Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [82]
My God. It looked just like the tracks he’d seen all around that carcass they’d discovered a while back. The dawning realization came suddenly and his mouth all of a sudden felt tacky and dry.
We’ve been followed.
He knelt down and traced another three-pronged footprint in the ground with his finger. And another. And another.
We’ve been followed … all the way from the camp.
It was then that he heard the soft rustle of dislodged leaves, something emerging from the foliage on to the ledge behind him.
‘Oh boy,’ he whispered.
CHAPTER 44
65 million years BC, jungle
Broken Claw could sense the new creature knew they were there; his nasal cavity picked out the faint smell of fear coming from it, a chemical cocktail of sweat and adrenaline, not so different from the large plant-eaters. The new creature had cleverly spotted their tracks. The new creature had finally realized it was being stalked.
Maybe now was the time to know a little more about these strange pale beasts. His soft bark ordered the others to remain where they were for now, out of sight. The new creature was holding one of those sticks-that-catch in one of its puffy pale hands. He’d watched one of these creatures fend off a giant sea-dweller yesterday with one of those sticks. So he eyed it warily as he stepped low under the sweeping fronds of a fern, under the branch from which the new creature had moments ago retrieved something bright and colourful and emerged over the rocky lip of ground to the small level clearing. That salty smell of fear grew suddenly much more powerful as the new creature turned slowly round to face him. Broken Claw rose from his crouching posture on all fours, up on to his hind legs, to stand fully erect.
It fears.
So close now, he could see the new creature more clearly: the eyes, curiously large, behind rounded shiny transparent discs. Its face, all loose pale flesh, unsculpted by muscle or sinew or bone carapace. It made noises with its mouth, noises that sounded so unlike all the other beasts in the river valley they called home. Noises, in fact, that didn’t sound too unlike the simple language of coughs, grunts and barks Broken Claw’s pack used.
Franklyn in turn studied the creature that had just emerged. It had a body shape he could best describe as halfway between one of the smaller therapod species, and … well, and a human. But incredibly thin, almost birdlike in its agility. A pair of long thin legs hinged backwards like a dog’s legs, meeting at a bony, very feminine-looking pelvis thrust acutely forward. A tiny waist beneath a protruding rib cage, a curved, knobbly spine that hunched over and ended with a delicate tapering neck supporting an elongated skull. Apart from the distinctive head, seen from a distance, and if one squinted a little, it could almost pass as a hominid – human-like.
‘Oh my … m-my God,’ he whispered.
It cocked its head, a head that fleetingly reminded Franklyn of a hot-dog sausage, long and bone-smooth, at one end a lipless mouth full of rows of lethal-looking teeth. Above the mouth were two holes that suggested a nasal cavity around which flesh puckered and pulled as it silently breathed, and above that two reptilian yellow eyes that seemed to sparkle with a keen intelligence. The thing’s skin was a dark olive green, that seemed to pale to an almost human pink colour around the vulnerable belly and pelvis.
The creature’s jaws snapped shut and opened again, and it made a whining noise that reminded him vaguely of the contented murmuring a baby made after a feed. It sounded almost human. And those curious, intelligent, eyes, studying him as intently as he was studying it.
It made