Nung sniffed. 'Yeah, lucky me.'
Mick turned back to the corpse. 'What about the arms and legs, though? Nothing prehistoric about them.'
Darren leaned down. 'No. No there isn't. Weird stuff. Looks like it's part dinosaur and well,' he sighed, 'part something else.'
'Human?'
He shrugged. 'Humanoid perhaps.'
'Nifty,' said Julia. 'What the hell are we on to here?'
Mick shook his head. 'I don't know. But we've got a bigger problem right now.'
'What's that?'
'All that gunfire. It was loud. Shouting. Screeching? It's probably alerted everyone or everything close by that we're here.'
'Which would mean?'
'We're going to have a lot more company than I'd be comfortable with in a very quick time. We need to find some shelter in here and watch what happens. I don't want us moving around when they send reinforcements. We'd get slaughtered.'
'Where can we hide in here?'
Mick pointed. 'They used the shrubs to attack us. I say we use them to hide in.'
'You don't think they'd look there?'
'Not much choice, Julia. It's either that or we stay here and fight.' He frowned. 'And die.'
Julia nodded. 'Everyone into the shrubs. Now!'
They scrambled off the main path. The leaves enveloped them. Julia found a place to squat and felt her butt touch the soft earth. She hadn't realized how much she'd been sweating during the battle. Now her clothes felt hot. Sticky. She wanted to go to the bathroom again, too.
She could see the others crouching in the undergrowth. At least they'd all managed to find bushes close together.
Mick kept the barrel of his gun aimed out toward the path.
Julia eyed him. Thank God for his presence. Whoever the hell he is.
Movement sounded close by.
Footsteps.
More growls.
Julia's throat felt tight. Her stomach ached.
She saw the feet go past her hiding spot. Inches away from her nose. She clutched the M16 and felt how slippery the grip had become.
On the path she could see there were maybe ten of the dinosaur creatures. They examined the scene carefully, but didn't touch their fallen comrades.
What's going on? Julia wanted to know. Part of her wanted to go out there and approach them. Some stupid sense of curiosity she supposed.
She felt Mick's hand on her arm. How had he gotten so close?
He pointed.
Julia looked.
More feet.
But different.
Another creature?
She could see the legs were incredibly thin. She could hear the growls and chirps coming from the dinocreatures. But she heard nothing in return communication.
Her head swam with images she didn't recognize. Pictures played across her mind. She could see the dinocreatures hauling away the dead to some unknown area of this cavern.
She opened her eyes.
The dinocreatures were stooped over their fallen comrades, collecting the bodies and trucking them away. The other set of feet turned and walked the opposite way.
What had just happened?
Mick pointed at the second set of feet.
Julia shook her head. They couldn't do it quietly. Not now. Not with those things running around already pissed off that we killed some of their friends.
But Mick wanted to follow the second figure.
His face implored her.
She frowned and then finally nodded. She held up ten fingers — ten minutes before he had to come back.
The rest of them would wait.
Was it safe here?
Julia didn't know. She didn't think what Mick was doing was safe either, but he was hard to control. Besides, as reluctant as she was to admit it, they needed some reliable information about these…things.
And Mick was the one best suited to finding out what was happening. He could move quieter than anyone else. He had the training after all.
Julia just hoped he'd come back.
Because she couldn't stand losing another member of her team.
Especially Mick.
19
While Julia sat there waiting for Mick, she tried to reason out what had happened to her head when it had suddenly filled with all sorts of images. And then she'd opened her eyes and seen the dinocreatures doing exactly what the images had shown.
Had she somehow stumbled onto a form of telepathy? Was that how they communicated? She didn't think the dinocreatures could be capable of it, especially considering they still chirped and growled. That seemed to be their favorite means of communicating.
But what about the second set of feet Mick had seen? She hadn't heard anything from them. Nor had she seen a tail.
Two races of creatures down here? She felt like she was in the land that time forgot or some other adventure story. It didn't make sense, after all. How could science explain an entire ecosystem contained within a mountain in the middle of one the coldest places on earth?
Was she missing something? Undoubtedly. They all were.
She hoped Mick would report back and say he'd found something.
She glanced around and saw Wilkins sweating under the canopy of leaves he'd found for himself. She couldn't see Nung or Darren but could hear someone breathing heavily.
She realized how labored her own breathing had become, especially since the introduction of so much stress over the creatures.
Another balmy breeze sifted through the leaves, bending them and adding more noise to their area. For the first time, Julia also heard the whine of insects. A mosquito landed near her face and she brushed it away without thinking.
Bugs, too?
She shook her head and wondered how much National Geographic would pay for a scoop like this: Shangri-La at the bottom of the world.
Insane.
One of the guys must have been battling a lot of the mosquitoes. They'd obviously sensed the heat from their bodies and carbon dioxide in the air. Julia found herself swatting more of them than she cared to.
