Cryptozoica (20 page)

“Maybe he’s taking a cue from Thurston Howell,” Kavanaugh said, an icy edge to his tone.

“I don’t have to answer to anyone here,” stated Belleau haughtily. “I could ask you why you brought weapons and food on what was supposed to be a brief junket.”

“That’s easy,” said Crowe, snapping off a three-finger salute from his sweat-pebbled brow. “Navy SEALS and the Boy Scouts share the same motto—be prepared.”

“Food, weapons and water are standard equipment in this part of the world,” Kavanaugh replied. “You don’t go anywhere without at least two of them.”

Honoré gazed steadily at Belleau as if she dared the little man to speak further. He affected not to notice.

Instead, Aubrey Belleau turned toward the brushline, hefting his walking stick. “I stand corrected. Shall we get going?”

The hot yellow disk of the sun slowly darkened at the edges as heavy clouds scudded across the sky. By degrees, the sun was swallowed by huge black thunderheads. Cloud mountains massed in the west and a crooked finger of lightning arced across them.

Almost automatically, Kavanaugh counted the seconds. When the thick humid air shivered to a clap of thunder, he estimated the storm front was less than ten miles away and moving very fast.

After the thunder, he heard the chittering of curious monkeys and the clacking screech of birds. He also heard the buzz of flies winging over and settling on the bloody bandage around McQuay’s head. The high humidity would prevent the blood from drying for some hours and the odor was sure to draw scavengers larger than flies. He hoped the rain arrived before that.

All around them, huge hardwood trees loomed, towering a hundred feet above the forest floor. Flowering lianas hung from every branch and bough. Bright red orchids bloomed between the gnarled buttress roots of the giant trees. Broad leaves and vines blocked the sunlight, creating a greenish labyrinth through which multi-colored butterflies darted back and forth.

Honoré stared upward at the intertwining boughs. “This looks like a very old-growth forest. I wonder what kind of trees those are.”

“Dipterocarps,” Crowe answered promptly. “They share a common ancestor with the Sarcolaenacea, a tree family indigenous to Madagascar. So, that suggests the ancestor of the Dipterocarps originated on Laurasia…and since these are very old trees, it seems pretty obvious that the Tamtungs were originally part of the Laurasian supercontinent.”

Honoré threw him a fleeting smile of appreciation. “All of you here continue to surprise and impress me. I was led to believe that you were a bunch of ne’er-do-wells who concocted one con after another.”

“Interesting,” grunted Crowe. “I wonder who gave you that impression.”

Kavanaugh came to a sudden halt, throwing out an arm. “Hold up.”

Everyone stumbled to unsteady stops. Honoré, Crowe, and Belleau followed the man’s gaze. A crumpled, bleeding mass of leathery wings lay in their path. Flies buzzed around the disemboweled corpse of the Quetzalcoatlus, crawling along loops of its blue-sheened intestines. The creature’s humped, limp body resembled a collapsed circus tent made of greasy black leather.

“Almighty God,” Honoré breathed, moving forward to nudge the tip of a wing with one boot. “It looks like the reconstructions of the animals I’ve seen, but there are a few significant differences.”

“Like what?” asked Belleau.

Stepping carefully, as if she feared the monster was only asleep; Honoré touched the talon-tipped fingers curving from the apex of a wing joint. Each one was the length of her entire hand.  “The digits are longer than the fossils would lead us to think they are. They seem built for grasping and holding. I’d guess when the Quetzal is on the ground, it walks on all fours, much like a bat.”

Tilting her head back and lifting the brim of her hat, she squinted toward the dark bulk of the escarpment several miles distant, the summit barely visible above the treeline. “The Quetzal must roost on the ledges and outcroppings. Trying to launch itself from the ground would be exceedingly difficult, if not outright impossible.”

“And they’re not supposed to have teeth, either,” Belleau said resentfully.

Honoré frowned as she stared at the half-folded and broken wings. “I still say the level of aggression it showed us was not normal.”

Mouzi said, “It thought we were something new to eat.”

“The something new factor should have made it fly away from us as fast as it could, not made it hungry or put it on the offensive. Very odd behavior.”

Kavanaugh edged around the creature’s half-open jaws, glaring down at its glassy, staring eyes. “All I know is that the sonofabitch killed my chopper before my chopper killed it.”

Belleau snorted. “Don’t be childish. You can’t blame an animal for acting like an animal.”

“I don’t.” Kavanaugh swung his gaze toward the little Englishman. “I blame you. We stirred it up because you insisted on flying too close to the escarpment.”

“If that makes you feel better,” Belleau said, not unkindly, “then I will accept your blame. However, we really weren’t all that close to the escarpment and we all managed to survive…unlike the last time you ferried people here. Of course, then your very expensive helicopter made it out intact, so you should look at this as a form of karmic balancing.”

Balling his fists, Kavanaugh leaned toward Aubrey Belleau, as if he were on the verge of leaping atop the dwarfish man. Oakshott tensed. But Kavanaugh turned around and started walking again, giving the fly-encrusted body of the Quetzalcoatlus a wide berth. He favored his left leg. Needles of pain stabbed through it with every step.

Honoré caught up with him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Never better, thanks for asking. I just want to get to the site so we can figure out how to get home.”

“It’s only a couple of miles to Little Tamtung, right? Conceivably, we could even swim.”

“Conceivably––if the riptides didn’t carry us out to open sea and we didn’t draw the attention of barracuda, sharks, sea snakes, sea wasps, moray eels, Portuguese Man o’ Wars, and even more sharks.”

Honoré mimed a shudder. “I don’t like eels.”

She looked at the jungle closing around them.  Sunlight, filtered through the sky-filling, broad-leaved canopy, tinted everything with an emerald hue. “Are there snakes on this island?”

“Do you not like them either?”

“Not very much, no.”

“You and Indiana Jones. Yeah, there are king cobras, spitting cobras and kraits, and a couple of different kinds of constrictor, like the short-tailed python. But they’re not likely to bother us. They have other enemies to worry about.”

A line of worry appeared on Honoré’s forehead. “Like what?”

Absently, Kavanaugh, touched the scar on his face. “Like the Deinonychus.”

Eyes widening, Honoré glanced around, and over her shoulder at the people walking single file behind. McQuay marched between Oakshott and Crowe, impatiently brushing flies away from his bandage.

“I read your deposition,” she said quietly. “The one that was never submitted. When the Deinonychus pack attacked you and your party, you were far from here. Out in the grasslands, right?”

“Right. But that doesn’t mean they can’t smell blood on the wind. They move like lightning.”

“You claimed they tended to follow the Hadrosaur herd.”

“Yeah, but there’s a competing predator.”

Honoré’s lips twitched in a smile. “The larger theropod you called a Stinkosaurus Rex.”

Kavanaugh matched her smile, but it looked stitched on. “It’s obviously of the Tyrannosaur family, but I think it’s more of a scavenger than a predator. It eats everything, including the shit of other animals. That’s why its breath smelled so bad.”

“How many times did you see it? How many were there?”

“We only got one really good straight-on look at one of them. We spotted it around sundown, at the peat swamp, near the grazing grounds of the Apatosaurus. That’s about ten or so miles away. We found its prints near the riverbank fairly often.”

“What other animals are indigenous to Big Tamtung?”

“Monkeys, tapirs, and we’ve seen leopards from time to time.”

Honoré nodded. “The
Neofelis nebulosa
, the Clouded Leopard. Mr. Flitcroft blamed the deaths of his investors on them, right?”

“That was the official story, but it didn’t really matter what killed them. They were just as dead.”

She paused and in voice barely above a whisper, she said, “There’s something else here, too, isn’t there? Some other form of life you encountered?”

Kavanaugh cast her a sharp glance, then turned toward the faint sound of rushing water. “Let’s pick up the pace.”

After clawing through a thicket of vines, they reached the riverbank, breathing hard because of the heat and the exertion. Mosquitoes whined around them. The Thunder Lizard River flowed broad and torpid under overhanging tree boughs. The buttress roots of the giant hardwoods stretched out like gnarled tentacles to the river’s edge. Because of their immense size, the trees were unable to send their roots down very far into the ground and extended them outward instead.

Several miles inland, the watery concourse lifted, until the river seemed to issue from a crack between two towering cliffs expanding outward from the base of the escarpment.

The sky rolled with the echoes of a distant thunderclap. Crowe gestured. “Over this way, girls.”

The six people walked into the perimeter of the Petting Zoo, following overgrown limestone pavers inscribed with the Cryptozoica logo. A main thoroughfare ran between four brick and concrete block buildings, all of them only one story high. The lane curved to the right and led to the helipad, a big square of concrete nearly covered with white flowering creepers. The logo of Cryptozoica Enterprises inscribed on the surface could be glimpsed through the greenery.

On the opposite side of a tin-roofed lean-to, a wide pier stretched out over the sluggishly flowing river. A canvas shrouded boat hung between a pair of metal hoists. Crowe gusted out a sigh of relief. “
The Nautique
is still here.”

“Who would’ve stolen the bloody thing?” Mouzi asked dourly. “It’s probably a home for snakes and face-hugging’ spiders.”

McQuay found a bench and sat down, examining his camcorder, absently fanning away flies from his bandage. Honoré surveyed the façade of the largest building. It bore a two-dimensional red and yellow plastic representation of a grinning Tyrannosaur-like creature holding a hamburger between its paws. The picture window, even green-stained and streaked, still showed the legend: Try Our Brontoburgers With Jurassic Jump Juice!

Honoré read it aloud with undisguised contempt and turned away, shaking her head. “Did they hire anybody who even knew the difference between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous?”

Belleau chuckled. “I doubt the people they hired to put this farce together knew the difference between their arses and the proverbial hole in the ground.”

A long bungalow with a faux thatched roof and vinyl bamboo siding occupied the largest tract of land. A veranda ran the length of the building. A metal sign hung askew above the door. The red letters in raised relief read Horizons Ultd Lounge.

“What did you charge for drinks in there?” Honoré asked Kavanaugh.

He shrugged. “We never got around to making up a price list. But they would have been reasonable, taking into account our transportation costs.”

“I’m sure,” she said coldly. “Just like I’m sure they wouldn’t have been watered.”

The Petting Zoo site felt less like a prefabricated visitor’s center and more like an abandoned frontier settlement, similar to the couple of ghost towns Honoré had come across while hiking in the American Southwest.

She walked down the avenue toward a vine-enwrapped concrete pylon. A spiral staircase corkscrewed around it up to a platform twenty-five feet above the ground. The monorail track extended straight outward, plunging into a mass of foliage. A couple of small outbuildings stood at the edge of the clearing.

“Where’s the train?” Honoré asked.

Kavanaugh made a vague gesture. “Somewhere out in the savannah––we think. We sent it on a test-run and something went wrong with the electronics and it stopped dead. We never got around to finding it.”

Belleau laughed derisively. “Dear God, this is so much worse than I imagined. Why on Earth wouldn’t Bai Suzhen and Howard Flitcroft be desperate to sell their interests in this place—to anybody who has a checkbook?”

Kavanaugh suppressed the urge to mention Jimmy Cao and the Ghost Shadow triad. That bit of knowledge was a hole card and he didn’t want to play it in a transitory game of one-upmanship. He maintained a neutral expression.

Honoré strode over to a metal handrail spanning a concrete apron. The platform overlooked a square pit covered by interlaced steel bars.  The sheer walls plunged downward about fifteen feet to the flagstone floor below. Where loose leaves and dirt didn’t cover it, it showed dark stains. The dimensions were twenty feet by twenty feet. Two heavy metal doors faced each other at opposite sides of the pit.

“What did you plan on exhibiting down there?” Honoré asked.

“Something fairly harmless and fairly cute,” answered Kavanaugh. “A baby snufflegalumpus, maybe. We never intended to keep them caged for long.”

“Hey!” came Crowe’s call. “I might need a hand over here.”

They turned toward the pier just as Crowe, Mouzi and Oakshott dragged away the canvas shroud from the boat. The yellow and white craft was a twenty-foot long luxury runabout equipped with a 475 horsepower Crusader inboard engine. On the forward-planing hull the name
Alley Oop
was painted in bright cobalt blue. The big, concave-curved windshield swept back to the aluminum framework of a black vinyl sun-shelter.

As Kavanaugh approached, Crowe slapped the right-hand hoist and winch armature. “There’s no power,” he said irritably. “We’ll have to lower it manually.”

“Hope you chased out the tenants first,” Mouzi commented.