Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 50

65 million years BC, jungle

‘Do you think it’s deep enough?’ asked Liam.

Becks squatted down beside the waist-deep hole in the mud, and studied the oozing sides, slowly sliding downwards, and the bottom, already beginning to fill up around Liam’s ankles with cloudy water. ‘I do not know,’ she said.

‘ Don’t know, is it? Great.’ He wiped at his sweating brow, smearing mud across his forehead. ‘Well, who knows how deep is deep enough? May I have the tablet?’

She passed it down to him.

He turned the brick of clay over in his hands and studied the inscribed letters and numbers.

So, my little silent messenger, you go get us some help, all right?

He bent down and placed the brick writing-side down in the cloudy water and gently pressed it deep into the mud. ‘We’re counting on you, Mr Tablet, counting on you to do your very best for us. Last as long as you can, all right? And, like my Auntie Loretta used to say, you be sure to make a good impression.’ He looked up at Becks with a grin plastered on his face amid the mud. ‘Uh? Make a good impression? See what I did there?’

She stared down at him, grey eyes coolly analytical. ‘A pun,’ she replied. ‘A single word with multiple meanings dependent on contextual framing.’

‘Aye, a pun… you know? It’s meant to be funny.’

She frowned for a moment, and then her face suddenly creased with an insincere mirth and she bellowed a mock laugh. He cringed at the sound of it.

‘Jay-zus, Becks, if it’s not funny… just don’t laugh. I’m serious — it’s embarrassing.’

She stopped immediately. ‘Affirmative.’

Liam pulled himself out of the hole as the wet sides of it began to slop down into the bottom. He and Becks scooped up handfuls of mud and silt and helped the self-filling process until all that was left was a barely noticeable mound on the stream’s bank. Liam produced a length of bamboo and plunged it into the top and tore a ragged strip of neon green material from the bottom of his shorts. He tied it to the bamboo stalk. ‘And that’s so we’ll find it easy enough when we come back for it.’

Becks nodded. A part of the plan she’d insisted was necessary: to return to this time-stamp once everything else had been put right and retrieve every single one of the five tablets that were being put into the ground.

Liam looked downstream. The small trickling artery of fresh water twisted and curled out of sight beyond a thicket of reeds. ‘I wonder how the others are doing?’

Kelly stood up straight and placed his hands on his tired back. Their two tablets were now dug deep into the fine sand of the beach at either side of the small cove, both marked with bamboo flags and strips of material ripped from the sleeve of his office shirt.

‘Done!’ He smiled at the others. There was a muted cheer from Juan, Laura, Jasmine and even Akira, a girl as shy as Edward, self-conscious about her thick accent and faltering English.

He looked up the beach towards the line of reed thickets and clusters of bamboo, and the small delta of fresh water and silt that spread out and trickled down a fan of flow-worn grooves in the beach, down into the warm salty sea.

‘The others should be done pretty soon,’ he said. ‘Then we can head back.’

Laura’s gaze drifted to the steep peak of jungle they were going to have to ascend. ‘I wonder if those things are out there still.’

Juan looked up. ‘We got our weapons, and we got robo-girl. We’re going to be all right.’

‘Maybe we’re safer now than we were,’ said Kelly. ‘One of them was killed trying to attack us. So maybe they’re more wary of us now.’

Laura tightened the grip on her spear. ‘Yeah… I guess you’re right.’

Franklyn finished piling a small cairn of stones around the base of the bamboo stake in the ground and looked up. Whitmore was leading the other two: Edward and his seemingly adopted big brother, Leonard, a hundred yards down towards another hump of silty bank they’d identified earlier as a good place for their second tablet.

‘You coming, Franklyn?’ the teacher called out.

‘Just a sec!’ he replied. The bamboo stake kept flopping over to one side and the rocks were very nearly, but not quite, holding it up. ‘I’ll join you in a second!’ he called back, reaching for another large river-smoothed stone.

He heard it then. A soft, muted cry. Like the whimpering of a small child. He froze, listening for it over the stirring hiss of the reeds and the chuckle of the stream. And there it was again, a little louder, a little clearer. It sounded like someone in pain.

‘Hello?’ he replied. ‘Who’s that?’

One of the girls perhaps? Maybe slipped on a wet rock and broken something?

‘Jasmine? Laura?’

The cry again, pitiful, wretched and insistent. It seemed to be coming from the reeds. ‘Akira? Is that you?’ He stepped towards them and fancied he saw someone shifting on the ground at the base of the reeds. He pushed his way in.

‘What? Have you slipped? Hurt your — ’

The form slithered back from him through the reeds and out of sight, moving in a fast — too fast for human — way. It was then his peripheral vision picked out eyes watching him intently from among the reeds to his right. It shifted forward, silently revealing itself a mere couple of yards from him: distinct yellow forward-facing eyes at the front of an elongated, tapering skull that sloped back over hunched bony shoulders and a hunched spine. The curious shape of its skull vaguely reminded him of the aerodynamic helmets worn by speed cyclists, or downhill skiers at the winter Olympics, only much longer, like the aliens in those DVDs his older brother kept watching over and over. It scrutinized him, perfectly still, perfectly poised. And then its scalpel-sharp teeth parted and he saw its black tongue coiling and unfurling like a snake.

‘ Aye… ammm… Fanck… leeennnnn…’ it hissed softly.

My God. This creature — he realized now, the very same reptilian hominid he had faced back up the hillside in the jungle yesterday — had remembered his name, had remembered their fleeting moment of communication, the exchange of a spoken word. Something that wasn’t going to happen again on this world for tens of millions of years. What’s more, this thing had actually the voice-box and the oral dexterity to reproduce a human word!

‘Yes!’ he whispered excitedly. ‘Yes… that’s me!’ He gestured to himself. ‘My… name… is… Franklyn.’

Its long tapered head tilted to one side and silently it glided a step forward out of the reeds towards him.

In his rucksack, nestled at the bottom beneath the last couple of parcels of grilled fish meat wrapped in waxy leaves, was his phone still with some charge left on it. Enough, he hoped, just enough to take a few photographs and maybe a short recording of this thing actually speaking. He eased the rucksack off his shoulders.

‘I’m just going to get something,’ he said softly, soothingly, moving slowly. ‘OK?’

The creature remained perfectly still, yellow eyes curiously watching his every move. He unzipped the bag and reached inside, the rank smell of fish spilling out. The skin flaps around the hominid’s nasal cavity began to twitch.

He can smell the food. Change of plan. Franklyn grasped one of the packages, pulled it out and unwrapped it. ‘Here you are… look! Food.’ He held the small hunk of barbecued flesh out in one hand towards the creature.

Further off, he could hear the voices of Whitmore and the others echoing back over the reeds, less than a hundred yards away. He was torn between hoping they’d turn up and scare the thing away, and hoping they didn’t. He could call out to them. But then what might that trigger? An attack? Or perhaps it would vanish for good, never to be encountered again.

He realized that would be a tragedy. Because this… thing, this species, like every other species of dinosaur, just wasn’t going to make it. The world of dinosaurs hadn’t much time left in geological terms. A thousand? Ten thousand years? Maybe tomorrow it was going to happen: a mass extinction event, either an asteroid or a mega-volcano was going to choke the world and kill every land-based species larger than a dog. And this intelligent species, so close in many ways to human, closer in some than man’s own ape ancestor, was going to vanish along with all the other dumb dinosaurs. They were going to vanish without leaving a trace, would never be known about, never leave any fossil markings, never have a Latin name or be exhibited in a museum or discussed by palaeontologists. And that was the cruellest irony. Because here was something that, given just a few more million years…

… could have been us.

The dominant intelligence, a reptilian version of Homo sapiens.

‘My God… you… you’re incredible,’ he whispered.

The creature was now just a couple of yards from him, yellow eyes on the hunk of meat, crouching low, its rib-and-spine-lined back looked so human, like the back of some size-zero catwalk supermodel or some lean gymnast.

‘… fankk… leeeen…’ it uttered again.

Franklyn realized he had to take a picture. The species deserved some evidence, at least one shred of visual evidence, that it had once upon a time existed. He gently placed the meat on the ground in front of him then delved back into his rucksack for his mobile phone.

The creature advanced another foot and then strained its long neck and curiously elongated head to sniff the meat. One slender arm swept forward and a hand with three lethal-looking sickle-shaped claws tapped it, rolled it over… then casually pushed it aside.

Its head cocked; its nostril flaps puckered. And then Franklyn realized the creature wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the stale odour of the mudfish. It was smelling him, reading his odours like a witch-doctor reading bones, like a medium reading the creased palm of a hand.

‘I–I mean no harm. I… just…’ Franklyn stuttered nervously.

Its jaw snapped open, and the tongue inside twisted and curled. ‘No harmmm…’ it mimicked.

‘Y-yes… friend… f-friend,’ said Franklyn, tapping his chest. It was now so close he could have reached out and stroked the bone-hard carapace of the front of its skull. He could feel warm, fetid puffs of air coming from its nasal cavity.

Franklyn had the mobile phone in his hand now. His eyes still on this thing’s reptile eyes, he fumbled with the touchscreen menu and finally got it into digicam mode and pressed the RECORD button.

‘A species,’ he said softly, panning the cell’s camera up and down the beast, ‘p-possibly a remote ancestor of the v-velociraptor… or more likely the smarter troodon.’ He hated that his voice was shaking like some nervous girl’s. If this was going to be a few seconds of footage that was going to make him famous… he wanted to sound like a pro, like a true hardcore adventurer, not some knee-trembling geek. ‘This species… is q-quite incredible. Capable of copying a human v-voice…’

The hominid’s mouth suddenly snapped shut with a loud clack of teeth and then the cluster of reeds began to rustle with movement all around him.

Franklyn looked up. ‘Oh God… n-no…’