by Sam Enthoven
‘YES!’ yelled Chris. ‘YEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS!’ He jumped up and down and punched the air, and even when he noticed how quietly horrified everyone else in the underground bunker seemed to be, he still couldn’t help the way he was grinning.
Outside, under the London sky, Tim froze. The dust was clearing, and he’d noticed something. Something that he didn’t like.
He’d been expecting to be presented with a view of his fallen foe – Mallahide’s body spread out liberally all over the landscape. But Mallahide wasn’t there.
Confused, Tim waded through the waterlogged wreckage. The Thames – never all that deep at this point in the river anyway – was now shallower still due to the sheer volume of bricks and mortar that had just been dumped into it. Tim prodded listlessly here and there with his hind legs – but it was true: of the gigantic creature that had hit him so horribly hard earlier, there was now no sign whatsoever. He looked north, east, south, west – no sign of Mallahide there either. Eventually, because it took Tim a while to realize that it was the only direction he hadn’t looked in yet, he looked up . . .
And got a nasty surprise.
‘Oh no!’ said Chris. There on the screen, the satellite feed, something terrible was happening. The unspeakable cool blue amoeba shape from before had returned. Far from being weakened, it now appeared to be even bigger.
Over Tim’s head, the darkness boiled and shivered. The entire London night sky seemed to be converging on a point just ahead of him: something between a tornado and a mountain was taking shape there. At last, Mallahide had suspended his efforts to convert any remaining Londoners left out in the open. Now the whole swarm was coming, concentrating here to face this latest and most surprising of the professor’s enemies. At last Professor Mallahide was beginning to take Tim seriously.
Mallahide knew the whole world was watching: not just governments through their satellites in orbit far overhead – everybody who had access to the media. Someone, somewhere would be recording the whole scene. At this very instant, jerky amateur footage from handheld cameras and phones was being uploaded to the Internet and sent out all over the globe. Those who could would be glued to their screens, breathless, watching the situation unfold – watching him, Mallahide, to see what he was capable of and whether what he was claiming he could do was true.
This creature, this ‘Tim’, had put up the only serious opposition that Mallahide had so far faced. So, he was going to have to make an example out of him.
First, the professor reconstructed himself. In moments, he was straddling the Thames again. His previous armoured half-insect shape had reappeared, exactly identical to how it had been before, right down to the atomic level. It only took him three seconds this time: the professor meant business.
Next, reaching out with two of his arms, he fixed his pincers on the rim of a convenient wheel shape that he’d seen beside him, standing on the southern bank of the river.
Until this moment, the London Eye had been an observation wheel – one of the tallest and most beautiful in the world. Built to celebrate the coming of the year 2000, it had rapidly become one of London’s most popular attractions. People had come from everywhere to step into its gleaming glass passenger capsules and ride the wheel to the top, there to see (on a clear day) one of the most spectacular views in the whole city. The Eye had been an almost miraculous work of engineering: 1,700 tons of steel had gone into its construction.
Mallahide’s newly recreated armoured limbs flexed once, easily, and the London Eye snapped off its moorings. He shook it, dislodging the irritating bubble cars attached all around it: they plummeted to the ground and shattered, a sudden hail of thirty-two unfeasibly large – and fortunately empty – glass eggs. Then he advanced. Before Tim could do much more than raise his forelimbs in a token attempt to protect himself, Mallahide lifted the London Eye’s 135-metre-diameter wheel, turned it to the horizontal –
– and drove it down smartly over Tim’s head.
The impact was stunning: Tim’s hind legs buckled, his vision filling with swathes of blurry green flashes. The pain was shocking. Tim wanted to reach up: he wanted to feel with his foreclaws whatever damage had been done to him – but strangely, his arms didn’t seem to want to move. His vision cleared slowly, and he realized why.
When the wheel’s hub jarred loose on Tim’s thick skull, the Eye’s bicycle-style spokes, which stretched from the hub to the wheel’s rim, were forced upwards, bent out of true. But as the ruined structure was shoved brutally down past Tim’s shoulders, something else had happened.
Tim’s arms were now clamped to his sides. Tim was stuck.
Tim was defenceless!
Mallahide swung out two of his great arms at once, striking Tim on both sides of the head simultaneously: the anvil-hard pincers collided around Tim’s skull with the force and power of a train crash. Stunned, Tim fell back. Behind him, the rim of the Eye’s wheel plunged into the Thames: it bit into the river’s silty bed, bending too – but it didn’t collapse. Instead, under the sudden weight, the thick cable steel spokes finally sheared clean away from the wheel’s hub and jabbed their sharpened ends straight into Tim’s back, hard.
Then Mallahide took hold of his tail.
Tim sat up, feeling the distinctive bite of all six pincers snipping shut on his flesh. Dimly grasping what was about to happen, he made a last effort to get to his feet: with an ease that bordered on contempt, Mallahide gave Tim’s tail a painful jerk, and Tim fell back again helplessly.
While Tim thrashed in the river, Professor Mallahide concentrated and focused, preparing for what he was about to do. The front pairs of Mallahide’s insect hind legs began to pivot on the spot: the rear ones began to walk sideways – and, slowly at first, Mallahide’s vast armoured black hindquarters began to swing round. At the same time, Mallahide’s torso leaned back, reeling Tim’s tail in harder. Now Tim found he was being dragged past Mallahide – past him, and round (as Mallahide continued to turn) in the beginnings of a wide half-circle.
ZOOSH! A spate of river water was flung up in a wave as Tim was dragged through it, sloshing the Thames up and over its banks as far as Whitehall (on the north bank) and Waterloo (on the south). But Mallahide continued to spin. He pulled harder on Tim’s tail, reeling him in, leaning back even further. And then Tim left the water. He found that he’d been jerked into the air!
Mallahide was whirling Tim around by his tail.
Tim felt the momentum taking hold in his skull as his poor dinosaur brain was forced outwards, swung around like water in a bucket. Tim flailed and kicked with his arms and legs, but there was nothing he could do. Tim’s eyes watered with pain – the place where his tail joined his body was sending powerful signals to his brain that it just was not built to withstand this kind of punishment. But even worse than the pain was the indignity. He was the Defender of the Earth! He shouldn’t have to put up with this sort of treatment! Tim mewled piteously, the sound taking on a strange Doppler effect as Tim and his opponent – locked together like a bizarre sort of spinning top – continued to revolve against the night sky over the Thames. Mallahide spun like an Olympic hammer thrower preparing to break the world record. Tim closed his eyes, waiting for what was coming, because then, at exactly the moment he wanted, Mallahide let go. The pincers scissored open. Tim’s tail was released . . .
And Tim was flung, like a dinosaur-size stone from a slingshot, straight into – and through – the Houses of Parliament.
Tim punched through the House of Commons like it was tissue paper, passing straight through one wall of the Commons Chamber and out the other in the space of less than a second, barely slowing down. Its support fatally weakened, the chamber’s ceiling collapsed utterly, effectively wiping the room from the face of the Earth: whatever other damage was going to take place that night, Britain’s politicians were going to have to debate their differences somewhere else now, and for some years to come. But Tim didn’t stop there. The oldest part of the complex by far, Westmins
ter Hall had stood there since 1097: its ancient and hallowed walls, at last, seemed to have some effect on Tim’s progress – though not, sadly, enough to stop him. Helplessly he continued to slide, cutting an awesome fifty-metre-wide swathe of destruction straight through the hall. As in his wake the ceiling collapsed in there too, Tim slid on, only finally coming to a halt in what remained of Parliament Square, a little in front of Westminster Abbey.
For several seconds afterwards the London night resounded with the reverberating thunder of the destruction. Then a breathless silence fell.
For a long moment Tim lay still. He opened his eyes, and he stared up at the stars.
There they still were, twinkling down at him mercilessly. For a second, Tim remembered the first night he’d seen them, the first night he’d emerged from under the ground and taken in the size of the world and his place in it for the first time. What had changed since then? Nothing.
He’d been fooling himself. Scared witless by the sky over his head, Tim realized he had grabbed at the illusions that the Kraken had offered him like a hatchling being hand-fed its first meat. A role in the world, something big and important – that had been what he’d wanted, and that had been what the Kraken and his visions had seemed to supply. But visions and illusions were all they were.
Tim wasn’t important. He wasn’t even big – not really, not compared to the world around him. He was nothing. That was what his first fight had shown him.
Groaning, hurting all over, covered in the dust of battle, Tim sat up. The crumpled remains of the London Eye had shattered, releasing his arms, but that was about as far as the good news went. He looked down the long valley of debris and mayhem that his latest fall had carved into the London skyline. There at the end of it, a hulking shadow of absolute darkness towering into the streetlit night, stood his enemy, watching him.
Professor Mallahide looked down at his fallen foe. It was time to stop playing. He began to change himself again.
As easily as a person might discard a set of clothes, Mallahide abruptly dropped his giant monster form. The arched ranks of colossal hind legs, the six jointed forearms, the armoured torso – they all vanished, dissipating into their component parts. For another second the remains of the monstrous shape hung in the air, a colossal and awesome pillar of black. Then, like the finger of some god reaching down from the heavens, it began to topple forward. Mallahide fell upon Tim and at once began to devour him.
What a prize he is! Mallahide thought gleefully: if he could successfully disassemble this monster and added its mass to the swarm, he would increase the numbers of his nanomachines by almost an entire quarter. True, the machines that were currently working on Tim were encountering some unusual difficulties in penetrating his tough hide, but surely those were nothing that wouldn’t be overcome with time.
Tim, for his part, wriggled and kicked and thrashed and roared as much as he could, but trying to fight Mallahide now was like trying to punch a cloud of gnats: it was impossible. No matter what he did, Tim simply couldn’t hurt Mallahide enough to offer any real resistance. Besides, he was tired. His whole body was hurting – everywhere, all at once, all over. And of course, worse than all that: he’d failed.
This had been his first battle, his first task as the Defender of the Earth – and Tim had lost.
THE BRACELET
AN EERIE HUSH had fallen in the bunker room. Faces lit by the blue-grey glow of the screens, Chris, Anna, and the most powerful people in Britain watched Tim’s struggle in silence.
Chris touched the bracelet at his wrist. The warm feeling that had radiated up his arm and through his whole body over the previous few minutes was receding. The metal was turning cool.
‘Oh no,’ he said quietly – then held his breath, caught by a moment of piercing clarity:
He was rooting for a giant lizard.
This was crazy! said Chris’s brain. This was worse than crazy: this was uncool. His style was supposed to be all about keeping his distance, maintaining his detachment at all times. But that wasn’t what he was feeling right now – not at all. He didn’t have any idea at what point the insane events of the past few days had started to affect him, but affect him they had. He didn’t want Tim to lose.
‘Come on . . .’ he said to the screens under his breath.
Instantly his face went red. He was sure everyone must have heard him: they would all be looking at him, probably grinning smugly or giving him pitying looks for being such a chump. For a second he didn’t even want to look round to find out – but when he did, he was surprised to find that everyone in the room was, in fact, still looking at the screens.
‘How much longer do you think Tim can last?’ asked one of the prime minister’s aides, not taking his eyes off the satellite feed.
‘Who can say?’ said Colin Wythenshawe, the aide who’d first announced Tim’s return. ‘He’s obviously quite a bit bigger and tougher than anything Mallahide’s taken on before.’
‘The fight’s going out of him, though,’ said the prime minister, pointing. ‘Look.’
It was true. Out there under the night sky, Tim was weakening.
‘You know,’ said one of the generals, ‘that creature has put up more of a fight against Mallahide than any of our forces have managed.’
‘But look at the damage it’s caused!’ the prime minister pointed out. ‘It . . . it destroyed the Houses of Parliament!’
Wythenshawe took his finger away from the receiver in his ear. ‘Sir, I’ve got reports coming in that while the fight’s been in progress, civilian disappearances seem to have ceased.’ He paused awkwardly. ‘If Tim is destroyed, it seems reasonable to assume that the swarm’s attack may start up again.’
‘What are you saying?’ asked the prime minister.
‘I’m saying, sir,’ said Wythenshawe, ‘that creature out there might be the only chance we’ve got.’
‘Get up,’ said Chris, out loud now. ‘Come on, will you? Get up.’
But Tim didn’t. He was all but invisible: the swarm covered him all over, wriggling and glistening. It looked like Tim had been dipped in some inky black tar-like substance: he’d stopped resisting and just lay there.
‘Isn’t there something we can do to help him?’ asked Anna into the silence.
‘What do you suggest?’ asked the prime minister, rounding on her. ‘We can’t risk sending in any more people, let alone our tanks or planes. All our weapons are useless.’
‘But . . . he’s dying!’ said Anna with a catch in her voice.
‘He’s dying for us,’ said Chris.
He blinked. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. But as soon as he said them, he knew they were true.
His eyes met Anna’s as she turned from the screens and looked at him.
‘When Tim arrived,’ she began, ‘you said something. I heard you. You said that he’d come back to fight. How did you know?’
‘I . . .’ said Chris. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Is that what Tim’s doing?’ Anna asked. ‘Is that what this was all about? Is he fighting for us?’
‘I . . . I think so,’ said Chris. ‘I think he’s here to help us. But I. . .’
He touched the bracelet and fell silent.
Why is this happening to me? That was what he was thinking now. Why me?
There was a way to avoid it, of course. There was a way to avoid involving himself any further in this whole situation. It was simple: all he had to do was continue to resist what was happening to him – continue to pretend to ignore what was going on – and then the issue would be decided. Tim would die – or be dissolved, like the people caught out there on the streets when the Mallahide swarm had attacked. Then it would be over. Was that what he wanted to happen?
Chris took a deep breath.
‘There’s . . . something I haven’t told you,’ he said.
‘What, Chris?’ asked Anna. ‘What is it?’
‘Me and . . .’ Chris gestured at the screens. ‘Me
and the monster – Tim. I think . . . there’s kind of a link between us.’
Oh God, Chris thought, how lame it sounded! But that was nothing compared to what else he was going to have to say.
‘How?’ asked Anna.
‘Through this,’ Chris said, pointing to the bracelet.
He took another deep breath . . . and went for it.
‘A lady gave it to me when we did that visit to the British Museum. It’s got some kind of – of magic to it, I guess. It glows and gets hot whenever Tim is near. It’s also supposed to connect me to all living things: I think that’s maybe why I passed out in the biology class.’
Anna was staring at him now. So was everyone else. Chris’s face now felt so red that he was sure it was going to explode.
‘She said something to me, Anna,’ he went on quickly. ‘The lady at the museum: she told me something weird. She said . . .’ He paused, trying to get the words right. ‘Yeah, she said, “The Earth needs her Defender once more, and you will be the channel of his power.”’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘I think that’s, you know, got something to do with this. Maybe.’
‘Young man – are you on some sort of medication?’ asked the prime minister. He turned to look at his aides. ‘Who let this boy in here, anyway?’
‘Shut up,’ Anna snapped, making the prime minister blink. ‘Chris, what was that about a “Defender”?’
‘That’s him,’ said Chris, gesturing at the screens. ‘Tim. The dinosaur guy. I think he’s the one the lady was referring to. But, well, that’s not the most important thing.’
