Day of the Predator

by Alex Scarrow

  Around twenty mil ion years pass and the Palaeogene Around twenty mil ion years pass and the Palaeogene period becomes the Neogene. The world grows cooler, and for the rst time, for a long time, ice-caps begin to form at the polar north and south. Species of grass colonize the land in a way that prehistoric ferns could only dream of, and smal four-legged mammals that wil one day look very di erent and be known as ‘bu aloes’ graze blissful y upon it.

  Around seven mil ion years ago, the hard-rimmed hoof of one of these smal grazing creatures catches the tip of a broken slab of sandstone, and pul s it out of the ground. It lies there in the darkness of night, moonlight picking out strange and subtle pat erns of raised markings on one side. But the roaring of a night predator spooks the herd. As one, they surge away from the sound, and the night is l ed with the rumble of thousands of hooves on hardbaked soil. By dawn the curious slab of sedimentary rock is no more than dust and fragments, destroyed by thousands of trampling beasts.

  Three silent witnesses remain as endless aeons pass in darkness, like the soft ticking of an impatient clock. Above ground, one species of rodent that took to the trees during the early Palaeogene, has nal y ventured down to the ground once more to forage for food as the Neogene era begins. It is larger, with a more muscular frame and a head larger in proportion to its tree-climbing ancestors. It’s a species that wil one day, in another more mil ion years, be known as ‘ape’.

  be known as ‘ape’.

  In 11,000 BC, early one morning as warm sun spil s across a plain, a young Indian brave careful y scouting the grazing bu alo ahead runs his hand over the coarse grass and dislodges the sharp corner of a stone. A chunk of int emerges from the orange soil, a int, he notices, with curious markings on it.

  For a moment the markings incite his curiosity. They look deliberate. But then his mind moves on to the size of the int itself. He can see how three separate tamahaken blades could be struck from it, and he thanks Great Father Sun for the nd.

  Now only two silent messengers remain.

  In 1865, a young Confederate lieutenant on the run from Union forces, leading a ragtag band of soldiers unwil ing to accept that the civil war is over, rests his aching back against a rock. With tired eyes, too old for such a young face, he watches the languid river in front of him as his ngers twist through coarse grass. And, yes, they nd the sharp edge of a stone. Before the war he was a student of history, and the faint lines of writing on the stone fascinate him. He puts the curious piece of rock in his saddle-bag and resolves to take it to a professor of natural history he once knew in Charleston when he eventual y can. But later that same day the Union cavalry regiment nal y catches up with the lieutenant and his men. And before the sun has set they – soldiers and o cer

  – lie in a shared unmarked grave not far away from the Paluxy River.

  Paluxy River.

  And so just one last tablet remains.

  CHAPTER 53

  2 May 1941, Somervel County, Texas

  Grady Adams watched his brother goo ng about in the water below with growing irritation. ‘Watch it, Saul … you gonna scare o al the sh!’ His brother ignored him and surface dived into the sedate Paluxy River.

  Grady ground his teeth. His younger brother could be a complete ass at times. No, strike that … al the time. He set led back on his haunches, his toes curled over the lip of tan-coloured rock overhanging the river. The stone was hot against the bare skin of his feet, egg-frying hot, that’s what Pa would say. The sun had been beating down on it al morning, and the pool of water that had dripped o him from his last swim in the river half an hour ago had long since evaporated.

  He looked up at a nearly cloudless sky and realized there wasn’t going to be any momentary respite from the heat of the sun. To his left, several dozen yards along the ledge of rock, a smal , withered cypress tree was clinging to the side of a large craggy boulder. He could see it was casting a smal pool of shadow, at least big enough for a part of him to keep out of the sun.

  He stood, grabbed his shing rod and walked careful y along the narrow ledge. Careful y, because from time to along the narrow ledge. Careful y, because from time to time, right near the edge, bits of the sandstone rock broke away and splashed into the river a yard or so below. That had happened to Grady before, scratching up his hips and chest as he’d slid into the water.

  Saul came up again, noisily splashing the surface of the river, no doubt scaring any remaining sh wel away from the oat bobbing nearby.

  ‘Saul! For crying out loud!’

  His brother gave him a toothy grin and paddled across to the far bank, deliberately kicking his feet on the surface and making as much of a ruckus as he could.

  Grady hunkered down in the shadow, his back now against cool rock, and to his right a dried earthy wal of orange soil and gnarled roots from the smal tree poking out from it. He prodded at the loose layers of soil, light and dark, like the layers of some fancy sponge cake. He’d once found a Paiute tamahaken blade among a bank of earth like this. Those layers folded away such fascinating things along this river. He remembered there was that team of men last summer, digging around along portions of the riverbank, looking for monster footprints in the rock. Dinosaur tracks, that’s what they’d said they were looking for.

  Grady and Saul had seen a few in their time along here, big ones like he’d imagined an elephant might leave, and smal ones too, three deeper dents and a shal ow one. Saul even claimed he’d once seen a human footprint in the rock, just exactly like a shoe. Sil y ass was always coming rock, just exactly like a shoe. Sil y ass was always coming up with doofus nonsense like that.

  Grady knew no cavemen wore shoes back then in dinosaur times.

  The people up in Glen Rose had started cal ing this place Dinosaur Val ey on account of the men and women from the museums and stu who came digging for fossils last year. He smiled at that as he tugged at one of the twisted roots. It sounded kind of cool … Dinosaur Val ey. He could imagine some of the gigantic beasts he’d seen in picture books striding across their Paluxy River, walking up and down the riverbanks, their long necks craning down to drink from the river …

  Grit and dry soil tumbled down on to his arm. ‘Ouch!’

  He let go of the root and it sprang up, releasing another smal avalanche of loose clay-like earth. And then he saw it, half hanging out, and resting on a coil of tree root that looked like a pig’s tail. A palm-sized slate of shale. He reached up for it and it fel heavily into his hands. For a moment, as he stared down at the almost triangular shape, he wondered whether it might just be another one of them tamahaken heads. But it didn’t have the tel tale signs of being worked on, shaped by some skil ed hand.

  It was just a plain ol’ slice of rock.

  He held it in his throwing hand, wondering how many bounces he’d get from skimming it across the river. It was nice and at … a good spin on the throw and maybe he’d count seven, perhaps eight, before it set led and sank. He count seven, perhaps eight, before it set led and sank. He stood up, saw Saul on the far bank sunning himself on a dry boulder. ‘Hey! Saul!’

  His brother’s head bobbed up. ‘What?’

  ‘I got me a skimmer. Reckon I get an eight with it?’

  ‘Nah,’ he cal ed back, ‘cos you throw like a girl an’ al .’

  Grady shook his head and sighed. His brother real y could be annoying. ‘Wel , why don’tcha just look and learn, you foo-bat!’

  He cupped it in his palm, wondering which side was at er … and then turned it over.

  CHAPTER 54

  2001, New York

  On Sunday 9 September 2001, Lester Cartwright, a smal narrow-shouldered man facing his last ve desk years before his long-awaited retirement, went to bed with his plump wife. A man who, if you asked him to be honest, would admit to being a lit le bored with his unchal enging life. His job – yes, it might sound interesting if he was al owed to talk about it – was as a projects budget assessor for a low-pro le US intel igence agency. But, in actual fact, despit
e the intriguing sound of working for a secret service, the work simply involved crunching numbers and balancing costs and expenditures. He might as wel have been doing that for Wal-Mart, or McDonald’s, or some carpet store … the job would have been exactly the same. Not exactly where he’d hoped to end his career when he’d rst joined them back in the 1960s, a young man ready to serve his country in the eld. A young man ready to kil or be kil ed for Uncle Sam. Now he was an old man who rubber-stamped expense forms.

  That night he went to bed after walking their dog, Charlie, climbed into his pyjamas and picked up a Tom Clancy spy novel, hoping to enjoy at least a few aimless thril s today before turning the light out on his bedside thril s today before turning the light out on his bedside table.

  Later, as he slept, change arrived in the form of a subtle ripple of reality. A wave of reality systematical y rewriting itself, a wave of change that had started in 1941 … with a young boy’s discovery of a strange rock beside a river in Texas. A boy who turned over a rock and saw something curious.

  Lester’s boring life in that moment of darkness was replaced in just the blink of an eye, with a far, far more interesting one.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ Knuckles rapped gently against the car’s rear passenger window. Lester Cartwright stirred, his mind had been o again, considering the incredible, the impossible. Only, it isn’t impossible, is it, Lester?

  He looked out of the window at Agent Forby, dark glasses, a suit, crew-cut hair and a face that looked like it had never told a joke while on duty. Lester wound his window down an inch. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sir, it’s time,’ said Forby.

  Lester looked down at his watch. Three minutes to midnight. Dammit … he must have been napping again. Get ing too old for something like this.

  ‘Forby, the area’s completely secure?’

  Forby nodded. ‘We have a two-block cordon set up. Police and state guard are manning those. The Wil iamsburg Bridge has been closed and al civilians have been evacuated from the perimeter.’

  been evacuated from the perimeter.’

  Cartwright nodded. The cover story had been an easy no-brainer to come up with: a bomb threat. American civilians seemed to react very wel to that. ‘So, we’re certain we have just agency personnel within?’

  Forby nodded. ‘A hundred per cent, sir. Just us guys.’

  Cartwright looked out of the window past Forby’s hunched form. The Wil iamsburg Bridge towered over them, the nearby intersection was deserted and there, fty yards away, was the entrance to the smal backstreet running alongside the bridge’s brick support arches. My God … nal y. This is it. This is nal y it. He felt his chest tickled by but er y wings and the short hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  ‘Very wel .’ He opened the car door and stepped out into the warm evening. ‘Then let’s begin.’

  Cartwright led the way across the quiet road, lit by several zzing street lights and the intermit ent sweep of a oodlight from a helicopter holding position high up in the sky. Apart from the far-o whup-whup-whup of its rotors, this three-block-wide area of Brooklyn was ghostly quiet.

  There was a barricade across the entrance to the backstreet, manned by more of Cartwright’s men. No soldiers or police this close to the target, on Cartwright’s insistence. Only personnel he trusted within the perimeter. Only personnel he’d recruited himself into this smal covert agency, an agency he and his men referred to as the Club.

  Club.

  He nodded at them as they raised their guns and let him through. He looked down the narrow cobbled street, lit ered with garbage, an abandoned skip halfway along. Good grief, I feel … like a kid.

  Al of his professional life had been leading up to this one moment, ever since he’d been quietly headhunted from the FBI to come and work for the Club. Forty years of knowing.

  Lester Cartwright began to make his way down the row of archways, past the rst one, clearly being used by some one-man auto-repair business.

  When he’d rst joined, his superior had been prepared to reveal only some of the facts: an incredible nd in a place cal ed Glen Rose, Texas – a nd that had major national security implications. That was al he got for quite a few years. But time passed, and Lester gradual y climbed several ranks, nal y becoming the senior serving o cer in the Club. His departing boss had handed him the complete dossier on his very last day, handed it to him with eyes that looked like they’d been staring far too long into an abyss.

  ‘Do me a favour, Lester,’ he’d said. ‘Sit yourself down and drink a nger of bourbon before you open this le, al right?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You’re about to join a very, very smal group … those that know.’

  And it was a smal group.

  And it was a smal group.

  Presidents had been briefed – Roosevelt, when the news of the artefact had rst been unearthed. Then Truman, then Eisenhower. But they’d stopped brie ng presidents when that sil y fool Kennedy had threatened to go public on it. That was the year after Lester had joined the Club, the year of the Dal as incident. A very messy business. But the Club had a responsibility.

  They hadn’t bothered to tel presidents since then. Cartwright passed the third and fourth archways, both open-fronted and unoccupied. He could see needles and bot les back there in the darkness. His men had checked in there for vagrants and unearthed only one grubby, stinking and ut erly bewildered alcoholic. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest as his feet slowly brought him up outside the metal rol er-shut er door of the fth archway. Forty years he’d known of a thing cal ed the Glen Rose artefact.

  But only for the last fteen years had he known exactly what it was.

  Figuratively speaking, a message in a bot le, with a date on it. A bot le that couldn’t be opened until a certain date. He looked down at his watch and saw that that certain date was a mere forty seconds away.

  There hadn’t been a single solitary night during the last fteen years that he hadn’t lain in bed and wondered what they’d nd inside this address. He’d been down this street on a number of occasions and looked at that corrugated metal; he’d even been inside and looked around on several metal; he’d even been inside and looked around on several occasions. Empty, unused.

  But now, nal y, there were occupants inside. Occupants from – his heart ut ered and his breath caught as he considered the phrase – another time.

  Cartwright instinctively reached into his suit jacket for the service-issue rearm he kept there as he looked at his watch and realized that after forty years of waiting and preparing he was nal y down to counting o the last ten seconds.

  ‘So … this is it,’ he ut ered.

  The second hand of his watch ticked past midnight and al of a sudden he thought he felt the slightest pu of displaced air against his face.

  He leaned forward, bal ed his st and knuckled the shut er door gently.

  CHAPTER 55

  2001, New York

  Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Oh my God! You hear that? That was a knock, wasn’t it?’ She hadn’t ful y expected to be right, that come the stroke of midnight and the reset there would actual y, for real, be a knock on their door. The rol er shut er rat led again, and they heard the mu ed sound of a man’s voice outside.

  ‘So we’re going to open it, right?’ whispered Sal.

  ‘I … uh … yes, I guess we’ve got no choice.’ She stepped forward towards the but on at the side and pressed it. With a rat ling whirr of a winch motor begging for oil, the shut er slowly rose. Both girls looked down at the ground, at the gradual y widening gap, and the soft glow of the street lamp outside creeping across their stained and pit ed concrete oor.

  Two shoes. Two dark-suited legs. Final y the person outside ducked down slightly to look in, and his wide eyes met theirs.

  ‘Hel o there,’ said Maddy, raising a limp hand. ‘We were

  … kind of expecting you.’

  The shut er rat led to a stop and the man stared at them for a long while in silence.

  �
�I …’ he started, his voice croaky with nerves. ‘You …

  ‘I …’ he started, his voice croaky with nerves. ‘You …

  but you’re just kids.’ He narrowed his eyes, looking past them at the dim interior. ‘Are there any others here?’

  ‘Just us, I’m afraid,’ said Maddy.

  He looked at her; his old creased face seemed to be struggling to cope with the moment. ‘Are you two … are you f-from the future?’ he asked.

  Sal looked at Maddy and she nal y nodded her head.

  ‘You’ve got a mil ion questions you want to ask us, I’m sure,’ Maddy addressed the old man. ‘And we’re prepared to answer some of them. But … you have something, right? Something for us?’

  He eyed her cautiously. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘A message?’

  He ignored the question. ‘Are you time travel ers?’

  ‘I won’t answer anything until you answer me. Do you have a message for us?’

  He took a step forward, squinting at the machinery on the far side of the arch. He nodded towards it. ‘Is that some sort of time machine?’

  She bit her lip. ‘I’m not saying anything until you answer me.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ He smiled. ‘My God … this is incredible.’

  ‘Please!’ cal ed out Sal. ‘Something brought you to us. It’s a message from our friend, isn’t it?’

  The old man turned away from them and barked an order down along their backstreet. A moment later Maddy could hear the slap of boots on cobblestones. She retreated from the entrance and into the arch, taking several steps from the entrance and into the arch, taking several steps towards the computer desk.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the old man. He reached into his suit jacket and pul ed a handgun on them. ‘Please remain perfectly stil . Do not touch anything! Do not do anything!’

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