Titanoboa Read online

  He had no weapons, no night-vision goggles, and nothing to eat. He had to get moving before his energy left him or Steven found him.

  Mark tried to force himself up but nearly collapsed from the pain. Everything hurt, from his toes to his head. He rolled to the side and lifted himself up on both elbows. Then his palms, then his knees. He let out a groan so loud he felt like a ninety-year-old man. Though the pain was ever-present, he could get into a kneeling position, which meant nothing major was broken.

  A quick evaluation of the pain told him he had at least torn something in his right shoulder and possibly fractured a rib. But his legs were largely all right. When he felt he wouldn’t do further damage, he rose to his feet with a grunt of pain.

  As he was about to turn, he heard a noise behind him.

  He had no energy left to fight. He was hollow and empty, and if Steven was there, he had won because Mark could do nothing to fight him off. Slowly, Mark turned his head. A figure strolled up to him. There was nowhere else to run.

  The figure was wearing shorts.

  “You all right?” Millard said.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Bastard shot at me, but I took off. What the hell is going on?”

  Mark grimaced from a throbbing fire that shot up his leg into his lower back. His sciatic nerve. “I think you and I have been duped, Professor.”

  Millard placed Mark’s arm over his neck and helped him stumble through the jungle. After a few minutes, when the blood had returned to his legs, Mark walked on his own. The pain had gone from intense burning to a powerful soreness. Mark couldn’t tell which hurt worse.

  Neither of them had any gear to cut through the thick shrubbery. Most of the vegetation tugged at Mark’s clothing and skin, leaving scrapes and bloody punctures.

  As they pushed through a thicket of trees, they came to a small path. Almost like the trail they had walked with Steven but narrower. Meant to be walked single file.

  “They’ll be on the trails,” Mark said.

  “I don’t know about you, but I can’t fight through a jungle all night.”

  Mark thought a moment then nodded. “Okay. Just keep your eyes open.”

  Their pace wasn’t much faster than the lazy stroll of a cat. Inch by grueling inch, Mark fought to keep stride with Millard, who frequently stopped to let him catch up. The heat was less intense now, but it was a wet heat that sucked all the moisture out and left Mark like a bag of dry sand.

  The clouds had moved on, fully exposing the moon. The light was enough for them to get by on the trail but nothing else. Mark wouldn’t have been able to navigate anywhere except a ready-made path.

  “Your phone working?” Mark asked.

  “No service. Yours?”

  “Lemme check… No.”

  “If we can make it back to camp, they’ll—”

  “We’re not going back to camp, Craig.”

  “Why not?”

  “Steven wasn’t acting alone. This was planned. This is what VN wanted. Or at least implicitly consented to. Steven wanted me dead, and now you’re a witness to it. There’s no way they’re letting us out of that camp alive.”

  Millard thought a moment. “Shit. Shit!” he shouted. “Fuck me. I did not sign up for this!”

  The statement was so ridiculous Mark would’ve chuckled if it hadn’t hurt so much. “We don’t need camp. We can make it out on our own. The cities and villages are all on the shores. We just have to keep walking in one direction, and we’ll eventually hit a beach.”

  Millard nodded, his hands on his hips as he looked up to the moon. “Do you know I haven’t even got tenure yet? That was my goal for like ten years, and I’m gonna die without doing it.”

  “Well, let’s just keep walking, all right?”

  “Yeah, all right,” he said, like a child accepting a chore they didn’t want to do.

  As they walked, Mark’s pain increased but not in a debilitating way. The important thing was to keep moving, and his legs did just that. A dull, radiating pain throbbed from his thighs and lower back though, and he worried he had injured his spine.

  The trail led deeper into the jungle, not away from it and to the shore. Right now, they had no other options, nowhere else to hike.

  Mark kept up as best he could, but occasionally Millard pulled so far ahead, lost in thought, that Mark wasn’t able to see him anymore. A small panic gnawed at him. Not that Millard could do anything to protect Mark, but just the thought of someone else there, someone else’s presence, was enough to comfort him in this hell, and he marveled that he even cared. He hadn’t known that about himself, how much he really needed other people.

  They walked for what Mark guessed was a couple of hours. The jungle grew denser and hotter. Finally, Mark couldn’t move his legs anymore. He had to drag each step out of himself until he stopped.

  “I can’t go anymore,” he said, out of breath.

  Millard turned. He was exhausted as well, as evidenced by the deep, nearly frantic breaths he was drawing. “This is as good a place as any to rest, I guess.”

  Mark collapsed. He sat down so fast the impact against the ground hurt his tailbone. He leaned back on his arms, but that hurt too much so he slouched forward. The thought of lying directly on his back on the jungle floor didn’t sound appealing.

  Millard sat down next to him, and they were quiet for a moment, listening to the jungle sounds. The monkeys were loud in this area, and for some reason that comforted Mark. He remembered the silence of the other night, the deathly silence that preceded one of their men disappearing without a trace.

  “Are snakes smart?” Mark said.

  Millard shook his head, staring at the ground. “No. One of the smallest brains for body size in the animal kingdom. Why?”

  “A man disappeared from my team last night.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that.”

  “If it was a snake last night that took that man, it sure as hell acted like it was smart. He distracted us and then struck when our attention was on something else.”

  “Impossible. That’s higher brain function. They just don’t have it. Snakes are opportunists. They lie in wait, hit a target, and if they get it they get it. If they don’t, they move on to another target. They can’t reason the way you’re suggesting. I think this particular genus would have to be smarter to survive as long as it did undetected, but not that smart.”

  Mark focused on drawing in as much breath as he could. The mugginess made it harder to breathe, as though he were sucking air through a straw. “You really believe what’s out here is a prehistoric snake?”

  “I do. The coelacanth is a sixty-million-year-old fish. We thought it was extinct, until we found out that some fishermen in South Africa had been catching them for decades. And this is a big fish, up to six feet long, and we had no idea it existed. There are still plenty of things in the world we don’t know about.”

  “But why here?”

  “This is the perfect environment for them. They want cover, which they have in the jungle, abundant prey, which again they have, and heat. The hotter the better. They’ve got all that here. And the fact is we don’t know why they went extinct. There was no cataclysmic event like with the dinosaurs. There’s no reason they shouldn’t still be alive.”

  “How big you think they can get?”

  Millard stretched his legs out in front of him. He sighed and looked up to the sky before answering. “It depends. They’ll grow until they die, so theoretically, they can get huge. I’ve seen anacondas over thirty feet. An explorer I admire, Percy Faucett, said he saw one over sixty feet when he was exploring the Amazon basin. He wasn’t the type of guy to exaggerate, so I would take his account as truth.”

  After that, they didn’t speak again for a long time. Mark slumped over and closed his eyes. He was worried that sleep would overtake him so fast he would just topple over, but the opposite was true. Sleep never came. Every inch of him screamed for sleep, but his mind wouldn’t allow i
t. As if it knew the dangers and had decided it wouldn’t follow Mark’s conscious direction anymore.

  “Should we get moving again?” Millard said.

  Mark nodded and slowly climbed to his feet.

  33

  Riki noticed two guards near the entrance and one around back of the administration tent. As the men escorted her there, she ran through different scenarios in her mind. They could offer her money to keep quiet, which would be the ideal. Or they might want to kill her. It was also possible they intended to do something in between. Maybe send her away, have her fired, sued, something like that. She just didn’t know, and the men that brought her to the administration tent weren’t speaking.

  The man from last night gently nudged her inside. He told the others to wait outside. He stepped into the tent with her and said, “Have a seat.”

  Riki did as he asked. She sat down, her back straight, and tried to appear as confident as possible, though inside she was a mess. If they knew how afraid she really was, they would use it against her.

  “Tell us what you were doing in the tent last night?” the man said, sauntering to a table and pouring a glass of water out of a clear jug.

  “I was just trying to check my email. I don’t have phone service out here.”

  “Bullshit.” The man sipped his water. “You’re not gonna like how I get information that I need, Ms. Howard. And I need that information. I need to know what you were doing in this tent.”

  The man was calm and collected, speaking smoothly and without apprehension. She imagined he had done this a thousand times and knew what she was going to say before she said it. So, Riki thought, what would throw a man like that off?

  The only thing she could think of was the truth. It might buy her some time until Steven and Mark got back. Maybe even allow her to get back to her tent, at which point she would slip away in the middle of the night. Mark had been right. Better to take chances with the animals in the jungle.

  “I was looking for information about what your company is doing on the island. I’m a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. My bosses know I am here, by the way, and with your company.”

  The man looked surprised for a moment. Just a flash that came into his eyes then quickly faded away. “Reporter, huh? Well, what exactly do you think is going on that is so important you came out into the middle of this jungle for?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? Your company hired me.”

  He smirked and finished his water. “See, here’s the thing, Ms. Howard, there are no police here. There’s nothing here but my men. Men we pay that are loyal to us. So I think you should probably just answer my questions and save the attitude for the mainland.” He paced around her, settling on a desk against the wall. He leaned against it and stared at her before speaking. “What exactly did you find out?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing yet.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, really. I know you have some instant messages set up to various executives, and that’s it. I was going to try to find out more tonight.”

  “Give me your phone.” She handed it to him, and he flipped through it before slipping it into his pocket. “I’ll be hanging on to this for a while.” As he walked out of the tent he said, “You may want to get comfortable. Might be a while before we decide what to do with you.”

  34

  The trudging had turned to the most grueling exercise Mark had ever done. Before this, he had always thought he could walk forever. It didn’t strain anything and was pleasurable. Now, each step caused his muscles to light on fire. He pushed for as long as he could then needed to rest. Millard stayed with him, though Mark got the impression he was happy to rest as well. Every inch of jungle looked the same as the last, and neither one knew where they were going. If they had been walking in circles, Mark wouldn’t have been able to tell.

  As the sun rose, it painted the clouds pink. The sky was a layered texture of blue and pink, stunningly beautiful. Mark wished he could focus on it instead of his situation. They were lost in a jungle with no food or water, and he was injured. The chances of making it out were remote, to say the least.

  He was grateful for the trail. Without a path already cut out of the dense shrubbery, he would’ve collapsed a long time ago.

  “Can you go any farther?” Millard asked.

  Mark nodded. Millard had to help him up each time, and he did so now. The man, despite Mark’s impression of a sheepish professor, was kind and calm under pressure. Not at all like the first impression he had given.

  They hobbled along the path, slowly but with few stops. Mark watched the sky as much as he could. He’d lived on the island for over four years, and he’d never seen the sky like this. Not that the sky was different from any other morning. The difference was his appreciation that he had lived to see another day.

  “What’s that?” Millard said.

  Mark looked forward, a slight jolt of anxiety gripping his guts. But no one else was around. Millard was looking at the jungle floor up ahead of them. He hurried over and bent down. It was a pack, one of VN’s.

  A single thought hit Mark, and suddenly nothing else was important. “Check for canteens.”

  Millard opened the pack and ruffled through. “Jackpot!” He threw one canteen to Mark and kept another for himself. Mark tried to restrain himself, only taking a few gulps, but it was as though he were fighting his own biology. His body screamed for water and didn’t stop screaming until the warm liquid doused his tongue and slid down his throat.

  He drank a third of the canteen. Millard had drunk nearly all of his. Millard flipped through the pack again and found the MRE. He ripped it open. Mark sat down next to him, and they ate the powdery, dry food. It was chicken enchilada. Mark had once heard a serviceman he knew call MREs “three lies for the price of one: they weren’t meals, they weren’t ready, and you couldn’t eat them.” But no meal had ever tasted quite so good.

  They scarfed down the meal and finished it with some water. As they were lying back, enjoying the sense of food in their stomachs, they heard a wet crunch, loud and echoing, from slightly behind and off to the side. Millard rose to his feet.

  At first, Mark could see nothing but jungle. Then something came into focus between two large trees not twenty feet away from them, like one of those paintings where one sees something if they stare at it long enough.

  He noticed the scales first.

  Black and slick, they looked like obsidian. Shimmering in the light, quaking with each contraction of the enormous muscles underneath.

  Mark’s breath quickened, and his heart beat in his ears. As his gaze followed the colossal body, he came to loops. The snake had coiled itself around something.

  The something was a man.

  The coils were like massive pipes, each much thicker than the width of the man. The man was completely horizontal and exposed only from the chest up, the rest of his body wrapped in the snake’s blackness. The man was still alive. He was blinking, blood pouring out of his eyes and nose.

  The coils tightened. It was little more than a shudder, but the force crushed the man to pulp. The pressure exploded his skull, causing brains and blood to eject over the jungle floor.

  Then Mark saw it.

  The head was about three feet wide, with black eyes the size of melons. The snake moved gracefully through the air as its tongue flicked several times. In a flash, it closed around the man’s lifeless corpse.

  It began to swallow the corpse whole.

  Millard was breathing so heavily, Mark was scared the snake could hear it. Millard shook his head several times then finally stammered, “It didn’t even need to unhinge its jaw.”

  Mark slowly stepped away, but Millard was frozen. He either couldn’t or wouldn’t move. Mark had to grab his shoulder and physically pulled him away. Once Millard was moving up the trail, Mark picked up the pack, slung it on his shoulders, and followed.

  The pain in his body suddenly didn’t bother him,
and his pace was quick. He kept up and even overtook Millard. When they were far enough away, the men looked at each other but didn’t say anything for a long time. Not until they had walked for so long that what they had seen seemed like a distant memory.

  “I never…” Millard mumbled. “I mean, I knew they’d be large, but I mean, that thing couldn’t fit through a doorway. I had no idea.” The fear in his voice faded, and excitement replaced it. “I mean, what does a creature that size eat? What’s its natural food source? Even the biggest rodents would just be snacks. I bet it eats crocodiles and giant turtles. I mean, a thing like that could eat anything it wants.”

  “There are no crocodiles in Fiji.”

  “Then it’s gotta go somewhere where there’s larger prey. The ocean, maybe. Can you imagine an animal that size in the ocean! Think what it could eat! It would be the top predator in these waters. And what about—”

  “Craig,” he said, cutting him off, “my only concern right now is that we’re on that thing’s menu. So let’s just focus on getting the hell outta here.”

  They managed to walk maybe a hundred feet before Millard began again. “It’s been undetected all this time. One of the biggest animals on the planet, and it’s been hiding in the middle of an island. I wonder if you were right? If maybe it’s evolved over the past fifty-eight million years and has something resembling basic reasoning. Intelligence. I mean, how else could something like that remain hidden from us?”

  Mark ignored him and kept walking. The shock of what he had seen hadn’t worn off. He had no words, no explanations, other than man wasn’t meant to see something like that. Because every time he blinked, the image was there. Like it had burned itself on the insides of his eyeballs.

  After a good hour, the weight of the pack finally got to him and the adrenaline had worn off. The pain returned, and Mark found every step a struggle. But he’d be damned if he was going to stop and rest here.