Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 45

65 million years BC, jungle

Liam and Becks emerged at the top of the steep hill twenty minutes later, a bald outcrop of rock with a view down all three sides to the tropical sea far below.

Liam collapsed on to the rocky ground.

‘W-where are they?’ asked Franklyn, looking past Liam towards the edge of the sloping jungle. ‘Are they coming?’

‘They are no longer pursuing,’ answered Becks.

‘My God, you’re wounded!’ cried Laura, dropping down beside him and ripping a strip of cloth from his shirt to use as a bandage.

‘What the hell happened back there?’ asked Kelly, undoing his loose tie and passing it to Laura to use as a tourniquet. He looked at Franklyn, still gasping from the exertion of climbing up the last half a mile of jungle. ‘He’s just been jabbering to us something about a load of creatures jumping him.’

Liam nodded. ‘Yeah.’ He pulled a plastic bottle out of his backpack and chugged the last of his water. He pumped air in and out of his lungs for a few moments, gathering enough puff to be able to say something more. ‘Yeah… we got attacked all right. Lots of them… dozens of ’em.’

‘Dozens of what?’ asked Whitmore.

‘A species of pack hunter,’ said Becks.

Whitmore went pale. ‘Oh God, don’t tell me there are raptors?’

‘Worse,’ said Franklyn. ‘Much worse.’ He sat down next to Liam, took off his glasses and wiped the fogged lenses of his spectacles. One of the lenses was laced with a spider’s web of cracks.

‘They’re not like anything we’ve ever seen,’ he began, carefully rubbing dry the fractured glass. ‘No one’s ever come across fossils of this… come across anything like this species.’

Whitmore squatted down opposite the boy. ‘Tell me, what’s back down there? What did you see?’

Franklyn shook his head. ‘I… I really don’t know. They’re… they’re human-like and raptor-like.’ He looked up at the teacher. ‘They’re unlike anything… anything, you know?’

‘Not a sub-species of therapod?’

The boy shook his head vigorously. ‘No… no, definitely not. Maybe millions of years ago there’s some kind of shared ancestry, but these things… they’re just… they’re…’ He was fumbling for words, for some way to describe them.

‘Unique?’ said Liam. He winced as Laura pulled the dressing tight one last time and finished a knot.

‘Yes.’ Franklyn nodded, putting his cracked glasses back on. ‘Unique. That’s it. They must be some kind of evolutionary dead end. A form of super-intelligent predator.’

Kelly stepped forward. ‘That doesn’t make sense, Franklyn. If they’re, as you say, super-intelligent, they’d have thrived. We’d have found their fossils everywhere, surely?’

‘How intelligent? What level of intelligent are we talking about?’ asked Laura.

‘Oh, they’re smart,’ said Liam. ‘Very smart.’ He looked up at the others. ‘I think I saw them back on the big plain at the same time Becks punched that dinosaur on the nose. I looked back behind us, just as that stampede was happening… and I think I saw them. Like a whole pack of monkeys… in fact that’s what I thought I saw — ’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Whitmore. ‘The only mammals alive now are the size of shrews.’

‘They’re not mammals,’ said Franklyn. ‘They’re reptilian, all right.’

‘Like I say,’ continued Liam, ‘I thought they were monkey-like. But then I wasn’t sure what I saw, because they were gone in a flash. Just went to ground when they saw me looking at them.’

‘They’ve been following us all the way from our camp,’ said Franklyn. ‘Did you see their tracks?’

Liam shook his head.

‘Three prominent depressions at the end of a long foot?’

Liam recalled the sickle claws, four on each hand, three on each foot. ‘Yes… that’s right.’

‘Those same tracks were around that carcass… I’m sure of it. That was their kill.’

Liam looked down the jungle slope at the broad curve of the long bay glimmering in the daylight. And, far off, the broad expanse of the open plain. Beyond that, lost beyond the shimmering air and the fogging of twenty miles’ distance, would be the low hummock of a slope and a cliff edge, and their jungle valley beyond.

‘They must have been watching us,’ he said, feeling his skin cool and the hairs on his arm stir. ‘Watching us and following us ever since then.’

‘But that was… like… over a week ago,’ said Juan.

‘Nine days,’ Becks added.

Juan made a face. ‘All that time?’

‘They’ve been studying us,’ said Liam. ‘Learning about us, so they have. Working out how much of a threat we are to them.’

‘Yes… I think you’re right.’ Franklyn pulled himself up and studied the fringe of jungle several dozen yards down the slope from them. ‘They’re curious. That makes them intelligent. Maybe almost as intelligent as us.’

‘A species of dinosaur as intelligent as us? Come on, Franklyn, that’s — ’

‘They’ve got a language! I heard them communicate.’

Liam nodded. ‘He’s right. When they were surrounding me and Becks, there was some sort of talking going on among them.’

‘And one of them tried to communicate with me… before you and robo-girl arrived. It was trying to speak like me!’

‘This is just crazy!’ said Whitmore. ‘There’s no record of any species, or any similar species with the cranial capacity for a brain big enough to develop a spoken language… or able to make human-like vocal sounds.’

‘But that’s the thing, Mr Whitmore, just because no fossil of these things has survived, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.’

‘The lad’s right,’ said Kelly. ‘Don’t palaeontologists say we’ve only got an incomplete record of prehistoric times? That there are large gaps in our knowledge?’

Whitmore rubbed his beard and stared down at the fringe of jungle. ‘Well, then, that’s one huge goddamn gap out there, isn’t it?’

They were quiet for a while, all staring at the nearby canopy trees, and the dark forbidding undergrowth beneath, imagining eyes staring out from the gloom back at them.

‘What do we do now, Liam?’ asked Laura.

He pulled on his bottom lip in thought. ‘We carry on with the plan.’ He turned away from the jungle he’d emerged from minutes ago and looked down the slope on the other side of the peak. Below he could see the pale apron of a small sheltered sandy cove nestling at the bottom of the ridge and another equally high ridge on the far side, like the protective embracing arms of a rocky giant. He could see the twinkle of a small stream meandering down through thickets of bamboo and reeds and spilling out on to the cove. It was an inviting, secret bay of turquoise-green water that lapped along the crescent of a pale cream-coloured beach. In another time, another place… a secluded tropical paradise. A picture-book pirates’ cove.

‘Is it down there?’ he asked Becks. ‘The place we need to be?’

‘Affirmative. That is it.’

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding his head firmly, hoping he looked every bit the decisive leader. ‘We can be down there in less than half an hour. We’ll make a camp on the beach and be sure to have a huge fire going. Hopefully that’ll keep those things at bay. And we’ll have half of us sleeping, and half watching, and we’ll do that in shifts.’ He looked at Becks again. ‘We’ll make this message, so we will, and tomorrow we’ll plant it.’

‘How are we going to do that?’ asked Kelly.

Liam was about to answer that he wasn’t sure yet, when Jasmine replied. ‘Clay.’

The others looked at her.

‘Clay,’ she said again. ‘If we could find some we can make a tablet. You can write your message on it then we can bake it hard in the fire.’

Liam stroked his cheek thoughtfully. ‘Right, yes… good idea. That’s what we’ll do. So? Any questions before we get moving?’

‘What about them things back down there?’ asked Juan with another pointed glance towards the jungle.

‘Well, I suppose they’ve learned something about us, right?’

The others looked at each other, not quite sure what Liam meant by that.

‘They’ve learned we can kill them.’ He gestured at Becks. ‘And they’ve learned our robo-girl is not to be messed around with, so they have.’

Becks frowned indignantly at that. ‘My ident. is Becks.’

He shrugged. Too tired and winded to apologize. ‘Right, then… I suggest we get going.’