Raptor

  “Those sounds might be another baby raptor—not Honker,” Uta said. “And even if we find him, how are we going to get him away from his mother?”

  Zack shook his head and admitted, “I don’t know.”

  The sounds were more distant now—as though Honker was being taken farther into the very center of the mountain—but there were other sounds as well. Shrieks and roars like they’d heard from the mother raptor. Gurgling sounds of underwater streams. And low-pitched cries like lions fighting over carrion in a jungle.

  Manny strapped on his rifle and climbing gear as Eric drove their Jeep up the rough road to the rockslide. They laughed about Dr. Boneid, following behind them in the Rover.

  “Bonehead!” Eric said. “Seeing living dinos! What a laugh!”

  “He must have been stewed!” Manny laughed. All Eric had to do was mention the word dinosaur or raptor, and Manny howled.

  “Yeah, boys,” Eric said, imitating Boneid’s raspy voice, “today we’re going on a raptor hunt!”

  “Stop it!” Manny yelled, clutching his sides. “It hurts. Hurts!”

  “Yes, men—see, this dino came out of the fog and jumped me faster than a duck on a June bug. And when the big dino opened its mouth, guess what was inside?”

  Manny screamed with laughter. “A little dino!”

  “Right!”

  The way Manny and Eric saw it, Bones had had a few drinks too many and come across a grizzly and her cub. All he’d probably seen was some big shadows and waving claws, and all he’d heard was a couple of roars. A spooked grizzly was hard enough to catch without making believe it was some kind of a cockamamy dino.

  Another thousand feet higher on the mountain there was a break in the evergreens and they could see the craggy peaks and badlands east of the dam. Roots of massive pines had gouged their way into the sandstone cliffs. The wound of the rockslide lay dead ahead.

  They parked at the end of the rutted road, unloaded their equipment, and carried it up the slope to the rock-slide and mine entrance.

  “I don’t want you going in deep,” Boneid said, puffing as he caught up. “Stay in touch with your walkie-talkie. Just get an idea of what we’re getting into.”

  “Right, boss,” Eric said, giving Manny a wink. He and Manny turned on their flashlights and started off with their rifles ready. Boneid checked his pistol in its holster to make certain it was loaded, and sat in the shadows of the entrance. He let them get a ways inside before he tested his walkie-talkie. “Hello,” he said.

  “We hear you,” Manny’s voice came from the receiver.

  “Good.” Boneid watched the silhouettes of the two men growing smaller as they moved a distance into the mine. He knew they were both experienced spelunkers. If there was anything to be found in the high tunnel, they’d find it. Shoot the big one. Catch the little one. He’d made that clear to them.

  “Something big came through here,” Eric said. They stepped on broken pieces of stalagmite and stalactites, which lay strewn on the floor.

  “Yeah,” Manny said. He kept his flashlight trained on the floor. He was the first to smell the bad odor and see more chunks of the mule’s carcass splattered at the base of a wall. Beyond, he saw a circle of vegetation in a dark cranny of the tunnel. He and Eric checked the vomit-covered leaves and small, shredded leathery sacks that were crawling with maggots.

  “We’ve found something that looks like … like where some animal sleeps, Dr. Bones,” Eric said, into the walkie-talkie. “Like a nest. It’s got weird ripped packets in it with worms crawling all over them.”

  “Could they be pieces of shells? Some kind of eggs?” Dr. Bones said, his voice crackling with excitement.

  “Could be,” Manny said.

  Manny and Eric fought to stifle their laughter. They’d seen bears make all kind of nests in caves and stash lots of stuff in them, just like rats and mice do. It looked like this bear had found some kind of a tire tube and bitten it to pieces.

  “How many shells?” Dr. Boneid asked.

  Eric counted. “About a dozen, maybe.”

  “Bring me one out—now!” Dr. Boneid’s voice came over the walkie-talkie. “I want to see it before you go any farther.”

  Eric pointed to Manny.

  Manny scowled. “You wait till I come back, okay?” he whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  Manny returned to the nest, took a small collapsible shovel from his backpack, and scooped up one of the torn leather packets—worms and all. He started back toward the tunnel exit.

  Eric waited for a few moments. He began to feel cold standing in one spot.

  SCRATCH. SCRAAAATCH

  He heard the sounds coming from just ahead—around a bend in the tunnel. He shifted his rifle, released its safety, and started forward. The sounds weren’t from a large animal. It couldn’t be much more than cave squirrels or a young cougar. Maybe the grizzly cub, he thought. For a moment he had a fantasy about catching a bear cub, just picking it up and bringing it out for Bones to see. He’d probably get a bonus, or they’d let him sell it. He knew one of the Utes who had gotten five thousand dollars from a St. Louis zoo for a baby grizzly.

  He looked down, saw a wide scraping trail, as though someone had dragged a sack along the dirt floor. There were tracks in the dust, small, most of them four-toed. Three thick toes and a fourth smaller one.

  He let his flashlight cut into the darkness of the bend. A few steps further on, he saw a wet spot, a small dark pool that had spilled and caked on the ground.

  SCRATCH.

  Suddenly, a lizard appeared from one of the alcoves along the wall. It was the largest lizard he’d ever seen, bigger and thicker than any iguana or anything down in Mexico. He had always liked iguanas. He had photos from home of lizards coming up to him and taking hibiscus flowers from between his teeth.

  “Hey, guy,” Eric said.

  Maybe Bones had seen a lizard, he thought. He was probably in one of his stupors and just thought it was big. He could imagine what Bones would do if he came out of the tunnel carrying it. And if it were a new kind of lizard, he knew Bones would take good care of him. A nice, juicy bonus. At least a couple of weeks off to go down and see his kids outside Mazatlán.

  The lizard looked up at Eric. It stood up on its thick hind legs and cocked its head. It almost looked cute.

  “Come here, guy,” Eric said gently. He reached out his hand, and moved forward slowly to pet it. “Come on. I won’t hurt you.” The lizard backed off, so he reached into his backpack, tore off a piece of a sandwich, and held it out.

  At the sight of the food, the lizard stepped forward carefully, like a wild turkey pecking the ground for seeds. It came to within a foot of Eric’s hand. Its eyes darted from the shred of a sandwich to the glint of the rifle barrel.

  “The gun scaring you?” Eric asked. He set his rifle down next to the flashlight. “See, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The lizard came closer now. It began to peck at the ham and cheese and bread. Eric kneeled. Slowly, he inched his left hand around the side of the lizard. It seemed tame, he thought. He knew there was a chance it could have been someone’s pet, some weird tourist or gem hunter who’d let his pet lizard get away from him. More likely, he knew, was that the mountain—with all its abandoned mine shafts and caves—had protected its wildlife so much that it wasn’t very wild anymore. He thought it might be like the Galápagos Islands, where the birds and lizards know no fear of man. He could see what a find it could be: Eric Gonzales, carrying the lizard out, letting Bonehead spin the mountain all over the world as the new Galápagos.

  That would mean a lot of money for everyone, Eric knew.

  Especially him.

  SCRAAAAAATCH.

  There were more sounds now. Suddenly, three more lizards emerged from the shadows and came right up to him. Then several more.

  “Hi, guys,” he said. He began to think about the lizards and the nest he’d seen. Lizards were reptiles, and reptiles had nests and eggs. He and Mann
y had only seen one nest, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be others. Other nests and …

  He realized he might have crawled too far from his rifle and flashlight. He smiled at the lizards and slowly began to inch back.

  Two of the lizards leaped up onto his backpack. They felt twenty or thirty pounds each.

  Heavy.

  “Hey, guys …,” he said.

  The lizards pecked at the open zipper and grabbed the edges of the backpack. Soon, they had ripped the pocket open and tore into the rest of the sandwich. “That’s not nice,” Eric said, trying to keep his voice friendly. He knew wild animals could smell human fear. He was not afraid, he told himself.

  There was no fear. He would just reach out to his rifle and …

  He moved his hand slowly behind him, letting his fingers crawl to the gun. Another lizard rushed from the darkness and pecked violently at his hand like it was chicken feed.

  “Ow,” Eric yelled. He yanked his hand back and stared at the wound in the center of his palm. Blood was gushing out of it. “All right, playtime is over!” He swung his arms left and right, smacking a bunch of the lizards away. As he spun, he threw himself backward toward the rifle, but the horde of lizards shrieked and rebounded at him. Their beaklike jaws opened to reveal the sharp, pointed teeth that lined their mouths.

  A couple of the lizards raced toward his legs and began to tear at them. Eric cried out. He would get the gun now and blow their heads off. He’d shoot them in the face, wallpaper the cave with their brains. He grabbed for the stock of the rifle, but a single lizard rushed forward and yanked it away.

  He punched at the lizards now.

  A dozen of them leaped up onto his neck and head.

  He reached up to tear them off, but several others raced at his face. He felt their snouts biting, pecking, deep into his cheeks and eyes. Soon, he felt the warm flush of his blood pouring down his face, and blindness came quickly—painfully.

  At the mouth of the tunnel, all Dr. Boneid and Manny could hear on the receiver was Eric Gonzales’s screams. By the time they made it back inside the cave to where Manny had left him, Eric had disappeared. At the tunnel’s bend were a few pools of blood and scuff marks in the dust.

  Zack had lost track of how long they had been following the honking sounds, but he had to continue looking for Honker. He couldn’t leave the mountain until he had the baby dinosaur back. No matter what, he would bring Honker out. For his father. For the sake of the whole Norak family.

  For Honker.

  Deeper inside the cave, the wind howled eerily as if somewhere a single, deep note was being played on a cello. The passageway curved and they saw a glint of light ahead. A series of mine shafts rose from the cave ceiling—straight up for over a thousand feet to the slopes of the mountain. Water trickled across the floor in small, crooked grooves. The light from Zack’s flashlight bounced off ghostly swellings that hung on the cave walls.

  “What are those?” Uta wanted to know

  “They look like …” Zack went silent as he reached out and touched one of the strange white sacks. Something long and black twitched under the mesh and webbing. “It looks like there’s a fish inside,” Zack said. “One of the big catfish—in something like a cocoon.”

  He looked closer, then corrected himself. “Half a catfish.”

  “What do you mean, half a catfish?”

  “Its tail … and chunks of its body … are missing.”

  “Oh, my …” Uta shivered. She looked away from the strange, dripping sack. A short distance farther, the sacks were larger, more plentiful. Within a hundred feet, they were hanging in clusters—nearly blocking the passageway, like the carcasses in a butcher’s freezer.

  Zack shone the light from his helmet onto one of the larger shapes. He gasped when he found himself staring into the veiled face of a beast. “What is that?”

  Uta moved closer, peered through the weblike mesh. “I think it’s a bear,” she said. “Part of a bear. It’s missing its … legs.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I can’t see exactly … they look like they’ve been bitten or ripped off.”

  Uta gasped.

  Zack made out a slow rising and falling of the creature’s chest. “It’s still breathing,” he said. Picasso sniffed, and let out a mournful howl. Zack picked him up and petted him. “Shhhhh,” he said.

  “We’d better go back,” Uta said.

  Sounds.

  Sounds behind them.

  Zack moved quickly ahead through the maze of hanging pouches. Finally, the clusters gave way to a clearing with a towering wall of sacks. It looked like a huge honeycomb—fifty or sixty feet high—as if cave bees had created a stack of outsized storage cells. The lighted shaft behind the stack silhouetted the contents of the sacks: fish and eels, wolves and bears and wild horses. Some were whole animals. Most were mutilated. Pieces of the animals protruded through the sack membranes, heads and legs and tails bursting out like some sort of living, undulating collage. The gruesome wall made Zack halt in astonishment. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Uta said. “It’s a larder. It’s got to be where the raptors store their food.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They must eat these things,” Uta said, “but not all at once. Maybe it’s some kind of rationing system—keep everything alive as long as possible, and then eat it one piece at a time. Like spiders do.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yes, but it’s probably how they’ve managed to survive,” Uta said.

  “They could be brainy in really weird ways. My dad always thought raptors were the smartest of all the dinosaurs anyway.”

  Putrid juices, yellow and crimson, oozed from the sacks. Zack felt his stomach twist and roll. He looked away. The wind shifted and he began to choke. “Where are the raptors?” he asked anxiously. “Where are they?”

  “The stench of the larder must be cloaking our scent,” Uta whispered. “They would have found us long ago. Let’s go …”

  Zack slipped his hand over her mouth. “They’re coming,” he whispered.

  He put out the lights on their helmets and gripped Picasso around his muzzle ready to squeeze tight if he tried to bark. It took a moment for their eyes to get used to the near darkness. There was movement in the shadows and side chambers ahead. Sounds came from the mouth of a dark tunnel at the base of the food wall.

  Uta followed Zack into the maze of sacks. The sacks shifted and turned as they brushed against them. Uta groaned when she felt the oily, sticky fluids dripping on her.

  The sounds were louder, closer now. Zack moved on until he found a good spot for them to hide behind a cluster of the hanging sacks.

  ROAR.

  The first of the adult raptors raced out from a shadowy side chamber into a clearing below the wall of prey. A half dozen other large raptors ran through a thick mist rising from the floor of the cave. They turned erratically, crying wildly at the wall. Zack saw Picasso’s eyes grow as big as saucers, and he tightened his grip on the dog’s snout.

  There was another roar.

  Louder.

  Earsplitting.

  Zack and Uta froze at the sight of a gargantuan creature materializing from the darkness. They gasped when they realized it was twice the size of Honker’s mother, a bloated freak of a dinosaur barely recognizable as a raptor. Its back was completely black, with the caudal vertebrae of its tail gnarled and as thick as kegs. Its grasping forelimbs were swollen with muscle, and it had claws twice the size of the other raptors.

  “Look at its jaws,” Uta whispered. Fangs curved out over thick strips of cartilage. Several of them were so long and curled they circled and were beginning to pierce the creature’s pebbled scalp.

  “What is that thing?” Uta asked.

  “God’s sick joke,” Zack said. A perfectly evolved killing machine. A monster beyond T. rex. Beyond Gigantosaurus. Something evolved further than any carnivore that had ever liv
ed. The creature was absurd, but terrible and deadly—all rolled into one! The sight of the dinosaur made Zack’s heart pound like a jackhammer. “It’s the only one with a totally black back. It’s a freak … a male …,” he said.

  “How do you know it’s a male?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Oh”

  The other raptors began to nudge several of the larger sacks and shriek at the giant raptor.

  Zack stood on his toes to see over the cluster of sacks. “It’s like Blackback is the protector of the larder. I think no one eats without checking with him. He’s probably the big cheese at every kill.”

  Shrieking erupted from one side of the clearing. Three of the most fierce-looking raptors herded a fourth until it was delivered to face the giant raptor. Uta recognized the cuts and scrapes on its body. “That’s Honker’s mother,” she whispered.

  “Then maybe Honker’s around,” Zack whispered back.

  The protector of the larder sniffed at Honker’s mother. Other raptors made elaborate hissing and hacking sounds, and swung their tails.

  Honker’s mother was cowed into silence along with the rest of the group. The giant raptor brought its loathsome face closer to her snout. Slabs of animal skull and shreds of dried flesh were permanently impaled on several of the blackback’s longer, swirling fangs. It seemed to be checking her mouth and groin and wounds for clues—where she had been and what she’d been doing.

  He was interrupted by a burst of screeching, shrill sounds from a pack of juveniles as they dragged something out of the darkness and presented it to the blackback like an offering.

  “What is it?” Uta asked. “I can’t see.”

  Zack pushed against the cluster of sacks to shift them and raised himself up on tiptoe. “My God! It’s Gonzales!” he said, shaking his head. “Eric Gonzales! Bones’s foreman from the dig. They killed him! That means Bones and his crew have already started a sweep into the mountain.”

  “Maybe the raptors got all of them.”

  “I don’t think so….”

  “What are they going to do to him?”

  Zack watched horrified as, suddenly, the blackback sunk its giant claws deep into Gonzales’s underbelly. It yanked its claws forward again and again, until the body yielded shreds, then whole chunks of flesh. The impact tumbled the body across the ground. The blackback chased it, pounced on it, and tore into Gonzales’s left arm. It began devouring it right on his body. Within moments, there was a sickening ripping sound as the arm was stripped of muscle and sinew, leaving only gristle and bones.