Volume 7: Copal
Issue 8: Dead End
Florian Reyes Honeywell
By Roach
Jay’s question hovered over us like a fly that wouldn’t go away. Where are we? I really had no clue. As I surveyed my surroundings—endless forests, the distant rise and fall of hills, and the river rushing past us—I saw nothing which I recognized.
“Maybe…” I started, after moments of silence. As everyone’s heads turned to me, I felt their gazes burn through me. “The river might get us back to the entrance,” I continued, trying to brush off my self-consciousness. “Water is usually connected, so maybe it could lead to the delta, with the Edmontosaurus.”
“Yeah, because what we need right now is more dinosaurs,” Jay muttered.
I looked down. “Just an idea,” I said. At least, it was my best guess. If the swarm had been acting normally, I would have sent out scouts to confirm or disprove my suspicion. But, given that they were still behaving erratically, that was all I had. And that was all it was—a guess. For all I knew, this could be an entirely different river. But, hopefully, the Refuge didn’t span that far… Although, we had been walking for what felt like an hour or two before the attack—and, not once, had we seen a fence or any sign of a boundary…
Just how big was this place?
“I’d rather take my chances with the herbivores than the raptors,” Hannah said.
“So… What, then we would go that way?” Daniel said, pointing upstream.
“No.” Hannah shook her head. “Let’s try downstream. If it’s really connected, the river should flow right into the delta.”
“Wait, wouldn’t it flow away from it?” Daniel tilted his head, a confused look on his face. “At least, water goes down, and we’ve been going… Umh, up and down. But mostly down? So we need to get back up?” He paused, his thick brows furrowing together. “Or maybe we’ve been going up. I don’t know anymore.”
Hannah stared at him with a deadpan expression. “Are you joking, or are you actually just that stupid?” she said, clearly losing her patience. “It’s a delta. The river can only flow into it.”
Although more harsh than necessary, she was still right. “Unless anyone has any better ideas, I suggest we go downstream,” I agreed.
“At least we can’t get any more lost,” Camilo said. “I mean, as long as we follow the river, we can always backtrack if we need to.”
Once it seemed that most of us were on board, we set course downstream. Without a path to follow, we walked along the horsetail-choked riverbank. I fell in line with Amber and Camilo.
“How’s it going?” I turned to Camilo. The soaking, wet ‘Rawr XD’ shirt now clung to his lanky frame.
“Nothing as refreshing as a dip in the river,” he said with a roll of his eyes.
“I hope you enjoyed it, because you’re not going near water again anytime soon,” Amber replied. “Watch out for that rock,” she added with a smug playfulness as she pointed to a pebble on the ground.
“I think I can manage,” Camilo said, making an exaggerated step over the pebble. Then, with a more serious expression, “But… when I fell, I lost my bag. It had all my shit in it. Not to mention my spare clothes.”
Realizing that I still had a spare change of clothing on me—thanks to Amber’s shirt purchase at the gift shop—I lent him my shirt. We paused our walk, while Camilo sought out privacy among the trees to change into dryer clothes.
We continued walking, our silence only filled in by the rush of water and distant animal calls. As we headed down the slope, the massive redwoods shrunk into smaller trees. Some species I recognized—the occasional gingko or sequoia—but others I didn’t. Bizarre-looking conifers intermixed with the cycads and ferns; instead of needles splaying out from each branch, spikey leaves clung tightly to the tree, accentuating its curious curving branches.
Monkey puzzle. Almost unbidden, the tree’s name surfaced in my mind. A nearly forgotten memory of my mom trying to grow the Chilean pine in our greenhouse—with predictable results. These trees must be the full-grown specimen… or, at least, a prehistoric ancestor.
I thought about my mom, humming to herself as she pruned the tree’s damaged branches—her hum indifferent to its stunted growth. An unfamiliar ache wrenched through me. It took me a moment to realize what it was.
Homesickness.
I so rarely missed home—my dad’s mediocre breakfasts, my mom’s long and tedious to-do-lists scattered about, the two of them operating in their own little bubbles—that the feeling caught me off guard. As much as I tried to dismiss it, even an empty house was more welcoming than the prehistoric wilderness surrounding me.
I wondered what my parents were doing right now. They were currently on a trip to Idaho—it was probably past lunch, so maybe they had hit the road after a gas station break. Did they even know what had happened at the Refuge? Surely, enough time had passed for them to be notified by now… News about whatever was going on here must have reached the rest of California.
Unless, the Refuge was so self-contained and in such disorder that no one outside knew—something I didn’t even want to consider just yet. I looked around at my classmates. Daniel stared out into the empty air, while Jay and Lucy walked close to one another—heads hanging down. And, Hannah, marching ahead…
Finally, the Queen murmured—bringing me back to the present moment. And, at the same time, my queasiness melted away. A change swept through the swarm. But, as they settled—their unease finally gone—it wasn’t a gradual change. In a single moment, relief washed through my body.
Testingly, I reached out to the swarm with my pheromones—finding them ready and attentive to me again. Although I still didn’t know what had happened—and surely didn’t know enough to tell if I were in the clear yet—I started loosening the tight hold I had been keeping on them.
I looked around, trying to see if anyone else noticed that something was different. But, as I surveyed the faces of my classmates around me, they marched on with the same quiet detachment as before.
“Does anyone’s phone work?” Lucy said.
Archean had warned us about the reception at the very beginning of the day. But, just in case, I still checked mine. I tried to look up the news, but was met by an error page. As expected, I remained cut off from the rest of the world.
No one said anything, but the lack of response to Lucy’s question was an answer in itself.
“Guys,” Camilo said, turning to Amber and I. “We should talk.”
“Is this…” Amber’s voice fell somewhere between a murmur and a whisper, her eyes darting conspiratorially back and forth. “…the right time?”
“I’ve made us an illusion,” Camilo said. While forcing a smile, he also hugged himself—as if he were still cold from his dip in the river. “No one’s gonna hear what we say, except for us.”
Both Amber and I looked around, our eyes moving between our classmates as if to make sure that they really weren’t listening.
“Guys!” Camilo shouted, as if to dispel our worries. “Daniel! Guess what!”
Daniel didn’t react.
“I’m Stagehand!” Camilo continued.
“Okay, okay,” I said. Although no one had responded—the illusion clearly working—his exclamation still made me uneasy. Amber’s widened eyes suggested she felt similarly alarmed. “I get it. Can we use inside voices now?” I finished.
“But we’re outside,” he countered, attempting a smile. “Nothing but outside for miles.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well…” He sighed, his half-hearted smile fading. “Yeah. But we really should talk.”
Amber raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
“Well…” Camilo cleared his throat. “We need to find a way out of this.”
“Obviously,” she replied with an undertone of impatience.
“I mean, like… We need to find a way out of this because we can do things the others can’t,” he continued.
I waited for him to say something more, trying to figure out where he was going with this.
“Florian, your bees could scout out the area. Then, once we know where we need to go, I can use my illusions for cover,” he finally said, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly.
“How… How so?” I said, a sudden doubt starting to creep up on me. Next to me, Amber furrowed her brows in contemplation.
“I mean… I could make a fog or a cloud or something. Cover us up, and we just walk out of here. Or, even better, I’ll make us all look like a T-rex in a trench coat so nothing will mess with us.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
As I let his suggestion sink in, there was one thing I couldn’t get past. “But… How are you going to do that, without telling everyone about your powers? How are we going to convince people to follow us, if we can’t explain to them how we know the way?”
“Maybe…” Camilo paused. He took a deep breath. For a moment, it was quiet all around us. Although I couldn’t see any sign of wildlife, I imagined eyes watching us from among the trees. I shook off the feeling, turning my attention back to him as he finished, “Maybe we should tell them.”
I felt my insides drop, the swarm churning inside of me. My body suddenly ran cold as I looked at Amber. She narrowed her eyes, still looking like she was in deep thought—but otherwise didn’t give anything away.
He continued, “If we meet those raptors again… or something worse… This is life or death. Maybe it’s our only option.”
“Hold on…” Amber said. “Are you sure you can pull off an illusion like that? I mean… You already fell into the river. It was because you were trying to distract the raptors, wasn’t it?”
Camilo looked down at the ground. “I only fell because I was concentrating for too long,” he muttered. “While we were running, I made some extra trees and obstacles along the way to slow down the raptors.”
It must have been subtle enough that I hadn’t noticed it, but that would explain how we had managed to outrun the Dakotaraptors in the end. Camilo’s illusions, Daniel’s quick thinking, and the raptor’s unexplained rage… It wasn’t all dumb luck.
“So, you think you can keep that up for the entire trek out of here?” Amber said pointedly.
Camilo’s stare remained on his feet. “I will if I have to.”
Although I wasn’t entirely convinced, I didn’t voice my doubts. Since our encounter with the monster in the theater, his illusions had grown bigger, more complex. At the same time, something of this scale sounded like too much.
But, more than that, the idea of sharing our secret with the others put me on edge. Even if only one of us revealed our hero identity, it wouldn’t take a huge leap in logic to figure out who the rest of us were. After all, why would someone like Camilo, Amber, and I start hanging out together right around the time the Chapel Trio appeared?
And I couldn’t let that happen. It was a selfish, ugly thought—but, as thousands of bees crawled inside of me, I really didn’t want anyone to know the horrors underneath my skin. I found myself glancing at Hannah, who had picked up a pebble from the riverside. She turned it over restlessly in her hand as she continued onwards, her pace steady.
No, I decided. My identity had to stay secret.
Straying from the topic, I instead said, “There’s something I need to tell you guys…” Once I had their attention, I continued, “Ever since those explosions went off and the dinosaurs started rampaging, the swarm has been acting… more erratically. They said something about a high-pitched noise. Something I can’t really hear, but it seems like they do. I don’t know how, but whatever it is, I think it’s what’s been setting off the dinosaurs.”
“Acting erratically how?” Camilo said, now looking up at me.
“Like, they’ve been harder to control… But then it stopped just a little bit ago, and they returned to normal. It was all really sudden and weird, but it seems to be over now.”
After a moment of silence, Amber said, “Let’s hope that’s a good thing.”
I nodded. Since crossing the river, we hadn’t encountered any more of Hell Creek’s reincarnated specimens—only heard their strange calls echoing through the trees or distant screeches looming in the skies. I hoped this meant that the dinosaurs really had calmed down—although I wasn’t eager to meet one to prove my theory right.
“But…” I continued, “I don’t think I should use the swarm just yet. At least, not until I’m sure that this is going to last. Whatever that noise was, it could come back.”
We lapsed into another bout of silence, Camilo’s matter still unresolved, as the terrain grew more rugged ahead. The slope became rocky and steep as the stream carved through it, sending white water splashing onto the boulders on the shore. There was a quick debate over our course of action until we all—some grumbling more than others, namely Jay and Lucy—came to the mutual decision to stick close to the stream and brave the slope. We couldn’t afford to lose the river and get even more lost in this primeval wilderness.
We began our descent down, the slope’s steepness forcing us to a slow crawl. The terrain was too steep to stand upright on, so—more than once—we were forced to slide on our asses or crawl backwards. But, without raptors in hot pursuit, there were no repeats of Camilo’s brief swim, and—after what felt like hours—we were back on level ground. By the time I made it down, I had a new collection of tears and rips on my clothes. I rubbed my palms together, trying to brush the dirt off my skin.
“Here,” Amber said, passing a half-empty water bottle to Camilo and I. “This is the last I have. Drink up.”
“No thanks,” I said, since my bees could fetch me any water I needed.
Meanwhile, Camilo greedily drank it all down. “What?” he asked as we looked at him. “I’m thirsty.”
“I hope it lasts in this heat,” Amber muttered.
“It will cool down tonight,” he said.
“In this humidity?” she scoffed.
Camilo shrugged, but didn’t contend the point. The environment around us was more humid than I had ever felt in California—maybe more humid than California had been for millions of years. Everyone but me were coated in sweat, and I hoped our water would last until we found the delta…
“Fuck!” Hannah cursed ahead of us. I exchanged glances with Camilo and Amber as we rushed up to meet her.
Instead of the delta, dark water now greeted us. A waterlogged swamp stretched as far as I could see. Horsetails choked its algae-slicked water, while tall cypress trees contributed to a dense and dark canopy above us. More concerningly, however, was the herd of Edmontosaurus grazing off the cypress branches. They trudged through the yards-deep water like it was nothing but a muddy puddle.
I took a step back, preparing myself for the huge herbivores to be gripped with a sudden violence and charge us—just like the Triceratops and Dakotaraptors had. I looked around at my classmates, as expressions of concern and panic spread through our group.
But nothing happened. If any of the Edmontosaurus even cared that we were here, they didn’t show it. They grazed peacefully—as if nothing bad at all had happened in the last few hours. However, dark red gashes on the brown and yellow mottled flanks of a few hinted that they hadn’t been entirely unaffected. Whatever had happened affected them just as much as the other animals we’d seen.
But, at least—whatever it was—was over now. My theory about the high-pitched noise seemed to ring true. A small comfort in a prehistoric jungle… One I could only hope would last.
“What do we do?” Lucy murmured, on the verge of tears.
“What if…” Daniel started, and I braced myself for something stupid. “…we built a boat,” he finished.
Everyone was quiet for a few moments.
“A raft isn’t that bad of an idea…” Camilo’s small voice broke the silence.
“No,” Hannah said. “And not just because that’s a really stupid idea,”—she pointed at a log drifting in the water—“but I really don’t want to get in the water here.”
Now that she had pointed it out, I inspected the log more closely. And, at least for a moment, it looked just like that; a muddy log. However—just like the moment you realize that the leaf in the hallway in front of you isn’t a leaf but actually a cockroach—I realized that logs don’t have eyes. Eyes, a scaly, ridged back, and nostrils on the end of a long toothy snout resolved themselves to reveal…
Something that looked pretty much exactly like a normal crocodile.
As recognition swept through the group, we all backed away from the shoreline. But, even so, I couldn’t help but feel comforted by the creature as it slowly drifted away from us. It was something so… normal, so modern compared to the dinosaurs. Around us, the Edmontosaurus continued to rip entire branches clean of needles—their presence strange and alien in contrast.
It was almost bittersweet to see the crocodile disappear under the muddy water.
“So what now?” Lucy moaned, tears fully running down her face now.
“This is messed up,” Jay said. “Just when I thought this school year couldn’t get any worse. They can’t even get a class trip right.”
For a moment, I just stared at the giant dinosaurs munching undisturbed on the branches. Just then, it hit me that the sky had grown a lot darker than since we started our trek—bruising from orange to purple.
“Now,” Hannah started, side-eyeing Lucy and Jay, “we need to find shelter.” She looked away from the duo, instead scouting our surroundings: the swamp lay to one side, while the slope rose into tree-studded hills around us—its forests thick enough that we could only barely make out a few distinct hillsides. Pointing up one of the hills, she continued, “Let’s try up there. Archean said we were supposed to go to the Expedition Center. It was up a hill, so we could be close.”
When her suggestion didn’t gain an immediate response, she added, “If not, it could give us a better vantage point to figure out where we are. It’s going to be dark, and the Expedition Center is our best bet. There would be food, water, maybe even other people.”
No one had any better ideas. After all, it was either that, or retracing our path along the river. Our exhaustion almost tangible in the air, we started the slow climb up one of the hillsides.
Beyond the ruggedness of the hill—which would suddenly manifest sheer cliffs and huge boulders, quickly forcing us to try a different path upwards—the thick undergrowth slowed down our trek. At best, we struggled through a thick patch of ferns—hoping no one would trip and fall, sliding a few yards back down the hill. At worst, however, a dense thicket of cycads blocked our push forward, yet again forcing us to find a new path to the top.
I still had no clue how much of our climb remained when I heard Daniel shout from ahead. “Found something!”
A new energy surged through our group as we clustered around him. My gaze followed his pointing finger. “I think… it’s a cave!” he exclaimed.
It was difficult to make it out in the dim twilight, made even darker by the thick canopy above us. Yet, under the thin light of the sun—which was barely more than a small red ball setting behind a distant mountain—I saw a large dark hole on the edge of the hillside, ominous and beckoning all at once.
“I thought this was an artificial ecosystem…” Hannah muttered as she stepped toward it. “Why would they design a fake cave?”
I heard a click. Then, a sudden bright, white light illuminated the area in front of her. She had a… flashlight? Maybe it had paid off to come prepared, after all… Now, the light washed over the cave—revealing a wide, gaping entrance.
“Let’s check it out…” Hannah said. She walked up to the cave, taking each step with care, while the rest of us followed close behind. Once she made it inside, she cast her flashlight about—its light guiding us deeper into the rock walls of the cave. But the cave wasn’t deep, and—after a solid twist through the earth—we came upon a metal door.
“IMAGO Personnel Emergency Access,” Hannah read aloud, focusing her light on the sign. A big red triangle sat above the words, with the Extinction Refuge’s logo—DNA helices merging with the shape of a phoenix—inside it.
“Try that,” Amber said, pointing at a small metal keypad to the side of the door.
Hannah punched a couple of buttons, but there was no response—not as much as a beep to indicate that it was doing something.
“I don’t think it’s powered,” Hannah said.
Daniel strode toward the door and started hammering at it. “Come on, anyone there?” he shouted at it. “Open up!”
Lucy and Jay joined in, pounding at the door. At the same time, Camilo gave me a strange, sort of haunted look. He seemed… lost. As he stared into the air, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was picturing an alternate world where we had tried to get out of this mess using our powers. Then, he turned to the door, slamming his fists against it alongside the others.
But, if there was anyone listening on the other side, there was no sign of it. Nothing but the weak echo of our own pounding responded back to us. The door remained stubbornly closed, which was somehow more frustrating than the cold rock walls around us. At least those didn’t give the tantalizing promise of an escape…
I glanced at the growing dark behind us. As the sun crept below the horizon, the hint of a deeper night than I had ever known emerged. Screeches, hoots, and bellows of things hidden in the dark created a prehistoric, alien orchestra in the forest just outside the cave. It reminded me that we weren’t alone in these woods. Our hammering on the door would do little more than let the entire forest know where we were.
It was a realization that crept through all of us, transforming impotent anger and desperation into creeping terror as the last glimmers of sunlight faded—replaced only by the cold white light of Hannah’s flashlight. Daniel was the last one to give up, and he slumped down against the door with a tangible exhaustion.
The door would not open.