Uta shifted so she could see what was going on out in the clearing. At the sight of the mutilation, a scream started up from her throat, but she cut it off. She began to hyperventilate, her heart pounding in her chest. She buried her head into Zack’s shoulder, fighting to get her breathing back under control.
The other raptors frantically circled the blackback as he feasted on Gonzales’s bleeding, shredded right arm. They began a high-pitched screeching, sounds that reverberated in the cave like chanting from a madhouse.
“They’re waiting,” Uta said.
“For what?”
“Their turn.”
The blackback finally stopped eating. It backed away from what was left of Gonzales’s torso, threw its head back—and emitted a long, wavering shriek. The other raptors rushed forward to the carcass, ripping away big slabs of flesh with their teeth. With snouts dripping blood, juveniles dashed in and out of the frenzy, taking nips of his organs. Some of the young raptors ran off proudly dragging the wet, scarlet ribbons of his intestines.
With another roar, the blackback swung back to the carcass. The other raptors had seized a good share of the body and had raced away to finish their feasting in privacy. Gonzales’s legs still twitched reflexively. The blackback hovered over him again and began to make new sounds, guttural ones from deep inside his body. Fluids sprayed from the blackback’s mouth. He let the drippings fall over the gaping raw and red holes in Gonzales’s body, making the wounds begin to steam and sizzle like frying bacon.
The smell of burning flesh filled the air.
Zack struggled to find words. “He’s … cauterizing what’s left of the body,” he said. “He’s sealing him.”
The blackback sank its jaws into the nape of its victim’s neck and swung the remains of his body up against a row of the sticky, hanging sacks. Other raptors ran forward and began to spray the carcass with other, whiter fluids. They helped spin the body, turn it, until the sprayed fluids from their mouths stiffened into fibers.
Zack gasped. “They’ve evolved … fluids. All kinds of … fluids …”
Uta had turned away. When she looked back at the wall of prey, she saw the remains of Gonzales hanging up in its own grisly white sack. His face had been half eaten by the baby raptors, dark, bleeding cavities where there had once been eyes. Zack, too, turned away. His instinct was to shield Uta, to put his arm around her, and move them both slowly back away from the larder. The abominable sight throbbed in his mind, and his knees had grown weak. Both he and Uta were choked with shock as they moved carefully away through the hanging sacks. They passed under one of the mine shafts. For a moment there was a circle of light and a breath of fresh air.
Then they heard a sound.
RING! RINNNNNNG!
The noise of a loud bell ringing. Ringing near them. A sound resonating in the cave.
“The phone!” Uta cried out. She grabbed it, and shut the ringer off, but it was too late. Every raptor in the clearing had turned to stare in their direction.
“Take Picasso and get out of here!” Zack ordered, pushing the dog into her arms.
“What about you?”
“Get help!”
“But …”
“NOW!”
Picasso barked as Zack turned back toward the raptors in the clearing. “I’M HERE! HERE I AM!” he began shouting at the top of his lungs. He headed straight toward the raptors.
Uta trembled in panic. It took her a moment to realize Zack was deliberately drawing the raptors away. “No!” she called hoarsely to him. “No!” She started after him, to make him turn and flee with her out of this unreal larder. “Zack!” she cried. He was sacrificing himself for her. She wanted to scream, as though that would make the nightmare go away, but she knew she wasn’t dreaming. She understood that Zack’s only chance—and her only chance—would be if she got out and brought back help.
Holding Picasso in her arms, she gripped his snout to quiet him as she sprinted through the maze of hanging white sacks. Paws, claws, pieces of animals hung out from the mesh, scratching her and catching on her clothes. She heard scurrying sounds, saw that there were hatchling-size raptors on her trail. They were scrawnier than Honker, but were still mean-looking eating machines. Several jumped out in front of her and she managed to kick one a good twenty feet.
The hatchlings snapped at her ankles as she ran. Picasso stared down at them and shook his snout loose of Uta’s grasp. He barked at them, launched himself out of Uta’s arms, and hit the ground running straight at them. He chased the chicken-size raptors away from Uta, growling at them fiercely.
“Picasso!” Uta called, as she fled. Picasso, like a border collie herding sheep, kept the little raptors scurrying away. They retreated through a maze of stalagmites. Picasso pursued them, confidently, ferociously. Suddenly, he raced around the base of a large stalagmite and found himself facing a couple of dozen of the nasty hatchlings. They were blocking his way.
Picasso stopped abruptly. For a moment, it seemed as if he was thinking things over. Suddenly, he let out a whine, whirled, and fled. The flock followed, shrieking, hungry for another kill.
9
SACRIFICE
Zack continued to shout as he broke loose from the cover of larder sacks. “LOOK HERE! HERE I AM!” For a moment he thought he would be attacked and killed instantly, but the raptors remained frozen—startled at the strange sight charging at them. “THAT’S RIGHT! LOOK AT ME! ONLY ME!” It was when he was certain that he’d completely drawn their attention, that an idea to save his own life clicked in.
The blackback was the first to register fury at the invasion. It rose up high on its haunches and shifted nervously. It began to hiss, flick its tongue over its crooked teeth, and finally opened its mouth into a roar. Zack noticed another tunnel and he began to think of an impossible, crazy escape for himself.
A delusion.
A dream.
“YEAH! LOOK AT ME! JUST LOOK AT ME!” he shouted and whistled. He made every nonsense sound and karate grunt he could think of, anything to keep the raptors paralyzed with surprise. In his fantasy born of fear, he would find Honker in the narrow tunnel. He’d find the baby dinosaur, without his vicious mother, and he and Zack would race down the tunnel. The other raptors would be amazed, even kind. They would understand that he meant no harm, and he and Honker would break out of the mountain and into the light of day….
Zack didn’t get ten feet past the raptors before the entire pack shrieked with rage. He kept his eyes glued on the entrance to the tunnel, as if his sanity depended upon believing he would escape. He heard motion, a raucous racing of bodies closing in on him. Out of the corner of his eye, he knew there were large creatures pursuing, attacking with the motion of ostriches.
“LET ME GO! JUST LET ME GO!” he shouted, when a blast of roars and shrieking exploded at his back. The first of the larger raptors thrust its jaws forward and bit into his neck. He felt himself being picked up, airborne, and thrown backward like a rag doll. When he stopped rolling, blood was trickling down his back.
Zack staggered to his feet, with a ring of shrieking raptors around him.
ROAR.
ROARRRRRRR!
The ground shook as the blackback leaped to tower over him. Zack looked up—up!—into the massive, gnarled face. Just a bad dream, he began to tell himself. A very, very bad dream! Then the saliva with the stench of death spilled out from between the tusk-sized teeth to drip on Zack. His muscles stiffened as the blackback’s forearms embraced him like a vise. He was lifted off the ground, held high in front of the glistening, gaping snout. A wet slime leaked from the blackback’s nostrils, and its bulbous yellow eyes stared into Zack’s soul.
Zack couldn’t speak as he stared up into the monstrous face. Its stinking breath wheezed out through a green pus that trickled from the base of its rotting teeth. Closer, he found the smell that spilled from its lungs was beyond that of the fetid shreds of flesh and fresh bone that clung to its jaws. It smelled of tombs and sweat an
d worm-infested meat.
Slowly, the blackback stroked Zack’s face with a claw. Its needle-thin, pointed tip touched Zack’s forehead and then was drawn slowly down the left side of his face. Between his screams, Zack thought of his father as the claw found the softness of his under chin.
EEEEEEEHHHHH!
Zack’s body contorted, his high-pitched shrieking filling the air, as he felt the claw rising up through his chin. Why are you doing this? Zack wondered. Why did you do it to my father? He felt the finger of the claw pulsate, as if it were some sort of a tube. There was a hotness as a fluid was being released into Zack. A poison? Zack wondered. What? What would the fluid do? What did it mean? Am I dead?
Finally, the blackback pulled the claw tip out. Zack felt the release of the pressure, but he heard new sounds coming from the raptor’s throat. There was a gurgling, and a gentle coughing. He was aware of losing consciousness. More than anything, he felt loss. The poison traveled quickly into his brain, and he understood his life was over. His dream of going back to L.A. seemed silly now Foolish. Dreams of Malibu cars and Sunset Boulevard and Galleria friends.
He thought of Uta.
And Picasso.
His last conscious thought was of his father, and he felt a sadness deeper than death.
The raptor brought its mouth closer to Zack, as though it were going to chew his face off. Instead, what looked like a large glob of spit rolled to the edge of the stinking mouth. With a final ritual, the blackback began to cover Zack with the spittle, letting it drip down over his eyes and neck and chest.
Uta heard Zack’s scream as she raced up a rise at the end of the larder cave. She turned and looked across the vast, ghostly chamber. In the distant shadows—beyond the clusters of stalactites and gory sacks—she glimpsed Zack clutched by the monstrous raptor. She saw his body kicking and flailing like a marionette.
Help.
She would get help. It was the only thing her mind could accept, the only way she could keep running away. She saw a slab of eroded petroglyphs on a wall by an air shaft. Whole pieces of the stone were cracked and had fallen away. Parts had been vandalized long ago by miners, but there were the remnants of a flute player and a rising rope bordering a tunnel.
“Picasso!” she screamed a last time. If he heard her, he could catch up. If the young raptors had gotten him, she …
Uta realized she couldn’t even think about it as she raced into the tunnel. She found herself praying, thinking of Spider Grandma and needing to believe that the flute player and rope meant she was going to escape the mountain. The tunnel was dark, and she stumbled on planking and chunks of granite and sandstone. She hit hard into the brittle stumps of stalagmites and flicked on the lights on her helmet.
The tunnel was straight, and finally there were nothing chasing her now but the echoes of her own footfalls. The beams of light reflected back from clusters of quartz and hematite in the walls. But there was a brighter light. Round and colorful and far off—as far as the distance she and Zack had traveled into the mountain. She could hardly run as her body trembled, and the truth began to take hold of her. She had heard Zack’s screams. She had seen him gripped by the horrendous claws of the blackback.
Zack was dead.
She knew he was dead.
For a dinosaur, a baby dinosaur that probably didn’t care that he existed.
Dr. Boneid left the dam’s control turret with a smile on his face. He’d wanted to go over the plan with the engineers, to make certain nothing could go wrong. “I want the mountain flooded,” Boneid had said. The Flaming Gorge chief engineer explained that it wasn’t a problem. There had been a contingency sluice built in place when the Gorge Recreation Area had first been conceived.
“The Magic Dog Canyon shunt of the reservoir hasn’t been used in forty years,” the engineer said. “It’s been abandoned and all the hydraulics are rusted shut. Jammed. My inspector up there says the gates won’t respond manually, but the commissioner says you can blow it if you have to.”
“Good,” Boneid said. “We have to.”
“It’ll put half the mountain underwater, you know”
“That’ll be fine. How long will it take for the flood to hit down here?”
“We’re talking several million cubic feet of water, through mainly narrow tunnels and constricted underground passages. About five or ten minutes after you blow the shunt.”
Boneid had borrowed helicopters from two commercial pilots that hired out to hunters and tourists for flights into the back lakes and the gorge. He’d sent the explosives team from the university dig north to the Magic Dog Canyon shunt. They had already set massive charges, wired the detonators to timers, and were waiting for a “go” command.
A drenching sheet of fog crawled off the reservoir and began to blanket the six-wheelers and vans in the parking lot. Tents had been rigged over portable generators that roared and shook the ground with spasms. Grids of flood-lights blazed against the drifting wall of mist. Manny ran across a maze of power cables toward Boneid.
“I got eel traps in on the downstream,” Manny said. “They’ll scoop up a bat’s ear if it floats out of that mountain. Seven riflemen who could shoot the whisper out of a whirlwind are on the upper shafts.”
“All I need is proof of those dinos, I don’t care if they’re in pieces,” Boneid said. “You tell the sharpshooters to be careful?”
Manny took a moment to catch his breath. “I told them they’ve got to shoot straight on this one or they’ll end up being dined on like cat food. They don’t like the idea of you flooding the mountain at all. There’s a bunch of rain dancers running around the town trying to get a sheriff up here to stop you.”
“What’s their problem?”
“Some whining about all the wildlife that’ll be destroyed. They think animals are people.”
“Yeah. And they think God lives on the sun. What else is new?”
“Engineers confirm yet that only two tunnels would be left above the flood line?”
“Yes.” Boneid felt sweat drop from his armpit. He went into his trailer. The radio transmitter in the office started beeping. He motioned Manny to answer it.
“It’s Joey up at Magic Dog Canyon,” Manny told Boneid. “They want to know if they’ve got a green light to blow it?”
Boneid took a moment to think. To daydream. He realized the significance of what was about to happen. Every natural history museum and society in the country—no, in the world!—would be waving money at him. Join our board, Dr. Boneid. Oh, please let us fund your next dig. Yes, let your fame and light and paleontological wisdom shine down on us!
There was a pounding on the trailer door.
“Who’s that?” Boneid mumbled. He found a single wine glass and a jelly jar, and began to rinse them out, as Manny opened the door. There was one of the Ute men and some strange-looking old woman. He recognized Larry Ghost Coyote as one of the Utes that rented horses to the dig. The old lady wore bear-claw earrings and an embroidered black velvet shawl.
“Dr. Bones,” she shouted as she pushed her way into the trailer. “You can’t flood the mountain! There are two kids down there! Two kids!”
Uta broke out from the mountain on a slope near the bottom of a gorge. She was shocked to recognize the remnants of pipe railings and leveled footpaths. The sides of the gorge were bathed in shadows and the bloodred sunset, and a familiar stream flowed out to the spillway. She spotted Zack’s motorcycle—and knew she’d come out of the mountain exactly where she and Zack had gone in! The second entrance—on the grade next to the stream—had been hidden by a cover of dense ferns and sagebrush.
Uta scampered down to the main path. A waxing moon and winding roadway to the dam lay to her right. She took out the phone from her backpack and punched in Spider Grandma’s phone number.
“Hello,” came her grandmother’s excited voice.
“Grandma! It’s me.”
“Uta!”
“I’m down by the spillway. I’m out of the
mountain. Oh, Grandma …” Uta burst into tears.
“What’s the matter? Are you all right?”
“No …” she said. Terror crawled in the pit of her stomach and her hands trembled. Her grandmother was talking too fast now, half English, half Ute. Too many questions. “They got him!” Uta blurted. “The raptors got Zack! This horrible larder! Monsters! Grandma—Zack’s dead!”
“Listen to me, Uta …”
“I left Picasso in the mountain! I left them both!”
Uta heard men’s rough voices in the background. She heard her grandmother arguing with them, and she heard Dr. Boneid: “At least she’s out. Where’s the Norak boy?”
“UTA!” Spider Grandma shouted. “LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN CAREFULLY! I’M AT BONEID’S TRAILER AT THE TOP OF THE DAM. THEY HAVE DYNAMITE—DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M SAYING? CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
“Grandma, what’s happening?”
“Where are you exactly?”
“At the spillway. The entrance you told us to use.”
“Everything’s going to be all right,” Spider Grandma said carefully. “Start up the road, Uta. Now Run! They’ve set timers at Magic Dog Canyon!”
“What?”
“They’re blowing up the shunt. It’ll flood the mountain! You’ve got ten minutes to get out of there!”
The night fog plunged down from the dam and spilled into the gorge. Uta felt numb. She turned the phone off and put it away. She was beyond tears as she walked toward the Yamaha. Still trembling, she turned the bike around, climbed on, and hit the kick start. She knew it would be easier to drive than any of her brothers’ vintage Harleys.
The motor started. She threw it into gear and headed slowly back out toward the road up to the dam. She felt as if she were in some sort of helpless trance. Stunned. In shock. She thought of Zack and began to weep. Now she thought she’d accepted his death too easily. But she had seen the blackback clutching him. Like Gonzales, he must have been eaten alive. Picasso, too. And Boneid’s rush to give them and Honker—all the raptors!—a watery grave.