by Hugo Navikov
“Ain’t no way my brother there is gonna make it unless you guys bring him inside. No time to cut his tape and run with him. Shit, he can’t even roll his way to safety. No trees to hide behind here. Now get your asses around the building and cut this shit. I have uses for you. The Organization doesn’t anymore … as far as you know.”
I didn’t even bother to shout extremely impolite words at Atari through the walkie-talkie. I just got my hands under Bonte—and thank God he was a skinny Congolese instead of our fat American—and hurled him onto my shoulders, to carry him fireman-style.
“I know where the eggs are!” Ellie shouted, like a light bulb had literally just popped on in her head. “The guardhouse! Atari said people would die ‘up to the guardhouse’!”
“Let’s move!” I said, and we did, Ellie taking the flashlight and keeping it on. It wouldn’t make much difference in a few seconds when the dinosaur emerged from the jungle and slid into the water to get at us.
“It’s not gonna do you any good!” Atari shouted from the walkie-talkie, and so Ellie’s deduction was confirmed and we ran faster.
“Ellie, get the miners toward the gate, past the guard station. HURRY!” I yelled at her, and she peeled off with the flashlight and started screaming at them in her very high-pitched shout, “Courir à travers la porte d'entrée!” That, along with her motioning with the flashlight, seemed to get through to every screaming person at once, and they moved as a panicked mass toward the front gate. It was just in time, too, maybe just in time, because the spinosaurus now cleared that hole in the jungle and let out a horrendous screech. She made a huge splash as she jumped into the water—no elegant sliding now—and would be on our side in seconds.
At the front of the camp, the lights from Tshikapa gave enough illumination for me to see by. Setting Bonte down and pulling the tape from his mouth, I made it to the guardhouse and remembered as I saw them that there were three eggs. I couldn’t carry three eggs—I wasn’t totally sure I could carry two of the big bastards. I wrapped my hand in the duct tape I tore off Bonte’s mouth and punched the side window of the guard station, shattering it. Just as I had hoped, Congolese building standards even for European countries had not caught up to the Western use of safety glass, so I had some nice big shards to choose from.
I chose the biggest and was through Bonte’s bonds in seconds.
“I cannot feel my hands and my feet well, Monsieur Brett.”
“Your blood’s going to start pumping real good here in about five seconds,” I said, and shoved one of the heavy eggs into his arms. “These are all that’s between us and that dinosaur. Let’s give her what she—”
WHOMP! The mass of humanity hit the guardhouse and flooded around it like a river around a monster island. We were stuck. Another HRRRRRRRANNNNNNNNH slammed into our eardrums, and it definitely came from this side of the river. We had no way to get past the wall of humanity, and she was coming for the eggs and the unlucky humans she would gladly chew into a slurry.
“There’s no time to get the eggs on the shore!” I had to yell to Bonte, even though he was standing right to me. “We have to think.”
Pushed by the waves of miners, Ellie nonetheless was able to switch direction and join us on the lee side of the guard station. “There’s no time to get the eggs on the shore!” she said, making Bonte and me laugh stupidly. She gave us a quizzical look but then shot a quick glance at the Vermeulen bunker and tore the walkie-talkie off Bonte’s head.
“Merde!”
“Pardon!” she said, but focused on mashing the talk button. “Atari! Mister Bushnell! We give up! We’re coming in!”
His laugh came through the bit of static at this greater range. “I don’t know … it was kind of a limited time offer.”
“What do you want?” she snapped into the phone. “Sex? Brett’s humiliation? You want us to work for you? Tell me!”
He laughed even harder and said through his mirth, “I’ll take all of those! Come to the front door. We can open it since the miners—”
“No, the spinosaurus will be too close!” she said, and we could see Mama sniffing at and stomping at everything she could. She was still far enough away that we would have time to run around the building, especially if we left the eggs right here to let Mama discover.
“I’m sorry, the what?” Atari said, obviously in no hurry. “I don’t know about any spinosaurus.”
“Fine—the Kasai Rex, the Kasai Rex!” she screamed with approaching panic into the radio.
“Ha! Very good. All right, yes, come to the back. Someone will have the door open for your dumb asses.”
The insults didn’t matter; all that mattered was running in a beeline around the side of the building and to the back as fast as we could. The spinosaur would see us exposed for maybe ten seconds as we made the dash, but that might not be enough for her to comprehend what was happening. She would smell the eggs, though, and then the jog would be up.
“Count of three,” I said. “One, two, go!”
Bonte popped out first, with Ellie next and me in the rear. But our driver didn’t make it two steps before his still-numb feet betrayed him, and he tripped forward.
Onto the egg.
Breaking the egg.
Covering him with the albumen and sticky fluid that surrounded what was an almost-ready-to-hatch baby spinosaur.
Mama whipped her head to the side and saw, smelled, what had happened, and released a sound of fury so deep that it came out as a garbled choking, extremely loud squeak as she turned to come at us.
Bonte shouted, “You go! You go!” and got up on his feet and ran in front of the bunker building, distracting her from Ellie and me and bringing it all to bear on poor Bonte.
Without another sound, Ellie grabbed one of the eggs and we ran with them toward the side of the building. We saw that Bonte had thrown himself against the bolted front door, smearing the egg’s fluid all over it and the walls as the enraged dinosaur ran to destroy him. His final act of defiance would be to smear the baby dinosaur egg fluids all over the Vermeulen door.
Why would he do that? Why the door? I wondered frantically as we high-tailed it around the building and saw that, true to his word for once, Atari had one of his lackeys, Melanie I believe, draw in a secret door with no knob or any discerning features on it to differentiate it from the building’s wall on either side. I would have walked right by it, never mind seeing it while running.
We started hitting the brakes as we got near the door Melanie was holding open, and Ellie asked, “Brett—what do we do with the eggs?”
Melanie just shrugged. She didn’t seem to care or even be terribly curious about our carrying these massive ovoids.
Then it hit me what Bonte did, the purpose of his final action against the company that would kill his family—he spread the egg innards all over the weakest spot in the building, even if it was bolted shut: the door. Mama Spinosaurus would associate the door—maybe the building as a whole—as the killer of her baby, and attack at that spot. Anywhere she smelled her destroyed offspring, she would attack. He would die, but his death would punish the killers of so many of his friends and those who would take his family from him.
“Take your egg inside,” I whispered to Ellie, although Melanie was more concerned with not being at the door when the monster was loose. So I said to the cowardly Vermeulen employee, “Miss, I’ll close the door—you get to safety.”
She darted inside and I set the egg I carried right in the doorjamb—and slammed the door, bursting the egg and also keeping the door from shutting since the almost-fully formed baby Spinosaur lay across the opening. Everyone inside had run to their safe places, leaving the former safe place for the miners—that tremendous empty space where the poor bastards slept in on sleeping bags—completely wasted.
Ellie had waited for me and we got to the middle of the building, then squatted down next to a support pillar in the large empty space. The dinosaur outside was smashing against the front door with
a ferocity that shook the entire building, but her bulk against the small size and reinforcements against the door wouldn’t allow her enough leverage to make any progress on getting inside.
Then the shaking stopped and Mama let out another shrieking roar. I tried hard not to think about the rarity and preciousness of the eggs I was breaking so flippantly, the killing. But I rationalized that she had more eggs that would now not be stolen, self-serving as that may have been. I had a plan, and now that I could hear her coming around the other end of the building where the fresher egg—and partially open door—awaited, I gave Ellie the choice of staying where she was or coming with me. “Neither way is safe,” I said, “because nothing is safe.”
She held the egg gently and looked at it for a moment before asking me, “Where are we going?”
“To Mister Bushnell’s new office. We have something to share with him, don’t we?”
Ellie again looked at the egg, ruefully this time. “Yes, we do,” she said, and took my hand to get herself up. We quickly reached Vermeulen’s former and Atari’s current vault-like office on the other side of the building, and I banged hard on the door just as the spinosaur found the next broken egg and screamed.
“What?” came the annoyed yell from inside.
“It’s me and Ellie, come to make good on our promises!” I yelled. “Sex, humiliation—all your greatest dreams come true!”
I heard him laugh and seconds later we could hear a code being punched in and sliding locks being retracted on the office door. At the exact second that knob started to turn, Mama must have realized she could get her two-foot-long claws into the outside doorjamb and rip the entire door off its hidden hinges. She was coming in that door, and our only chance at survival was getting through this one.
The noise was unreal as she stuck her snout against the door, the jellied insides of her babies coating the very tip, and ROARED. I could hear the employees screaming in abject terror—something they probably found amusing when the miners were doing it when locked outside at the bolted front door.
The office door knob stopped turning as soon as the roar started, but it was too late for Atari to change his mind—I got my hand on it and continued its twist, throwing my shoulder against the door and blasting it open, knocking the fat black kid to the floor. I followed his eyes to the .357 Magnum still on his desk, and we both lunged for it. I got there first, and he curled into a ball in a pathetic attempt to protect himself.
But I didn’t want the gun so I could shoot him.
I cocked the Magnum and shot six smoking holes into his door. A smaller-caliber handgun might not have penetrated that steel, but the .357 did.
When he counted all six bullets fired, Atari untucked his head and said, “What the hell’d you do that for?”
“Ventilation,” I said, and nodded to Ellie, who raised the last egg up and brought it down forcefully onto Atari’s evil, rotten head. The egg was pierced by his skull and he ended up wearing the egg like a full-face mask as the albumen and bloody yolk poured out, soaking him and his new suit in a scent Mama would find irresistible. The fetus flopped out, wiggling a little bit but not quite developed enough to survive yet.
He got the now-empty shell off his head and screamed at us: “You assholes are crazy! You think I’m not gonna kill you for this? Both of you?”
A dozen voices cried out and kept screaming as Mama pushed her head through the back door and roared again at the little pieces of food running around inside. The look on Atari’s face was almost indescribable, but if I had to say, I’d call it THIS IS NOT HAPPENING followed by I JUST SHIT MY PANTS.
“Shut the door! Lock it! We’re safe in here!” Atari pleaded, as if he hadn’t just promised to kill us for drowning his suit in egg and aborted spinosaur fetus.
I smiled and said, “You’ll never be safe again, asshole” and, before he could scramble to his feet, I took the butt of the .357 and brought it down on his knee so hard I thought I bent the metal. Atari pierced the air with his screams and remained on the floor, his broken kneecap not allowing him to stand, let alone cross the room to shut and bolt the door. “No, please—I can get you millions right now! Just shut the door! Please!”
“Your girlfriend will be right in, sir,” Ellie said, and we made motions like we were sweeping the egg’s scent through the new ventilation holes I had provided. “She’ll love your new cologne.”
Atari hadn’t stopped screaming from the kneecapping, but now that he knew what was about to happen, his pitch rose even higher and the promises he made even grander. We laughed at them and ran, leaving the door open for good measure.
The spinosaur lifted a large part of the back wall of the building now and it broke to pieces that rained off the sides of her snout. Vermeulen’s staff of rotten shits had all ensconced themselves somewhere, and maybe they’d be safe. Depended on how much of the building Mama decided to destroy in the flames of her anger.
Ellie and I flat-out ran to the front door. I struggled to get the reinforcements down out of their cradles while Ellie started unbolting everything as fast as she could. But then the building shook like an earthquake was bringing it down.
It was the spinosaur rearing up on her hind legs to rip half of the bunker’s roof off. Much of it crashed back inside, but that didn’t matter—Mama was in now … and heading straight for Vermeulen’s vault.
We had to get out, out of the building before it all came down in top of us, but for the immediate moment we were mesmerized as the dinosaur got the open door of the office and screamed louder than ten jet engines, so hard that papers from the office swept out the open door and spinosaur bile was shot inside like bullets. If Atari wasn’t dead, both of his eardrums were burst, pain no one who hasn’t experienced it can even imagine.
Then she shoved what she could of her snout inside and—Atari wasn’t dead, we could hear his pleading screams—dragged the treacherous bastard out by his legs. My knees almost buckled even trying to think about what that would feel like after a kneecapping.
Sorry, but I enjoyed every second of it.
She flipped the heavy man like a salmon in the mouth of a bear and clamped him in her jaws—but didn’t crunch him to pieces. He was still alive, we knew that from watching him struggle and hearing him shriek, but she didn’t chew. She carried him, keeping an inescapable hold on him in the jaws, but then backed up, her tail whipping against the part of the bunker I assumed the office workers were in. It crumbled, and I couldn’t tell if I heard any fresh screams because the walls collapsing was tremendously loud.
Seeing those walls go was like a whipcrack getting Ellie and me back to work at unlocking the front door before this part collapsed as well. Finally, we got it open and all at once we spilled outside in the purple sky of the approaching dawn. The flattened tent city was visible in the early morning light, but no bodies were in them this time, no fires, no bloody horror.
There was one human form, however, not too far from the door, and although it was pretty much face-down, it pulled itself along by its arms and elbows.
“Bonte?” Ellie said, and hurried to him, lifting his face out of the clay.
He looked terrible, eyes blackened and face puffy from abuse, but he smiled at us with no more missing teeth than before. “Miss Ellie! Monsieur Brett! May the ancestors be praised!” he said with joy, and added without changing his tone, “My legs are also broken!”
Ellie started to say something soothing, but we were interrupted by the spectacle of the ninety-foot-long impossible dinosaur coming around what was left of the front of the building, pausing to look our way and stare at us before she turned away and slid her enormity into the deep waters of the river. In a few seconds, she came up onto the other side and disappeared into the tunnel in the foliage on the opposite shore.
“Did you see that?” Ellie asked. “She was still carrying Atari in her jaws.”
“I saw … and heard, too.” I’d be hearing those screams in my nightmares for a long time to come, I
bet.
“Bonte, what happened? How are you alive?”
He chuckled a little at that, even though it obviously made the pain flare up. “She bashed at the door and bashed and bashed. Then she picked me up with her mouth, breaking my poor legs as she held on to me.” He blinked, obviously amazed by his own story. “Then she sniffed the air real good and dropped me onto the ground. Right on my legs, sacre bleu …”
Ellie looked at me. “Why would she pick him up, and then Atari? Why didn’t she just rip them apart like the others?”
“You’re the cryptid expert.”
“I bet your son could have told us,” she said sweetly. She was right: sharing my memories with her did help keep him alive. “Any theories, Daddy-O?”
It only took me a moment to connect the nearly complete spinosaur babies inside the eggs with what Mama did first with Bonte, and then, when she smelled even more of her young around the building, dropped him and got Atari in her jaws. “The remaining babies are ready to hatch,” I said. “They’re gonna be hungry.”
“Holy shit,” Ellie said, her eyes wide and a hand held to her mouth, and then she laughed really hard. “That’s horrible!”
I laughed too, and Bonte even managed another smile. I knelt and leaned down to him and said, “Where’s the car?”
“Right outside the gate.”
“How far is the hospital?”
“Everything is close in Tshikapa. You can’t miss it,” he said, and passed out.
I got him up onto my shoulders in the fireman carry—if he hadn’t lost consciousness from the pain a minute earlier, he would have now. I could feel the broken pieces inside his legs. But he was alive and not ripped to pieces by baby dinosaurs like Atari would be very soon, so all things considered I think we could call it a win.
Epilogue
I sat in the tent with Ellie, helping her mourn Gregory and also the fact that she got no footage of her first real cryptid.
