Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 63

65 million years BC, jungle

Suddenly he found himself spinning amid a roaring chaotic swirl of swiftly moving water. Instinctively he’d snatched a lungful of air as he’d gone under, his body doing the thinking for him while his mind shrieked uselessly with blind panic.

Drown! I’m gonna drown!

He knew it. His lungs were only going to buy him a half minute of life. His mind was all of a sudden back in the narrow confines of a corridor groaning with the sound of stressed bulkheads, flickering wall lamps and the distant roar of ice-cold seawater finding its way up from the deck below. The certain promise of death a mile down in the cold dark embrace of the ocean.

Oh no, no, no, no, not this! Not like this!

Then his head suddenly broke the surface. He flailed in the foam, still holding on to the stale breath in his lungs. He caught sight of their log bridge thirty or forty yards behind him already and fast disappearing as the swift current carried him away.

His legs thumped heavily against a boulder and he found himself being rolled over its hard rounded surface. His head again under the water, his ears filled with the pounding roar of the river, he felt himself being sucked down deep by a spiralling current, pressure compressing his chest.

Panic. Sheer, blinding panic robbed his mind of any useful conscious thought and left him with a curdling mental scream, knowing this dark roaring depth was where it was all going to come to an end for him.

But the river’s mischievous current decided to play one more game with him and shot him to the surface to say goodbye to life and air and trees and the crimson sky of later afternoon once more. Liam gasped for another lungful of air, half aware that perhaps the kindest thing he could do was simply breathe out and prepare his mouth, his throat, his lungs for an invasion of water.

But then his shoulder thudded hard against something. Something he could grasp hold of and fight the incredible pull of the river. He opened his eyes and realized it was a fallen tree. For a moment he wondered if the river had carried him right the way round their island in some logic-defying loop-the-loop and he was right back where their crudely constructed bridge was.

He desperately grappled with the rough bark and the small leafy branches that sprouted from it, merciful handholds that their smooth and straight trunk had lacked. From branch to branch he managed to pull himself out of the strong current in the middle of the river to some calmer eddies of swirling water.

Finally his foot brushed against the river bottom, scattering pebbles, and his feet desperately fumbled for firmer footing that promised to stay beneath him. His hands followed the fallen tree, pulling on thicker, more reliable branches until he found himself wading out of the river, finally collapsing on hands and knees on wet shingle that shifted and clattered noisily beneath him.

‘Urgh,’ he spluttered, between ragged gasps of breath.

His breath was still pounding in and out as he finally pulled himself, exhausted, to his feet. He turned to look at the fallen tree, trying to get his bearings and work out which side of the river he was now standing on. The base of the tree was on the far side; he could see a frayed and splintered stump that looked like it had been hacked at by a team of inept carpenters armed with blunt chisels… or beavers even.

Not beavers, obviously. Perhaps some species of termite had cannibalized the tree, or it had simply rotted and split. Either way, he thanked it for saving his life. He noticed a mess of disturbed shingle and footprints around him among the leaves and branches of the felled tree and realized that perhaps Lam and the others must have felled the tree for wood, but foolishly allowed it to fall across the river and just left it.

Idiots.

The first thing he’d do once he found them was get them to heave the tree back into the water and let it be carried away. He turned round and squinted up the riverbank. Through a hundred yards of jungle he could just about make out crimson slivers of waning sunlight, the trees thinning, the clearing beyond… and their camp.

He’d lost his spear in the river. No matter, he was on the safe side now. He made his way up the shingle and into the narrow apron of jungle. Up ahead through the dangling loops of vine he could see the sun casting long shadows across the leafy hummocks of their shelters and the wooden wall of their small palisade as it began to make a bed on the horizon. But, as yet, he couldn’t make out Lam and the other three kids they’d left behind.

Where are they?

‘Hello-o-o-o!!’ he called out again, his voice ricocheting through the jungle.

A few moments later he was stepping out from beneath the dark canopy of foliage and into the clearing. On the very far side, he could see Becks and the others emerging.

He waved at them. ‘Hey!’

He saw their heads turn his way and their mouths form sudden dark ovals of surprise and relief.

‘I made it! I’m all right!’ he called across to them. ‘I’m fine! Have you seen the others?’

Becks led them across the clearing towards Liam until finally they converged around the smouldering remains of a campfire.

‘The others have not been located,’ said Becks.

Liam noticed their small turbine wasn’t spinning. The cross-bar was split and the school bag was on the ground, its load of round pebbles spilled. ‘The windmill’s broken. What’s happened?’

There were no answers.

‘We should get that running again first,’ he continued. He looked around at the others. ‘Maybe they’re out looking for us?’

Becks strode swiftly towards the contraption to see whether a quick repair could be made. Liam was about to pass on some instructions to the others to split up and search for the others when he noted Jasmine’s gaze, wide-eyed and lost on some detail everyone else seemed to have missed.

‘Jasmine? You all right?’

She pointed at the ground. ‘That,’ she whispered. ‘What’s that?’

Liam followed her gaze down to the ground. Nestled amid a cluster of pebbles, cones and the dry brown decaying leaves of long-dead ferns, he saw a pale slender object that looked to him like an impossibly large maggot. He took a step towards it and noted the ground was stained dark around it, and at one end of it, pointed yellow-white shards poked out like the antennae of a shrimp.

He felt his stomach lurch and flip in a slow, queasy somersault.

It was someone’s index finger. The antennae, shards of bone.

‘What is it?’ asked Whitmore, stooping to get a better look. ‘My God! Is that a finger?’

The conclusion hit Liam like a punch. ‘They’re here.’ He looked up at them. ‘Those pack hunters are here, on the island.’

Whitmore’s mouth flapped open and shut and produced nothing helpful.

‘How?’ asked Howard. ‘It’s impossible. No way those things can swim across!’

‘They don’t need to.’ He looked at the others. ‘They went and copied us… learned from us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think they made their own bridge.’