Day of the Predator tr-2

by Alex Scarrow

  Half a dozen men emerged from the backstreet, all of them wearing bio-hazard suits, faces hidden behind tinted fascias of plastic. All of them armed with what looked like television remote controls.

  Oh no. Maddy felt lightheaded. This isn’t good.

  ‘We’re going to talk,’ said the old man gently. ‘But we’re going to talk safely away from this place. Please,’ he said, beckoning for them both to come forward, out of the archway and into the street, ‘step forward, away from the equipment.’

  Now! You have to do it now!

  Maddy spun to face the computer desk. ‘BOB! OMELETTE! ’ she screamed, desperately hoping the desk mic across the archway had managed to pick up her voice. The last thing her conscious mind registered was every muscle in her body contracting with a sudden jolt, and then keeling over on to the hard floor, her forehead smacking heavily against the concrete.

  Cartwright watched in silence as the older of the two girls was wheeled away on a hospital gurney, and the other one, younger, Asian or Indian by the look of her, was escorted down the backstreet towards the containment van.

  He ordered the remaining three agency men in containment suits to stand guard outside the shutter door once they’d made a sweep and reported that the archway was clear. Good men, trusted men… but still better they knew as little as possible.

  He stood alone now in front of a giant perspex cylinder of water, metal steps up the side and what looked like a toddler’s swing seat fixed at the top. Obviously something to do with time travel… like the bank of computer equipment, the other tall thin perspex tubes in the back room, the power generator… all these things clearly played some part in the process.

  He wandered back to the long table — a pair of scuffed office desks pushed end to end and cluttered with monitors, a keyboard, a dozen crumpled cans of Dr Pepper and a few empty pizza boxes. He could hear the soft whirr of activity from beneath the desk and ducked down to see the muted glow of blinking green and red LEDs. It looked like there were a dozen or more PCs, the kind you could pick up from any Wal-Mart or PC World, linked together into a network.

  Beside the desk was a battered old office filing cabinet. He pulled out one drawer after another, each filled with nests of tangled cables and bits and pieces of electronic circuits, like somebody had ripped off a RadioShack store for bits and not yet figured out what to do with it all.

  He felt a small stab of disappointment. In his mind’s eye he’d imagined this moment; he’d conjured up visions of some futuristic arrangement, technology from centuries ahead, something that looked like the bridge of the USS Enterprise set up in this old brick archway. Instead, everything he could see here seemed to have been obtained from the present.

  He sat down in one of the office chairs and it squeaked under his weight.

  The answers to this place, why they were here in New York… why they were also in the Cretaceous past, how all this machinery worked, and what it could do… all of those answers he presumed were on these quietly humming computers. He picked up the mouse and slid it across the desk. One of the screens flickered out of screen-saver mode and lit up to reveal a relaxing desktop image of an alpine valley and, right in the middle of the screen, a small square dialogue box.

  › System lockdown enabled.

  Cartwright cursed under his breath. The older girl, the one with the frizzy reddish hair, had barked something out just before he’d tasered her. He’d thought she was calling out to someone else in the arch, but he realized now that it must have been a voice-activated command.

  He tried to remember what she’d said. Oh yeah…

  ‘Omelette,’ he said into the desk mic.

  › Incorrect activation code.

  ‘Dammit!’

  › Incorrect activation code.

  He tried a dozen other candidate words and phrases: egg, broken eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, Easter egg, fried egg. Egg hunt, egghead, egg-nog. All of them produced the response on the screen.

  Absently he tapped his fingers on the desk. If he was being honest, this wasn’t how he imagined the moment of discovery was going to be: two scruffy kids, a computer system that looked like some bedroom hacker’s dream set-up, and that big plastic cylinder making this place look like some kind of homemade brewery. And this locked-down computer system was obviously not going to tell him anything. He decided it was time he had a little chat with the girls.

  He stepped out towards the open door and punched the green button on the side. The metal shutter started to clank and rattle slowly down.

  ‘No one goes in, or comes out. You have permission to shoot to kill anyone who tries. Understood?’

  The three men guarding the entrance nodded.

  CHAPTER 56

  65 million years BC, jungle

  The wide-open plain was alive with the echoing calls of nocturnal life. Liam had assigned half of them to remain on watch and the other half to try their best to get some sleep, although he doubted anyone was managing that.

  A fire was burning in the middle, not for the meagre light it provided, but for the effect it seemed to have on the creatures roaming around out there, keeping them all well away. It was bright enough anyway. The full moon seemed to illuminate the night enough that it felt little darker than an overcast winter’s afternoon in Cork.

  ‘That moon is actually bigger, right? Or am I going mad?’

  Becks looked up at it. ‘Affirmative. It is approximately twenty per cent larger.’

  Liam’s eyebrows shot up. ‘A larger moon? So what do you think happened to it? Did it sort of wear down over time or something?’

  Whitmore looked at him oddly and tutted. And Becks… he wondered whether she’d just rolled her eyes at him or whether that was just a trick of the light. ‘Negative, Liam. It has not changed size.’

  ‘It’s just a little closer,’ said Whitmore.

  ‘Oh.’

  Becks resumed her silent vigil, slowly panning her eyes across the plain, watching for the dark furtive shapes of the creatures moving beyond the dancing circle of their firelight.

  ‘What do you think of those things?’ asked Liam. ‘Are they really a species of super-smart dinosaur? That lad, Franklyn…’ He paused for a moment, realizing the ensuing panic-stricken retreat from the cove, over the jungle peak and down on to the beach hadn’t permitted him a single moment of reflection for the poor boy. He could only imagine what those creatures had done to him, if that carcass from nearly a fortnight ago was anything to go by.

  The others were waiting for him to finish what he’d started saying.

  ‘Franklyn said all dinosaurs, even the smart ones, were pretty stupid.’

  Whitmore sucked in a breath of warm night air. ‘Those hominids could well be a dead-end evolution, a branch-off species that maybe shares a common ancestor with troodon.’

  ‘Troodon?’

  He nodded. ‘Palaeontologists commonly agree that the troodon was quite possibly the most intelligent species of dinosaur. Smarter even than their evolutionary cousins, the raptors. Very similar in appearance, both therapods… saurischian dinosaurs.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Bipedal… they walk on their hind legs. Like the T-rex does.’

  Liam shook his head. ‘Those creatures didn’t look anything like any dinosaur I’ve seen, big or small. I mean… their heads?’

  Whitmore nodded. ‘Like I say, some dead-end evolution. Perhaps if the K-T event never happened, the asteroid, or volcano or whatever it was, many more sub-species with similar long skulls might have evolved from them. Perhaps that’s why they’re so smart — a greater cranial capacity, a larger brain.’

  ‘The species exhibits high levels of intelligence,’ said Becks. Her neutral voice seemed to have adopted an ominous tone. ‘They appear capable of tactical planning. They appear to have a language. They do not, however, appear to have developed tool-use.’

  ‘Why not? If they’re so smart? Why don’t they use spears and bows and arrows?’<
br />
  Becks had no answer. Whitmore shrugged. ‘Who knows? Perhaps they’ve never needed to use tools? Maybe nature already made them so lethal they’ve never needed tools? Or perhaps, because they only seem to have four digits and no thumbs, tool-using is just something they’re unlikely to ever do?’

  ‘But they’re smart enough?’ asked Liam. ‘Is that what you’re saying? If they had thumbs an’ all… they’d be smart enough to make a spear or a bow or something?’

  Whitmore scratched his beard absently. ‘Who knows?’

  On the far side of the campfire, Howard and Edward stood watch. The robo-girl had been standing with them for a while and then gone to rejoin her Irish friend and Whitmore. Howard decided now was quite possibly the best time he was going to have to say what he needed to say.

  ‘Edward?’

  The small boy looked up at him.

  ‘Thank you, you know… for saving me from that shark thing yesterday.’

  Edward shrugged like he’d done nothing more than buy him a Coke. ‘OK, Leonard.’

  ‘No… seriously, Edward, that was something… what you did. It could just as easily have gotten you. But you… you stayed right by me. You saved my life.’

  Edward smiled. ‘Sure, Lenny. You’re my best friend.’ He sighed. ‘Well, my only friend. Like I said, I don’t do so good back home. You know, making friends and stuff.’

  Howard felt a sour twist of guilt churn away in his guts. He’d come to kill Edward — that’s how he’d ended up here — and yet this boy seemed like a ten-years-younger version of himself. He’d had things the same way when he’d been at school: lonely because he dared to be different. It never changed, did it? Not even in his time, the 2050s. Kids always found a way to single somebody out.

  ‘Edward, I’ve got to tell you something,’ he said before he could stop himself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m… I’m not who you think I am.’

  Edward frowned and smiled at the same time, bemused. ‘You’re Lenny.’

  ‘No,’ replied Howard, ‘that’s just it, I’m not. I’m not Leonard Baumgardner. I’m not seventeen.’ He lowered his voice and his eyes flickered across the campfire towards the other three people on guard duty. ‘And I’m not from the year 2015.’

  ‘What? Serious?’ Edward’s eyes widened. ‘You’re one of them? An agent from the future too?’

  Howard shook his head. ‘Not an agent. I don’t work for the same people. I belong to another group, a group trying to stop time travel, but… but in a different way.’

  Edward stared at him silently. ‘Not Lenny. So what is your name?’

  ‘Howard.’

  He heard Edward mouth the name quietly.

  ‘But listen, Edward… I… I managed to go back in time to find you

  …’ He hesitated, toying with how best to continue, when Edward spoke the words for him.

  ‘To get to me. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  Howard looked away.

  ‘To stop me going to university? Stop me doing a degree?’

  Howard couldn’t bear to meet his eyes.

  ‘Not to… oh no…’ Edward’s voice dropped. He’d figured it out. ‘No. Don’t say you came to kill me?’

  Howard nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Edward… but yeah. To short-circuit history, to cut out a chunk of the past that should never have happened.’ In the dark he couldn’t see how the boy was taking it, just the outline of his round head and narrow shoulders gazing out at the dark plain.

  ‘That means you’re not really my friend, then?’

  Howard felt that twist of guilt curl and flex like some restless eel making a nest in his belly.

  ‘That mean you’re still going to kill me?’

  Howard shook his head. ‘No, not any more.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t need to. We’re stuck here now.’

  Edward turned back towards him. ‘But we’re gonna get rescued. Those messages that we — ’

  ‘No one’s going to find them,’ he replied, shaking his head.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘If they’d ever been found — ’ he nodded towards the others — ‘and Liam and robo-girl’s people were able to come and rescue us, then they’d know what happens in 2015, wouldn’t they? They’d know about me. And they’d make sure you were never on that field trip to the TERI labs. They’d make sure you were kept as far away from that assassination attempt as possible.’

  Edward’s face clouded with thought for a moment.

  Howard offered him a smile that was probably lost in the dark anyway. ‘So, I’ve done what had to be done. I’m truly sorry it’s landed us here. I really am… but the world after 2015 is a much safer place without you. There’s no you, there’s no maths thesis, no Waldstein and no time machines. For good or bad… I know the world’s heading for dark times ahead, certainly it is where — when — I came from: floods, droughts, billions starving, oil running out, wars. But the world will get through that eventually. It can survive that.’

  ‘But it can’t survive time travel?’

  ‘No. We’ve been messing around with stuff we can’t understand, can’t control. We’re like children playing catch and toss with a neutron bomb. But that’s finished, Edward… It’s not going to happen. I’m relieved, but I’m also sorry it’s landed you and the others here.’

  ‘Why be sorry?’ said Edward flatly. ‘Mission successful. You did it.’

  ‘I’m sorry… because, I think, well, I hope, you and I have become friends. And I’ve put you in this situation.’ Howard could understand if the boy walked away right now and told everything he’d just heard to the others. Then, of course, they’d confront him and perhaps even exact a brutal revenge on him. Howard could understand that and was ready to face the music.

  Instead he felt Edward’s small hand on his forearm. ‘It’s OK. I’m not angry with you.’

  He laughed. ‘You have every right to be.’

  ‘No point,’ said Edward. ‘We’re stuck here forever, then. So we’ve got to work together. Right, Leonard?’

  Leonard… it sounded like Edward was going to keep this confession to himself.

  Howard nodded. ‘So?’

  ‘So, I’m not telling. You’re Leonard still.’

  He smiled. ‘OK… I’m Leonard.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Right.’

  CHAPTER 57

  2001, New York

  Maddy’s mouth was dry and her head was pounding. She slowly opened her eyes and winced them shut against the painful bright glare of the light overhead.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she heard someone say. The lights in the room dimmed slightly. ‘Better?’

  She cracked her eyes open again, and then nodded. She felt something cool pressed into her hands.

  ‘Water. Have a sip. It’s just water, I assure you.’

  Maddy lifted a plastic tumbler and gratefully slurped a mouthful. Her eyes blinked and she tried to focus on her surroundings: a small room with a low ceiling, what looked like a medicine cabinet, a strip light overhead. She was lying on what appeared to be a hospital bed and beside her she saw the old man who’d come knocking at their door sitting on a stool. He’d taken his jacket off, rolled up his shirtsleeves and loosened his tie.

  ‘You took a knock on the head when you went down. I’m sorry I had to taser you.’

  Yes… that was it. She’d felt like every muscle in her body had locked and an unbelievably agonizing sensation had coursed through her whole body.

  ‘Where am I?’ She realized she was lying on some sort of a hospital gurney. But then this didn’t look like a hospital ward, or a private ward.

  ‘New York still,’ he smiled. ‘And somewhere perfectly safe.’

  She sipped the water again. ‘Who are you?’

  The man pulled the stool forward. It rattled on castors across a smooth linoleum floor. ‘My name’s Lester Cartwright,’ he answered warmly. ‘And yes — if that’s your next ques
tion — I work for a, shall we say, a quiet little intelligence agency on behalf of the American government.’

  Maddy nodded and smiled blearily. ‘I figured it would be someone like that who’d come to our door.’

  ‘Well… who else would it be?’ he asked. ‘Something like this, knowledge of this… it’s far too important for any old Joe to have in his possession. I’m sure you’d agree.’

  Maddy shrugged, her hand reaching up to her forehead and finding a dressing there. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘So,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I have just about a million goddamn questions I’ve been wanting to ask someone like you. Questions I’ve been waiting for answers to most of my adult life. And, in return, I have a curious message that I’m sure you’re rather keen to see.’

  She was encouraged by the old man’s directness. No beating about the bush, no attempting to fool her, beguile her. Just the straightforward declaration of a quid pro quo.

  She nodded. ‘A message from a friend.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said as he got up and reached for his jacket neatly draped on a small storage cabinet in the corner of the room. He fumbled for the inside pocket and finally pulled out a folded sheet of paper. ‘A friend who apparently decided to take a holiday during the, if I’m not mistaken, the late Cretaceous period?’

  Maddy’s jaw dropped open. ‘I… uh… when did you say?’

  ‘The late Cretaceous. We’ve tested the rock. It’s definitely from that time.’

  Her lungs emptied a gasp. ‘You mean, like, dinosaur times?’

  Cartwright nodded. ‘Yes, I believe it was a popular time for dinosaurs.’

  ‘Oh my God, I didn’t think the machine — ’ She stopped herself before she blurted out anything else. She decided it would be far smarter to keep as much as possible to herself for now.

  ‘Yes.’ The man’s eyes narrowed curiously. ‘Yes, you do look genuinely surprised at that. What were you going to say?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  He studied her silently for a few moments. ‘This is someone you lost, isn’t it? Someone you’ve been unable to retrieve? To find? Some kind of mistake? Is that it?’