Lost World II: Savage Patagonia Read online

“Yeah, but why isn’t it dead?”

  “I don’t know. They say dinosaurs have brains the size of marbles. Maybe you missed the brain?”

  “The cranium’s not that big to begin with. The arrow went right through it. There’s no way I missed the brain.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s dead and just doesn’t know it.”

  The head flopped around a few more times, sometimes hitting the ground and kicking up dust. The movements did suggest an automatic response, with no effort to pull back and flee. Longer than Gerald thought it should take, the beast finally gave up the ghost, and the head stopped moving, the body relaxed.

  “Son-of-a-bitch, we beat it,” Will said with a bit of disbelief in his voice. He looked over at Gerald. “We, beat it.” It was obvious an epiphany he hadn’t really considered before.

  “We sure did. And you made the kill. You, Will Prescott. You.”

  “I did, didn’t I? This changes everything.” He looked at Gerald, with a calm, confident gaze. “Things are going to be different from now on.”

  “Whoa, there. We survived this one, but who knows what tomorrow will bring? Let’s not get too big for our britches here.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m not thinking we’re some great dinosaur hunters. I’ve been living scared ever since our resurrection. It’s clouded everything. My fear has been a monster controlling me. It had me held in a victim mentality—like my only option was to lose. Well, I now know that’s not true. So I’m not going to let my fear have that control any more. I’m going to man-up and push past that fear—take things head on—regardless of the consequences. I may be torn in half tomorrow by God-knows-what, but I’m not going to live in fear any longer.”

  “Sounds reasonable. We both need as few distractions as possible in order to survive.”

  “Well, at least we know what’s for dinner tonight,” Will said, and rubbed a knuckle under his chin.

  “How about I cook and you clean?”

  “I don’t know. That’s a big beast to clean. I’m not even sure what parts are the best to eat.”

  “Wings and feet are a no-go for me. Not much meat on the arms and legs either. You can’t go wrong with ribs. We’ll gut it and figure it out,” Gerald said.

  “You know, that head would look good as a trophy hung on the wall.”

  “Or as a Halloween mask.”

  “Ha. I don’t know about that. Might be too heavy and break your neck to wear it.”

  “I wonder if we can make some clothing out of the wings. I’m tired of looking at your junk.”

  “Really. And why were you looking at my junk? It’s because it’s three times bigger than yours, isn’t it?”

  “Hey, I’m a grower not a shower,” Gerald said, throwing his arms up into the air.

  “That’s not what she said,” Will said with the seriousness of a declaration in a court of law.

  The banter unleashed an avalanche of suppressed tension and purged it to the wind. The two roared in laughter until both gasped for air. This was the first time Gerald could remember a happy moment since the time they awoke from the strange vortex by the volcano.

  Chapter 2

  Perpetual clouds enveloped the massive land of Patagonia, an uncharted area in the south-eastern portion of South America. The cover was a timeless weather phenomena generated by the freezing air of the surrounding mountains and the hot rivers of magma that hid not far below the Earth’s surface.

  The horizon to the north offered the eleven survivors a spectacular view that evoked both awe and anxiety. A mighty volcano poked through the earth like Satan’s horn piercing flesh. The mountain’s jagged mouth opened as if a massive finger flicked off the peak. The vent hole of Hell burped black smoke and rank gases into the orange sky directly above as streams of lava bled down its sides.

  “Meat. Shut the fuck up,” Vince Cooper, a geologist employed by Ace Corporation and leader of the expedition, said to Clint Perry, a large block of a man of Samoan descent, otherwise known as Meat. “We all just found ourselves here with a lot of questions, for sure. The last thing we need is some nut-ball mystic religious bullshit to confuse the situation.” Coop pointed a crooked index finger bent by the onset of arthritis. “Brahma creates and Shiva destroys,” he said in a mocking tone, repeating one of Meat’s earlier rants. “You almost had me for a moment. I’ve had time to think about it, and I’m sticking to what I know is real. In my over sixty years of existence, I’ve learned that science has, or will find, the answer to any question. There is a scientific answer as to what happened to us.” He redirected his index finger over to the smoke-like spiral churning like a slow moving pinwheel. The interior of the vortex danced with ethereal flashes of blues, greens, and reds. “That thing over there is what’s responsible for our situation. I don’t know what it is, but it’s more than likely a product of nature.”

  “If it was a product of nature, then why aren’t there others like this around the Earth? You’d think by now we’d have stumbled upon another,” Alex Klasse said, a Professor of Zoology by profession, Cryptozoologist by passion. As leader of the group from Southwood University, he had failed miserably fulfilling his duties as the keeper of his crew’s welfare. “You all know my background, exploring the fringe of science. I’ve read a lot of strange books and listened to a lot of kooks on late night radio. Never has something like this come up. This…this thing has the ability to bring us back to life.”

  Coop slowly passed his gaze over the group, trying to come up with an answer. Chief, lead member of the seven member Redwater security team, had his head hung low and appeared to be in deep thought. Henry Hunter—Suge, the only African American with the security team, looked about as if his head was on a swivel; no doubt expecting the unexpected. Tim Colter, who had earned the nickname Bats for being bat-shit crazy, had his eyes shut and looked as if he were trying to will the situation away. Unfortunately, the only medicine that seemed to keep Bats in emotional check was to kill something every few days. John Jones, known as Caveman for his outdoorsman prowess, pushed a rock around with his big toe. If Curly of The Three Stooges had a twin, it was Caveman. Ron and Don Bartel, the twins who were also the oldest of the whole bunch, just stared at each other in disbelief. Well, doesn’t look like anyone else has a suggestion, Coop thought.

  Coop turned his gaze over to the college crew. Ace Corporation had to use Alex and his associates as cover for entering Patagonia. Authorities in Chile didn’t have a problem accepting bribes for a dinosaur hunting expedition. Had the authorities known the truth, that the main purpose was to locate and bring back a horde of rare red diamonds, well, things wouldn’t have gone as smoothly. Susan Klasse stood by Chief, and not her husband, Alex. She had realized Alex sent her in anaphylactic shock by putting peanuts in a canteen and giving it to her to drink, not long after her rebirth. The situation would only add to complications the group currently faced. Natasha Kamdar was Alex’s student and probably the reason Alex killed his wife. Coop had thought Alex and Natasha spoke to each other with a familiarity that went beyond teacher-student before Susan died. Natasha certainly was a beauty, and her bronze East Indian skin tone added to her allure. Natasha was nearly young enough to be Coop’s grandchild, though, and he wasn’t one of those lecherous old men who fantasised over younger women. Alex was around fifty-years-old, and Coop thought the age difference between Alex and Natasha was creepy enough.

  Natasha caught Coop’s gaze and held it for a moment, and then said, “How do we know that this isn’t something God made?”

  “Because when you shave this thing with Occam’s Razor, you eliminate God from the equation. Saying God did it because we don’t understand it has been a hindrance to mankind for centuries,” Coop said.

  The rock under Caveman’s toe stopped. The rotund man asked, “What the hell is Occam’s Razor?”

  “When you have two competing theories that offer the same results, the simpler one is usually better. You have to discount the unobserved. That alon
e cuts out any mystical force responsible for our rebirths,” Coop said.

  “Okay, then. The question is, what are we observing?” Natasha said.

  Everyone turned toward the vortex. The fog-like spirals reached some fifty feet in the air, and the colors danced like in the Aurora Borealis.

  “Let’s talk this out,” Coop said. “What does it most resemble?”

  “It reminds me a satellite shot of a hurricane,” Suge said.

  “Yeah, I see that. It resembles a weather pattern, so it might be a force of nature,” Coop said.

  “But,” Alex said, “notice the rotation. It’s spinning counterclockwise like a hurricane would do in the Northern Hemisphere. We’re in the Southern Hemisphere. If it was affected by nature as weather, then it would rotate clockwise.”

  “Point noted. So, if it’s not a force of nature, then it’s something manmade,” Coop said.

  “Or alien,” Alex said.

  “Don’t jump the gun, Alex. Let’s keep this to what we can observe. If you get right down to it, there is zero evidence that life exists anywhere in the universe except Earth.”

  “Yeah, but—” Natasha started.

  “But nothing. Despite the odds that life of some sort exists outside of Earth due to the magnitude of the universe, we still have not one shred of evidence that it’s so,” Coop said.

  “What about the Pyramids?” Meat asked.

  “What about them? There’s no evidence anything other than man built the Pyramids,” Coop said.

  “True, there’re engineers today who claim they could recreate the building process using only human labor if someone would fund it,” Alex said.

  “Let’s stay with this. We have a machine that does what? Returns people to life after they die. How could it do that? Does it revive a dead body? I doubt that. I was torn to shreds and eaten by a Spinosaurus. Would it use our DNA to reconstruct the body? How would we get our minds, personalities, and our memories back?” Coop asked.

  Alex rubbed a finger on his bottom lip and then raised his hand in the air. “Because it’s not a machine that resurrects the dead,” Alex said. “It’s a time machine.”

  Coop went to speak a rebuff, but something inside held him in check. “Go on.”

  Alex cleared his throat and let his gaze drift over at Susan for a brief moment, then turned it toward Natasha, and then back to Coop. “The best explanation for how we live again is that somehow we were snatched back from a previous time before we were harmed.”

  “Playing on that, what about our memories? I remember a lot of pain I felt before I died. The rest of you?” Coop asked.

  The others nodded, except for Bats, who just shrugged his shoulders. Bats died a quick death due to a head injury when an attacking Spinosaurus knock over his vehicle.

  “How can our memories be explained?” Coop asked.

  “I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject of time. Not only from crackpots, but I’ve studied hard physics too. Maybe it works like this: we live in a world made of three dimensions. Length, width, and height. We travel past these three dimensions through the dimension of time. But—and try follow me here—if we went up into a higher dimension, the fifth dimension let’s call it, then you could see the entire timeline stretched out like a snake, seeing the beginning and the end. As if everything in the future that will happen has already happened. But in our normal lives we aren’t above the timeline, so we have to travel through time past these three dimensions in order to experience it. But, if we are transported from a time earlier than our death, we move up to a higher place on the timeline—let’s call it now, we have access to any memories experienced on the timeline at any time—including the memories of our previous death,” Alex said.

  “Huh?” Caveman said.

  “I don’t know, Alex. That’s a lot to swallow. Some of that sounds like religious predestination speak,” Coop said.

  “No, not in the least. I’m not saying our lives are predestined by God. I’m saying that using the laws of physics, it’s possible to see from the beginning of time until the end. We were moved from a time we were alive to now, another point on the timeline,” Alex said. “I may not have it right how we have retained our memories, but what difference does it make? We have them, and that’s that.”

  “Alex is right,” Meat said.

  All eyes turned toward the Samoan.

  “What do you mean?” Natasha asked.

  “My arm. Look at it.” Meat lifted up his left arm and pointed to the inside of his forearm. “I tattooed my arm the day before I was killed. It was of Natasha’s face. Remember?”

  Natasha gasped. “You’re right. It’s gone. Wait,” she said, and twisted her left leg to the side and looked down at her heel. “I still have my tattoo.” She felt her left elbow and then looked at her forearm. “I had skinned my elbow on the trip across the mountains—when the Warthog went sideways and I hit the floor. That wound’s still there. But the day I was killed, I scraped my left forearm on a tree. That cut isn’t there. So it doesn’t look like we’re rebuilt from DNA. My body is from a time between the two events.”

  Coop ran his fingers through his graying hair, and said, “Let’s say the vortex is a time machine. Why would it be here?”

  “I think it’s obvious,” Alex said. “It’s here ensuring that prehistoric creatures don’t go extinct. Whoever did this wanted to preserve dinosaurs from the past.”

  “So you’re suggesting that dinosaurs, or anything that dies in Patagonia, are reborn by the vortex,” Susan said, her tone more civil than Coop had expected.

  “Yeah. It looks that way. That vortex isn’t some creation of a God or Gods intending to play some type of game throughout eternity. It’s a machine put here to preserve the most magnificent life that’s ever roamed the planet. We just happened to be caught up in the process because we invaded the land,” Alex said.

  “Aw, hell,” Ron said, and looked at his twin brother, Don.

  “You was thinking what I was thinking, weren’t you?” Don asked Ron.

  “Guys, what are you two talking about?” Coop asked.

  “When Alex was saying this here was a time machine, well…” Ron hesitated and cleared his throat. “I was thinking, and I was thinking Don was thinking it, too, that we could use the time machine to bring back The Bear, Coach Bryant.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t that be a hoot,” Don said. “I bet that man could have led Alabama over Ohio State in that playoff game and won the National Championship to boot.”

  “Now, we ain’t saying we don’t like Coach Saban,” Ron said.

  “No, we ain’t saying that,” Don said.

  “But he just ain’t The Bear. Right, Don?” Ron said.

  “Right, Ron,” Don said.

  “Roll Tide!” both brothers said at the same time.

  Coop closed his eyes and shook his head. “Seriously, guys. There is a time and place for football—”

  “But it’s Alabama football,” Ron said.

  “This isn’t time for any kind of football. Can it for now,” Coop said.

  “So if this is a machine placed here to preserve dinosaurs, that means we aren’t trapped in some pocket universe in a different dimension. We have another chance in our world if we can escape,” Chief said. He brought his right hand up and gently placed it on Susan’s shoulder. She leaned her body closer to the rugged leader.

  “If there’s a way out of this mess, I’ll find it,” Caveman said.

  Bats lifted his head as if coming out of a daze, and said, “I don’t think it’s going to be that simple.”

  “So Alex,” Suge started, “you said whoever made the time machine. Who do you think made it?”

  “Aliens,” Alex said, and with a closed eye, cast a gaze at Coop as if expecting a verbal slap down.

  “Alex, Occam’s Razor. There are no aliens,” Coop said.

  “What then?” Meat asked.

  “Could be mankind—from the future. What if in the future it was decided to
go back to prehistoric times and set up a machine that kept a select group of dinosaurs alive?” Coop said.

  “You mean like a habitat of sorts?” Susan asked.

  “I guess so. Just think, by doing so mankind in the future will be able to see, study, marvel, and enjoy these great creatures,” Coop said.

  “Yeah, just one big fucking petting zoo,” Bats said. He then coughed up some phlegm and spit it in a puddle of molten lava. The spit hissed like a fast burning firecracker fuse.

  “Well, if man went back in time to preserve dinosaurs to one day introduce them back into the world, that means the future is now,” Alex said.

  “That’s right. It does. Because we found them now. Guys, it’s a hunch, but the very fact that we found prehistoric life and are still alive to talk about it, just may mean that we will succeed in getting out of here and reintroducing dinosaurs to the world,” Coop said. “That may also suggest that the time machine put here was built some time in our near future.”

  “It’s hard to imagine this advanced technology coming from anything in this century, but you never know what advances science may bring,” Alex said.

  “Science output doubles every nine years. So I guess anything is possible,” Coop said.

  “Okay, what’s the plan?” Suge asked.

  The dead, rocky land in this area was too harsh of an environment to support even one blade of grass. The volcano was on the opposite side, to the north-west, of where the All-Terrain Tracked Carrier, known as the Warthog, carried the expedition into the heart of Patagonia. That vehicle, along with a Humvee-like truck affectionately called the Mule, were essential for travel and protection in the hostile lost world. “Survival first. Escape second,” Coop said.

  “Yeah. We’s need to eat,” Caveman said. “I’m hungry enough to eat the ass out of a low flying duck.”

  Coop never found a limit to the imagery of what Caveman’s observations painted in his mind.

  “We will have to find food—water too. It’s going to be tough out here without our guns,” Chief said. “As far as escape goes, what do we do? Try to go back the same way we came in? We still have those mountains to cross. That’s going to be a long and dangerous journey. A cold one too. We won’t survive the hike without warm clothing and plenty of calories in our bellies to burn.”