled, but instead was pebbled and leathery, and it ended in a box-like head that looked like it was made of solid bone. Powerful jaws hung open, and were studded with needle-like teeth.
“Dimetrodon,” she whispered. “But you guys were as big as rhinos. Are you a juvenile?”
She squinted, concentrating. The creature didn’t look young. “Perhaps you’ve shrunk.”
Dwarfism maybe, she thought. The same thing happened to mammoths when they were trapped on islands. Over many millennia, they grew smaller to fit their environments. The last vestiges of the great beasts were in Crete, where the population was all under four feet tall, she remembered. This is an entire world down here, but a small one.
Giants in the water, but maybe everything else had shrunk to accommodate their smaller landmass. “A world of tiny dinosaurs.” She grinned, feeling safer by the second. “But big frogs. Hey, I can live with that.”
The Dimetrodon slipped away. Damn, she thought, watching for a few moments for it to reappear. Eventually, she turned back to the pond. The water was dark and didn’t look inviting in any way, but she longed to see what was below the surface. There was occasional movement as the pondweed swirled, meaning something was moving beneath the algal blanket.
Cate tried to imagine what sort of creatures there could be, her imagination fired by the previous monstrous tadpole. There’d been bony fish around for hundreds of millions of years, and primitive air-breathing lungfish and their lobe-finned variants since the Paleozoic period.
The pond surface swirled and flipped only half a dozen feet from the bank where she crouched. She desperately wanted to get a glimpse of what was in the water. After all, she had ditched Alex Hunter to observe this world, so …
She lifted her sharpened stick, looking at its end, thinking, justifying. She could spear one – just one – all in the name of science, she convinced herself. She got slowly to her feet and walked carefully down the bank.
She placed one foot in the water, and paused, looking up to check her surroundings. She frowned. The small island at the pond’s center seemed closer – now only about twenty feet from the bank. She watched it for a moment. A large bug alighted on it, and then flew away. Everything was still and quiet. An optical illusion or I’m just tired, she thought.
Cate placed another foot in the water, and stared down, frowning again. It was no use, the darkness made even the shallow water difficult to see. She pulled her flashlight, flicked it on, and pointed the beam down. She crouched.
Life, lots of it. Things whirled and whizzed past her circle of light. There were crustaceans, but unlike anything she had ever seen living or from any fossil record. Long bodies, spines on their backs, and jagged claws held out stiffly before them. A tiny eel wriggled past, and then something like a salamander with a wedge-shaped head momentarily investigated the light before twisting away.
Cate stood slightly bent over and leaned out further. From the new angle she could see something bumping along in the shallows. She moved quickly, spear poised, but then smiled and turned to toss the spear up onto the bank behind her. She bent over to scoop up the creature.
“Hello, beautiful.” She grunted from the weight and turned the foot-and-a-half long thing around to look into its face. It was some sort of tortoise, with a bony head and heavily clawed toes. Its shell was oval and the huge plates overlapped almost like giant scales that had been welded together into its armor.
“Hmm, Pleurosternon, maybe, or something new?” The thing hissed in her hands, its beak snapping at the air. “Easy there, fella. I’m not going to eat you.” She looked at the patterning on its back – more like wood grain than the usual tortoise coloring. Tortoise were long-lived creatures, and as everything else here had a nice coating of moss and algae, the tortoise’s shell should too.
“How did you avoid getting covered?” She put it down on the bank, and flipped it over, eliciting another round of furious hissing as the thing bicycled its legs in the air.
“Oh, hell.”
The answer became clear – because i
t hadn’t lived long enough – yet. The creature was a juvenile. The pond water surged slightly up on the bank in front of her. Cate’s head whipped up, alert now. The small island was even closer, only a dozen feet from the bank … and from her.
She flipped the baby tortoise back into the water, and rose slowly to her feet.
“Sorry mama, no harm no foul.” She started to back away from the water. Alex Hunter’s words run again in her ears: Everything down here wants to eat you, eat you, eat you …
Cate reached down for her spear. “Okay, we’re a-aaall good here. Saying goodbye now.”
She held the spear out in front of her as she backed away. One foot after another, easing back until her next footfall came down on something soft that wriggled furiously under her foot. She shrieked and leapt to the side, landing hard on her ass and elbow.
CHAPTER 33
Cate’s sudden movement was like a trigger – the thing that looked like a small island burst from the water, moving at a colossal speed for something so large. The Carbonemys turtle was about eighteen feet across, and its broad bony head was easily three feet wide, with a sharp curving beak, angled down like a single large dagger tooth. That horned mouth was open and its angry hiss was like a truck coming into a hard breaking stop.
Cate’s eyes were wide, and she felt an electric jolt of pure terror run through her to flood her system with adrenalin, making everything seem to happen in slow motion. In a blink, she knew her puny stick was kindling compared to the armor-plated behemoth that bore down on her. Its neck extended, a column of leathery muscle reaching for her, with its head angling down for her legs, and she knew it would crush them like twigs before she was dragged into the water.
Her mind, now supercharged with fear, collected strange data and images from around her – the buzzing of some sort of gnat at her ear, a drop of water splattered onto her nose, the polypy fronds that closed by themselves when she grazed them, and then the huge turtle, now up on the bank before her, revealing that it had a stump where one of its front legs should be.
Who took that? she wondered, as a familiar voice – her mother’s? – whispered softly: shut your eyes, darling.
As her lids began to close, there was a blur from the corner of her eye, and something like a black cannon ball struck the tortoise’s extended neck. The behemoth’s mouth snapped shut with an audible clack, and incredibly the huge beast was spun sideways. Before she could even draw another breath, the blur was back, scooping her up and carrying her like she weighed nothing.
Cate blinked, not able to speak as fern fronds closed over her, leaving the lake and its mistress long behind. She was let go then, and she lay on the marshy ground for several seconds, her mouth working. Adrenalin still coursed through her system, making her limbs feel like they had singing wires within them. She sucked in a few deep breaths, aware her heartbeat was a racing staccato. Nausea suddenly gripped her and she doubled over, throwing up onto the squelchy ground.
Cate wiped her mouth and turned. “You … you …”
“Take it easy, you’re in shock.”
Alex crouched down beside her. She spat, wiped her mouth and got to her feet.
Her head spun with dizziness, but she felt more anger than relief. She waited for the, I told you so.
Alex came up beside her. “You okay?”
“Listen, before you say anything …” Cate began.
“It’s my fault,” Alex said.
“Huh?” Cate’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“No one can ever be ready for this place. It’s not our world. We are nothing down here.” He half smiled. “Nothing but warm meals.” He looked back in the direction of the pond for a second or two, before fixing her with his unblinking gaze. “We were lucky this time.”
“Lucky?” Cate wiped her hands on her legs.
“There are far worse things down here. You have no idea.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
She exhaled, pushing the hair back from her face. It was covered with grit and slime. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”
“Good. We need to get out of this swamp.”
Cate looked back in the direction of the lake. Suddenly it didn’t seem like paradise anymore. “I agree. We need to find drier ground.”
Alex turned. “That’s the plan, and the signal’s coming from that way.” He smiled and motioned for her to follow.
*
Aimee followed in close behind Soong and Casey, feeling her nerves becoming wire-tight as she strained to hear anything unusual. Though she and Casey were fairly tall women, both standing about five foot ten, Casey was twice as broad and more muscular and it gave her a stocky appearance. They were both dwarfed by the male HAWCs. Except for Blake, each man was over six foot. But it was Aimee who seemed to be the one walking like she was made of lead – scuffing a toe, crunching a piece of rock, or grazing a cave wall. She felt she was the loudest among all of them. The training these men and women undertook for stealth movement was showing now, as the huge ghosts edged through the ever-tightening cave.
The walls were becoming slick, the moisture undeniable, and tiny amounts of algae and flat lichens were patterning the stone. As a petro-biologist, Aimee knew that they’d be the basis of a food chain. And she knew exactly how far the links of that chain grew.
Aimee edged past a narrow fissure, and heard the sound of something liquid deep inside. She briefly turned to shine her light into its depths, and momentarily caught her breath as it looked as if there was movement within the crack. But when she moved her light around, there were just the slick walls in a fissure that narrowed to no more than eight inches wide. She placed her face into the crack and inhaled deeply. No telltale ammonia scent, and besides, not even she could have fit in there.
She continued on a few paces, and then heard a grunt behind her. Must be Parcellis. She smiled – at least she wasn’t the only one to walk into something, she thought, and turned. But there was nothing there, not even the twin dots of the night vision equipment the HAWCs wore.
The grunt came again, further back, this time with cursing, and then shouts.
“What the fuck?” Casey climbed over Soong, and barged into Aimee but couldn’t get past, so she pushed Aimee back along the narrow tunnel until they came to an alcove that she was roughly jammed into. Casey bullocked on, Aimee now following close behind. Lights came on and goggles were pushed up, as peak illumination was the priority.
Another ten feet back, Aimee saw Earl Parcellis leaning hard up against the wall – no, she thought, not leaning at all. The soldier was wedged into the small crack she had just passed over. His face was wracked with pain, and his arms were out to the sides as he braced himself. It wasn’t clear what he was doing until there was a sharp tug on his body, and then came the sound of something ripping, followed by the revolting sound of bones cracking.
Jennifer Hartigan came up fast, crawling, burrowing, and edging past the HAWCs to grab at one of his arms. “He’s suffering some sort of seizure. Help me to hold him.”
Parcellis roared a curse that ended as a howl of pain. He seemed to be yanked another few inches and his body started to fold into the crack.
“It stinks,” Hagel yelled.
Seizure my ass, Aimee thought, as her eyes watered from the reek of ammonia.
The trapped HAWC gritted his teeth, threw his head back, and screamed his agony in a sound that Aimee found truly frightening coming from a man who knew how to deal with pain in all its forms. Redman Hagel lunged forward to grab his other arm, just as another sharp tug dragged more of Parcellis into the fissure.
It was impossible, Aimee thought. He couldn’t possibly fit – his equipment alone made him many times the size of the opening in the stone.
Another yank, and more crunching of bone. Jennifer was screaming now. “He’s stuck on something.” She shook her head. “Its – got – hold of him.”
With another almighty tug, a crackle-crunch of material, and perhaps flesh ripping, the toug
h HAWC simply … folded in on himself.
Casey threw herself to the ground, getting underneath the deformed shape of Parcellis, and pointed her rifle into the crack.
“Fuck it – no shot, no shot!” She half turned. “Hold him; don’t you dare let him go. Hold hiiiim!”
Hagel and Jennifer still gripped Parcellis’s arms, and Aimee came to hang on as well. Blake reached past Hagel, and took hold of a forearm, now one of the last bits of the man still showing, besides his head.
Parcellis was silent now, the blood on his lips looked black against his ghastly white face. Aimee knew that no one of his size could fit into that crack without significant trauma – his own crushed body would suffocate him. There was a final tug, and then they were all jerked together to collide with the crack in the stone.
Impossibly, he was inside now, and Aimee saw his fear-filled, glazed eyes fix on her momentarily, before he was ripped away into the narrow darkness.
“Fuck you!” Casey screamed as she fired into the crack. Blake and Hagel joined in, the others not able to get close. The laser’s concentrated light beams fizzed as they burned stone, and anything else they could touch.
Aimee put a hand over her mouth and nose, as the lasers scorched the traces of blood and gore on the fissure’s inner walls. Deeper inside it took on a hellish orange hue, and the extra light showed them just how narrow the fissure was, and made it seem impossible for the large man to have disappeared. However, the bloody debris on the ground just inside was testament to how he was made to fit, and the immense forces that were brought to bear on his mutilated body.
“Rhino, cannon!” Casey yelled, and the big HAWC strode over the top of everyone, telescoping out his weapons, and jamming its end into the crack.
