Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [146]
She nodded, wiped her eyes and laughed. ‘No … no, you’re just fine as you are.’
‘Did it work?’ asked Liam. ‘Has anyone looked outside?’
‘I think a time wave came,’ said Laura, looking at Sal for confirmation.
‘That’s right.’ Sal nodded. ‘I’ll go see.’
She turned back to the entrance, hit the button and the shutter slowly began to crank up. They gathered around the rising corrugated shutter and as it lurched to a halt they stepped outside into the dark night.
Manhattan glistened brightly across the Hudson, a towering wedding cake of lights. A commuter train rumbled overhead along the Williamsburg Bridge, and the evening was filled with the soothing white noise of far-off traffic and the echoing wail of a police siren.
‘Normal New York,’ said Liam. He puffed out a weary sigh. ‘That was a bleedin’ mess and a half we got out of, so it was.’
Sal reached out and hugged him tightly, embarrassed by the tears rolling down her cheeks. She squeezed him in a self-conscious way, just like anyone might a big brother, and then let him go.
‘But here we are again,’ she whispered.
They watched New York in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts for a long while.
Maddy stirred. ‘I better go and sort out the return window for the support –’ she corrected herself – ‘for Becks.’ She turned and headed back inside.
The rest of them savoured the evening panorama, watching beads of car headlights edging forward along FDR Drive across the river, and a ferry cutting the mirrored reflection of Manhattan with its wake. Finally, it was Edward who stated the obvious as-yet-unfinished business.
‘Me and Laura, we got to go back, don’t we? To get things back to the way they were?’
‘Yes,’ Liam nodded. ‘But I don’t suppose it has to be tonight.’
‘Good,’ whispered Laura, ‘I’m not feeling so good.’
‘We’ve got some beds back inside,’ said Sal. She looked at the girl and the Chinese boy. Both looked pale and ill, their faces smudged with a fortnight’s worth of grime. And Liam … She realized he looked disconcertingly old and young at the same time with that streak of white hair at his temple.
‘I’ll go make some coffee,’ she said.
CHAPTER 79
65 million years BC, jungle
Becks watched the pyre of logs and branches burn. Amid curling tongues of flame she could just about make out the outline of the several dozen bodies she’d stacked on top. The log bridge was gone now, its counterweight device dismantled like their windmill and tossed on the fire as kindling. The palisade, the lean-tos, all gone as well. The assorted rucksacks, baseball caps, jackets, mobile phones that had flown back into the past, all of them tossed on the fire.
By morning those things would be nothing more than soot or contorted puddles of plastic that would eventually break down over tens of thousands of years into minute untraceable contaminants.
Her computer mind took a moment to make a detailed audit of all the other items of forensic evidence that marked their two-week stay here. The human bodies she’d been unable to retrieve: Franklyn, Ranjit and Kelly. Of those, only Franklyn had died in a location that would one day yield fossils, and even then it was statistically unlikely that his body was going to be preserved in a way that would produce anything. A corpse needed to be almost immediately covered by a layer of sediment to stand a chance of that. Those three bodies, wherever they lay, were exposed to the elements, to scavengers.
Bullets and casings littered the clearing. But they too would soon become unidentifiable nuggets of rust in this humid jungle. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, no more than stains of oxidized soil on the jungle floor.
She was satisfied that the sheer weight of time and natural processes would wipe their presence clean. There was always the remote possibility that a footprint or the unnatural scar of an axe blade on a tree trunk might just, somehow, become an immortalized impression on a fragment of rock. But the probability factors she crunched yielded