Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall

by Thomas P Hopp

CHAPTER 7

  With every turn of the road he put between them and the tyrannosaurus, Chase’s mood lifted. To have fought with such a creature and survived was incredible. Going through it all with Kit Daniels somehow thrilled him beyond words. As seconds went by and their distance from the ranch house increased without further sight of the monster, he began to chuckle. Overdosed on an excess of adrenaline, his laughter quickly escalated to semi-hysterics.

  “Can you believe that?” he shouted at Kit.

  She had sunk into the corner of her seat and was staring at him. “What’s your problem?” she asked.

  “Pretty good rescue, huh?” His mirth faded when he glanced at her sour expression.

  “Rescue? Seems like I had to do quite a lot of it myself.”

  “Oh, sure,” he agreed. “You’re quite a hand with a pitchfork. I’m impressed. I want you with me next time I take on a T rex.”

  She let out an exasperated sigh. “What’s so funny about me almost getting eaten?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I just can’t quite believe we’re still alive.”

  She wore her sour face resolutely. “It wrecked my house.”

  “Yeah,” Chase agreed. “But you wrecked his mouth pretty good with that pitch fork. And I got a couple of good shots in, even if I do have to say so myself.”

  “Ooh,” she said sarcastically. “My hero.”

  “C’mon,” he said. “Lighten up. Think what a team we make. This is one hell of a first date if you ask me.”

  “Date?” She clucked her tongue. “I don’t know what in the world you’re talking about. This is no date. It’s a struggle for survival.”

  Chase sighed. He couldn’t explain his feelings any better than he already had. Despite doing eighty on a straightaway he took his eyes off the road for a second and smiled at her. Kit kept her eyes on the road and suddenly she flung herself at the steering wheel, grabbing it and pulling hard to the right. “Turn!” she shouted.

  Before Chase could react they were off the road and careening over rough ground. The truck heeled up on one side and Chase yanked the wheel the other way and the tires crashed back down. As they came to a halt on a small two-rutted dirt road, he caught his breath and stared at Kit in disbelief.

  “You trying to get us killed? Again?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  She smiled at his anger, having neatly turned the tables. She pointed up the dirt road. “We should go see Dr. Ogilvey.”

  Chase suddenly recognized the siding she had put them on. It was the fenceline road leading to Sandstone Mountain.

  “Oh no, we don’t,” he said. “We’re not going up there. We’re going someplace where there’s police and guns and people who can help us deal with that dinosaur.”

  “But we can’t just leave Dr. Ogilvey up there by himself. He’s in danger too.”

  “You know, you are really something,” Chase said, gripping the wheel and pressing the accelerator down. As they moved forward at a more reasonable speed along the narrow brush-lined track, he chuckled one more time.

  “What now?” she snipped.

  “You’ve got a good point, though. We have a problem with a dinosaur, so who better to go see than a paleontologist?”

  They rolled into Dr. Ogilvey’s camp fifteen minutes later, finding everything the same as when they had left it. The Land Rover was there but the old paleontologist was not. They walked down the creek bed and climbed the slope to the dig. He wasn’t there either.

  “Dr. O?” Kit called out.

  From a hole dug under the cliff at the back of the excavation came a muffled call. “In here.”

  Kit knelt and stuck her head into the opening. “Dr. O, please come out. Something terrible has happened.”

  “No,” Ogilvey called back. “You come in. Something wonderful has happened.”

  “But there’s a tyrannosaurus.”

  “Couldn’t compare with what’s in here!”

  Kit glanced at Chase in frustration. Chase shrugged and gestured at the opening. “After you.”

  She ducked into the dark gap like Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole and he crawled in after her. They scrambled on hands and knees under the cliff rock until a space opened up around them, a chamber large enough to stand in, lit by Ogilvey’s flashlight. The paleontologist grinned at them like the Cheshire Cat, his eyeglasses glinting in the flashlight’s glow.

  “Listen,” Chase began forcefully, pointing a finger at Ogilvey.

  “No, look!” crowed the professor, casting his flashlight’s beam on the wall beside him. Chase intended to say more but what the light revealed made him stop. The wall wasn’t part of a natural tunnel. It was a corridor of stone blocks covered in sculpted images and hieroglyphics stretching from floor to ceiling. Inhuman creatures sculpted in relief six feet tall, seemingly had been put there to further strain their already-boggled minds.

  Kit reacted first. “They’re dinosaurs.”

  “Yes, Kit!” Ogilvey chirped. “Living Pteronychus, sculpted in the flesh 65 million years ago by their own hand.” He illuminated one of the images closely. “The head with carnivorous teeth, the three-clawed hands, the bipedal stance—look at the extraordinary detail of the carving. So much more here than the skeletons outside could ever tell us. A graphic representation of anatomy I could only have guessed at. Look at the feathers. It seems more bird than reptile.”

  The body and arms of the pteronychus were covered with delicately sculpted impressions of feathers extending from the reptilian head down the body to a long feathered tail that stood out rigidly behind the beast. The S-curved dinosaurian neck had a feather mane that bristled outward from the back of the head and along the nape, sculpted in exquisite detail.

  “And that head!” Ogilvey enthused. “At once beautiful and horrific, equal parts reptile and bird. The jaws of a carnivorous dinosaur and a crest much like that of a cassowary. And Look!” He shone the light lower. “The chest is encased in an armor jacket of smooth-finished metal.”

  Kit caught her breath. “What’s it got in its hand? A sickle?”

  “A, er, weapon of some sort,” said Ogilvey. “There are a number of these, er, warriors brandishing as they move along in some sort of procession.” He shone the light along the wall to reveal a long line of similar creatures marching in military order.

  “Yes,” Ogilvey said as if guessing Kit’s thoughts, “Pteronychus was a civilized, intelligent, and warlike dinosaur.”

  “But what is this place?” asked Chase.

  “An underground catacomb,” replied Ogilvey. “I’d guess it was subterranean even in their time. We’re somewhere beneath the ancient city, down where the sand couldn’t reach when it buried the place. It goes on quite a ways in either direction.” He flashed the light one way and then the other along the wall, illuminating a large corridor perhaps ten feet across and as many feet high, with an arched ceiling made of finely fitted alabaster stone blocks. The frieze of engraved figures—hundreds of them—stretched away in both directions on both sides of the corridor wall. All were marchers in a procession that headed straight into the mountain.

  “It’s astonishing,” said Kit, so deeply taken in that other thoughts seemed swept away.

  Chase was not so easily diverted. “Wait a minute,” he said. “We’ve got something else to talk about.”

  “Yes of course,” Ogilvey said blandly, moving away from Chase and following the procession along the wall. “We’ll talk as we walk.”

  Chase had little choice but to follow the paleontologist as he moved along shining his light from one marching pteronychus to the next. “We’ve seen a tyrannosaurus,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ogilvey mused. “T-rex fossils are common in this stratum.”

  “No,” Chase fumed. “I don’t mean a fossil. I mean for real.”

  Ogilvey stopped and shined his light in Chase’s face. Chase flinched at the glare. The old paleontologist was apparently satisfied that Cha
se wasn’t joking but, incredibly, turned and continued walking and scanning the wall. He said casually, “I’m afraid T rex can’t hold a candle to this creature.”

  Chase gripped the old man by the shoulder, spinning him around.

  “Listen,” he growled. “We came to warn you there’s a great big, dangerous, hungry monster out there.” He pointed back the way they had come. “Don’t you care?”

  Incredibly, the professor still looked uncertain. “Well, yes, of course I care. To see a tyrannosaurus in the flesh would be the thrill of a lifetime, under other circumstances.”

  “Thrill!” Chase exclaimed.

  “But this is the greatest discovery of my life.”

  Chase looked to Kit for support, pointing a finger at Ogilvey. “Either paleontologists are a special breed or this old coot is nuts.”

  She tried to intercede. “Please listen to him, Doctor O. We’re going to Red Lodge for help. We came to take you with us.”

  “Oh my!” Ogilvey moaned. “What a bad moment.” He shined his light at the wall, then back at the two of them again. “What a horrendous choice.”

  Chase muttered, “I think you still don’t get it. We’re in danger. There’s some connection between the lights coming from the moon, an invasion from space and the T rex.”

  Ogilvey at last fell silent. He stared at Chase dumbly, mouth agape, eyes goggling wide.

  “Now, let’s get out of here,” Chase said, turning to retrace his steps. Kit followed but Ogilvey stopped them with a single softly-spoken word.

  “No.”

  Chase wheeled around and shouted in the old man’s face, “What?” The words echoed down the dark corridor, “What? What? What?”

  “I won’t go with you,” Ogilvey retorted. “You two go on. If the end of the world is upon us, then I must stay here until I know who they were.” He shone his light along the wall. “Where they went.” The flashlight beam fell across a row of hieroglyphics at the base of the wall.

  “Look at these,” he marveled. “Unlike Egyptian characters or Mayan script, unrelated to any human writing system. Carved by an intelligent dinosaur, a scholar, my colleague of an eon ago.” Ogilvey addressed the writing itself. “You’re speaking to me, telling me your story, aren’t you? If I can only read what you have to say, then let the tyrannosaurus take me.”

  Chase circled an index finger around one ear for Kit’s benefit. Then he crowded nose to nose with the paleontologist.

  “Listen, you old buzzard. I can’t decide whether to leave you here or drag you out kicking and screaming.”

  “Wait.” Kit put a restraining hand on Chase’s shoulder. “I know how he feels about this. It’s his life’s work.” She asked Ogilvey, “If we give you a few minutes to look around, then will you come with us?”

  “Yes, yes, I suppose so,” Ogilvey mumbled, casting his light along the wall and moving deeper into the corridor. Kit hooked an arm around Chase’s elbow and pulled him along, following several paces behind the professor. After a few yards they reached a point where the hallway crossed another at right angles. Ogilvey called “Hello!” into the crossing corridor. In the utter stillness of the underground space his call echoed repeatedly, fading off into the black distance. He quipped, “The catacombs seem to go on infinitely. It wouldn’t do to get lost in here. Ah, Theseus, where is your ball of twine?”

  He moved forward, shining his light around and making verbal notes. “There are signs of great age in this catacomb. Look at the stalactites hanging from the ceiling and stalagmites built up on the floor, no doubt through millennia of slowly dripping mineral water.” Look here, where the corridor was cracked by an earthquake long ago, probably along a fault that runs through the very sandstone of the mountain. The corridor floor is coated in dust as though no living foot has trod it in eons.”

  There was a dank mustiness to the air that caused Chase to wonder if they were heading into worse danger than they had left outside.

  “What was the purpose of this procession?” Ogilvey wondered aloud. “Shades of Dinotopia!”

  His light struck several of the creatures who wore, in addition to their armor, fantastic headdresses adorned with tall feathers fanning out above them. “The ruling class, I should think,” Ogilvey murmured. “Or generals. Perhaps both.” He played his light on one after another of the chieftains. Then the scene shifted to pairs of marchers carrying between them large boxes and baskets. “Filled with booty, perhaps?” Others marchers carried lances waving banners in the air, and still others carried what appeared to be a sort of rifle. Each, regardless of its adornment or what it carried, marched solemnly forward, its crested head held high, the heavy reptilian jaws gaping to show off sharp teeth.

  “They’re like a victorious Roman legion,” Ogilvey exclaimed. “Barbaric and yet civilized. The crowning evolutionary achievement of their times.”

  “Listen,” Kit suddenly called in a whisper, tightening her grip on Chase’s arm. “There’s something behind us.”

  The two of them paused to listen as Ogilvey moved forward heedless of noises or anything else, humming quietly to himself and scanning the walls from top to bottom as if trying to understand the hieroglyphs carved there.

  When he was a dozen yards ahead, Chase heard a noise coming faintly from the darkness to their rear. It was a low, thumping, ill-defined sound that seemed to put a greater chill in the dank air.

  Kit shuddered. “This is starting to give me the creeps.”

  “You and me both,” Chase replied.

  They hurried forward to where Ogilvey had stopped to illuminate a new scene on the wall. Pairs of the creatures bearing horizontal poles between them carried members of their own species lashed hand-and-foot and stripped of armor, hung like captured animals.

  “Listen,” Kit whispered, and Ogilvey quieted. The thumping was there again, stronger, rhythmic, like footfalls.

  “There’s something back there,” she hissed.

  “Yeah,” Chase agreed, turning to stare into the darkness behind them, his pulse quickening. “Footsteps, and they’re getting closer.”

  He grabbed the flashlight out of Ogilvey’s hand and snapped it off, plunging them into total darkness. The sounds echoing out of the depths of the corridor immediately seemed louder and now it was clear that each heavy footfall was accompanied by more of the same. “There’s more than one,” he whispered.

  “A lot more,” Kit agreed.

  “They sound like they’re in that side corridor,” Chase whispered. “If they get into this one, we’ll be cut off from the way we came in.” Kit gripped his arm until her nails dug in.

  Other sounds became discernable. Metallic clanks mingled with the thumping footfalls, interspersed with mechanical clicks, whirs and pneumatic hisses.

  Out of the pitch-blackness a greenish glow appeared, dim at first and swaying in cadence with the footsteps. It grew brighter and cast eerie moving shadows along the sculpted walls. Chase began instinctively backing away from it, pulling Kit with him as he moved. The sound of the footfalls grew closer and louder.

  As they retreated with Ogilvey following, Kit glanced at the stone procession on the wall, now illuminated by the green glow. She gasped at what she saw. “Look,” she murmured and the three of them paused to gape at the culmination of the procession. The captives were laid on altars and their captors were setting upon them with sickle weapons—beheading, gutting, and eating them.

  The light brightened into a strong searchlight pointing in their direction. Simultaneously the corridor walls opened out into a cavernous black room. Nothing inside was visible except the floor, upon which the green light cast shadows from their legs stretching away into the darkness. The searchlight, now a distinct circular shape, had closed to within a hundred feet of them.

  “Maybe this is not as bad as it looks,” Ogilvey mumbled. As Chase and Kit retreated into the chamber, the professor suddenly reversed direction and took a tentative step toward the light. “Perhaps we should just talk to them a
nd find out what they want.” He raised a hand in salutation and called toward the light, “We come in peace.”

  Chase quickly grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him into the darkness beside the door they had just entered. “Some other time, Doc.” The three of them groped their way along the dark interior wall for a few feet until they found a sheltered nook out of the reach of the oncoming light just as it burst through the doorway.

  They pressed themselves back into the shadows as a second light and then a third entered the chamber. Meanwhile the bearer of the first lamp, invisible to them behind its blinding glare, scanned the room with its beam. The shaft of light moved across the walls revealing a huge chamber, perhaps a hundred feet across, outlined by massive stone columns supporting a ceiling lost in the darkness above. The walls were lined with dozens of niches and doorways leading into dark side-chambers. The main chamber had not escaped the ravages of time. Piles of rubble, stalactites and fissures running across the floor were everywhere, but most of the immense space was intact.

  As the light swept along the wall in their direction, they shrank further into the tight space they had chosen—a niche behind a pillar flanking the door they had entered. Chase put an arm around Kit as all three of them pressed into the back corner of the niche. He felt her tremble when the light passed in front of them. Failing to illuminate them, the light continued along the wall without pause. They were safe for the time being.

  As the searchlight continued its scan, more beacons entered the chamber and joined it. The combined beams brightened the room until it was possible to see the bearers of the lights. Each lamp was the searchlight of a ten-foot-tall, two-legged robotic walking machine. Their streamlined bodies looked like fuselages of fantastic jet fighter planes made of silvery metal with rounded dark glass canopies on top large enough to house human-sized pilots. Tapering to a point at the rear, each fuselage moved with bird-like strides on a pair of jointed mechanical legs. Mechanical arms projected from either side of the machines’ bodies and where there should have been hands at the ends of the arms, there were arrays of instruments—pincers on the left hand and groups of projecting gun barrels and antenna-like rods on the right. The searchlights were attached to the left wrists above the pincers.

  Chase whispered, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Not in my wildest dreams,” Ogilvey concurred.

  “Nightmares,” Kit corrected.

  The group of machines grew to about a dozen, moving into the room accompanied by a bedlam of clanking and whirring sounds. The dark canopies concealed the occupants and the shimmering metal skins of the machines dazzled the eye. Each machine’s fuselage bore an individual insignia, the emblem of its driver, some designed in blood red hieroglyphs, some in patterns of black or dark green. The attention of the drivers seemed drawn to the far side of the room, where a gigantic idol stretched from the floor to the ceiling of the chamber: a huge stone pteronychus head with its reptile-bird face contorted into a hideous scowl. Its fiercely toothed jaws were open wide enough that one of the machines could have fit inside the gape. Surmounting the reptilian phantasm’s head was a headdress of sculpted feathers that rose high and fanned out across the ceiling of the chamber.

  An ornate stone altar lay in front of the idol’s giant jaws and the machines went to form a semicircle around it, hunkering their jointed legs down until they squatted, birdlike, on the floor.

  One by one, the dark glass canopies opened and the occupants emerged. The creatures stepping from the machines were the very image of the god sculpted above them.

  “Living pteronychus!” Ogilvey murmured, fascinated.

  Chase shushed him softly, wondering whether the professor had a shred of survival instinct.

  “I’m simply amazed,” the professor said in a softer whisper. “The impossibility of it all! Just moments ago we were examining a carved procession on a wall and now we’re looking at the same unearthly beings in the flesh. This morning I was excavating their fossil remains and now they’re here as living creatures!”

  There was little danger Ogilvey would be heard by the creatures. More than a dozen of them had dismounted their vehicles to stand in front of the altar, and from their mouths came a cacophony of raven-like vocalizations.

  “Listen to that,” Ogilvey whispered. “They’re talking!”

  “Of course they are,” Chase replied under his breath. “They’re intelligent creatures. They built this place.”

  “I wish we could understand them,” said Ogilvey.

  “I wish we could get out of here,” said Chase.

  The creatures’ speech was unintelligible but seemed ominous given its hoarse, rasping tone coupled with the creatures’ ferocious appearance and the barbaric nature of the sculptures on the walls. Like those sculpted figures, they wore armor breastplates of glittering silver and bronze, adorned with colored enamel designs of red, black or green. Some wore ornate helmets of enameled bright metal that covered the head from crown to mane; others wore headdresses bearing colored feathers similar to those sculpted on the idol. The effect of the armor and headdresses was to make these already-fierce creatures look purely hellish, like feathered Zulu warriors endowed with crocodile jaws.

  Among the cackling, cawing group, one pteronychus stood out—a particularly large and fierce individual with a headdress of scarlet feather plumes jutting high and dancing around its head. Strutting among its companions, it exhorted them to greater excitement and celebration. It stepped to the altar and raised its arms toward the idol. In a harsh raven-like voice, it began an incantation. The others fell silent as the chieftain in red made his supplication to the idol. “Eng-Kan! Ne-too essakana teh!” it roared. The others joined in a chorus of deep guttural hurrahs.

  Although Chase had no inkling of the words’ meaning, his skin crawled at their unmistakably warlike, raving cadence. “I’ve seen enough,” he whispered. “None of them are looking this way. Time to get out of here.” He took Kit’s hand and began edging around the pillar toward the doorway. Ogilvey followed, but his rock hammer slipped from its unfastened holster and fell to the stone floor with a loud clank.

  The ceremony instantly stopped. Chase pushed Kit and Ogilvey back into the nook and followed them into the shadows just as the creatures turned to look in their direction. Fortunately none carried a light to shine on them, but after an awful moment of silence one of the warriors left the group and came toward their hiding place. It stopped ten feet away and peered into the shadows, flaring its nostrils and sniffing the air.

  Then it inexplicably turned and moved back toward the group at the altar uttering a terse, “Kteh!” The others seemed satisfied nothing was amiss and turned their attention back to their leader and the idol.

  As the incantation resumed, Chase squeezed Kit’s hand. “Come on. Let’s get moving.” He edged around the pillar a second time with Kit and Ogilvey following and sneaked out the doorway undetected. In the darkness, they made their way a hundred feet along the tunnel before Chase cast a glance back. The pteronychuses were still preoccupied with their deity.

  Feeling their way along the dark corridor by running their hands over the sculpted wall, they continued until they reached the hallway that crossed at right angles. Chase had thrust Ogilvey’s flashlight into a back pocket and now, figuring they were far enough away that the creatures couldn’t see, he switched it on and quickly led the way to the opening where they had entered the catacombs.

  Crawling out into the daylight of Ogilvey’s excavation, they glanced around warily but found the area undisturbed. The creatures had probably used a separate entrance elsewhere on the mountain.

  Exhausted by the quick retreat, Ogilvey sat down on his pile of bricks, removed his hat and wiped dusty perspiration from his brow. “Why were we spared?” he wondered aloud. “I’m sure that creature saw us.”

  “Maybe its night vision isn’t so hot,” Chase suggested. “Now, come on. If we hang around we’re gonna end up on that altar
after all.”

  “Yes, of course.” The professor stood up and followed them out of the excavation. They hurried up the creek bed and reached camp as the sun was setting.

  “My God,” Ogilvey said, huffing from exertion and squinting into the sun’s last rays. “Were we in there that long?”

  “It seemed like eternity to me,” Chase grumbled. He went to his truck and fired up the engine. Kit climbed in but Ogilvey went into his tent, emerging a minute later with an armload of notebooks, which he began placing neatly in a box on the tailgate of his Land Rover.

  “Leave them,” Chase called. “They’re not worth your life.”

  Ogilvey headed for his tent again, waving them off.

  “My notebooks are my life. You two go on, I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Suit yourself,” Chase muttered, driving away from the cul-de-sac and leaving the professor to his notebooks and his fate. “He’s been warned,” he said as he concentrated on steering along the narrow tire ruts. He shot an irritated glance at Kit. “Any other bright ideas about where we should go?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s try Red Lodge, then.”

  The sun disappeared below the mountain ridges as they bumped along the narrow track leading out of the canyon. As far as they knew, the creatures in the underground city hadn’t spotted them. But Chase kept an eye out behind as he drove out of the hills.