by Roland Smith
“You keep it,” Ted said. “You’re a better bot pilot than I am, and I’m going to have my hands full with the Rivlan. We’ll figure out a way to communicate when I’m back on board.” He looked at his watch. “Time to go. Stay alert. We’ll be back. Good luck.”
“You know,” Crow said. “I’m not that comfortable leaving a couple of kids by themselves in the jungle.”
Ted smiled. “They’re more resourceful than they look.”
“Thanks a lot, Ted,” Marty said.
“And they’re faster than we are,” Ted added. “If they have to run, we’d just slow them down.”
Crow gave him a reluctant nod, threw one last glance at the hatchlings, then followed Ted down the dark trail back to the dock.
Marty watched them go, then turned to Dylan. “You want to get the meat buckets ready?” Marty asked. “I’ll check out the huts to see if I can find something to attach the tracking tags.”
Marty walked over to the closest hut. It was obvious that it was being used by Grace and Ana. There was a Moleskine journal on one of the hammocks, with a fountain pen stuck between its pages. On the other side of the hut, Ana’s laptop sat on a crude desk made from a split log.
He knew better than to peek inside Grace’s journal.
But this is an emergency!
It turned out it wasn’t Grace’s Moleskine. He could tell from the smell that it was one of Rose’s journals. He flipped through the pages quickly, admiring the sketches and wondering why she had drawn them. All he knew was that the swollen journal had nothing to do with their current dilemma. He tossed it back on the hammock and hurried over to Ana’s laptop. Her last journal entry was on the screen. She was frantic about the communications being down and everyone disappearing. She felt as if they were getting picked off one by one. Marty scanned the entry quickly until he reached the final paragraph.
Now Luther is gone…. We don’t know if he wandered away from camp or was taken. Buck and I are going to go out looking for him. Grace is going to stay in camp and feed the hatchlings, which have just woken up.
This meant that Ana and Buck had been gone for several hours, and Luther a lot longer than that.
Where’s Grace?
He started to leave the hut, then remembered why he’d come here in the first place. He rummaged through a cupboard and found a roll of twine.
Dylan had the buckets ready, and the hatchlings were snapping the air so wildly Marty thought their sharp teeth would shatter. Getting a string around their necks with the tracking tags was not going to be easy. He decided to wait until they were asleep to give it a shot.
As they fed the hungry hatchlings, Marty told Dylan about what he had learned from Ana’s computer.
Snap!
“So we have ten people missing in the rain forest,” Dylan said.
Snap!
“Dang, that was close!” Marty checked his fingers to make sure they were all there, then fished out another hunk of meat from the bucket. “I guess you’re right. Ten missing in ac—”
“I’m not missing and you’re feeding them all wrong.”
Marty and Dylan whirled around. Grace was standing three feet behind them, looking as if she had been swimming in a swamp, swallowed by a gator, and spit back out. She was covered with leaves and slime from the top of her head to the bottoms of her boots.
“What happened to you?” Marty asked.
“I got lost. Found my way back here by the lights. And your loud voices. Ana and Buck aren’t back?”
Marty shook his head.
“Luther?”
“No,” Marty said, wiping the blood off his hands.
“Where’s Ted?”
Marty told her about Yvonne.
“Slowing Yvonne down won’t do us any good,” Grace said. “He needs to kill her.”
Hearing this from his normally pacifist cousin and former twin was a little shocking.
“That’s not how Ted and Wolfe do things,” Marty said. “Which is what separates them from Noah Blackwood. And what do you mean we’re feeding the hatchlings wrong?”
Grace stepped forward, grabbed a couple of pieces of meat, and tossed them into the air.
Snap! Snap!
“Oh,” Marty said.
“Wow,” Dylan said.
“Buck came up with the technique.”
“You mean Buckley Johnson?” Marty asked.
“I guess. Everyone here calls him Buck.” Grace continued tossing meat, finishing up the feeding in less than two minutes. She opened the corral door and the hatchlings staggered outside full as ticks, then collapsed on the ground and fell asleep. “I’m going to change,” she said.
“That would be good,” Marty said. “Then we can figure out what we’re going to do.” He turned to Dylan and showed him the roll of twine. “Time to lasso a couple of sleeping dinosaurs.”
Getting the tags on the hatchlings turned out to be no big deal. The worst part was being so close to them as they digested their food. By the time they finished, Grace had reappeared looking more like herself and less like a swamp monster.
“What are you doing?”
“Tagging dinosaurs,” Dylan said.
Grace shook her head. “I knew it would happen.”
“What?” Dylan asked.
“I knew if you hung around Marty and Luther, they’d corrupt you. You’d start sounding just like them. It’s a disease. Incurable.”
Dylan grinned and climbed over the fence. “Tracking tags,” he said.
“Why?”
“In case we have to let them go,” Marty answered, joining Dylan.
“We’re not letting them go!” Grace protested.
“I said in case.” Marty walked over to the water bucket and washed the gore off his hands. “Tell us what’s been going on here.”
When Grace finished filling them in, they all gathered around the Gizmo. Yvonne was still in the wheelhouse next to G.I. Joe, barreling up the Amazon in the Anjo.
“She doesn’t seem to be slowing down,” Dylan said.
Marty looked at the GPS. The Anjo was an hour away. He flew the dragonspy out of the Anjo’s wheelhouse to look for the Rivlan. He found it about a mile upriver.
“What are they doing?” Grace asked.
The Rivlan was slowly chugging across the river from right to left. Ted and Crow were standing at the stern looking at something behind them. “I don’t know,” Marty said. “But if they don’t hurry up, Yvonne will be on them. She’s only a few minutes away.”
They continued their odd course all the way to the left bank. Ted jumped off the boat to shore. Even with night vision they couldn’t tell what he was doing. Marty flew the dragonspy higher to get a bird’s-eye view.
Yvonne’s boat was tearing up the middle of the river. When it got parallel to the Rivlan, there was a loud, grinding explosion. Yvonne’s boat went airborne for about twenty-five yards, then slammed back onto the water like a rock.
“They pulled a bunch of flotsam and jetsam into Yvonne’s path,” Marty said.
Yvonne’s boat started to spin out of control back downriver, past where the Rivlan was tied to shore. They could see figures running around the deck desperately trying to get the boat under control. Marty flew the dragonspy back to the deck of the Rivlan, slowing it to a hover within an inch of Ted’s face. Ted smiled into the lens and gave them a thumbs-up.
“Guess that’ll take care of Yvonne,” Dylan said.
Grace shook her head. “No, it won’t,” she said. “She doesn’t give up.”
Crow came into view. He was pointing to something offscreen. Marty flew the dragonspy up into the air so he could see what it was.
“Uh-oh,” Marty said.
Dylan looked at Grace. “You were right.”
The Anjo had recovered and was heading back upriver, not nearly as fast as before, but steadily. It was already past where the Rivlan was tied up along shore. Marty flew the dragonspy into the Anjo wheelhouse. Yvonne and the other guy were in the
same position. Yvonne was holding a bloody towel to her forehead. The guy at the wheel was holding his left arm across his chest like it had been injured.
“Wounded, but undeterred,” Grace said.
“Eyes straight ahead,” Dylan said. “Looks like they don’t know the stuff they banged into was pulled into their path intentionally.”
“It’s going to be hard for the Rivlan to get in front without Yvonne noticing,” Grace said.
Marty took the dragonspy three hundred feet above the river. “It’s going to be impossible. They can’t pass them on the river and the forest is too thick to use the hover mode to get around them.”
He flew back to the Rivlan. Ted and Crow were below deck in the control room. Ted had opened a hatch in the floor and was fiddling with some electronics.
Ted looked up at the hovering dragonspy. “Can you hear me?”
Marty turned up the volume as far it could go, then flew the dragonspy up and down as if he were nodding yes.
“Listen carefully,” Ted said. “The Rivlan is dead in the water. We aren’t going anywhere. There’s something wrong with the fuel cells. It could take me several hours to fix, and to be honest I might not be able to fix it at all. You need to run. You need to hide. If Ana and Buck and Grace are back, take them with you. Let the hatchlings go. We’ll round them up later. And I’ve been thinking about the Gizmos and the tracking tags. If you’ve already put the tags on the hatchlings, take them off. Take your tracking tags off, too. Destroy them. I think Blackwood has gotten his hands on a Gizmo. That’s the only way he could have found a back door into our system and shut it down. Once he has his people in place down here, he’s going to turn the system back on, and when he does, he’ll know exactly where you are. Keep the dragonspy close to your location. I’ll figure out a way to hack into it with my Gizmo to find you. Do you have all that?”
Marty glanced at Grace and Dylan. They looked as worried as he felt. He flew the dragonspy up and down.
Yes.
Waking up the hatchlings was like trying to wake the dead. Dylan and Marty pushed and cajoled them while Grace gathered supplies from the huts.
“They’re like slugs with long necks,” Marty said, leaning his entire body against one of them.
“At least they aren’t trying to snap our heads off,” Dylan said, pushing on the other.
Marty circled around his hatchling and pulled on its massive tail. He was rewarded with a blast of gas that sent him staggering backward. For a moment he thought he was going to faint. When his head cleared, he grabbed the knob on the end of the hatchling’s tail and held his breath. He was about to give it another jerk when he noticed something blinking. At first he thought the noxious gas had messed up his vision, but then he leaned in closer. There was a flashing green light just beneath the surface of the hatchling’s mottled skin.
“I think I just discovered how Noah Blackwood knows where the hatchlings are.”
Dylan joined him and looked down at the flashing light, then went over and checked his hatchling. “This one has one, too.”
Grace walked up to the corral, shouldering two heavy backpacks. “What are you doing? We have to go.”
“We can’t go until we wake them up enough to walk. And if we don’t get rid of this …” He pointed to the flashing light. “… Yvonne will find them in about ten seconds.”
“Subcutaneous tracking tags!”
“Sub-what?” Marty said.
Grace dumped the packs and climbed over the fence.
“Yvonne must have put them in when they were at the Ark.” Grace reached into her pocket and pulled out a knife, as Marty gaped. This was definitely not the same kind and gentle Grace he’d known his entire life. His cousin did not carry a knife in her pocket. She expertly flipped the blade open with her thumb.
“Uh …,” Marty said. “What are you going to do?”
“Dino surgery.”
Before he could object, Grace made a shallow cut where the light was flashing. The hatchling turned its head and bared its sharp teeth at her.
“So that’s the trick,” Marty said. “To wake them up, all you have to do is stab them.”
Grace squeezed the bloody tracker out and dropped it into his hand. It was about the size of a thumbtack.
“Thanks.” Marty stuffed it into his front pocket.
The patient got to its feet sluggishly. Marty, Grace, and Dylan backed away. It was one thing to feed a hatchling over a barrier, and another to be standing within its enclosure right next to it. The hatchling was taller than all of them, and it did not look happy.
“You better get the other tag out quickly,” Dylan said. “I don’t like the look in his eyes.”
Marty didn’t, either. The dino looked ticked off at being woken up and stabbed. Grace hurried around the back of Number Two and got to work.
Snap!
Marty grabbed Grace by her shirt collar and yanked her out of the way just in time.
“Thanks,” Grace said. “I made the incision, but I didn’t get the bug.”
The dinosaurs had whipped around and were facing them with their heads bobbing on their long necks.
“Maybe it will fall out on its own,” Marty said.
“And maybe it won’t,” Grace said.
“Distract them,” Dylan said. “I’ll try to get behind this one and get it out.”
“Are you sure?” Marty asked.
Dylan didn’t answer. He was on the move, following the fence. Marty and Grace started jumping up and down and waving their arms to get the hatchlings’ attention. Dylan positioned himself directly behind them and started to crawl on his hands and knees.
Number One swiveled its head.
“Busted!” Marty shouted. “Get out of there!”
But it was too late. Number Two swung its tail, sending Dylan sprawling into the fence. Both dinos started moving toward him. Marty dashed in and grabbed Number Two’s tail. It let out a terrible scream.
“Run!” Marty shouted, still holding on to the tail. “Get out of here! Open the gate!”
Grace ran over and yanked Dylan to his feet. They stumbled over to the gate, swung it open, and ran through. Marty let go of the tail. The two dinos turned on him. He ran.
Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap!
He dove headfirst over the fence, not sure if he’d been bitten or not. He rolled, got to his feet, and ran into the forest. He didn’t look back until he had taken refuge behind a large tree. The dinosaurs had found the gate and were dashing through the opening. Grace and Dylan were hiding behind the building. The hatchlings slowed down when they reached the center of the camp. They sniffed the fire pit, then made some odd guttural sounds that Marty hadn’t heard before. He stepped out from behind the tree. Grace and Dylan came out from behind the building and joined him.
“Are you okay?” Grace asked.
“I think so,” Marty said. “A few scrapes and bruises on the front, but what I’m worried about is my butt. I think they might have snapped a chunk out of it.” He turned around.
“Got your back pocket and a piece of your tee,” Dylan said. “It looks like you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Hilarious.” Marty turned back around.
“Did you get the other tracker?” Grace asked.
Marty opened his hand, revealing a flashing tracker. “It popped out when they swung around to kill me. I caught it on the fly as I was diving over the fence. You should have seen it. It was beautiful.”
“I’m sure,” Grace said. “Crush them both and let’s get out of here.”
“Not so fast,” Marty said. “I think we should keep them intact until we figure out the best use for them. At the very least, we should see which way the hatchlings go and head in the opposite direction with the trackers in order to get Yvonne off their trail.”
“Looks like they’re going that way,” Dylan said, pointing.
The hatchlings were moving quickly toward the edge of camp. They had their heads down as if they were on the s
cent of something.
“They’re headed for the main trail,” Grace said. “Do you think they’ll be okay?”
Marty felt where his pocket had been. “I think they’ll be fine. Where’s the main trail go?”
“To Flanna’s web.”
“Her web?”
Grace nodded. “Zip lines. I haven’t been up there, but Ana told me she has miles of line strung throughout the canopy with observation platforms, shelters, and provisions.”
Marty began to reconsider his decision to head in the opposite direction from the hatchlings.
“I’m not sure how far down the trail you have to go to get up,” Grace continued. “I’m pretty sure that’s where Luther was heading when he disappeared.”
Marty was pretty sure, too. Luther had never seen a tree he didn’t want to climb.
“Luther was a monkey in a former life,” Marty said. “Can you get up top going the opposite direction?”
“I think so,” Grace said. “But I think it’s farther down the trail on that side.”
“But the web is all connected?”
“That’s what Ana said.”
“Then that’s where we’ll go.” He looked at the Gizmo. “They’re forty minutes out. I hope the way up isn’t too far down the trail.”
He also hoped Ted would get the Rivlan working, and that Luther and the others were all okay, and that Wolfe was close to finding his parents.
Luther was not okay. He had been sliced, poked, bitten, and stung, and he was exhausted and hungry. Especially hungry. He’d hoped that when it got dark his captors would stop and fry up a monkey or a parrot or something. But they had kept moving, seemingly unaffected by the dark or their growling bellies. During the day, with his hands tied, it had been difficult enough to protect himself from getting whacked by thorns and sharp leaves. Now that it was dark, it was impossible.
Death by a thousand cuts, he thought again. Tenderizing me before they throw me into the communal pot.
Luther’s only respite had a been terrifying ride in a dugout canoe across a river. When they finally reached the opposite shore, he’d thought they would push him down a short path to their village and the walking torture would be over. But it wasn’t over. They continued walking, and walking, and walking, or in Luther’s case, stumbling. His tired feet seemed to be finding every exposed root and rodent hole in the rain forest.
