With excitement, he peeked around the corner of the tent—pointlessly, he knew, if it was a bomb; it wasn’t like a piece of fabric was going to protect him from an explosion. He didn’t have a flashlight and the floodlights from the building illuminated nothing this far away. So he bent down and put his hands on it.
It was smooth, like a river rock. Or an egg. He pushed on it a little and it was so heavy it barely even moved. It had a weird, kind of musty smell, exactly like one would expect from a dredged-up river rock—
HRANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNH!
Arthur almost fell down at the sound, thinking at first a plane from the town’s little airport had crashed and blown up. But that wasn’t what it sounded like, not really. It was more like a roar. Like a—
HAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNHHHHH!
That one was even longer and louder. What in the name of his ancestors was that? He couldn’t see anything in the dark, but he could see just enough to get back to his family’s tent, seeing that many miners had been awakened by the unholy shrieking, snarling, screaming ROAR that he could tell had come from the far side of the Kasai.
“Get up! Get up! Come with me!” he roused his family in Swahili, grabbing his children by their arms and dragging them out of the tent until they had woken enough to walk on their own. Arthur’s wife was slow to awaken, but once she realized the children were gone, she snapped to and rushed out of the tent to follow her family into the brush on the edge of the tent city.
Some fires had been lit inside tents, no doubt instinctively at the outset of some kind of chaos, and Arthur could see the fires were around rags around tree branches, the fabric doused with cooking oil to make torches.
Another blast from what Arthur knew now had to be some kind of animal, and something raged out of the dense jungle. They could feel more than see the giant thing’s stomps, which ceased with a splash.
The blood froze in Arthur’s veins as he realized what that had to mean: The roaring, epically enraged monster was swimming to the mine side of the river. Their side.
Men, being men, had massed with their torches near the water’s edge, trying to see what was making the horrifying sounds and making the ground shake beneath their feet. Arthur could see what was going to happen as if it were already a memory, and if he didn’t have his wife and little ones with him, he would have shouted to them to get out of the way, run away, GO!
But they stayed grouped together, the torches illuminating their patch of ground.
Then the river heaved and the torches showed Arthur the monster climbing out of the water. The light showed a crocodile’s head on a lion’s body, four legs as thick as an armored car, and, when it crashed down on the screaming men, making the torches fly and set the tents aflame, the huge fin on the thing’s back. It roared again and now everyone was screaming, some coming out of their tents to run, others huddling and hoping not to be seen.
None of it did any good. Arthur and his family watched in horror as the Kasai Rex—that’s what it was, a Kasai Rex, the river monster of legend, a dinosaur that never died out, a predator, a death machine Congolese parents told their children about to scare them into good behavior—stomped and ripped and bit and swallowed and ate, the fire spreading all around it but the building-sized creature not even noticing.
It trampled every tent, killed every single person in the way, until it got to that final tent, the one that the militia had placed the bomb or rock next to, and it let out a roar so loud that it made Arthur’s eyes water even though his hands were clamped hard against his ears. Roared and roared and roared until Arthur, his wife, and his children all had been forced into unconsciousness.
***
When Arthur Mabele woke in the light of the morning, his wife was already awake, shaking from cold and fear but watching over their children, who were still sleeping. The tent city was a smoldering mess of mud, bodies, body parts, and ruined wood and fabric.
His wife looked at him and said but one thing:
“Kasai Rex.”
Arthur nodded. He had never in his life made an international phone call, never tried to find the number for a telephone in America, but knowing his family was safe, he knew it was his responsibility to tell the world so the Kasai Rex, taller than the Vermeulen building and almost as long as the tent city itself, killer of everything it encountered, could itself be killed.
It took him the better part of a week even to locate a telephone—miners were not welcome inside the Vermeulen building. It took still longer to find where and whom he should contact, and almost three weeks had passed before Arthur could find someone who spoke English and Swahili to place the call for him and interpret his story. But finally he was able to tell what had happened, tell the only people he knew would believe him.
He called Cryptids Alive!
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