Fire and Water

by Simon Guerrier

  Connor had called the Met Office, but they didn’t think anything unusual of the rain. Well, they said, it was heavier than usual for the time of year, but it had a natural cause. The United Kingdom apparently sat on a sort of ‘weather crossroads’ between the North Pole and the Tropics, between the Atlantic Ocean and the great continent of Europe. It only took a warm current of air running down one side of the country and a cold current on the other, and massive black storm clouds whirled up in between.

  Connor and Abby had been keen to point out that though raptors were warm-blooded, being desert dwellers they wouldn’t normally venture out into a storm. They’d argued possibilities all the way from London, but Becker had his own ideas. Connor said the raptors would mainly kill prey for themselves, but there was nothing out in this downpour. The creatures would be cross and hungry and the runaway river had disrupted litterbins and sewers, disgorging foul-smelling filth all through the town. Becker understood the simple economics of scavenging from his own tours of duty. If you were hungry and thought there’d be food you could grab easily, you didn’t mind getting wet.

  The trick was to think like a lizard, with a worldview that didn’t include things like sniper rifles. The bus stop stood in relatively open space, with little cover for an ambush. The raptors would gauge the fresh meat hanging there as a treat rather than a trap... and once they’d got themselves under cover from the rain, they wouldn’t move until they had to.

  They were, thought Becker as he regarded them coolly from his safe position, creatures of instinct. Like several Anomaly Research Centre staff, they acted without considering the consequences. Becker was a soldier — and a good one. He knew how to scope out situations, assess different possible interventions, gauge their chances of success and their cost in resources and men.

  There were three options open to him. He could use his safe position to pick off the raptors with a single grenade — a messy, inelegant solution that would earn him little favour with Abby and Connor. He could take them out one-by-one using tranquilliser darts, but he suspected the group would scatter after the first of them was hit.

  What is the collective noun for raptors, he wondered. A brace? A brood? A terror?

  Or he could place himself in the most danger and face the things head on. Challenge them, poke them, get them to notice him so they would chase out into the rain. And then see which of them was fastest...

  “Weavers!” he barked.

  “Sorry, Captain,” Jamie said quickly, struggling to extract himself from the depths of the chair. “Sir!”

  “Get Abby and Connor up here.”

  Becker found himself smiling at the prospect of telling them his plan. It was foolhardy, dangerous, and put the lives of the creatures above those of himself and his men. But he’d show them he was more than just a jumped-up bodyguard, that he played the same game as them.

  “Um,” Jamie said.

  Becker felt a familiar sense of dread.

  “What have they gone and done this time?”

  “They, uh, took a speedboat off about twenty minutes ago, Captain.”

  “What?” Becker snapped. “Which idiot authorised that?”

  “Um,” Jamie said again, scratching his forehead with his rolled up magazine. “They said you did.”

  Becker swore under his breath. “Fine. We’ll show them we can do this without them. I need two cars and another driver.”

  Jamie gaped at him.

  Becker grinned.

  “Good man. Well volunteered.”

  ***

  “With weather like this, it’s no wonder people are beginning to see... strange things, but I think we can assume, Debbie, that what you saw swimming down the High Street was a badger, or something like that, and not the Loch Ness Monster...” The voice from the speaker paused, then continued. “Next we’ve got a text from Joe, who’s stuck in traffic in Winnersh. Apparently there’s about three feet of water under the railway bridge and —”

  A small, slim hand reached out and turned off the radio.

  “Hey,” Connor Temple called over the roar of the engine and the lashing rain. “They might have mentioned us.”

  Abby Maitland shook her head wearily — or perhaps she was just trying to shake her sopping fringe out of her eyes. They were whooshing down Maidenhead’s narrow High Street in a speedboat they’d pinched from the army. As a result of several days of rain, the lower end of the High Street was now a fast-moving torrent of foul-smelling water and debris. Behind the spot where Abby crouched, their boat’s sludgy grey wake slapped against the shop windows of McDonald’s and Dixons.

  Connor saw she was staring at him, her head on one side, her lips parted ever so slightly. Connor let his own head tilt over, losing himself in her eyes. One day he’d find the right moment to tell her —

  “You’re such an idiot, Connor,” she called out over the noise of the boat. “Why would we get mentioned?”

  “Well,” Connor admitted, moving back from her, “I don’t know exactly. But Jenny’s not around any more to make sure we’re not.”

  “Her team’s still with us. They’re the ones telling people to stay in their homes because of burst sewage pipes and stuff.”

  “That’s not a cover story though, is it?” Connor responded, wrinkling his nose. “And it stinks worse being at the front of the boat. Can’t we swap, and I’ll drive for a bit?”

  She nodded reluctantly, and he reached for the control in her hands. It didn’t look too difficult — a lever on the back of the boat that attached to the great fin of a rudder. You pushed the lever in one direction and the boat nosed in the other. Even he couldn’t get that wrong.

  “Connor!”

  Abby yanked the lever out of his hand and pulled them hard around the tree that stood in their way. In fact, there were trees and telephone boxes at irregular intervals all the way down the High Street.

  “Ow,” he said, rubbing his fingerless-gloved hands together as if he had been stung. Abby steered them neatly between the obstacles, frowning in concentration.

  “It’s really just Mario Kart, isn’t it?” he said. “Like steering past the crabs.”

  “Sort of.” There was suddenly a wicked gleam in her eye. “Have you beaten my high score yet?’

  “Yeah, like ages ago,” he told her, for the first time glad that he and his Wii had been evicted from her flat, because she wouldn’t be able to check.

  “Come on,” she said. “You’re meant to be searching for whatever scared the raptors out into the rain. You’re facing the wrong way.”

  Huffing, he shuffled back round to face the front again. His knee hit the radio, knocking it backwards over the edge of the boat. Connor pounced, caught it, lifted it up to show Abby with a wide grin on his face. Then they bumped hard against a great wave of water and Connor found himself sprawled helplessly on top of her.

  There was silence. No sound of the engine. Just the lash of the rain on his back, and the splash and plop of the water around them. The warmth of her body inside her army-issue waders, pressing hard against him. Connor lay stunned and sore and soaked to the skin.

  But really this was okay...

  “Get,” she said, “off.”

  “Uh, yeah.” He disentangled himself from her, being extra careful where he placed his hands. Abby sat up crossly.

  “You’ve done something to the motor. You’d better be able to get it working.”

  “And I, uh, I think I dropped the radio over the side.”

  “Connor!”

  “What? You wouldn’t let me listen to it anyway!”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t ours. You’ll have to explain it to Becker.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that. It might distract him from his mouse trap.”

  “You’re scared of him,” she teased.

  “Me? Never! He’s just, you know, quite serious about all his army stuff. Got to wonder about anyone with such a thing for guns. What’s he compensating for, eh?” There had been a time when
he had been quite excited about the prospect of carrying a gun, actually. But somehow, since Cutter had died, he hadn’t felt quite the same way about things.

  “He means well,” Abby said. “And those guns have come in quite useful. You should give him a break.”

  Connor considered that for a moment, looking out across the flooded High Street. Then he found himself facing something altogether more important.

  “Abby?” he said gently.

  “Yes, Connor.”

  “Actually, I think we should have brought Becker with us. Look.”

  He pointed carefully across the water to the NatWest Bank, some way upriver from them. An ornate old clock high above the entrance gave the time as a little past seven. A breeze seethed through the rain as the night came on. Yet Connor felt chilled for another reason entirely.

  A railing broke the surface of the water that was running in front of the bank. Debris had got trapped between the railing and the wall. And in amongst the stinking mulch and litter were two impossibly enormous crocodiles.

  Crocodilians, to be precise. Their snouts were as long as Connor was tall, jagged teeth showing all the way down.

  “Deinosuchus,” he murmured. “That’s quite bad.” He peered down the street and then back behind them, as though hoping to find something in the running water.

  “I don’t believe it,” Abby said with a giggle in her voice, a crooked grin on her impish face.

  Connor turned back to peer at the giant crocs. What could she find so amusing? These things, he knew, ate other dinosaurs — even the bigger, scary ones. They weren’t really what you wanted to happen across when you were only armed with tranquilliser pistols.

  They should back away now, he thought silently; get reinforcements, come back another time. Yeah, he’d even apologise to Becker. After all, the giant crocs weren’t going anywhere. They lay in the shallow, black water almost perfectly still, one on top of the other...

  “Um, Abby,” he said at last. “Are they doing what I think they’re doing?”

  FOUR

  Shadows reached long across the ground. The sky remained huge and blue above them, yet without the pressing vibrancy of before.

  Weird, Danny thought, glued to the window. In this vast, empty wilderness, even the dusk feels different.

  They crested a low rise and looked out over a long, shallow valley that stretched for five miles or more ahead of them. Sophie raised a hand from the steering wheel to point off to the horizon, where an ugly dark blob of smoke belched into the sky.

  “That’s the oil mine,” she told them without any attempt to hide the accusation in her tone. “Can you see the Union Jack?”

  Danny squinted, then realised she was joking. Again, he thought he glimpsed her watching him in the mirror, and smiling. But in an instant her eyes were on the road again, and he couldn’t be sure.

  “The game park is just the far side of it?” Lester asked.

  “About another twenty minutes.” Sophie nodded. “Be dark by the time we get there.”

  “That’s not really ‘next door’ to it,” Lester observed. “I think we’re wasting our time out here, Quinn.”

  “It’s near enough,” Sophie countered anxiously. “And there’s nothing else out here. Our mystery creature gets through the fence, that’s the next thing in its way.”

  “How would it get through the fence?” Danny asked. “We’re not talking Steve McQueen on a motorbike, are we? You think it’d just charge through?”

  Sophie grinned at him wickedly.

  “Depends how much it wants out.”

  “But the fence is electrified,” Lester said.

  “Kill a man without much problem,” Sophie told him. “Kill an elephant if it hangs about. But this thing of yours...” her smile faded. “It’s an unknown quantity, yeah?” Her eyes flicked to Lester, then to Danny in the mirror, as if checking their reactions.

  Danny shrugged at her, but felt uneasy. This woman was a hunter, a tracker, and she was hard upon their trail. It was going to be damn difficult to stop her from following what they got up to, to stop her getting involved.

  On the other hand, she knew the country and the rest of the wildlife. She was smart and understood the danger. She was exactly what he needed. Someone not afraid to get her hands dirty — unlike Lester, who he imagined would leave all the action man stuff to him. Truth be told, Danny was looking forward to the chase, after being cooped up in planes and cars.

  That, he told himself, was all this feeling was.

  They were on a long, straight road now, scrubby bushland on either side of them. A tall wire fence followed the roadside on their right, enclosing acres and acres of emptiness that reached as far as the vast reddy hillside a few miles beyond, its outline stark in the lengthening shadows. The fence was twice the height of a man, and an additional barbed wire section on top angled sharply out at forty-five degrees, making the thing impossible to climb. The same sign appeared at regular intervals: a black stick figure on a yellow background being vividly electrocuted.

  It took Danny a moment to realise why such empty landscape would be so fiercely guarded.

  “This is all the park,” he said.

  “We’re coming round the perimeter, yeah,” Sophie acknowledged.

  He sat forward, eagerly scanning the emptiness for signs of life. Ahead, the road stretched on to the horizon. Yeah, the park was big. He began to understand what more than 500 square kilometres actually meant. And how hard it was going to be to find one escaped dinosaur somewhere deep within it. Why this might take them months. Lester wouldn’t keep them out here that long, would he?

  Sophie turned right, following a dirt track. The SUV bumped and bucked easily over the coarse terrain; the road might not be tarmacked, but it had been maintained. They kept on for perhaps another mile and then came to a series of sentry posts. A man in a dark green, armylike uniform stepped forward to intercept them, one of the modern Winchester Model 70s cradled in his hands.

  The gun was, Danny noted, made from black resin, not wood — cheaper and longer lasting but not quite as cool. He’d learnt about guns in the police force. The new Model 70, he recalled, had controlled round push feeds, though he couldn’t remember exactly what those were. But this was a serious, no-nonsense gun for dealing with huge and lethal beasts.

  Sophie coasted to a stop in front of the man with the gun and pressed the button to lower her window. He came over and broke into a gap-toothed smile. He had a small head with high cheekbones, all perched on a long, skinny neck. His dark skin shone with sweat as if he had been varnished. He and Sophie exchanged pleasantries in a language full of strange sound effects — clicks with the tongue and at the back of the throat. The man poked his head right into the car to get a better look at Lester and Danny, but he seemed more curious than suspicious. As if the Englishmen had landed from the moon.

  “Hi,” Danny said, grinning awkwardly. The man gazed at him with wide, keen eyes, and Danny felt his grin falter.

  And then Sophie swatted the man away with what might have been a swear word. Laughing, he lifted the barrier to let them through. As she put her foot down, he called out to her, suggesting something rude that didn’t need to be translated. Sophie just shook her head and pressed the button to raise the window.

  “Friend of yours?” Danny asked.

  “Ted’s all right,” she responded. “But he’s on duty tonight. Pissed he’s gonna miss out on the drinks.”

  “Drinks?” Lester said. “What drinks?”

  “To celebrate your arrival,” she answered scornfully.

  Dusk was coming on quickly as they drove deep into the game park. Danny’s eyes picked over the details of bristly shrubs and grasses as they whooshed by and he soon found that he couldn’t concentrate on anything that close up to the car. Even as he shifted his gaze, there was just so much to keep his eyes on in the middle-distance. A tree branch that might be a giraffe. A shadow that might be a lion. Sophie was braking just as Danny saw a patter
n in the long grass ahead of them that might be a —

  “Zebra!” he exclaimed.

  The car stopped abruptly, jolting them in their seats. Three zebras mooched slowly across the road in front of them, one turning its head back to stare balefully at the vehicle.

  Danny realised he was grinning like a kid.

  “I saw them first,” he said. “How many points is that?”

  “Have a million,” Lester said blandly.

  “Great! I’m winning.”

  “You’ve still got all the Big Five to go,” Sophie told him as the car started on again.

  “Big Five?” he asked.

  “Lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard, rhinoceros... We tell the tourists they’re the rarest to spot, but that’s not really how they got the name. Truth is, they’re the most valuable kills.”

  A little later they just made out in the dwindling light a small herd of elephants crossing a grassy plain. They were such strange creatures, huge and round yet moving rather gracefully on their tree-trunk feet. Nothing like the carnivorous creatures Danny had encountered through the ARC. He couldn’t understand how anyone could wish harm on these gentle beings. It would make you less of a man to shoot one.

  As they crossed a trickle of river, he thought he spotted a crocodile — though it could just have been a log floating by the bank. But night was drawing in now and it became more and more torturous to pick out detail in the dusk. Sophie clicked on the car’s blinding headlights. White light seared deep into the roadside bush, conjuring lurid, twisting shadows as they drove quickly by.

  Without warning they turned off the main dirt road onto one that was narrower, more windy and bumpy; plunging deep into the heart of darkness. Danny’s skin prickled with goose flesh at the strange magic of the place; he could feel the wild pressing in around them, and suddenly he felt apprehensive.

  Up ahead there appeared a warm glow from some kind of building. Fully forty-five minutes after they had passed through the gate, the road wound lazily round the structure, allowing Danny to appraise it. Less a log cabin than a log complex, a series of interconnected one-storey buildings all raised up from the ground on stilts. They didn’t look particularly well defended.