by Anna Martin
Kit grabbed his backpack and pulled out the slim laptop he habitually carried everywhere. It only took a moment to turn it on, and he hesitated for another second before logging in and setting up a connection to a virtual private network.
“KIT.”
Kit was deep into dark websites dealing in all sorts of horrors, scribbling notes on a scrap of paper at his elbow that he could destroy a lot easier than digital files. His team knew not to disrupt him while he was working on projects with the blinds drawn. It meant he wanted peace and quiet.
He looked up from his screen, too consumed with his work to answer with words.
Leilani stood in the doorway, her expression stricken. Kit hadn’t heard her open the door.
“Dr. Beck just got back. It’s….”
“What?”
“It’s bad.”
Kit dropped his pen and ran.
Chapter Five
LOGAN KNEW these islands better than anyone other than the dinosaurs. His team worked tirelessly, tracking and logging all their observations, but Logan was the one who studied their reports on top of preparing his own. The rangers were good. Logan’s job was to be the best.
He’d always felt a sense of responsibility for the animals that were put in his care. It was funny, in a way; he’d never labeled himself as an animal lover. He’d never had a pet as a child, and he took a fairly pragmatic approach to animal rights. But when he was put in charge of a patch of land, those animals became his animals, and he took the duty of caring for them incredibly seriously.
Over the past few months, Logan had tasked his teams with tracking the particular breeding habits of the different dinosaur species. And the results had been fascinating. They already knew some species only mated once every few years, with each breeding pair only producing one offspring, if any. The predictable mammalian breeding seasons absolutely didn’t apply to these animals.
Logan wouldn’t be able to draw any conclusions from the research for a few more years at least, but his dirty, tiring, thankless work of tracking down and documenting nesting sites was some of the most fascinating work he’d done so far.
If one of his team had wanted to do what he’d been doing on their own, there was no way he’d have allowed it. Logan was a stickler for working in teams. For safety. They were working on islands inhabited by at least twenty thousand dinosaurs—he had to be safety conscious.
But Logan had camped without a tent in Kenyan safari parks, and in Jeeps with no roofs in Yosemite. He knew how to make himself safe in environments that many other people would consider wild. And since he’d become head ranger, he’d set up plenty of fail-safes and safety alert systems on the islands.
With new theories swirling around in his mind, Logan climbed back into his truck to head back to the South Island. It had rained heavily through most of the day, turning the local vegetation lush and green and thrumming with life. The rain brought the bugs out, though, and Logan was sure he’d be treating dozens of mosquito bites when he got home.
He checked the clock on the dash and noticed it was later than he thought. That meant he could either drive through the night to get home, and arrive at his own bed by dawn, or camp out another night. He put the truck into Drive and set off at a speedy five miles per hour through the dense undergrowth. He’d make a decision in a few hours, when he could better assess his mental state and ability to keep driving.
The sunsets over the South Pacific Archipelago were almost as beautiful as the sunrises, and he got an incredible view as he wound his way through the North Island, heading for the spit of land that would take him back to the West Island. Logan knew the tidal patterns better than anyone else here too, and was confident he had hours more before the tide came in and buried the natural bridge between the two islands.
He had identified this particular stretch of land as one of the most dangerous areas on the whole Archipelago, and it had nothing to do with the tides.
He’d set up a motion trap camera and knew that nearly every species of dinosaur used the spit to cross between the islands. Some of the dinosaurs were nocturnal, or only crossed at certain times of the year or particular times of the day. But there was no real way of confidently knowing which dinosaurs would be encountered while trying to cross back toward safety.
A few years ago, Logan had discovered a natural rise, not quite a hill, that gave an almost uninterrupted view of the stretch that joined the islands. He’d made it a habit to park there and watch for a while, checking out what animals were crossing before he made the journey himself. It was a habit he’d hammered into his team too.
The last of the sun was just creeping over the horizon when Logan deemed it safe enough to cross. The rain they’d had during the day had made the passage slippery with mud and crap, so he took it even slower than normal. Dusk was a popular hunting time for predators, but he didn’t see anything. It seemed like it was going to be a quiet night on the West Island.
HE DROVE with the windows down, letting in the smells of the forest. As night fell, the sounds of wildlife crept in too—bugs mostly, but some calls that Logan could identify as the dinosaurs.
After a few hours of driving, he pulled the truck to a stop and got out, stretching slowly to work out the ache in his back. The long periods of driving definitely didn’t do him any favors, especially after he’d spent his days climbing trees and hiding behind stuff so he could observe different dinosaurs and their nesting sites.
All that meant his back hurt, but right now, his most pressing concern was his bladder.
Logan ducked around a tree to stretch his legs and use his portable pee bottle after giving the area a cursory glance. The last known animals roaming this area were the ornithomimus, who’d be unhappy to come across him, but not threatened by his presence.
Just as he was zipping up again, Logan noticed that the forest had fallen silent.
A cold trickle ran down his spine.
This had happened to him a few times before, and it was possibly one of the most unnerving experiences. It was like all the birds and the bugs turned off, leaving only the sound of the wind rustling through the trees.
And a low, rumbling noise that was not the weather.
Logan didn’t bother looking around for the source. He knew he had to get back to the truck as soon as he could. There was no point in wasting time. He’d run if he had to and—
Carnotaur.
The carnotaurs were the bigger of the two Coelurosauria-type dinosaurs that lived on the North and West Islands—a group of dinosaurs that included the Tyrannosaurus rex. When misinformed tabloid journalists speculated about the possibility of a T. rex being hidden on the North Island, it was because someone had seen a picture of a carnotaurus and mistakenly believed it to be a juvenile T. rex, when in fact, there were no dinosaurs anywhere near that large living on the islands.
At ten feet tall and weighing up to a ton, they were the biggest predator living here, and Logan had just pissed on their territory.
He stared down the animal through the trees, noting that it wasn’t quite fully grown, potentially still a juvenile carving out its own territory. When the dinosaur leaned forward and roared—a clear challenge—Logan ran.
Part of him hoped his show of retreat would be enough, that the carnotaur would take it as submission and let him run away. But Logan wasn’t going to be lucky, and he wasn’t going to make it to the truck, and he knew this was going to hurt.
The carnotaur charged, easily moving through the tricky undergrowth in a way Logan couldn’t on his spindly human legs. He sensed the huge animal swinging his boxy head, and then he was knocked sideways into a tree.
Logan tried to go with the momentum, rolling into it rather than away. It helped, a little, but the carnotaur wasn’t done yet and kicked out. Logan felt the flash of pain across his shoulder and yelled.
That seemed to momentarily startle the dinosaur. So Logan did it again.
He scuttled backward toward the truck and knew he wasn�
��t going to be able to get inside. He wasn’t going to make it. He wasn’t….
The carnotaur roared again. The noise resonated deeply through the forest, shaking the trees, shaking through to Logan’s bones.
Logan yelled back.
In any other situation, it would have been comical.
Either way, it seemed enough to startle the carnotaur, and Logan threw himself into the truck and turned over the engine. That definitely gave off more noise than he did.
The carnotaur was startled again at the new noise from its adversary, and Logan revved the engine as loudly as he could.
Without waiting to see how the carnotaur reacted, he threw the truck into Drive and skidded away.
OVER THE next hour, he sent out continuous SOS messages back to base, back to his team, to anyone who might respond. His phone had been in his pocket and wasn’t behaving, so Logan switched to the radio system built into the truck. But he didn’t get any response on that system either.
Which was bad news.
The slash across his shoulder was screaming, and every pain receptor in Logan’s body was firing at full blast. He had no idea how he was even driving, crediting the ability to adrenaline and self-preservation.
Both of which would run out soon enough.
With the windows firmly up now, he made his way to the beach. Few dinosaurs made this their territory, preferring the shelter the forest provided. He only knew of the dissimosaurs who had a beach-front territory on the North Island and that was far away from here.
Logan left the engine idling and finally let himself react to the pain. His body expressed that with some yelling and sobbing and cursing up a storm.
Part of him wanted to get out and into the first aid kit he kept in the trunk. Another part didn’t want to leave the truck… possibly ever.
He wasn’t ready to move yet; that much was clear. So he took stock of his body instead.
He’d maybe dislocated his left wrist when he rolled away from the carnotaur. It was twisted funny and hurt almost as much as the cut on his shoulder. His ankle was sprained.
But he was alive.
Despite being late, the moon was big enough to cast light over the whole stretch of beach, giving Logan fairly good visibility in all directions. The carnotaur hadn’t followed him. Thank all the gods.
Logan stripped off his overshirt, because it was covered in dirt and leaves, and turned it inside out to press the clean side against his wounded shoulder. He knew he needed to take better care of it than this, but stopping the bleeding was his first priority, and he was crashing.
This would do. For now.
LOGAN SLEPT fitfully, unable to do much more even though he knew he needed to move. Every so often he checked the truck’s emergency response system again. It wasn’t working. No one was coming to help him.
And because he worked late and did stupid things like overnight shifts on the islands, no one was going to come looking for him.
And even if they did, Logan couldn’t be sure his GPS transmitter was working either, so it could be days before he was found.
He had to take care of this himself.
Carefully cradling his injured wrist to his chest, Logan shifted out of the truck and edged his way around. He couldn’t hear much apart from the waves lapping at the sand in the cool, clear night air.
Of course the trunk was filled with all sorts of equipment, and of course the first aid kit was right at the back, so he had to shuffle through everything to find it.
He almost missed it at first, the little shift in the air. He’d blame it on the pain and his delayed responses. Logan turned slowly, heart in his throat.
The oviraptor cocked its head and chirped softly.
Logan froze.
He was covered in blood, probably stinking of “meal,” and completely exposed out here on the beach.
The oviraptor was maybe three and a half feet tall. They were named for the assumption they were mainly scavengers, stealing eggs and hunting smaller dinosaurs and lizards rather than coordinating attacks on prey.
Logan made a decision to find the guy who came to that assumption and beat him around the head with it.
There were six oviraptors in this pack, fanned out in a V shape farther back on the beach. The lead animal, the one currently only a few feet away from him, snapped its jaws, revealing long rows of very sharp, short teeth.
The fact that it looked like a huge turkey was not much consolation when Logan was staring down those teeth. And claws.
He had a feeling if the animals launched a successful attack, no one would even find pieces of him. It would just be his blood-covered truck left abandoned on the beach, with some poor sod tasked with figuring out what had gotten him.
Logan was not going to let that happen.
His guns were either in the cab of the truck or locked away—he didn’t have time to grab one and fire off enough shots to take down all the oviraptors.
The wind picked up then, ruffling the hair on the back of his head, and he knew he had one chance. Just one.
In a smooth motion, Logan bent down, wrenched the lockbox open, and grabbed a smoke bomb as his injured wrist screamed in protest. That didn’t matter. He twisted the pin and pulled it, then launched it at the animal on the truck as hard as he could. He turned his back and ducked down again, pulling his T-shirt up to cover his nose and mouth.
The oviraptor screamed as the smoke bomb flashed, then puffed out the thick smoke. Unsure of what was going on, the lead oviraptor hopped away, and Logan didn’t wait for them to figure out that it was just smoke and mirrors—ha—he ran.
But one of the oviraptors had figured out how to get around the smoke and was waiting for him, crouched in a distinctive attack position near the front of the truck. Logan just had time to open the passenger side door before it launched itself at him. He brought his hands up, smelling the stinking predator as it snapped and clawed at his hands and arms and tried to gut him with one of the claws on its strong hind leg.
The claw caught on his leather belt, disorientating it, and that was enough for Logan to punch it in the side of the head and wrench himself into the truck, pull the door closed behind himself, and lock it.
Then he passed the fuck out.
Chapter Six
THE INFIRMARY was in the same building as Kit’s lab and was used most often to treat small scratches and burns and the occasional twisted ankle. Though someone had thought it appropriate to build an ambulance entrance into the infirmary, no ambulance was in operation on the island. In a serious emergency, the helicopter landing pad was half a mile away.
Forward planning was not one of the island’s strengths. They were always dealing with the consequences of hastily made decisions and failing to learn from previous mistakes.
Kit rushed through the small crowd of people who had gathered, either having heard the gossip or wanting to see for themselves. He ignored them all and pushed open the swinging doors that led to the treatment room.
“Hello?”
Logan was sitting on a bench, leaning against the wall. He cradled one arm to his chest and twisted his lip into a smirk when he saw Kit come through.
“When I asked for a doctor,” he croaked, “I meant one with a degree in medicine.”
“Shut up,” Kit snapped. He crossed the room to the sink and started to wash up, ignoring the trembling in his hands. “My mother was an emergency room nurse for fourteen years. I’m the best thing you’ve got right now.”
“They were going to get the nurse,” Logan whined.
“She’s not here. She’s in Auckland.”
Logan coughed a laugh, then groaned. “Helpful.”
“Yeah. You’re stuck with me, so get used to it.”
He snapped on a pair of blue gloves, then turned back to Logan. Who was in a bad way.
“What the fuck happened?” Kit asked.
“I was on my way back,” Logan started as Kit grabbed a pair of fabric scissors and started cutting through L
ogan’s shirt. “Stopped to pee. After crossing over to the West Island. Got caught by a carnotaur.”
Kit paused. “Holy shit.”
Logan tipped his head back and groaned.
Kit continued working, stripping away the fabric so he could see the extent of Logan’s injuries. He was already bruised in places—two black eyes and mottled discoloration along his jaw—his nose was broken, and his lip was split in two places. It looked like he’d caught a claw to his shoulder that had cut deep into his back. It was going to require stitches.
His hands showed distinctive defense wounds with scratches and dried blood caking his forearms, and considering the strange angle he was holding his left hand at, his wrist was likely dislocated.
“Lean forward for me,” Kit said, gently helping Logan up.
As he gently prodded down Logan’s sides, he figured Logan was suffering from at least a couple of cracked ribs too.
But it was the bite marks that worried him. Those were ripe for infection.
“Okay,” he said. “Did anyone call for the helicopter?”
“Dunno,” Logan slurred. “I’d really appreciate some pain meds now, though.”
Kit nodded. “Stay there,” he instructed.
He pulled the gloves off and stormed back through to the infirmary waiting room, where at least a dozen hangers-on were hovering.
“Helicopter?” he demanded.
“They can’t get one out here for at least a few hours,” someone responded. Kit glared at her. Intern, he figured. Probably one of the ranger interns. She looked terrified of him. Kit could work with that.
“I can keep trying,” she offered.
“I’m going to try to patch him up. See if you can get a doctor to come out here.”
The intern nodded and scrambled for a phone.
