Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [139]
She wanted to tell him what she knew, what Foster had told her. She wanted to tell him so that at least he could decide for himself if it was worth it, killing himself slowly, one corruption at a time.
‘Shall we?’ he said.
She pressed a digital watch into his hand. ‘Six hours,’ she said softly, then glanced at the chalk circle and the concrete already gouged out of the floor in the middle. Liam understood. He had six hours back in 1941 and then she’d open the return window. He casually ambled across the floor towards the circle as Maddy silently initiated the countdown sequence. The machinery began to hum – there was no way to avoid that – and the ceiling light flickered and dimmed.
She was hoping Cartwright would be too engrossed in listening to Sal and watching for the time wave to immediately notice something was going on, but the wily old man spun round and looked back into the arch. ‘What’s going on?’
Liam stepped smartly into the chalk circle just as a sphere of air began to twitch and fidget around him.
‘What’s happ– Hang on, what’s …?’ His eyes widened. ‘Where the HELL IS HE GOING?’
Maddy ignored him. Cartwright reached into his jacket pocket.
‘No! Don’t shoot!’ shouted Maddy, realizing what he was going to do. ‘Please!’
Cartwright pulled out his pistol, straightened his arm and aimed. ‘STOP IT, NOW!’
‘I can’t! Please … I can’t stop it. Don’t sh–’
He fired a single shot at Liam just as the sphere wobbled and collapsed in on itself with a puff.
1941, Somervell County, Texas
At the very same moment that Liam landed on a riverbank of pebbles something whistled past his ear and off into the sky.
‘Jay-zusss!’ He ducked and then looked around, wondering what the hell that was. He saw nothing, just a narrow river, rolling sedately along a shallow creek of sandy-coloured rock, small and mean-looking yew trees and arid tufts of sun-bleached grass that hissed softly alongside the soothing gurgle of water.
Perhaps a bird? A bee? A fly?
It could have been. A fast one, though.
His mind turned to more pressing matters – which way to go? He had no idea, no idea at all, other than to look out for a pair of boys. He looked at the digital watch, Maddy’s. She’d set a countdown on it: five hours and fifty-nine minutes.
‘Right,’ he muttered to himself, ‘where do I start?’
A midday sun beat down on his head as he stood there, unsure which way to turn. He decided, before walking anywhere, that he was going to mark the window location with a small cairn of rocks: a dozen fist-sized worn and rounded rocks stacked in a small pyramid. Big enough so that he wasn’t going to walk right on past and miss it.
Then, caught on a lazy midday breeze that had the nearby yew trees stirring and hissing, he heard the faint call of a voice and what sounded like a splash of water.
That way … downstream. He set off, walking along the riverbank, shingle and pebbles clattering underfoot. For a moment he recalled an image of that huge sweeping bay and the calm prehistoric green sea spreading out to an infinite horizon on his right.
It was here. Right here, an incredible tropical sea.
Quite a breathtaking notion, that … in the vast dimensions of geological time, even seas and oceans, just like any other living creature, had lifespans that came and went.
He heard voices again, echoing up the creek. The sound of children playing, larking about.
CHAPTER 76
65 million years BC, jungle
Becks followed the spatters of dark blood into the jungle. By moonlight the streaks of blood were black and glistened wetly. The trail didn’t lead too far into the jungle, fortunately. If it had, she suspected she’d have been unable to follow it; the moonlight was beginning to fail her, blocked by the drooping leaves from the canopy trees above.
She heard them before she saw them: the rattling breath of one snorting like