Cryptozoica (38 page)

The skreeks were repeated from Wadjet. Pushing himself to his feet, Kavanaugh watched the raptors moving aside, to allow the screaming Aubrey Belleau to run past.

Bai Suzhen turned to face Kavanaugh, slowly lowering her sword. “Are you all right, Jack?”

He nodded, despite the spasm of pain the movement caused in his neck muscles. “Think so. You?”

Gingerly she probed at the side of her head with careful fingers. “I was unconscious—I came to in time to watch Wadjet’s open heart surgery technique on Oakshott.” She smiled cruelly.

“I think you’ve been hanging around me too long,” Kavanaugh commented as Crowe and Honoré arose. Both of their faces showed abrasions and contusions sustained in the struggle with Oakshott.

Crowe turned Mouzi over on her back, called her name and lightly slapped her face. Her eyelids fluttered, but did not open. He touched the back of her head and his fingertips came away wet with blood.

“We’re going to have to get her out of here,” he said darkly. “Where the hell is the first aid kit?”

Honoré went over to fetch it from where it had fallen on the floor. “We can’t let Aubrey run free. He’s hurt, too and very well may bleed to death.”

“And that’s an issue why?” inquired Bai icily.

Honoré started to reply, then shrugged. “I can’t imagine.”

She handed the kit to Crowe and eyed Wadjet, standing as motionless as the cadaver in the stone chair. Softly, she asked, “Why do you think she saved you, Jack?”

“I don’t think she saved me so much as she saved herself, saved the memories of her people. As long as they still live in her, they haven’t vanished completely.”

He forced himself to look directly into Wadjet’s eyes.
Thank you.

Do not thank me.
Her eyes poured a torrent of emotions into her mind—savage anger, outrage, and a deep abiding grief. A cold thought, like the slithering of a reptile, crawled across the surface of his mind:
If you return, you will die. All of you will die.

Bai Suzhen stiffened, drawing in her breath sharply. She backed away from Wadjet. “She just told me to leave and not to come back under pain of death.”

Kavanaugh said, “I think she told us all the same thing.”

Crowe gathered Mouzi in his arms and heaved her up from the floor. “Let’s do what she says, before she decides she’s had enough visitors for this century.”

Steepling her fingers beneath her chin again, Bai Suzhen bowed deeply to Wadjet and whispered reverently,
“Pa-yaa-na aak, ram laa.”

They emerged from the mouth of the cave as the storm front slowly crept away, thunder rumbling off to the west. Flashes of lightning lit up the ruins. Trees creaked and bent beneath intermittent wind gusts. Although not in a torrent, rain fell in sporadic sheets of tepid water.

The Deinonychus had not interfered with their departure, although Kavanaugh suspected they followed them down the passageway, just out of revolver range. Honoré carried the autorifle and one of the Colt Pythons. Crowe carried Mouzi in his arms as if she were a sleeping child.

Droplets of fresh blood glistened on the tunnel floor but they didn’t catch a glimpse of Belleau. By the time they reached the point where David Abner Perry had done his demolition work, Mouzi regained consciousness.

Although her scalp wound still bled sluggishly and her vision was blurry, she insisted she was fine and could walk. She took the M16 from Honoré, frowned at the sheared through plastic stock and Crowe muttered, “Don’t ask.”

They reached the mouth of the cave and waited for the rain to abate before leaving. Honoré ran trembling fingers over her forehead. Her face was paper-pale, her eyes dull with fatigue. In a tone muted by horror, she whispered, “This has been like a nightmare.”

“Worse,” said Crowe tersely.

“How so?”

“Because it’s for real.”

Kavanaugh studied the ruins with slitted eyes. “I can’t believe Aubrey made it this far after he lost so much blood.”

Honoré considered his words while gazing at the rainfall. “He’s very resourceful, as you probably guessed. He could’ve made a tourniquet from his belt and boot-laces to stop the bleeding.”

“Stop the bleeding and do what?” asked Bai, thumbing the edge of her sword.

“I think he’s headed for the Prima Materia.”

“What good would that pool of crud do him now?” Crowe demanded.

Honoré shrugged but did answer. Kavanaugh frowned, first at her and then at the jungle on the other side of the ruins.

When the rain slackened to a drizzle, he announced, “Let’s look for him there.”

Bai Suzhen’s eyebrows lifted toward her hairline. “Why should we?”

“If he’s dead, that’s one thing. If he’s still alive, he can cause problems.”

The walls and structures glistened with diamond-like drops of water in the dim light. The assembly of ruins looked depressing and forlorn in the suffused late afternoon sun, not awe-inspiring.

As they walked past a serpentine pillar, Kavanaugh heard a staccato pop-popping, like a string of firecrackers going off under a tin can. He threw himself down, pulling Honoré and Bai with him as the stone erupted and showered his shoulders and the back of his head with gravel.

“Jimmy!” Bai hissed between clenched teeth.

Everyone pressed themselves into the ground as if hoping to be absorbed by it. Bullets snapped above them like a steel flail. When the machine-gun fire stopped, they rolled and scrambled behind the green-stained head of a fallen statue. Faintly, they heard the murmur of male voices speaking in Chinese. Then Jimmy Cao’s voice lifted in a shout: “All I want is Bai Suzhen and Aubrey Belleau!”

Kavanaugh exchanged startled glances with Crowe and Honoré. Bai whispered, “I assumed Jimmy had found Belleau. Guess not.”

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Kavanaugh shouted, “No deal! Not until we’re all back on Little Tamtung. Even Aubrey thinks that’s a good idea.”

“Don’t be a stubborn asshole!” came Cao’s shrill, angry voice. The echoes in the ruins distorted  the direction from which it emanated. “After what me and my men went through getting here, there’s no way we’re going to let them out of our sight.”

“Sorry about your men,” Kavanaugh said. “How many of them made it here with you? How’d you find us?”

Jimmy Cao ignored the question. He yelled, “Belleau! Talk to me! Belleau!”

“He can’t talk right now, Jimmy,” Bai called. “You’ll have to deal with me.”

Voice thickening with fury, Cao yelled, “You goddamn better bet I’ll deal with you—I’ll deal with all of you!”

The subguns hammered again, chewing notches out of the top of the statue. Kavanaugh ducked as a shower of rock ships swept over him. He hefted the revolver in both hands and said sarcastically, “Good strategy, Bai. Now they’ll surround us.”

“At least we’ll find out how many of them there are,” Crowe stated, handing his revolver to Honoré. “Hold this for me.”

Hitching around, he pulled the bandana-wrapped sticks of Titadyne from his back pocket. “You still have those blasting caps, Jack?”

Kavanaugh dug around in his pocket and pulled out the little silver cylinders. He had to raise his head a bit to do so and a subgun stuttered. Before he ducked back down, he glimpsed orange flame stab out of the encroaching twilight. Divots of dirt flew up all around as the bullets pounded a cross-stitch pattern in the ground.

Kavanaugh waited until the gunfire stopped, then he twisted around and came up on one knee, holding the big pistol in front of him. He squeezed off a shot, the boom bouncing around the ruins like a marble rolling in a washtub.

A fist-sized chunk of scrollwork burst from a column and a screaming man lurched out into the open, clutching at the left side of his face. He dropped the Type 64 sub-machine gun.

Sitting back down behind the statue, he calmly unwound the fuses from the cylinders and laid them out in a neat row on the ground. Honoré eyed them skeptically. “Now what?”

Mouzi removed the pliers from her pocket and gave them to Crowe as he inserted the little silver cylinder in the end of the Titadyne stick. With the pliers, he squeezed the cap until he heard a faint crunch. “You crimp the fuse into place right here, so the ignition and the primary explosive mix. Give it a twist.”

“Then what?”

From a pocket he pulled out the box of stick matches taken from the survival kit. “The fun and simple part. After you light the fuse, you have about five seconds to throw it before it detonates. Probably a good idea to know where you’re going to be throwing it
before
you light up. Got it?”

Honoré swallowed. “Got it.”

From another pocket he removed the black stub of a cheroot, barely two inches long. Putting it between his teeth, he struck a match into flame and lit the cheroot, sending up a plume of acrid smoke. Honoré coughed and fanned the air.

“Ghastly stench,” she said.

“It’ll keep the mosquitoes away,” Crowe replied, puffing on the stub until the end glowed bright red. He took it from his mouth and held it out, his eyebrows raised questioningly. “Who wants to be responsible for it?”

Without hesitation, Bai Suzhen took it, sliding it between her index and third finger, she puffed on the end experimentally. “I’ll keep it lit.”

Crowe handed the Titadyne sticks to Honoré. “Start crimping.”

Kavanaugh looked at Crowe. “Ready, Gus?”

“No, but let’s do it anyway.”

Carefully, they raised their heads up above the top of the statue. Almost immediately, a barrage of bullets spewed from three weapons, thudding into the sculpture, chopping out fragments, but not penetrating it. Crowe and Kavanaugh returned the fire, shooting blindly. The syncopation of the gunfire was deafening, but they fixed in their minds the two points from which the subguns blazed.

Crowe turned toward Bai. “Light me up.”

She picked up a stick of explosive, touched the fuse to the end of the cheroot in her mouth and when it sparked, slapped the cylinder into his waiting hand. He hurled the Titadyne in a looping overhand.

One of the Ghost Shadows saw the spark-spewing tube bouncing across the ground and he opened his mouth to scream a warning. A thunderclap blast slammed his words back into his throat.

For a microsecond, the area was haloed in a red flash. Flying tongues of flame billowed outward. The detonation of the Titadyne hurled two bodies into the air. A fine drizzle of dirt and pulverized pebbles rained down. Crowe and Kavanaugh looked up, over their stone shelter. Two men lay motionless, draped across the broken walls.

“Think that’ll discourage them?” Crowe asked quietly.

“Depends on whether we got Jimmy.”

As if on cue, Cao’s strident voice lifted, screaming out commands in hard-edged Chinese. A wedge of men, at least half a dozen, ran around the far end of a wall in a milling rush. Wielding their Type 64 subguns, they began to fan out warily but swiftly around the perimeter, staying close to the shadows of a long stretch of wall.

Kavanaugh extended a hand toward Bai, who lit a fuse with the cheroot, and quickly placed the stick of Titadyne in his palm. He lobbed it around the curve in the wall. Eyes wide and fearful, the Ghost Shadow soldier dug in his heels and tried to stop, but the men behind him pushed him forward.

The explosive detonated in a tremendous cracking blast, a blinding burst of dirt and rock erupting from the ground. The echo of the explosion instantly bled into a grinding rumble, as a long section of the wall toppled forward in a cascade of bouncing blocks and spurting dust. All the men were engulfed, buried by the down-rushing tons of basalt and limestone.

After the rolling echo of the crash faded, there came a stunned silence, stitched through with a clicking of pebbles and faint moans. Grit-laden dust hung in the air over the fallen mass of rock, blending with the perennial mist to make a nearly impenetrable haze.

Everyone cautiously stood up, coughing, waving the air in front of their faces. Mouzi whispered, “Think that did it?”

Kavanaugh opened his mouth to reply, and then held up a hand for silence. The steady reverberations of heavy weights slamming repeatedly against the ground sent corresponding shivers up his spine.

A dark shadow loomed against the cloud of smoke and mist. The revolting odor of rotten meat and the stench of excrement clogged everyone’s nostrils.

Crowe groaned in heartfelt disbelief and disgust. “Oh, no, don’t tell me—”

Vegetation swished and crashed, saplings snapped and the Majungasaur bounded out of the undergrowth bordering the ruins, hopping like a kangaroo afflicted with St. Vitus Dance. The creature lowered its head and bellowed, overwhelming everyone with its carrion and septic tank breath.  Its armored hide was acrawl with flies, caked with dried mud and blood. 

“How the hell did it escape the quagmire?” demanded Honoré in a high, wild voice. “And why did it track us down?”

Kavanaugh pulled her back by her left hand. “Like I said before—it’s personal.”

“That’s mad.” She looked ill, her eyes darting wildly like a trapped animal’s. “Insane.”

He tightened his grip on her hand. “Don’t go simple on me, Dr. Roxton.” He pitched his voice at a calm, unemotional level. “I don’t want to have to slap you.”

Honoré’s eyes flicked toward him and she forced a chuckle. “That’s a good thing…for you.”

From behind fallen pillars and heaps of stone, two men bolted in terror, running in blind, screaming panic. One of them brandished a dao sword. Bai leaned forward intently, the smoldering cheroot dropping from her fingers. “That’s Jimmy!”

“I think he’s gone raw prawn,” Mouzi observed dryly.

The Majungasaur’s head whipped back and forth as if trying to decide which sprinting human would be easier prey. It sneezed explosively, and then dug at its nostrils with three-fingered foreclaws.

“All this smoke acts as an irritant,” Honoré observed, bending down to pick up the stub of the cheroot. “Probably bothers its eyes, too.”

“Let’s take advantage of that,” Crowe said grimly, “We’ll spread out, and confuse this damn thing. Grab the dynamite and start running.”

The Majungasaur pivoted and pounced, its talon-tipped toes tearing out great clots of damp earth.