Danny peered at Lester, and sensed his distaste at the building’s lack of a five-star rating.
They emerged into a clearing around the back, a simple car park next to the lodge. Sophie brought the SUV round to fit neatly between two other battered vehicles already parked up by the entrance. The full beams swept across the uneven ground.
The lights glared red in the eyes of a pride of lions.
Sleek and beautiful and undeniably deadly, seven of the creatures stalked the edge of the car park, their back legs in the bush. Sophie stopped the car but left the engine running and sat there, watching them coolly. The lions shifted uneasily on their feet, eyeing the newly arrived intruder and its edible cargo. Danny felt a cold bead of sweat trickle down the side of his face.
“There must be a hole in your fence,” Lester said, nerves making his sarcasm sound less cutting than usual.
“No fence round the lodge,” Sophie told him. “Waste of time. Animals rarely come anywhere near us. Don’t like our music and the noise we make.”
They sat, watching the lions watch them impassively.
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Danny said. “There isn’t any music.”
They all looked up to the lodge. Light glared from the windows and the open front door. No sound came from within — no sign of life at all.
“Stay here,” Sophie said, turning off the engine.
“If you insist,” Lester said.
“I’ll come with you,” Danny volunteered. Sophie turned around to look him up and down.
“You ever fought a lion?” she asked.
“Uh,” he said. “No.”
She considered. And then her eyes lit up with a grin.
“Me neither,” she said. “Come on.”
Slowly, gently, they opened their car doors and let in the hot, sweaty night air. Danny struggled to get his long, tired legs out and onto the ground. He stood gingerly, pins and needles in his feet, while Sophie made her way calmly round to the hatch at the back of the car. Seven lions watched them both with interest, but made no move. Only one had a mane, and some of them seemed smaller. They might have been teens rather than full adults.
Even so, the family group clearly wasn’t to be messed with.
Sophie eased open the back of the SUV and reached in for a rifle. Danny joined her, trying to broadcast the same waves of assurance and cool. He took the gun from her — a bolt action Winchester Model 70 like the one belonging to Ted, the gamekeeper at the gate. It was heavy, and he checked it over quickly, familiarising himself with its features. It carried a massive .458 calibre cartridge.
“This enough to stop them?” he asked.
Behind him he heard one of the lions murmur with irritation.
“Hope so,” Sophie said.
“We normally use a tranquilliser.”
“All right,” Sophie said. She snatched back the rifle and handed him a feeble looking dart gun.
“Great,” he said, turning slowly towards the animals, rubbish gun at the ready. But the creatures weren’t even looking in his direction.
“This is no fun,” he said. “Don’t I look like a good meal?”
“Richer pickings in the lodge,” Sophie replied as she closed the back of the car. She carried the Winchester she’d taken from him, plus the khaki satchel that must be her handbag. Turning, she headed for the stairs.
He followed her slowly up to the lodge. The bush all around them bristled with life; things creaking and twittering and breathing. But the lodge remained eerily silent. And there was an acrid tang in the air; one Danny knew from many a call-out as a policeman.
The unmistakeable stink of blood.
Sophie must have noticed it, too, and she stepped quickly up onto the raised platform running around the lodge. The wood creaked loudly under her weight, and they both glanced back cautiously and saw one of the lions behind them become suddenly alert. It stood up tall, straining forward as though about to pounce.
“Don’t worry about her,” Sophie said, turning back to him. “They’re all cowards, really.”
Danny nodded, but he wasn’t entirely convinced. He joined her on the platform, and they edged carefully towards the open door. Sophie slowly pushed it wide.
“Hell,” she breathed as light streamed out from inside.
The hallway beyond wasn’t much like a hotel reception — it looked more like the front porch of a teeming, ramshackle family home. Jackets swamped the coat hooks to his left, and there were crates of empty bottles, a stack of crudely split logs presumably for a fire, and — oddly — an old wooden rocking horse.
There were books and papers all over the floor where a bookcase had fallen. A bare hand and arm protruded from under the bookcase, the chunky, golden watch on the wrist smeared with blood and grime.
“Oh, God,” Danny said. And he tensed as a door slammed loudly behind them.
“I’m not going to be left out there on my own,” Lester said as he stepped into the room behind them. “I was starting to feel like a tin of Whiskers —” He stopped, seeing the mess and the body. “Oh,” he said. And then, “I should have a gun, too.”
Sophie ignored him as she crouched down beside the exposed arm and felt for a pulse. She looked up, shook her head, a chilling emptiness in her eyes.
“They didn’t want us ‘cause they’ve already eaten,” Danny said.
“Wasn’t a lion that did this,” Sophie said quietly, getting to her feet. “They’re just waiting for their turn.”
A chill ran through Danny.
“But if they’re waiting,” he said, “whatever killed him must still be here.”
“Yeah,” Sophie agreed. “The mess room and kitchen are down the hall. The bedrooms all lead off that. You can go first.”
“But you’ve got the gun,” Danny said.
“So I’ll cover you,” she said.
Danny turned to Lester, who just shrugged at him. “What the hell — what can possibly go wrong?” he sighed, and started down the hallway.
Beyond the hallway, through a door, there was a wide-open space, a mess room not unlike the canteen at the ARC. But it had been ransacked. The sofa and chairs had been upturned, the large dining table cracked in two. And two bodies in army-green uniforms lay strewn under and on top of the furniture, their limbs wrenched at impossible angles. It was less like they’d been attacked than as if a whirlwind had torn through.
Sophie quickly went over to them, confirming one at a time that her colleagues were dead, without saying a word. Danny stood where he was, not wanting to get in her way, and watching for any sign of the creature that had caused such carnage.
An odd stench mingled with the tang of blood. It took Danny a moment to spot the broken glass behind the table. The park rangers had been planning a boozy welcome for him and Lester when whatever it was had killed them.
“So much for the party,” he said.
“Wasn’t going to be a party,” Sophie said quietly. “Just a few drinks.”
“Who do we need to call?” Lester asked, exerting authority and practicality with a single question. He went over to the telephone that was mounted on the wall.
“Ted will be on Sentry Two,” Sophie told him. “But tell him to hold back.”
Lester turned.
“Hold back?”
“The killer’s still around here somewhere...” Danny told him.
“... And we need to find it,” Sophie finished.
Lester stood with the phone in one hand, his other one reaching for the speed-dial button that would call Sentry Two. He stood perfectly still, gazing through a side door into what seemed to be the kitchen. Slowly, the hand that had been reaching for the speed-dial button pointed at what he saw.
“Oh —” Danny began, raising his dart gun.
Sophie stepped forward into his line of sight to see what Lester had found.
Beyond her came a terrible, primal roar. And then the creature was on them.
FIVE
Sarah Page sat be
neath the five large screens of the anomaly detection device and wished someone was around to make her some tea. She didn’t really want the tea; it would just give her an excuse to strike up a conversation, to kill a bit of time.
But the huge main operations room of the Anomaly Research Centre remained eerily quiet. She’d once relished being left on her own to work. Then an anomaly had opened at the British Museum and her life had changed forever. Now everyone else was off on exciting adventures, leaving Sarah to watch the screens and call people if anything happened. So far, since Abby, Connor and Becker had raced off to Maidenhead, nothing had.
Sarah leaned back to put her feet up on the little platform that held the Anomaly Detection Device’s keyboard, and leafed through the notes she had written up on some of the ARC’s most recent cases. Only days ago — just a couple of feet from where she sat — Jenny Lewis had almost frozen to death while infected with a virulent fungus. The extreme cold had played havoc with the ADD and the team’s other equipment. So while the technical guys had tried to fix the glitches, Sarah had started writing up notes in longhand. It felt good to rely on a thick notebook and retractable pencil, the kit she’d used on so many digs, because sand and water and laptops really didn’t mix.
She wrote slowly, carefully, gathering her thoughts before entrusting them to paper. On a computer she would just batter away, knowing she could shunt the order and meaning of her words once she’d got them down. Writing it out longhand, she first had to get the story clear in her mind, the sequence of incidents and reactions.
The anomalies were suddenly starting to appear more frequently, all around the world. She had read about Peru and Siberia, and ever since then more and more had manifested. Their small, embattled, secret gang was struggling to fight back the tide. Sarah had thought her role was going to be as an archivist or researcher, explaining the history humanity shared with the anomalies and the creatures. She had been tasked with finding proof of early encounters, ferreting it out in ancient stories, myths, and religions. But now, as she prepared to put her thoughts to paper, she realised her real role.
To discover a way for them to survive through to the future.
The ARC needed to change how it worked fundamentally, or they were all going to die. And in an instant, she knew what they needed to do. Just for an instant, it all seemed so clear, if she could just write it down.
She wrote carefully into her precious notebook: The solution can only be —
And then her mobile rang.
“Hi Sarah,” Abby whispered into her phone, cradling it to her ear with both hands, in the hope that the rain wouldn’t get to it. “We’re in a bit of trouble.” Water bashed against her wrists and hands, cold tendrils dripping down her sleeves. She told herself — not for the first time today — that a long bath awaited her later, if her brother had left any hot water.
She was in the front of the boat, watching over Connor’s shoulder as the Deinosuchus couple continued with their coupling. Crocodilians weren’t really her speciality, but she suspected they didn’t go in for post-coital cuddling and cups of tea. Any moment now they’d disengage, after which they’d both be hungry. And conveniently placed just upstream, they’d see two stranded, defenceless human beings.
Connor sat bent over the speedboat’s engine, trying to get it working. But he probably hadn’t done it much good when he’d lifted off the plastic cover and exposed all the workings to the rain.
“What do you need?” Sarah asked from her warm, dry office.
“Have you heard from Becker?”
“Um, isn’t he with you?”
“We sort of got separated,” Abby said hurriedly. “And now we can’t reach him.”
“You and Connor ran off again, didn’t you? He is there for your protection, you know.”
“Yeah,” Abby said, so loud that Connor boggled at her. “But you know what he’s like,” she said more carefully. “We find a creature, and he starts to shoot at it.”
“Usually it’s so it doesn’t eat you,” Sarah argued.
“Well, yes. And he may have a point. You see, we’re in sort of a situation with two giant crocodiles who are about to realise they’re peckish.”
“Giant crocodiles? You mean a Sarcosuchus?”
“Um, Connor thinks they’re Deinosuchus. But he’s not got his laptop.”
Connor looked up from his work.
“I don’t need to look them up any more,” he protested. “I know my dinosaurs.”
“Connor knows they’re Deinosuchus,” Abby said down the phone. On the other end of the line, she could hear Sarah tocking away on the keyboard.
“Puts the anomaly as Late Cretaceous,” she said at last. “Except the raptors would come from Late Cretaceous Asia while the Deinosuchus would be Late Cretaceous North America. So you might have two anomalies.”
“I know,” Abby said through gritted teeth. “We really need to get hold of Becker.”
“I can’t reach him either. He must be busy with the Velociraptors. They were what you all got sent out to deal with in the first place. I can’t help it if you don’t stick together.”
“Sarah!”
“I’ve got him on redial. The moment he pokes his head out of the water, I’ll tell him where you are.”
“Right,” said Abby. “We’re —”
“At one end of Maidenhead High Street,” Sarah told her calmly. “I triangulated your signal just now using GPS. In fact —” For a moment there was a clatter of quick typing. “— I’ve got you on CCTV. Yes, I think I can see Connor’s bum.”
Abby leaned forward in her seat, towards where Connor was kneeling with his back to her. She twisted slowly round, scanning the High Street until she spotted the camera mounted on the side of a building. Instinctively she waved, and the camera twitched left and right in acknowledgement.
“So where’s the —” Sarah began cheerily, and then Abby heard her exhale. The camera had rotated, and she was watching the crocodilians.
“I guess you can see what they’re up to.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Um, not something you see every day. Do you think I should record it?”
“Sarah!”
“All right! I’ll keep trying Becker.”
The engine screamed in protest as Becker put his foot down. A plume of thick amber sand sprayed out high behind his armoured car and with a lurch he started forward, bringing the vehicle around in a wide arc. The car bounced and bucked over the hot, dry ground. If he could only keep on moving he might avoid getting bogged down.
The plain inclined steeply upwards towards open woodland, perhaps a mile away. Unruly foliage marked the edge of a wide, shallow river, flat like a mirage. Between Becker and the trees the anomaly twinkled brightly in the sun, leading back to the Maidenhead monsoon.
The six raptors stood between him and the anomaly.
They had taken the bait, and followed the vehicles he and Weavers had driven through into this hot summer in the past. If it weren’t for the ravenous creatures bearing down on him, Becker might have considered staying longer — the weather was certainly better than back at home.
But the raptors weren’t watching him any longer.
Steam coiled from his soaking clothes as he leaned out of the window to see how Weavers was getting on. They had both got caught in the loose sand as the lower part of the plain became desert. Weavers was fighting with his gears and pedals, while all the time watching the raptors. His armoured car was sinking imperceptibly, its front wheels dragging the rest of it down. The raptors had seen the distress he was in and trotted idly towards him, almost as if they meant to help out.
Becker spun his own car around and raced towards Jamie.
Roused by the sudden movement, the raptors started running towards the prone car.
With one hand on the steering wheel Becker reached for his prized SIG .229, which he kept in the pouch at his thigh. But then his conscience got the better of him and he grabbed the tranquilliser gun from the seat
beside him. Left hand still on the wheel of the car, he aimed the gun out of the window with his right. A split second to aim, he pulled back on the trigger and shunk! — he shot one of the raptors in the back of the neck. It dropped, mid-stride, into the sand — to sleep for roughly an hour.
Its comrades didn’t even glance round.
Dammit, Becker thought. He cranked the armoured car into fifth and hurled himself at them. They leapt nimbly out of his way as he sped through, dropping back into formation in his wake.
Still with his foot down he leant his head out of the window and yelled at the top of his voice.
“I can’t stop! You’ll have to run to me!”
For a moment it didn’t look like Jamie had understood. But no, he was just gathering his senses. Then his car door was open and he began running for his life. In his arms he cradled his HK G36 — standard issue, without the grenade launcher.
The raptors spotted him out in the open and redoubled their efforts.
Becker was almost there now. He put the car back into second, the engine wheezing as it slowed right down. The captain had been trained in emergency driving, but the usual bootleg turn wouldn’t work on the sand; he’d just have to drive in a loop and take the raptors head on.
He leaned over to the passenger door and yanked at the handle. The door opened wide and then slammed shut again. Becker reconsidered the idea and pressed the button on his right. The window in the passenger door rolled down smoothly with an electric buzz.
Slowing down even further, he turned the car.
“Jump!” he shouted. All he could do was keep his foot on the gas.
A sudden drag on the side of the car and Jamie’s front half was through the window. His arms flailed about as he tried to find purchase, smacking Becker in the head.
“‘Scuse me, sir,” he said awkwardly as he clung on to the passenger seat. His legs billowed out of the car window, cracking against armoured side panels. He swore at the sharp pain.
“Get yourself comfortable,” Becker told him sternly. “We’ve got to get through this lot yet.”
Fire and Water Page 4
