Law of the Jungle Read online

  LAW t°hfe JUGGLE

  DAVE SMEDS

  Illustrations by Max Douglas

  BYRON PREISS MULTIMEDIA COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK

  BERKLEY BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

  CHAPTER 1

  The Tyrannosaurus rex crashed into the clearing, jaws snapping. A young man—more of a boy, really, dressed in nothing more than a loincloth—scampered in front of her, with so little lead that the gust of the meat-eater’s breath chilled the sweat on his supple young back. Now that they were in the open, the dinosaur could sprint, and would soon overtake her prey.

  Just as the animal hit her full stride, a thick cord rose from the grass behind the fleeing teenager and was pulled taut. The tyrannosaur’s ankle struck it, and down the beast went, flailing her ridiculously undersized arms. The huge body slammed to the earth.

  Dazed, the gray-green theropod barely shifted as half a dozen powerful grown men raced from their hiding places in the brush and wrapped additional ropes around her huge, ostrichlike feet and around her snout to keep her vicious teeth in check. The savages darted away before a claw could swing their way and eviscerate them. They tugged in the direction the youth had been running.

  A stone’s throw away, the clearing ended at a steep slope.

  The dinosaur blinked, roared, and began to thrash. One man was yanked off balance. Another eight men joined the first six and continued pulling. The boy lent his effort as well.

  The eight-ton monster need only have remained still and the men would have been hard-pressed to drag her massive body any distance at all, but her wriggling helped scoot it

  over the bedewed grass toward the slope. She glared at her tormentors, far too eager to nip one or ten of them to notice the precipice.

  Under thick, tropical fronds at the edge of the clearing, a final pair of men waited, one a coppery-skinned, long-nosed figure like those fighting the dinosaur, the other a tanned blond in a set of cut-off Levi’s and sandals.

  The native hefted his spear. “A jab through the eye and we are rid of her, Lord Ka-Zar,” he said, his words rendered in a gutteral language full of sharp breaks.

  “Have you no confidence in your men, Tongah?” Ka-Zar asked in the same tongue.

  “Of course I do. Did you not see how magnificently they brought down the longtail?”

  “Exactly,” said the blond. “So no spears. Not unless they lose their grip on those ropes,” Ka-Zar could hardly blame Tongah or his people for struggling against his strange requests. Spare the life of a longtail? Counter-intuitive. But he had to insist. This part of the Savage Land was becoming overrun with large herbivores. Only predators as large as the T. rex could assure ecological balance. Besides, Ka-Zar merely wanted the animal out of the way so he and the Fall People could continue their mission. If they were actually hunting for food, it might be a different story. But the Fall People had no shortage of food this year.

  The main party of men worked their way over to the slope’s edge. At the last moment, the tyrannosaur dug for purchase in the loose soil, resulting in a primal tug-of-war across the gap. Tongah’s warriors eyed the hard boulders at the bottom of the slope and tightened their grips, pulling until their muscles stood out in corded ripples. The creature roared one, two, three times. A last surge of effort from the humans sent her careening over the edge. Down tumbled the tyran-nosaur and the trailing ends of the ropes.

  The beast eventually came to rest awkwardly amid the boulders, flattening a mound of creek shrubs. She roared in pain. Ka-Zar worried she might have suffered a broken spine or major injury, but she rolled, twisted, and began pulling at the ropes entangling her legs. She soon broke free and stood up.

  She didn’t charge. The scrabbly ground made climbing back up impractical, and the rex had to have realized that. She rumbled off downstream, growling. The men jeered at her, tossed stones, laughed.

  The monster would eventually find a spot where she could mount the banks, but to return to the clearing would take her an hour or more. By then, the tribesmen would be gone.

  Ka-Zar and Tongah greeted the victors as they recrossed the chasm on the remaining log. The teenager who had baited the trap found himself the center of attention.

  “You were not supposed to lead the beast so closely, Im-mono,” chided the youth’s father, shaking his head so emphatically the long stripe of hair along the center of his scalp flapped from side to side.

  “The longtail was faster than I imagined,” Immono said. His immature Adam’s apple fluttered at his throat, and he turned so pale Ka-Zar stepped back in order to avoid the splatter should the lad abruptly lose his breakfast. Delayed fear. A natural, healthy response. What counted was that during the chase, he had remained calm and executed his role in a manner that brought success.

  “You bring honor to your family, Immono,” Ka-Zar said, squeezing the shoulders of both sire and offspring. “You will have plenty to talk about at the storytelling fires tonight. Tonight, and many nights to come.”

  “Thank you, Lord Ka-Zar,” the young man said, and beamed.

  “And,” Ka-Zar said, rubbing his palms together, “now that we’re finally, rid of that, nuisance, we can get back to following this trail.”

  The Lord of the Savage Land pointed to a cluster of footprints along the top of the bluff, not far from those created in the scuffle with the dinosaur. Some bore the outlines of human feet. One set was distorted in a vaguely wolflike pattern, complete with clawed toes. A final set looked like they had been made by a giant frog.

  Ka-Zar bent down, touched the spoor, and frowned. Half a day old now, and no fresher thanks to that T. rex. Her arrival was probably coincidental, but either way, the trackers had been delayed while they dealt with her, and the small hope they had had of catching up with their quarry had grown ever more faint.

  But what was there to do but make the attempt? “This way,” he said, leading the men of the Fall People into the jungle.

  The tracks took them up along one side of the little gorge where they had lured the dinosaur. The riot of footprints were plainly etched in the dirt. Small branches lay broken, the ends hanging by shreds of bark. The grass was still flat where it had been trampled. Even if Ka-Zar had been raised entirely in England as Lord Kevin Plunder and never escaped the protected, genteel lifestyle his cousins endured, he would have been able to follow a path such as this. His quarry had not tried to disguise where they had gone. They had chosen to flee as fast as possible, eliminating the delay inherent in avoiding soft ground or seeking out streams that would wash away spoor. This route made use of an animal trail, so that it had not even been necessary to hack away vines and fronds.

  Tongah grunted and pointed to a shadow in a clump of grass. He picked up a broken leather necklace. “Ararisa,” he said, caressing the pearly mussel shell that decorated the loop. * •

  Ka-Zar nodded. Ararisa Was one of the three members of the Fall People who had been kidnapped in the night raid. Her mate Kombo had been among those killed by the attackers.

  At least the children had been spared. That was the only silver lining in the recent depredations. The raiders sought adults. And they wanted them alive if possible—Kombo apparently had been too quick for them, and had put up too much of a fight.

  A mile up the slope, they came to a broad swath of volcanic rock. The trail vanished upon the dark, pitted surface, one of many scars from the catastrophic upheavals the Savage Land had survived in recent years. Tongah’s warriors combed the perimeter of the area, but shook their heads. It was as if their quarry had vanished into the air.

  Ka-Zar was sure they had.

  Young Immono confirmed it. “Look!” he called. Ka-Zar ambled over to a crevice near the center of the flow field, and looked down where the boy pointed.


  “Leatherwing droppings,” he said. Pteranodon, or some other type of pterosaur, had left the pungent gift. “Like the last time.”

  Ka-Zar gazed skyward, toward the umbrella of clouds that perpetually hung over his realm. Out over the great central lake he spotted a flock of leaf-tailed rhamphorhynchus and several puffin-beaked dimorphodons. Over the foothills to his left he saw a pair of condors gliding the thermals. The creatures belonged there. They were merely going about their business of slurping up fish from the lake or carrion from the upland meadows. But Ka-Zar knew that earlier in the day he would have seen particularly large flying reptiles with saddles and riders, carrying away Ararisa and the two grown cousins who had shared the hut along with her late husband and their children. ?

  Again. Ka-Zar clenched his teeth until the enamel threatened to crack. This search party had met with failure more profound than the previous one. Two days earlier, when a pair of Fall People brothers had been snatched from their raft while spear-fishing in the river near the village, sharp-eyed observers had seen the kidnappers and their winged mounts pause to rest on an islet out in the lake. The stygian blackness of . Savage Land night had concealed where they went from there, but at least they had been seen. Should those raiders turn up in a village, some among the Fall People would recognize them.

  Today, nothing. Only Ararisa’s necklace to put on her empty grave. Though her abductors had taken care to carry her off alive, once their master had his way with her, she would be dead.

  “Back to the village, my friends,” Ka-Zar said. “Our vengeance will have to wait.”

  The mounting of the search, the snaring of the Tyrannosaurus rex, and the fruitless end of the chase had consumed most of the day. Twilight was nearing by the time the band of warriors slipped out of the jungle foliage into the fields of the Fall People.

  Ka-Zar frowned at the rows of tiny com stalks and the vegetable patches. He still wasn’t certain how much he should have encouraged the Fall People to take up agriculture. They had not forgotten their hunter-gatherer ways yet, but the risk was there. Once they made the shift, their culture would never be the same.

  Too many doubts. The day’s mission had been a failure, so it was all tod easy to question his lifework as well.

  Preoccupied, so close to home, tired from an ordeal that had begun at first light! with the news of the raid, he failed to notice that the parrots and bowerbirds in the trees had gone silent.

  Tongah was more alert. “Lord Ka-Zar! Beware!”

  The tribesmen flung themselves flat. Abruptly a hail of axes and spears rained down from above. Ka-Zar whirled just in time to see talons descending. He leapt to the side.

  Clever. Who would have expected a raid upon such a large group of warriors, coming so soon after the other attack? Wounded men screamed. Dust flew. Ka-Zar rolled to his feet and looked up.

  A rider on a pteranodon had Immono and had already risen above the treeline. The youth kicked, swiping upward with his knife. The alert rider spurred his mount—

  —and the flying reptile let go. Immono plummeted. “No!” Ka-Zar screamed, sprinting forward.

  He made it only four steps before a heavy weight landed on his back. His chin struck the path hard. Stars twinkled behind his eyelids.

  “The Lord of the Savage Land himself.” The exclamation grated like an obsidian knife dragged across granite, point down. The language was English. At one time, the voice had belonged to a friend. “I have been so looking forward to touching you.”

  Ka-Zar twisted, but could not free himself from the cold, scaly grip. He could see his attacker’s face, however. It was elongated, green, with a bony protrusion extending its skull backward. The face of a pteranodon grotesquely combined with that of a man.

  “Sauron,” Ka-Zar grunted.

  The monster answered with a smile. Checking to the side, it swept away Torigah, who had risen and drawn back his arm to fling his spear. Anpther warrior was sent tumbling on the other side, unable to /ekct as fast as Sauron’s long wings could whip outward. Other raiders had wheeled about on their pterosaur mounts and were keeping at bay anyone else who might try to interrupt their master at his amusement.

  Tendrils of agony sprouted deep in Ka-Zar’s body. From his spine, his heart, his joints. The strength poured from him. In seconds, even keeping his eyelids open was more than he could manage. Then, mercifully, everything went dark.

  Sharina O’Hara sprinted through the gates of the village palisade. Some of the village warriors kept pace, but none were able to pull out ahead. Not after what she had seen in the sky.

  She and her party leapt across an irrigation ditch and through a row of orchard crops into the com and vegetable fields. It was as she had feared. Raiders on winged reptiles whirled and struck at the search party that had gone out with Ka-Zar. Limp bodies lay on the ground.

  In the midst of them was the tall, blond form of her husband, pinned to the ground by a grotesque harpy, an enemy she had once thought dead.

  She was within range now. She stopped, notched an arrow, and drew back her bowstring.

  Sauron looked up, let go of Ka-Zar, and stared straight at her. Waves of nausea struck her. Something tugged at her mind, repeating a message so simple it was almost impossible to resist. Sleep, sleep, sleep.

  She released the arrow. It sailed past Sauron’s head. A clear miss, not even enough to make him flinch.

  She and the warriors beside her stumbled forward, no longer completely dazed by. his hypnotism. A wave of villagers—not just more warriors, but teens, pregnant women, children, elders—pouted through the orchard and onto the field of battle. Ahead of them raced Zabu, Ka-Zar’s sabretooth cat. Shanna had ordered him to stay and guard little Matthew, but the feline knew where he was needed most.

  Sauron hissed and took flight His squadron of raiders scattered. They vanished toward the clouds. A few arrows raced after them, but fell far short. They were gone. The growing twilight would soon swallow every trace of them.

  Zabu sent a blood-curdling roar after them. Shanna bel--lpwed even louder. It did nothing to slow the enemies down, but the outburst restored Shanna to full equilibrium. If those

  murderers returned____

  Tongah rose from the disrupted com and bent over Ka-Zar. Zabu nosed in, rolled the fallen man over, and began licking his face. By the time Shanna arrived, her husband was stirring.

  “He lives,” Tongah said.

  “Oh, my love,” Shanna said. She leaned down and kissed him, wishing him awake.

  To her joy, he did open his eyes. He stared vacantly for an instant, then focused on her features and smiled faintly. “I am a husk,” he groaned. “I’m like a fly after the spider has sucked out its juices,” The smile collapsed.

  “He feasted on your energies,” she said. “But we chased him away before he could take too much.” '

  Ka-Zar tried to raise his head to check on his fallen comrades. “How bad?”

  “Some were struck by the first hail of weapons,” Tongah

  If

  declared sadly. Still crouched beside Ka-Zar, the chief surveyed the battle site. “An axe caved in Mhogo’s skull. The others may have a chance, except... oh, no.”

  Shanna saw where he wasjooking. An entire mountain of heavy stone settled upon her heart. Fighting back the tears, she raised Ka-Zar to % sitting position so that he could see.

  Immono lay crumpYed in the com furrows, his head twisted at an impossible angle. He had freed himself from the claws of the flying reptile, but not before he had gained too much altitude to land well. He was staring sightlessly at the darkening sky.

  “Shanna...” Ka-Zar murmured.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “We need help. I’ll make the call.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE. T ear the idyllic, thickly wooded community of Salem Center in upstate New York, the summer night lay A wL gently upon the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning, a latter-day incarnation of what had once been called Professor Charles Xavier�
��s School for Gifted Youngsters. The day’s mugginess had dissipated. Mild breezes caressed beds of petunias and wafted the leaves of trees that had just thickened into the full bounty of the season. A few puffy clouds rolled by beneath the dome of stars and moon. A passerby on Greymalkin Lane would have every reason to think of the facility as the epitome of quiet, contemplative study.

  It’s amazing what good soundproofing can do.

  Deep beneath the visible portion of the building, bodies careened off the walls of the Danger Room. No silent contemplation here. Anyone treading across its threshold dared not relax their guard for a moment. If they did, they might have to pay a heavy price, in spite of the safety protocols.

  Sailing through the air came two heavily muscled men known to the world as Wolverine and the Beast. Anyone would have labelled them hairy, particularly the Beast with his thick coat of blue fur, but at the moment they seemed even more so. Behind them raced six metal tentacles crackling with enough voltage to stun an elephant. The charged corona that extended from the devices was tugging each and every whisker, curl, and eyelash within reach straight out from the follicles. The two men were haloed in fuzz.

  A feminine laugh echoed off the walls. The pair looked ridiculous. It didn’t change the fact that the situation was serious. Nothing the Danger “Room threw at its occupants was intended for their .amusement. For many years, the chamber had been the ke^ training site of the X-Men. If any group of super heroes had gone to greater measures to regularly challenge their powers, reflexes, and determination, they had probably swiped the idea from this mightiest of obstacle courses.

  “Don’t slow down now, Comball!” Wolverine shouted.

  He was speaking to the youngest occupant of the room. Sam Guthrie, or Cannonball—Comball only to a certain rough, gruff, mannerless elder X-Man—was rocketing across the room. The Beast and Wolverine were his passengers, surfing atop the kinetic envelope that surrounded the youth. He had just saved them from the initial thrust of the tentacles.

  In fact, Cannonball was slowing down. He hadn’t much choice. The added weight was not the problem. The other wall was. If he sped up any more, he wouldn’t be able to stop in time. They were safe enough inside his bubble of power, but the impact of the wall would likely knock him for a loop and give the Danger Room another chance to nail them.