Episode 06 River of Fire

  Preston Lost stood on the brink.

  Before and below him was a large, armed camp surrounded by a ditch and a wooden palisade. A field of tents and cabins surrounded a central fortress of stone buildings. Above rose a stone tower. Black banners and pennants displayed an emblem of a stylized dragon circling and consuming the many-rayed red sun.

  A flying disk was seated atop the tower. It looked like the hood of a strange and giant mushroom. He saw no evidence of damage: perhaps this was the same flying disk he had shot yesterday, now repaired. Perhaps it was another.

  He turned. In the opposite direction was a tall, harsh mountain slope of pine trees, frost and snow. Above this loomed a smoking volcano cone. A growing black cloud filled the sky above it.

  From one side came the sound of hunting horns. One arm of the pursuit, perhaps running all night as he had done, had circled the mountain to approach from the opposite direction, and cut off any flight to the north.

  To the south an open strip of tall grass separated the edge of the forest from the brink of the cliff. Here he could see, silhouetted against the morning sky, tall and broad silhouettes marching with sinister, deliberate, tireless steps toward him. In their hands were wands they leaned upon. They either wore headgear shaped like antlers, or they grew antlers. If so, this was yet another race of men different from the gray men or the motley men. The grass reached up to their knees.

  Preston looked at the grass around him. It was above his waist. These creatures were gargantuan, twelve or fourteen feet tall.

  The rustling in the grass around the Gargantuans betrayed the motions of shorter creatures, perhaps hounds, perhaps houndsmen.

  Preston turned with a snarl to Smiley the simian panting next to him. "Here I thought you had scented or sensed some danger you were going to lead me around. Now we are trapped against the cliff. Why did I trust a big red monkey?"

  Smiley looked up, and his ears drooped at the tone of voice. Smiley was weary from the all-night run, but his eyes were still bright. It was not clear if he understood the situation, or understood Preston's fear, but he showed his fangs and chattered gaily, and then leaped away through the tall grass, and was lost to sight.

  "Go on! A rat deserting a sinking ship…" growled Preston angrily. He stepped to the edge of the cliff, and peered down the dizzying, sheer slope. He measured the distance to the treetops below with his eyes, wondering if he had time to rappel down the cliff face.

  There was fifty feet of parachute cord in his survival pack. It was not long enough. Perhaps he could cannibalize the handle of his steel drinking cup to act as a piton. But the idea of dangling from the handle of a cup hammered into the rock face did not thrill him. Not while clinging precariously above what was obviously a military camp.

  Meanwhile, he was still murmuring to himself. "I fed you! You could have stuck around and flung poo at them or something."

  A noise behind him made him turn. Smiley was halfway up a tree, gibbering and gesturing. Smiley saw him looking, scampered a short way, looked back.

  "Am I dumb enough to follow you again, after you led me here?" He kicked a pebble over the brink. In the deceptive twilight, the fall was twice what he first had guessed. He sighed. "Yeah, I guess I am."

  Smiley led. As before, Preston alternated jogging and sprinting. Sweat loosened his bandages, and his cuts began to sting and bleed.

  Fatigue was building. He fell into a sort of walking daze. The sounds and signs of pursuit grew steadily closer as he climbed.

  Two hours later, the slope steepened. His legs were leaden. But his will was iron. He forced himself to continue, jogging and walking.

  An hour after that, chill bit him. Snow was on the ground. Around him the trees were no longer leafy palms, but crabby pines. He saw he was leaving footprints.

  "Come on, Smiley," he said to the simian. "This might not fool a hound's nose, but it will tire out any huntsman trying to climb after." And he shimmied up the tree.

  Perhaps it was the novelty of using a different group of muscles, but he got his second wind. For the next few miles, the going was slow but steady. The forest was dense enough to go from tree to tree. Sticky sap coated him. Pine needles clung to his sweat.

  Twice he made a daring leap rather than circle back to find a narrower gap to cross. Both times he broke branches and bruised himself, and promised himself not to do that again.

  Smiley now hopped back to Preston, and pulled on his hair, and gibbered excitedly. The little simian clearly had a firm idea of which way he wanted Preston to go.

  "Why not?" muttered Preston. "Fall through a hole in the sky, ram my crate into a dinosaur, get shot at by flying saucer men, follow a monkey."

  Preston smelled smoke. He glanced up. The volcano cone above was belching like a factory chimney. Other plumes of black smoke issued from cracks and fissures lower down the slope. He was not imagining the burnt smell in the air could cover his scent, only that the hounds might grow hard to manage. No dog wanted to go into a fire.

  Time passed. The red sun climbed toward noon, but the light never grew strong. Pursuit grew loud. He heard barking, and a chattering like that of a monkey troop disturbed. Had the pine needles been thinner, he doubtless would have been in eyesight of the hunters.

  Preston followed Smiley from tree to tree uphill and down, but always toward the volcano cone dominating the sky above. Suddenly the trees stopped. There was a wide meadow sloping up and away. On the far side, beyond the crest, were more trees. There was no way to cross the gap without exposing himself to hostile eyes.

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  Preston clung to an upper branch, bruised, and breathing heavily, his eyes and arms aching with fatigue. Smiley chirruped at him, tugging, dancing, and pointing. "You want me to cross the meadow? Leave my footprints all over, where everyone can see? What is the hurry?"

  Smiley jabbered frantically.

  Preston squinted. What was frightening Smiley? He sniffed. The scent of burning stone was also mingled with the smell of burning wood. More plumes of smoke were rising up than had been an hour ago.

  He uttered an oath. "We are in a forest fire, aren't we?"

  Most of the smoke, at the moment, seemed to be coming from a point just behind the ridge of the slope ahead.

  But Smiley was already scampering down the trunk.

  Preston decided to trust the instincts of the beast. Animals knew what direction to flee when a forest fire was spreading.

  Down he went.

  Smiley went pelting rapidly over the snow of the open meadow. Crazily, he was heading toward the high crest, that selfsame crest pouring so much smoke into the air.

  Preston sprinted after the running red simian.

  A sound of baying and a chattering clamor rose up from the trees behind him as he struggled up the slippery white slope. Smiley disappeared across the top of the crest ahead while Preston was still laboring through the clinging snow a hundred yards behind him. The soft and yielding surface clung as if with freezing fingers to his toes and ankles each time he moved his boots. Smiley appeared again, his furry red head popping above the skyline. His wide gold eyes seemed even wider in their raccoon rings. He hooted, urging Preston onward.

  Preston wondered at himself. He could see the black smoke hanging like a curtain just beyond the crest toward which he ran. But his every trained instinct told him that Smiley would not run into a forest fire, no, not even when pursued by hounds. Animals simply did not act that way.

  But there was no time for second thoughts. Fifty yards. Ten. He could hear the pursuit crunching in the snow behind him, close enough to be clearly audible, of quadrupeds loping. Long, blood-chilling bays rent the air.

  At the crest, the snow cover was thin, and Preston could feel solid ground beneath his boots. He turned.

  It was over a dozen beasts that were plowing and plunging through the snow drift toward him. They were not bloodhounds.

  Hounds? These monsters were bigger than ponies. The shoulder blade of the massive front legs stood taller than a grown man's head. The narrow, jackal-like skulls of the monsters were over two feet long, and most of that was snout. Massive fangs like sabers hung over the lower lip. A course mane clung to the spine and ran from neck to tail. The back legs were puny, and gave the creatures the distinctive hunched look of a hyena. The paws ended not in claws, but four hooves, one on each toe. The fur was tawny, marked with white stripes on flanks, with white mittens.

  Giant hoofed jackals. A memory from one of his many books on paleontology floated to the surface: these were mesonychids: Andrewsarchus mongoliensis.

  He remembered the scientific name because Roy Chapman Andrews, for whom the genus was named, was an American explorer, adventurer, and naturalist who had been Preston Lost's idol and mentor.

  He stood on the slope, dumbfounded with horror at their size, and at the hideous jackal-skulls, barking and yammering, with fangs longer than his forearm. Had these been the beasts he had been hoping to tire, to outdistance?

  Then he saw a stranger sight. Little red simians with raccoon masks and ringed Lemur tails were riding along in the manes of the giant hoofed jackals. Some were running lightly alongside, their smaller bodies not breaking the surface of the snow. They were the twins of Smiley. Some of them had been outfitted with harnesses, pouches, or hunting horns.

  His brain whirled. Were these trained circus monkeys whom some madman had trained to run with a hunting pack? Or were they intelligent creatures? These had been the smaller biped had had glimpsed walking next to the giants, but mistook for children.

  Taking to the trees had been a help to them, not to him.

  One of the little red simians riding a giant hoofed jackal raised its horn and blue a blast. The jackals bayed horribly. Deeper horns, no doubt carried by larger, gargantuan hands, answered from the forest, deep as the trumpeting of elephants.

  Preston, without thinking, raised his Holland & Holland to his shoulder, aimed, and shot. The monster jackal's head exploded, and the shards passed through the little rider, killing him. The roar echoed.

  Two of the jackals were spooked, and halted. Those two had riders. The other ten continued clawing up the slope.

  "Avalanche, please, God!" he said. "Otherwise, there is no way out of this."

  But no avalanche came. "Well, I might have time to reload, or might not. And there is a Gideon Bible in the survival kit. Do I die while shooting, or praying?"

  A thrown rock bounced painfully against the back of his skull. Smiley beckoned, turned, fled over the slope, and scampered away.

  "Fine. I'll die running after a monkey. Wonder what that says about how I've lived."

  So Preston followed. Once over the ridge, he saw what lay beyond.

  This valley was smaller, less than a hundred yards to the next crest, which was snowy and rocky and thick with pine trees. The crease in the center of the valley was filled with smoke. The show had melted. The puddles steamed. Like a river down the spine of the valley was a tongue of lava. It was oozing, black as night, and cracks broke through the surface like blood through a scab, but the blood was red-hot molten rock.

  Downstream, where the lava was still in motion, the forest fire was roaring merrily. Here, where black crust had formed, all the trees within yards of the lava flow had burned to ash or stood like smoldering corpses, upright husks black as burnt matchsticks. The taller trees had crumbled into a mixture of white ash and black dappled with red coals that panted and breathed like living things.

  Smiley ran downslope and straight toward the lava stream.

  Insanity. A barefoot monkey could not cross molten lava. As well walk through a blast furnace. The temperature was above a thousand degrees.

  Where the lava skin was broken, the liquid rock was bright, and superheated plumes were visible as shadows shivering in the air. These spots could not even be approached without risking severe burns unless the wind was behind him.

  This was not merely a small channel of lava, but a river. It was a black and cracked tube three yards high and ten or twenty yards across. It looked like some headless and horrible heaving worm of fire slowly inching its way across the valley bottom, burning all before it.

  It was insanity to go, and certain death to stay.

  Preston Lost was not a cautious man: he went.

  A plume of smoke from the burning trees nearby made him cough. His eyes watered but he dared not blink. He soaked a handkerchief in packet of water, and tied it over his mouth and nose.

  Where was the red monkey? Preston ran on, as the air grew hot and hotter.

  As he got closer to the valley floor, the smoke grew thick, blinding him. He heard the crackling of burning trees, saw the floating sparks like fireflies, smelled the scent of burning pine and molten rock.

  Then, suddenly, the air was cool and fresh. The smoke was gone.

  Preston looked, and froze. His legs were weak. Astonishment paralyzed him.

  The river of lava was parted neatly, and he had walked into the middle of it. A wall of molten lava was upright, looming above him, to his left. The bare ground was cool underfoot. A few paces away, a second wall of lava was looming. This wall was not the black skin of cooling lava, but the raw, red-hot liquid that should have burned him like bread in a toaster.

  Nothing was holding the liquid rock back. Nothing was halting the plumes of superheated air which should have incinerated him.

  He was safe in the middle of a river of molten rock.

  It was impossible.