Still screaming, Dodgson felt himself carried back into the jungle. High branches of trees lashed his face. The hot breath of the animal whooshed in snorts over his body. Saliva dripped onto his torso. He thought he would pass out from terror.
But the jaws never closed.
Inside the store, they stared at the tiny monitor as Dodgson was carried away in the jaws of the tyrannosaur. Over the radio, they heard his tinny distant screams.
“You see?” Malcolm said. “There is a God.”
Levine was frowning. “The rex didn’t kill him.” He pointed to the screen. “Look, there, you can see his arms are still moving. Why didn’t it kill him?”
Sarah Harding waited until the screams faded. She crawled out from beneath the car, standing up in the morning light. She opened the door and got behind the wheel. The key was in the ignition; she gripped it with muddy fingers. She twisted it.
There was a chugging sound, and then a soft whine. All the dashboard lights came on. Then silence. Was the car working? She turned the wheel and it moved easily. So the power steering was on.
“Doc.”
“Yes, Sarah.”
“The car’s working. I’m coming back.”
“Okay,” he said. “Hurry.”
She put it in drive, and felt the transmission engage. The car was unusually quiet, almost silent. Which was why she was able to hear the faint thumping of a distant helicopter.
Daylight
She was driving beneath a thick canopy of trees, back toward the village. She heard the sound of the helicopter build in intensity. Then it roared overhead, unseen through the foliage above. She had the window down, and was listening. It seemed to move off to her right, toward the south.
The radio clicked. “Sarah.”
“Yes, Doc.”
“Listen: we can’t communicate with the helicopter.”
“Okay,” she said. She understood what had to be done. “Where’s the landing site?”
“South. About a mile. There’s a clearing. Take the ridge road.”
She was coming up to the fork. She saw the ridge road going off to the right. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going.”
“Tell them to wait for us,” Thorne said. “Then come back and get us.”
“Everybody okay?” she said.
“Everybody’s fine,” Thorne said.
She followed the road, hearing a change in the sound of the helicopter. She realized it must be landing. The rotors continued, a low whirr, which meant the pilot wasn’t going to shut down.
The road curved off to the left. The sound of the helicopter was now a muted thumping. She accelerated, driving fast, careening around the corner. The road was still wet from the rains the night before. She wasn’t raising a cloud of dust behind her. There was nothing to tell anyone that she was here.
“Doc. How long will they wait?”
“I don’t know,” Thorne said, over the radio. “Can you see it?”
“Not yet,” she said.
Levine stared out the window. He looked at the lightening sky, through the trees. The streaks of red were gone. It was now a bright even blue. Daylight was definitely coming.
Daylight . . .
And then he put it together. He shivered as he realized. He went to the window on the opposite side, looked out toward the tennis court. He stared at the spot where the carnotauruses had been the night before. They were gone now.
Just as he feared.
“This is bad,” he said.
“It’s only just now eight,” Thorne said, glancing at his watch.
“How long will it take her?” Levine said.
“I don’t know. Three or four minutes.”
“And then to get back?” Levine said.
“Another five minutes.”
“I hope we make it that long.” He was frowning unhappily.
“Why?” Thorne said. “We’re okay.”
“In a few minutes,” Levine said, “we’ll have direct sun shining down outside.”
“So what?” Thorne said.
The radio clicked. “Doc,” Sarah said. “I see it. I see the helicopter.”
Sarah came around a final curve and saw the landing site off to her left. The helicopter was there, blades spinning. She saw another junction in the road, with a narrow road leading left down a hill, into jungle, and then out to the clearing. She drove down it, descending a series of switchbacks, forcing her to go slow. She was now back in the jungle, beneath the canopy of trees. The ground leveled out, she splashed across a narrow stream, and accelerated forward.
Directly ahead there was a gap in the tree canopy, and sunlight on the clearing beyond. She saw the helicopter. Its rotors were beginning to spin faster—it was leaving! She saw the pilot behind the bubble, wearing dark glasses. The pilot checked his watch, shook his head to the copilot, and then began to lift off.
Sarah honked her horn, and drove madly forward. But she knew they could not hear her. Her car bounced and jolted. Thorne was saying, “What is it? Sarah! What’s happening?”
She drove forward, leaning out the window, yelling “Wait! Wait!” But the helicopter was already rising into the air, lifting up out of her view. The sound began to fade. By the time her car burst out of the jungle into the clearing, she saw the helicopter heading away, disappearing over the rocky rim of the island.
And then it was gone.
“Let’s stay calm,” Levine said, pacing the little store. “Tell her to get back right away. And let’s stay calm.” He seemed to be talking to himself. He walked from one wall to the next, pounding the wooden planks with his fist. He shook his head unhappily. “Just tell her to hurry. You think she can be back in five minutes?”
“Yes,” Thorne said. “Why? What is it, Richard?”
Levine pointed out the window. “Daylight,” he said. “We’re trapped here in daylight.”
“We were trapped here all night, too,” Thorne said. “We made it okay.”
“But daylight is different,” Levine said.
“Why?”
“Because at night,” he said, “this is carnotaurus territory. Other animals don’t come in. We saw no other animals at all around here, last night. But once daylight comes, the carnotaurus can’t hide any more. Not in open spaces, in direct sunlight. So they’ll leave. And then this won’t be their territory any more.”
“Which means?”
Levine glanced at Kelly, over by the computer. He hesitated, then said, “Just take my word for it. We have to get out of here right away.”
“And go where?”
Sitting at the computer, Kelly listened to Thorne talking to Dr. Levine. She fingered the piece of paper with Arby’s password on it. She felt very nervous. The way Dr. Levine was talking was making her nervous. She wished Sarah was back by now. She would feel better when Sarah was here.
Kelly didn’t like to think about their situation. She had been holding herself together, keeping up her spirits, until the helicopter came. But now the helicopter had come and gone. And she noticed neither of the men was talking about when it would come back. Maybe they knew something. Like it wasn’t coming back.
Dr. Levine was saying they had to get out of the store. Thorne was asking Dr. Levine where he wanted to go. Levine said, “I’d prefer to get off this island, but I don’t see how we can. So I suppose we should make our way back to the trailer. It’s the safest place now.”
Back to the trailer, she thought. Where she and Sarah had gone to get Malcolm. Kelly didn’t want to go back to the trailer.
She wanted to go home.
Tensely, Kelly smoothed out the piece of damp paper, pressing it flat on the table beside her. Dr. Levine came over. “Stop fooling around,” he said. “See if you can find Sarah.”
“I want to go home,” Kelly said.
Levine sighed. “I know, Kelly,” he said. “We all want to go home.” And he walked away again, moving quickly, tensely.
Kelly pushed the paper away, turning it over, and s
liding it under the keyboard, in case she should need the password again. As she did so, her eye was caught by some writing on the other side.
She pulled the paper out again.
She saw:
She realized at once what it was: a screen shot from Levine’s apartment. From the night when Arby had been recovering files from the computer. It seemed like a million years ago, another lifetime. But it had really been only . . . what? Two days ago.
She remembered how proud Arby had been when he had recovered the data. She remembered how they had all tried to make sense of this list. Now, of course, all these names had meaning. They were all real places: the laboratory, the worker village, the convenience store, the gas station. . . .
She stared at the list.
You’re kidding, she thought.
“Dr. Thorne,” she said. “I think you better look at this.”
Thorne stared as she pointed at the list. “You think so?” he said.
“That’s what it says: a boathouse.”
“Can you find it, Kelly?”
“You mean, find it on the video?” She shrugged. “I can try.”
“Try,” Thorne said. He glanced at Levine, who was across the room, pounding on the walls again. He picked up the radio.
“Sarah? It’s Doc.”
And the radio crackled. “Doc? I’ve had to stop for a minute.”
“Why?” Thorne said.
Sarah Harding was stopped on the ridge road. Fifty yards ahead, she saw the tyrannosaur, going down the road away from her. She could see that he had Dodgson in his mouth. And somehow, Dodgson was still alive. His body was still moving. She thought she could hear him scream.
She was surprised to find she had no feeling about him at all. She watched dispassionately as the tyrannosaur left the road, and headed off down a slope, back into the jungle.
Sarah started the car, and drove cautiously forward.
At the computer console, Kelly flicked through video images, one after another, until finally she found it: a wooden dock, enclosed inside a shed or a boathouse, open to the air at the far end. The interior of the boathouse looked in pretty good shape; there weren’t a lot of vines and ferns growing over things. She saw a powerboat tied up, rocking against the dock. She saw three oil drums to one side. And out the back of the boathouse there was open water, and sunlight; it looked like a river.
“What do you think?” she said to Thorne.
“I think it’s worth a try,” he said, looking over her shoulder. “But where is it? Can you find a map?”
“Maybe,” she said. She flicked the keys, and managed to get back to the main screen, with its perplexing icons.
Arby awoke, yawned, and came over to look at what she was doing. “Nice graphics. You logged on, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I did. But I’m having a little trouble figuring it out.”
Levine was pacing, staring out the windows. “This is all well and good,” he said, “but it is getting brighter out there by the minute. Don’t you understand? We need a way out of here. This building is single-wall construction. It’s fine for the tropics, but it’s basically a shack.”
“It’ll do,” Thorne said.
“For three minutes, maybe. I mean, look at this,” Levine said. He walked to the door, rapped it with his knuckles. “This door is just—”
With a crash, the wood splintered around the lock, and the door swung open. Levine was thrown aside, landing hard on the floor.
A raptor stood hissing in the doorway.
A Way Out
Sitting at the console, Kelly was frozen in terror. She watched as Thorne ran forward from the side, throwing the full weight of his body against the door, slamming it hard against the raptor. Startled, the animal was knocked back. The door closed on its clawed hand. Thorne leaned against the door. On the other side, the animal snarled and pounded.
“Help me!” Thorne shouted. Levine scrambled to his feet and ran forward, adding his weight.
“I told you!” Levine shouted.
Suddenly there were raptors all around the store. Snarling, they threw themselves at the windows, denting the steel bars, pushing them in toward the glass. They slammed against the wooden walls, knocking down shelves, sending cans and bottles clattering to the floor. In several places, the wood began to splinter on the walls.
Levine looked back at her: “Find a way out of here!”
Kelly stared. The computer was forgotten.
“Come on, Kel,” Arby said. “Concentrate.”
She turned back to the screen, unsure what to do. She clicked on the cross in the left corner. Nothing happened. She clicked on the upper-left circle. Suddenly, icons began to print out rapidly, filling the screen.
“Don’t worry, there must be a key to explain it,” Arby said. “We just need to know what—”
But Kelly was not listening, she was pressing more buttons and moving the cursor, already trying to get something to happen, to get a help screen, something. Anything.
Suddenly, the whole screen began to twist, to distort.
“What did you do?” Arby said, in alarm.
Kelly was sweating. “I don’t know,” she said. She pulled her hands away from the keyboard.
“It’s worse,” Arby said. “You made it worse.”
The screen continued to squeeze together, the icons shifting, distorting slowly as they watched.
“Come on, kids!” Levine shouted.
“We’re trying!” Kelly said.
Arby said, “It’s becoming a cube.”
Thorne pushed the big glass-walled refrigerator in front of the door. The raptor slammed against the metal, rattling the cans inside.
“Where are the guns?” Levine said.
“Sarah has three in her car.”
“Great.” At the windows, some of the bars were now so deeply dented that they broke the glass. Along the right-hand wall, the wood was splintering, tearing open big gaps.
“We have to get out of here,” Levine shouted at Kelly. “We have to find a way!” He ran to the rear of the store, to the bathrooms. But a moment later he returned. “They’re back there, too!”
It was happening fast, all around them.
On the screen, she now saw a rotating cube, turning in space. Kelly didn’t know how to stop it.
“Come on, Kel,” Arby said, peering at her through swollen eyes. “You can do it. Concentrate. Come on.”
Everyone in the room was shouting. Kelly stared at the cube on the screen, feeling hopeless and lost. She didn’t know what she was doing any more. She didn’t know why she was there. She didn’t know what the point of anything was. Why wasn’t Sarah here?
Standing beside her, Arby said, “Come on. Do the icons one at a time, Kel. You can do it. Come on. Stay with it. Focus.”
But she couldn’t focus. She couldn’t click on the icons, they were rotating too fast on the screen. There must be parallel processors to handle all the graphics. She just stared at it. She found herself thinking of all sorts of things—thoughts that just came unbidden into her mind.
The cord under the desk.
Hard-wired.
Lots of graphics.
Sarah talking to her in the trailer.
“Come on, Kel. You have to do this now. Find a way out.”
In the trailer, Sarah said: Most of what people tell you will be wrong.
“It’s important, Kel,” Arby said. He was trembling as he stood beside her. She knew he concentrated on computers as a way to block things out. As a way to—
The wall splintered wide, an eight-inch plank cracking inward, and a raptor stuck his head through, snarling, snapping his jaws.
She kept thinking of the cord under the desk. The cord under the desk. Her legs had kicked the cord under the desk.
The cord under the desk.
Arby said, “It’s important.”
And then it hit her.
“No,” she said to him. “It’s not important.” And she dropped off th
e seat, crawling down under the desk to look.
“What are you doing?” Arby screamed.
But already Kelly had her answer. She saw the cable from the computer going down into the floor, through a neat hole. She saw a seam in the wood. Her fingers scrabbled at the floor, pulling at it. And suddenly the panel came away in her hands. She looked down. Darkness.
Yes.
There was a crawlspace. No, more. A tunnel.
She shouted, “Here!”
The refrigerator fell forward. The raptors crashed through the front door. From the sides, other animals tore through the walls, knocking over the display cases. The raptors sprang into the room, snarling and ducking. They found the bundle of Arby’s wet clothes and snapped at them, ripping them apart in fury.
They moved quickly, hunting.
But the people were gone.
Escape
Kelly was in the lead, holding a flashlight. They moved, single file, along damp concrete walls. They were in a tunnel four feet square, with flat metal racks of cables along the left side. Water and gas pipes ran near the ceiling. The tunnel smelled moldy. She heard the squeak of rats.
They came to a Y-junction. She looked both ways. To the right was a long straight passageway, going into darkness. It probably led to the laboratory, she thought. To the left was a much shorter section of tunnel, with stairs at the end.
She went left.
She crawled up through a narrow concrete shaft, and pushed open a wooden trapdoor at the top. She found herself in a small utility building, surrounded by cables and rusted pipes. Sunlight streamed in through broken windows. The others climbed up beside her.
She looked out the window, and saw Sarah Harding driving down the hill toward them.
The Lost World Page 39
