by Justin D'Ath
SCORPION STING
I ran in slow-motion, like someone in a nightmare with nightmare creatures snapping at their heels. But this wasn’t a bad dream and the creatures weren’t imaginary. They were real. And they were deadly.
I’m dead! I thought, with every crunching, sliding, heart-stopping step.
I knew the risk I was facing. All it would take was a single scorpion to get flicked up onto my calf and sting me through my jeans, and I’d be cactus …
Puffin Books
Also by Justin D’Ath
Extreme Adventures:
(can be read in any order)
Crocodile Attack
Bushfire Rescue
Shark Bait
Scorpion Sting
Spider Bite
Man Eater
Killer Whale
Anaconda Ambush
Coming soon: Grizzly Trap
The Skyflower
Gold Fever
Topsy and Turvy
Snowman Magic
www.justindath.com
SCORPION
STING
JUSTIN D’ATH
Puffin Books
For Rachael
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2006
Text copyright © Justin D’Ath 2006
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Text and cover design by David Altheim © Penguin Group (Australia)
puffin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74-228059-2
1
DINOSAUR
Nathan led the way. It felt like we were the last two people alive in a black, silent world. We both wore helmets. A four-metre safety rope connected us, in case one of us slipped. The floor was rocky and uneven. In a couple of places we had to climb down nearly vertical shafts. It was slow going. My big brother was an experienced caver, but he was being extra careful because no human being had ever set foot in here before. Anything could be around the next corner.
About five hundred metres from the cave entrance, we came to a rock fall. Nathan wormed his way over, then turned back to help me. As I wriggled across the chest-high pile of rubble, I glimpsed something over Nathan’s shoulder.
No way! I thought.
I was so busy gawking that I lost my balance and fell on top of him. We tumbled down the rock pile, our torch beams slashing like light-sabres through the dust cloud kicked up by our sliding bodies. When we came to rest, I was lying on my back, looking up at an enormous grinning skull.
‘A T-rex!’ I gasped.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Nathan. He helped me to my feet. ‘Look at the teeth. It’s a herbivore.’
I didn’t argue. Nathan is a tour guide for an outback adventure company. He’s an expert on everything to do with the outdoors and wildlife – even wildlife that’s been dead for millions of years.
‘Have you any idea what kind it is?’ I asked.
Nathan chuckled. ‘You don’t need to whisper, Sam – it won’t hear you.’ He moved his torch beam across the scatter of large brown bones partially embedded in the cave wall and ceiling. ‘I’d say it’s an ancestor of the kangaroo. A super roo. Look at the size of that femur. It must have stood six metres tall.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Imagine how high it could jump!’
Nathan rummaged through his backpack for his digital camera. ‘I’ll get some pictures,’ he said. ‘I know a guy at the Sydney museum who’s going to do backflips when he finds out about this.’
I grinned to myself. When Nathan mentioned he’d discovered a hidden cave mouth during a desert safari three weeks earlier, it had been my idea to come back and explore it. Nathan hadn’t been keen – it was a very long drive and we were in the middle of a heatwave – but I’d kept on at him until he agreed. So it was mostly thanks to me that we’d discovered the prehistoric kangaroo.
‘Can you get a photo of me?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got heaps of photos of you, bro,’ Nathan said.
‘With the dinosaur.’
‘Fair enough. Stand next to the head and put your hand on its jaw.’ He looked through the viewfinder. ‘Say cheese.’
‘Cheese,’ I said, and the camera flashed.
There was a rumble.
The floor shook.
Then the entire cave roof collapsed on top of us.
2
KILLED MY BROTHER!
It was my fault. I hadn’t expected the flash to be so bright. We had been underground for nearly an hour, and my eyes had become accustomed to the gloom. When Nathan clicked his camera, it was like a magnesium flare going off in my face. I must have flinched and accidentally leaned on the dinosaur’s jaw. The ancient bone hadn’t been touched for a million years, much less leaned on. It cracked. Which started a chain reaction. A whole series of cracks went shooting up through the other bones and spread across the cave’s ceiling like a giant spider’s web.
Then it all came crashing down.
I was knocked to the ground by the cave-in. But I was lucky – one of the massive thigh bones fell diagonally across me. It was stronger than the others and didn’t shatter. It formed a sloping girder, protecting me from the other falling bones and clay and rock. Nathan had made me wear my old bicycle helmet, so I didn’t get brained. Apart from a few bumps and grazes, I felt okay.
My torch was lying next to my elbow, its beam turned a dull orange by all the dust in the air. I grabbed it and looked around. There was a small gap behind me. I managed to wriggle out, legs first, then struggled carefully to my feet.
The cave looked different in the settling dust. The ceiling was much higher than it had been, and a huge mound of bones and rubble rose up in the centre of the floor. Trailing out of the mound, one end tied around my waist, was the rope.
‘Nathan?’ I whispered.
Silence.
‘Nathan!’ I crouched over the rope where it disappeared under the rocks. I gave it a gentle tug, but the rope was stuck. My brother was at the other end. With several tonnes of rubble lying on top of him.
I’d killed my brother!
I set the torch on a small boulder and began digging. I tore away rocks, pieces of bone, lumps of dirt. Centimetre by centimetre, I uncovered the
rope. It was dusty, tattered and frayed. In one place, a bone shard had cut it almost in two. I tried not to imagine what the cave-in had done to my brother. Gritting my teeth, I concentrated on digging.
Five minutes later I rolled aside a heavy slab of rock. And there was Nathan’s camera. Pulverised. Dreading what I was about to find, I lifted another rock.
My whole world seemed to stop. A hand lay in the rubble. It wasn’t moving. A worm of red blood curled around the base of one fingernail. Dust clung to the dark hairs below the knuckles. I drew back, unable to touch it. I knew that hand almost as well as my own. How many times in the last fourteen years had it grasped mine? Or mended a bike tyre for me? Or untangled a fishing line? Fifteen minutes ago, it had helped me across the first rock fall.
It seemed impossible that Nathan was dead. He was nine years older than me, and all my life I’d looked up to him. He was my big brother, my best friend. I’d always thought he was indestructible.
I was trembling all over. It was difficult to breathe. Tears blurred my vision as I built up the courage to reach forward and touch my dead brother’s hand.
One of his fingers … moved!
Then they all did. Moving like the tentacles of a waking octopus, Nathan’s fingers wrapped slowly around my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
3
STRETCHER CASE
It took about ten minutes to dig Nathan out. He hadn’t been as lucky as me. His lightweight caving helmet had stopped his head from being crushed, but no giant kangaroo bone had fallen over him and formed a protective bridge. He had a broken arm, a broken leg, and he reckoned several ribs were cracked, too.
‘You’ll have to get help,’ he croaked.
‘I’m not leaving you here,’ I said, crouching over him. ‘I’ll carry you out.’
He gave me a weak smile in the dim orange torchlight. His teeth were chattering. ‘Don’t be a nong, bro. I’m way too heavy. Besides, I’m a stretcher case. Drive back to Gibson Station and get them to call the Flying Doctor.’
We had passed the Gibson Station homestead on the way to the cave. It was four hours to the north.
‘I’ve never driven that far,’ I said doubtfully.
‘If you can drive two kilometres,’ Nathan said, ‘you can drive two hundred.’
It was Nathan who’d taught me how to drive on an abandoned mining site near our home town, Crocodile Bridge. But driving round a disused quarry was different from finding my way through two hundred kilometres of sandy desert.
‘What if I get lost?’
‘You won’t get lost, Sam. Head straight for Camel’s Hump. Just before you reach it, you’ll come across a track. Turn left, and it’ll take you all the way to Gibson Station.’
He made it sound easy. But Nathan was an adult, he’d been driving for years, plus he knew the Top End like the back of his hand. I was only fourteen. Too young to have a licence. And this was my first time in the desert.
‘You can do it,’ Nathan said, sensing the doubts running through my mind. He gave me another wobbly smile. ‘My life is in your hands, little brother.’
I tried to smile back, but failed. He wasn’t joking. His life was in my hands. Nobody knew where we were, not even our parents. They had taken the twins to Darwin for a few days and let me stay at Nathan’s. They didn’t know about our trip to the desert. The trip I had pestered Nathan into making. It was my fault that this had happened. Everything was my fault. And if I didn’t fetch help, my brother was going to end up as dead as the prehistoric kangaroo we’d just found.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ I said.
The car keys were in Nathan’s pocket. I had to get them out myself because his right arm was broken. He wanted me to take his mobile phone and GPS, but they were both in his backpack, which was buried somewhere underneath him – there was no way I could get to it. I hadn’t brought a backpack, but there were two muesli bars and half a packet of M&M’s in my pockets. I left them with Nathan, along with the water bottle I’d had clipped to my belt. Nathan’s torch had been smashed by the cave-in. I couldn’t give him mine because I needed it to find my way out. It was horrible leaving him there, all alone and badly injured in the pitch-black cave. Last thing before I left, I removed my jacket and tucked it around him.
‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘You take it easy,’ Nathan called after me. ‘Don’t drive more than forty kilometres per hour. It won’t help either of us if you don’t get to Gibson Station in one piece.’
‘Sure,’ I said, careful not to look back. There were tears in my eyes that I didn’t want Nathan to see. ‘Catch you later.’
‘Later,’ my brother said, just a croaky voice in the darkness behind me. I scrambled over the first rock fall and began the long, dangerous climb back to the desert’s surface.
4
COMING THROUGH!
I stopped and listened. What was that noise? It came from somewhere up ahead. It sounded like leaves rustling. But there were no trees or bushes directly outside the cave mouth. Just spinifex, a rocky outcrop, then nothing but red scrubby desert for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. I held my breath and concentrated on the sound. Was it a sandstorm? It didn’t sound like sand – it was too rustly, too slithery. My skin prickled.
Could it be something alive?
A snake, for example.
I shone the torch up the steep rocky tunnel ahead of me. Nothing was there, just a few spiders’ webs and shadows. Whatever was making the rustly, slithery noise was further ahead. Closer to the cave mouth. Outside the cave mouth, I hoped. It was probably just the wind.
What wind? I asked myself. It had been dead calm when Nathan and I entered the cave. But that had been nearly an hour ago. The weather could have changed since then.
Thoughts of Nathan focused my mind. I was supposed to be going for help. My badly injured brother was depending on me. This wasn’t the time to get spooked by strange noises. I started forward again.
The noise slowly grew louder. And scarier.
Rustle, rustle, slither, slither.
If it was coming from outside the cave mouth, why couldn’t I see a glow of daylight ahead?
Moments later, I did see a glow. But it wasn’t daylight. I came round a slight bend and there, about forty metres further up the tunnel, was a narrow strip of starlight. Stars! I’d forgotten it was already late afternoon by the time Nathan and I reached the cave. Night must have fallen while we’d been underground.
Would I be able to find my way to Gibson Station in the dark?
No longer thinking about the rustling sound, I laboured up the sloping tunnel towards the cave mouth. But I didn’t get far. After only two or three paces, I stopped in my tracks.
Something was there. Halfway between me and the strip of starry sky. Something with eyes.
From the size of them, I guessed the eyes belonged to a small creature – a mouse or a lizard. Nothing to worry about. I began creeping forward again, my torch trained on the eyes. All around them, the cave floor was strewn with small stones. And here’s something weird – the stones seemed to be moving.
How ridiculous! I thought. As if stones could move. It was just shadows cast by the wavering torch beam. I kept going. But the nearer I got to them, the more the stones seemed to twitch and weave. Even when I held the torch still. The rustling noise was growing steadily louder, too. When I was seven or eight metres from the eyes, my foot crunched on something that squirmed under my boot. I hopped backwards, and shone the torch down.
Shishkebab!
My feet went into auto-drive, back-pedalling away from the freakish sight lit up by the torch beam.
What had looked like stones from a distance were actually huge brown scorpions! Hundreds of them. Ahead of me, the cave floor was a living, moving carpet of the horrible things.
I retreated halfway back to the bend in the tunnel. My heart was still thudding like a bongo drum as I moved the torch beam over the horde of scorpions blocking my esc
ape. Except for a few of the nearer ones, which were watching me with shining eyes and their stingers raised, the army of oversized arachnids was scuttling steadily away from me – up towards the star-filled cave mouth. As they moved forward, more scorpions wriggled out through a narrow fissure in the cave wall and joined the rear of the rustling, bustling swarm.
I have no idea how many there were. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. They must have lived in a secret den behind the wall. Because the cave was so isolated, and the habitat around the cave was probably ideal for the tiny creatures that scorpions feed on, the colony had bred to plague proportions.
Scorpions are nocturnal, I suddenly remembered. That’s why Nathan and I hadn’t seen any on the way in. But now it was night-time. The scorpions had woken up and were on their way out for a night’s hunting.
I’d be okay, I realised, as long as I waited until the last of them had disappeared out into the desert beyond the cave entrance.
But how long would that take? I shone the torch on the crack in the cave wall. A procession of scorpions came streaming out. The flow seemed endless.
I had a sudden brainwave. The fissure was only a few centimetres wide. Maybe I could block it, trapping the rest of the scorpions in their lair. Then it would take only a few minutes for the cave ahead of me to clear. I collected a handful of rocks and began tossing them into the fissure. But as fast as I tossed them in, the huge scorpions pushed them back out. They were like miniature bulldozers. Or tanks. Enraged by the assault, several of the horrible creatures went into attack mode. They came scuttling towards me with their pincers spread and their stingers curled forward over their backs like deadly hypodermic needles. I quickly backed away.
It was no good. I was trapped. I retreated another ten metres and sat down to wait until the coast was clear.
But could I really afford to wait? Somewhere in the inky depths of the cave behind me, Nathan lay badly injured. He reckoned he had cracked ribs. What if he had other internal injuries? He might even be dying as I sat there. There was no time to lose. I had to go for help.
