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.