Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 21

Brilliant white, floating in a void of perfect, featureless white. To Liam it felt like hours, staring out at it, hanging motionless in the void as if he was floating in a glass of milk.

It felt like hours, but it could have been minutes, seconds even.

He’d begun to wonder if he was actually dead and hanging around in some pre-afterlife limbo. Then he saw the faintest flicker of movement in the thick milk world around him.

An angel coming for him? It looked like a cloud of slightly dimmer white and it danced around like a phantom, gliding in decreasing circles that brought it ever closer to him. It looked familiar.

I’ve seen that before.

Then he remembered. The day that Foster had pulled him from the sinking Titanic. In the archway, as he’d woken the three of them from their slumber…

The seeker.

There were more out there, faint and far off, drawn to him as if they could smell his presence, like sharks smelling blood. Perhaps the first seeker had silently called out to them that there was something here for them all to share.

Oh Mary-Mother-of-God… they’re going to rip me to pieces!

The nearest seeker swooped still closer to him and the faint cloud of grey began to take form. He thought he could make out the head and shoulders of the indeterminate shape, almost human-like. And a face that took fleeting form.

Beautiful. Feminine.

He almost began to think he was right first time, and that this was Heaven and those swooping forms were angels coming to escort him to the afterlife. Then that vaguely familiar feminine face stretched, elongated, revealing a row of razor fangs and the eyes turned to dark sockets that promised him nothing but death. It lunged towards him…

And then he was staring up at another face, framed with hair dangling down towards him, tickling his nose, with piercing grey eyes staring intently at him. ‘Liam O’Connor, are you all right?’

‘Becks?’

‘Affirmative. Are you all right?’ she asked flatly. ‘You appear undamaged by the explosion.’ He felt her strong hands running up and down his arms and legs, around his torso. ‘No apparent fractures.’

‘I’m OK, I think. Just a little… dizzy, so I am.’ He began to sit up and she helped him.

‘You are disorientated,’ she said.

He looked up at a clear blue sky and a dazzling sun. He blinked back the sunlight — a curious vaguely violet hue to it — and shaded his eyes with a hand. ‘Jay-zus, where are we? Is this another world?’

‘Negative.’ She looked at him, then corrected herself. ‘No. We are where we were,’ she replied.

But when? The spherical chamber and laboratory buildings were gone. Instead of the institute’s water-sprinkled lawns and flowerbeds, there was nothing but jungle. If this was the same place, then it had to be some significant time in the future or the past. It certainly wasn’t 2015.

‘The tachyon interference caused an explosive reaction,’ said Becks. ‘We were pulled through the zero-point window into what is known as chaos space.’

‘Chaos space?’

‘I am unable to define chaos space. I have no detailed data on it.’

‘And then what? We were dumped out into reality again?’

‘Correct.’

He saw another head suddenly appear above a large lush green fern leaf. Somebody else, dizzily sitting up and wondering where on earth they were. It was one of the students: a black girl, her hair neatly thatched into corn-rows. A gold hooped earring glinted in the sunlight.

‘What the — ?’ she muttered as her eyes slowly panned round the tall green trees and drooping vines. Finally her eyes rested on Liam and Becks.

‘Hello there,’ said Liam, waving a hand and smiling goofily.

She stared at him silently with eyes that still seemed to be trying to work out what she was seeing.

He noticed another head appearing out of the foliage several dozen yards away. He recognized the receding scruffy hair and sparsely bearded jowls of the teacher who’d been with the group of students during the tour of the institute.

Other heads appeared, all looking confused and frightened, spread out across a clearing in the jungle, a hundred yards in diameter. Liam recognized the institute’s smartly dressed tour guide, one of the technicians who’d been in the chamber and the rest of the students.

‘Wh-what happened?’ called out the teacher.

The guide’s carefully groomed silver hair was dishevelled, his smart suit rumpled and dirtied with mud. ‘I… I… don’t know… I just …’

Liam looked at Becks. ‘We’re going to have to take charge of things, aren’t we?’

She looked at him blankly. ‘The mission parameters have changed.’

Liam sighed. ‘No kidding.’

He was about to ask her if she had any idea at all of when in time they were when he heard a shrill scream echo across the clearing.

‘What was that?’

It came again. Sharp, shrill and terrified. He got to his feet, as did several others, and pushed through clusters of knee-high ferns towards where the sound was coming from. Becks was instantly by his side, striding slightly ahead of him without any trepidation. Liam realized he felt reassured to have her there despite her diminutive frame. Despite lacking the intimidating bulk of Bob, he had a feeling she was a great deal more dangerous than she looked.

Finally, a yard ahead of him she stopped. Liam stepped round her and looked down.

The blonde girl he’d spoken to earlier — he remembered her name, it was Laura, wasn’t it? — was screaming, her eyes locked on to the thing that was lying in the tall grass beside her.

It took Liam a moment for him to make sense of what he was seeing on the ground, then… then he got it; understood what it was. His stomach flopped and lurched and it took every ounce of willpower he had not to double over and vomit.

The teacher emerged from the tall grass to stand next to Liam. He followed Laura’s wide-eyed gaze and then sucked in a mouthful of air. ‘Oh my God!.. That’s not… that’s not what I think it is,’ he whispered, and turned to look at Liam. ‘Is it?’

Among the tall fronds of vegetation nestled a small twisted mass of muscle and bone. At one end Liam could see a long braid of blonde hair, matted with drying blood, and halfway along the contorted form, he spotted a solitary pink Adidas trainer, hanging half on and half off a pale and perfectly normal-looking foot. It had to be one of the three blonde girls they’d tagged behind on the way into the chamber. He could quite understand the girl, Laura, screaming. They’d been chatting, giggling and exchanging phone numbers only ten minutes ago.

Liam recalled Foster saying sometimes it happened; sometimes, very rarely, the energy of a portal could turn a person inside out. Oh Jay-zus, what a mess.

Half an hour later those of the group that had survived the blast and arrived in one piece had made a rough assessment of their predicament. Dotted around the jungle clearing, they’d made the gruesome discovery of more bodies just like the girl’s, turned inside out and almost unrecognizable as human. Sixteen of them. Of the thirty-five people who’d been in the chamber when the explosion — or, more accurately, implosion — had occurred, only sixteen of them appeared to have made it through alive.

Now, gathered together in the middle of the clearing, well away from the forbidding edge of thick jungle, it was Whitmore who first seemed to be stirring from a state of stunned shock. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve and narrowed his eyes as he studied Becks.

‘You!’ he said. ‘Yes, you! I remember now… you said it was going to explode. Just… just before it actually did.’

Becks’s face remained impassive. ‘That is correct.’

‘Hang on!’ he said again, his eyes suddenly narrowing with dawning realization. ‘You… you’re not one of m-my kids. You’re not — ’

Liam could see where this was going. It was pointless continuing to pretend to be high-school students a moment longer.

‘What just happened, whatever’s just happened,’ blustered Whitmore, ‘you damn well knew it was going to happen.’ His voice rose in pitch. ‘Who are you? Is this some sort of terrorist thing?’

Becks shook her head slowly, her face impassive. ‘Negative. We are not terrorists.’

Whitmore fell silent. His lips quivered with more questions he wanted to ask, but he was struggling to know what exactly to ask. Where to begin.

‘Excuse me?’

Their heads all turned towards a boy with kinky ginger hair, neatly side-parted into a succession of waves, and thick bottle-top glasses that made his eyes seem to bulge like a startled frog. He pointed to his name tag. ‘My name’s Franklyn… you can call me that. Or just Frank will do.’ He smiled at them uncertainly. ‘Uhh… I just wanted to say that… this is going to sound really weird, but I guess I’ll just come out and say it.’

‘What?’ snapped Whitmore.

‘Well — ’ he pointed up at the sky — ‘you see them?’

All eyes drifted towards the top of some trees twenty yards away, a long branch leaning out over the clearing with strange dangling willow-like green fronds drooping to the ground. In among them, a pair of dragonflies danced and zig-zagged with a buzz of wings they could hear from where they stood.

‘Those are huge,’ uttered Kelly. ‘Good grief!.. Two-foot, three-foot wingspan at a guess?’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Franklyn. ‘They’re really big and I’m pretty sure I know what species that is.’

The others looked at him.

‘It’s a petalurid, I think… yeah, I’m sure that’s the right name.’

‘Great,’ said Laura, ‘so now we know.’

‘No, that’s not the important bit,’ said Franklyn. He looked at her. ‘They should be extinct.’

‘Well, obviously they’re not,’ she replied.

‘Oh yes they are. We’ve only ever had fossils of insects that size.’

Whitmore stood up. ‘Oh my God! He’s right!’ He watched the two dragonflies emerge from the overhanging branch and dart out into the open, their wings buzzing noisily like airborne hairdryers. ‘Insects haven’t been that size since…’ He swallowed, looked at the others. ‘Well… I mean, millions and millions of years.’

‘Petalurids,’ uttered Franklyn again. ‘Late Cretaceous. I’m pretty sure of that.’

Kelly got to his feet and stood beside Franklyn. ‘What are you saying?’

The boy wiped a fog of moisture from his glasses, blinking back the bright day from his small eyes. ‘What I’m saying, Mr Kelly, is those things haven’t existed, alive… in, like, well, I guess something like sixty-five million years.’