by Alex Scarrow
It fears.
So close now, he could see the new creature more clearly: the eyes, curiously large, behind rounded shiny transparent discs. Its face, all loose pale flesh, unsculpted by muscle or sinew or bone carapace. It made noises with its mouth, noises that sounded so unlike all the other beasts in the river valley they called home. Noises, in fact, that didn’t sound too unlike the simple language of coughs, grunts and barks Broken Claw’s pack used.
Franklyn in turn studied the creature that had just emerged. It had a body shape he could best describe as halfway between one of the smaller therapod species, and… well, and a human. But incredibly thin, almost birdlike in its agility. A pair of long thin legs hinged backwards like a dog’s legs, meeting at a bony, very feminine-looking pelvis thrust acutely forward. A tiny waist beneath a protruding rib cage, a curved, knobbly spine that hunched over and ended with a delicate tapering neck supporting an elongated skull. Apart from the distinctive head, seen from a distance, and if one squinted a little, it could almost pass as a hominid — human-like.
‘Oh my… m-my God,’ he whispered.
It cocked its head, a head that fleetingly reminded Franklyn of a hot-dog sausage, long and bone-smooth, at one end a lipless mouth full of rows of lethal-looking teeth. Above the mouth were two holes that suggested a nasal cavity around which flesh puckered and pulled as it silently breathed, and above that two reptilian yellow eyes that seemed to sparkle with a keen intelligence. The thing’s skin was a dark olive green, that seemed to pale to an almost human pink colour around the vulnerable belly and pelvis.
The creature’s jaws snapped shut and opened again, and it made a whining noise that reminded him vaguely of the contented murmuring a baby made after a feed. It sounded almost human. And those curious, intelligent, eyes, studying him as intently as he was studying it.
It made another noise, grating, slightly deeper this time. Beyond the teeth, he could see a black tongue twitching and fluttering and curling, like a restless animal in a cage, experimenting with different shapes to produce different sounds.
Did it… did it just mimic me?
‘Hi,’ said Franklyn.
The long head tilted to one side, like a dog listening for its master’s voice. The mouth opened again, and the tongue rolled and curled. ‘ Ah-eeeee,’ was the noise that came out, lower in pitch now, lower than a baby and almost matching the timbre of Franklyn’s as yet unbroken voice.
He felt some of the terror replaced with the slightest flush of excitement.
It’s trying to communicate.
‘Hi, my name’s Franklyn,’ he said again, louder, bolder, slower.
That long head tilted over to the other side now, the gesture almost comical. One of its long arms, muscular, lean and ending with three digits that curled into lethal-looking long curved serrated blades, flexed in front of it.
Is that a hand signal?
Franklyn attempted to duplicate the gesture, bringing his short pudgy hand up before his face and curling his fingers in the same way. The creature snorted air out of its nostrils and clacked its teeth. He wondered if that was the creature laughing at his attempt.
Suddenly, he heard the crack of twigs, and the clatter of dislodged rocks; something coming down the slope above.
Becks leaped out of the foliage on to the ground between them, landing in a fight-ready and perfectly balanced stance. She spun round to face the reptilian hominid. ‘Run,’ she said calmly as she crouched ready for action, one of their crude jagged metal hatchets in one hand, a spear in the other.
Franklyn was frozen in place, unsure what to do. The creature had dropped down low, on to all fours, its elongated banana-like skull tilted back and resting flush in the spinal dip between two protruding shoulder blades. It hissed and barked and a swarm of others began to emerge over the lip of ground that sloped steeply down to the bay below.
‘ RUN! ’ screamed Liam, tumbling out of the foliage clumsily on to the ground beside Becks. ‘Run, for Jayzus sakes, RUN!!’ he shouted, getting up and readying his spear.
Franklyn’s moment of indecision passed as he took in the crawling carpet of dark olive bodies slowly, warily gliding on all fours across the clearing towards them like a deadly lava flow. He turned, grabbed a branch and pulled himself up the slope and into the jungle, panting with panic and effort as he and his yellow rucksack quickly disappeared through the thick green fronds.
‘ What? ’ hissed Liam. ‘Oh, sod this! I thought it was just the one of them!’
The creatures were spreading out around the clearing, attempting to flank them, encircle them.
‘Recommendation,’ Becks said, turning to look at him, ‘leave!’
Liam could hear the sound of footfalls from above — the others. He couldn’t tell if it was the sound of them coming down to help, or scrambling up the slope to get further away.
‘Uh… right, OK. You going to be… er… all right?’
Becks ignored his stammered question as she swivelled the hatchet in her right hand with the grace of a martial arts master. The yellow-eyed creatures had moved too quickly, encircling them so that Liam already had no choice but to stay. He backed up against her until their shoulders were touching.
‘Oh… boy… oh b-boy… I’m really n-not… uh, oh God…’
‘Stay close to me,’ Becks uttered over her shoulder.
‘S-sure… and w-what are y-you going to — ?’
Becks was already in motion. He glanced round to see her leap forward, swinging the spear like a baton. The sharp end punctured the flank of one of the hominids and with it still lodged between two ribs she effortlessly flicked it off its feet. Liam backed up, keeping his spear aimed at the creatures closing the gap in front of him.
Becks stepped forward again with the grace of a ballet dancer, the jagged hatchet flickering and flashing in the blur of movement. It caught the long clawed digits of one of the creatures and they spun in the air spraying droplets of blood in messy arcs.
In front of him, one of the creatures made a sudden lunge for Liam, hoping to catch him off guard as he backed up in Becks’s wake. He caught the movement in his peripheral vision and had only the time to swing the spear tip round towards it before he felt the impact rattle down the frail bamboo shaft.
He turned to see the creature’s deadly sickle-shaped claws flailing inches from his face and the teeth in its long skull snapping and grating and dripping spittle-strings of saliva. It was impaled on the bamboo, but so very far from incapacitated and quite enraged.
‘Oh Jay-zus! I got one skewered!’
Becks was busy.
He held on to the rattling spear as the creature thrashed and drummed and swung and slowly, eagerly pulled itself further down the shaft, thick gouts of its dark blood running on to his hands. ‘Help!’ he screamed.
He could see one of the other hominids lowering, coiling, ready to leap on to him, when the air was split with a child-like shriek from one of them. In an instant, the beat of a heart, the dark olive-coloured bodies snaked, scrambled and swarmed with incredible speed towards the lip of rocky ground and out of sight into the jungle slope below.
Gone. Just like that.
Except for the creature still struggling halfway down his spear. A sickle claw swiped across his upper arm, cutting through the material of his shirt and digging into his muscle with the ease of a butcher’s blade through tenderized beef.
‘ Gah! ’ Liam bellowed. ‘ Help me! ’
Becks was there in the blink of an eye and with a blur of movement swiped the hatchet across the creature’s elegant neck. It froze in shocked realization of its fate. The long head tilted for a moment like a cocked gesture of curiosity, then swung backwards on to its hunched spine, almost completely decapitated yet still attached to the body by a frayed strip of exposed pale pink tendon. It collapsed a second later, pulling the spear out of Liam’s trembling hands.
They both stared down at the tangle of lean grey-green limbs and bony protrusions, and the
rhythmic jet of almost black spurting gobbets of blood across the floor of dried pine cones and needles. One of its legs still twitched and flexed; a post-mortem response.
Liam looked up at Becks. She had a spatter pattern of blood across her pale face and chest and her normally expressionless cool grey eyes were wide and wild. But that passed in an instant as artificial intelligence regained control of her face. She regarded him calmly.
‘Are you unharmed, Liam?’
Liam looked down at his bloody arm, cut deep, but nothing arterial going on there. He was vaguely aware that he was in a state of shock as he said, ‘Can I be put back on the Titanic, please?’
CHAPTER 45
65 million years BC, jungle
Liam and Becks emerged at the top of the steep hill twenty minutes later, a bald outcrop of rock with a view down all three sides to the tropical sea far below.
Liam collapsed on to the rocky ground.
‘W-where are they?’ asked Franklyn, looking past Liam towards the edge of the sloping jungle. ‘Are they coming?’
‘They are no longer pursuing,’ answered Becks.
‘My God, you’re wounded!’ cried Laura, dropping down beside him and ripping a strip of cloth from his shirt to use as a bandage.
‘What the hell happened back there?’ asked Kelly, undoing his loose tie and passing it to Laura to use as a tourniquet. He looked at Franklyn, still gasping from the exertion of climbing up the last half a mile of jungle. ‘He’s just been jabbering to us something about a load of creatures jumping him.’
Liam nodded. ‘Yeah.’ He pulled a plastic bottle out of his backpack and chugged the last of his water. He pumped air in and out of his lungs for a few moments, gathering enough puff to be able to say something more. ‘Yeah… we got attacked all right. Lots of them… dozens of ’em.’
‘Dozens of what?’ asked Whitmore.
‘A species of pack hunter,’ said Becks.
Whitmore went pale. ‘Oh God, don’t tell me there are raptors?’
‘Worse,’ said Franklyn. ‘Much worse.’ He sat down next to Liam, took off his glasses and wiped the fogged lenses of his spectacles. One of the lenses was laced with a spider’s web of cracks.
‘They’re not like anything we’ve ever seen,’ he began, carefully rubbing dry the fractured glass. ‘No one’s ever come across fossils of this… come across anything like this species.’
Whitmore squatted down opposite the boy. ‘Tell me, what’s back down there? What did you see?’
Franklyn shook his head. ‘I… I really don’t know. They’re… they’re human-like and raptor-like.’ He looked up at the teacher. ‘They’re unlike anything… anything, you know?’
‘Not a sub-species of therapod?’
The boy shook his head vigorously. ‘No… no, definitely not. Maybe millions of years ago there’s some kind of shared ancestry, but these things… they’re just… they’re…’ He was fumbling for words, for some way to describe them.
‘Unique?’ said Liam. He winced as Laura pulled the dressing tight one last time and finished a knot.
‘Yes.’ Franklyn nodded, putting his cracked glasses back on. ‘Unique. That’s it. They must be some kind of evolutionary dead end. A form of super-intelligent predator.’
Kelly stepped forward. ‘That doesn’t make sense, Franklyn. If they’re, as you say, super-intelligent, they’d have thrived. We’d have found their fossils everywhere, surely?’
‘How intelligent? What level of intelligent are we talking about?’ asked Laura.
‘Oh, they’re smart,’ said Liam. ‘Very smart.’ He looked up at the others. ‘I think I saw them back on the big plain at the same time Becks punched that dinosaur on the nose. I looked back behind us, just as that stampede was happening… and I think I saw them. Like a whole pack of monkeys… in fact that’s what I thought I saw — ’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Whitmore. ‘The only mammals alive now are the size of shrews.’
‘They’re not mammals,’ said Franklyn. ‘They’re reptilian, all right.’
‘Like I say,’ continued Liam, ‘I thought they were monkey-like. But then I wasn’t sure what I saw, because they were gone in a flash. Just went to ground when they saw me looking at them.’
‘They’ve been following us all the way from our camp,’ said Franklyn. ‘Did you see their tracks?’
Liam shook his head.
‘Three prominent depressions at the end of a long foot?’
Liam recalled the sickle claws, four on each hand, three on each foot. ‘Yes… that’s right.’
‘Those same tracks were around that carcass… I’m sure of it. That was their kill.’
Liam looked down the jungle slope at the broad curve of the long bay glimmering in the daylight. And, far off, the broad expanse of the open plain. Beyond that, lost beyond the shimmering air and the fogging of twenty miles’ distance, would be the low hummock of a slope and a cliff edge, and their jungle valley beyond.
‘They must have been watching us,’ he said, feeling his skin cool and the hairs on his arm stir. ‘Watching us and following us ever since then.’
‘But that was… like… over a week ago,’ said Juan.
‘Nine days,’ Becks added.
Juan made a face. ‘All that time?’
‘They’ve been studying us,’ said Liam. ‘Learning about us, so they have. Working out how much of a threat we are to them.’
‘Yes… I think you’re right.’ Franklyn pulled himself up and studied the fringe of jungle several dozen yards down the slope from them. ‘They’re curious. That makes them intelligent. Maybe almost as intelligent as us.’
‘A species of dinosaur as intelligent as us? Come on, Franklyn, that’s — ’
‘They’ve got a language! I heard them communicate.’
Liam nodded. ‘He’s right. When they were surrounding me and Becks, there was some sort of talking going on among them.’
‘And one of them tried to communicate with me… before you and robo-girl arrived. It was trying to speak like me!’
‘This is just crazy!’ said Whitmore. ‘There’s no record of any species, or any similar species with the cranial capacity for a brain big enough to develop a spoken language… or able to make human-like vocal sounds.’
‘But that’s the thing, Mr Whitmore, just because no fossil of these things has survived, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.’
‘The lad’s right,’ said Kelly. ‘Don’t palaeontologists say we’ve only got an incomplete record of prehistoric times? That there are large gaps in our knowledge?’
Whitmore rubbed his beard and stared down at the fringe of jungle. ‘Well, then, that’s one huge goddamn gap out there, isn’t it?’
They were quiet for a while, all staring at the nearby canopy trees, and the dark forbidding undergrowth beneath, imagining eyes staring out from the gloom back at them.
‘What do we do now, Liam?’ asked Laura.
He pulled on his bottom lip in thought. ‘We carry on with the plan.’ He turned away from the jungle he’d emerged from minutes ago and looked down the slope on the other side of the peak. Below he could see the pale apron of a small sheltered sandy cove nestling at the bottom of the ridge and another equally high ridge on the far side, like the protective embracing arms of a rocky giant. He could see the twinkle of a small stream meandering down through thickets of bamboo and reeds and spilling out on to the cove. It was an inviting, secret bay of turquoise-green water that lapped along the crescent of a pale cream-coloured beach. In another time, another place… a secluded tropical paradise. A picture-book pirates’ cove.
‘Is it down there?’ he asked Becks. ‘The place we need to be?’
‘Affirmative. That is it.’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head firmly, hoping he looked every bit the decisive leader. ‘We can be down there in less than half an hour. We’ll make a camp on the beach and be sure to have a huge fire going. Hopefully that’ll keep those things a
t bay. And we’ll have half of us sleeping, and half watching, and we’ll do that in shifts.’ He looked at Becks again. ‘We’ll make this message, so we will, and tomorrow we’ll plant it.’
‘How are we going to do that?’ asked Kelly.
Liam was about to answer that he wasn’t sure yet, when Jasmine replied. ‘Clay.’
The others looked at her.
‘Clay,’ she said again. ‘If we could find some we can make a tablet. You can write your message on it then we can bake it hard in the fire.’
Liam stroked his cheek thoughtfully. ‘Right, yes… good idea. That’s what we’ll do. So? Any questions before we get moving?’
‘What about them things back down there?’ asked Juan with another pointed glance towards the jungle.
‘Well, I suppose they’ve learned something about us, right?’
The others looked at each other, not quite sure what Liam meant by that.
‘They’ve learned we can kill them.’ He gestured at Becks. ‘And they’ve learned our robo-girl is not to be messed around with, so they have.’
Becks frowned indignantly at that. ‘My ident. is Becks.’
He shrugged. Too tired and winded to apologize. ‘Right, then… I suggest we get going.’
CHAPTER 46
2001, New York
The alarm clock on the table between them was showing 11.45 p.m. Maddy noticed Sal’s eyes nervously glancing at it. ‘Fifteen minutes to go.’
‘I’m a bit scared,’ whispered Sal.
If Maddy was being honest, she would have admitted she was a little jittery too. Instead she smiled, reached across the table and grasped Sal’s arm. ‘It’s going to be fine, Sal. I promise.’
‘Maybe I should go get Foster’s gun from the back? You know? Just in case somebody unfriendly turns up.’
‘Really?’ Maddy cocked an eyebrow. ‘Do you think that’s going to be sensible? We might be answering the door to a backstreet full of very excitable armed men in suits and dark glasses.’
‘You think it’ll be like that?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘I really don’t know what’s going to happen, Sal