Jurassic Dead (2 page)

3.

Transfixed, Alex barely heard the muffled explosion over the screams and sounds of rending, biting and ripping. It was like a pack of rabid dogs were attacking one of their own. Alex shuddered and hesitated, then was about to turn to the sub when the mob just… stopped. One of the figures stepped back, holding what looked like a shredded limb, looked at it, sniffed it, and then just dropped it. The others backed away in a semi-circle from the figure on the bloody ice. Tony was barely recognizable, his coat shredded along with his flesh, his ribs protruding from huge bite marks, but a viscous darker mass oozed from lacerations on his face and neck.

All this Alex could only register in an instant, before mind-numbing fear took hold, as the entire horde of Russians turned toward him, tensing, about to rush him when—a wall of ice and snow roared over them. A massive avalanche collapsed the tunnel with hundreds of tons of glacial ice, silt and earth, and a rolling wave of demolition swept over the soldiers, annihilating everything and sweeping them into the lake.

It was just the impetus Alex needed to turn and run. The tunnel was gone, the flares winking out, all but one… Sounds of scraping and growling in the darkness behind him. Splashing feet…

Alex got to the lake edge and hauled open the sub’s hatch. A two-seater…perfect. He angled the nose toward what he hoped was the American side, pushed it free of the shore, and jumped in. He locked the hatch back down and powered on the control systems. Refusing to waste time trying to interpret the Russian symbols, he piloted by instinct, knowing it couldn’t be too different from flying a Cessna or a Beechcraft, and he had studied the schematics for one of these for weeks back home.

He could do this.

Now…find the exterior lights.

He flicked them on, swelling with satisfaction as the twin halogen beams stabbed out into the gloom. The depth gauge immediately caught his attention. The sub was drifting down, fast, so he found the thrusters, angled the control joystick and veered back up.
Compass…? There. Guide it, come on. Accelerate.

Imagining a small army of swimming figures pursuing relentlessly underwater, Alex resisted every urge to look back.

Sorry Tony.

Staying on course, keeping the shoreline (or what he hoped was the shoreline) on his left, he maintained a depth of twenty meters and kept moving straight. Fifty meters. One hundred. He shrugged off the coat and threw it in the empty co-pilot seat, breathing a sigh of relief. Then he took a moment to study the environment outside.

The water—and the creatures in it. Floating particles, some of them exhibiting non-random movements. Alex could only imagine what he couldn’t see: the microscopic bacterial organisms—those plentiful, ancient life forms he and Tony had set out to preserve and protect.

He swallowed hard. Thinking… thinking again about the lake. About Tony, and the Russians. He had fallen in, and certainly had been cut up. Did bacteria infect him, get in his bloodstream? Had the same thing happened to the Russians earlier?

Did what we had come to protect, instead see us as hosts, and attack?

What had happened to the Russians, and what was happening to Tony?

Alex studied the inner structure of the sub, breathing hard. His lips were dry and he cut his speed, worried suddenly about striking a rock or a wall, breaking the Plexiglas and letting in those…things.

He cut the thrusters just as the sub entered an area that had its own illumination. Brighter lights bobbed in the water, and beams were projected from above.

Welcome to America
, he thought, slowing and preparing to descend again, hopefully out of sight before anyone noticed. He would make his way carefully to the far wall and rise to where—according to the American schematics—there should be a dock and an exit ladder.

First… he turned the sub gently—but stopped before he began to accelerate.  Something huge was in the way.

Apparently lodged in the muck and rising some…fifty feet at least, according to his gauge, Alex had no idea what it could be.

A rock formation, or a huge glacial deposit?

Alex steered, trying to go around it to the right. Moving in closer, the bright beams focused and reflected off patchy green flecks, like aquatic lichen or bioluminescent sponges. Here and there were deep gouges taken out of the surface of whatever this thing was, segments plucked out in ways that Alex figured were far from natural. He was no geologist, but the manner of erosion—or whatever this was—seemed…violent and…

The sub, carried by an imperceptible drift, jarred to a halt as he suddenly pulled back on the joystick and reversed thrust.

Impossible…

Angling the nose of the craft, he aimed the lights dead-on toward the apex of the formation—where he figured the object was angling and narrowing, providing evidence it had grown like a crystal structure. Except...this formation had something it shouldn’t have. Nearly frozen, perfectly preserved down here in the ice until the pressure and weight created a lake of sludge that somehow preserved it…

This… He couldn’t believe what his eyes were seeing. Perched above more gashes, torn scales and what he now realized was
flesh
, rested
a single huge eye.

Not daring to breathe, Alex could only gape as the sub reversed slowly, his hand on the controls…until suddenly, the eye
blinked
.

It seemed to attempt to focus, and then the pupil narrowed and turned almost yellow-white. An enormous set of teeth flashed into the brilliance, as the jaws opened, spreading moss and weed-like debris everywhere.

Losing control in a flurry of ice and bubbles, the craft spun in a one-eighty and slammed into the side of the creature. The viewing dome cracked. Water sprayed inside the submersible, Alex’s head slammed against the hatch—and everything went black.

4.

Antarctica: American Drill Site Montgomery-Alpha

“Imagine my surprise,” Marcus Ramirez said when the soldiers brought Alex into his office, two miles above the lake site. “Here I thought we had captured a Russian agent in violation of our exploration treaties, and I would have to initiate numerous international protocols and cause a huge scene involving multiple government agencies, and instead, I find that the criminal trespassing onto my secure research site is…my own goddamned son!”

He leveled a glare at Alex as icy as the frost on the windows obscuring his view of the perpetual gloom outside Montgomery station. Somewhere out there were two huge cranes poised like giant frost guardians over the pit—except these instruments would be used not for defense, but for extraction.

Marcus sat at his desk, a mahogany behemoth that would have been better suited to a banker’s office than a paleontologist’s field station, but that was par for the course for his benefactor. William DeKirk spared no expense, and wanted his people drowning in opulence, as if wealth and the mere presence of overpriced equipment could produce the discoveries he expected.

Maybe in this case, it had, or perhaps it was just dumb luck—or, Marcus liked to think, his own persistence, research, painstaking work and informed hunches, that had convinced him to outbid the Russians in this dual-nation race-for-the-lake mission. He had lobbied for the more difficult western approach. The underground lake was deeper at this section, less accessible, without any gradient allowing for a motorized approach along an incline. Marcus still recalled the months of persuasion and insistence on his part. If DeKirk was really after something more sizable—more media friendly—than microscopic organisms, his best bet was the deeper sediments on the western edge, where all the sonar and initial probes indicated an earlier basin more in line with the natural habitats and feeding areas of the larger dinosaurs.

Alex cleared his throat and raised his wrists—still bound with flex-cuffs. “If I’m damned, we may as well both be.” He looked wet and miserable, shivering in a blanket between the two hulking soldiers. His long, partially dread-locked hair was tied back in a ponytail with a length of rawhide. He wore a crude necklace featuring a single, dull stone.

One of the soldiers moved forward and carefully held up Alex’s pack, which he had hidden in his coat—a tightly-packed collection of clay-like bricks, along with wires and plugs.

“C-4?” Marcus said. “Oh God, Alex, what were you thinking?”

His son lowered his head. “Dad, I know it’s been two years, and I know what you think of me, but—”

“I don’t believe this. Now, of all times, you show up again in my life?”

Alex fumed at him. “I’ll disregard the hypocrisy in that question, and ask you another one. Do you know that thing down there is alive?”

“So you saw it,” Marcus said, lowering his voice, “what we have down there?”

Alex shook his head hard. “Yeah that… it’s freakin’ unbelievable, and congratulations on the discovery of a lifetime, but I swear, it’s alive.”

Marcus shook his head. “It’s not. Average water temperature down there has been around twenty-seven degrees, most likely for millions and millions of years, and before that, this thing would have been frozen solid in a glacial layer. A veritable ice cube. No metabolic activities can function in those conditions, not to mention the fact that it couldn’t breathe or eat or anything, even if you thought it was an evolutionary marvel like the Loch Ness Monster or something, it still would have had to eat.”

“Dad, it opened its eye, and its freakin’ mouth.”

“Gas bubbles maybe, escaping from its gut as your sub's thrusters stirred up the water, changing the pressure.”

“Bullshit.”

“Really? Then what’s the alternative? That a sixty-five million year old dinosaur has been taking a little cryogenic nap all this time?”

Marcus could tell his son was thinking, trying to reason out alternatives. He had to settle this and move on to more pressing matters. “Listen, you hit your head pretty bad, and you’ve been out in the extreme cold for I don’t know how long. All these elements, and if I know you, no sleep… It’s not surprising—”

“We found this too,” one of the soldiers said, holding up a camera with a cracked faceplate. “We’ll have to run the images.”

“Yes!” Alex insisted, a spark returning to his eyes. “Run it, and then you’ll see.”

Marcus frowned, looking from the camera to his son, seeing the boy’s crazed eyes, a look touched with a fear beyond anything these soldiers could have instilled in him. “See what?”

“That you’ve got bigger problems than whether or not I’m hallucinating. Bigger problems than finding some prehistoric monster that shouldn’t be here.”

#

Marcus wasn’t aware that Alex had been following his career, much less that he would have known about the distribution of Jurassic-era dinosaurs and their geographic prevalence. Although it might stand to reason that few laymen would have expected much in the way of fossils down at this pole, but Alex was right. The few previous discoveries in Antarctica had pointed only to the presence of certain avian-variety dinosaurs and some herbivore species, as well as a new carnivorous species—dubbed a
Cryolophosaurus
, of which only a sub-adult had been found so far, so descriptions about the adult’s size and attributes were just guesses. Marcus had theorized that the landmass that had once connected Antarctica and Australia would have been more than capable of allowing for a greater variety of dinosaurs during a time when Antarctica was lush and subtropical. It was exactly this theory that brought Marcus to the attention of billionaire DeKirk. Whatever DeKirk’s motives (and he certainly hadn’t shared them with Marcus), he was sure that they involved Marcus’s theories. Today, this discovery apparently had DeKirk wild with excitement.

Alex’s presence, a veritable thorn in his side, couldn’t have come at a worse time.

“The Russians,” Alex insisted. “The other side. We started there and…”

“Sir!” Another soldier just ran in, skidding to a halt beside his colleagues. “Just received word. A seismic event was recorded two miles east. Theta-1, it has to be…”

Marcus shot a glare at his son, then to his backpack full of C-4. “What did you do?”

Alex struggled with the handcuffs and against the restraining grip on his arm. Finally, Marcus nodded and made a wave with his hand and the soldier produced a key to release the cuffs.

“Thanks. Listen, so there
may
have been an explosion over there, but Tony and I—”

“Oh no,” Marcus said in a low voice. “Not Tony Harrison?

“Dad, just listen.”

“Where is he?” Marcus looked to the soldiers, then back to Alex. “What did you two do? Gary, contact Theta-1 and—”

“Tried sir, no response.”

“Dad—”

“Try again.”

“
Dad!
”

Marcus turned back to him. “What?”

“Tony’s…dead.”

“Oh, Alex.”

“It was…an accident. At least at first. We fell down the pit. He was all cut up and landed in the lake—”

Marcus blinked at him, imagining it, but something in his son’s voice held back his own questions.

“The Russians, they were there…they…were not right. Attacked us, and I’m telling you—”

“Wait, they attacked you? Oh Christ, now we
do
have an international incident.” He could see it now. American intruders, they would be branded as CIA operatives or something, and the Russians would be in the clear for defending themselves. An American activist dead, another wanted for criminal actions. Marcus held his head in his hands. It was all falling apart fast.

“Dad, the water! I’m telling you, there’s something about those microbes. You have to get your men out of there, pull them all up and—”

“Impossible,” Marcus said. “We’re beginning extraction of the
T. rex
today, and the other two…”

“What?” Alex frowned, and then looked to the desk, where Marcus had three monitors, two showing split screens of various artificially lit views of the infrastructure down at the base of the pit, the catwalks, wires and mesh netting, the six submersibles and five inflatable boats. “Jesus, so that was a
T. rex
? Did you say,
other
two?”

“Alex, we’ve got a team of fifty trained technicians down there with state-of-the-art equipment. We’re talking military-grade harnesses and hydraulic load-bearing gear with computer-assisted winches and other stuff that isn’t even on the commercial market yet. All set to raise one of the greatest finds in paleontological history. A perfectly-preserved
Tyrannosaurus rex
! Yes, last week we located in the sediment two more
Cryolophosaurs.
Sub-adults both, but also perfectly preserved. At only twenty feet long, their extraction is a far simpler matter.”

He pressed a few keys and the screen flashed, showing from a distance what looked like two wet, frozen dogs, and Marcus could just make out the telltale crown-like appendages on their heads, the ridges on their skulls, and the rows of nasty-looking teeth in their jaws.

Marcus beamed, but just then the third monitor flickered and a Skype call came in. A grizzled face, heavy with scars like an ancient roadmap across his leathery skin, William DeKirk’s wild eyes, slightly off-jade, loomed in the screen. His hair, silvery and thin, fell over his face but couldn’t block his enthusiasm. 

“I want minute-by-minute updates, Marcus. Patch me in to the operation.”

Marcus immediately pulled the screen to an angle where, hopefully, DeKirk couldn’t see his son, or the soldiers.
Please…

“Yes, Mr. DeKirk, but… there’s been an incident. We may have to wait.”

“What incident?” His voice snapped like a cobra, and he hissed back. “What, the Russian explosion? Heard about that, it’s of no consequence.”

“You heard…?”

“I have my sources, and no, I don’t care. I’ve alerted the American embassy in Moscow and they can handle it with the usual denials and claims of ignorance. Which is correct isn’t it?” His eyes peeked through the silver hair and blinked at Marcus, then tried to look beyond the camera’s limited field of view from his end. “You
didn’t
have anything to do with it, right? Even though there’s the disturbing family connection…”

Oh God.
Marcus flashed a look to his son, who just raised his hands.

“Sorry,” Alex whispered. “My camera…it was a thirty-minute-delay live feed to our blogsite… at least until it all went nuts.”

Marcus rubbed his temples. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then looked at the screen again. “Sir, I had no idea.”

“I’m sure.” DeKirk pulled back, grinning devilishly.

“Really. I have Alex here. He’s in custody, and I’ll deal with him. Harshly or…” He looked at Alex. “Turn him over to the authorities if that’s what’s required.”

“We can decide that later,” DeKirk said, “depending on the situation and the level of response from the Russian side. I heard there were…casualties?”

“Regrettably,” Marcus said, “Alex’s…colleague, as it were, and—?” He raised his eyes to Alex. “The Russian scientists?”

“I’m not sure they were scientists,” Alex said, walking around, now in view, so that he could see DeKirk—and vice versa. “I’m not sure they were…right. They just weren’t
right
. Something happened down there, sir…”

“Alex, not now.”

“What happened?” DeKirk asked, perking up again.

“I don’t know exactly, but I was telling my father. The lake down there, the bacteria or the microscopic organisms, you can’t just expose something millions of years old to present conditions without some consequences. Tony and I—we came here to protect an indigenous species, but after what I saw down there, after what I think it did to Tony, infecting his wounds…I don’t know. It acted fast, and something—”

DeKirk nodded in an off-screen direction and just raised his hand. “That’s fine, son. Your concerns are noted, but we’ve been studying the lake’s…microscopic denizens... for several months now. We know what we’re dealing with, and it’s nothing to be worried about.”

Marcus frowned.
We have?
It was news to him, and as far as he knew, he was the only true scientist at this base. The others—they were either technicians who operated specialized equipment, or else, they were all muscle. Mercenaries. A crew of ex-military contractors hired through DeKirk, but officially working on a U.S. initiated contract of exploration and polar research. If anyone was studying the water, it wasn’t Marcus. So, was DeKirk lying, or was he just leaving Marcus in the dark?

“But, sir—”

“Alex, stop.” Marcus turned to the screen again. “Look, the men are ready and we’re close, but maybe we should listen to him. Give it another day or two. Make sure we’re not in the middle of an international incident and that—I don’t know—we’re not bringing up something we can’t deal with.”

“We can deal with anything.” Never had Marcus heard anything spoken with such confidence.