Immediately near one of the stoves, as clear as could be, was a badly decaying severed arm.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
A powerful hand reached out and grabbed Downs, cradling him around the waist, and reeling him in. The reunion between Josiah and Downs was short-lived though, as their eyes met for a quick fleeting moment. Then the high pitched screams of Nat and Max broke in. Quickly, Downs looked behind them and could see a thick black swarming and seemingly endless mass that was moving and twitching about everywhere and anywhere there was space.
“Go,” Max shouted. “Go. Just freaking go.”
The zoologist’s hands pushed Downs and Josiah out from the maintenance platform. Downs had failed to notice that several enormous tree limbs and branches were gathered in a tight configuration, supported from below by a myriad of other trees, producing a giant makeshift platform of sorts that lay horizontally with a slight decline. A handful of other limbs pinched and leaned in from close by. Quickly the four of them made their way off the maintenance level and onto the primary fallen limb. The group continued to move out, moving with hesitant yet cautious steps. They used the three limbs to the side which acted as a rail all the while continuing to place careful steps on the enormous tree limb beneath them.
“Just go,” Max continued. “Don’t look back.”
But Downs managed to look back, just enough to have a peek, and he could see a black swarming mass that had completely invaded the maintenance perch.
Ants, his brain registered. A swarming, hungry, uncontrollable mass of ants, ready to engulf everything and anything in their path.
They looked furious, absolutely in some type of whipped up frenzy. The ants were substantially larger than modern day bullet ants, and probably no less aggressive. Downs turned back around as they continued down the decline, the limb wide enough to walk on, yet still requiring extreme concentration.
Max continued periodically to look behind, making damn sure the swarming mass was not in pursuit. To his relief it was not. Up ahead, he could see green vegetation and growth that had already begun to invade and grow around the broken off limbs. And beyond that Max knew it fell away to the forest floor below.
“That was close,” Josiah said, breathing a slight sigh of relief as they slowed and came to a stop, still on edge given that they were easily a good eighty feet up in the air.
Downs looked around though, knowing full well whatever it was that was hunting them moved with ease through the forest. That coupled with the heights they were at made his pulse continue to skip beats. “We can’t stay here unfortunately. There can be no such thing.”
Downs moved closer and felt with his hand along the other limbs that were butted up against the end of the enormous tree limb they were on, the bark of those trees providing somewhat of a stable base to ease his mind. He was still somewhat uneasy about the idea of being so high up, and on a gathering of disconnected treelimbs to make matters worse. Since arriving on the boardwalk he had felt uneasy about everything, and now that they were being hunted seemed to be the culmination of all those bad vibes he had experienced earlier.
“Bick’s right,” Max chimed back. “We’re not safe here either. We’re not safe anywhere, to put it bluntly, with something like that moving where it wants, when it wants.”
“Yeah, but at least we’re safe from those ants.” Nat winced in pain just thinking about how bad that would be. “Those things make bullet ants look cute and cuddly.”
Downs was quite confused as well. Nothing seemingly was making sense atop Corstine’s boardwalk. “What the hell happened back there? I’ve never seen a swarming mass of ants move like that before?”
“Well,” Max replied, his eyes already trying to take in as much as they could. “Um, this is a whole new ecosystem up here with discoveries most likely abounding with every new insect that is uncovered. It’s also possible that the flies and ants that we’ve experienced so far might be acting in some type of symbiotic relationship to this creature, much like pilot fish do to a shark.”
“How something that large moves like that, and at these heights, is beyond me,” Nat said, folding her arms and giving off the impression of extreme worry.
The silence of the rainforest was downright unnerving, as the thick and humid air was devoid of sound, the kind of silence that meant the creatures and insects knew that a predator was close by. All of their eyes shot ninety degrees to the right as several birds came to a noisy squawk of a landing on a nearby branch. They watched with baited breath as the three birds screamed loudly as if almost in protest to one another. One of them took a peck at the other with its beak, and then with several more loud squawks, they lifted up into the air and out of view.
“How far to the chopper rendezvous point?” Josiah asked, his eyes deadlocked on Nat.
Nat pulled out an old-fashioned map from her backpack. She did her best to estimate where they were in relation to where Corstine had originally planned for them to meet his private helicopter at what he informally called “the rendezvous point,” or that was at least what his assistant Collin Fairbanks had told them.
Fairbanks, Downs thought to himself momentarily, reciting Collin’s name in his head. He didn’t like the name one bit. Sounded like the name of a scam artist, but he had no facts or figures to back that up. It was just the way it sounded and felt when he shook the personal assistant’s hand.
“We have approximately 3.7 miles,” Nat announced, “according to my calculations, give or take a half-mile here or there. Once we get back up to the boardwalk of course.”
Downs let out a deep sigh, now fully back in the moment. “Not a crazy distance, but with something hunting us at our backs, and from all around, may as well be a thousand miles.”
“Let’s just cut right to the chase,” Josiah remarked, folding his arms across his wide chest. “No b.s., just straightforward talk. What are we dealing with here? You dig, brothas?”
The group chuckled at his last line as it offered a moment of reprieve.
“Sorry,” Josiah said, “just had to get in a quick William Jamison jab. But seriously, do we know what the hell we’re dealing with here?”
With the question posed, Downs had his own personal opinions, but naturally his eyes gravitated towards Max, giving the zoologist the stage alone.
“Geez, you guys,” Max said, showing both signs of nervousness and tension. “You guys really know how to put the pressure on a fella.”
Max looked at Downs, Downs giving him a quick nod of approval, hopefully egging him on in the process, and giving him the confidence to deliver his best scientific opinion.
Max took a deep breath. “Okay, you guys, here it is. Mind you, I’m a zoologist, and to truly find out what that thing is, we’d have to get a blood sample, take it back to the lab, and perform a series of tests on it.”
Nat smiled a tired smile. “I think all of us would settle for just getting the hell out of here.”
“I second that,” Josiah replied. “Come on Max, just tell us what ya think we’re dealin’ with and, more importantly, how we can defeat it. You know, possible weaknesses and things like that.”
Max’s face scrunched up into a ball of concentration, undoubtedly the face that his colleagues back at his day job in the lab saw on a daily basis. “What we’re dealing with here appears to be some type of monstrous hybrid of a mixture of different animals, both from the past and the present.”
Max was heading in the direction that Downs had thought as well, but he still wasn’t quite certain where the young zoologist was going to take it. It was obvious that Max wanted to pace back and forth, undoubtedly, his forte for long-winded explanations, but he remained firmly rooted at where he stood for obvious reasons.
“Where do I begin with this creature?” Max continued with. “The jaw or the skull itself, in my opinion resembles the extinct predator Koolasuchus, a gigantic amphibian that lived some 137 to 112 million years ago.”
“Possessed a flat and spade-shape
d head,” Downs added.
Max turned and looked at him. “You know your prehistory. I’m impressed.”
Downs nodded and smiled. “Spent many a night as a kid watching Discovery Channel. But what do you make of the teeth of this thing?”
Max shook his head, most likely somewhat confused himself. “That’s where the hybrid, almost insane, part of this creature begins. The shape of the head seems straight out of the pages of Koolasuchus, while the teeth themselves point towards a resemblance to the Great White Shark lineage. And if the tooth in my back pocket is any indication as to the size of a shark under the water, it’d be a giant shark by any estimation. Twenty feet plus.”
No one said a thing as Max continued on. “The body of this creature is extremely muscular and heavily built, and the way that it maneuvers hints at a possible big cat relationship, like the giant cats that stalk the African plains, and possibly affirming some type of Smilodon relationship, once again though just speculation on my part. Yet the way it moves and the fact that it can propel its massive body from tree to tree via a prehensile tail affirms some type of primate relationship.”
Max snapped his fingers and smiled. “Bingo. And it has feet that resemble a tree frog, allowing it to suction cup to a firm base and climb.”
“Yet with the talons and weaponry of a full-on killing machine, Nat added.
“Treetop canopies,” Downs said with a smile as he looked in Josiah’s direction.
“Yeah I know,” Nat said. “An undiscovered ecosystem, but something this size. Don’t you think it would have been discovered by now?”
Downs shook his head and looked at his feet, deciding to step into the conversation. “In this part of the world, a lot goes unnoticed and unreported in third world countries, and given just how off the beaten path we are, I’m surprised anything makes it out and into the news. Take shark attacks for instance. It’s tough to get an accurate worldwide number of how many people are bitten and attacked by sharks each year because so many people live in third world countries where the attacks are never reported and tabulated.”
“You got that straight from “Shark Week” on Discovery Channel, didn’t you?” Josiah commented with a wry smile on his face.
Downs raised his head up. “Damn straight.”
In as blunt a tone as Downs had ever used in his entire lifetime, he spoke directly to no one in particular. “Now to the important issue. How do we kill this thing?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Collin Fairbanks wasn’t certain how he had done it, but he had somehow managed to suppress the revolting urge to vomit. His eyes saw a badly decaying and severed human arm, and before he knew it, his eyes found what looked like the mangled and partially devoured chunk of an adult human thigh close by. Now his mind was reeling uncontrollably fast, and in a strange out-of-body experience he staggered forward with his hands covering his nose, offering partial relief to replace the putrid smell.
Collin hunched over, hands still covering his nose, and stumbled clumsily into the gas-powered stove with a loud thump. Now his body was leaning over the stove, and that’s when he saw what an absolute disaster the kitchen was. Blood was splattered in thick splotches on both the walls and floor, indicating that a struggle had taken place.
He recoiled at the sight of what was more than likely a pile of ragged, shredded flesh, and it had the unmistakable look of being human. Collin’s mind continued to race with frantic, wild scenarios of what had gone down in the kitchen.
Now that he was close to the pile of flesh, flies buzzed in and out and in close proximity to him. He saw a black mound beyond the pile of flesh, and then upon closer examination, the black mound was molting, moving, turning over as if it were a living, breathing entity.
And then that’s when Collin saw it, an eyeball that stared lifelessly back at him as the severed head of a man jarred to one side, offering him a partial view of the forehead region as well as the eyeball. The black mass once again turned over, and just like that the eyeball and the head disappeared.
Collin felt as though he was on the verge of unconsciousness.
Breathe, he told himself. Just breathe. You must breathe.
William Jamison and Ridley Bells had come upon the only small building that the boardwalk currently had. Despite this most interesting and unexpected of discoveries, it had all become somewhat of a blur for Ridley, whose attention and mind was surprisingly still firmly wrapped around the idea of Ecological Television. Ridley was positive, just downright positive that the concept would be enough to sustain a twenty-four hour television network. He, unfortunately, was downright positive as well that they would never see fellow investor Frederick Douglass again. The thought was and had been weighing on him as they moved further and further across the boardwalk and started to see more evidence that hinted towards the idea of Frederick’s demise.
Ridley had already made ungodly sums of money in his entrepreneurial career, and if he played his cards right, there would be more ungodly sums filtering and flowing his way soon again. He and Corstine had been working on the idea for a little over a year when he read the headlines that Al Gore had sold their television network called Current T.V. to the Aljazeera Television Network for a reported $500 million dollar payday, with Gore’s personal cut of the endeavor valued at $200 million dollars.
Reading that only wet Ridley’s own personal quest to launch another large television network. The first television network had found him to be a scrappy entrepreneur just eager and grateful enough to have a group of investors who were willing to invest in his idea. When the idea was officially up and running, it was voted on by the small board of directors that they would sell early, not wanting to officially see the idea through to years down the road, and rather wanting to cash in on a guaranteed and quick profit.
Ridley’s personal cut was just shy of $250,000, not exactly chump change, but certainly not enough with which to think about retiring on. With the sale of his second television network, his cut was bumped up to an impressive twenty million. Now for the first time in his life, a life that had seen several business ideas come and go before finally hitting on a winner, he was ready to launch his third television network and, hopefully, if all went well, receive an even bigger percentage of the company than before.
Ridley had been so preoccupied with his thoughts that he had failed to see that both he and Jamison were now crouched some fifty feet behind what appeared to be the back entrance to some type of building. Jamison slung the bow over his shoulder as his strong and powerful legs remained in a crouch position low to the ground. He looked at the structure before them and then up towards the roof, instantly seeing two vents. Jamison studied the metallic-colored vents for a moment and then looked back towards the small and ordinary looking back door.
“What the hell is this place?” Jamison said scratching his chin, deep in thought.
“Huh,” Ridley said, as if he had been awakened from a dream.
Jamison turned to Ridley in frustration, knowing immediately that his partner was not fully entrenched in the moment.
“Wakeup, brotha,” Jamison said abruptly. “We’re about to enter through that backdoor. There may be some supplies in there that we can use.”
Ridley nodded at Jamison’s statement. “Right.”
Jamison turned to him with as intense a glare as he’d ever seen before. “Are you with me? No mistakes.”
Ridley nodded as his grip tightened on the Ak-47.
“Okay then,” Jamison said. “Let’s move in.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Jepson Ray realized what must have happened just as the first shrill scream rang out through the old dilapidated Brazilian school bus. He turned and was overwhelmed with the sight as a middle-aged Brazilian woman was hastily making her way towards him down the crowded and narrow aisle of the bus. Her outstretched arms begged and pleaded for him to help her, as if by some weird quirk of fate she knew he was responsible for her predicament.
H
er upper arms and neck were engulfed in a traveling mass of black as she continued to panic and scream, making her way closer to him. Then out of nowhere, an elderly bald gentlemen stood to his feet, as if answering the call to duty. The two collided violently in the aisle; the momentum that the woman had was almost enough to knock the old man to the ground as he stumbled back a few steps. He managed to cling on to one of the seats, keeping himself upright, yet barely at that.
The old man pushed off the seat and edged himself forward towards the woman once again. Yet strangely it was as if she did not want the man’s help, and she tried to push her way through him towards Jepson. The man was now up against her, close to her crawling skin.
Jepson could see it all from where he stood. He saw that the oversized Indonesian ants, easily thirty percent larger than that of a normal bullet ant, were repeatedly stinging the woman and violently shaking themselves at the same time, thereby releasing miniature versions of their adult selves onto her panic stricken skin. The miniatures were now hastily making their way from the woman’s skin onto the man’s skin, as if rushing to claim a new territory.
The man’s ungodly screams signaled that an attack had indeed been launched by the hungry and voracious miniatures. The bus erupted into complete and utter chaos, as not a single soul remained calm. Husbands shouted tirelessly, mothers tried relentlessly to protect their babies and young children, and Jepson Ray, the only white Caucasian male on the bus to Sao Paulo, continued to stand where his carry on bag was stowed.
One man stood and pointed at Jepson while shouting out phrases in Portuguesse, signaling towards the lone Caucasian. Jepson knew that the man was insinuating that this was all because of him, that he was responsible for the madness, but the commotion and stir that the man was causing was soon drowned out by the overall madness taking place inside the bus. Jepson had, after all, agreed to take the voracious new species of Indonesian ants that Collin Fairbanks had sent him out onto the black market to see what the huge ferocious ants would fetch in terms of a pure dollar amount.
Prehistoric: (A Prehistoric Thriller) (Bick Downs Book 1) Page 14
