Fire and Water

by Simon Guerrier

  Sophie’s eyes were laughing as she followed the dust road.

  “What?” Danny asked her.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you till I had to, but we find a space up here to park and then we go ahead on foot.”

  There was a groan from the back seat.

  They could hear but not see the water as they climbed out of the car. It lapped and trickled somewhere to their right. With the full beams now off, the only light came from the stars, glittering brilliantly in the expansive sky. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust, and when they did it became clear that the world around them was bathed in an eerie silver light.

  They had stopped in an oblong clearing just off the dusty road. It must be some kind of car park on the trail, though there were no other vehicles around. Danny was surprised to see deep wedges in the ground — suggesting the path of one heavy vehicle, rather than several tourist cars.

  “Has some kind of lorry been this way?” he asked Sophie as he joined her at the back of the SUV.

  She handed him a Winchester rifle. This time he didn’t say no.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The tracks.” She followed his gaze, and then just shook her head. “Ah, well,” he said. “I’ll leave it to the experts.”

  Sophie gathered up the rest of the equipment, checking the ammunition and the one torch she had.

  Danny peered up at the incredible explosion of pin-pricks filling the sky, amazed at how different it looked from any night sky in England. He knew how to spot a handful of the most familiar constellations in the northern hemisphere, but didn’t recognise anything here. That realisation brought back to him how far he was from home.

  “It’s getting chilly now,” Lester said, slamming the passenger door shut. He winced at the noise he had made. Sophie scowled at him.

  “Here,” she snapped, handing him a Winchester Model 70 just like Danny’s. “Know how to use it?”

  Lester looked peculiar in his borrowed khakis, but he handled the gun like a pro. He raised an eyebrow at Sophie.

  “Ready when you are.”

  She carried the one torch so Danny and Lester followed behind as she led them onto a dusty boardwalk. A tall wire fence bordered their path, leading them safely through thick bush and tall grass. The lap of the water became steadily louder and after a few minutes they reached a simple wooden structure with a sloping roof that was held up by four struts.

  Sophie clicked off the torch as they entered. Danny and Lester’s first footsteps echoed loudly on the wooden floor, and they both stepped more gingerly, joining her at a bench that sat before a single, long window.

  There was no glass in the window. It looked out over a short drop onto the wide, slowly undulating lake. Starlight speckled the surface of the water, glinting and shimmering peacefully. A couple of scrawny birds sat on the surface some way out, seemingly asleep. Danny scanned the edges of the lake for any movement in the reeds. His eyes worked round every twig and stone, as best they could in the starlit darkness, but he could see nothing.

  Sophie pointed out across the water. She offered the binoculars to Lester, who swiftly took them.

  Danny strained to see what she had indicated. There was a strange dark patch out there on the water, something like a shadow.

  A few moments later, Lester emerged from behind the binoculars. Wordlessly, he passed them to Danny, who pressed the twin tubes over his eyes. At first he couldn’t make it out properly: something long, thin and dark was resting on the water’s surface. The starlight caught on something at one end of the shadow.

  An eye, he thought. Perhaps it was a snake of some kind, but stretched out taught across the water.

  The thing shifted, shallow waves rippling out, making a wide oval-shape around the creature, and spelling out its bulky figure. At once Danny realised what he was looking at — the uppermost couple of inches of a hippopotamus, lurking in the water. As soon as he knew what he was looking for, he quickly spotted more: a whole family of huge, squat hippos, all almost entirely submerged.

  He lowered the binoculars.

  “They’re not happy,” Sophie whispered. “I think you might be right — there’s something else here.”

  They stayed on the bench, watching the dark patches in the water intently, sharing the binoculars between them. The hippos did seem to be agitated, they clustered in the water a few metres in from a bald patch on the bank. Danny began to make sense of the markings in the mud, the heavy, round footprints of the creatures. The bald area must be a shallow entrance to the water, easy access for pudgy creatures with stumpy little legs.

  And easy access to the water for anything else, as well.

  Something lurked in the dark shadow of long grass just beyond the entrance to the lake. The grass wavered back and forth slowly, but not in time with the light breeze. And then a long, lizard nose poked out into the open and took a careful sniff.

  One of the hippos waded a little way towards the new creature, a bulbous head emerging from the water. The hippo yawned, its head splitting almost in half to reveal a great expanse of flesh inside and grey, uneven tusks. Danny guessed that this wasn’t actually a yawn, but some kind of warning.

  Another one stepped up beside the first and performed an even more impressive yawn. The long, lizard nose retreated back into the grass. Moments later, there came the sound of the same angry roar Danny had heard before.

  Without warning the great theropod tore out of the long grass, hurled itself down the short, bald riverbank and leaped on top of one of the two hippos. Its clawed feet struck deep into its flesh.

  Danny turned to see Sophie’s reaction to the violence unfolding before them, but her expression was as impassive as ever.

  The hippos snapped at the creature, but the nimble dinosaur had already turned tail and run back up onto the bank. It tried to swipe one of the hippos with its tail, but the hippo had bulk on its side and took the full brunt of the impact without flinching. Instead, the dinosaur staggered, lost its step, but righted itself quickly. It seemed to hesitate, unsure now whether to run away or face its prey once again.

  The two hippos heaved their heavy grey bodies out of the water. Behind them, more of the beasts poked their heads from the water, yawning their support.

  “Come on,” Sophie said, getting quickly to her feet. Danny and Lester exchanged glances, but she was the one with the torch, so they didn’t have much choice but to follow her. They jogged to catch up as she made her way briskly across the car park, ignoring the SUV and heading for the road.

  “You can’t go after that thing on foot,” Lester insisted.

  “I just want to make sure it doesn’t kill any more of the local population,” she said over her shoulder, not slowing down. “We don’t need to get too close. I take a shot, the hippos can finish it off.”

  “What about the lions that were pursuing it?” Danny pointed out, rushing to catch up with her. “Where have they got to?”

  “They know better than to come onto hippo territory. Trust me. We’ll be fine so long as we keep our distance.”

  Up ahead awful, brutal squawks and growls reached their ears as the fight kicked off again.

  Sophie’s torch swept the rust-coloured, dusty road in front of them. Again Danny noted the deep-laid tracks where some vehicle had come this way. The tracks still preserved the thick treads of the tyres — it really couldn’t be anything other than a lorry or transporter, maybe two at a pinch. As he turned this information around in his mind a wild thought occurred to him — someone might have brought the dinosaur into the park on purpose. Perhaps it was some kind of corporate sabotage, someone seeing more value in all this land than wasting it on the wildlife.

  Sophie glanced around at him, a strange look on her face. It seemed to Danny that she tried to maintain a veneer that she didn’t like them muscling in on her turf. But something in the way she looked at him now, the sweat beading on her brow despite the coolness of the air...

  “It’s not ju
st the creature, is it?” he said to her. “There’s something else happening here.”

  Sophie looked surprised, startled like a petty crook Danny had just caught pilfering. Even in the meagre, silvery starlight he could see the slight blush in her cheeks. She stopped in her tracks, lowering the torch.

  “You have to understand what we’re up against. I can’t talk about it now. But when we’re done here...”

  She turned away and continued leading them on. Lester glared at Danny but he only shrugged. Whatever it was, it would have to wait.

  They came to a rough T-junction. Across the road, a sign fashioned out of a split log showed an arrow pointing right to a picture of a lake, and an arrow pointing left to some kind of refreshments. Beneath the directions — in capital letters — was a warning, “STAY IN YOUR CAR!”

  Danny and Lester joined Sophie where she had halted at the junction leading to the right. She kept just behind the turning, and was staring straight ahead. Danny couldn’t see anything up towards the lake, but the noise of the fight between the hippos and dinosaur had grown even more ferocious.

  He noticed that the heavy-set tyre tracks had vanished — the large vehicle had clearly taken the left fork. He felt a little disappointed — it had probably just gone to stock up the soft drinks and chocolate, after all. So much for his conspiracy theory. But something about it had agitated her, he recalled.

  “Okay.” She gestured to them, and began to venture forward in the direction of the fighting. She held the torch low, so that the light fell only a little way ahead of her feet. Lester and Danny flanked either side of her, both ready with their rifles.

  Danny knew from his days on the force that you should never go out into the field unprepared, let alone with a weapon you didn’t know how to use.

  There were all kinds of superstitions about handling weapons — beliefs held by men who’d survived when their compatriots had not. He knew full well that he was breaking all the rules. But they couldn’t go back now.

  The stench of blood carried on the breeze, which blew from the dark and noisy fight somewhere up ahead.

  Sophie stopped again.

  The road rose slightly up ahead of them, a pale ribbon in the darkness, then dropped steeply down. Some distance beyond, the starlight glittered in the water of the lake, so they had to be close to the fighting, though the rise in the road made it impossible to judge exactly how close.

  She took a step forward, bending her knees, keeping low. She put the torch down on the ground, gripped her rifle with both hands, aiming out in front of her. Danny and Lester followed suit, crouching as they walked, scanning the darkness ahead of them, ready to fire. The torch behind them cast three long shadows out into the road ahead of them.

  Suddenly the sounds of combat ceased.

  Something moved quickly in the darkness and the theropod let out an almighty roar of rage. As quickly as it appeared, it was gone again. The mayhem resumed. Sophie turned to Danny and Lester, raising the palm of one hand, signalling them to stay put.

  The two men stood in the middle of the road while she made her way to one side, her shoulder almost brushing against the needle-sharp thorns of the acacia. Crouching down so that her knees almost touched the earth, she took careful steps in the direction of the fighting. Her shadow merged with the bushes, so that only Danny and Lester’s remained, filling the road right up to the rise.

  She looked back at them, and in the faint glow, her expression appeared stern. Danny smiled reassuringly, ready with his gun. But Sophie didn’t smile back, and he glanced around behind him to see if she was looking past him, at something else. But the torch lay bright in the middle of the road, blinding him.

  He turned to look at Sophie again, and saw that she had ventured a few steps further, to the point that her blonde hair was the most visible part of her. She leaned out, peeking over the top of the rise at the battle going on. Movement appeared from time to time in the darkness, swishing and slashing in time to the growls and roars of weary creatures locked in battle.

  She raised her gun.

  Danny held his breath. He watched her body stiffen as she lined up the shot.

  The gun barked loud in the night air. A great cry came from the far side of the rise, followed by the thudding of feet and heavy splosh es of hippos scurrying back into the water. She must have brought the dinosaur down, startling its opponents.

  But no.

  Danny watched in horror as a long, scaly head appeared over the rise, jaw hanging open, displaying awful, bloody teeth. The creature tottered forward, its body and neck a gruesome mass of jagged cuts and slashes. The lions and hippos had done it terrible damage, but still it kept coming.

  It reared up on its two powerful legs, more than twice the height of Sophie. Then it made for her.

  A gunshot cracked loudly, right by Danny. Lester quickly fired again. They both marched forward, firing with each step. Sophie sank back into the bush, also shooting rapidly.

  The creature didn’t run, rather it moved unevenly as the onslaught smacked into its damaged body. Blood oozed from the multiple wounds, but it kept on coming into the hail of bullets. It was dying — it had to be — but it meant to drag Sophie down with it.

  Reaching where she cowered into the bush at the side of the road, it stood over her, dripping blood and gore, enjoying a delicious moment of anticipation. Danny and Lester were almost on her, too, shooting up at the creature’s face and neck. It twisted its head back and forth, dancing round the bullets, and let out a long roar. Then it looked directly at Danny.

  He stared into the deadly, yellow eyes of the prehistoric creature, knowing he was powerless to escape it. The creature stood poised over Sophie’s defenceless form, tiny by comparison. Then its expression changed.

  Danny felt rather than heard something behind them. Before he could turn around, a shadow loomed beside him and Lester. Without pausing to think, Danny threw himself at Lester so that they both tumbled off the road. His gun went off, smacking hard into his upper arms. For a moment he fell through the air, something whooshing just past his feet. Then they crashed into the painfully hard and spiky acacia, needles stabbing through their clothes and skin.

  He scrambled around in time to see another creature, the size and weight of the theropod, running on all fours as it launched itself at the battered dinosaur. The theropod fell backwards with a yelp of surprise and both creatures tumbled down behind the rise.

  “That was rather convenient,” Lester said, lying stunned in the acacia where he’d broken Danny’s dive.

  Danny didn’t stop to help him up. He ran to Sophie, who was already getting to her feet. She was wide-eyed and breathless, but shook off his attention. They both hurried down the road to see the two dinosaurs locked together in battle on the edge of the water. The hippos yawned and growled from well within the lake, like an audience cheering on a match between two wrestlers.

  The vast, dog-like newcomer seemed just a little smaller than the theropod that writhed underneath it. No, not dog-like, Danny realised. More like a crocodile, but with longer legs that lifted its flat body high above the ground. It grappled expertly with the theropod, tearing at its long neck with sharp, serrated teeth. The theropod flailed and squawked, but weakened as it was, it seemed utterly powerless against this new threat.

  Danny lowered his gun and reached instead for the mobile phone in his pocket. He’d got a souped-up model when he joined the ARC, which apparently had an extra million megapixels, and something that compensated for the darkness. Quickly he clicked the camera function and took a blurred snap of the brawling creatures.

  “Well, shoot it then,” Lester said, joining them. “You know, with a gun?” His face was badly scratched and bloody, but there was fire in his eyes.

  Sophie raised her rifle and aimed. The crocodile-like creature turned from the dying theropod, whose legs still twitched and quivered feebly, to stare defiantly back at her. Then it stepped nimbly back, grabbed one of its victim’s thick ankles
in its teeth, and with startling strength dragged its prey roughly off into the bush.

  The hippos in the lake continued to yawn, and one moved forward, its flabby head emerging from the water. They might have surrendered their ground to the two dinosaurs, but they wouldn’t let the three humans have it.

  “We need to fall back,” Lester said firmly.

  “Yeah,” Sophie lowered her rifle, “nothing more we can do.”

  They turned, making their way quickly back towards the car. The torch lay in pieces in the middle of the road where the second creature had smashed it. Small bits of glass and metal reflected the grey starlight.

  Another second, Danny thought, and that would have been me and Lester.

  ELEVEN

  Emergency vehicles lined the washed-out roads as they made their way into central London. Policemen, firemen and soldiers worked together in the rain, constructing lines of sandbags. They all looked worn and weary; it had just gone one in the morning and they would be toiling all through the night.

  Connor and Abby sat up in the front of the military truck, sharing the not-quite-double-width seat next to the driver. Connor sat in the middle, and had to lean hard against Abby to keep his right knee from getting in the way of the gear-stick. He didn’t mind, for all he might be squashed and uncomfortable in his damp clothes. Abby had fallen asleep on his shoulder, and he sat there, his arm around her, sharing her warmth and the blanket, actually quite content with life.

  Tall skyscrapers gleamed wetly on either side of them. The street-lights changed from white to dull orange as they drove into an older district.

  London sometimes seemed to Connor like a whole load of very different towns and villages all squashed up together — cross a road or turn a corner and you were in a different world. He liked the buzz and bustle of all these different cultures colliding, the rich melting pot of London life, so it felt especially eerie to drive on roads that were empty but for emergency vehicles. The city on the far side of the windshield seemed so grim and foreboding, like something out of a sci-fi movie, or as if they were at war.