by Paul Kearney
No, better to —
Something moved in the corner of his vision.
He kept running, picking up the pace but bringing up his rifle and snicking off the safety catch. In his head there ran childish prayers he hadn’t uttered since school, when the Christian Brothers had beaten them into him.
On both his right and left, the shadows moved up. They were loping smoothly, keeping pace perhaps a hundred metres out on either side.
McCann began to sprint. The breath tore in and out of his lungs. The bright gleam of the anomaly was above him now, at the top of the slope.
One of the things broke trail in front of him, tearing at incredible speed through the ferns, uttering a series of high-pitched squawks which sounded almost birdlike. He felt a rush of relief. They were small, these things, not more than five- or six-feet tall. It wasn’t so bad after all. They weren’t real dinosaurs.
Another streaked across his path, and there were more behind him. He could hear movement all about in the ferns; the starlit slope seemed to have come alive. He turned, still running, and fired a burst behind him at the shadows, the muzzle-flash momentarily blinding him.
He tripped, and went down.
For a second he lay there, heart hammering. There was almost no sound, a crackle of the harsh ferns, no more. I’ve scared them off, he thought.
He rose to his feet.
And the first one came leaping out of the air upon him with its hind legs held back, and then it slashed them forward. He saw it only as a blur before it crashed into his chest and knocked him down. As he fell, his fist convulsed on the pistol grip of the rifle, and it went off in another tearing crack of automatic fire.
The thing was on top of him, ripping, shearing away his flesh in flurries of shining claws. He screamed as the claws ripped open his belly. The thing raised its bird-like head and squawked again.
More of its fellows joined it, leaping into McCann’s dying vision and starting to tear at his body as he lay twitching, his insides steaming as they were scattered through the ferns. The pack fed, crooning and squabbling and hopping up and down.
Like sparrows at a bird feeder.
Connor and Willoby stopped in their tracks as they heard the gunfire. Back up the slope behind them they saw the tiny flash of light, then another. After that there was silence.
It was daylight when they made it back to camp, a darker dawn than the morning before, with clouds building up in the sky and an oppressive heat in the air. Willoby threw his rifle down upon the ground and grabbed the nearest water bottle, swallowing gulp after gulp with his eyes closed.
The rest of the team stared at him, and at Connor, was sat down some distance away with his head between his knees.
“McCann’s dead,” Willoby said, forestalling Cutter’s question. “He took off on his own. We found an anomaly, maybe five kays north of here, out on the plains. Connor says it’s fading, so time is short.”
“What happened to McCann?” Lieutenant Brice asked quietly, cradling his broken arm.
“Something got him, don’t know what. We heard gunfire, and that was it.”
“Did you see him die?” Brice asked.
“I didn’t have to. There’s something out there in the ferns, a pack of something. They’re not big, but they move fast.”
“Eotyrannus?” Cutter asked. Willoby shook his head, wiping water from his chin.
“No, smaller than that. I don’t know what the hell they were.”
“Maybe he got away,” Brice said. “You don’t know — you didn’t see.”
“Maybe he did,” Willoby said. Plainly, he did not want to talk about it. “In any case, there’s an anomaly out there, and we have to try and get to it before it disappears. Time to move again, people.”
“Hart can’t walk, boss,” Doody said.
“Then we’ll carry him. Fox, rig up a litter. Doody, get him ready to move. Come on people — this may be our only chance.”
The team began to pack up. While they had been gone, Sergeant Fox had already broken down a couple of stout saplings and slid them through a poncho, tying the whole thing up with paracord. Abby and Cutter helped lift Stephen onto it.
“Who are our strongest?” Cutter asked.
“Me and Fox,” Willoby said bluntly, “but we need to provide security. Cutter, you and Doody take the litter first. We’ll relieve you if it gets too much for you — but once we’re down on the plains, the soldiers need to have their arms free, so the girls will have to pitch in with the lifting and carrying.”
Jenny and Abby looked at one another.
“I’m a woman, not a girl,” Abby growled.
“I can walk, if I have to,” Stephen protested. “I’m not a complete invalid.”
“Good,” Willoby said. “Because if things go really pear-shaped out there, we may all have to run for it, and the devil take the hindmost.”
His tone sobered them all. Clearly, whatever he had encountered in the night had shaken him. Connor was still white-faced and silent, holding his pistol in one hand and the anomaly detector in the other. He looked as though he had forgotten what sleep meant.
“Let’s do it then,” Cutter said, drawing his own pistol and cocking it with a snap.
Brice looked up at the sky as the little procession left the remains of their camp, the campfire still smoking.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” he said.
TWENTY
The marines advanced in fire teams across the barren ground leading up to the base. Despite his best efforts, Lester felt himself growing apprehen-sive. The door was wide open, and looking in, it was possible to see an American-made light machine gun lying abandoned amid a scattering of other kit. He had seen one of the SAS troopers cleaning that machine gun back in the ARC.
Desaix held up a hand, and the marines went firm. Then one four-man team approached the doorway.
“Mon Dieu!” Lester heard one of them gasp, and the little radio clipped to Desaix’s ear crackled in a stream of unintelligible French.
“Shit,” Lester murmured, sticking to Anglo Saxon.
“There are body parts all around up there,” Desaix said, watching the fire team move into the base through his binoculars. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look good.”
“I should go forward,” said Ramis, the ship’s doctor.
“No one moves until the base is secured. Monsieur Lester — Monsieur Lester!”
Lester ignored him. He walked quickly and purposefully towards the base, staring at the ground as he went. There was old blood here, congealed in puddles, soaking shreds of black cloth. A black M-4 magazine lay in the mud with the brass rounds still gleaming inside it. Here was the silver foil of a boil-in-the-bag ration-pack, and there, ludicrously, a trampled tea bag.
He stopped short. A man’s hand lay severed at his feet. It had been bitten off; he could see the mark of the teeth as plain as day.
He raised his head and looked up at the base, now only some thirty yards away. Two French marines were crouched in the doorway, their rifles at their shoulders. The other two had gone inside. Lester forced himself to walk on. He wasn’t squeamish in the slightest, but he wasn’t looking forward to walking through that doorway.
He squared his shoulders and continued, nodding at the two startled marines. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” one demanded.
“Rien,” he replied, and waved his hand in dismissal.
The entrance to the base was a slaughterhouse. There was dried blood everywhere, and shreds of tissue plastered in pink and brown streaks of torn flesh. Empty casings rattled under his feet and bullet holes pocked the concrete of the walls.
For the first time, he began to believe that they might all be truly dead. He had not allowed himself to think it before — Cutter, that arrogant ass, always seemed so indestructible. But now the possibility was very real.
This was going to be a disaster.
“Give me your torch,” he said to the marine.
“Eh?”
; “Votre lampe de poche — maintenant!”
Scowling, the marine handed over a small maglight. Lester twisted it on and stepped into the base.
It stank. There had been animals here. Their dung reeked, and the pools of blood that covered the floor were surely too big to have come from human beings.
Stairs down.
Ahead, he could hear the other marines talking, the static crackle of their radio. He went down the stairs. More blood — it was everywhere.
The marines were standing with flashlights in their hands before a great vaulted door. This had been a lab. There was broken glass underfoot now, and wooden workbenches which had been shattered and torn into matchwood.
And something else. Lester joined the two Frenchmen and found that they were staring at the partially eaten carcass of a huge animal. There were bullet holes in its head and upper body. It looked as though it had been shot, and then something else had decided to make a snack of it. The thing must between fifteen and twenty-feet long. Lester was no dinosaur expert, but he appraised the massive jawful of teeth thoughtfully.
The marine closest to Lester rapped on the massive steel door before him.
“It’s locked,” he said in surprisingly good English. “Maybe they are inside.” He spoke into his radio, and Lester heard Desaix’s voice on the other end. Then he and his comrade went back to examining the dead dinosaur, plainly flabbergasted. They cast dark looks at Lester, as though they thought he might be responsible for it.
There were footsteps above, and more marines entered the shattered lab, their torches flicking back and forth over everything. Desaix and Ramis were with them. Desaix glared at Lester and then nudged the massive carcass at his feet, shaking his head.
“There is another one of them outside, at the north end of the base. It does not have a mark on it, but it is dead.”
“Perhaps the cold killed it,” Lester said. “The weather really has been shocking lately.”
Desaix frowned. “Your people — any sign?”
Lester turned and looked at the great round door behind them, with its circle-lock and combination box. He touched the brass tumblers. The door had score marks all down it where the creature had clawed furiously to get in.
“If they’re anywhere,” he said quietly, “they’re in here. Drag that gruesome heap of meat out of the way. We need to get this door open.”
The tumblers ticked smoothly as Lester clicked them to the right numeral, one by one. It was a code he had been given only after a heated set of arguments in Whitehall. He had passed it on to Captain Willoby with great reluctance, but Willoby was discreet. He was a good man.
Now he was probably dead.
They swung the door open, and gaped at what they found. A Christmas tree of whirling lights at the base of a large, circular chamber with a raised catwalk all about it, and a ramp leading down. Nothing else. Just that pillar of coruscating light, turning like a slow-motion firework.
“What is this?” Desaix asked.
Lester studied the anomaly with a detached air. The chamber was empty but for its glittering radiance. They had done it — they had actually gone through. Must have. They had left not so much as a button behind them in here. He found himself admiring their courage.
Of course, when one is desperate, one might do anything.
He had seen anomalies before, and he had read countless reports on them. He studied this one now with an expert eye, and pursed his lips.
“Tell me — what is this thing?” Desaix demanded again. He stepped toward the floating lights.
“Don’t touch it!” Lester snapped as the French officer approached the phenomenon, walking down the catwalk ramp like a man entranced. After his abrupt outburst, he composed himself. “Stay away from it, Lieutenant. You have no idea how dangerous these things are.”
“What is it they do — is it a weapon?”
The anomaly was yellowing, and the spangled shards of light it threw out covered ever smaller arcs. It was fading. He could see that it was dying in front of him.
And Cutter, with all his people, would be trapped on the far side of it.
He stood stock still for a moment.
“Set a guard on this thing,” Lester said, striding out of the chamber. “No one goes near it, and cover it with fire, you understand me?”
“The monsters are to do with this thing, are they not?” asked the doctor, Ramis.
“Very perceptive of you,” Lester drawled. “Lieutenant, I need you and some of your men. We have to go to the other site, where your pilot saw more of these things, and we must be quick.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then stop trying, and just do as I say. Vite!”
Lester’s abrupt authority seemed to draw the French officer after him irresistibly. Desaix called out orders to his fire teams. With four men and the bespectacled ship’s doctor, they blew through the dark charnel house that was the Guns Island base until they were outside again. Lester studied the sky, and gave vent to some more prosaic profanity.
“Pick up the pace,” he said. “There’s not a moment to lose.”
***
A hundred million or so years earlier, Cutter and the surviving members of his team made their way down out of the hills, carrying Stephen on the litter. They picked their way out of the shadow of the trees, and after an hour’s stumbling march had made it to the wide, rolling plain Abby described as the Sea of Ferns.
To the north, it rose in a long series of shallow slopes up to the horizon, where it was dotted with clumps of conifers and long brakes of head-high ferns. Up there, somewhere, the anomaly stood, at least so they hoped. And up there somewhere, John McCann had been killed.
They marched steadily. Four of them carried the litter: Cutter, Connor, Doody and Abby. Willoby was out in front, Brice and Jenny walked alongside, and Sergeant Fox brought up the rear. No one spoke. It was as if the oppressiveness of the day had invaded their minds.
The sun had been hidden by an ominous build up of towering clouds, the black heads of which lowered like grey anvils over the world below. Already, they heard the first rumblings of thunder travel over the hills, and they could not help but wonder what a Cretaceous storm would be like. The air seemed charged with electricity, so that Abby’s bright bob crackled like the fur of a cat stroked the wrong way, and the plains below the hills, which had been teeming with herd animals at dawn, now seemed deserted.
The big herbivores had made off in trundling masses for the lower slopes of the foothills, where they stood in patient crowds, calling to one another in bass bellows that carried from one end of the hills to the other. Of the big predators, the Neovenators, there was no sign. The air seemed hushed and still, with even the Pterosaurs retreating to their cliff ledges, as if they didn’t trust what the sky held.
“We’re in for a rough spell of weather,” Cutter said, looking up at the lowering clouds, which shifted and jostled under the rising wind. “Still, it may be for the best. It should put predators off the scent, to some extent.”
There was a beeping in Connor’s pocket.
“Professor,” he said, fishing out the anomaly detector, “I’m picking up the signal again. It’s still there — the anomaly is still up there!”
A wave of relief swept through the group. Part of Cutter had been afraid that it would be gone, that the detector would remain dead as they approached the plains, and they would end up standing there with nowhere to go. The others must have felt it, too, though no one had said anything.
Now the revelation cheered them. They began to pick up the pace.
Cutter felt the first drops of rain slap him on the face. They were warm, and as big as pound coins. He bent his head and concentrated on carry-ing the litter, forcing one foot in front of the other. He tried not to think of anything else.
“I think they were Raptors, last night,” Connor said, blinking rain out of his eyes. He shook drops off the anomaly detector and stowed it back in his pocket, where it clinked
against his pistol.
“They were smaller than those monsters back on the island, though,” Willoby said from in front. “I reckon whatever they were, they were smaller than a man.”
Cutter stared at Connor, eyes widening.
“Dromaeosaurs?”
“Could be, Professor. We didn’t get a look at them, but I remembered —”
“I know,” Cutter said. He remembered a nighttime shopping mall not so long ago, where he and the team had battled against a mated pair of Dromaeosaurs. A single pair, and they had almost come unglued in the confines of a shopping mall.
Now they were out in the open, perhaps facing an entire pack.
“Movement draws their eye,” Connor went on. “I think that’s why they went after McCann. He was running, whereas Willoby and me, we were standing still.”
The rain grew heavier. Quickly they became soaked through, and the wooden shafts that supported the litter began to slip and slide in Cutter’s hands. Underfoot, the ground began to run with excess water, and mud sucked at the soles of their boots. Visibility decreased to a hundred metres.
“This is good,” Cutter said loudly. “This is helping us.”
“You could have fooled me,” Doody said.
“Sight and smell, the two big senses of predators. This is covering us. It’s all good, believe me.”
If I keep saying it, I may even believe it myself.
An unbelievably loud rattle of thunder broke out across the sky, echoing from one horizon to the other. Out of the corner of his eye, Cutter saw a flash, and he turned his head just in time to catch the flared branch of the forked lightning as it seared an afterimage across his retinas.
“Who’d be under a tree now, eh?” Willoby shouted over the hissing roar of the rain.
The day grew dark, as though dusk had come upon them prematurely. All along the horizon, lightning exploded out of the clouds in arterial branches of unbearably bright light, and in its wake the thunder broke out in an awesome barrage, continuous now, deafening.
