Torosyan hugged himself and stomped his feet to stay warm. He’d go back inside as soon as he’d had his smoke. He’d go back inside and tell them all to shut up with their stupid stories.
He turned.
His mouth opened. His last drag of smoke exhaled in a plume as he gasped in disbelief.
How long had that been standing behind him?
Yuri Torosyan reached for his gun. He was fast.
It was faster.
Inside the medical hut, they heard a muffled impact outside, a slicing thud like the drop of a giant guillotine. Something bounced off the back wall of the tent.
“What the hell was that?” Suvova’s loud voice demanded.
One of the soldiers called out Yuri’s name. The soldier looked at his companion, who shrugged, muttered something in Russian and went to the door of the hut.
He opened it to look out. Outside, a head lowered inquisitively, sniffing, and Baba Yaga looked in.
The soldier slammed the door shut.
Baba Yaga opened it again for him. She did it with her teeth. The colossal jaws of the mature female Tyrannosaurus bit through the door, the tent wall and the soldier simultaneously. He didn’t even have time to scream. Snatching her head back, her jaws full, the eight-ton hyper-predator ripped the front wall and roof off the medical hut.
It shook the contents of its mouth, flapping the trailing, torn canvas and severed guy wires like a dog worrying a slipper.
Inside the suddenly roofless hut, Bulov began to scream. Suvova shrieked in dismay. Antila was so stunned, she stumbled backwards into a tray of instruments.
The remaining soldier stared up in immobile dismay.
“Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot it!” Bulov screeched.
The soldier fumbled with his AK and ripped off a couple of bursts into the air. Baba Yaga took a step forwards and closed her mouth around him with another guillotine thwack. She lifted him six metres into the air. All Abby could see of him was his legs, the boots still kicking.
“Move!” she yelled at Bulov and Suvova. “Move it! Run! Now!”
Baba Yaga finished with the soldier.
She came for them.
FIFTY
Across the camp, Koshkin stopped as he heard the distinct pop-pop of gunshots.
“Hear that?” he asked.
“I can’t hear anything,” Connor complained. “My ears are completely ringing from the thunder and —”
“Quiet! It’s gunfire!” Koshkin snapped. They hurried past a couple of supply tents and a generator truck, until they had a view along the length of the camp.
At the far end, through the whirling snow, they could see the nightmarish shape of an enormous black Tyrannosaurus shredding its way into a hut.
“Good God!” Cutter cried.
“A decent enough distraction,” Koshkin said calmly. “Baba Yaga chooses to fight on our side.”
“That’s the medical hut, isn’t it?” Cutter snarled at him.
“Abby!” Connor cried.
Cutter looked at Koshkin. The Russian tossed him the AK-74 he was carrying, and took the other one off his shoulder.
“Go!” Koshkin said. “The boy comes with me.”
“Go with Koshkin,” Cutter told Connor. “Do your thing.”
“But —” Connor began.
“Do it, Connor!” Cutter yelled over his shoulder.
He began to run towards the monster that was looming in the lightning and the snow.
In the command tent, Shvachko looked up from the list of new command directives he was typing on-screen. He cocked his head, listening.
“Those were shots,” he decided.
“Were they?” Medyevin asked.
“Go and find the sentries,” Shvachko instructed him. “Find out what’s going on.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you, Medyevin.”
Medyevin hesitated slightly. It was unbearably cold outside, and he didn’t want to leave the fan heater. Furthermore, he was no soldier. However, he appreciated the fact that Shvachko seemed to be trusting him. Shvachko was the man to impress now.
Medyevin made another crucial career decision.
“No problem,” he said. He zipped up his coat and went to the door. “If it’s trouble, shouldn’t I have a gun?”
“Do you know how to use one?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Then you shouldn’t. If it’s trouble, rouse the damn sentries and come and get me.”
“Okay.” Medyevin paused again, and made a business of adjusting his gloves.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Shvachko muttered. He pulled his pistol out of its holster and held it out to Medyevin, grip first. “If it makes you happier, take this.”
“Thanks!” Medyevin said.
“Safety’s on the grip behind the trigger.”
“Got it.” Medyevin hurried out into the snowstorm.
Shvachko turned back to his laptop. An email had arrived. General Markov was questioning some of the deployment revisions he had just sent.
Useless old fool. Shvachko would see that he’d get the chop, too. He was going to clean up the Tunguska operation from top to bottom.
***
The truck bounced along the forest track, lurching and slipping in the snow.
“He’s driving a bit fast,” Jenny commented.
“He’s probably keen to get home to his nice warm stove,” Hemple responded. They were having to hold onto the handgrips, the vehicle was bouncing so much.
Their truck was following the ATV carrying Redfern, Mason, Murdoch and Garney. They kept getting a glimpse of its rear-end in their headlights, squirming along the track ahead of them.
It was a full-on blizzard outside. The truck’s wipers were fighting the dizzy blitz of snowflakes blowing out of the night. As they crossed the headlight beams, the flakes glowed phosphor-white like tiny comets.
The truck jolted so violently that Jenny and Hemple were bumped out of their seats for a second.
“Good grief! I wish he’d slow down!” Jenny said.
Zvegin looked back at her from the front passenger seat.
“We don’t want to be out here all night,” he said.
“No, we don’t,” Hemple agreed. He pointed out of the side window. Jenny looked.
The immense forest fire was closing in. To the right of the winding track, the entire forest was back-lit by the dazzling wall of flames. Driven by the abnormal wind and fuelled by the fury of lightning strikes, it had formed a moving front that looked two or three kilometres wide, and the line of it was less than a hundred metres from the trail.
“That’s spreading really fast,” Hemple observed nervously. They could smell the hot odour of woodsmoke in the air pouring through the truck’s ineffectual heater vents.
“It’s getting close,” he said to Zvegin, leaning forward.
“We’ll be clear of it soon. It won’t bother us,” Zvegin replied. “Rain will come overnight, or more snow. That will be the end of it.”
“Never mind us,” Jenny said. “The rate that fire’s spreading, it’ll soon be at the camp.”
Zvegin shrugged.
“Maybe. But they’ll have sentries and fire-spotters out. They won’t just sit there.”
“Even so,” Jenny insisted, “I think you should warn them. You’ve got a radio, haven’t you? They may not realise how fast the fire’s moving.”
Zvegin thought about it.
“Maybe.” He reached for the radio handset.
“Look out!” Hemple yelled.
Something was suddenly filling the truck’s windscreen. The pale bulk of an adult Anatotitan lumbered through the headlight beams.
The driver hit the brakes, and the truck went into a skid. Honking and hooting in anxiety, several of the creatures were fleeing the fire, hurtling across the track from right to left.
“Hold on!” Hemple cried. He slammed his arm around Jenny and clamped her to the seat.
The truck clipped the tail of an Anato
titan. The windscreen crazed, and the vehicle’s skid became a little wider and a little more ugly. Zvegin, the driver and the guard were all yelling.
They hit something in the road, head-on, crunching the front end of the truck. The impact threw them all forwards, and stopped the truck dead.
“Jenny?”
“I’m all right!”
The driver, Zvegin and the guard were still yelling. The truck was sideways-on across the trail, facing the creature they’d hit.
It wasn’t an Anatotitan, though several more Anatotitans rushed past them as they sat there, dazed. The creature was a quadruped, nine metres long, weighing in excess of five tons. It had a small head fringed with pyramidal cheek horns, and a wide, domed back that was armour-plated with enormous scutes of bone. In the light of the one surviving headlamp, it appeared to be black and white.
Sensing an assault, the Ankylosaurus turned its head away from them, flexed its tail once, and then swung it at the front of the truck.
It came at them like a wrecking ball.
Jenny screamed.
The mace-ball of fused bone, powered by stupendously massive tail muscles, hit the truck.
The vehicle flipped backwards. The cab disintegrated in a cloud of glass spray and torn metal.
The world turned upside down.
FIFTY-ONE
There was nowhere to run. The front half of the tent was ripped away, and the space left there was filled with fourteen metres of Tyrannosaurus. Abby, Bulov, Suvova and Antila were crushed frantically against the back wall of the hut.
It was only a tent wall, but it had been constructed by diligent Russian quartermasters to be strong, durable and entirely secure. There were no flaps or openings. The wall was made of a thick, weatherproof, plasticised canvas that their clawing fingers could not hope to tear.
They were trapped.
Bulov was screaming.
Suvova was yelling.
The black Tyrannosaurus swung her extraordinarily big head down into the shell of the ruptured hut and opened her jaws. The curved teeth were the size of heavy bread knives and similarly serrated. They felt the hot, acid blast of its breath.
Abby picked up one of the hut’s folding camp chairs and threw it at the oncoming snout. The chair bounced off, but the advance hesitated for a moment. Baba Yaga’s eyes, small and bright, and high in her skull, seemed to stare at Abby for a second. There was a manic glare to them, a crazed, feral anger.
Natacha Antila snatched up a metal tin and opened it, scattering stainless steel theatre tools in all directions. She produced a surgical scalpel, stabbed it into the back wall of the tent and forced it downwards with both hands.
The blade cut a long vertical slit in the plasticised fabric before it snapped. Antila yelled something in Russian, and pushed Suvova and then the babbling Bulov out through the vent.
“Go!” Abby screamed at her. Antila plunged through the slit and vanished.
There was no time for Abby to follow. The jaws lunged at her, blind. She threw herself flat.
The Tyrannosaurus’s head went straight over her, and buried itself in the rear of the tent. Baba Yaga raised her head, uprooting the back half of the hut, and bringing it with her, hooked like a canvas bag over her head and neck. The tip of her snout was poking through the slit Antila had cut.
The tent’s flooring and groundsheet were integrally woven into the tent structure. As Baba Yaga straightened, Abby felt the floor being pulled up under her. She slid forward, tumbled, and then rolled off the stretched slope of the ground sheet onto the exposed forest floor. An avalanche of camp furniture and medical equipment came with her.
She landed right next to the Tyrannosaurus’s left foot. The massive toes were splayed, and the claws were digging their tips down into the loam.
Abby rolled, hit snow and leapt to her feet. The scything wind was in her face, and snowflakes were hitting her like pellets.
She started to run.
She looked back.
The Tyrannosaurus was shaking her head free of the tent sack. A profoundly deep growl was throbbing from her torso and throat, the threat purr of the super-predator.
Baba Yaga was huge. Her massive skull was thrust forwards, counterbalanced by her long, heavy tail. She stood four or five metres tall at the hip, and her hind limbs were pillars of sleek muscle ready to piston her forwards.
She was black-on-black: slate black skin laced with tiger stripes of a darker black down her throat, torso and tail. There was a slight paling of tone on her belly and the underside of her throat and tail.
The infamously puny forelimbs, though dwarfed by the creature’s stupendous bulk, looked pretty big to Abby. They were more than half as long as she was, and knotted with muscle. Connor had once told her that, though they were short, the arms of Tyrannosaurids had been anatomically proven to be robust and very strong. It was possible they were used as powerful anchors to hook into struggling prey and hold it tight while the jaws went to work.
Yeah, but not on me, Abby decided.
She ran through the driving snow looking for cover. Soldiers had emerged from some of the other tents in the campsite to investigate the commotion and had started yelling. Some were running away, though Abby couldn’t tell if it was to find weapons or to hide. Sentries were blowing whistles, raising the alarm.
The creature purred out a huge, bellowing snort that throbbed the air. Lightning flashed. Baba Yaga took off, her legs powering her forward.
She wasn’t following Abby at all.
Abby turned. The snow was in her eyes. She ran back, bumping into wide-eyed soldiers fleeing in the opposite direction.
Antila, Bulov and Suvova had exited the medical tent and were running away from the edge of the camp across a broad snow-field between the trees. Lightning was strobing, and the thickly laying snow made everything bright. Abby could see the three of them clearly. Antila, young and fit, was in the lead by a good measure. Suvova was struggling along behind the medic, trying to bring Bulov with her, but the plump conservator seemed too rattled by fear to move with any purpose.
Baba Yaga was pounding out from the camp after them, tail high, jaws low and open, running them down.
Abby started running towards them, even though she was fairly certain that the Tyrannosaurus, with her huge stride, was going to beat her to it.
Besides, Abby had absolutely no clue what she was going to do if she got there first.
Except, perhaps, get eaten too.
There was evidently something drastic going on. As Medyevin hurried through the camp from the command tent, he could hear whistles blowing over the noise of the storm, and he could see men milling about. Some of them were running. Some of them seemed rather alarmed.
He wondered if he should go back and tell Shvachko that something had kicked off, but he decided he ought to see if he could find out what it was first. He could imagine the exchange.
“There’s something going on,” he would say.
“What?” Shvachko would demand nastily.
“I don’t know,” he would reply reasonably.
“I conclude you are a useless imbecile and I will forthwith see to your immediate and permanent demotion,” Shvachko would finish.
Medyevin began to run.
“What’s going on?” he asked several of the men. But they were too concerned with running away to frame a decent response.
That didn’t bode well.
He reached the southern limit of the camp area, where it faced the thicker forest, and came out through a row of tents.
Ahead of him, forty-odd metres away, three people were running with abandon towards the treeline across the snow.
Everyone’s running tonight, he said to himself.
Something went past him, shaking the ground, kicking up clouds of snow. It was a colossal black beast, with a vast tail sawing around like the bough of a giant tree. It was chasing the three figures.
Nikolai Medyevin had just enough professional detachment to ident
ify the beast as a mature Tyrannosaurid, and just enough self-control not to wet himself. He remembered that Shvachko had given him a gun, but it seemed rather small compared to the scale of things.
Medyevin concluded — on reflection — that the most rewarding career move he could make next would be to hide.
Holding his AK upright, Koshkin slid in towards the command tent. He glanced back at Connor, who was supposed to be creeping along as well, but he was too agitated about what might be happening to Abby at the medical tent.
Koshkin glared at him and mouthed something.
“What?” Connor mouthed back.
“BE... QUIET!” Koshkin mouthed.
Connor nodded, and mimed zipping up his lips, locking them and then discarding an imaginary key.
“What was that?” Koshkin mouthed.
Connor wondered how to mime “never mind”.
But Koshkin turned back to the tent doorway. He held up his left hand with three fingers raised.
“Three words?” Connor mouthed. “Sounds like?” Then he realised the Russian wasn’t even looking at him.
Koshkin shook his hand with the raised fingers.
“Oh, on three. Got you!” Connor nodded. One finger lowered, then another...
When the third finger went down, Koshkin stormed the tent. Connor was right behind him.
Koshkin aimed his AK from the shoulder, but the camp table and chairs were empty. The laptop was sitting on the table, a screensaver drifting across it. The fan heater was chugging.
Concealed by the side flap of the tent doorway, Shvachko rested the barrel of an AK-74 against the side of Connor’s head.
“You’re getting sloppy, Koshkin,” he said. “You both made far too much noise.”
Reluctantly, Koshkin dropped his weapon.
“Run! Run, Grisha!” Suvova screamed.
All Bulov seemed to be able to manage was a drunken stumble. Up through the ground, Suvova could feel the shock of the huge feet thundering after them.
“Run!”
Closing for a snatch-kill, the Tyrannosaurus roared. It was a brutal, chilling blast of sound, and it wasn’t just a victorious call or a triumphant announcement. A great part of the complex roar was made up of infra-sound, its frequency under twenty hertz, which generated fear and disorientation. Like many apex predators, the Tyrannosaurus used its roar to immobilise its prey with numb terror.