Cryptid Zoo

by Gerry Griffiths

  The guard finished packing everything up and put both cases on the floor. He pulled up the handles and dragged the wheeled luggage to the door. He took the suit bag off the clothes rod and draped it over one of the travel cases. “That’s everything.”

  “You’re sure?” Ivan asked.

  “I even threw in the booze and their empty glasses.”

  “Good.” Maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as he thought. Thanks to the kraken, at least he didn’t have bodies to worry about. “Go ahead and put that in as well,” Ivan said, pointing at the plastic bag by the door.

  The guard unzipped a travel case, snatched the bag filled with toiletries and managed to flatten it inside with the clothes, then closed it up.

  “What should I do with everything?” the guard asked.

  “Take them to the furnace and burn them.”

  17

  THE REPTILE HOUSE

  The next morning, Nick and Meg were about to leave their room to meet up with Bob, Rhonda, and the boys when there was a knock on the door.

  Nick glanced at his wristwatch. “I wonder who that can be? We still have a few minutes.”

  “Maybe it’s Gabe,” Meg said, putting her purse strap over her shoulder.

  The knocking persisted, this time a little louder.

  “I’m coming,” Nick said, crossing the room and opening the door. He was surprised to see a tall man dressed in a black security uniform.

  “Nick Wells?” the man asked. He was holding a clipboard and had it tucked between his elbow and ribs.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Ivan Connors, in charge of security for the theme park. May I come in?”

  “Ah, sure.” Nick backed against the wall so Connors could enter the room.

  Nick closed the door and followed Connors into the suite.

  “Is everything all right?” Meg asked.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Mrs. Wells.”

  “Oh my God. Is it Gabe?” Meg put her hand up to her mouth.

  “No, it’s not your son. Bob Pascale had a massive heart attack.”

  “Is he okay?” Nick asked.

  “I can’t really say. We flew him out last night. His wife accompanied him.”

  “Does Shane know?”

  “Not yet. That’s why I’m here. I understand you and Mr. Pascale work in the same department.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you and your families friends?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Perhaps you could break the news to Shane. He might take it better if he heard it from someone he knew.”

  “I’ve a question. Why didn’t they take Shane along?” Nick asked, thinking it was strange that Rhonda would leave her son behind.

  “There wasn’t enough room on the med-evac chopper.”

  “Oh. Sure, I’ll talk to him,” Nick said. He wasn’t looking forward to telling the boy his father was seriously ill and had no idea how Shane would take it.

  “Shane and our son, Gabe, are sharing a room,” Meg said.

  “I know. I have all that information right here on my roster,” Connors said and showed them the clipboard. “I have to go. Again, I’m sorry.” He turned to leave.

  “You will keep us posted on Bob’s condition?” Nick asked as he opened the door for Connors.

  “As soon as I know something,” Connors promised and walked out into the hall.

  Nick closed the door and walked over to Meg.

  “Oh my God, Nick.”

  “I’ll admit, Bob wasn’t in the best of shape and liked to drink, but I never thought he would have a heart attack. Hell, he’s only thirty-seven.”

  “He’s only a year older than you,” Meg said. “So when do we tell Shane?”

  “Right away. No point in putting it off,” Nick said. “The longer we wait the harder it will be.” He opened the door and they both went out.

  A housekeeping cart was parked just down the hall next to an open door.

  “That’s Bob and Rhonda’s room,” Meg said.

  Once they reached the cart, Nick stopped to glance inside the suite. A maid was wiping down the small table. The bed was made and everything looked in order.

  “Where’re Bob and Rhonda’s stuff?” Meg asked. “I doubt they had time to pack.”

  “Someone must have collected their things.”

  “Who?”

  Nick stepped in the doorway. “Excuse me?”

  The maid stopped what she was doing and looked up. “Yes, sir?”

  “The guests that were in this room. Where are their belongings?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I was told to clean the room.”

  Meg pulled on Nick’s arm. “We can check with the front desk later.”

  “Okay.” Nick waved at the maid. “Thank you.”

  They went to the next door and Nick knocked.

  Gabe opened the door. “We’re just about ready.”

  “We need to come in and speak with Shane,” Nick said.

  There were two twin beds in the suite. Nick and Meg sat on the edge of one bed while Shane sat on the other, so that they were facing each other. Gabe took a chair at the table.

  Nick took a moment to collect his thoughts and said, “Shane, your father has suffered a heart attack. He’s okay as far as we know but they had to airlift him to a medical facility. Your mom went as well.”

  Shane took it hard at first and began to cry. Meg jumped off the bed to sit beside him and put her arm around the boy’s shoulder to console him, which helped to ease his pain as after a few more tears, he wiped his eyes and gave everyone a brave face. “Can we go have breakfast?”

  “Sure, Shane.”

  The four of them left the room and went down to the dining area. Once again breakfast was served buffet-style. With everything going on, Nick had forgotten to bring along his binder so he couldn’t do an on-the-spot evaluation of their meal, which was no better than the first day.

  Once they were through eating, they went out by the pool area.

  A sign was posted: POOL CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE DUE TO MAINTENANCE.

  “That sucks!” Gabe said.

  “Yeah, big time,” Shane chimed in.

  Nick had to agree. So far, it seemed they were experiencing one letdown after another.

  They joined up with the tour group and went on a short hike between the Bioengineering Laboratory and Animatronics Workshop Complex building and Sea Monster Cove to another spherical structure.

  Christine led the way inside, which had the same floor plan as the Biped Habitat with a skylight and an observation room in the center.

  “Welcome to The Reptile House,” she said. “I’m sure many of you have heard the expression when pigs fly.”

  Almost everyone nodded.

  “Well, what about when snakes fly?”

  “There’s no such thing as a flying snake,” a woman laughed.

  “Oh, but there are. They are called arabhar and are from a region by the Arabian Sea. These snakes are aggressive and extremely venomous,” Christine said and walked up to the dark pane glass, which suddenly became transparent as the lights lit up the enclosure on the other side of the divider.

  The pie-shaped habitat looked like an oasis with a small pool surrounded by palm trees. Nick saw something that looked like a miniature parachute trick jumpers used, gliding across the water. Then he saw the snakehead and the tail. What he thought to be a parachute was actually four unfurled wings attached to the snake’s ribcage enabling it to fly.

  He could hear everyone’s surprise, especially when three more snakes appeared out of the trees and took flight.

  “That’s totally crazy,” Meg said to Nick.

  “Kind of hard to top that.”

  But Nick was soon to be proven wrong when they stepped up to the next exhibit that lit up and had a Japanese theme with the facade of a house with paper walls. An area of sand had been raked flat and was next to a water garden with a small footbridge spanning a pond fi
lled with a dozen large orange and white carp. Nick saw what he initially thought was a tire, appear from behind the paper house and roll out onto the sand. When it came to a stop, Nick quickly realized that it was a fat snake with its tail in its mouth, taking on the shape of a wheel.

  “Well, I guess that’s a bit faster than crawling,” he quipped.

  “That is a tzuchinoko,” Christine said. “They are quite unique. There are actually two in this exhibit.” She took a few seconds to look for the other one. “Oh, there it is.”

  Nick saw the other snake. Instead of slithering on the ground, it was able to leap, covering three-foot stretches at a time. It looked to be about five feet long and was so thick he wouldn’t have been surprised if it weighed 100 pounds. It had a thin tail at the end of its fat body.

  “Again, these Japanese snakes are very dangerous,” Christine said, not that anyone was going to doubt her word, especially when one of the snakes came up to the glass, opened its giant mouth and hissed, exposing four-inch long fangs.

  “Not so friendly, is it?” Meg said.

  “Hey, check these guys out,” Shane shouted.

  Nick saw that Shane and Gabe had gotten ahead of the tour group. Normally, he would have told the boys to get back with the others but he didn’t want to sound like he was scolding them, figuring Shane was going through enough and didn’t need any added stress.

  Three giant lizards roamed the next enclosure landscaped with dirt and knee-high grass, strewn boulders, and a 10 by 20 foot in-ground Fiberglas swimming pool. They were fifteen feet long with bony-ridged backs and powerful tails. Each foot on their stumpy short legs had eight-inch long claws.

  “These monitor lizards are called Buru and are from India.”

  A Buru standing in the grass let out a hoarse bellow.

  “Just like a komodo dragon,” Christine said, “a Buru has so much bacteria in its mouth, a single bite will cause the victim’s body to rot.”

  “Talk about dragon breath,’ Meg said.

  Nick noticed that Shane and Gabe had split away from the group, again, and were already to the next exhibit. “Come on,” he said to Meg. “We have to keep moving.”

  Christine saw the teenagers and hurried everyone along.

  The overhead lights on the other side of the glass came on. The landscape was rolling dunes like in the Sahara Desert.

  “Here we have Mongolian death worms,” Christine announced. “Found only in the Gobi Desert.”

  “I don’t see anything,” a man said, disappointedly.

  “That’s because they live in the sand and burrow underground.”

  “So how do we see them?” asked the same man.

  “Easy.” Christine went up to a push-button pad on the wall. She tapped a key.

  Water shot out of an overhead sprinkler and rained down on a section of sand. A few seconds later, an enormous hideous-looking worm punched out of the wet sand. It curled up, raised its eyeless head, and opened its round mouth, revealing a ring of sharp, pointy teeth.

  “These twenty-foot-long creatures have the ability to shock their prey and are attracted to sound,” Christine said and pushed another button on the pad.

  A speaker mounted on a pole in the sand began to make a thrumming noise.

  The sound was enough to draw another worm out of the sand. It turned its sightless head and faced everyone staring from the other side of the glass, sensing the vibration of shuffling feet.

  A thick salivary goop shot out of the worm’s mouth and splattered the window.

  “That icky stuff is venom,” Christine said.

  “Jesus, Nick,” Meg said. “That thing must be twenty feet away.”

  “What if you were to touch one?” Nick asked.

  “I’m afraid you’d die. Well, that concludes our tour of The Reptile House,” Christine said and signaled for everyone to follow her out.

  “House of Horrors, you mean,” Nick muttered to Meg as they funneled down the hall with the others toward the nearest exit door.

  18

  THE CHILDREN

  Jack and Miguel were just finishing up with lunch.

  The buffet was Italian cuisine with abundant helpings of sliced pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, baskets of garlic bread, eggplant Parmesan, lasagna, ricotta and meat cannelloni, cheese-stuffed tortellini, fettuccine, and other pastas.

  There were even pony-sized bottles of assorted wines for the adults.

  Miguel preferred Mexican food but had no problem wolfing down three slices of pepperoni pizza and polishing off two bottles of red wine.

  Jack took the last bite of his eggplant Parmesan, put his fork down, and pushed himself away from the table. “Man, am I stuffed.”

  “You’re getting spoiled,” Miguel said, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms.

  “And you’re not? I don’t hear you complaining.” Jack knew Miguel often bragged he would rather rough it in the outdoors than stay in some fancy hotel. But lately it seemed Miguel wasn’t so anxious to jump at their next assignment as he once was. Jack suspected that his friend missed his family and wanted to go home to spend time with them, which wouldn’t be long as they would no longer be contractually obligated to Carter Wilde once the theme park opened.

  Now it was just a matter of hanging around and hoping they didn’t die of boredom.

  “Thought I might pay Nora a visit,” Jack said. “Care to come along?”

  “And cramp your style?”

  “Like you could do that. Come on, you could use the exercise.”

  Jack and Miguel got up from the table, bussed their trays over to the trash bin, and went outside. They followed the pathway to the Bioengineering Lab and entered the building. Jack used his access card and opened the door to the laboratory.

  Nora was standing next to a wire cage, watching the pregnant chupacabra, its belly fully extended, lapping up blood from a small pan.

  “Hey,” Jack greeted. “She looks about ready to burst.”

  “Won’t be long,” Nora said, beaming as if she were a close relative to the expecting mother instead of a scientist waiting for an abomination to deliver.

  Jack noticed a movie camera on the counter. “Are you planning to film the birth?”

  “Yes, unless one of you would like to assist?” Nora asked.

  “I was in the delivery room when Maria had Sophia,” Miguel said.

  “So you want to do it?”

  “Not really, but for you I will.”

  “Thanks, Miguel. Would you both like to come back and see the children?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. He glanced around and was glad to see that Dr. McCabe was not around. There was something about the man that made Jack feel uneasy. He never liked the idea of Nora working in the same room with the man.

  Nora led the way through the laboratory to a door in the back. She slid a keycard in the reader and the door swished open.

  Jack and Miguel followed Nora into the nursery where they were assaulted by a barrage of chattering, chirping, and strange devilish cries.

  The room sounded like the inside of a pet store.

  There were different sized cages and glass enclosures against the wall to accommodate the occupants depending on their stages of development.

  Jack saw thunderbird and kongamatok chicks perched in wire cages. Across the aisle were small habitats with baby bigfoot and white yetis. In a playpen were a couple of sauropods that looked like plastic figurines until they moved in their slow fashion. A blue tiger cub was fast asleep in a cage. Inside a tall enclosure stood a four-foot tall six-month-old yeren.

  He spotted more innocent-looking cryptid infants lazing about, too young to be of any real threat but in time would become too dangerous to handle.

  “How would you two like to help with the bottle-feeding?” Nora asked.

  “Okay by me,” Jack said. He looked at Miguel.

  “Sure, why not. It’s not like there’s anything else around here for us to do.”

  19

&n
bsp; MAMMOTH ARENA

  The round concrete structure looked like an enormous fort, stretching up more than a hundred feet. Of all the exhibit buildings, this was the largest and was at the rear of the dome.

  Nick leaned back to look up. “Kind of reminds me of that wall in the King Kong movie the natives built to keep out the big ape.”

  “Please don’t tell me that’s what’s inside,” Meg said.

  “Hey, in this place nothing would surprise me.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Ever since they had arrived, everything had surprised him. Even though he had his reservations about the theme park and questioned if it was really a safe place for families to visit, he had to admit it sure had its appeal and billions of people from all over the world would flock to see it.

  Cryptid Zoo had the potential of becoming the number one attraction on the planet. The only things missing were amusement rides and concession stands which could be integrated as afterthoughts seeing as there was ample space on the grounds between the existing buildings: suggestions that Nick planned to include on his evaluation sheet.

  Christine stood facing the group at the front entrance of the building and said, “Welcome to Mammoth Arena. Even though you have seen some amazing creatures on our other tours, I would like to think we left the best for last. If everyone—”

  A horrendous roar bellowed from within the steep-wall enclosure.

  “Oh my God,” Meg said.

  “What the hell was that?” a woman asked nervously, grabbing onto her husband.

  “You’ll soon see,” Christine replied, unflinchingly. “Now, if everyone will please come this way.”

  As they entered, Nick caught a strong whiff of feces and smells associated with large animals. He looked up. He could see the I-beam girders high up inside the dome, as there was no ceiling on the building.

  Two enclosures, a combination of wire-cage and glass took up a portion of the ground floor, flanked by a high wall where a steel spiral staircase wormed up to the top.

  “Mommy, look,” a little girl yelled excitedly, “Blue tigers.”