Primordia_In Search of the Lost World Page 16

  She increased her speed, moving like a spider as excitement gave her muscles new energy. She quickly left Ben and Nino, as the smaller Venezuelan man unfortunately beginning to act as a plug to the other climbers. He was just lucky he had Ben with him who continued to push him skyward, as he would surely have been left far behind.

  Emma’s grin widened as she detected something else, and she reached up to flick off her headlamp.

  Yes, she whispered, and turned once again. “We got light, people.” She started to scamper higher, leaping now.

  “Slow down,” she heard Ben yell, but his voice was already far behind now. The chimney narrowed a little but caused her no problem. However, she knew that someone the size of Barlow would struggle. Good, she thought, hope he loses skin.

  In another hundred feet, she smelled damp earth, exotic odors, and many sweet scents that could have been pollens or flowers in bloom. Her wristwatch told her it was 7am, and sun up, but the light was still muted. She sniffed again; there was also something odd, faintly acidic, almost like cat-piss ammonia.

  Emma put her hand up onto a ledge with a roof above it. The chimney had ended in a horizontal cave, flat at about two feet high, but broad and disappearing off into the darkness for both ways.

  She eased off her backpack, scrambled on her belly over some sort of gravel to the end, and stopped.

  “Oh my God.”

  Her mouth stayed open

  *****

  It felt, as well as heard, the animals in the cave. The vibrations in the stone that had been transported to her body told of blundering creatures, several of them, and all inside the cave. Her cave.

  It tasted the air but didn’t pick up any scent; they were still far away. It eased itself from its hiding place, prepared to defend its territory. But something else flared inside it, hunger, always the ache of hunger.

  It also hadn’t eaten in days, and nothing would be wasted.

  *****

  Like the rest of them, Ben had to dump his pack to crawl forward. He put a hand on Emma’s shoulder. She had her chin resting on the back of her hands, and she turned to smile.

  ‘It’s real,” she said dreamily.

  Ben turned back to the vista. “And there we were, upon the dreamland, the Lost World.”

  “From the story?” she asked.

  He nodded, letting his eyes take it all in. There was a heavy fog or low cloud, but even the plant life that he could make out was so alien to what he had seen in many other jungles before that it was near unrecognizable. And the size of everything was breathtaking – massive trunks soared high into the clouds without showing their canopies. Jagged outcrops berthed ferns and strange flowers with raw red heads, and there were the prehistoric scaly looking trees that Jenny had identified below.

  But there were also strange palms with fruiting bulbs of brilliant orange, yellow, and purples, and massive columns of hairy wooded stumps that had green strips like reeds rather than leaves at their tip.

  “Everything is so…big,” Emma whispered.

  Nino crawled up beside them, the gravel crunching underneath him, and scanned one way then the other. “I don’t like it.”

  “Well, I love it,” Emma responded.

  The others came and lay beside them, with the long flat cave allowing the entire group to lie side by side.

  “Well done, sir,” Barlow said between puffing breaths.

  Ben turned to the wheezing man; his face was so flushed and red it looked like some sort of overripe fruit about to burst. Sweat dripped from his chin and the end of his nose. He wiped it with a dusty handkerchief.

  “Well done to my great, great grandfather, I’d say,” he replied.

  Barlow nodded. “Quite so.”

  Further down the cave, Dan gave him the thumbs up and took pictures, and Andrea divided her time between glancing out at the jungle and examining broken fingernails.

  “What’s that smell?” Emma asked.

  “Sour; smells a little like cat’s piss.” Ben wrinkled his nose. “Something died in here?”

  “Great, and we’re lying in it.” Emma stuck her tongue out.

  Ben looked past her to see Jenny fiddling with something that looked like a lot of large chalky rocks. She was breaking them open, sniffing them, and her brow was creased. She looked up. “We should probably get out of here… now.”

  He was about to ask what she was doing when Emma nudged him. “Let’s go; I want to see…everything.”

  “Wait…” He grabbed her.

  “Why? That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  Ben shook his head. “You know, I never really thought about a plan for when we were here. I guess my goal was to see if it existed, and now that we know it does, I’m not sure what to damn well do.”

  “Well, I do,” Barlow answered over their heads. “Now, we go forth on an adventure like no other.” He rested on large beefy forearms. “I want to see the specimens, the animals, plants. Think of the opportunities, the wonders, and think of the advances in medicine, paleontology, and biology. People will pay a fortune to come here.”

  Emma’s jaws clenched. “All about the money, huh?”

  “Isn’t everything?” Barlow turned back to the vista. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s like we have just been transported back in time for about 100 million years. I suggest we use our time well.”

  “We need to think about this,” Jenny said quickly. “We also need to think about interacting with plants, animals, bacteria, and parasites that do not exist in the modern world, and haven’t for millions of years. Dangerous doesn’t begin to describe it.” She grimaced. “But…” She looked over her shoulder briefly. “… we can do that outside, okay?”

  “Agreed. And please remember, we’re not the first here,” Barlow responded.

  “That’s true,” Dan said. “And not just Ben’s ancestor; the Pemon or some other race, were obviously coming up here as well.”

  Steve snorted. “Oh yeah, the natives; wonder what happened to them and those baskets of body parts. And no offence, Ben, but your namesake ancestor didn’t exactly die of old age either.”

  “Jesus, Steve.” Emma scowled

  Janus Bellakov sneered. “I think you’ll find we’re a little better prepared than primitive natives or a long-dead Cartwright.”

  “Asshole,” Emma whispered.

  Steve crawled forward, and looked out and upwards. “The clouds are rising.”

  “Thermal effect,” Dan said. “The sun will heat up the surface, drawing the clouds away from the land. Doubt it will allow the sun through, but it’ll at least improve visibility.”

  Steve hiked his shoulders. “Now or never.”

  “Now.” Barlow turned. “Mr. Bourke, crawl back and retrieve our packs. There’s a good chap.”

  Bourke’s lip curled down and he grumbled as he turned on his belly and crawled to the rear of the cave.

  Ben chuckled, but then pointed. “Okay, there’s a tumble of boulders about a hundred feet forward and just to the left. I’ll take a quick look and if it’s safe, then we head there and stretch our legs before…deciding to do anything else. We can spend a few hours looking around and then come back here, long before either sundown or the clouds drop again.”

  “That is agreeable,” Barlow said with a smirk.

  Ben sucked in a deep breath, felt Emma give his bicep a quick squeeze for luck, and then he slid out of the flattened cave. He had his M4A1 assault rifle over his back and kept it there. But he unclipped his sidearm holster.

  He stood tall and inhaled – it smelled earthy, alive, and damned primordial. There was bare ground for about a hundred feet around the front of the cave, and then there was the great wall of jungle. He looked along it, trying to detect the slightest hint of movement, unusual color, or even odd shape. But there was nothing.

  He walked forward a dozen feet and stopped to examine some tracks in the gravel – they were bird-like, three-toed, but large like they were made by something the size of a la
rge ostrich. He lifted his gaze again to the jungle where there were towering stump-like trees, tangled vines, and broad ferns, palms, and cycad plants. He scoffed silently – he knew it could have held a hundred creatures that had developed extraordinary camouflage abilities, and he might not even see one of them.

  He turned back to the cave and saw the heads of his group as they watched from a letterbox-type crack in the wall of rock. He had expected that they would be at the cliff edge, but he remembered that the chimney was at a slight angle, so over the thousand plus feet of climbing, they had been moved a little inland on the plateau’s surface.

  “Looks okay,” he said softly, but knowing his voice would carry. “Grab your stuff and come on out.”

  *****

  Jenny and Nino were the last to clamber back to the rear of the cave to retrieve their packs. She saw one of Barlow’s men, Bourke she thought he was called, pulling his and his master’s bags towards himself and then removing weapons and sliding them into his pockets. He looked up to see her watching and blew her a kiss.

  Ugh, she thought.

  This far back in the cave, she could smell again the sharp tang of ammonia. It gave her an uneasy feeling after finding the large white chalk-like bundles that reminded her of the times she had to clean out the snake tanks in the zoo’s reptile house. It damn well looked like snake droppings. The problem was the size made that impossible.

  She had broken one open and seen the remains of crushed bones and teeth – exactly the contents she would expect to find in a large jungle constrictor-type snake. But she’d only ever seen that size as coprolite – fossilized dung.

  She placed a hand down on the gravel and then looked down – it wasn’t gravel at all, but thousands of teeth, mostly human. And they were ages old, possibly thousands of years. She knew that tooth enamel was mostly hydroxyapatite, a mineral form of calcium phosphate that was one of the hardest biological materials and, in fact, harder than steel.

  Jenny narrowed her eyes, looking around in the darkness; was this what happened to the race who had once been coming up here? She inhaled, smelling the ammonia again – was it getting stronger? she wondered. She pulled her pack a little closer as she suddenly had the eerie sensation of the hairs on her neck rising.

  She tried to see into the darker depths of the cave, but there were too many areas of inky blackness, and looking left and right again, what she could see of it travelled a long way. There was one thing she learned about caves in the jungle; they were never unoccupied. She felt decidedly uncomfortable.

  “Nino, we better go,” she said softly.

  “Si, si.” Nino started to drag his bag to the entrance, and Jenny reluctantly turned to Bourke.

  “Hey, hurry it up. I don’t think it’s safe.”

  Bourke snorted, continuing with his tasks. He looked up, grinning in the dark. “Don’t worry, darling, this party hasn’t even started yet.”

  “Fine, take your time.” She started to crawl back towards the light and away from the chute. She quickly caught up with Nino, and the small man looked at her and his nose wrinkled.

  “He is asshole.”

  She chuckled. “You got that right.”

  Behind her, she heard Bourke grunt. Then grunt again. She turned.

  It felt like her eyes actually bulged from her head – almost half of the man’s body was inside the mouth of a snake so big that it had to flatten itself down to fit inside the cave.

  Inward-curving, dagger-like teeth had dug deep into his body. But the tough mercenary pumped with his free hand against a head that had scales bigger than dinner plates and doubtless wasn’t troubled by the defensive display of the small warm and soft animal.

  “Jesus Christ,” she shrieked and jerked up, smashing her head on the roof of the cave. Nino screamed something about a demon and started to scramble away.

  The snake began to tug Bourke deeper into the cave, and she heard the muffled screams of the man still coming from inside its mouth. But then to her horror, she saw that curled in his hand was one of his grenades. Then in a practiced motion, he flicked the pin out.

  “Bomb!” she yelled, crawling faster than she’d ever crawled in her life.

  *****

  “What?” Ben heard Jenny’s yell and turned back to the cave. He saw her head appear just as the percussive blast shot across them, blowing him and the group flat.

  Ben rolled on top of Emma who lay beside him as the rubble and dust rained down around them. Rocks, some as big as bowling balls, thumped onto the ground, but thankfully, it was mostly pellet-sized.

  He sat up quickly. “That fucking asshole.” People were sprawled and struggling to get to their feet. He turned to Barlow who sat up groggily. “Your asshole just blew himself up.” He turned, remembering who was still in the cave.

  “Jenny!”

  Ben sprinted back to the cave mouth that was now just obliterated rubble. He found her forty feet away, moaning with her clothes still smoking. Her hair was singed and clots of blood patterned her shirt and matted the hair on the back of her head.

  “Jenny… Jenny.” Ben carefully wiped a shred of flesh from her face. Thankfully, there was no gaping wound beneath it – it had belonged to someone else. Her eyelids fluttered, and he cradled her into a sitting position. She moaned. “Stay still; we’ve got you.” He eased hair back off her face and wiped away more blood.

  Her eyes opened as slits. “Can’t…hear.”

  Ben nodded. Staring down into her face, he knew she definitely would have damaged her eardrums; he just hoped it wasn’t permanent.

  Forty feet away, Nino rolled on the ground, his clothing tattered. He sat up and wailed, holding his head. Ben pointed to him.

  “Someone see to him,” he yelled. Dan was first there.

  Jenny groaned, reached up to grab his shirt, and dragged herself to a sitting position. Emma rushed over, then Steve, and they gave her water to sip while Ben checked the back of her head and neck, looking for damage. Luckily, it looked like her hair had cushioned much of the blast, and maybe she was far enough away that the percussive force spat them out before it chewed her up.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay.” She pushed the water away. “Nino, did he…?”

  “He’s alive.” Ben sat in front of her. “What happened? Did Bourke use a grenade?”

  She winced. “Snake, giant snake.”

  “Say what?” Steve leaned closer.

  “Maybe Titanoboa.” She started to gulp air. “So big; attacked him.”

  “Easy; you’re fine now.” Ben’s lips compressed. This happens, he thought, and they’d only been here a few minutes.

  “Jesus, Ben. A snake big enough to eat a man?” Steve’s brows knitted.

  Jenny sat forward by herself and rubbed her face. “We should have expected it – the smell, and the dung I found.” She winced again. “In fact, it was only just a few years back in a coal mine in Colombia that they found fossils of an enormous snake estimated to be around 70 feet, and as thick around as a draft horse.”

  Jenny held out a hand and Steve pulled her up and also threw an arm around her waist, while she looped one over his shoulder. She carefully rubbed one of her ears. “Titanoboa cerrejonensis, lived right around here about 50–70 million years ago during the Paleocene epoch; probably ate dinosaurs. In fact, it outlived the dinosaurs, and no one knows why they went extinct.”

  “Obviously they didn’t.” Ben turned back to the cave. “Looks like we’re not going home that way.” He walked a little closer to the collapsed cave mouth. On the ground, there were a few huge chunks of meat that had scales like Chevy hubcaps.

  We should have expected it, Jenny had said. Sure, but we just couldn’t ever imagine it, he thought.

  Ben sucked in a deep breath and turned, seeing the damage to his friends, their supplies, and their way home. Andrea wailed and Dan rushed to her as she got up hopping on one foot. There was a rip in her pants and underneath, a matching gash in her leg.

  “I’m cut…and
bleeding,” she wailed.

  “Oh shit,” Ben seethed.

  “I’ve got it.” Steve rushed to her and eased her down to sit, kneeling before her. He ripped her pants a little to get at the wound and dab it with a cloth. He smiled up at her. “Just a small wound, but a lot of blood – actually looks worse than what it is.”

  “It hurts,” she said, frowning.

  “I’ll bet it does. I’ll patch it and stem the bleeding, okay?” He continued to dab at it.

  She nodded but her lips were turned down. “It’s going to look terrible.”

  Steve grinned. “But think of the publicity?’

  Her frown lightened a few degrees, as she obviously thought it through.

  Ben went and sat with Nino, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. He nodded, but his eyes watered from the dust and probably the pain.

  Dan put a hand on the Venezuelan’s shoulder. “Best I can do.” He had bandaged his head, but already the cloth was damply red.

  “Good job.” Ben helped him up and then turned back to the group. “Okay, gather up everything we can use; anything else, leave behind. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Barlow recovered his hat and swiped debris from it with one chubby hand before jamming it back on his head. “I really think we should rest a little longer and gather our senses. Maybe make another plan, hmm? Don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.” Ben turned. “Did you not hear what just happened to Bourke? Up here, we’re not top of the food chain – and your idiot just rang the biggest dinner bell he could find.”

  Everyone turned to the wall of green. It was strangely silent, and had been since the blast. It was if a thousand eyes were watching them. Almost as one, people started to recover bags, weapons, stray food, and anything else they could find. In another few minutes, they were ready.