Sink: The Lost World (20 page)

“I am sorry,”
the boy said. “I did not mean to scare you.”

“Who are you?” Zoe said.

“I am Cawing Crow,” the boy said. “From the Lakota tribe.”

“Lakota?” Zoe said. “You’re a Native American Indian?”

“They are my ancestors, yes,” Cawing Crow said.

“Where are you from?” Zoe said.

“I am from a tribe in the jungle,” Cawing Crow said. “We were captured. Just like you.”

“‘We’?” Zoe said.

Cawing Crow gestured to the darkness behind him. A group of men stepped out of it, eyes on the floor. They were shaped like modern men. They were hairless, with broad chests and handsome bronze skin. Their hair was uniformly black and long, tied up into bobs at the nape of the neck. They had feathers in their hair.

“We mean you no harm,” Cawing Crow said.

“Why are you here?” Zoe said.

“We were out hunting when they caught us,” Cawing Crow said. “The jungle is becoming a hard place to find food. We must hunt farther. We keep trying to farm animals so there will always be enough food for everyone, but the apemen, they come and break our fences, take our food.”

“Why don’t you stop them?” Zoe said.

“We try,” Cawing Crow said. “But they are many more than us.”

“What will they do to us?” Zoe said, her voice shaking.

“They will take us to the rock on high and lay our heads down and smash in our skulls with a lump of wood,” Cawing Crow said. “If we are lucky.”

“And if we’re unlucky?” Zoe said.

“Fire,” Cawing Crow said. “And then they will cheer and hoot and scream. They are worse than the creatures in the jungle. Animals fight and kill to survive. These apemen fight for sport.”

Cawing Crow moved to the door, thereby moving closer to Zoe and Cassie. They shied back, but he didn’t seem to notice. He pointed through the grating at the apeman leader.

“He is Shard,” Cawing Crow said. “He is worse than the others. He enjoys killing us. Killing a dumb animal is no challenge. But fighting a man… That’s different. It requires intelligence and strength, and the apemen are very aggressive. The metal in Shard’s head lessens his ability to feel pain, and he seems stronger than the others, but he’s not. He just doesn’t feel the pain. But it will kill him. Eventually.”

“How did it get lodged in his head in the first place?” Zoe said.

“We had a battle with them, and it got stuck in his head,” Cawing Crow said. “Despite their appearance, they are smart. Too smart, sometimes. Too smart for me. We built these caves. But they came and took them from us.”

English was clearly Cawing Crow’s second language, and Zoe found him hard to follow.

“Could you take us to the far wall?” Zoe said.

“The far wall?” Cawing Crow said, frowning.

“In the north,” Zoe said, touching the cell’s stony wall and pointing.

“Yes,” Cawing Crow said. “We can take you. But how? We are in here.”

“We have something that will make these Stone Age critters more scared than they have ever been before,” Zoe said.

Cawing Crow beamed, and then turned to speak to his other tribe members.

“What are you doing?” Cassie said. “You don’t have anything to make them afraid.”

“I don’t,” Zoe said. “But you do.”

Bryan didn’t take
his eyes off the prison where Zoe and Cassie were kept. Aaron weaved
reeds together into a long chain. They’d sat in silence for over an hour. Each time Bryan tried to speak something seemed to interrupt him. Really, it was only his nerves stopping him.

“I never wanted to replace your father, you know,” Bryan said. “From what I hear about him, he was-”

“Is,” Aaron said.

“-is a decent guy, interesting to be around,” Bryan said. “I’m not like him. I don’t pretend to be. I can never – and would never – attempt to replace him. I just wanted to be someone you can talk to from time to time about things, if you wanted. Your father and I aren’t similar, but we do have one thing in common: a love for your mother. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. You’re her son and I would have loved you too. I know it wouldn’t have been easy, but we would have been a family.”

Bryan let out a sigh. It sounded rehearsed. It
was
rehearsed. And now he’d said it he wasn’t sure he was glad he had.

“You’re not in love with Mom any more?” Aaron said.

Bryan looked toward the apemen’s caves, where he knew Zoe to be.

“I love her more than I can express,” Bryan said.

“Why?” Aaron said. “Are you bad with words?”

“What?” Bryan said. “No. It’s just an expression. I don’t know how Zoe feels about me any more, that’s all. I don’t want to love someone who doesn’t love me. Not again.”

“I’m sorry we tried to break you up,” Aaron said. “Cassie…”

He shook his head.

“We thought you would both be better off without each other,” Aaron said. “Without us.”

“Cassie can be a force of nature sometimes,” Bryan said. “I get that. But in a few minutes we’re going to attempt a rescue of Cassie and Zoe, and I don’t know how it’s going to go. That’s why I said what I did before. Just in case.”

Aaron didn’t need to ask what he meant. He understood. A pause filled the void between them.

“How did you start your business?” Aaron said.

“Oh, the usual way,” Bryan said. “I saw an opportunity and took it.”

“What opportunity?” Aaron said.

“A lucrative one,” Bryan said. “In oil. After that, I diversified and never stopped growing.”

“Must take some balls,” Aaron said. “Doing something like that.”

“It’s no different than what we’re going to do tonight,” Bryan said. “It’s a calculated risk. Once you’ve done the risk assessment, come up with a plan of attack, all you can do then is pull the trigger. What about you? What’s your dream?”

“My dream?” Aaron said, cheeks coloring. “I don’t really have any.”

“Sure you do,” Bryan said. “Everyone has a dream, even if they’re not quite sure what it is yet.”

Aaron looked at Bryan, weighing him up.

“I want to be a scientist,” he said.

“A scientist?” Bryan said. “What’s wrong with that? Some of the greatest people in history were scientists.”

“I know,” Aaron said. “But it’s not a cool job like being a singer or actor.”

“Listen to me,” Bryan said. “Being a scientist, helping people and making the world a better place, is ten times better than prancing around on a stage for a living. Or being in board meetings all day.”

Aaron smiled.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s the truth,” Bryan said.

There was activity in the apemen village. The children had been put away and a group were piling up wood.

“Looks like they’re about to do something,” Bryan said. “We’d better get going.”

Bryan felt nervous. This was the most dangerous thing he had ever done. He wiped his hands on his pants. He pulled down some vines from a tree and wound it around into a wide circle.

Night had draped
over the apemen village when they came to the cell. It took a dozen apemen to lift the door up. The Native American Indians were under Cawing Crow’s orders not to struggle, and they obliged, though they glared at the apemen and pulled away their arms when touched.

Zoe kept her fist clenched. They had pulled half a dozen fireworks apart and extracted the gunpowder. There was little inside it, but a handful was enough for what they needed. The rest of the fireworks were kept in their original packaging.

The apemen led the prisoners to a huge pile of wood. Shard sat before it, working hard at something. Zoe couldn’t quite see what it was. Then, when he moved aside, she saw a spark. It caught and spread across the wood. It was a pyre. She doubted it was for a funeral. The apemen stood around them in a circle, faces lit up like grotesque masks.

Shard stood before the roaring fire, the light glinting off his metal crown. He grunted and moaned, directing himself at a wall behind Zoe. She looked over her shoulder. The wall had a large tarpaulin draped over it and showed a handsome man with chiseled features on his knees with an apeman standing over him with a gun. The picture was torn across the top and bottom. Zoe recognized it for what it was: a poster for a Planet of the Apes film. In the current setting it worked as a piece of propaganda. Zoe would have burst out laughing if the situation wasn’t so tragic.

Looking at the two species now, Zoe was struck by how different they appeared. The apemen had thick hair over their whole bodies, the Indians, hairless. The apeman walked with an awkward bowlegged gait that looked forced, the Indians’ legs were long and strong, good for running.

The apemen bared their large canine teeth and hissed and growled at their captives. Strength was the sign of power here, not intelligence. Zoe wondered how they’d managed to emerge from such beginnings.

The female apemen came forward, their fur covered with a white powder. They danced around the fire.

Zoe’s heart beat loud in her ears. Cassie’s body shook too, but there was a confident cast to her eyes that Zoe admired.

Shard marched up and down, jutting out his muscular chest and hammering the ground with his powerful forearms. The other apemen screamed.

Zoe clenched her fist tight and prepared to toss the powder into the fire, sensing the moment approaching. Cassie slipped the fireworks down her sleeve and prepared to do likewise.

Then the rocks on the ground jittered, hopping up and down across the surface. The apemen stopped screaming and watched them. They shared confused expressions. They hooted and roared and whimpered, not knowing what was happening.

The trees that ran up to the rocky outcrop shivered and shook, bending and buckling like a wrecking ball was knocking through them. Then came the moans and roars of huge beasts.

A few apemen exploded from the foliage, running hell for leather for the caves in their lumbering gait. They screamed in fear. The apes closer to the caves turned and ran for the safety of their homes.

“Get behind me!” Cawing Crow said.

“What?” Zoe said. “What is it?”

The foliage exploded like a tin can, huge monsters spilling forth. They were dinosaurs, eyes wide and broad and white with fear. They ran toward the wall, their footing uncertain on the hard slippery rocky surface. They slammed into the wall, bouncing off it, sliding along it, leaving a streak of blood against its rough surface, before taking off along the barren path and sinking back into the jungle. Some of the less fortunate apemen were crushed underfoot by the giant beasts.

Zoe heard a voice:

“Zoe! Cass! Come here! Quick!”

Bryan and Aaron waved from the edge of the jungle.

Zoe turned to the Natives.

“Come on!” she said.

They ran down the incline, as fast as their legs could carry them. Zoe swept Aaron up in her arms, forgetting how heavy he was, and smothered him with kisses. Bryan did the same with Cassie.

“How did you do this?” Zoe said.

“Just a little wrangling,” Bryan said. “I did it all the time on a farm when I was young. With bulls, of course, not dinosaurs.”

The Natives looked at Bryan, and then averted their gaze.

“Who are they?” Bryan said.

“Friends,” Zoe said. “They were going to help us get away before you rudely interrupted.”

“Sorry!” Bryan said.

The apemen emerged from their caves, the dinosaur stampede having vacated. Shard was not amused. He grunted and raised his arm. The apemen bolted forward, picking up spears without breaking step, and tore down the incline.

“I think that’s our cue to leave,” Bryan said.

“Agreed,” Zoe said.

They turned and ran.

The Natives’ speed
was astonishing. They ran, leapt and hurdled over the obstacles as if they were a playground. Cawing Crow slowed when he noticed Zoe and the others falling behind. He made a whooping sound and the other Natives drew alongside them. Then Cawing Crow made a gesture with his hands and two Natives slowed further and disappeared into the jungle behind him.

Zoe wanted to tell them not to risk their lives, but she couldn’t spare the breath.

The jungle was alive with the cries of the beasts of the night, howling and growling and flashing white eyes. Zoe tripped and landed flat on her face. A black snake rose and pulled its head back to bite. A Native seized the snake under its jaw, spun it around, and threw it high into the tree canopy. Zoe’s heart thumped like the beating of a war drum.

There were growls and screams from the treetops, like animals provoked in a zoo.

Cawing Crow looked at two more Natives and, never breaking stride, made a sharp movement with his hand. The two warriors broke off and peeled away.

After a moment there were loud howls and roars, shouts and bellows. But the roars quickly absorbed the howls, and the sounds grew silent. The jungle ended and their feet came to soft sand. They were at the side of a large lake.

“Great!” Bryan said. “Now we’re trapped!”

Cawing Crow and the other Natives ran to a thick clutch of reeds and pulled out a pair of canoes.

The roars and grunts grew louder from the jungle, the darkness and its hidden dangers mawing open. The apemen threw themselves from the treetops and rolled into running positions on the sand.

Cassie’s eyes widened and she pointed at something behind Zoe.

“Zoe, look out!” she said.

A shape moved in Zoe’s peripheral vision.

Zoe dived aside as a giant snake snapped at her heels. It missed and struck the ground instead. The snake shook its head, dazed. Zoe backed away and picked up a stick, keeping her eyes firmly on the snake. The snake snapped at her again, but Zoe brought the stick across and smacked the snake aside the head.

The snake shot forward again, this time seizing the stick. It wrenched it from Zoe, tensed its muscles, and snapped the stick in half, jutting out like vampire fangs. It spat the stick remnants out and drew itself up taller, its slit of a mouth seeming to smile at Zoe. She knew she was done for. Its tongue, as thick as her arm, lolled out of its mouth and quivered in the air. The snake peeled back its thick lips and its six-inch fangs protruded.

The Natives hooted and threw themselves at the snake.

“Get in the boat!” Cawing Crow said. “Quick!”

The family did, hopping on board. Most of the Natives escaped the snake. One had his foot ensnared in a snake’s coil. The snake wrapped another coil around the Native, watching him with its dead black eyes. The warrior beat at the snake’s huge muscles, to no use.

The Natives pushed away from the bank and paddled away.

“Wait!” Zoe said. “The warrior! We have to save him!”

“He’s already dead,” Cawing Crow said.

The canoes pulled further across the lake. The apemen hurled spears at the canoes, a couple connecting, but none doing permanent damage. The metal in Shard’s head glinted with glow bug moonlight. They stood there watching as the canoes pulled away.

“Stab the warrior, please,” Zoe said under her breath. “Show mercy.”

But Shard and the other apemen only watched as the snake enveloped the warrior with its thick muscular coils, and then tensed its body. There were a series of pops as the man’s bones were snapped in two dozen places.

None of the Natives reacted.

Zoe shivered. It had nothing to do with the cold.