by RR Haywood
‘They’re really heavy,’ Ben says dutifully.
‘How’re you supposed to stamp a man’s head in wearing them things?’ he asks, flapping a disdainful hand at the modern boots. ‘You’d hurt your foot,’ he adds, nodding seriously. ‘And a sore foot is no joke.’
‘Get changed and we’ll go outside,’ Safa says, scooping her pile up.
‘Outside?’ Ben asks, rising from the chair. ‘What about the bacteria?’
‘Oh, they’ve got a decontamination thingy by the back door.’
‘Technical,’ Ben says.
‘S’what I said,’ Safa says. ‘Malcolm and Konrad know how it works.’
‘What about the wildlife? There’s dinosaurs out there . . . big fucking dinosaurs.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ she says with a smile as she walks into her room. ‘We’ll feed Harry to them if we get trapped.’
‘Roger,’ Harry says, walking into his room and closing the door.
Ben scoops his pile up and heads into the room with his name on the door that isn’t his room because he does not belong here. This is a mistake. They think he’s something special, somebody who can do incredible things. Ben Ryder. He’s not Ben Ryder. He is Ben Calshott, who was going to get married to Steph but Steph was having an affair. The thought of her sends his mood plummeting into a state of despair that grips his insides and sends a rush of nihilism coursing through his body with a deep longing to be surrounded by things he knows. He doesn’t care about what happened when he was seventeen. He had years of psychological treatment but in truth, the fact he killed never really bothered him. He could justify it in his head. They would have killed him, that woman and her child, so therefore the actions he took were right. What did bother him was the fact that killing did not bother him. Everyone told him he should be upset and traumatised, but he wasn’t. He was upset that it happened in the first place, and he felt awful that the woman and her child had such a thing happen to them. In the end he faked it, as it was the only way he could end the treatment. He told the therapists he felt bad and let them convince him that he should not feel bad. The same with Holborn, even though it only happened a few days ago. The fact that it happened is awful. The fact that people died is terrible and he feels every emotional reaction one should feel to such a thing. The lives he took, though? No. Nothing. Again it was justified. They would have killed him and many others. What is fact is that neither of those things he did makes him a hero in his mind. Harry and Safa are heroes because they dedicated their lives to protecting and defending others. He didn’t do that. He only reacted to a threat in front of him and that was it.
He goes back into the middle room with a feeling of panic starting to rise in his chest as Harry finishes tying the laces on his old boots and stands straight, fingering the black material of his trousers then his top. ‘Good stuff,’ he mutters.
‘I can’t do it,’ Ben says quietly.
‘Both ready?’ Safa strides out, looking and feeling entirely comfortable in the new clothes. ‘Ben? You’re not dressed.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘Can you rip this for me?’ she says, handing her grey tracksuit top to Harry. ‘Need a hair-band about this thick,’ she says, holding her thumb and forefinger slightly apart. ‘Get dressed,’ she says to Ben gently.
‘Safa, I can’t. I can’t do what you do—’
‘I’ll train you,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘You’ll be okay, I promise.’
‘I just can’t.’ He flaps his hands and feels lost in the room with two such incredible professionals. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Ben, we’re staying,’ she says, keeping that same gentle soft tone. ‘Just get dressed.’
‘But . . .’
‘Please,’ she says, locking eyes on him.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says pointedly. ‘You both look normal in those clothes. I won’t. I’ll look stupid because I don’t belong in them.’
‘Ben, get dressed.’
‘Safa, I can’t . . .’
‘You can and you will,’ she says, taking a step closer to him. ‘You’ll be okay. Christ, you’re Ben Ryder,’ she says again with her dark eyes locked on his. ‘Think of the incredible things you’ve done.’
‘That stuff doesn’t bother me,’ he says desperately.
‘What does then?’ she asks questioningly.
‘I don’t know, like . . . being away from home and . . . not being at home . . .’
‘That’s homesickness. That’s normal. Everyone gets it.’
‘But this is forever and . . . we’re not going back.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Sit down for a minute.’
‘Safa, I’ll sit down but—’
‘Good, then do it.’ She guides him to a chair as Harry starts shredding her grey top into hairbands. ‘Break it down into an hour at a time.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We’ve got to disconnect from what we were. We’re here to do this. We died. We do not belong to the places we came from. So,’ she says, pausing while leaning towards him on the edge of her chair, ‘worry about the next hour and just that next hour. Get through that and worry about the next one. Do that and eventually all those hours roll into days and this feeling you’ve got will ease up.’
‘How do you know?’
She shrugs, remembering what she had to endure at Downing Street and that fourteen days had seemed like a lifetime but she knew she would get through it. ‘Because it will,’ she says.
The way she speaks to and looks at him, the tone of voice, the care in her eyes and genuine concern in her manner all work to push that panic away until he starts to feel settled and calm again.
‘Okay,’ he says, more to himself. ‘Hour at a time.’
‘Hour at a time,’ she says.
‘Okay. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ she says, quickly reaching a hand out again, and for a second he thinks she’ll grip his hand in a comforting gesture but she stops and pulls back at the last second. ‘I’ll get you through this, Ben. Now get changed.’
He returns to his room and tries suppressing the emotions. Just do what she says. He tugs the tracksuit off and starts getting dressed. Just do what she says. Trousers on. Shirt on. Belt through the loops but he leaves the shirt untucked and starts pulling his new black socks on. Do what Safa says. The boots are weird with side zips and laces made of strange material that he guesses isn’t flammable or likely to break.
‘The trousers are too short,’ he says, stepping into the main room with the bottom of his trousers an inch above his boots.
‘No,’ she says as Harry grins. ‘They’ve got tie bottoms,’ she adds.
‘What are those?’ he asks.
‘I’ll show you.’ She drops down to his ankles and feels for the bottom hem of the trousers. ‘See this?’ she says, tugging a thread of material out to the side. ‘Two of them. You pull them to tighten the bottom of the hem but they go inside the boots.’
‘Oh right,’ he says, staring at the top of her head and noticing her hair is now tied back in a ponytail held secure with a torn-up bit of grey tracksuit. ‘I always thought they just tucked the trousers into the boots.’
‘Prevents the material from snagging on anything,’ she says, working to tighten them. ‘That’s it, let’s have a look.’ She stands up and steps back, giving him an appraising look. ‘Very good. Feel alright?’
‘Blurgh,’ he says, shoving his hands into his pockets.
‘You’ll wear it all in,’ she says. ‘Ready?’
‘Blurgh,’ he says again.
Eighteen
It looks enormous. It is enormous. The grain of the wood shows clear from the base of the stock to the underside of the long metal barrel.
‘That for me?’ Harry asks, picking it up from the table. That the rifle is for him is beyond doubt. Ben watches him slide the bolt back and check through the barrel while getting the balance and weight of the weapon. Harry grunts in approva
l and pulls the bolt back several times to feel the action.
‘Winchester Magnum four five eight bolt-action hunting rifle,’ Safa says. ‘They make bigger and more powerful now, but I figured you’d be used to something like that. Apparently it’s big enough to bring an elephant down with one shot.’
‘They weren’t elephants,’ Harry mutters, holding the rifle one-handed while he opens the cardboard box containing the huge brass bullets.
‘Well, we’re a bit short on tanks right now,’ Safa says, picking up the holster containing the squat black Glock pistol.
‘What’s that?’ Harry asks, nodding at the pistol in her hand as she checks the weapon.
‘Glock. Nine mill.’
‘That bring an elephant down too, will it?’
‘No, but I’d be on my arse if I fired that thing,’ she says easily, glancing at his rifle. ‘I’ll need to practise before I use something like that.’
Ben watches them. The sudden seriousness of it all slamming home at the sight of the weapons. Real guns with real bullets. Safa attaches the holster to her belt, puts a magazine into the pistol and slides it in as Harry pockets a load of the bullets before slinging the rifle across his back.
‘You not loading it?’ Safa asks him.
‘In here?’ Harry asks. ‘I’ll load it outside.’
‘Ben,’ Safa says, holding out the binoculars. ‘You get these.’
He takes the black binoculars without comment but feeling incredibly inadequate. Malcolm and Konrad watch from a short distance, both silent and obviously nervous of Safa. Malcolm shifts position and clears his throat, getting ready to tell them they shouldn’t really shoot dinosaurs because the bullet could be found later. He doesn’t say that though. Instead, he opens his mouth but stays quiet.
‘Ready,’ Safa says, looking at them both.
The two workmen lead them from the main room through the corridors to the back door and the stainless steel panels that form the porch effect.
‘That it?’ Safa asks, as blunt as ever. ‘Looks like a metal detector.’
Malcolm nods as Konrad presses a switch on the right side panel. Lights come on. Small blue LEDs on all three panels.
‘They use them in labs,’ Konrad explains. ‘Like computer labs and places that need to be sterile.’
‘This isn’t sterile,’ Ben says quickly.
‘Works though,’ Konrad says, pressing another switch. A low hum sounds from the panels with the noise of air hissing. Like a much quieter version of the hand dryers in public bathrooms. Ben goes forward, holding his hand towards the door and feeling air being blown from the three panels.
‘That’s it?’ he asks with a frown.
‘That’s it,’ Konrad says. ‘Go through it on the way out and same when you come back in.’
‘You know what happened when Columbus landed in America, right?’ Ben asks. ‘They killed millions with diseases. What if we do that here? What if it’s us that ends up wiping out the dinosaurs with a bloody head cold virus?’
‘We’ve been outside,’ Malcolm says. ‘Loads of times. We had to when we built the bunker . . . the meds we took and that thing stops anything on us hurting anything out there.’
‘Fuck me,’ Ben says, shaking his head. ‘That is the least scientific thing I have ever heard. Have we got those meds in us?’ Malcolm nods. Konrad looks down at his feet, actively avoiding looking anywhere near Safa. ‘Do we have to take more meds or is it just once?’
‘Um . . . just that one time,’ Malcolm mumbles.
‘Right,’ Ben says for lack of anything else to say. The whole of this is staggeringly awful. Guns. Wearing black combat clothes. Two idiots injecting them with God only knows what and a fucking hand dryer that’s meant to stop them causing inadvertent mass extinction. The despair comes back. That whatever sensation that makes him shrug and go passive.
‘Let’s go then,’ Safa says, seeing the change in him. ‘Do we stand under it or just walk through?’
‘Er, well, the manufacturer said you just need to walk through it, but me and Kon stood for a couple of seconds . . . you know . . . just to be sure sort of thing.’
‘Did the manufacturer know it was for the fucking Cretaceous period?’ Ben asks, switching back on for a second.
‘Er, no, no, we just read the instruction book,’ Konrad says quietly.
‘Sod it. Let’s just go,’ Safa says, once again taking the lead. She waits for Malcolm to pull the locking bar out of the clasp and slide the big bolts back on the top and bottom of the door, which he pushes open.
The sinking feeling of spiralling depression evaporates the second Ben steps through the door. The sheer wonder of the moment is of a magnitude too great to be dwelling on anything other than the instantaneous sensory overload. His eyes go wide and open a clear path to his brain that translates each visual spectacle with a rapidity that feels fluid and organic.
All three of them feel instantly alive and thriving. They see the grass is green but the stems are thicker, broader, and give resistance to each step they take.
Ben is walking on thick weeds that refuse to be cowed but fight back to hold him up. Horsetail is everywhere. So distinctive with the green stems intersected by black and white stripes at the joining segments and the small heads pushing up from the bushy foliage. They’re low and spread in every direction. Growing freely through the grasses that surround the bunker on the ledge on the side of the hill that forms one side of the valley.
In nineteen ninety-three a song came out that Ben loved and used to play over and over. ‘Insane in the Brain’ by Cypress Hill. The words stuck in his mind, as did the distinctive name of the group. Years later he was investigating an insurance claim of a fire to a garden shed that also damaged a cypress tree. He didn’t know it was a cypress tree but read it on the claim form. He connected the tree to the words from the song he loved and now, standing here, he can tell that the big tree growing from the side of the hill is a cypress. The trunk is growing sideways out of the hill before forming a right angle and shooting up to the helicopter landing pad foliage at the top, and the branches up the trunk are short and weak, giving it an almost barren look. He looks round and sees more of them growing out in patches from the hillside as it sweeps down to the valley floor, which looks dangerously far below.
The hillside is staggered with ledges and varying gradients of rocky outcrops with trees, ferns and wild flowers growing here and there. Ben turns round slowly, staring in wonder. It looks so normal yet slightly off-centre. Like trying to read classical literature when you’re half-drunk. You can see the words but by fuck they don’t make any sense. Not that he has ever read classical literature, but he can imagine that’s what it would be like.
The valley floor is beyond big. It’s enormous and given scale by the forests they can see within it. Thick wooded glades stand distinct and separate from the others with wide open, barren-looking plains between them. Lakes too. Huge glittering lakes of blue water that seems to shimmer and ripple. Trees grow from the lakes and again Ben spots the distinctive swamp cypress trunks so huge at the bottom with striations of roots bulging out that sweep up to a narrow, long trunk. They grow in water and thrive in marshy conditions of high humidity and warm air. At least that’s what the owner of the garden shed that burnt down told Ben when he asked him about the cypress on the claim form.
The grazing dinosaurs they saw from the window are there too. A herd of them off to the right and more herds at the lakesides, by the glades and wading through swamps, and yet more further down to the left. Different sizes and makes too, or species, or subspecies, or whatever they’re called. Some are just gigantic, but those are fewer in number. The bigger herds seem to be of smaller ones, which are still big but just not as big. They’ve all got long necks, small heads and long tails, but they differ in thickness of body and the length of the tail and height too. Some are eating from the ground while others stretch those necks up to reach low branches. They look mostly grey but Ben spots areas
of darker and lighter shades amongst them and some that border more on browns and greens, but all natural and subtle.
‘This is unbelievable,’ Safa states, tutting and shaking her head. ‘I mean, no warnings, no lists of what is dangerous or what could hurt us, no idea of the time of day or how far we can go. No instructions. It’s bloody awful. Harry? Don’t you think it’s bloody awful?’
‘Aye,’ he says simply and slides the rifle from his shoulder. He takes one of the huge bullets, pops it in the rifle and operates the bolt to make the weapon ready. He lifts the rifle to stare down the scope towards the plains below, using the magnification to gain a closer view.
Words and phrases like ‘ecosystem’, ‘microclimate’, ‘biology’ and ‘hereditary traits’ swim through Ben’s mind. His history, geography and biology teachers would be wetting themselves right now. He moves off down the side of the bunker, which is nestled perfectly into the hillside and painted shades of green and brown to make it blend so well. No sharp edges either, everything is rounded and seemingly organic in design and he guesses from a distance you’d struggle to even see it. He passes the bit where Roland’s office must be, then the main room, and works out that the next section is the corridor leading to their rooms.
Past the bunker, the ground remains flat from a natural ledge that tapers off hundreds of metres away. The first thing that springs to Ben’s mind is a roof garden with a safety balustrade and white-shirted waiters serving chilled drinks to people sitting in bamboo chairs enjoying the view down below. Instead, he spots more cypress trees, plants, weeds, ferns and rocks of a world that has already been forming for hundreds of millions of years and is forever continuing to form. Time has no meaning at this point. It is nothing. Time does not exist. Just the sequential transition of the sun following the moon as the planet rotates and spins through space.
The one thing he does remember from school is that continental drift was happening in the Cretaceous period. The land masses of the Americas were joined to Europe, Africa and Asia, which all formed some supercontinent, the name of which escapes him. Pang? Pangle? Pangea? Something like that. They could be anywhere in the world. They could be in the spot of what later becomes the Atlantic Ocean or Beijing or bloody Battersea Dogs Home for all he knows. That’s happening now though. The continents are moving apart right now. They could walk or drive for thousands of miles and recognise nothing. The coastlines would be completely different. Everything is different but exactly how you would expect it to look. Get an artist to read some dinosaur books and ask them to paint a picture from the image formed in the mind and this vista is what you would get. Swampy, hot and green.