Fire and Water E-Book

Simon Guerrier

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

Seitenzahl: 373

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. At a safari park in South Africa strange creatures have been seen battling with wild animals. Danny and Lester fly in to investigate and are drawn into a dark and dangerous conspiracy... Back in London, Connor and Abby have been left to cope on their own. As torrential rain pours down over the city, an enormous anomaly opens up in East London.

Leseprobe

Also available in the Primeval series:

SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR

By Steven Savile

THE LOST ISLAND

By Paul Kearney

EXTINCTION EVENT

By Dan Abnett

PRIMEVAL

FIRE AND WATER

SIMON GUERRIER

TITAN BOOKS

Primeval: Fire and Water

ISBN: 9781848569027

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition April 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: Sunset in the Kruger Park © Shutterstock.

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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 the famlee

You asked for it.

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINTEEN

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

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ONE

“Batsha sengathi yizibhanxa — they only eat us if we’re stupid.”

Jace stood perfectly still on the edge of the dirt-track road, the brick-red earth solid under his heavy boots. Long experience had taught him how to keep still, to exert only the barest effort under the hot, dry sun.

“Ewe,” — the isiXhosa word for ‘yes’. Beside him, Ellie slammed shut the door of their 4x4. She hefted the .375 calibre rifle in her lean and muscular arms as she surveyed the open land around them.

“This lot,” she added, “were really stupid.”

In front of their 4x4 stood another all-terrain vehicle; a more plush and comfortable model, the kind fitted out especially for tourists. One of the passenger doors stood open, as if its occupants might return at any moment. It was parked beside a battered, wooden sign at the edge of the road which warned visitors — in no uncertain terms — to stay inside their cars.

The people in the car had clearly ignored the warning. The sun beat down on the gore and scuff-marks that littered the dirt in front of the sign. Jace and Ellie were upwind of the blood but still tasted its putrid tang in the back of their throats, nature’s stomach-turning way of expressing horror.

They stayed away from the scuff-marks, knowing that all kinds of creatures could be hidden in amongst the dense acacia trees that grew just behind the sign, their thorns as long and sharp as needles.

Anything could be attracted by this terrible stink of death.

Instead, the two rangers stood waiting, listening, watching. Squinting their eyes against the glare they combed the vast expanse of game park that sprawled off in all directions. Sun-bleached blond grass and bushland shimmered under the cloudless sky. Tangles of trees and rocky outcrops speckled the landscape, occasional bald patches exposing the iron-rich red soil.

The air sat still and silent, heavy with anticipation.

Jace let his eyes pick slowly over every tiny detail, straining to spot any movement. He’d been doing this job for nearly a decade and yet still his mind played tricks on him, conjured life out of shadows, patterns of rock, or the lightest breeze ruffling the grass. Coming out here day after day for so many years, he realised his eyesight didn’t get sharper; his instincts didn’t build up. He could never hope to know this land as well as the animals that lived here.

This is their territory; you see them when they let you.

When they didn’t deign to grant an audience to lumbering, noisy humans in their lumbering, noisy SUVs, the native species could sink unseen into the grass and bush, invisible as ghosts. The hippos, elephants, zebra and giraffe, even the impala and warthogs, were more at home here, more in command than any human being ever would be.

Yet these stupid tourists got out of their car to take pictures by the warning sign, he thought ruefully. No wonder they were such easy prey.

“Leopards or lions, you reckon?” His voice broke into the unsettling quiet.

Ellie rolled her eyes at him.

“With the size and body mass to drag ‘em all away,” she said, “gotta be lions.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Figured.”

Lions don’t normally eat people, thought Jace. Well, they didn’t in this park anyway. It wasn’t good for business.

The new management wanted this incident and the others like it cleaned up long before there could be any enquiry. They had to provide a coda — instant closure — to the news story when it broke.

Yes, they’d say, lions killed a family. But those lions have been destroyed.

It didn’t matter that the lions had just done what lions do. The new management had ideas that differed from the old guard of gamekeepers like Jace and Ellie. This wasn’t the animals’ territory, into which humans intruded. This was, they said, a business, and the animals were assets for attracting tourist revenue. Lions eating customers was little different to rats infesting a hotel; they just needed to be dealt with, swiftly and severely. Humans would impose their order, their rules, upon the wildlife.

They would enact revenge.

Yeah, it was stupid. But what choice did he and Ellie have? The management had already sacked a whole bunch of the old guard, replaced them with cheaper, less experienced gamekeepers who had no interest in the wildlife, and acted more like security guards or mercenaries. People with whom he had nothing in common, lacking even basic tracking skills, who made more problems than they solved for the game park.

So here they were — just the two of them, no backup but a second rifle each. And all they could do was follow this trail of gore and see where it led them. See if they could spot the perpetrators somewhere in the vicinity, find out if there was anything left of the victims.

And they had to do all that without getting eaten themselves.

“Come on, then,” Ellie muttered, as if reading his mind, and she started forward. Jace followed, keeping his distance so that he could cover her if something leapt out.

Well, maybe, if he was quick enough.

The acacia trees rasped against the tough fabric of their uniforms. Jace held his rifle high, keeping his hands and exposed forearms clear of the thorns. It was an easy trail to follow, the tangled scrub trampled and bloody where the bodies had been hauled through by their attacker. There were occasional trophies hanging from the needle-like karroo thorns: strips of brightly coloured fabric that had once been a person’s clothes. And then, as they ventured deeper into the undergrowth, there were scraps of flesh.

“Jeez,” Jace said, disgust in his voice. “They’re gonna be a mess.”

“Yeah,” Ellie replied, nodding soberly, “but at least they were dead up this far.” She glanced back the way they’d come, at the jagged scuff marks in the ground. “They were struggling back there. Here, they weren’t struggling. Reckon it’s better that way.”

Jace swallowed slowly, less at the thought of how the people had died than at Ellie’s superior tracking ability. It always impressed him.

As they continued on their way, he found it difficult to look at anything else but the taut and capable woman moving along in front of him. At times she seemed almost like a wild cat herself. He remembered that night a year or so ago, when their associate Mac, a bit drunk, had refused to take no for an answer. She’d punched him so hard the fat white letch had lost two of his teeth.

Mac had loved that, and he’d told everyone he met. Even used it to explain why management had laid him off. How could they keep me when Ellie’s more of a man than I am? Though that didn’t explain all the others who got laid off at the same time.

Funny, Jace thought, so few of the old-timers left, the park has become a different place. Maybe that was what had spooked the animals. They picked up on stuff people didn’t notice, odours, vibrations in the air. Perhaps they didn’t like the scent of the new regime. He didn’t understand the politics that were involved, but he knew this new lot stank to high heaven.

He was about to say as much when Ellie stopped dead in her tracks, about six metres ahead of him.

Jace froze instinctively, eyes flicking left and right, barely breathing. He felt a fat pearl of sweat track down through the dust that caked his face.

Lions. Two females and a male blended into the blond grass ahead of them. Short legs, long bodies, the male’s tawny mane reaching back well past his shoulders. He was about two metres long and no more than four years old, judging by the light speckling of his nose. All three stood poised and wary, their back haunches trembling with lithe and terrible power as they readied themselves to pounce.

But they weren’t watching the two gamekeepers. And as Jace very, very slowly raised his rifle, he saw they bore no marks of a kill. Their jaws weren’t bloody and — from their posture and the shape of their flanks — he guessed they hadn’t eaten in days. Lions would go half a week without food.

No, they’d been drawn by the smell of the blood. They, too, had tracked the real killer.

They were staring at it now.

Jace peered ahead, past Ellie, into the dense bush, looking for anything that represented a competing predator — a mane or tail or paw. So he only saw the thing when it actually moved. His first thought was that they’d brought the wrong cartridges, that they needed something that would take down an elephant. Maybe the .470 or .500 Nitro with the kick that could knock you on to your back.

The creature was at least six metres long — the length of the three lions combined and then some — and maybe twice the height of a man.

He blinked, trying to make sense of it. Tan-coloured, glimmering skin like a snake’s. It stepped forward on long powerful legs, two skinny forelimbs reaching outward like human arms.

In horror, Jace realised it was ignoring the lions and was edging slowly towards Ellie, pushing easily through the thorny bush until it stood over her. Her usual poise and quick thinking seemed to have abandoned her as she stood gawping up at the terrible creature, paralysed by fear and disbelief.

Pure adrenalin pumping through his veins, Jace raised his rifle, targeting the creature in its huge and dark left eye.

Head low and submissive like a naughty dog, it towered over Ellie, sniffing the air around her.

Arm steady, Jace adjusted his aim as it moved, waiting for the right moment. The creature’s wide mouth parted so that it seemed to smile. The bloody pulp of human remains hung from its long, sharp teeth.

“Yeah,” Ellie breathed. She seemed to understand its intent, yet was too utterly stunned by its existence to react.

“Get down!” Jace yelled.

He pulled back on the trigger.

The rifle punched hard into his shoulder. Time seemed to slow down as he saw the black speck of the bullet streak fast into the creature, just as it reacted to the noise. The bullet punched the tough bone of the creature’s forehead... but didn’t break it.

The creature took a few steps backwards, stunned just for an instant. Jace let out the breath he’d not been conscious he was holding, and made to fire again.

But he was too late.

His brain struggled to catch up as the tan-coloured blur smashed through Ellie’s fragile body, knocking her aside like a rag doll, and launched itself at him.

He squeezed hard on the trigger, felt the gun kick into his shoulder again, unbalancing him, and sending him backwards into the ground. A moment later there was an explosion of pain, followed by a weird calm that somehow didn’t make sense.

Lying there in the hot soil he tried to breathe, and found that his lungs weren’t working. He couldn’t move or feel his limbs, and felt somehow unbalanced. With tremendous effort he raised his head just a tiny fraction to look down on his own body.

And just had time to see the creature nosing through his exposed, dismembered guts.

TWO

A tall blonde woman stood waiting in Arrivals at Johannesburg Airport. She bore an A4 card on which she had written in firm, precise letters, ‘Lester’.

James Lester and Danny Quinn fought their way through the crowd of newly landed passengers towards her.

Danny had assumed that gamekeepers would be seasoned, serious types, with deep-etched scars and stories. But this woman was young, tanned and, he thought, beautiful — dressed in a khaki vest, shorts and a sturdy pair of boots. For the first time since Lester had marched into his office brandishing plane tickets, visas and a curt order to “get packing”, Danny reflected that this assignment might actually be fun...

He walked over, one arm outstretched, the other carrying his bag.

“Hi,” he said brightly. “I’m Danny, and that’s Lester over there,” he gestured at the immaculately dressed figure moving towards them at a more refined pace. “You must be from the park.”

The woman didn’t smile or even make eye contact — instead she just tucked the card into her satchel.

“I’m Sophie,” she said; she had a South African accent and her voice was curt and dismissive.

“Nice to meet you,” Danny said, trying to appear undaunted. Sophie glanced over at him, shrugged, and continued to sort out her bag.

He would win this woman over whatever it took.

“We’ve kept you waiting,” Lester said as he arrived. He didn’t extend his hand, just fussed testily with his cuff links. “Trouble with your customs,” he went on, his impatient tone implying that it had been Sophie’s fault. “In an astonishing display of complete incompetence, they refused to let us bring through our vital equipment. Seemed to think we were planning a hostile takeover.”

“Equipment,’” Danny echoed. The airport authorities had — strangely enough — baulked at allowing two British Government officials to bring a vast arsenal of guns into the country without giving any good reason.

In fact he and Lester had only brought minimal kit: one handheld anomaly location detector, two tranquilliser pistols, two tranquilliser rifles, a G36 sniper rifle with the added grenade launcher, a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun, the Beretta Cougar that Danny had adopted since joining the ARC, and the old Glock 17 he’d never quite given back to the police force.

Only the essentials, yet it had all been impounded.

Lester’s name-dropping — and increasingly angry sarcasm — had only annoyed the security people, and at one point Danny thought they might both be arrested or put on the first plane back to London.

In the end Lester had been forced to concede defeat and leave the guns behind, though he had been on his mobile ever since, pulling strings, trying to ensure that South African Customs regretted landing on the wrong side of James Lester.

It was all part of the plan, and it seemed to be working a little too well.

Back at the ARC, Lester had proposed that Danny would be playing the good cop out here. He had done so with a slight wince, as if it were a radical change from the norm. Danny still couldn’t be sure if he’d been joking. Lester had an unsettling way of making you feel he was several steps ahead of you.

“We can make up the time on the road,” Sophie said curtly as she turned on her heel, leading them both through the bedlam. Danny ran to keep up with her, while Lester ignored them both, marching along at his usual pace.

As they emerged from the air-conditioned cocoon of the airport, the atmosphere outside slammed into them, hot and heavy. Instantly Danny felt the sweat drip from him as he followed his guide up the stairs and then over the walkway into the car park. What must he look like, he wondered, straight off a plane after eleven hours in the air without stopping to comb his hair? He had on his usual leather jacket, a polo shirt and jeans while Lester wore a pale tan, tailored linen suit and elegant silk tie. Somehow he still managed to look slick and fresh, despite the long flight. It probably helped that Lester had upgraded to Business Class, while Danny had been forced to fold his long frame into an Economy seat.

Sophie paid the ticket machine, received the card that would let them leave the car park, then led them up to the next level. Danny dropped back to walk beside Lester.

“Can’t take her eyes off us, can she?” Danny muttered. Lester smiled thinly.

“She’s a professional. Knows not to ask any questions. Better for all parties this way.”

“Here,” Sophie called back to them as she reached a battered old SUV, rust curling round its edges. She heaved open the wide hatch at the back and moved around to the driver’s-side door, while he and Lester tossed in what little luggage they had brought. Just an overnight change of clothes, the kit for a quick stopover to assess the situation. Not anything like their usual kit.

By the time Danny had got his luggage safely stowed, Lester had already taken the front passenger seat beside Sophie. Danny sighed and folded himself into the back, his long legs stretched behind Lester’s seat, the rest of him behind Sophie. His body protested at being jammed into yet another small space so soon after the flight.

“How long is it to the park?” he asked, already feeling restless and fidgety.

“About two hours,” Lester told him before Sophie could answer.

“Depends how fast we go,” she said. She cranked the car into first gear and soon they were out of the anonymous, concrete world of the airport and speeding through Johannesburg itself.

Danny watched out the window, content to sit back, take in the sights and sounds of this — to him — new country. As in any big city, there was plenty going on. Vast glass and aluminium skyscrapers springing up, garish, barely legible posters announcing concerts and comedy clubs and selling everything from perfume to cars. He smiled, watching the people just going about their lives: carrying shopping bags, holding hands, yammering into mobile phones. Just like at home in London, only different.

Every now and again there was a glimpse of distant mountains, of the huge world beyond the city. Then they were lost, hidden behind yet more urban sprawl.

He tried to spot the legacy of apartheid in the streets themselves, his only real knowledge of the country and its complex politics having come from old TV news. Everything seemed pretty jumbled and as multicultural as it was at home.

It took a moment to recognise the difference between rich and poor, because the poor seemed to take such pride in their appearance. That was something he wouldn’t have seen in London, or in most cities he’d visited; a defiant, hurt-but-healing pride. This was a place of great hope and possibility.

Once he recognised it, he could see the great gulf that existed there, segregation inspired not by colour but by cash. He’d done some reading on the plane, in between his futile attempts to sleep, and the guidebook had warned of a country without welfare — where it was all too easy to fall from grace. And this was a nation with far too many guns.

They stopped at a traffic light — or ‘robot’, as he’d learnt from his book. Sophie pulled up the handbrake and sat back in her seat. Danny peered round, getting his bearings, and watched as a weary old minivan studiously ignored the queue. It drove down to the right of them, well out into the oncoming lane. It was crowded with people, all black, all dressed smartly for work. No one else seemed to notice when the vehicle overstepped the red light and pushed forward into the traffic, streaming left and right, cutting a precarious path through to the other side.

He was certain there was going to be a collision, yet somehow, impossibly, the stream of cars swept round it. No one beeped or shouted. The drivers all seemed to be looking completely the other way. But Danny’s heart was in his mouth.

“Did you see that?” he gasped.

“What?” Lester said. He was busy on his BlackBerry.

“Cab,” said Sophie flatly. “Got their own rules, them.”

“But that was idiotic!” Danny protested. “They could have all been killed.”

“Yeah,” Sophie replied, though her accent made it sound like “Yoh”. “But they weren’t.” She just shrugged.

Then the robot turned green, but unlike in London, no one seemed in any rush to put his or her foot down. The cars in front of them laboured, the drivers releasing their handbrakes and pushing off sedately. Danny had never seen anything like it; it was as if they all just assumed some loon would jump the lights.

In some ways it made for a more relaxed drive than he would have experienced back home. Everyone was better behaved because they expected some nit to do something stupid.

Even so, he sat in a knot of tension as they made their way out of the city. He’d never been a very good passenger, never liked to surrender control to anyone. But this was beyond anything he could have expected.

They climbed the crest of a hill and were suddenly out in the countryside. Danny gasped at the great expanse of scrubby land stretching out in front of them as they headed north.

“It’s so... big.” He gaped. “It’s like the horizon is further away than it is at home.”

Lester tutted, lifting his head from the small screen he had clutched in his hand.

“Really, Quinn. You know that isn’t possible.”

“But he’s right,” Sophie said in a sudden burst of conversation. “Don’t know how you people live in England. So small. An’ always raining.”

“That’s a bit of a cultural cliché,” Lester retorted.

“We were lucky to get off the ground at Heathrow,” Danny reminded him, keen to stick up for Sophie. “Been storms all this past week.”

“That’s a recent development,” Lester muttered, returning to his BlackBerry. “Extremes of weather are an indicator of climate change. I’m sure Sophie’s seen similar changes here.”

“No,” she said. “It’s always like this here. Apart from when it isn’t.”

Danny laughed. But she looked deadly serious.

They drove on in silence, and as they got further from the city he wondered what it might be like to call this vast landscape home, somewhere so untouched by humans that it seemed unlikely that you could ever feel like you really belonged here.

“Is that a mine?” Lester asked, snapping Danny out of his reverie. He looked up to where Lester pointed. A huge, ugly factory squatted in the landscape.

“Platinum,” Sophie explained. “Not so pretty as a gold mine. And a gold mine isn’t pretty.”

“You’ve got to exploit the potential of your resources,” Lester replied in clipped tones. “Encourage the entrepreneurs. It’s good for the economy.”

“Whose economy?” Sophie snapped. “The mine by the game park is British.”

So, Danny thought, this was where their cover story came into play. He and Lester were in South Africa to look into the strange deaths at the game park, but they were doing so under the pretence of being concerned about the British-run oil mine that loomed just next door. Rather than being seen as hunters, they were assessors of health and safety, insurance men, that sort of thing. What better excuse to be sniffing around, asking tricky questions, than to say that they were protecting large sums of money?

Like all the best lies, the story contained a fair amount of truth. Lester’s superiors were keen that the oil operation should not be compromised by an anomaly. The mine might just play a major part in solving Britain’s energy needs, they said, presumably with many more mines to follow.

Danny suspected that Lester was hoping to impress certain high-ranking officials by sorting all this out. That was why he was here in person, on safari in a rusting old SUV. For something to get him out from behind his comfortable desk, there would have to be the potential to score some serious brownie points, perhaps even a promotion.

“The consortium,” Lester replied smoothly, word-perfect on his brief, “is an equal mix of British and South African interests. The day-to-day grunt work is mostly done by a British team, but profits are split fifty-fifty. Otherwise, do you think your government would let us be here at all?”

“They’ll do anything you tell ‘em if you say you’ll make them rich,” Sophie replied hotly, refusing to give in to Lester’s cold logic.

“To be fair,” Danny put in, the contents of the brief coming back to him, “it’s more like seventy-thirty in your favour. We covered the costs of set-up, and that eats into our share.”

“Yes, thank you, Quinn,” Lester said, and he sighed wearily, ungrateful for the back-up. “I’m sure our hostess doesn’t need to hear your opinions.”

Danny bristled at this, but tried to convince himself it was just Lester being in character. The idea was to have them slightly at odds, to make them seem less of a team, and thus less of a threat. Not that Lester could ever exactly be described as a team player.

Though on the ARC team for a relatively short time, Danny had observed how Abby and Connor worked when investigating creature sightings. They weren’t like policemen, all formal and in control. They bickered and goofed around, and didn’t wear anything like a recognisable uniform. On a police beat civilians always wanted someone official to take charge. But if you’d just seen a T-rex ransacking your bins, you wouldn’t say so on the record — not unless you wanted to be carted away to the asylum. So by not wearing a uniform, being a bit clumsy, they seemed to help witnesses to come forward and say, “It sounds crazy, but —”

Danny liked to think that Abby and Connor might have planned it that way, but suspected it was just a happy accident. This new game he was playing was all about lucky chances.

For as long as their luck holds out anyway, he thought ruefully. Our luck, he corrected.

He himself had only just filled a dead man’s shoes. Since Nick Cutter had died — and Stephen Hart before him — there was a sense at the ARC that they all lived on borrowed time. He remembered Jenny’s warning as she’d walked away from it all, not two weeks earlier. People died doing this job.

He looked up to see Lester scowling at him in the rearview mirror. Sophie seemed to have noticed the scowl, too. Danny realised it must have looked like he was biting his tongue, holding back on telling Lester where he could stick his advice.

“What?” he said irritably, playing it up.

Then he went back to gazing out of the window, drinking in the incredible landscape. The pale road snaked between huge, blocky rock formations like a series of ancient weathered castles. Danny knew there was probably a simple scientific reason for these things and yet that didn’t explain their inherent majesty, how they seemed to speak of such vast scale and time. They effortlessly dwarfed such puny things as all of human history.

When he glanced back into the car, he caught the reflection of Sophie’s eyes flicking away from him again. He pretended he hadn’t seen her watching, and bent forward to admire the view from her side of the car. But his grin wasn’t all about the majestic land before them.

Gotcha, he thought.

He decided to push his luck.

“So you think our mining operation caused what happened in the park?” he asked her.

The car swerved as Sophie twisted her head round to look at him, her expression seeming to register shock.

Lester’s sharp intake of breath made her turn back around, take firm hold of the steering wheel, and lurch them back into their lane.

“What do you mean?” she said now, and she seemed to be trying to sound casual.

“I, uh,” Danny said, stalling for time. He wasn’t sure what he meant. How to pursue this without blowing their cover, or bringing up the topic of prehistoric creatures?

God, this wasn’t in the briefing!

“I’ve seen it on the television,” he said quickly. “Animals are more sensitive to what’s happening around them, aren’t they? Stuff people don’t hear or see. So maybe the lions hear the noise of the mining, and it makes them go wild.” He hoped he didn’t sound like an idiot.

She concentrated on the driving, but he could see that her cheeks were flushed. Was she cross with him, he wondered, or with herself for letting slip her guard?

“You don’t agree?” he persisted.

She snorted. “That the mine made the lions go wild?”

“They’re already wild animals,” Lester said with exaggerated patience. “What Mr Quinn was trying to say, in his own clumsy way, is that it might have prompted them to strike out.”

“Yeah,” said Danny, riled by this. “That’s what I meant. I’m not stupid.”

“Nor am I,” Sophie countered. “And you know as well as I do, lions didn’t do this.”

Her words hung in the air for a little too long.

“What makes you say that?” Lester asked pleasantly. “Surely there’s no reason to think otherwise, is there?”

“Ha!” Sophie said. “I know it isn’t the lions. I’ve seen what happened to the bodies. I’ve seen the tracks in the ground. Sure, someone’s tried covering it up. Telling us it’s nothing to worry about. But you two didn’t come all the way from London just ‘cause a lion has killed some tourists.”

“So what do you think jumped on these people?” Danny asked.

Lester cleared his throat.

“Hmm,” Sophie began. “Tracks made me think it was an ostrich or something,” she said. “But it’d have to be a big one. Runs on two feet, anyhow. Big. Quick. And a carnivore.”

“And is there an animal like that in the park?” Danny asked.

“Nah,” Sophie said. “Only...”

“Only?” Danny pressed, leaning forward. He could see that look in her eye, that need to share her reading of the facts, no matter how ridiculous or impossible. The same look he saw in everyone else he’d ever met who’d come into contact with the anomalies’ creatures.

“Only,” she continued, “maybe some kind of giant lizard. Like they got on Komodo. Don’t think the Komodo ones run on two legs, though. Should probably check that out.”

Good, Danny thought. She was keeping it within the realm of the conceivable. Which made it easier for him to support her.

“And you think whatever it is has been introduced to the park recently?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And you two think it’s a risk to your precious mine. Puts your insurance up or something. Or you think someone’s trying to mess things up on purpose.” Lester and Danny said nothing, which Sophie took as confirmation. “Whatever it is,” she added, “it’s got to be pretty tough.”

“The autopsies didn’t make for much fun reading,” Danny agreed. He was more familiar with bullet and knife wounds than with maimed and eaten corpses.

“It’s not that,” Sophie said. “That’s what you expect when an animal gets you. But what about the other animals, eh? This thing is on their turf. Why don’t they scare it off, or just kill it outright? If it’s on its own that shouldn’t be too hard.”

“You’ve not found the remains of any animals who have tried?” Lester asked, peering imperiously out of the car, not bothering to make eye contact.

“Not yet,” Sophie said carefully. “Park’s a big place. Chances are we’d only see bodies if they were near the road. If this thing kills them, they’ll be dragged off somewhere out of sight, so it can eat them in peace. And if they’re wounded, they’ll go find somewhere quiet anyway. To lick their wounds or die.”

“So you wouldn’t know?” Lester said, his voice vaguely accusing.

“We’d know eventually,” she told him. “Tracking takes time. This thing sticks around though — goes on unopposed — all the territories will change. We’ll just watch the other animals and see which areas they avoid.”

“How long will that take?” Danny asked, feeling his heart sink. He’d hoped the park rangers would have already isolated the creature, so he and Lester would just need to neutralise it, and send it back to its own epoch. But it sounded as if they might be in South Africa for at least a few days. He’d not brought enough underwear for any longer.

Sophie shrugged.

“Spring’s the breeding season. All the boys get hot-blooded, so they’re more likely to fight for their favourite spaces. And you want to take down or steer clear of an aggressor if you’re raising young.”

“Spring,” Danny said, his heart sinking. “But over here that’s not for another five months.”

THREE

Velociraptors, noted Captain Becker, really do hate the rain just as much as human beings.

From his safe vantage point in the living room of a flat above a newsagent, he watched six of them sheltering underneath the bus stop across the street. They were a little shorter than humans, skinny, vicious and grey, and had made short work of the bloody pork loins he’d got his men to hang there. Becker watched the raptors shove and bite and kick each other. They were cross that they’d run out of food and because they didn’t all fit under the shelter.

It didn’t help that floodwater kept surging over their feet and ankles.

“Think we should put them out of their misery?” he said — and he didn’t get a horrified response. Becker looked round, and found no Connor. A couple of soldiers loitered in the doorway of the small living room. Lieutenant Jamie Weavers sat slumped in an armchair, his black uniform and body armour making a strange contrast to the issue of Heat magazine in his hands. A small child — the son of the woman whose home this was — sat to one side of him, gawping at Weavers’ various guns.

A tray of tea things sat on the low table to one side. The plate that had earlier overflowed with Jaffa Cakes and Bourbons now lay empty but for a few crumbs. Which explained, Becker thought, where Connor had disappeared off to. Both Connor and Abby were sulking because this was his plan, not theirs. But as Becker had explained to them — while they rolled their eyes and pulled faces — this was all about tactics.

So far it had been raining for three days. At times it would die down to a drizzle with a grey wetness clogging the air. Most of the time, though, it came clattering down, thick, consistent, and bruising. The drains in many parts of the country couldn’t cope with the volume of water and their roads were now fast-flowing rivers.

Stinking black and brown water surged through Maidenhead’s suburbs and shopping centres, smashing walls and windows as it went. And then, as if the damage hadn’t caused trouble enough already, an anomaly had opened up right in the midst of it. The late Professor Cutter had suggested that bad weather might exacerbate the anomalies — though they’d never found any concrete proof. To Becker, it was just an example of the old army principle: It never rained, but it poured.

Connor had called the Met Office, but they didn’t think anything unusual of the rain. Well, they said, it was heavier than usual for the time of year, but it had a natural cause. The United Kingdom apparently sat on a sort of ‘weather crossroads’ between the North Pole and the Tropics, between the Atlantic Ocean and the great continent of Europe. It only took a warm current of air running down one side of the country and a cold current on the other, and massive black storm clouds whirled up in between.

Connor and Abby had been keen to point out that though raptors were warm-blooded, being desert dwellers they wouldn’t normally venture out into a storm. They’d argued possibilities all the way from London, but Becker had his own ideas. Connor said the raptors would mainly kill prey for themselves, but there was nothing out in this downpour. The creatures would be cross and hungry and the runaway river had disrupted litterbins and sewers, disgorging foul-smelling filth all through the town. Becker understood the simple economics of scavenging from his own tours of duty. If you were hungry and thought there’d be food you could grab easily, you didn’t mind getting wet.

The trick was to think like a lizard, with a worldview that didn’t include things like sniper rifles. The bus stop stood in relatively open space, with little cover for an ambush. The raptors would gauge the fresh meat hanging there as a treat rather than a trap... and once they’d got themselves under cover from the rain, they wouldn’t move until they had to.

They were, thought Becker as he regarded them coolly from his safe position, creatures of instinct. Like several Anomaly Research Centre staff, they acted without considering the consequences. Becker was a soldier — and a good one. He knew how to scope out situations, assess different possible interventions, gauge their chances of success and their cost in resources and men.

There were three options open to him. He could use his safe position to pick off the raptors with a single grenade — a messy, inelegant solution that would earn him little favour with Abby and Connor. He could take them out one-by-one using tranquilliser darts, but he suspected the group would scatter after the first of them was hit.

What is the collective noun for raptors, he wondered. A brace? A brood? A terror?

Or he could place himself in the most danger and face the things head on. Challenge them, poke them, get them to notice him so they would chase out into the rain. And then see which of them was fastest...

“Weavers!” he barked.

“Sorry, Captain,” Jamie said quickly, struggling to extract himself from the depths of the chair. “Sir!”

“Get Abby and Connor up here.”

Becker found himself smiling at the prospect of telling them his plan. It was foolhardy, dangerous, and put the lives of the creatures above those of himself and his men. But he’d show them he was more than just a jumped-up bodyguard, that he played the same game as them.

“Um,” Jamie said.

Becker felt a familiar sense of dread.

“What have they gone and done this time?”

“They, uh, took a speedboat off about twenty minutes ago, Captain.”

“What?” Becker snapped. “Which idiot authorised that?”

“Um,” Jamie said again, scratching his forehead with his rolled up magazine. “They said you did.”

Becker swore under his breath. “Fine. We’ll show them we can do this without them. I need two cars and another driver.”

Jamie gaped at him.

Becker grinned.

“Good man. Well volunteered.”

***

“With weather like this, it’s no wonder people are beginning to see... strange things, but I think we can assume, Debbie, that what you saw swimming down the High Street was a badger, or something like that, and not the Loch Ness Monster...” The voice from the speaker paused, then continued. “Next we’ve got a text from Joe, who’s stuck in traffic in Winnersh. Apparently there’s about three feet of water under the railway bridge and —”

A small, slim hand reached out and turned off the radio.

“Hey,” Connor Temple called over the roar of the engine and the lashing rain. “They might have mentioned us.”

Abby Maitland shook her head wearily — or perhaps she was just trying to shake her sopping fringe out of her eyes. They were whooshing down Maidenhead’s narrow High Street in a speedboat they’d pinched from the army. As a result of several days of rain, the lower end of the High Street was now a fast-moving torrent of foul-smelling water and debris. Behind the spot where Abby crouched, their boat’s sludgy grey wake slapped against the shop windows of McDonald’s and Dixons.

Connor saw she was staring at him, her head on one side, her lips parted ever so slightly. Connor let his own head tilt over, losing himself in her eyes. One day he’d find the right moment to tell her —

“You’re such an idiot, Connor,” she called out over the noise of the boat. “Why would we get mentioned?”

“Well,” Connor admitted, moving back from her, “I don’t know exactly. But Jenny’s not around any more to make sure we’re not.”

“Her team’s still with us. They’re the ones telling people to stay in their homes because of burst sewage pipes and stuff.”

“That’s not a cover story though, is it?” Connor responded, wrinkling his nose. “And it stinks worse being at the front of the boat. Can’t we swap, and I’ll drive for a bit?”

She nodded reluctantly, and he reached for the control in her hands. It didn’t look too difficult — a lever on the back of the boat that attached to the great fin of a rudder. You pushed the lever in one direction and the boat nosed in the other. Even he couldn’t get that wrong.

“Connor!”

Abby yanked the lever out of his hand and pulled them hard around the tree that stood in their way. In fact, there were trees and telephone boxes at irregular intervals all the way down the High Street.

“Ow,” he said, rubbing his fingerless-gloved hands together as if he had been stung. Abby steered them neatly between the obstacles, frowning in concentration.

“It’s really just Mario Kart, isn’t it?” he said. “Like steering past the crabs.”

“Sort of.” There was suddenly a wicked gleam in her eye. “Have you beaten my high score yet?’

“Yeah, like ages ago,” he told her, for the first time glad that he and his Wii had been evicted from her flat, because she wouldn’t be able to check.

“Come on,” she said. “You’re meant to be searching for whatever scared the raptors out into the rain. You’re facing the wrong way.”

Huffing, he shuffled back round to face the front again. His knee hit the radio, knocking it backwards over the edge of the boat. Connor pounced, caught it, lifted it up to show Abby with a wide grin on his face. Then they bumped hard against a great wave of water and Connor found himself sprawled helplessly on top of her.

There was silence. No sound of the engine. Just the lash of the rain on his back, and the splash and plop of the water around them. The warmth of her body inside her army-issue waders, pressing hard against him. Connor lay stunned and sore and soaked to the skin.

But really this was okay...

“Get,” she said, “off.”

“Uh, yeah.” He disentangled himself from her, being extra careful where he placed his hands. Abby sat up crossly.

“You’ve done something to the motor. You’d better be able to get it working.”

“And I, uh, I think I dropped the radio over the side.”

“Connor!”

“What? You wouldn’t let me listen to it anyway!”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t ours. You’ll have to explain it to Becker.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that. It might distract him from his mouse trap.”

“You’re scared of him,” she teased.