by Paul Kearney
“There’s more to it than that, Cutter.”
“Then do me a favour; come down to the vault with me and open it. Because they gave you the code, didn’t they, Willoby? You know how to open that last door. I can see it written all over your face. And deep down, you’re as curious about it as I am.”
“Curiosity! Is that what it comes down to?” Willoby demanded savagely. “People have died —”
“And more will die, many more, before we understand these things.”
The two men stared at each other.
“My career would be over,” Willoby said.
“With the military, certainly. But you never know — I might be able to find an opening for you somewhere else.”
Willoby shook his head, smiling.
“You slippery bastard.”
“You’ll do it then. I’ll take as much of the responsibility as I can. They can’t sack me; I’m the only loon they have willing to front this stuff.”
“Maybe I’ll sleep on it. I have letters to write tonight,” Willoby told him.
“Letters?”
“To the families. That, also, is part of my job, Cutter.” With that, he walked away.
The middle part of the long winter night drew near, and Stephen was on stag with the Minimi trained on the outer door. He drew satisfaction out of the simple demands of the job. Stay awake, watch the door, be ready to open up on anything that tries to come inside.
He could hear them out there, in the storm. He felt almost sorry for them. They had come through from a warm, familiar world, and had found themselves in this subarctic hell in which they wandered around, dying by inches. Such magnificent animals, any one of which would be worthy of a lifetime’s scientific study, and he was sitting here ready to kill them without hesitation or remorse. He didn’t like the way this job had gone, and he didn’t like the things he and Cutter had become involved with. There were too many soldiers, which somehow always seemed to add up to more death.
This is not scientific enquiry, Stephen thought. It’s the law of the jungle. And sitting here, in the midst of this desolation, we’re nothing but bait.
He tried to remember everything he knew about Eotyrannus, but kept coming back to the fact that they were superlative hunters and killers. Perhaps the earliest Tyrannosauroid ever found, pre-dating Tyrannosaurus rex by nearly eighty million years..
But maybe the most fearsome of their characteristics was the fact that they were pack hunters, and where there was one, there were sure to be others.
Two had been killed, and now Stephen was quite certain that the rest of the pack had followed their fallen brethren through the gateways. They were out there now, coursing through the dark like hounds on a scent. They would scavenge the bodies scattered about the island, and then they would start following the blood trail.
Here.
Get it in the head, he thought calmly. Get the first burst in its head and you may stop it long enough to prevent it tearing you to pieces. Of course, if there’s another one right behind it, you’re nothing but dog food anyway.
He almost jumped out of his skin when Abby came up quietly and joined him at his post.
“Jesus, you scared me!” he murmured. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to sneak up on a man who’s holding a machine gun?”
“My mattress smells,” Abby complained.
“We all smell. I’m surprised you even noticed.”
“I was well brought up, me, not like the rest of you tramps.”
“Tramps — well, I like that.” In fact, he did. She sat down beside him, and together they listened to the eerie sounds of the night.
“God,” Abby said, “I’m so sick of the sound of the wind.”
“At least the rain and sleet will help wash our scent away,” Stephen told her.
“How long can this storm last, anyway?”
“It’s a bit of an event, it seems. I did a little light reading before we left the ARC. Storms like this one only appear once or twice in a generation. The low pressure here is trapped between two high pressure systems, one over the Western Atlantic, and one over the European continent. So it sits here, turning endlessly, until at last it loses energy and the other systems swallow it. Guns Island is an unfortunate place: it happens to be square in the middle of that region of the Atlantic where this phenomenon often happens. It happens all over the planet, but mostly out to sea, so it’s not picked up the way it would be if it were circling over Cambridgeshire, say.”
“Lucky us, to be here at just the right time.”
“Timing — yes, it’s everything,” Stephen said. And then it struck him. “Abby, the storm... it was already in full flow when Connor discovered the anomalies, wasn’t it?”
“As far as we know.”
It was on the edge of his thoughts, a kind of realisation, like a forgotten name perched on the tip of his tongue.
Something moved outside. There was a clatter of dislodged stone.
“Stephen —” Abby whispered.
“I know. Get back.” He brought up the barrel of the Minimi, the bipod swinging as he lifted it clear of the floor.
In the crack of the doorway there was a sharp snort, like that of a horse blowing down its nose, only shriller. The door moved a centimetre, then two, as something nudged against it. Stephen felt Abby’s small hand gripping his shoulder until her fingers seemed almost to be grating bone.
A dark muzzle poked through the doorway, just the tip of it. They saw the slit nostrils opening and closing, snorting out warm breath into the freezing night air. Beside Stephen, the candle flickered as the widening crack let in more wind.
Oh, don’t go out, he prayed. Don’t go out and leave us in the dark.
He swivelled his head minutely. His head-torch was lying on the ground four feet away. It might as well have been a thousand yards. Beside him, Abby was as frozen and immobile as a marble caryatid.
The snout withdrew. They heard it snuffling around outside, the click of rocks turned over by massive claws. Then there was only the howl of the storm, that familiar backdrop to all their experiences here.
“It’s gone,” Abby whispered. “It went away.”
Stephen shook his head. The Minimi was aching his arms with its weight but he could not let the barrel drop. He held it trained on the door as though it were held in place with invisible strings.
“Torch,” he said in a low voice. “Get it.”
She scrambled for the torch on the ground, and just as she reached for it, the creature’s head pushed fully through the doorway, followed by its neck and one shoulder. The head turned towards Abby, sniffing, and pushed the heavy metal door wide open, grinding back the large stone that had secured it. One yellow eye was cocked at them, and the animal uttered a series of harsh, piercing barks. It was so close that even in the guttering candle light they could see the feather-like quills that fringed along the top of its head.
“Get out of the way!” Stephen shouted at Abby. She was in his field of fire. He stood upright just as the maw of the animal opened and it pushed fully into the room, its long hands held out in front of it.
Stephen kicked Abby sprawling, squeezed the trigger, and the Minimi exploded in a furious flash of gunfire.
Tracers snapped out of the machine gun in his hands, and he watched in shattered glimpses of light as the creature came hurtling towards him, and was progressively torn up by the fusillade of bullets. Then the beast crashed into him, and he felt the hot breath of the thing as those hundredweights of flesh and bone and muscle and shredding teeth bludgeoned him to the ground and smashed him onto the unforgiving concrete.
The candle was blown out, and in the sudden blackness the gunflash seemed almost to make things slow down, with a kind of stroboscopic unreality. Stephen saw Abby’s blonde head moving frame by frame in a film of his own mind’s nightmare; he saw the Eotyrannus stalk into the room, vast beyond belief in the confined space, and the retort of the gunfire blasted away his hearing, so that he was
deaf, aware only of the high hissing sound in his head.
***
“Stand-to!” Willoby shouted, and in the adjacent room the rest of the team scrambled out of their sleeping bags and reached for their weapons, clumsy and groggy with sleep. They bumped into one another, slipped, tripped and cursed as the hard angles of their firearms caught each other in the ribs.
“Out of the way!” Willoby yelled, shaking off the effects of fatigue, and he pitched through into the darkness of the outer room, weapon raised, cocking it as he went.
It was pitch-dark in there, a blackness full of an animal screaming. He heard Abby shrieking out Stephen’s name. He clicked on the torch attached to the barrel of the M-4 and it lit up the vast, fearsome head of an Eotyrannus, not eight feet away. It was covered in blood.
Willoby fired two rounds into the creature’s eye, and the head snapped back. He darted the rifle-torch about the room, stabbing out into the darkness, and caught a glimpse of Abby as she tried to haul Stephen’s body away from the creature.
“Fox, Bristow, on me! Fire only at identified targets. We’ve got friendlies and enemy all mixed the hell up in here!”
A warm spray hit him in the face. He tasted it on his lips; he did not know whose blood it was.
The creature was thrashing and roaring and barking like a thing possessed.
Cutter joined him. He had a big torch, the wide-beamed one they had brought off the dinghy. It lit up the room like the stage in a theatre. Half the floor was swimming in blood. The Eotyrannus was still struggling, but like something that has nothing but pure will left to keep it alive. Willoby put five more rounds in its head, and it gave a high-pitched gargling hoot, then was still, the head hitting the floor with a crack.
They were all half deaf with the gunfire, but even so, Willoby could hear the high-pitched barks of more creatures right outside.
“Christ, it’s a whole pack of them,” Cutter said. “Abby, are you all right?”
“It’s Stephen; it landed on him. I think it hurt him pretty badly.”
“Get him out of here, back down the stairs. All of you, out of here,” Willoby said. “This is soldier’s work.”
“We’ll be in the labs,” Cutter said. “Nothing can get through those doors.”
“I’ll join you down there. Grab the gear — leave nothing behind! Joe, Calum, help me close this bloody door.”
The three soldiers put their shoulders to the door and began to heave it closed, but there was a sudden, massive impact on the far side that jolted them backwards. Willoby was bowled off his feet and an Eotyrannus’s head snapped through the widening gap. The soldiers couldn’t hold back that massive force.
Joe Bristow whipped a hunting-knife from his belt, still pushing at the door, and stabbed the creature near its eye. The Eotyrannus yowled in pain and as quick as a darting snake, it snapped out and closed its jaws about Bristow’s head. He was lifted off his feet, screaming.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Willoby yelled, and Doody raised his weapon, but there was nothing to aim at — only the lower half of Bristow’s torso disappearing through the gap in the doorway, his muffled voice still shrieking outside. Calum Fox grabbed his boots and tried to pull him back through the door, but there was a savage tug, and he was gone. Faintly, they heard his screams disappear into the howling storm.
“Oh, Christ,” Fox said. There were tears streaming down his face. He bent and picked up his carbine, and then made as if to go out the door, his eyes not quite sane.
“No, Calum.” Willoby shouted.
“Joe’s still alive boss — we have to go out and get him!”
“He’s as good as dead Sergeant, and if you’re his friend you’ll hope he dies quickly.” Willoby looked around at what was left of his team. “We have to —”
He was interrupted by a chorus of sharp barks outside.
“God almighty, they’re still out there,” Doody said.
“Grab your gear and head down the stairs. Follow the civvies. Move it, lads!”
They seized their rucksacks and pelted down the stairs into the darkness, Willoby providing rearguard. When they reached the labs level Cutter was there at the heavy door.
“Come on!”
Willoby turned as he got to the door and raised his carbine. The torch attached to the barrel followed his gaze. At the top of the stairs two Eotyrannus stood, watching. Both were covered in gore. As he stared, they both crouched, and held out their arms before them as though they were about to catch a ball.
“They’re going to spring — come on!” Cutter yelled, and tugged at Willoby’s arm.
Willoby fired off a full magazine wildly at the stairtop, and then ducked past the heavy steel door. There were people on the other side, their faces lit with a zigzag of head-torches.
The door was slammed shut. Cutter began spinning the lock closed just as a massive weight thundered into it. The steel vibrated under the impact, and even through all that metal and concrete, they could hear the creature on the far side screaming its frustration.
They stood at the door, panting, scraping the stale air into their lungs.
“That’s it now,” Willoby said. He wiped the cold sweat from his face. “They’ve got us trapped.”
SIXTEEN
“I don’t suppose anyone thought to grab the candles,” Connor said. He and Doody and Abby were bent over Stephen, and the beams from all three of their head-torches were glowing a sickly yellow.
“This is a sealed environment,” Cutter said. “So long as this door remains closed, we’re eating up the air in here, which wasn’t great to begin with. The candles would only burn it up faster. Use your torches as little as possible everyone — you don’t need three there. And try not to move around too much. We have to conserve the oxygen in here.”
“So it’s stay here and suffocate, or go outside and get eaten,” Connor said. “Professor, I have to tell you, those choices both really suck.”
“Ammo check,” Willoby said. “Come on lads, get a grip. McCann, you too. You’re a soldier. We need you now.”
The Irish trooper joined Doody and Fox and held out a hand.
“John McCann, Irish Rangers,” he said. “I’ve three full mags, ninety rounds — that’s it.”
Fox shook his hand. It seemed strange to Cutter, but the soldiers seemed to take comfort in the symbolic gesture.
“Welcome to the team, John. It’s a laugh a minute.” Fox turned to Willoby. “We left the Minimi upstairs. All we have are the M-4s and the Glocks. Boss, I’m down to forty rounds, tops, and two clips for the pistol.”
“Same here,” Doody volunteered.
“I’ve one full magazine left, thirty rounds,” Willoby said with a weak smile. “It’s not enough, not enough to go back out there.” He looked around at the austere concrete walls of the lab. “We need an idea, Cutter, and we need it fast.”
Cutter was bent over Stephen, frowning.
“He’s broken some ribs and he’s bruised purple from chin to crotch,” Doody said, “but I don’t think there’s anything internal. He’ll come round in a while, and it’ll hurt like hell, but he should be all right. Meanwhile, he just needs to be kept warm.”
Cutter patted the medic’s shoulder.
“Thanks,” he said. Then he straightened, checked the big hand-held torch, and flashed its wide beam about the room, until finally it came to rest on Willoby.
“Captain, I think it’s time we had a look beyond that locked door of yours.”
Cutter, Willoby, Connor and Jenny stood before the massive entrance labelled ‘Bio-Containment Area’, and tried to breathe slowly. Already, the air inside the bunker seemed to be thinning, and they were panting slightly, as though they were at high altitude.
“Anyone starts feeling lightheaded, sit down at once,” Cutter said. “Captain, would you like to do the honours?”
Willoby stepped up, slung his carbine, and flicked open the lockbox at the side of the door. He began clicking the brass tumblers into place
one by one. When they were arranged to his satisfaction he grasped the steel wheel that sat in the centre of the door, and twisted it slightly.
There was an audible click.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked Cutter.
“If we’re to die down here, then I’m damn sure we can at least satisfy our curiosity before we pop off,” Cutter said.
“Hear hear,” Jenny added. Willoby smiled at her.
“You really are a strange sort of civil servant, Miss Lewis.” He began spinning the wheel-lock.
A clank, and the door seemed to vibrate for a second. Then with a grunt Willoby began to haul it open. The hinges squealed. It was like trying to push-start a car. They all put their backs into it, and eventually moved the massive structure of steel and rubber three-quarters open.
“My God,” Willoby said.
They weren’t looking into blackness. In the space beyond the door there was light, a strange, glass-sharp, flickering light. They entered the chamber, and found that they were standing on a broad catwalk. Below them there was a well, the base of which wasn’t concrete, not man-made, but the black, granite bedrock of the island itself. And upon that rock, a ten-foot tall pillar of light gleamed and glittered and spun, shards of light spangling out from it and rejoining it again.
“Every time I see them, I wonder at how beautiful they are,” Cutter said. He leaned on the railing of the catwalk and smiled.
“Bioweapons,” Jenny said with a curl of her lip.
Connor was staring at the little LED screen of his hand-held anomaly detector. It was winking green. “I knew it! I knew there had to be one here somewhere.”
Willoby stared at the anomaly like a man entranced.
“So that’s it. That’s the door to another world.” He kept his gun at the ready, though, as if wondering what might appear through this hole in space.
“Another time,” Cutter corrected. “The world of the past, or the future, but our world, this world.” He looked at his watch.
