Eighteen
Matt climbed nimbly to the top with Monica; for all their hardships he still looked to be enjoying himself. “I also came third in a hot dog eating contest in my final year, but I’m holding that one back for now.”
Monica whistled. “You’re a very talented man, Mr. Gym Jock, now let’s dig.”
It took them longer than expected. Even though most rock piles formed a basic pyramidal shape, the top of the boulder choke still needed about ten feet of digging and hauling down and along the human chain. First Monica crawled through, and came back quickly to report they could wriggle through to the next open cave — it also looked like they might avoid getting wet.
One by one they crawled through, this time with Tank managing to avoid getting hooked up. On the other side, they found themselves in a large domed cavern with what looked like stars twinkling on the ceiling. Matt looked up and said to Monica, “Bioluminescence again, huh — bugs or moss?”
“Let’s find out.” Monica clapped her hands loudly. In the cavern it sounded like a rifle shot and all the lights in the ceiling winked out at once.
“Aw, the nasty cave woman turned off the stars,” said Matt.
“Wait for it.” Monica pointed up and sure enough the lights came back on. “Glow-worms probably. Or maybe a hundred other things we’ve never even seen before.”
The small team continued on for another thirty minutes in the darkness and most managed to forget their predicament by marvelling at the wonders of the cave. Enormous limestone formations towered above them, looking like the organ pipes in the Vatican cathedral. There were dripping shoulders of stone like giant angel wings and vast columns reaching from floor to ceiling where a stalagmite and stalactite had joined, some easily a hundred feet high and as wide as a house.
Their beach was narrowing, and they were being forced to walk closer to the water. It was Monica who first noticed the changes.
“It’s getting warmer again, and the stream has stopped flowing, and hey, look.” She pointed into the water. “This is very rare. I’ve only ever heard about it in caving chat rooms.”
It was a strange effect, the stream seemed to float. It looked like a stream on top of another stream.
Matt knelt down to look. “It’s like magic.”
“It’s not magic, you boy scout.” Silex managed to make the normally innocent term sound like a curse. “It’s a natural phenomenon called a thermocline. It’s either where warm water overlies colder water, or where there’s a geologically active floor site. Means it could be toxic as well if hydrogen sulfide is dissolved in the water. This could be more bad news.”
“I don’t think so.” Aimee had also knelt down now. “It’s not warm enough to be a thermocline and there’s no build-up of minerals to suggest there’s sulfide in the water.” Aimee removed a small vial from her backpack and took a sample of the lower water level. She sniffed it and then dipped her finger in. She looked at Alex and winked and put the tip of her finger to the end of her tongue. “Yep, that’s salt.” She got to her feet. “It’s a halocline, which is a stable boundary between seawater and fresh water. They usually occur where an underground river flows towards the sea. Seawater backs up into the cave, and the less dense fresh water flows smoothly above it for a distance. It’s safe.” Aimee picked up a small pebble and tossed it in. Two sets of ripples formed — one set on the surface magically seeming to float above a second set a couple of feet under them.
Monica stood with her hands on her hips. “If it’s salt water meeting the stream’s fresh then that’s good news. We must be going the right way.”
Alex looked at the group. Aimee’s helmet torch was yellowing. He hoped Monica was right; the dark was fast catching up with them.
In another hour the scent of salt could be detected in the air and the stream’s double layer combined into one. Monica had been walking for a while with her head tilted up and she called to the group to stop. “Guys, we need to check something. Could everyone turn their torches off for a few seconds?”
One by one their helmet torches went out. Aimee noticed that Alex hadn’t used his light for ages and couldn’t remember when he ever had it on. She saw him give some quick signals to Tank and Takeda who both pulled lenses down over their eyes; infra-red, she guessed. Seconds passed with nothing occurring and Silex started to complain in the blackness. Aimee noticed that his voice had moved as he had taken the opportunity to get a lot closer to her. Creep, she thought, as she
After a few more seconds the bioluminescent stars appeared again on the ceiling, then on the walls, and after a minute, they could actually make each other out in the cavern. They were no longer in the sightless black of the cave, but in a soft blue twilight.
“Cool,” Matt said, looking up, and to perform his own test clapped his hands just once very loudly. It came as such a surprise that even the HAWCs swung around towards him with their rifles raised. Immediately, and as he expected, all the cold lights went out, leaving them once again in the impenetrable darkness. But what no one was expecting was to hear the loud splash from the other side of the stream. Everyone switched their helmet torches back on and some lit up their handhelds for good measure.
Alex spoke to his HAWCs while never taking his eyes off the stream. “Something large entered the water about a hundred feet farther down — eyes on. Everyone else get behind us.” The stream, which had been as flat and calm as ice, suddenly lapped up on the sand.
“Surge wave, something’s coming towards us in the river. Get ready.” The group backed up and positioned themselves behind the HAWCs who had their rifles pointed at the river surface.
It happened quickly. The smooth stream surface exploded as the thing charged out of the water like a shiny, black torpedo. An enormous mouth opened to display a zigzag of deadly teeth at the front of a twenty-foot-long muscular body. It powered itself at Alex on squat legs, aiming to take him round the waist. None of the HAWCs flinched; three rifles fired at once, sending highly compressed bullet-sized projectiles of air into the long body. Holes ruptured along its head and flank and the creature thrashed and thumped heavily on the sand for a while before trying to retreat back into the stream. Tank fired one more round between its eyes and it dropped still on the shore, its flattened tail still in the water and its great shovel-shaped head falling to the sand leaking greenish fluid.
Everyone stood in silence for a few seconds until Matt spoke. “I love this place! This is like fucking Pellucidar. Do you know what this is?” he asked wide-eyed to the still panting group.
“Looks like a cross between a shark and some sort of alligator,” said Tank.
“I used to keep Mexican walking fish when I was a kid; looks like the daddy of one of those,” said Monica.
“I think it’s a dinosaur. Man, oh man, it was a real live dinosaur!” Matt was beside himself.
“Close, very close, but not reptilian or saurian. Long scaleless amphibious morphology, shovel-shaped head, short but muscular legs; I think it’s a labyrinthodont.” Aimee moved to the head and lifted the mouth to display an upper and lower jaw that when brought together made the teeth slide past each other like scissor blades. The surface of the palate was covered by tiny raised denticles, similar to shark skin. By looking at the mouth and teeth, once the creature got something into that maw, there was little hope of it escaping. In fact, Tank was right; it did look exactly like a shark’s mouth.
“Wow, welcome back, big guy.” Matt ran his hands down the slimy body. “Once we started finding life, we should have expected something like this.”
Aimee nodded. “Monica was close about walking fish. These are the grand-daddies of today’s salamanders and newts and last lived right here in the Antarctic. Everywhere else they were out-competed by the crocodiles, but it was way too cold for crocs down here and the labryinthodonts once thrived. Of course, this was over a hundred million years ago. But one thing no one would have expected — it’s black,” said Aimee.
“I know, deadly but beautiful, isn’t it.” Matt responded, still looking lovingly at the dead creature.
“No, I don’t mean that as a fashion statement. I mean it shouldn’t be; it shouldn’t be any colour. We’re miles under the surface in total darkness. All the creatures we’ve seen so far have displayed all the expected troglomorphies associated with their adaptation to a subterranean life. Things like loss of pigment, loss of eyes, longer legs and other enlarged sensory organs. This thing is an ambush specialist; it hunts using sight.”
They all looked at the fist-sized black eye on the side of the large head — it jerked. Matt and the others
