Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 65

65 million years BC, jungle

‘Did you hear that?’ said Laura, her eyes round with fear.

They’d heard it all right. Although the jungle was soon due to stir with its concert of nocturnal cries and calls, the sun had only just slipped from the sky, leaving behind thin combed cirrus clouds stained a coral pink from its waning light. The jungle was on the turn, the stillness between those that lived in the day and those that prowled the night.

But there it was again. A desperate female cry for help. It was one of the four they’d left behind, either Keisha Jackson or Sophia Yip.

‘… Please… help me…’

‘It’s Keisha!’ said Jasmine. She turned to the others. ‘It is! It’s Keisha!’

‘Which direction did it come from?’ asked Liam. It wasn’t far off, somewhere within the apron of jungle around their clearing. Could be coming from any direction, the mischievous way voices seemed to bounce around.

‘… Help… it hurts…’

‘We have to go help her!’ said Edward.

‘Negative,’ said Becks. ‘The hominids could still be on the island.’

Laura’s eyes darted back to the finger on the ground. The light was getting dim enough for it to be almost, mercifully, easy to overlook. ‘ Could be? ’ she exclaimed. ‘They’re h-here, all right.’

‘Or they’ve been and gone,’ added Whitmore. He looked at Liam. ‘We’ve got to go help the poor girl! She could be dying!’

‘… Please…’

Whitmore nodded across the clearing. ‘It came from over there.’ He grabbed a spear and turned to the others. ‘I’ll need help lifting her.’

Edward grabbed a spear and joined him. Howard and Juan did likewise.

‘OK,’ said Liam, ‘go get her.’ He turned to Laura, Akira and Jasmine. ‘We need this fire going again. Can you see to that? Big fire, all right? Big as you can make it.’ They both nodded. ‘And, Becks, we need that windmill contraption running.’

She nodded. ‘Affirmative.’

‘And, all of you,’ he called out, particularly to Whitmore and the others already jogging in the direction they hoped to find Keisha, ‘all of you, stay close together! No one goes on their own!’

He watched them go, four of them all armed with spears. In the jungle on their way back from laying down their clay tablets, they’d been infinitely more vulnerable to ambush, and yet the creatures had warily held back… only jumping Kelly, he presumed, because he’d been entirely on his own.

He looked anxiously around the clearing. The girls were just a dozen yards away working on the fire, and Becks merely thirty yards from him, busy trying to re-jig the windmill. Liam tried to think quickly. He wasn’t exactly alone here in the middle of the clearing, but he’d have felt happier having another one or two people standing right beside him. His eyes darted to the dark entrances of a couple of the nearby lean-tos, the small gateway to their palisade, possible hiding places. Possibly containing one or two of them.

Liam. Stay calm, Liam. Stay calm.

Broken Claw watched the new creatures approach. Four of them armed with their killing sticks.

He turned to the others, crouched nearby, and softly hissed for them to make ready. He turned towards the younger one, crouched next to him. The youngest ones of the pack were best at this particular skill — mimicking the calls of wounded prey — their voice-boxes being smaller, allowing them a much higher pitch, the shrill pitch of fear and desperation.

He clacked his claws gently, instructing the young one to do it once again.

The young female’s jaw opened, and her tongue and voice skilfully reproduced the cries the female new creature had been making earlier today as she lay dying from a fatal stomach wound.

‘… Help me… please…’

They changed direction, veering directly towards Broken Claw and the others, just a few dozen yards away now, stepping out of the clearing and into the darkness of the jungle. The new creatures seemed to have absolutely no sense of how close to danger they were, their small seemingly ineffective noses unable to detect the smells that filled Broken Claw’s nasal cavity: the smell of excitement from his pack, the smell of anticipation of a fine kill, the smell of their dark-skinned female brethren lying dead amid the ferns nearby — bled out hours ago.

How could they not smell any of this?

These creatures were either foolish or incapable of sensing all the warning signals in the air around them, stumbling blindly. Certainly — he understood this now — nothing for his pack to be wary of any more. He’d learned enough about them: that they were as vulnerable as the larger plant-eaters they usually hunted, more vulnerable, in fact, since they had neither their weight or strength to throw around.

And now… Broken Claw and several of the stronger males in his pack now possessed sticks-that-kill.

The four long digits on each of his hands tightened round the thick bamboo shaft. Broken Claw was determined to use his stick-that-kills on one of them as he had that older male earlier this morning up in the hills. A fascinating way of delivering death. An intriguing tool of death.

Juan stopped and pointed at a splotch of drying blood on the back of a broad waxy leaf.

‘Keisha!’ he called out. ‘You here?’

The four of them stood perfectly still, listening to the gentle hiss of shifting leaves above them and the fading echo of Juan’s voice.

‘Keisha!’ he called out again.

Then, very softly, not a crying-out voice trying to be heard across acres of jungle, but a soft whimpering close-by murmur. ‘… Please… help me…’

‘Where are you?’ asked Whitmore. ‘We can’t see you!’

‘… Help me…’

‘Where are you, Keisha? Can you see us?’

‘… Please… please…’

Juan cocked his head. ‘That don’t sound like her, man.’

Edward nodded. ‘She sounds kind of funny.’

‘… Sophia… run…’

Whitmore’s eyes narrowed. ‘Keisha?’

‘… They killed Jonah…’

Juan looked silently at the others. His face spoke for him. That really isn’t her.

Whitmore nodded and then slowly placed a finger to his lips. He waved his hands at them to back up the way they’d come. Fifteen… twenty yards of jungle, that’s all, then they’d be out in the clearing again.

They’d just begun to carefully retrace their steps when Juan suddenly convulsed, burping a trickle of blood down the front of his varsity sweatshirt. He looked slowly down at the six inches of sharpened bamboo tip that protruded from his belly.

‘Oh… oh, man…’ was about all he could say before his eyes rolled and his legs buckled beneath him.

Crouching behind Juan’s collapsed form was one of the bipedal creatures, its long head cocked with curiosity and its yellow eyes marvelling at the spear in its hands.

‘RUN!’ screamed Whitmore to the other two. ‘IT’S A TRAP!’

Howard and Edward turned on their heels to head back towards the clearing, only to face another pair of those creatures, springing seemingly out of nowhere. Howard lunged quickly with his spear, catching one of them in the thigh. The creature recoiled with a scream.

‘GO!’ screamed Howard, pushing Edward away from the creatures. Meanwhile, Whitmore found himself trapped by a closing circle of four of them.

‘You r-really… are… c-clever… aren’t you?’ he found himself babbling through trembling lips. A couple of them were holding spears just like he was holding his. ‘My G-God… you’ve learned f-fast… haven’t you?’

The creature that had speared Juan stepped over his body and approached Whitmore with an unsettling raptor-like bobbing movement. The creature barked an order to some more of its kind hiding in the undergrowth and Whitmore heard the thud of feet and the swish of branches flicked aside as several set off in pursuit of the other two boys.

Now it cocked its head, its yellow eyes drinking him in, eyes that burned with intelligence and curiosity and a thousand questions it probably wanted to ask, but hadn’t yet developed a sophisticated enough language to know how to ask.

‘I… I know… you can c-communicate…’ Whitmore babbled, his man’s voice broken and mewling now like a child’s. ‘S-s-so… can w-we. W-we’re the s-same. Y-you,’ he said slowly, pointing a shaking finger towards the creature. ‘M-me… me,’ he said, gesturing to himself. ‘We’re the s-same!’

Its long head protruded forward on the end of a fragile, almost feminine, neck.

‘Th-the same… the same,’ whimpered Whitmore. ‘Intelli-intelligent.’

Whitmore was only vaguely aware of his bladder letting loose, a warm trickle running down his left leg and soaking his sock. A small detail. A faraway detail. Right in front of his own face, only inches away, his world was this bony carapace of another face and yellow piercing reptile eyes that seemed to grow ever larger.

Its jaw snapped open, revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth and a twisting, leathery black tongue that furled and unfurled like an angry snake in a cage.

Whitmore let go of his spear and it clattered to the ground between them. ‘Do… d-do you s-see? No n-no harm. I m-mean y-you no h-harm!’

The tongue twisted and coiled and Whitmore heard an odd facsimile of his own voice coming right back at him. ‘… No h-harm… the s-same

…’

He nodded. ‘Y-yes! Y-y-es! W-we-we’re intelli-’

Whitmore felt a punch to his chest. It winded him — like a medicine ball launched at his thorax. He gasped, spattering a fine spray of blood on to the creature’s expressionless face. He would have doubled over from the blow, but claws from behind were holding him up on his feet. The yellow eyes inches in front of him looked down at something. All of a sudden, feeling oddly dizzy and lightheaded, he decided the polite thing was to do the same.

And there it was in the palm of the creature’s hand, his own heart still dutifully beating away.