Extinction Event E-Book

Abnett Dan

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 401

Beschreibung

Strange anomalies are ripping holes in the fabric of time, allowing creatures from distant past and far future to roam the modern world. Evolutionary zoologist Nick Cutter and his team must track down and capture these dangerous creatures and try to put them back where they belong. An Entelodon goes on the rampage down Oxford Street in central London causing untold damage and loss of life, and Cutter decides a new approach to tackling the anomalies is needed. When a mysterious Russian scientist arrives at the ARC, the Primeval team think they might have found the answer...

Leseprobe

Also available in the Primeval series:

SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR

By Steven Savile

THE LOST ISLAND

By Paul Kearney

FIRE AND WATER

By Simon Guerrier

PRIMEVAL

EXTINCTION EVENT

DAN ABNETT

TITAN BOOKS

Primeval: Extinction Event

ISBN: 9781848569003

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition January 2009

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Primeval characters and logo TM & © 2008 Impossible Pictures Limited.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover imagery: Belukha mountain 4506m, Altai, Russia © Shutterstock. Vicious

Dinosaur © Shutterstock.

Visit our website: www.titanbooks.com

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group UK Ltd.

For Ray

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ONE

The advance camp was an assortment of canvas prefabs erected a few hundred yards from the river. After hours, you could hear the fast-flowing water chuckling and gurgling like a gleeful baby.

It wasn’t a bad place to be, if you didn’t mind being nowhere. The closest town, which wasn’t much more than an oblast station, was three hours drive east, six if the day was warm and the track turned to mud.

The camp sat against a screen of grey conifers that hid the mossy, misty depths of the forest. A patch of ground was being cleared to make a landing strip, but it was slow work.

Technically, it was early summer, but this far north summer had only managed to give the region the limpest of embraces. The nights were still long, and the brief days were watery and cool, with hazy white skies that turned the broad tracts of forest and the hills beyond into brooding watercolour studies.

Walking up from the latrines to the north end of the camp, Dima tamped a filterless cigarette against the side of its packet. He wasn’t going to smoke it, but the habit kept his hands busy. The commanding officer had restricted smoking privileges inside the camp, and it was prohibited on open forest patrols. To Dima, this was another symptom of the pro-gressive Westernisation of Russian culture. He’d read about it in one of his sister’s glossy magazines. Smoking was banned in the West; you couldn’t even light up in bars. Drinking was frowned on, too. Men were transforming into what they called “metrosexual” creatures, all tanned and toned and depilated, with a sudden interest in childcare and macrobiotics.

It made him laugh. When signs of this creeping decay showed up in the Russian Army, then it was time to man the barricades.

He played with the fat cigarette. The old habit would die hard in him and he was proud of it. In the eyes of the West, he would be seen as a dinosaur, a throwback, a primitive beast from the distant past, out-evolved and threatened with extinction.

The reason he didn’t light it actually had nothing to do with the CO’s orders. Cigarettes were a scarce commodity at the advance camp, and there was no local store or bar to buy them from. A man guarded his supply, and rationed it carefully. There was no way of telling how long the deployment was going to last.

Routine manoeuvres, that’s what they had all been told — an un-scheduled training exercise in the deep woods of the Krasnoyarsk Krai, six weeks minimum, maybe more. Dima had hoped that the spring might see his unit off on a more recreational deployment, perhaps on the Baltic. Instead they got months in the damp and drizzle of Siberia.

Still, the prefabs were heated, the food was good and plentiful, and the regimen none too arduous. He quite liked the woods. He liked the peace, the stillness, the endless nature of the forest. Sometimes, on patrol, he could lose himself. It felt as if the trees stretched away from him in all directions, including time.

He liked the way the stillness could be broken by sudden, bright bird song: clear notes, rasps, the band-saw buzzing of woodpeckers. There were other sounds too, from deep in the woods, grunts and squeals made by animals he had not yet identified.

A human cry broke the air.

Someone in the camp had shouted. Dima turned and caught sight of a 4×4 coming down the loop track through the trees. Its top was down, and its headlamps were switched on to combat the overcast gloom, even though it was late morning. Dima stuffed the cigarette back into the packet and jogged over to the side of the track, the folded skeleton stock of his AK-74 bumping against his shoulder.

He raised his hand in a friendly challenge. The approaching 4×4 dropped a gear and began to slow down. There were four men aboard: an army regular at the wheel and three troopers in black BDUs and field caps. The trio wore no insignia or unit marks, and no expressions on their faces. Their Bergens and cased weapons were piled in the back of the vehicle behind them.

Dima felt a pinch of anxiety.

Aye, aye, what’s this now? These men aren’t regulars. He knew exactly what they looked like. Voiska Spetsialnoye Nasranie, that’s what they damned well looked like. Troops of Special Purpose. What were they doing here? Suddenly the deployment didn’t feel so much like a routine training exercise. Top brass pulled that kind of stunt all the time. A man got deployed, and then found out it was the real deal.

The 4×4 halted beside him.

“Morning,” he said, waiting for them to identify themselves so he could allow them to pass.

“I’ve got to get these boys to the CO,” the driver said.

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Dima responded easily.

The man in the passenger seat fixed him with a caustic gaze. The guy had deep scars running straight down from the corners of his mouth that reminded Dima of the chin-joints of wooden ventriloquist dummies.

“You know who we are?” he asked Dima belligerently. His accent was strong, maybe Rostov or the Urals.

“Yeah, I think so,” Dima replied, trying to keep it light.

“Then do us a favour,” the man said, and he made a little gesture with his hand that suggested he was brushing Dima out of his way, like a scatter of cake crumbs.

Dima heard a sharp whistle. He looked over his shoulder. Several men had emerged from the camp’s prefabs, and one of them was Zvegin, the CO’s adjutant. Zvegin waved impatiently. He forked his fingers into his mouth and blew another shrill whistle.

Dima took a breath.

“On you go then,” he said.

The driver thumped the gears and squirmed the 4×4 away down the rutted, wet track as if he was on a tight clock.

Dima watched them go. What was this all about? Spetsnaz. Bloody Spetsnaz. There was going to be trouble, he could feel it in his gut.

He wandered away from the track and into the trees, turning things over in his head. The firs were solemn and grey, and seemed sympathetic. They didn’t mind if he took five and smoked a cigarette.

So he lit up. His feet were damp. The forest floor was covered in needle litter and little browned scraps of pine cone that looked like spent ammunition. Rocks were caked with lichen as pale as verdigris. Birds piped and chattered in the vaults of the wood. There were black spruce and fir, and enduring larch, and the occasional broadleaf. Daylight, as muffled and white as snow, sank through the canopy overhead.

He inhaled. God damn the West and its emasculating trends. Few things could match a drag on a filterless cigarette, and fewer still could compete with that experience in the great outdoors. Fresh air seemed to magnify the flavour.

As he continued to smoke, Dima gradually realised that the wood had become very quiet. The birds had stopped calling. He couldn’t even hear the occasional crack and pistol shot of the stirring trees. He felt un-accountably guilty about the cigarette in his hand, as if the stink of it had forced nature into disapproving silence. The smell of the smoke was certainly pungent. It carried in the cold, damp air.

Dima hoped to hell the CO couldn’t smell it down in the camp.

He pinched the ash off the half-smoked cigarette and put the offending butt in his top pocket. Then he turned.

It was simply standing behind him. It was just there, as tall and as solid and as motionless as the trees. He wondered — in the very little space of time left for wondering — how something so entirely huge could have approached without him hearing anything.

It was such a shock to turn and find it standing there that he forgot to be terrified.

Then Dima began to remember very quickly. He reached for his AK, fumbling with the strap like a raw recruit.

The creature snapped forward to take him. It moved with a speed that something so big had no business being capable of. Its jaws opened.

He saw teeth, and a gape a metre wide.

TWO

It was going to be bad.

Central London, a weekday lunchtime, fine weather, crowded streets; the factors did not add up well. Whenever the ADD — the anomaly detector — painted a contact anywhere near a population centre, the team moved with particular urgency. Today, the contact point was slap bang in the middle of the biggest population centre around.

“Let’s hope it’s something small and fluffy,” James Lester said, sitting in the back of the sleek black SUV as it attempted to edge through the dense traffic. “Something from a quieter moment in history. Something cute. Perhaps something furry with big eyes. Or something pretty and bird-like. I don’t know, something —”

“Vegetarian?” Jenny suggested.

Lester turned to look at her.

“Vegetarian would be good,” he agreed. “Vegetarian would be excellent.”

Jenny Lewis returned her attention to the laptop that was open on her knees.

“Cover story?” Lester asked.

“Just the basic shape for the press release,” she replied, “so we can rush it out as soon as the incident’s been contained.”

Lester pulled out his mobile and tried a number. Then he made a face.

“Cutter’s not picking up. Why doesn’t that surprise me? Far be it from him to keep us in the loop.”

“He’s probably got his hands full,” Jenny offered, still typing.

Lester leaned forward, and raised his voice.

“Can we get through this?” he asked the driver. “Can we try? We’re not even on Charing Cross Road.”

“It’s a bit stuck, sir,” the driver replied.

Lester made a slightly pained expression and sat back. Jenny looked up.

“If it doesn’t start moving soon, I’m going to get out and walk,” she said. Lester didn’t look too enamoured of that idea.

“It’s Oxford Street,” she continued. “The contact was right on Oxford Street. That’s got to be less than 300 yards from here. I —”

“Bloody hell,” the driver exclaimed emphatically.

Suddenly, there were people all around them, a rushing tide of people pushing and threading through the stationary traffic. They were moving fast, in panic, in fear. There was a commotion of agitated voices, shouting and yelling. Lester’s vehicle rocked as the flow of bodies bumped and shoved past it. Hundreds of people — shoppers, tourists, city workers — were pouring back down Charing Cross Road from the direction of Oxford Street.

“Oh God,” Lester sighed.

“I think that pretty much answers the question,” Jenny said.

“What?”

“It’s not vegetarian.”

“Hold on,” Cutter told them.

“No no no no no!” Connor pleaded from the passenger seat next to him.

The road was blocked. Hastily abandoned cars littered the street, and floods of people were swarming towards them. Cutter swung the wheel, and the big silver pick-up mounted the curb at speed. He kept one palm flat on the horn, encouraging people to get out of his way.

“Try not to kill anyone!” Abby called out from the back.

“Particularly, like, us!” Connor added.

Nick Cutter’s expression was grim. He didn’t reply. He kept his hand on the horn, and his foot on the accelerator. The pick-up blasted down the pavement. He had to jink the wheel to avoid an old man who seemed too dazed to get out of the way, and the pick-up’s bull bars clipped a litter bin and sent it flying across the road.

“Was that a person? Oh God, did we just hit someone?” Connor asked. He had his hands over his eyes.

“No, we didn’t,” Cutter muttered. He wrenched on the wheel, and bumped them off the pavement and across a zebra crossing. He spun the wheel sharply again, and began to drive down Oxford Street on the wrong side of the road.

Two black Land Rovers with tinted windows followed Cutter’s pickup in a tight, obedient formation. Every wild turn and illegal manoeuvre Cutter made, the Land Rovers stuck right with him, following him down the pavement and across the zebra crossing in a high-speed convoy, nose to tail.

The crowds of fleeing civilians began to thin. Within moments only an occasional straggler fled past, sprinting in the opposite direction. Oxford Street — in the middle of a weekday lunchtime — had emptied. It looked like the four-minute warning had sounded. Buses, taxies, and the odd private car choked the street in both directions, but they were all empty. Some had been left with their doors open and their engines running. That spoke of an alarming haste to leave. There were abandoned bicycles, scattered bags of shopping, even a discarded set of golf-sale sandwich boards.

“How close?” Cutter asked.

“I couldn’t say,” Connor replied.

“Would you be able to say if you opened your eyes and looked at the detector?”

“Probably,” Connor agreed. He opened his eyes. They were back in the middle of the road, travelling down the centre line between the queues of cars and buses. Connor didn’t think their wing mirrors were long for this world.

“Um, island,” he said, pointing.

“I see it,” Cutter snapped, and he brutally swerved the pick-up around the traffic island without losing speed. “Detector?”

Lurching in the passenger seat of the thundering pick-up, Connor studied the display on the portable detector.

“Okay, less than a hundred metres now,” Connor said.

“Stop!” Abby cried.

Cutter hit the brakes and brought the pick-up to a juddering halt. The two black Land Rovers behind it braked savagely. The leading Land Rover turned out and came to a halt beside Cutter’s pick-up.

The Land Rover’s side window whirred down, revealing Hemple’s frowning face.

“Professor?” he asked.

Cutter nodded ahead, as if that said it all. Then he got out of the vehicle. Abby took two CO2 pistols and two air-pump rifles out of the pick-up’s weapons case and loaded them, then she and Connor followed him.

Hemple touched his radio headset.

“Bone Idol is moving. Switching to feet. Go, go!”

The ARC’s armed response alpha team executed a rapid dismount from the Land Rovers. There were six of them — including Jake Hemple — all dressed in black battledress and stab vests, and brandishing a variety of ultra-modern assault weapons. Before joining the ARC, every single one of them had been something seriously heavy in the services: SAS, paras, commando.

“Bone Idol?” Cutter asked, glancing at Hemple as they strode forward. “Really?”

Hemple shrugged.

“I don’t make the code names up, Professor.”

“Who does?”

“I would imagine that would be Miss Lewis,” Hemple replied.

“Yes, I imagine it would,” Cutter said, glaring ahead.

“Do I have a code name?” Connor asked eagerly.

“Yes,” Hemple responded.

Ahead of them, the abandoned traffic had been rearranged. Several cars seemed to have been shunted out of line, forming a fairly effective roadblock across the street. Abby handed a CO2 pistol and an air-pump rifle to Cutter. He tucked the pistol into his belt and checked the rifle’s pump pressure.

Hemple raised his right fist and signalled his team forward. They skirted between the jumbled cars, crab-walking with their weapons aimed tight to their cheeks. Hemple and three of the others carried MP53s. Jenkins and Mason had Benelli MI Super 90 semi-automatic shotguns.

Cutter and Abby led the way, with Connor in tow, keeping his eyes on the portable detector. Hemple fanned his fire team out so that all three of the principals were in sight and covered at any time. He’d been working with the ARC long enough to know that things could hit the fan on an average day just as messily as they could in Basra or Helmand. He’d seen things, things his old oppos in 22 Regiment would never believe in a million years.

A million? Make that millions.

The shame of it was, Hemple wasn’t allowed to talk about any of it.

It was an odd job to wind up in, that was for sure. Here they were, walking down the middle of Oxford Street, armed to the gills, troubleshooting for three oddball civilians.

There was Connor, a tall and gangly lad with shaving issues. He was a joker, a whizz-kid, a computer nerd... or was he a computer geek? Hemple wasn’t sure. There was Abby Maitland, petite and very pretty with her bob of white-blonde hair. Every time they went out on a call, she displayed a serious devotion to her work that would put most servicemen to shame.

Then there was the professor, Nick Cutter, clean-shaven with light, unruly hair, mean and moody, driven and brilliant. Like all brilliant men, he wasn’t an easy ride. Hemple admired him, but he didn’t get him at all. Cutter had a bitter, wounded air about him, as if he’d lost too much already and was damned if he was going to let anything else slip away.

Cutter was leading the way through the stranded traffic. With his cargo trousers, his faded, green army jacket and his rifle, he looked for all the world like a great white hunter stalking big game on the veldt.

Hemple wondered exactly how big the day’s game was going to be.

“Wow, that’s not right,” Connor said.

They were coming up on a black cab in the middle of the road ahead of them. The cab had been rammed with such force it had been flipped over onto its side. It lay in a starburst of chipped windscreen glass. Connor stooped and peered in through the shattered window.

“Just look for the anomaly,” Cutter said. “We must be right on it.”

There was a brief, deep snorting sound from somewhere nearby. Cutter took off at once, and Abby and Connor went with him as if they were tied to him with string.

Hemple waved his men after them.

Cutter ran to the next corner and skidded to a halt, looking around rapidly. The others came up behind him.

“Anything?” Abby asked.

Cutter shook his head.

“Can you still hear it?”

“No,” Cutter said, “it’s gone. I can smell something though.”

“Oh, nice!” Connor exclaimed. He’d stepped off the pavement and planted his right foot in a spatter of wet dung. “Oh, my shoe! Oh, that’s nasty!”

Cutter came over and bent down to examine the fecal matter.

“It’s fresh,” Connor moaned, “though not in every sense of the word. Look at my shoe! That’s a brand-new pair of Vans, and they’re ruined!” He started to scrape his sole against the kerb.

“Well, Professor, did you find some useful... er... excrement?” Hemple asked, standing over Cutter.

“Oh, it smells really bad!” Connor complained. He found some discarded napkins and began to wipe off the offending fecal matter.

“Uh, yeah,” Cutter said to Hemple. “From the volume of the scat, it looks as if we’re dealing with a pretty big creature.”

“I guessed that from the overturned taxi,” Hemple said.

“True,” Cutter replied. “As for the consistency...”

“Yes, let’s examine that in detail,” Hemple suggested with a wry smile.

Cutter looked up and beckoned over Abby.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“I can’t be sure,” she said, crouching down to look more closely, “but I’d say we’re looking for an omnivore. Not a discriminating one, either. There’s a lot of bone matter ground up in this, and undigested bark. All sorts of things.”

“So?”

Abby stood up and looked around.

“I don’t know. A giant pig?” she suggested.

“A giant pig,” Hemple echoed doubtfully.

“Well, it’s not an exact science,” she protested.

“And it smells! Science smells!” Connor groaned, still wiping his shoe.

“We’ve got to spread out,” Cutter said.

“I’d be happier if we stayed as one group,” Hemple countered.

“I’d be happier if this wasn’t happening at all,” Cutter replied. “We’ve got to find this creature quick smart. It’s big, it’s aggravated, and it’s not fussy about what it takes a bite out of. It may not even be on Oxford Street any more. It could have gone off down a side road. It could have gone anywhere.”

Hemple sighed.

“I need Connor and Abby to find the anomaly and lock down its location,” Cutter told him.

“Mason? Redfern? Stay with them.” Hemple turned to the others. “Rest of you are with me and the prof.”

Cutter and the four soldiers moved away down the street. Cutter looked back over his shoulder.

“The anomaly,” he urged, “quickly, please.”

Connor nodded and with a final wipe he turned his attention back to the detector.

“Where do we start?” Mason asked, the big shotgun propped across his shoulder.

Connor slowly turned in a circle, standing on the spot, holding the detector up.

“We’re right on top of it. This way.”

He moved towards the nearest shops. Mason swung in behind him, his shotgun lowered to a cover position. The other soldier, Redfern, had his MP53 pulled up tight against his chest.

“After you, miss,” he said to Abby. “And stay where I can see you.”

Cutter walked another thirty yards down the street, with Hemple and his men in tow. They passed two more vehicles — a BT van and another black cab — that had been struck and damaged. Both vehicles looked as though someone had gone at them angrily with a battering ram.

Cutter thought he heard the deep, ragged snorting noise again.

Jenkins turned to the left sharply, aiming his shotgun.

“Contact!” he barked.

“Hold your fire!” Hemple countered. He ran forward. There was a woman crumpled up in the doorway of a shoe shop. Her hair was bedraggled, and the front of her coat was soaked in blood.

“Dammit!” Cutter growled, moving beside Hemple and bending over her.

“Miss? It’s okay,” Hemple said softly. “You’re going to be okay.”

The woman didn’t reply. Her face was pale and she was staring at nothing. Her whole body was trembling very slightly.

“She’s in shock,” Cutter said. He reached in and gently moved her coat aside. There was no sign of injury.

“That’s not her blood,” Cutter confirmed. Parts of her coat were damp with something other than blood. Cutter touched the patches and sniffed his fingertips.

“That’s got to be saliva,” he said. “Smells pretty rank.”

“What did you see? Miss? What did you see?”

The woman was virtually catatonic. She didn’t respond to Hemple.

“Sir!” one of the team shouted.

Hemple and Cutter got up.

“Stay with her,” Hemple told Jenkins. “Keep talking to her.” Jenkins nodded, and knelt down in the doorway beside the woman.

Cutter and Hemple hurried to catch up with the other two men. They’d come to a halt beside a single-decker bus. As he approached, Cutter saw what they were standing over, and turned his head aside in anger and disappointment.

“We’ve got two dead here,” Garney, one of the two squad members, said. He gestured to the body at his feet, and to another one nearby. “There’s another one over by the kerb.”

“Oh God,” Cutter murmured.

“I can’t work out if they’ve been bitten or trampled to death,” Murdoch, the other trooper, said.

“Or both,” Garney suggested.

It was a fearful, mangled mess. There was blood right across the road, and it had spattered up the side of the bus and all over the white plastic traffic bollards on a nearby island. Deep impact dents showed where the side of the bus had been struck several times. Some of the side windows were broken.

Cutter made himself look at the bodies. This is what it meant when he didn’t get his job done — death, horrible, undeserved, violent death; innocent people caught in harm’s way, their normal, everyday lives ended, cut off. He wondered who the victims were. What had they been doing? Had they been shopping, or on their lunch breaks, or heading for an early showing at the cinema? What had they been planning for the rest of their day, their week?

Their lives?

Who was going to miss them when they didn’t come home?

Cutter swallowed hard. Anger swirled impotently inside him. How many more was it going to have to be?

He closed his eyes, and saw Stephen’s face.

He heard a deep, snorting noise.

Cutter opened his eyes. He listened hard. He glanced at Hemple and the two troopers, his expression fixed, and motioned them to follow him.

Thirty yards away, behind a Fed Ex van, something large was moving around. They could hear it snuffling and grunting. Over the top of the van, Cutter glimpsed a fleshy, humped back, thick with dark bristles. It was big, all right, whatever it was. He could smell its ripe, pungent odour.

He advanced more slowly now, the rifle in one hand, his other hand open and raised at his side, emphasising caution.

The thing behind the van moved again. They could hear what sounded like hooves clopping on the asphalt.

“Steady,” Cutter whispered. “I want to get the first shot. I want it alive, if possible.”

“After what it did to those people?” Garney said, a look of shock on his face.

“I want it alive,” Cutter repeated.

He took another step.

His mobile started to ring.

Cutter hit ‘reject call’ as quickly as he could, glancing down. On the mobile’s screen, the caller ID read ‘Jenny Lewis’.

But he hadn’t been fast enough. The creature had heard. There was a violent, ugly snort from behind the Fed Ex van, and something struck the side of the vehicle so hard that it rocked down on its shocks. Then whatever it was started moving away, and quickly. They heard it crunching into vehicles. They heard the hoof-like clatter on the road surface.

“Come on!” Cutter yelled.

With the soldiers at his heels, he started to chase after it.

“He’s still not answering,” Jenny snapped. She glanced at Lester. He was leaning back in his seat, his head resting on one hand in a pose that oozed listless tedium. He was drumming the fingers of his other hand on his armrest.

Outside, the street had become quieter. The mad rush of people had passed by. Drivers were getting out of the jammed cars to look around. A few of them were leaving their vehicles and hurrying away to follow the crowd. But even though the people were gone, their vehicles still sat in the way.

“I’m not just going to sit here,” she said. “Are you coming?”

Lester shifted in his seat.

“I’ll coordinate from here,” he said.

“Fine,” she replied, getting out of the car and slamming the door.

Lester wound down his window as she began to stride away.

“Jenny?” he called.

“Yes?” she said, turning back.

“Try not to get eaten or anything.”

“I’ll do my best,” she responded, then she spun and marched off between the rows of halted cars towards Oxford Street.

As she walked, she pulled out her mobile and tried Cutter again.

Abby looked at Connor.

“In here?” she asked, doubtfully.

“That’s what it’s telling me,” he replied, carefully studying the detector’s display.

They were facing the entrance of a small arthouse cinema, a tall-fronted building sandwiched between a mini-market and a budget travel office. The marquee board promised some European arthouse classic, the sort of film Connor would gnaw his own leg off to escape.

“Keep behind me,” Mason said. He led the way in with the shotgun ready. Abby and Connor followed, and Redfern brought up the rear.

The lobby was small and dark. There was no one around. It took a moment for their eyes to adapt from the bright sunlight in the street. A spinner full of leaflets had been knocked over near the concessions, and the ticket office door was open, as if someone had left in a hurry. They could hear the soundtrack and dialogue of the movie booming from the theatre next door.

“We’re right on it,” Connor said, reading the display on his portable detector.

“Can you smell that?” Abby asked.

“More dung,” Redfern noted.

“I suppose.” She nodded.

With Mason in the lead, they pushed open the swing doors of the cinema. The amplified sound and jumping blue-grey flicker of the screen washed over them. There was another light too, a softer light. Connor felt the magnetic tug on all things metal.

They stepped into the cinema.

It was very dark. The silhouettes of the seat backs looked like rows of molars. A gamine Sixties ingenue gazed soulfully out of the black-and-white world of the film, while a man spoke French off-camera.

Off to the left there was a hole that had once been a side door. Some-thing large had gone that way, and just beyond they saw the dim impression of daylight, indicating the route the creature had taken to the street.

The anomaly floated in front of the screen, like a scintillating, multi-faceted jewel catching, like sunlight, on a patch of rippled water.

“Bingo!” Connor said, triumphantly.

“What was that noise?” Abby asked, looking around.

“Where has it got to?” Hemple demanded, running up.

“Wait, wait,” Cutter whispered. They kept their heads down, and threaded between the abandoned vehicles. They saw a scraped fender or a dented wing every few yards. Chips of headlamp glass dusted the ground.

“I think it’s stopped running,” Cutter said, raising his rifle.

Hemple signalled to his men to circle in around them.

They were close. Cutter could hear the creature breathing. The respiration was deep and bovine. The ripe smell hung in the air.

Cutter took another step.

It came at them.

A car smashed aside, turning violently end to end. The beast was the size of a rhino, a colossal thing with terrible power and weight in its deep, humped body. Its head was a freak-show photo-fit of pinched, squinting eyes, flaring nostrils, bristled cheeks, and a giant, long-snouted mouth full of spittle and ugly, discoloured teeth the size of tent pegs. Its noxious breath assaulted them like a chemical weapon.

Hemple swore.

“What did Abby tell you?” Cutter murmured. “Giant pig.”

He aimed his rifle.

The beast began to charge them.

It was going to be bad.

THREE

The anomaly seemed to flare and pulse. It was exhibiting some kind of inherent instability Connor hadn’t seen before.

He saw the soldiers struggling to manage their weapons in the fluctuating magnetic wash. Even with gun furniture and sights deliberately switched out for plastics, the metal fabric of all ARC weapons was vulnerable to anomaly magnetics.

The mag field was affecting the cinema’s projector too. The movie was running slow. Frames were lingering in the blue and white glare of the big screen, and the French voices had slowed to deep, treacly bass notes.

“Call Cutter,” Connor said to Abby. “Tell him we’ve got it.”

Abby took out her mobile and tapped a speed-dial number, but she was distracted. The phone — a slim model with a metal cover — shot out of her hand and disappeared into the anomaly.

“Nice one,” Connor said, rummaging in his pocket to find his own mobile.

“Didn’t you hear that?” Abby asked, looking behind them. “There’s that sound again.”

“It’s just the soundtrack.” Connor responded, and he held his phone out to her.

Abby shook her head.

“No —” she began.

Then she saw it, and so did Connor. There was something in the gloomy cinema with them. It was hidden in the shadows to the left of the screen, but Connor could tell it was big — and agitated. It exhaled, and a wave of bad air washed over them.

“Back up, real slow,” Redfern hissed.

“Do as he said,” Mason added, raising the shotgun.

In the darkness of the deserted movie theatre, something that sounded like the demon-god of all swine snorted and began to move towards them.

It was a ton and a half of gristle, bone and meat, with a skull a metre long, and a monstrously short fuse.

“It’s an Entelodon!” Professor Cutter shouted.

But Jake Hemple didn’t bother committing it to memory. From his professional perspective, the fact that the thing charging at him possessed a scientific label had little or no bearing on anything. Knowing what it was called — or where it sat on evolution’s great family tree — wouldn’t keep it from killing him, and this giant pig-thing promised a particularly horrible death.

He had seen the bodies in the street.

So, the name didn’t matter. All that mattered was its size, its power, and the speed at which its screaming, snorting snout full of teeth was closing.

Hemple thought about squeezing off a shot, but he remembered Cutter’s counter-intuitive instruction to keep the thing alive, even though it wasn’t showing signs of extending the same courtesy to them.

“Professor...” he growled.

Cutter stared at the oncoming monster with a mix of alarm and admiration. Certain creatures, even a grossly ugly one like this, managed to be truly impressive in their singularity of purpose.

The Entelodon was a massive, foraging waste disposal system from the mud pools of the Asian Cenozoic, 35 million years ago. Everything about it was made to endure. Its bones and body mass were huge and heavy, built to soak up trauma and physical punishment. Indeed, its great gargoyle face was ridged and split with old, half-healed scars where it had engaged with others of its kind in brawls over food or mating rights, evidence Cutter had seen in the fossil records many times. Its thick, enameled teeth were worn and broken in places from grinding down bone and bark, and its deep neck muscles gave it a hell of a bite. No part of a kill would be wasted. Everything would get pulped and passed down into an iron-clad stomach that could digest anything.

The Entelodon was created to survive by any basic means.

Part of its arsenal for survival was its astonishing aggression. It came from a world where it had very little to fear apart from a bigger, meaner Entelodon. That upbringing meant that it wasn’t going to back down.

Cutter had the rifle aimed right at it. He wanted to hit it in the flank or the hunched back, where there was some meat and the dose would have maximum effect. The thing’s head, which formed most of the target, was thickly boned, and there was a danger of the dart simply bouncing off.

He heard Hemple saying his name. He heard Murdoch and Garney swearing as they started backwards. He smelled the landfill stench of the Entelodon’s breath.

He twisted and shot a dart into the black bristled flesh at the top of its neck.

Still it came on.

He pumped the rifle furiously, and put a second dart in its left shoulder.

His plan had been for the creature to fall at his feet in a drug-induced coma before it could plough him down like a runaway freight car. Suddenly he realised that no one had explained this to the Entelodon.

Its jaws opened wide to display brown teeth sticking out like a hippo’s tusks. Its long, repellant tongue was the colour of blancmange, and it quivered as a pressurised snort burst from its gullet.

It wasn’t even slowing down.

Hemple barged Cutter sideways, tackling him like a rugby player. Locked together, they slammed over the bonnet of a late model Lexus that stood beside them, and rolled off the other side, barely vacating their location as the Entelodon hit.

The demon pig crunched into the side of the Lexus and did about six grand’s worth of damage to the door panels. The side windows burst in sprays of glass chips, and the car shifted several feet to one side.

Hemple and Cutter had landed on the road. The right-hand side of the car bumped into them as it was shunted around.

The Entelodon struck again, head down, butting into the obstacle, refusing to give in. Tyres dry-squealed as the Lexus was rammed side-ways. Hemple began to rise.

“Drop!” Cutter yelled at him.

They both rolled flat. A third shunt slid the battered Lexus over their heads and shoulders. They found themselves looking up into the oil-sweet blackness of the car’s underside.

The demon pig knocked the car again, and then Murdoch and Garney began yelling at it to draw it away from Cutter and their chief. It swung aside and began to stomp in their direction, indifferently spattering dung in its wake.

Cutter and Hemple clambered out from under the wrecked car. The pig had its back to them. Cutter loaded another dart.

“Let me take the shot,” Hemple said, brandishing his MP53.

Cutter shook his head.

“Fat lot of good that’s done so far,” Hemple responded, and he nodded at the pump rifle.

“That thing’s got a hell of a constitution,” Cutter said. “It’s used to shrugging off just about anything that goes into its system. It’s metabolising the drug faster than most creatures its size. We just need a wee bit more.”

The pig had gone for Murdoch. He ran clear as it crashed into the works van he’d been using as cover. Its canines ripped the skin of the van’s cargo space like tinfoil.

Cutter fired the rifle, and put the third dart into the pig’s rump. It rotated, stamping, as if it was executing a clumsy three-point turn, and gazed balefully at Cutter and Hemple. It barked and snorted, and began to canter towards them again, head-butting a Mini out of its way.

“Oh good,” Hemple said, “I see you’ve got its attention again.”

Connor didn’t need to be told to run. The glimpse he’d got of what was coming out of the cinema’s darkness was pretty persuasive. They all bolted for the lobby.

Abby fired her dart rifle in the confusion, but there was no way of telling if she’d hit anything. In fact, Connor wasn’t sure of anything any more, including where she was.

He made it into the foyer, and glanced over his shoulder. No Abby, no Mason, no Redfern, but there was a hell of a lot of snorting and bellowing coming his way.

The swing-doors exploded open with such force that one of the arrestor springs broke. Something that looked to Connor like a cross between a water buffalo, a mastiff, and an alligator thundered into the lobby area, spit drooling from its preposterously unpleasant mouth. The thing had the build of a hyena, with hunched shoulders, long forelimbs and shorter hindquarters, but it seemed to have hooves, and it squealed like a stag boar with anger management issues.

Connor said something colourful and sprinted towards the nearest door. The street exit was out of the question. He knew he’d never make it. The pig from hell was as big as a truck, but it could move like nobody’s business. Connor headed for a closer option.

He made it into the gents’ in a time that wouldn’t have discredited Usain Bolt. The pig was right behind him. Connor slammed the toilet door in its face, but it splintered clean through it with an almighty crash, and pursued him inside.

The pig’s hooves slithered on the tiled floor, fighting for purchase, and it skidded sideways into the toilet stalls, comprehensively demolishing the first three in a row. Doors and partitions shredded under its bulk as it thrashed. Water gushed from ruptured cisterns and broken toilet bowls. Connor raced across the room and started pulling himself through a small, frosted glass window — the only other exit.

The pig lunged at him.

Connor pushed off from some pipework with his feet and posted himself through the window. The massive jaws snapped shut on nothing, just inches from his ankles.

Outside, in the alley behind the cinema, Connor fell head-first and landed on his back under the men’s room window on a deep pile of refuse sacks. He looked up in time to shield his face with his arms as the pig’s head smashed through the toilet window, spraying broken glass and splinters of frame into the alley.

His mobile started to ring. Under the circumstances, he decided to let voicemail take the call.

He rolled off the sacks onto his feet, and got his breath back, realising that he was safe enough. The pig’s head was fearsome, and it was making a lot of noise, but there was no way it was going to get the rest of its body through the window. The angle made it impossible for the creature to attain any momentum.

Abruptly, it withdrew.

Connor hesitated, and then got back up on the rubbish bags to peer in. The toilet was a mess, but there was no sign of his pursuer. He hoisted himself back in through the window, being careful to avoid the rim of broken glass, and dropped down onto the rapidly flooding tiles.

“Abby?” he called softly. “Fellas?”

He splished gingerly across the tiles to the caved-in door and glanced out into the lobby.

“Abby?”

“Shhh!” Abby replied, rising slowly into view from behind the ticket desk. Mason and Redfern were near the street door, moving slowly and warily.

“It’s gone out into the street,” Abby mouthed.

Connor nodded. He could see it now, through what was left of the tinted, back-printed plate glass of the cinema’s entrance, a huge black shape snuffling on the pavement outside. Abby edged forwards, fitting a fresh dart into her rifle.

Connor’s mobile rang again.

Cutter gazed down at the mighty Entelodon. It lay on its side beside the wreck of the Lexus, its ribs juddering up and down, and what approximated a snore ripping in and out of its throat.

“I told you, we just had to give it time,” Cutter said to Hemple. “I knew the tranks would knock it down eventually.”

Hemple shrugged, but didn’t seem convinced. His look said, God made MP53s for a reason, and surely this is one of them.

“We’re going to need chains and tackle, and something like a forklift,” Cutter said. He had his phone to his ear. “I want to get it back through the anomaly before it wakes up.”

Hemple nodded and called out instructions to Garney and Murdoch. They moved to comply.

“I’m hoping Connor’s found the anomaly,” Cutter remarked, still listening to his phone. “He’s not picking up.” He dialed again.

Connor answered almost immediately.

“Little busy!” he yelped.

“What?” Cutter asked. “Have you found the anomaly yet?”

The noises on the other end of the line became garbled. Cutter heard shouting, crashing and what sounded like a gun discharging.

“Connor? Connor, what’s going on?”

Connor came back on.

“We’ve found it, Professor!” he yelled.

“The anomaly?”

“No! Well, yes, that too! But we’ve found the creature! It’s here!”

“No, it’s here,” Cutter replied. “We just brought it down.”

“No, it’s here!” Connor gabbled. “It’s right here! Outside the cinema.”

Cutter looked at Hemple.

“There are two of them,” he said.

FOUR

Jenny picked her way along Oxford Street, edging between the abandoned cars. It was alarmingly quiet, and she was beginning to regret leaving the comparative safety of Lester’s SUV.

She had tried Cutter’s phone several more times. She hoped the reason he wasn’t answering was bad reception, although it was Central London and the chances of there being any gaps in signal coverage were zero.

She didn’t really want to consider the alternatives, though.

Perhaps the anomaly is interfering with mobile reception, she told herself. However random this theory, it was reassuring. She kept reiterating it to herself.

The emptiness of Oxford Street was eerie. It reminded her of a film she’d gone to see, a horror film where everyone turned into zombies and the streets of London were deserted. The scenes had been haunting.

This was somehow worse, not just because it was real, but because it was so normally abnormal. The scene hadn’t been artfully decorated by some acclaimed set dresser, nor had the emptiness and abandonment been contrived by Hollywood designers. It was simply empty, clumsily empty, unromantically empty. It was desolate and frightening in a terrible, prosaic way.

She found Cutter’s pick-up and the alpha team Land Rovers. The sensation of relief surprised her. She never thought she’d be so grateful to see a motor vehicle.

Then she realised there was no sign of Cutter or the team.

She hesitated. There was something, though. She’d heard something that wasn’t the breeze stirring the litter, or the beep of the pedestrian crossings running through their automatic cycles. Something was moving.

Jenny thought she heard what sounded like a sniff or a snort, the sort of nasty grunt a pig would make. Involuntarily she shuddered. She’d had a great uncle who’d owned a farm and raised Wessex Saddlebacks. They had been completely horrid, vicious brutes, and when she’d been a little girl they’d absolutely terrified her.

She looked around now. The light breeze was wafting a smell to her — a really foul smell, like bad drains. She hooked her lip in distaste.

She thought she heard the snort again.

Her phone purred softly in her hand. She answered it before the vibration could become a ring tone.

“Jenny?” It was Cutter.

“Cutter? Where are you?” she began, more stridently than she meant to.

“Lower your voice,” he said gently. “Please. Where are you?”

“Where are you, more like? I’ve been calling and calling and —”

“Jenny, where are you?”

His tone was disarmingly quiet.

“I’m on Oxford Street,” she said, her voice lowered as instructed.

“Where on Oxford Street?”

“I just passed your truck.”

“Can you go back towards it?”

“I suppose. What’s going on?”

“Jenny, just head back towards my truck, please,” Cutter said. “Do it quietly. Don’t run.”

Jenny turned. Her heart was pounding.

She began to walk back towards the silver pick-up, glancing from side to side as she went. Her eyes were wide. Her imagination was suddenly seeing all sorts of things in the lengthening shadows of the afternoon.

“What’s going on?” she whispered as she walked. “Cutter, what’s going on? What is it?”

“I think it’s an Entelodon,” Cutter said. His voice was so soft and calm, it sounded like he was making idle, after-dinner conversation.