Lost World II: Savage Patagonia Read online

  Lost World II

  Savage Patagonia

  Dane Hatchell

  Copyright 2015 by Dane Hatchell

  Chapter 1

  SKEER-AK! The cry of the pterodactyl electrified the air as the shadow of the thirty-foot leathery wings passed in front of the cave’s entrance.

  “Not this shit again,” Gerald Hawkins said. He had been daydreaming—thinking how good a cool margarita would taste right now. The memory of the tartness of lime had his mouth moist. What he wouldn’t give for the tangy beverage and a bowl of chips and salsa.

  “Why would today be different than any other day?” Will Prescott sat with his back pressed against the cave wall and continued to rub the edge of a smooth, knife-shaped stone with a coarse black rock.

  “Because we’re not in the movie Ground Hog Day. We aren’t living the same day over and over again. Every day is new. As long as we stay alive there’s hope someone will find and rescue us. There’s no way Ace Corporation is going to ignore the cache of red diamonds Patagonia has to offer. You know how greedy Henry Lear is. He wants to grow Ace Corp into the most profitable outfit in the world. I’m sure once Perkins showed him the diamonds I put on the drone, Lear picked up the phone and started gathering an army to come out here.”

  “We didn’t stay alive the first time,” Will said, and carefully rubbed his thumb across the stone’s sharpened edge. “What makes you think we need to stay alive? If we die again, we’ll just end up back over at the volcano. Right by that vortex. I don’t know who was more surprised that day, me or you.”

  “I was more surprised. I watched that pterodactyl grab your ass and haul you off. I knew you were as good as dead. When I walked out of that vortex light show, the last thing I expected was seeing you alive. You were just in shock when you saw me arrive.”

  SKEER-AK!

  “Shut the fuck up, motherfucker,” Gerald said as he peered from the mouth of the cave into the sky above. The cave had only one access. It was a good fifteen feet wide inside and about as deep. The walls were solid too. He and Will didn’t have to worry about some nasty creature finding a way in through a tunnel or crevasse looking for food—like before.

  The cave’s entrance had rows of bamboo spears strategically embedded into the ground. The spears’ sharp points reached about ten feet high and were spaced enough for a grown man to snake his way around, but discouraged a flying predator from swooping down for an aerial attack.

  “I was also in shock from being divided and fed to the pterodactyl hatchlings. The mother held me down, digging a talon into my gut, and then plucked off an arm and fed it to one of the babies. Then she ripped off the other arm and a leg, and then the other leg. I blacked out not long after, but that shit hurt.” Will closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and shook his head. “If I think about it too much, I can still feel the pain.”

  “I didn’t have such a fun time dying either. Those two dinosaurs, hell, I don’t know what they were. They were a little taller than me, walked on two legs, and played tug-of-war with my arms. I remember one of them swallowing an arm up to the elbow and stripping the meat off the bone like a hungry man in a chicken wing eating contest. And if that wasn’t bad enough, one of them ripped open my bowels, and I watched my own intestines pop out.”

  “Just like Mel Gibson in Brave Heart at the end,” Will said.

  “Hey! Don’t you make fun of my death.”

  “I wasn’t making fun. I was just saying.” Will had let his words die toward the end.

  Gerald cast his gaze toward the ground. “This is bullshit. All fucking bullshit. We shouldn’t be here—alive again. Patagonia shouldn’t be here either—crawling with dinosaurs that have been extinct for millions of years. I do have to wonder, though. If we get killed again, will we be reborn in the vortex by the volcano or was that a onetime thing?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. I’m mentally fucked up enough over dying the first time. Can you imagine the physiological problems you’d have faced with multiple deaths haunting you?” Will’s jaw dropped, and his eyes stared into an unseen void. He shook his head and looked over at Gerald. “As far as Patagonia goes, I think it’s scientifically feasible to exist. The area’s been walled off by mountains for millions and millions of years. The living conditions have remained the same, so I guess there was no other outside forces of nature to mess with evolution. One thing we don’t know, is how many or what other dinosaurs exists other than pterodactyls and those other two legged lizard types you told me about, and the smaller ones we’ve been surviving on. There might be T-rexes or Velociraptors, like in Jurassic Park.”

  “Yeah, and I wouldn’t want to meet up with anything like that. You know, it just occurred to me that you and I relate to things in life to movies. How pathetic is that? Modern life is so fucked up that we spend more time identifying our lives with fiction than real events.”

  “Hmm, I see your point. But dinosaurs only existed in movies, until now. It might be a while before we go out for dinner and a movie again. If we do survive this thing and make it back to civilization, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fit back in like before. I bet we’ll be changed forever.”

  Gerald rubbed the hairs on his chin. He thought they would have grown more by now. How long had they been in Patagonia? There was no way to know. The time between their deaths and waking by the volcano was a complete unknown. The marks he had made on the wall counted six weeks, but there was a day or two or three that he hadn’t bothered to count. His heart just wasn’t in it. Living day to day was enough of a struggle. If he died, what difference would it make how many days it took for that to happen?

  The air whooshed with the flapping wings of the air dragon as it hovered above the spears. Gerald watched as the taloned claws of the pterodactyl reached toward his face, stopping just short of meeting the business end of the sharpened bamboo only a few feet away. “Damn, this one just won’t give up. It’s either real pissed that it can see us but can’t get us, or food’s been kinda hard to come by, and it’s desperate.”

  Will pressed his hands tightly over his ears. “I wish it would just go away. It’s getting harder for me to go through this. I’m going to reach my breaking point one day.”

  “Go on, get!” Gerald yelled, and then reached down and picked up a rock a little smaller than a baseball. He held the rock at waist level and waited for the claws to pull up, before he hurled the projectile and hit the brown colored beast in the chest. The giant flying reptile squawked once and raised its triangular shaped beak into the air before leaving from sight. “Asshole. Don’t come back.”

  Will had removed his hands from his ears and had his arms wrapped around his knees. He gently rocked back and forth, again focused on an unseen void. “You know what I think about sometimes?”

  “Pussy?”

  Will stopped rocking, and his mouth formed a slight grin. “No,” he followed with an incredulous giggle. “I haven’t thought about that for a while.” He turned his gaze to Gerald. “I think about getting caught again by that flying devil. It picks me up and takes me to the nest—just like before. And it slowly tears me in pieces, relishing in the agony that it’s putting me through, as if my suffering itself will strengthen its offspring in a better way. And then I die and appear again out of the vortex. But then I’m caught again, and my torture begins anew. Divided and fed to hatchlings. And the next day the same, and the next day the same. Until one day the hatchlings are large enough to leave the nest. And the next time I wake from the vortex, one of the grown hatchlings catches me up and brings me to its nest where I’m used as food again. Every time I’m reborn, I’m eaten. Over, and over, and over again. Throughout time. Thro
ughout eternity.”

  Gerald listened to Will’s words cooled by the inner terror that held an evil grip on his friend’s soul. The sharing had grabbed his spine with icy fingers and held any words of rebuttal or consolation that he had might want to offer. As if things weren’t bad enough, he had to worry about Will’s sanity. There wasn’t any Prozac available in Patagonia, and he doubted a slap in the face would do much to cure a mental issue.

  SKEER-AK!

  The winged wonder was back. Right now Gerald was only catching a good case of red ass. How long would it take before this constant harassment reduced his fortitude to jelly?

  “Will, we’re going to have to build a fire and shoot some flaming arrows at it. Maybe that new bow you made will have enough pull to penetrate skin. I’d love to see that thing catch an arrow and smoke all the way to the ground.”

  Before his partner had a chance to respond, the pterodactyl flew low, just beyond the fence of spears leading to the cave’s entrance. Instead of making a passing swoop and squawking a few reptilian cuss words as usual, it rapidly flapped its wings until it slowed and hovered above the ground. Its legs lowered, and its feet rested on terra firma. With its wings drawn in close to its body, it moved its head, as if looking for a way past the spears.

  “Uh oh. Pretty bird is thinking outside the box. It’s never been brave enough to land on the ground before. You better hurry up with that fire. We need to teach it a lesson,” Gerald said.

  “I’ll try.” Will crawled over to the pile of branches and began layering wood. He scooped up a handful of kindling and a hand sized rock with a flat surface on one side. He placed some kindling on the flat part of the rock and used another rock in the other hand to strike the edge of the other, creating sparks.

  The pterosaur stretched it wings wide to its sides and flapped them a bit in frustration.

  “You’re not going to scare the bamboo away, big boy.”

  With some caution, the reptile advanced toward the spears. When it got close enough, it reached out a tiny little hand attached to a tip of its wing and pushed against one of the bamboo spears.

  “It’s not going to be as easy as you think,” Gerald said.

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to big bird. He’s testing the bamboo defense. How’s that fire coming?”

  “It’s coming. You know how long this shit takes.”

  Yes, Gerald knew. He was getting worried about the pterosaur snooping around but didn’t want to excite Will any more than necessary. That bamboo was some pretty strong stuff. The spears were nearly three inches in diameter, and the ends sunk four feet into the ground. Will had scoffed at the thought of burying the bamboo. Gerald knew how to do it, though. It was easy—a hell of a lot easier than cutting the bamboo with those stone knives. Boy Scout training had come in handy many times since his resurrection. All that was needed was some water on the ground where the bamboo would go, and then someone had to hold the shaft upright and twist it back and forth. In this case, both he and Will had to work together because the fourteen-foot shaft was awkward to handle. As the end of the bamboo sank into the ground, he’d add a little more water, and continued the twisting motion. It took less than five minutes to sink a shaft.

  The pterosaur pushed at the spear fence with one of its wings. The bamboo leaned a bit but not enough to encourage the beast to put more effort into it. It spread its wings again and squawked.

  “The big, bad wolf is getting pissed,” Gerald said to Will. He turned his gaze back outside the cave. “These two little piggies didn’t build their house with straw. You better get while the getting’s good, or we’re going to fuck you up in a major way.”

  The reptile stared through the fence, twisting its head back and forth like a curious bird looking through a cage. It slowly stretched out its neck, turned its head to the side, and closed its beak on one of the spears. It tugged on it a few times without any success and let go.

  “See, I told you.” The metallic smell of flint mixed with smoldering moss let Gerald know that fire was soon on the way.

  Undeterred, the pterosaur’s beak latched onto another spear, and this time it used its body weight and leaned backward as it tried to pluck the bamboo from the ground.

  Gerald’s eyes widened as the shaft slowly lifted out the earth until the end was completely out. “Oh, that’s not good.”

  “What?” Will said. He was hunched over blowing the smoldering kindling. Tiny flames popped up heating the sticks. “Got the fire going.”

  “Good, and not too soon.”

  “What?” There was no need for Will to wait for an answer. He turned and saw the pterosaur’s beak latch onto a spear and pull it out the ground.

  “Big bird learned a new trick. Now it’s time to make him pay for not listening to his superiors. C’mon, let’s fire up a few arrows.”

  Gerald went to the weapons cache and gathered the six arrows they had made. They were crude, to say the least, and flew about as straight as a one winged pigeon in a hurricane. Still, at short distances they were accurate enough to skewer some of the small two legged dinosaurs. He didn’t want to wait to see the white or yellow or what-the-hell-ever color of its eyes were before taking a shot. They need to scare the beast away as soon as possible. It needed to be afraid of mankind. Humans might be the new kid on the block, but if he and Will had any chance of surviving, it was time to start establishing some territorial boundaries. “Or get eaten. Whichever comes first,” Gerald said only loud enough for him to hear.

  Will had some plant material and wrapped it near the arrowhead while Gerald held it. He used some thin, coarse vine to secure it to the shaft. “I wish we had fuel to dip this in. This stuff won’t light a fire big enough to do any real damage. Hopefully, it will be enough to scare it away.”

  Once Will tied the knot, Gerald brought the arrow by the fire, and held the shaft near the arrowhead until the plant material caught fire. Will was already by the cave’s entrance with the bow in hand. Will’s tight jaw and wide eyes told Gerald the pterosaur was making good progress.

  “Here, it’s ready to go,” Gerald said has he handed Will the arrow. He looked up to see the predator had made its way halfway home. “Shit.”

  “It’s hard to get a bead on him. The bamboo’s in the way, and I can’t get a straight shot,” Will said.

  “You’re going to have to do the best you can. That fire won’t last long. Take your shot. Show it we mean business.”

  With a sign of frustration and moving his aim from side to side, Will let the arrow fly.

  The arrow ricocheted off two spears before finding its target. It hit the pterosaur in the left wing, but didn’t penetrate it, and fell harmlessly to the ground. The flame of the arrow, as small as it was, did take the beast aback for a fleeting moment. But the flame quickly dimmed until it smoldered out, and the reptile went back to work edging his way closer to dinner.

  “Let’s try again,” Gerald shouted.

  “We don’t have time to make another fire arrow. He’ll be on us in no time.”

  “At least shoot some regular arrows at it. I’ll get my spear.” Gerald ran to the weapon cache and grabbed a long spear, while Will scooped up the remaining arrows. “Try to hit that thing where it counts. In the head, or the eye, or something.”

  “I’ll be lucky if I hit it at all. It moves its head around too much.”

  “Just shut up and shoot.” Gerald had the long spear by his side and thrust the end past the few remaining pieces of sharpened bamboo fencing. The stone spearhead challenged the pterodactyl’s beak in a duel for the next picket. It wasn’t much of a fight, as the spear’s tip bounced off the rock-hard beak.

  Will’s first arrow whizzed by the predator’s head. The second arrow hit it square in the chest. The arrowhead penetrated enough to embed into the flesh, but not by much. The arrow hung limply toward the ground as blood trickled down. “That thing’s tough!”

  With another piece of fence u
prooted, the saw-toothed maw of the flying reptile had reached the cave opening.

  “Look out!” Gerald dove to the side as the massive head shoved past two bamboo pickets into the entrance.

  Will backpedaled, tripped over his own feet, and fell on his ass. The reptile’s beak snapped empty air mere molecules from his right foot.

  In the reptile’s haste, its strategy for removing the bamboo defense made it vulnerable to attack. Instead of removing a layer of pickets at a time and allowing all of its body to advance, it essentially carved out a wedge shaped passage. Its head advanced farther than its body. While the head was the deadliest weapon, the rest of the body didn’t pose a threat, at least for now.

  The pterosaur’s neck was extended as it made a move for Will. Gerald seized the opportunity and ran the long spear through its neck. At first the stone head came to an abrupt stop as it entered flesh, but adrenaline had made him numb to mortal limitations. Red blood spurted from the wound, wetting his chest, as the spear’s shaft pushed deeper.

  The beast shrieked and jutted its head to the side, knocking Gerald away, and slamming him against the cave wall. As it tried to pull its head back, the spear prevented an escape from the cave’s mouth as it hung up on the remaining bamboo pickets. It shrieked again, sounding more pissed off than hurt.

  Will was up on his feet, and though Gerald saw the weight of terror pulling the skin on Will’s face downward, Will pulled back on the bow as the pterosaur’s beak flew forward for another attack. The predator’s head stopped just short of the poised archer. Will let the arrow loose.

  At that short distance, direct hit. The arrow went straight through the eye, and the stone tip stuck out the back of its head. The beasts went berserk, thrashing its head about. There was no telling how much the head weighed. If it connected with either of them, the results might prove deadly.

  Gerald scampered to the back of the cave by Will. “Good shot,” he said amongst the turmoil.