Extinction Event

  Hemple raised his right fist and signalled his team forward. They skirted between the jumbled cars, crab-walking with their weapons aimed tight to their cheeks. Hemple and three of the others carried MP53s. Jenkins and Mason had Benelli MI Super 90 semi-automatic shotguns.

  Cutter and Abby led the way, with Connor in tow, keeping his eyes on the portable detector. Hemple fanned his fire team out so that all three of the principals were in sight and covered at any time. He’d been working with the ARC long enough to know that things could hit the fan on an average day just as messily as they could in Basra or Helmand. He’d seen things, things his old oppos in 22 Regiment would never believe in a million years.

  A million? Make that millions.

  The shame of it was, Hemple wasn’t allowed to talk about any of it.

  It was an odd job to wind up in, that was for sure. Here they were, walking down the middle of Oxford Street, armed to the gills, troubleshooting for three oddball civilians.

  There was Connor, a tall and gangly lad with shaving issues. He was a joker, a whizz-kid, a computer nerd... or was he a computer geek? Hemple wasn’t sure. There was Abby Maitland, petite and very pretty with her bob of white-blonde hair. Every time they went out on a call, she displayed a serious devotion to her work that would put most servicemen to shame.

  Then there was the professor, Nick Cutter, clean-shaven with light, unruly hair, mean and moody, driven and brilliant. Like all brilliant men, he wasn’t an easy ride. Hemple admired him, but he didn’t get him at all. Cutter had a bitter, wounded air about him, as if he’d lost too much already and was damned if he was going to let anything else slip away.

  Cutter was leading the way through the stranded traffic. With his cargo trousers, his faded, green army jacket and his rifle, he looked for all the world like a great white hunter stalking big game on the veldt.

  Hemple wondered exactly how big the day’s game was going to be.

  “Wow, that’s not right,” Connor said.

  They were coming up on a black cab in the middle of the road ahead of them. The cab had been rammed with such force it had been flipped over onto its side. It lay in a starburst of chipped windscreen glass. Connor stooped and peered in through the shattered window.

  “Just look for the anomaly,” Cutter said. “We must be right on it.”

  There was a brief, deep snorting sound from somewhere nearby. Cutter took off at once, and Abby and Connor went with him as if they were tied to him with string.

  Hemple waved his men after them.

  Cutter ran to the next corner and skidded to a halt, looking around rapidly. The others came up behind him.

  “Anything?” Abby asked.

  Cutter shook his head.

  “Can you still hear it?”

  “No,” Cutter said, “it’s gone. I can smell something though.”

  “Oh, nice!” Connor exclaimed. He’d stepped off the pavement and planted his right foot in a spatter of wet dung. “Oh, my shoe! Oh, that’s nasty!”

  Cutter came over and bent down to examine the fecal matter.

  “It’s fresh,” Connor moaned, “though not in every sense of the word. Look at my shoe! That’s a brand-new pair of Vans, and they’re ruined!” He started to scrape his sole against the kerb.

  “Well, Professor, did you find some useful... er... excrement?” Hemple asked, standing over Cutter.

  “Oh, it smells really bad!” Connor complained. He found some discarded napkins and began to wipe off the offending fecal matter.

  “Uh, yeah,” Cutter said to Hemple. “From the volume of the scat, it looks as if we’re dealing with a pretty big creature.”

  “I guessed that from the overturned taxi,” Hemple said.

  “True,” Cutter replied. “As for the consistency...”

  “Yes, let’s examine that in detail,” Hemple suggested with a wry smile.

  Cutter looked up and beckoned over Abby.

  “What do you think?” he asked her.

  “I can’t be sure,” she said, crouching down to look more closely, “but I’d say we’re looking for an omnivore. Not a discriminating one, either. There’s a lot of bone matter ground up in this, and undigested bark. All sorts of things.”

  “So?”

  Abby stood up and looked around.

  “I don’t know. A giant pig?” she suggested.

  “A giant pig,” Hemple echoed doubtfully.

  “Well, it’s not an exact science,” she protested.

  “And it smells! Science smells!” Connor groaned, still wiping his shoe.

  “We’ve got to spread out,” Cutter said.

  “I’d be happier if we stayed as one group,” Hemple countered.

  “I’d be happier if this wasn’t happening at all,” Cutter replied. “We’ve got to find this creature quick smart. It’s big, it’s aggravated, and it’s not fussy about what it takes a bite out of. It may not even be on Oxford Street any more. It could have gone off down a side road. It could have gone anywhere.”

  Hemple sighed.

  “I need Connor and Abby to find the anomaly and lock down its location,” Cutter told him.

  “Mason? Redfern? Stay with them.” Hemple turned to the others. “Rest of you are with me and the prof.”

  Cutter and the four soldiers moved away down the street. Cutter looked back over his shoulder.

  “The anomaly,” he urged, “quickly, please.”

  Connor nodded and with a final wipe he turned his attention back to the detector.

  “Where do we start?” Mason asked, the big shotgun propped across his shoulder.

  Connor slowly turned in a circle, standing on the spot, holding the detector up.

  “We’re right on top of it. This way.”

  He moved towards the nearest shops. Mason swung in behind him, his shotgun lowered to a cover position. The other soldier, Redfern, had his MP53 pulled up tight against his chest.

  “After you, miss,” he said to Abby. “And stay where I can see you.”

  Cutter walked another thirty yards down the street, with Hemple and his men in tow. They passed two more vehicles — a BT van and another black cab — that had been struck and damaged. Both vehicles looked as though someone had gone at them angrily with a battering ram.

  Cutter thought he heard the deep, ragged snorting noise again.

  Jenkins turned to the left sharply, aiming his shotgun.

  “Contact!” he barked.

  “Hold your fire!” Hemple countered. He ran forward. There was a woman crumpled up in the doorway of a shoe shop. Her hair was bedraggled, and the front of her coat was soaked in blood.

  “Dammit!” Cutter growled, moving beside Hemple and bending over her.

  “Miss? It’s okay,” Hemple said softly. “You’re going to be okay.”

  The woman didn’t reply. Her face was pale and she was staring at nothing. Her whole body was trembling very slightly.

  “She’s in shock,” Cutter said. He reached in and gently moved her coat aside. There was no sign of injury.

  “That’s not her blood,” Cutter confirmed. Parts of her coat were damp with something other than blood. Cutter touched the patches and sniffed his fingertips.

  “That’s got to be saliva,” he said. “Smells pretty rank.”

  “What did you see? Miss? What did you see?”

  The woman was virtually catatonic. She didn’t respond to Hemple.

  “Sir!” one of the team shouted.

  Hemple and Cutter got up.

  “Stay with her,” Hemple told Jenkins. “Keep talking to her.” Jenkins nodded, and knelt down in the doorway beside the woman.

  Cutter and Hemple hurried to catch up with the other two men. They’d come to a halt beside a single-decker bus. As he approached, Cutter saw what they were standing over, and turned his head aside in anger and disappointment.

  “We’ve got two dead here,” Garney, one of the two squad members, said. He gestured to the body at his feet, and to another one nearby
. “There’s another one over by the kerb.”

  “Oh God,” Cutter murmured.

  “I can’t work out if they’ve been bitten or trampled to death,” Murdoch, the other trooper, said.

  “Or both,” Garney suggested.

  It was a fearful, mangled mess. There was blood right across the road, and it had spattered up the side of the bus and all over the white plastic traffic bollards on a nearby island. Deep impact dents showed where the side of the bus had been struck several times. Some of the side windows were broken.

  Cutter made himself look at the bodies. This is what it meant when he didn’t get his job done — death, horrible, undeserved, violent death; innocent people caught in harm’s way, their normal, everyday lives ended, cut off. He wondered who the victims were. What had they been doing? Had they been shopping, or on their lunch breaks, or heading for an early showing at the cinema? What had they been planning for the rest of their day, their week?

  Their lives?

  Who was going to miss them when they didn’t come home?

  Cutter swallowed hard. Anger swirled impotently inside him. How many more was it going to have to be?

  He closed his eyes, and saw Stephen’s face.

  He heard a deep, snorting noise.

  Cutter opened his eyes. He listened hard. He glanced at Hemple and the two troopers, his expression fixed, and motioned them to follow him.

  Thirty yards away, behind a Fed Ex van, something large was moving around. They could hear it snuffling and grunting. Over the top of the van, Cutter glimpsed a fleshy, humped back, thick with dark bristles. It was big, all right, whatever it was. He could smell its ripe, pungent odour.

  He advanced more slowly now, the rifle in one hand, his other hand open and raised at his side, emphasising caution.

  The thing behind the van moved again. They could hear what sounded like hooves clopping on the asphalt.

  “Steady,” Cutter whispered. “I want to get the first shot. I want it alive, if possible.”

  “After what it did to those people?” Garney said, a look of shock on his face.

  “I want it alive,” Cutter repeated.

  He took another step.

  His mobile started to ring.

  Cutter hit ‘reject call’ as quickly as he could, glancing down. On the mobile’s screen, the caller ID read ‘Jenny Lewis’.

  But he hadn’t been fast enough. The creature had heard. There was a violent, ugly snort from behind the Fed Ex van, and something struck the side of the vehicle so hard that it rocked down on its shocks. Then whatever it was started moving away, and quickly. They heard it crunching into vehicles. They heard the hoof-like clatter on the road surface.

  “Come on!” Cutter yelled.

  With the soldiers at his heels, he started to chase after it.

  “He’s still not answering,” Jenny snapped. She glanced at Lester. He was leaning back in his seat, his head resting on one hand in a pose that oozed listless tedium. He was drumming the fingers of his other hand on his armrest.

  Outside, the street had become quieter. The mad rush of people had passed by. Drivers were getting out of the jammed cars to look around. A few of them were leaving their vehicles and hurrying away to follow the crowd. But even though the people were gone, their vehicles still sat in the way.

  “I’m not just going to sit here,” she said. “Are you coming?”

  Lester shifted in his seat.

  “I’ll coordinate from here,” he said.

  “Fine,” she replied, getting out of the car and slamming the door.

  Lester wound down his window as she began to stride away.

  “Jenny?” he called.

  “Yes?” she said, turning back.

  “Try not to get eaten or anything.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she responded, then she spun and marched off between the rows of halted cars towards Oxford Street.

  As she walked, she pulled out her mobile and tried Cutter again.

  Abby looked at Connor.

  “In here?” she asked, doubtfully.

  “That’s what it’s telling me,” he replied, carefully studying the detector’s display.

  They were facing the entrance of a small arthouse cinema, a tall-fronted building sandwiched between a mini-market and a budget travel office. The marquee board promised some European arthouse classic, the sort of film Connor would gnaw his own leg off to escape.

  “Keep behind me,” Mason said. He led the way in with the shotgun ready. Abby and Connor followed, and Redfern brought up the rear.

  The lobby was small and dark. There was no one around. It took a moment for their eyes to adapt from the bright sunlight in the street. A spinner full of leaflets had been knocked over near the concessions, and the ticket office door was open, as if someone had left in a hurry. They could hear the soundtrack and dialogue of the movie booming from the theatre next door.

  “We’re right on it,” Connor said, reading the display on his portable detector.

  “Can you smell that?” Abby asked.

  “More dung,” Redfern noted.

  “I suppose.” She nodded.

  With Mason in the lead, they pushed open the swing doors of the cinema. The amplified sound and jumping blue-grey flicker of the screen washed over them. There was another light too, a softer light. Connor felt the magnetic tug on all things metal.

  They stepped into the cinema.

  It was very dark. The silhouettes of the seat backs looked like rows of molars. A gamine Sixties ingenue gazed soulfully out of the black-and-white world of the film, while a man spoke French off-camera.

  Off to the left there was a hole that had once been a side door. Some-thing large had gone that way, and just beyond they saw the dim impression of daylight, indicating the route the creature had taken to the street.

  The anomaly floated in front of the screen, like a scintillating, multi-faceted jewel catching, like sunlight, on a patch of rippled water.

  “Bingo!” Connor said, triumphantly.

  “What was that noise?” Abby asked, looking around.

  “Where has it got to?” Hemple demanded, running up.

  “Wait, wait,” Cutter whispered. They kept their heads down, and threaded between the abandoned vehicles. They saw a scraped fender or a dented wing every few yards. Chips of headlamp glass dusted the ground.

  “I think it’s stopped running,” Cutter said, raising his rifle.

  Hemple signalled to his men to circle in around them.

  They were close. Cutter could hear the creature breathing. The respiration was deep and bovine. The ripe smell hung in the air.

  Cutter took another step.

  It came at them.

  A car smashed aside, turning violently end to end. The beast was the size of a rhino, a colossal thing with terrible power and weight in its deep, humped body. Its head was a freak-show photo-fit of pinched, squinting eyes, flaring nostrils, bristled cheeks, and a giant, long-snouted mouth full of spittle and ugly, discoloured teeth the size of tent pegs. Its noxious breath assaulted them like a chemical weapon.

  Hemple swore.

  “What did Abby tell you?” Cutter murmured. “Giant pig.”

  He aimed his rifle.

  The beast began to charge them.

  It was going to be bad.

  THREE

  The anomaly seemed to flare and pulse. It was exhibiting some kind of inherent instability Connor hadn’t seen before.

  He saw the soldiers struggling to manage their weapons in the fluctuating magnetic wash. Even with gun furniture and sights deliberately switched out for plastics, the metal fabric of all ARC weapons was vulnerable to anomaly magnetics.

  The mag field was affecting the cinema’s projector too. The movie was running slow. Frames were lingering in the blue and white glare of the big screen, and the French voices had slowed to deep, treacly bass notes.

  “Call Cutter,” Connor said to Abby. “Tell him we’ve got it.”

  Abby t
ook out her mobile and tapped a speed-dial number, but she was distracted. The phone — a slim model with a metal cover — shot out of her hand and disappeared into the anomaly.

  “Nice one,” Connor said, rummaging in his pocket to find his own mobile.

  “Didn’t you hear that?” Abby asked, looking behind them. “There’s that sound again.”

  “It’s just the soundtrack.” Connor responded, and he held his phone out to her.

  Abby shook her head.

  “No —” she began.

  Then she saw it, and so did Connor. There was something in the gloomy cinema with them. It was hidden in the shadows to the left of the screen, but Connor could tell it was big — and agitated. It exhaled, and a wave of bad air washed over them.

  “Back up, real slow,” Redfern hissed.

  “Do as he said,” Mason added, raising the shotgun.

  In the darkness of the deserted movie theatre, something that sounded like the demon-god of all swine snorted and began to move towards them.

  It was a ton and a half of gristle, bone and meat, with a skull a metre long, and a monstrously short fuse.

  “It’s an Entelodon!” Professor Cutter shouted.

  But Jake Hemple didn’t bother committing it to memory. From his professional perspective, the fact that the thing charging at him possessed a scientific label had little or no bearing on anything. Knowing what it was called — or where it sat on evolution’s great family tree — wouldn’t keep it from killing him, and this giant pig-thing promised a particularly horrible death.

  He had seen the bodies in the street.

  So, the name didn’t matter. All that mattered was its size, its power, and the speed at which its screaming, snorting snout full of teeth was closing.

  Hemple thought about squeezing off a shot, but he remembered Cutter’s counter-intuitive instruction to keep the thing alive, even though it wasn’t showing signs of extending the same courtesy to them.

  “Professor...” he growled.

  Cutter stared at the oncoming monster with a mix of alarm and admiration. Certain creatures, even a grossly ugly one like this, managed to be truly impressive in their singularity of purpose.