“Stay still,” Cutter whispered.
The duck-bills halted, too, more like statues in the starlight than ever. Several had their heads raised, as if they were listening. The silent tension was almost unbearable.
The hunter made its move.
A hundred metres behind them, back along the shoreline, something huge and dark broke cover and charged into the motionless herd. It was too far away and too dark for Cutter or any of the others to see it clearly, but the consequences of its ambush were more than obvious.
It selected one of the creatures. There was a thunderous squealing and bellowing from the prey. It hooted and blew like a broken tuba connected to a pressurised air pump. The noises were appalling, brassy booming mixed with terrible, high-pitched squealing. Cutter could see the stricken duck-bill, a large, pale shape, thrashing and crying at the water’s edge, held in the grip of a massive black shadow. He heard a rumbling, predator’s growl overlapping the piteous shrieking.
The rest of the duck-bill herd broke and fled in instinctive panic. Every single creature rose up on its hind legs and started to run, kicking up stones from the shingle beach and hooting their frantic alarm calls.
The victim managed to drag the hunter that had seized it into the river shallows, churning up sheets of spray as it fought and twisted and lashed its tail to break free.
But without success. The huge black shadow hung on to it.
The herd rushed into the river. Cutter and his companions were drenched by the violent spray. They tried to shield themselves from the whizzing riverbank stones that were being scattered by crashing feet. Bolting duck-bills erupted out of the trees, threatening to trample them underfoot in their panicky surge to reach the water.
Cutter grabbed Suvova and pulled her aside before a galloping Anatotitan could crush her. Bulov screamed and covered his head. Abby flinched and tried to dodge the creatures that came close.
In the river, kicking up volumes of water, the duck-bills struck out for the far bank. The water was full of them, wallowing down, heads raised, tails going, hind feet kick-paddling. The cacophony of hooting and splashing sounded like a colliery band going through a car wash.
Holding tight to Rina Suvova, Cutter looked back down the bank. As far as he could see, all the Anatotitans were in the water and crossing the river now, all of them except the prey creature. Cutter could see its pale shape in the gloom, struggling at the water’s edge. It was still squealing, but its cries were weaker, and its struggles far less strenuous. The great black shadow still had hold of it.
Cutter heard the crack of major bones finally breaking under titanic pressure. He saw the starlight glistening off black wetness. Even from a hundred metres away, he could smell the blood and the stench of ruptured innards.
“Let’s get into the trees,” he urged the others as quietly as he could. “Find some cover.”
Koshkin nodded, and led the way. Bulov followed him in something of a daze. One of the flying stones kicked up off the shore had cut his scalp. Another had badly bruised the shoulder of one of the soldiers.
Cutter brought up the rear. He took a last look back along the shore.
The ghost-pale shape of the victim had stopped moving. Something was slowly, ponderously dragging its slack shape up the shingle, away from the river.
It was too dark — too frustratingly dark — for him to see the predator properly. He could just sense the shape of it, the sheer size, the power.
For a fleeting moment, he felt its eyes on him, as if it had raised its head from the kill and turned to look his way. He felt it see him, and know him, and — in that passing moment — he realised he ought to be profoundly grateful that, by the grace of God, it had enough food in its mouth not to care about him at all.
FORTY-TWO
The moon that rose over the Cretaceous forest was a monster, too. It seemed many times bigger and brighter than any moon Abby had ever seen at home, just as the stars seemed far more numerous and livid. It was more than just the absence of light pollution. There was something unearthly about it, something magical.
In the moonlit woods, away from the river, they rested for a while. Nocturnal sounds resumed. Insects clicked and whirred, night birds called, and larger animals roaming the woodland left whoops and hoots and long, strangled bellows in the air. The hunter had made a kill: everything else was safe for a while.
“We’ll rest for ten minutes, and then try to make our way back to the anomaly,” Cutter said.
“We hide, and we wait until dawn,” Bulov contradicted. He mopped at the blood that was seeping out of his hairline from the cut on his scalp.
“There’s no point waiting,” Cutter insisted. “If the anomaly’s re-opened, we need to get back through it.”
“Can you find the way?” Koshkin asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Cutter replied. He took the spray can out of his pocket and looked at it dubiously. “Even though blue’s going to be hard to see in this light.”
“We really didn’t go that far, did we?” Abby offered.
“No, we didn’t,” Cutter agreed.
“It’s sort of that way,” she said, pointing, “and less than a kilometre.”
Cutter agreed, nodding.
Bulov threw his hands up.
“I have no idea any more. I am lost,” he said.
“The girl is right,” Koshkin said. “That way, less than a kilometre.”
“And if it’s reopened,” Cutter said, “we should be able to see it a lot more easily in the dark.”
They waited for a little while longer. The two soldiers sat under a tree and watched the dark, warm sky, brimful of stars. The one with the bruised shoulder nursed his arm. The other one exclaimed a couple of times, and pointed at the heavens.
“What are they saying?” Abby asked Suvova.
“One is saying, ‘make a wish’,” Suvova replied. “They have seen shooting stars. You make a wish when you see a shooting star.”
Suvova paused as she realised what she had said. She looked over at Cutter.
“Nicky?”
Cutter had already got to his feet and was staring at the sky. Abby joined him.
“There!” she cried, after less than a minute. A sharp little line of yellow-white light had cut across the sky for a second, a fleeting back-slash amongst the multitude of stellar full stops.
“Shooting star,” Cutter breathed. They saw two more almost at once, quick flashes that were there and gone, as if they’d glimpsed them in their peripheral vision. A minute later, a bigger, more spectacular slant of light lit up and disappeared.
“The Earth’s passing through a meteor shower,” Cutter said. “Probably one of the periodic ones. Most of the objects are tiny. They’re just burning up.”
“But some might be big enough to reach the surface,” Abby suggested, “or at least detonate in the high atmosphere?”
Cutter put his hands to his mouth, deep in thought.
“Oh my God,” he murmured, and then laughed grimly.
“This is the very end of the Cretaceous period. We know that from the creatures. I think...”
“What do you think?” Suvova asked.
“I think this is literally the end of the Cretaceous. This is it. The last years, the last weeks, maybe...”
He looked at the sky.
“Maybe the last hours.”
“That’s one hell of a coincidence,” Suvova pointed out.
“Well, that’s been my point all along,” Cutter said. “All of this fits together for a reason. I think we’re right on the threshold, right on the K-T boundary. It’s about to happen, and the age of reptiles, the Mesozoic Era — a magnificent period more than 180 million years long — is about to come to an end.
“Look there.” He pointed at the sky.
“I thought it was a cloud. Earlier on, I thought it was just a cloud in the evening sky, but it’s still there. It’s not shifting like a cloud at all.”
“It’s just a smudge of light,”
Koshkin said dismissively. “Just a smear. Are you sure it’s not a cloud?”
“It’s not a cloud,” Bulov said quietly. “When you look at it, you can see that it’s not. You have sharp eyes, Professor Cutter.”
“Is that really it?” Abby asked.
“I think that’s what we’ll call the Chicxulub impactor one day,” Cutter replied softly. “I think that’s it, on its way in. It’s a long-period comet, and its just days or hours away. When it hits, the dinosaurs and two-thirds of all species on the planet are going to die.”
“The meteors, then,” Abby asked. “What are they? Pieces of it?”
“Out at the edges of the solar system,” Bulov said, “there is the Kuiper belt, and also the Oort cloud. Both of these regions are packed with dust, volatile gas, and rock and ice. Once in a very long while, the gravitational effects of the solar system cause objects in these regions to become disrupted, to collide. It is possible then for some of these objects to be deflected in towards the inner planets, as a swarm of Oort cloud comets, for example.”
Bulov got to his feet and stood beside Cutter, staring up at the blur of light.
“This could be just such a swarm. It has been travelling in towards us for thousands of years. Smaller objects are already arriving, and burning up as shooting stars or striking like the Tunguska event. Behind them comes the big one, the main event, the killer, the ice in it heating as it approaches the sun, subliming, forming a glowing tail behind it, the coma of the comet.”
“Let’s head back,” Cutter said suddenly. “Let’s see if the anomaly has reopened.”
“Let’s hope it has,” Suvova said. “After all this talk of the sky falling, I don’t feel much like staying here.”
“I hate to disagree,” Cutter said, “but I kind of hope it hasn’t.”
“What?” Suvova laughed. “Are you mad, Nicky? You want to stay here?”
“Not at all,” Cutter replied. “But if the anomaly is open when that thing hits, it won’t just be this world that dies.”
FORTY-THREE
“Do you know where we are?” Jenny asked.
“Do you mean specifically, or generally?” Helen replied.
They had stopped to rest yet again. The members of alpha team were slowly wearing themselves out carrying Jenkins. The night was humid, and a huge moon was up. Insects were thrumming in the deep woods around them.
“Try generally,” Jenny said.
“The very late part of the Cretaceous.”
“That means... dinosaurs.”
“Very much so,” Helen said, as if humouring a child. “But not for much longer. Do you see? Up there, that scar of light. There, just above the line of the trees. That’s a world killer, coming this way. A comet. When it hits the planet, it will cause a mass extinction, leaving the Earth crippled for hundreds of thousands of years until life begins to restore itself.”
“That’s what wipes out the dinosaurs?” Jenny asked.
Helen smiled. “Absolutely. It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it?”
“It’s a comet? Life gets wiped out by a comet.”
“Not for the first time and not for the last,” Helen said. “The history of life on Earth is punctuated by great extinction events. The cosmos wipes the slate clean, so that other strands of life can try their luck. At the end of the Permian, which is about 250 million years before you were born, there was an impact event that left less than ten percent of species alive. In fact, of the twenty-five major extinctions known from the geological record of our planet, at least seven were the result of large impact events.”
“I can’t wait to go home,” Jenny said. “I can’t wait to go home, and have a bath and cup of tea, and surround myself with normal things.”
“Of course you can’t. That’s only natural. Then again, impact-based extinction events only take place once every several tens of millions of years. When you’re having your bath and your cup of tea, bear in mind that by 2009, the next one will be really very overdue.”
“You’re a barrel of laughs, you know that?” Jenny told her. She walked off towards Hemple. Redfern was leaning against a tree nearby, keeping an eye on Helen.
Hemple was standing over Jenkins as Murdoch cleaned and re-dressed his wound.
“How is he?” Jenny asked. In the moonlight, she could see for herself. Jenkins was delirious and sweating badly.
“His wound’s already infected,” Hemple said grimly. “He’s slipping in and out. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Not here maybe, but when we get him back —” Jenny began.
Hemple looked at her.
“That look on your face had better not mean you don’t think we’re getting back, sunshine,” Jenny said.
Hemple laughed, despite his mood. He motioned to her to follow and walked a little way away from the other men.
“I thought I was pretty well prepped,” he said to her quietly. “I didn’t think there was much I couldn’t handle if I had to. But I already feel out of my depth. This is tougher than I was expecting, which is stupid of me.”
“Why?” Jenny asked.
“Because it means she might be right, and I don’t want her to be right,” Hemple said, glancing across the clearing at Helen.
“I’d better not tell you what she just told me then,” Jenny said.
“Go on.”
“Apparently, on top of everything else, the world’s about to end.”
“Oh, great,” Hemple said. “We’ll get some beers in, make a night of it.”
She was about to respond when Hemple raised a quick hand to shush her. Across the clearing, Helen had just ducked down low, and Redfern had followed suit. Hemple prowled across to join them, keeping as low as possible. Jenny followed him, dropping into a crouch.
“What’s going on?” she whispered.
Helen looked around at her, her eyes hard in the starlight.
“Everything just went quiet,” she whispered. “Can’t you feel it?”
Jenny realised then that the nocturnal sounds had fallen off. Animal and bird calls had faded to nothing.
“So what is it?” Hemple said quietly.
“Something’s hunting,” Helen whispered back. “An apex hunter, a hyperpredator. I’ve felt this before. It’s like the whole world goes quiet when the killer’s about to strike.”
“Oh fantastic. What do we do?” Jenny whispered.
“Well, we shut up for a start,” Helen hissed back.
They waited. Even the insects seemed to have stopped stridulating. Then Jenny felt it: a thump, as if something heavy — but muffled — had hit the earth. There was a pause, and then another thump. She heard a swish and rustle of foliage.
They were footfalls, the steps of something very big and very close, stalking through the woodland.
It went quiet again, and then Jenny almost jumped as dreadful, frantic shrieking and squealing split the night air. It sounded like a pig being slaughtered. A frenzy of activity was taking place in the stand of trees nearest to them. Undergrowth ripped and shook. She could hear crashes and thumps, and the splinter of wood.
An creature burst out of cover, scattering leaves and twigs. It was the source of the ghastly squealing sounds. It seemed huge to Jenny, a bipedal dinosaur nearly five metres long, sprinting on its hind legs and squealing like a butchered hog. She could see its small mouth, like a sheep’s snout, open and braying, the tongue sticking out, the small eyes wide with anguish. The creature’s skull was crowned with a great knotty mass of blunt spikes and knobs.
“We’ve got to move!” Helen cried. “Now!”
The shrieking creature was coming straight towards them. Blood was jetting from a series of awful gouges just above the base of its tail.
“Move!” Hemple yelled.
Helen was already moving. Redfern darted in the other direction. Hemple grabbed Jenny’s hand and they began to run.
The stricken creature was fleeing an attacker, blinded by panic and pain. It ploughed through the un
dergrowth that had been concealing their group, shredding leaves in all directions, and then crashed into a tree, splintering the trunk. It staggered back, began to run again, and piled into another tree bole. This time it went over onto its side, kicking and thrashing.
The air was full of leaves flying like confetti.
Hemple pulled Jenny down into a thick bed of ferns for cover. The creature was still squealing and braying.
More branches splintered. Wood cracked. The attacker thumped out of the trees, crashing aside low-hanging boughs. It was significantly bigger than the wounded creature. Its huge legs propelled it, and the weight of its steps made the ground shudder. A seismic growl thundered out of its throat like a fierce roll on a kettle drum.
Jenny only glimpsed its huge form. She saw the immense, strutting legs, each one the size of a tree trunk. She saw the vast body and tail, striped black on black, as it slid past. She saw a flash of teeth that looked like swords. She willed the ferns to hide her and Hemple.
It strode past them, and reached the wounded creature, which was still making its abominable bleating noises and pinwheeling its legs. The predator dipped its massive head, and sank its teeth into its helpless prey. The creature’s noises became more frantic for a second, and then withered away to nothing. The sour stink of blood was suddenly so powerful that Jenny almost retched.
The hyperpredator’s tail, held high, lashed to and fro. Its head was still down. Bones cracked and shattered. The killer uttered another growling roar that was half-muffled by its mouthful of kill.
It scooped the dead creature up in its jaws and carried it away. The prey creature’s bone-crowned head lolled out of one side, and its long hind limbs and tail dragged slack out of the other. Blood streamed off the killer’s chin.
It moved away, leaving a trampled track of blood-flecked undergrowth in its wake, and vanished into the trees.