Day of the Predator tr-2

by Alex Scarrow

  The creatures probed and circled, clacking teeth and claws and mewling like foxes, occasionally testing them with a lunge and snap of jaws… so far the six of them were doing better than Liam could have hoped holding them back. But then he realized there was patient thinking going on behind what these creatures were up to.

  Wearing us down. That’s all they’re doing. Wearing us down.

  His eyes picked through the lean olive-coloured hides, the flickering chitinous teeth, until he found the pack leader, holding that spear and looking strangely human because of that.

  If we got him…

  Yes, if Becks could somehow be fast enough to reach out past the others and grab him, and snap his neck in her hands, then the others would surely panic and run. He had a spear in his hand; he realized he could at least have a go. The pack leader was only fourteen or fifteen feet away and, unlike the others, circling in that strange bobbing way, he stood perfectly still, watching them with keen studious eyes.

  Liam dropped his hatchet at his feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ yelled Jasmine.

  ‘Gonna get that one there,’ he said, nodding towards Broken Claw.

  He steadied his balance on his back leg, lined up the creature staring at him with cocked-head curiosity down the length of the bamboo shaft and then hurled it like a javelin. A straight point-to-point throw instead of an arced trajectory. He surprised even himself with his accuracy and would probably have caught the thing square in its narrow chest, had not another smaller one bobbed in the way unintentionally. The sharp tip of the bamboo punched into its long bony skull and the creature crumpled to the ground with a short brittle scream that sounded almost like the wail of a human child.

  Liam winced and cursed that he’d not got the leader. And now they were down to one spear.

  Out of the black one of the smaller hominids suddenly ducked down low and swiped with a claw, knocking Akira off balance. Her leg buckled and, with a thin yelp, she dropped heavily into the dirt. Winded and worn out, she struggled to get up. Yet more spindle-thin arms emerged from the gloom and clawed digits wrapped tightly round her ankles and wrists.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, her pale face just two wide eyes and her mouth an ‘O’ of horror. Within a second, two beats of a pounding heart, they’d dragged her struggling form out of the pall of flickering light, her screaming voice smothered, muffled and then brutally silenced.

  Becks took advantage of a careless incursion and lunged forward again, sweeping her blade and missing as the creatures leaped once more back out of her range.

  ‘We… can’t keep this… up,’ said Laura. ‘Not all… not all n-night.’

  ‘I know,’ replied Liam.

  Just then something whistled past his cheek. ‘ Whuh? ’

  He looked down and saw the shaft of a bamboo spear rattling and flexing on the ground. He looked up at the empty-handed pack leader and understood.

  ‘Oh no!’ he gasped. ‘You see that? It… threw… It threw it back.’

  Good going, Liam. You just taught them how to toss a javelin.

  ‘Ah Jay-zus… if they start throwin’ missiles at us, we’ll be in trouble.’

  ‘L-like we’re not already?’ muttered Laura, lashing out at one of the smaller creatures bobbing too close.

  Liam watched the leader, moving around the rear of his pack, those yellow eyes no longer on him but flitting across the ground, looking for something.

  Looking for another spear to throw?

  ‘Information.’ Becks’s voice suddenly cut across the clacking and mewling. ‘I am detecting a burst of precursor particles.’

  ‘Is… is that good?’ asked Jasmine.

  Liam nodded. ‘Yes! Oh Jay-zus, yes!’ He turned to Becks. ‘That’s a window, right? Tell me it’s a window and not another probe?’

  ‘Affirmative. The configuration suggests an imminent window.’

  ‘YES! Oh yes!’ He grinned breathlessly.

  ‘We must move out of this space,’ said Becks. ‘They will not open the window until it is completely clear.’

  ‘Right. Together,’ said Liam. ‘Keep together, back to back… move towards the fire!’

  The five of them backed up towards each other, until they were almost bumping together. Then Becks stepped a little ahead, swiping and spinning a hatchet in each hand with ballet-like precision at the creatures. They wisely backed away from her, creating a path for them to shuffle along in her wake.

  ‘Enough!’ barked Becks after they’d moved half a dozen yards across the clearing towards the increasing heat and flickering light of the campfire. She turned round to face them. ‘The extraction area is now unobstruct-’

  It was then a sharpened tip of bamboo erupted through her abdomen, ripping through her flesh and the tattered material of her black crop top. Becks glanced casually down at the bloody tip.

  ‘Becks!’ gasped Liam.

  With a blur of movement, she reached round and grabbed the creature that had skewered her from behind. She flipped it over her shoulder on to the ground in front of her. Its claws viciously flailed at her, shredding the skin on her forearm into tatty red ribbons. With a savage jerk she twisted its long head. The creature’s yellow eyes and leathery black tongue bulged under the sudden tension in its slender neck. They heard a crackling sound and then the thing stopped squirming.

  ‘Becks! You OK?’ cried Liam.

  ‘Negative. The damage is significant,’ she replied, looking down at the point of the spear, still protruding from her waist. One of her legs wobbled beneath her and she dropped to her knees.

  ‘BECKS! Hang in there!’ yelled Liam.

  Then they all felt it, the solid push of displaced air. Liam looked behind him and saw a shimmering sphere: the faint, dancing pattern of a reassuringly familiar place — the archway. ‘LOOK! That’s it! THAT’S THE WINDOW!’

  Right now, in this instant, there were no creatures between them and their way home. ‘GO!’ Liam yelled.

  For a moment the two remaining girls and Edward stared at him, unsure what he meant by that.

  ‘NOW!’ he screamed, his voice breaking. ‘THERE!.. RUN FOR IT! GO, GO, GO!’

  Laura nodded, more than happy to obey. She turned on her heels and sprinted for the window. Jasmine followed suit. Edward lingered. ‘What about — ?’

  ‘NOW!’ screamed Liam.

  Edward turned and sprinted after the girls. Liam turned to Becks. ‘Come on!’

  She struggled to her feet unsteadily. ‘Information: I have lost significant levels of blood — ’

  ‘Just shuddup!’ he snapped, sliding his hands under her armpits and hefting her up. She staggered to her feet. ‘Leave, Liam!’ she ordered him. ‘Protect Edward Chan!’

  Liam shot a glance over his shoulder. He could see Laura hovering just outside the spherical boundary of the window, hesitating to step in. Between her and them, Edward and Jasmine sprinting.

  ‘GODDAMMIT GO THROUGH!’ he shouted. ‘GO THR-… AGHHhhhh!’

  He suddenly felt a searing pain through his leg and saw that one of the smaller creatures had grasped his shin; the razor-sharp edge of its claws sliced through his shorts, through his skin and now grated against his shin bone.

  Becks swiped with the hatchet still in her left hand, and cut through the creature’s thin wrist. Its claws and its hand were still attached to Liam’s lower leg like the jaws of some tenacious decapitated soldier ant. Despite the grating agony in his leg, he dragged Becks with him, she barely able to drunkenly stagger, and yet still swinging her blade in powerfully vicious yet groggy ill-aimed arcs that thwacked and cracked against the hungrily grasping reach of those creatures determined enough to reach out for them.

  Around him, Liam could hear a mixture of frustrated snarls and startled whimpers… and a sudden high-pitched scream that sounded unmistakably human. His mind solely on dragging Becks, heavy despite her slight frame, he could only fleetingly hope that it wasn’t Edward Chan’s voice he’d just heard.

  ‘
Mission priority — ’ Becks began to chastise him.

  ‘JUST KEEP HITTING THE BLOODY THINGS!’ he bellowed back at her. She shut up and obliged, swinging a booted foot out at a long bony jaw getting ready to snap down on her blood-caked thigh. Her boot made heavy contact, and the skull spun on its turtle neck like a skittle, a handful of toothpick-sized teeth whizzing out into the dark.

  Ten seconds later — ten seconds that to Liam could easily have been a minute or an hour, ten seconds of dragging, hacking, swinging, kicking and screaming — and all of a sudden he felt the hair on his head lift in response to the warm soup of energy and excited particles around him. Over his shoulder, he could see Sal, actually see her shape, dancing and undulating as if seen through a thin veil of oil, and other shapes, Edward, Laura standing beside her. He could see the flickering blue fizzing archway light that normally irritated him so much as he read on his bunk.

  ‘WE DID IT!’ he found himself yelling as his foot seemed to lose touch with solid ground and he felt that all too familiar nauseating sensation of falling.

  CHAPTER 71

  2001, New York

  He felt his face smack against a hard concrete floor, the dead weight of Becks landing heavily on the top of his back, knocking the air out of his lungs.

  ‘Good God!’ he heard from somewhere nearby — a male voice he didn’t recognize.

  While his eyes were still seeing stars, he could feel Becks struggling to lift herself off his back. He heard the pounding rasp of laboured breath nearby, presumably, hopefully, Edward and the other two. He could hear the faint muted chug of the generator in the back room. And through the still-open portal hovering a couple of feet above the tangled pile of himself and Becks, the far-off sounds of a jungle night stirring to life… and the click-clacking and mewling of those things getting louder, closer.

  ‘Ummpph… closhhhh the ’ortal!’ he mumbled into the floor, his bloodied lips still mushed against the hard concrete as Becks struggled to lift her dead weight off him.

  ‘Liam? Is that you under there?’ Maddy’s voice.

  ‘Umpph. U’mm… yeshhh,’ he mumbled. ‘Closhhh the ’leedin’ ’ortal!’

  Then all of a sudden he felt another heavy load land on his back, and the excruciating pain of three sharp blades digging deep into his left shoulder-blade.

  ‘What on earth is THAT?’ Another unfamiliar voice, another man’s voice.

  The weight was gone as quickly as it had arrived and he heard the skittering of claws across the concrete floor and the startled bark of one or two of those creatures echoing off the arched brick ceiling.

  ‘My God, Forby! Shoot it! SHOOT IT!’

  The piercing scream of a girl, he couldn’t be sure who. Then, with a rattling sigh, Becks finally flopped off the side of his back, her pale face spattered with dark dots of drying blood, thudding to the floor beside his. Her grey eyes stared lifelessly back at him, as if looking at something far, far away. He managed to lift himself up on to his elbows, grimacing at the sharp pain in his shoulder and his head still spinning from the impact of the heavy landing. He attempted to get his first glance at what was going on around him.

  Two of the creatures had managed to follow them through and were now darting in confusion and panic one way and then the other across the archway floor. He spotted two men he didn’t recognize: one old, in a rumpled suit with a loosened tie dangling round his throat like a hangman’s noose. The other man was younger with buzz-cut sandy hair and an army-fit physique beneath what looked like a baggy light-green boiler suit. He raised a gun.

  ‘Where did they go?’ snapped Maddy.

  They heard something fall off a shelf in a dark corner of the archway and roll noisily across the floor.

  ‘Over there!’

  With trained, quick precision, Forby squinted down the weapon’s barrel and flipped the night-sight of his scope on. A soft green glow poured across his face as he slowly panned the weapon around the archway, then up towards the curved brick ceiling.

  ‘Ahh… I see one.’

  Liam followed the direction of his gaze and thought he could just about make out some dark shape moving among a criss-cross of old rusting pipes and loops of electrical flex. Age-old dust and the grit from crumbling bricks and mortar trickled down past the softly fizzing glow of the ceiling light, giving the hapless creature’s position away.

  The man fired two aimed shots in quick succession. The creature screamed, then plummeted to the floor, bringing down a small flurry of dust and grit with it. It squirmed and screamed and drummed arms and legs against the floor, until the young man put a third shot into its long skull.

  As the echo of the last shot rattled around the brick walls, Liam looked around him. He could see Edward and Laura huddled together by the displacement machine’s perspex tube, and Sal and Maddy beside the computer desk. All of them looking from one dark recess to another, listening intently for the sounds of movement.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’ whispered Sal.

  The man with the gun placed a finger to his lips to hush her. ‘Hiding,’ he whispered.

  ‘Well, for Christ’s sake find him, Forby!’ hissed the older man.

  Liam watched as Forby stepped across the floor into the middle of the archway, continuing to slowly pan his gun, studying every nook and cranny around until finally he came to a halt, aiming at the arched recess where their bunk beds were.

  ‘Uh-huh… I think he’s skulking under there.’

  He squatted down low and pumped his finger. A single shot danced and ricocheted under Liam’s cot, sparking against the metal frame.

  It was then that something dropped down from above, past the ceiling light on to Forby’s back — a blur of movement and flashing of claws and teeth, a bright arc of crimson.

  ‘HEELLP M-!’ His voice was cut off as the creature’s claws flailed at his neck. He dropped the gun as he staggered and struggled to wrestle the thing off his back.

  Liam picked himself up and scrambled across the floor, reaching out for the heavy assault rifle as Forby’s legs buckled and he dropped to his knees, blood spraying from the multiple ragged wounds across his face and head. The creature leaped off his shoulders and darted towards the shutter door as Forby flopped the rest of the way to the ground. Quite dead.

  Liam raised the gun and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked his shoulder as he emptied the clip with a protracted and unaimed volley that produced a dozen showers of sparks and brick-red plumes of dust.

  With the gun angrily clicking in his hands, he finally eased his finger off the trigger and peered through the gunsmoke at the inert body of the other creature. Now a shredded mess.

  ‘Jesus,’ whispered the old man, his croaky voice shaking.

  CHAPTER 72

  2001, New York

  They stared at the naked body floating amid the pink-red soup of liquid in the plastic cylinder.

  ‘Will the support unit survive?’ asked Sal.

  ‘Becks,’ said Liam quietly. His voice little more than a gentle croak. ‘Her name is Becks.’

  The soft glow of red light coming from the base of the birthing tube was the only illumination in the back room. It was enough for Maddy to see the lost expression of post-traumatic stress on Liam’s face. ‘She’ll live,’ said Maddy with the hesitant smile of someone not really sure. ‘Bob said their combat frames can sustain roughly a seventy-five per cent blood loss and still be able to recover from that, given enough time.’ She glanced at the shredded remnants of the female unit’s left lower arm. Almost all the soft tissue had been clawed away leaving a skeletal forearm surrounded by tatters of skin and tendon that floated and swayed in the gloop like so many ends of frayed rope.

  ‘Unlike Forby,’ said Cartwright sombrely.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Maddy. ‘He seemed, like, you know… like a good guy.’

  The old man nodded thoughtfully. ‘The best. The very best.’ He sighed. ‘Family man too.’

  The only sound in the back room was th
e gentle purring of the tube’s filtration system. Maddy had shut down the generator to conserve the half a tank of fuel they had left. There was no need for the generator to be chugging away right now; a row of steady green LEDs showed the displacement machinery was fully charged and ready to use again. She’d shut everything else down, the computer systems, the lights, the other birthing tubes and the fridge containing the other embryos… they’d keep in their cryo-tubes for a few more hours without refrigeration.

  ‘So how long?’ asked Laura, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. ‘You know? Until she’s all better again?’

  Maddy looked up at the girl. She could imagine her in another time, confident and popular in her high school, a baton-twiddling cheerleader, everyone’s favourite, always invited to parties, always surrounded by friends and acolytes. That Texan accent — the confident bray of someone who’d never need to question her place in the world… Well, she didn’t look quite so much like a future Homecoming Queen now. Even in this muted light Maddy could see how badly affected she was by the portal’s corrosion effect. Her face looked ghostly pale, the flesh around her eyes dark and it seemed her nose was still leaking a steady trickle of blood: a ruptured blood vessel somewhere inside that quite possibly might never heal.

  The boy, Edward Chan, seemed to have fared only slightly better.

  Apparently, according to Chan, there’d been another girl with them, but she’d been jumped by one of those things just before she could reach the portal. If she’d suffered the same fate as Forby, then Maddy could only hope her death had been as mercifully quick. Although, after what she’d witnessed only half an hour ago, merciful felt entirely like the wrong word to use. She watched Chan’s large round eyes staring at the mush of organic soup, at the foggy figure of the support unit inside. Both these two, Chan and the girl, seemed to be in a deep state of shock, well beyond grieving for a lost classmate. Liam said there’d been others, sixteen of them had survived the blast back in time. Only these two plus Liam and Becks had made it.