Almost there. Almost.
A shadow loomed over me.
"Now that's a view worth getting hot and sweaty for," Doug said, voice slick as oil. "Need a hand, sweetheart?"
Shit! He must have heard me scream.
I looked up the pit wall, squinting against the glare. Doug stood at the rim, silhouetted by the sun.
"Wow, Charlie. This is a hell of a find. We weren't expecting this."
We? I couldn't read his face, but the greedy excitement in his voice gave him away. "No. We weren't." I couldn't keep the sarcasm from my voice.
With my heart thundering in my ears, I hauled myself over the edge and collapsed onto the dirt beside his boots. He wore his usual khaki field shirt with his sleeves rolled and chest unbuttoned, as if he fancied himself as some rugged Indiana Jones knockoff. Except he was all show and no class at all.
He smirked. "You get spooked by all those bones?"
I glared up at him. "There's a snake in the pit."
Doug's eyes lit up. "What kind?"
"A king brown." Pushing to my feet, I dusted my dirty hands onto my shorts. "It's massive. The bloody thing dropped into the pit right next to me."
He peered into the pit. "Well, well. Look at all those bones we found. We need to get down there and check these specimens out."
We found. Clenching my jaw, I resisted arguing the point. "I don't know where the snake went, but we have to wait until it's gone."
He gave me that infuriating grin. "Relax. It's probably more scared of you than you are of it."
I clenched my fists. "You think this is funny?"
He raised his hands. "Don't stress. I'll get my gun."
"What?" I blinked. "You have a gun?"
"Of course, I do."
"Doug. We're in Australia, this isn't Texas. You can't just carry around a gun."
"I've got a permit." He waved me off as if I were being dramatic. "You think I'd come all the way out here with no protection? We've got snakes, dingoes, and worse, poachers. The minute word gets out that we found these amazing fossils, some bastard's gonna try to haul them out from under our noses." He winked at me. "Back in a sec."
He strode toward the converted bus site office, moving faster than I'd seen him walk since we had arrived.
I paced the rim of the pit, scanning the bones below for the snake and my heart rattled against my ribs.
I'd never feared snakes until a fellow student got bitten by a red-bellied black snake at my last dig. Lucas had been in his prime, all muscle and cardio-fit, but within ten minutes of that snake bite, he'd been struggling to breathe. He'd only survived because a supply chopper had just happened to land at that moment. They'd had to resuscitate him twice in the air.
He'd gotten lucky.
I wasn't interested in testing my luck with a king brown, which was just as deadly as a red-belly black, but much harder to see.
A few bones shifted near the bottom of the pit.
I squinted at the spot, and the snake slithered between the scattered remnants of an ancient ribcage as if it knew exactly where it was going. It glided past two dinosaur skulls, then paused, flicking its tongue like it could taste my fear.
My stomach twisted.
Doug reappeared at my side with a rifle in his hands.