Fire and Water

by Simon Guerrier

  “I...” Sarah began. “I haven’t really worked here that long, you know.”

  Samuels leant forward, his face full of concern.

  “But you know you can trust them, don’t you?”

  SIXTEEN

  It had just gone midday when they pulled up in a wide-open space roughly the size of a football pitch. A low, tangled tree of thick branches sat at the centre of the clearing, and a few sparse shrubs broke up the rocky ground. The lack of greenery in such a teeming, verdant country made Danny immediately suspicious. This was the kind of place to which primitive man would have attributed evil spirits.

  “Picnic spot?” he said to Sophie as she turned off the car’s engine.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Salt in the earth means nothing much grows here. Help me get out the lunch.”

  First they unloaded the guns — two Winchester Model 70s and a much bigger, more modern rifle of a make he didn’t recognise — and the other supplies. Danny checked over his rifle, the same one he’d used the night before. He was about to check the magazine when Sophie put a hand on his arm.

  “All set?” she asked him.

  “Just checking it’s loaded,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  “Sure,” she said. “But I did that before we set out.”

  “Good thing I trust you,” he said, grinning. But Sophie didn’t smile back. She looked quickly away, leaning into the back of the car to drag something bleating and mewling towards her. The creature’s hooves were roped together, and it tried to prod her with its short curly horns. Danny didn’t know livestock particularly well, but the thing was about the size of a goat.

  “Impala,” Lester observed.

  Sophie fixed a rope around the animal’s neck, then freed its hooves. The impala struggled to escape her, straining at its leash, but Sophie held it firm.

  They followed her as she led the animal out to the twisted tree in the centre of the plain. The ground was hard and uneven — Danny stumbled more than once. Heat pressed hard against them, and the air was thick, as if they were walking through water. Even with his Ray Bans on, he had to squint.

  He nodded at Lester.

  “What’s that they say about mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun?”

  “That they usually have someone else to carry their equipment,” Lester replied.

  They could see for miles and miles, across great plains and twisted woodland to the vast mountains beyond. But while they were out in the open, anything hidden in the tall grass and acacia bordering the space had a perfect view of them, too.

  A short distance in front of the tree a wooden stake emerged from the ground. Sophie attached the impala’s rope to a metal ring hanging from the stake. The animal lunged away from her as soon as she stood back, racing for the cover of the tall grass. It came to a sudden, shocking halt as it reached the end of the tether, the impact knocking it from its feet. They watched it choking, spluttering and walking a few steps one way and then the other, testing how far it could get.

  Sophie ran her hand along the rope and walked out to the impala. It mewled at her miserably. She stroked its nose and forehead, calming it. Then she reached into one of the side pockets of her camouflage trousers and withdrew a small plastic bottle, a simple spray like those used for cosmetics. She sprayed the clear liquid over the impala’s back. It kicked and fidgeted, trying to resist, but Sophie held onto the rope so it couldn’t get away.

  “What is that stuff?” Danny asked as she made her way back to them. Behind her, the impala rolled itself on the barren, hard ground, trying to scratch off whatever she’d just sprayed on it.

  “A hunch,” she said. “Come on.”

  She led them to the shadow of the tree. From close up they could see a platform built amongst its higher branches. A rope hung down, but there didn’t seem to be a ladder.

  “How do we —” Danny began.

  Sophie ran forward, jumped high against the tree and then scrambled quickly upwards. They watched her swing a leg over the rail running round the platform. She peered quickly around it, presumably checking for snakes or poisonous spiders, then looked back down at them.

  “Pass the guns up first.”

  “You don’t seriously expect me to climb up there?” Lester said.

  “No, not unless you want to,” she said, and smiled sweetly, “but it’s safer than being down there.”

  “It’s not just the Postosuchus we need to worry about,” Danny said. “Anything could take the bait.”

  “I’ve read John Patterson’s account of hunting lions at Tsavo in 1898 —” Lester began pompously.

  Sophie smiled again, but this time there was nothing sweet about it.

  “You would have.”

  “He also staked out an animal, watched it from up a tree. But he rather neglected the fact that lions can climb trees.”

  “Still killed them,” Sophie said. “Didn’t he?”

  Danny laughed. She has you there.

  “Yes,” Lester snapped irritably, “but nevertheless this strikes me as a rather dangerous game.” He continued to eye the rope as if it was a snake, coiled to strike.

  “You got a better idea?”

  He peered up at her.

  “We could look for its tracks, and follow them.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, I’m a civil servant, not a hunter. That’s your job.”

  “The tracks aren’t distinct enough, and we’d be on ground we couldn’t secure. This is about the best guarantee we’ve got of facing this creature and surviving. Unless you know some other way we can do this, you’d better get up here.”

  Danny stepped forward.

  “Doesn’t look like there’s much room up there,” he called up.

  “There isn’t,” Sophie informed him.

  He turned to an angry looking Lester.

  “Hey,” he said. “This could be fun.”

  Two hours later, they were still squashed together on the platform. Danny remembered fishing trips with his dad, an uneasy attempt at male bonding in a family that had almost collapsed after they’d lost his brother Pat. They would sit watching the river, their fishing rods standing idle. He would go over in his mind all the things he might ask his dad, just to break the awful silence. But whatever he said only earned the same long-suffering expression, that sense that his father could’ve coped with losing a son if only it had been Danny.

  He felt a similar sense of anger and frustration now, cooped up on the platform with Sophie and Lester, unable to speak and weighed down by the heat. He’d taken off his leather jacket and hung it from one of the branches above them, but even in just his polo shirt the sweat dripped from him in constant rivulets. At first he’d apologised when his bare arm had brushed against Sophie’s. Now they were just used to pressing against each other, sharing their skin and smell.

  When he did try, Sophie ignored any effort at conversation, even if brokered in a whisper. Since she’d gone to get the supplies she’d seemed even more distant — if that was possible. Perhaps she has a boyfriend, he mused for the hundredth time. Perhaps someone has teased her about running round after the two pale Englishmen.

  Perhaps she was setting them up.

  Lester sat motionless, his bad mood further stifling the atmosphere between the three of them. They watched the impala circle idly round the stake, scratching at the ground, mewling, going to the toilet.

  All at once Danny felt Sophie tense beside him. The impala stopped its endless circling and stood perfectly still, watching the long grass at the edge of the arid ground. Sophie reached for her field binoculars with one hand and raised her rifle with the other. This close, Danny could read the names of the thick cartridges in the clear panel of the magazine. They were .585 Nyati, a size he didn’t know. But a cartridge like that, in a gun that didn’t look more than twelve pounds, would come with quite a recoil.

  He raised his own Winchester, which had enough kick as it was, and ai
med it in the same general direction.

  They watched and waited. The impala’s legs trembled.

  Then the grass parted and a long snout pushed its way through. Slowly, the crocodilian shape of the Postosuchus padded out onto the rocky, dry ground. The thick ridges of armour-plating ran down its back like the rungs of a ladder, and glistened in the sun. It took its time, occasionally rising up slightly on its hind legs, revealing its pale underbelly, sniffing the air in deep lungfuls, the length of its face and the jagged teeth giving it what looked like a crafty smile. Danny noted the long, sharp claw on each front limb, which he assumed it had used to gut the doomed Eustreptospondylus.

  Suddenly it was moving, galloping fast across the ground, its long forelegs tucked underneath its body. The impala let out an awful wail of distress, but the Postosuchus barely hesitated as it snapped the thing up in its jaws. It still didn’t stop; chewing goat, it charged at the tree in the centre of the clearing. The tree in which three humans were hiding. Danny raised his gun.

  Sophie’s gun exploded beside Danny, and he heard her grunt with pain as the butt tried to break through her shoulder. He glimpsed the trail of the bullet as it bounced off the creature’s thick armour, an unlucky shot that just didn’t find the right angle.

  Beside him, Lester fired off two shots, and Danny aimed right into the creature’s open jaws. The Postosuchus took the blasts and didn’t even blink. Danny just had time to wonder if he’d even hit the thing when it crashed against the tree.

  The whole platform shook, and their bottles of water rained over the back and down onto the ground.

  The Postosuchus reared up on its hind legs, snarling, biting and scratching. Its huge savage jaws reaching a half metre below the platform. Danny fired again, right into its face.

  This time he knew his gun was faulty — he couldn’t have missed at this distance, yet his shot had had no effect at all.

  Sophie struggled to aim at the creature’s head as it bundled against the tree. It was moving quickly and angrily, enraged that it couldn’t quite reach them. She squeezed back on the trigger and a bullet streaked down the armour plating on the creature’s back. Because of the close proximity, it scored a long rent of blood behind it. The Postosuchus cried out in rage and smashed hard again into the tree.

  The tree shook.

  And bent.

  The Postosuchus pressed itself against the trunk. Danny held on tight to the rail of the platform, his legs swinging out over the ground below. Lester and Sophie hung on beside him, Lester’s gun escaped his grasp and disappeared over the edge.

  “Hold on!” Danny yelled, but the tree was cracking, the platform coming apart. He flung himself forward, reaching for the higher branches, but he missed and fell back just as the platform gave way. Lester, Sophie and Danny tumbled out of the tree, the remains of the platform and twigs and leaves plummeting to the ground around them.

  They hit the ground hard. Only Danny had managed to hold on to his gun; the other two lay out of reach.

  The Postosuchus glared at them. On all-fours its eyes were about shoulder height, its jaws as long as Danny’s arm. It watched them with beady, hungry eyes, as though deciding who to eat first.

  Then Danny noticed a strange aroma hanging around them. He looked round and his quick eyes picked out the wet stain at the pocket of Sophie’s trousers: the spray bottle she’d used on the tethered impala had broken in the fall. The Postosuchus sniffed through long thin nostrils, then settled its eyes on her.

  Realising what was about to happen, he ran forward, firing right into the creature’s face. It turned its head slowly to look at him, but was completely unaffected. An awful realisation dawned on him.

  “I’m only firing blanks!” he shouted. “Someone’s set us up!”

  He threw the rifle, smacking the Postosuchus squarely on the nose. The creature growled at him. He took a step back, but with chaos all around him there was nowhere he could run. The creature started to lunge right at him, its ghastly jaws hanging open.

  He braced himself...

  And then Sophie was lunging at him, too, shouting.

  “No, leave him!”

  She pulled the mangled plastic bottle from her pocket. Immediately, the Postosuchus turned from Danny and threw itself on Sophie’s out-stretched arms, the full weight of its armour-plated body crashing into her. She cried out. There were a series of explosions.

  Lester stood tall with Sophie’s rifle in his hands, firing a quick succession of .585 cartridges into the creature’s face and neck. They smashed into the soft tissues, detonating blood and bits of skull. The Postosuchus fell back under the onslaught. Lester kept shooting until the gun clicked empty, by which time the creature was very dead.

  Danny ran over to where Sophie lay, spattered with blood and remains. Her right arm was mangled and, as Danny got close, he could see she had been crushed. He knelt down beside her and wiped her bloody hair out of her face.

  “I’m sorry...” she croaked. “They wanted me to...”

  “Don’t try to talk,” he told her. “We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, the muscles in her neck straining with effort. A bead of blood appeared at one nostril and trickled backwards down her cheek.

  Danny looked round at Lester, who was quickly and professionally replacing the empty magazine of the gun.

  “She’s dead,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure.

  Lester looked up, and Danny saw something terribly cold in his eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, glancing at the body.

  “She gave us guns that didn’t work,” Danny said, his arms still round the broken body. “She set us up.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And then... and then she tried to save me.”

  “Your charm must have got through to her.” He pulled at the bloody mess of his tie, discarding it on the ground. “We’ve been played since we first got here. This creature rather conveniently ambushed us last night. Sophie hasn’t been working alone.”

  “What should we do?” Danny asked. He got up from the ground, a torrent of conflicting emotions coursing through him.

  Lester’s shirt was spattered with gore, the huge rifle nestled in his arms. Danny didn’t see him as Wellington any more, but as a one-man army.

  “We take her back to the lodge and we try to contact London. But our options have been curtailed very efficiently. This isn’t over yet.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “Okay,” Sarah said. “This is what I’ve got so far.”

  Connor and Abby sat red-eyed but alert on the settee, a good arm’s length between them at the insistence of their guards. Adam and Sharon watched over them coolly, Adam filling the doorway that led out of Lester’s office, Sharon standing in a corner, her arms crossed. Samuels sat back in his chair, still at an angle to Lester’s desk, still trying to suggest he was just filling in rather than taking over.

  He smiled at Sarah encouragingly.

  “The soldiers who broke in here didn’t take anything, as far as we can tell,” she continued. “One assumption is that they were disturbed, that security got wind of them before they’d got whatever it was they came for.” She paused for a moment. “I don’t think we can have been that lucky. They haven’t made any effort to come back, though.”

  “I’ve had some security people brought in to beef up the numbers,” Samuels put in. “Good people we can trust, who know what they’re doing. Then again, the systems here are pretty complex, no one person understands them completely.”

  “I do,” Connor protested dourly.

  “Most of the time,” Abby added.

  “That fact does rather incriminate you, Mr Temple,” Samuels said. “Sorry, but it does. Go on, please, Sarah.”

  “Right, well, imagine a policeman investigating the evidence here. He looks at the facts, identifies suspects, matches them to motive and opportunity — we’ve all seen it on television — and on that basis the evidence points in one dir
ection.”

  “Me,” Connor said glumly.

  “But why would Connor turn on us?” Abby protested.

  “Maybe,” Sarah said, “you’re fed up with the ARC’s management and handling of the anomalies, especially in light of Cutter’s death. You think we could be doing things better.”

  “Well, we could,” Connor put in, and Abby grimaced.

  “There’s new people on the team and your old loyalties have shifted. Even Abby threw you out on the street.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “You sort of did,” Connor told her kindly. “It’s okay though, I understand.” He turned to Sarah. “Um, this is all really good. But aren’t you meant to be clearing my name? You’re kind of stacking things up against me.”

  “It does all sound rather convincing,” Samuels agreed.

  “Yes,” Sarah said, “it does. A policeman might think it all slotted together just perfectly.”

  “Yeah,” Connor sighed, and he looked more dejected than ever.

  “The thing is, I’m not a policeman,” Sarah said. “I don’t look at things in the same way. I work with myths and legends, stories that have been handed down to us over hundreds, even thousands of years. We check and compare them against other evidence, the facts of history and archaeology. But we also analyse them as stories, and this simply doesn’t work as a story.’”

  “You’re saying he’s been framed?” Abby said hopefully.

  “The CCTV footage of him at the ADD has some strange jumps in it, like it’s been tampered with, like it’s been edited by someone.”

  “But the break-in wasn’t a story,” Connor said. “It really happened, didn’t it?” He peered at her intently.

  “Yes,” Sarah confirmed, “those were real events, but just as with myths, events are shaped by the person telling the story. They’re edited, crafted, built on, adapted. My job is to ask certain questions: Who told the story? In what context and for what purpose?”