Primordia 2: Return to the Lost World

CHAPTER 30

Emma watched them go with a feeling of resignation and relief. And for the first time, she felt something else that she loathed: self-doubt.

Fergus drew the short straw and had the near comatose Juan hanging from his side. Andy was on the other side, but the soldier basically carried the weight, and Andy was just there for balance.

Their plan was to head back to the temple, and maybe fight their way in, or hope they could somehow evict the occupants. She really hoped they were successful, and not just for the wellbeing of her colleagues. But also because when she found Ben, that’s where she’d be heading, and if time was short, she wanted to be able to make their way straight to the base of the tepui before the doorway snapped shut again.

Emma walked a few paces toward the edge of the clearing and stared in the direction of the plateau edge. She inhaled, smelling the damp green, the sap, rotting earth, and leaf detritus. There was also the oddly sweet smell of weird blooms, and a unique muskiness she knew came from dinosaur shit.

She checked her sidearm and took a sip from her canteen. Emma took a look at her watch, an old wind-up analog Seiko with a crystal face and demagnetized steel casing that she knew would keep running no matter what the comet threw at them.

It was 5pm; time was growing short. She was now alone, but knew in her heart that this was how it was always going to end up. She gritted her teeth and headed in.

Drake led them through the dense jungle, retracing their steps where they could, and making detours around areas that sounded occupied.

Once they came across a gargantuan creature that was like a giant hippopotamus, except it had a longer neck and a small head. On its back was a row of large triangular plates that moved and changed angles like solar panels to catch rays of sun. A twig snapped and the thing froze. The plates on its back turned from an iridescent green to a drab khaki, and it melted back into the jungle.

Drake was about to lead them on, but Helen reached out a hand. “Wait. Get down.”

They squatted, staying under cover, and in just another few moments, they heard something treading heavily, and a huge intake of air as a creature sniffed deeply. Then from the jungle came a beast from their nightmares.

On two colossal legs, the thing materialized from between the giant jungle tree trunks. Two almost-deformed-looking front arms were held stiffly forward and its body was a deep orange with black stripes on its back. But the colors broke up its shape in the dappled light.

Its massive clawed feet eased it forward, slowly, as it was obviously stalking. It was attempting to be silent, even though the monstrous beast must have weighed in at about 15 tons.

“Giganotosaurus,” Helen breathed.

The monster lowered its head and inhaled again, this time directly over the place where the plant-eater had occupied only moments before. It picked up the trail and slid into the jungle, following the big vegetarian.

Drake didn’t even realize he was holding his breath until his lungs began to burn. They waited another full five minutes until the sounds of the jungle returned.

“Jesus.” He turned, looking back the way they’d come. Never in his life had he cut and run on anyone or anything. But he’d just dropped Emma on her butt, while they held most of the firepower. He felt like a complete asshole.

“Okay,” Helen said.

Drake stayed low and called everyone in. “New plan.”

“Say what?” Ajax scowled.

“Going back for Emma,” he said matter-of-factly.

“No, we’re not,” Ajax shot back.

“I know you’re not; you’re to continue on to the temple. Clear it out. You can either give us another six hours, or not, your choice. Either way, you’re to get everyone down and out of here.”

“Bullshit, man.” Ajax paced away for a few steps and then spun back. “No, no, no, you’re not going either.” He looked panicked. “We need your firepower.”

Drake shook his head. “You’ll be fine.” He turned to Fergus. “You’re in command.”

“You’re not fucking listening. You’re staying.” Ajax’s voice was suddenly dead calm.

“Shut it and get back in line, soldier,” Drake said over his shoulder.

“Don’t make me do this, Drake.” Ajax’s voice now had a menacing edge.

Drake turned slowly to see the big man holding his sidearm loosely in his hand. Drake came to his feet. “What do you think you’re doing?”

To the side, he saw Fergus look like he was about to charge in, and Drake held up a hand to him. He turned back to Ajax.

“Not a good time to be losing it, son.”

“It’s not me that’s losing it, sir.” Ajax’s eyes were wide. “We all stay together. Mission is over, you know that. Priority now is getting us home.” He lowered his brow. “Anything else is command negligence in the field.”

“I see.” He nodded toward Ajax’s weapon. “Put the gun down before you hurt yourself.”

Ajax straightened to his full height. “Your behavior leaves me no choice. I’m assuming command.”

“Bullshit you are,” Fergus growled.

Ajax momentarily pointed the gun at him. “I know you agree with me.” He swung back to Drake. “We’re all going to head to the temple.” The gun was at his side again.

Drake could see the man was agitated, knew he was impulsive. Right now, he was unpredictable. Worst outcome was one of them killed the other. Ajax was right about one thing — they needed all the firepower they had.

“So what’s the plan?” Drake lifted his chin. “You disarm me and take me hostage? How’s that gonna work?”

“This is stupid,” Andy said, peering around from behind the young soldier. Andy tried to sidle around him, and then reached out, just touching his elbow. “Ajax… ”

“Fuck off,” Ajax half-turned and growled, his gun hand coming up.

Big mistake, Drake thought. He moved fast, stepping in close, grabbing the young soldier’s wrist, pushing down and to the left. Then, before Ajax could fully react, Drake snapped his other elbow back to the right and along the man’s jaw. The crack of elbow tip on bone was like a gunshot going off as Ajax’s teeth clacked together.

Ajax dropped his gun but lowered his head and recovered fast. He threw out two rapid blows, both aimed at Drake’s face. But they were slow due to his disorientation and Drake easily blocked both. He then flattened his hand and struck at Ajax’s exposed throat. His fingertips dug in at Ajax’s Adam’s apple.

Drake pulled the blow; if he wanted to, he could have crushed Ajax’s windpipe. As it was, it still would be a painful blow and cut off his air for a few moments. Drake wanted the fight over, but he didn’t want him dead or even permanently incapacitated.

Ajax’s eyes bulged and he gripped his throat. Drake finished him with another blow to the cheekbone. Ajax went down onto his hands and knees.

He stayed down, one hand gripping his throat as he made coughing noises.

“Take it easy, son. Breathe in slowly through your nose.” Drake retrieved his gun and stood over him. “Feel better now?”

Ajax coughed again and his head stayed down.

“Fergus will assume command in my absence. Got it?” Drake stared down at him.

Ajax finally nodded. Drake held out a hand, and Ajax reached up and gripped it. Drake pulled the man in close, almost nose to nose. “When the other guys lose their heads, we keep ours. We are sanity in chaos. Got it?”

Ajax nodded again. “I just wanna—cough—get the fuck outta here.”

“Yeah, we all do.” Drake handed him back his gun, and Ajax took it, but Drake held onto it for a second, looking into his eyes. “We good?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, boss. Won’t happen again.” Ajax reholstered his gun.

Behind Ajax, Drake saw Andy fist pump. Drake turned to the entire group. “Like I said, I’ll be going for Emma and Ben. In six hours, I hope to be back. You can wait for me or not — your choice. Fergus will take it from here.”

“Ah, shit.” The redheaded soldier shook his head.

“Whatever; long as we get to bug out,” Ajax said.

“I’m staying too,” Andy said.

“What?” Helen rounded on him. “No, you’re not.”

The young paleontologist tilted his head. “Helen, you know they’ll need my expertise. Besides, you’re the only one of us with medical experience, not me. You need to look after Juan. Without you, he’s dead.” He shrugged. “Sis, my mind’s made up.”

“Your funeral,” Ajax said.

Fergus didn’t look happy, but gathered himself in. “Boss, six hours, be there, or we gotta be on our way.”

Drake saluted then turned to Andy. “You don’t need to come. In fact, best if you don’t; you might just slow me down.”

“Don’t you worry about me; you provide the brawn and I’ll provide the brains. Together, we might just find her.”

Drake chuckled. “We got six hours, Mr. Brains; so let’s go to work.”

He and Andy melted back into the undergrowth.

CHAPTER 31

Ben jerked upright, spun one way then the other and quickly rubbed his face to full wakefulness. He tried to judge the time by the lengthening shadows — it had to be late afternoon. He only had tonight, and maybe a few hours tomorrow morning to find a way off the plateau and back to his own time, and maybe also find Emma if she was here.

He felt the breath catch in his throat at the thought that she might actually be on the plateau right now, somewhere out there, maybe even looking for him. He wanted to yell. He wanted to cup his hands on each side of his mouth and call her name. But he knew instead of bringing Emma, he would only bring the hunters. Making noise invited death.

Ben tried to get in her head, to think like her — if she were here, she would search for him. But where would she start her search? He smiled; she would be trying to think like him, just as he was trying to think like her. Would she start at the last place she had seen him? He knew both of them didn’t have too many times they could guess wrong — he either found her, or he missed her, and this time, it’d be forever.

He decided. As good a guess as any, he thought.

Ben struggled to his feet and worked hard to stifle his groans. The salve had worked to keep his wounds clean and they were already scabbing. But the pain on and in his chest was like being wrapped in white-hot iron cables.

He waited a few more seconds until the throbbing eased. He needed to find her, and quickly. She’d been here before, but there was much she didn’t know. He’d found out things about the plateau that he needed to tell her and warn her about.

CHAPTER 32

Ajax watched as Fergus had lain Juan down at the trunk of a tree. The guy was like a boneless sack, and though he still breathed, raggedly, he was just dead weight.

The big soldier peered between hanging vines and three-foot-wide tongue-like fronds that dripped with moisture. Helen and Camilla crowded in behind him. The light was fading fast, and he knew that in less than an hour, it’d be dark.

He looked back at the even darker portal that was the open doorway of the temple. He didn’t want to go back in there, as every Special Forces alarm was ringing in his head. But then again, he didn’t want to be out in the open in this godforsaken place either.

He knew it was a Morton’s Fork decision — two choices, both of them shit. But one at least had a chance of escape, so…

“See anything?” Helen whispered.

“Nothing,” he said without taking his eyes off the ancient stone building.

Fergus had his binoculars up to his eyes. He half-turned. “Okay, stage-1, we go in, clear the main floor, and then do a quick recon. Stage-2, we secure the environment, defend our position, and lay low until Drake gets back.”

“Nah, not happening,” Ajax said. “We’re not waiting. We don’t know how long it’s going to take us to kill those snakes, or to climb down, or to even make sure we’re climbing down the right tunnel.” His mouth turned down. “My gut feeling is we won’t be seeing Drake, or anyone else again.”

“Drake asked for six hours; he’s still got five more. We can give him that.” Fergus lowered his glasses.

“I second that,” Helen said. “We wait.”

“I vote for leaving now,” Camilla said. “Look.” She pointed at Juan. “He needs emergency help. I’m sorry, but we cannot wait.”

Ajax snorted. “Yeah, well, I gotta tell you, lady, your buddy is pretty much a freaking corpse already.”

Camilla’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes blazed.

“We’re taking him back,” Fergus said.

Ajax’s grin fell away. “You mean you’re taking him back. You’re in charge, so you can be in charge of him.” He turned away. “We’ve been paid, so I don’t plan on putting my life at risk for some asshole I don’t know from Adam.” He jerked his thumb toward Juan. “Just remember, these two nobodies muscled their way in on our little adventure. Serves ‘em right.”

Camilla gathered herself up. “I’ll have you know—”

“Shut the fuck up, you whiny bitch.” Ajax rounded on her. “Or I’ll leave you both right here.”

“Hey, what’s your—?” Fergus grabbed Ajax’s arm.

“Don’t.” The big young soldier just scowled. “I am not in a good mood right now.” He motioned to the three civilians. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re expendable.”

The Venezuelan woman looked like she’d been slapped. Ajax scoffed and then turned left and right, scanning the undergrowth for movement. “Can’t see any of our leaping lizard buddies, so we go hard and fast for the front door. Helen, you’ll be going in first, me next, then you two can bring sleeping beauty.”

Fergus’ jaw clenched, but he seemed to bite it down.

“On my ready.” Ajax pulled his M4 and held it tightly. “3, 2, 1, go.”

Helen took off across the clearing, Ajax following with his gun up, and Fergus and Camilla dragging the now limp form of Juan.

In just a few minutes, Helen got to the doorway, paused, and then darted in, followed by the rest. Fergus lay Juan down and snapped his flashlight onto the barrel of his M4.

“I’m taking right flank.” He started to scan the temple’s main room to the right side.

“Yo, got it.” Ajax did the same at the other side.

Helen and Camilla tended to Juan, but there was nothing they could do now, as they couldn’t even get the near-comatose man to sip water.

Both of the Special Forces soldiers met at the dark entrance to the downstairs rooms. Fergus crouched.

“I still think we should wait for Drake and the others. If he comes back with Ben, I want to be here for that.”

Ajax nodded. “That’s fine; I’ll head on down. But while both of us are here and armored up, the first thing we need to do is clean those fuckers out of the caves, right?” He raised his eyebrows. “You gotta admit, it’s certainly gonna make it easier for everyone, if when the guys arrive and if they’re short of time, that they don’t have to try and fight the dragon then, huh?”

“Yeah, there’s that.” Fergus stared down into the dark. “We can’t use explosives.”

“Yeah, I agree we can’t deploy grenades when we’re in the tunnels. But if that thing is as big as we think it is, we might need those explosives. The M4’s might do little more than piss it off.”

“We need to lure it out then,” Fergus observed.

“Yup.” Ajax rested on his haunches, staring down into the darkness. “When I was a kid, we used to go fishing for moray eels on the rocks at the seaside. One of us had string with some meat tied on it, and he’d dangle it just outside the eel’s home, while another of us held the spear ready. When old Mr. Eel smelled the meat, out he’d come, mouth open, those razor-sharp teeth ready.” He laughed cruelly, as if relishing the memory. “What he got instead was a five-pronged spear in the neck — we never missed.”

Ajax stood. “So, to draw out our giant eel, we need some bait.”

“We go hunting?” Fergus asked.

“Nope, I got a better idea. C’mon.” Ajax went and crouched by Juan, and looked at both Camilla and Helen. Fergus stood behind him.

“Ladies.” Ajax saluted with two fingers and smiled warmly. “Listen up; to get home, we’re going to have to flush that big bastard out of his, our, cave. When it comes, we’ll need every ounce of firepower we got — that means you two ladies blasting away as well.”

“You mean downstairs, in the dark?” Camilla’s voice was small.

Ajax nodded slowly.

“I’m ready,” Helen said.

“That’s the spirit.” Ajax looked down at the comatose Juan. “And your boy’s gotta play his part as well.”

“What?” Camilla frowned. “How?”

He looked up and into her eyes. “Well, we need something to tempt the snake out of its hole. Juan’s the only one that can’t fire a gun right now, and… ” He grinned. “… won’t run away if something makes a lunge at him.”

“You… want to… use him as bait?” Camilla’s eyes were wide, and she began to shake her head. “What kind of monster are you?”

“The kind that wants you, and all of us, to live.” Ajax continued grinning, his silver tooth glinting in the fading light. “Do you have a better plan?”

Camilla put her hands to the side of her head. “No, no, not happening.”

Ajax twisted his features into mock concern. “Oh, so you want to take his place? Are you sure?”

“That’s enough,” Fergus said. The redheaded soldier leaned his head back for a moment. “Look, it’s a shit option, but it’s the best shit option we got. We can protect him.”

Camilla spluttered, and Helen turned to the men and spoke through clenched teeth. “I don’t like it either.”

“Me either,” Fergus said. “But it’ll probably work. And we’ll be there to blast the shit out of anything that comes out. It’s the only way to maximize our firepower while the snake is focused on something else — I think we’ll need to try it.”

The group fell into silence for a few moments, and then Ajax looked at each of their faces. The half-smile was still on his lips as he spoke.

“Good, team meeting over. Help me get our boy up so we can begin.”

They dragged Juan up, and between he and Fergus, they carefully pulled him down the steps. Helen and Camilla followed, guns drawn, but Ajax thought that both of the novices would more than likely shoot him or Fergus than hit the freaking snake no matter how big it was, so they were instructed to keep their weapons pointed down, and not to fire until told.

But what he really needed the women for was to add to the noise and confusion when the thing came out. All he needed was for the monster to be disorientated for two seconds — enough time to line up a kill shot. Also, having four targets for the snake to potentially attack meant the odds of him being killed went from 50–50 to one in four — much better.

They crept down, just using their flashlights. It was how they remembered the large room, with the portal opening at the end. The rocks were polished smooth by something about eight feet wide continually rubbing against them.

“Keep your eyes on that freaking hole, man,” Ajax said to Fergus.

“You got it,” Fergus replied.

Ajax grabbed a large block of stone and dragged it about 15 feet to be right in front of the hole. Then he took Juan and slid the unconscious man across so he was sitting up with his back against the stone, facing the dark hole in the wall.

“Just like he’s home watching football on television,” Ajax said, sniggering.

The man’s head lolled, but he stayed in place.

“And now, we ring the dinner bell.” He pulled out a flare, holding it tight, but turning first. His grin had fallen away. “You ready for this?”

Fergus nodded, the stock of his rifle in tight against his shoulder. Helen and Camilla were too frightened to even speak.

“Let’s boogie.” He jammed the flare against his thigh and waved it inside the tunnel.

“Hey!” he yelled. His voice echoed away into the stygian depths. “Hey!” he yelled even louder and waved it twice more. “Come and get it.”

Ajax then dropped the flare between Juan’s feet, and they all retreated back into the shadows, guns pointed at the large hole in the wall.

Ajax licked his lips. “Hold fire until that big asshole comes out.”

They waited, with just the sputtering noise of the fizzing flare and its infernal red glow. Ajax wished the stupid flare was silent as it masked the approach of anything from within the cave-tunnel. But at least it lit up the first 10 feet of the interior, so as a trade-off, it was justified.

He’d positioned himself the furthest back of the group, and he tried to visualize how it would play out. He saw several scenarios; one of them, unfortunately, was the snake coming out fast and overshooting Juan. Then, either Camilla or Helen would probably start firing wildly as they tried to follow it with their guns. That’d mean they’d probably be firing across at the opposite side of the room, where Fergus was. Being at the back, he put himself behind that. He hoped.

Ajax looked briefly over his shoulder, reconfirming his bearings. He’d also put himself close to the stairs in the event everything went to shit. He wanted to be the first one out. Live to fight another day was his motto.

He looked across to Fergus. He was the only guy he could count on to score a hit every time. The man had his gun in hard at his shoulder and his eye down on the barrel. If Ajax could take one person with him down the chute, Fergus would be the guy.

Ajax planned on letting the others pepper the thing with the SIG Sauer’s standard bottleneck rounds, and hope they did the required damage. But he knew if it pushed through that and came outside of the portal, then boys and girls, cover your fucking ears, ‘cause he was going to lay down some fragmentation shit and end the argument right there and then.

He waited, his nerves begging to stretch. He looked up off his gun sight. “Hey, maybe no one’s home,” he said.

“Maybe,” Fergus replied. “But we don’t know how deep it goes.”

The flare sputtered down and then went out, leaving them in total darkness. Four flashlights came on as one. Camilla’s beam was shaking like she was having convulsions, and Helen’s wasn’t much better.

Ajax grabbed another flare from his thigh pouch. “Last one, then we’re going in.” He ignited it and tossed it in front of Juan again.

The room bloomed with the Hadean red glow once again. The group waited, their nerves stretching to breaking point, and their eyes focused hawk-like on the smoothed portal opening.

After another few more moments, Ajax ground his teeth and cursed. It should goddamn be working; they had a body, still alive and warm. The light and heat from the flare should have drawn any hunter in the area. It should fucking-shit-goddamn work.

No choice now, he guessed. They were going to have to go in. Ajax sniffed, his eyebrows coming together. Just floating over the top of the flares pyrotechnic stink, he thought he could detect other scents. Something more acrid. Was it here when they came down? he wondered. Musta been.

He sniffed deeper this time. It was a bit like cat’s piss, musky, old meat, and maybe something that smelled like old gym socks.

Ajax clicked his fingers and Fergus turned to him. But his comrade in arms froze as he stared — but not at him — at something just past him.

Ajax felt the hairs on his neck rise, and he spun around.

“Contact!” Fergus yelled as Ajax threw himself to the side.

Stopped on the steps leading down to them was a vision straight from Hell. The triangular head of the snake was as wide as a small car and filled the entire tunnel. Its unblinking eyes reflected the dying glow of the flare, making them dance like twin infernos.

Both he and Fergus opened fire and piled dozens of rounds into it. Camilla screamed and just went to her knees. She grabbed the crucifix from around her throat and held it up as some sort of talisman. Helen fumbled with her handgun, finally getting off some shots that struck the walls and ceiling.

The snake came down the steps like molten death. Its massive, muscular body seemed to be something from mythology and not of some flesh-borne world.

Ajax ejected his magazine and jammed in another. His last. In the blink of time it took for the task, the snake was right in front of him.

CHAPTER 33

Emma watched the stream for many minutes, losing herself in the clear water as it burbled over stones and surged around fallen logs. Along each edge of the waterway were fronds, palms, vines hanging like bead curtains, and huge trunks reaching thick roots into the dark, compost-rich soil.

The light was nearly gone now, but the edge of a huge moon was just starting to show through the tree canopy. It lit up the stream like a ribbon of silver. She knew if she followed the watercourse, it would take her to the plateau edge. She also knew that tracking along the streambed or its bank would mean she was under less cover, and it was exactly what she had warned the group to avoid.

She wondered how they were getting on. Fine, she bet. They had Drake with them, plus a truckload of weaponry. She was the dumbass who headed off by herself.

She sighed and looked up to the sky, spotting the huge lunar disc as it became visible — a hunter’s moon, Ben had called it once. She knew why. There were always nocturnal hunters, but a huge moon meant that the daytime hunters could double their chances of a kill by hunting on through a moonlit night.

Speed or safety? That was her choice.

She squinted as she continued to look upward. To the west, there was a tiny streak of silver—Primordia—the comet was starting to veer away from the Earth. Time was running out.

Dammit, she thought; it had to be speed then. She was up against a wall and needed to find Ben or pick up his trail in the next few hours, and then leave more time to get back to that temple. She prayed that the team would be able to clear out the horrors that lived in there. And she doubled down on praying that it was a chute that took them all the way to the ground.

She pulled the night scope from her pack and slid it over her head — it was as heavy as she remembered. She flicked it on and then turned her head slowly. She panned back and forth, and then craned her neck to look upward at the overhead branches. Thankfully, everywhere was all empty and all quiet.

She checked her watch; 10 hours remaining—still doable, she hoped.

Here goes nothing, she thought, and eased down the bank, her feet skidding in the mud. She sucked in a deep draft of humid air, and then set off.

CHAPTER 34

“Keep up,” Drake said over his shoulder before turning back to the tell-tale signs of passage on the ground — tiny flattened stems, indentations in the soil, and almost imperceptible grazes on rocks. It had to be Emma; no other thing living on this plateau would be this clumsy, unless it weighed several tons and didn’t give a shit.

He looked briefly back at Andy again — the young scientist grinned in the near darkness. He wore his night vision goggles that made him look slightly robotic and geeky, and more than a little like a kid at a birthday party.

“I hoped I’d get a chance to use these; I love them,” he whispered.

“Fine,” Drake said. “They’re yours. Now stay close so you get home in one piece to enjoy them.”

They had to clamber over some fallen tree trunks; the massive boughs were about five feet around, but sagging in the middle as they weren’t like real wood, but more like some sort of soft fibrous material, a little like that of the trunk of a tree fern.

Drake slid down over one stump with Andy dropping softly beside him. The soldier held up a hand to halt, and then took off his glove. He crouched and placed his hand on the ground, and then half-turned his head and concentrated — he could feel it under his fingers then; the tremors.

“Something big on the move.”

“Coming this way?” Andy flipped the goggles up and stared into the darkness for a moment and then flipped them back down.

Drake concentrated a little more and felt the tremors again, each a second or two apart; they were growing stronger, as if from the gait of an enormous beast.

“Yeah.” He looked around. “We need to get under cover.”

“Do you know what type it is?” Andy leaned closer.

Drake snorted. “Listen, kid, my expertise in dinosaurs extends to watching Jurassic Park.” He grabbed Andy’s shoulder. “But that’s why you’re here, remember, Brains?”

“Oh yeah.” Andy grinned and thumbed over his shoulder. “Those tree trunks; I think one was hollow.”

Drake took one last look around. “Then that’s where we’re going. Lead on.”

He followed as Andy turned and crouch-ran back the way they’d just come. They found the massive tree that had fallen and over time broken into pieces. A 15-foot section lay at a slight angle to the rest, and at one end, Drake could see what Andy had previously spotted — the trunk seemed to have a four-foot hollow section within its six-foot girth.

As he quickly shone his light inside, he now felt the tremors beneath his feet. Whatever was coming was now pretty damned close.

“In we go.” Drake folded himself in, with Andy sliding in next to him.

“Tight squeeze,” Andy said, lying up against Drake.

“Doesn’t mean we’re engaged,” Drake said.

Andy chuckled.

Drake elbowed him. “Quiet.”

The footfalls were big enough and close enough now to be felt right through the tree trunk and their asses. Dust and debris rained down on top of them, and Drake also pulled his night scope, slipped it over his head, and flicked it on.

Inside their hiding place, the trunk lit up in the usual phosphorescent green of the night vision. He saw there were a few weird-looking toadstools, mounds of leaf debris, and what could have been flat rocks like hubcaps, embedded inside the hollow trunk with them. Drake and Andy remained still and silent, as whatever moved around just outside came right up to where they were hiding.

They heard deep sniffing as something huge inhaled droughts of air; it was either tracking them, or hopefully following the scent of something else entirely.

Drake looked along the trunk and out into the darkness that was now lit green, just as a foot, like that of an ostrich except hundreds of times bigger, came down on a tree trunk segment right next to them. The soft and fibrous trunk compressed down almost flat, and Drake prayed the next foot didn’t come down on them.

At worst, they’d get crushed immediately. At best, they’d have to make a run for it, and then one of them might get chased down and eaten alive. No, he thought, that one was the worst scenario.

The snuffling came again from outside, but a little further away. Drake breathed out, and then sucked air deep into his lungs, conscious of his racing heart hammering on his ribs. On the next intake, he smelled something weird that he hadn’t noticed before — bitter almonds, and it was getting stronger.

He turned and leaned in close to Andy. “What the hell is that?”

“Not reptilian,” Andy said and looked down the length of the log. “More like… ”

Drake followed his gaze. Some of the things he had thought were flat stones embedded in the tree trunk’s inner walls, suddenly lifted up on eight pincer-like legs.

Oh fuck no, Drake whispered, trying to slowly reach down to pull out his gun.

“Holy shit; Pulmonoscorpius,” Andy whispered as he backed up and into Drake. “Don’t move a muscle,” he said, and kept backing up all the way past the soldier.

“Thanks,” Drake said, pointing his gun.

The thing was three feet long, and it lifted two claws before it that were larger than human hands. From behind it, a long, segmented tail extended and for now at least, the sting on its tip was straight-out flat.

Drake stared — it was shiny, like hard plastic, and segmented like it had been assembled from different pieces. It turned toward the open end of the trunk and took a few steps, but then stopped. The sounds outside hadn’t quite abated, as whatever the monstrous thing was out there still poked around. The insectoid thing obviously changed its mind and turned. Toward them.

It stopped again, seeming to balk at heading down toward the two men, and froze, watching, glossy eyes like dark buttons fixed on them.

“Early scorpion,” Andy whispered as he peered around Drake.

“Venomous?” Drake asked.

“Probably. What’s the point of having a stinger without venom? Even if it’s not highly toxic, with the size of that guy, the amount it pumped into you would probably kill you anyway.” Andy nudged Drake’s arm that held the gun.

“Don’t shoot; that big predator outside will react.”

“Right, so I’ll just give that giant scorpion a good talking to.” Drake shook his head.

The massive scorpion began to scuttle toward them, and it knew they were there as its tail went from straight-out behind it, to curling up and over its back.

“Ah, shit. Not good,” Andy whispered.

Even in the dark, Drake could see that its sting-tip was as large as an apple with a barb like a hypodermic syringe pointed straight at them. Drake knew at this range he couldn’t miss, but Andy was right; if he took out the scorpion, he might bring the thunder down from that big mother outside.

Andy tapped his arm again. “Get your knife ready. Follow my lead.”

Drake pulled his long hunting blade. Then Andy carefully moved to the other side of the log and lay one hand on the ground, palm up, and started to wiggle his middle finger. He continued to slide his other hand and arm along the inside of the trunk.

With the glass-like eyes of the scorpion, it was impossible to tell if it sighted the wiggling finger, but its head moved a fraction.

“Come on, just a nice worm for you. See, it’s wiggling, and ri-iiight here.”

One of the giant scorpion’s legs rose and came forward, then another, and in an almost mechanical motion, it began to creep forward. The huge claws opened, intent on grasping and holding the moving finger so it could deploy its stinger.

“Re-eeeady,” Andy breathed.

The scorpion rushed forward, hunger overtaking any caution. Andy swept his other arm across and grabbed the foot-long tail just under the bulbous stinger. The massive claws reached up for Andy’s hand.

“Now.”

Drake swept his blade across, just under Andy’s hand, and severed the chitinous appendage. The massive scorpion went mad, scrambling and skittering. In another second, the thing vanished in a blur of thrashing legs out the other end of the log.

Andy tossed the barb out after it. He turned with a big kid-like grin splitting his face.

“And that, Sergeant Brawn, is why you need me.”

CHAPTER 35

The stream turned into a broad, shallow river, and then turned into a swamp.

“That’s just great,” Emma seethed.

There was no more riverbank, no path, just a lot of water that was probably shallow, but as it was ink-black, it could have been bottomless for all she knew. To add to the eerie setting, there was a mist hanging listlessly over the dark water. And its surface wasn’t still; there were ripples, pops of bubbles, and the signature V-waves on the top as things moved about in the depths.

She’d seen enough of the lake to know that things took advantage of water, and the more water, the bigger the creatures were that made it their home.

Emma flipped her goggles from light-enhance to amplify and immediately the green fluorescent landscape became enlarged. She turned slowly — there were mangrove-type roots up on stilts, numerous palms, ferns, fronds, and things that looked melted or rotted with decay. The humidity was all-encompassing, and everything was wet, dripping, and smelled of sulfur and methane.

In amongst the trees, she could make out the massive column-like legs and rotund bodies of enormous creatures, their heads lost in the dark foliage canopies way overhead. They were near motionless, and the only sound came from the occasional gurgle of bellies and bursts of gas she assumed were dinosaur farts.

She breathed a little easier, if not through her mouth. One of the things she’d learned was that if the plant-eaters rested easy, then predators probably weren’t close by. She turned, scanning the swamp, and then in the direction she needed to try and get to.

“Maybe,” she whispered. Just over the other side of a stretch of water was what looked like dry ground.

She crouched, scanning along the banks, and then the water, looking for places to cross.

Dumb, dumb, and dumber, she thought. She’d done her homework and researched what she could potentially run into in this time period — and there was plenty to fear in the waterways, swamps, and generally boggy areas.

There were the ancestors of massive eels, snakes, heavy-jawed fish, and the crocodiles. Monstrous things like the Deinonychus that reached 35 feet in length, and probably chowed down on other dinosaurs. She’d be a tasty morsel to something like that.

But then again, those big plant-eaters wouldn’t be looking so chilled out if there was a 10-ton, 35-foot croc hanging around.

She plotted her path — down to the water’s edge, and then leap to that first large flat stone, and then to the next. Finally to leap off and sprint the rest of the way — if it was as shallow as she hoped, she’d be over the other side in an instant. The key tactic was to stay out of the water as much as possible.

Emma stood, wiped her hands on her pants, and walked down to the water’s edge and looked in — nothing. She had zero chance of seeing the bottom. She looked out to the first flat rock about 10 feet hence, and then backed up, five, 10, 20 feet.

Emma exploded forward, sprinting, and then leaping from the water’s edge to the flat stone. She came down and tried to stick her landing, but oddly the stone sank a few inches.

“Shit.” She kept her balance and leaped to the next, even larger one that had to be 10 feet around. This one had a slight upward curve and she landed easily, going into a crouch. But again, within seconds of her touching down, the entire rock moved.

“What the fuck? Hey, stop that.” On one side, something lifted from the water. It was about two feet wide, and then the thing swiveled.

“Jesus.” It was a head, a goddamn big head, with a long downward-curving beak. It glared and made a hoarse rattling noise deep in its throat. She remembered there was one more thing to look out for — giant freshwater turtles.

“Oops, sorry, buddy.” She stood, arms out like a surfer, and then ran up its back to leap off, and land on another smaller one that also sunk—probably its young, she thought. But this time she kept going, clearing a few more and landing on the bank.

She turned. The eyes of the turtles glowed like headlights, and she could imagine what they were thinking—what a rude little creature, they undoubtedly thought.

Emma grinned and saluted them. “Thanks, guys.” She then turned back to her path and saw that the water was shallowing into puddles here, with a few remaining boggy areas.

She began to jog to the jungle edge. Her feet sloshed, first to the ankles, and then to her calves. Then, her feet sunk, deep, and she fell forward. Her hands struck the oily slickness, like porridge, and nothing to grab onto. It was all around her, and in the seconds it took her to realize where she was, she had already sunk to her waist.

It hadn’t been a puddle at all. But just a thin veneer of water over quicksand, she thought with horror.

She remembered what she needed to do: relax, try to lay flat, and float. However, her legs wouldn’t come up as the glutinous mass was low on water and high on silt, and the layer on top was brackish swamp-slime, and below that a sucking bog. It was more quickmud than quicksand.

In seconds more, she was in it to her chest.

“No, no… ”

Emma grimaced, and turned one way then the other. This is where I yell for help, she thought insanely.

She looked for something, anything, she could use. She spotted a tapering log, just at one end of the pool she was in, and she reached out for it. Her fingers fell a foot short, and she stretched again, with little forward motion.

She needed to be closer or she needed longer arms. As she wasn’t able to move back or forth, so, longer arms it was.

She sunk a little more—now or never, she thought and reached down to undo her nylon clasp belt and pull it out of her belt loops.

She wrapped one end around her hand and concentrated — the log had a skinny end and was hard to see clearly in the darkness.

Emma pulled her smallest blade from her belt and stuck it right through the nylon webbing until it reached its hilt. She held up the miniature grappling hook and began to swing it back and forth a few times before launching it.

“Shit.” She missed.

And the motion caused her to sink another few inches. She grinned at the lunatic thought that popped into her head; she remembered the mysterious print from the museum with the weird indentations they thought might have been a human footprint.

If they thought that was a mystery, then what would they make of a human skeleton dug out of some prehistoric petrified bog in 100 million years time? she wondered. I’ll be a sensation, she answered herself.

She reeled her belt in, and once again swung it back and forth a few times, and then this time gave it more slack. The belt and its blade hook slapped down on the log end, hooking it.

The log was immediately whipped away with an angry hiss like a steam train. Emma froze.

Then the diamond-shaped head emerged from between the fern fronds about 30 feet away.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

The snake was big by modern standards, but smaller than the monsters she had seen on the plateau. The head was a foot across, and she bet its body was as thick as her waist, and given where the head just appeared, would have been 30 feet long if it was an inch. Small, she knew, but easily big enough to make a meal out of her.

Emma stuck a hand down into the mud and fumbled for her SIG Sauer handgun. She lifted it free from the glutinous mess she was stuck in, aimed, and pulled the trigger — there was a grinding sensation, but nothing happened. She pulled again and again with the same result.

The guns were extremely reliable, but she guessed they drew the line at being gummed up with gritty silt.

She dropped the gun, and instead grabbed at her longest blade, drew it, and held it up. The 10-inch metal tooth was a feeble defense against something this size, but it was all she had.

She knew the snake would have hundreds of backward-curving teeth in two rows that were used for gripping. If it got hold of her, she’d never get herself free from the mouth.

She knew what to expect — it would rear up and then lunge, using its muscled body to strike out, hit her hard, and bite down, embedding its teeth in her flesh. Her knife would probably never even penetrate the armored scales. The one chance she had was to stick her knife into the softer palate — inside its open mouth.

Emma could have wept; the odds of her pulling that off were about zero.

Stay focused and stay alive. She tried to think through its attack, how it would come, and what she would do.

She bared her teeth. One thing’s for sure — she’d die fighting. Emma raised the knife. She knew how to use it.

The snake glided forward, but instead of coiling itself back, loading its muscles for the impact strike as she expected, when it got to the edge of her scum-covered pool, it simply slid in below the surface.

“Oh, no, no, no.”

It was going to come at her from below.

Emma became frantic and swiveled one way then the other. Her screwing back and forth forced her lower into the slimy water.

The snake entered the pool and for all she knew was right below her now. No, she bet it’d do one thing first… and it did. The huge head rose a few inches from the water, sighting her, before easing back down.

Fuck it, she thought.

“Help!”

She tried to swim backward but was stuck in place.

“He-eeelp!”

She lowered her head and shoulder into the water and sliced the knife back and forth. Emma couldn’t resist the urge to open her eyes, but the gritty blackness did nothing but fill her eyes with slime and grit. Coming back up, she screamed again.

“Goddamn it!” Frustration boiled over.

“Emma!”

She spun, her stinging eyes held wide.

“Help me… snake… in water.” She sputtered a little. “Stay back… quicksand.”

Drake edged forward, with Andy holding onto him from behind by his belt. The soldier had his rifle pulled back tight into his shoulder. He fired several rounds into the water — spraying one side, then the next.

Andy let Drake go and quickly ripped a length of rope free from his pack and tossed the loop to her. She grabbed it, feeling her groin tingle at the thought of the snake still being down there.

As the pair of men began to haul her out, Emma felt something touch her thigh and she kicked at it, feeling the scaled resistance of its muscular body. She jerked her leg away and in another second, she was sliding backward in the mud.

Drake came and crouched beside her, and she clung to him, feeling her emotions boil over. She kept her face buried into his shirt for several more moments before using it to wipe the grime from her face and out of her eyes.

“Thank you.” She leaned back and gave him a crooked smile. “I’m having a real bad day. How about you?”

The massive Giganotosaurus lifted its head, listened for a moment more, and then sniffed deeply. The cry of a distressed animal was irresistible to it.

The cry came again, longer this time, and not far away. It sniffed again, inhaling the breeze as it tried to pick up the spoor trail.

The huge 30-ton body turned, its tail flattening ferns, tree trunks, and palms as it tracked the sound. The darkness didn’t bother it, and in fact, as well as having a highly developed sense of smell and excellent hearing, it had nocturnal vision.

The sound had been close, and the huge hunter lowered its head and stiffened its thick tail out arrow-straight behind it as it pushed through the thick jungle growth. It was a massive battering ram of muscle and teeth and could run at 30 miles per hour if needed.

It picked up the trail and moved further up toward the center of the plateau.

Ben’s head shot up, and he froze, listening.

Then the cry came again, longer this time. Could it be?

“Emma?”

Ben’s eyes widened in both shock and exuberance. He hoped and prayed she would come, knew she would come, but hearing her voice, any voice, was still a shocking sound after 10 long years.

It had to be her; who else would or could it be?

And she was close.

And she was in trouble.

It took all his willpower to stop himself going madly crashing through the jungle. He’d found out too many times that predators were always there, always waiting. Even the plant-eaters, the great cows of the prehistoric times, were so huge that he could be crushed underfoot, gored by a horned head, or obliterated by one swing of a clubbed tail. This was not a place for soft mammals, and wouldn’t be for many, many millions of years.

Slow down, slow down, he kept repeating, trying to turn it into a mantra to ensure he stayed alive. His chest still burned and felt tight from the scabbing. Plus, breathing was a minute-by-minute agony, but all of it was forgotten as Ben burrowed and darted around a forest of dawn redwoods, massive trees that vanished into the darkness hundreds of feet above him and had trunks easily 20 feet around.

Thorned cycads, spread wide like massive starfish, and from some lower branches and ferns hung things that looked like huge wasp nests.

Ben slowed as he passed underneath a particularly large and angry-looking one, and recognized them as not insect nests at all, but instead some sort of fungal parasite that showered spores when they were disturbed. He guessed the objective was that if an animal brushed past them, they’d end up covered in the fungal spores and then it would lumber off, taking the seed of a new generation of fungus with it, so they could propagate over a larger area.

The problem for Ben — and one he’d found out the hard way — was if the spores touched human skin, they generated an angry immune response of a blistered rash, itching, and then weeping sores for weeks afterwards. And if they got in your eyes, forget about seeing anything for a while.

He then moved through a stand of hanging vines and bamboo-like stems, so closely packed he had to squeeze through sideways.

In the center of the thicket, he paused and cocked his head, listening some more. Ben desperately wanted Emma to call again, or give some sign, but he also wanted her to shut up. A noise in the dark attracted the hunters in an instant. And even in darkness, there was no hiding from most of them.

He swallowed down a small ball of tension in his gut, because he knew up here, there was one predator that could see in the dark, knew which way you went from a single handprint on a tree trunk, and could also see your body heat flaring like a beacon in the darkness.

They were all at risk. And now that Ben was totally disarmed, he was more vulnerable than ever. And then.

“Goddamn it!”

Ben heard her again, very close now. He gave in to his impatience and worry for her, and his limbs took on a will of their own. He barged through the jungle toward her voice.

Drake looked over Emma’s weapons; he ejected the magazine, popped out a few rounds, and then sighed.

“All I can salvage is the ammunition. The gun needs to be broken down and cleaned. That grit and silt has jammed everything up.” He handed it to her.

Emma took the handgun back and reholstered it. “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen, is it?”

He chuckled. “Not as bad as it sounds; we find some clean water and I can break it down and rinse it out real quick. I’ll also need to eject and repack the rounds, but it’d all be done in maybe ten minutes.”

She half-smiled. “When we find some clean water, and when we have better light, and when we have a spare ten minutes.” Her smiled widened. “The sand in our hourglass is running down, Drake.”

He nodded. “Yep.” He tilted his head, looking at her. “We came to find and help you. So what do you want to do?”

She checked her watch and blew air from between pressed lips. “We surely can’t be far from the clearing edge now. We give it another couple of hours, and then… ”

“And then we decide what comes next,” Drake answered. “And we make that decision clinically, and without emotion, right, Emma?” He stared hard at her.

She turned back to the jungle, spotting Andy examining something on the lower branches of a massive tree. He smiled as he picked something from one of the limbs. At least he’s enjoying himself, she thought.

She turned back to Drake. “Yeah, sure, another couple of hours. Then we decide what comes next.”

Andy collected a few strange insects with horns on their heads, or had multiple legs, but claws on the end of each limb, like they were test models in some sort of evolutionary game that Mother Nature was playing. He tucked them into tubes or bags, sealing each. He couldn’t wait to compare notes with Helen when they caught up with them.

He held one up, admiring it. Andy knew he could spend months, years, a lifetime here, investigating plants, animals and species never before seen. Evolution was a game, and it rolled the dice on creativity sometimes. Added to that, fossilization was just as much a crapshoot. Even the most optimistic experts knew that the further back in time you went, the lower the chance a species makes it into the fossil record.

Andy sighed; there were exotic things here that no one had seen, would see even as a fossil, and perhaps could even imagine in their wildest dreams.

While Drake and Emma talked, he guessed he had a few more minutes, so he lifted his search to the lower branches. He was about to turn away from one hanging limb, when he spotted the bulbous papery-looking sack hanging from the branch.

Drake had warned him about using his flashlight, so he flipped his night vision down over his eyes. The first thing he noticed was that the papery-looking sack was cold, meaning it wasn’t an insect hive, or at least an occupied one. Even though bugs themselves were room temperature, a group moving together generated a lot of heat, and a hive would have been warm.

There was a hole in its bottom, and he doubted it was a fruit, as it seemed to just be attached to the limb as opposed to growing from it. As it wasn’t part of the tree, then maybe it was some sort of parasite? he wondered.

Andy ducked down, but the flaring green night goggles didn’t help. He looked over his shoulder at the still-talking pair. One or two seconds of real light couldn’t hurt, he thought.

He lifted his goggles away from his face and pulled out his slim flashlight and moved in closer. He still wore gloves and so had no qualms about touching the thing.

He reached out for it and flicked on his light just as he grabbed the bulbous sack and lifted it toward himself, planning on shining his light inside the hole.

Immediately, there was a reaction — the sack compressed and exhaled exactly like a lung with a sound like an old man wheezing. The particle dust or whatever it was blew outward with some force and covered Andy’s mouth, nose, and both of his eyes.

Then the excruciating pain set in.

“Jesus… ” He dropped his light and backed away. “Ouch, ouch.” He rubbed at them, shaking his head. “Drake.”

In a second, he felt a strong hand on his arm. “What happened?”

“Thing on the tree, farted on me. Spores, I think.” He grimaced. “It’s in my eyes. Stings like hell.”

“Stay still,” Emma said.

Andy felt hands on his head, tilting it back.

“Open your eyes,” she said forcefully.

He did as he was told. He could see nothing, but felt warm water being poured over his face. He immediately felt relief from the pain, but his vision stayed blurred.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“Better.” He blinked. “But still can’t see a damn thing.” He cleared his throat and spat. “Must have been like some sort of puffball fungus. Covered me.”

“Anyone else remember being told not to touch anything?” Drake said with little humor.

Andy still hung onto him. “Yeah, but I’m a scientist. I know what I’m doing.”

Drake chuckled. “Yeah, I can see that now. But in reality, you’re now disabled, in a prehistoric jungle, at night. Great timing, son.”

“Leave me,” Andy said, feeling dumb and resentful at the same time. “Pick me up me on the way back.”

Emma shrugged. “Okay… ”

“No.” Drake cut across Emma, glaring at her. “How long would he, or you, stay alive in this jungle if you were blind?”

Emma just crossed her arms and looked at him from under her brows. Drake turned to Andy. “Take off your belt.”

“Huh? Why?” the paleontologist asked.

“Do it, quickly,” Drake said. “I’m going to have to put you on a lead. When I say duck, you duck. When I say left or right, you do as I say. You’ll need to use senses besides your eyes until your vision comes back. Got it?”

“Sure, sure,” Andy said, still feeling guilty for putting this extra burden on Drake, but relieved he wasn’t staying behind.

Drake took the belt and looped one end around the back of his own belt. The other end he tied around Andy’s wrist.

“There.” He turned to Emma. “Okay, let’s do this. In two hours, if we don’t find anything, we head back.”

“Two hours.” Emma simply turned away, moving in the direction she expected was the plateau edge, and Ben.

Emma felt her anger and impatience begging to burn within her. She had the germ of a feeling that kept trying to grow within her about going home with no Ben. The comet, Primordia, would leave, the wettest season would end, and the portal, gateway, or whatever it was, would close again for another 10 years.

Did she have the drive to try again in another decade? Would Ben even be alive? Was he even alive now?

Fuck it, she spat into the darkness.

They had to cross over a fissure in the landscape. It was only about seven feet wide, but a good 20 deep and it narrowed at the bottom. Hopefully, there was a fallen tree over it for them to ease across.

They reentered another stand of ancient pine trees, and she accidentally kicked a cone the size of a small football, the heavy seedpod hurting her toes and then lifting off and bouncing away. It threw up twigs as it bounced, and then settled. But after it had stopped, instead of silence returning, there came the soft crack of a branch. But about 50 feet further in.

Emma raised an arm and held her position. Then she felt a hand alight on her shoulder. “We got a problem.” Drake kept his voice soft and calm.

Emma froze, just letting her eyes move over the primordial landscape. The clouds opened a little, throwing down a few more slivers of moonlight, and the black-on-blackness of the night jungle forest was illuminated enough to make out shapes.

There were endless trunks of the massive primitive pines, standing thick and mighty and seeming to reach the sky. But in amongst them, there was another shape — just as mighty — but this one had a large boxy head the size of an SUV, an upright stance, and colossal legs of raw power.

Emma felt her stomach flip. The creature also seemed frozen, and if she wasn’t where she was, she might have believed it was some sort of giant mockup, and they were at a fun park looking at a Disney model.

But it was real, and the only reason it was rooted to the spot, was that perhaps their non-movement had meant its eyesight built for tracking moving prey had temporarily lost them.

“What is it?” Andy whispered from behind them.

Without turning, Drake gently shushed him, and then leaned ever so gently back toward Emma.

“We can’t outrun that monster over open ground. If it attacks, we need to get somewhere it can’t follow.”

“Yep,” she whispered back. By the look of the carnivore’s size, it must have been the Giganotosaurus that they had seen previously. It was larger than a T-rex and one of the biggest theropod carnivores to have ever lived.

Emma tried to keep her eyes on the massive beast while talking to both men. “Remember that crack in the ground we passed over a while back? Think we can make it?”

“Maybe deep enough. And we’ll damn well die trying,” Drake said. “We’re gonna have to run for it. I’ll let Andy know the plan.”

She heard him whispering, and then she saw the massive creature take a careful step. The way it eased its foot forward, bird-like, and then placed it gently down in front of it, it told her it was beginning its stalking… of them.

“It knows we’re here,” she said. Emma looked at the coiled power of the thing and started to doubt they could stay in front of it.

“On the count of three, we’re gonna go for it,” Drake said.

“Wait,” she said. “Need a diversion.” She reached for one of her flares and held it for a moment in her hand.

“Now count.”

Drake began. “3, 2… ”

She punched the flare down on her thigh, and it immediately turned their jungle a brilliant red. The Giganotosaurus bellowed, and the sound was a physical force that battered their senses and made Emma’s heart race. It charged, and the ground shook beneath them.

“1!” Drake grabbed Andy and they ran for their lives.

Emma tossed the flare at the thing as it bore down on them. She didn’t wait to see if it struck, but the sound of trees being pushed aside, thumping footfalls, and thunderous roars, ceased for a moment. Even if the flare only gave them seconds, it might just be enough.

She ran almost blindly, praying she was heading back to the crack in the Earth. She also hoped it was as deep as she first thought. Up ahead and just to her right, she could just make out Drake dragging Andy along, trying to guide the young scientist around, over, and under obstacles. He fell, and Drake roughly dragged him back to his feet.

Behind her, the ground-shaking pursuit started again. The flare was still burning as the glow still emanated from behind her, but it had obviously lost the attention of the huge meat-eater.

Worryingly, she was catching up to Drake and Andy. She knew that together the two men were a larger target. They were also moving slower.

Behind her, she began to hear the deep huffing and drew her shoulders up and pulled her head down as though the inch difference might make the monster miss her when it reached for her.

“Run… faster!” she yelled, as she was about to overtake them.

And then they both vanished into the ground. Emma didn’t slow, and in fact accelerated to where they had disappeared. She saw the small crevasse and dove into it.

Where they landed, the fissure in the ground was only about seven feet wide, but a good 20 feet deep. Emma pinballed from one side to the other as she fell to the bottom. Drake immediately grabbed her and pulled her in close to the wall where he and Andy hid.

Soil rained down as the ground shook from the gargantuan footfalls, and then they stopped, and the huffing of huge breaths came from just above them.

The silvery moon was directly overhead and they pressed themselves back into the shadows where there were mounds of fallen bracken, rotting logs, and rocks. From beside her, something the size of a small dog with too many legs scuttled out to investigate, and she batted it away with her fist. She had bigger problems.

Then the moon glow seemed to shut off, as a massive boxy head leaned out over them. It inhaled, deeply, sucking up huge drafts of air. She was bathed in sweat, and she bet the two men were the same — she knew they probably stank to high heaven, and the great beast wouldn’t need super senses to know exactly where they were.

Seemingly satisfied, it turned its head sideways as eyes that seemed too small for the oversized head turned toward them. It seemed to bulge slightly like the lens of a camera focusing, or that of a bird that regards you from behind the bars of its cage.

The massive body lowered, and the head reached in. It had to turn sideways to fit in, but the head on the powerful neck craned downwards as the heavy back end of the animal gave it balance and the monstrous powerful legs braced, like the ballast of a crane.

“Shit,” Drake hissed. He held up his rifle; the barrel was bent, and he’d obviously landed on it. Instead, he pulled his handgun and held it against his chest as he stared upward. Emma lunged across and grabbed at Andy’s holster, taking his gun and doing the same. But she knew the 9mm guns would be like shooting peas at a thing with a skull that had to be many inches thick, plus a hide that was tougher than hardened leather.

“It can’t reach us,” Drake whispered. He looked up and down the crevice, and then back up at the great beast. “And this is the widest point. I think we’re okay here.”

The head was lifted back out, but it stayed above them.

“One problem,” Emma said. “We can’t wait here until it gets bored and gives up.”

Drake turned to her. “Sure, but I think we can afford to give it just a few more minutes, right?”

She bet he grinned in the dark.

“I guess.” She hunkered down as soil rained heavily onto their heads. “Now what?”

Emma looked up just as a single three-toed foot that had to be as wide as an industrial shovel began to rake at the dirt. “Look out.” She leaped out of the way as a large rock was dislodged and rolled down into their crevasse. She seethed. “That big bastard is going to try and dig us out.”

Like a monstrous dog, the Giganotosaurus raked with one massive foot and then the other. After a few pulls, it’d stop and lower its head again, checking on the width. In a few more moments, it had already widened the top of the fissure by several feet.

Emma looked up and down the crack in the ground. “Move.” She crouch-ran a few dozen feet along the crevasse floor. Drake pulled Andy along after him as he followed. She stopped and flattened herself back against the wall again. The beast followed them, and immediately began its raking again.

“Shit,” she hissed.

“We can’t stay in here,” Drake said.

Emma looked at the walls on either side of her. There was no way to climb out quickly. And even if they did, they’d be back out on the thing’s turf. Frustration boiled within her. She spun, lifted her gun in a two-handed grip, gritted her teeth, and fired half a dozen quick rounds into its face.

The head pulled back, and she was sure she hit it, perhaps every time. But after a few seconds, the raking began again directly over them. The huge head leaned over and reached down again, and then inhaled deeply. This time, the head angled and the mouth opened and the jaws snapped shut again, so close she actually saw the broad, flat tongue inside the mouth.

It was only just too far away, but it was getting closer. Emma held her breath as she smelled the vile carnivore stink emanating from its gaping mouth. She’d seen her friends disappear into mouths like those, and she was damn sure she’d never let that be her fate.

Once again, the head pulled back, and the raking started again, and once again, the trio scurried another 20 feet further along the crevasse. But it was like a dog enjoying a game; the great beast followed them, to immediately rake again.

Emma groaned. The problem for them was that the further along the crack they went, the shallower it got. A few more sprints, and the monster would only need to dig a few feet to reach them.

She turned to see Drake looking at her. He grinned and shrugged. “This has been one helluva a trip, Ms. Wilson.”

She couldn’t help smiling in return. “It’ll sure be something to tell your kids about.”

“That’s first prize,” he said. “Second, is just staying alive to tell anyone.”

Andy leaned around Drake and lifted one side of the bandage over his eyes. He blinked myopically, and then ripped it off. He kept blinking, and then looked upward, seeing the massive boxy head reaching down.

“Jesus.” He ducked as the massive head thundered down into the gap. ‘Please tell me it’s just my screwy eyes making me see that.”

“I wish,” Drake said, also hunkering down even more. “Maybe you should put that back on, buddy.”

Emma grimaced. “Welcome back.”

The head smashed down again, and Emma contemplated another scurry along the trench. But she saw that it became too shallow. They’d be dug out in an instant, if the beast even had to dig. The other option was to try and rush past the head and get to the other end of the fissure — where there were already huge holes now dug in the edge of the crack.

“Lie down flat,” Drake said.

You mean, lie down and prepare to die, Emma thought grimly.

The claws raked and raked some more, and stones tumbled down on them, adding to the fear and chaos. Emma could hear its breath quickening as it started to tire, she hoped, but more likely it was becoming excited at the prospect of soon being able to reach its prizes.

To hell with that. I’m not lying down and not staying here, she thought. I’d rather die trying to get away than be picked off like some piece of fallen fruit. The moonbeams shone down again, illuminating the end of the crevice. It shallowed out, but even at its end, was still around seven feet high; too high to jump and run, and scaling meant she was vulnerable even for the few seconds it might take her.

Her mind computed the distance, the speed she might need, and her odds—low, she knew. She also knew by herself she might make it, might. But if all three of them tried, then they’d bunch up and potentially get in each other’s way.

She sat up, just as there came the thump of something striking the opposite wall of the crevasse. There came more, as more of the things rained down. A few struck the Giganotosaurus, and it roared its displeasure or shock.

More things rocketed down, and she heard the hard objects striking the head of the great beast with a solid crack of wood on bone. One of the items rolled close by, and she scurried over to reach for it.

“A pinecone thing.” It was larger than the variety she knew, and the size of a small football. The cone’s scales were closed tight, and it was damn heavy, several pounds at least, and hard as a rock.

The cones continued to shoot down, striking the Giganotosaurus’ head, neck, and flanks. It finally screamed its rage, and turned, looking for something to confront.

Emma looked up to see the beast’s tail hanging over the edge of their crevasse, as the thing must have been facing away from them now. She got up, hunched over, trotted to the end of the crevasse and jumped up, catching the lip with her fingers and pulling herself up to peek over.

She saw the massive theropod snap at the air and take a few thunderous steps toward the huge primitive pines, but it could find no assailant. All the while from high up in the branches, the heavy cones sailed down, striking the infuriated beast over and over.

Drake lifted himself up beside her, and she turned to him. “Jesus Christ; who’s doing that? Is it Ajax?”

“Unlikely he’d even think of coming back for us,” Drake said. “Plus, the guy can’t climb for shit.”

The animal bellowed a few more times and lowered its head. More accurate strikes cracked down on the huge skull again and again, and finally, the thing lumbered off in amongst the pine trees. They listened as the heavy footfalls got softer and softer.

It seemed that a head full of lumps changed an easy meal into something not worth the trouble.

“Round one to our pitcher,” she said.

Drake took out his binoculars. “And looks like we’re about to find out who they are.”

A figure scaled down the tree and jumped lightly to the ground. It was a man, with hair to his shoulders. Though underweight, his body still bulged with sinewy muscle and the frame was still broad.

He was near naked save for the remains of a tattered pair of pants covering his groin and one thigh. There was also a woven sack over his back.

He looked around slowly, and he lifted his head as though sniffing. Seeming to be satisfied, he turned back and walked confidently to the edge of the pit. He stared down at the trio, and then his face broke into a broad smile.

“What kept you?”

Emma fell back into the crevasse.

Ben had tracked the sound of Emma’s voice and then followed the trail of the massive theropod. He’d seen the group disappear into the crevasse, and given he had no weapons, he had to rely on the one thing he retained — experience.

The big carnivorous beasts had hard heads but small brains and were easily confused and distracted. He’d used the ploy before to see the smaller ones off, and the large, heavy pinecones made ferocious missiles.

He climbed well above the beast’s reach and began his attack — one strike, a dozen, 20, 40, before it had finally had enough. He stayed in place, watching its head and shoulders muscle back in through the tree growth and move away down along the waterway.

It might be back, but for now, it would lay low for a while and nurse its headache.

He walked to the edge of the fissure, seeing the heads now poking up. The moon had vanished and he could only just make out their shapes. Each step closer he went, he felt his heart swell to bursting.

Ben tried not to run, but his steps quickened anyway. Would his voice crack? Would he mumble, not being used to talking to anyone but himself for years and years.

He crouched, spoke just a few rusty words, and Emma fell back into the crevasse.

“Huh?” He jumped in after her, and a body immediately fell on top of him.

“Only a guy like you could survive in this place for ten years, Cartwright.” Drake threw an arm over him, while Ben tried to help Emma sit up. He brushed the hair from her grimy face.

She burst into tears and reached out for him. “I knew. I knew.”

He hugged her close. “You came.” He couldn’t say any more, as he felt hot tears running down his own face.

“Ho-oooly shit,” a young man said from just behind Drake. “He actually survived. How? What did you see? Where did you go? I have so many questions.” He tried to burrow in closer, but Drake elbowed him back a pace.

Drake reached out a hand to Ben’s shoulder. “Captain, we need to bug out, like right now. The walls are closing in.”

Ben stood, pulling Emma up with him. He kept his eyes on hers the whole time. “Roger that; and I’m certainly not staying here another ten years.” He grinned, wiped his face, and turned to his friends, really seeing them for the first time.

“You got old.” He grinned.

Drake grinned. “Oh yeah, wait until you see your first mirror after a decade, buddy. And get a haircut, you hippy.”

The four of them climbed out of the crevasse, and Ben turned his head to listen for a moment. “That big guy will be back.”

“Then we need to be far away,” Emma said and hung onto him tightly.

The four of them huddled in together, and Ben looked down at Emma, then to Drake. “Do you have a plan?”

“We ballooned in, and we were gonna go out the same way. Unfortunately, it got ripped apart coming in,” Drake answered.

“But we think we know another way down,” Emma added. “We’re not sure if it’s viable, but there’s another temple built over a chute. I think it leads to the ground.”

“First prize, we climb all the way down, and then keep going,” Andy said, and stepped in closer. “Captain Cartwright, Ben, what did you see? Where did you—?”

“Not now,” Ben said and pushed long hair back off his face. “There’s one problem; the reason I moved off the plateau and stayed far away is because it’s owned by the snakes. And most of the big nests are underground.”

“Of course,” Andy said. “That’s why we found the fossilized remains of the Titanoboa deep in a coalmine. It wasn’t sedimentary settling, but that’s where the thing lived.” He snapped his fingers. “And I bet being underground shielded them from the worst effects of the meteor strike extinction event.”

“Then the snakes will definitely be in the temple,” Ben said.

Drake snorted. “Yeah, we found that out. Don’t worry; Ajax and Fergus will clean them out by the time we get there.”

Ben laughed softly. “You talked them into coming along as well?”

Drake shook his head. “Not me, your girlfriend. And Brocke came as well. But we crashed into the lake, and… he bought it there.”

“Fuck.” Ben’s mouth flattened into a line momentarily. “He was a good guy.”

“The best,” Drake added.

Ben reached out and took Drake’s hand, shaking it. “Thank you, Sergeant; you’ve done a good job. This place is Hell.” He pulled Emma in closer. “You’re all mad, you know.”

“Hell to us, but not to the creatures that live here,” Andy added.

Emma looked up at him. “And we’re not supposed to be here.”

“True.” Ben hugged Emma again. “So let’s go home.”

CHAPTER 36

Eventually, hunger overcomes caution, fear, and pain. The Giganotosaurus turned and then headed back to where it had tried to catch the small sweet-smelling creatures in the ground.

It avoided the same path it had come before, not wanting to suffer the same bombardment. But upon returning to where it had dug at the crack in the ground, it found they had fled.

But their scent was still strong. It moved quickly to where the fissure narrowed and smelled that they were on the other side of it. The great beast turned away and trotted about 50 feet from the eight-foot-wide crack, then swung back and accelerated quickly, its massive legs pounding down on the hard earth. When it was a few feet out, it leaped across the fissure to land on the other side with a thunderous impact.

The huge carnivore then traced its way back to where it detected the small things had climbed out. It followed the scent trail, huge nostrils flaring wide and sucking in the odors — they’d moved into the jungle. It began to follow.

CHAPTER 37

“What was it like, Ben? Please, I must know,” Andy persisted. He was like a small satellite as he stayed at Ben’s shoulder. “You’ve got to tell me what you saw.”

“It was Hell.” Ben sighed. “And what did I see?” He turned. “I saw a place that people should not exist in.”

“Ruled by tooth and claw, huh?” Andy pushed.

“Ruled by hunger, and without mercy — eat or be eaten,” Ben replied.

“I want to see it,” Andy said. “I want to see it all.”

“There’s a price.” Ben turned. “I stayed alive because I lived below the ground, in caves, only foraging at night, and staying out of sight. Being seen meant inviting death.” He grinned like a death’s head. “If I was a cat, this would be my last life.”

“Yep, I get it.” Andy nodded. “Working with fossils all my life means having to use my imagination to construct what dinosaurs must have looked like when they were alive. But being here, I’ve seen living dinosaurs. The colors, the way they move, even the sounds they make, un-bel-ievable.” He grinned.

“Yes,” Ben said. “They’re faster than we ever imagined. The hunters display pack behavior, just as the plant-eaters move in herds. And some of the pack hunters are smart, even smarter than dogs. They can work things out, problem solve, and they learn real quick.” His eyes narrowed as he remembered. “Makes me wonder what the world would be like if they hadn’t all become extinct.”

“They’d rule the world,” Andy said, beaming.

Ben snorted softly. “The ones in the ocean were the same.”

“What?” Andy grabbed Ben’s arm and stopped them both. “You actually made it to the ocean?” His mouth gaped.

Ben nodded. “Several weeks’ hike, always moving at night. Spent months there living off the land and sea.”

“Oh God.” Andy let him go. “I want to see it,” he whispered.

Ben shook his head and began to walk ahead. “The price is too high.” He stopped and turned. “Things… people, die horribly here.”

Andy nodded, but kept his head down.

CHAPTER 38

They entered the swamp half an hour later, about the same time the weird mist started to settle around them. Ben stopped them to crouch by a particularly viscous-looking pool. He dipped a hand into the soft mud and started to liberally apply it to his shoulders, underarms, face, and neck.

“Insects?” Drake asked.

“Keeping insects off is for comfort,” Ben said. “But mainly it’s to mask my body heat and scent. And that’s to survive.” He held out a handful. “I suggest you all do the same. After ten years of not seeing and hearing another human being, I can tell you one thing — you smell.” He half-smiled. “Not in a bad way, it’s just that I can smell you. And if I can, the hunters certainly can.” He finished and stood. “Not to mention the snakes. They’ll see you in the dark.” He looked at Emma. “Remember?”

She nodded. “They can see our body heat.” She held out her hand. “Pass me the cold cream.”

Andy and Drake looked at each other, and Ben pointed to the mud. “I’m serious. You don’t need to strip down, but coat your clothing and all exposed skin.” He looked up at the sky for a moment and saw that the moon had vanished. “Em, how much time do we have?”

Emma checked her watch. “Four hours. It’s three until sunup.” She turned to Drake. “I’m thinking a good hour and a half to the temple.”

“By then, Ajax, Fergus, Helen, Camilla, and Juan should have all scaled down. Or maybe waiting for us,” Drake said. He crouched, scooped some mud, and lathered it on his neck, cheeks, and up through his short hair.

“That’s quite a team. But more people, more risk,” Ben said evenly.

“Yeah, most I hand-picked,” Emma said. “Ass kickers like Drake, but also some scientists. Camilla and Juan are press, and managed to barge in on a, take us or else proposition.”

“Frankly, I’ll be happy if they’re all gone,” Drake added. “If not, we’ll get an update on why.” He exhaled. “I only hope, if they are there, it’s not because it’s a dead-end… or something worse.”

Drake, Andy, and Emma were lathering the mud on their faces, ears, and began to cover their clothing. Drake stopped for a moment. “And before you ask, we don’t really have a Plan B.”

“Yeah, we do.” Emma tilted her head. “The mist made me remember when we scaled up, and I scaled down the last time. We seemed to pass through a distortion layer of air.”

Ben nodded. “You think maybe that was what separated our two time zones, and our worlds?”

Emma nodded. “We know the magnetic effects of Primordia are localized. So maybe that was as far as the time distortion effect reached. So our Plan B is if the temple’s chute is deep enough, maybe we can drop below the distortion line. So once Primordia moves on, we can climb back up, and be… back.” She shrugged. “It’s a theory.”

“I like it.” Ben nodded. “And I never even thought about that.”

“Or we could climb back up, and still be here,” Andy said, not looking worried by the prospect at all.

Ben grinned at Emma. “But, I believe in miracles.”

A wind began to rustle the treetops, and Ben looked up again. “And so it begins.”

“Or ends,” Emma said softly.

CHAPTER 39

Comet P/2018-YG874, designate name, Primordia, was pulling away from the third planet to the sun to continue on its eternal elliptical voyage around our solar system.

The magnetic presence that had dragged at the planet’s surface, caused chaotic weather conditions, and created a distortion in time and space, was lessening in intensity by the seconds, and in just a few more hours would vanish completely.

The clock was ticking down, and soon there would be another 10 years of calm over the mountaintops of the Venezuelan Amazon jungle.

CHAPTER 40

“So, what’s the first thing you’re gonna do when you get home, big guy?” Drake walked at Ben’s shoulder.

Ben turned to smile at Emma, who nodded in return.

“Yeah, after that,” Drake said, chuckling.

Ben had lived it in his mind too many times. He grinned in the darkness. “Ribs.”

“Huh?” Drake tilted his head.

“Ricky’s ribs,” Emma said. “Double plate, special barbecue sauce. Jug of cold beer.” She threw an arm around Ben’s waist. “My treat.”

He hugged her in close and looked to Drake. “Play your cards right, you might just get an invite.” His face became serious, as someone else came to his mind. “Cynthia, Mom, is she still…?”

Emma nodded. “Yeah, still there, still hopeful. Took every ounce of my strength and persuasion skills I had to keep her from coming along.”

Ben laughed. “Yep, that’d be Mom.”

They walked on in silence for another few minutes before Ben noticed that the swamp was drying and the ground was becoming harder beneath their feet. “This the right way?”

“I should be asking you, Tarzan. This has been your home for the last ten years,” Drake said.

Ben stopped. “No, it hasn’t. I stayed well away from here. For good reason.”

“The snakes, huh?” Drake asked. “Yeah, pretty badass. We saw one in the temple.”

“No, we saw a juvenile,” Emma said. “The adults are three times as large.”

“O-oookay.” Drake’s jaw clenched for a moment. “Nothing Ajax and Fergus can’t handle.”

Ben grunted. “I’m glad Fergus is there. Ajax is a little… impulsive.”

“He can be. But he’s matured… a little.” Drake didn’t sound all that convincing.

“Hope so; he was a damn hothead. Up here, that won’t just get him killed, but everyone killed, and eaten alive.” Ben sighed. “This is no Garden of Eden.” Ben gave his friend a half-smile. “Thank you for coming. But you’re insane for doing it.”

Drake winked. “Gotta tell you, buddy. We came for the money. I thought you were just a pile of bones somewhere in the Amazon Jungle.” He looked around. “Never expected to find you, and sure as hell never really thought all this was going to be real.”

“You and me both.” Ben nodded sagely and walked on for a few minutes. He half-turned. “You’re still invited for the ribs.”

They continued to push through heavy fronds dripping with moisture, trying to move fast but in silence. After another moment, Ben thought he heard and felt something. He held up his hand.

“Quiet.”

He turned back the way they’d come, staring into the darkness. He tilted his head, straining to listen, and then crouched to place a hand flat against the ground. This time, he closed his eyes, concentrating.

After a few minutes, he opened his eyes. “Goddammit.” He stood. “That big bastard is following us.”

“The Giganotosaurus again?” Andy asked. “Shit.”

“Good and bad news,” Ben said. “The good news is that the smaller hunters will head for the hills with a big theropod in the vicinity. The bad news is, there’s a big theropod in the vicinity. This is usually the time I run and hide — into a cave, or to a treetop.”

“How far back is it, you think?” Drake asked.

“Half a mile, less,” Ben said and shrugged.

“We can make it. I’m sure the temple is less than that. If there’s no smaller carnivores, then we can double-time it,” Drake replied.

Ben grabbed Emma’s hand. “Good idea.”

Drake pulled his longest blade and turned to the wall of green. “Let’s push it.” He hacked at a vine and then began to jog, thrashing away in front of him. Ben and Emma followed, with Andy lagging a little behind.

The four of them crouched just behind the last line of hanging vines. Before them was the temple, still imposing and draped in shadows within shadows. At the eastern horizon, a tiny blush of red indicated that sunup wasn’t far off.

Ben snorted softly. “Just like on the jungle floor all those years ago. Even the gargoyles out front; the monster snake in battle with the beast.”

“Same culture,” Emma said.

Drake rested on his haunches and had his binoculars up to his eyes. “All calm and quiet.” He handed them to Ben.

Ben scanned the entrance. “I’d be happier if there was someone waiting for us.”

“Think positive,” Emma said. “They’ve already made it to the base of the plateau and are waiting for us down there.”

Ben turned and grinned. “Yeah, I like it; that’s what happened.”

Behind them, Andy had his night vision goggles over his eyes, but was furiously scribbling something on a piece of notepaper with a pencil.

“See anything?” Ben asked him.

“Huh?” Andy looked up. “Oh.” He turned to the temple and stared for a few seconds, his mouth slightly open. He slowly shook his head. “Nope, no one and nothing.”

Ben looked up at the sky between the branches and saw something familiar that filled him with dread — the clouds were low and ominous, beginning to rotate like they were in the eye of a cyclone, even though the wind was still gentle. For now.

“Let’s get this over with.” Ben turned to the trio, and thought he saw Andy pull his hand back as if he had been about to touch Emma’s leg. Weird kid. Smart, but weird, he thought.

“Ready?” he asked Emma first.

She nodded. “When you are.”

Ben half-turned. “Guys?”

“Yo.” Drake’s eyes were gun barrels on the temple, and Andy nodded but still looked distracted.

Ben turned back. “Count of 3, 2, 1… go.” He led them out of the cover of the jungle and across the clearing. He ran hard, but not fast enough as to leave Emma behind. He needn’t have worried, as she kept pace with him easily and was probably fitter than he was now.

In another minute, he bounded up the huge stone steps and stopped just inside the heavy carved doorframe. Emma came in and flattened herself against the wall next to him. Drake came in on the other side.

Ben was breathing hard, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Drake and Emma flicked on flashlights.

“Where’s the kid?” Ben noticed Andy hadn’t arrived.

“What?” Emma immediately looked back out across the clearing to where they had come out of the jungle.

Ben followed her eyes. “Were there hunters there?” His stomach suddenly felt leaden.

There was no one and nothing in the clearing, and no man or beast still in the jungle they could see.

“Unlikely,” Drake said.

“What the hell happened to him?” Emma asked. “I don’t… I don’t even remember him running with us.”

“We go back,” Drake said. He moved to the entrance and looked out over the clearing.

“Wait.”

Ben had a mad thought. Impossible, but…

“Emma, check your pockets,” he said softly.

She frowned and reached a hand into one, then the other. From her right pocket, she drew forth a folded piece of paper. She looked down at it as if it was the strangest thing she’d ever seen. She held it out and lifted her querying gaze to Ben.

“What does it say? Read it.”

She quickly unfolded it, and Drake held his light over her shoulder. She began:

“Emma, Drake, and Ben, thank you. Thank you for bringing me here. My life’s love has been to immerse myself in the distant past. I used to just use my imagination to reconstruct the wonders of that time. But you have managed to take me there, for real.

But there’s still so much I want to see — must see.

I want to see a sunrise over a prehistoric ocean. I want to see the colors, the habits, and the behaviors of creatures long gone. I want to see the creatures that never even made it into our fossil record.

I’m sorry. Please tell Helen I love her and will miss her.

But don’t try and look for me. This is my decision. And I’m already gone.

Yours truly, Andrew Francis Martin.”

“That goddamn idiot,” Drake said. He bared his teeth and leaned around the doorframe again. “He can’t be that far ahead of us.”

“No,” Emma said with heavy resignation in her voice. “Let him go.”

“No one on my watch gets left behind,” Drake insisted.

“Drake, he’s not being left behind. He’s made a decision to stay; respect it,” Ben said. He pointed up at the sky. “See that?”

Drake turned to where Ben indicated.

“That spinning cloud is just the start. Soon, the wind will rise, the cloud will drop, and then all hell breaks loose as this place goes back to where it belongs.” Ben looked at his friend. “We need to be long gone by then.”

Drake dropped his head for a moment. “Yeah, I get it.” He took one last look out at the clearing. “That’s the plan. So let’s go see if any of our wayward clan is still here, or left us a sign.” He checked his gun and then held his flashlight high, locating the room that held the steps down to the basement. “This way.”

The trio entered the room, and Ben saw the hole in the floor. He sniffed. “Not good.”

“Yeah, snakes. Seems there was a nest in the chute,” Emma said.

“Well, as long as Ajax didn’t bring the entire roof down on his head, I expect to find a lot of snake bodies.”

“Here’s hoping,” Emma said, uncertainly.

Drake turned to her. “Don’t worry, he and Fergus know their stuff and had enough firepower to do some serious damage.” He lit a flare and tossed it down into the darkness. The red glow was anything but warm and welcoming as the soldier was first to descend.

Ben paused for a moment; the smell alone put him on edge. He also noticed that Drake went down the steps like he did — as far up against the wall as he could get. For all his confident words, he noticed the guy was on edge.

They inched down, toes alighting first, softly, followed by the rest of the foot. Add weight, and then onto the next step, doing the same over again. Just the sound of the flare fizzed below them.

Ben and Drake came into the room first with Emma at their heels. Ben went to push Emma back, but she swiped his arm away and held her gun in both hands.

Then he saw it.

Ben dry-swallowed down some bile. The place looked like an abattoir, and even though the pyrotechnic smell of the flare was strong, they could still detect the overpowering smell of the blood and viscera.

“What the fuck happened here?” Drake had his gun up. “Is it snake’s blood?” he asked hopefully.

“No, look, there’s torn cloth, boots, clothing strewn about.” Ben pointed at a shred of camouflage material. “I think one of the guys bought it right there.” He put an arm across his lower face as he saw the glistening thing. “Jesus Christ.”

Ben stared down at the mess on the ground. It was about 10 feet long and was roughly compressed into a giant, wet-looking cigar shape. But in amongst the red of the meat and speckled fragment of bone, there was a boot on one end.

“I think that’s Ajax,” Drake said. The tough soldier’s jaws clenched as though he was also fighting to keep down his sick down.

“Regurgitation,” Emma said softly. “I remember Andy telling me that big snakes do it from time to time. If they’ve had their fill, even after crushing and swallowing something, they might decide to vomit it up and come back to it later.”

Ben was nauseated but found it hard to drag his eyes away from that crushed boot. He didn’t want to, but his gaze was now drawn to the other end of the thing, where the man’s head should have been. In amongst the mess, he could just make out some hair, an elongated skull, and a single eye floating in the mess. The jaws were still there, but now torn wide in a perpetual scream of agony.

Now he knew how Drake had identified Ajax — there was a silver tooth floating in the gore. He grimaced. “Poor sap.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Drake spat the words through clenched teeth. “We’ve gotta get out of here. Get off this damn plateau.” He edged up to the portal in the wall and darted his head around the carved stonework, and then pulled it back. When nothing jumped out at him, he looked back in and shone his flashlight deeper into the hole. He looked about to step inside.

“Don’t!”

They all spun, three guns pointing to where the voice had come from.

About five feet up on the wall, there was a crack, no more than a foot high and six feet wide. Probably where some sort of earth movement had caused the heavy stone blocks to settle at an angle.

A slim hand emerged, followed by a dirt-covered woman — Helen. Drake rushed to her, helping to extract her from where she had wedged herself in tight. He carried her down to the floor of the room, and she clung tight to him.

“You’re okay now.” Drake tried to calm her, but Helen just shook her head, and wouldn’t let him go. Drake tried again. “Can you tell us what happened?”

“Out, out,” she hissed.

“Let’s take her upstairs,” Ben said, keeping his eyes on the hole in the wall.

Drake looked up and saw where he was looking. “Yeah, good idea.” He helped the woman to her feet, putting an arm around her and literally dragging her up the steps. Emma quickly followed.

Ben spotted some things near the hole and ran for them. He snatched them up — one of the M4 rifles and a bloody ammunition belt that held stubby can-like rounds. He could feel by the weight of the gun that the magazine wasn’t empty. There was also a slime-covered handgun. He took one last look at the dark portal, and then backed up the steps, keeping his eyes on the impenetrable blackness inside every step of the way.

Drake sat Helen down and gave her a sip from his canteen. She immediately lurched forward and vomited onto the ground. Emma rubbed her back and spoke softly to her and she sobbed once, wiped her mouth and nose, and sat back. Her eyes remained tightly closed.

“We can’t stay here,” she said. “We can’t.”

Drake put a hand on her shoulder. “Tell us wh—”

Helen grabbed his arm, her eyes round. “We’ve got to go.”

“We’re here, you’re okay now.” He kept his voice soft.

“You don’t understand.” Helen seemed to deflate and leaned forward onto her knees. “The Titanoboa; much bigger than I ever expected. And fast, so fast.” She started to laugh, but her eyes began to redden again. “Couldn’t kill it.” She turned to Drake, shaking her head. “Nope, wouldn’t die.”

Helen’s eyes took on a faraway look. “It trapped us; ambushed us.” She slumped again.

Emma’s eyes went to Ben momentarily, before she took the woman’s hand. “From the pit?”

“Yes, no… ” Helen grimaced. “The snake came, but not from the cave. We all thought it was in there, and Ajax tried to lure it out.” Her eyes went wide. “But it came from behind us, trapped us. The bullets didn’t seem to hurt it at all.”

“Shit,” Drake said under his breath and looked up at Ben.

“I had to hide. I couldn’t do anything but hide.” Helen shook her head. “I’ve been in there ever since. The snake ripped them to shreds, crushed them down to nothing and ate them all.” Her face screwed up in horror. “Then the others came, the smaller ones, and she fed some of the bits to them.”

Helen buried her face in her hands. “Camilla, Fergus, all of them, crushed, eaten.” She took her hands away, her eyes wild. “We need to get out, run, now.”

She went to get to her feet, but Emma grabbed her, and sat her down hard. “No; there isn’t time.” She looked at Ben, and then Drake, her teeth showing. “We stick to the plan.” She shook Helen. “Look!” She pointed at Ben. “You know who this is?”

Helen shook her head, and then realization must have dawned on her. “You’re Ben Cartwright?”

Ben nodded.

Emma’s eyes drilled into Helen, and she still gripped her arm. “He survived here for ten years. We only need to do it for another few hours. But we need to escape. Nothing is going to stop that from happening. Got it?”

“We’ll never make it.” Helen looked panicked. “You didn’t see what happened.” She tried to pull out of Emma’s grip. “Andy and I… ” She stopped dead and looked around, as if realizing for the first time her brother wasn’t with them.

“Where’s Andy?” Her voice was small.

Emma finally let her go. “We think… he decided to stay here. No, we know he decided to stay. He left us and vanished when we were just outside.”

“He left a note,” Ben said. “He wanted you to know that he loved you, and not to worry about him.”

“Oh God.” Helen grabbed her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “That little fool. Ever since he was a kid, he’d do things like this.”

“He’s not a kid now. This is what he wanted,” Ben said.

“Andy’s a dreamer. He hasn’t seen what I’ve seen,” Helen quaked out.

“Too late; he’s gone. Nothing we can do now.” Emma sat back on her haunches. “So, now we need to save ourselves.”

“We stick to the plan,” Ben said softly.

“Only one we got. And the clock is ticking,” Drake added. “Weapons check. Whatta we got?”

Ben checked the rifle he found; he wasn’t familiar with the new model but knew he could operate it. He pulled out the magazine, checked it, and then noticed the undercarriage wasn’t holding the grenade launcher. “Magazine is half-full, grenade launcher is gone. So I have a belt with three grenade cartridges and nothing to fire them with. Also a handgun that has five rounds remaining.”

“Good,” Drake said. “I’ve got two knives, M4 handgun with half a magazine, and a spare mag in my belt. I’ve also got two flares remaining.”

Emma checked her handgun, popped out the magazine, and saw there were only two rounds left. From a pouch on her thigh, she drew forth a full magazine and snapped it in, and then snapped the slide forward and back. “Full magazine, plus another full mag in my pocket, and two rounds in another. I’ve got the bush knife and three flares.” Her lips compressed. “Not much, but it’ll do.”

Drake raised an eyebrow. “It’ll have to, and it will do.”

Ben had extracted one of the copper-colored grenade rounds. He held it up — it was like a stubby bullet with a red tip. He’d never seen one like it before. “Are these DOI?”

Drake looked at him and grinned. “M203 cartridges can be DOI — detonate on impact — or air burst, incendiary, and even water detonation. We’ve come a long way in a few years, buddy.”

Ben turned the fat cartridge in his hand. It still had streaks of blood coating it, and it stained his palm red. “What sort of velocity for DOI?”

“Baseball pitch. Impact detonation, on paper, means if you can just throw ‘em hard enough, they’ll detonate. But you’ve got to have a good arm and a hard surface to strike.”

“Got it,” Ben said, resheathing the plug.

Helen turned to him. “Ben Cartwright?”

“Yep.”

“If you survived here by yourself, do you think, um, that maybe there’s a chance that Andy can too?” Her eyebrows were high, and there was real fear in her eyes.

Ben got down on one knee close to her. “Sure he can. He’s a smart guy; smarter than I am.” He smiled crookedly and patted her hand. But he didn’t believe it for a second.

She nodded back, her eyes still wide. “And then I can come back for him, like Emma did for you.” Her eyes were pleading now.

Behind him, he heard Emma exhale. “Anything’s possible.” Ben patted the woman’s hand. “Helen, I need to ask you something. It’s important.”

She looked up. “Of course; what is it?”

“We’re going to have to move quickly, climb, maybe fight; can you do that?” He waited.

“Fight?” Her brows drew together in confusion.

“Yes, fight to live.” Ben kept his eyes on hers.

“I don’t want to go back down there.” She looked away. “But I’ll do what needs to be done.”

“That’s all we can ask. Thank you.” Ben squeezed her hand and then stood. He walked to the doorway and looked out into the jungle. He had to squint now as the wind blew debris in at him. He momentarily recoiled as a long thread of lightning traveled horizontally, branching up and down like a blinding river of light.

“Not much time now.” He sucked in a breath right to the bottom of his lungs. “This is where the shit gets real.” He looked along the jungle wall and saw what he needed just in through a stand of trees. “We need to make use of every advantage we have. And every tool and weapon we have. We’re going to war, and the odds are not in our favor.”

Drake looked back to the room with the steps leading to the portal. “Might be more we can salvage down there.”

“Yeah, you do that,” Ben said over his shoulder. “I’m going to grab a few things. Be back in ten minutes. Em, can I borrow your knife?”

“No.” She scowled. “But you can borrow me and I come with a knife. You’re not going anywhere by yourself right now.”

Ben sighed. “Don’t have time to argue.” He pointed. “See that stand of trees, the larger ones with the collars of thin leaves around their base? That’s where we’re going.”

“No problem; ready when you are,” she said.

Ben turned to nod at Drake. “Ten minutes. Be ready.” He turned, took one last look up and down along the tree line, and then sprinted from the temple doorway. Emma was right beside him.

Emma beat Ben to the tree line, and immediately went down on one knee, gun up in a two-handed hold. She scanned the trees, but there didn’t seem to be anything moving. It was damn hard to tell now, she thought, as the branches whipped about and the low moan of rushing wind dominated everything.

Ben crouched beside her, also scanning the brush. She looked back at the temple; the dark mouth of the doorway was now empty as she assumed Drake and Helen were down in the basement room retrieving anything of use they could salvage from the carnage.

Good on Helen, Emma thought; couldn’t have been easy going back down after what she had seen take place.

She winced as thunder cracked, and looked up to see the boiling clouds rotating like froth in a bath about to go down the plug. They were getting down to the last hours or maybe even hour now — seconds counted.

“What do we need?” she yelled.

Ben held out his hand. “We need to cut some straight branches, some vines, and collect some of that resin.” He pointed.

She handed him the long knife. “I’ll get the vines.” She withdrew her smaller blade.

The pair worked fast. Ben hacked down five-foot trees and stripped them of their branches and leaves. Emma extracted elastic vines from around the tree trunks, and quickly scooped up some of the dark sticky resin onto broad, flat leaves.

Ben then shaped the ends of his rods, cutting a groove a few inches from the top, and then making a small notch in the top like a saddle. Emma brought him her pieces.

“I think I know where you’re going; and I like it.”

He grinned as he worked. “Every bit helps.” He took one of the grenade cartridges and sat it in the saddle at the top, rounded head as the spear tip. Ben then lashed and tied them with the vines, and finally liberally coated them with the sticky and fast-drying resin.

He examined it and handed it to Emma. “One.” He worked quickly; creating two more, and then wiped off his hands and turned to her. “Seems fitting that in this place we’re back to resorting to spears.” Ben got to his feet.

“One more thing.” Emma came up beside him. Her eyes were luminous, and he couldn’t help bending toward her. She smiled and pushed her face back at his, their lips meeting, hard. She broke the kiss.

“For luck.”

“I’ve loved you… ” He grinned down at her. “… for 100 million years.”

She laughed and the pair turned, about to leave the jungle edge, but Ben threw an arm out in front of her.

“Don’t move.”

From the other side of the clearing, the monstrous snake slid from the jungle like a waterfall of dark brown and green scales. It was on its belly, but the arm-thick tongue continued to dart out, tasting the air. The tongue’s movements became more frantic and then the snake reared up, raising its head around 20 feet from the ground.

Emma couldn’t help her intake of her breath — to her, the nightmare was back. Out in the open, its size was colossal, and even though she had witnessed a full-grown creature before, her modern mind still had trouble processing it as being real.

They both eased back behind the trees and tried to stay motionless. The red, glass-like eyes of the Titanoboa were impossible to read, but the tongue began flickering again, and the head began to turn as it looked along the line of foliage.

“Drake and Helen will be sitting ducks,” Emma whispered.

“So are we,” Ben responded.

“We can run for it,” she replied.

“To where? And for how long?” Ben answered. He hefted one of the spears. “No, we’ve got to discourage it from entering — we need that temple.”

“Yeah, we do.” Emma swallowed. Suddenly, the spears and her handgun seemed a joke when contemplating a war on this thing. She wanted to run and hide, but Ben was right. Running and hiding might mean life for now, but it would also mean missing their window of opportunity. Did she want to try and live in this place for 10 years? Or condemn Ben for another decade?

“Goddamnit,” she whispered.

“No, this is a good thing.” Ben pulled her along behind the tree line. “We wanted to flush it out. Now we don’t have to.” Ben’s jaw worked for a moment, as he seemed to come to a decision. “Cover me.”

“What?” Emma grabbed at him, but he had already moved further along behind the line of trees, getting closer to the snake.

Even though Ben crept along and tried to stay behind cover, the snake spotted him almost immediately. Its five-foot-wide diamond-shaped head swung around to watch him. The creature’s body was around four feet wide at the neck, but then broadened to be about seven wide at its girth. It was a monstrous animal and emanated power and lethality. Ben would have made a perfect bite-sized snack for the creature.

“Oh no.” Her mouth dropped open as Ben broke cover and sprinted at the monster, yelling and holding up one of his spears. The snake must have been taken by surprise by a prey animal charging it, and stopped its advance, rearing up even higher in a defensive display.

When Ben was just 50 feet away, he whipped his arm forward and propelled the spear like a javelin.

It flew, wobbling, and as a first effort, it wasn’t bad. But it was obvious that Ben needed practice as the swirling wind caught the missile and nudged it just enough to make it land several feet wide.

“Shit!” Ben yelled.

It got worse, as it struck a patch of thicker grass and didn’t even detonate. Emma grimaced, her teeth clamped together so hard they hurt.

Ben fumbled with another of his spears, but it was obvious that the odds had moved even more out of his favor.

“Fuck it.” Emma gripped her gun tight and stepped from the line of trees, knowing they were now on a suicide mission.

But instead of the snake bearing down on them, it swung away as an earth-shaking roar came from the other end of the clearing.

The thundering, predatorial bellow of the carnivore was a challenge, a warning, and designed to freeze its prey to the spot — it worked, as Emma cringed to be rooted to the ground from the noise alone.

She watched in awe as the massive theropod emerged from the jungle. Giganotosaurus, she breathed. The thing had tracked them from when she was in the crevasse. It seemed the monster decided it still had unfinished business with them. One problem: to get to Ben and Emma, it might have to fight for them.

The effect on the snake was instantaneous — Ben was forgotten, and the colossal snake reared up, rising high from the ground. Its head shivered slightly and the tongue flicked out, faster and faster, in clear agitation. Amazingly, its throat flared red with aggression.

Ben backed up, trying to keep watch on both monsters, but he was insignificant and nothing more than food to the victor, and right now, the two formidable beasts, both territorial, undoubtedly knew their meeting could end in only one way.

He joined Emma back in the tree line, and both could only watch with mouths gaping.

Though the snake was colossal in size, the Giganotosaurus lived up to its name — it was the biggest carnivore on this primitive continent, and this one was 40 feet long and stood 18 high at the shoulder. Though the snake was longer, the saurian massively outweighed it by many tons.

The Giganotosaurus roared, and its massive box-like head split open, showing the rows of razor-sharp, backward-curving teeth, each about 10 inches in length. It started to move, keeping its eyes on the snake and trying to circle it.

With small twitchy movements, the snake kept itself facing toward the threat. The dinosaur edged sideways, bellowing and snapping massive and powerful jaws at the Titanoboa. It looked like a monstrous guard dog threatening an intruder.

“No, no, no, not that way,” Emma said.

The dinosaur was moving the snake, and they could see that the Titanoboa was going to end up between them and the temple. If the snake decided to cut and run, it’d be back inside with Drake and Helen before they could blink. That’d leave them alone with one of the most fearsome creatures of the Late Cretaceous Period, and Emma knew how that would go.

There came a long hiss from the snake, and it tried to rear up even higher, perhaps to make itself seem even bigger. It didn’t work; the dinosaur charged.

The ground shook beneath their feet as the three-toed monster closed the gap between them in seconds. Ben and Emma were transfixed, watching the two land leviathans come together.

The Titanoboa snake was reputed to have fed on dinosaurs, and it was easily big enough. But the Giganotosaurus was a species of theropod that ruled its domain for a good reason and amazingly, for something of such a titanic size, was even faster than the snake probably suspected.

The snake went to strike the beast on its flanks, but the dinosaur lowered its head like a bull. The front of the creature’s skull was a massive plate of many-inches-thick bone, and even though the snake’s teeth caught and dug in, they inflicted little real damage.

In turn, the Giganotosaurus angled its head and opened its massive jaws wide and clamped them down on the snake’s upper body. The machine-like head brought a bite pressure of 1,000 pounds per square inch to bear on the giant pipe of scale and muscle.

The Giganotosaurus clamped down with an audible crunch, and the snake went mad. It became a monstrous worm in a bird’s beak. The body and tail of the snake whipped and thumped down, raising dust and making the ground shake.

“Now’s our cue,” Ben said, snapping Emma out of her trance and grabbing her hand. They sprinted across the clearing and were at the temple doorway in seconds. But just as they reached the steps, they were both thrown backward as a second colossal snake flowed from the doorway.

This snake was even bigger than the one locked in its death roll with the dinosaur. Perhaps it had been called by the first or had heard the commotion via vibrations in the ground, but it ignored the humans and poured forth toward the fighting pair.

Ben and Emma leaped aside but got to their feet quickly when it became clear the snake was going to pass them by. They watched it go and still couldn’t tear their eyes away as the second snake sped into the fighting pair.

It didn’t stop or even deviate, but simply accelerated, opened its mouth, and shot its head and neck forward to thump into the flanks of the Giganotosaurus and then clamp its jaws down hard. Immediately, the snake’s massive body was brought into action, throwing itself forward and wrapping itself around the great beast’s torso.

The Giganotosaurus must have known the dynamics of the battle had shifted as it dropped the first snake, which fell limp to the ground, and tried to bite at the muscular coils that were now wrapping around it.

The two colossal legs of the dinosaur planted and it raised itself to its full height as the body of the snake engulfed it — loop after loop, until the massive theropod, still upright, was bound in place and could only scream its primal rage.

“Look.” Ben nudged Emma and pointed to the gargoyle images of the carved intertwined deities at the temple’s entrance.

She nodded. “Yeah, this battle has played out before.”

“Come on, quick.” They bounded up the steps and sprinted inside.

“Drake, Helen,” Ben yelled into the cavernous space so his voice could be heard over the titanic struggle going on outside.

“Yo,” came an answer from the furthest room. Drake’s light appeared and then he and Helen followed it.

“Goddamn monster burst outta that portal. Went past us like we didn’t exist.” Drake looked pale but managed a grin regardless. Helen just looked ill.

Ben pointed to the room with the steps to the basement. “Now’s our chance. Those bastards have bigger fish to fry than us.”

Ben led them down the steps and slowed as he approached the ink-black hole in the wall. He leaned in and shook his head. “Still stinks in here. A nest for sure.”

“Yeah, and even the young ones are bad news.” Drake lit a flare and tossed it as far in as he could manage.

The red glowing stick bounced a few times and came to rest about 60 feet in. The carved portal opened out into a cavern. The smoke of the flare blew toward them.

“A breeze,” Emma said. “Warm air rises, so this is the best news we’ve had in days.”

“Years.” Ben grinned at her, but then turned back and tilted his head, listening.

Emma watched him for a moment. “You hear something in there?” she whispered.

“No, and that’s the problem. It’s gone quiet, but I mean from outside, and that tells me the fight is over.” He moved his remaining explosive spears from one hand to the other. “There’s no choice now; we’ve got to stay ahead of the snakes, and stay ahead of the gateway closing.”

Ben stepped inside.

CHAPTER 41

Ben led them in, walking carefully, holding the rifle up. Emma was at his left shoulder, gun ready but pointed down for now. Her eyes were wide and she was as alert as a hawk.

On Ben’s other side, Drake also had his gun ready, but also had Helen clinging on tight to his arm. She looked on the verge of panic—not good, Ben thought. If things went bad, they needed to remain cool and clear-headed, and able to move quickly. Ben knew from his mission firefights that it was indecision, hesitation, and panic that were always the first killers.

He had a spare gun and would have liked Helen armed, but given her state, he bet that when the chips were down, she’d more than likely drop it, or shoot one of them by accident.

Ben held up a hand. The cavern had opened out and then forked. There were several passages before them, and the gentle slope of the ground they’d been traveling on meant they were probably already quite a way below the surface. They’d left the flare far behind and were at the edge of its faint red glow, but their next discovery told Ben they were still well within the danger zone.

“Coprolite,” Helen observed as they passed the balls of chalk-like packages.

“Their shit,” Emma added. “And no, not fossilized.”

Some of the crap balls were the size of footballs, and some the size of large watermelons. In amongst the droppings, there were the remains of crushed bones. Ben didn’t want to think that the remains of Fergus or the others would soon end up deposited here. He shuddered; for that matter, he didn’t want to end up that way either.

The rocks inside the cave were smoothed, as if they had been polished by something heavy sliding over them over and over. And he knew what.

“Is this the nest?” he asked.

Helen peered around Drake. “No; there’d be clutches of eggs scattered around. This must just be an antechamber.”

“Damn; I have no idea which way,” Ben whispered as he flicked his light into each of the passages in front of them. “Emma, this is your field. Which way do we go?”

Emma turned slightly, spat on her hand, wiped it on her pants, and then held it up in front of her face. She moved it around and then pointed.

“The entrance on the left; that’s where the breeze is coming from.”

“Good enough for me,” Ben said.

“Hey, look.” Drake had his flashlight shining up against the flat wall. It was heavily carved with glyphs and drawings. “Je-zuz.” He shook his head.

Ben added his light. “They were as bad as the snakes.” The images showed men, women, and children all roped together by the neck, dozens and dozens of them, and all being led out past the gargoyle statues of the carved snake and beast.

The next image showed them standing before the monstrous snake. And the last image was of the snake beginning to consume them, as the tied-up victims stood calmly as though simply waiting for a bus ride.

“Bastards,” Emma spat. “I used to think they killed their people first and then fed the parts to the Titanoboa. That was bad enough. But it’s worse; they fed the snakes with their own people goddamn alive.”

“I think they got what they deserved,” Ben said. “Looks to me like the snakes got tired of waiting for their dinner to be brought to them and decided on a little self-service.”

“Karma is a bitch,” Drake said, chuckling. “And now the snakes run the place.”

“Let’s keep going.” Emma glanced over her shoulder.

“How much time have we got?” Ben turned to see her still looking over her shoulder the way they’d come. “Emma?”

“Huh?” She turned to him. “Sorry?”

“You okay?” He followed her gaze, but there was nothing to see and the cave now extended back well beyond their light beams. “Time left, how much have we got?”

She didn’t even need to check her watch. “Based on the last apparition of Primordia, I estimate we’ve got 1 hour and 20 minutes. We must be below whatever line it is, or we all stay.”

“Okay. Give us a countdown every ten minutes to keep us focused and, you know, motivated.” Ben half-smiled at her.

“Yeah, motivated.” She grinned back.

He led them on through the passages that were still large enough to run a truck through. Ben had hoped they’d narrow, but guessed it wouldn’t matter, as the snakes were able to fit in fairly small spaces. He hoped they could go some places where the snakes couldn’t, but anything real tight, there was a chance they’d get stuck. He’d risk it, they all would, if it gave them even the slimmest chance to get the hell out of this place.

Ben swept his light from one side of the cavern to the other, spotting an alcove in the left rock wall that seemed incongruous. It narrowed to no more than a few feet wide, but inside, there were stones — cut stones — stacked up, almost sealing it off.

Around the outside, there were gouges in the rock walls, as though something had tried to force its way in. Ben leaped up and shone his light in between two of the stacked rocks.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” He stood back. “Looks like I wasn’t the only sap to get trapped up here once.”

The others took turns crowding around and looking inside the walled-off alcove. Ben knew what they were seeing — a skeleton, small, and brown with age. There were the remains of feathers and colored stones that were dappling the ribs and must have been some sort of necklace jewelry.

Whoever it had been, man or woman, they had sealed themselves in. And as the snakes had obviously been trying to get in, they had never been able to get out.

“They were trapped,” Ben said. “So they just sat back and waited to die.”

“Jesus — trapped in Hell.” Drake bared his teeth. “That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.”

“Yeah, it’s Hell. But you know what they say, when you’re going through hell…?” Ben turned and grinned.

“You keep going,” Ben, Drake, and Emma both said at once.

Helen had her arms wrapped around herself and stayed closed to Drake full time now. “Appropriate, this being Hell, I mean.” She gave them a broken smile. “Some ancient Amerindian races believed that down, being the underworld, was Heaven. And the sky was where the devil lived. That’s why they used to carry their dead deep into caves.”

Drake turned his back on the tunnel to face her. “Then we better find our way back to Heaven.”

The snake struck then, grabbing Drake by the thigh. The soldier yelled, more in surprise than pain, and was thrown backward by the force of the attack. Helen screamed and Drake pummelled down on the reptile’s head as it immediately began to throw coils as thick as the man’s waist around him.

Ben remained calm, turned, and fired controlled bursts from his rifle. The gunfire was near deafening in the confined space, and the bullets zippered along the snake’s flanks.

Emma held her gun in a two-handed grip and also fired, taking care to avoid the downed man. Helen backed up against the wall and held her hands over her ears.

Drake managed to pull his knife, and using the entire upper half of his body, swung the blade into the eye socket of the creature, sinking the steel deep.

It opened its mouth and hissed with pain and fury. Drake then twisted the blade, and it was like the creature was receiving an electric shock, as the snake went mad, thrashing around and jerking Drake up and down. Eventually, its head lay still, while its tail seemed to be trying to coil itself into knots.

Ben was first to his friend and dug his fingers into the mouth and pried the jaws open. It took a while to unhook him, as the backward-curving teeth were sunk like fishhooks into his flesh.

“Fuck it,” Drake yelled, as Emma wrapped her belt around his thigh.

“You were lucky,” she said.

“Yeah, for some reason, I don’t feel it.” He grimaced as she tightened the tourniquet.

“She’s right,” Ben said. “It was a small one. If it was an adult, next time you made an appearance, it’d be like that.” He pointed to a huge ball of snake shit in the corner. He helped pull the man to his feet.

Drake hopped for a moment and then put his foot down gingerly. He shook his head. “I can move, but if it comes to running… ” He just shook his head. “Ain’t gonna win any medals this week.”

Ben handed him the rifle, and Drake used it like a walking stick.

“Yeah? Well, I’m betting if that big mother makes an appearance, you’ll win medals.” He slapped Drake on the shoulder. “Let’s move out.”

CHAPTER 42

Rib bones the size of a full-grown man’s torso on the theropod began to compress. The Giganotosaurus’ massive jaws were of no use if it couldn’t get anything between them, and the Titanoboa knew to keep away from them, using the coils of its colossal body to bring a titanic pressure onto the huge predator’s chest.

It squeezed some more, and the eyes of the theropod bulged and its mouth sprung open. A few large gasps emanated from its throat as it tried to suck in air. Another squeeze, and then like cannon fire, the ribs broke, one after the other. Finally, the massive heart exploded under the pressure.

The monstrous snake lowered its head close to the open mouth of the Giganotosaurus, and its tongue flickered out. It tasted the saliva, the blood, and felt for any trace of breath or a heartbeat — there was none.

The giant theropod predator was too large for the Titanoboa to eat, but hunger always burned within it. The snake could continue to crush the beast down, turning it to mush, but even then, it would be a challenge.

At that moment, the booming sounds emanated from the stone building. The snake released the gigantic corpse and turned to the temple, and its nest. Like a molten river of glistening scales and muscle, it flowed toward the doorway.

CHAPTER 43

“This way.” Emma followed the faint movement of air. Her hands ached from gripping the gun and flashlight. Added to that, her nerves were piano-wire tight. She didn’t doubt for a second that there were more snakes in the caves, and only prayed that they ran out of snakes before their bullets did.

Ben had dropped back to cover their rear now. Though Drake would still be a formidable fighter, his ability to move quickly was compromised. She turned and looked briefly at Helen, who looked pale and scared half out of her wits. As long as she kept up, then that’d do, she thought.

Emma wiped an arm up over her face that streamed with perspiration. Thank God she could feel the soft kiss of a breeze on her cheeks. It had to be coming from below — it had to be another entrance—please be another entrance.

She dared to check her watch and winced. Time was moving too fast on them. “We got forty minutes to go,” she said over her shoulder.

“Got it,” Ben said from back in the darkness.

They’d come too far to turn back now, she knew. There was no backtracking and trying another route. It was all in or bust.

After another few minutes, the cavern began to get smaller and the gentle breeze started to turn into wind. As of yet, there was nothing but the smell of dry dirt, ancient dust, and just a hint of the musky scent of the monster reptiles.

As a caver, what she was desperate to find was a chute that dropped them down into the heart of the flat-topped mountain. One that was climbable, yet steep enough to get them below the distortion line quickly.

She held a hand up and shone her light at her palm. There seemed to be a mist or fog filling the cavern, and it rushed past her on the breeze.

“It’s starting to happen,” she whispered.

But then the mist slowed, and then stopped, just hanging listless in the air. Oh no, she thought. Emma turned slowly. The wind had stopped dead now, and the mist hung heavily around them.

There was only one reason for it — a blockage. She turned and met Ben’s eyes. “Something’s coming.”

CHAPTER 44

“From in front or behind?” Ben spun to look over his shoulder, and then back to Emma. “Shit.” Where they were, there were few vantage points, no places of concealment, or even opportunities to mount a real defense.

It didn’t matter; he’d seen what the monsters could do, and trying to fight one in an enclosed area was not a good tactical move. He had to assume it was one of the creatures coming up from behind them. And a cave blockage meant it was a big one.

“We stay ahead of it.” Ben spun to Drake, and his voice became authoritative. “Sergeant.”

Drake’s head snapped around. “Sir.”

“We are going to double-time it, and you will keep up.” Ben glared at his friend.

“Damn right I will, Captain.” He put more weight on his leg and grimaced.

Helen grabbed his arm tighter. “I’ve got him.”

“Go.” Ben began to jog, taking the lead with Emma who was right on his shoulder. A few more paces back, he could hear the quick clacking sound the gun muzzle made as Drake jammed the barrel into the cave floor.

Ben spotted the narrowing of the cave and went through a natural archway. He immediately slowed as they found themselves in a huge cathedral-like cavern.

He began to walk. “Ah, shit.” He lifted his gun. Emma did the same. The huge cave was filled with piles of eggs, eggshells, and twisting snakes. Most were no more than 20 feet in length, but some were larger.

“Look; at the far end of the cave.” Emma pointed.

On the other side of the huge cavern, there was what looked like a well, with hand-carved stone blocks built around a hole in the floor. Around its edge were eight-feet-tall stone idols of natives in headdresses, huge, two-legged beasts roaring to the sky, and rearing snakes with the green gem eyes.

“This must be it. This is how the natives were climbing up here in the wettest season,” Emma said. “We just need to get through.”

“Well, no time for diplomacy.” He turned to Drake. “Shock and awe.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Drake grinned with zero humor.

Ben turned back. “Then let’s make some space.” He pointed his gun at the largest snake and fired twice in quick succession. The bullets created twin holes right between the 30-foot snake’s eyes, and it shuddered and fell to the cave floor.

Drake balanced on one leg and started firing the rifle, picking his targets and never missing. Emma followed, drilling holes in anything that moved.

The room quickly filled with a mist of blood, smell of cordite, and the sound of a furious hissing that grew so loud that it almost hurt the ears. But in just seconds more, most of the remaining snakes had vanished like smoke.

“Cease fire,” Ben yelled, but he had no choice. “I’m out anyway.”

“Me too,” Drake said.

Emma jammed in her last magazine and went to point her gun at a rapidly retreating, but wounded snake.

“No!” Ben yelled again. “Save it. It’s all we have left.”

Emma reholstered her weapon and looked quickly at her watch. “Shit; hurry.”

They ran to the edge of the well-like pit and looked down. Emma grabbed her last flare, punched it against her thigh, and dropped it.

It floated for a moment on a wind rushing up into their faces, and then fell slowly. It kept on spinning and falling into a pit that seemed bottomless.

“Look.” She pointed. On the outside of the 20-foot-wide hole, there were steps carved into the stone in a corkscrew design.

Ben stared down and waved a hand in front of his face. The fog was thickening, and he looked to Emma. “Time to portal close?”

She quickly checked her watch and grimaced. “We’ve got twelve minutes, and we need to be down… ” She shook her head. “… I have no idea how far.”

“Then no time to waste — and deeper has got to be better. So… ” Ben was first over the side. Stuck in his belt were a few of his spears tipped with the grenade slugs.

Drake had discarded the empty gun and hobbled as best he could. He moved Helen in front of him but grabbed her arm and looked deep into her eyes.

“Don’t look back. Just keep your eyes on Ben the whole time, okay?”

She nodded but looked like she didn’t trust herself to speak. Ben looked into the pit, and what looked like miles down deep, there was a pinprick of red light. With his back to the wall, he began to navigate a set of steps that were narrow, crumbling, and in some places coated in moss.

He moved as fast as risk would allow — too slow, and they were all staying — too fast, and he’d slip and tumble into the void.

Concentration, persistence, patience, his mind whispered to him as he descended. His legs wanted to run, and he fought with them every step of the way. Concentration, persistence, patience, he told himself over and over.

The snake burst into the nesting chamber and reared up. The bodies of the young were everywhere, and even some of the eggs were riddled with holes and leaking their precious life fluid.

Its tongue flicked out, sensing the fresh blood, and also tasting the chemical traces of the small beings.

The massive 70-foot creature had been challenged many times in its long life, and it prevailed every time. In its primitive reptile brain, it was concerned with territory, mating, eating, and survival.

But surveying the destruction of its brood created another sensation not felt before in its entire life—hate.

It surged toward the hole in the cavern floor and without stopping went over the surrounding stones.

In the darkness of the pit, it could see the creature’s flaring warmth — they weren’t far ahead of it. The Titanoboa increased its speed as it flowed like water around the outside of the shaft.

“Five minutes!” Emma yelled.

She heard Ben curse and try to speed up. He succeeded in slipping on one of the steps, and cursing even more.

The wind rushed up past them as it was sucked up inside the tunnel. The mist was so thick now that they could only just make each other out by their shapes and the glow of their flashlights.

“How far down — do you think—?” Ben continued to edge along. “—we need to get?”

Emma followed closely, her fingertips almost touching his, but he still became indistinct in the foggy darkness. She had to squint from the flying debris smashing into her. Behind her, Helen and Drake were just shadows.

“I remember, that first time, when I came out of the mist layer, everything just seemed to… settle down.” She wracked her mind, but the detail wasn’t there. “But I can’t remember how far I had to climb.” She grimaced. “It took a while. I think.”

“We must hurry.” Ben turned and yelled up the shaft. “Drake, get a move on.”

Ben turned back and kept going, and as his foot alighted on one of the steps, it simply crumbled underneath him.

Ben’s arms pinwheeled for a moment, and then he fell.

“Ben!”

Emma went to grab for him, but nearly overbalanced herself. Ben spun in the air and threw out both arms. His fingertips caught the edge of the next step down and he swung hard but managed to cling there.

Drake and Helen bunched up behind her, but their path was so narrow, no one was getting past anyone else. Emma carefully straightened and went to step over Ben’s fingers to try and get below him.

Immediately, the rushing wind stopped dead in the shaft.

She froze. “Oh no.” Emma lifted her gun, pointing it upward. “Everyone… get down.”

“Down where?” Drake said.

The huge snake came dropping down at them like a missile of scales and teeth. Emma immediately fired several rapid shots into a head that seemed to fill the entire shaft.

Drake could do little other than throw an arm over the shrieking Helen and cover her with his own body.

Ben screamed his frustration and tried to lever himself up. The monstrous snake seemed to coil around the outside of the shaft, its muscular body laying on the winding steps, and pressing outwards to hold itself in place. With the snake now not fully blocking the shaft, the gale-force wind started to howl upward again.

Ben released one hand to reach down for his spears, knowing he couldn’t possibly get the leverage to throw them, but thinking he might be able to pass them up to Emma or Drake.

As he fumbled them out, the snake lunged, and Emma fired her remaining rounds into its open mouth. The snake pulled to the side just over Drake and Helen, smashing into the side of the shaft to avoid the stinging pellets.

“I’m out!” Emma yelled and looked down at her watch, and Ben could tell by her face, their time was up. Around them, the entire shaft shuddered, and chunks of the steps, dust, and debris rained down.

Ben held out the spears. “Take these… ”

A baseball-sized chunk of rock flew down from above and struck his wrist, smashing the spears from his hand, and they tumbled away into the void.

“Shit!” he yelled. He looked briefly over his shoulder, but they were already gone. He’d lost their last weapon, but more importantly, he wondered would they…

The detonation was like a thunderclap. The shaft lit momentarily as an orange flower bloomed several hundred feet below them. The snake pulled back on itself a few dozen feet, as the hurricane winds first brought the heat of the blast, to be quickly followed by the sound of collapsing stone.

And then there was just dead air.

Ben stared downwards, knowing what that meant. He turned away to look up at Emma, and their eyes met.

She mouthed the fateful words he already knew.

“Time’s up.”

He felt like just letting go and letting himself drop to the bottom of the collapsed shaft. They were all doomed now anyway, he thought.

Ben looked past Emma and saw the snake still hanging above them, glassine, soulless eyes on them again. It seemed confident now that the bloom of the explosion didn’t mean any harm to it, and then it burst into action.

The Titanoboa came down on them and its coils against the blocks sounded like a miller’s stone crushing the rock to dust. Drake turned toward it, and then stood, defiant and waiting. But as the monstrous reptile opened its enormous mouth, displaying rows of backward-curving, tusk-like teeth, the air around it became indistinct.

It just seemed to become frozen, like an old movie on a projector where the film wheel has stopped.

“What?” Ben’s mouth hung open.

And then… it simply vanished.

Everyone just stared, mouth’s gaping, and no one able to speak for several moments.

“What. Just. Happened?” Ben asked softly.

“It’s gone,” Emma said with a chuckle. “The snake, the world, Primordia, it must be all gone.”

“Primordia has left us and taken that goddamn snake with it,” Drake whooped. “Yes!”

“Little help here.” Ben still dangled on the step, his fingertips now bloodless from the strain.

Emma finally was able to step over him and help him get an arm up over the remaining steps. Ben climbed back up and sat with his back against the wall. He looked up at her. “We can’t go down.”

“So we go up.” She grinned and rubbed his shoulder.

Ben nodded. “We go up. And we pray.”

CHAPTER 45

They scaled upward, taking them hours this time. At first, the massive body of the snake had crushed the stone steps, but further up, they simply ceased to exist. The carved steps had been totally eroded back into the wall.

Emma’s rock climbing skills allowed her to lead the way, and when they finally reached the top, she found there was no well-like structure built around the rim, but instead a roof of solid stone over the top of them. There was a slim crack of light showing, and together, they battered, beat, and bludgeoned the hole wide enough for Emma to be able to slide through.

She stayed down on her belly for a few more seconds, hugging the stone, and trying to shake off the fatigue and disorientation. They weren’t in a cave anymore, and she felt slightly nauseous as she got slowly to her feet.

“Wow.” She took a few halting steps, looking one way then the other, before quickly coming back to pick up a rock and bash the hole wide enough so Ben, Drake, and Helen could slide out.

They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, not moving, but simply adjusting, as they let their eyes move over the landscape.

Drake limped forward a few paces. “Ho-oooly shit.” He turned. “Did this just happen?”

Ben nodded slowly but reached up to wipe streaming eyes. “Yeah, yeah it did.” He smiled through his tears. “And now it’s over.” He threw his head back and whooped.

The tepui was different — very different. There was no monstrous snake, no gargantuan dinosaurs, or flesh-eating bugs. There was no primordial jungle, no lake, no temple, no nothing. It was like they had been transported to another planet.

Instead, there was just a weather-beaten, heavily cracked surface of a flat-topped mountain. Instead, there were a few stunted trees, wind-ravaged spindly grasses, ponds of water, and a clear blue sky above them.

“Gone, all gone.” Emma turned, arms out. Her face broke into a broad smile and she rushed to Ben to wrap both arms around him. “We made it.”

“We made it. WE MADE IT!” Ben lifted Emma off her feet and spun her around. “We’re back.”

“Thank God,” Helen said and tilted her face to the sun. “Home.”

Drake hobbled back to them. “We’re not home just yet.” He pointed. “We’re still right in the middle of the Amazon jungle.”

Emma looked out at the endless landscape — the tepui mountain was a floating island in a sea of impenetrable green for as far as the eye could see in every direction.

“Not this time,” Emma said. “Cynthia knows where we are.” She looked at Ben. “And you just try and keep this guy’s mom from seeing her little lost boy.”

Ben laughed out loud. “Today is a good day.” He put his arm around her and looked up into the sky. High up and toward the west, there was a faint streak, like an artist had daubed a tiny dash of white.

“Primordia is going again.”

“Good riddance,” Emma said.

“It’ll be back again,” Ben said. “In ten years.”

“Yeah, well, when it is… ” Drake grinned. “Please don’t call me.” His face became serious, and he fumbled in his pocket for his canteen. He shook it, eliciting the sound of a few drops sloshing around inside. He then uncapped it and held it up.

“To our friends not with us — to Brocke, Ajax, Fergus, Camilla, Juan, and Andy. We thank you and will miss you.” He sipped and passed it to Emma, and then Ben.

“Um.” Emma winced and turned to see Helen walking away, looking down at the bleak rock.

“No, we didn’t lose him,” Ben said. “He chose his path. I just hope he finds what he’s looking for.” Ben looked out toward the east. He knew just over the mountains there lay a sparkling blue ocean. On its shore today were the bustling metropolises of Georgetown, Paramaribo, and hundreds of smaller villages like Mahaica and Suddie and countless more. But it wasn’t always like that.

“Yeah, I just hope he finds what he’s looking for.” He turned away. “And lives long enough to enjoy it.”

CHAPTER 46

Primordia was gone from the third planet, and already on its way to the middle star where it would be grabbed by its gravitational forces and then flung back to begin its decade-long elliptical voyage around our solar system all over again.

The monsoon-like rains dried, and the clouds parted, then cleared. The magnetic distortion on the eastern jungles of Venezuela had ceased, doorways closed, and pathways were erased. On the surface of the tabletop mountain, silence and stillness settled over the sparse grasses and fissured landscape.

A few tiny skink lizards, insects, some hardy birds, and a handful of human beings were all that remained on the huge plateau. The wettest season was at an end, and once again, there would be 10 years of calm over a single jungle mountaintop in the depths of the Venezuelan Amazon jungle.

CHAPTER 47

Nicolás frowned, fiddled with the resolution, and frowned even deeper. He leaned back.

“I think I can see something in there.”

“Huh?” Mateo turned. “In where?”

“The Amazon, ah, over that tepui. The clouds have dissipated, and the localized effects are now gone. That wettest season of yours seems over.” He licked his lips and rolled his chair in closer to his desk. “So I’ve been playing around with the saved data from the last twenty-four hours. And I can tell you there is, I mean was, something weird inside there.”

Mateo folded his arms and waited. “Weird, hmm?”

“It looked like a balloon, and it traveled into the eye of that storm, and then vanished.” Nicolás shrugged.

“Balloon, huh?” Mateo looked at him from under lowered brows. “Are you sure it wasn’t a lady with an umbrella?” He chuckled.

Nicolás didn’t get it. “No, a balloon. But it’s a little hard to make out as the image is heavily distorted. Plus, there looked to be a lot of other debris flying around.”

“Yeah, that happens in storms.” Mateo sighed and rolled his chair closer to where the young meteorologist had set himself up. His bank of screens were all analyzing the data, but the largest held an image of the swirling purple clouds that had hung over the tepui for over 24 hours.

Mateo squinted. “Could be.” He bobbed his head, and let the image roll forward and rewound it, and rolled it forward several more times. The entire grab was only three seconds, and blurred, but there was definitely something there. He thumbed to another server.

“Use the Paradox software to try and clean it up.”

“Oh yeah, yeah. Good idea.” The young man jumped from his chair and brought the smaller server online. The Paradox software program used a heuristic analysis application to apply a best-guess logic to images that were indistinct. It could never be relied on as 100 % accurate, but it did give the user a high-probability suggestion based on what it saw, and what it could be.

“Working now,” Nicolás said and craned forward, watching the screen closely. The image cleared, then cleared some more, as a bar along the bottom of the screen filled up to ping when at 100 % complete.

“Run it,” Mateo said.

Nicolás rewound and then ran the portion of video they were interested in. Their mouths hung open — a large orange balloon, with what could be several people jammed into the basket, dropped toward a funnel-shaped vortex in the center of the cloud mass. But what happened next had both men feeling lightheaded.

Things, big bird-like things, came out of the cloud and attacked the balloon. Then it was gone.

Nicolás ran and reran the film several more times, and for the last, he froze the image of one of the giant bat-like creatures on the screen. Both men just sat in silence, staring at it. Nicolás finally cleared his throat and turned to his senior colleague.

“What do we do now?”

Mateo blew air through pressed lips and shook his head slowly. “Normally, I would say, make a note, sign it, and then leave it for ten more years’ time. But instead, today I say, we didn’t see a thing.”

“But…?” Nicolás swung around.

Mateo held up a hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll check again.” Mateo rolled back to his desk. “In ten years’ time.”