It made precious little difference. His hand went limp.
Beside her, Jenny was doing the same.
“How is he?” Cutter asked.
“How does he look?” Abby said brusquely, without looking up at him. She didn’t want to think about what had just happened. But for a wrinkle in time, a split-second reaction from the man on the floor of the forest, they would have traded places, and the team would have been looking down at her, knowing she was going to die, and asking: “How is she?”
A cough wracked Blaine’s body. A bubble of bloody phlegm dribbled out of his mouth. His eyes were clouding over.
“No one else is going to die today,” Abby said to him, even though he was in no fit state to listen. And to Cutter, and Jenny, and all of the others. She meant it, too. Lives weren’t meant to be snuffed out like cigarettes. She pressed down harder against the wound.
“Lucas?”
“What do you need?”
“A needle and thread from the kit, a naked flame, and more luck than any one girl ought to have,” she said, through gritted teeth.
“How does two out of three sound?” The soldier took his pack off and opened one of the side-pouches to retrieve a small sewing kit. “Physician heal thyself, and all that,” he said.
“You’re such a boy scout,” she said. “I love it. Thread it and heat it. It’s not exactly going to be sterile, but anything we can do to lessen the chance of infection the better. Stephen? Cutter? We’re going to need something to carry him out of here.”
“Got it,” Stephen said. She didn’t look to see where he went or ask what he had in mind. She trusted him.
Abby leaned in close to Blaine, talking slowly and clearly. “This is going to hurt, Andy. I’m sorry, but we are going to get you out of here. I promise you that.”
He nodded. Or at least she thought he did.
Jenny held his hand as Abby lanced the blackened tip of the hot metal through the flap of skin. Blaine didn’t so much as wince as the needle penetrated.
“Come on, come on,” Abby breathed, the words becoming a mantra. There was nothing holy to her prayer; it was totally selfish. She didn’t want him dying for her. “I’m going to need some water,” she said to no one in particular. Blood continued to leak from the worst of his wounds, the cuts so deep they showed no sign of clotting — and they wouldn’t, unless she could close them up.
Jenny took the last of their water bottles and spilled a thick dribble of water down over the cut to cleanse it. This time Blaine did cry out, against the sting. It was a weak and pitiful sound.
“I’m not waiting here,” Lucas said, handing the light to Connor. “How far away are the vehicles?”
“A mile or more at least,” Genaro told him.
“Fine, how about you two come with me. We’ll cut a path through the trees and see if we can’t bring the cars a little bit closer?”
“Better than standing around doing nothing,” Nando said. Something in his voice smacked of betrayal and bitterness, and seemed to say, How could you bring us out into this, knowing what was happening, and not warn us?
Abby didn’t look up. She continued to thread the needle through the soldier’s skin, drawing the flesh closer together with each stitch.
Her hand shook as she threaded stitch after stitch, closing up the worst of the wounds.
All the while, she felt the grim sensation of hungry eyes on her.
Cutter stripped the leaves from four long, straight branches, and a single short one. He used vines to lash them together, placing two perpendicular and the other two on the diagonal, forming a cross-brace. The shorter one he laid down across the middle to stabilise the frame. As stretchers went, it was barely worthy of the name, but it would do the job.
It had to.
With Stephen’s help he finished binding the wood tight.
“It’ll have to do,” he said.
He caught it again, that faint whiff of an out of place fragrance.
“Can you smell that?”
Stephen cocked his head slightly, inhaling deeply and slowly. He closed his eyes, as though to minimise sensory input so that his world might be reduced to an olfactory one.
“Apples?” He said.
“Apples,” Cutter agreed, thinking about it. That made vanilla, baking biscuits, coffee and now apples. Not one of them was an aroma that he would have expected to encounter in the middle of the wilderness. “There’s something going on here with these smells, something that I don’t understand. It’s there, like some finger puzzle, and the more I worry away at it the further away the answer to the riddle gets.”
“I’ve never heard of a hunting theory that involved scents like this,” Stephen admitted. “Not for a borhyaenid, or any other species, for that matter. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Cutter said. “It just doesn’t make sense. My first instinct is that they’re using the aromas to mark us. Like the smells are sensory tags. That would make sense if we were smelling the same things, like back at the village where the scent of baking biscuits was so strong. If that smell was somehow involved in inciting the creatures to attack, surely it would have to be the same aroma we’d be smelling now, after the Thylacosmilus attacked Blaine.
“That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. What if it’s some kind of glandular thing? Perhaps they secrete certain fragrances in their sweat?”
“It’s not out of the question,” Stephen mused, drying his hands off on the legs of his shorts. “After all, in the most basic of ways, that’s pretty much how deer hunters work. They lay out scents, knowing that the adult buck will invariably try to get downwind of the source. Then the hunters wear charcoal suits to mask their own scent, and lay in wait, downwind of the false trails they’ve laid out. What you’re talking about is an extrapolation of that, surely.”
“Now take it a step further,” Cutter said, his mind racing with the possibilities. “Queen bees use scent as a form of mind control, to keep the youngest bees in the hive well-behaved. By controlling their aversive memories, she’s able to keep some of them around to help groom her.”
“So what you’re saying is that maybe it isn’t the borhyaenids using the scents at all. That it’s something else entirely that’s using the scents to control them,” Stephen said. “As impossible as it sounds, that would explain the different scents, each for a different use.”
Cutter stared at him for a moment, then smiled grimly in the darkness. Had they not shared their experiences with the anomalies, such a thing would have seemed like madness. Now it seemed like something else altogether.
“Stephen, you’re a bloody genius. Of course it’s something else! That makes perfect sense. Think about it: the queen bee secretes a mandibular pheromone that prevents the worker bees from learning through aversive experiences. It’s a form of mind control. The scent reduces the likelihood of her young using their stingers; yet another pheromone could equally be used to incite another reaction, couldn’t it? It’s only when the older bees leave the hive to gather food that they’re no longer under the control of the scent, and learn to protect themselves using their stingers.
“So let’s say that somehow, someone is using these scents to impel the Thylacosmilus to do his bidding, like the queen bee. That has to be the answer!”
Cutter didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; this was no triumph, achieved in the sudden flash of understanding. It only added another layer of doubt. Stephen spoke up again, his voice full of confusion and uncertainty.
“But what? What creature is capable of using the pouch-blades to hunt for it?”
Cutter remained silent for a moment, and a terrifying thought occurred to him.
“What if it’s something from another anomaly? And not one that connects to the past.”
“Is that possible?”
“Can you think of a better explanation?”
Stephen and Cutter carried Blaine between them.
The SAS man was delirio
us with the pain of his wounds. He mumbled constantly, his words barely intelligible. Abby walked beside the makeshift stretcher, holding his hand protectively in hers. Strands of short grass stuck to his face where the sweat had condensed on his brow and cheek. She brushed them away.
Suddenly twin beams speared the dark, illuminating every twisted and ugly tree branch, and throwing phantom forms across the canopy of vivid green leaves. The first Land Rover lurched into view, followed by the second and third, and every time one of them crossed the beam it threw the others behind them into near-darkness.
Lucas stood on the driver’s side running board, and leaned out to usher them on. His silhouette was emphasised by the light that seemed to stream out from him. Along with Genaro and Nando, he had somehow managed to get the four-wheel driven tyres to bite, forcing it through the craters and over the tangled roots. The old vehicle had negotiated the uneven ground, albeit with some considerable difficulty. The passenger side-mirror had been ripped off by greedy vines and the canvas tarp had been torn away from the back as they squeezed between tree trunks and beneath trailing vines that clawed with grasping thorns.
Their desperate manoeuvres saved the others more than half of the mile-long walk with their burden, and more than double the time.
Now they had to pray it would be enough for Blaine.
Cutter rested a hand on Stephen’s shoulder. He held a finger to his nose. Stephen nodded. It was there again, a wrong odour clinging to the air. He breathed it in, embracing the utter wrongness of it. This time it took him a moment to place it, beyond the obvious fish-market reek, then he realised it was subtler — it was the scent of roe. A North Sea smell, and it carried with it trace memories of blasted coastline and rolling waves.
They hadn’t shared their theory with any of the others, but now that he had an inkling of how it worked, the sudden materialisation of these inexplicable aromas was a lot less disturbing — if no less alarming.
For it meant they were being hunted on two levels, the primary threat posed by the Thylacosmilus, and the secondary — perhaps more terrifying — idea that those hunters were almost certainly being controlled by some unimaginable overmind.
That there was no animal on the evolutionary chain that was capable of such a feat sent a shiver of dread through Cutter — because there was one word missing from that thought.
Yet.
He couldn’t allow himself to give in to the rising sense of panic he felt growing in his gut. Right now, all that mattered was getting Blaine to a hospital, and the rest of the team to safety. Everything else could wait until sunrise.
So Cutter braced the splintered poles of the stretcher against the Land Rover’s tailgate and slid it in, then clambered into the cage at the back and used his weight and leverage to man-handle Blaine off it. The soldier grunted as he slid onto the cold metal bed and lay shivering, unable to move for fear of tearing his makeshift stitches.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. It was not an easy lie.
Cutter clambered back out of the cage, jumping down to the churnedup ground.
“Get the blankets from the other car,” he told Nando. “He’s going into shock. We need to keep his body temperature up. Anything you’ve got in there that can be used to keep him warm.”
The reek of roe didn’t show any sign of dispersing as the others busied themselves stripping down the emergency camping gear to scavenge any-thing remotely thermal they could wrap around the shivering Blaine.
Abby clambered into the back of the Land Rover and lay down, pressing herself up close to Blaine to lend him her own body heat. Cutter passed in the blankets and sleeping bags the others brought to him, and helped Abby make him comfortable.
“Just make sure Lucas drives carefully,” she said to him.
Cutter said nothing. ‘Careful’ was a luxury they didn’t have if the heightening fragrance was anything to go by. He slapped the side panel and shouted, “Go, go, go!”
The vehicle turned awkwardly, like a drunken uncle at a wake, lurching from side to side as its wheels stuck in the rutted earth and then pulled free.
The second vehicle followed the first, as Cutter clambered into the passenger seat of the third, slamming the door. The sound rang out like a shotgun blast in the quiet forest. As the shock of it rustled through the leaves, the beasts came out of the darkness.
There were five of them, yellow eyes caught in the glare of the headlights and turned bloody by the reflection on their retinas. They prowled forward, the huge dark bulk of their bodies pressed low to the dirt as they advanced.
Next to Cutter, in the driver’s seat, Nando gunned the engine. It roared to life as he gave it full throttle and slammed the Land Rover into reverse. The car lurched back, the axle dipping as the rear wheel snapped through a thick root and dropped into the rut it left behind. The undercarriage ground against the stone and roots in the dirt, and then the car almost jumped back a foot as it lurched clear of whatever had snared it.
Cutter didn’t take his eyes off the five predators moving oh-so-slowly, almost proprietorially, around them, full of menace and raw animalistic power. There was a beautiful feline grace to their movement, but more, as their heads twisted to follow the light and they opened their huge jaws, jowls peeling back on those thick tusk-like teeth. He watched as they inclined their heads, nostrils flaring, and pawed at the dirt. Their fur was slick, and rippled over the musculature as they moved, circling.
It took him a heartbeat to realise what was happening out there.
The first threw back its head and loosed a primal roar. As one, the others answered, the jungle coming alive with their rage.
And then they threw themselves at the Land Rovers, slamming into the side panels and rocking each frame on the chassis. One of the Thylacosmilus leapt up onto the bonnet, leering in through the dirty windscreen as Nando wrestled with the wheel, trying desperately to dislodge the beast. It lashed out with its hugely powerful claws, slashing at the windscreen. The claws grated down the length of the glass, leaving five deep gouges.
As the headlights roved wildly around the grove and the smothering press of trees, Cutter caught a flurry of movement in his peripheral vision. Out of the corner of his eye, it was impossible to say exactly what it was that he had seen lurking in the shadows, only he knew what it wasn’t.
It was not, by any stretch of even the most warped imagination, a Thylacosmilus.
In truth it wasn’t anything he had ever seen before; it was awkward and ungainly, almost like a hybrid of lupine, avian and shadows. Before he could focus on it, however, it was gone, and he could only think that the beast had shown itself deliberately, goading him with its presence.
Nando yanked down hard on the wheel, and accelerated, throwing the Land Rover forward at full throttle. The wheels bit in the dirt. The creature’s claws scraped and scratched as it scrabbled for purchase, but the gathering momentum threw it clear.
“Drive,” Cutter said, unnecessarily.
Nando Estevez already had his foot flat to the floor.
TWENTY-ONE
The full beam of the Land Rover’s headlights speared through the oppressive night.
The creatures had chased them all the way to the open road, then the Land Rovers had managed to pull away from them. They were far behind now. If they were still chasing their prey, no one could see them.
They sat in silence, still in shock over what had happened. In the back seat, directly behind him, Jenny looked at Cutter through the secrecy of the shadows, rocking slightly in his chair like some idiot-savant Rain Man wrestling with whatever it was that haunted him. She was shaking. She had been ever since Blaine had saved Abby’s life.
The Land Rover hit a rut in the track and juddered. Jenny pressed her hands up against the ceiling to brace herself as they were thrown about. She felt so far from home, and she couldn’t simply pick up her mobile phone, make a call, and put things right. The hospital was more than ninety minutes away, the road about as drivable as
a landing strip deep in the heart of a combat zone. And on all sides the darkness was filled with madness.
It didn’t matter how much time she spent around Nick Cutter, the world he lived in wasn’t the world she was used to. Primordial worms, sabre-toothed cats, velociraptors, these were monsters that had no place in the world she had grown up in. They had no place in any world, for that matter. Any modern world.
She found herself watching him again. He was in many ways the father of this little group. They looked to him for wisdom, protection, encouragement and support. They turned to him for answers. In turn he treated them like his children, protective and proud. He was usually the steadying influence, the calm at the core of the enormity that was their role in this insane world of anomalies and truths no one could ever know.
Events seemed to have run away from him though. The strain was in his eyes, if you knew where to look. And she did. His heart yearned for something it couldn’t have back, the Claudia in the photograph he still carried in his wallet. She didn’t know how she felt about that; she was the paradox in his world of certainties. He demanded so much of himself. When she looked at him she couldn’t help but wonder if he were still searching for the other woman.
Was he secretly trying to pull the past apart to find a woman that had never been?
And what if he found her?
What if he found a way to bring his Claudia back? What would happen to Jenny Lewis then? What would happen to her bones and her skin and the thoughts that made up her identity?
Would it be her turn to simply cease to be?
After all, Aristotle had posited that the soul was essentially scientific, not some romanticised religious or spiritual thing, but rather substance. Form and matter joined in biology. The flesh provided the host, but the identity, the soul, that was some holistic other. From this, Aristotle concluded that the soul was part of a collective force that returned to this collective upon the death of an individual soul. He could not bring himself to believe in something created out of nothing.
So then Claudia and Jenny had to be a part of the same collective, created from the same substance, form and matter joined in biology. And one of the basic laws of physics she did remember was that two things could not exist in the same place at the same time — or in this case the same flesh.
Shadow of the Jaguar Page 21