Monsters In The Clouds

by Russell James

  “Something this big wasn’t feeding,” Grant said. “It was just snacking.”

  McCabe looked at the trunk of one of the trees. Deep, waist-high gouges exposed white, pulpy bark. “And it eats trees.”

  Grant ran a finger through the gash. “This wasn’t done by teeth. Some kind of horn or spike grazed it.” He checked the ground around the tree. A few big palm leaves lay crushed. He swept them aside and revealed a deep footprint in the soft ground, almost a meter wide with three broad toes.

  “What the hell made that?” McCabe said.

  “First guess?” Grant said. “A dinosaur.”

  And from the look of the familiar, slashed damage to the trees, the same kind that just lost a nest of eggs.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As soon as Grant and McCabe returned to the campsite, McCabe went to brief Riffaud. Griggs and the Bobcat were back to clearing the future runway.

  The others gathered around Grant and he told them about the site they’d found in the jungle.

  “Looks like we have a whole new dinosaur,” Katsoros said. “Now we go out for bigger game.”

  “Bigger is the operative word here,” Grant said.

  “How much bigger?” Janaina asked.

  “Tree-smashing big. And it hunts to eat,” Grant said.

  “And that’s why we have Mr. McCabe and his men with us,” Katsoros said.

  “Do you think that little wall of dirt around us will stop an animal that big?” Janaina said to Grant.

  McCabe returned and cut in with an answer. “I just need to slow it down enough to get a clean shot. I’ve got rounds big enough to drop an elephant.”

  “This thing might be bigger than an elephant,” Grant said.

  Janaina turned to Katsoros. “And you think it’s a good idea to go find this animal?”

  “We don’t need to find it, just traces of it,” Katsoros said.

  “That’s right, we’re here to scoop poop,” Grant said.

  “We’ll give the animal a head start and Mr. McCabe will lead a group out in half an hour. Start at the attack site you found.”

  “It’s more likely we’ll find animal traces by water sources,” Grant said.

  “The trail went northwest,” McCabe said, “toward the creek that runs out of the clearing.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Katsoros said.

  “Your turn for some field work, Dixit?” Grant said.

  “Hobart will be with you taking samples,” Katsoros said. “Dr. Dixit will continue doing the analysis here with me.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Dixit said. “The phoberomys analysis will be quite lengthy, indeed.”

  “Damn it, man,” Grant said. “Hobart’s injured. Maybe you let him tap on the keyboard while you scrape up dino dung.”

  “Dr. Coleman,” Katsoros said. “Dr. Dixit is right to stay back. You’re fit to go exploring, aren’t you, Hobart?”

  Hobart limped over, favoring his bandaged leg. “Yes, ma’am. Ready and able.”

  “Then we leave in thirty minutes,” Katsoros said. “Everyone pack water and food for the day.”

  Grant shook his head in disgust and went to the supply pallet to refill his water bottle. Janaina followed.

  “You are troubled?” she asked.

  “That stupid kid is going to end up with some kind of infection in that animal bite after wandering around in the jungle. All because Katsoros wants to let Dixit play the chicken again. If he wants to work in a lab, he should have stayed back in a lab.”

  “It’s Hobart’s choice.”

  “But a good mentor would keep him from making a bad one.”

  “We’ll have to keep an eye on the boy.”

  “We? You don’t need to face that thing.”

  “I’m searching for other humans until I’m certain we are the only ones up here.”

  In a world filled with pterosaurs and whatever kind of behemoth eats giant guinea pigs, Grant doubted any primitive humans could survive here long.

  Then he wondered how much better their odds would be.

  ***

  The dinosaur’s trail of crushed everything was easy for McCabe, Grant, Hobart, and Janaina to follow, and it did lead to the water. But what flowed like a creek in the clearing was more like a river when they got there. Other streams must have fed into it because it stretched a hundred meters wide and ran swift. No one would be doing any barefoot wading in it. The good news was that past surges in the water level had scoured the banks clear of vegetation, and they had a good line of sight on whatever they might be catching up with.

  After a quick search, Grant had to swallow some pride and admit that he’d been wrong. They didn’t see any signs of animals along the banks. No footprints, no nests. There might have been fish in the river, but after his experience with the fish in the Montana cavern, he was keeping his distance from the water.

  “Hold up!” McCabe whispered.

  He dropped to one knee on the sandy shore. The others followed. Grant’s pulse quickened. McCabe brought a set of small binoculars to his eyes and trained them down river. Grant had no idea what the man was looking at. He couldn’t see anything.

  “Damn it,” McCabe said. “Janaina, come here.”

  She scrambled over to him, and he handed her the binoculars. She trained them downstream. Her jaw dropped.

  “Ai, meu Deus,” she said. “There are people here.”

  Everyone crawled up beside Janaina. She passed the binoculars around. When it was Grant’s turn he brought them up against his glasses with an embarrassing thunk. He kept them a few millimeters away and worked the focus. When it went razor sharp, he saw it too.

  A suspension bridge across the stream.

  A coating of leaves papered the bridge. There were no abutments on the stream, no supports in the center.

  “How could anyone build that?” Hobart said.

  “They started in the middle and worked out in both directions,” Grant said.

  “This is one of the beauties of these supposedly primitive societies,” Janaina said. “Often they have amazing solutions to share. We’re still not certain how the Easter Island monoliths came to be, or the great pyramids in Egypt.”

  McCabe took back the binoculars. He scanned both sides of the river. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone here now. Good time to pass by.”

  “And solve the mystery of its construction,” Janaina said.

  McCabe led them downstream along the riverbank. The closer they got, the more bizarre the bridge became. There was no overhead suspension, no underlying trusses. Though the air was still, the bridge swayed ever so slightly, which only furthered the illusion that it was floating over the river. As they closed on it, the narrowness became apparent, and it ended up being under a meter wide. The group paused at the end. The leafy pavement made an almost imperceptible twist and return.

  “Pretty damn narrow for people to walk across,” Hobart said.

  “And the lack of handrails would send an OSHA inspector screaming,” Grant said.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been walking across,” McCabe said. “No footprints in the sand.”

  Indeed, there weren’t any, on either side. Instead, tiny holes speckled the sand, like someone had pricked it all over with a stick.

  Hobart dropped his backpack and knelt down to inspect the top of the bridge. He grabbed one leaf. It appeared to be coated with half-dried glue. The bridge shuddered. He peeled the leaf up.

  The head of an enormous ant popped up and hissed at him.

  He jerked back and ripped the leaf clean away. Several other leaves came with it. The opening exposed the inner structure of the bridge. All ants, rosy red and a meter long, with leaves glued to their backs. A hissing chorus spit from the leafy tube of the bridge.

  A deeper hiss responded from back in the jungle.

  “Pull back,” McCabe said. “Right now!”

  The four dashed back up the riverbank and into the underbrush. They dropped flat on the spongy g
round. Grant held his breath.

  The sound of breaking leaves and snapping twigs came closer. Hobart’s head began to tremble. He raised himself up to make a run for it. McCabe grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him back down with a thud.

  “Too late for that now,” McCabe whispered.

  Two sharp little squeals punctuated the sounds of something big breaking trail. Grant buried his face in the dirt, wishing he could burrow completely into it.

  The train of something marched past them, so close that bushes right in front of the group rustled. But the intruders passed by and headed for the river.

  When the noise stopped, Grant crawled over for a better view of the bridge. Four ants, twice as large as the ones they’d uncovered, trooped toward the bridge. They were a darker, ruby red, with mandibles as long as a man’s forearm. Clamped in each set wriggled a phoberomys. The ants marched single file across the leaf-bridge and into the jungle on the far bank.

  Leaves rustled behind Grant, then came another hiss, deeper, more like a roar. The heads of three more ants thrust out of the bushes. Their mandibles stretched wide open and the razor-sharp edges sparkled in the sunlight.

  Grant and the others broke and ran down the riverbank. The ants charged after them.

  Janaina and Grant dashed for the water. Hobart cut the other way. His weight shifted hard to his injured leg. He screamed, stopped, and dropped to one knee.

  McCabe spun to face the ants at the water’s edge. He snapped his rifle to his shoulder and fired at the lead ant. The creature’s head exploded like a ripe melon. The rear segments kept charging forward.

  McCabe stepped aside, aimed at the ant to his left and fired again. This round disintegrated the middle segment. The other two fell on their sides, legs flailing in the air. The mandibles on the head snapped furiously at nothing.

  The third ant moved too fast. By the time McCabe turned to it, it had clamped on Hobart’s leg. The mandibles sliced through his thigh like shears snipping a rose stem. Hobart shrieked. Blood spurted and splattered the ant’s head and antennae. The ant jerked its head and tore Hobart’s leg free. The technician collapsed.

  The ant reared its head high, leg clamped in its mandibles. McCabe fired twice. Bullets tore through the ant’s head and thorax. It spun to the ground, dead.

  From across the river came a chorus of hisses. A half-dozen more soldier ants scurried out of the jungle and charged single file across the bridge.

  McCabe swiveled to the bridge, aimed, and fired. The shot missed and blasted through the leaves coating the bridge’s center. The structure shuddered and the soldier ants paused to get stable.

  Grant had an idea. He drew his machete and dashed to the end of the bridge. Several ants clamped the riverbank from under the leaves’ edges. With one swipe he slashed at the insects. Ant legs snapped like match sticks. A hissing head popped up near Grant’s foot. He chopped again at the bridge. More legs splintered and then the bridge collapsed. The soldier ants skidded sideways off the canted leaves and splashed into the river. The bridge dissolved into a swarm of leaf-covered ants thrashing in the water as the current pulled them downstream.

  Grant sighed with relief. Janaina ran to Hobart. Twenty meters downstream, a bridge ant, water-soaked leaf draped over its back, crawled up on Grant’s side of the river. McCabe dispatched it with one shot.

  Grant went to help Janaina with Hobart, but his gray skin and clouded eyes said that they were both too late. He was dead.

  “What the hell was all that?” McCabe said. “Since when do ants act like steel girders?”

  “Army ants do,” Janaina said. “They build living bridges like that to cross obstacles. And the leaves? Weaver ants excrete silk and build whole nests that way. These ants have adapted to use the leaves for traction, or perhaps protection from the sun while hanging in place. The stronger soldier ants were likely bringing back food for the colony.”

  “Is bringing live food another normal ant thing to do?” Grant said.

  “No, that’s very different.”

  “Nice to see them wash downstream,” McCabe said.

  “I’m certain they will be back,” Janaina said. “Ants communicate with each other using pheromones and body movements. The survivors will return to the colony and tell what happened here. Scouts will return to the water obstacle, and then the colony will start the rebuilding.”

  “Let’s not be here when they do,” McCabe said.

  Janaina looked up, eye welling with tears. “What about Hobart? We can’t just leave him here.”

  “I’m not carrying a corpse through the jungle,” McCabe said.

  “You would if it was one of your men.”

  “You bet your ass I would. But he isn’t.”

  Janaina looked to Grant for support.

  Grant sighed. “I hate it but McCabe’s right. We have no way to carry him.”

  Janaina shot Grant a cold stare.

  “We’ll come back for the body,” Grant said.

  “Or whatever’s left after the ants pick him clean,” McCabe said. “We need to pull back and carry more firepower if we’re going dinosaur hunting.”

  Hobart’s backpack lay on the sandy riverbank. Grant picked it up and walked back to Hobart’s body.

  “What are you doing?” McCabe said.

  “Making sure that the guy didn’t die for nothing. I’m bringing back a sample.”

  Grant stepped over to the corpse of the ant that killed Hobart. Hobart’s severed leg lay beside the creature’s head. Grant raised his machete and with two blows severed the long mandibles from the creature’s head. A third well-aimed chop severed the head from the rest of the body. He opened the pack and scooped the head up inside it. The big head was a tight fit. Grant shouldered the pack and it felt like he was carrying an oversized bowling ball. He cinched the straps tight.

  He wished they were leaving cowardly Dixit’s body on the ground instead of Hobart’s. He didn’t feel guilty about wishing it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When they returned to camp, the berm around the site had an extra layer of tree trunks and branches around the crest. The Bobcat was recharging by the solar panels. Griggs had fashioned a crude ladder and now stood guard atop the shipping container. He gave the group an all-clear thumbs-up and waved them in through a narrow gap in the trunks. The three scaled the berm and slid down the other side.

  Katsoros met them at the container. Her eyes narrowed. “Where’s Hobart?”

  “Killed by giant ants,” Grant said. He threw the backpack at her feet. “But we got a sample of one, so it’s all worth it, right?”

  Katsoros gave the backpack a grim look. “Where’s Hobart’s body?”

  “In the jungle. We’ll need to fashion some kind of a stretcher and go back and get it.”

  “No we won’t.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t risk lives over a life already lost. Any more casualties and we might not complete the task at hand.”

  “He wouldn’t be a casualty if you’d sent Dixit. Hobart’s leg injury cost him his life.”

  Katsoros looked at McCabe. He shrugged. “Might have got him anyway. Ants moved fast.”

  Katsoros put a hand on Grant’s shoulder. “I’m sorry that Hobart was killed. Believe me. At least you thought to get this sample of the ant.”

  Grant shook off Katsoros’s hand. “I’m going to make sure Dixit knows what this sample cost.”

  He grabbed the backpack from the ground and stormed over to where Dixit sat engrossed in a laptop screen. Grant unzipped the pack and dumped the ant head in Dixit’s lap. Dixit yelped, jumped to his feet, and scrambled backwards. The head rolled to a stop, face up, black, glassy eyes staring at Dixit.

  “That thing killed Hobart,” Grant said.

  “H-how?”

  “Giant ants attacked us at the river. McCabe shot two but the third one bit Hobart before McCabe killed it. You’re the one who should have been out there. His death is on you.”

  Dixi
t took a breath and exhaled. “I cannot control what wild beasts do. Or people’s reaction to them. This is a most dangerous location.”

  “You bastard. Now next time you need a sample of something, you’ll be getting it yourself. We’ll see how the ‘wild beasts’ treat you.”

  Grant scooped the pack off the ground and left Dixit staring at the severed ant head. He stomped off to a spot in the shadow of the sleeping container, tossed the pack aside, and slumped to the ground. A thick yellow card with a clip on one end fluttered out. Grant picked it up.

  The card had a Transworld logo on one side. On the other were five squares. Each square had a number in it. 5, 10, 25, 50, 100. The square with the 5 was filled in green, the rest were clear.

  More Transworld nonsense. He threw the card back in the backpack. Nothing about the expedition was working out as expected. And he was starting to wonder if there was more to the objective than he’d been told.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Later that afternoon, Grant carried a small canvas roll in his hands as he approached the container. Inside were his tools for unearthing and preparing fossils. They weren’t even close to correct for what he was about to do, but this place was the land of making do. Janaina sat slumped against the container on the sliver of shade the afternoon sun provided. He walked over.

  “I’ve seen engineering students in English Lit classes look more enthusiastic than you do right now,” he said.

  She managed a small smile. “Well, I just watched someone get shredded by ants. And I’m here to manage the contact with any indigenous peoples, but unless they come climbing up the cliff face, I don’t really have anything to do except wait to be killed by some formerly extinct species.”

  “You said you earned a degree before you turned to working for the indigenous peoples, right?”

  “Two biology degrees, actually.”

  “Let’s put them to work.” He tossed her the pack of tools. “Want to help me examine that pterosaur?”