Fire and Water

by Simon Guerrier

  Also available in the Primeval series:

  SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR

  By Steven Savile

  THE LOST ISLAND

  By Paul Kearney

  EXTINCTION EVENT

  By Dan Abnett

  PRIMEVAL

  FIRE AND WATER

  SIMON GUERRIER

  TITAN BOOKS

  Primeval: Fire and Water

  ISBN: 9781848569027

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of

  Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St

  London

  SE1 0UP

  First edition April 2009

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Primeval characters and logo TM & © 2008 Impossible Pictures Limited.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover imagery: Sunset in the Kruger Park © Shutterstock.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group UK Ltd.

  For the famlee

  You asked for it.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINTEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ONE

  “Batsha sengathi yizibhanxa — they only eat us if we’re stupid.”

  Jace stood perfectly still on the edge of the dirt-track road, the brick-red earth solid under his heavy boots. Long experience had taught him how to keep still, to exert only the barest effort under the hot, dry sun.

  “Ewe,” — the isiXhosa word for ‘yes’. Beside him, Ellie slammed shut the door of their 4x4. She hefted the .375 calibre rifle in her lean and muscular arms as she surveyed the open land around them.

  “This lot,” she added, “were really stupid.”

  In front of their 4x4 stood another all-terrain vehicle; a more plush and comfortable model, the kind fitted out especially for tourists. One of the passenger doors stood open, as if its occupants might return at any moment. It was parked beside a battered, wooden sign at the edge of the road which warned visitors — in no uncertain terms — to stay inside their cars.

  The people in the car had clearly ignored the warning. The sun beat down on the gore and scuff-marks that littered the dirt in front of the sign. Jace and Ellie were upwind of the blood but still tasted its putrid tang in the back of their throats, nature’s stomach-turning way of expressing horror.

  They stayed away from the scuff-marks, knowing that all kinds of creatures could be hidden in amongst the dense acacia trees that grew just behind the sign, their thorns as long and sharp as needles.

  Anything could be attracted by this terrible stink of death.

  Instead, the two rangers stood waiting, listening, watching. Squinting their eyes against the glare they combed the vast expanse of game park that sprawled off in all directions. Sun-bleached blond grass and bushland shimmered under the cloudless sky. Tangles of trees and rocky outcrops speckled the landscape, occasional bald patches exposing the iron-rich red soil.

  The air sat still and silent, heavy with anticipation.

  Jace let his eyes pick slowly over every tiny detail, straining to spot any movement. He’d been doing this job for nearly a decade and yet still his mind played tricks on him, conjured life out of shadows, patterns of rock, or the lightest breeze ruffling the grass. Coming out here day after day for so many years, he realised his eyesight didn’t get sharper; his instincts didn’t build up. He could never hope to know this land as well as the animals that lived here.

  This is their territory; you see them when they let you.

  When they didn’t deign to grant an audience to lumbering, noisy humans in their lumbering, noisy SUVs, the native species could sink unseen into the grass and bush, invisible as ghosts. The hippos, elephants, zebra and giraffe, even the impala and warthogs, were more at home here, more in command than any human being ever would be.

  Yet these stupid tourists got out of their car to take pictures by the warning sign, he thought ruefully. No wonder they were such easy prey.

  “Leopards or lions, you reckon?” His voice broke into the unsettling quiet.

  Ellie rolled her eyes at him.

  “With the size and body mass to drag ‘em all away,” she said, “gotta be lions.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Figured.”

  Lions don’t normally eat people, thought Jace. Well, they didn’t in this park anyway. It wasn’t good for business.

  The new management wanted this incident and the others like it cleaned up long before there could be any enquiry. They had to provide a coda — instant closure — to the news story when it broke.

  Yes, they’d say, lions killed a family. But those lions have been destroyed.

  It didn’t matter that the lions had just done what lions do. The new management had ideas that differed from the old guard of gamekeepers like Jace and Ellie. This wasn’t the animals’ territory, into which humans intruded. This was, they said, a business, and the animals were assets for attracting tourist revenue. Lions eating customers was little different to rats infesting a hotel; they just needed to be dealt with, swiftly and severely. Humans would impose their order, their rules, upon the wildlife.

  They would enact revenge.

  Yeah, it was stupid. But what choice did he and Ellie have? The management had already sacked a whole bunch of the old guard, replaced them with cheaper, less experienced gamekeepers who had no interest in the wildlife, and acted more like security guards or mercenaries. People with whom he had nothing in common, lacking even basic tracking skills, who made more problems than they solved for the game park.

  So here they were — just the two of them, no backup but a second rifle each. And all they could do was follow this trail of gore and see where it led them. See if they could spot the perpetrators somewhere in the vicinity, find out if there was anything left of the victims.

  And they had to do all that without getting eaten themselves.

  “Come on, then,” Ellie muttered, as if reading his mind, and she started forward. Jace followed, keeping his distance so that he could cover her if something leapt out.

  Well, maybe, if he was quick enough.

  The acacia trees rasped against the tough fabric of their uniforms. J
ace held his rifle high, keeping his hands and exposed forearms clear of the thorns. It was an easy trail to follow, the tangled scrub trampled and bloody where the bodies had been hauled through by their attacker. There were occasional trophies hanging from the needle-like karroo thorns: strips of brightly coloured fabric that had once been a person’s clothes. And then, as they ventured deeper into the undergrowth, there were scraps of flesh.

  “Jeez,” Jace said, disgust in his voice. “They’re gonna be a mess.”

  “Yeah,” Ellie replied, nodding soberly, “but at least they were dead up this far.” She glanced back the way they’d come, at the jagged scuff marks in the ground. “They were struggling back there. Here, they weren’t struggling. Reckon it’s better that way.”

  Jace swallowed slowly, less at the thought of how the people had died than at Ellie’s superior tracking ability. It always impressed him.

  As they continued on their way, he found it difficult to look at anything else but the taut and capable woman moving along in front of him. At times she seemed almost like a wild cat herself. He remembered that night a year or so ago, when their associate Mac, a bit drunk, had refused to take no for an answer. She’d punched him so hard the fat white letch had lost two of his teeth.

  Mac had loved that, and he’d told everyone he met. Even used it to explain why management had laid him off. How could they keep me when Ellie’s more of a man than I am? Though that didn’t explain all the others who got laid off at the same time.

  Funny, Jace thought, so few of the old-timers left, the park has become a different place. Maybe that was what had spooked the animals. They picked up on stuff people didn’t notice, odours, vibrations in the air. Perhaps they didn’t like the scent of the new regime. He didn’t understand the politics that were involved, but he knew this new lot stank to high heaven.

  He was about to say as much when Ellie stopped dead in her tracks, about six metres ahead of him.

  Jace froze instinctively, eyes flicking left and right, barely breathing. He felt a fat pearl of sweat track down through the dust that caked his face.

  Lions. Two females and a male blended into the blond grass ahead of them. Short legs, long bodies, the male’s tawny mane reaching back well past his shoulders. He was about two metres long and no more than four years old, judging by the light speckling of his nose. All three stood poised and wary, their back haunches trembling with lithe and terrible power as they readied themselves to pounce.

  But they weren’t watching the two gamekeepers. And as Jace very, very slowly raised his rifle, he saw they bore no marks of a kill. Their jaws weren’t bloody and — from their posture and the shape of their flanks — he guessed they hadn’t eaten in days. Lions would go half a week without food.

  No, they’d been drawn by the smell of the blood. They, too, had tracked the real killer.

  They were staring at it now.

  Jace peered ahead, past Ellie, into the dense bush, looking for anything that represented a competing predator — a mane or tail or paw. So he only saw the thing when it actually moved. His first thought was that they’d brought the wrong cartridges, that they needed something that would take down an elephant. Maybe the .470 or .500 Nitro with the kick that could knock you on to your back.

  The creature was at least six metres long — the length of the three lions combined and then some — and maybe twice the height of a man.

  He blinked, trying to make sense of it. Tan-coloured, glimmering skin like a snake’s. It stepped forward on long powerful legs, two skinny forelimbs reaching outward like human arms.

  In horror, Jace realised it was ignoring the lions and was edging slowly towards Ellie, pushing easily through the thorny bush until it stood over her. Her usual poise and quick thinking seemed to have abandoned her as she stood gawping up at the terrible creature, paralysed by fear and disbelief.

  Pure adrenalin pumping through his veins, Jace raised his rifle, targeting the creature in its huge and dark left eye.

  Head low and submissive like a naughty dog, it towered over Ellie, sniffing the air around her.

  Arm steady, Jace adjusted his aim as it moved, waiting for the right moment. The creature’s wide mouth parted so that it seemed to smile. The bloody pulp of human remains hung from its long, sharp teeth.

  “Yeah,” Ellie breathed. She seemed to understand its intent, yet was too utterly stunned by its existence to react.

  “Get down!” Jace yelled.

  He pulled back on the trigger.

  The rifle punched hard into his shoulder. Time seemed to slow down as he saw the black speck of the bullet streak fast into the creature, just as it reacted to the noise. The bullet punched the tough bone of the creature’s forehead... but didn’t break it.

  The creature took a few steps backwards, stunned just for an instant. Jace let out the breath he’d not been conscious he was holding, and made to fire again.

  But he was too late.

  His brain struggled to catch up as the tan-coloured blur smashed through Ellie’s fragile body, knocking her aside like a rag doll, and launched itself at him.

  He squeezed hard on the trigger, felt the gun kick into his shoulder again, unbalancing him, and sending him backwards into the ground. A moment later there was an explosion of pain, followed by a weird calm that somehow didn’t make sense.

  Lying there in the hot soil he tried to breathe, and found that his lungs weren’t working. He couldn’t move or feel his limbs, and felt somehow unbalanced. With tremendous effort he raised his head just a tiny fraction to look down on his own body.

  And just had time to see the creature nosing through his exposed, dismembered guts.

  TWO

  A tall blonde woman stood waiting in Arrivals at Johannesburg Airport. She bore an A4 card on which she had written in firm, precise letters, ‘Lester’.

  James Lester and Danny Quinn fought their way through the crowd of newly landed passengers towards her.

  Danny had assumed that gamekeepers would be seasoned, serious types, with deep-etched scars and stories. But this woman was young, tanned and, he thought, beautiful — dressed in a khaki vest, shorts and a sturdy pair of boots. For the first time since Lester had marched into his office brandishing plane tickets, visas and a curt order to “get packing”, Danny reflected that this assignment might actually be fun...

  He walked over, one arm outstretched, the other carrying his bag.

  “Hi,” he said brightly. “I’m Danny, and that’s Lester over there,” he gestured at the immaculately dressed figure moving towards them at a more refined pace. “You must be from the park.”

  The woman didn’t smile or even make eye contact — instead she just tucked the card into her satchel.

  “I’m Sophie,” she said; she had a South African accent and her voice was curt and dismissive.

  “Nice to meet you,” Danny said, trying to appear undaunted. Sophie glanced over at him, shrugged, and continued to sort out her bag.

  He would win this woman over whatever it took.

  “We’ve kept you waiting,” Lester said as he arrived. He didn’t extend his hand, just fussed testily with his cuff links. “Trouble with your customs,” he went on, his impatient tone implying that it had been Sophie’s fault. “In an astonishing display of complete incompetence, they refused to let us bring through our vital equipment. Seemed to think we were planning a hostile takeover.”

  “Equipment,’” Danny echoed. The airport authorities had — strangely enough — baulked at allowing two British Government officials to bring a vast arsenal of guns into the country without giving any good reason.

  In fact he and Lester had only brought minimal kit: one handheld anomaly location detector, two tranquilliser pistols, two tranquilliser rifles, a G36 sniper rifle with the added grenade launcher, a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun, the Beretta Cougar that Danny had adopted since joining the ARC, and the old Glock 17 he’d never quite given back to the police force.

  Only the es
sentials, yet it had all been impounded.

  Lester’s name-dropping — and increasingly angry sarcasm — had only annoyed the security people, and at one point Danny thought they might both be arrested or put on the first plane back to London.

  In the end Lester had been forced to concede defeat and leave the guns behind, though he had been on his mobile ever since, pulling strings, trying to ensure that South African Customs regretted landing on the wrong side of James Lester.

  It was all part of the plan, and it seemed to be working a little too well.

  Back at the ARC, Lester had proposed that Danny would be playing the good cop out here. He had done so with a slight wince, as if it were a radical change from the norm. Danny still couldn’t be sure if he’d been joking. Lester had an unsettling way of making you feel he was several steps ahead of you.

  “We can make up the time on the road,” Sophie said curtly as she turned on her heel, leading them both through the bedlam. Danny ran to keep up with her, while Lester ignored them both, marching along at his usual pace.

  As they emerged from the air-conditioned cocoon of the airport, the atmosphere outside slammed into them, hot and heavy. Instantly Danny felt the sweat drip from him as he followed his guide up the stairs and then over the walkway into the car park. What must he look like, he wondered, straight off a plane after eleven hours in the air without stopping to comb his hair? He had on his usual leather jacket, a polo shirt and jeans while Lester wore a pale tan, tailored linen suit and elegant silk tie. Somehow he still managed to look slick and fresh, despite the long flight. It probably helped that Lester had upgraded to Business Class, while Danny had been forced to fold his long frame into an Economy seat.

  Sophie paid the ticket machine, received the card that would let them leave the car park, then led them up to the next level. Danny dropped back to walk beside Lester.

  “Can’t take her eyes off us, can she?” Danny muttered. Lester smiled thinly.