Chapter 4
Charlie
I cried out as my boots skidded on loose gravel. Compacted earth and embedded rock sheared away inches from my feet, tumbling into a chasm that swallowed the debris whole. My arms windmilled as my heel slipped over the edge, and I scrambled back on my hands, gasping.
A massive sinkhole yawned open where I'd been standing two seconds ago.
I covered my mouth with my elbow as a cloud of choking dust surrounded me.
After the landslide stopped and the haze settled, I crawled on my hands and knees to the edge of the pit and looked down into the sinkhole.
I gasped.
Holy shit! I was right. This is a pitfall. The bottom was covered in bones. But the cave-in had also exposed more bones in the walls of the natural well.
Layer upon layer of bones. Entire skeletal segments. Thick femurs. Rib arcs shaped like bridge struts. And below the large skull I'd been excavating was a second skull.
I scrambled to my kit bag and grabbed my field camera. Returning to the edge, I snapped photos from every angle, including a selfie with the massive skull in the background and me grinning like I'd shot one too many tequilas.
This was evidence of what I'd found.
Me. Charlie Macintyre. Unknown paleontologist from Brisbane.
Holy shit, this is huge.
Two carnivore skulls were embedded in the pitfall wall. The one I'd found earlier this morning was bigger than Banjo. This second one was smaller. Maybe juvenile.
Oh my God. Please let it be a baby dinosaur.
My mind went crazy, imagining what had happened here.
The smaller dinosaur fell into the pit. The larger one that was chasing it dropped into the hole, too.
Both got stuck and died. However, after the big one's flesh decayed away, the bones remained.
The skeleton became a form of scaffolding, and over the years dirt accumulated over the bones, eventually covering the dinosaur remains and the pit altogether.
And I'm the lucky paleontologist who found it.
Holy shit! This is incredible!
The large skull was different enough in shape that my brain lit up with species possibilities.
My chest tightened. I'd just found a brand-new fossil bed. And these two skeletons weren't just the fossilized remains of lone wanderers, they were another species that no one had discovered in this area before.
The urge to cheer and whoop for joy was huge. But I bit my tongue. I needed to work this site as quickly as possible before Doug set his sights on the skulls.
My mind raced with the implications. The grant proposals. The published paper that could finally put me on the paleontology map. I could finally step out of Doug's shadow and Marcus Webb's lies, and into my own damn career.
I glanced toward the site office.
Still no sign of Doug. Thank God!
If he kept to his usual pattern, I wouldn't see him for at least another three hours. Good. I had to get down into the pit and take photos before he surfaced.
Doug probably still hadn't realized that the stratigraphy of this site didn't match the details I'd referenced in my pitch proposal.
Which was probably a good thing. I didn't need him questioning my research, and he definitely hadn't noticed what the collapse had just revealed - that the fossil site I'd been working on for days was circular in shape. I hadn't either, until now.
A flicker of light on the western horizon caught my attention. Lightning burst beneath a massive cumulonimbus cloud that was as black as soot. Shit, a storm was brewing. There was plenty of evidence around this area to prove this ground had suffered its share of brutal Outback downpours.
The last thing I needed was torrential rain to wash away my discovery of the decade.
I sprinted around the rim of my excavation pit, past the idling generator and the old bus site office, not slowing until I reached my tent on the far side. Working in stealth mode, I unzipped the flap and ducked inside.
The air was so hot it was hard to breathe. As I tugged my kit out from behind my camp bed, my heart pounded with exhilaration. But underneath that rush was my dread of Doug swooping in to steal my glory, just like Marcus had.
I'd been doing all the work, but as Doug had mentioned at least a dozen times since we left Brisbane ten days ago, without the funding he'd acquired for this exploratory dig, I wouldn't be here at all.
Did that mean he had the right to claim this is his?
Hell no. It's mine. My idea. My research. My hard work.
Especially after my previous dig supervisor, Dr. Marcus Webb, had stolen my work four years ago.
By the time I realized what he’d done, he'd published a paper on the discovery, claimed a government grant, and gotten a bloody speaking tour showcasing the Burrinjuck theropod find.
He had connections, reputation, and institutional power.
I was just his twenty-eight-year-old researcher with no proof that I'd found that dinosaur, except my field notes.
I wasn't letting that happen again.
I tugged out my extra-long rope ladder that I always carried. It was a habit born after a dig site in the Northern Territory went deeper than I could reach, and the student who had replaced me on that site made the discovery of the season.
My rope ladder was now a permanent fixture in my kit.
Tucking the bulky rope ladder under my arm, I rezipped my tent. The last thing I needed was a scorpion or brown snake in my bed in the middle of the night. Holding my breath, I glanced at the site office again. Still no sign of Doug.
Not that I was surprised. He wasn't interested in my dig site at all.
Since we'd arrived at this site, he'd disappeared inside the bus, and every time I tried to update him on my progress, he waved me off with a distracted nod or asked me to "summarize it later.
" He was either playing blackjack on his computer or flirting with the university's funding rep via satellite email.
Or, more likely, he was still asleep in the comfort of his real bed, in the cool air-conditioning.
Definitely not digging. Definitely not sweating.
Giving the site office a wide berth, I raced back to the edge of the sinkhole. A rolling rumble filled the silence, and, groaning, I scanned the western horizon again.
No. No. No. That storm cloud had doubled in size in ten minutes.
Shit! That wasn't good.
The cave-in I'd created meant that this pit, which had been concealed for decades or even centuries, was now exposed to the elements. We had a canopy to protect us from the sun and light rain, but it would be useless against a torrential flow of water.
Adrenaline buzzed through my veins as I hammered two anchor spikes into the hardened clay near the edge of the pit. I hooked the ladder onto the spikes and gave it a solid tug.
It held.
I glanced toward the bus. Still no Doug.
Perfect.
I swung a leg over the edge and began to descend. Hot dry air rose beneath me, and my heart raced at the secrets I was about to uncover.
Three rungs down, I paused at the smaller skull, and my breath hitched.
It had teeth. Oh my God. This is amazing.
Adjusting my grip on the ladder, I snapped a dozen photos.
I couldn't yet tell whether the remains belonged to a baby dinosaur or a smaller species altogether, but what I could tell was that most of the skeleton was intact, if not all of it.
Holy shit. I was right about this site. And this was my dig site.
No, not just my dig site. This discovery could rewrite the history books.
And Doug Walker could go screw himself if he thought he was taking credit for it. Especially if this skull turned out to be a dinosaur that had never been found in this region before.
I scanned the bones scattered below, and with every photo I took, my heart thumped harder. The base looked solid enough and dry, but faint sediment trails suggested water still flowed through the pit from time to time.
I shoved my ponytail over my shoulder, hooked the camera strap around my neck and climbed deeper. The ladder creaked beneath me, and the edges above crumbled as the ladder ropes shifted across the dirt, showering sediment onto my hat.
About halfway down, I found a tiny skull near the curve of a buried femur.
I leaned closer. That wasn't a dinosaur bone. It was a rodent skull.
Beside it lay a ribcage no bigger than my hand, perfectly arched like a fallen leaf. A rabbit, maybe? Or a bandicoot?
Further to the left, a long snake skeleton lay coiled between two layers of silt.
Wow.
There were thousands of bones down here. Some were so old they were fossilized into stone. Tiny claws. Hollow bird bones. Jawbones the size of grapes.
This wasn't just a prehistoric site frozen in time.
It was still catching victims.
A living trap that had claimed the desperate, the unlucky, the predator, and the prey for thousands of years. Maybe millions.
Halfway down, I stopped again. Nestled in a shallow depression lay another massive skull with teeth as big as daggers. There was a split in the cranium above the eye socket, and the rib cage splayed outward from the base of the skull in a fan of bone.
The quality of the find stole the breath from my lungs.
These bones had been protected from the elements.
The skeletons would be perfectly preserved and could go straight into a museum.
I imagined my name printed on each card detailing the species and how I had discovered them.
Dr. Charlie Macintyre. Not "Junior Researcher to Professor Doug Walker.
" Not "that girl from Brisbane who claimed Dr. Marcus Webb had stolen her discovery.
Just my name. My work. My research. In the history books forever.
My skin tingled at how good that sounded.
Everyone who had tried to turn me against my career choice would regret their unwanted opinions.
Well, not everyone. My older sisters never said sorry about anything.
And Mom would finally have to admit that my career choice was way better than being a wife and a mom, like she tried to force onto me with every single phone call.
This was my shot. One big find. That's all I'd needed. One big, career-defining, impossible-to-ignore discovery.
And I'd found it.
I reached for the camera again, and with my heart pounding, took over a dozen photos of the giant skull.
This skull belonged in a museum and the textbooks.
And if Doug tried to claim ownership of this discovery, I'd bury him in the sediment next to it.
Not really.
Possibly.
Grinning like a crazy woman, I aimed the camera down into the pit and snapped photos of what could be the biggest discovery the University of Queensland had had in decades, if ever.
After hooking the camera strap around my neck, I continued down the ladder.
The bottom was nearly twenty feet down, deeper than I'd realized.
I frowned at the way the wall sloped outward near the base, shaping it similarly to a giant Bunsen burner bottle.
Maybe water had once swirled around the lower section like a whirlpool, carving away the soft soil.
Erosion halfway down looked fresh, too. Could be from last summer's floods.
Yet the massive skull near the top remained intact.
Erosion from recent rainfall could explain why I'd found that enormous fossil so easily, not that Doug needed to know that detail.
I ran my hand across the wall and it crumbled under my touch. The clay was soft. Unstable. This pit was fragile. And that made excavation dangerous. I'd already seen how easily the upper layer had collapsed after I'd knocked away a chunk of dirt.
I glanced across the pit. The far wall was barely two feet thick. Not a lot of earth separated this discovery from the ravine beyond. Now that I'd reopened the pit, one heavy storm could take out the whole damn side, and everything in it could tumble into the dry creek bed below.
My boots hit the bottom with a soft crunch.
The floor was studded with bone fragments and compacted sediment that shifted slightly under my weight.
I picked my way carefully across the fossil-strewn ground toward a partially buried skull near the centre.
Its jagged teeth were splayed in a permanent snarl.
I crouched to get a better look, my fingers working carefully to brush away loose sediment.
The bone structure suggested a carnivore, but I needed to see more of the jaw to be certain.
The teeth were unusual: curved and serrated in a way I hadn't seen before. My breath caught as I leaned in closer, squinting at the fossilized enamel.
Out of the corner of my eye, a shadow shifted in the wall behind me.
I turned just in time to see a hole in the pit wall darken. Then a thick, scaled body emerged from the hole. A six foot long brown snake poured from the crevice in one smooth, muscular wave and hit the ground with a dull thud just a few feet from me.
I screamed and scrambled backward, slipping in the loose dirt and scattered bones.
"Shit. Shit. Shit!" My boot caught on a femur and I windmilled my arms for balance, trying not to fall.
My heart hammered against my ribs so hard, it pulsed in my throat.
The snake's head rose, tongue flicking out to taste the air between us.
Shrieking, I bolted for the ladder.
Halfway there, I risked a glance over my shoulder.
The snake was slithering straight for me, its body rippling in smooth, terrifying waves across the ancient bones.