Both men looked like they were having trouble choosing irritation or admiration, but before either could say a word, the sound of gunfire issued from the passage below. The noise was barely audible, muffled by the turns in the narrow passage through to the neighboring cavern.
“Get back,” Knight said. “Away from the edge. Stay out of sight.”
Felice was about to comply, but saw that Knight had laid down at the edge of the recess, aiming his rifle at the mouth of the passageway below. She sprawled out next to him.
“Do you listen to anyone?” Knight said, not looking at her.
She ignored him.
There were more shots, and even Felice’s untrained ear could distinguish the subtle differences in the sounds made by Bishop’s machine gun and the rebel fighter’s assault rifles. After the initial exchange, she heard only the latter, and then silence.
She waited, listening, the seconds stretching out to an agonizing infinity, but there were no more shots.
Suddenly, a raptor exploded out of the passage, and over the edge, tumbling down the slope in a flurry of talons and feathers. Something else emerged onto the ledge right behind it — not a single velociraptor, but three of them, tangled up with another figure.
Bishop.
Felice watched incredulous as Bishop, standing poised on the precipice, stripped the clinging, clawing dinosaurs off his body one by one. He caught one by the throat and with a whip-cracking motion, snapped its neck. A second raptor had its teeth clamped onto his shoulder and was raking his back with the spur-like claws on its hind legs, but with his hands now free, Bishop reached back, closed his fingers around the duck-shaped head, and squeezed until the creature’s eyes burst out of their sockets. A third, which had somehow gotten its legs twisted around the sling of Bishop’s machine gun, tried to bite Bishop’s face, but instead Bishop got his own teeth around the thing’s neck and he bit down hard.
His victory had not come cheap. Raptor talons had flayed skin and torn deeply into muscles. Blood streamed from a dozen gash wounds. Yet that was not the worst of it. As he was fighting, Felice felt as if she was watching him transform before her eyes — Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, Bruce Banner metamorphosing into the Hulk. It was not a physical change precisely, but his human essence being consumed by a darker, bestial entity.
Bishop seemed to sense that she was watching. He turned slowly, letting the dead raptor fall from his jaws. His face was a mask of blood and feathers. He looked like some kind of savage tribal warrior, but his eyes…
His eyes were the same.
Felice breathed a sigh of relief…
That turned into a gasp of horror as a swarm of velociraptors broke from the passage and swept Bishop over the edge.
44
Definitely Jules Verne, Queen thought as the raft slid along the subterranean river.
Rook knelt at the front of the makeshift craft, using a semi-rigid length of plant stalk like the punt of a Venetian gondolier, nudging the raft back to center stream whenever the unpredictable current brought them too close to the bank. Queen sat at the rear, using a broad, fan-shaped leaf like a rudder. Rook had selected two more stalks with their fans still attached to be used as oars, but thus far there had been no need to use them. The current was swift, carrying them faster than they could have walked through the dense vegetation that flourished on the valley floor. Walking wasn’t really an option. The local flora was not the only obstacle they would have faced on foot.
They spied the first creature only a few minutes after their river journey began. Based on its size, Queen had assumed it was an enormous elephant, but then it had raised its small head, which was situated at the end of a neck that was nearly as long its massive body, and she knew that what she was seeing could only be a dinosaur.
She pointed it out to Rook, who in characteristic fashion, tried to conceal his astonishment with a quip. “Whoa. That’s a lot of Bronto burgers. Better keep an eye out for Sleestaks. Those things always gave me the creeps.”
“It’s a Paralititan,” Deep Blue had informed her a few seconds later, the disbelief audible in voice. “An herbivore sauropod from the Cretaceous period.”
“You should go on Jeopardy,” Queen told him.
“As it happens, I was just doing some research on the subject. There have been rumors of giant monsters in the Congo region for years, which has led a lot of folks to believe that dinosaurs might have survived to the present day, hidden in the jungle.”
“Or under it.”
“Those monster legends might indicate that dinosaurs living down here have been able to migrate to the surface from time to time. There’s got to be an exit to the surface somewhere in the Congo Basin.”
“So this is a good thing,” she replied, not completely sincere. “If they’ve been coming and going all this time, why aren’t there more recent fossils?”
“Most dinosaur skeletons are found in deserts,” Deep Blue said, “where the conditions are favorable for preserving and fossilizing the remains. There’s not much of a fossil record at all in the tropics, so we have no idea what kind of creatures might have once lived in Central Africa. The Congo Basin itself is only about a million years old. Most African dinosaur fossils date to more than ninety million years ago, well before the rest of the dinosaurs went extinct.”
“Now we know where they went,” Rook said, “and why the Ancients built that wall. Maybe why they stopped using the underground route, too.”
“An actual lost world.” Deep Blue’s voice held a tinge of wonder. “It might not be what Mulamba was looking for, but a discovery like this will change everything we think we know about the world. And it will change the way the world views Africa.”
Queen wasn’t so sure about that. From a scientific standpoint, the importance of the African continent was already well-established, if not completely understood. It was almost certainly the birthplace of the earliest humans. For most people however, Africa was just a primitive land, inhabited by strange wild animals. What they had found here might just reinforce that belief.
The mind-boggling novelty of the sighting quickly wore off as they spied more dinosaurs, not just Paralititan, but a dizzying variety of the evidently not-quite-extinct creatures. Deep Blue attempted to identify them based on what little was known of dinosaurs living in Africa. The conversation ceased when both she and Rook realized that, if this lost world supported populations of plant-eating dinosaurs, then it almost certainly would contain predators — not the humanoid insect-lizard hybrids that had plagued Rook’s Saturday morning cartoon-fueled nightmares perhaps, but animals much bigger and much more dangerous.
They soon discovered that even the river was not entirely safe. Large reptilian and amphibious creatures swam across their path. For the most part, the animals ignored them or scurried away, but a few were curious enough that Rook laid aside his punting pole and drew his spear head, ready for combat. A massive snake, easily larger than an Amazonian anaconda, trailed in their wake for several minutes, its serpentine body undulating along the surface at an astonishing speed. Queen had no doubt that, if it had chosen to attack, the snake could have crushed the little raft in its massive coils, and then gulped them down whole, but after a while it got distracted by something on the shore and lost interest.