Sink: The Lost World

by Perrin Briar

  “I’m joking! I’m joking!” he said.

  47

  Bryan didn’t sleep well that night. He dreamed of falling down a rabbit hole, deeper and deeper and deeper, heading toward a pinprick of light in the distance, but never quite getting there. When he woke up, he initially thought it had just been that: a dream. With his green surroundings and his aching back from a poor night of sleep, it was easy to believe he was still in the woods camping.

  But then he spotted a lemur with blood-red eyes, hanging from the branch above, staring at him. It bent its head to one side in a caricature of curiosity.

  They were up at first light, as the glow bugs coalesced, bunching up to form a tight ball of light on one side of the domed ceiling. The night soundtrack quietened but did not disappear, and remained there in the background.

  They ate vegetables Zoe carefully selected from the foliage, and washed it down with some clean water from a flowing stream. They ate a lot, but were still hungry afterwards. It took the edge off their cravings. They put on their backpacks, now free of heavy rocks, and headed into the jungle.

  “How much farther do you think we’ve got to go?” Cassie said.

  “We did maybe half a day yesterday, so we’ve probably got a couple of days left yet,” Bryan said.

  Cassie groaned. Aaron did too, but his was more of a yelp as he fell face-first to the ground. Zoe helped him to his feet.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I’m fine,” Aaron said, dusting off his knees. “I just tripped on something.”

  Zoe looked at the offending item. A horn protruded from beneath a bush. No doubt just a wayward branch. But Zoe knelt down and put her hand to it. She must have noticed something about it because next she lifted the bush up.

  “Guys,” she said. “Come take a look at this.”

  Bryan and Cassie exchanged a look and rolled their eyes. What was it this time? Endangered dirt? A rare rock? But they said nothing.

  Zoe pulled the foliage back further. It caught on whatever was underneath, and when she finally managed to pull it back completely, they found themselves gawping at a giant skeleton.

  “Is that a skull?” Bryan said.

  “Yes,” Zoe said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Bryan could think of many words to describe it, but beautiful wasn’t one of them. Creepy, maybe. The yellowed bone had two large eye sockets, a pair of rounded humps on its forehead, and two long tusks jutting from the base of its skull.

  “Is that an elephant?” Bryan said.

  “It’s a mammuthus,” Zoe said. “A woolly mammoth.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it before,” Bryan said.

  “I’m sure you have,” Zoe said. “In various natural history museums around the world. Strange that it should be here.”

  “It’s strange we’re here,” Bryan said.

  “No, I mean it’s not the right environment for them,” Zoe said. “The vegetation here, and the creatures we have seen, are all from a world long before these mammuthus were around.”

  “What are you saying?” Bryan said.

  “I think this place we’re in right now, this ecosystem, was formed shortly after the Earth was,” Zoe said. “Maybe even at the same time. Judging by the unusual plant vegetation, and the primordial soup we saw yesterday. Other creatures obviously came here much later. It was luck of the draw whether this ecosystem would be favored by them or not. Like this poor mammuthus. These creatures would not have stood a chance at survival. I mean, look at them. It’s hot and balmy in here, and these mammoths would have been covered in thick fur. They’re big and clumsy, and couldn’t go into the denser forest, losing out on a lot of food they might have otherwise have benefitted from. They’re more suited to the open plains. They didn’t stand a chance.”

  “You think that’s how it died?” Bryan said. “It starved to death?”

  “Probably,” Zoe said. “It couldn’t have been due to lack of breeding partners. Look, there are more here.”

  Hidden amongst the foliage, wrapped and half-buried beneath the thick veins of vines, were half a dozen skeletons. Undergrowth grew out through the skulls and giant ribcages. A graveyard swallowed by the jungle.

  Bryan noticed something about one of the ribcage bones. It’d snapped off and lay haphazard. He picked it up and placed it next to the ribcage bone it had snapped from. He held it the wrong way round. When he turned it over, it revealed a series of large holes on one side. Indentations, caused by a series of sharp objects. If Bryan didn’t know any better, he would have thought they were bite marks. But bite marks from a pair of jaws unimaginably large.

  There was a honking noise, causing Bryan to start and drop the bone on the ground. The sound came again, first deep, and then higher pitched, like a band was warming up.

  “What was that?” Aaron said.

  “I have no idea,” Zoe said.

  Zoe continued on through the jungle, heading toward the strange trumpeting sounds. The others followed in her wake, apprehensive, but intrigued. There was crashing and snapping, crunching like trees were being uprooted and thrown down. The ground shook beneath their feet. They slowed, crouching to keep their heads below the foliage’s crown.

  Bryan’s mouth was dry. He couldn’t swallow. After what he had seen at the side of the watering hole he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was causing the sounds.

  “How about we just keep moving?” he said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.

  “We should know what we’re up against while we’re here,” Zoe said. “You can never know too much about your environment. Right, Aaron?”

  “Right,” Aaron said, though he didn’t look excited about knowing either.

  “Uh, guys…” Cassie said. “I think you should step back a minute.”

  “Why?” Zoe said.

  They followed Cassie’s eye line. She was looking at their feet. They were standing in a meter-wide recess. Bryan jumped out of it like it was about to bite him.

  “Oh my God,” Zoe said, realizing what it was. “Guys, do you know what we’re standing in?”

  She couldn’t hide her childish glee.

  “A puddle?” Aaron said.

  “We’re standing in a dinosaur footprint!” Zoe said.

  When Aaron and Bryan looked at it more closely they could make out the round curves of the toes.

  “Dinosaurs?” Bryan said, disbelieving. “I thought they were long gone.”

  “From the surface,” Zoe said. “But evidently not down here.”

  Bryan peered at the jungle with new-found awareness.

  “Listen, I saw Jurassic Park,” he said. “And all the sequels. I don’t much like the idea of being stuck in this jungle with them.”

  “It’s all right,” Zoe said. “This footprint is of a plant eater. They’re harmless.”

  Zoe looked at the kids and frowned.

  “You don’t seem very surprised,” she said.

  Cassie shrugged.

  “There’s old plants here, so why not old animals?” she said.

  “Leave it out,” Aaron said. “What is it with you and always wanting to keep secrets? The reason we’re not surprised is because we saw a small dinosaur yesterday at the waterhole.”

  “You saw one?” Zoe said. “And you didn’t tell us?”

  “We thought you had enough to worry about already,” Aaron said.

  Zoe frowned, unable to hide her annoyance.

  The branches above them shook. Leaves drifted down like snow. Bryan looked up and caught the long thick neck of a creature high up in the trees, munching away. The glow bugs in the sky were directly above him, blinding him. The shape was just a silhouette.

  Zoe lifted up a giant fir leaf and looked out at what lay before her. Her shoulders fell and she became still. The others drew up beside her and peered out at a great plain through the narrow slit of their foliage window, out onto another world. A true lost world.

  48


  The creatures’ skin was as green as the vegetation surrounding them, their heads small compared to their body size, flat and arrow-shaped, ending in a rounded beak. A darker green pattern ran over the top of their heads and down the back of their spines to the tip of their tails like a port wine stain. They bent down to nip at the shoots of a wide-brimmed plant with their grazing teeth. Others stood up on their hind legs to get at the juicy leaves at the top of the trees, revealing their gargantuan size.

  “Wow,” Aaron said.

  None of them could think of a better word to describe the scene. The creatures looked CGI, they were so unreal.

  Bryan worked some saliva into his mouth.

  “What are these things?” he said.

  “These are what they call iguanodons,” Zoe said. “The first dinosaur to be discovered and recorded, in fact.”

  There was movement behind the great creatures, and more varieties of dinosaur than Zoe and Aaron could name emerged. There were parasaurolophus with the tall pipe-like protrusion on the top of their heads, and a small group of pachycephalosaurus with their thick domed craniums, and even an ankylosaurus with its clubbed tail. Bryan’s heart swelled, amazed at the variety of life that could exist below the Earth’s crust.

  “I need to get closer and take some pictures,” Zoe said. “Here, hold my bag.”

  “Zoe, wait,” Bryan said. “It could be dangerous.”

  But she was already heading toward the giant creatures. The herd grazed silently, stripping the bushes clean of their leaves. A male iguanodon rose up onto his back legs and pushed against a tall tree with his front feet. The tree bent and snapped, crashing to the jungle floor. The iguanodon and his babies feasted on the juicy leaves.

  A creature like that ought to be avoided at all costs, and there was Zoe, creeping up under a bush with her camera. She lay on the ground and snapped photographs through a small hole. He could imagine the words on her lips now: “This is amazing.”

  He agreed with her – it was amazing – but he’d prefer to be in a safari jeep surrounded by highly-trained hunters armed with the latest in technology should anything kick off. Instead, they were exposed.

  One of the creatures came close to Zoe’s location and sniffed at her with its nostrils – large enough for a man to put his fist inside. Zoe slowly raised her hand toward the great beast. She must have felt the hot air from its nostrils as she turned away from it. Zoe had a look of amazement on her face, like a child sat on the knee of Santa Claus at the local shopping center.

  Then the animals stopped in their tracks. They all turned, necks arching toward the far side of the plain. The huge male iguanodon went up onto his hind legs and peered around at the vegetation around them, his senses heightened.

  The hair on the back of Bryan’s neck stood up on end. He peered around at the foliage. It looked calm, but that only made Bryan all the more wary.

  The giant male became completely still, and then lowered his head to the food again. Bryan too relaxed. A beast of that size presumably had senses far beyond what Bryan possessed. If he was relaxed, so should Bryan be. But he wasn’t, and just then, the edge of the foliage erupted, spilling forth a huge beast.

  Bryan didn’t get a good look at it. All he saw was a mouthful of sharp teeth, small yellow eyes, and black claws on the end of powerful legs.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Bryan shouted.

  The iguanodons were up on their feet in an instant, the babies mehing pathetically as the adults wrapped their bodies around them and ushered them away. Bryan did the same with Aaron and Cassie, pulling them away. Zoe got to her feet and ran, racing behind Bryan.

  The foliage behind them exploded beneath the weight of the huge beasts as they ran, panicked.

  The T-Rex was a dirty brown color with a distinctive purple crest down its back, shaped like a flower in bloom. It took a step, and the whole world shook.

  “Go, go, go, go, go!” Bryan shouted.

  They ran, and the foliage broke and snapped behind them. Huge dinosaurs ran alongside them, bustling past. The ground shook as the trees hit the earth, and the family lost their footing and almost fell over. Birds hovered over the treetops, hissing and cawing at the dinosaurs trampling over their nests.

  The iguanodons rushed past them, their bulky muscles slamming into the ground beside them. Zoe skidded to a halt and grabbed Cassie’s hand, leading her underneath the iguanodon’s legs.

  The T-Rex leapt at the iguanodon and tore into its neck with its powerful jaws. The iguanodon honked in pain, stopped, and turned. But it wasn’t beaten yet. It folded its front fingers into fists, and extended the long blade-like bone protruding from its thumbs like a mugger with a knife. It held its arms in tight and leaned back on its tail like a boxing kangaroo. The T-Rex was hesitant, moving left to right, looking for an opening.

  Meh!

  A baby iguanodon cried from one side. At some point it had lost contact with its mother. The T-Rex looked from the baby to the fully-grown adult. It turned and ran after the baby iguanodon. The adult relaxed, turned, and took off into the jungle. She did not try to rescue the baby. It was too risky.

  A triceratops squawked behind Bryan. It was coming straight for him. Bryan smacked into Zoe with his shoulder, knocking her into Cassie, sending them rolling down a sharp incline strewn with leaves. Then Bryan grabbed Aaron and pulled him aside.

  The triceratops whined again, and smashed through a slim tree with its horns. It attempted to skid to a halt, but was going too fast, and ran straight into a swamp. It was only up to its knees, but was sticky, and despite the dinosaur’s huge muscles, it couldn’t pull itself free. It wailed. Bryan felt sorry for it. Each movement seemed to pull the dinosaur deeper into its clutches. The triceratops emitted a haunted groan. As it sank it took its last breath, and a large bubble popped on the surface, like the swamp had digested the young dinosaur and burped with relish.

  The other dinosaurs were gone, no doubt to safer climes. The jungle was silent once more.

  “Are you all right?” Bryan said to Aaron.

  “I’m okay,” Aaron said, shaking with shock. “But where’s Mom? And Cassie?”

  “Hopefully somewhere safe,” Bryan said. “Come on. Let’s go find them.”

  49

  Why Bryan had slammed into Zoe and Cassie, knocking them down the side of the sharp incline, Zoe couldn’t fathom. He must have seen a danger she hadn’t. Or maybe he just thought it was funny. She wrapped her arms around Cassie.

  “We need to find your father and Aaron,” Zoe said.

  “What if we can’t?” Cassie said.

  “Then we’ll head to the opposite side of the jungle, like we originally planned,” Zoe said. “I’m sure that’s where your father will head if he can’t find us either.”

  Zoe began to scale the steep incline.

  “Come on,” she said. “The last time I saw them they were up here. Cassie?”

  Cassie stood frozen, not moving a muscle.

  “Cassie, come on,” Zoe said.

  Cassie let out a little squeak. Her whole body was shaking. Zoe walked down the incline and joined her. She froze, her heart in her throat.

  Not five hundred yards away, standing there with blood around its broad lips was the T-Rex. Its small yellow eyes were fixed firmly on Cassie. Zoe’s legs felt weak, like they might collapse beneath her any moment. History’s greatest predator, and Cassie was having a staring competition with it.

  The T-Rex stepped forward, and Zoe turned and ran, her hand clasping Cassie’s tight. The T-Rex growled at the back of its throat and its footsteps crashed, shaking the world, and their souls. The ground was level here, with broad leaves covering it like a carpet. The T-Rex was gaining. Zoe could hear its breath exhaling through its nostrils.

  The T-Rex slammed through the trees, knocking them over like they were twigs. It growled, lowered its open jaws, opening them wide, exposing its giant tongue.

  Zoe and Cassie screamed.

 
The T-Rex’s jaws slammed shut tight with a loud hollow snap, and its footsteps took it further on before it slowed to a stop and turned about, looking one way and then another for its missing prey.

  Cassie sat wrapped in Zoe’s arms, her eyes shut tight. Zoe stared at the wall of the hole they had fallen through, terrified, refusing to look to see where the T-Rex was or what it was doing. They were huddled in the corner, knowing that at any moment the T-Rex could lower its nostrils and find them, and they would be trapped and defenseless.

  The T-Rex’s footsteps slammed into the earth, getting louder and louder, each crash making Zoe and Cassie jump. Cassie whimpered. Zoe remained calm, though her heart was beating a mile a minute.

  50

  They had been flying over the terrain for several hours, strafing over the canopy in undulating lines to cover every square inch, but so far they hadn’t come across anything.

  “We’re running low on fuel,” the pilot said. “We’re going to need to turn back.”

  “All right,” Rosetta said.

  She was disappointed. She would have thought she would have seen something by now, but it was difficult to see much through the canopy, wide and broad like a second sky.

  The helicopter turned sharply and headed back toward the fracking site, but as it did, something caught the corner of Rosetta’s eye. It was a dark blot on the landscape, at odds with the vibrant greens and yellows of the native plants and trees in the area.

  “Wait,” Rosetta said. “Turn back. I saw something.”

  She was not prone to outbursts, and so the pilot did not argue with her.

  “Which direction?” the pilot said.

  “That way,” Rosetta said, pointing. “South-southwest.”

  She kept her eyes on the direction she could have sworn she had seen something. The helicopter arched around. Rosetta’s eyes scrubbed the forest. Where was it? But she couldn’t make anything unusual out. The canopy broke like waves across the breakers at a dock.