Extinction Event

by Dan Abnett

  The Entelodon drove its head into the driver’s door with much greater force, honking and squealing like a hog at feeding time. The window shattered and blew glass at her. She threw open the passenger door and scrambled out.

  As she rushed across the street, she glanced back over her shoulder. The Entelodon dragged its head back out of the mangled driver’s door and shook its neck. It could see her — or smell her. It rose up a little on its powerful front legs and turned to the side to trot around the pick-up and come at her. She started to run. It broke into a canter, and began bellowing like a fog horn.

  Jenny turned and without stopping hurled her mobile at it. The phone bounced off its snout, causing it to come to a halt. The Entelodon bent to sniff the phone. It rolled its huge head on one side so it could scoop the phone up in the V of its jaws. Then it began to crunch.

  Jenny kept running. She heard its hooves striking the ground as it moved again, heard its dreadful snorting.

  “Jenny!”

  She looked up. Cutter was standing on a car ahead of her. He had his gas-powered rifle in his hands. He didn’t have to tell her how useless the weapon was going to be in the current circumstances.

  “Come on!” he yelled at her. “Run!” Hemple stood nearby.

  She needed no encouragement. She ran. It was right behind her.

  Cutter looked over at Hemple.

  “No choice. Do it,” he said.

  Alpha team opened fire. Jenny screamed at the roar of gunfire. The high velocity munitions tore into the huge omnivore and puffed clouds of red mist into the air. The multiple impacts stopped it in its tracks and shredded huge chunks of bloody meat off its stumbling body.

  It managed a few last, uneven steps, its ancient blood streaming out onto the asphalt of Oxford Street. It whined and gurgled, its snorts and squeals drowning in blood.

  Cutter leapt off the car and grabbed Jenny. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her clear.

  Hemple stepped forwards, raised his MP53, and fired a last burst that put the demon pig down forever.

  FIVE

  Abby hurried up the ramp towards Lester’s office. It was late evening.

  The glass-walled room grandly overlooked the main operations area of the Anomaly Research Centre, and a combined murmur of human voices and electronic noise rose from the consoles and workstations below her. The Oxford Street incident had been the most public yet, and a lot of very clever people with extremely high national security clearances were going to be working long into the night tidying it up.

  Tidying it up... and covering it up.

  But the cover-up wasn’t Abby’s remit. She was as highly cleared as any of the ARC personnel, but her area of expertise lay with the animals. More often than not, they were monsters, but they were always victims too, victims of the anomalies that cast them into an alien world in which they were not intended to exist. This afternoon, they’d had to kill one. She hated that, and it always sat really badly with Cutter.

  Abby approached the door of the office. Through the glass, she could see Cutter, Jenny and Jake Hemple waiting in front of Lester’s desk, while Lester sat back and skim-read an interim report.

  He dropped the report onto his blotter and sat back with his arms folded.

  “So... thank heavens for automatic weapons, then?” he said.

  Cutter smiled humourlessly. He’d been around the block with James Lester too many times to rise to the bait. Lester’s interests and priorities were so far removed from his that it wasn’t even funny.

  “We took the kill out of necessity, sir,” Hemple said. “All other options had been explored and exhausted.”

  “Took you a while, though, Hemple,” Lester observed.

  “We were mindful of Professor Cutter’s desire to keep the specimens alive.”

  Lester glanced at Cutter.

  “The creature didn’t deserve to be shot,” Cutter said.

  “It had killed people, Cutter,” Lester said firmly, then he sighed. “Three, wasn’t it? Three people?”

  Jenny nodded.

  “It was just doing what it does,” Cutter said evenly. “It was probably scared, too.”

  “And so, I should imagine, were the people it ate.” Lester stared at Cutter. “Thankfully, Jenny wasn’t one of them.”

  “Jenny didn’t deserve to get eaten any more than the Entelodon deserved to get shot,” Cutter said. “It was a no-win situation. I made the best call I could.”

  “Thank you so much,” Jenny said. Abby could hear the withering scorn in her tone and she pulled a face. Nice going, Cutter.

  “The live specimen was delivered back through the anomaly before it closed,” Hemple said briskly. “Now we’re cleaning up the area.”

  “But it’s out, isn’t it?” Lester inquired.

  “Very much so,” Jenny said. “There was an extremely high volume of witnesses and word of mouth is like wildfire. We can usually control it with misinformation, but dozens of people had cameras on their mobiles, and many more were tourists with videos and still cameras. On top of that, there was a local news team filming a segment at the location when the event occurred. There’s footage on all the news channels, and the Internet’s lousy with clips and downloads.

  “It’s big. It’s gone global.”

  “And what do you propose to do about that?” Lester asked, his emotions unreadable.

  “We can’t cover it the way we normally do,” Jenny replied. “It’s too big to deny. I’m working to change the rules and spin the story. There were monsters loose on Oxford Street today, but they were new generation animatronics built for a movie. It was all special effects. Nobody really died. It was publicity gone wrong, a spectacularly misguided promotional stunt.”

  “I thought all those monster shows these days used CGI,” Lester pointed out.

  “I think I can sell animatronics in the circumstances,” Jenny said. “The whole story will be an ‘and finally...’ by the end of the week.” She sounded businesslike to Abby. Jenny was very good at her job, and if she said a story would go away, then it would go away. But Abby could hear a slight catch in her voice. She’d had a tough day and a very close call. She was keeping going to get the job done, but as soon as it was over, the shock would catch up with her and she’d crash.

  “Good,” Lester nodded. “That’s good. We can run with that. We’ll need to set up a fake production company to take the rap, maybe a trailer or two, a website...”

  “Already in work,” Jenny jumped in. “I’ve got press announcements written and ready. Horrified by the recklessness of the publicity stunt, some of the film’s principal financial backers will pull out tomorrow morning. The production will fold on Friday afternoon. End of story.”

  “What about the people who did die?” Cutter asked quietly.

  Jenny looked at him.

  “You know very well what we do when there’s a fatality. The families will be informed and compensated. We usually say it’s a traffic accident.”

  “Don’t you think they deserve better?” Cutter looked Jenny in the eye. “If something, God forbid, had happened to you today, wouldn’t you have wanted your mum or dad to know the truth?”

  “Let’s see,” Jenny replied. “I was devoured by a prehistoric pig in broad daylight on Oxford Street, or I was knocked down by a bendy bus on Tottenham Court Road? I think I know which set of mental images would help most with the grieving process.”

  Cutter shrugged and looked away. Lester finally noticed Abby hovering in the office doorway.

  “Can we help you?” he asked.

  “I need Cutter, when you’re finished,” Abby replied with a friendly smile.

  “Oh, I’m done,” Lester said with a wave of his hands.

  Cutter walked over to join Abby.

  “What’s up?”

  “Connor’s got something,” she said. “He wants you to take a look.”

  ***

  Cutter and Abby headed swiftly down the ramp, side by side. Jenny and Hemp
le left the office behind them.

  “You okay?” Hemple asked her quietly.

  “I’m fine. A little shaken.” She gazed down the ramp at the figures pulling ahead of them. “Nice to know I’m in a no-win situation.”

  “I don’t think Cutter meant it quite the way it came out,” Hemple said.

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” Jenny replied, as if she believed precisely the opposite. “He tortures himself when innocent bystanders are caught up in things, and he hates the cover-ups, and yet sometimes he seems to care more about the creatures than people. The efforts he goes to in order to keep them alive and safe.”

  “He’s a riddle, all right,” Hemple agreed.

  “He’s never exactly liked me,” Jenny said. “Apparently, I remind him of someone.”

  “Like an ex-girlfriend, you mean?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s rather more complicated than that. It would be, of course. It involves Nick Cutter.” She glanced at Hemple and smiled.

  “Thank you, anyway. You saved my life this afternoon.”

  “It’s my job,” Hemple replied. “And, anyway, I got to shoot a monster.” He grinned. “I mean, honestly, I’m a monster hunter. I can’t believe this job, it’s like a childhood dream come true.”

  “You are joking, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said. Then he pursed his lips. “Well, a little, maybe. When I was a kid, I wanted to battle dinosaurs and mammoths and giant lizards. What kid didn’t? Too many corny movies, probably. And look at me now, I’ve got my own machine gun and a ready supply of monsters.”

  She laughed.

  “Trouble is, the professor does like to keep them alive,” Hemple continued, “so my opportunities for heroism are strictly limited. Luckily, you got yourself into a bit of bother today and there was nothing else for it but to lock and load.”

  “Glad to be of service,” she mocked.

  “Seriously,” he added, “that’s what we’re here for, to look after you. All of you. No matter what the prof says, team safety is paramount. I know there was a fatality just before I joined the ARC.”

  “Stephen,” Jenny murmured quietly.

  “Cutter blames himself for that, doesn’t he?” Hemple asked. “I mean, that’s why he’s so conflicted.”

  “Sometimes,” Jenny said, “I honestly have no idea what really drives Nick Cutter.”

  “Shoot,” Cutter said. Then he chuckled softly.

  Connor looked up from his workstation in the middle of the main ARC chamber as Cutter and Abby joined him. He had the mobile detector he’d been carrying that afternoon, and he’d hooked it up to the main ADD network.

  “Something funny?” Connor asked.

  “I’ll say,” Cutter replied, sniffing.

  Abby wrinkled her nose.

  “Have you changed your shoes since you stepped in that stuff earlier?” she asked.

  Connor frowned and looked down at his feet.

  “Oh, no. I forgot. I knew there was something.” He grinned at them and pulled a gagging face. “I wondered what the pong was.”

  “Uh, euw,” Abby said.

  “Apart from excrement, what have you got?” Cutter prompted.

  “Ah, well, yes,” Connor said, turning back to the monitors enthusiastically. “We were all a bit carried away with the screaming and the running away this afternoon to notice, but there was a bunch of well-strange things about the anomaly.”

  “Define ‘well-strange’?”

  “Some kind of integral instability,” Connor replied, pointing to various coloured graphics on the flatscreen display. “The magnetic field was all over the place... see? It’s all spiking in the weirdest way. Here, right? And also here... and here.”

  Cutter leaned in to study the screen intently.

  “Could be some sort of interference,” Connor added.

  “From what?” Abby asked.

  “I’ve actually got no idea,” Connor admitted, his teeth gritted, “but it’s a theory.”

  “Could it be a system glitch?” Cutter suggested.

  “Well, yes, it could,” Connor said. “I did, like, drop the detector in the cinema a little bit.”

  “Was that when you were running away and screaming?” Abby teased.

  “About that time, yes,” Connor agreed.

  “But you wouldn’t have called me in if it was a system glitch, would you?” Cutter asked softly.

  Connor grinned.

  “I ran a diagnostic on the handset to make sure it was undamaged, first. Then I checked the data recorder for errors. Then I compared the readings to the last three anomaly incidents we’ve dealt with. Then I called you in.”

  “Good work,” Cutter nodded. “Go on.”

  Connor tapped some commands into the keyboard, and punched up three sets of graphics that overlaid the display on the monitor.

  “It’s nothing like as pronounced as the incident today, but in hindsight you can see the same thing in the last few readings. There wasn’t enough to spot it before. Instability and spiking. Eccentricity. See?”

  “I see,” Cutter said.

  “This is a whole new thing,” Connor continued. “It looks like the anomalies are becoming more energetic and less stable. If it continues to graph like this, within a month we’re going to have... well, I don’t know what we’re going to have, actually. But I don’t think it’s going to be good.”

  “Neither do I,” Cutter said.

  In the small hours of the morning, a skeleton staff manned the ARC watch stations and the ADD. The place was quiet. Staff had gone home, or were catching forty winks in the readiness dorms.

  Cutter skulked in his laboratory. Anglepoise lamps formed pools of light in the small, cluttered space, illuminating scattered books, notepads, crates of fossils, equipment pods and partly assembled scientific models. Most of those had come straight out of Cutter’s head, and looked — to the uninitiated — like haphazard nests of string, duct tape, wire and rods.

  Cutter had never liked his new lab at the ARC much. It was smaller and far more functional than his space at the university. He could hardly complain about the facilities on tap, of course, but there had been a sort of personality to the university workspace, a character. He’d known where things were. He’d invested time there, and his belongings and specimens had accumulated in layers, laid down organically like sediment.

  The ARC lab was just clutter. He hadn’t even moved into it himself, not exactly, not that he could remember.

  There had been a hiccup in time, a little speed bump. Cutter had no idea how it had happened, or where, but the evidence was all around him. He didn’t belong to this version of the world, or rather it didn’t belong to him. He’d gone through an anomaly and something had altered, had reset. When he’d come back, the world had undergone a subtle transformation. Suddenly Lester’s operation had increased in size and clout. Suddenly there was a place called the ARC, a bleeding-edge facility purpose-built to tackle the anomalies. Suddenly he had a lab there, and he’d quit his university place.

  Suddenly there was no Claudia Brown, just a woman called Jenny Lewis, who looked just like Claudia.

  It was by far the most disconcerting thing that had ever happened to Nick Cutter. Holes in time? Encounters with primeval creatures? He could cope with that, but the subtle shift of everything, the alteration of history, that spooked him. He wondered if it was actually the world that had changed, or just him.

  More than anything else, it had taught him how dangerous the game they were playing had become. One slip, one false move, and history got rewritten and realities got remade. What would happen if you made a really big error? Would history change so much it couldn’t survive? Would time collapse? Could they trigger, without even realising it, an extinction-scale event?

  Cutter adjusted one of the lamps, and leafed through the notebooks on his desk. He studied drawing after drawing, diagram after diagram. The answer lay with the anomalies, but the more he learned about them, th
e more he recognised that he didn’t know. With his help, Connor had devised and built the ADD system, which had allowed them to detect and trace anomaly occurrences. He hadn’t been able to determine their frequency, pattern, or energetic mechanism, and he certainly hadn’t fathomed out what was causing them. No wonder really, because it wasn’t his field at all. A zoologist, he’d been brought in to help deal with the creatures, but the creatures weren’t the real problem. You didn’t need a PhD in zoology to see that.

  The real problem was what was bringing the creatures through time. And now Connor was saying that it was getting worse.

  Cutter swivelled his chair around and resumed work on his latest chart. He was attempting to map the anomalies based on where they’d appeared in the present and what time periods they linked to, but there was only so much you could do with a Biro and pieces of graph paper. Perhaps a bigger model would help.

  Perhaps a bigger lab.

  “Working late?”

  He looked up. Jenny was standing in the doorway.

  “Just, uhm,” he began. “There never seems to be enough time to get things done.”

  She nodded.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  “Oh, just working the cover story through. Making sure it sticks. Keeping an eye on the news feeds. You know, I think I’ve taken the heat out of it.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “You don’t think that.”

  He laughed.

  “No, I don’t. I think keeping it from the world is just making things worse. I’m not banging on about free speech, you understand. Maybe it’s better that the public doesn’t know what’s going on. But we’re working in complete isolation. We should be sharing what we know with the global scientific community, and seeing what they’ve got.”

  “You think other people are working on this?” she asked.

  Cutter shrugged.

  “It’s entirely possible. I hope so. I hope someone out there has got a better clue about this than I have.”

  “You have the detector,” she countered. “We can track these things, deal with each incident —”

  “That’s not enough. That’s just firefighting. We need to find the cause. I can’t explain how important it is.”