A bone-chilling male reptilian roar met the female’s sizzling hot hiss as I dragged Dharma over a landscape of gooey ivory boulders and out the other side of the nest. I was so winded I could barely inhale, and my leg muscles felt like liquid lead.

Staggering twenty paces from the hole, I collapsed with Dharma in my arms, completely spent.

Having circled the nest, the male croc now stood between us and the cliffs, its raised head towering three stories, its golden-yellow eyes glistening in the late afternoon sun. Its jaws remained half open and motionless; its upper fangs, set below the snout, were twisted outside the mouth like a briar patch, each tooth as long as my arm. No longer downwind of us, the monster seemed unsure of our location, and though the tip of its twelve-foot skull remained poised less than one of its body lengths away, ABE warned me not to move, that its vision was sensitive to motion.

The megacroc snorted the air, each inhalation accompanied by a hollow gurgling growl. I remained frozen in place, even as my eyes tracked something hovering in the air behind the creature—a glint of sunlight?

To my horror, Dharma expelled a low wail and it was Game Over.

The croc roared, its massive head turning toward us—as a shrill sound blotted out my hearing and caused the beast to tremble. As I watched in stunned confusion, the croc’s stomach expanded outward, its torso bloating, as if it were inflating … and then sixty tons of crocodilian insides suddenly, unexplainably, burst out of either side of its belly, the sonic detonation splattering internal organs across the beach.

What happened next? To be honest, I’m not sure. I was dazed, lying in blood and innards, my head buzzing, my hearing replaced with an incessant ringing. In the silent aftermath, a cavalry of tentacles snaked around my body and Dharma’s waist and suddenly we were bounding across the open beach, heading for the cliffs.

I must have lost consciousness, for when I reopened my eyes we were standing before the boulders marking the base of the rise. Oscar appeared to be engaging its breathing organ, tooting the device like a cephalopod ram’s horn, though I heard only my shrill silence.

In my delirium, I saw two unusually shaped rocks set in a natural recess animate into a whirlwind of tentacles. The three camouflaged cephalopeds quickly untangled, allowing Oscar to pass, my guardian squid hauling Dharma and me through the narrow cave entrance and into the darkness.

Chapter 24

24

To be great is to go on. To go on to be far. To be far is to return.

—LAO TZU, Tao Te Ching