Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [84]
He turned to see the creature’s deadly sickle-shaped claws flailing inches from his face and the teeth in its long skull snapping and grating and dripping spittle-strings of saliva. It was impaled on the bamboo, but so very far from incapacitated and quite enraged.
‘Oh Jay-zus! I got one skewered!’
Becks was busy.
He held on to the rattling spear as the creature thrashed and drummed and swung and slowly, eagerly pulled itself further down the shaft, thick gouts of its dark blood running on to his hands. ‘Help!’ he screamed.
He could see one of the other hominids lowering, coiling, ready to leap on to him, when the air was split with a child-like shriek from one of them. In an instant, the beat of a heart, the dark olive-coloured bodies snaked, scrambled and swarmed with incredible speed towards the lip of rocky ground and out of sight into the jungle slope below.
Gone. Just like that.
Except for the creature still struggling halfway down his spear. A sickle claw swiped across his upper arm, cutting through the material of his shirt and digging into his muscle with the ease of a butcher’s blade through tenderized beef.
‘Gah!’ Liam bellowed. ‘Help me!’
Becks was there in the blink of an eye and with a blur of movement swiped the hatchet across the creature’s elegant neck. It froze in shocked realization of its fate. The long head tilted for a moment like a cocked gesture of curiosity, then swung backwards on to its hunched spine, almost completely decapitated yet still attached to the body by a frayed strip of exposed pale pink tendon. It collapsed a second later, pulling the spear out of Liam’s trembling hands.
They both stared down at the tangle of lean grey-green limbs and bony protrusions, and the rhythmic jet of almost black spurting gobbets of blood across the floor of dried pine cones and needles. One of its legs still twitched and flexed; a post-mortem response.
Liam looked up at Becks. She had a spatter pattern of blood across her pale face and chest and her normally expressionless cool grey eyes were wide and wild. But that passed in an instant as artificial intelligence regained control of her face. She regarded him calmly.
‘Are you unharmed, Liam?’
Liam looked down at his bloody arm, cut deep, but nothing arterial going on there. He was vaguely aware that he was in a state of shock as he said, ‘Can I be put back on the Titanic, please?’
CHAPTER 45
65 million years BC, jungle
Liam and Becks emerged at the top of the steep hill twenty minutes later, a bald outcrop of rock with a view down all three sides to the tropical sea far below.
Liam collapsed on to the rocky ground.
‘W-where are they?’ asked Franklyn, looking past Liam towards the edge of the sloping jungle. ‘Are they coming?’
‘They are no longer pursuing,’ answered Becks.
‘My God, you’re wounded!’ cried Laura, dropping down beside him and ripping a strip of cloth from his shirt to use as a bandage.
‘What the hell happened back there?’ asked Kelly, undoing his loose tie and passing it to Laura to use as a tourniquet. He looked at Franklyn, still gasping from the exertion of climbing up the last half a mile of jungle. ‘He’s just been jabbering to us something about a load of creatures jumping him.’
Liam nodded. ‘Yeah.’ He pulled a plastic bottle out of his backpack and chugged the last of his water. He pumped air in and out of his lungs for a few moments, gathering enough puff to be able to say something more. ‘Yeah … we got attacked all right. Lots of them … dozens of ’em.’
‘Dozens of what?’ asked Whitmore.
‘A species of pack hunter,’ said Becks.
Whitmore went pale. ‘Oh God, don’t tell me there are raptors?’
‘Worse,’ said Franklyn. ‘Much worse.’ He sat down next to Liam, took off his glasses and wiped the fogged lenses of his spectacles.