Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 41

65 million years BC, jungle

Howard noticed the young boy walking alongside him, sloshing through the warm seawater.

‘Hey,’ he said.

Edward smiled. ‘Hey. You always called Leonard, or do your friends call you Lenny?’

Howard shrugged; not a question he’d anticipated being asked. ‘Uh

… mostly just Leonard,’ he replied. ‘My mom calls me Lenny, but I hate that.’

‘I heard someone say your best subject is math.’

He nodded. ‘It was my — ’ He stopped, inwardly cursing. ‘It… is… my favourite school subject. Always loved math. It’s like, well, I dunno… I suppose it’s like a sort of poetry that only a few people get. If you know what I mean? It’s, like, exclusive.’

Chan nodded. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. That’s why I like it. It’s something I know and other people don’t. It makes me feel kind of special, I guess. Maybe that’s why I don’t have any friends at school, cos they think I’m odd.’

Howard nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess I’m the same. A loner.’ He squinted up at the bright sun. ‘Never ever get picked for sports, because I’m the geek.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s OK, cos I never liked sports anyway.’

Edward nodded. ‘Me neither. It’s for jocks and ditto-heads.’

‘Ditto-heads?’ Howard laughed. ‘I like it.’

‘You never heard that expression?’

Not in my time, he almost answered. But instead he just shook his head.

‘Hey!’ said Edward suddenly, and bent down to scoop up a curious twisted ammonite shell from the shingle.

‘See? There are even bigger ones of those,’ said Howard, nodding at some of the others, wading waist deep in the clear blue water, occasionally ducking down to pull shells out of the water to admire them.

They walked on in silence for a while, going a little further into the warm water. Up ahead, leading the way and deep in conversation, Howard could see the two ‘agents’ — Liam and his robo-girl. He shook his head at the irony of it. Despite their turning up in 2015 to ‘save’ Chan, they were all on the same side really, all trying to prevent the nightmare of time-travel technology from destroying the world. Same goal… different methods. He wondered how he’d never come across this agency in all the years of his campaigning, all the rallies and protests he’d been to… and no one, no one, had ever suggested, even as a joke, that there might be an agency out there actually using time travel itself to combat the corruptive effects of time travel. He wondered who was behind it, who’d set it up. Surely not the American government? Not any government, in fact. The internationally agreed penalties for that were severe. No politician would have the guts to risk having anything to do with time travel, because international law was brutal and strict on this matter. It was an automatic death penalty for any involved. The great Roald Waldstein had been a powerful speaker on the horrendous dangers of it. A great man, an influential man. Howard’s small campaigning group had achieved far less. His group was little more than bunches of students in universities and colleges around the world.

But this secret agency, they were going about matters in the wrong way. Attempting to repair history that had been damaged by careless travellers? That was very much like trying to close the barn door after all the horses have bolted. No — worse than that… it was having to go out and hunt all those horses down then drag them kicking and screaming all the way back to the barn. On the other hand, his campaign group’s approach had been far simpler.

Destroy the possibility of time travel at its very root. Instead of closing the barn door, they were burning the cursed thing down with all the horses still inside.

He looked at Edward Chan. The boy smiled back at him then looked down at the lustrous pink and purple sheen of the shell in his hand. He stroked the smooth surface, then held it out. ‘You can have it if you want it, Leonard.’

Howard shook his head. ‘No, it’s er… no thanks.’

He has to die, you know that, Howard? Burn the barn, right? Burn it long before any horses get out.

He realized he was delaying the necessary, putting it off and putting it off. And yet he knew it had to be done. In theory the future — the future after the year 2015 — must already be changing, must have changed by now. It would be a world where this boy vanished in an explosion and never got to fulfil his destiny. It was surely a world where a man called Roald Waldstein would never become the figurehead of an international campaign, never become a billionaire from all his other inventions, never become a household name. And, yes, this world would still have its problems: dwindling supplies of resources, global warming, rising seas, migrating billions and dangerous levels of over-population. But… at least it would no longer have the ever-present threat of complete and utter annihilation dangling over it.

He’d once heard a speaker at a rally ask the audience what must lie beyond the dimension of space-time we all exist in. Is it Hell? And to meddle with dimensions beyond what we know was surely no different from opening a door to the devil himself and inviting him right on in. He’d spoken of a medieval artist called Hieronymus Bosch who’d claimed he’d once caught a glimpse of the devil and the underworld and painted endless nightmarish visions of what he’d seen. Perhaps, the speaker had said, perhaps what he’d glimpsed were dimensions beyond our understanding, a momentary rip in space and time. Howard shuddered at the thought.

You know the boy has to die, Howard. Burn the barn. Burn the barn. What are you waiting for?

He was so deep in thought he didn’t at first register the voices from further up the beach. Voices crying out a warning, screaming a warning back at them.

Edward grabbed his arm and yanked him hard. Howard’s thoughts were shaken away.

‘What the h-?’

‘RUN!’ screamed Edward, pointing his finger at something behind him. Howard turned round to see an odd-looking dark wave approaching him fast. Water rolled down either side of an enormous grey hump, sliding up the shallows towards him like a gigantic torpedo. He spotted a large fin at the top of the large grey hump — large, very large… the size of a car, no, bigger — the size of a bus!

Edward was still pulling him back from the thing, trying to get Howard’s leaden fight-or-flight response to do something. Howard started to react, but far too sluggishly, too clumsily. He stumbled backwards over something in the thigh-deep water and an instant later was flailing on his back, his head underwater. Surfacing a moment later, spluttering for air, his legs scrambling to find a steady footing below, all he could see now was an approaching dark cave, riding up out of the shallow water at him like a freight train, a cave lined with stalactites and stalagmites of razor-sharp teeth and dangling tatters of rotting meat swinging between them.

‘ OH NO! ’ was all he could scream as the gliding mass of glistening grey hide finally came to an abrupt rest and the cave, easily six foot across, snapped shut round one of his feet. He felt a vice-like grip on his ankle, the tough leather of his combat boots compressed agonizingly tight as something hard and sharp pressed from the outside. Then the beast began shaking its head vigorously from side to side and he knew bones had to be breaking and splintering in his ankle as he swirled through the water.

Howard’s head was underwater. He felt pebbles, rocks and shells grind painfully up his back, and knew that meant the creature was now manoeuvring itself back from the shallows into deeper water.

He was holding his breath amid the tumbling underwater chaos… and, for a fleeting second, wondered why he was bothering to do so.

I’m gonna die. Surely better to breathe out now and drown than experience the agony of being ferociously dismembered by this thing?

Then, without warning the incredible pressure round his now-shattered ankle was gone. He flailed with his arms to right himself, to find solid ground on which to place his feet. He caught something with his hand, the rounded side of another ammonite shell. So that’s down. He tried to stand up and realized the creature must have pulled him further out than he’d thought in those few seconds. Finally his head broke the surface and he realized the water was chest deep.

The air was thick with screaming voices and spray.

And the first thing he saw was Chan, a few yards away, screaming abuse at the giant shark and jabbing his spear repeatedly at the creature’s nose. Its head snapped and swung from side to side, trying to get a grip on the fragile spear, trying to get past the spear to Chan, on whom it had decided to vent its frustration.

Howard waded through the water, painfully slowly, the chest-high sea in collaboration with the giant predator, wanting to slow him down. His one good foot kept slipping on the slimy rocks below, barely giving him enough purchase to make his way to shallower water. Behind him he heard Chan still hurling abuse and still stabbing and prodding, and the hiss and roar of water turned frothy white by the enraged shark thrashing in the shallows. Then he slipped again and fell under the water.

He felt a hand under his arm, then another, lifting him clear again. It was the robo-girl.

‘Remain calm,’ she said emotionlessly.

‘What… about… Chan?’ he found himself gasping.

She dragged him back to water shallow enough for him to crawl on his hands and knees. Then she let him go and headed back into the sea.

He turned and sat in the gently lapping waves, exhausted and vaguely aware of the burning agony of snapped and twisted bones down at the end of his leg. He watched Becks splashing through the water towards where Chan was still managing, incredibly, to keep the shark at spear’s length.

That’s a very big fish, was the last coherent thought his mind managed to put together before the world seemed to slump over on to its side.?

Liam watched the young man as he came round. ‘Leonard? How are you feeling?’

‘Hurts,’ he grunted thickly.

Becks leaned over him. ‘There are no broken bones, but your Achilles tendon has snapped and there is a significant contusion and several abrasions to your lower leg. This will hurt, but it will also mend.’

‘On the other hand,’ said Liam, ‘the bad news is your boot didn’t make it.’

Howard half smiled, half winced. A fire crackled brightly high up on the beach, throwing dancing skeins of amber light and dark shadows across the shingle down to the softly lapping waterline.

Edward Chan joined them. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You OK?’

Howard looked up at him. ‘You… you saved my life.’

Edward shrugged. ‘I just poked my stick at it for a while.’

‘My God, we were lucky,’ said Howard, wincing again as he adjusted his position.

‘No,’ said Liam sombrely, ‘no, we weren’t. Ranjit’s missing.’

Liam vaguely recalled he’d been at the back of their party, wading slowly through the water, falling behind the others. They’d foolishly allowed themselves to become strung out all along the beach, enjoying the tropical sea like holidaymakers. They’d allowed themselves to feel a false sense of security with the peaceful flat sea to one side and a wide open beach on the other.

‘Poor guy,’ whispered Howard.

‘That shark thing must have got him first.’

Liam wondered about that. He’d been about a hundred yards back. Surely they would have heard the rush of water as that shark slid out of the surf? Surely they would have heard Ranjit scream? He looked out into the dark and wondered whether it had been that shark, or perhaps it had been those dark shapes he thought he’d seen earlier this afternoon, scattering to the ground and disappearing like ghosts as he’d turned back to look over his shoulder.

Now, was that real? Did I really see that?

‘We were lucky,’ said Kelly, ‘that it only got the one of us. I mean, did you see the size of that thing? Bigger than a killer whale.’

‘This is the age of the big predators,’ said Whitmore. ‘Big ones. The golden age for the giant carnivores.’ He looked ashen-faced, shaken still, even several hours after the incident. ‘And we’re prey.’

‘It’s not the golden age for much longer,’ said Franklyn. ‘If this is sixty-five million years ago, then we’re near the end of the Cretaceous era. Something happens soon on Earth that wipes out all the big species. Fossil hunters call it the K-T boundary. Beyond that thin layer of sedimentary rock, you don’t find dinosaurs any more. Certainly not the big ones.’

‘Good,’ said Laura.

‘The big asteroid?’ said Juan. ‘That’s what killed them all, right?’

Franklyn shrugged. ‘It’s still debated. Could have been an asteroid, or a super volcano. Or it could simply have been a sudden climatic shift. Whatever extinction event happened, the large species were extremely vulnerable to it.’

‘It won’t happen while we’re still here, will it?’ asked Jasmine. She looked as unsettled and shaken as Whitmore.

Franklyn snorted dismissively. ‘Unlikely.’

‘So,’ Edward muttered softly. ‘Now there’s only fifteen of us. If no one comes for us, we won’t make it, will we?’

The others huddled around the fire heard that and it stilled their quiet murmurings until all that could be heard was the soft draw and hiss of the waves and the crackle of burning wood.

Becks broke the silence. ‘Leonard, I have constructed a pair of crutches for you.’

Howard eased himself up on to his elbows. ‘We’re still going on?’

Liam nodded. ‘Yes, we’re nearly there.’ He pointed up the beach. ‘Another four or five miles around this bay and we should be there. It’s our only hope… so we’re going on.’

Whitmore nodded. ‘Right. We can’t go back now.’

Laura shuffled closer to the fire, hugging her shoulders against the cool night air. ‘This will work, won’t it? Somebody will find your message and they’ll come for us?’

Liam grinned. ‘Sure they are. They’re already looking for us. And hopefully leaving them this message will help them narrow down their search. Trust me… it’s going to work out all right.’ He looked at Becks. ‘Right?’

She nodded, seeming to understand that the others needed to hear something positive and certain from them. ‘Liam is correct.’