by Paul Kearney
***
Jenny’s eyes were gummed shut. She tried to raise her hands to rub them, but only one would move. She prised open her eyelids, wincing as whatever had glued them shut took a few eyelashes out at the roots.
She could hear metal ticking, and the wind rattling something loose, a metallic banging sound. The quiet was eerie after the roar of the turbine. She couldn’t quite recall what had happened. Part of her wanted to close her eyes again.
“Hello?” she said.
A moan answered her. There was a body lying limp across her legs, warm and heavy. She could not move.
Memory flooded back, and with it came panic. It was blood on her face; her palm was red with it. So much blood — how bad was it? She touched her matted hair. Blood was oozing out of it.
McCann was unconscious in her lap, and the entire helicopter was lying on its side. They were at an awkward angle, but at least she wasn’t hanging in mid-air, as she had been when she lost consciousness. One door had been smashed off above her, and with a turn of her head she was looking up at the snarling, blank curtain of the sky.
So much for the lull in the storm.
“Hello?” she said again. “Lieutenant Brice?”
No answer. She could see the two men in front, hanging limp in their seats with their helmets lolling to one side. They looked like discarded dolls.
Don’t panic — think about this. How to get out. She could smell aviation fuel all around her, and it was the terrified thought of it catching fire that finally galvanised her into movement.
She shoved McCann’s body away from her legs, gasping as the seat belt cut into her side. Some ribs cracked there. As a child, her pony had thrown her, and the pain had been the same.
Not serious, she told herself. Concentrate.
She freed the belt buckle that anchored her in place and at once slid down to what was now the bottom of the aircraft. It had once been the starboard door. The pain forced a cry out of her, and brought tears to her eyes.
Angry now, she twisted in the shattered confines of the aircraft and then had to stop, as her brain was fogging up again. Blood was dripping in coin-sized drops onto her hands. When she shook her head to clear it the drops spattered over the interior of the helicopter, as if she had shaken a scarlet-dipped paintbrush.
The sight of it made her stomach twist.
She stood up. From the front seats there came a moan, a stirring.
“Brice?” she said. No answer. But at least someone else was alive. She had to get out — she was going to be sick. She started to climb up toward the doorless side of the aircraft above her.
Something struck the side of the broken helicopter with a metallic bang. She froze.
Again, a crash on her left, towards the tail-boom, and then a scoring sound, as though something sharp were being trailed down the skin of the aircraft.
Jenny froze.
“Cutter?” she whispered.
There was a low grunting noise outside, a snuffling, and then a series of sharp, loud barks, like those of a seal. Jenny shrank down into the well of the helicopter, trying to make herself small. Her hands went out by themselves, searching over McCann’s body. He had a pistol strapped to his thigh, but was lying on top of it. She tried to lift up his limp body. The pain in her ribs exploded, as though fireworks had gone off in her head.
An exclamation escaped her lips, a sharp cry. Covering her mouth, she listened silently.
A moment later the carcass of the aircraft shuddered as something heavy climbed up it. The whole airframe tilted, and there was the unmistakable sound of claws scrabbling on aluminium. McCann shifted, allowing Jenny to find the grip of his pistol, and she began to tug frantically on it.
The light was cut off above her. She raised her head slowly, and looked up.
A head was framed in the opening above, a long snout with yellow, gleaming eyes and lines of teeth. The snout alone was big, a yard long perhaps. She felt the exhalation of the creature’s breath, a carrion stench. The breath curled around her in a foul, steaming fog.
Her fingers slipped off the pistol grip.
The thing barked at her, a dry, piercing series of sounds which were caught inside the aircraft and hurt her ears. She could smell the blood on herself, all around her. But she could not move.
The creature opened its maw and tensed. It seemed as though it was about to launch itself right into the wrecked aircraft. She could see its claws now, braced on the doorframe. Her hands fluttered wildly, and she couldn’t even scream, for the terror had turned all of her muscles to water.
Just before it leapt, something dark spat out of its head, and the great snout was jerked to one side. A fine spray of blood had exploded from near the top of its skull. The creature was unbalanced for an instant, and Jenny was able to see with perfect clarity one of the great luminous yellow eyes as it flooded dark. Then it half jumped and half toppled off the helicopter with a thin screech.
All this happened in half a second, and in that half second, Jenny distinctly heard the crack of a gunshot, catching up with the supersonic bullet that had preceded it. She fell, and lay back on top of McCann’s body, feeling cold and sick, the nausea so powerful that she didn’t even feel relief at her deliverance.
Minutes passed, and she heard voices outside, then feet in the crunching snow. She cleared her throat.
“In here! Help us!” The reek of blood and aviation fuel became too much for her, and she vomited into her lap.
“The copilot is dead,” Willoby told Cutter. “The pilot is coming round, and the other passenger seems in decent shape. They’re pretty banged up, but they’ll make it.”
Cutter was kneeling beside Jenny as Doody stitched shut the gaping scalp wound that ran behind her ear. Her face was white as marble except where the blood streaked it, and her hands were clenched into tight fists. Cutter touched one, his face dark and unreadable.
“Cutter,” Willoby said patiently, “what was that?”
It was Stephen who answered. He still had his sniper rifle held up to his shoulder and was scanning the crags which bounded the horizon with the patient intent of a born hunter.
“A Theropod,” he said. “I saw its forearms as it took off.”
Cutter rose, collecting himself.
“A big one, with long forearms. An Eotyrannus maybe, they were a known predator of Iguanodon.” He smiled bleakly. “Connor will be mad as hell to have missed it.”
“That bloody thing was twenty-feet long if it was an inch,” Doody said, still stitching.
“I’m fairly sure it’s a pack hunter,” Cutter explained. “Where there’s one, it’s likely there’s others. We have to get back to the camp as quickly as possible. All this blood will draw them, if they’re out there.”
Willoby swore. He looked the wreckage of the helicopter up and down. They had dragged the occupants some fifty metres away, wary of anything that might set off the fuel that saturated the area around the wreck.
“Six of us, and three wounded to carry, plus one body. Can’t be done in one trip. We take the living and leave the dead.”
Joe Bristow, his shaven head bristling, said, “You can’t do that boss. That big ugly bastard will come back and eat him.” He was looking at Les Mullan’s corpse. The copilot’s neck had been broken, his lower limbs shattered, but his face was almost untouched. It stared peacefully up at the sky, a waxen mask.
“No choice, Joe,” Willoby said quietly. “Break out your ponchos lads. We’ll carry them —”
“No,” Jenny said clearly. Her eyes had opened.
“Jenny!” Cutter exclaimed, and he knelt down beside her again. She smiled at him.
“Glad to see you made it, Cutter,” she said. Then in a more determined voice, “I can walk back myself. How far do we have to go? We’re not leaving anyone behind for these things to feed on.”
Willoby looked at her with a new respect.
“The lady has spoken. Very well then. Pack up lads, and let’s be on our way. There
’s not much daylight left.”
They made slow progress until Corporal McCann woke up unexpected-ly, and with Doody under one arm and Bristow under the other, was able to limp along instead of being hauled in a poncho. Stephen brought up the rear, turning every few yards to eyeball the windswept crags behind them with his rifle sights. After they had limped and hobbled some 200 metres, he called up to Willoby at the front of the little straggling column.
“They’re behind us! I see two of those creatures. They’re quartering the ground. Looks like they’re trying for our scent.” He went on one knee, sighted, and fired a single shot, startling them all. Then he jerked back the bolt to eject the casing and seat another round.
“Missed, damn.”
“Move it!” Cutter hissed loudly. “Those things could be as fast as bloody racehorses.”
They stumbled on. At last they saw ahead in the gathering darkness the glimmer of a torch, and were met by Sergeant Fox. He had his M-4 cocked and ready.
“I heard shooting,” he said, eyes wide at the new additions to the team, the body of Sergeant Mullan with one arm dangling limply out of the poncho.
“Cover our rear,” Willoby told him. “Don’t fire unless you have a clear shot.”
“Yes, boss,” he replied. “So, what am I firing at?”
“Big bloody monsters, Calum — now get to it.”
They made it to the tents at last, a quiet, tired crew with a sombre load. Jenny, McCann and Brice were wrapped up warm in the tents with Doody to attend to them while the rest of the party took up firing positions around the camp.
Darkness had fallen just before they reached the tents, and sleet was pouring in on the back of the wind, the beginning of a bitter night. The cold and wet bored into them, soaking them all over again. Whatever warmth had been generated by the journey back to camp was quickly lost.
“The weather’s in our favour,” Cutter told Willoby. “Might just throw them off the scent.”
“I hope so,” the soldier told him. “We can’t stand-to all night in this.”
They lay on the hard ice-strewn rocks, shivering and staring out into the flailing storm-torn dark, as wary and afraid as cavemen peering into the blackness of an ice-age winter. But nothing came.
Finally they called it a night, and set one-hour sentry slots for all the soldiers... and Stephen, Willoby having been reluctantly impressed by the shot which had almost taken the Eotyrannus’s head off at 400 metres in bad visibility and a high wind. Cutter, Connor and Abby also wanted to go on ‘stag’, as the soldiers called it, but the Captain refused.
“You’re the brains of this operation,” he told them. “We need you alert and alive and keeping the information flowing.”
Jenny lay in an arctic sleeping bag, a field dressing bound behind her left ear. Cutter sat beside her in the tent while behind him Abby and Connor were huddled with another sodden sleeping bag wrapped around their shoulders. Connor’s hair hung in lank rat’s tails down his forehead and he was shivering convulsively. News of the Eotyrannus had sparked up a return to his old self, but now he was staring at the prospect of another wet, freezing night, this time with large predators roaming the crags and wastes beyond the campsite. His taste for adventure seemed to be at its lowest ebb.
He sat with the electronic guts of the portable anomaly detector spread on a handkerchief in front of him and mechanically dried the components, one by one, but his heart didn’t seem to be truly in it.
Abby’s head was nodding. Once, when it came to rest on his shoulder, he closed his eyes and buried his nose in her hair.
“That poor man,” Jenny was saying. “Dying in a place like this.”
“At least it was quick,” Cutter said.
“Cutter, what the hell are we doing here?”
Cutter smiled down at her. She had taken his hand, and her fingers were warm against his own chilled skin. “Trying to clear up a mess, I suppose, same as we always do. It’s just that this time we’re a bit further out on a limb than usual.”
“This is going very wrong, Nick.”
“We’ll muddle through,” he told her. He didn’t sound convinced, though.
“We have your sat-phone,” he continued. “It made it in one piece, and three of you made it out of the chopper with only minor injuries — there’s that to be thankful for. As Lester would put it, we’re still fit for purpose.”
“Lester!” she said, anger flitting across her face. “All James Lester gives a damn about is his ascent of a very greasy pole.”
“He shouldn’t have sent you out here,” Cutter admitted. “This isn’t your kind of scenario, Jenny.”
“I know. Public relations, eh? It never said anything in my contract about storms at sea, helicopter crashes and marauding prehistoric predators.”
He patted her hand.
“In the morning we’ll pack up and make for this abandoned army post in the north. We can’t spend another night in the open, not in this weather. After that, things will be a little more...” He searched for the word.
“Reasonable.”
THIRTEEN
In the night, the wind fell, and Cutter woke up to the strangest sound: silence. The storm had been a part of their world for what seemed like so long now that its absence was a new and amazing thing.
He left the tent with the plastic brick that was the sat-phone in one hand, and with the other he tucked a borrowed pistol in his jacket pocket. Outside, the air was freezing cold and still full of water vapour. He looked about himself in dismay. The island was covered in thick, freezing fog, visibility down to perhaps fifteen metres. It was so thick that he could feel it moving against his face, and tasted salt on his dry, chapped lips. It reminded him that they were getting low on water.
Doody was on stag behind the Minimi, lying on a karrimat with his cheek leaning against the weapon’s stock. As Cutter approached his head snapped upright and he cursed.
“Good job it was you,” he said. “If it had been the boss, I’d be in for a rocket, snoozing on stag.”
“If it was an Eotyrannus, you’d get more than a rocket,” Cutter retorted. He sat down and he and Doody split a bar of chocolate, savouring the sugar and the boost in energy it spread through their systems at this enervating hour of the morning. “No sign?” Cutter asked.
“No sign. Though there could be half a dozen of the bastards a hundred yards off in this fog, and you’d not know.”
“All right, Doody. When’s your relief?”
“Your mate Hart takes over in ten minutes.”
“How are our patients?”
Doody rubbed his hand over his face.
“The squaddie, McCann, will be fine. He just got a bump on the head and a lot of general bashing around — no worse than a good night out in Colchester. The pilot, Brice, has the same, but his right arm is broken, too. He won’t be flying any helis for a while.”
“And Jenny?” Cutter asked, affecting what he hoped sounded like clinical detachment.
“You mean the brunette beauty you’re soft on?”
Cutter glared at him. “What did you say?”
Doody chuckled. “It’s all right, sir, it’s just a bit obvious, that’s all. She’s fine, too. Mild concussion, five stitches, two cracked ribs. She’s got bottle, that girl. She’ll be up and about today, I’ll bet you anything.”
Cutter nodded. “Thanks Doody.”
“Don’t wander off!” Doody said quickly as Cutter walked away. “SOP is now to pee in pairs.”
“I’m a civilian. I don’t have Standard Operating Procedures,” Cutter told him. “But if you hear me being eaten, do come running.”
He walked some sixty yards out of camp, pausing every now and then to listen. No noise but the sound of water trickling. The island seemed dead and deserted. He wondered if the anomalies were still open.
Connor has to get the detector working again.
He set up the sat-phone, extending the tiny dish and setting it on a nearby rock. Then he hit redial
.
The phone rang twice, and a voice said, “You took your time.”
Cutter smiled.
“Good to know you missed me,” he said, and listened with relish to the silent astonishment on the other end.
“Cutter! So you’re alive.”
“And kicking, Lester. But only just. It was a bold move, sending Jenny out here to check up on us.”
“It was necessary.”
An edge of anger crept into Cutter’s voice.
“You bastard. She was almost killed.”
“What happened?”
“Her helicopter went down. She’s marooned here now, the same as the rest of us. One of the crew was killed in the crash, and another was seriously injured.”
“I see.” Then silence.
“Don’t you want to know his name? His next of kin will need to be informed.”
“All in good time, Cutter. After all, it wasn’t my decision to get the Irish military involved in all of this. And at this moment, none of you exist, Guns Island is deserted, and the media are going to keep believing that for as long as possible.”
“Well, so long as everything is neat and tidy in the corridors of power,” Cutter replied, without bothering to disguise his disgust.
“What communications do you have?” Lester asked, with a patience that was quite unlike him. Perhaps he felt a measure of guilt after all.
“Two-way radios with a limited range, and this sat-phone. That’s it. The long-range UHF was lost in the sea, along with half our other gear. Lester, we have injured people here. We need a resupply and a casevac as soon as possible. We’re short on food, water, medical supplies and —”
“Are you giving up on me, Professor?”
Cutter bit back his fury.
“I’m merely stating the facts.”
“What about the anomalies? Are they still open — have you seen any creatures?”
“We’ve seen three distinct species so far, one at sea and two on land. Our anomaly detector got scrambled. We’re working on it.”
