by Alex Scarrow
‘ OH NO! ’ was all he could scream as the gliding mass of glistening grey hide finally came to an abrupt rest and the cave, easily six foot across, snapped shut round one of his feet. He felt a vice-like grip on his ankle, the tough leather of his combat boots compressed agonizingly tight as something hard and sharp pressed from the outside. Then the beast began shaking its head vigorously from side to side and he knew bones had to be breaking and splintering in his ankle as he swirled through the water.
Howard’s head was underwater. He felt pebbles, rocks and shells grind painfully up his back, and knew that meant the creature was now manoeuvring itself back from the shallows into deeper water.
He was holding his breath amid the tumbling underwater chaos… and, for a fleeting second, wondered why he was bothering to do so.
I’m gonna die. Surely better to breathe out now and drown than experience the agony of being ferociously dismembered by this thing?
Then, without warning the incredible pressure round his now-shattered ankle was gone. He flailed with his arms to right himself, to find solid ground on which to place his feet. He caught something with his hand, the rounded side of another ammonite shell. So that’s down. He tried to stand up and realized the creature must have pulled him further out than he’d thought in those few seconds. Finally his head broke the surface and he realized the water was chest deep.
The air was thick with screaming voices and spray.
And the first thing he saw was Chan, a few yards away, screaming abuse at the giant shark and jabbing his spear repeatedly at the creature’s nose. Its head snapped and swung from side to side, trying to get a grip on the fragile spear, trying to get past the spear to Chan, on whom it had decided to vent its frustration.
Howard waded through the water, painfully slowly, the chest-high sea in collaboration with the giant predator, wanting to slow him down. His one good foot kept slipping on the slimy rocks below, barely giving him enough purchase to make his way to shallower water. Behind him he heard Chan still hurling abuse and still stabbing and prodding, and the hiss and roar of water turned frothy white by the enraged shark thrashing in the shallows. Then he slipped again and fell under the water.
He felt a hand under his arm, then another, lifting him clear again. It was the robo-girl.
‘Remain calm,’ she said emotionlessly.
‘What… about… Chan?’ he found himself gasping.
She dragged him back to water shallow enough for him to crawl on his hands and knees. Then she let him go and headed back into the sea.
He turned and sat in the gently lapping waves, exhausted and vaguely aware of the burning agony of snapped and twisted bones down at the end of his leg. He watched Becks splashing through the water towards where Chan was still managing, incredibly, to keep the shark at spear’s length.
That’s a very big fish, was the last coherent thought his mind managed to put together before the world seemed to slump over on to its side.?
Liam watched the young man as he came round. ‘Leonard? How are you feeling?’
‘Hurts,’ he grunted thickly.
Becks leaned over him. ‘There are no broken bones, but your Achilles tendon has snapped and there is a significant contusion and several abrasions to your lower leg. This will hurt, but it will also mend.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Liam, ‘the bad news is your boot didn’t make it.’
Howard half smiled, half winced. A fire crackled brightly high up on the beach, throwing dancing skeins of amber light and dark shadows across the shingle down to the softly lapping waterline.
Edward Chan joined them. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You OK?’
Howard looked up at him. ‘You… you saved my life.’
Edward shrugged. ‘I just poked my stick at it for a while.’
‘My God, we were lucky,’ said Howard, wincing again as he adjusted his position.
‘No,’ said Liam sombrely, ‘no, we weren’t. Ranjit’s missing.’
Liam vaguely recalled he’d been at the back of their party, wading slowly through the water, falling behind the others. They’d foolishly allowed themselves to become strung out all along the beach, enjoying the tropical sea like holidaymakers. They’d allowed themselves to feel a false sense of security with the peaceful flat sea to one side and a wide open beach on the other.
‘Poor guy,’ whispered Howard.
‘That shark thing must have got him first.’
Liam wondered about that. He’d been about a hundred yards back. Surely they would have heard the rush of water as that shark slid out of the surf? Surely they would have heard Ranjit scream? He looked out into the dark and wondered whether it had been that shark, or perhaps it had been those dark shapes he thought he’d seen earlier this afternoon, scattering to the ground and disappearing like ghosts as he’d turned back to look over his shoulder.
Now, was that real? Did I really see that?
‘We were lucky,’ said Kelly, ‘that it only got the one of us. I mean, did you see the size of that thing? Bigger than a killer whale.’
‘This is the age of the big predators,’ said Whitmore. ‘Big ones. The golden age for the giant carnivores.’ He looked ashen-faced, shaken still, even several hours after the incident. ‘And we’re prey.’
‘It’s not the golden age for much longer,’ said Franklyn. ‘If this is sixty-five million years ago, then we’re near the end of the Cretaceous era. Something happens soon on Earth that wipes out all the big species. Fossil hunters call it the K-T boundary. Beyond that thin layer of sedimentary rock, you don’t find dinosaurs any more. Certainly not the big ones.’
‘Good,’ said Laura.
‘The big asteroid?’ said Juan. ‘That’s what killed them all, right?’
Franklyn shrugged. ‘It’s still debated. Could have been an asteroid, or a super volcano. Or it could simply have been a sudden climatic shift. Whatever extinction event happened, the large species were extremely vulnerable to it.’
‘It won’t happen while we’re still here, will it?’ asked Jasmine. She looked as unsettled and shaken as Whitmore.
Franklyn snorted dismissively. ‘Unlikely.’
‘So,’ Edward muttered softly. ‘Now there’s only fifteen of us. If no one comes for us, we won’t make it, will we?’
The others huddled around the fire heard that and it stilled their quiet murmurings until all that could be heard was the soft draw and hiss of the waves and the crackle of burning wood.
Becks broke the silence. ‘Leonard, I have constructed a pair of crutches for you.’
Howard eased himself up on to his elbows. ‘We’re still going on?’
Liam nodded. ‘Yes, we’re nearly there.’ He pointed up the beach. ‘Another four or five miles around this bay and we should be there. It’s our only hope… so we’re going on.’
Whitmore nodded. ‘Right. We can’t go back now.’
Laura shuffled closer to the fire, hugging her shoulders against the cool night air. ‘This will work, won’t it? Somebody will find your message and they’ll come for us?’
Liam grinned. ‘Sure they are. They’re already looking for us. And hopefully leaving them this message will help them narrow down their search. Trust me… it’s going to work out all right.’ He looked at Becks. ‘Right?’
She nodded, seeming to understand that the others needed to hear something positive and certain from them. ‘Liam is correct.’
CHAPTER 42
2001, New York
Sal looked at her. ‘How can you be so sure?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain. But look, if Liam and the unit survived the jump, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they’d do. I mean, that’s all they can do.’
Sal looked up from the mug of coffee in her hands, across the dim archway, illuminated by the fizzing ceiling strip light, towards the shutter door. It was gone eleven now. By this time on any normal Tuesday, the three of them would have been settling in for the evening: L
iam on his bunk with his nose in a history book and a bowl of dry Rice Krispies on his chest and Maddy surfing the Internet. But tonight she and Maddy were both up and sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for midnight to come. Waiting for the ‘reset’. She could hear the softly growing hum of power being drawn in through the mains, building up and being stored in the capacitor. Come midnight they would feel an odd momentary sensation of falling as the time field reset and took them back forty-eight hours to 12 a.m. Monday morning.
Maddy was certain, or at least working hard to give that impression, that immediately after the reset happened and they appeared in Monday one stroke after midnight, there’d be a welcome party waiting outside in the backstreet and very eager to meet them.
Who, though?
Maddy said that ‘secrets have a way of drifting up’. What she meant by that was that advance knowledge of a time machine appearing in New York in 2001 would surely ultimately end up in the hands of some shady government agency, men in dark suits. Something as important, something so profoundly monumental as that could only end up in the hands of secret service spooks. If that was the case… then, Sal hoped, Maddy was going to find a way to cooperate with them to get Liam back.
And then what? What exactly?
Interrogation? For sure. Because they’d sure as shadd-yah want to know every little thing about this place and the machinery inside and how it all worked. They’d want to know every little thing. There’d be endless questions about the rest of this mysterious agency, how many others? Where are they? Who’s in charge?
Sal really wasn’t so sure she wanted to jump back to Monday and face that.
There was the other possibility, of course — that they jumped back and no one was there waiting for them.
Maddy’s logic was quite black and white about this. Sal realized she’d thought this all through very thoroughly. If nobody was waiting for them, then that could only mean one thing. If there was nobody outside waiting for them, then Liam and the support unit had never survived the explosion. Or, if they had survived, then they’d been unable to get a message to them; they were lost in time for good, never to be seen again.
She looked at the digital clock on their kitchen table, red numbers that glowed softly and changed all too slowly.
11.16 p.m.
Oh jahulla… I rea-a-a-ally hate waiting.
CHAPTER 43
65 million years BC, jungle
Liam stared up at the steep slope in front of them, rising up from the turquoise sea and the narrow strip of gravelly beach. It was covered in canopy trees, dangling vines and the swaying fronds of ferns. Thick jungle once again. He’d grown used to the reassuring comfort of being out in the open, where he could see anything coming their way from afar.
‘It’s just beyond that?’
Becks nodded. ‘Affirmative. One and a half miles north-east of this point.’
The rest of the group were wearily bringing up the rear along the broad beach, none, though, daring to splash through the water this morning. Leonard was struggling at the back on the shingle with his crutches, but there was Edward and Jasmine helping him along.
‘I have the calculation now,’ said Becks.
‘What’s that?’
‘When in time we are.’
‘Oh.’ Liam arched a brow. ‘When did you do that?’
‘I set the routine running thirty-three hours ago, identifying and cataloguing each tachyon particle in our vicinity before and after the jump. Two billion, ninety-three million, three hundred and twenty-two thousand, nine hundred and six particles before. And seventy-three million, one thousand, five hundred and seventy-two identified particles after.’
Liam rolled his eyes. He didn’t need a blow-by-blow account of the maths. ‘That’s great. So… what’s the answer?’
‘With a constant particle attrition rate, my calculation is that we are located sixty-two million, seven hundred and thirty-nine thousand, four hundred and six years into the past.’ She smiled proudly. ‘Accurate to five hundred years either side of that date.’
‘Well done, Becks.’ He watched the others slowly staggering across the shifting, clattering pebbles. ‘So we have a date we can put in the message. And we can encode the message with your Harry Potter book code?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘And of course the date and location of the field office.’ He drew in breath through his teeth. ‘Jay-zus, this does really feel like we’re meddling with time in a big way.’
‘We are,’ she replied.
‘We’ve just got to figure out the best way to ensure our get me out of here note lasts… sixty million whatever years.’
‘Sixty-two million, seven hundred and thirty-’
He raised a hand to shush her. ‘To ensure it lasts a long, long time.’ He picked out Whitmore and Franklyn walking side by side comparing some of the shells they’d collected. ‘I just hope those two fossil geniuses know where best to leave our message.’
In the distance, four or five miles down the beach, he saw several long necks hastily emerging from a cluster of jungle and out on to the beach, a small herd of those alamosauruses hurrying out into the open.
Something just spooked them over there. Didn’t it?
He watched as they thundered along the beach, kicking up a trail of dust in their wake.
His gaze rested on Edward and Jasmine supporting a limping Leonard up the shingle. They finally caught up with the rest of them gathered at the foot of the steep slope of jungle.
‘We’ve just got to hike over that, ladies and gents,’ said Liam, ‘and we’re there.’
Franklyn was exhausted, out of breath and dripping with sweat. He was pretty sure the climb up this steep slope of jungle was one or two degrees short of full-on vertical rock climbing. He wondered how the huge canopy trees with their mushroom-like roof of leaves were managing to keep a purchase on the craggy rock sides.
The others seemed to be faring better than him, even that poor kid, Leonard, who was hopping and clattering up awkwardly, his bad leg dangling behind him. But then Franklyn was carrying twenty more pounds in weight than them, most of it round his middle. ‘Puppy fat’ he preferred to call it, in a vain hope that come college it was all going to magically disappear and the trim athletic body of sports jock was going to emerge. He’d still be a geek on the inside, though. But a cool jock on the outside.
A smart sports jock.
Now there’s something you don’t see every day.
He was so pleased with that observation that he misplaced his step and stumbled to the ground, barking his shin on a rock. ‘Ow!’ he hissed.
‘You OK, man?’ asked Juan, six yards ahead and above.
‘Yeah, I’m f-’ His rucksack slid off his shoulder as he picked himself up and started sliding down the slope. ‘Oh no!’ he muttered, watching it bounce off a tree trunk and continue its rolling, bouncing, tumbling descent. ‘Just great,’ he sighed. ‘Now I gotta go down, get it and climb this bit all over again.’
‘I’ll tell the others to hold up while you get your bag, ’kay?’
Franklyn nodded a thanks and began his descent. He could see his yellow rucksack down there, swinging from a low branch. Good, it wasn’t going any further, then.
Several minutes later he was nearly there, pushing his way through the large fronds of a fern on to a small level clearing of dried cones and needles and soft soil. Across the clearing — on little more than a wide ledge — was his bag, still swinging from a shoulder strap tangled round the broken stump of a branch. If it hadn’t caught there, it would have rolled over the edge and he’d be backtracking another tiresome ten minutes’ worth of climbing all the way to the bottom.
He stepped across, unwound it from the stump and put the straps over both shoulders this time, determined not to lose it again. He turned round to begin his ascent once more when his eyes picked out something on the ground: the familiar shape of a human footprint in the dry soil. One of theirs, but either side of it
he saw three small dents — the distinctive marks of a three-toed creature. He stooped a little lower to get a closer look.
My God. It looked just like the tracks he’d seen all around that carcass they’d discovered a while back. The dawning realization came suddenly and his mouth all of a sudden felt tacky and dry.
We’ve been followed.
He knelt down and traced another three-pronged footprint in the ground with his finger. And another. And another.
We’ve been followed… all the way from the camp.
It was then that he heard the soft rustle of dislodged leaves, something emerging from the foliage on to the ledge behind him.
‘Oh boy,’ he whispered.
CHAPTER 44
65 million years BC, jungle
Broken Claw could sense the new creature knew they were there; his nasal cavity picked out the faint smell of fear coming from it, a chemical cocktail of sweat and adrenaline, not so different from the large plant-eaters. The new creature had cleverly spotted their tracks. The new creature had finally realized it was being stalked.
Maybe now was the time to know a little more about these strange pale beasts. His soft bark ordered the others to remain where they were for now, out of sight. The new creature was holding one of those sticks-that-catch in one of its puffy pale hands. He’d watched one of these creatures fend off a giant sea-dweller yesterday with one of those sticks. So he eyed it warily as he stepped low under the sweeping fronds of a fern, under the branch from which the new creature had moments ago retrieved something bright and colourful and emerged over the rocky lip of ground to the small level clearing. That salty smell of fear grew suddenly much more powerful as the new creature turned slowly round to face him. Broken Claw rose from his crouching posture on all fours, up on to his hind legs, to stand fully erect.