Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [36]
Finally, a yard ahead of him she stopped. Liam stepped round her and looked down.
The blonde girl he’d spoken to earlier – he remembered her name, it was Laura, wasn’t it? – was screaming, her eyes locked on to the thing that was lying in the tall grass beside her.
It took Liam a moment for him to make sense of what he was seeing on the ground, then … then he got it; understood what it was. His stomach flopped and lurched and it took every ounce of willpower he had not to double over and vomit.
The teacher emerged from the tall grass to stand next to Liam. He followed Laura’s wide-eyed gaze and then sucked in a mouthful of air. ‘Oh my God! … That’s not … that’s not what I think it is,’ he whispered, and turned to look at Liam. ‘Is it?’
Among the tall fronds of vegetation nestled a small twisted mass of muscle and bone. At one end Liam could see a long braid of blonde hair, matted with drying blood, and halfway along the contorted form, he spotted a solitary pink Adidas trainer, hanging half on and half off a pale and perfectly normal-looking foot. It had to be one of the three blonde girls they’d tagged behind on the way into the chamber. He could quite understand the girl, Laura, screaming. They’d been chatting, giggling and exchanging phone numbers only ten minutes ago.
Liam recalled Foster saying sometimes it happened; sometimes, very rarely, the energy of a portal could turn a person inside out. Oh Jay-zus, what a mess.
Half an hour later those of the group that had survived the blast and arrived in one piece had made a rough assessment of their predicament. Dotted around the jungle clearing, they’d made the gruesome discovery of more bodies just like the girl’s, turned inside out and almost unrecognizable as human. Sixteen of them. Of the thirty-five people who’d been in the chamber when the explosion – or, more accurately, implosion – had occurred, only sixteen of them appeared to have made it through alive.
Now, gathered together in the middle of the clearing, well away from the forbidding edge of thick jungle, it was Whitmore who first seemed to be stirring from a state of stunned shock. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve and narrowed his eyes as he studied Becks.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Yes, you! I remember now … you said it was going to explode. Just … just before it actually did.’
Becks’s face remained impassive. ‘That is correct.’
‘Hang on!’ he said again, his eyes suddenly narrowing with dawning realization. ‘You … you’re not one of m-my kids. You’re not –’
Liam could see where this was going. It was pointless continuing to pretend to be high-school students a moment longer.
‘What just happened, whatever’s just happened,’ blustered Whitmore, ‘you damn well knew it was going to happen.’ His voice rose in pitch. ‘Who are you? Is this some sort of terrorist thing?’
Becks shook her head slowly, her face impassive. ‘Negative. We are not terrorists.’
Whitmore fell silent. His lips quivered with more questions he wanted to ask, but he was struggling to know what exactly to ask. Where to begin.
‘Excuse me?’
Their heads all turned towards a boy with kinky ginger hair, neatly side-parted into a succession of waves, and thick bottle-top glasses that made his eyes seem to bulge like a startled frog. He pointed to his name tag. ‘My name’s Franklyn … you can call me that. Or just Frank will do.’ He smiled at them uncertainly. ‘Uhh … I just wanted to say that … this is going to sound really weird, but I guess I’ll just come out and say it.’
‘What?’ snapped Whitmore.
‘Well –’ he pointed up at the sky – ‘you see them?’
All eyes drifted towards the top of some trees twenty yards away, a long branch leaning out over