Prehistoric: (A Prehistoric Thriller) (Bick Downs Book 1)

by Michael Esola

  As all out chaos ensued, Jepson turned in horror to see the bus driver slumped over the wheel of the bus as the vehicle hit a large bump, sending many of the still screaming passengers up and into the air momentarily. Jepson raced over towards the driver. Whether the large man suffered a heart attack, passed out from shock, or had been bitten and inflicted with bites, Jepson did not know. All he knew was the man was slumped over the wheel and there was no one driving the out-of-control bus. Jepson was just about to put his two fingers up to the man’s neck to check his pulse, when the bus hit another violent bump. It was now evident that they were heading off the side of the road and were going to plummet down the steep hillside.

  For a split second Jepson thought he would take the wheel of the bus, attempting to save the forty foot out-of-control moving mass, but it was too late. The slumped over bus driver was far too heavy to try and move at this point.

  Just as the bus went careening over the edge of the road and down the steep embankment, Jepson managed to look back towards the main part of the bus to see the man and woman’s body piled on top of each other in the middle aisle of the bus, more than likely both dead. Jepson knew what was happening next as even more shrill, panicked screams filled the bus. The predatory ants were leaving the dead bodies and going after the terrified bus patrons.

  Screams of terror and pain filled the air as the bus crashed through a healthy sized branch and continued its reckless descent down the Brazilian hillside.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  John Corstine knew he was under attack as a piece of unknown flying substance went sailing through the bottom lower window of his quaint little bungalow with a loud shattering sound. Corstine hastily gathered the papers he had been reviewing and stuffed them back into the manila colored folder. Quickly, he made his way to the door, pausing for a moment to have a look back. Just as he did so, the wall to his left was once again splattered with a substance.

  “What the hell?”

  Bending down quickly, despite his aging knees, the substance had the unmistakable and disgusting odor of raw feces.

  Could it actually be? Corstine thought to himself. The ground to the left of him was littered with what seemed like dried animal feces.

  Corstine quickly slammed the door and spun around in the little house. He wasn’t quite certain what to do next, but as another small window in his living room was shattered, he knew he needed to leave. He looked down to the rug to see several large balls of what he now knew were more than likely animal feces.

  “Jeez,” he muttered to himself, his eyes looking up the stairways to the two bedrooms that were on the second floor.

  Quickly, he made his way up the stairs with the manila envelope still tucked firmly at his side. Once up on the second level, Corstine scurried past his small bedroom and towards the room that served as his office. Another shattered window from an unknown location somewhere in the house caused Corstine to move with more urgency.

  Quickly he threw open the desk drawers and began shuffling through papers. Not finding what he was looking for in the first drawer, he slammed it shut and opened the second drawer. Once again his hands were working at a feverish pace, fumbling through all sorts of papers and documents.

  Corstine’s heart was pounding inside his already nervous chest. He needed to find those papers as his hands continued to make quick work of all the other excess paperwork that had built up from years and years of not cleaning out the desk drawers.

  His eyes spotted something though, the key words he was looking for. Still moving at a frantic pace and forcing himself to take deep, fulfilling breaths for fear of passing out, he saw the word CRYPTOZOOLOGY written in big bold letters atop the official document. He quickly shuffled through the rest of the seven pages that were paper clipped to the title page and closed the drawer. Corstine had the documents for which he had been searching.

  The sound of feet shuffling and scurrying about from the bottom floor of the living room quickly caught his attention as his body went as stiff as a board. He peered out of the second story window to the ground below. He thought about it for a moment, but the fact that there was no lower level to which he could jump meant he would have to jump two stories down to the dirt of the jungle below. It wasn’t worth breaking an ankle or far worse. Then he would truly be done for.

  The noise and scurrying from below in the living room was becoming louder and more pronounced as Corstine heard one of his vases atop his mantle fall and shatter to the ground. Quickly, he needed a plan of action. Going out the office window would not suffice. His eyes scanned the room for anything, anything at all that could serve him well. Nothing seemed of any use to him except for a lone pitching wedge, a friendly reminder to his favorite past time of golf. It greeted his eager eyes, and it would have to do as he hastily grabbed the golf club, making his way out of the office and in the direction from which the noise was coming.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  “It’s a must that we start a feeding frenzy,” Downs announced, the words stumbling quickly out of his mouth.

  The others looked at him. Downs’ eyes locked with those of Max’s, who had a wide grin on his face.

  “To bide much-needed time for ourselves,” Downs added.

  Nat looked back down at the map once again. “Only about 3.7 miles to the rendezvous point, but what are you getting at, Bick?”

  “Everybody likes a free meal, right,” Downs said, his eyes making contact with each and every one of them. “I’m proposing that we take something down and start the ultimate feeding frenzy to give us some much needed time to make our getaway to this so called “rendezvous point.” Even just a little snippet of time could make the difference between life and death.”

  Max scratched his chin. It was obvious that the gears were churning inside the zoologist’s head. “Not a bad plan, not a bad plan at all, but what would we take down at these staggering heights?”

  Downs looked around, the nearby branches, vines, and leaves greeted his vision. Beyond that endless mile after mile of green treetop canopies continued on and on.

  Downs let out a long and drawn out sigh. “What about capturing and taking down another reticulated python?”

  “A retic,” Max said, his eyes almost popping out of his head in disbelief. “Would be an extremely difficult task this high up. The one that we encountered was most likely taken from somewhere lower in the canopy if not from the forest floor itself or a nearby stream or water source.”

  Downs sighed once more.

  “Well,” Josiah joked. “We could always hope that another fully grown Komodo dragon gets tossed our way.”

  “Um, fat chance,” Max said. “The fact that it already happened seems like a one in a million chance. If we are even to hypothesize that we can fully execute Bick’s plan, we need something fresh. Nothing rings the dinner bell harder than fresh meat.”

  “Well, it happened before,” Nat said, trying her best to be as positive about the situation as she could.

  “Yeah, and that’s why I want to get the hell outta here,” Josiah insisted. “That thing out there’s just playing games with us.”

  “It is.” Max said, “Make no doubt we all could have already been dead, but we’re not. It’s kept us around, for whatever reason.”

  Max’s words hung in the air.

  “Well, first thing’s first,” Downs said. “We need to get back on terra firma.”

  “Terra firma, the ground, or terra firma, the boardwalk?” Josiah asked as he smiled.

  Downs smiled. “Terra firma, the ground, would be great, but for right now the boardwalk sounds better than being stuck out here.”

  Max turned himself in the direction from where they had come. “Not if that swarm is still going strong.”

  “Yeah man, what’s up with that?” Josiah asked. “What kind of ants are they, if you can even call them that?”

  Max shook his head. “They’re definitely something that hasn’t been documented, or at least I certainl
y have never gotten wind of them. My gut instinct tells me that the tribal and local people of this region have been dealing with these ants for millennia. It’s possible they could be directly linked to the creature by some type of symbiotic relationship, yet at this moment I don’t see how the creature would benefit. Just like pilot fish swim close to sharks and feed off the entrails from dead kills, these ants might be doing the same thing to this here creature of ours. Merely speculation on my part though.”

  Downs nodded as he fully absorbed everything that Max had said, knowing full well that there was nothing to prove that what he was saying was correct, but it certainly seemed plausible. Downs knew that the third world, in general, was a great hoarder of secrets from the rest of the civilized world, hoarding such secrets as official shark attack numbers and statistics, people being bitten by poisonous insects and reptiles, and medicinal plants which possibly held the cures to diseases deep within the rainforests of the world. By and large, it seemed as though the third world never wanted to relinquish its secrets.

  Such was the case with whatever it was that was hunting them. It was no doubt a secret, something that had hunted and survived high in the relatively unexplored Indonesian rainforest canopy. Downs knew they were not dealing with a myth or some monster created from men gathering round a fire and speaking of tales from the primeval past. They were dealing with a living, breathing creature, one that seemed to have only assets and no liabilities. They were dealing with a living relic, something from a time gone by, something that appeared as though it would have blended in perfectly with the world that the dinosaurs once called home.

  Then suddenly, and without warning, something reached out and grabbed Nat.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  William Jamison and Ridley Bells entered the back side of the building about as secretly and as unassumingly as they had stumbled upon it. Jamison was first to enter through the back door. Crouched low to the ground and with his senses on heightened alert, he took several large but quiet steps into what looked like a kitchen, coming to a stop just behind a large stainless steel refrigerator. There he crouched for a full thirty seconds, mired in silence and waiting to see what clues his environment would give him. When all seemed clear, he motioned with his hand for Ridley to begin coming forward.

  Ridley did so, but with quite a bit of trepidation. With his hands still firmly wrapped around the AK-47, he began to edge forward towards where Jamison was waiting for him. He was moving slowly, as if each uncertain step were being taken on an ice sheet above a frozen lake.

  Jamison motioned with his arms for the television entrepreneur to quicken his pace, but he let out a quiet sigh when he saw that Ridley was locked firmly at one speed and one speed only. Jamison quietly turned around and stood softly to his feet, the bow still locked in a firing position.

  Jamison began inching his way forward towards yet another stainless steel refrigerator that stood some ten feet away, but his eyes were focused on making his way further to the gas stoves that lay just beyond. He could hear Ridley behind him and didn’t know if the man was crawling on all fours, crouching, or walking slowly upright, and, quite frankly, he didn’t care. Jamison could hear the man behind him, and for him that was good enough.

  Meanwhile, Ridley’s eyes were beginning to take in the entire scene. He saw dark and forbidding red patches on the far wall, his eyes straining to make sense of it all. It sure as hell looked like blood. He saw more dark red patches on the wall as if some great struggle had taken place.

  Ridley let out a deep breath and focused all of his attention on the broad and powerful shoulders of William Jamison up ahead. But just before he did that, something caught his attention on the front side of the second stainless steel refrigerator as he passed it on his left. He came to a complete stop and watched as several enormous ants were traveling in both directions across the surface of the refrigerator. Some were moving up while others were moving down in pure working fashion, similar to the way leaf cutter ants behave. Like faithful workers, they traversed the industrial-sized refrigerator.

  He was just about to wave in an attempt to get Jamison’s attention when out of the corner of his eye he saw the big man come to a halt, his hand looking as though it was about ready to release an arrow.

  Ridley’s breathing became slow and deliberate, his ears straining to hear what his eyes could not see. To his mind, the silence was deafening. He had always hated silence, had always tried to fill the void by talking, but now was not the case as the silence persisted. Ridley held on for about another twenty-five seconds or so when he saw exactly what Jamison had probably seen a split second earlier.

  Jamison had just released the first arrow and was busy quickly reloading the second as the black apparition rose up from the ground and came at him with surprising speed. Ridley sprinted to get a better view, stopping some ten feet behind where Jamison stood as the black mass raced forward with Jamison’s first brightly colored arrow protruding out of it.

  “What the hell?” the words just fell out of Ridley’s mouth at the shock of what he was seeing.

  Cool, calm, collected, and with the steady and ice cold nerves that only a former professional athlete could possess, Jamison moved to the side and steadied himself as he fired the second arrow and placed it several inches to the right of where the first arrow jutted out from.

  Ridley felt his knees, along with the rest of his insides, reduce to jello as a limb outstretched towards the top and brushed away vigorously, exposing the unmistakable eyes, nose, and face of Collin Fairbanks. Amidst the black and crawling mass, Collin pushed to keep his face free of the vicious oversized attacking ants. John Corstine’s personal assistant was totally engulfed and under attack as he held out his arms, completely covered by a moving mass of black as he managed to mouth the words “help me.”

  It was then that both Jamison and Ridley realized why no words had escaped the assistant’s mouth. Overflowing like a small cascading waterfall out of Collin’s mouth were more of the ants, which quickly covered up his exposed face and replaced it with black once again. It was hard to consider that under that swarming mass there still was a living breathing human.

  In one final act of desperation, the black mass managed to propel and rush itself forward with outstretched arms, but it was too late as Jamison had already put a third and final arrow into the personal assistant’s chest, the black mass stumbling and twisting sideways before keeling over and hitting the kitchen floor. The minute the body hit the ground, it was as if a beehive had been dropped out of a tree from up high above, as ants poured out and scattered in all directions.

  “Let’s go,” Jamison shouted. “He’s done. It’s over. Move out.”

  And with that Jamison leaped and bounded over the mess, hitting the ground on the other side with ease as he made his way towards the doors that led back into the restaurant. Jamison pushed through the double doors and was gone.

  Ridley stood stunned, half of his brain in complete shock while the other half was running wild with fear.

  Go, Ridley, get outta here, his subconscious shouted to him. Ridley, get the hell outta here now.”

  When the rational part of his brain had finally won, he ran and leaped over the remains that were once Collin Fairbanks and headed for the double doors through which Jamison had exited.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  John Corstine was slightly winded and breathing heavily as he approached the stairs and slowed himself somewhat, having sprinted the he entire length of the hallway just to get there. He held the golf club like a baseball bat as he slowly began to make his way down the stairs, taking it one step at a time. He felt as though he had been awakened suddenly in the night by a burglar, and was now the stereotypical husband clutching the Lousville Slugger baseball bat, waiting to confront the intruder.

  For a split second, Corstine’s mind gravitated back towards his own son, his only child. Had it really been a year since they had last seen one another? His son made residence in Maui
and was responsible for acting as the official property manager to the investment properties that Corstine had on the islands. Corstine shook his head, trying to clear those thoughts and firmly establishing himself back in the present moment as he was now almost halfway down the stairs.

  Corstine had his first glimpse of the living room, and it was a befuddling one. He saw that two of the three couch cushions had been uprooted and the stuffing had been ripped out of them, looking as though a dog had a field day with them. He gripped the golf club even tighter as he continued down the stairs, one painfully slow step at a time, his pulse now beating out of his ears.

  As he finally got down to the last few stairs, he heard a sharp and crisp tearing sound, the sound of another one of his cushions being ripped apart. Then he saw the culprit as he stepped down and onto the living room floor.

  It was a small creature, and if it weren’t for the forest green coloration adorning its body, Corstine might have thought as though he had stumbled upon some type of wild dog. Then his eyes saw the small, three-toed taloned feet, the well-defined prehensile tail swishing back and forth, and the beady, scaly skin of a reptile.

  The little creature continued to tear viciously at the cushion. Corstine had only taken one step forward on the floor when all of a sudden one of the boards that he stepped on let out a loud creak and groan. He froze. Surely the little creature had heard him, but to his surprise it continued to pull the stuffing from the cushion as if it were a chew toy.

  As Corstine took a few steps towards it, he was granted a more defined view of its distinguishable features: razor sharp talons adorning its feet, prehensile tail, thin layer of blackish hair rising up several inches or so like a Mohawk atop its head and continuing on through the tail, and the gleam and shine of beady, reptilian skin.